on learning opportunities

If there really is some superior force out there in the universe, who has a hand in our actions, I can only assume that this semester, he/she/it has been occupying his/her/its time by seeing how much he can test me. Really, with the pseudo-gout, kidney stone, and now intestinal virus (which I got from my wife, who must've caught it from one of her advisees), I have felt the toll of the year. Luckily, though, for each strike against me, there is a learning opportunity.

Today's lesson: before work, I had to stop by the grocery store to pick up some medication to control my...um...outbursts. Here, I learned several things:

1. While I thought the store greeters were monotone before, the ones who work the morning shift are positively comatose. I do my best to talk to them as if they're people, and the greeters usually respond. This one? I strongly suspect he was a fairly bored robot. The lesson? There's always a more boring job out there.


2. While walking back to the medicine aisle, I saw that they are now selling McDonald's K-cup coffee pods. The idea of the pod coffee system (one that removes user control of all the key elements) is bad enough. That people buy a $125 machine which takes specialty coffee pods which average $25-50 a pound is worse. That people then use that to replicate the coffee they get at McDonald's? Bleedin' frightening. The lesson? Sometimes, the William Randolph Hearst dictum "It is impossible to underestimate the intelligence of the public" seems increasingly true.

Of course, take all this with a grain of salt. In addition to getting five classes-worth of portfolios in to grade by the end of the week, I am also sick in a relatively gross way. But hey, that's another lesson there, huh? That having chronic diarrhea tends to make one negative?

Some lessons are admittedly better than others.