note to self

Get better informed. I pay attention to the news, I read, and I try to follow what’s going on. But I confess that days can go by and I miss details of ongoing stories that enable me to have a full grasp of their complexity. It becomes all too easy to have Sound Byte Knowledge as opposed to Understanding. The debate about Sarah Palin’s levels of Knowledge and Understanding serve to confront me, as well, about what I do and don’t know.

I suffer at times, as well, from the intuitive dilemma of forgetfulness. When what I read makes internal sense the information is absorbed into the inner pool of knowledge and I lose its source and, often, the specifics. Case in point: I read Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat when it came out several years ago. Now I can’t remember what I read. Time to read it again.

All of this is underscored whenever we are at Melrose. We disappear into the black hole of “no news” (radio signal is weak, and there is no television here). Hungry for news, on Saturday Ken set out to find a decent newspaper while we were in town picking up a few things for The Project. We stopped at three drug stores, one convenience store and a grocery store, only to find the local paper (Augusta Chronicle) and a day-old USA Today. Venturing to Starbucks might have yielded a New York Times, but traveling to pick it up involved more time and gas than he wanted to expend at that point in the day.

We’ve read a few headlines online: OJ was convicted, and Sarah is accusing Obama of running with Terrorists. We’re interested in something more substantive. If only we could figure out how to get a dsl line out here…