Andy Smallman

Here’s another song on Carina’s mixed tape, this one fully in French. It’s about how difficult it can be to choose something. And once you do choose something, you might end up wishing you chose something else, like when at a restaurant. It’s a big challenge.

In 2004, Barry Schwartz’s book “The Paradox of Choice” was released. In it, he suggests the amount of choice we have increases anxiety. Schwartz suggests that our best decisions follow these steps:

• Figure out your goal or goals
• Evaluate the importance of each goal
• Array the options
• Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your goals
• Pick the winning option
• Modify goals

So, Carina, it’s about time you figured out one of your goals. Left or right first, if you know what I mean.

This is one of the songs on Carina’s mixed tape. The lesson? Beauty is more than skin deep…

And maybe the best songs have their choruses sung in French. Here’s the first chorus:

La Belle et la bête (the beauty and the beast)
Quelle tragédie (what a tragedy)
Elle est comme le jour (she is like the day)
Il est comme la nuit (he is like the night)
Il est amoureux (he is in love)
Elle ne se soucie pas (she doesn’t care)
Vont-ils mourir tout seule? (Will they die alone?)
On verra (We’ll see)

I chatted with my mom this morning (and, btw, a happy 57th anniversary to my parents!) about Carina’s pending visit to Seattle. Yeah, yeah, I hear her mom is coming with her, and maybe a grandparent or two. But Carina is coming and that’s what’s most important. Anyway, my mom made reference to yesterday’s post and the playlist I made for Carina. And I got an email indicating a secret admirer named Ella is now following me on 8tracks.com, the place I post these playlists.

Want to be my secret admirer? Care to listen to one of my uploaded playlists? Do so via this link.

So here is where you can listen to the songs I selected for Carina’s mixed tape (oh, don’t go clicking on the arrow in the image above – it’s just a screenshot, not a link). I’m about to start the process of writing the liner notes. I’ll be posting those here in good time so just be patient, okay?

So at PSCS I convene and facilitate a weekly activity called “Boys Group,” an opportunity for students who identify as male to come together and talk. Lots of people jokingly assume that all we talk about it is, well, the body part considered uniquely male. This week, the boys played on that theme, but by talking about which “ball” would be the best or worst to be.

They started with things more sports-oriented, like a football or a baseball. They figured it would be better to be a football because people are always fighting to have you. A baseball, they said, is regularly being hit by a bat.

By the end of the discussion, they had considered things like a crystal ball (good!) and a gumball (bad!). They created a spectrum of the balls they talked about, and I took this photo to document the experience, suggesting it would be a fun one to include in the community-wide slideshow at the end of the year. They thought the photo should be taken without anyone smiling, tough guys that they are…

Click on the photo to enlarge it and get a better look at their spectrum.