We received The Astronaut Farmer<\/i> from Netflix a few days ago. We haven’t watched it yet, or, for that matter, Monsters Inc<\/i> (which I borrowed from Charlie). Penelope is a fantastic sleeper for her age, with consistent stretches from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m., then down again for a few more hours, but the result is that our evenings are somewhat truncated. I’m not complaining, mind you–just relating the status quo.<\/p>\n
No philosophical musings lately. I went to Barnes & Noble Saturday afternoon to buy a copy of the new Clarence Thomas book as a birthday present for my father-in-law, as well as a copy of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress<\/i> for Diane and me to read to each other (an activity we are greatly enjoying, by the way), and I had another chance encounter with a certain bookseller there. His name is Chris, is partially of French ancestry and is one of the most engaging conversationalists out there about the issues Diane and I enjoy discussing–history, current events, philosophy, worldview, etc. His stance on most of them differs from ours to a degree, but every time we’ve talked (and it has been a good half-dozen by this point), I’ve come away feeling alert and excited. Granted, much of that probably has to do with the fact that the conversations are an outlet for much of what bounces around in my head continually, and so I am grateful just to be able to share it with another (Diane receives the brunt of this). As I mentioned, his opinions don’t quite line up with ours, though they are close from what I can tell, and yet, I’ve had far more awkward, and at times, heated conversations with people who espouse viewpoints much closer to our worldview. I’d like to think the dialogues with Chris have more of the French quality to them; that is to say, allowance for sharp disagreement without unnecessary infusion of personal sentiment. Not that it’s wrong to feel strongly about tenets of one’s worldview, or to passionately speak what you know to be the truth, but a maintained respect for the other person’s intelligence and the thought behind their viewpoints goes a long way. By way of example, the French love to talk politics, and it’s said two good French friends can have the sharpest differences of opinion in conversation and still remain civil, polite and indeed, good friends. That relational demeanor is seen more rarely on this side of the pond, but I do enjoy it when it’s present.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We received The Astronaut Farmer from Netflix a few days ago. We haven’t watched it yet, or, for that matter, Monsters Inc (which I borrowed from Charlie). Penelope is a fantastic sleeper for her age, with consistent stretches from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m., then down again for a few more hours, but the result […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1390"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}