Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Time Flies, Butterflies

Last time we took Willow to Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory and Gardens she was, mostly, terrified; this time, she loved it all. For fortyfive minutes until closing time, she ran around the tightly networked greenhouse garden, peered through the wooden bridge slats at the giant koi, squatted along the pavement in the unwitting middle of other people's photographs, laughing as she reminded herself to look wi' eyes. No touch!. What a difference a year makes.

Shared happiness, of course. It was seventy degrees in the middle of winter there under the glass, and hardly busy: a nice place to be in the setting sun. Great brown-speckled moths and zebra-striped butterflies flew by us in swoops and swarms, while their smaller lacewinged cousings sipped nectar from bright sponges just out of reach; in the corners. A tiny greenbacked hummingbird fed itself on hothouse flowers inches from our faces, its body seemingly weightless, its wings mere disturbances in the air beside.

Taking a last lingering look around the fluttering air on our way out to the truckstop diner for steak, grits, and overeasy eggs we spotted a veryyoung couple clutching each other and crying in the back, by the bower and benches -- two kids, probably up from UMass, she with an Army surplus store handbag, he in a Beck/Beatles harcut, carefully mussed, and a velvet ring box on the bench behind them; two kids, I thought at first, surely far too young to make it to where we are now, and what kind of life together starts at the butterfly gardens, and costs $7.50 per person?

And then I looked down at my family, buttoning up against the cold beside me, and how lucky I am to have them here with me in the butterfly gardens on a spare Saturday in January, and how young my wife and I were when we dropped out of college together ourselves. And thought about our own engagment, in the only restaurant we could find open on Christmas Eve: no more auspicious, and far less well planned.

So in pennance for my cynicism, here's to the happy couple. May their life together be filled with bright colors, light hearts, and warmth in the worst of winters, as it started. If we can have it, then why not, after all, anyone else?

The Peoples' Evening: Why I Love It Here

Payday today, and a long weekend ahead; flush-feeling and free (and hungry) brought us to a meet-up with younger sis-in-law and boyfriend Ryan at the most child-friendly microbrew bar and local/organic grill in town.

Greenfield, MA haunt The People's Pint specializes in a cozy hardwood atmosphere and a mean Pale Ale, but we go as much for the food itself. Tonight: the usual homemade local sausage quesadila with salsa sour cream, warm chips, and the cajun catfish special, a spicy slab with cucumber dressing and sides of rough-hewn local cornbread, coarse-chopped slaw, and candied sweet potatoes.

Afterwards a homebrew champagne hard cider back at the house, uncorked clear and crisp from its unlabeled well-kept bottle in the back of the fridge. Distilled two doors down by the head of the History Department from the unpasterized raw-press cider served in the school dining halls, made on the school farm, pressed from the Macs and Spys and Cortlands and other sundries grown on the school orchard, it's the best cider I've had. Period.

Have I mentioned it's been three years since I've eaten any maple syrup more than 15 miles from where it was made? Mmmm...pancakes.

Stranger Than Fiction

Fire breaks out on teacher's desktop. Heat causes fish bowl on desk to explode, water puts out the fire. Fish OK. Students get to write narrative from perspective of the fish: He saw the fire, and then he got real hot and then his vase broke and he fell on the floor and the fireman came in and saved him. Ah, the circle of life.

Still not clear how teacher's desk caught on fire at 1:00 a.m. on a Saturday, though. Perhaps the goldfish was smoking?

In other news, I made a student cry today. Now if only I could get the parents to stop sharing while I'm trying to teach their kids, all would be groovy with Parent's Visiting Days.

Shared Expanses

My second favorite meme today asks what's on your front yard right now -- a question I submitted, which makes it all the more humiliating to find that it doesn't apply. For what it's worth, here's what I can offer:

Technically, we have no yard. Yards belong to first floor residents; when you live on the third floor, among the eaves and slantroof spaces of a splitlevel, you take what you can get, and ask permission first. For us, sitting outside means sitting outside someone else's window, and isn't privacy part of what yard is all about?

Too, even if we did, nothing here is really ours. We live in school housing, an old once-infirmary farmhouse on the edge of the largest coed boarding school in New England; our house and its plot, our neighbor's houses and the roads connecting them are all part of an expanse of over three thousand acres of land owned for the last hundred years by the school itself. It's everyone's yard, and no one's; what ownership we due feel is due to politeness and propriety, not mortgages and liens as is usually the case. Sometimes, when I can't sleep in the wee hours of the morning, it's because I'm thinking about the hard truth of this: if I were to be fired tomorrow, we'd be homeless, too.

I suppose if we had seniority among residents we might have a stronger case for a patch of land to call our own in name, if not legality, but we're freshly out of dorm this year. Faculty Dean Pam (1st floor) and English Teacher Chuck (2nd floor) are older, have taught here longer, and lived here first. When we wanted to set up a swingset and bench for the baby over the summer, they were gracious enough to grant us a few square feet on the edge of the back meadow, and we were grateful for it. Even now, if you open the picture window and crane your head past the fire escape birdfeeders, you can see the corner of it, half-buried from yesterday's storm.

But only barely, and dimly at that. Because it's dark, and the whole world's covered in a fluffy nine inches, snow late in coming and driven through all day long as the storm doubled back and the fat white flakes fell and fell and fell: on the yard, yes, the tiny strip in front which hugs the road and holds nothing and the wide expanse in back; on the cultivated sides, the trees, and the swingset too; on the squirrel nests and the family of five doves huddling on the low branches of the biggest tree. Even now, like a blanket in the night where I cannot see, snow covers the catprints and the fallen seeds below the picture window that isn't ours, crusting against Pam's flat Volvo roof in the parking lot, and burying Chuck's snowmobile on its track behind the house.

