20141127.0717

To those who celebrate it: Happy Thanksgiving!

To those who will question the phrasing above: There are people outside the US whom I know and who do not celebrate the holiday. And there are people inside the US who understandably have difficulty finding things for which to be thankful--if they can do so at all. Nor am I certain that they ought to do so--and you ought not to be. It is not your life they live. It is not your circumstances they face. It is not yours to dictate whether they are or are not thankful for the circumstances in which they find themselves. Nor is it yours to dictate whether those circumstances are of their own making; you do not know. And you likely do not want to know--or, rather, you might like to know but are unwilling to do what it takes to know.

And I do know that.

To those who do not celebrate the holiday: fine. I hope your day is good to you and allows you to do some good in the world.

I will be working to do some good for my family. Freelance work continues, and I have a project to do. (I should be able to get it done today.) Its completion will allow me to support my wife and my daughter just a little bit better, and I will admit to being more concerned with matters at the scale of my home than those of the regional, national, or world levels which I cannot meaningfully affect without setting aside the responsibilities which are mine to discharge. (And I am aware that such rhetoric is a tool used to oppress, albeit at lesser levels than others historically documented and unfortunately still ongoing; my deployment of it in reference to myself is a marker of how I have been shaped by such systems, I know.)

To those who will recoil at the thought of working on a holiday: Needs must. Am I not supposed to be diligent in providing for the needs of my family? Do their needs stop because it is a day appointed for celebration? Should I not use the resources available to me--the presence of family in the home--to make easier the work of supporting that family, relying on those here to tend to those here while I apply the skills I have to the task of earning income for them? Is that not the way appointed? And, after all, I am simply sitting at a desk, reading one piece to write another as I do in most of the work that I do; is this really so onerous a task that I need so much respite from it? Am I not derided as part of a class for doing that very thing and presuming to call it work? Why, then, should I leave off from it for a holiday, since it is not "real work" in the eyes of many? More, how should I do so, when there is much to do for the support of my family, to ensure that they have somewhat with which to celebrate if they are going to do so?

20141126.0714

Today is payday, as it is the last business day of the month. That means it is also "pay the bills day," which is far less happy an occasion. Still, the task is done, and I think I have a bit more money after doing so this time than last. It is a pleasant thought, and one I hope to have happen again.

The Mrs. and I have company over; since she is working today and Friday, we were not able to arrange to be elsewhere for Thanksgiving. We are still seeing family, though; my father-in-law and stepmother-in-law are visiting from Arkansas. It is good to have them over, even if Ms. 8 is having what seems to be a typical infant reaction to new people in her space.

I think she is learning too much from the cats.

Work continues, of course. I have a freelance job to do in addition to the grading that suddenly blossomed on Monday. And the other project still needs attention, as do job applications (because I am still looking for continuing-line work, hence the trip to Vancouver for which I am still seeking assistance) and yet other projects. I am fortunate that the present company works at a school and so understands the demands that classroom work imposes outside the classroom.

We get so many holidays, those of us who teach.

20141125.0651

Christmas is only a month away
The shopping season's growing short
Black Friday has not happened yet
With bargains, sales of every sort.
Families will gather soon
And marvel at the gifts they bring
And how much spent and how much saved,
For the one important thing
Is how the money moves around.
Lavish gifts will show the wealth
Of those who give, and frugal gifts
Demonstrate concern for health
Financial, marking as the poor
Those who give them. Those
Who get them have the chance
To act better the part that knows
"'Tis better to give than to receive."
The Christmas adage rings more true
For wealth from poor than from reverse--
As likely it will ever do.
But Christmas is a mere month away.
The shopping season's growing brief.
Black Friday has not happened yet.
The sales are coming; what a relief!

20141124.0651

I am looking forward to a relatively easy day at campus today. It will be the only day this week that I meet with my students, and I will be administering student evaluations (as much as I ever actually administer them). All four classes have large projects coming in, though, and so much of the rest of the week will be taken up with grading. Thursday will probably not, as I do have every intention of enjoying such fruits of the harvest as are mine to take, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do so. But the rest of the week...oh, yes. Grading. And work on a project that is due at the end of the month; that needs doing, too.

Honestly, though, I do not expect to have many students in the rooms today. Attendance was poor on Friday, and what I heard from the relatively few students on campus is that many are simply taking the week off, despite school being open today (Monday) and Tuesday. A number of my colleagues have reportedly cancelled classes for those days, which skirts the raw edge of acceptable practice; convenience is not really a good reason to lay out, although those who have the leave time are entitled to it, certainly. But because I remain in a contingent position, I am wary of doing such things, and I have already missed several days this term (illness and travel take their tolls). And I will not bemoan having fewer students today; it will allow me to get done what I need to get done all the more quickly.

