Great Expectations I

It was the same kind of flamboyance that I felt before my departure to the US as Pip felt when he surveyed the marshes, as the so-hinted mysterious Great Expectations loomed at large before him. So was the record:

After our early dinner, I strolled out along. proposing to finish off the marshes at once, and get them done with. As I passed the church, I felt a sublime compassion for the poor creatures who were destined to go there, Sunday after Sunday, all their lives through, and to lie obscurely at last among the low green mounds. I promised myself that I would do something for them one of these days, and formed a plan in outline for bestowing a dinner of roastbeef and plum-pudding, a pint of ale, and a gallon of condescension, upon everybody in the village. (Dickens, 1960, p. 148)

The condescendingly "sublime compassion" came from both a youth's impatience with the current lot of living and his inability in appreciating the ever more scarce love in the upper society that he had in his environment then. Dickens grasped this eager feeling by Pip positioning himself in the "gentleman's" perception even before his parting with the family and friends. Poor thing, life will be different, but how so? And to your satisfaction or dismay?

Dickens, C. (1960). Great expectations. New York: Holt Rinehart Winston.

What to Learn?

Yesterday I had a meeting with Rich Stephens, talking on my request about the career development services for my students. I felt that once the attention withdrew from the daily necessities like an on-call firefighter, then, one could have more freedom to speculate and to plan ahead, first by making the things interesting, then useful, and then make them even feel necessary. It was a delight to find his son's career service books written with an ethnographer's approach, which is the closest approach an author can get to his subjects.

This morning, I went ahead to search some literature on student services. The monotony of work has helped me make decision to make it interesting by knowing more about what others are doing and what theories have been developed about this part. No sooner had I dug out several books and posted link on my email to myself did I need to go for a meeting with an outsourced company for mentoring our students. They also had the idea of doing research with their data. Such a coincidence.

I have also started reading "四世同堂." It is time to start reading some Chinese books. For English books, I am reading "Great Expectations." I no longer want to read for classes, which have formed a task-oriented reading habit and deprived of much fun from reading. Now I would like to read only for fun. Good for me to try to recover fun, relaxation, and ease with myself, others, and life, from a PHD (permanent heart damage) syndrome.

So what to learn? Kids never ask such a question: They can pick up a book and start to read, or drop it down and stop if it is not funny enough. That should be what I do: to rediscover the fun of reading.