Andrushka

The blog is dead, long live the blog!

2010-03-31T14:50:00.000-05:00

To be honest, this blog has been pretty dead for a long time; that's not news to anyone. I'm just putting this out there so that, if anyone is still subscribed to this RSS feed, they will know where to find my new and improved blog ... nay ... my full Web site. Andrushka.net is the domain, and though it's still under construction, if you were actually interested in this blog, you'll probably be interested in that. Also of note, the new RSS feed is located at feed://www.andrushka.net/rss.xml.

There will be no photos from Barcelona

2009-09-21T14:46:00.005-05:00

Earlier this afternoon I was thinking about all the wonderful things about Barcelona I would blog about. Unfortunately for you and me, that blog post has been preempted. I’m just not in the mood anymore.

Today as I was walking from the Monastery of St. Paul of Camp to the Maritime Museum, a young man in his early twenties tapped me on the shoulder and, through a series of charades, informed me I had something on my back. I wiped my hand across my back and sure enough, something orange had splattered on me. It had gotten on my light-colored pants as well. It was kind of disgusting.

He searched through his backpack and offered me some Kleenexes, even helping wipe my back. It was on my camera bag as well, so I took it and my camera off and started wiping the strap. He mentioned something about water to help clean and as I looked up to see him off, he was already gone. When I turned around, so was my camera.

My very expensive Nikon D90 and also rather expensive Tamron 24-300mm lens was stolen.

I looked around for him and couldn’t find him, of course. I then looked for a police officer, and when I finally found one, he told me to report it at a station. When I got to the station, they directed me to another station. Finally at the right station, they had me take a number and wait for two and half hours before I could fill out a report. I’m not sure why I bothered, since I’m sure they’ll never find it and I don’t I have any insurance that will help in this situation. Anyway, in the very unlikely event that they find my missing camera, they know how to contact me.

The officer at the front desk told me I was the second person to report a “let me help you clean off your back” theft today.

I keep thinking of all the things I should have done differently. I should have just come back to the hotel to clean up. I should have never taken off my camera. I should have taken a different route … ad infinitum. As the British lady sitting next to me said, “at least we weren’t hurt. We can be thankful for the big things.” She came to Barcelona for a Leonard Cohen concert and had her purse stolen by two men on a a motorcycle. That’s a new sort of drive by to me.

I don’t know if I’m more upset about how expensive the camera is, or about the photos. I hadn’t downloaded the pictures from Versailles or the Eiffel Tower yet. There’s some on the card of Vianui and Tehani looking incredibly cute. If you're a camera thief and not a complete douchebag, at least leave the memory card. But I guess it kind of goes without saying that he was, indeed, a complete douchebag. I have the orange crud still on my shirt and pants to prove it.

Also, as I’ve been traveling alone, my camera has kind of been my raison d’etre. It’s my artistic expression, dialogue with friends, even my way of keeping time (since I didn’t bring a watch). Today I’d walked all over the place trying to find a USB cable to replace the one I'd left in Paris, and I finally bought one for way more than I would ever have paid for it at home, just because I wanted to share those pictures so badly. Fat lot of good it will do me now.

Waiting at the police station this evening, a muted TV played Gilmore Girls, and as I watched Rory and Paris at Yale, I couldn’t help but wish I could feel more carefree, as I did earlier when I contemplated how to describe my lunch to you all.

I just keep telling myself Most people are nice most of the time and hoping that in the morning I’ll have a new perspective on things.

P.S. If anyone with piles of cash laying around was wondering what to get me for Christmas, a Nikon D5000 or Canon T1i would do the trick.

Au revoir, Paris

2009-09-21T02:23:00.001-05:00

On Sabbath, I went to church with Jenny, Yann and the girls. They belong to a church plant that tries to tailor itself to bring in people unfamiliar with Adventism, much like New Creation in Lincoln. And like New Creation, they have a talented praise team who sometimes write their own music. Also, like many early Christian churches, it meets underground, literally in a sub-basement, albeit a somewhat futuristic sub-basement.