Willow's Bellows

Tonight for the last fifteen minutes of supper in the school dining hall, while she waited for us to stop making small talk with friends and co-residents Sarah and Alex and their own shy little one Jack, our darling wee one, now a big girl at eighteen months, sung a corrupted version of "This Old Man". For fifteen minutes. At the top of her lungs. Without ever making it to the second verse. And, if you listened carefully, you could tell that this particular man wasn't old, but naked, and quite possibly a pedophile. As in:

Naked man, he played one, knick knack knick knack on my tum...

Puts give the dog a bone into a whole new context, doesn't it?

Preemptively, in the car on the way back from the student dining hall, I tried getting her through the old man's shoe, knee, and other sundries. She seemed to be getting it right, or so I thought. Then, just as the old man began playing five, I realized the voice from the back seat had begun singing something else entirely:

Tree my mice,
Tee my mice,
Tee my mites,
Tea nigh my,
Me my mice,
See my mice,
Me my my,
Me me my,
My my my,
Tee my my,
Tails.

Language play and the observation thereof has been so much fun, especially when there's so much gusto involved. But we always knew at some point it'd stop being so cute. It's times like this I can see that horizon.

Sounds Like...

(a sad pun that reflects a sadder mess)

Still running as hard as I can just to catch up. Thanks to all well-wishers and afficianados; true blogging in all its pithy wit will return shortly. (Or is that witty pith?)

Did manage to squeeze out the weekly radio show on WNMH 91.5 FM, the most powerful high school radio station in the Western Hemisphere last night, though the studio phone's still broken, and the cranky old radiators have begun to knock loud enough to be heard on-air. As always, this week's playlist follows:

Tributary 1/26/04

Bob Dorough -- Too Much Coffee Man
Phish -- Back On The Train
Beck -- Devil's Haircut
Suzanne Vega -- 99.9 F
Stevie Ray Vaughn -- Empty Arms
Manu Chao -- Me Gustas Tu
Eddie From Ohio -- Monotony
The Waifs -- London Still
Barry White -- Can't Get Enough Of Your Love, Babe
Jorma Kaukonen -- Red River Blues
They Might Be Giants -- Fibber Island
Sarah Harmer -- Basement Apartment
Glen Phillips -- Have A Little Fun With Me
Barenaked Ladies -- Blame It On Me
Cassandra Wilson -- The Weight
Norah Jones -- Cold Cold Heart
The Story -- love is more thicker than forget
Gillian Welch -- Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor
Shawn Colvin -- Every Little Thing (he) Does Is Magic
John Gorka -- Like My Watch
Paul Simon -- She Moves On
Cesaria Evora -- Carnival De Sao Vincente
Fatal Mambo -- Magot Tcheri (In The Summertime)
Marc Cohn -- She's Becoming Gold
Girlyman -- My Sweet Lord

Monday Mosh: The No Excuses Edition

I've been feeling kind of sick. My grandfather's sick again. We had company. I disconnected the cable modem at home for a party last weekend and am just too lazy to get it hooked back up again. I had far too many papers to grade. My family comes first, and they hadn't been.

Okay, so I haven't blogged in five days. Mostly, I'm just so far behind on work I'm worried about keeping my job. You, on the other hand, haven't been moshing! What's your excuse?

Mosh to a song which explains everything.

And make it a good one, eh?

How To Monday Mosh:

Dance around just 'cause it's Monday, and answer three questions in your blog or in the comments below, leaving us a link so we know you were here:

1. What song did you mosh to?
2. What did you step on / bump into? (Bonus points for breakage)
3. Why did you stop?

Now I Rock

Why? Because I managed to find the extra carriage return in my own darn comments and fixed 'em!

Feel free to comment on this. Later, I might actually write something worth commenting on.

Tech Assistance Needed...

...to help me figure out why my comments aren't working when they worked fine just last week. Brownie points, fresh from the virtual oven, to anyone who can help.

Other than that, I'm still too swamped to blog much. Grades were due yesterday, but I ended up with a backlog of other "stuff" as a result. Committee work, grading, class prep, and media projects -- including an infrastructure design of the media/edtech web page for work, and a proposal for student supplemental staffing of information commons spaces -- should ebb enough by tomorrow for a full entry. I hope.

[UPDATE 2:12 p.m.: Obviously, you can't leave comments to assist me (duh), so here's an email link. ]

My Brother Rocks

Jesse Farber, Rock, styrofoam and acryllic, 2003

From One Inch Show, a recent group exhibition in a NJ/NYC area gallery. No work could be larger than one inch cubed.

Comments Temporarily Dead, But...

Thanks to bravenet, you can still sign the guestmap!

Out Of Time

Yes, I know the comments are acting up. But midterm progress reports are due tomorrow at noon noon noon, as they like to say around here. I'm far, far behind. Meanwhile, I've got class until ten, a series of instructional sessions for a ninth grade Humanities class on how to organize and develop excellent PowerPoint presentation, two of those 9th grade Health class lectures on media literacy and tobacco in the afternoon, and agreed to cover in-dorm study hall duty for a coworker who will have to put her ailing dog to sleep today. Looks like an all-nighter coming up; expect no blogging or blogfixing for a day or so.

To tide you over, here's last night's banjo-heavy radio show playlist. Feel free to recreate it on your own stereo.

