The plain ordinariness of this week has been striking. I've been struggling to get my projects to a point where I can let go of them, but really the most unusual thing to happen recently was that today I brought my new French press in to work and made my own coffee, because office coffee sucks. It was pretty good, although the only coffee I have is espresso grind, which gets through the filter and the resultant coffee is, shall we say, a little thick.

I've been thinking recently about how much of my generation's and communities' lexicon and sense of humor has been driven by The Simpsons. It's now in its fourteenth season, so it's really been a cultural presence during the whole stretch where I've grown from adolescence into adulthood. It's been occurring to me that we may have difficulty communicating with our children; this was sort of confirmed to me when I was training with a 12-year old girl at the dojo this past weekend, and there was no response when I said "Excellent" in my Mr. Burns voice. I say "sort of", because I barely got any acknowledgement from her at all, so there wasn't really a control to judge against. She did laugh when the female teacher showed her how easy it is to make me fall down by kicking the back of my knee and pulling me down from behind.