They share the facility with a more traditional Adventist congregation, which lets them afford a pretty plum spot in Paris, right on Place de la République. Now I’m sure you’re saying, “Wow, that sounds like it would be difficult to find a parking space.” Yes, indeed it would be ... unless you’re Yann. There’s a Gendarme station right next to the church building, and since Yann is a Gendarme, he can park there without any problems. I’m guessing most everyone else takes the metro.

For Sabbath School, I attended Jenny’s kindergarten class, and even that was stretching my French comprehension. The lesson was about the gift of the Holy Spirit and the apostles preaching in tongues, so Jenny worked my presence and English speaking into the lesson. Also, I hadn’t brought a pen or paper for doodling, so I was rather glad to have coloring time.

The sermon went through five chapters of Acts to make a point that could have been established with one text in five minutes or less, but I often feel that way about sermons. He had a very thorough PowerPoint presentation, which normally I would complain about on principle, but it really does help when you aren’t good with the language.

After church, several of the single 20 and 30-somethings from church came over to Jenny and Yann’s apartment, and we had a picnic outside. I really couldn’t follow most of the conversation, but occasionally someone would fill me in or attempt to converse in English.

I don’t remember everyone’s names or what they do, but one in particular stood out for two reasons. First, he’s a professional graphic designer who said, “I not use the Mac.” Graphic designers using PCs are few and far between in America, but I’m guessing the additional cost of Macs in Europe may make it more tempting to be a Microsoftie. Secondly, I swear he looks like Napoleon I. Yann says he doesn’t see it, but when I first saw him I thought of a portrait of Napoleon we’d seen at Versailles.

After eating, we played petanque. Horseshoes is the closest game to which I can relate it, though curling might also be helpful. Basically, you throw a small wooden ball some distance from you, preferably in a sand pit. Then you throw steel balls at the wooden ball, trying to get your ball closest to it. Whoever has the closest ball wins and gets to re-throw the wooden ball. You get one point for each ball you have closer than the nearest opponent’s ball. We were playing in teams of two and each person had two balls, so the most points you could get in a round was four. We played to 13, but I got the impression any predetermined number will do.

At first I just sat on the sidelines and watched this strange and, quite literally, foreign game. But when I did eventually join in, I did pretty well. Years of bean bags with Daniel really came in handy. There was some discussion of a cheer for me being “biscuit” as a pun of “be Scott,” which took me a while to understand, but at least Napoleon I was entertained.

Before we’d even started playing, Jenny had left us for another appointment. She went to a neighbor’s apartment to improve her skill as a sushi chef. So after the church friends left, we joined Jenny to eat the results of her lesson.

It was good. I particularly enjoyed the avacado-based sushi.

The man of the house is a captain in the Gendarmes, and Yann’s direct supervisor. All evening he kept saying, “MaXImum” (with that emphasis), which apparently is an inside joke referring to someone he and Yann work with. The wives didn’t find it nearly as entertaining as their husbands.

His wife is a Kosovar and currently pregnant with her second and his fourth child. It seems like no matter where I go, there’s talk about pregnancy and newborns. I’m sure it has something to do with being an integral part of the human life cycle (and most everyone I talk to is human), but those subjects do seem to keep coming up more than they used to.

I was tired and still not completely used to the time zone, so I left early and went to bed. That brings me to today.

After a leisurely morning (well, leisurely for me, since I wasn’t the one feeding and bathing small children), we went out to eat in the Latin Quarter at a restaurant advertising traditional French cuisine.

I had raclette, which it turns out is a baked potato served on a hot plate with a rack to melt cheese under it. A potato in France is still just a potato, but combined with the right melty cheese, heating contraption, and a name like “raclette,” it can be a meal to remember.

Afterwards we went to the Eiffel Tower and walked up the stairs to the second platform, at which point I continued to the top in the elevator while everyone else waited below.

I don’t know if I should try to describe the Eiffel Tower. Before I visited it the first time (10 years ago), I always thought it was ugly, referring to it as the “Awful Tower.” I was firmly on the side of the Parisians who protested the project when it was being built who thought it would ruin the Paris skyline and secured a promise that it would be temporary. It wasn’t until I stood under it that I understood its appeal. It seems to be so effortlessly enormous, almost weightless and yet towering. To me, it’s now more awe-inspiring than awful.

