Signs of Growth

Spring is here. And gone. And back again. And likely gone again tomorrow.

---

The conference planning continues along, in that way that suggests that the ruling members of the planning committee don't exactly have their feet on the ground. I spent a significant portion of last not looking for my temper which got off leash and access to my e-mail. Drafts were written. Things were quoted - perhaps the worst thing one can do in an e-mail argument. In the end, I found it and reigned it in.

I was tempted to resign, to cancel the things I'd organized and to let them go it alone. I was tempted to give back funding and salute as the remaining organizers were left to twist in the wind.

Cooler moods prevailed. It's been awhile since I've found myself pushed to that point. Had it not been for the love I have for this organization, which has been kind to me and instrumental, I might have.

---

The other day, coming out of the gym, strangers were talking in the hallway. They were circled, and sprawled across the corridor, so no one could easily pass. There are boundary issues at play here. It's one of the things I won't miss - that sprawling lack of awareness that others might also - must also - pass through space. But I digress.

One man said, "As you can see, I have a problem with shrinkage."

The others laughed. And as I squeezed through, I suppressed the reply that raced automatically to my lips. Ten years before, it would have slipped out before I'd seen it coming. Growing up, my friends and I made jokes on each other whenever they came up, whatever they may have been. It was hard to ignore the urge.

But I couldn't help laughing a little on the way to my car, and wishing I'd only known one of them so I could have let fly.

"You can't call it shrinkage if it's always that way."

Untitled

I don't sleep well in hotels. I never have. I find myself listening for sounds outside the window, noises in the hallway. The beds don't feel like my own. The rooms feel both antiseptic and the linens always feel dirty.

---

At the end of the dream last night, I was sitting on the lawn outside an ivy covered classroom building. I'd just taken a walk that drifted from one campus I'd seen to another. On a bench nearby and the lawn around me were various friends and colleagues. We were talking about life before we were all due at our podiums to shape young minds. Enjoying the sunshine, I'd reached a conclusion: I was going to go back to school. I missed it.

In the sky, we could see a jet flying low. It was a big one, and a friend said "Isn't it amazing?" Another jet entered the picture, flew too close to the first. We laughed, joking about giving the drivers here pilot licenses. The first jet began to spin. It would be cartoonish in the waking world. But this was someplace else and so it spun, and we knew.

We ran. But even in your dreams, you sometimes can't run that fast.

I didn't see it when it hit. What I saw was bright light. One of my friends turned dark, grizzled, dissolved. I felt something tear into me. Burning. Then I, too, dissolved. But slowly.

And only when I was almost entirely atoms and fire and pain did I wake.

----

The day has been quiet. I'm pondering a nap again, after hours of glad-handing and self-promotion. You never know when it is going to be useful.

It is warm outside, and I'd like to go for a walk, but the hotel isn't convenient for that. My lips are chapped - maybe from the dryer weather, maybe a holdover from my day-to-day in colder climates. I look bad in my suit, though not so bad. I'm feeling at odds though not with the trip itself, which has been good.

I don't know.

Leaving Home Thoughts

Culled from entries while home.

---

Every day, a relative says something appalling:

"We shouldn't have even bothered to fight that battle. There are more of them here than us now anyway."

"Those people sure are good at making ribs."

"Those faggots make me sick."

I try to take some comfort in the fact that none of them are my immediate family, that my parents and brother are trying to perfect the same blank stare. And I worry because we are all trying it, rather than simply speaking. Silence is what constitutes best behavior.

---

Sitting a traffic light, watching teenage street vendors work up between lanes. No idea what they're selling, but the farther north, the less this happens. They're weaving between cars, coming up to windows. Even without a sale, they seem to get some conversation.

There's an opposite effect as you move north: the less eye contact and chance of conversation in moments like this. There's a tendency to look away - no, more correctly, straight ahead as though there simply isn't someone approaching you - that seems to come with following the roads further north.

