All posts by X Teri

Personal, Social Rules

12152014 Bureaucracy and Teaching…

This is something I made in response to a recent post of a teacher and friend of mine. I thought hard about the best way to make a picture with text that succinctly and accurately conveys what she was trying to say – and in a way that can be posted  in school and no one would deny the truth of the frustration that most teachers suffer with as they work.

Here is one of the article/links she was referencing….
Click Here For Article…

Whimsical

12142014 Wintertime Reflections

100_2134cropped multiple tilt shift dark text

A photo I made expressing a pet’s contemplation of our absences, as well as the brusque touch of winter… (It’s a picture I took of our cat Güino…)

I hate photography, but love pictures. I have photoshop and a couple of other tools, but enjoy manually tweaking the simpler programs for effect. Perhaps erroneously, sometimes I make a picture that I’m sure someone else will like, if only because I feel a spark of satisfaction when I look at it.

Personal

“Life Was Indeed Simpler.” But Not Better

Link to original image is on bottom-right corner of photo.

The temptation to drown in the “good ole’ days” is deceptively appealing. I miss my grandma something fierce when I remember her or think about some of my childhood. But then I remember that those chapters in life contained a lot of burned and ripped pages, too. Life is immensely better these days, surrounded by the few great people I need, with the world’s knowledge at my disposal. But grandma? She’d be shaking her head in bewilderment at the pace and complexity of our daily lives.

Social Rules, Writing

11292014 To Offend None Is To Delight Few

Bull Abstract Silhouette

Almost every joke can offend someone. No matter how innocuous its content or noble your motive, it is possible that your humor or words can cause pain.

This isn’t an excuse to deliberately go forth and start spouting hurtful things.

But it is a reminder to use your internal filter to acknowledge that someone, somewhere, might take your words or jokes in a manner unintended. You can’t censor everything you say out of fear.

Doing so weakens your ability to communicate.

Social Rules

11292014 We Are All Children of a Lesser God

Lying Sheep(1)
http://goo.gl/6o5zXV  link to original image

Recently, someone got very angry at me because I posted a comment consisting entirely of a snopes.com link. Whether you want to argue about whether snopes is always legitimate or not, the larger issue is one of denial of any opposing or contradictory information. That’s a real problem in society and much of the reason why we have difficulty interacting.

(But, let’s be honest, isn’t it a fabulous feeling when someone posts something inflammatory and crazy on social media and you find the snopes article from 3 years ago, debunking it entirely?)

One of my goals as a person and as a liberal is to remember to be willing to change my opinion with new information. I need to strive to keep an open mind – but not all ideas and ideology are predicated on the precept of learning and adaption to information and circumstances. All too often people have a “one-answer-fits-all” solution – and it is invariably wrong. As I look back on my life, I know that I’ve been spectacularly wrong about some things. This means that I’m probably wrong about some things today and I’ll be wrong tomorrow.

I don’t always need to be right.

We are all in some ways children of a lesser god, even if it doesn’t seem obvious to others.

But first and foremost, we have to open to learning instead of using our ideology to beat the same old drum.

Let’s play a new song.

(“Children of a lesser god” refers to the original idea implied by Tennyson, rather than a religious concept per se. I only mention this to avoid some people from reading some bizarre connotations into it.)