Margo Shea

With a new semester, it begins again.   I am not talking about the classes, the meetings, the students, the committees, the scrambling to pick up loose strands left over from last semester. I am talking about the promises we make to ourselves.  It is our new year's ritual in a world of busy, whether it is manufactured or organic busy.  Everywhere I turn, people are making bold declarations. "I will say 'no' more often."  "I will only check email twice a day." "I will remember to stop and breathe."  "I promise to make time for what matters to me and to stop wasting time on things that don't matter."  "No more Facebook!"  "No more Netflix." "No more letting people dump stuff on my shoulders.  I choose me!" Everywhere I look, people want off the habitrail… Looking for meaning.  Purpose. Authenticity.  Time for the people and things we love.  The sense that we are in the right place, doing what we sho

They say comedy = tragedy + time .  A proposed television series set in Ireland during the Famine (1845-1852) has raised interesting questions about how to attribute meaning and weight to each variable in this particular equation. When screenwriter Hugh Travers, a Dublin native, mentioned in an interview that he had been given an open commission to develop a television program by Channel 4, and was working on a tragicomedy set during the Famine, he referred to it as a "kind of Shameless , set during the Famine."  Reaction was speedy, and quite what you would expect.  Most stories ran photos of Rowan Gillespie's Dublin memorial to Famine victims. The Daily Mail  led the race for the headline with, "Is this the Most Tasteless Idea for a Sitcom Ever?"  while IrishCentral.com's Irish-American pundit  Niall O'Dowd forgave those who thought this was an April Fool's joke . The Irish Times interviewed writers and historians who said it was in poo