20140910.0654

I spent much of yesterday reviewing what students had submitted to me on Monday. It went as well as it ever does; the assignment was for a one-page memo, I read quickly, and not all students submitted the work as they were directed to do. Even so, it took a large chunk of the day, the more so because it was interspersed with taking care of Ms. 8 and doing a few necessary things around the house. I was not able to attend to my own work in earnest because of it; by the time the grading was done, domestic chores called, and then other things demanded my attention.

I could have ignored them, of course. I have neglected meals more than once through simple forgetting. (One would think my belly would be smaller if I forget at times to eat.) I have failed to recognize the need for time and attention on the part of those whom I profess to love. And I could well repeat the occurrences; I doubtlessly will, in fact. But I did not yesterday, even if it had the effect of leaving me having not done things that I ought to do--not for the immediate demands of my job, but for the demands of my discipline and the potential to gain for myself a continuing line position.

It is a common complaint, surely, and one that can be dismissed easily as whining. And perhaps I ought to leave off it as such. The effort I expend on it can be better directed, as could the time...yet I do feel compelled to explain. Even if it is only to help things make sense in my own mind, I feel the need to explain, to try to arrive at some semblance of sense of how things work. Maybe, through building up the body of text that I do in this webspace, I can do something to look back over what of my thoughts and life I have recorded and identify some patterns that can help to illuminate me. And maybe, just maybe, I can do so at a time when doing so will be of some help to me.

It is a thing to consider. Even if I do spend much of the time I spend in writing the words in this webspace whining, there may be a pattern to the whining that indicates, among others, when I whine about what I whine about or what the focus of what I whine about is. The former would allow me to gain some sense of upcoming troubles (even if past performance is not a certain indicator of future performance), while the latter could help me to identify what (admittedly first-world and therefore not terribly problematic in the greater sense) problems there are for me to address. There are things that happen which escape immediate attention, after all, being too large to be seen in proximity but revealed in taking in the larger view.

Now, if I can get my students to realize that...

20140909.0734

It is not often that I am able to leave work at work; like most who teach, I too often end up bringing things home. Such has not always been the case for me; time was that I could get my work done at work, so that when I did come home, I could be at home. I also stayed at the office long to make it happen, which I cannot do in good conscience anymore, and my teaching schedule and assignment sequences were somewhat different. Now, even today, I am stuck with work from work, so that I cannot be home at home.

I suppose I deserve it, though. While I did not know about many of the problems of the kind of job I have now, I did know that grading would occupy much of my time, and I came into the line of work anyway. My supervising teacher, back when I did my student teaching, advised me against the very thing that I find I have to do--grade at home--coming up on ten years ago, now. It was good advice, and I am glad that I was able to take it for as long as I was. But that is no longer the case, and, like many others, I find that work invades my home life.

It is a seemingly sensible consequence, actually, of the work ethic promulgated in the dominant stream of US popular culture. The job is the thing that defines, and willingness to work hard (often interpreted as "work long") is seen as a major virtue. (Not cardinal, of course: having money is the primary virtue.) I am far from alone in wanting to be virtuous; I am far from alone in being entangled in the dominant culture amid which I was raised, despite seeing its problems. And so I am far from alone in finding that time I ought to spend improving myself in some existentialist way or being with those I love is spent in taking care of jobs of one sort or another.

I see no acceptable way out of the situation. I cannot exactly give up the work I do; I need the paycheck too badly, and not only for me. And since it buys my way into work on The Work, and I am called to The Work, I am stuck with it, as well. I could, perhaps, sacrifice some of the things for which I strive to earn the pay, thereby lessening the need for that pay, but not in enough measure to make a meaningful difference in the amount of money going out--particularly against the costs of transfer and relocation that would be involved (not all of which would be monetary at this point, but which still matter and could well become monetary). Too, I try to be a man of my word, and I put my name to some agreements that have contributed to the condition in which I find myself; to breach them would make a liar of me, and I have the misfortune of having scruples...

