When I was in grad school and teachers talked about professional development (which was not nearly enough for my tastes), one of the things they frequently mentioned was the academic conference. Conferences were many things; they were places to share ideas, mingle, develop contacts, network, interview, gain publications. They were an opportunity to be a professional in your field amongst other professionals. They were a break from teaching and an opportunity to be, first and foremost, a scholar.
I wish those teachers would've added "your mileage may vary."
Don't get me wrong. I still love going to conferences. I still love presenting, hearing other presentations, getting the chance to be a scholar. Conferences, though, have never really been the mystery wonderland of academia others make them out to be.
The problem is, I suspect, one of marketing.
My best two conference presentations were the two that were explicitly organized around a specific theme. When I presented at the American Studies Association, I was on a panel about comics, so everyone there wanted to hear and learn about comics. It was cool, keeping in mind I see problems being marketed as a comics scholar. The second one was something about medicine and popular culture at the North East MLA. I got great feedback, but my paper was on House, M. D....and who doesn't like talking about hit television?
But the rest of the time, I end up being the "which one of these things is unlike the others?" presentation. As a result, I normally don't get many good questions. If I don't visibly fit in, if I'm the oddball, then how will any good questions come? Who will be impressed/interested/curious?
And yes, I know that being an academic oddball is ultimately down to my own choices, but every academic ultimately has to answer the question: do you want to be a small player in a big field, or do you want to be an innovator yet have no peers? This is something I've been working on since starting my Ph.D.; I initially was going to study Twain as post-traumatic stress syndrome literature (thus becoming one of a million Twain scholars) before settling on deconstructing definitions of the mainstream in 1980s popular culture (a field that has, as far as I can tell, only me). However, I'm still not 100% sure where I want to be.
So, for my New Orleans conference, I honestly tried to present with marketing in mind. I submitted what I thought was a nice topic with wide appeal, involving New Orleans, football, race, and Katrina. I applied to the television area, which I assumed would be fairly mainstream. However, I was on a panel with one presentation analyzing some HBO drama about a psychiatrist and an analysis of the nineties sitcom Wings...so right away, I didn't fit in in spite of my attempts to market my presentation. However, as there were utterly no commonalities between any of the papers, ultimately, no one fit in...so I guess that's something.
Then I had A/V difficulties. I assembled my first powerpoint for a presentation ever. I made multiple copies (on flash drive, on cd, mailed to 3 different e-mail accounts). There was no computer. Luckily, I had my dvd and knew the exact times of my clips. However, the panelist closest to the dvd player could not, for some reason, fast forward to my second clip for me; I had to bring my presentation to a screeching halt to get to it. So much for flow.
Nonetheless, I thought I did a good job on my presentation. I spoke rather than read. I had neat clips. I was on time. But then there was the Q/A session. I got one good question, but I got one person who blatantly attacked my premise on the grounds that how can sports broadcast do anything other than cover sports? He obviously didn't like or hear anything I had to say. Sigh.
So academically, it wasn't the most smashing success I've had, and ultimately, my attempts to market myself made utterly no difference whatsoever. However, how upset can you really be when you still get to hang out with long-dispersed friends in New Orleans?
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
distraction
Someone down the hall from me is playing Bonnie Tyler, "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Yes. Honestly.
Y'know, I expect certain distractions when I work in my office. I expect to have my colleagues dropping by to complain about their day. I expect to get annoying e-mails. I expect to have homicidal maniacs run through the hallway carrying axes. I expect to battle the infestation of wallabees.
But Bonnie Tyler? Damn. I need a raise.
Y'know, I expect certain distractions when I work in my office. I expect to have my colleagues dropping by to complain about their day. I expect to get annoying e-mails. I expect to have homicidal maniacs run through the hallway carrying axes. I expect to battle the infestation of wallabees.
But Bonnie Tyler? Damn. I need a raise.
trapped in the gutters
When I was a kid, I was never really close to the world of comics. Certainly, I knew that world existed, but that was about it. My parents only ever bought me the Harvey comics--either Richie Rich or Casper the Friendly Ghost--and those weren't really good enough (or even, for that matter, non-gag-worthy enough) to inspire a habit. Furthermore, I didn't have any comic book friends, so there was no hope of becoming indoctrinated by an acolyte in the cause.
So I was never really a comic guy. I had no preconceptions of the medium, of the quality of the texts, of the limits of the form, because I really had no earthly idea what they could do.
I never even considered comics in high school...they would've distracted from my horror novel phase. College was no better, particularly as I was in an English department. Don't get me wrong, though...this had nothing to do with prejudice. I was all about breaking literary boundaries (I did in fact write a Freudian analysis of a Bugs Bunny cartoon), but again, comics were too far off my radar to hold the level of a preconception which needed to be shattered
Trust me, though, I had a lot of preconceptions at this point. Fortunately, I left my hometown in order to get my Ph.D., and in addition to changing my physical location, I also decided to revisit and actively undermine most of those preconceptions. As I was going to be teaching popular culture, I decided that I needed to know more about that popular culture. So I began a program of total immersion: I saw more movies, I started watching a few of the Star Treks, and some friends introduced me to wrestling.
Somewhere within my second year, a professor offered a class on comic book culture, and I took it out of the same spirit of exploration and boundary-stretching. Not only did I get to read a bunch of enormously important texts for the first time (including Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns) and wrote a paper which would eventually become part of the dissertation, I also became a fan of the medium. I found favorite writers. I developed the expensive habit of my own comic pull list. In many ways, I started to make up for lost comics time.
Comics did (and still do) fascinate me. There are several reasons for this. Not only are they a relatively open field for me personally (I had, after all, few preconceptions to overcome), graphic fiction still has the feel of a medium on the edge. While comics have been around for ages, and superhero fiction specifically has been around since the thirties, comics really only came of age in the eighties. There are still numerous possibilities for innovation within the medium, and it still harbors writers (such as Warren Ellis and Brian Micheal Bendis) who could never really work as well in a different, more established tradition.
But then there's the quandary of the comic-obsessed academic. As there's still room for cutting edge fiction within comics, there's likewise room for cutting edge interpretation. There's the growing role of comics in determining the timbre of our popular culture as a whole (as movies and television is increasingly either based off or inspired by comics). Comics is, in short, a medium which should be very attractive to academics, to scholars looking for mediums to make their own. And indeed, there's lots of exciting scholarship coming out of comics studies.
However, comics also bring their own baggage. Up to the late eighties, most comics were, frankly speaking, really awful. In my research, I've found myself stuck reading 50s Captain Americas, 60s Thors, and 70s Avengers...and they were all painful to read. They were, for the most part, the type of fiction obviously written as a "product" rather than a serious endeavor. Worse still, lots of it was written as "dumbed down" children's literature...simple plots, unrealistic dialog, and the utter and complete lack of complexity, moral, ethical, or otherwise.
Unfortunately, I am wiling to bet dollars to donuts that most people have the latter impression of comics rather than the former. Many people still must think of comics as being simple, and therefore, comic scholarship as inconsequential. Do serious scholars study comics? I imagine that many (including a sizeable chunk of the intellectual "powers that be") would say the answer is obviously "no."
This is something with which I really struggle. I love comics. Moreover, I love writing about comics; I've done it many times, and I think I've done it rather well. But do I keep doing it? Do I try to become a big name in an unrespected field that I nonetheless love? Or do I try to avoid typecasting as a frivolous scholar?
It's not just comics that bring up these thoughts. I wrote my dissertation (and am writing my book) on eighties culture, so I've also been wondering if I really in fact want to market myself as an eighties scholar...there are few jobs for someone with that label. But comics...well, have you heard the quote "just when I thought I was out, they drag me back in?"
So how does this tie into today's weird mood? Well, that requires a history lesson.
When I was taking that comics class, I wrote a paper about the aforementioned Watchmen and Dark Knight. A few months later, a fellow grad student saw me in the library. When he told me that him and the professor of that comics class were putting together an anthology, he suggested that I contribute something on comics in the eighties. I protested, saying that I didn't really have the time...moreover, I didn't really know anything about comics in the eighties. He gave me a list.
This of course meant many hours plowing through back issue after back issue of many different titles. Eventually, I found a neat bit I could write about Captain America, plowed through the article, stitched it with that comics class paper, submitted it for the anthology, and made it the basis to one of my dissertation chapters.
Then the anthology died. Undeterred (I had, after all, spent a lot of time on this article and wanted to milk it for all it was worth), I submitted it to The Journal of Popular Culture, and they accepted it...my first academic journal publication!
Unfortunately, the journal had (at that time) a pretty intense backlog of accepted work. It took over four years for my article to actually see print. I got to present it at the American Studies Association's conference (which allowed me to meet both Lawrence Levine and Janice Radway), but then, I put it out of my mind.
In the meantime, I concentrated on finding a job, and only really thought about comics as my own fun bit of culture. While they were amongst the things to go when money got tightest during the adjunct period, one of my first acts upon getting my current job was to hit a comic store. I wasn't, however, thinking of them as a subject of scholarship.
Then the Journal of Popular Culture article on Captain America came out--a nice line on the vitae! Within a month, though, I was contacted by a guy who was putting together an anthology on the good Cap, and was I interested? Again, when I tried to beg off (I had no time to write, hadn't read it in years, still didn't know much, and had no ideas), he gave me a list of ideas...and there I was, writing about Captain America again.
It took me a while to write, but the article came out really well. I ended up focusing on Cap's popular fiction appearances (another medium I can teach) and the version of masculinity they portray (another theoretical angle I can teach), so it was all a good thing, and I can use it to make several career-based arguments. The anthology, Captain America and the Struggle of the Superhero, recently came out, so that's another neat vitae line.
I currently have no superhero stuff in the cue, but the medium is still forcing its way into my head. I recently had an article on House, M. D. accepted by Television & New Media which looked at the show's protagonist as a (wait for it...) superhero...and, of course, involved superhero fiction analysis as my critical theory (which allowed me to cite myself, something I wholeheartedly recommend). I get to revise the dissertation/book chapter on Cap this summer...that is, if my brain does not implode before I get to that stage of the process. And who knows where else comics will rear their ugly head?
And this is where I'm torn. I dearly love graphic fiction. I regularly read a number of titles. My favorite current writer (Warren Ellis) works in the world of comics. If pressed, I would say my favorite work of fiction period is Sandman. I don't see comics ever going away for me. And I would love to present more comics stuff, research more comics stuff, write more comics stuff.
Do I dare do this, though? How much attention should I pay to the stereotypes? Do I suppress my academic urges and write about more marketable stuff? Or do I follow my muse, even if it leads to academic ghettoization? It's not selling out, because I do also love the stuff currently in my head and on-deck circle...but what happens when my biggest ideas are ones that might work against me? Will I be labeled as a "comics scholar?" And will that ever be anything other than limiting to my career?
The world of comics is one of panels, borders, word balloons, and gutters. Even in the wildest, most cutting edge comics, there is still, in the end, a sense of order in the medium in spite of experimental artwork and narrative. There are definitive lines even when there are competing visions.
I know that. I get that. Sometimes, though, I wish my intellectual relationship to comics was as clearly defined.
So I was never really a comic guy. I had no preconceptions of the medium, of the quality of the texts, of the limits of the form, because I really had no earthly idea what they could do.
I never even considered comics in high school...they would've distracted from my horror novel phase. College was no better, particularly as I was in an English department. Don't get me wrong, though...this had nothing to do with prejudice. I was all about breaking literary boundaries (I did in fact write a Freudian analysis of a Bugs Bunny cartoon), but again, comics were too far off my radar to hold the level of a preconception which needed to be shattered
Trust me, though, I had a lot of preconceptions at this point. Fortunately, I left my hometown in order to get my Ph.D., and in addition to changing my physical location, I also decided to revisit and actively undermine most of those preconceptions. As I was going to be teaching popular culture, I decided that I needed to know more about that popular culture. So I began a program of total immersion: I saw more movies, I started watching a few of the Star Treks, and some friends introduced me to wrestling.
Somewhere within my second year, a professor offered a class on comic book culture, and I took it out of the same spirit of exploration and boundary-stretching. Not only did I get to read a bunch of enormously important texts for the first time (including Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns) and wrote a paper which would eventually become part of the dissertation, I also became a fan of the medium. I found favorite writers. I developed the expensive habit of my own comic pull list. In many ways, I started to make up for lost comics time.
Comics did (and still do) fascinate me. There are several reasons for this. Not only are they a relatively open field for me personally (I had, after all, few preconceptions to overcome), graphic fiction still has the feel of a medium on the edge. While comics have been around for ages, and superhero fiction specifically has been around since the thirties, comics really only came of age in the eighties. There are still numerous possibilities for innovation within the medium, and it still harbors writers (such as Warren Ellis and Brian Micheal Bendis) who could never really work as well in a different, more established tradition.
But then there's the quandary of the comic-obsessed academic. As there's still room for cutting edge fiction within comics, there's likewise room for cutting edge interpretation. There's the growing role of comics in determining the timbre of our popular culture as a whole (as movies and television is increasingly either based off or inspired by comics). Comics is, in short, a medium which should be very attractive to academics, to scholars looking for mediums to make their own. And indeed, there's lots of exciting scholarship coming out of comics studies.
However, comics also bring their own baggage. Up to the late eighties, most comics were, frankly speaking, really awful. In my research, I've found myself stuck reading 50s Captain Americas, 60s Thors, and 70s Avengers...and they were all painful to read. They were, for the most part, the type of fiction obviously written as a "product" rather than a serious endeavor. Worse still, lots of it was written as "dumbed down" children's literature...simple plots, unrealistic dialog, and the utter and complete lack of complexity, moral, ethical, or otherwise.
Unfortunately, I am wiling to bet dollars to donuts that most people have the latter impression of comics rather than the former. Many people still must think of comics as being simple, and therefore, comic scholarship as inconsequential. Do serious scholars study comics? I imagine that many (including a sizeable chunk of the intellectual "powers that be") would say the answer is obviously "no."
This is something with which I really struggle. I love comics. Moreover, I love writing about comics; I've done it many times, and I think I've done it rather well. But do I keep doing it? Do I try to become a big name in an unrespected field that I nonetheless love? Or do I try to avoid typecasting as a frivolous scholar?
It's not just comics that bring up these thoughts. I wrote my dissertation (and am writing my book) on eighties culture, so I've also been wondering if I really in fact want to market myself as an eighties scholar...there are few jobs for someone with that label. But comics...well, have you heard the quote "just when I thought I was out, they drag me back in?"
So how does this tie into today's weird mood? Well, that requires a history lesson.
When I was taking that comics class, I wrote a paper about the aforementioned Watchmen and Dark Knight. A few months later, a fellow grad student saw me in the library. When he told me that him and the professor of that comics class were putting together an anthology, he suggested that I contribute something on comics in the eighties. I protested, saying that I didn't really have the time...moreover, I didn't really know anything about comics in the eighties. He gave me a list.
This of course meant many hours plowing through back issue after back issue of many different titles. Eventually, I found a neat bit I could write about Captain America, plowed through the article, stitched it with that comics class paper, submitted it for the anthology, and made it the basis to one of my dissertation chapters.
Then the anthology died. Undeterred (I had, after all, spent a lot of time on this article and wanted to milk it for all it was worth), I submitted it to The Journal of Popular Culture, and they accepted it...my first academic journal publication!
