It's just not practical

When Mom used to take the kids shopping for their birthday, she never asked what I thought they should have. She only asked them. Lots of times they would come back with gifts that had no practical purpose. With all the things they could really use, it was hard to watch them come home with yet another knickknack. However, it gave me pause. I realized that gift giving, like most things I did, was drenched in practicality.

We went to Music Man this week. It was performed by a local community group. Two of our ward members were in it, but I didn't know that until I got there. It was quite enjoyable. Harold Hill was played by a young fellow whose family runs Pickleville Playhouse (T.J Davis). In reading his bio, I was struck by the fact that he had gone to dental school for a year, but because it wasn't "risky enough" he came back to a Northern Utah career in theatre. He was good, but, honestly, can anyone make a career in theatre in Northern Utah? Pickleville does well in the Summer, but summer is short at Bear Lake. I was impressed with the total lack of practicality of his plans, yet had to admire someone who throws caution to the wind and follows his dream.

Today two students came to me with a question. For over six months they have been trying to solve a problem that they thought up. It goes something like this. You have a paragraph with all the spaces and punctuation thrown out. You want to recreate the paragraph using only a dictionary of words. They kept talking about "It was the best of times the worst of times" being parsed as "I twas the best oft i me ..." They didn't want to use anything like sentence construction. They were excited with various forms of searching and backtracking that they had used. I gave them a few ideas for solving the problem and convinced them that any type of greedy scanning (looking for shortest word or longest word) wouldn't work in all cases, so they had to settle for finding the most likely candidates first. They seemed pleased with my suggestions and went on their way. I was plagued with the thought that they had spent six months working on a problem that no one else wanted the solution for (including me). Yet, I had to admire them for living the (albeit nerdy) dream.