Sunday, February 25, 2007

Fighting Kung-Fu

We did a little channel-flipping tonight in an intrepid effort to avoid the Oscars, and somehow we stumbled on an episode of a classic of televised cheesiness: Kung-Fu, which was my adorable husband's favorite show back in the 1970s. An hour later, I can say that 1973 must have been a particularly bad year for both hair and dialogue. The resident 17-year-old, who had never seen Kung-Fu, took great pleasure in translating the old Asian guy's enigmatic pronouncements into Yoda-esque mystical insights. From deep within the Lazy-Boy would come the Yoda voice: "Every journey a beginning must have, and an ending must it come to."

My journeys this week should be fairly simple since the blizzard passed well north of here and the temperature appears to be rising. On Wednesday I leave for Atlanta, which means I'll spend the next two days frantically finishing things so I don't have to take a pile of work with me. The conference paper is written and the freshman essays are graded, but I still don't expect to have time to relax until I step onto the airplane--and who can relax on an airplane? I'll have to practice some deep breathing and focused visualizations, except that might lead me to envision an old blind Asian guy saying, "Can you snatch the pebble from my hand, Grasshopper?" When I'm trying to relax before takeoff, the last thing I want to envision is David Carradine with a bad haircut. That's one journey that never should have started.

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