Richard Lawrence Cohen's Only What Is and Glenn Reynolds's An Army of Davids came by USPS today. Annie Gottlieb's A Return to Innocence (with Annie, by Jeffrey M. Schwartz) arrived last week. If only we were readers of the printed page. Being as we have recalcitrant vision issues, we much prefer the computer page. Trying to muddle through, but. In our salad days we were 20/20 and turned to cute little fashiony glasses in our middle years, but somewhere in there at the Design School at Harvard, a phantom-limb thing happened such that we could no longer wear glasses without unbearable facial pain. We turned to contacts, not by choice but by necessity. Now we wear one in the left eye and use the right eye for long-distance driving and such. Disagreeably, a cataract seems to be engulfing said right eye in the last year or two. As Goomp always says, old age is not for the faint of heart. And as Dylan Thomas wrote:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
There are some great laser operations out there at our local cutting-edge Mass Eye and Ear. Goomp himself has benefitted from that sort of thing in the last few years. It's probably about time for us to bite the bullet. But as Daniel Drezner wrote in another context yesterday, we all tend to "fall into the black hole of procrastination . . . It's nothing revolutionary, but it might help some to know they're not the only ones suffering from missed deadlines." We were particularly taken with his citations of Mary McKinney's "excellent essay 'Academic AWOL' for Inside Higher Ed":
1. Realize that your absence weighs heavier on your mind than the other person’s.
2. Remember, when you do get in touch, the person is unlikely to be angry and punitive.
3. Lower rather than raise your standards when you’re running late.
Guilt or shame? Only Dr. Sanity knows for sure, but in our book it's usually too close to call.
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