Tributary 1/19/04

Bob Dorough -- Too Much Coffee Man
Spacehog -- Senses Working Overtime
Skavoovie and the Epitones -- Blood Red Sky
Phish -- Sample In A Jar
Barenaked Ladies -- The Old Apartment
Rusted Root -- I Would Like To Hold Your Little Hand
Ani Difranco -- Angry Anymore
Nirvana -- Polly
St. Germain -- Latin Note
Nickel Creek -- Spit On A Stranger
Biscuit Boys -- You Ain't Going Nowhere
Patty Larkin -- All That Innocence
The Jayhawks -- Save It For A Rainy Day
Girlyman -- Hey Rose
String Cheese Incident -- Joyful Sound
Ladysmith Black Mambazo w/ Des'ree -- Ain't No Sunshine
Tony Furtado -- Waiting For Guiteau / President Garfield's Hornpipe
Alison Brown -- The Dalai Camel
Bela Fleck -- Almost 12
Bela Fleck -- Bach: Three Part Invention No. 15
Medeski Martin & Wood -- Bemsha Swing / Lively Up Yourself
Patty Griffin -- Forgiveness
Dolly Parton -- Shine
Rani Arbo and Daisy Mayhem -- Big Black Bird

The Day In Work

First, steal a dozen traffic cones (high-water signs optional). This way, no one will be able to get close enough to see you slacking off at work.

Next, spend the day taking revenge on evil customers.

Finally, after working far more than 40 hours, come home and complain about your sucky customers.

All links accessed from work -- courtesy of Fark, of course.

Monday Mosh: The Half-a-Loaf Edition

They're cutting my school in half by September of 2005. I only managed to grade half the papers I needed to today. I had half an Aleve before media center proctoring duty tonight, but it wasn't half enough to kill the backpain. I've got half a mind to throw in the memtowel, since I get so many hits but so few moshparticipants these days; if only half of you actually participated, it'd be worth it. Todays memetheme:

Mosh to half a song.

Any half will do.

Feedback

It occurs to me that vote-based link heirarchies are self-perpetuating. For example, if you go to blorgy.com -- where I am currently at the top of blorgy's Most Highly Rated list -- and gave my recent blogentry Teaching As A Subversive Activity a 4 or 5 score, my position at the top of said list would last until the post is two weeks old, and thus no longer eligible. If I wasn't there on the list to point to, you'd have a harder time doing that.

Also contributing to this phenomenon: more people are likely to visit that post if it's featured so prominently. As long as it's decent, then its status gets reinforced. Inversely, if it can't be found, it gets missed by strangers.

Much cooler: it seems I not only have succeeded in hovering, albeit temporarily, at the top of the list overnight, thus rating Blog of the Moment status for the site, but in doing so for long enough (or perhaps enough times?) I've actually rated a site-specific icon of my own:

Thanks to the good folks at blorgy for doing the dirty work here; readers of all types are invited to beg, borrow, or steal said icon, as long as they attribute it properly.

Grading Supplies

Needed to grade huge pile of papers and, subseqently, write midterm progress reports:

Restful sleep (couch acceptable, though not ideal)
Dark roasted organic Guatemalan coffee (also milk)
Hair of the dog (damned hangover)
Aleve (damned bad back)
Huge pile of papers (see car)
Printer to print hard copies of papers submitted at last possible moment
Pilot Precise Extra Fine Rolling Ball pen (red, of course)
Manilla folder on which I've been recording grades
Calculator
Grading rubric (may be internalized, however a reference sheet may help ensure near-objectivity)
MS Access progress report application
Time (about 10 hours)
To stop procrastinating and get to work

Change Is The Only Constant

The trustees of Northfield Mount Hermon, a large coed prep school celebrating its 125th birthday this year, called the community in for a major announcement yesterday after months of uncertainty in the face of financial stress and a sense that mediocrity had become the status quo. The announcement, in barebones:

The Board of Trustees strongly believes that to best serve coming generations of students, to carry forward the enduring aspects of Dwight L. Moody’s legacy, and
to continue to strengthen our unique educational program, Northfield Mount Hermon School:
will be located on its Mount Hermon campus in Gill, Massachusetts,
will be a coeducational boarding and day school of approximately 600–750 students,
will operate on one campus at Mount Hermon in September 2005.

The emergency nature of the meeting -- the out-of-the-blue call came out via the phone chain, just after two, for a 3:30 meeting in the school chapel -- speaks to the urgency the trustees feel is needed to get things moving quickly and decisively, rather than get bogged down in what-ifs. The deed is done, as it were.

Though a semi-surprise birthday party in my honor left me unable to attend the last-minute meeting, and a full-court grading press today and tomorrow will keep my mind too busy to stress about it, the ramifications are enormous. Deserting one campus, and electing to shrink the student body down to just over half its current population, inevitably means half of us will lose our jobs (and our homes, as boarding school requires residency). Deserting the Northfield campus specifically means a sudden and urgent need to build those facilities that the Mount hermon campus lacks: Art facilities, library facilities, enough classroom space, an admissions building. And the timetable means a year of high-stakes turmoil. Alums and current students are already up in arms (also here, with surely more to follow).

At least we'll have something to talk about.

Teaching As A Subversive Activity

Besides the obvious ego-serving high of being the one in the room with all the answers, not to mention the chalk and the gradebook and the stage persona to carry it off with aplomb, you know what I like about teaching? Assigning papers. It turns out to be deeply satisfying to create the perfect catalyst for epiphany-laden learning, coming up with just the right essay question, the one which makes the students really struggle to put complex relationship and theories into their own words (and, in doing so, broaden the brain a little). And I've even begun to enjoy reading the work that comes back. It's so fascinating how other people see the world, and moreso to watch them squinting at it.

And squint they do. Despite long hair and a young subject -- you don't find that many close-to-retirement media and pop culture faculty these days -- I have a rep for being one of those esoterically-minded teachers that assigns too much work, lectures too much, makes you work for your B-, and is more interested in what you'll learn from the class than what you learn in the class. Not by accident, either. Heck, it worked for me.

