odd holidays

My daughter Sabrina found the book America’s Oddest Holidays by Erika Edwards at the library.  Some highlights:

• Eeyore’s Birthday Party, celebrated the last Saturday in Aril in Austin, Texas
• National Ice Cream for Breakfast Day, celebrated the first Saturday of February (mostly in Rochester, NY)
• International Talk Like a Pirate Day, September 19
• Deviled Egg Day, November 2
• National Sandwich Day, November 3
• Yell “Fudge” at Cobras in North America Day, June 2
• Don’t Step on a Bee Day, July 10
• National Pig Day, March 1
• Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day, January 26

That last one’s coming up, so mark your calendars.

2018: my year in reading

Intellectually, my life is divided into periods of reading and periods of thinking.  The two overlap, of course, and the former should be and is a stimulus to the latter, but I do find that my concentration switches between absorbing others’ ideas and working out my own.  My last few years of graduate school, I spent a great deal of time on philosophy, politics, and Church history (probably to the detriment of my dissertation research).  While I was a postdoc, my spare time reading tapered off as I concentrated on the construction of my own synthesis, which was then unveiled as Throne and Altar.  By the time I became an assistant professor and new father, I was too engrossed with my own thoughts to devote any of my precious bits of free time to reading others’ thoughts.  Not much could have come of those years outside work and family regardless, so I’m quite satisfied to have written a couple of essays that greatly pleased me.  However, without outside stimulus, my mind came to be stuck moving in the same rather small circles.  Eventually, even I noticed it and started to lose interest.