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For a man whose official term ended two weeks ago, I am desperately overworked right now, and yet I really need to recharge. Last night Julie and I went to the Spinal Tap Unwigged & Unplugged concert, which was COMPLETELY AWESOME, if you like Spinal Tap and the Folksmen, which you do, if you have any sense. But I was only in to work two days this past week, because Julie's dad was in town (which was excellent, just not-work-conducive), and when I was at work, I was dealing with a bunch of crap, most of which doesn't really belong in print, anywhere, never mind a public journal entry. And the things that were not getting done while I was dealing with those are still there. But you know what? I can already tell that today is not going to be productive for those things - I can't even imagine dealing with them today. So I'm going to do some yardwork, and reorganize our storage room, and make a Glossographia post that has been delayed for a couple of weeks, and hang out with Arthur and Julie, and play Oblivion. Possibly not in that order. Tags: growlery
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Please cram it in your piehole. Maybe you think it's cool, when you're seventy years old, immensely privileged, and have nothing to lose, to systematically provide ideological justifications for the dismantling of everything we as academics are supposed to hold dear. It isn't. Even when you're right about an issue (which you might be, this time), it's for the wrong reason. Maybe you really think that every time a tenured physics professor offers a political opinion in the classroom, this should be grounds for dismissal. But the immense hypocrisy that emerges when you, a literary theorist, offer those opinions and expect the rest of us to just nod grimly at your pomo nonsense, makes me think that you are just playing games with all our academic freedom. Please stop. Tags: academia, growlery
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1) Arthur got extremely upset and threw a huge tantrum because he didn't want to go to preschool, forcing me to basically haul him out the door. 2) Drove to the border, where my Nexus card didn't register for some reason, so I had to pretend to Arthur that it was going to be so much fun to get called in for a secondary inspection by Customs, where we ended up in line behind a busload of old people. Got told off for trying to use my phone to call Julia to apprise preschool of the delay, had to hang up on her. 3) Got to preschool, where Arthur freaked out again, claiming to be afraid of his teacher and clinging to me wildly and tearfully. This is not the first time this has happened over the past month or two, but it is probably the most upset I've seen him when it is time for me to go. On the other hand, the article, Elven Lays and Powerchords: Chaos, Revelry, and Community in Tolkien-Themed Heavy Metal, featuring Blind Guardian (oh hells yeah!), is really awesome (thanks, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) eldritchhobbit!). Okay, it's not my scene, but the music is great. Tags: growlery
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I've only been blogging over at Glossographia for six weeks, but I've been blogging here at The Growlery, for six years, which must correspond to a century or more in Internet time. And over those past six years, but particularly over the past six weeks, I've been thinking a bit about the different reasons I blog. I blog because I like to think someone out there is reading and thinking about an issue differently than they did before. I have never been accused of being unopinionated, and the sharp immediacy of the blogging environment gives me a thrill I rarely find outside the classroom - with the added benefit that my words are there on the screen to mull over. Want to know what I think about something? You can be pretty sure I've written about it somewhere, and if not, you know where to ask. I blog because the community of interesting and thoughtful people that I know through blogging. Livejournal is not primarily the refuge of fourteen-year-old emo kids. Fully one-third of my friends list has at least one graduate degree, and there are (at last count) a dozen people with doctorates and another half-dozen who are pursuing the doctorate. I know doctors, lawyers, and architects - most of whom I have never met in real life - and people from virtually any other field of endeavour you might think of. Not to mention the reams of bright, fascinating people whose paths have not yet led them to further education, or never will. I blog because of my colleagues. Anthropology seems to be underrepresented in the academic blogosphere, in comparison to, say, history or linguistics (two other fields in which I have some specialized training and interest), which is a shame. I find it to be absolutely essential not only as a tool for social networking, but also as a tool for playing around with ideas that may not yet be quite ready for peer review, but which need a collective of thinkers. Is academic blogging playful, even trivial sometimes? Sure, but so is 95% of what academics do on any given day. Is it going to give me tenure? Not likely, but I don't sit up nights panicking about that. Is it worthwhile, socially and intellectually? Damn right it is. I blog because I see the potential for blogging to change the way we think about academic mentorship also. One of the real joys I had while working at McGill was to observe the level of student participation in presenting ongoing research, as in the NOCUSO field school blog from Finland, or the zooarchaeology field school blog from