20140908.0629

Go to work, work, come home, take care of baby
Take care of baby
My days have a familiar pattern
Go to work, work, come home, take care of baby
Take care of baby
My days have a familial pattern
Go to work, work, come home, take care of baby
Take care of baby
Do a few things
Take care of baby

Go to work, work, come home, take care of baby
Take care of baby
I am not alone in this, of course
Go to work, work, come home, take care of baby
Take care of baby
Her pattern is the same a day off
Go to work, work, come home, take care of baby
Take care of baby
Do a few things
Take care of baby

Go to work, work, come home, take care of baby
Take care of baby
We look for a change in hers more than mine
Go to work, work, come home, take care of baby
Take care of baby
Strangely, to accelerate the cadence
Go to work, work, come home, take care of baby
Take care of baby
Do a few things
Take care of baby

Go to work, work, come home, take care of baby
Go to work, work, come home, take care of baby
Go to work, work, come home, take care of baby
Go to work, work, come home, take care of baby
Go to work, work, come home, take care of baby
Take care of baby
Do a few things
Sleep

20140907.0850

After a couple of conversations yesterday, I have had occasion to think about the kinds of things we leave behind. It is not a new circumstance for me; I have given some thought before to the stories of the stuff we have (as well as before that), and I have long since read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, although my own experiences are far different from what the author reports, as have been the events of my life. And they have been different from those people whose papers formed the bases of those conversations I noted, the records of which contained in those papers are now gone away.

Parsing and poring over papers is a delicate process, I know. Were I to pass on now, I know that my wonderful wife would have some...interesting times trying to figure out what to keep and what to discard of the papers I have collected through my life of study and few years of writing. For those who must treat what is left by those who have had longer lives of study and teaching, I imagine that the task is more difficult yet. How can one decide what to keep privately, what to keep publicly, what to donate, and what to discard? Upon what bases are the decisions made?

And when it is known that such decisions have been made, what does it suggest that the choices made are made? When things are hidden, what is it that makes them worth hiding? When they are discarded, what makes them worth being thrown away, cast aside? What makes things worth display, and what does the display show about the one displaying? I find myself asking such questions, wondering about the lives of those concerned and what I now will never know about them. The choice is not mine to make, of course; the materials are not mine to handle at this point, and I have to respect the choices of those whose they are. (I recall some of the readings I have done in CCC, and I remain convinced by them.) But there is a part of me that will burn to know what I will never be able to know on this side of the grave.

I have to wonder who will ask questions of me after I have gone and what answers they will be able to find after I am no longer able to answer them mouth to ear and face to face. What I have left in this webspace will be available, I know, an archive that once established is like to endure long. But of my other writings, I know not what to say. Some, perhaps, will persist; I have a few things in print or on their way to being in print, and someone may at some point read them. Of my journals and other papers, though, what will endure, and what will be done with them, and what will be made of them, I do not know. But it is a thing that I will have to consider, and I think I am not the only one.

20140906.0737

There is nothing to say that has not already been said
And said many times before
Whether it has been heeded or not

There is nothing to add to the discussion
Maybe there is a way to combine the old anew
But that is increasingly unlikely

Perhaps it is the case that we ought to stop
That our endeavors have reached their limits
And we ought simply to let things be as they are

20140905.0629

Something I enjoyed about teaching in The City was the relative lack of organized sport at the school where I taught and the schools where my wife and her friends taught. I grew up in the Texas Hill Country, where high school football is the national religion (a quip I remember hearing, although not where or when or from whom), and I was not seldom the target of that faith's inquisitorial practices--until I was part of its slave labor class as a bandsman. (We did not have songs this entertaining.) Even during my undergraduate days, when the school I attended did not have a football team (a blessed state from which it has since fallen), football permeated the campus and broader cultures, and I still found myself the subject of zealotry and proselytizing that I did not care to hear. My graduate school had a football program whose funding came often at the expense of such things as the library and professorial salaries, but in The City, I was blessedly free from such concerns. Some of the students would talk about the games shown on television, and when a team from New Jersey won the Super Bowl, there was (an annoying) celebration in the streets. But such were rare and minor occurrences; the people I met in The City had other things to do, by and large, and were very much about getting them done.

