20190620.0430

I've posted six times to this webspace on this date previously, in 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The 2015 strikes me as relevant to some of my present concerns; in it, I muse on going to an outdoorsy store in the City of Thunder's Bricktown and my ill fit for most of what it presents. There are similar stores in and around the Alamo City, and I have been to them--and I have found that I still fit ill in them, years later and in the part of the world where I would seem to belong. And I still muse upon some of the same concerns that I voiced four years ago; indeed, it is not so long a time, four years, even if there are some ways in which the world seems wholly different than it then did.
In and around the City of Thunder, I found a sense of non-identity in many of the people I encountered. That is, they did not seem to know who they were as much as they did who they weren't. Given such circumstances, I understand why many would cling to such shreds of certainty as they did, why they make so much of themselves being such and such kind of person, usually someone who hunts a particular type of game or shoots a particular brand of gun. But I am not such a person, and I have never been one, so I do not share that particular kind of affiliation; not sharing it, I necessarily stood outside, but I did not expect to remain in Oklahoma even as long as I did, so I was not terribly concerned about it.
In the Texas Hill Country, though, there is a much more affirmative sense of self. Texans, generally, know that they are Texans--and that means the Wild West still, but also arts and sciences in plenty, William Travis and Willie Nelson, both. A lot of that identity, though, still links itself to outdoor life, to hunting and fishing and shooting, and I do not do such things much if at all. (I'll occasionally drop a line in, when I have time and inclination, but the former is a rare commodity, indeed.) My heart may sing at a field of wildflowers such that it brings tears to my eyes to think on such beauty, but there are parts of me that still don't fit here.
It's part of why I am so eager to grill when I can (and I can't always, given work and the unusually wet weather this year--not that I'm complaining about the rain, since I know it might not come back for a good long while). Grilling and barbecuing both are time-honored traditions here, taken from others but not unappreciated, and their enactment and performance is something that does allow me to fit in in at least some ways. Given that I have been and remain somewhat anxious about the ways in which I fit, not least because how I fit affects how others are able to fit, it is some source of ease for me that I do.

20190619.0430

This date has seen five previous posts to this webspace, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. It is the first of them that attracts my attention as I look back over things again, the first that suggests itself as still the most relevant to me. In it, I react to an article that argues being over-educated for a first job has negative consequences throughout a career; while I was not overeducated for my first jobs by any means, I have found that, even well after my first, I read as overeducated for most purposes; it is hard for me and for those like me to get jobs other than those for which we are ostensibly trained because we are seen as dangers to higher-ups or poised to seek elsewhere at any time.
Admittedly, my present job does not look at me so, but that is something of a special case. I was hired with the explicit understanding that I would assume a leadership role in my present organization, and I am set to do so at the beginning of September. For that, my advanced education was seen as an asset, and my current supervisor continues to extoll it. And it has helped me to do a fair bit of what has needed doing as I have worked my current work and trained to take on the new work that I expect is coming; I am not certain I'd be doing so well in it as I am did I not have the background in taking in and synthesizing information that I do.
Again, though, it is a rare case. When I was on the job market, I ran into a number of companies for which hiring practice more or less automatically excluded me from consideration. When I would apply for other-than-entry-level positions, I would be rejected because I was not seen as having the experience asked for by the position. Evidently years of teaching writing and being an active scholar does not read as equivalent to years of writing work, at least not to the automated systems frequently deployed by employers. At the same time, when, following the suggestions of those systems, I applied to entry-level jobs, I was rejected as being other than an entry-level applicant; years in the workforce and the cluster of letters at the end of my name quashed such ideas. And leaving the letters off...lying by omission is reason to rescind a job offer.
I am in a position now where I am involved in hiring; I will be taking a position where I will do the hiring. I have already seen a candidate's application that made me ask "Why would this one want a position here?" I know it may seem strange that I would ask such a question; the applicant's credentials and location against the job for which the application was made merit it. Unlike many, though, I believe that there is and answer, and a good one; my own experience tells me I need to at least wait to hear it before I make any kind of determination about hiring or not.