Parc Safari in southern Quebec, both spearheaded by my friend Andre Costopoulos, but written and run by the junior scholars there who I am happy to call my friends and colleagues also. In these efforts, as well as in the web-published projects I run, I see a grand opportunity for extremely bright and thoughtful young scholars to develop their ideas and find their voice - as well as to stay in touch. Next term I am looking forward to having my graduate students at Wayne do similar sorts of work. I blog because I believe in the democratization of knowledge. That may sound all highfalutin and whatnot, but what it comes down to is a feeling of obligation to share things that I know, without any expectation of reward. I've been doing that for over a decade now at the Phrontistery, and my motivation is still much the same as it was back in 1996 in the Middle Paleo-Internet. Sure, my day job involves me getting paid to share my knowledge, but that doesn't mean I think I should get paid for everything I write. I am privileged enough to enjoy a career that allows me the freedom to do this service. I blog because of my friends (academic and otherwise). I recently moved to a city of 300,000 where I know virtually no one who is not a blood relation - and let me tell you, I don't do well in isolation. Most of my closest friends are nine hours' drive away in Montreal, and most of the rest are even more distant. But over the past little while I've come to realize that I'm not really alone, and that, while I really do need to get out more, it would be foolhardy in the extreme to discount what I have here. There are people I've never met in person with whom I feel a strong personal connection. There are also people I once knew as well as family who have faded from my life through their absence, which I regret, and hope to avoid in the future. I blog because of my family. I don't know what Arthur will think of the various things I have written about his young life, when he's older and jaded and thinks his dad is a big dork. I'd like to think though that there is value in having this record of funny moments and strange episodes, the sort of minutiae that most people never know about. And I blog because Julia blogs - she was the one who sucked me into this life, after all - and not a day goes by that we don't spend some time looking over one another's shoulder at some funny thing, or talking about something we've encountered in our mutual journey. Lastly, I blog for me. I'm not sure what kind of person I would be without this outlet, but I can't imagine that I would be better off. Like a lot of people, I can be anxious, I can be overanalytical, and I can be wracked with doubt. But having the ability to express these thoughts in a relatively neutral medium can be (and is) a great source of personal strength. And having the ability to look back on things I wrote long ago, to rethink an issue, or just to remember a good day warmly, is something I wouldn't trade for the world. (Crossposted to Glossographia) Tags: academia, growlery, lj
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Bleah. It took over an hour to get to work and to get Arthur to preschool today due to some sort of snafu at the bridge. The border guard was very surly even in the Nexus lane, and was asking why Arthur didn't have a visa for which he was not eligible. So probably someone somewhere has had an alert, or just a stick up their ass. Also, my nice new shiny laptop has arrived, but due to the lack of wireless access in my building for some inexplicable reason, there isn't much I can do to play around with it until tonight when I get home. Above and beyond the daily trivia, though, I'd have to say that I'm coming off a big high after our trip to Montreal. I thought I knew what the potential hurdles would be in going there, but I was wrong, or at least mostly so. In Montreal, I have not one but two really great communities of which I am an integral part. First, there's all our old gaming friends, most of whom have been friends for twelve years now, and every time we see them, it's like old times, but we have new things as well. They all love Arthur so much, which makes me so happy and so proud. I miss them dearly even though they're all here on LJ to some extent. I worry about them because they don't keep in touch with one another as much as they should/might when we're not around. It's silly that that should be the case, but it does really feel sometimes like Julia and I are the ones responsible for keeping the group together. For as long as I can remember, our place (wherever that place might be) has been the heart and home of the group, the place where social activity takes place. And I've never once felt resentful of that - just the opposite, as I love to entertain - but now that that place is gone, and we're here in Windsor, there is no 'our place'. Then there are all my new friends, both colleagues and students, in anthropology at McGill. When I took the job at McGill back in the fall of 2006, I didn't envision it as a triumphant return home. My job search had crapped out, and I was crawling back to McGill in defeat, hoping to turn things around quickly, teach a few classes, earn some money to pay the bills, and yes, to reconnect with my graduate mentors, especially Bruce, before finding a job. But then Bruce died and my job search crapped out again, and so in the spring of 2007 my community, my people, came around me to support me. And these same people came together for me last week, and I realize that it is like nothing I've had in my work life before, and certainly nothing like what I have now. And on the one hand it's fantastic that this