June is busting out all over! *

Well, I guess the calendar gave up on spring and decided to jump right into summer. It was 81 yesterday and 82 today, and they predict more of the same for the next few days. I'm not complaining at all; it's like I'm getting the same weather as Otis in Maui, except without the island breezes. Or the beach. Or the ocean. Well, a lot of stuff is missing, actually. But the weather is pretty darn close to the same! Hello, June!

I really should be in bed instead of posting this, but May was the month that saw the shuttering of the site, and I guess I wanted to make sure I was here on June 1 to declare it re-opened. NatDog sussed it out: she said the other day, "I knew you were working on something else, because you sure haven't been blogging." Well, I have been, and I still am, working on other stuff, but I'm back blogging, too.

So much is going on that makes me want to write stuff. Good things: blessings and satisfactions and achievements and options. Not-so-good things: challenges and struggles and disappointments and choices. Threads in the rich tapestry of life, as the Jesuits who taught me in high school were wont to say, threads which I would love to start sharing again.

I had dinner with my pal A-Wo tonight, and we were reflecting on that tapestry, particularly on how some things in life today are so different - my G1 Android® GooglePhone® is a marvel, without a doubt - while some things - like the decrepit restaurant booth we were sitting in - would have been instantly recognizable even fifty years earlier. The discussion put me in mind of a line from Messner-Loebs and Fujitake's overlooked classic from 1987, The Dragons of Summer. The bureaucrat-hero, commenting on life in a future filled with all kinds of technological advances, says

Oddly enough, the ordinary things of life - eyeglasses, neckties, danishes, poverty - seem to stay the same through time, while complex things like transportation change constantly. They call it Thompson's Law.

Well, I can't find any record of that law, but we have arrived at the future and it seems to be in effect. I don't even notice that the classroom I teach in is wired to the hilt and puts the most extensive network of knowledge in history right at my fingertips, yet I am still wearing sandals and T-shirts that I could have worn to high school. I don't know what to do with this understanding yet, but somehow I can't shake the feeling that I could find wisdom in it if I looked long enough.

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* Oh, and for all of you who were disappointed I was didn't take the easy way with that title, here's a picture of Otis from Hawaii. Makalapua!