wretched excess?

Wed May 28th

I'm back, after a travel-ful Memorial Day weekend, and after some thinking about how to prompt/prod/encourage students to blog themselves. We usually like to write about ourselves, so one thing I'd suggest would be that students choose words to describe themselves in their profiles -- just lists of single words -- and then expand those words into blog entries.

For example, why did I choose the title "wretched excess," and what does that have to do with who I am? It connects, for one thing, with my listing "politics" as an interest. More and more, I recognize that Americans tend to over-everything: we overeat, we overspend, we drive cars that are too big. We use too much of the planet's resources, and most of us think too little. (Okay, so there's an "under" activity.)  In many ways I include myself in the "we"; I like to drive fast. I like loud music. I have a hard time throwing things away, so I have lots of boxes of stuff that I don't really need.  

Ummm, excuses?  I like my stuff, my books and clothes and shoes and memorabilia. I feel connected to my past by the old concert tickets, by photographs, by my that's-the-dress-I-wore-to-my-best-friend's-wedding dress (even though it way doesn't fit any more). And some of the "stuff" is sentimentally valuable in more significant ways, like the china hutch my mom refinished when I was about fourteen. It's filled, now, with my mother's china and other glassware, a collection of breakable, beautiful things. [I'm still calling it my mother's china even though she has been dead now for several years, and the china is living in my house. How long will it take for these things to become mine, in my own mind?  Perhaps it will be called "Anita's china" after I am dead and have passed it on to someone else, someone younger, with her own collection of "stuff."]

No excuses: I have too much stuff and use too much gas and too much water. Every gallon of diet Coke uses a couple gallons of fresh water in production, and I drink a LOT of diet Coke. But then....so do the rest of us. It's hard to swim against the stream.