Mom left a message on the machine while I was in class: Dad is home from surgery and feeling "better than yesterday" and even went up and down stairs a couple of times.
We sent him his birthday present a couple of days early; he'll get it tomorrow. It's a reminiscence of WW2 by a guy that Dad met when he was out here visiting last summer. (My sister V if she is reading this should be sure to check it out at New Years!)
Ok enough blog-fun. I have a short paper to write for tomorrow's class. Last assignment for this particular class - woo and hoo!
My brother called tonight (happens a couple of times a year anyway) to say that my father is having minor surgery tomorrow. My bro knew my mother wouldn't call until after it was all over. She wouldn't want me to worry.
So I called my dad. He sounded calm, kinda meek actually, rather unlike his usual feisty self. That means (I think) that he was worried about the cause of his pain and now that he knows what the problem is and that it's relatively minor, he is very much relieved.
I hope it goes well. Communicating with my family is like speaking a foreign language that is constantly changing but you have no dictionary for the changes. You have to infer meaning from inflection, gesture, lacunae.
Also everyone is terminally polite, so that has to be decoded too. "Hmm, this tastes interesting" means "why are you feeding me this garbage, but I'm too nice to call you on it." "To each his own" means "your choice makes no sense whatsoever but I don't want to be the one to have to enlighten you." And so forth.
I like to think that this heritage is one of the reasons I'm pretty good at learning foreign languages. I know that less than 10% of the meaning comes from the actual words.
We just watched "the Life of David Gale," an Alan Parker film about a college professor/accused rapist/murder on death row. Some great acting, some great scenes; some not-so-great acting and cliched scenes. But overall a fantastic film, worth renting.
It really makes you think about the value of an individual life and what's worth doing.
B. guessed the plot twist to-come in the first 30 seconds. Which reminds me that we should be writing movies scripts instead of making fourteen-something per hour in this grad school gig. He really has a feel for knowledge - who knows what, and when, and how. I think I have a feel for scenes - it's all setting and symbolism for me. Together we have a plot outline for a thriller - but when?? We should go to Vegas for two weeks in January and knock it out by the pool.
I am reading a so-called ecological history of Chicago and am bored beyond belief. The same author wrote about New England and I couldn't put the book down. So what's the deal? - is it the subject matter that interests me/bores me, or is this book just not as good as his earlier one?
I am looking forward to reading about the catfight in _Antipode_ about this book. But I fear it's just geographers all ticked off that Cronon got all the credit for writing a book that a geographer "should" have written. Geography = history, with maps. N'est-ce pas??
So long since I've written - longest hiatus yet, I'll bet. I've opened up an entry window a couple of times, stared at the blank screen and blinking cursor, and then sighed, closed the window, and moved on to something more pressing.
Had some friends/colleagues over for Thanksgiving - very enjoyable. I did a weird thing (for me) and invited someone from one of my classes that I really don't know at all. He looked totally nonplussed in response and I thought, oops, I just stepped over the bounds of appropriate social behavior, right? He ended up not coming, but at the break he asked if I was really serious and I said of course and gave him the address, and he seemed really appreciative.
Today we braved the First Day of Christmas Shopping at Rose-whatever Mall. Ugh - we'll not make that mistake again. Parking lot traffic pattern designed by morons, drivers who'd clearly never been to this mall before (or driven at all before, as far as it looked), stores bustling, all the loss-leaders already sold out.
Is Christmas a necessary national myth? Would our struggling economy just completely tank if we gave it up cold turkey? If it weren't such a scrooge-thing to do, I'd propose it. I just see resources directed in lots of dead-end directions and lots of misery created in the process.
I got less than 10 emails yesterday, very strange. Including NOT getting a paper back.
It was so odd that I checked a couple of other destinations for email - but nothing. People just aren't writing me.
Slept through the entire afternoon yesterday, trying to compensate for waking up at 4-something to finish a paper. I hadn't slept well that night anyway - sometimes on Tuesday nights my brain is so full of Polish words that it just goes round and round in circles. Last night, same thing: it would be agreeable to think that my brain is building new synaptic connections overnight, and the round-and-round thing is the residual. (Probably not, though.)
So - is it better to study Polish before bed (and be plagued with the buzz of the words all night) or better to study in the morning so that maybe the words seep into long-term memory in some less annoying way? I find that the early vocabulary, from back in September, is really solid. The newer stuff is fugitive. If I do the full set of vocabulary a couple of times a week, would that move things into long-term memory? And how to develop automatic sentence patterns?
And how to rethink my dissertation concept so that it doesn't rely on fluent Polish??
(the title of this entry is "happy now?" It's missing some accent marks - a squiggle under the e and a slash over the second s. It's pronounced shchen SHLEE vah. "teraz" is exactly as it looks, oddly enough. That doesn't happen too often, in my estimation. My textbook is full of marginalia that phoneticize these words.)
On Friday I was sitting in the office I share with about 30 other people, and one of my colleagues was meeting with a student, about 2 feet away from me. I stuck my fingers in my ears (ouch!) to concentrate on my reading, but some of their conference seeped through anyway.
It gives some indication of a different sort of problem with public education than test scores and social problems.
Colleague: (trying to develop some rapport) So why are you interested in this course or in geography?
Student: (flatly) I’m not interested in it.
C: Um, well ok, then, what made you decide to take it?
S: It’s required, I have to take it.
C: (trying a different angle) well, then, what expectations do you have for this course?
S: I don’t have any expectations. (Pause.) I don’t have any expectations for any courses other than in my major.