"What I need to get done" consists of the aforementioned student evaluations, which will happen after attendance-taking and a brief breakdown of the projects submitted. I always do a brief recap of events when major assignments come in, and I do occasionally take into consideration what the students tell me about them. Only occasionally, though; the myriad "It's too hard" ring too poorly in my ears for me to heed them. Indeed, I think sometimes that they want to be spoon-fed pap that they will then vomit back up before taking anything of it into themselves, as though they view education as a sullying of their supposedly sacred selves. It is an uncharitable thought, perhaps, but one that accords with the actions I see from many in my classroom.

I ought to be better, I know. I ought to approach my classroom as an engine for change, a venue in which I can reach into young minds and awaken the potentials in them, touching lives so that they can touch others, and any others of a number of wonderful clichés that I heard bandied about pedagogy classes and read bandied about although surrounded by layers of turgid prose (per an old professor of mine) in pedagogical theory. But I cannot. I have not the power to continue to do so amid the many other things to which I must attend--including those students who *do* open their eyes and *see* when they are in my classes. And so I look forward to an easy day today.

20141122.0716

The semester is winding down
Next week is truncated
The following week is dead
The one after examines
And then it is done

It is the calm before the storm
The hurricane's eye
For papers and projects are due Monday

I breathe deeply in this small space
I will need it

20141121.0714

A year ago, I wrote of the effects coffee had been having on me. Now, as then, I have been drinking more tea on my days away from the office (to call them "days off" is a misnomer, as I and many others have noted), and now, as then, doing so has largely staved off the negative consequences of over-caffeination while still allowing me access to the benefits of caffeine consumption. Yet I feel myself to be less productive now than then, and I do not know if it is an effect of my being a year older or if it is a result of my being a year more inured to the stimulant. Nor do I know what can be done about either, if anything.

There is a part of me that suggests my stimulant-enabled successes could be continued, even enhanced, by recourse to more powerful drugs; it reminds me that my lovely wife, even though she holds a master's degree in English and another in linguistics, works as a pharmacy technician and thus has access to such substances. It is not one of the better parts of me, I know; the side-effects of such chemicals are not likely to be advantageous to my family life, both in terms of the legal troubles attendant upon their misuse and in the alterations to my psyche they would doubtlessly impose. Neither my Mrs. nor Ms. 8 should be subjected to such travails--yet I cannot help but wonder if I would not do better at supporting them did I avail myself of such things.

Perhaps I am paranoid about my situation that I even tangentially entertain the idea of taking other stimulants than caffeine to increase my productivity. Perhaps also I am embedded more fully in certain myths about work and the work ethic than I had realized or noted (here, here, and here, among others). I am not going to heed the part of myself that suggests I take on another drug addiction to help support my financial addiction--as I remark above, I am passingly aware of the consequences, and I do not deem them acceptable--but I confess to having such a part, and I worry about what it indicates about me that I have it and that I react to it as I do.

It is one more thing about which I worry for myself and for my family (who I flatter myself depend upon me). There are many such, as I think I have given evidence. And I probably ought to let them alone; considering them does me little if any good, and they are as nothing compared to the worries I know others have. I have made remarks to that effect, and more than once. Yet I am still who I am, and it seems that among the parts of that person is a worrier, and an introspective one trained and habituated to follow ideas almost out of reflex. And that has some interesting implications about the way things happen...

20141120.0704

Today is the National Transgender Day of Remembrance. I am a cis-hetero-male of the white middle class and from the middle of the US; I am the unmarked. But I recognize that it is wrong, flatly wrong, to persecute those who do not conform to "traditional" gender binaries because they do not conform to them. I admit that I have little if any understanding of the circumstances and situations of those who are transgendered; even with the ways in which I have been made to feel less, I have never not felt male. When I have spoken with or worshipped with members of trans communities, the fact of trans-ness has not much been the topic treated; we were doing other things entirely. So I do not claim expertise in the matter. But that does not mean I cannot recognize the systemic wrongs that enable discrimination against trans persons because they are trans. It does not mean that I cannot pause for a moment to condemn those wrongs or to think on those who have suffered them. It does not mean that I cannot consider what little I can do to right the wrongs as they occur within me and around me, whether through working to redress ignorance or to deter willful bad behavior.

Violence and other discrimination against trans persons comprise one of the many ways in which the dominant culture of the United States is in need of correction; that culture, from which I am ostensibly positioned to benefit through standing at the focus of many of its normalizing assumptions (I am the target audience of the performance and easily swap in for the presumed originator/s of many of its tenets), does much to normalize through rejection of what is different, and there are many differences to be found. At its most forgivable, the rejection proceeds from a lack of understanding, and I admit to my own culpability in that regard; I do not know, and so I likely end up offending through that ignorance. And there are limits to what any one person can know; we all of us have work to do (paid and validated by the dominant culture or otherwise), and the attention demanded by that work and given to it cannot be otherwise spent. But much of the rejection is based not on ignorance but unwillingness to learn, and that is not forgivable. One may be pardoned for not knowing if not exposed to knowledge, and one may be forgiven (if to a lesser extent) fro trying to learn and not having mastered material, but forgiving those who refuse to make the attempt...I am not so good a person as to do so. When that refusal erupts as violence against persons, it is clearly wrong. When it manifests as differentiation of legal protection, it is also clearly wrong. Both happen, and entirely too much. Hence the Day of Remembrance. Hence the activities that surround it. And hence my own small contribution, for whatever good it may actually do in the world.

20141119.0730

Not as much is made of Gettysburg this year as was last

The speech is no less important
Either as model for writing
Or as encapsulation of an ideal
To which we aspire in name
And which we do not achieve

Its age is not a convenient number
And so it remains curiosity only
A school-child remembrance much obscured
By the minutiae of adult life
And "adult life"

Even when it is convenient
And trotted out again in solemn celebration
For it is an epitaph upon many graves
A eulogy
It is not much honored

To honor it would be to embody it
To keep in mind its tenets
To live in such a way as brings credit to those for whom it was spoken
To act in such a way as means
Such sacrifice is never again needed

We do not do so.

20141118.0628

As I was in the shower this morning, I considered the piece that I just read for my freelance work--another police procedural. My mind wandered thence to the idea of detection, but not so much in the police-sense as in the sensory sense, and I thought about the kinds of words that get used to describe sensory experience. They are raw and unmolded thoughts, more fit for the first part of this blog's title than the last, but because they fit it, I feel no compunction about offering them:

To say that we detect a thing is an accurate statement, but broad (for it obscures the means of detection) and somewhat sterile (it evokes techno-arcane scanning devices that work at long distances or at very small scales, neither of which translates well into human experience). It is a vague word, a word used when other words do not quite fit--and it does not fit well, itself. It is, in a sense, a too-large jacket; it covers what needs covering, but it hangs oddly and looks strange. Perhaps there is something beneath it that should not be seen...

Yet other words for senses have problems, as well. To say, for instance, that we feel a thing may be accurate, and it does make more visceral the sensory experience, tying to a shared sensation. (Except for lepers.) But it also has overtones of the non-serious, the hallucinatory, the surreal; it is difficult to verify that a thing is felt or that it has been felt, and because much that cannot otherwise be perceived is called "feeling," it may or may not be trustworthy.

Smelling, seeing, and tasting seem to me to be more accurate for what we tend to call "detection." As I have seen it used, "detection" involves identifying small particles of things amid many others or amid empty space, and smelling, seeing, and tasting all do that. Tasting has a particularly intimate association--there is something about the work of the mouth that makes for peculiar closeness--but seeing and smelling do not. And, frankly, smelling does not get enough attention (possibly because it is not the most acute human sense, but I am not up enough on the research in that line to be sure). Perhaps it would be fitting to say that the sensors "smelled" the thing rather than simply "sensed" it, as the latter term has even more surrealist connotations than does "felt." I know that anthropomorphization rankles, and that to ascribe biological characteristics to the non-biological goes too far in that direction...

As I note, the thoughts are raw and unformed, more fitting of ravings than of lucid prose. But there is something to consider in the way we use the words we use.

20141117.0653

I am doing what I can to ramp up my job search amid the oncoming end of the term (only three weeks to go--frightening), my freelance work (another project due Wednesday, and I have hardly begun), and some service projects with which I am struggling (Travels in Genre and Medievalism--please contribute--and scouring journal articles for annotations). As part of that, I will be traveling to the MLA convention in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in January, where a number of the jobs for which I have applied will be conducting interviews. And because I am not wealthy, I am asking for help to support that effort.

It is not a thing with which I am thrilled. I dislike having to outright ask for help, to admit that the way I have done things hitherto has not sufficed to my needs and the needs of my family. And I anticipate objections, namely that my asking confirms the parasitic nature of my professional endeavors and that I am seeking too high a post instead of starting at the bottom and working my way up. I do not know how to address the first, except to say that a single instance does not a whole profession make; that I need to ask at this point in time, after having worked diligently in the field for many years and not at all often getting the "time off" which is thrown in the faces of those whose work is like mine, does not mean that I always do or that all do. Hasty generalization is a fallacy. But for the second objection, I do have a response; I did start at the bottom, first working as an adjunct at a two-year college, then earning a full-time theoretically-continuing spot there, then moving (slightly south of laterally, professionally) to a full-time contract position at a state university. If I am supposed to be moving up, and attendance at the MLA convention, despite financial concerns and the socioeconomic stratification they entail, is almost prerequisite for doing so (there are some jobs that do not oblige me to interview there, but many will only interview there), then it should not be thought odd that I seek to travel there. And I can but go where the work is--or promises to be. Or am I a serf, bound to a single place in the world and expected to toil on behalf of feudal/corporate masters and with few rights or hope?

As I note, I am not happy to ask outright for money. I am not happy to admit to my own incapacities of the moment. But I would be far less happy to "suck it up" and not make the solid, honest attempt to secure a better future for myself and my family. My own pride as a person is far less than my responsibility as a husband and father; I am annoyed and only annoyed at sacrificing the one--which has done me little good, I might add--for the other. And I would still appreciate the hand up--I am, after all, looking for a shot at work.