They're selling apples for a school band. I am home, and from here even if most days I don't feel it. I buy one and ask them where the best tacos are. No one like police and teenagers to point you to the best hole-in-the-walls for food.

---

I'd almost made it through the trip without incident.

But on the last night, at almost the last hour of the day, it happened. A blow up at one of the family. I wonder now why we try to avoid it. I'd spent the entire trip trying to give extra benefit of the doubt, and at the end, after all the quiet deep breaths when appalling things were said, there was simply too little reserve left.

Home makes me feel like I'm coiled up rope. Knotted. Ropes of obligation and good behavior, twisting in on itself. Pulling against itself. Straining. I wonder what the rest of them feel like in these moments.

---

I spend a Saturday teaching my friend's daughter to throw invisible balls. She's got a good arm and hefts one 90 miles to the south, to her grandfather's back yard. She's got a good eye. She catches it when he tosses it back. At the end of the afternoon, before the belly kisses and flying lessons begin, I warn her to be careful: an arm like that and she might throw one and knock the moon down.

Solemnly, she nods. She'll be careful.

---

My oldest friend says he doesn't want to get married. That he's not ready for kids. His brother is giving him the third degree. Isn't it time? Doesn't he feel the pull?

Married with kids, he's still somehow lonely. His life has contracted, 90 miles from an old life with friends and the rest of his family, surrounded by the pleasures of children's cartoons and a garden designed to draw butterflies and birds. Is this it?

They're brothers to me. Most days, more so than the actual one I've got. I wish I had something to tell them, some perspective to give. I wish I were here more.

---

The best moments are the quiet ones. My father and I laughing about some off-hand comment. My mother and I talking about a recipe. Or my best friend and I making up super heroes like we're 8 years old again as we drive home, halfway between where we were and some undefined where we're going.

Save us, Graffiti-on-the-wall-just-add-some-basil-to-make-it-sing-recapturing-childhood Man. Save us.

1:17 AM

I am suddenly over-committed for the end of January. Naturally, I must procrastinate.

I have nothing particularly interesting to tell. I have not made a great use of the break; I'm struggling through "The Monsters of Templeton," hoping to finish it before I head home to visit the family on Christmas day. The annual spate of bad holiday TV has been on, and so I can't even claim to have watched much of that.

I have spent the week taking small drives - long ones lead to things like me screaming in my car and flipping grandmothers the finger (honestly, I'd feel bad about it if they were even close to being good drivers around here). I have committed to eating every cookie I am given, and this is fortunate as two of my neighbors seem to have entered a cookie-making war. I have made great strides at organizing the vault that is my room. It now looks less like a bunker after a bombing. Still, the break seems wasted so far.

There is a paper to be put together, a faculty research presentation to be drummed up, and syllabi that need to come together.

Words are failing me. I've been trying to write a letter - now there's a second to be written - and they refuse to come together, to echo even a little what I'm trying to say. How many new ways to say "thinking of you" can there be before they sound hollow and forced?

My dog is sleeping in the chair, and I feel guilty that I have to put him in the kennel while I head home. My flight is on Christmas day - anyone lingering around the Detroit airport: I'll be the bored one with the Mac and the attitude. I'll likely be starving. Cookies will, in defiance of my cookie-war attempts at appeasement, be more than welcome. My parents are stressing because my crazy Republican uncle is coming to visit over the holidays. Fights can be expected at hour four. This year they decided they didn't want to do gifts, which helps me a little but doesn't make the holidays feel any better, really. For oh so many reasons, I'm less excited about heading home than I feel like I should be.

The wind outside is picking up. The apartment is a galleon in a storm, creaking as it sails along. But it does sail. Any moment now the phone will ring. The message it brings - even before the voice on the other end speaks - will be that joy will find you, whether you believe it or not, whether you are hidden or snowed under or in the midst of loss or whatever. Any moment now, the song will come on the radio that makes you sing a different tune.

The time will come.