20190618.0430

I've posted in this webspace on 18 June in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018. The first of them attracts my interest most; it voices a complaint I still feel. Tired as I often find myself--and I do often find myself tired--I am still not fond of having to sleep. It is still the case that I'd not do it if I could get away without, and it is still the case that I am vexed by the biological necessity of sleep. There are better things for me to do abed, and there are more things to do than I have time in the day to do, even absent having to spend between a quarter and a third of each day unconscious while my body repairs itself and my mind works in ways I almost never remember upon waking.
Most of what I wrote five years ago remains true; I don't much need to rehash it, since it can still be read easily. I can add, though, that I have some idea how Ms. 8 feels about the matter--and she is clearly her mother's daughter in that regard. (In most, she seems to take after me at this point. I'm not sure how good a thing that is. I've noted before, and not a few times, that I was a little shit as a kid; Ms. 8 taking after me may not be to her benefit or her parents' comfort.) Getting her up and out of bed on weekdays is not a small task, just as getting her to bed is a challenge. ("Gee, I wonder if the two are somehow related," he comments acerbically.) The juxtaposition is strange to me; she clearly likes her bed, but she hates going to it.
In any event, however much I may resent the fact that I have to sleep, I have to do so. Even as I write this, I am aware of my body being tired, and I am aware of how that tiredness is interfering between my mind and what I want to make happen. I am able to form cogent thoughts, but getting my hands to put them where others can see them is more challenging, and getting my body to set aside its various discomforts so that I am not distracted in doing so is not as easy as it have been at other times. Normally, I am able to press ahead despite my sciatica acting up or the thermostat being set too low or too high; now, I keep having to pause as I type to rub my eyes or shift in my seat so that the tightness running from my kidney down past the back of my knee doesn't edge into pain. And I have to change form to from and from to form more often than I would prefer, because my fingers will not coordinate smoothly.
Resentful as I am, maybe I ought, indeed, to go take a nap.

20190617.0430

I have posted to this webspace on five previous years of 17 June: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018. The first of them, the 2013 piece that looks at Dave Neal's 17 June 2013 Inquirer piece "Tweet Hits the Oxford English Dictionary," seems particularly relevant at the moment. Neal's piece reports on the introduction of Tweet and several other words to the OED and the unusually early inclusion of Tweet. My response proceeds, if I recall correctly, from comments made by some people I knew in Stillwater, though it could be a response to others of more literary bent just as easily. And it is not a stance on which I have much softened in six years and across my overall departure from academe, if I have softened at all.
Language changes. New words come into being. Old words are repurposed. Some uses fall away. It is a natural thing as much as the succession of generations, and it is of no more or less moral import than that same succession. And while it is the case that people complain about "kids these days and their newfangled" whatever, it is also the case that people complain about the lingering of the old and their ossified expectations of how things should be. There are problems to both complaints, just as there are problems in the protestations that language should not change, that there was some point at which it was "right," and that all users since have somehow screwed things up.
There are several things I found and still find particularly irksome in such discussions. In many cases, the people making the comments are those whose own usage does not conform to the standards they imagine as in force when the language was "right," and while it is a fallacy to disregard the pot's words about the kettle's color, annoyance knows no logic--and to have people who demonstrate or confess that they do not know make pronouncements as if they do know provokes annoyance in abundance. And it is unfortunately common.
In some cases, some of the people I know who know that language changes, who indeed study the ways in which languages change, make such complaints, that language is being somehow degraded. Yet they do not conduct their business in the older languages that they claim are "better," or even in older forms of modern languages. They do not affect the patterns of decades past, or of centuries. Again, pot-and-kettle annoyance arises, compounded by knowing that they know better--and believing that they ought to act on that knowledge. Somebody damned well needs to.

20190616.0430

This date, 16 June, has seen five posts in this webspace: in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018. The first is perhaps most germane today; then, as now, the date marked Father's Day. And what I wrote then holds true now. I remain damned lucky to have the father I have, even if he's a damned hard act to follow. And I still love you, Pop.
What else needs to be said?