Then I left The City to come to what I have heard called the Buckle of the Bible Belt and teach at a school that rents itself out to the football fandom. Tents are pitched and cars and RVs parked for the weekend, interfering with students getting to class and instructors getting to where they can teach their classes despite those classes still being in session. Following my normal practice, I want to make some comment about prostitution and the blooms of various sexually transmitted infections; it would be apropos, if impolitic. I should not be surprised, of course; I was here last year and saw the same damned thing, and it is not as if I did not expect to face something of the sort when I reached this place where Red Dirt began. Nor ought I to be shocked that a school would make it harder to do that thing for which the school ostensibly exists in favor of 1) bringing in money to pay the bloated salaries of those whose salaries are bloated (which is neither me nor anyone in my department) and 2) setting up a spectacle to pacify the teeming masses of students and draw their minds away from study. (A cynical part of me thinks the latter either to distract them in the hopes of encouraging failure and thus paying again for classes or to keep them from unifying in a way detrimental to entrenched structures of power. But it is unlikely; it requires assumptions being in place that I do not think are.) While the point of school ought to be the development and dissemination of new knowledge and the skills used to do those things, it is not--and long has not been.

I have known this. But it still saddens me.

20140904.0743

I have been thinking back a bit on places I have lived, and it occurs to me that I have not lived in a great many of them. I have not had to move as much as many other people have, and many if not all of those moves have been largely supported by others, so that I have not had quite the trauma of relocation that others experience. I have been insulated from it, and I am grateful. How could I not be? I have been fortunate enough to enjoy stability and continuity because of it, and I value both of those things.

That I do may well be held against me. "The way things are" is a result of past and continuing oppression, locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally, and for me to benefit from it is for me to be complicit in that oppression. Many of my acquaintances would exhort me to throw off such structures--and they are not wrong, although they themselves remain enmeshed in them. (Several work for governmental agencies, federal and state, making themselves props for the legitimating structures of oppressive practices. As do I.) I have said before that I am in good company among hypocrites, and it remains true.

Still, I see no end to it and no meaningful means to bring about that end. Trying to extricate myself from the system requires more resources from the system than I currently command--or am likely to now or in the future. Even were I to be able to put every bit of money I earn to that end, it would not be enough--and I cannot, for I must eat and those who depend upon me must also eat, and the sacrifice of myself and those people would not do a damned thing to change matters, so that it is not even a question of service to the greater good.

If it sounds like resignation, it is wrong. It is not like resignation; it is resignation. It is the recognition that nothing available to me to do, and certainly nothing the consequences of which I am willing to suffer, will make a difference on anything more than the most minute of scales--and that what is efficacious on the micro level is deleterious to the macro. And I doubt that any of us can do any better. What would avail? Force? It will be met with greater force, and with glee. Boycotting? Who willingly forces their own children to go hungry for the sake of proving a point? (Stocking up beforehand solves nothing.) Going "off the grid?" How to get the land, seed, and supplies necessary to do so? How to maintain them? Unless to get the land and try to live off of it--but hope then not to have a cut get infected or a compound fracture happen. And even then, there are property taxes to consider...

Some will say I ought to spend my time thinking of solutions. Why they think I and others who make such remarks as I have have not, I do not know. That there may be no victory never occurs to them, and I have to wonder if it is true optimism or simply blindness...

20140903.0635

The Ceti Alpha V eel
(I know I show myself a nerd
By opening with such a line)
Is appropriate in kind
But not in form
For it is not simply some rubbery-fleshed tube that enters the ear
Controls the mind
Causes pain
But sounds themselves
Damnable earworms
Snippets of songs or the whole of them
Heard in passing and disregarded at the time
Growing and manifesting later
Playing again in the mind
(Which sounds like hallucinations
And hallucinations are a mark of lessened sanity)

I need a purgative for them

20140902.0654

The wind that comes sweeping down the plain has brought rain with it, which I am sure will be a relief to the sweet-smelling wheat and more to the still-drought-reduced rivers, lakes, streams, and ponds in the area. They had been doing better, but the summer heat has told upon them, and it is good to have a bit of respite from the grinding glare of Helios (although at least one metaphor that comes to mind is a bit...icky). (Why I always have to make that kind of joke...) I am glad, then, that I do not have to walk to work today; one shower is enough for a morning, and I already had mine.

