Twenty-five

I did all the normal exercises and then ran just over 2.5 km on the treadmill today at the gym.  I felt sick at the end of it all.  When we went out to the car, it felt positively balmy, as the temperature had gone up to -2C! 

Yesterday I wrote about how the technology of streaming movies made teaching so much easier.  For example, my friend who teaches Biology can find just about anything she needs to explain on YouTube.  And the little movies explaining photosynthesis or evolution are beautiful, succinct, and perfect for adolescents.  I begin many of my art projects using little movies about artists, or about the process we are attempting.

But it is also easy for kids to stream movies and shows with no parental control, so I have heard really young kids in my class discussing gory violent shows like Dexter and Breaking Bad, and really explicit ones like Girls.   And I know I am part of the much older generation now, but I worry about their souls.  I worry about both sexes getting their sex education from porn and shows like Girls, and being so desensitized by the violent shows so that they don't care about anything deeply, they don't feel.  That there is nothing mysterious or fascinatingly beautiful about the opposite sex by the time they are 14 or 15.  They have seen everything, they know everything.  But the good, the kind, the lovely parts are left out. 

My son told me not to worry, that it would all even out in the end, that every older generation believes that the younger generation is at some terrible risk of degradation, but that it seems to work out in the end.  And although I am very worldly-wise in my older age, I suppose I do come from a fairly ignorant generation, having gone to an all-girls school, and having grown up in South Africa with no television and few movies.  I was in my twenties before I realised, for example, that men get erections about every naked woman, not just the one they are with.

Cape Town in the 1960's

Turquoise is a beautiful stone, an exquisite colour.   Turquoise forms by the percolating of acidic aqueous solutions, and the blue comes from the oxidization of copper in the minerals.  There are many mines in the United States, and the Native Americans used it as jewelry a long time ago.

When I was a chaperone in Vietnam a couple of years ago we were sitting at breakfast one day in the Mekong Delta and I complimented one of the girls, noting how lovely she looked in her blue-green top, and she responded by commenting on how good I looked in my sky-blue sandals and matching earrings.  I said thank you very much, and then she suddenly astonished me by sprouting forth with a litany of things about me, how I wear my hair every day, what I wear around my neck, the colour of my nail-polish, ending with the fact that I always wear something turquoise to match my turquoise eyes!  I was caught unawares, as she went on to tell me how shocked I would really be to realise how much the students watch, and notice about their teachers in general. I was secretly delighted at what she had said, but it was so strange to think of them discussing me, being so much older than them.

Turquoise is also the colour of robins' eggs, and the earth seen from space.