television, texts, and change

There might be a new way of doing things coming. It might completely change the way the media is made. It might alter the stories we can tell...or the stories we can be told. The effects could be momentous.

And it all started with a silly name.

When I first heard it, I have to admit that I fell victim to my own prejudice. After all, I had seen enough juvenile crap at the movie theater and had no real reason to waste any more of my time on something I just knew I wouldn't like. Really, how good could something called Buffy the Vampire Slayer really be? The name alone drove me off (as it would later drive off my parents, who refused to even consider the show in spite of (or maybe because of) my suggestion). I did hear that it was originally a bad movie, so its history also worked against it. But really, more than the name or its past, I realize now that it really was my prejudice that kept me away.

But graduate school in culture studies does strange things to a person. One of my own personal projects upon arriving in Bowling Green was to open myself up to new experiences, to overcome my prejudices. This is why I started watching the various Star Trek series, why I started to follow wrestling. I wanted to know what was going on.

Eventually, this led to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One of the networks (TNT, I believe) was showing episodes, 2 a day. And my schedule was, at that moment, pretty flexible, so I started to watch. I was amazed at the level of depth, complexity, intricacy, and real-world applicability this admittedly weird horror series contained. I immediately indoctrinated the spousal unit, and we both became really big fans. And while I never reached the level of obsessiveness that some Buffy followers attain, this series (and its spin-off Angel, which I actually think is a better program) made me devout followers of their creator, Joss Whedon.

Whedon, for those of you who might not know, is more than the creator of these shows. He's more than an extremely good and experienced Hollywood writer (responsible for, among other things, the script for the Pixar breakthrough Toy Story). I think he's responsible (at least in part) for signaling a change in the way television works.

A bit of Media 101 background first. One of the most difficult (and seemingly counterintuitive) facts about broadcast television networks is that even though they provide a large volume of programming, spanning multiple genres and styles, they are not actually in the entertainment business. They don't make any money by showing (say) twelve episodes of American Idol each week (with the exception of some ancillary revenue such as licensing fees). No, they get most of their money by selling advertising. They are in the business of selling ad space. In that way, they are really more like a billboard company than an entertainment provider.

The programs are only really there in order to give us reason to watch television advertisement. Show of hands: who would sit and watch commercials on television if there were nothing else beside the sales pitch? And while I realize that some of you might share my obsession with bad infomercials, that's not what I'm talking about.

No, you watch the advertisements that come on television because they happen to interrupt your favorite program. But networks realistically care more about a good audience for advertising than a good audience for, say, drama or comedy. This is not to say that broadcast television does not lead to some great pieces of art; however, their ability to draw in the 18-25 year old male demographic is the real reason for the success of a particular program, not its level of quality or insight.

(This, incidentally, is why all television seems to be marketed towards the youngish...they are the ones with disposable income.)

Cable has obviously changed the landscape, because with cable television (or its sibling, the mini satellite dish), you do actually pay for the content you watch. However, most cable networks include advertising as well. You might pay for the right to watch Cartoon Network, for instance, but the network still operates on the broadcast paradigm.

There are non-commercial exceptions, of course, networks like HBO or Showtime. They have no commercials, but you do have to pay more for them (hence the name "premium channels"). However, the content is generally movies (a medium where the consumer does pay for content). And while they have always had original programming (at least since the early 80s, when I first encountered them), that programming was always more of a filler than a draw.

But then came The Sopranos, a gritty serial drama about a mob family. It was a television show on a non-advertising-based network which really became a "destination" show. People subscribed to the network specifically to watch the show. A television show became a product rather than just something to draw in advertisers, because there actually were no adversisers. And under these circumstances, it is much easier to do Art.

The Sopranos had a real effect on how television could be produced/consumed/perceived. There are a host of other premium channel programs now, and I have many friends who alter their television purchasing options based specifically on program schedules.

There are other things changing the landscape of television, such as the digital video recorder (perhaps my favorite gadget of the last decade). There's lots of work to be done studying the ramifications of DVRs, and this is something I would gladly both read and teach.

How does Joss Whedon fit into this? Well, two things.

First off, consider Whedon's third created program Firefly, a science fiction western. It is perhaps my favorite program of all time. Unfortunately, the network did not like the show that much at all, and it was canceled after less than half a season.

However, a weird thing happened. People who watched and liked Firefly were generally extreme fans of the program. DVD sales were very brisk, more than you'd think for a show that didn't even run a full year. Furthermore, upon the show's cancellation, a letter and e-mail campaign to bring back the program, aimed towards its studio, generated an avalanche of messages, so great that Whedon was allowed to bring it back as a movie, the 2005 release Serenity. Think of the momentousness of this for a minute; A broadcast television show, which never found its audience while on the air, generated so much commitment from its fans (which should, according to the broadcast model, only really be advertising demographics) that it was made into a motion picture. It went from something used unsuccessfully to sell advertising to a commerced piece of art unto itself.