Unfortunately, the journal had (at that time) a pretty intense backlog of accepted work. It took over four years for my article to actually see print. I got to present it at the American Studies Association's conference (which allowed me to meet both Lawrence Levine and Janice Radway), but then, I put it out of my mind.
In the meantime, I concentrated on finding a job, and only really thought about comics as my own fun bit of culture. While they were amongst the things to go when money got tightest during the adjunct period, one of my first acts upon getting my current job was to hit a comic store. I wasn't, however, thinking of them as a subject of scholarship.
Then the Journal of Popular Culture article on Captain America came out--a nice line on the vitae! Within a month, though, I was contacted by a guy who was putting together an anthology on the good Cap, and was I interested? Again, when I tried to beg off (I had no time to write, hadn't read it in years, still didn't know much, and had no ideas), he gave me a list of ideas...and there I was, writing about Captain America again.
It took me a while to write, but the article came out really well. I ended up focusing on Cap's popular fiction appearances (another medium I can teach) and the version of masculinity they portray (another theoretical angle I can teach), so it was all a good thing, and I can use it to make several career-based arguments. The anthology, Captain America and the Struggle of the Superhero, recently came out, so that's another neat vitae line.
I currently have no superhero stuff in the cue, but the medium is still forcing its way into my head. I recently had an article on House, M. D. accepted by Television & New Media which looked at the show's protagonist as a (wait for it...) superhero...and, of course, involved superhero fiction analysis as my critical theory (which allowed me to cite myself, something I wholeheartedly recommend). I get to revise the dissertation/book chapter on Cap this summer...that is, if my brain does not implode before I get to that stage of the process. And who knows where else comics will rear their ugly head?
And this is where I'm torn. I dearly love graphic fiction. I regularly read a number of titles. My favorite current writer (Warren Ellis) works in the world of comics. If pressed, I would say my favorite work of fiction period is Sandman. I don't see comics ever going away for me. And I would love to present more comics stuff, research more comics stuff, write more comics stuff.
Do I dare do this, though? How much attention should I pay to the stereotypes? Do I suppress my academic urges and write about more marketable stuff? Or do I follow my muse, even if it leads to academic ghettoization? It's not selling out, because I do also love the stuff currently in my head and on-deck circle...but what happens when my biggest ideas are ones that might work against me? Will I be labeled as a "comics scholar?" And will that ever be anything other than limiting to my career?
The world of comics is one of panels, borders, word balloons, and gutters. Even in the wildest, most cutting edge comics, there is still, in the end, a sense of order in the medium in spite of experimental artwork and narrative. There are definitive lines even when there are competing visions.
I know that. I get that. Sometimes, though, I wish my intellectual relationship to comics was as clearly defined.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
sanity and reunions, part one
I have most likely decided to go to my high school reunion. This is unexpected for me...I hated high school, hated the person I was at the time, had no good relationships, and generally could not wait to leave. On top of that, I have seen remarkably few people from high school since leaving.
It's not that I hated everyone with whom I went to school. Far from it, but out of the 5-10 people I really would like to see, the majority of them still live in our hometown, and I've run into most of them during my brief stays. While it would be great to see them all at once, the thought of "enforced nostalgia" which will inevitably accompany the formal reunion makes me itch, frankly. And if I wanted to see all my old friends, I'd rather just plan an extended trip back down there and make some phone calls.
However, a friend of mine who moved to California (and developed a rather nasty habit of saying the word "dude" repeatedly) is coming, and since I have very little chance of making it out to the left coast anytime soon, I have agreed to go to this nightmarish reunion. In order to make the whole shindig more notable, I have suggested a number of tasks to occupy our time at the ceremony. Round one involves coming up with and then betting on over/unders for the:
Anyone have any further suggestions? I feel I'll need all the distractions I can get.
It's not that I hated everyone with whom I went to school. Far from it, but out of the 5-10 people I really would like to see, the majority of them still live in our hometown, and I've run into most of them during my brief stays. While it would be great to see them all at once, the thought of "enforced nostalgia" which will inevitably accompany the formal reunion makes me itch, frankly. And if I wanted to see all my old friends, I'd rather just plan an extended trip back down there and make some phone calls.
However, a friend of mine who moved to California (and developed a rather nasty habit of saying the word "dude" repeatedly) is coming, and since I have very little chance of making it out to the left coast anytime soon, I have agreed to go to this nightmarish reunion. In order to make the whole shindig more notable, I have suggested a number of tasks to occupy our time at the ceremony. Round one involves coming up with and then betting on over/unders for the:
- number of people who scare us
- number of people who show us photos of their kids
- number of people astounded we don't have kids
- number of people who tell us children are the greatest blessing in life
- number of people who will talk to us now but wouldn't in HS
- number of people we really don't want to see
- number of people who look disappointed when they find out I'm a leftist
- number of people who don't understand why I would want to be a teacher (and, as a result, I'm thinking of just introducing myself as a media scholar)
- incidents of homophobic rants
- amount of times we hear Bon Jovi, hair metal, or Prince
- amount of subsequent dancing to said crap music
- robots
- automatons
- number of people who have aged 20 years more than expected
- general level of smugness
- number of people who've never actually left our hometown
- amount of times we resist the urge to punch someone
- number of minutes until we are overcome with the urge to blow the joint and just hit a dark dive bar
Anyone have any further suggestions? I feel I'll need all the distractions I can get.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
NO part 1: two incidents I like
I have lots to report on the New Orleans trip, but most of that is waiting for me to have time to manipulate the photo imagery. In the meantime, there are just two things I can't wait to tell you about.
- When I was checking into the conference, I was recognized. I went to the registration desk and said "Hi, my name's DuBose, first name..."
The guy running the "A-D" section looked up, excitement splashed across his face. "Mike?"
"Um...yeah."
"Oh, hey. It's great to meet you!"
(was he really talking to me?)
"I saw you give a talk in Hartford, and I use some of your ideas."
This floored me...mostly because it took me a few seconds to remember when the hell I was in Hartford. "Was that for the American Studies Association," I asked.
"Yeah. You presented on Captain America. There was also some guy who did something on Batman."
This is when I was sure that the Hadron Collider must've ripped a hole into the space/time fabric and sucked both me and this guy into this world from totally distinct and different dimensions...because I presented with two very big scholars in the field on this panel (the late Lawrence Levine and Janice Radway)...and I'm the one he remembered? Not to mention this was in 2003.
But he seemed like a nice guy, so we talked for a few minutes. Eventually, we exchanged business cards (which took the form of a nice ceremony that pretty much inverted the scene in American Psycho...we were comparing how cheap were our respective cards), and I hope to have some conversations with him in the future.
The whole incident was pretty surreal, though, and it was the first time anyone's ever talked to me out of the blue who was a fan of anything I've done. You can bet that this a story I'll be repeating widely and often.
- We spent a lot of our night time in two bars. While me, the spousal unit, and two friends were on the road, another friend (still in NO) called us to tell us that the bartender of Molly's on Toulouse told him "You're not really tourists...you're more like travellers."
I like that.
Monday, March 23, 2009
context
While walking out of the dentist's office, my mind started to bounce from topic to topic, first thinking of how roughly 2/3 of the females working within seemed to share a penchant for the exact same cut of their peroxide-blonde hair, then thinking of whether the personalized "RU FLOSIN" license plate was cutesy/clever or instead a desperate cry for career choice validation, then trying to think of a good lesson plan for the day's class, all within the fifteen steps before finally reaching my car. But, as someone who professionally studies the elements of everyday life, it's always like this for me. The brain is a pinball, constantly propelled from thought bumper to thought bumper, and it's up to some other part of my consciousness to try to first find some usable patter and then try to do something with the resulting accumulation of thought. Sometimes, I think that the real difference between a hopefully normal person and the crazed, neurotic academic is a constantly shifting, sliding, rotating mental terrain.
I get to my car and pull out before the cd player finishes reading the enclosed disk and spits out sound. It's a compilation of The Replacements someone made for me years ago. Normal, healthy people would, I assume, try to lose themselves in the songs. Not I, however. Yet I do try. I pound the steering wheel in time, bob my head, attempt some typical "rock guy" gesticulations designed to follow the various crescendos of the main guitar part. But still, that "I must know what IT (whatever it may be) means" portion of my brain just cannot cut off.
For instance:
I was never a big fan of The Replacements growing up. I had nothing against them, but they just never entered my radar. I was too busy listening to ACDC, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, and Megadeth. When I finally did get to hear them, it was when they were opening up for Tom Petty. They were horrible...they opened with a pseudo-jazz song, played a lot of meandering stuff, and then started to antagonize the bored crowd. As a result, I didn't listen to them for years. I had, I told myself, better uses for my time than a band that clearly was unprofessional and didn't really care if anyone liked them.
About a decade later, long after they had broken up, someone made me a compilation cd of songs from throughout their career, and something did indeed click. I started to appreciate why people became fanatical about The Replacements. However, when I tried to discuss my new-found appreciation for the band with these fans, I found out I liked much different stuff than did the hard-core. I, for instance, liked a lot of their later songs. I liked the "wrong" version of some songs. I preferred the studio stuff to any live bootlegs I heard.
The difference ultimately came down to context. I didn't like The Replacements as a band representative of a certain segment of musical history. I just could not listen to "Left of the Dial" and think of it juxtaposed to the mainstream music released simultaneously. I never had to reconcile their move to more professional, maybe more commercial music as their career progressed. They were ahistorical for me, because I lacked the context embraced by the hardcore fan.
Of course, that context can be a double-edged sword. Many hardcore Replacement fans miss a lot of good songs from their last few albums out of a loathing for those final disks inspired by an unreasonably intense loyalty to their early work. Still, though, I sort of wish I had the context, because without it, The Replacements would only ever be "a band" for me...they would never become a cause.
So, as I was driving back to campus, instead of just listening to my Replacements cd, instead of losing myself in the moment, instead of just "being," I was analyzing. I started to apply my rambling theory of context to other things...television, movies, friendships, politics. I started to think about the connections between time and experience. I started to think about systems, logic, and disorder.
Again, plusses and minuses exist. A friend can burn me a disc of his favorite band growing up, but I now know that I can never experience it the way he does, that it will never mean the same thing to me as it does to him. This is because of the nature of my mind. It will throw me from topic to topic. It will push me into oceans of material before yanking me out, up towards the higher ground of context, of theory, of concepts...and then, it will plunge me back into the realm of minutiae.
I eventually got back to campus, miraculously found a parking spot, and the cd died in time with my car's engine. As I walked back to my office, I thought less about context than my insatiable, unstoppable need for the order I would never find. I unlocked my door, sat down at the computer, and did get a lesson plan out of it. It does make me wonder, though...is this neurotic tendency what threw me into academics, or is it caused by my choice of vocation?
Another mystery to ponder, I guess.
I get to my car and pull out before the cd player finishes reading the enclosed disk and spits out sound. It's a compilation of The Replacements someone made for me years ago. Normal, healthy people would, I assume, try to lose themselves in the songs. Not I, however. Yet I do try. I pound the steering wheel in time, bob my head, attempt some typical "rock guy" gesticulations designed to follow the various crescendos of the main guitar part. But still, that "I must know what IT (whatever it may be) means" portion of my brain just cannot cut off.
For instance:
I was never a big fan of The Replacements growing up. I had nothing against them, but they just never entered my radar. I was too busy listening to ACDC, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, and Megadeth. When I finally did get to hear them, it was when they were opening up for Tom Petty. They were horrible...they opened with a pseudo-jazz song, played a lot of meandering stuff, and then started to antagonize the bored crowd. As a result, I didn't listen to them for years. I had, I told myself, better uses for my time than a band that clearly was unprofessional and didn't really care if anyone liked them.
About a decade later, long after they had broken up, someone made me a compilation cd of songs from throughout their career, and something did indeed click. I started to appreciate why people became fanatical about The Replacements. However, when I tried to discuss my new-found appreciation for the band with these fans, I found out I liked much different stuff than did the hard-core. I, for instance, liked a lot of their later songs. I liked the "wrong" version of some songs. I preferred the studio stuff to any live bootlegs I heard.
The difference ultimately came down to context. I didn't like The Replacements as a band representative of a certain segment of musical history. I just could not listen to "Left of the Dial" and think of it juxtaposed to the mainstream music released simultaneously. I never had to reconcile their move to more professional, maybe more commercial music as their career progressed. They were ahistorical for me, because I lacked the context embraced by the hardcore fan.
Of course, that context can be a double-edged sword. Many hardcore Replacement fans miss a lot of good songs from their last few albums out of a loathing for those final disks inspired by an unreasonably intense loyalty to their early work. Still, though, I sort of wish I had the context, because without it, The Replacements would only ever be "a band" for me...they would never become a cause.
So, as I was driving back to campus, instead of just listening to my Replacements cd, instead of losing myself in the moment, instead of just "being," I was analyzing. I started to apply my rambling theory of context to other things...television, movies, friendships, politics. I started to think about the connections between time and experience. I started to think about systems, logic, and disorder.
Again, plusses and minuses exist. A friend can burn me a disc of his favorite band growing up, but I now know that I can never experience it the way he does, that it will never mean the same thing to me as it does to him. This is because of the nature of my mind. It will throw me from topic to topic. It will push me into oceans of material before yanking me out, up towards the higher ground of context, of theory, of concepts...and then, it will plunge me back into the realm of minutiae.
I eventually got back to campus, miraculously found a parking spot, and the cd died in time with my car's engine. As I walked back to my office, I thought less about context than my insatiable, unstoppable need for the order I would never find. I unlocked my door, sat down at the computer, and did get a lesson plan out of it. It does make me wonder, though...is this neurotic tendency what threw me into academics, or is it caused by my choice of vocation?
Another mystery to ponder, I guess.
Monday, March 16, 2009
it's gonna be a bright, sunshiny day
What leads to the perfect morning? More than you'd think.
About a month or so ago, I started to have a low-grade case of the sniffles. This took place mostly at night, particularly when trying to sleep, so I suspected I had some hidden stores of dust in the bedroom. I got as far as moving the bed and vacuuming behind that, and I had every intention of moving the rest of the furniture and cleaning behind that...but I got (what a surprise!) both busy and lazy.
Yesterday, in the morning, the sniffles were a bit worse. I had my great role-playing experiment in the afternoon, and I did get through that, but afterwards, I started to feel increasingly horrible. By the time dinner came around, I was going through a centimeter or so of tissues per hour. I began to suspect that, as a girl I knew in high school claimed, that my nose was really leaking out of my skull...and it was all slimy and gross. This was on a day when it was finally nice enough to be outside. I had plans to invite friends over for cigars, but ultimately, I decided that inhaling a monstrous amount of smoke might not be the best thing for my condition.
By bed time, my mood and feeling had not improved. However, my nose was both throbbing and glowing, and I was reconsidering the legend of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I stocked up on drugs, apologized to my spousal unit in advance for the torture I was surely going to inflict on her throughout the night, and collapsed in bed.
This all leads to the perfect morning.
