1. I got sick last weekend, meaning I missed a day of school and I’m still not a hundred percent. I keep miswriting things on the board and having to start over. But oh, well; I have another weekend to recover.

2. Oddly, I don’t have much to say today, though I’ve got quite a lot on my mind. My thoughts are not sufficiently cooked for general use.

3. It strikes me as typical of our culture that when I try to look up the lotus flower, the first result I get is a car company.

4. I’m reading Confucius’s Analetics in a casual kind of manner. Somehow, I have the impression that he is much more astute and more likely to be true in what he writes about society and human behavior than any modern expert writing a scientific study on the subject. I rather think there is something in the nature of the ‘scientific’ approach (using numbers, statistics, and so on) that means it will inevitably miss the mark when dealing with human subjects.

5. I like Confucius so far, by the way. There are a large number of passages that miss me for one reason or another, but most of it’s interesting and predictably profound.

“Learn as if you could not reach your object, and were always fearing also lest you should lose it.”

6. There is a wonderful story of St. Vincent de Paul, who was the son of poor farm laborers, but had become the chaplain of an aristocratic family and moved among the highest circles in Paris. One day he learned that his father was come to visit him in Paris, and he ordered church bells rung and gathered all the priests of his order together to present his father, the peasant, to them with great pomp and excitement.

7. When it comes to illustrating humility, another, less sublime, but still virtuous anecdote comes to mind; a moment in the Justice League cartoon. It’s the episode where Flash invites Batman and Orion to see him get the key to the city, and they end up stopping by his apartment. Batman, remember, is one of the wealthiest men in the world, and Orion is a god-like alien from a paradisaical planet. Flash, meanwhile, lives in a one-bedroom, which he’s perfectly happy to show off, boasting “there’s a laundry on the same floor!”

That throwaway line is really one of my favorite Flash moments. Having Flash boast about such a very ordinary and mediocre convenience tells us more about his character and attitude toward life and, by extension, his heroism than a whole conversation.