Blah and boredom.

I'm in one of those moods. Been reverting to my childhood state of reading a lot, writing less, and thinking about writing other things (not science-related at all).

So I don't really feel like blogging.

Had an almost completely brainless day yesterday, which was good in some ways.

Last night we ended up, by accident, at one of these Benefit Our Wounded Soldiers kind of benefit thingees where we watched our local team trounce these poor guys, most of them back from the Middle East for only 1-2 weeks.

Hey, at least they were back.

Anyway it was strange, because I usually don't watch sports at all. The Michael Phelps Show was enough for me this week. Poor guy, he seems to know the rest of his life will be mostly downhill from here.

And I was thinking again about how I hate that sports players are heroes in our country, but doctors and scientists aren't.

In other news, I'm thinking about taking a new student. So far she keeps calling me Dr., which I find kind of amusing, and that worries me.

I'm debating whether I really have the time and appropriate activities for someone new, or if I'm just so desperate for help of any kind that I'm tempted to take a student when I really shouldn't. I need to make up my mind this week so she'll have time to find another person to train her.

And I talked to a friend this week who wants to quit her job, too.

She just dumped the guy she was dating, and hates her boss more than most people (her boss is truly among the worst of the worst).

It wasn't particularly uplifting to talk to her, but it got me wondering about something they've been saying about the gymnastics portions of the Michael Phelps show: that nobody wants to do gymnastics anymore in the US because it's too hard.

Everybody quits, they said.

This could be said of a lot of the old activities of yore, like playing a musical instrument, and has always been said about science and math. And yet somehow there are still enough musicians, aren't there?

Would it be so bad if we all shifted away from our previous forms of entertainment and focused our efforts on other kinds of things, like playing video games? Is it really so different, is it really worse, to play video games than to play a musical instrument?

Is it worse to be good at video games than to be a scientist? Not in some countries, where they laud their gamers the way we laud our athletes.

I find it bizarre that some of these activities are viewed in our society as being brainy or requiring a certain amount of skill, and others aren't.

Speaking of, I really need a new video game. Suggestions are welcome.