Live in the moment

I am now nice and cranky because the coffee hasn't kicked in yet which was needed because of lack of sleep due to the temperature and lack of air movement last night. It's a shame too because before that, I was in a really good mood. I watched Richard Pryor's Live on the Sunset Strip which doesn't portray Pryor has this outstanding, charismatic, high-energy performer but he's a very good storyteller none the less. His stage presence is more like what it would be if he were standing in your living room. He's also proof that some of the best humour comes from pain.

So I was downright excited about getting home yesterday after an afternoon of pouring through documents of which many had to be brought back to the originator to get information they already knew they needed to give but since they value acting as immature as possible, I get to play this game with them every now and then.

That spoiled the good mood created from the morning meeting I had with a couple of faculty and staff members from the department I service (hee hee). I absolutely LOVE being around people who deeply love what they do and have a passion to see that it's done well. One professor has been here since the early '70's and because of his elder-statesmen status, one may think that he has antiquated notions about how to best educate people. This is not the case. He was excitedly talking about how the department should utilize online technologies much more than they currently are. At first I kind of baulked at this because I've always thought that it's better to learn hands-on rather than on a model created with no unknowns in it. There's an element of unaccounted for situations or maybe even chaos, that I don't think can be built into a computer program. Then again, I'm not a computer programmer so I could be way off about that. I was then reminded of my physics labs. The Physics 101 experiments we were doing with wind shear and friction never worked the way they were supposed to because of faulty equipment so we would end up drawing how it was supposed to work out on the board. May as well replace the board with a 3-D computer model which is much easier to understand. The meeting was a much needed shot of optimism after two years of hearing nothing but negativity about the future.

Before that I used to be excited about coming to work because it was nice to get back to a regular day-shift schedule after years of working the night shift which lead to my love of the song "Night Shift" and a tendency to break into a Temptations dance sequence although the song was by the Commodores. But what did I really know about music, before that I was one of the only headbangers at UMD where my roommate and I covered every inch of our dorm room with pictures of long-haired guys, some that were prettier than us.

Those pictures were quite a switch from my childhood bedroom where I had one poster of Madonna when she did Desperately Seeking Susan and one poster of Van Halen, the black and white one where David Lee Roth looks really hot and not crazy like he would eventually turn out but what kid can ever picture that happening to their idols? At that point, I was just happy to have my own bedroom after my brother was moved upstairs and one might think that I would be jealous of the fact that he got the whole upstairs while I got a small, 8x8 room but I really liked that room because it had two windows and there was a small section right next to one of the window sills where you could see all the different layers of paint that had covered the walls. The first color I could see was yellow, then coral, then pink, then blue.

I hate yellow now but I probably didn't really notice it when I was in the crib in that room since I had other mobiles to look at which was better than looking at the inside of a womb, but I really don't remember that.