I think it's working for them, too. You can see it in their eyes, in the questions they ask. Some of them have taken to staying after class to tell me their brain hurts, and they're pissed off at themselves for not yet "getting it." Mostly they're really asking for an exchange, for a few minutes of clarification, of focus. I tell them that what they're feeling is academic growing pains, that its a sign that they're doing something very, very right. And it is.

So if students are coming to me eager to get complex ideas right, it also means I'm doing something right. Whether they realize it or not, such questions present as compliments. What else is it but a mark of teaching success when a student wants to wriggle on the hook a little bit more after the bell has rung? When they've seen your fire, and want it for themselves?

You know what I really love about teaching? Making thirst. And helping the thirsty dowse, drill wells, and prepare to drink deeply. Mostly, I love finding the perfect essay question because it can accomplish all that.

Today I collected ten essays, all addressing the ways in which changes in social consciousness become institutional change via analysis of the growing pains of our own institution in the late sixties, as experienced through two alumni speakers who visited the class last week; I still have to grade the abstracts for their class presentations this week, each exploring the sociohistorical significance of a paradigmatic event, text or practice in the same era. Midterm grades are due Wednesday at noon noon noon; I've got a pile of papers to grade, and I'm looking forward to it.

The Flip Side Of Multi(media)tasking

It's logical and intuitively obvious that the more tasks you try to take on at once, the less total brain you'll be able to spare for a given task; it's this truth which underscores the importance of organization, compartmentalization, interconnection, and the ability to locate and search in the modern noetic, where once a print-dominant culture mandated linearity and logic (and, before that, orality demanded memory and the ability to store memory iconographically).

Symptomatically, we've know this all along: remember being on the phone, strange faint noises filling the background, finally realizing that the reason your conversation isn't going anywhere is that the idiot on the other line is watching TV while supposedly talking to you? Keyboard clicking is just as easy to overhear, but this time, according to "the brainy people who study these things" -- don't you just love modern journalism? -- the resulting speech pattern which belies inattention apparently deserves a formal popsociology phrase: "surfer's voice." This is news?

Deep Freeze

It's been hovering around and below zero for days. Deep breaths hurt the lungs and sting the sinuses. The dog pees on the doorstep and begs to come back inside. The baby's not been outdoors since Tuesday morning. Driving to work in the mornings, the defroster fights a losing battle with the whip of wind against the windshield glass: in streaks and swirls, my breath ices up the window's interior.

Now the overnight low is supposed to be -17 F, and the still air has given way to a wind chill of negative fifty degrees; only in New England's worst winters do the words "winds of 25 to 30 miles per hour" strike such fear into the hearts of mice, men, and prep school students. The kids clamor for a day off, noting that every public school in the entire region has already cancelled classes for the rest of the week; in response, our Dean of Students notes via our bulletin board system that budget cuts have forced state schools to cut bussing for kids who live less than two miles from their school, while we have nice warm student centers for pre-bus congregation, and no walk across campus should take more than four minutes -- notably, just about half the time it should take for frostbite to kick in. That, and tomorrow's midterm. It would take an act of God to close this place.

Tonight on dorm duty the house director called a meeting for the sole purpose of explaining how to layer up. We've already covered the signs of frostbite: tiny white triangles, blue extremities. Half our multiculti, international student body has, quite literally, never been so cold.

The adolescent mind needs a cause, of course, and winter has many. Last week the local sledding death of a ten year old girl on her last run of the day, out of control, in her father's sight, had them clamoring to decry our ban of sledding down the steepest, rock-lined hills on campus, despite the impossibility of any policy but that in our newly litigious society. Before that it was snow days -- how dare we let the busses run with three inches, six inches, twelve or more, despite plows that run all night and a local alcohol-and-sugar mix that keeps the roads sticky and solvent-heavy, the crisp cold air sweet.

I've never liked the cold myself. Like my father before me, true winter weather has always brought actual nerve-ending pain, as deep as bone, as white as light. But in true mind-over-matterhood, I find myself this year more prepared, less bruised by cold than in the past. I wonder if the empathy of fatherhood may have something to do with it. I cried at the death of the ten year old girl, and split my mind again, wanting both the joys of sledding for my as-yet unready duaghter, and simultaneously the eternal bubble-wrap safety of her fragile red-eared body, but I forge out each morning in the now-negative double digits unafraid.

Celebratory Randomalia

It's my 31st birthday today. As a gift to myself, I'm not going to worry about creating a single cogerent entry; what follows is instead a cyclical, intertwined laundry list of current brainfodder, i.e. a trifecta of trite tight colon-heavy post-modernistic tidbits, titles included, which otherwise might have made great blog entries -- or so that little homunculus that lives in the back of my brain claims. Well, (s)he's always been right before.

Jewish By Association?

I'm a happy participant in a mixed-religion marriage: in rhyme, a Reconstructionist Jew married to a Unitarian U. Niceties result: not having to choose between one set of relatives and another for major religious holidays, since the Jew-lunar spiritual calendar hardly ever coincides with the Christ/Gregorian holy timetable. Yes, there was the initial concern about Judaism-as-race from the parent, but my ace-in-the-hole -- a faux-innocent suggestion that surely my God wouldn't have found me love in someone he didn't want me to love seriously, because what am I, Job? -- put that behind us quickly. Nary a negative in sight, so far (knock wood). But perhaps I spoke too soon: In the mail today, the Simon Weisenthal Center mailing asks for a signature to support "The Growing Threat to World Jewry," but the nine by twelve is addressed to her. What, I'm not Jewish enough for you, Simon Weisenthal Center?