This is not the only reason I believe Whedon's works are notable, though. Also important is the recent renewal of Dollhouse. Dollhouse has not had the highest of ratings, for several reasons; it is aired on Friday night (traditionally a low-viewership night), and it does have a rather complex and morally ambiguous story (it concerns humans who get imprinted with different personalities and leased to customers) which might throw off casual viewers.

However, Dollhouse was just renewed for a second season. What is interesting about this is the resulting press coverage. Many reporters have gone out of their way to note that Dollhouse is one of the lowest-rated television programs in recent memory to be renewed. The show does do a good job of drawing in viewers either via DVR or the internet, but those viewers do not see the accompanying advertising which the network is supposedly in the business of selling. So why, if it fails at its job of bringing a desired advertising viewers, is it being renewed?

While one article quoted a network executive jokingly suggesting it was a preemptive move to stop the expected avalanche of fan letters and e-mails, most of the articles point toward the possibility of high DVD sales...as all of Whedon's shows have done extremely well in that market.

This is, I feel, why Whedon and Dollhouse are both important. Dollhouse is still a broadcast television show, but the actual broadcast and resulting advertising revenue is perhaps its weakest point. Instead, it's become a valuable program predominantly for what would normally be ancillary revenue potential. It is not used to sell something else (the ads) but instead has become a commodity in and of itself, as a piece of art, in spite of being on broadcast television. In other words, it's breaking the traditional model of broadcast television and suggesting something much more text-centric, art-centric.

This feels notable.

(note: this may eventually morph into an academic paper, a class segment, or maybe nothing at all. If anyone has any insight, please let me know.)

a political quandry

This says something about me, apparently, but my first thought, upon seeing this photo, is "are we now negotiating with with terrorists?"

cleaning and self-realization

I determined that it was long past the time when I needed to clean my oven. So, on one of her last trips to the store, I had the spousal unit pick up a can of oven cleaner.

Tonight, I finally got around to starting the cleaning. Rather than just jump into the new can, I seemed to remember having just a bit left in a can under the sink that should probably be used up first. So I checked under the sink for said half-used can. I didn't find it, but I did find two completely full cans instead.

Apparently, every so often, I decide the oven needs to be cleaned, so I buy oven cleaner. But then I procrastinate, and eventually the can goes into storage. Time passes. Again, I decide I need to clean the oven, buy a new can of cleaner, procrastinate, store cleaner. Repeat.

This says something about me. If I was a stronger man, I might be tempted to figure out exactly what the message is.

my American Spendor day

In some issue of American Splendor, Harvey Pekar expresses his shock at seeing someone else named Harvey Pekar appear in the Cleveland phone book, And then another appears. And another. This makes Pekar question his feelings of uniqueness and individuality, driving him to ask "Who is Harvey Pekar?"

So why am I thinking about this?

Way back in December 2007, an article I wrote on Captain America saw publication in The Journal of Popular Culture after over four years in their cue. This led, through a rambling path (one I've recounted earlier) to another essay in an anthology on Cap. Today, when the lovely spousal unit got home from work, she brought in the mail (I leave it for her, because fetching the mail gives her a certain amount of glee), and amongst the bills and assorted crapola was my copy of the anthology containing my new publication.

I instantly geeked out a little, but there was little time for a full-blown ego-fest...me and the spousal unit were out the door, onto the theater for Star Trek. Later, though, when we got home, I looked through the book more carefully and found that not only was my Journal of Popular Culture article included in the "Selected Bibliographic Essay," it was also cited by one of the other contributors. Instantly, I moved from just being a published author to a cited authority...for what it's worth.

This wasn't the end to my self-referential day, however.

I have a friend in Canada who randomly calls me up late at night. They're always fun, interesting,and informative calls, if always a little unusual and out of the blue.

Tonight's call, amongst other things, had to do with my school bio and an error within. Apparently, my friend, in researching something else, ran across my department biography by googling my full name and spotted said mistake. Feel free to go look for the error, but it is now a priority to write a new bio first thing tomorrow, so your time will be limited.

While I was talking to said friend, I also googled myself. I've done this before, but as I share a name with a former University of Alabama football coach, I never come up in the search results. However, it is scary to realize there's also a Mike DuBose whose an Austin musician (maybe an alternate reality me?) and one who's a businessman of some sort.

