May 31, 2008.  Of Ignorance and Anchovies

This may strike many people as very odd, but my wife and I were in our thirties before we learned that anchovies are fish.  All we knew about anchovies was that they were used as topping on pizza.  We had never had them as topping because we somehow had the idea that they were something that grew in the ground, like mushrooms, which are also used as topping and which we don't like.  We had no reason to think otherwise; anchovies had never been discussed in our college biology classes.

We became enlightened while watching a nature program on TV.  The commentator referred to "a school of anchovies," and we both burst out laughing.  He might as well have said, "a school of mushrooms."  Of course, our curiosity was piqued, so we dug out the dictionary.  Good grief!  Anchovies are fish!

This little gap in our information base proves the validity of the saying, "Everyone is ignorant of something."  Perhaps all of us are ignorant of one or more things that more than 90% of everyone else in the world knows.  For my wife and me, it was this little detail; for other people, it might be something else.  It was certainly a humbling experience because we began to wonder what other facts we had missed while almost everyone else took them for granted.

As I explain to my students, ignorance is not stupidity.  Stupidity is essentially a behavioral defect – acting foolishly when we know, or should know, better.  Ignorance merely means not knowing.  It's true, I suppose, that I was stupid for never ordering pizza with anchovies because I thought that anchovies were sort of like mushrooms.  Mostly, though, it was just a matter of ignorance, and now that I've replaced that ignorance with knowledge, I can act accordingly.  I'm glad I've filled that gap before I made an ass of myself by saying something about picking anchovies in the forest, but otherwise it doesn't matter.  I don't like anchovies any better than mushrooms anyway.

June 23, 2008.  Back from Vacation in Maine.

The reason for the long silence on the Mudgelog is that we've been away for two weeks in Maine (Bar Harbor / Acadia National Park) – a more or less annual pilgrimage that this year included our daughter, son-in-law, and three grandsons, who flew in to New Jersey from Phoenix, AZ, before driving up to Maine.  Such an outing tends to become a Major Production.

It's not possible to describe in detail here how we spent our two weeks, which alternated between very restful interludes and almost hyperkinetic activity, driven in no small part by the boys, the oldest of whom is twelve.  The younger folks took about six or seven mountain hikes; grandpa managed three.  There were cruises, the usual sightseeing, shopping for souvenirs, and some special family activities.  The younger contingent probably could have gone on at that pace indefinitely; grandma and grandpa were relieved to be home.

Needless to say, we took hundreds of pictures.  Some of these will be posted in new albums on Webshots (link on the homepage here) once I have an opportunity to sort through them.  Since acquiring a digital camera, I have shot 600 or 700 photos on our Maine trips each year, but this year the total is more than double that because our daughter was also taking pictures.  We both shot digital video as well, but I can't easily post four to six hours of video.  Our daughter, who has far more expertise in this area than I do, will probably edit the footage and produce one or two DVDs.

Though I can't share the videos, I shall be posting alerts periodically on this site's homepage as albums of photos become available.  At the moment, however, Grandpa is too trail-weary and pooped in every respect to do much more than unpack his bags and sink back into a more leisurely routine.

July 5, 2008.  Retirement:  Plus and Minus.

We've been back for two weeks now, and I'm still having a hard time getting in gear.  One of the advantages of retirement is that one doesn't have many commitments; one of the disadvantages is . . . that one doesn't have many commitments.  It's a disadvantage as well because not very much gets done, especially if we are the least bit inclined toward procrastination.  I have not only neglected the photos, but I haven't done anything on my book either.

Most of us spend our working lives beset by deadlines.  We curse (mostly under our breath) bosses and clients who expect us to do things by a certain time, and we long for the days when we will be free of such constraints.  We believe that we would be quite productive, thank you, without having people breathe down our necks, forgetting that we've had to be prompted iun one way or another all our lives, probably starting with our mothers' nagging.  As most of us learn to respond to these external prompts without much thought, we develop the illusion that we are self-motivated.

Finally, we get to retire.  Overnight, almost all of our deadlines vanish, and our time is our own.  At first, it is like a vacation; we don't have to do much of anything.  Then, after perhaps a month of this, we recognize that the vacation is permanent, that we are not going back to the routine that forced us to manage our time – and we realize that we've just spent a month doing virtually nothing.  We probably had a formidable mental or physical list of things we were going to do when we retired and "had time," but we haven't scratched one item on the list.  This won't do, for we are spending a great deal of time being slothful, reminding ourselves that sloth is one of the seven deadly sins, and continuing to be slothful anyway.

After I retired, I joked that my new lifestyle was "purposeful sloth," but I soon realized that I wasn't being purposeful at all.  I wasn't bored, but whole weeks were passing in which afterwards I couldn't think of a thing I had done.  Obviously, I wasn't making very constructive use of myself.  Finally, I devised some new rules for getting things done without the pressure of external deadlines, which I had depended on more than I realized.

Always a list maker, I became an even greater list maker.  I determined that no day would go by without my scratching several items off my lists.  An important requirement was that at least one of those items had to be something that I really did not want to do, something that I dreaded and had been putting off.  I devised a scheme whereby each time I did something I dreaded (say, call an insurance company to straighten out some mess it had made), I would reward myself by doing something I really, really liked.  I learned, too, to list big tasks that were so overwhelming that I hesitated to begin into smaller chunks that could be done in less time.  Here, my stubborn streak kicked in because, once started, I often did more than the smaller chunk I had set out to do.

Consequently, I am making more productive use of all the time I have on this "extended vacation."  Then, of course, I go on a vacation within the vacation – a time with hardly any real commitments – and, when I return, as I have just done, it's hard to get back into my self-directed groove.  I have no boss or clients telling me to get back to work.  It took me more than a week just to get unpacked.

(Big sigh!)  Oh, well, at least I got this entry in the Mudgelog.  That must count for something.