Taste Buds: Nurture or Nature?

Shouldn't be surprised, I guess, having started out in such a mecca of Jewry. 31 years ago today I was born just outside Atlanta, Georgia, in the midst of my father's two-year first-draft try for a corporate lawfirm partnership; we returned to the Northeast within my first year and never looked back. Notably, my nine month old was barely eating solid food by nine months. So why is it that every year what I really crave for my birthday is southern barbecue? Tonight, for example, catfingers and crawdad poppers, pulled pork and Memphis ribs at Easthamptonian Smokin' Lil's, courtesy of Darcie, with a little help from her babysitting parents; luckily, there's a mess o' great rib joints this end of Massachusetts. Redbones when we can in Somerville, home visiting my parents. Even had my first legal drink over a plate of cornbread, beans, slaw and rubs at East Side Grill in Inman Square back in Cambridge. If there's a homunculus in my head, there's a good ol' boy in my gullet.

Think Globally, Travel Internationally

It's not like I've been to the American South much -- and Florida doesn't count after three decades of Disneyworld and old folks retirement. Louisiana a couple of times in high school and soon after, mostly for the Jazz and Heritage Festival (now sadly off-limits for me, as it's too close to the end of the term). But heck, I've only been in less than 20 of "our" fifty states. Been in more overseas countries than that, some which don't even exist anymore (yes, the USSR was too a country, dude). Is this like living in New York and never climbing the Statue of Liberty? And yet I teach American Culture now. Ah, irony. If I had my druthers, I'd be spending my birthday touring the Heineken Brewery in Amsterdam. Now that was living -- a quick tour of copper vats and Percheron stalls, and then all you can drink in fortyfive minutes, all for a buck. And speaking of beer, did you know the only place to get Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in Bangladesh is the American Club? You gotta know somebody to get in, though.

Blogstipation

Headachy and bored at work in the library information commons, trying too hard to make yesterday's draft/notes about my trip up to the top of the chapel belltower with Leon the custodian imbued with some serious metaphoric meaning about history and our place in it. Trying so hard, in fact, that the entry I'm trying to write is falling apart, and my head's begun pounding so hard it hurts.

So I wrote this one instead.

I know why I'm trying so hard: it's that damn blorgy.com rating system, which has, I now realize, crept under my skin, raising the subjective stakes for blogging, as if I shouldn't try to write something serious and good and essay-esque unless I'm willing to sweat blood to get it there. As if the word essai didn't mean to try.

You know you're writing for the wrong reasons when you've got blogwriter's block. Maybe it's time to let this one go for a while.

Undercaffeinated

Back on the air tonight after almost a month of holidays, with no opportunity to pick up my weekly cup on the way over. The phone kept ringing while I was on-air running down the playlist, but when I picked it up there was just a strange beeping sound, and then silence. At least the music felt right. And I love that the universe grants me an opportunity to share my soundtrack once a week.

As always, here's tonight's playlist; I'm too tired to say much else, so we'll let the music speak for itself, as it should. Starred music is newly acquired -- it was a good vacation, after all. And tomorrow, I promise, I'll tell you all about my visit to the chapel clocktower.

Tributary 1/12/04

Bob Dorough -- Too Much Coffee Man
*Beau Jocque -- The Back Door
*Robert Earl Keene -- Furnace Fan
Trey Anastasio -- Alive Again
*Michael Franti and Spearhead -- Everyone Deserves Music
*Otis Rush -- Homework
Joss Stone -- Fell In Love With A Boy
*Ralph Stanley -- Are You Tired Of Me My Darling
Erin McKeown -- Slung-lo
Dan Zanes -- Wonderwheel
Dan Hicks -- My Cello
Skavoovie and the Epitones -- Boyo
Kasey Chambers -- You Got The Car
Marianne Faithful -- Nobody's Fault
*Patty Griffin -- Christina
Girlyman -- Amaze Me
*Eva Cassidy -- American Tune
Daniel lanois -- Falling At Your Feet
Keller Williams -- Anyhow, Anyway
Chris Smither -- Happier Blue
Eddie From Ohio -- Good At That
David Wilcox -- Leave It Like It Is
Not Earthshaking -- Judy Blue
John Cale -- Hallelujah
Dixie Chicks -- Let Him Fly

Monday Mosh: The NOW Edition

Look, so few people Mosh, but so many of you visit. So let's make it easy this week. You're reading this now, right? Okay,while you're here, have a Mosh. Todays memetheme:

Mosh to that song, yeah that one, the one that's playing right now.

If you don't have any music playing, just mosh to whatever noise you can hear. What, like it's totally silent where you are?

Why We I Blog

Over a year ago, Eric had some interesting thoughts about the stages a blogger goes through when settling into the form; in his experience and, later, mine, navel-gazing -- that time when we spend much of our thought thinking about thinking, and what it means that we're doing this thing we call blog -- necessarily marked its own stage, if only because, so far, the raison d'etre of the blog is still in the jury room. (You'll note that most of the "blogging as media" links over there ------> on the sidebar date from a relatively finite time frame, for example.)

This makes sense. Finding ones own way into blogging, and making ones own meaning of self and symbology, medium and mind, would necessarily be an essential stage in growing towards a user-of-blog, if only because blogging is

But the questions are worth coming back to; if we accept that we change, and that our knowledge needs might change accordingly, performance review of the self and soul seem imperative to health. Thanks to Anne, and to those who follow her threads, for asking about why we started blogging, which prompted a more general think-back and refinement. I'm still thinking a bit about why I'm here -- and maybe when I'm done I'll have time to ask about all of us -- but, for what it's worth, here's what I left in her comments.