When my spousal unit's alarm went off, I went to the bathroom real quick and took a slug of Nyquil before collapsing back in bed. Three hours later, the doorbell goes off. I call out "Be right there" and throw on some clothes. As I shamble to the door, I wonder why I have Peter Cetera's "Next Time I Fall" stuck in my head. My landlord's maintenance man is at the door, letting me know he's here to fix the back door...a request I made in November. I stumble back to the bedroom, but there is no more sleep...just a battle between the crappy mid-eighties MOR ballad, the numbing effects of super cold medicine, and the hammer/drill sounds from the back door.
At least it can only get better, right? Hey, Road House is on AMC. Philosophy in the morning!
About a month or so ago, I started to have a low-grade case of the sniffles. This took place mostly at night, particularly when trying to sleep, so I suspected I had some hidden stores of dust in the bedroom. I got as far as moving the bed and vacuuming behind that, and I had every intention of moving the rest of the furniture and cleaning behind that...but I got (what a surprise!) both busy and lazy.
Yesterday, in the morning, the sniffles were a bit worse. I had my great role-playing experiment in the afternoon, and I did get through that, but afterwards, I started to feel increasingly horrible. By the time dinner came around, I was going through a centimeter or so of tissues per hour. I began to suspect that, as a girl I knew in high school claimed, that my nose was really leaking out of my skull...and it was all slimy and gross. This was on a day when it was finally nice enough to be outside. I had plans to invite friends over for cigars, but ultimately, I decided that inhaling a monstrous amount of smoke might not be the best thing for my condition.
By bed time, my mood and feeling had not improved. However, my nose was both throbbing and glowing, and I was reconsidering the legend of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I stocked up on drugs, apologized to my spousal unit in advance for the torture I was surely going to inflict on her throughout the night, and collapsed in bed.
This all leads to the perfect morning.
When my spousal unit's alarm went off, I went to the bathroom real quick and took a slug of Nyquil before collapsing back in bed. Three hours later, the doorbell goes off. I call out "Be right there" and throw on some clothes. As I shamble to the door, I wonder why I have Peter Cetera's "Next Time I Fall" stuck in my head. My landlord's maintenance man is at the door, letting me know he's here to fix the back door...a request I made in November. I stumble back to the bedroom, but there is no more sleep...just a battle between the crappy mid-eighties MOR ballad, the numbing effects of super cold medicine, and the hammer/drill sounds from the back door.
At least it can only get better, right? Hey, Road House is on AMC. Philosophy in the morning!
Thursday, March 12, 2009
spring break party!
It wasn't without its requirements. Their visit did require a modicum of prep work. The house needed a certain amount of rearrangement and cleaning. Both the spousal unit and I had a decent volume of our stuff in piles. The carpet was in need of a good vacuuming--the severe move-all-the-furniture variety. I also had to go and purchase some Honey Nut Cheerios, as we only had the unadulterated variety...and our house guests had certain...needs.
Their departure also showed the needs that had to be abandoned for the duration of their visit. Amongst the things that went by the wayside included workouts, salads, home-cooked meals, sobriety, bathroom visits with the door open...but these can all be set aside for a week. Friends are always worth it.
I do really love it when friends come to visit, and I try to go out of my way to get everything ready. It's one of the sincerely depressing things about academics is that you tend to lose friends on a normal basis. Some go crazy and socially disappear, but most just move away. I try to get people together at conferences, but conferences involve travel costs, lodging costs, registration costs, and vacation costs...besides the pesky little requirement of having to write another paper. Until all my friends have tenured jobs, this just isn't the perfect solution.
Luckily enough, my comrades dr. alex and thmarn are strange enough to actually want to come back to Bowling Green for their spring break. Somehow, my humble city beat out Palm Beach, Cancun, Key West, Tahiti, Stockholm, Lichtenstein, Bellingshausen Station, and many other spring break hot spots...so we got house guests!
It was one fun week. We got to do Howards Club H on multiple occasions, did the road trip thing, endured the "heteros gone wild" catcalls, ate out every single night (which, when I finally got back to my workouts, led me to pass out upon discovering my level of weight gain), danced with my spousal unit in a bar and accidentally dropped her on the cold floor, watched a fairly amusing movie and some horrific television. Generally, we had a blast.
However, I noticed a few things. First, we got to hang out with 80% of the people I know in Bowling Green. What was interesting about this was that most of them, I only get to see most of them every few weeks. This just proves I'm one of the least successful people I know at surrounding myself with a large posse. This always leads me to the quantity versus quality argument.
Second, we got to see some of our long distance friends, a few from Michigan and one from Cleveland (on top of our two visitors), so there was a little bit of a "high school reunion" feel to the evenings...except I really missed and wanted to see everyone there. It was amazing how easily we fell back into our old conversations. It was also sad when we had to leave them.
Finally, whenever we were being social, I noticed that we had a "it shall not be named" topic of conversation constantly floating around the periphery of our conversations. What was the common denominator?
Uncertainty. Very few of us know what we'll be doing next year...I'm one of the lucky few. Most others do not. Job announcements are down. Those that do get posted are just as likely to lose funding as move to the hiring stages. Existing jobs won't necessarily continue.
We all feel it. It's the human cost of the economy. It's no longer safe being a thinker, a teacher. And while I'm relatively stable for the next year or two, I do worry. The pressure of being an academic has always been dealing with an amount of uncertainty. However, now I also have to take on that of my friends.
I don't have many friends, but the ones I do have are magnificent. They are dealing with massive uncertainty. That uncertainty will, most likely, push them even further away.
The best I can do is dwell on the joys of our meetings...thankfully, we have enough good times to almost make up for the departures.
Their departure also showed the needs that had to be abandoned for the duration of their visit. Amongst the things that went by the wayside included workouts, salads, home-cooked meals, sobriety, bathroom visits with the door open...but these can all be set aside for a week. Friends are always worth it.
I do really love it when friends come to visit, and I try to go out of my way to get everything ready. It's one of the sincerely depressing things about academics is that you tend to lose friends on a normal basis. Some go crazy and socially disappear, but most just move away. I try to get people together at conferences, but conferences involve travel costs, lodging costs, registration costs, and vacation costs...besides the pesky little requirement of having to write another paper. Until all my friends have tenured jobs, this just isn't the perfect solution.
Luckily enough, my comrades dr. alex and thmarn are strange enough to actually want to come back to Bowling Green for their spring break. Somehow, my humble city beat out Palm Beach, Cancun, Key West, Tahiti, Stockholm, Lichtenstein, Bellingshausen Station, and many other spring break hot spots...so we got house guests!
It was one fun week. We got to do Howards Club H on multiple occasions, did the road trip thing, endured the "heteros gone wild" catcalls, ate out every single night (which, when I finally got back to my workouts, led me to pass out upon discovering my level of weight gain), danced with my spousal unit in a bar and accidentally dropped her on the cold floor, watched a fairly amusing movie and some horrific television. Generally, we had a blast.
However, I noticed a few things. First, we got to hang out with 80% of the people I know in Bowling Green. What was interesting about this was that most of them, I only get to see most of them every few weeks. This just proves I'm one of the least successful people I know at surrounding myself with a large posse. This always leads me to the quantity versus quality argument.
Second, we got to see some of our long distance friends, a few from Michigan and one from Cleveland (on top of our two visitors), so there was a little bit of a "high school reunion" feel to the evenings...except I really missed and wanted to see everyone there. It was amazing how easily we fell back into our old conversations. It was also sad when we had to leave them.
Finally, whenever we were being social, I noticed that we had a "it shall not be named" topic of conversation constantly floating around the periphery of our conversations. What was the common denominator?
Uncertainty. Very few of us know what we'll be doing next year...I'm one of the lucky few. Most others do not. Job announcements are down. Those that do get posted are just as likely to lose funding as move to the hiring stages. Existing jobs won't necessarily continue.
We all feel it. It's the human cost of the economy. It's no longer safe being a thinker, a teacher. And while I'm relatively stable for the next year or two, I do worry. The pressure of being an academic has always been dealing with an amount of uncertainty. However, now I also have to take on that of my friends.
I don't have many friends, but the ones I do have are magnificent. They are dealing with massive uncertainty. That uncertainty will, most likely, push them even further away.
The best I can do is dwell on the joys of our meetings...thankfully, we have enough good times to almost make up for the departures.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
on social networks, paranoia, and the proper metaphor
(If you're one of my Facebook friends, I want to be clear: I'm not talking about you...I'm talking about the person behind you.)
For a long time, I resisted joining the rising internet trend of social networks. To the uninitiated, they struck me as remarkably similar to the "internet for dummies" approach of AOL...and the very thought of slipping into an AOL-esque wonderland of corporate stupidity made me shutter in fear.
Why? Two reasons. First, when I was getting my MA, some of my colleagues worked part time at AOL. Their job? Scouring the chat room transcripts and customer e-mails for "banned" words and phrases, so the offenders could be kicked off the service. That let me know that AOL was basically fascism rapped in the flag of "family friendly." Even at my then politically unenlightened state, something about this really gave me the heebie-jeebies. Thank goodness this kind of censorship doesn't still happen online, right?
Secondly, when I first met her, my lovely spousal unit subscribed to AOL for some unfathomable reason. I remember being over there and hearing the computer hard drive freaking out. When I asked spousal unit (then only "significant other unit"), she told me that AOL automatically updated their software on a normal basis. Yes, this means that they essentially hijacked her computer hard drive. This wouldn't be so bad if they were just providing bug fixes and security updates, but with the aforementioned censorship, I became very scared, paranoid, and suspicious. Plus, AOL's software was basically a bloated warthog anyway, and it had slowed her computer down to a crawl.
These factors led to my first attempt to classify social networking: it was like volunteering to have all your keg parties and weekend bashes observed by the KGB.
So this is what I thought of social networking. However, I was (by this time of my live) smart enough to know I couldn't entirely rely on my prior conceptions and really needed to figure out stuff for myself. Yes, I bit the bullet and signed up for my own MySpace account.
What happened when I dived into this new virtual playground? I would like to say that I learned the error of my ways and discovered a wonderland of openness and communication, entirely new models of interaction. However, at first, I was mostly listening to the sound of crickets. Then, however, something funny happened...I was contacted by someone from high school on whom I had a crush (and calling it anything other than that would be pure fiction on my part). Then I was contacted by another. And another. And then several long-lost high school friends.
What was funny about this, however, is how the conversations inevitably went. They would, on average, start with a "remember me?" message on either side, then a "this is what I've been up to" message, then no more than 2 attempts at ongoing conversation, then whomever contacted me would not reply to a message, and I'd go back to being out of touch with this person. This was the procedure the vast majority of the time.
I really started to get paranoid (or, as I'm going to start calling it, I went all "Mike") when contemplating the sudden fall-off of conversations. Did they quit talking to me after remembering what I was really like in high school? Were they put off by who I had become? Did they stop writing because they felt the whole idea of reestablishing ties with me was, in hindsight, a huge mistake?
I decided that maybe the lack of a real discussion was because of the forum, so I got myself a Facebook account (profile name Mike S. DuBose), and damnit, if the same thing didn't happen there. It is this point where I came up with my second social networking metaphor: it was a high school reunion attended by classmates with whom you didn't really have anything in common...and therefore only fun in the beginning when it was still a novel experience, or later on only if you keep drinking heavily.
After a while, I decided the whole social networking thing was silly. Instead, I put my energy/need to kill time into Twitter, which I found much more effective. It seemed to attract a much more serious clientele, revolving more around thinkers than "hey, remember me?" figures from your past. Twitter devotees just weren't interested in sending you survey/questionnaires/chain letters, inviting you to play games, or trying to trade fictional prizes and gifts...things that, much to my chagrin, seem to pervade MySpace and are starting to invade Facebook.
Twitter also has a simple yet awesome interface. I loved its 140 character format (which rewards brevity and works well as a 1-liner dump), but I liked that I got into funny, serious, and intriguing conversations...instead of empty "high school reunion" talk, which accounted for about 90% of my Facebook and MySpace experience. Twitterers seem to talk to you rather than just spout enigmatic oddities as they do in Facebook's status update (those of us who are truly weird, by the way, can be strange and say something meaningful). Simply put, Twitter is just better. So I abandoned both my MySpace and Facebook accounts for a good long while, twittered, blogged occasionally, and put the whole concept of social networking out of my head.
Then, however, I got the bright idea to see if I could cross-post my twitter feed into the mainstream social networking...mostly so I could use it all as promo for this blog. Myspace had no easy way to do it and refused to let me include links. Facebook, however, allowed for direct posting access. So I linked up my tweets with my status update and tried to re-embrace Facebook.
I discovered a few things. Facebook is easier to get non-internet-savvy people to join, for some reason. It also becomes tremendously more powerful when you get above the 50 friend mark...then there is enough input to guarantee a workable signal to noise ratio. In other words, you gotta get enough Facebooking junk to be able to find the good stuff.
I really only look at the status updates, though, so I am essentially using Facebook as an inferior version of Twitter. But this seems to be the method of use preferred by many users. I have one or two friends with whom I've IM'd via Facebook, but by and large, if I could convince five or six of my Facebook friends to move over to Twitter, I'd probably abandon it again.
Some Facebookers persist, however. When I asked a while ago why people Facebook, no one could give me a good answer. One friend, also disdainful of Facebook, had a great metaphor: it's like the bar in your town that sucks but you go to because your friends like it for some reason.
I like this. However, I always have real conversations in bars...or at least funny/bad/memorable conversations. The same rarely happens in Facebook. Contact there is usually fleeting, impermanent, and entirely surface.
Where else have I seen this?
Finally, last week, it hit me. Where did people just try to shock rather than engage? Indulge in two second bursts of conversation before going on about their day? Are more worried about the appearance of nicety than any real depth?
This led me to the perfect Facebook metaphor: Social networking is like being stuck the halls in high school between periods. It's a fine place if you really loved high school. However, for those who developed very few lifelong friends in high school, had hardly any lasting relationships, really deplored the shallow nature of the social structure, or just wished we were somewhere else, somewhere meaningful, well, it's not an ideal hangout. It's a place between places, an insignificant interstitiality, where seemingly nothing meaningful ever gets said or done.
I realize that it might sound like I'm being harsh here. There were plenty of people in high school who I really enjoyed, who I either hung out with constantly or wished I knew better. I had many great conversations, learned a lot by talking to people, and even gained a certain level of strange notoriety. I could work the limited social opportunities of the non-class periods of school well enough. However, people only ever really got me if we had the chance to get away from school and settle into the real work of knowing each other.
That kind of connection didn't happen between classes. Will it ever happen in an online place which is remarkably similar? I've had some very memorable Facebook moments, but frankly, the ratio is not all that high.
Facebook is high school between classes. It's a starter kit for sociality, a place to practice gaining and maintaining the connections. It's not a great place to live your life, though. Sooner or later, we're going to have to grow up and find a better way to really connect.
For a long time, I resisted joining the rising internet trend of social networks. To the uninitiated, they struck me as remarkably similar to the "internet for dummies" approach of AOL...and the very thought of slipping into an AOL-esque wonderland of corporate stupidity made me shutter in fear.
Why? Two reasons. First, when I was getting my MA, some of my colleagues worked part time at AOL. Their job? Scouring the chat room transcripts and customer e-mails for "banned" words and phrases, so the offenders could be kicked off the service. That let me know that AOL was basically fascism rapped in the flag of "family friendly." Even at my then politically unenlightened state, something about this really gave me the heebie-jeebies. Thank goodness this kind of censorship doesn't still happen online, right?
