Scraps and fragments

I reflected this afternoon on how hard it is for me to make other people do things -- how hard it is to make myself step in to push other people into doing things, including things that they really ought to do anyway even without being pushed. It's why I'm only marginally effective when I have to manage other people, in my professional life: I do best when I can operate on my own, or when I can hire people who don't need to be managed. It's why I would never rate myself higher than middlingly-effective as a father, for all that I think it's the most important task I have ever tackled. I just don't succeed in doing a better job of it than that (though I wish I did). And this in turn is one of the many reasons that I am so interested in shipping the boys off to boarding school: I recognize my own limitations as a parent, and so I rather hope to subcontract the job out to qualified professionals.

It has always been a huge irony, therefore, that Wife -- who always has to have everything just so -- accuses me of being "controlling". Meshugge.
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"You'll find that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort."
-- The Mathemagician of Digitopolis, quoted in
Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, p. 198

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"YOU ARE WISE TO KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN AT ALL TIMES."
-- from my fortune cookie with dinner tonight

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I gave up drinking all alcohol as of Ash Wednesday this year. We're not Catholic, but I figured it would be good for me to cut it all out till Easter. That's a nice round span of time, and I also figured that if I couldn't, that might be a problem. Well, I've stuck to it: not a drop since Tuesday the night before. But somehow I have put on four pounds since then.

But boy it sure would be nice in the evenings or late at night. Maybe I had better go to bed now, before I change my mind. (sigh)