I started blogging, actually, for two reasons:

1. I had a student in my Media Literacy class get me all excited about blogs when she did a project exploring their relevance to the digital age.
2. I wanted my new daughter to have a history of me to browse someday.

Notice: not typical reasons, if there is such a thing. I've BEEN a published writer, both journalistically and in my academic field; I enjoyed it, but it's a heck of a lot of work, and I prefer to publish for real only once or twice a year (still do, actaully). Peripherally, I also always wanted to have a diary that actually demanded that I keep up with it. Having a public diary-form did this for me -- once I had just one regular reader, I had enough reason to keep it up. Better to externalize such a push -- make the world your enabler! Much better than those start-em-and-kill-em-a-week-later high school and collegial "journals" that litter my attic.

Tales From The Trip

Before it gets too late, and since we finally unpacked the journal, a couple of short pieces from our trip to Florida last week. Warning: the following, while true, is rated PG-13. This means you, Mom.

1. The Barnes and Noble Blowjob
Warning: the following, while true, is rated PG-13. This means you, Mom.

It's the day before we fly back home. I'm browsing the combined LitCrit/Essay section -- actually a single narrow shelf of fauxwood wedged between a 270 degree corner on the left, and a forest green trimmed window on the right -- at the Cityplace Barnes and Noble, checking the font size of Sarah Vowell's new collection, trying to decide which This American Life author will make for the best reading for the most amount of flight time, and as my eye wanders to the end of the shelf a flash of flesh and a spidery tattoo, something swarming and Celtic, flashes outside the window.

I begin to lean, surreptitiously. The girl, upon further furtive examination, displays a thin adolescent's knobby spine, interrupted by a half-shirt of seaweed, or at least something shimmery and dark in the almost complete darkness, the glow of the incandescent yellow old-Florida streetlights. Her cornrows are like her shirt continued: thin, wiry, and scatter-reflective. I lean out a little more, and realize the reason I can see all this is she's leaning way over forward, so I lean way over around the fauxwood shelf, and I see this guy's hands massaging her hair like some porn star, her underage head in his lap, facedown

oh dear god

She's giving him a blowjob. A Blowjob, on the full balcony of the Cityplace Barnes and Noble. They must figure no one can see them, the way his back is turned carefully to block the view to the other tables. It's clearly a space crefully chosen; here in the corner, the balcony walls come up so high like turrets, you'd never be noticed unless there was some guy staring at you from the window into the store. Heck, maybe they like the thrill of possible discovery.

Or maybe they're just too young to care.

The boy could see me, I think, pulling back self-consciously. My forehead begins to burn, and then my cheeks. I feel old, like a peeping tom. I pay for the Raskoff book and go back to my sleeping wife and daughter.

More later.

Nap Rhapsody

The girls -- by which I mean my wife and now eighteen-month-old daughter -- sleep for an hour in the afternoons, sometimes more if it is quiet. Though most workdays I miss it (and though most days are workdays), in the rare lazy day of stayathome this affords an unusual phenomenon: a long moment, midday, of total home ownership, as long as one is relatively quiet.

Though I am grateful for the grace, it feels weird to have this time. But it's not the feeling that's so rare or blogworthy. It's the daylight.

Nocturnal insomnia runs in my family. As a child required to turn lights off at ten, I read books secretively, on the carpet in the open doorway's crack of hallway light, unable to fall alseep until it ended and I had finished inhabiting it's world. To this day my father in his study reads, and works on lawyering until two, sometimes later.

I think we all needed that time for a similar and private purpose, too. My siblings and I, like my father before us, never interacted much in those hours. We sat in our rooms, and considered the occasional noises of our family comforting ghosts on the other side of walls. On rare visits home, today, the dynamic still holds: if my sister's visiting, and is watching television first when the house starts to get dark, then I find something else to do naturally, without thinking about it. But I check back occasionally, and if she's gone I'll take my turn.

The need to be up, to take that time and silence, to sit peaceful in the universe, and inhabit it entirely for a while; to center oneself and be that center, matters little whether I've has three or nine hours of sleep the night before. Though I may be tired after a full-steam day, one begun in the pre-sunrise of six o'clock, even now it's exceptional for me to snuggle down into the communal bed pre-midnight.

I've never lived alone, and never wanted to; when I'm home alone I wander unfocused and slightly anxious. There's something essential to this process in the security of the sleeping family, and true aloneness would be limiting, I think.

But I find that darkness serves this total impression far better. In the illuminated home, exterior dark, the windows reflect the interior world, making it entire. The outside world becomes an absence, like the theoretical stuff just beyond the edge of the universe.

Why Am I Not Surprised?

You are a Theory Slut. The true elite of the
postmodernists, you collect avant-garde
Indonesian hiphop compilations and eat journal
articles for breakfast. You positively live
for theory. It really doesn't matter what
kind, as long as the words are big and the
paragraph breaks few and far between.

What kind of postmodernist are you!?
brought to you by Quizilla

In The Bleak Midwinter

Woke this morning into a numbing, blind and impotent universe, and I couldn't do a damn thing about it but shiver and curse.

I'm used to the darkness by now, I suppose. The 8 a.m. class isn't my strong suit, but modern technology has made the wee hours inhabitable. With a flip of the bathroom light switch, a flick of the coffee pot button, the setting of the iron, what was once a drag (Get up in the dark? You're kidding, right?) has become familiar, a blurry comfort, a sense of ritualistic self-starting unimaginable in those ancient and vaguely understood societies where the sun drives the day. Owning my consciousness once seemed stressful; it has become a blessing, and a way of owning both universe and self.