Secondly, when I first met her, my lovely spousal unit subscribed to AOL for some unfathomable reason. I remember being over there and hearing the computer hard drive freaking out. When I asked spousal unit (then only "significant other unit"), she told me that AOL automatically updated their software on a normal basis. Yes, this means that they essentially hijacked her computer hard drive. This wouldn't be so bad if they were just providing bug fixes and security updates, but with the aforementioned censorship, I became very scared, paranoid, and suspicious. Plus, AOL's software was basically a bloated warthog anyway, and it had slowed her computer down to a crawl.
These factors led to my first attempt to classify social networking: it was like volunteering to have all your keg parties and weekend bashes observed by the KGB.
So this is what I thought of social networking. However, I was (by this time of my live) smart enough to know I couldn't entirely rely on my prior conceptions and really needed to figure out stuff for myself. Yes, I bit the bullet and signed up for my own MySpace account.
What happened when I dived into this new virtual playground? I would like to say that I learned the error of my ways and discovered a wonderland of openness and communication, entirely new models of interaction. However, at first, I was mostly listening to the sound of crickets. Then, however, something funny happened...I was contacted by someone from high school on whom I had a crush (and calling it anything other than that would be pure fiction on my part). Then I was contacted by another. And another. And then several long-lost high school friends.
What was funny about this, however, is how the conversations inevitably went. They would, on average, start with a "remember me?" message on either side, then a "this is what I've been up to" message, then no more than 2 attempts at ongoing conversation, then whomever contacted me would not reply to a message, and I'd go back to being out of touch with this person. This was the procedure the vast majority of the time.
I really started to get paranoid (or, as I'm going to start calling it, I went all "Mike") when contemplating the sudden fall-off of conversations. Did they quit talking to me after remembering what I was really like in high school? Were they put off by who I had become? Did they stop writing because they felt the whole idea of reestablishing ties with me was, in hindsight, a huge mistake?
I decided that maybe the lack of a real discussion was because of the forum, so I got myself a Facebook account (profile name Mike S. DuBose), and damnit, if the same thing didn't happen there. It is this point where I came up with my second social networking metaphor: it was a high school reunion attended by classmates with whom you didn't really have anything in common...and therefore only fun in the beginning when it was still a novel experience, or later on only if you keep drinking heavily.
After a while, I decided the whole social networking thing was silly. Instead, I put my energy/need to kill time into Twitter, which I found much more effective. It seemed to attract a much more serious clientele, revolving more around thinkers than "hey, remember me?" figures from your past. Twitter devotees just weren't interested in sending you survey/questionnaires/chain letters, inviting you to play games, or trying to trade fictional prizes and gifts...things that, much to my chagrin, seem to pervade MySpace and are starting to invade Facebook.
Twitter also has a simple yet awesome interface. I loved its 140 character format (which rewards brevity and works well as a 1-liner dump), but I liked that I got into funny, serious, and intriguing conversations...instead of empty "high school reunion" talk, which accounted for about 90% of my Facebook and MySpace experience. Twitterers seem to talk to you rather than just spout enigmatic oddities as they do in Facebook's status update (those of us who are truly weird, by the way, can be strange and say something meaningful). Simply put, Twitter is just better. So I abandoned both my MySpace and Facebook accounts for a good long while, twittered, blogged occasionally, and put the whole concept of social networking out of my head.
Then, however, I got the bright idea to see if I could cross-post my twitter feed into the mainstream social networking...mostly so I could use it all as promo for this blog. Myspace had no easy way to do it and refused to let me include links. Facebook, however, allowed for direct posting access. So I linked up my tweets with my status update and tried to re-embrace Facebook.
I discovered a few things. Facebook is easier to get non-internet-savvy people to join, for some reason. It also becomes tremendously more powerful when you get above the 50 friend mark...then there is enough input to guarantee a workable signal to noise ratio. In other words, you gotta get enough Facebooking junk to be able to find the good stuff.
I really only look at the status updates, though, so I am essentially using Facebook as an inferior version of Twitter. But this seems to be the method of use preferred by many users. I have one or two friends with whom I've IM'd via Facebook, but by and large, if I could convince five or six of my Facebook friends to move over to Twitter, I'd probably abandon it again.
Some Facebookers persist, however. When I asked a while ago why people Facebook, no one could give me a good answer. One friend, also disdainful of Facebook, had a great metaphor: it's like the bar in your town that sucks but you go to because your friends like it for some reason.
I like this. However, I always have real conversations in bars...or at least funny/bad/memorable conversations. The same rarely happens in Facebook. Contact there is usually fleeting, impermanent, and entirely surface.
Where else have I seen this?
Finally, last week, it hit me. Where did people just try to shock rather than engage? Indulge in two second bursts of conversation before going on about their day? Are more worried about the appearance of nicety than any real depth?
This led me to the perfect Facebook metaphor: Social networking is like being stuck the halls in high school between periods. It's a fine place if you really loved high school. However, for those who developed very few lifelong friends in high school, had hardly any lasting relationships, really deplored the shallow nature of the social structure, or just wished we were somewhere else, somewhere meaningful, well, it's not an ideal hangout. It's a place between places, an insignificant interstitiality, where seemingly nothing meaningful ever gets said or done.
I realize that it might sound like I'm being harsh here. There were plenty of people in high school who I really enjoyed, who I either hung out with constantly or wished I knew better. I had many great conversations, learned a lot by talking to people, and even gained a certain level of strange notoriety. I could work the limited social opportunities of the non-class periods of school well enough. However, people only ever really got me if we had the chance to get away from school and settle into the real work of knowing each other.
That kind of connection didn't happen between classes. Will it ever happen in an online place which is remarkably similar? I've had some very memorable Facebook moments, but frankly, the ratio is not all that high.
Facebook is high school between classes. It's a starter kit for sociality, a place to practice gaining and maintaining the connections. It's not a great place to live your life, though. Sooner or later, we're going to have to grow up and find a better way to really connect.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
programming note
Today is a special day...it is the anniversary of the day where the higher powers blessed this earth by giving us my spousal unit. And if you know her, I want you to do a favor. When it hits 8pm, please take a minute out of your day to dance in celebration of Lori. It doesn't have to be a tango or anything, but I feel some celebration is in order, so shake it for my baby.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
backing up
Way back when I was starting college, computer were just starting to really make inroads into education. I knew that computer skills would eventually be a necessity, so I signed up for a "Microcomputing Skills" class at the community college, where we learned dBase, Lotus, and WordPerfect 5.1. Ah, the days of DOS. It was less an operating system and more a special magical language, designed to alienate the technophobes and elderly.
One of the first things the teacher tried to impress upon us was the importance of making multiple backups, and we needed to buy disks to store these copies. Feeling like I was on the edge of the future, I eschewed the 5 1/4" floppies in favor of pre-formated 3 1/2" disks. I ended up doing a lot of work at the campus computer lab, and I kept all of my papers on those disks. I would say they became my friends, but at the time, I didn't really care that much about my disks or my work. I was 19 and, as a result, fairly stupid. College was more a way to avoid getting a real job than anything else, and these disks were as valuable to me as the paper on which I'd doodle when bored in class...which was, unfortunately, quite often.
Then I got my 2 year degree and decided to take a semester off. Nearly 3 years later, I realized that there were probably better career options than my job as a water salesman, so I applied to the local commuter college, went back to the pizza place (for the flexible hours and free bread sticks), and searched for my old computer disks. Luckily, I had landed on the proper side of the 5 1/4" versus 3 1/2" debate, so my disks still worked. I only found one of them, but I was fine with that...it did have most of my work still on it.
Going back to school meant that I would be doing a lot of work at the university. I had a brief stretch of owning my own computer...a glitzy, hi-tech 16 megahertz machine that I couldn't get to do anything useful. However, in the two years between buying that computer and going back to school, it was already obsolete. That was fine, though...I was used to working at labs, and they provided me more opportunities to run outside for a smoke than would working at my parent's home...at the time, they were still pretending that they thought I didn't smoke, and I also kept up the illusion while around them.
Anyway, I soon sank into my own college routine...classes in the morning, working entirely too much, then driving back to the university. My nights at the U would be spent either reading on the top floor of the library or typing on some fairly hefty IBM machines in the computer lab, saving my drafts on my prized 3 1/2" and reveling in my hi-tech knowledge of special WordPerfect keystroke commands. I did notice a few new-fangled machines with some weird peripheral that people called a "mouse," but they were more an oddity than anything else. During my occasional breaks sitting outside the lab, smoking Winston Light 100s and drinking dirt-like vending machine coffee, I thought of myself as some multi-class hi-tech scholar/adventurer, pushing the limits of technology unseen only a few years before.
One day during my senior year, I pulled up to the university, trudged across the campus, found an empty seat in the computer lab, pulled out my disk case, went to grab my one disk containing everything I'd written in over three years, and started whimpering as its case fell apart in my hands. Suddenly, I realized that among all the lessons I should've learned in my community college years, the Microcomputer class's lesson of "always make multiple backups" might've been the most important thing I ignored.
Luckily, the lab attendants were well-versed in dealing with panicky students. More than once, I had seen frightened undergrads approach the techies almost in tears because of some work-destroying glitch. I stumbled up to their desk and moaned, "disk...broke...gah...stuff...gone...help." They were indeed able to help me get the disk together just long enough to copy it to a spare disk. From then on, I learned the cardinal rule of computers...indeed, I had it burned into my soul:
This is a lesson I have never forgotten. Nowadays, I keep copies of everything
Thus, in the event of a nuclear war, my scholarship would probably survive. I'm still uncertain on whether I deserve such posterity, but there you go. I can never violate the backup rule, and online storage is one of my many weapons.
However, lately my appreciation for online storage has led to weird complications. As more and more online services follow the draconian Facebook terms of service model, this means that ownership of the stuff I've backed up online might be questionable. Does the university own my online class stuff, or do I? Say I post something both to my course website and to a blog, does the university now have to fight with Wordpress or Blogger? If I link to this post on Facebook, who owns it? If I back up this blog on Wordpress, the same issue exists.
Some people think the real solution is to go to open source blogging and social networking. I disagree. I think we should all back up everything with at least three different web companies, so our stuff is owned by a bevy of different, competing companies. That way, we might go far towards pushing Wordpress, Google, Facebook, MySpace, several major universities, and about thirty other companies to all get involved in a major mish-mash of interconnected lawsuits when one of them expresses interest in one of my bon mots. They'll spend so much time suing each other that we, the humble users, will be free from their lawyerly gaze. All major web companies will lawsuit each other into bankruptcy, and we'll be back to fending for ourselves online.
It would be a better world...we would bring a lot of evil corporations to their knees by turning their own terms of service against them! Of course, we'd also have to reintroduce the floppy drive, but no great deed is without its costs, I guess.
One of the first things the teacher tried to impress upon us was the importance of making multiple backups, and we needed to buy disks to store these copies. Feeling like I was on the edge of the future, I eschewed the 5 1/4" floppies in favor of pre-formated 3 1/2" disks. I ended up doing a lot of work at the campus computer lab, and I kept all of my papers on those disks. I would say they became my friends, but at the time, I didn't really care that much about my disks or my work. I was 19 and, as a result, fairly stupid. College was more a way to avoid getting a real job than anything else, and these disks were as valuable to me as the paper on which I'd doodle when bored in class...which was, unfortunately, quite often.
Then I got my 2 year degree and decided to take a semester off. Nearly 3 years later, I realized that there were probably better career options than my job as a water salesman, so I applied to the local commuter college, went back to the pizza place (for the flexible hours and free bread sticks), and searched for my old computer disks. Luckily, I had landed on the proper side of the 5 1/4" versus 3 1/2" debate, so my disks still worked. I only found one of them, but I was fine with that...it did have most of my work still on it.
Going back to school meant that I would be doing a lot of work at the university. I had a brief stretch of owning my own computer...a glitzy, hi-tech 16 megahertz machine that I couldn't get to do anything useful. However, in the two years between buying that computer and going back to school, it was already obsolete. That was fine, though...I was used to working at labs, and they provided me more opportunities to run outside for a smoke than would working at my parent's home...at the time, they were still pretending that they thought I didn't smoke, and I also kept up the illusion while around them.
Anyway, I soon sank into my own college routine...classes in the morning, working entirely too much, then driving back to the university. My nights at the U would be spent either reading on the top floor of the library or typing on some fairly hefty IBM machines in the computer lab, saving my drafts on my prized 3 1/2" and reveling in my hi-tech knowledge of special WordPerfect keystroke commands. I did notice a few new-fangled machines with some weird peripheral that people called a "mouse," but they were more an oddity than anything else. During my occasional breaks sitting outside the lab, smoking Winston Light 100s and drinking dirt-like vending machine coffee, I thought of myself as some multi-class hi-tech scholar/adventurer, pushing the limits of technology unseen only a few years before.
One day during my senior year, I pulled up to the university, trudged across the campus, found an empty seat in the computer lab, pulled out my disk case, went to grab my one disk containing everything I'd written in over three years, and started whimpering as its case fell apart in my hands. Suddenly, I realized that among all the lessons I should've learned in my community college years, the Microcomputer class's lesson of "always make multiple backups" might've been the most important thing I ignored.
Luckily, the lab attendants were well-versed in dealing with panicky students. More than once, I had seen frightened undergrads approach the techies almost in tears because of some work-destroying glitch. I stumbled up to their desk and moaned, "disk...broke...gah...stuff...gone...help." They were indeed able to help me get the disk together just long enough to copy it to a spare disk. From then on, I learned the cardinal rule of computers...indeed, I had it burned into my soul:
- ALWAYS MAKE MULTIPLE BACKUPS OF EVERYTHING
This is a lesson I have never forgotten. Nowadays, I keep copies of everything
- on my office computer
- on my flash drive
- on my laptop
- on at least one online site
- on my desktop
- on an external hard drive (for monthly backups)
- and even on cds, which I will occasionally burn and mail to an out of state friend or relative
Thus, in the event of a nuclear war, my scholarship would probably survive. I'm still uncertain on whether I deserve such posterity, but there you go. I can never violate the backup rule, and online storage is one of my many weapons.
However, lately my appreciation for online storage has led to weird complications. As more and more online services follow the draconian Facebook terms of service model, this means that ownership of the stuff I've backed up online might be questionable. Does the university own my online class stuff, or do I? Say I post something both to my course website and to a blog, does the university now have to fight with Wordpress or Blogger? If I link to this post on Facebook, who owns it? If I back up this blog on Wordpress, the same issue exists.
Some people think the real solution is to go to open source blogging and social networking. I disagree. I think we should all back up everything with at least three different web companies, so our stuff is owned by a bevy of different, competing companies. That way, we might go far towards pushing Wordpress, Google, Facebook, MySpace, several major universities, and about thirty other companies to all get involved in a major mish-mash of interconnected lawsuits when one of them expresses interest in one of my bon mots. They'll spend so much time suing each other that we, the humble users, will be free from their lawyerly gaze. All major web companies will lawsuit each other into bankruptcy, and we'll be back to fending for ourselves online.
