its fun to have fun

[Eric Crump <wleric@showme.missouri.edu>]

Lynne,
I see your point, but we're close to being in agreement here. To expand: 
I don't think 'fun' and 'hard' are in any way mutually exclusive. In 
fact, I'd be tempted to say that *most* fun things are hard. But not all 
hard things are fun. Fun is the opposite of grueling, tedious, 
soul-shrinking drudgery. Drudgery is hard stuff that you have to do 
because somebody else expects you to. Duty is drudgery. Or, to grab a 
quote from a recent issue of _Wired_ (in which Nicholas Negroponte quotes 
Einstein): Love is a better master than duty.

You pull those weeds in the hot sun because you know the job will help 
your garden flourish. Gardening, generally, is fun. Pulling weeds is 
something you want to do in order to experience the joy of a good 
harvest. That's a different thing than what my dad did to me and my 
brother when we were worthless teenagers who wanted to shoot baskets and 
listen to music and watch TV all day. In order to build character in us, 
he made us pull crab grass from our yard by hand. 

We did not like it, SamIam, we did not like it one little bit. 


 --Eric Crump