To find the power gone was more than disconcerting -- it was disempowering. No coffee. No heat. No iron. No hot water. No light; it's still pitch dark out at 6 in New England in January. Good thing the moon's still mostly full, and out about as high in the sky at six in the morning as it is at six in the evening, except on the other side of the house. Otherwise I'd have been stumbling blind into a blackout of neighborhood scale.

Baffled by the still-dark universe, freezing to death and increasingly undercaffeinated, I went back to bed and lay awake, confused and shivering. Soon the baby woke up my wife, who reported that the power had started blinking on and off rhythmically at 2 am, enough to keep microwave, laptop, stereo and cordless phone cradle beeping until she got up to turn off the major appliances.

It felt good to have an explanation, I guess. But it didn't really make things better. You can lose a lot of heat in a drafty old house over four hours in single-digit weather, and we did -- I figure the house was down to the low forties, and colder near the windows, by the time the power finally went on sometime just after seven. A subsequent call from the top of the snowday phone chain here let us know how widespread the outage really was: school was delayed two hours, that the classrooms might have time to heat up enough to sustain even the most heavily bundled of students.

We don't have all the answers, even now, of course. Over the course of a wonderfully foreshortened day (one class, and a trip to the grocery store with Darcie while her mother watched the baby) the rumor mill was fairly consistent, if mysterious: the power outage was "by the Windmill," the inn up the road a piece, according to the official school bulletin-board announcment about the delay and its pace-of-day ramifications, but the four lane road that passes the school was blocked for miles of detour until long past sundown, and Darcie's mother reports a military convoy heading into the no-longer-dead zone when she drove in just after lunch.

Still, it's nice to be warm again, online and in the glow of soft lighting; was nice, earlier, to dance with the baby to the web, and snuggle in to watch the Muppet episode guest-starring Alice Cooper later on, as Darcie made a neo-tex-mex supper (long-grained rice, chicken and salad with avocado, onion, and mangoes) on our electric range; will be nice to sit in the glow of a taped-last-night ER with Darcie soon, once the baby falls asleep. And I am thankful for the modern conveniences, even under the light of the ovoid moon; thankful that we can choose to turn off the lights and see it if we wish, and that we do not have to, because it's too damn cold out there to visit it for long, though nice and toasty here, where a faint smell of mango lingers in the warm kitchen air.

Boohbah Update

In anticipation of the Jan 19th episode 1 airdate, PBS brings us their usual stellar combination of games, character and plot overviews, and parent resources. I can't wait!

[Update Update 6:29 pm: And I didn't wait, either. Spent almost an hour this afternoon bouncing Willow on my knee and exploring the web materials together; Darcie was over at the yearbook office yelling at the kids for missing another deadline. Looks like the kid's gonna love it, and I'm happy to report that, if the website is a reasonably accurate reflection of the program itself, Boohbah's going to be about as safe as kidTV gets -- and that's saying a lot, coming from a seasoned media literacy teacher.]

Why I Love Being A Media Studies Teacher

Ohh...trippy public television daytime rave for kids of all ages.

Reason #387: New "exercise show for preschoolers" from creator of Teletubbies: Boohbah.

Reason #388: New terminology which came up in She Speaks 3-Year-Old, the NYT Magazine cover story on the subject: toyetic potential (defined as the extent to which kid-filled focus groups indicate that they'd want to buy television-program-related toys; according to the aforementioned article, most major players in entertainment won't give a green light to a show unless toyetic potential is high enough.)

A Vote For Me Is A Vote For Me

Voting for this year's Bloggies ends Monday at 10 pm sharp. So what are you waiting for? Vote!

Might I suggest voting for me in the best-kept-secret category?

From The Department of Oh Dear God, No!

Recently-hospitalized-for-depression
actor Rowan Atkinson

Mr. Bean set to play Lord Voldemort in next Harry Potter film.

[UPDATE 1/9, 11:19 pm: Rowan rep refutes ridiculous rumor. Alliteration surrenders.]

Also in Fark today, from the Department of Wish I Had Thought Of That: "Friends" wrap every single thing in man's apartment in aluminum foil while he's on vacation (w/pics). Well, everything except a copy of Penn & Teller's Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends.

Boo...oh, wait...YAY!

Not me, I swear.

The bad news is, after more than a decade -- that's right, a decade -- Pathetic Geek Stories, a fun little comic based on real-life stories of chronic social awkwardness sent by readers and edited/illustrated by Maria Schneider, is ending its run in The Onion AV Club.

The good news? Comic interpreter Schneider's not discontinuing the strip, but moving it to an official PGS website, with a whole slew of extra goodies to boot! Should be worth the extra bookmark.

And The Onion? Well, there may be one less reason to visit, but it's still among the best of the web. New weekly feature Say Something Funny quite makes up for the loss; this week's say-it-in-250-words (featuring "Weird Al" Yankovic) is an especially good one. Oh, and it turns out Maria's also an Onion staff writer, so she'll still be around.

What's On My Other Favorite Meme Right Now

What's on my calendar right now? In no particular order:

January 14th, My birthday, though last year's thirtieth seems much more significant.
Celebrations for my birthday, including a dinner out with Darcie that same evening, and a Saturday-after thing with my parents and hers.
A follow-up appointment with the doctor sometime next week re: my still-blocked ears.
The baby's 18 month check up next Tuesday at 1:30.
My parent's trip to Florida, from the 12th to the 18th.
Classes every morning from 8-10, and two afternoons a week from 2-4.
Ed Tech / Media meetings every Wednesday.
Media Literacy instruction -- focusing on nutrition and body image -- for the 9th grade Health classes tomorrow and Friday, and T/Th/F of next week, too.
A brand new ER tomorrow night.
Tonight's full moon, and next week's quarter moon.
A close-up photo of a single song sparrow, tucked into itself, and perched on bent straw.
A tiny December on one side, and a tiny February on the other.
A tack to hold it all to the wall.

