A few months ago I saw Randy Pausch's Last Lecture - the backstory being his diagnosis with a terminal illness and departure from Carnegie Mellon.  He passed away yesterday and this morning I watched it again perhaps as an attempt to hold onto what he was planning to leave those alive with after his death. It was as moving today as it was when I first saw it, especially with his ending "head fake"; that the lecture was for his children.

What an inspired life; even though I can't physically be surrounded by people like Randy, listening to him makes me feel the cushion of listening to another dreamer whose dreams were done.

Added: A New York Times summary has some good links related to Dr. Pausch

Today I learned of the death of a person I knew in school. Married, like me. 33, like me. Wife expecting, like me.

Who knows how short life will be? The time that we have around here is just a gift.

REMEMBER me when I am gone away,  
Gone far away into the silent land;  
When you can no more hold me by the hand,  
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.  
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:  
Only remember me; you understand  
It will be late to counsel then or pray.  
Yet if you should forget me for a while  
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave  
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,  
Better by far you should forget and smile  
Than that you should remember and be sad.
- Christina Rossetti, "Remember"

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.

William Deresiewicz on the "disadvantages" of an elite education. If it's the endgame that we look at I'd prefer "entitled mediocrity" to "the depths of one bureaucracy or another." But so too would Mr. Deresiewicz I suspect which is why his piece rings with irony. He knew people like me would read it and that we would feel like the Prep's Lee Fiora in an encounter with Cross.

Wow.

What time is it? Hm, 1pm?

My friend M was asking me over the weekend about records - whether I listened to them in the past.  I was never wild about the experience but had a cheap turntable because some music just wasn't available on CD format in my heyday of buying music.  Perhaps the biggest factor for me was that I had to listen to music on a track by track basis with the singles I most often found only on vinyl.  Today, however, I've drawn a connection between that and my YouTube listening - one track at a time.

In rotation? Some talented Japanese people -

Yukumi Nagano

Towa Tei

I stopped only once, for just a second, to look back. I debated whether I wanted to look back—I was afraid I’d jinx myself if I did—but then I thought: this is a huge moment in my life and I want to take just one more look at the homestead.

I paused, turned around and looked. Everything was quiet. No movement, no noise, no lights on in the house, nothing. I was safe. No one knew I wasn’t up in my room sound asleep. I took off again as fast as I could...

The tale is concluded.

Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite writers, has a presentation on a great online TV station called Fora.tv (after finishing his presentation I started downloading quite a bit from there). He discusses "SF" (Science Fiction) as a genre and makes a lot of interesting points, one of which had me laughing because a Hallmark film on television I happened to be exposed to was predictably NOT SF.

As Mike Ladd once pointed out, people like Mozart and Shakespeare were "writing pop sh_¹" which was why he didn't feel slighted by a lack of recognition from today's literati.  Not only is it true but if one holds something I recently read as literature in comparison with Cryptonomicon, the points Stephenson makes are as sweet as refined sugar.

I agree with a lot of his points although I thought he failed to make a distinction between "space opera" and true SF.  A piece he had in the NY Times concerning recent Star Wars films illustrates the distinction I thought would have fit in his discussion.

Final note: his discomfort and lack of polish in public speaking was heartening for me as the mark of a man who writes more than he markets.

¹I am self censoring because people used to complain to me in my previous blogging life and those of you who don't mind can handle an underscore more than those who can't stand the epithet.

I hadn’t gotten beaten by my mom that day, and we hadn’t had any significant arguments over anything. I thought that if I died, I wanted to die without being mad at my mom. So I thought, I might as well take the opportunity to do so before I got back to the house—at which point who knows whether there would be another fight or a beating.

I put a bullet in the chamber and raised the rifle up. The closer it got to my head, the faster my heart beat. I was taught that whoever committed suicide would go to hell. But I was so miserable in the Amish culture that I believed God would understand that my motives were good.

In the end, I didn’t have the guts to point the barrel straight at my head. Okay, I thought, I’ll just put the gun next to my cheek to see what it feels like.

The instant I felt that cold hard steel, I suddenly realized that I wanted to live.

I had never had that thought before in my life. I had always thought I wanted to die. I don’t know where the idea came from that I wanted to live, but it completely changed my outlook on life.

Here is the whole thing.

A few months ago I was at our local equivalent of Jiffy Lube getting an oil change. The guy working on my car not only had rehearsed and delivered their customer service script impeccably, as he worked on cars he'd yell out all the "check point" items that he'd finished. It went something like:

Brake fluid. CHECK!
Wiper fluid. CHECK!
Tire pressure. CHECK!

You get the picture.  The zeal with which he shouted his checklist was commendable - I'd wager a drill sergeant in a bootcamp somewhere either smiling, because of all the effort, or frowning, because effort like that seems out context when it's a matter of the wiper fluid or windshield wipers on a car - by extension a mockery of that much ceremonial bombast as applied to anything.

Before I could think to snicker I realized I actually liked it. If this kid took the trouble to shout and scream over an oil change, he'd take it seriously enough not to make a mess - the silly kinds of messes that I've paid for in the past - a broken wire that opens the car's hood, or a tire that's been ignored an nearly flat as I left.

These days I'm liking the people who take themselves seriously even if it seems like pomp or pretension.  Risking ridicule in the hopes of achieving something - that's something I can admire and even aspire to...