The Tyrany of Snow

I'm a Southwestern boy. Or a kid of the South Plains. I prefer Summer. Then Spring, then Fall, in that order. I'd leave the fourth option blank if I could.

I don't like the winter.

I do not understand the snow or the hold it has over people. I've only rarely truly wished for a White Christmas. I've had occasion to live in it, ample experience driving in it. I've camped in it and made forts in it. I've had snow ball fights and caught snow flakes on my tongue. And at the end of it all, I still don't understand the love of snow.

---

It occurs to me that perhaps my problem with snow is really tied to questions of photography.

But later, learning photography, trying to get anything to work in the crisp white was a nightmare. On film, snow either burns too brightly, reflecting all manner of light and making everything else that much hard to capture or it washes everything out. There is a lot of compensation that has to go with taking pictures amid the white stuff.

That unpredictability frustrates me to this day, and now it extends well beyond trouble with photography. Snow disrupts driving and parking and playing with my dog and lots of things.

But I do think it really started with that question of how to deal with snow in pictures.

---

Okay, okay. I'm not trying to say there's nothing good about snow.

Certainly when I was a kid, I liked snow. Even growing up in Texas, I did wish for it on occasion: just a dusting in my home town could shut things down for days. There was a magic to snow that certainly appeals to kids. Every time there was the rumor of snow, I was sure this time would be the big one: weeks out of school, snowmen at every house. Of course, I also believed I'd one day own a car that could turn into a robot. By and large though, most of us have learned to leave those childish snow dreams behind. Sure, we still hope for a snow day, but aside from that, snow is more nuisance than blessing.

Don't believe me? Come shovel out my car the next time I'm stuck in a drift.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

If you're one of the snow fascists - those folks who can't hear anyone say anything negative about it - this is as close an acknowledgment as you'll get from me that you're not completely touched in the head. Enjoy your hollow, snow covered victory.

---

Sitting in the car, waiting for the heat to catch up and for the blood and warmth to return to my hands, I wondered why I would have done this. The list of "should haves" and excuses grew out of control, like a bean stalk in a fairy tale

• should have worn gloves ("But I can't photograph in gloves.")
• should have brought the 35 mm ("But cold weather is hard on the gears.")
• should have brought someone with me ("But there's no one here.")
• should have called someone ("But what to say?")
• should have called more often ("But who has the time?)
• should have... ("But...")
  
• should have... ("But...")
  
• should have... ("But...")
  

Shouldn't snow, shouldn't winter stop these things from sprawling so?

---

It feels like people have been extolling the virtues of snow to me for years. It's so beautiful, they say. I think they've missed it. Snow isn't beautiful. Things you can see through the snow are.

There's a difference.

Cover everything in snow, and everything becomes the same white-washed idea. Cover it all in snow and there's no distinction, no nuance: only a blanket of indistinction making the world over in the same bland image. Snow covers us. Snow forces us in. We wait snow out and when it leaves, resume our lives. Imagine snow as a metaphor for anything oppressive, and you're starting to get the picture.

It isn't snow that's beautiful. It is what peeks through that is. Even the most ordinary object, refusing that yoke - that sameness - becomes something more and finds its beauty.

The beauty is in resistance: this is the lesson of snow.

Cravings

Spending the holidays away from home year after year hasn't gotten so much easier. One year at a graduate school Thanksgiving celebration, I showed up with tamales - a staple around any holiday back home no matter who you are. Everyone stared and wondered, and at the end of the evening, I had nearly two dozen tamales to take home for myself.

For whatever reason, I've been craving mole, which frankly is a recipe that's more involved than I care to deal with. Growing up, my friend Greg's mother would make mole maybe once a year - usually around Christmas. Rare treats are often the best. In grad school, my friend John made it for us once - he was a chef, an under appreciated genius in kitchen who could tell the nastiest stories over a meal and make you love it. Chefs, he said, told the worst stories, the sickest jokes nightly to make the evenings pass. I thought perhaps he was exaggerating until I read Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, and saw that even back in the early 1900s that tendency was there.