Anyway, that brings me most of the way up to the present. I’m currently typing this laying on my miniature bed on the way to Barcelona. My cabin is pretty quiet. There’s a college-aged guy from Korea already asleep across from me on the top bunk, a German under him who has done little but read the newspaper since leaving Paris, and a Spaniard in the bunk under me who hasn’t done or said anything of note, just makes an annoying sound every once in a while that I think is his way of trying to suck out something stuck in his teeth. I’ve considered offering him floss, but 1) I’m not sure that would be considered polite and 2) it’s packed. (Update: the sucking sound was denture related.)

In contrast to my sedate cabin, next door a Spanish family sounds like they’re having a grand time, and it’s kind of getting on my nerves.

Towards a Taxonomy of Tourists

2009-09-18T11:23:00.008-05:00

Walking around, I often try to classify my fellow tourists. I group them then label those groups and try to establish a taxonomy. I started writing this on the train from Florence and just took the time to type it up this afternoon.

The Enlightened Youth

Success Condition: finding themselves, or at least telling their friends back home that they did.

Easily identified by their clothing, female Enlightend Youth may commonly be seen wearing brightly colored summer dresses with a little hippy flair on warm days and pea coats on cold days while the males often affect fedoras, scarves or a ratty sports coat in any weather. They may also be seen carrying a notebook in which they plan to write a novel or collection of poetry. Determined to experience the “real” (insert destination), specimens of this genus make a point of walking at least three blocks away from any major attraction before purchasing food. They abhor lines as a sign of the commercialization of art and culture and as a result, they are more likely to have seen the building in which treasures of human achievement are stored rather than the artifacts themselves. When they return home from their “mind blowing” three weeks of “backpacking,” they will be able to definitively state that Michelangelo is overrated, but Coravaggio was a true master.

The Photographer

Success Condition: kick-butt slideshows.

Not to be confused with contortionists, this genus can often be identified by the strange positions they assume in search of the perfect angle and perfect framing of their subject. Their initial success with the auto setting on their point-and-shoot will encourage them to upgrade to a professional-level camera with a much more advanced auto setting. Even when traveling with a group, they are often seen alone because of the time it takes to “get the shot.” They consider museums which ban photography a waste of time. Upon arriving home, they will find it difficult to create photographs of mundane subjects that match the beauty of the images they captured of the great art and architecture of history, and will eventually stop researching MFA programs in photography.

The Academic

Success Condition: confirming what they already know.

Armed only with a guidebook and advanced coursework in a usually unrelated field, this genus is best known for the phrase, “Well actually …” They feel confident correcting tour guides, and may offer to lead tours for companions or anyone else who asks a question within earshot. Some researchers suggest that, rather than a distinct genus, the Academics are the mature stage of the life cycle of the Enlightened Youth. They exhibit many of the same tendencies as the Enlightened Youth, albeit with more money and luggage. In addition, the females often wear large, chunky necklaces and earrings handmade by a fashionable ethnic minority, while the males still dress much like the Enlightened Youth, but with less hair.

The Midwesterner*

Success Condition: surviving.

Often choosing to visit a destination because they heard such good things about it from Lou and Barb, they will not understand what their friends saw in the place until they arrive home and can in turn tell all their friends how much they enjoyed their vacation, that it was worth every penny, but you can’t trust the locals. Generally not in prime physical condition, the Midwesterners gravitate toward seated activities such as bus rides, waiting, and holding bags for others while they “go enjoy yourself” at the top of anything that doesn’t have an elevator. They are guided by two conflicting traits: overwhelming friendliness and suspicion. They form instant friendships with any travelers they meet from their region or country and share an incredible esprit de corps with these new-found allies. They can’t understand why the locals can’t just learn (insert language) or a little customer service, and usually double check any information given to them by a local with other tourists, just in case. They are often in the company of an apologetic-looking Enlightened Youth or a Party Animal who looks bored.

* The name comes from the fact they tend to be middle aged or older and from a Western country, not the region of America of the same name.

The Party Animal

Success Condition: exotic hookups, memory loss and/or Amsterdam.

