Hell

      Yep, that's where I am right now. Awwww, Doctor J, what's wrong?, I can hear you all asking in that mock-pitying tone that you reserve for crying babies and mopey teenagers. *pout, pout* I am in the hellish position of having to put together a pedagogical statement which, for me, is like asking a baseball player how he (or I guess she) plays the game. Sure, there are core principles, core goals: sure there are basic tips and tacks; but it's all in the details, in the circumstances, in the actual act of doing -- as opposed to the often bloated pretensions of pedagogical theory. How does a hitter know when to swing at a pitch? How does he know how he should swing? And so on and so forth. Writing something like this isn't much different than asnwering questions like "Who are you?" or "What do you want?" (That one's for all you Babylon 5 fans out there, all two of you.) Sure, there are easy answers, obvious answers, but go any deeper than those, and one lands in a quagmire of explanations, complications, qualifications, and hesitations. I do what I do, and, I'm generally told I do it well and better than most. To theorize it, though, or to explain it, or to summarize it in terms of particularites of goal, method, or approach, and one opens up a Pandora's Box of questions such that one eventually feels like echoing Prufrock's declamation, "That is not what I meant at all." So the writing of this "thing" stops and starts and stops and starts, hems and haws and hews, and I eradicate the lot, pull out half my hair and start anew. Aaaargh. Writing this is-- pardon me, those of you dispossessed of a Y chromosome-- like trying to please a woman: something is always "not quite right," something is always missing, something is always begging to escape detection, there's always something. (Sorry if that sounds sexist, ladies, but I assure you, every man out there reading this is nodding in knowing agreement.) And yet, the more I try with this writing, the more I frustrate myself, the more things become unworkable, like those annoying Chinese Fingercuffs. I know, I know, the answer is just to relax, to ease one's way out. It just doesn't work that easily with writing. I wish it did. So here I remain, in Hell, though the rain outside suggests it's a watery inferno. Errrrrgh. Aaaargh. I am in Hell. Hell. Well, at least I know where everything is. *shrug*