One of the things I like about Thanksgiving is that it is like the best moments of grad school: it's people around each other because they really like each other. Grad school Thanksgivings are the best because everyone chips in what they can - mostly in terms of alcohol - and a good time is had by all. That's how Thanksgiving has always been though. When I was growing up, on the holidays, I'd spend time with my family and then would wander down the street to my best friend's place. We'd spend the day, like all teenage boys, eating our weight and glaring at the world, secretly in love with our own surliness and a world that let us be.

It was when I was a teenager that I discovered one of the truths of my life: that I like a certain amount of suffering with my pleasure, a little spice with my sweetness, some surliness in a world that'll feed me and nod knowingly. Those are the things I'm craving right now.

But like I said, making mole is more than I can deal with.So the closest I've managed to get is brownies with green chilies. What can I say? Something about the combination of sweet and spice just does it right now. And I'll be heading out to see some grad school friends in a few days - not all of 'em, sadly, but it's a start. Maybe I'll take 'em some tamales and chili brownies and see if I can't capture the full experience.

Why I Agree With Fiorina

Wow, politics is farce. John McCain helped create the Blackberry? And we should be thankful for that? Have you seen what twits most people become when they get one? And the economy is fundamentally sound. Pay no attention the Man behind the curtain, or the queue forming at the ledge.

But I digress.

In case you hadn't heard that one of McCain's advisers, Carly Fiorina, said that none of the Republican or Democratic candidates have what it takes to run a company, and it has the talking heads yapping. The heads are, of course, spinning this as a betrayal (however inadvertent) of McCain by the former head of Hewlett-Packard (who, it is worth noting, caused the company major woes). And no doubt, to politicians anything that suggests they can't do anything is a betrayal.

Fiorina, though, attempts the argument that running the government isn't like running a company. I agree, though probably not for the reasons she thinks. What I'd love to hear spun out of this is the idea that the government shouldn't be run via the free market the way business is. I'd love to hear that government is something different, something that should be a limit on the free market, not one of its subjects.

Wouldn't that be something?

RBOC: Lunchtime edition

Sitting here in my office, having just eaten my meager lunch and skimming the edges of the blog world, and I'm thinking about all the ways food (and by food, I also mean booze) has played a way in my academic life.

Khora, whose handle makes me think of all sorts of 80s songs and Spanish questions, asked what was one thing we wished we'd been told in graduate school before we leaped out into the world, and my response was predictably "what other job"-ish. But today, I think it'd be about how food is tied into all of this. Here are some examples:

• you can absolutely tell who cool a theory/school of thought/disciplinary division is by how good their parties are. The best conference party I ever attended was thrown by a bunch of broke Marxists, but they shared the bottle and the music was good. For my money, a party thrown by Marxists or Feminists usually tops the situation (curiously, Marxist feminists are hit and miss...hit or Ms....or...I just know as a joke that's going to fail); folks who do cultural work come in a close second foodwise, while historians have the best stories
• Don't be mistaken by size of the party or lavishness, however. The Marxists' polar opposites in my field tend to throw huge parties at conferences which are noteworthy for the enormous amounts of booze which somehow do nothing to make the moment pleasant
  
• if someone can include a bottle of Patron in their contract for a speaking engagement, you can bet they'll be an interesting speaker.
• maybe we really go into academia because we like eating the same type of food we've eaten for years. I was just finishing my PB&J (strawberry jam, suckas - the only way to roll), a container of yogurt, and a banana and suddenly it was 3rd grade all over again (except it's harder to have a crush on my home room teacher now)
• interestingly, academics have the worst manners around food I've ever seen. At a recent conference, I watched academics swarm waiters as they emerged from the kitchen with trays of fresh goodies, nearly throw elderly British scholars to the ground, circle tables like sharks, and what appeared to be an inadvertent exclusion of third world scholars and graduate students from the buffet
  

So that's my thought on this. I should probably go back to doing real work. Unless you're not going to eat those fries....