I suppose that it is one of many marks against me that my sense of humor runs to the ribald, the bawdy, the lewd, and the outright obscene, and that it sprints to them in such a way that would make Bolt look less like lightning and more like a fastener rusted into place. I have long been adept at doing so, and it is a human tendency to do often the things done well, but it is not always (or necessarily even often) well received. I persist nonetheless, in part because it is not until after I have heard the comment made that I realize it was not amusing in context. Yet to wait is to miss the moment when it could be funny; the potentiality of being funny and thus of being liked is a powerful draw and prompts the risk that collapses the potential into actuality--funny or not.

Yet the same could be said for any humor. And it is not only the obscene that falls upon its face in my utterance; I am an incorrigible punster, and even my non-lewd puns are met with groans and rolled eyes in most cases. I am an old hand at the dad-joke (in part because my own father is a past master of the form, something I am given to understand obtains in the American Midwest), but I am also an old hand at having those jokes fail to lighten the mood--or succeed. Still, they demonstrate, at least anecdotally and in my experience, that it is not only the obscene that suffers from the timing and moment. They suggest to me that I need to search further for the source of my salaciousness in speech.

The easy answer is, of course, that I have a dirty mind. Yet "easy" does not seem to be "best" to me; to say I have a dirty mind provokes the questions of whence and why I do, just as to say I am a pedantic ass provokes the questions. Certainly I am interested in sex and I have had it more than once, but the same is true of many people whose senses of humor are better received than mine, whose jokes do not always drip of genital juices and who do not seem so much to obsess about alliteration. So I suppose I have more to consider as I get up in the morning...

20140901.0817

So it is Labor Day again in the United States, and I think I will be spending it better this time than I did last year. I doubt that I will be much on the grill or the smoker today--particularly the latter, as I would need to be already setting up for it--but I am with the two most important women in my life, and that is better than any cooking I can do. (That it allows me to continue to rest instead of having to work in the heat to cook meat and then to entertain until all hours of the night has its attractions also. I enjoy having people over, but I have not the endurance for parties that I used to have. Such is life.)

I will not go into the history of the holiday today. I do not need to, as there are many such histories already about that are better researched than my passing interest of a day will allow. (That of the US Department of Labor is one.) What I will go into instead is some discussion of my experience in the community that Labor Day ostensibly celebrates, a community that seems very much to be on the wane, so that the holiday may soon be more a day of mourning and regret than a day of celebration and hope.

For I was for several years a member of UAW Local 2110, and I did benefit from my membership. It was only because of the provisions of the collective bargaining agreement the union had executed with the school where I taught that I was able to make a living as an adjunct for my first few terms working there. It was only because of those provisions that I was able to put back what I could put back and pay down what I could pay down once I was promoted to full-time status. And while it was provisions of that agreement that led to my being on the short list for layoff, it was also sticklers for those provisions working on my behalf who ensured that I was recalled and so was able to support myself and my family through the summer until I left The City for Where the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plain.

During that time, I saw the kinds of people against whom anti-union pundits rant. They are correct that there are people who exploit the entrenched seniority systems found in many union contracts to essentially collect pay for no work. They are correct that there are those who act as reflexively against management as they themselves do against unions. But I also saw a great many hardworking people who were able to make decent livings for themselves and their families through the sweat of their brows and the work of their hands and minds--solely and specifically because of the union to which they belonged. And, in an institution that was rife with problems I will not explicate here, the common bond of union membership was a source of morale and community, welcome however thin. It had its own problems, certainly, but it did far more good than harm for me and for others like me.

But such things are becoming rarer. Union membership continues to fall, and law and legal precedent continue to vitiate against the power possessed by what membership remains. Popular perception continues also to align against the union, shaped by mainstream media that can hardly be called liberal in their statements overt and tacit against organizing workers and their concerns. Unions are not yet dead, but they are hardly in good health, and the day may well be coming when they can do no more good in the world. Perhaps it is fitting on this day to consider what they still do for the workers who compose them and thus for the communities in which those workers live, to consider what will be lost on the day when they function no more, to consider what we will then have to mourn.