Comfort zone

The College president, Kathy Murray, asked me to be the convocation speaker to open the 2019-2020 academic year in late-August. Convocation is a kind of complement to commencement (i.e. graduation) for the incoming students and their parents. It's an honor to be asked, but to me it's a frightening prospect. I definitely thought about it a bit before accepting. Now I have 3 months to fret about it.

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I continued reading The New Childhood by Jordan Shapiro after a bit of a hiatus. The more I read, the less I like. He shares in the book that he is a divorced father of two. He also shares that he and his two boys spend a lot of time playing video games and on computers in general. After that, his position starts to sound like a justification for how permissive he is with his sons vis a vis "screen time". Some of his points contradict his own words from earlier in the book. For example, he lauds "parallel play" at one point and then complains when his sons' friends come over only to separate into their respective screens and play on-line (which is effectively the example of parallel play he lauds earlier).

I'm going to give it a few more chapters before giving up on it completely.

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I mostly worked on stats today. There are a couple of challenging exercises that are slowing me down.

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I also did a little more lifting today at the gym. The streets are still pretty empty because of feria.

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Laura set up a trip to Bilbao (in northern Spain) for two weeks from now.