Catch-22

A friend in my community group let me read his favorite book, which happened to be Catch-22. Never read this in school for some reason, but it is fantastic…an absolute tearing apart of the absurdities of war, but also of bureaucratic life and America in general. My favorite quote:

“The chaplain had sinned, and it was good. Common sense told him that telling lies and defecting from duty were sins. On the other hand, everyone knew that sin was evil and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively marvelous. Consequently, it followed logically that telling lies and defecting from duty could not be sins. The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”

Craftsmanship

‘Craftsmanship’ may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society–but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.

Every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding. The relation between hand and head appears in domains seemingly as different as bricklaying, cooking, designing a playground, or playing the cello–but all these practices can misfire or fail to ripen.

There is nothing inevitable about becoming skilled.

~ Richard Sennett “The Craftsman”

A Quick Thought on Bay Area Sports Figures

Living on the east coast I experience various questions and assumptions about California. In the last couple of years my beloved Bay Area sports teams have been pretty good, and so these questions and assumptions have risen to the surface more often.

When it comes to Bay Area sports figures no one comes up more often in conversation than Tim Lincecum. Timmy (even though he hails from Seattle) seems to embody a primal image of the “Californian”. He fits the “dude/bro/stoked/gnarly/chill/man” stereotype.

Because he looks like this:

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Trying to explain California to people who have never been there and only know MTV and sports is difficult. They are missing something important. Something I learned when I was teaching kids math in the state’s public schools.

Most of the kids I taught look like this:

bilde

sergio-romo-crop

I hope that Colin and Sergio continue to perform well on the field, but I also hope that they take their public image seriously. There are a lot of kids in California who will look up to these guys.

Pay attention, rest of the world, these guys represent California way more than Tim Lincecum.

And that’s a good thing.