Florida: A Preview

Oy

Darcie threw her back out yesterday. Just one of those "bent over the wrong way" moments. She kicked me out of bed for it so she didn't have to keep bending over the baby to nurse in the night.

I slept on the couch.

And with my ears still seriously blocked up -- as if I had my fingers hard in my ears all the time -- I slept right through the alarm this morning. [Thanks to Darcie for waking me up, albeit with less than a half hour to iron, dress, make-and-drink coffee, and the other usual sundries.]

Tore my shirt pocket trying to smooth it down; decided to wear a vest over it.

Car got stuck in last night's ice; I had to run upstairs and rouse everyone, then push while Darcie sat behind the wheel in a nightgown, the baby strapped in her carseat for no reason other than where the heck else would she go?

Lucky today was a late-start class. Unluckily, the kids seem to have forgotten everything over the break, including their homework, and the brightest girl in the class was absent. With my ears blocked up I feel like I have voice-immodulation syndrome (c.f. SNL); I hope I didn't yell at them too quietly.

Similar problems guest-lecturing in a health class (Media Literacy as a cultural health issue): too many rowdy freshmen, and I have no idea if they could even hear me.

The computer's got a virus and keeps shutting down on me; it took three tries to get the Florida pix from the camera to the now-corrupted hard drive; the wireless router screwed up the cable modem connection so much I don't know where to begin.

I think I have a fever.

We'll try again tomorrow, I guess. I WILL get those pix up this time, and do some backblogging about Florida, I WILL. I'd say "if it kills me," but after today, I'm taking no chances.

Monday Mosh: Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes Edition

After an eternity of blogsquatting, fellow ex-Marlboro-ite Shaw has moved out with but a simple farewell.

A new year, and already my solipsistic universe has shifted. This week's memetheme:

Mosh to a song about change.

And speaking of change: Shaw, that background has really got to go.

How To Monday Mosh:

Dance around just 'cause it's Monday, and answer three questions in your blog or in the comments below, leaving us a link so we know you were here:

What song did you mosh to?

What did you step on / bump into? (Bonus points for breakage)

Why did you stop?

It's Been One Week Since You Looked At Me

Back from a week-and-then-some in Florida with the wife and kid, and boy, are my arms tired. Also pretty damn ill, with a fluxuating fever and a head thick as a brick. Ears have been stopped up since we left. Got three hours of sleep Friday night to catch a 3 a.m. airport shuttle; drove back yesterday through thick fog, internal and ex-. It's warm for a New England winter, but that's still forty degrees colder than even the evenings last week.

The cumulative effect is that the world is more distant by half, more surreal than the haze remaining outside. It's raining, I think, on the low roofs and eaves, but I can't even hear it.

But work's faint call grows stronger -- I've plenty of long-overdue papers to grade tomorrow. So the full procrastination-driven deep-thought report on Florida, family and fun (and illustrative pix to prove it!), including perhaps a booklist, and surely a major photoblog or two (a day at the beach; the verycool house) will have to wait.

For now, a shortform post-dated itenerary, tentatively titled Where I've Been.

Saturday

A.M. Pack; drive to Newton for lunch with parents.

P.M. Parents drive us to airport. Two hours in terminal, two in the air, three in Charlotte airport riding the moving walkways with the baby, two in air again. Land in Ft. Lauderdale after midnight. Cab to Days Inn with noisy Tiki Bar in center. Nosebleed. Bed.

Sunday

A.M. Rent car. Breakfast with Great-Aunt Lil in Ft. Lauderdale.

P.M. Drive to West Palm Beach. Move in to gorgeous rental place. Read while Willow naps with Darcie in J.P. Morgan's bed. City Place for grocery shopping and fancy supper. Read on porch after Darcie and Willow go to sleep. Bed.

Monday

A.M. Home visit and out to lunch with my paternal grandparents.

P.M. Read, nap. Sand and sunset on Palm Beach. Dinner at townhouse -- sausage on grill, corn on the cob. Solo walk around neighborhood; read on porch. Bed.

Tuesday

A.M. Nearby Cuban bakery for coffee and pastries. Beach again -- sand, and swimming a bit. Leftover lunch.

P.M. Willow and darcie nap; I go to City Place for book shopping. Grandparents over for dinner in townhouse; Darcie cooks chicken. Porchreading. Bed.

Wednesday

A.M. Lion Country Safari rocks our world.

P.M. Epanadas and coffee, more book shopping while Darcie and Willow nap. Lobster Tacos and ribs at Cayenne in City Place (Willow has fries and pepperidge farm goldfish); playing in the fountains and a horse carriage ride. Porchreading while fireworks go up in the backyard; bed.

Thursday

A.M. Beach again. Early nap/reading.

P.M. Grandparents house, and a dip in their community center swimming pool before a last three-generation dinner. More bookshopping. More porchreading. More bed.

Friday

A.M. Pack and chat with townhouse owner Gregory. Twice-leftover lunch.

P.M. Nap. Read. Leave. Drive back to Ft. Lauderdale. Italian dinner with Lil. Check in at no-longer-Hilton hotel. Return car; take shuttle to airport; take shuttle from airport to hotel. Drunken hot tub. Crash.

Yesterday

A.M. Stagger to airport. Wait for ticket counter to open; board plane; fall asleep. Wake in Charlotte; ride walkways; board plane; read.

P.M. Picked up by parents at airport for lunch out, play in. Nap. Drive blearily home. Crash.

Today

A.M. Shopping. Sick.

P.M. More sick. Blogging. Sleep to follow.