I know these alternate Mike DuBoses are not me. However, I think I'm going to have to start following their careers. When the musician Mike DuBose's album comes out, I need to get it. Who knows? Maybe I'll make a false cover and photoshop my face into the artwork. At any rate, it's one of the reasons I called this blog "TheMikeDuBose"...to separate myself out from all these other (seemingly more successful) versions.

Anyway, this time, I included my middle initial into the google search, and I learned a bunch of facts about myself, some of which might be a little frightening to those who know me.

• The only poem I published in the two years or so I thought I would become a poet is still online. I thought this was, for good or ill, lost to the nether regions of the interwub. Now I know it's still up there as a potential object of either praise or ridicule.
  
• The aforementioned Journal of Popular Culture article? It seems to be a part of some anonymous Ph.D. student's reading list...which makes me wonder how helpful I am to this student.
  
• Furthermore, the JPC article is also a required reading for a senior level history class called Mass Culture and the Postmodern Era. Do they like me, or are they just bored with me?
  
• The same article is also being used for an Arizona State University English class, as well as a few others.
  
• I also saw that article reviewed on a few student web sites, including this student blog entry.
  

In many ways, this should be the exact opposite of the aforementioned Harvey Pekar moment...because all the references I encountered are, in fact, actually about me. On the other hand, I still have a problem reconciling them with the man who spent most of the day sitting on the couch reading, only taking a break for lunch while watching a Deadliest Catch repeat. Am I the Mike DuBose that took my wife out to see a geek movie, or am I the Mike DuBose who has 137 google hits, and who is apparently read and debated in class rooms?

I'm not sure how to feel about any of this. Frankly, I think the world might very well have imploded on itself today, and I missed it only because I was sitting on the couch.

the return of fragments

For anyone who's interested, my summer restart of scholarly activity means I am now thinking again. This means I need somewhere to ramble on, to spout out incoherent and developing fragments of thought. This means I am now posting again over at Thought Emporium. If you have any desire to see unconnected thoughts as they emerge from my reading and pondering, go, visit, comment.

hot fun in the summer

This morning, my alarm went off..and a large part of me regretted it. My first act, rather than jumping out of bed and rushing through a morning routine (speed shower, speed breakfast, speed drive across the countryside to traverse devastated roads to get to the university) was to shake the dream fragments from my head (some like B horror scenes, some like a sitcom version of my life, some of people I don't recognize, but strangely enough, no pizza making dreams) and wonder why I set the alarm in the first place. After a minute, it came to me...it was all about motivation.

During the course of the normal school year, I am up to my neck in schedules. I have my teaching schedule, schedules in each of my classes (each of which balances out my students' assignments into some master schedule), my office hours schedule, my lesson planning schedule, and others (including to, but not limited to my vague relaxation schedule). These all balance out with my lovely spousal unit's schedules. Some of these are mandated, some of these are by design, and some of these are by default. Regardless, they all rule my life in many ways, throughout the course of the semester. I don't have to question what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, because it's all mapped out.

However, the summer is quite different. I don't have a set natural schedule. I don't have any specific, gun-to-the-head obligations. I don't have anything I have to do. Everething is entirely up to my personal discretion.

At least, that's what the narrative of "teacher over the summer" says. The reality is quite different. I'm non-tenured, and I very much want to become tenured. Because I'm non-tenured, I really don't have to do service or scholarship. It's not part of my job. However, since I want to become tenured, I have to do a lot of scholarship to make it visibly apparent that I'm still an active thinker. My job allows me absolutely no time to do scholarship. So guess what I do over the summer? So I gotta do a lot of scholarship, because I want a better job, and doing the work of an assistant professor on top of doing the work of a lecturer is not optional.

Moreover, it's a requirement of my ego that I stay active. While I absolutely love teaching, I ultimately did get into this business to do scholarship, to think. If I don't do it, I feel more like I'm a warehouse worker than anything else.

And a lot of this ego-business is preemptive. On top of the pure random luck involved, my success on the job market next year will depend on how much work I get done this summer. So, while I could still possibly sit around unshowered and play video games in between watching television every single day, it would mean that much heartache and depression when the rejection letters start rolling in. Of course, getting a lot of writing done is no guarantee that I'll get a job (see the last two years), but it does make me feel that much better...okay, less whiny.

However, while my need to do unpaid work is not really optional, I still have to deal with the workload while knowing that I have no schedule. I am master of my own summer domain, true, but this only really means that I can't count on outside schedules to provide guidance. Instead, I have to set my own plans, keeping that fear and need for ego as my motivation.

So, what's on tap? How do I proceed? I have my plan lined out, step by step.

