I and Me, Us and We

I've been putting up some rough cuts of tunes from my forthcoming album "I and Me, Us and WE" on Soundcloud:

Check em out if you are so inclined:

https://soundcloud.com/shannon-gordon-scott/sets/i-and-me-us-and-we

I made a funny and won some money.

Stump the DJ

Bach

So my toddler wanted to go downstairs and play with his "grabber" truck this morning. Whilst he was playing I took the opportunity to grab the acoustic and fiddle. I started playing Bouree by Bach (probably the only classical piece I play, poorly I might add) when my toddler stops playing with his truck, looks at me and says "what's that song papa?" I didn't think he was listening. So I started playing it again and he was watching my fingers. I smiled a grin from here to East Berlin. 

Using DFW in General Psych

I am teaching an intro to Psychology course this semester. After dispensing the syllabus I put together a little Prezi to get them a little jazzed about Psychology. I read this section from DFW's Infinite Jest to highlight disorders and depression. The collective jaw dropped.

"Katherine Gompert seemed to come out of her dark reverie for a moment. She stared full-frontal at the doctor for several seconds, and the doctor, who'd had all discomfort at being stared at by patients trained right out of him when he'd rotated through the paralysis/-plegia wards upstairs, was able to look directly back at her with a kind of bland compassion, the expression of someone who was compassionate but was not, of course, feeling what she was feeling, and who honored her subjective feelings by not even trying to pretend that he was. Sharing them. The young woman's expression, in turn, revealed that she had decided to take what amounted for her to her own gamble, this early in a therapeutic relationship. The abstract resolve on her face now duplicated what had been on the doctor's face when he'd taken the gamble of asking her to sit up straight.
'Listen,' she said. 'Have you ever felt sick? I mean nauseous, like you knew you were going to throw up?’
The doctor made a gesture like Well sure.
'But that's just in your stomach,' Kate Gompert said. 'It's a horrible feeling but it's just in your stomach. That's why the term is "sick to your stomach." ' She was back to looking intently at her lower carpopedals. 'What I told Dr. Garton is OK but imagine if you felt that way all over, inside. All through you. Like every cell and every atom or brain-cell or whatever was so nauseous it wanted to throw up, but it couldn't, and you felt that way all the time, and you're sure, you're positive the feeling will never go away, you're going to spend the rest of your natural life feeling like this.’"

Ones and Zeroes

Stumbled across this:

http://ds106.us/

Then this:

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/back-to-basics/

Which led to this:

or this:

Open Doors Closed Doors

Did you smell it this past weekend? Were you up early enough? If you woke early this past Saturday morning, in the northeast US anyway, you probably had a certain aroma fill your olfaction caves. This smell was mixed with a cooler than usual air. This smell reminds you of two things: Fall and Football. Yes my friends, both are on their way.

They say early man had a far more sensitive smell than us current homo sapiens. Tis still a powerful sense though isn’t it? How that scent can transport me back to early Saturday mornings at Highland Field in my game day uniform, teams all around: The Johnson Dragons in their yellow and gold, the Decker Vikings in their purple and white, the Oakdale Red Raiders in Red, and your hometown favorite Portage Bears in blue and white (with the only mesh jerseys in the league I might add!). The concession stands are being set up, warm ups commencing, parents pacing, butterflies fluttering not in the air but in stomachs. So many boys and families learning life lessons all under the guide of chasing an oblong ball covered in pigskin. You don’t have to be Archie Bunker to say those were the days. 

Those certainly were the days and this nostalgia hits me every fall. Nostalgia is bittersweet for me because it co-occurs with guilt. Yes, I feel guilty when I yearn for the past because I realize that in some way shape or form I am not appreciating my present. 

As a busy family man though, I don’t have too much time for nostalgia…or guilt, there is too much to do, including the zoo on Sunday. But this Sunday zoo trip we were mixing it up a little. We were meeting a family with two kids ages 9 and 5. My oldest will be 3 in late November. Our two new friends really took a liking to our toddler and had a ball showing him around. I found myself enjoying the freedom of not constantly engaging him and adoring watching him interacting with his new friends. But then it hit me, he is going to have friends and they are going to engage him, they are going to entertain him, make him laugh, play kick the can with him, and play sports with him (should he choose, including possibly Pee-Wee football). And in a flash, the moment became bittersweet, kinda like nostalgia, because while new doors are opening, as they must, some are closing behind us, as they must. 

How good was my Pee Wee football team you ask?

Watson and Crick

I think it was back in junior high school circa early 1980's when I would come home everyday and head straight upstairs to my brother's room (actually a littler larger than a crawl space in the attic) and power up the sofa sized stereo and listen to Led Zeppelin II in it's entirety. While doing this I would just analyze the album cover inside and out, finding something new every day.

Flash forward to present day. I recently did the canvas art thing and made a few from pictures of heavy equipment for my son.

A picture is worth a thousand words and the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

I wonder if he'll like Zeppelin?

On the wall: