http://www.apu.edu/blogs/steve/blog_undergrad Azusa Pacific University Blogs en-us Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:36:00 PDT Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:36:00 PDT http://www.apu.edu/blogs/steve/12146/  

I’ve been seeing quite a few of you around campus the last couple of days because of Senior Preview Weekend.  I’m glad you are here and checking us out. 

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Some of you might consider this a bit of cheating.  I can’t say for sure one way or the other.  If there are rules about resolutions, I’ve never heard about them.  Since this is the case, I’ve made up a couple of my own.  First, one benchmark of a good resolution should be that it yields beneficial results.  Avoiding heroin and/or leaps from very tall buildings seem to qualify as beneficial.  Second, good resolutions should also be realistic and attainable, and I seem to be doing OK on that front as well.

 

Despite the benefit and attainability of my current resolutions, my wife isn’t quite as impressed with them as I’d hoped.  I think she would have preferred that I do one of those “getting in shape” resolutions for me.  When I told her that round is a shape, she wanted to push me off a ten story building.

 

While it isn’t a good as Christmas or Easter, I think New Year’s Day s a spiffy idea for a holiday.  My sincere thanks to whoever came up with the idea.  After all, by the time you get toward the back half of a calendar, the year has become more than a little messy.  Even when, on balance, the last year was a very good one, the negative stuff just seems to pile up.  New Year’s Day is like one giant “do-over,” an annual mulligan.

 

That’s what is really nice about the school year.  You get (at least) two New Year’s Days.  That means that all those assignments turned in late, the alarms that you slept through, chapel probation, and all that other messy stuff that accumulated during the fall semester has gone away.  You have a shiny new semester to work with.  Maybe you made some good resolutions about that too.

 

After twenty years of teaching at APU, I’ve made a lot of New Semester’s resolutions.  Quite frankly most of them haven’t worked out very well.  For example, we still have a team of archeologists working in my office in a (so-far) fruitless quest to locate my desk.  If they can find a dinky piece of pottery buried 3000 years ago in the middle of a desert, I’m not sure why they can’t locate a desk that was last seen just three years ago.

 

I’ve learned my lesson on New Semester’s resolutions like cleaning up my desk, so this semester I’ve activated the “beneficial and attainable” standard.  My academic New Semester’s resolution for Spring 2008 is to take more coffee breaks.  I’m off to a good start.  However, my wife is less than impressed about that one too.  If you find my mangled corpse at the base of a tall building, she did it.

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History seems to indicate that some good thinking gets done in jails. 

]]> Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:23:00 PST http://www.apu.edu/blogs/steve/11076/ ]]> Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:25:00 PDT http://www.apu.edu/blogs/steve/10993/ How to kill a conversation.

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