1. I have to remember how to be an academic scholar. This basically means I have to read a whole lot of scholarship and theory so I can have quotes and experts at my disposal.
   
2. I have to remember what my book is about. This means revisiting my dissertation and the pile of revision notes scattered across the study and computer...after, of course, trying to find everything and get it into a system of piles which makes sense.
   
3. I have to remember what I was thinking in the big theory chapter. That means reading all the chapter-specific notes, theory, texts. It means re-reading the 50% of the chapter I've finished, hoping to get back into whatever groove I was in when I had to abandon this. It means reading my old fragment note, maybe writing some new ones.
   
4. I have to finish said chapter, which takes all my theory and half of my literature review from the dissertation and pushes them through the grinder with my analysis of the novel Neuromancer. It takes on postmodernism, as well as a whole bunch of Haraway derivatives. It's also where the main point of the book comes out and moves into "this is exactly what I'm adding to the cultural conversation." In other words, it's the most important part of the whole project.
   
5. I have to see if there's updated stuff I have to read for any of my other chapters...and since I've been working on this project for eons, you know there will be books galore.
   
6. I have to revise everything else, getting it to read as much like a popular book while not diminishing the intricacies of the thoughts swelling around my head for the last several years.
   
7. I then have to proof everything and send it off to the editor who was interested...not to mention hope that said editor is still interested.
   
8. Time permitting, I have a 90% researched paper on CSI: that I would love to bust out.
   

Piece of cake, no? This is why I have to set the alarm, avoid hitting the snooze, and actually do something...which is cool, because I do, after all, enjoy the work.

I have to admit, however, that I still have to fight the temptation to just goof off...which is the true peril of the summer academic.

I'm going down...all the way

When I first started teaching, there were many things about the occupation/calling that really surprised me. I was surprised at the emotional response I had to being in front of a group of students, for instance. I, a normally shy person, did not freeze up or feel all that nervous. Instead, I participated in a bevy of shared emotions with the students: frustration at a stupid text, wonderment when a mental wall was broken down, glee when a cool idea took center stage.

What really shocked me, though, happened in my (communally shared, cramped, and ultimately decaying) office, at my lonely desk, when I was forced to slog through student papers and exams. I thought that I would be able to coolly detach myself from the act of grading. After all, I was (I figured) only dealing with questions and answers, theories, ideas...wasn't I? I wasn't actually rendering judgment on them on their worth as people. And I had the added benefit of having an extremely rotten mind for putting names together with faces (am I mentally deficient? just had too much fun in high school? I dunno), so I couldn't really figure out, in the majority of cases, whose work I was evaluating. The anonymity, I believed, would help.

Somehow, in spite of knowing I was evaluating ideas and not people, in spite of not being able to tell which person wrote down those ideas, I felt very much involved in the plight of the (oft-anonymous) students anyway. Sifting through stacks of paper, red (or the more student-friendly green) pen in hand, I still found myself rooting for students, cheering their accomplishments, feeling insanely proud when someone got a key point, suffering a meltdown when the point (whatever it may be) was irrevocably lost in a haze of illogic, suffering akin to the sensation of parental failure when someone obviously didn't care. Frankly, I wasn't expecting this level of emotional investment.

Moreover, I wasn't expecting the resulting student reactions. Those who earned As were unnervingly nonchalant about them. Likewise, and even more unexpectedly, those who earned Cs were similarly nonchalant. The realm of student expectation was so strange to me. About the only people who really seemed to care, out of that first group of students, were those who earned A-s...those acted as if I was exercising some vast, personal vendetta against them because I mysteriously didn't want them to get into Harvard Law or something like that.

And although there is a bunch of negatives about the actual grading process (it's isolating, tedious, mind-numbing, repetitive, the papers blur together, your eyeballs hurt, your back starts to give out, you envy everyone who gets to work outside), it's this emotional state that's the worst.

It's also why I try not to do it anymore.

Nowadays (or, as the comp student likes to say, "In our modern society today..."), I just hold conferences. Rather than me rendering solitary judgment, the student comes in, and we read, talk ideas, plot organization, and suggest revision strategies. It actually takes more time, but for most students, we get to have a conversation. Students seem to prefer it, and for me, it turns an isolating, pain-inducing desk session into an interactive student-centered learning opportunity (how's that for educat-speak?).

However, there's still a problem...the students still ultimately have to turn in revisions, and I still ultimately have to grade them. I only have to experience the roller-coaster that is grading one time a semester, but that one time involves everything each student has written...and therefore is a real doozy.