20190615.0430

I have posted in this webspace on five previous 15ths of June: in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. It seems clear to me that I have gotten more diligent about posting as I have moved along. It's a good thing, far better than the opposite. I am uncertain how long I will be able to keep it going, though. There is much that needs my attention, and I am concerned that, at some point, the other work I do will prevent me from attending to this. I do work to foster a buffer, and retrospection is helpful with that (the materials I treat are already present, so I do not have to wait for things like I do when I am commenting on current events), but building a buffer takes time, and I may not always have as much of that available as I would like to have. And I may not be in a good frame of mind to write when I have the time--if I ever am; I know some might look at what I write and argue that I am not.
The two prose pieces among the five I've posted on this date in past years (the other three are verse) attract some attention. The first one, from 2014, reflects a bit on my first Father's Day as a father and upon my then-new fatherhood. (I still sit on the Arc of Attention, though I can already feel myself slipping towards the Trough of Delusion; Dad still floats on the Sea of Sagacity, even if he has to bail out his boat occasionally.) I am still learning how to be a decent father; while I flatter myself in many ways, I do not pretend that I do a good job at it. Honestly, the best I do is get out of the way and let Ms. 8 be her own excellent self, stepping in on occasion to pick something up she can't heft herself--and there seem to be fewer such things each day. That's as it should be; I won't always be here, and she'll need to be able to face the world without me, probably for longer than I'll be here to help her.
The other prose piece recalls a pleasant story. Ms. 8 has at this point long since given up pacifiers, though I think I might still have the one I retrieved from the stagnant ditch in the City of Thunder. (There is something nice about the kenning-like reference to cities; the metonymic names seem make the places less prosaic and more, somehow. But I am a nerd and given to rolling around in fantasy literature, so I would be expected to think such things.) She does still clutch her long-held and well-worn softie, though, and I know that I should be working to wean her away from it as I did her pacifiers and her bottles before. At the same time, I also know that her holding it does no harm. It is a shaped and stuffed piece of cloth given her by her mother's mother; it is a thing had since before she was born, a physical link to her earliest life. I have few such things available to me, and I prize them (though I have not always done so as I likely ought to have done). Why I would take hers from her is unclear to me.
Such questions as whether or not I ought to persuade her away from her softie are frequently in my mind. As I approach another Father's Day, I wonder how common a thing it is to question so.

20190614.0430

I have not been particularly diligent about writing on 14 June, doing so in this webspace only in 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The last three are snippets of verse that I do not want to revisit at the moment, whether because of their context or because of the lack thereof. The prose piece from 2014 might merit a bit of attention, though, in part because I have ended up talking about some similar things in the years since (here and here, for example). I am sure there is some kind of rhetoric that might append itself to more formal treatments of things like Renaissance fairs and historical festivals, some more erudite understanding that accounts for what I miss--but I note a common thread in my musings on such events as the Pawnee Bill show, the ScotFest, and the North Texas Irish Festival, among many others.
The common thread is this: there's an implication that what is on display is "how things were," that the festivals somehow encapsulate the reality of the time and places being depicted, and that those times and places are somehow not universal but moving that way. That is, the "medieval" and the "Wild West" are not conflated, but they are aggregated and expanded in such ways as do not admit of much nuance--or even much recognition of temporal or regional variation. The medieval of Beowulf and the medieval of The Canterbury Tales are different things; so, too, are the medieval of Chaucer and the Gawain-poet. Similarly, frontier life differed from, say, 1836 to 1866 to 1896. Yet the medieval is compressed and homogenized, even as the Old West has been. (And both are made Californian all too often, which annoys for different reasons.)
I understand that festivals and celebrations and shows have to remove themselves from the mundane, the "normal." They have to do so to mark themselves as special events set aside from the broader lives that enfold them. I find no fault with them for it, even if my still-curmudgeonly self tends to prefer to be at work to being at play. (Indeed, this last weekend, while my wife and daughter went to a waterpark, I stayed home to take care of some things around the house that have long needed doing. In the event, I am glad I did; the work needed doing and got done, and they got to have fun without my stolid self slowing them.) What I do find fault with, still, is the idea that many such festivals reinforce, overtly or tacitly, that the way things are shown is the way they always and in all places were. It does not take doctoral research to find that it is not so, and it chafes that even such cursory work is too often elided.

20190613.0430

As I continue to look back at this webspace, I note writing in it on 13 June in 2010, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The 2010 was the text of a sermon I delivered--yes, I have done such things, and I am still struck by the similarities between that genre and the conference paper, though it has been long enough since I was a regular attendee of a church that I have forgotten how long sermons tend to run. (I do recall, though, that they tend to restrict their sourcing more than many conference papers--at least those I am prone to writing. Then again, I am not at all certain my conference papers are "normal" by the standards of the genre; given my professional circumstances, I have to think they are generally substandard. But that's as it is.)
The 2014 and 2015 pieces both note family coming to visit at Sherwood Cottage. They are largely expository posts, noting then-current circumstances and my reactions to them. I know I make much in one of them about adjusting to having company, and I'm better about it anymore, though I still prefer to meet people at other locations than my home--or theirs, to be fair. I do still put on a mean cookout, weather and resources permitting, and I largely enjoy doing so. (I need to do one again soon, actually; it's been too long.) I know, too, that it's an easier thing for my wife and daughter to see much of our families now than it was then. We live closer to more of them in the Hill Country than we did in Sherwood Cottage, and we have happier lives that allow us more flexibility. So that much is good.
The last three years have each been taken up with poetry on this date. I seem to write quite a bit of it in this webspace, though I know better anymore than to flatter myself that much of it is any good--if any is. Much of it is occasional or introspective, and I have to think that the work in the former line loses its import with the repeated incidence of what occasions the comments in verse. The 2016 piece was a comment on the Pulse shooting, but there is not enough in the poem itself to confirm that; only the dating makes it obvious, and there have been so many such at this point that they threaten to blend together for those fortunately spared their direct effects. That is a failing of mine and of the cultures in which I am enmeshed, not of the victims of such events. I remain the wrong kind of doctor to prescribe a solution, though, or one that might actually be taken up...