It would be a better world...we would bring a lot of evil corporations to their knees by turning their own terms of service against them! Of course, we'd also have to reintroduce the floppy drive, but no great deed is without its costs, I guess.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
thoughts on an ending
Lately, I've been feeling lethargic. I have all new class preps this semester, and that, in addition to the usual array of puzzling student battles (someone is complaining to my boss that I'm making him bring his book to class), has me not really touching my book. The cyberpunk chapter is the sticking point. Sure, every so often, I do reread Neuromancer, but I don't have the time to do a sustained blast at the analysis....and this is turning out to be the kind of scholarship which I just can't drop and return, drop and return. Much like my inability to actually find the time to do more than simply imagine playing my guitars, my inability to write has led, from time to time, to me questioning exactly what I'm doing with my life.
This uncertainty seems to be an increasing element, encroaching on me beyond its normal "winter depression" boundaries. I should be used to it, but every so often, it still takes me by surprise that I am not where I want to be in my life, and that I seem to not be making much progress. Usually it's little things that nudge me into an apathetic lethargy...another job rejection letter, hearing about how my friends are struggling on the market (most worse than me), not finding anything on television, my drinking partners holed up with their computers instead of sharing minipitchers, and so forth. Sometimes its nothing at all. Other times, however, something sizeable comes along and does some real damage.
Last Thursday, I was throwing stuff together for the second of my two night classes. With ten minutes left, I checked my mailbox, hit the restroom, and started filling up my water bottle when my cell phone rang. It was a friend of mine calling from Florida...a really good friend, but I fear he's a bit of a Luddite, so I tend to lose contact with him in between my visits to the ancestral homeland of Jacksonville. The call was, in short, unusual.
I was happy to hear him, but before I could let him know that I was off to teach, he told me "I'm afraid I have to hit you with some bummer news." A friend of ours, it turns out, died that afternoon.
I taught the class pretty much on autopilot...luckily, I've been doing this long enough to where I can go into my "blank space" and just unconsciously ramble on for an hour fifteen without thinking of much of anything...which is what I did. I hurried down to my office, ran into a student, and came very close to snapping off said student's head before heading out to the frigid dark, with car scraping and an icy drive ahead of me. I tried to play loud disgusting rock music for the ride, but it didn't help me much.
The whole time I was heading back home, my brain was locked in the most depressing battle in recent memory. In this corner, I had all the memories of my deceased friend R....and they ranged from life-of-the-party moments, to memories of performing petty vandalism, to the times where my friend would come close to snapping, whether from too much alcohol, girlfriend problems, or, on occasion, for no real reason whatsoever. I remembered when R. began therapy, which somehow made him less social. I remembered hanging out with him and other friends, listening to new (to us) music, smoking way too many cigarettes. I remembered R.'s smile and infectious laugh.
In the other corner, however, battling my varied memories of my late friend, was something else. It wasn't the standard dark, morbid, "what happens when you die?" stuff, either. Instead, something was reminding me of exactly how long it had been since I saw him. I also started to wonder how well I really knew him in the first place. I knew he had some issues, but I never really knew what they were. I knew R. could snap, but I was never able to predict when it might happen...or know if I could anything do about it. This friend was a friend of my brother's first, and during that drive home, something was reminding me that as much as I liked hanging around him, I was probably mostly "the little brother" to him.
Coming home provided no solace. The lovely spousal unit was at a conference, so the house was dark. I called the friend who broke the news to me for more info, but it was not a comforting conversation. R. died of liver failure...but, of course, the story was more complex than that, and I have to wonder if his body gave out or if he simply gave up on living. Knowing I couldn't make it back for the funeral didn't help any.
After the phone call (which I had to break off early because I just couldn't think of anything to say) and a few moments of quiet reflection, I finally decided that, for the love of all that's decent and good, I had to do something fun. Luckily, a friend of mine was available, so we had some drinks and played video games where we smashed stuff.
This isn't the first time I've experienced loss. Both my grandmothers have died in the last few years, and I wasn't there for either one of them. My paternal grandmother had slipped into a coma by the time I could've seen her, and my maternal grandmother was in another country. I don't think I knew either of them nearly enough (especially my dad's mom)...I'm not sure that's entirely my thought in either case, but that doesn't stop me from feeling guilty.
This one was different. I knew R., spent plenty of time with him, and enjoyed his company immensely. However, I always had the sneaking suspicion that, as much as I liked him, I was probably only a blip on his radar. Sadly, this is a suspicion which extends to many people I know...there are many people who I value highly and enjoy immensely, in spite of my suspicion that they don't really think much of me at all or (in one documented case) actively dislike me. But with them, I guess there's always some part of my mind which argues there is still time to make those connections, even though it will probably never happen. No such time exists with R., though...so his death was like having hope torn away.
Even though this upsets me, it's not the thing on which I find myself dwelling. From the sound of it, when R. died, he was not the happy, friendly, lively person I remember. Instead, he was lonely, depressed, and, to some extent, destroying himself. I wonder how he felt about his life, about the impact he had on the world...and, unfortunately, I am not optimistic.
Of course, I've been thinking about this a lot over the last week. I know of no list of "good ways to die" or "good thoughts about death." I hear lots of advice, but most of it seems trite, beside the point, or incredibly naive. It would be easier if I was a Klingon or something...a glorious battle would be enough, in that case...but instead, I just have to struggle on and do the best I can.
What have I come up with? Two things that at least provide a bit of comfort and guidance to me.
One of my favorite tv shows deals with death a lot, and earlier this season, the protagonist told a dying patient that the best he could come up with was to hope your last thought is a happy one. I like that. There are lots of marvelous things out there to see, amazing people to know. Warren Ellis once said that every day we're here is a bonus. I tend to agree. Any day that I know I can converse with friends, learn something, see my beautiful spousal unit...those are good days, and those are things I want to remember when the time comes.
The other good thought comes from one of my favorite books, where the progatonist goes on a rant, which I find notable:
Doing something helps. But it's more than just that. It's good to make an impact on the world, to change things in some way, but there are other issues to consider. Am I helping? How can I make the world a better place than before I got here? What can I do to improve the place, to help people's lives? I firmly believe it's the most moral question we can ask ourselves, the best thing we can do.
And that's all. Know people. Enjoy their company. Try to help them. I hope it's enough.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to dive into that mound of work, try to make some headway...and maybe that will help.
This uncertainty seems to be an increasing element, encroaching on me beyond its normal "winter depression" boundaries. I should be used to it, but every so often, it still takes me by surprise that I am not where I want to be in my life, and that I seem to not be making much progress. Usually it's little things that nudge me into an apathetic lethargy...another job rejection letter, hearing about how my friends are struggling on the market (most worse than me), not finding anything on television, my drinking partners holed up with their computers instead of sharing minipitchers, and so forth. Sometimes its nothing at all. Other times, however, something sizeable comes along and does some real damage.
Last Thursday, I was throwing stuff together for the second of my two night classes. With ten minutes left, I checked my mailbox, hit the restroom, and started filling up my water bottle when my cell phone rang. It was a friend of mine calling from Florida...a really good friend, but I fear he's a bit of a Luddite, so I tend to lose contact with him in between my visits to the ancestral homeland of Jacksonville. The call was, in short, unusual.
I was happy to hear him, but before I could let him know that I was off to teach, he told me "I'm afraid I have to hit you with some bummer news." A friend of ours, it turns out, died that afternoon.
I taught the class pretty much on autopilot...luckily, I've been doing this long enough to where I can go into my "blank space" and just unconsciously ramble on for an hour fifteen without thinking of much of anything...which is what I did. I hurried down to my office, ran into a student, and came very close to snapping off said student's head before heading out to the frigid dark, with car scraping and an icy drive ahead of me. I tried to play loud disgusting rock music for the ride, but it didn't help me much.
The whole time I was heading back home, my brain was locked in the most depressing battle in recent memory. In this corner, I had all the memories of my deceased friend R....and they ranged from life-of-the-party moments, to memories of performing petty vandalism, to the times where my friend would come close to snapping, whether from too much alcohol, girlfriend problems, or, on occasion, for no real reason whatsoever. I remembered when R. began therapy, which somehow made him less social. I remembered hanging out with him and other friends, listening to new (to us) music, smoking way too many cigarettes. I remembered R.'s smile and infectious laugh.
In the other corner, however, battling my varied memories of my late friend, was something else. It wasn't the standard dark, morbid, "what happens when you die?" stuff, either. Instead, something was reminding me of exactly how long it had been since I saw him. I also started to wonder how well I really knew him in the first place. I knew he had some issues, but I never really knew what they were. I knew R. could snap, but I was never able to predict when it might happen...or know if I could anything do about it. This friend was a friend of my brother's first, and during that drive home, something was reminding me that as much as I liked hanging around him, I was probably mostly "the little brother" to him.
Coming home provided no solace. The lovely spousal unit was at a conference, so the house was dark. I called the friend who broke the news to me for more info, but it was not a comforting conversation. R. died of liver failure...but, of course, the story was more complex than that, and I have to wonder if his body gave out or if he simply gave up on living. Knowing I couldn't make it back for the funeral didn't help any.
After the phone call (which I had to break off early because I just couldn't think of anything to say) and a few moments of quiet reflection, I finally decided that, for the love of all that's decent and good, I had to do something fun. Luckily, a friend of mine was available, so we had some drinks and played video games where we smashed stuff.
This isn't the first time I've experienced loss. Both my grandmothers have died in the last few years, and I wasn't there for either one of them. My paternal grandmother had slipped into a coma by the time I could've seen her, and my maternal grandmother was in another country. I don't think I knew either of them nearly enough (especially my dad's mom)...I'm not sure that's entirely my thought in either case, but that doesn't stop me from feeling guilty.
This one was different. I knew R., spent plenty of time with him, and enjoyed his company immensely. However, I always had the sneaking suspicion that, as much as I liked him, I was probably only a blip on his radar. Sadly, this is a suspicion which extends to many people I know...there are many people who I value highly and enjoy immensely, in spite of my suspicion that they don't really think much of me at all or (in one documented case) actively dislike me. But with them, I guess there's always some part of my mind which argues there is still time to make those connections, even though it will probably never happen. No such time exists with R., though...so his death was like having hope torn away.
Even though this upsets me, it's not the thing on which I find myself dwelling. From the sound of it, when R. died, he was not the happy, friendly, lively person I remember. Instead, he was lonely, depressed, and, to some extent, destroying himself. I wonder how he felt about his life, about the impact he had on the world...and, unfortunately, I am not optimistic.
Of course, I've been thinking about this a lot over the last week. I know of no list of "good ways to die" or "good thoughts about death." I hear lots of advice, but most of it seems trite, beside the point, or incredibly naive. It would be easier if I was a Klingon or something...a glorious battle would be enough, in that case...but instead, I just have to struggle on and do the best I can.
What have I come up with? Two things that at least provide a bit of comfort and guidance to me.
One of my favorite tv shows deals with death a lot, and earlier this season, the protagonist told a dying patient that the best he could come up with was to hope your last thought is a happy one. I like that. There are lots of marvelous things out there to see, amazing people to know. Warren Ellis once said that every day we're here is a bonus. I tend to agree. Any day that I know I can converse with friends, learn something, see my beautiful spousal unit...those are good days, and those are things I want to remember when the time comes.
The other good thought comes from one of my favorite books, where the progatonist goes on a rant, which I find notable:
- we drink 'til we stink and we smoke 'til we choke because that's how we get things done, you and me. Spending our lives making things and making things out of our lives, because anything else would be dull as hell. And we're damned if we're going to sit at the other end of whatever years we get, saying, well, what the f*&# was that for?
Doing something helps. But it's more than just that. It's good to make an impact on the world, to change things in some way, but there are other issues to consider. Am I helping? How can I make the world a better place than before I got here? What can I do to improve the place, to help people's lives? I firmly believe it's the most moral question we can ask ourselves, the best thing we can do.
And that's all. Know people. Enjoy their company. Try to help them. I hope it's enough.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to dive into that mound of work, try to make some headway...and maybe that will help.
Friday, January 23, 2009
emotion and technology
The first real video game was Space War!, but I've never actually seen the original. The first commercial game was Pong, but the first one I remember seeing was Breakout. We were living in Germany on an Air Force base, and the base pizza parlor had a console. I don't remember playing it myself, though.
Not too long after we moved to South Carolina, we got our first video game system. I don't remember the name of the system, but it had four built-in games: Tennis (a Pong derivative), Racketball (don't remember how this was different than pong), Squash (ditto), and a shooting game. In the last game, a big white dot bounced around the screen, and you got to shoot it with a Dirty Harry-esque handgun.
There was a video arcade near the SC base that I'd visit from time to time. On Fridays, they would let you play all you wanted from 8 to 11 for 3 dollars. I would go, jump from game to game, and play until my eyeballs felt like they were about to spontaneously combust. I sucked at the games, but I had one hell of a time killing aliens, shooting tanks, and stabbing monsters.
Later, we finally got an Atari 2600, which took the idea of video games, for me, from a curiosity to a really engaging diversion. I was particularly taken with Yar's Revenge (one of the most fun ways to shoot aliens), but I also remember me and my brother pooling our Christmas money to buy their version of Defender for $50...which is over $110 today.
The Atari was the last system I owned, but I did play others. Many friends had the NES, and I learned that I (a) sucked at Super Mario Brothers, (b) loved fighting in Blades of Steel, and (c) giggled at the racism of RBI Baseball (where all players were white). When I played the Sega, I marveled at the speed of Sonic. I didn't have a lot of experience, but I was pretty sure I knew what video games were.
Later on, though, friends made a point of undermining my outdated knowledge of video games. While I was busy getting a degree, my friends informed me, video games had grown up. There were intricate stories, a variety of genres, many points of view, more dazzling technology. I accepted this, of course...my "young punk" friends were more experienced in this than I. But I only accepted it on an intellectual level. I didn't really know for myself.
Then I got a Wii. Frankly, my main experience with the Wii to date is being constantly surprised by how I react to the games. I wasn't prepared for the atheticism/strategy combination of Wii Sports, for one. Boom Blox I bought because I wanted to smash things. However, there is much more depth, strategy, and subtlety than I was expecting. Wii Fit has actually made exercise something that does not bore me into submission. Exercise can be fun? Apparently so.
But mainly, I wasn't expecting the emotional aspect of the games. I find any number of Wii elements to be very cute. For those of you who don't know me, "cute" is usually the fastest way to turn me off, but I'm enjoying the cuteness of the Wii. Also, I'm reacting weird to the Miis. For those of you who are Wii-inexperienced, you create a virtual version of yourself and use that avatar to play the games. The Wii tends to populate the background of the games with whatever Miis you've created...celebrities, politicians, historical figures, and friends. I find it really funny when I'm playing a game and see Groucho Marx, Teddy Roosevelt, or some character from The Office. However, I also see Miis of my friends show up...and that makes me feel warm and good in ways I can't really yet describe.
Furthermore, I love how it attracts the non-video game crowd. My spousal unit is now a full blown addict. She's got friends of hers who've probably never played a video game in their life to enjoy the Wii.
The Wii continues to shock and surprise me. And I haven't even got to kill a single video game alien or monster yet!
Not too long after we moved to South Carolina, we got our first video game system. I don't remember the name of the system, but it had four built-in games: Tennis (a Pong derivative), Racketball (don't remember how this was different than pong), Squash (ditto), and a shooting game. In the last game, a big white dot bounced around the screen, and you got to shoot it with a Dirty Harry-esque handgun.
