Good morning!

This morning, walking yet again through the graveyard to work, the iPod favorites playlist provided me with a delicious contrast between two views on female adolescence. First, Norah Jones sang:

"My heart is drenched in wine
you'll be on my mind
forever."

Whereas Tori Amos had a slightly different angle

"And if I die today I'll be the happy phantom
And I'll go chassin' the nuns out in the yard
And I'll run naked through the streets without my mask on
And I will never need umbrellas in the rain
I'll wake up in strawberry fields every day
And the atrocities of school I can forgive
The happy phantom has no right to bitch
oo who
The time is getting closer
oo who
Time to be a ghost
oo who
Every day we're getting closer
The sun is geting dim
Will we pay for who we been"

These two brilliant insights into the adolescent female psyche, which so often alludes us males approaching middle age, was confidently buffered by Wes Montgomery, a shy, big, virtuoso male playing a subdued and tasteful version of The Days of Wine and Roses. What a way to start the morning!
Yippee! I was first to arrive at work, got to turn the lights on. Oh, what a glorious feeling. Call me weird... and you're probably on to something.

Two early morning tidbits of information which I found from the book The Corrosion of Character by Richard Sennet, one of my favorite social theorists:

""Career" [...], in its English origins meant a road for carriages, and as eventually applied to labor meant a lifelong channel for one's economic pursuits. [...] The word "job" in English of the fourteenth century meant a lump or piece to be carted around. Flexibility today brings back this arcane sense of the job, as people do lumps of labor, pieces of work, over the course of a lifetime."

And now.. time for some more teaching frenzy.