Turns out, on further questioning, she's in the program for middle school teachers and can't wait to finish "all this stupid coursework" and get to teaching. Geography is not job #1 for our public schools, so I sort of see why she is not able to see the relevance of it for her (very instrumentalized) program.
My question is, why do education programs attract the students LEAST interested in learning, if teaching learning is what they want to do for the rest of their lives? Lest you think this is an isolated example, let me give you some additional backup:
1) one of my friends commented that the worst students in his classes as an undergrad at a large state university were the education majors.
2) the infamous B found that the classmates least interested in learning for its own sake in his undergrad classes at a teaching college (!) were the ed majors.
3) In all my graduate English lit classes, the worst and most disengaged students were the teachers who were there simply to get another step closer to the piece of paper (masters) required by state law. It finally got so if I came the first day and saw a preponderance of them, I'd drop the class. It just wasn't worth having a class that got dragged down so from lack of interest.
The prevailing attitude is "why do I have to know [substitute intellectual content here] if I'm only gonna teach fourth grade?" Well, with that logic, we might as well have fifth graders teach fourth grade! They'd be fresh with the material, and we could probably get away with paying them minimum wage.
'Kay, 'nuff ranting. At least for now. Movies tonight - "Blue." :)
Well, I never got back to the trenches yesterday. People came over. There was food and conversation. Then there was sleep.
There is a historical line across France and Belgium, partially erased now, that was once two parallel ditches in the ground where millions of men lived and died in mud and smoke and fear.
For round numbers, let's just say that 10 million died during WWI. The loss is unimaginable. It's 1000 times the number of American soldiers who've died during this Iraq war. I say that not to minimize what's happening today but to magnify it, to find some way of coming to grips with the enormity of it.
I wonder sometimes about the parallel universe in which diplomacy was successful in 1914.
Why is it that on Wednesdays I feel compelled to catch up on old newspapers before I can begin the business of scholarship? It took quite a while yesterday, and I never really got rolling on anything else.
I COULD give up the newspapers (especially the daily) and just get my news on the weekend or online, but I like the feeling of being connected to the world every day, however tenuous that connection might be. Reading hypertexted newspapers feels wrong; there's something right about reading an entire set of the stories that a team of journalists has found to be THE news of the day. (Yeah, buying into the dubious notion of relying on professionals instead of forming my own notion of what's important, news predigested for the global consumer, etc.) I do read the BBC Europe news almost every day online but it's very Brit-centered and I'm mainly skimming for potential controversies that would suit a dissertation.
Polish on Tuesday night was NOT fun. I spent all day working on the exercises and vocabulary but I just couldn't learn the words, so I spent all of class with one eye on the textbook as a prompt for all the new (reflexive) verbs. It was very disquieting. But I have found someone who wants to study with me, so that will be good. We are both having the same trouble: we have no problem (present week excepted) learning the vocabulary and grammar and producing correctly written sentences, but the oral and aural components leave us bewildered.
To honor those who died in WWI, a bit about the trenches...later.
Sometimes I use this space to note down things I'll otherwise not remember. I have had various systems for keeping track of such scraps of information; what I like about using a blog is that I'll have access to the information whenever I'm proximate to the Internet. In daily life, that's pretty much all the time.
Snippet #1: work by the MN photographer Paul Shambroom. Apparently I misssed his show in the TC a year or two ago. But his work is in the Julie Saul Gallery in NYC through December 4 and there are two books (neither of which the UMN library owns:
Face to face with the bomb: nuclear reality after the cold war (2003: Johns Hopkins UP)
Meetings (Chris Boot, London, 2004)
Snippet #2: the NYT (Sunday 10/31/04, p AR28) notes the trend toward tearing down Brutalist 60s architecture because 1) people have never liked it (amen, bro!); and 2) it doesn't always work very well. "All 87 of the roofs" of the Orange County NY courthouse leak, for example. In West Palm Beach, the county tore down the 1960s surround to reveal the 1916 structure that had been encapsulated by the later building - the photo series is most interesting (and would be even cooler in time-lapse). I will save this article for my construction management class, because I am thinking of adding a section on intellectual property rights.
What a beautiful day! If you haven't been out yet, get out and enjoy it!
I am just in from a little light leaf-raking. Nothing too strenuous - uncovered the plant beds so they can be mulched when the ground freezes; took some snippings from my lemon-scented geranium to root for houseplants; raked a portion of the lawn that was relatively toy-free. I still have to pot up some herbs for the kitchen. They will probably all die - I don't have a great track record with houseplants - but if we get a few more weeks of fresh herbs, that'll be worth it.
I'm not obsessive with raking but it's better for the lawn to have most of the leaves raked up, and the brilliant green of autumn is so enjoyable to the eye. It'll be yellow-brown soon enough.
People in Minneapolis seem in no hurry to button down for winter - but it's so much more enjoyable to do it on a day like this than wait until you REALLY have to do it. Last week, during another of the warm days, I saw the grounds crew at the University taking in the petunias in the big concrete planters outside the library. They rolled them up like a big fragrant purple rug, and threw the mat into the truck bed.
I doubt if I will have a garden next year. I am hoping to be abroad for most of the summer. RIP fun in the dirt - at least for now.
Everyone I know is dragged-down, mopey, blue. We are frightened about the next four years: now that Dubya has nothing to lose but his reputation in the history books, he and Big Business can trash the environment however they want. And invade whoever they want in the name of democracy.
On the plus side: it's likely that Bush hasn't done any actual running of this country in the last 6 to 8 weeks, and everything went fine without him.