should be so. But on the other, it's very hard to leave. I am also well aware that this community doesn't include Julia, and that during our time in Montreal (and to some extent still today), my connection to this community, and the time and energy it took, was a source of tension. My ongoing connection with these people is, as with my first community, largely online except for times like last week, and is related to all the ongoing work I'm doing with McGill people, but I hope, not limited to it. It's been a long while since I did any serious reading in communitarian theory, but if you asked me, I'd have to say that yeah, I'm a communitarian of sorts, and proud of it. I believe that what makes us human is small-scale social interaction, and fulfilling our responsibilities to these people. I guess too that it might be an outgrowth of the small-town boy in me, where social relationships between small(ish) groups of individuals who care about each other are very important; that's something that Julia and I both share in common, which is something I should think about more. But where we are now, that is really lacking, both on the home (Windsor / social life) front and at work (Wayne). We need to build it from scratch, and that is fairly distressing. Tags: growlery
Current Mood:  distressed
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On the one hand, our social schedule is insanely busy. This past weekend, xypharan and his girlfriend came to visit from Toronto, and it was also Julie's birthday. This coming weekend, Julie's dad and stepmom are coming up for a few days. The next weekend (Canadian Thanksgiving), my mom, dad, and brother are coming up for the weekend, plus I have a departmental picnic/potluck in Ann Arbor to go to. They leave on the Monday, and then we follow them on the Tuesday night, heading to Montreal for several days of seeing friends and meeting with co-authors and colleagues. The Saturday after that, I'm at the Michigan Linguistics Society conference, where I am presenting. Needless to say, I expect to be exhausted after all this. On the other hand, we are still pretty isolated here. We don't know anyone in particular, not even our neighbours, really, and there isn't any evident way that we would meet like-minded people (or even what the heck I mean by 'like-minded'). My colleagues largely live in places like Grosse Pointe and Ann Arbor and aren't really accessible. And really, I'm so busy over the next month both with the above events, and with work, that I don't know if I have any energy to spare to meet new people. I suppose these things will come in time. Truth is, though, I'm happy with the number and range of my friends; I just wish you all lived a little closer. Tags: growlery
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When you're rather isolated (ie: no face to face human contact in several days except at work), almost anything sounds like a good idea to keep your brain from spinning. But there are limits. Today I went to the second of three new faculty orientation days at work, where I actually am meeting some interesting people. Several of the presentations were quite useful and I may have decided to rope myself into the Honors College as a form of service activity that is very amenable to my personality, before I can get roped involuntarily into more tedious things. However, limits, like I said. At the end of the day a helpful person informed us that our next exercise was an 'interactive resource orientation'. What is that, you might ask? Basically various services and auxiliary organizations (the tech centre, interlibrary loans, the university press, the campus police, etc.) each had reps at tables, and we were supposed to go around and talk to them. But to make it more 'interesting', we were put into groups and given green sheets of paper with dozens of descriptions of services, and we were supposed to fill in the blanks with the names of the organizations that provided them. Bear in mind that we are all Ph.D. holding full-time faculty. To make it even more exciting, we were supposed to turn in our worksheets at the end and then they would tell us which group got the most things right!!! OMGWTFBBQ!!! Needless to say, I opted out of this event and went home to test-drive a car. Now I think I'll go out for a walk. Sometimes being alone with your wayward brain isn't so bad, given the options. Tags: academia, growlery
Current Mood:  pensive
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Just got back from a good walk through the Devonwood Conservation Area. Needed to clear my head and think through some things that have been bothering me, and it seems to have done the trick at least for now. Really Windsor could use more green space, or rather, more usable and attractive green space (rather than parks that are basically empty fields), but having walking trails within 10 minutes walk of my house, I can't complain too too much. I could complain about the heat, which is a blistering 33 (39 with humidity) making this basically the hottest place in the country, but truth be told, that wasn't so bad even after 45 minutes out in it, and now I'm here in my air conditioned house. I could also complain about the fact that we haven't had any significant rain in several weeks (only 5 mm this month, as opposed to our average of 86 mm), making it very hard to keep anything growing in the garden, but that also means I haven't had to mow the lawn since July. But I think I'm going to go take a shower and then go out for supper somewhere. It may be dinner for one, but it's dinner I don't have to cook. Tags: growlery
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