{"id":1305,"date":"2008-04-26T01:13:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-26T05:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/2008\/04\/26\/friday-night-reruns\/"},"modified":"2008-04-26T01:13:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-26T05:13:00","slug":"friday-night-reruns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/2008\/04\/26\/friday-night-reruns\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday night – reruns"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\t\t\t\t\t\t Well folks..I’m feeling pretty lazy. I had a hard, hard day at work (but fairly productive.. I think)… Then I took off around 3 to work on the house with Diane.. Today’s project was the new lab… my workspace in the barn.. It’s a pretty amazing mess..and it feels good to go through it… But . I’m not through cleaning it yet.. and I didn’t have my camera today.. so I’ll write about that tomorrow. So I got the idea to do today’s blog as a rerun .. I figured I’d go back to a year ago today (April 25, 2007) and see what I was up to .. It’s pretty interesting for me to read back like that… I had just returned from an IBM conference (TLE ) in Anaheim. I’d been frustrated in feeling out of step with the world at every turn.. I remember feeling at the time how difficult it was for me to get motivated to work hard…and that’s just where I feel I am this week… looking back gives me some perspective on where I’ve been and where I am now.. the funny thing is that it actually makes me feel better… not worse… I remember wondering to myself at the time how I’d make it through the year… and I did just fine.. more or less…<\/p>\n

So without further explanation.. I bring you my blog from a year ago tonight… I’m shading it in an appropriate flashback color so no one gets more confused than they already are .. Gnite all. Gnite Sam !
-me<\/p>\n

John’s Blog from 4\/25\/07<\/p>\n

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I feel like I have been just a little out of step the world for these last two weeks. I seem to be constantly in the wrong place at the wrong time\u2026 or\u2026 actually \u2026 not at the right place at the right time. It’s like my whole ‘be in the moment’ thing has slipped a few hours into the future. Not wildly so .. like it used to be.. but just enough that I keep missing stuff I feel like I’m intended to see. None of it’s earthshaking stuff.. I’m thinking of stuff like missing that Ben Zander talk at the conference last week.. and having everyone come up to me and tell me how much the message was perfect for me.. or at the same conference last week.. always being in the boring conference presentation while hearing laughter or loud clapping coming from the meeting in the conference room next door. Monday I managed to miss an important meeting at work in which the secrets of the universe.. ..actually the secrets of our product roadmap and the budget for the year\u2026. were finally revealed.. Everyone has been talking about that ,meeting all week about wha a great turning point it was for our area\u2026 sigh.. Tonight I had another one of those things. Several of our friends went and saw the Nobel prize winning Holocaust witness Eli Wissel this afternoon at UVM. Wissel was in town to receive an honorary degree from UVM. I’d thought about going.., the talk was free and open to the public, but I had work meetings throughout the afternoon and miles to go before I sleep\u2026 <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>From what I heard from Deb, Jen and their kids <\/span>Wissel gave a memorable talk. <\/span>They said he talked three types of reaction to tragedy like the holocaust: the first is to close off the past, try to forget it and live for your own pleasure and preservation.. the second is to become bitter and angry about the wrong that has happened to you and to stay angry at the world.. the third <\/span>is to become a witness to the world of what has happened to you and to become a force <\/span>to teach and to prevent others from ever having to face that same pain. Those descriptions sounded alot <\/span>(I know alot isn’t a word, mom \ud83d\ude42 <\/span>like the way that people react to a tragedy like <\/span>the death of a loved one. <\/span>Since Sam died we’ve met folks who’ve reacted in each of those three ways.. I always try <\/span>to live in the third way\u2026.. that is live in such a way that we help others learn from Sam.. and learn by our experience of his passing. <\/span>but I don’t always get to choose how I react. In fact, I’ve come to believe that people generally don’t get to choose the way that they <\/span>react.. It comes from your nature, circumstance <\/span>and surroundings more than from choice.. and for that reason, I’ve also learned not to pass judgment on people <\/span>who react in one of the first two ways. <\/span>Deb told me that Wissell said exactly the same thing.. I think grief has no scale. <\/p>\n

<\/span>Deb and Jen told me that Wissel also talked about <\/span>how unbelievable it was to him that despite all that the world has learned from the Holocaust that we still have genocide in our time: in Darfor.. in Rwanda<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region>, Kosovo in Iraq<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region>.. He told a story about when Pres <\/span>Clinton had said that ‘if Americans had been in Rwanda<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region>.. 400,000 lives could have been spared…’ he wrote to Clinton and said <\/span> ‘why if<\/b> ?’ . I think that’s a pretty telling story when you think about how fast our country moved into Iraq<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region> or Kuwait<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region> when our business <\/span>interests were at stake.. makes you think.. no ? <\/p>\n

<\/span>I really wish that I’d heard Wissel’s talk today\u2026 but I was in the wrong place at the wrong time\u2026 .. and you already know what that’s like Sam.. you really know<\/p>\n

-jc<\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

ps. The TakeYourKidsToWorkDay thing I did yesterday was covered by the Burlington Free Press<\/a> and WCAX TV.<\/a> Here’s a low-res video of the story<\/p>\n

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Well folks..I’m feeling pretty lazy. I had a hard, hard day at work (but fairly productive.. I think)… Then I took off around 3 to work on the house with Diane.. Today’s project was the new lab… my workspace in the barn.. It’s a pretty amazing mess..and it feels good to go through it… But … Continue reading Friday night – reruns<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}