Mira Has Learned How to Sew

The other day at karate, Mira saw a girl sewing, and decided she wanted to learn. Yesterday, she sewed a whole pillow by herself, and today she made two more, with very nice, even stitches!

This is very much like her. She shows no indication of wanting to learn things, then when she decides she wants to do something, she does it with fairly quick mastery. She seems to have a clear awareness that she has no need for things until, well, she does. She's very mature about these things, which makes her very good at pretending she's immature. No, it wasn't that she wasn't *ready* to read. She'd just decided that all those books with *words* must be incredibly boring and therefore reading was "stupid." Now she's reading hundred-page books, and I'm keeping my mouth shut.

Some Good Short Stories

I am also reading Tabloid Dreams by Robert Olen Butler. Rarely am I blown away by short stories. In fact, I'd guess that my response to at least 80% of the short stories I read (which are already selected in some way or another to be "good") is "I'm not sure whether that's good or not." I suppose this is partly due to how stories are written these days, or what we value (inventive! unique! brilliant structual finesse!). It's rare to find a story that just hits you in the gut.

I've been reading Butler's From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction -- a transcription of his writing lectures, and I was curious to read some of his stories. I've read a lot of writing books: is he any good? Is there really value added here?

Each story in the book (yes, every single darned one) has so far made me say "Holy shit, I wish I'd written that." Especially Titanic Victim Speaks From Waterbed. How many people can pull of a story of an aqueously embodied ghost voicing its regrets from within a waterbed?

A Whole New Mind

I have just finished reading A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. It is basically about how we are moving from the information age to the conceptual age, and how our previous and current focus on only left-brained skills is no longer useful to us.

The reviews of the book on Amazon are pretty dead-on, I think: "upbeat, but overly simplistic view of globalization." My thoughts were a little briefer and perhaps less eloquent: "Well, duh." It used to be that being a doctor, engineer, or having an MBA was the way to get ahead in life. Now that information-age jobs are being outsourced to Asia, and the knowledge stored in doctors' heads can be found almost everywhere, this isn't the case anymore. But isn't that all obvious?

What amazes me though, is how even though this seems so obvious, we're either unwilling or unable to look at our educational system and realize it's a dinosaur. We still compliment our kids on mostly left-brain things: how much can you memorize, do you know your times tables in third grade just like I did, how much do you know? Yes, it's important to have basic skills. But it's harder to quantify and "prove" (and therefore praise and encourage) right-brained skills. We weren't taught to value them, and we're lucky if we still have any left. If we adults are generally ignorant about the nature and capabilities of the mind, how on earth can we presume to prepare them for the future?(getting out of the way is one good option).