That's where I am now...in the middle of grading hell. One class is down, and I'm in the middle of a second. I hope to get class 2 finished after lunch, maybe get class 3 done before bedtime. Friday will be class 4 and any stragglers. Then I will be done...both in terms of workload and of leftover mental sanity.

When I'm grading, other things, the regular small activities, tend to increase in importance and interest. I must, must regularly check all e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, Reader pages for updates...I can't fall behind! I need hot tea; coffee provides too steep of a kick, and tea has the added benefit of taking just long enough for me to go ahead and stay in the kitchen, away from those pesky portfolios. Lunch moves away from a quick sandwich, or maybe leftover something-or-another, and takes on epic proportions, both in preparation and consumption; today, for instance, I plan to cook a nice chateau brion, accompanied with rosemary-chive-goat cheese-black truffle mashed potatoes and cedar-wood grilled asparagus in a freshly made bernaise sauce. Then, of course, there's always writing this damn blog entry.

All to avoid going back to grading, you see. Because I want it all. I want large breaks from the tyranny of having to apply judgment, but I also want all said judgment over with. I want to do experience all the aspects of learning save the detection and determination of whether or not any actual learning actually happened. I want the teaching experience to be limited to just the adulation, the admirers, the illegal cash gratuities, the wine and champagne, the admiring students throwing garlands of freshly picked roses.

Of course, that will never happen. That, my friends, is why they call this grading hell.

sanity and reunions, part two

A while back, I mentioned my plans to go to my high school reunion In typical themikedubose style, I quickly turned the post into a snarky dig on people who have really done nothing whatsoever to me. Well, wouldn't you know that the situation has gotten stranger and more complex.

The main reason I planned to go was because I convinced a friend from California to come to the reunion, and frankly, I had no real idea how else I'd be able to get together with him and hang out. I really like Mr. California, and I often wonder what he's up to. I hung out with Mr. Cali quite a bit in Jax. We even played briefly in a band. And, as he likes to say, we have lots of bribery material on each other.

But it goes beyond just hanging with a friend. While I would never say I acted perfectly around him, he is one of the people that I don't feel ashamed of my behavior around. Thinking about the high school reunion has brought this unpleasant truth to the surface: I don't really like who I was in high school.

True, I did achieve a certain level of popularity. I also had bitchin' hair. However, I was socially awkward. While I put on the "I don't care what you think" appearance quite regularly, the fact was, I really cared a lot. Even worse, I really had no clue how to get people to like me by just being myself. So I acted (alternately) strange, distant, eccentric, aloof, ass-ish, deep, intellectual, scumbag...you fill in the adverb. The result of this was that I had a few really good friends, a bunch of people who thought I was an amusing freak but whom I never let know me, a number of friends/coworkers who saw the dictator side of my personality, many people I liked but who thought me inconsequential (potential relationships mostly fit into this category), and so forth.

Not Mr. CA. We were always pretty open around each other. We never held back. Neither of us would allow the other to play games.

This is why I was looking forward to hanging with him during the reunion. It would be fun to get the comedy duo back together. But more than that, I knew that I would have at least one anchor to the real themikedubose, someone who had as much disdain for appearance games as I, someone to keep me honest.

Unfortunately, wouldn't you know, he can't make it to Jax until after the reunion. I've been trying to see if any of my other friends (those who actually know me) are going. So far, I'm having a hard time getting any real confirmation. One friend, I didn't realize, graduated the year after me. A few can't afford it. I've lost contact info for a bunch of others. So if I go to the reunion, I have no clue who else will be there, which makes it scary.

Also, the reunion itself scares me. The brochure I have has the day one welcome party at some place called "Maverick's Rock & Honkey Tonk"...which doesn't sound an appealing venue in the lest. Day two has a buffet dinner/dance, with a DJ playing 80s music...I hated the decade's popular music back then, and time has been less than kind to it. Plus, this night requires "cocktail attire," whatever that is. Damnit, I lent my tuxedo out. Also, the whole shindig costs $100, and that doesn't even include the bar. I do get a photo name tag, however!

Simply put, this does not look good.

Right now, I'm leaning towards just setting up shop in some bar and holding an alternate protest reunion.

NO part 2: on marketing, conferences, and incompatibility

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?

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.

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.

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:

• 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.

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.

1. 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.
   

2. 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.
   

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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:

ALWAYS MAKE MULTIPLE BACKUPS OF EVERYTHING

This is a lesson I have never forgotten. Nowadays, I keep copies of everything

1. on my office computer
   
2. on my flash drive
   
3. on my laptop
   
4. on at least one online site
   
5. on my desktop
   
6. on an external hard drive (for monthly backups)
   
7. 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.

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:

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.