Category Archives: Wendy Welch

Time to Select Reverse

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Jack finally gets a Wednesday blog post up on time – – –

Back in the 1990s I was working as a middle manager in a local Scottish community college. I was head of construction crafts, and that department was fairly low in the pecking order. So I decided to find a focus for us that would boost our profile.

I had been interested in environmental topics for a while and did some research. That resulted in a series of projects funded by the EU and with partners all over Europe. The college senior management supported me and I traveled regularly from Belgium to Denmark and Germany and Italy and even eventually to Romania and Vietnam.

earth image

But I worried continually that I wasn’t always producing the educational outcomes that I had promised. It was many years later that I discovered that these were never the expected outcomes in the first place. It was always just about getting people from different countries and cultures to interact and talk to each other!

This brings me to the real point –

I discovered a few weeks ago that my hard-won US Citizenship can be arbitrarily taken from me at the drop of a hat and the whim of a faceless bureaucrat. This seems to mirror what’s going on in Britain right now as well. Not just there but all over the world there seems to be a resurgence of the fear of ‘the other’.

Of course I don’t expect to be deported any time soon. I’m not black or Hispanic. Not Mexican or Muslim. Not Catholic or Italian. Not Irish or Chinese. I’m a white guy from Scotland – – –

So come on folks. It’s time to put all this nonsense behind us. We inhabit a tiny dot in the universe and we need to look after each other – and that tiny dot too!

“There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.” – Douglas Adams

 

Baby Yoda’s Existential Writer Questions

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84298025_3089609634383413_6129584940381110272_oWriters are known for seizing moments, protecting our writing time, drilling it out from between day jobs and family commitments and other stuff.

So when I had one half-day free during a two-week trip for work covering conferences, meetings, and funding seminars, how did I use it?

I speed-watched The Mandalorian on my friend’s Disney Plus account.

To my credit, I watched 8 episodes in about 2 hours, because I didn’t bother with the fight scenes and plot development, so it’s not like I wasted time. No, I went straight to the important bits, when Baby Yoda wiggled his ears or let his little eyes shine.

I fell in love with the little green guy the minute the memes started. In fact, when the semester began I embedded an Easter Egg in my syllabus asking students to make a Baby Yoda meme that reflected something they’d learned from the syllabus. That. Was. Fun.

What’s funny online is how many people are so very aware that the little green guy is nothing more than a Disney plot to sell the most plush toys ever. And the response of many a hardened cynic is the same: fine, here, take my money. We’re good.

He is soooooooo cute. And I’m sure the whole plot would be as meaningful as Disney ever makes it, but in the interest of preserving time, a writer’s gotta do what a writer’s gotta do. Now, with my cuteness load at full strength, I can get some writing done. Thank you, Baby Yoda.