There was a video arcade near the SC base that I'd visit from time to time. On Fridays, they would let you play all you wanted from 8 to 11 for 3 dollars. I would go, jump from game to game, and play until my eyeballs felt like they were about to spontaneously combust. I sucked at the games, but I had one hell of a time killing aliens, shooting tanks, and stabbing monsters.
Later, we finally got an Atari 2600, which took the idea of video games, for me, from a curiosity to a really engaging diversion. I was particularly taken with Yar's Revenge (one of the most fun ways to shoot aliens), but I also remember me and my brother pooling our Christmas money to buy their version of Defender for $50...which is over $110 today.The Atari was the last system I owned, but I did play others. Many friends had the NES, and I learned that I (a) sucked at Super Mario Brothers, (b) loved fighting in Blades of Steel, and (c) giggled at the racism of RBI Baseball (where all players were white). When I played the Sega, I marveled at the speed of Sonic. I didn't have a lot of experience, but I was pretty sure I knew what video games were.
Later on, though, friends made a point of undermining my outdated knowledge of video games. While I was busy getting a degree, my friends informed me, video games had grown up. There were intricate stories, a variety of genres, many points of view, more dazzling technology. I accepted this, of course...my "young punk" friends were more experienced in this than I. But I only accepted it on an intellectual level. I didn't really know for myself.
Then I got a Wii. Frankly, my main experience with the Wii to date is being constantly surprised by how I react to the games. I wasn't prepared for the atheticism/strategy combination of Wii Sports, for one. Boom Blox I bought because I wanted to smash things. However, there is much more depth, strategy, and subtlety than I was expecting. Wii Fit has actually made exercise something that does not bore me into submission. Exercise can be fun? Apparently so.
But mainly, I wasn't expecting the emotional aspect of the games. I find any number of Wii elements to be very cute. For those of you who don't know me, "cute" is usually the fastest way to turn me off, but I'm enjoying the cuteness of the Wii. Also, I'm reacting weird to the Miis. For those of you who are Wii-inexperienced, you create a virtual version of yourself and use that avatar to play the games. The Wii tends to populate the background of the games with whatever Miis you've created...celebrities, politicians, historical figures, and friends. I find it really funny when I'm playing a game and see Groucho Marx, Teddy Roosevelt, or some character from The Office. However, I also see Miis of my friends show up...and that makes me feel warm and good in ways I can't really yet describe.Furthermore, I love how it attracts the non-video game crowd. My spousal unit is now a full blown addict. She's got friends of hers who've probably never played a video game in their life to enjoy the Wii.
The Wii continues to shock and surprise me. And I haven't even got to kill a single video game alien or monster yet!
has it been that long?
When I first met her, it was her smile I noticed. There were plenty of other things that could stick in one's mind, but the smile...it lights up rooms. It's amazingly warm, friendly, and inviting...and it makes me feel magnificent, when I see her smile, like somewhere, somehow, I must have done something right in my life to be so well rewarded.
She's the warmest person I know. One quintessential Lori moment? We took a very brief trip to Spain so I could present at a conference. On our third (and last) day, we were walking down some back streets in Alcala (just south of Madrid), past shops and boutiques. As we passed a bistro, a gust of wind blew down a sign outside a restaurant we just passed. The fairly burly restauranteer came out to reset the sign, but Lori already beat him to it. The man didn't need help and couldn't thank Lori anyway, but that didn't matter...Lori saw an opportunity to help someone and did so, without thinking.
She's also hilarious. Much of her hilarity is probably unintentional. Her stories, for instance, often follow their own interesting internal logic, which escapes most conventions of order...she can start out talking about her grandmother and end up in a discussion of jelly packaging, and it somehow makes sense to her. In many respects, it's like being married to Gracie Allen, which means my life with her will always be interesting.
She also can be fabulously lively and crude. She'd hit me if I told too much, but one example will suffice. Since we got a Wii, I've noticed that she can have a tremendously foul mouth. Sneak a serve past her while playing tennis? A throw in Boom Blox doesn't have the proper effect? She gets blown up in Mario Kart? You will hear language out of her that would make most sailors look twice.
The calendar says that come tomorrow, we've been married six years. While I still intimately remember the day (and the city hall ceremony, the room decorated with plans to expand Wooster Street, where we became contractually obligated to each other), I have issues with the time. You see, I have a hard time fully remembering what it was like to not have her sitting next to me, to not see her walking up the driveway and smile when she sees me, to not be able to hold her at night before we both drift off to sleep.
It's a day early, but happy anniversary, my dearest spousal unit. I can't imagine being without you.
hope?
I have to admit something: although I have been public in my support of Obama through the election, I was not sure I really trusted him. I liked him, for sure. Having a president who was presentable and articulate would be a nice change, and I suspected that he would be a better president than #43 (but then again, a dead vole would be better). But trust him?
I had been burned before. I voted for Clinton the first time, largely because I thought the idea of universal health care was a good one. Should the ability to be healthy...to NOT DIE...be the exclusive right of those with lots of money? That didn't (and still does not) seem right. So the failure of Clinton to pursue...hell, their total abandonment of health care in general really stung. Although lots of good things did come out of those 8 years, I lost my ability to really trust politicians.
So, while I loved the rhetoric of Obama, and I definitely thought he was better than the McCain/lunatic governor ticket, I'm not sure I fully trusted him. Secretly, I was expecting the same "great run to the center" as Clinton, where many campaign promises get thrown out.
So, what has happened in the first week?
There is a ton of stuff for which I'm still waiting, of course. I still want habeas corpus reinstated, because I don't like the idea that I can be locked away without ever being charged. I still want some movement on civil unions/marriages for gays, because I hate the idea of a large segment of our population being denied basic human rights just because of their choice of partners. I still want some good solution to the Palestine/Israel war, because, as we've had such a large hand in this conflict, we need to be part of the solution. I still need to see the US regain all the international stature we've lost and quit being seen as a power-hungry bully. The US also has to take the lead on working to preserve rather than poison our environment. I don't like the government having the power to covertly go through my private records on a whim. The list goes on.
But, for the first time, I am hopeful...and that is a really nice feeling.
PS: Obama also revives the Freedom of Information Act. Best line? "The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails." Cool.
I had been burned before. I voted for Clinton the first time, largely because I thought the idea of universal health care was a good one. Should the ability to be healthy...to NOT DIE...be the exclusive right of those with lots of money? That didn't (and still does not) seem right. So the failure of Clinton to pursue...hell, their total abandonment of health care in general really stung. Although lots of good things did come out of those 8 years, I lost my ability to really trust politicians.
So, while I loved the rhetoric of Obama, and I definitely thought he was better than the McCain/lunatic governor ticket, I'm not sure I fully trusted him. Secretly, I was expecting the same "great run to the center" as Clinton, where many campaign promises get thrown out.
So, what has happened in the first week?
- Guantanamo Bay has been closed. If we really are a great country, do we need a secret place offshore where we can keep prisoners outside of American scrutiny, where we can hold people forever without charges, facts, evidence? America should not need to sneak around in the dark if we are as much of a force for good as we think.
- Also, Obama has officially banned the use of torture. This is definitely an issue of morality, to be sure, and I really didn't like being a part of a country that had to stoop to such awful methods. But there is another concern: torture simply does not work. To quote the last linked article:
- Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 -- long before Abu Ghraib -- to assess interrogations in Iraq. Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply "not a good way to get information." In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no "stress methods" at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones.
- Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 -- long before Abu Ghraib -- to assess interrogations in Iraq. Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply "not a good way to get information." In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no "stress methods" at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones.
- Also,he has ended the funding ban on overseas abortion groups. Now, no matter how you feel about abortion, it is in fact legal in America. And by banning all funding for overseas family planning clinics who offer abortion as an option, the government was unjustly interfering with the rights of Americans living overseas (mostly military) by denying them rights available to the average citizen. Unlike many so-called conservative pundits, I'm really against the government specifically robbing US citizens of their rights.
There is a ton of stuff for which I'm still waiting, of course. I still want habeas corpus reinstated, because I don't like the idea that I can be locked away without ever being charged. I still want some movement on civil unions/marriages for gays, because I hate the idea of a large segment of our population being denied basic human rights just because of their choice of partners. I still want some good solution to the Palestine/Israel war, because, as we've had such a large hand in this conflict, we need to be part of the solution. I still need to see the US regain all the international stature we've lost and quit being seen as a power-hungry bully. The US also has to take the lead on working to preserve rather than poison our environment. I don't like the government having the power to covertly go through my private records on a whim. The list goes on.
But, for the first time, I am hopeful...and that is a really nice feeling.
PS: Obama also revives the Freedom of Information Act. Best line? "The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails." Cool.
Monday, January 12, 2009
the quest
When I was an undergrad, for some strange reason, I took a lot of medieval literature courses. The professor was cool, but that wasn't the main point. Rather, there was a continuing theme that ran through the sagas and poems, one that stuck with me, one that had been a part of my personal existence for some time. After taking a few undergrad courses (and this, of course, makes me an authority on the subject...doesn't it?), I am convinced that the vast majority of medieval literature was about one thing: the quest.
In medieval literature, heroes are always going on quests...to find some revered object like the foreskin of some long-dead saint, to slaughter and kill others who worship a different deity, to discover the magic rock that will turn any object into either gold or a better long distance plan, something like that. Likewise, teachers of this literature love to push the idea of a quest, usually so they can shove in some cheesy metaphor ("the quest of Sir Gawain to find the magic chalice that will kill the dragon is much like our own quest for knowledge to slay the beast that is ignorance," the teacher will say, as we, the students, try to hide our gagging faces). When discussing quests, these teachers also love to use the theories of some pseudo-hippy philosopher like Joseph Campbell, who's better suited for men who love gathering around fires, wearing loincloths, and beating their drums while reciting Iron John poetry.
In spite of the high schmaltz factor involving quests, I always have been drawn to them. Maybe it's some cultural memory of the time when my European ancestors were searching for the magic dragon or something (although they were more likely working the fields for that questor). Maybe it's some personal search for meaning. Maybe it's just a need for motion, a need to justify some largely irrational action...but the lure of the quest does call to me, from time to time.
In high school, quests would revolve around wild hairs. One of my friends was used to me knocking on his door at 2:30 on a Saturday afternoon, bundling him into my car, and the two of us driving from store to store, all around town, in the religious pursuit for someone, anyone, who had some used Frank Zappa...or that special brand of guitar pick...or bottles of iced coffee (rare, in those pre-Starbucks days). We would hardly ever find what we were looking for, but my friend would have plenty of opportunity to bitch about things, I'd have plenty of opportunity to smoke incessantly while driving around town, and we both would listen to a lot of loud music. Thus, the quest was good.
Eventually, everything else became a quest. I didn't go out to eat but instead looked for the perfect pizza. I didn't go out to a club but instead looked for the ultimate band. I didn't start college for an education but instead looked for the perfectly original idea. I didn't start dating but instead scanned the horizon for the one perfect person who actually got me...which was the one quest that, happy to say, I actually finished. All the others? They were important more for the motivation, the imposition of drive, and, of course, the voyage itself.
I still quest, but I do so with an increased awareness...that the main point of the quest is to bring drive and reason to what would normally be merely the mundane. Today's quest was a simple one, but it's one that, as always, taught me immeasurable lessons about life, the world, philosophy, and everything else imaginable.
Some time in December, I bought a Nintendo Wii. It's a fabulously fun system, and the spousal unit particularly has taken to it in a way that I wouldn't have expected...seeing as she probably hasn't ever played one before for more than a few minutes (and now she devastates me at Wii Tennis quite frequently). When we bought the system, we also wanted to get the WiiFit, but the store was out. I've tried to find it a few other times, but the display cases stubbornly remain empty. The WiiFit has become elusive, more so every time I hit Meijer and note its absence. Normally, this would just depress me, but instead, I realized that all the ingredients were lining up.
My desire for a WiiFit has officially become a quest.
First, the spousal unit and I entered an agreement to always look for one if we go into a store where they might be sold. Then, realizing that I didn't have to teach today until 5:45 and already had lesson plans done, I decided the time was right for an all-out store assault.
Final score? Seven stores visited. Absolutely no WiiFit to be found.
I started at a gaming store. They told me they get one a week. Toldeo Meijers didn't have anyone working the area, but they were certainly out. Toys-R-Us told me there are rumors of them getting one in either Friday night or Saturday morning. Best Buy looked like a Wii-seeking tornado had plowed through and taken half of their games...but leaving a massive stack of Guitar Hero sets intact. Target didn't even have the core system. Lord help me, I even went into Wal-Mart, but they were out as well. By this point, I was beginning to suspect that all WiiFits were swept into some Hadron Collider-created alternate dimension...because they sure aren't here.
By the time I got to Circuit City, I had developed a fairly zen-like sardonic approach to the whole deal. When the guy (who looked suspiciously like Seth Rogan) asked if he could help me, I told him, "I'm on a doomed quest for the WiiFit...don't suppose you have any, do you?" He told me that they actually had eight in the store Sunday, but they were gone within ten minutes. Apparently, when they get mentioned in the sales papers, people camp out. He recommended I do the same. I dunno, but it feels more like trying to get Stones tickets (which I've done & is a story unto itself) than a video game. There has to be a better way, but none has been suggested as of yet.+
Ultimately, I suspect that the WiiFit never existed to begin with...that it's all some giant, conspiracy-driven viral marketing campaign-slash-social experiment-slash-paranoid delusion of my own doing...that the quest I'm on is ultimately doomed, that I will wander the streets forever looking for something that only exists in the rolls of myth, lore, and legend.
Will that stop me, though? Hell, no...it's a quest.
In medieval literature, heroes are always going on quests...to find some revered object like the foreskin of some long-dead saint, to slaughter and kill others who worship a different deity, to discover the magic rock that will turn any object into either gold or a better long distance plan, something like that. Likewise, teachers of this literature love to push the idea of a quest, usually so they can shove in some cheesy metaphor ("the quest of Sir Gawain to find the magic chalice that will kill the dragon is much like our own quest for knowledge to slay the beast that is ignorance," the teacher will say, as we, the students, try to hide our gagging faces). When discussing quests, these teachers also love to use the theories of some pseudo-hippy philosopher like Joseph Campbell, who's better suited for men who love gathering around fires, wearing loincloths, and beating their drums while reciting Iron John poetry.
In spite of the high schmaltz factor involving quests, I always have been drawn to them. Maybe it's some cultural memory of the time when my European ancestors were searching for the magic dragon or something (although they were more likely working the fields for that questor). Maybe it's some personal search for meaning. Maybe it's just a need for motion, a need to justify some largely irrational action...but the lure of the quest does call to me, from time to time.
In high school, quests would revolve around wild hairs. One of my friends was used to me knocking on his door at 2:30 on a Saturday afternoon, bundling him into my car, and the two of us driving from store to store, all around town, in the religious pursuit for someone, anyone, who had some used Frank Zappa...or that special brand of guitar pick...or bottles of iced coffee (rare, in those pre-Starbucks days). We would hardly ever find what we were looking for, but my friend would have plenty of opportunity to bitch about things, I'd have plenty of opportunity to smoke incessantly while driving around town, and we both would listen to a lot of loud music. Thus, the quest was good.
