Dr. Kun, our new band director, is very good at giving out interesting things to read or listen to. When we started to discuss some interesting ideas for non-standard concerts and artistic collaborations, she got excited and suggested I read The Rise of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida.

This Thanksgiving, I started the book.

Florida's book is one of the top two most thought-provoking books I have read since last semester. I'm thankful for a professor who is excited and interested about things enough to assign outside reading. Dean Pennington is also good source for interesting study tidbits that fall outside of classwork.

On Thanksgiving Day, my brother and I snuck out of our cousins' house and drove to Starbucks (ugh -- he's the addict -- I prefer independent shops) for a morning of study.

Florida would say we're part of the creative class, since we spent quality time together for our holiday -- writing, doing classwork, and designing websites.

Don't worry, we did more normal things later, like eating turkey, getting marauded by a cadre of four-year-olds in a vertigo-inducing game of quasi-football, and singing hymns at the piano.