20190612.0430

I've posted on 12 June seven times previously in this webspace: 2010, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The last four years have presented poems, either in sequence or independently. The earlier three are short prose pieces, with the 2014 ranting against disregard for the academic humanities, the 2013 musing on my now long-lapsed study of aikido, and the 2010 reflecting on what was then commonplace in my classrooms and is now far less so (in part because I teach so much less now than I did before). As is often the case, the verse attracts my attention more than the prose, largely because I think the prose explains itself in its own overly verbose way. (I've been accused of writing turgid prose more than once. I could quip that it's more tumescent, but I don't know how well that joke would stand up.)
As I read the 2015 poem, I have to think that I was describing a toilet. I know I have a tendency towards scatological humor; I never have outgrown poop and fart jokes. (I am in good company among Geoffreys for that, as the Miller's Tale attests, among others.) I imagine it's fairly clear to readers that I've not. Whether it's similarly clear that the 2015 poem is a toilet piece or just one fit for a toilet is less certain. Hell, even I'm not really sure, and I wrote it. I suppose it bears out Wimsatt and Beardsley a bit more, anecdotal as it is.
The 2016 piece is a bit more opaque to me. I know I have a tendency to write riddling pieces that describe things or people in oblique terms. I do not think the 2016 poem is such a piece, though. Writing that moves of its own accord might still be an interesting idea, and I might follow up on it in one of the other venues I maintain; I always need to be doing more writing, even when I am writing, and that means I need material about which to write. But I do not think that what I wrote corresponds to any physical object. Then again, it's been years since I wrote the piece; it may simply escape me at the moment. Enough does, certainly.
I am happier with the 2017 piece. I'll admit that my meter gets a bit ragged at times, that the cadence is looser than it ought to be. The rhyme scheme--the four triplets and a couplet I prefer when I try to write sonnets--works well, and I am pleased with the description of the Texas Hill Country I give. I still rise early in the morning, still prize the quiet and look with love on the scrub-clad hills under the moonlight, silver turning cerulean through pinks and golds as the sun rises. And it is still the case that I cannot linger looking as long as I would like; work still wants doing, now as ever, and I yet have responsibilities I must meet.

20190611.0430

I wrote on 11 June in this webspace in each of the following years: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The last, again, is a short poem in a cycle of them, bearing no real explication on its own. The 2017 is a vaguely Shakespearean sonnet, though I do not claim writerly skill to equal that of Billy Shakes. The 2016 is a bit of free verse, and the 2015 a report on current circumstances. The 2014 was a reflection on my inability to watch the San Antonio Spurs play basketball if I want them to win; I know it ascribes entirely too much agency to me to be accurate, but it was still an interesting thing on which to think at the time.
Looking at the 2015 piece, I remember being paid to read popular novels and write them up. When it was available, it was good work, and I miss it. It played to my strengths, after all--if nothing else, I can read swiftly and well. And, at $100 plus the cost of the book for each job, with me able to do three or four a week, it was a welcome addition to the family finances. It still would be, though I think I could probably only do two each week at this point. Still, I could find ways to use an additional $200 each week. I think most people could. I wonder whatever happened that made it dry up...
Looking at the 2017 piece, with its typical English-language sonnet form, I recognize again that it is something of a paean to the Texas Hill Country, where I grew up and where I live again. (I am not likely to move away from it again, though I do travel away from it from time to time.) It does make reference to other places I have lived: southwestern Louisiana; New York City; and Stillwater, Oklahoma. And it does so obliquely, not naming the places, but giving descriptions of them that take on a mildly riddling function. Louisiana only emerges from the lines for those familiar with its physical and cultural geography. New York City only comes across for those who've heard of Manhattanhenge and are familiar with the squared-off layout of many of New York County's streets. Stillwater pops out for those familiar with a musical and the relatively recent geological instability of the place (occasioned by fracking, as is clear to me and many others, even if denied by some).
Overt, though, is my reaffirmation of belonging in the Hill Country. When my family came here more than thirty years ago, it was because we had been battered. When I returned, bringing my family with me, in 2016, it was because I had been beaten. I continue to recover, if in different ways than recovery often looks here. I have to think it is something about this place that allows me to do so.