Eventually, everything else became a quest. I didn't go out to eat but instead looked for the perfect pizza. I didn't go out to a club but instead looked for the ultimate band. I didn't start college for an education but instead looked for the perfectly original idea. I didn't start dating but instead scanned the horizon for the one perfect person who actually got me...which was the one quest that, happy to say, I actually finished. All the others? They were important more for the motivation, the imposition of drive, and, of course, the voyage itself.
I still quest, but I do so with an increased awareness...that the main point of the quest is to bring drive and reason to what would normally be merely the mundane. Today's quest was a simple one, but it's one that, as always, taught me immeasurable lessons about life, the world, philosophy, and everything else imaginable.
Some time in December, I bought a Nintendo Wii. It's a fabulously fun system, and the spousal unit particularly has taken to it in a way that I wouldn't have expected...seeing as she probably hasn't ever played one before for more than a few minutes (and now she devastates me at Wii Tennis quite frequently). When we bought the system, we also wanted to get the WiiFit, but the store was out. I've tried to find it a few other times, but the display cases stubbornly remain empty. The WiiFit has become elusive, more so every time I hit Meijer and note its absence. Normally, this would just depress me, but instead, I realized that all the ingredients were lining up.
My desire for a WiiFit has officially become a quest.
First, the spousal unit and I entered an agreement to always look for one if we go into a store where they might be sold. Then, realizing that I didn't have to teach today until 5:45 and already had lesson plans done, I decided the time was right for an all-out store assault.
Final score? Seven stores visited. Absolutely no WiiFit to be found.
I started at a gaming store. They told me they get one a week. Toldeo Meijers didn't have anyone working the area, but they were certainly out. Toys-R-Us told me there are rumors of them getting one in either Friday night or Saturday morning. Best Buy looked like a Wii-seeking tornado had plowed through and taken half of their games...but leaving a massive stack of Guitar Hero sets intact. Target didn't even have the core system. Lord help me, I even went into Wal-Mart, but they were out as well. By this point, I was beginning to suspect that all WiiFits were swept into some Hadron Collider-created alternate dimension...because they sure aren't here.
By the time I got to Circuit City, I had developed a fairly zen-like sardonic approach to the whole deal. When the guy (who looked suspiciously like Seth Rogan) asked if he could help me, I told him, "I'm on a doomed quest for the WiiFit...don't suppose you have any, do you?" He told me that they actually had eight in the store Sunday, but they were gone within ten minutes. Apparently, when they get mentioned in the sales papers, people camp out. He recommended I do the same. I dunno, but it feels more like trying to get Stones tickets (which I've done & is a story unto itself) than a video game. There has to be a better way, but none has been suggested as of yet.+
Ultimately, I suspect that the WiiFit never existed to begin with...that it's all some giant, conspiracy-driven viral marketing campaign-slash-social experiment-slash-paranoid delusion of my own doing...that the quest I'm on is ultimately doomed, that I will wander the streets forever looking for something that only exists in the rolls of myth, lore, and legend.
Will that stop me, though? Hell, no...it's a quest.
Saturday, January 03, 2009
to tweet or not to tweet
I've been cross-posting my Twitter posts to this blog. However, they are also going to the sidebar widget (look right, damnit), and they are now my Facebook status updates. Plus, you can (and should) always just follow me on Twitter.
Because my tweets are available elsewhere, I have suspended the auto delivery, and I'm going to delete the ones here...they mess up the aesthetics and flow of the site.
Back to your regular browsing, please.
Because my tweets are available elsewhere, I have suspended the auto delivery, and I'm going to delete the ones here...they mess up the aesthetics and flow of the site.
Back to your regular browsing, please.
the break that is--the mental edition
For me (and, I suppose, many academics), vacations are a double-edged sword. It might be sold to us as a time of rest and celebration, but really, it's the time when we learn whether we should be laughing or crying.
On the plus side, the break is a chance to get away from the often crippling teaching load and do some of the scholarly work which played such a huge role in drawing us into the life to begin with. I, for instance, entered this academic vida loca because I loved reading. Furthermore, I love writing about what I have read.
I gotta be more specific here. While the actual drafting process usually makes me want to drive spikes through my eyeballs, jump in a swimming pool of loose gravel, and then pour lime juice and salt over the resulting wounds (with some tequila thrown in for good measure--it adds to the pain and also makes a tasty margarita), I love having written, I love planning out my papers, I love finishing a nice draft, I love establishing an analytical order for everything. In the final account, I love the writing process and am truly a better person for it.
This break, I had (as I always tend to have) grand plans. I was going to finish the Great Book Revision, the one that's been driving me into the light pole for ages. I was going to knock out the theory revamp/refiguring chapter...it is, after all, the most brutal part of the project. It is where all the "aha"s take place, and it largely spells out everything else I've been hinting at throughout the other chapters. After this chapter is done, I really can fly through the rest. There is plenty of language polish afterwards, but that's an easy task for me. There's an introduction to write, but I've been writing that one in my head for years. There's a conclusion, but that's gonna be a mash-up of several existing pieces. In all, this all hinges on the theory chapter.
It figures, of course, that I haven't actually been able to write word one on the thing all break. I think I have the organization figured out, but I won't really know until I can do some sustained blasts o' writing. And I haven't been able to do said blasts because of...well, family commitments, shopping, celebrations, day trips, and all that...the standard mundane holiday tasks which seem to just suck up every spare moment.
Now that it's after New Years, I thought at first that this would be a prime writing time for me. However, I also haven't done nearly enough of my class prep for Spring, and my utterly fabulous teaching load for the upcoming semester is me basically starting from scratch for four different preps. So, instead of my pre-semester binge writing next week, I will instead be slamming together assignment sheets and setting up my Blackboard online course shell...which is both as fun and as vital as it sounds. It's definitely a sarcastic "weee" moment, but it's one which I cannot not do.
On top of that, most other thinking things are stuck in what seems a perpetual holding pattern. There's the CSI: paper which is, at least in the noggin, completely done but waiting for me to finish the damn book. There is now the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles paper festering in the Buffy-esque "I've got a theory!" mode of existence. There is the House, M.D. paper which is still caught in journal reader limbo (6+ months and counting), and there is the New Orleans paper, which is also in reader limbo but has been accepted for a conference....the day before the discounted "early bird registration" ran out. Sigh.
So, in terms of my writing, where does this winter break put me? There's a scene in that magnum opus Big Trouble in Little China where the good guys are captured and blindfolded. Jack Burton tries to covertly ask his friend Wang Chi where they are, but one of the evil Furies (Rain, I believe) instead responds with a forceful and dismissive "you are nowhere." Yep, that's me.
Then there's that other side of the winter break sword. For those of us on the job market, the winter break is the breaking point of the first big wave of jobs. The deadlines have since passed, and most institutions are notifying applicants and setting up interviews. This is particularly true if one applies for jobs in the English field (as do I), because much of this interviewing takes place at the MLA, the big mac-daddy of all English conferences.
Well, me and the MLA, we have this arrangement. Every year, a few months before the conference, I look to see where it is and start contemplating if I should attend, in the lucky event that someone wishes to interview me. I fret about this for a while, send out some more applications, and fret again. When December rolls around, I pay special attention to my cell phone and e-mail, in case anyone tries to contact me to schedule a last minute interview. When the conference date itself arrives, I get mean, bitter, and lash out at whomever is nearby. After the conference has ended, I chant some empty mantra about how the job search is not over, that there is still a chance I will find other jobs, get an interview later, then I both hope I haven't alienated any friends and become very thankful that the spousal unit is both forgiving and loving. It's not a great arrangement, but it is, by this point, tradition.
This year, in the final reckoning, I did not make it out to San Francisco for the MLA. There was, apparently, not a whole lot of call for Mike at the conference. Neither did anyone try to make alternate arrangements. This lack of popularity, while certainly not surprising, is at least familiar.
Strangely enough, though, I did not fly into my normal bout of depression. Instead, I've been in a fairly decent mood all break. This I do not understand...and at any rate, my lack of depression is starting to depress me. I'm really hoping I am not becoming resigned to my fate.
At any rate, I know that my success at the job market is by now inextricably tied to my success getting stuff published, and up until this break, I've been doing good on the production front. Over the summer, I did everything I could do. I had a Dec. 2007 publication (it was in their cue for years) that led to an anthology article...that one comes out sometime in 2009. I pumped out 2 book reviews, already published. I sent out two essays that are, in my eyes, the best things I've ever wrote, even though they are still awaiting judgment elsewhere.
But this break has been mostly writing-free, which puzzles me. And it's not like I've been killing too much time in my "I need to have fun" activities. Hell, my guitars are all about in their 6th month of staring at me in neglect. Yes, I have a Wii, but I really have only been using that when all I would've been doing is watching football pregame shows or Food Network programs.
I'm really hoping this is not the resignation phase. I still want this. I can still do the work. I still have ideas that need to be heard, that no one else is saying. I still need the critical engagement. I still have been singing Two Cow Garage's line "I'm not gonna burn out 'cause things didn't turn out like I planned." Honestly, I'm still into the whole scholarship bit.
I just need to produce, and it needs to start happening post haste. Is frustration better or worse than paranoid drive? Than desperation? Than gloom and doom? What negative emotion will yield the most positive results, at least in terms of production?
These are the questions which will drive my new year.
On the plus side, the break is a chance to get away from the often crippling teaching load and do some of the scholarly work which played such a huge role in drawing us into the life to begin with. I, for instance, entered this academic vida loca because I loved reading. Furthermore, I love writing about what I have read.
I gotta be more specific here. While the actual drafting process usually makes me want to drive spikes through my eyeballs, jump in a swimming pool of loose gravel, and then pour lime juice and salt over the resulting wounds (with some tequila thrown in for good measure--it adds to the pain and also makes a tasty margarita), I love having written, I love planning out my papers, I love finishing a nice draft, I love establishing an analytical order for everything. In the final account, I love the writing process and am truly a better person for it.
This break, I had (as I always tend to have) grand plans. I was going to finish the Great Book Revision, the one that's been driving me into the light pole for ages. I was going to knock out the theory revamp/refiguring chapter...it is, after all, the most brutal part of the project. It is where all the "aha"s take place, and it largely spells out everything else I've been hinting at throughout the other chapters. After this chapter is done, I really can fly through the rest. There is plenty of language polish afterwards, but that's an easy task for me. There's an introduction to write, but I've been writing that one in my head for years. There's a conclusion, but that's gonna be a mash-up of several existing pieces. In all, this all hinges on the theory chapter.
It figures, of course, that I haven't actually been able to write word one on the thing all break. I think I have the organization figured out, but I won't really know until I can do some sustained blasts o' writing. And I haven't been able to do said blasts because of...well, family commitments, shopping, celebrations, day trips, and all that...the standard mundane holiday tasks which seem to just suck up every spare moment.
Now that it's after New Years, I thought at first that this would be a prime writing time for me. However, I also haven't done nearly enough of my class prep for Spring, and my utterly fabulous teaching load for the upcoming semester is me basically starting from scratch for four different preps. So, instead of my pre-semester binge writing next week, I will instead be slamming together assignment sheets and setting up my Blackboard online course shell...which is both as fun and as vital as it sounds. It's definitely a sarcastic "weee" moment, but it's one which I cannot not do.
On top of that, most other thinking things are stuck in what seems a perpetual holding pattern. There's the CSI: paper which is, at least in the noggin, completely done but waiting for me to finish the damn book. There is now the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles paper festering in the Buffy-esque "I've got a theory!" mode of existence. There is the House, M.D. paper which is still caught in journal reader limbo (6+ months and counting), and there is the New Orleans paper, which is also in reader limbo but has been accepted for a conference....the day before the discounted "early bird registration" ran out. Sigh.
So, in terms of my writing, where does this winter break put me? There's a scene in that magnum opus Big Trouble in Little China where the good guys are captured and blindfolded. Jack Burton tries to covertly ask his friend Wang Chi where they are, but one of the evil Furies (Rain, I believe) instead responds with a forceful and dismissive "you are nowhere." Yep, that's me.
Then there's that other side of the winter break sword. For those of us on the job market, the winter break is the breaking point of the first big wave of jobs. The deadlines have since passed, and most institutions are notifying applicants and setting up interviews. This is particularly true if one applies for jobs in the English field (as do I), because much of this interviewing takes place at the MLA, the big mac-daddy of all English conferences.
Well, me and the MLA, we have this arrangement. Every year, a few months before the conference, I look to see where it is and start contemplating if I should attend, in the lucky event that someone wishes to interview me. I fret about this for a while, send out some more applications, and fret again. When December rolls around, I pay special attention to my cell phone and e-mail, in case anyone tries to contact me to schedule a last minute interview. When the conference date itself arrives, I get mean, bitter, and lash out at whomever is nearby. After the conference has ended, I chant some empty mantra about how the job search is not over, that there is still a chance I will find other jobs, get an interview later, then I both hope I haven't alienated any friends and become very thankful that the spousal unit is both forgiving and loving. It's not a great arrangement, but it is, by this point, tradition.
This year, in the final reckoning, I did not make it out to San Francisco for the MLA. There was, apparently, not a whole lot of call for Mike at the conference. Neither did anyone try to make alternate arrangements. This lack of popularity, while certainly not surprising, is at least familiar.
Strangely enough, though, I did not fly into my normal bout of depression. Instead, I've been in a fairly decent mood all break. This I do not understand...and at any rate, my lack of depression is starting to depress me. I'm really hoping I am not becoming resigned to my fate.
At any rate, I know that my success at the job market is by now inextricably tied to my success getting stuff published, and up until this break, I've been doing good on the production front. Over the summer, I did everything I could do. I had a Dec. 2007 publication (it was in their cue for years) that led to an anthology article...that one comes out sometime in 2009. I pumped out 2 book reviews, already published. I sent out two essays that are, in my eyes, the best things I've ever wrote, even though they are still awaiting judgment elsewhere.
But this break has been mostly writing-free, which puzzles me. And it's not like I've been killing too much time in my "I need to have fun" activities. Hell, my guitars are all about in their 6th month of staring at me in neglect. Yes, I have a Wii, but I really have only been using that when all I would've been doing is watching football pregame shows or Food Network programs.
I'm really hoping this is not the resignation phase. I still want this. I can still do the work. I still have ideas that need to be heard, that no one else is saying. I still need the critical engagement. I still have been singing Two Cow Garage's line "I'm not gonna burn out 'cause things didn't turn out like I planned." Honestly, I'm still into the whole scholarship bit.
I just need to produce, and it needs to start happening post haste. Is frustration better or worse than paranoid drive? Than desperation? Than gloom and doom? What negative emotion will yield the most positive results, at least in terms of production?
These are the questions which will drive my new year.
Monday, December 29, 2008
The Year That Was - media edition
Best Music
Yes, this is only a "top 9"...there just simply wasn't a tenth album I will claim as good. A weak year, musically.
