Palimpsest Overdrive

Learned Color Spectacular 2022 #6

Welcome to the end of the calendar year. The days are short, the weather is cold, and the chatbots are taking over. And here we are in the middle, juggling holiday preparations both merry and stressful, end of the year performance reviews, and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of personal assessment. It’s all a bit much. And, if you’re at all like me, the temptation is call in an orbital strike¹ and to erase every little thing on my to do list. We can start over in January, tabula rasa.

Chat bot. Wait, no, sorry. That is Le Chat Botté, or Puss in Boots, illustrated by Felician Myrbach for Charles Perrault’s French edition of the Italian fairytale. It is also what I imagine our A.I. overlords will look like once they’ve ascended to their final forms.

I enjoy this time of year. Yes, it is stressful, and I, personally have a mountain of grading waiting, or perhaps weighing, on me. And the holidays have more than their fair share of drama, but I like the pageantry of Christmas and New Year’s. More than that, being reflective and introspective by nature, I enjoy taking stock² of everything that transpired in the previous twelve months and maybe even setting goals or plans for the next. Yet this year, for reasons I haven’t quite discerned, there’s been a subtle change in my thinking.