- Two Cow Garage – Speaking in Cursive
While I have been a big fan of this band for quite some time, this album is a monumental step forward, in terms of depth and quality. Just buy it already. - The Hold Steady – Stay Positive
Take off one or two songs with gratuitous keyboards, and this thing really rocks. "Lord, I'm Discouraged" alone has enough lyric power to make you weep. Combine it with "Hey Sapphire," and whoooboy. Plus Craig Finn now sings! - Ben Folds – Way To Normal
Many have expressed disappointment with this album. They're nuts. "Kylie from Connecticut" alone (one of the most beautiful songs of the year?) should propel this into your top album lists. Good, rythmic virtuousity as well. - The Pink Spiders – Sweat It Out
While the production is poppier than I would like and there is (unfortunately) a power ballad (skip "Don't Wait For Me"), this is still a very good album. "Gimme Chemicals" and "Seventeen Candles" are catchy as all-hell. - Magnolia Summer – Lines from the Frame
Many have brought up the Jayhawks comparison. I'll just say that this is alternately lush, rocking, and lyrical. Go buy it. - Jay Bennett – Whatever Happened I Apologize
The best thing he's done since The Palace at 4am. This all-acoustic effort is sweet, complex, and fun. Plus, you can download it for free! - The Raconteurs – Consolers of the Lonely
A good second album of rock, although this sounds more like a band effort than their debut. Consolers more than makes up for the disappointment that was the last White Stripes disk. - Paul Westerberg – 49:00
Sloppy, sticky, catchy in parts, and (sadly) no longer available through official channels. - Gaslight Anthem – The '59 Sound
Nice bar rock with (if I'm not mistaken) a little Clash thrown in.
Top Songs
- “Brass Ring,” Two Cow Garage
- “Lord I'm Discouraged.” The Hold Steady
- “Glass City,” Two Cow Garage
Musical Disappointments
- We will probably never see another album from Brent Best, Caitlin Cary.
- You Am I forgot how to rock.
- The Drive-By Truckers lost it.
- Ryan Adams has gone all slick
Music I'm Looking Forward To
- New Wilco, Grand Champeen, We Are The Fury, Jason Isbell
Someone I Discovered Much Too Late
- Josh Ritter
Best Movies
- Wall-E
Gorgeous. Hardly any dialog, but the emotion and meaning couldn't be any clearer. A scathing critique of consumerist culture, and a tear-jerking tale of love and hope at the same time. - Vicky Christina Barcelona
Woody Allen makes a fresh film. It's young, lively, and gorgeously shot. The only down side is that the supreme gorgeousness of everyone in it might make you question your own looks...if you were not as pretty and confident as I. - Zach & Miri Make A Porno
Kevin Smith knocks one out of the park. Both hilarous and touching, more so than it should ever be.
Cinematic Crap
- Cloverfield
This one wouldn't be so bad except for one thing: I hate everyone in it.- Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull
Space aliens? Space aliens??? Is this really the best they could do? - Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull
Why in the Hell Haven't These Opened Here Yet?
- Synecdoche, New York
- The Wrestler
- Zombie Strippers (okay, so I could probably rent this one...)
The Year in TV
- The Shield ended perfectly
- I got absolutely hooked on Burn Notice
- Jeez, The Office is SOOOO much better post-strike
My Year in Technology
- Why buy newspapers when you can get Darkgate Comics Slurper
- I know I'm late to this one, but I love my Wii
- Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog was probably my favorite bit of entertainment all year.
Monday, December 22, 2008
taking the chill off with a lovely beverage
I call this one "The Sub-Zero":
- take a mixer and fill with ice
- add
- 1 measure dark rum
- 1 measure tequila
- 1 measure vodka
- 1/2 measure triple sec
- 1/2 measure strawberry liqueur
- 2 TBSP sugar syrup
- 2 measures grapefruit juice
- 3 measures cranberrry juice
- light squeeze of lemon
- 1 measure dark rum
- shake vigorously
- pour into glass 2/3 full
- top off with seltzer/soda water
- garnish with lemon wedge
- sip and try to forget your heating bill
frozen dreams
My favorite band right now is Two Cow Garage. I first met them when they got up and jammed with Slobberbone after one of their Wapakoneta OH shows. While Slobberbone was brilliant (two separate sets, each about 1 1/2 hours, with a 30 minute encore), Two Cow was an unexpected pleasure, unknown, unannounced, raw, energetic. They even did most of their own songs (save a jam/duet/whatever on "Give Back The Key To My Heart" with the 'bone), and each of their originals had a spark, an energy that I really needed to hear in rock at the time.
They were obviously talented, and I was taken with the guys. I wanted to tell all my friends about them. This being the era of the internet, I talked an awful lot online with friends from all over. Word spread. When their first album Please Turn The Gas Back On came out (awesome, raw rock, with some raw country thrown in for good measure, they had established an online fanbase.
As much as I liked album one, it was The Wall Against Our Back that really grabbed me. As well as pure rock your face off tracks like "My Concern" and "Make It Out Alive," the guys in the band started to really think about their situation, the career of an indy, small rock and roll group. They started to explore the class and status structure of rock and roll. Do you hold on to some vague desire for authenticity, or "sign on the dotted line" and become corporate? Do you remain who you are, in the face of overwhelming odds?
This continued with III, perhaps more explicitly. As someone who was struggling with my own job dilemmas (trying very hard to find a tenure-track professor gig, wanting to move into a job where I felt like a scholar and academic rather than just a mechanic, blindly teaching courses outside of my training, specialty, and interests, making entirely too little money and working entirely too much), I could relate. In fact, I needed to have this music. Realizing that other people in other fields were having the same issues as I made me feel a little less alone, a little more hopeful.
It's not much of a stretch to say that The Wall Against Our Back got me through my years of adjuncting, and III helped me adjust to teaching in a field pretty foreign to me. Their latest album, Speaking in Cursive (click on the link, buy it for $5, it's unbridled awesomeness) shows amazing musical and lyrical growth, but part of the reason I'm so taken with it is the theme of "what happens if we never become rock superstars? Is what we have enough?" which pretty much mirrors how I've been thinking of my own career. It's always nice to know you're not alone.
What made my love for this band even better is the personal connection I forged with the guys in the band. One of the first times I saw them, Shane, bass player and singer extraordinaire, came over to thank me for talking them up online. Every time thereafter, we talked a bit more, got to know each other a bit more. And while I don't know him nearly as well as I would like, I do think of him as my friend. I've also gotten to know guitarist/singer Micah, and this personal connection brings a new dimension to their music. I'm not just a fan. I feel I have to fight for these guys, push them wherever and whenever I can.
And, of course, see them perform whenever I can as well. After completely missing their last BG show (even though I was at the bar three days before, I saw no flyers or ads to tell me they were playing), I was pumped to find out that Shane and Micah were scheduled to play an acoustic show at Toledo's Frankie's Innercity. So I gathered up some friends and went, but it was just fated to be one of those nights.
The first issue was the bitter cold. In order to celebrate the first official day of winter, the weather plunged down to a lovely -2...not including the wind gusts of up to 35 mph. My car fought me, but it did eventually start. Of course, it took a good ten minutes to come up to temperature, and my foggy breath was steaming up the windows.
Of course, the drive necessitated going down many roads which have been studiously avoided by any plow or salt trucks, so it's always fun to know that at any minute, you can lose control, slide across intersections, and get run over by a similarly out-of-control semi. But in spite of the mortal peril, we made it.
There was the third issue, related to my inability to find a designated driver. It's always hard to see good rock and roll without beer, but hey, I love these guys, so I was willing. Of course, the bar had to rub my sobriety in my face by having the $1.50 special on PBR, Blatz, and Black Label...it was the trio of destruction, and I could not partake.
Unfortuntately, after an hour or so, we got the announcement: Micah and Shane were stranded outside of Cleveland in a blizzard. So, since I couldn't even drink my oblivion away, I instead had to settle for introducting my mad Romanian friend to White Castle hamburgers.
The guys at Freankies told me that Shane and Micah are planning to try to reschedule for next weekend, though. Hopefully I'll have a designated driver then...or at least, maybe it won't be so damn cold.
They were obviously talented, and I was taken with the guys. I wanted to tell all my friends about them. This being the era of the internet, I talked an awful lot online with friends from all over. Word spread. When their first album Please Turn The Gas Back On came out (awesome, raw rock, with some raw country thrown in for good measure, they had established an online fanbase.
As much as I liked album one, it was The Wall Against Our Back that really grabbed me. As well as pure rock your face off tracks like "My Concern" and "Make It Out Alive," the guys in the band started to really think about their situation, the career of an indy, small rock and roll group. They started to explore the class and status structure of rock and roll. Do you hold on to some vague desire for authenticity, or "sign on the dotted line" and become corporate? Do you remain who you are, in the face of overwhelming odds?
This continued with III, perhaps more explicitly. As someone who was struggling with my own job dilemmas (trying very hard to find a tenure-track professor gig, wanting to move into a job where I felt like a scholar and academic rather than just a mechanic, blindly teaching courses outside of my training, specialty, and interests, making entirely too little money and working entirely too much), I could relate. In fact, I needed to have this music. Realizing that other people in other fields were having the same issues as I made me feel a little less alone, a little more hopeful.
It's not much of a stretch to say that The Wall Against Our Back got me through my years of adjuncting, and III helped me adjust to teaching in a field pretty foreign to me. Their latest album, Speaking in Cursive (click on the link, buy it for $5, it's unbridled awesomeness) shows amazing musical and lyrical growth, but part of the reason I'm so taken with it is the theme of "what happens if we never become rock superstars? Is what we have enough?" which pretty much mirrors how I've been thinking of my own career. It's always nice to know you're not alone.
What made my love for this band even better is the personal connection I forged with the guys in the band. One of the first times I saw them, Shane, bass player and singer extraordinaire, came over to thank me for talking them up online. Every time thereafter, we talked a bit more, got to know each other a bit more. And while I don't know him nearly as well as I would like, I do think of him as my friend. I've also gotten to know guitarist/singer Micah, and this personal connection brings a new dimension to their music. I'm not just a fan. I feel I have to fight for these guys, push them wherever and whenever I can.
And, of course, see them perform whenever I can as well. After completely missing their last BG show (even though I was at the bar three days before, I saw no flyers or ads to tell me they were playing), I was pumped to find out that Shane and Micah were scheduled to play an acoustic show at Toledo's Frankie's Innercity. So I gathered up some friends and went, but it was just fated to be one of those nights.The first issue was the bitter cold. In order to celebrate the first official day of winter, the weather plunged down to a lovely -2...not including the wind gusts of up to 35 mph. My car fought me, but it did eventually start. Of course, it took a good ten minutes to come up to temperature, and my foggy breath was steaming up the windows.
Of course, the drive necessitated going down many roads which have been studiously avoided by any plow or salt trucks, so it's always fun to know that at any minute, you can lose control, slide across intersections, and get run over by a similarly out-of-control semi. But in spite of the mortal peril, we made it.
There was the third issue, related to my inability to find a designated driver. It's always hard to see good rock and roll without beer, but hey, I love these guys, so I was willing. Of course, the bar had to rub my sobriety in my face by having the $1.50 special on PBR, Blatz, and Black Label...it was the trio of destruction, and I could not partake.
Unfortuntately, after an hour or so, we got the announcement: Micah and Shane were stranded outside of Cleveland in a blizzard. So, since I couldn't even drink my oblivion away, I instead had to settle for introducting my mad Romanian friend to White Castle hamburgers.
The guys at Freankies told me that Shane and Micah are planning to try to reschedule for next weekend, though. Hopefully I'll have a designated driver then...or at least, maybe it won't be so damn cold.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
a day in my life
In an effort to satisfy those who are bored with my Twitter feed reposts (hopefully it's better than nothing, but who knows?), I realize that I need to provide some original TheMikeDuBose content...after all, you are the ones who pay big money for subscription fees to this site, who send me mountains of fan mail (the photos are particularly appreciated), who give up their jobs and family to follow me on tour, I realize that you deserve something just for you.
Unfortunately, though, my life was (up until yesterday) pretty much filled with grading, conferences, and similarly exciting stuff. And what did I do to actually celebrate was read a book. Trust me, describing myself sitting on the couch under a blankie turning a page does not make exciting, edge of your seat prose. In fact, I've done absolutely nothing that warrants extended writing.
But, in an effort to satisfy my throng of fans, I realize I have to provide something. So please forgive the randomness and look for whatever jewels that might come. After all, even a disjointed TheMikeDuBose is better than none at all. We present you, the reading public, moments in my day:
So there you have it, folks. My post-Fall semester has so far been taken up with an armpit allergy, saran wrap windows, and pizza dreams. Exciting stuff, huh? Rest assured that over the break, as I'll be occupied with syllabi planning, writing, and teaching myself video game theory, that there will be more wacky adventures. Bet you can't wait.
Unfortunately, though, my life was (up until yesterday) pretty much filled with grading, conferences, and similarly exciting stuff. And what did I do to actually celebrate was read a book. Trust me, describing myself sitting on the couch under a blankie turning a page does not make exciting, edge of your seat prose. In fact, I've done absolutely nothing that warrants extended writing.
But, in an effort to satisfy my throng of fans, I realize I have to provide something. So please forgive the randomness and look for whatever jewels that might come. After all, even a disjointed TheMikeDuBose is better than none at all. We present you, the reading public, moments in my day:
- Last night, I had another Little Caesars Pizza dream. I worked there 9.5 years (throughout school and such), and on average, I still have one of these dreams every week or so. In these dreams, I'm always the avenging savior assistant manager, sent over to bring law and order to a store on the edge of destruction. This was pretty much the role I played in real life, so the subject matter doesn't surprise me that much. However, what does it say about me that, even in my dreams, that the most heroic role my mind can imagine is to save a pizza franchise? Superheroes, after all, don't usually work for minimum wage, and pizza workers don't usually get the girl. Oh well.
- Even though we're renters, we had to spend a few hours doing home improvement. We live in a very small (some would say cute or petite) little bungalow in town, which has as its main advantage washer and drier hookups and no undergrads living either above or below us. Unfortunately, though, if this place is insulated at all, it's with one or two 37 year old copies of The Toledo Blade, which, as you might imagine, doesn't cut down on the wind very much. Our windows are even leakier...sometimes I'm surprised that sparrows and other small birds don't just fly through the gaps. So yesterday, after the spousal unit and I dined on White Castle stuffing for lunch, we went out and applied window insulation kits...it's basically double-sided tape and humongous sheets of plastic wrap. Of course, whenever we've had to do this, the BG wind picks up and gives us hell. But now, our place leaks much less. It's a pain, though, and I often wish we could just tent the house with a giant ziplock bag.
- I am used to my car being against me. I am also used to computers trying to sabotage me by randomly freezing or erasing data. General paranoia has made me immune to most shocks when things go horrifically wrong. However, now my own body is trying to kill me. I have a problem where I get hot really easily. This means that when it hits 75 degrees, I start to sweat. My doctor, after hearing my tale of woe, told me that I have "Heat Intolerance" (neat name, at least), and he gave me a prescription for a super-strength antiperspirant, which is basically a super-concentrated solution of the over-the-counter active ingredient, and it glues up your armpits for a few days. Well, I put on my Thursday night dosage before bed, but when I woke up, my armpits were red, tender, and burning. My body has randomly developed an allergy to the only active ingredient in mass-market antiperspirant. I'm sure friends and family will be thrilled to hear this.
So there you have it, folks. My post-Fall semester has so far been taken up with an armpit allergy, saran wrap windows, and pizza dreams. Exciting stuff, huh? Rest assured that over the break, as I'll be occupied with syllabi planning, writing, and teaching myself video game theory, that there will be more wacky adventures. Bet you can't wait.
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