Rarely seen at tourist attractions before noon unless accompanied by an Academic or Midwesterner who has funded their trip, the Party Animal has ventured from their homeland primarily in search of exotic brews and members of their same genus of the opposite sex. They are often under the misapprehension that “what happens in (destination), stays in (destination).” They tend to run in packs with others of this same genus who they may or may not have met 48 hours before. Much like fish who change gender in an otherwise same-sex habitat, in the absence of other types of tourists, one Party Animal per group will become “the responsible one” whose job is to arrange for accommodations, transportation, and nag his or her pack into visiting sites of interest.

The Coachmen

Success Condition: checking off sites on their to-do list.

Easily identified by the umbrella, flag or other distinctive object held aloft by the herd leader, this genus believes tourism is best when it is a precise and synchronized game. They have the advantage of being able to form long-term attachements while on vacation, because most everyone they speak with is from their own country and speaks their language. Their basic fear is that they will be left behind either literally or figuratively by not learning as much or enjoying as much as the other herd members. To assuage this fear, they tend to buy the same souvenirs and take the same photos as everyone else.

I think it’s safe to say that on this trip so far, I’ve exhibited traits of pretty much all these groupings.

Let them eat cake.

2009-09-18T08:49:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, after a lazy morning of reading e-mail, tech news, and sorting through thousands of photos, I went to Place de la Bastille and the Musee d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaisme.

I remember my first time visiting Place de la Bastille 10 years ago and being rather disappointed. I was expecting to see the Bastille and not just some big pillar. But, as Deny explained to me at the time, that's kind of the point. The prison was torn down by the revolutionaries as a symbol of oppression, so of course there's only a monument there now. So anyway, this time I knew what to expect and could appreciate the monument for its monumentalness.

The Jewish museum, like most Jewish museums, was for the most part depressing. However, it was also fascinating to see medieval menorahs, read propaganda relating to the Dreyfuss affair, and learn about the debate over the status of Jews caused by the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The part of each room I looked forward to the most was quotes from modern Jewish French men and women about what being Jewish means to them.

Today, Yann didn't have to work, so we drove to Versailles, a living testament to the axiom, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall." You can't help but notice none of the monarchies that survived to the present day ever undertook any project as grand as Versailles, and wonder if France would be a constitutional monarchy now if it hadn't been for such excesses.

As for the interior of the palace, it seems like once you've seen one 18th century palace, you've seen them all. As I walked through the royal chambers, I kept recalling Schönbrunn in Austria and Herrenchiemsee in Bavaria. Of course, there's a reason for that. Everyone was trying to imitate the French court at Versailles. So even though I've seen plenty of similar palaces, there's something to be said for seeing the original that inspired them all.

Tomorrow I'll be going to church with Jenny, Yann and the girls and they've invited some people home for lunch afterwards. Jenny says they only invited single people, "but don't worry, it's not a set up."

Je suis ici, en Paris

2009-09-16T15:32:00.002-05:00

Between Jenny’s excellent directions and the extraordinarily helpful elderly gentleman I shared a compartment with on the train, by 11:00 a.m. I’d found my way to Jenny’s office, luggage and all, without a hitch. I’m not sure if the gentleman was Italian or French, he spoke both, but he did not speak any English. Nevertheless, he insisted on helping me find the metro, purchase tickets, and get on the right train. It completely makes up for the incredibly bad breath that had been annoying me from the other side of the compartment all night.

After dropping off my bags with Jenny and promising to meet her again at 5:00, I started to wander. I went to Notre Dame de Paris and spent a lot of time there. It’s much nicer with the windows in tact. The last time I was there, several had been broken by a windstorm. After that, I just walked, took a bus now and again, and walked some more without really going inside of things.

Walking through Montmartre was kind of uncomfortable since it’s stayed true to the tradition of the Moulin Rouge and is mostly sex shops and topless theatres. However, one of my goals was to see the real Moulin Rouge, and now I have. The outside, anyway.

Paris feels so different from Florence and Rome, and not just because it’s much colder here. This is a working city, with a non-tourism based economy and all the hustle and bustle that entails. In Florence and Rome, everything in the city centers was based on tourism. Here, the tourism is superimposed on the actual business of being a city. Except in a few small areas, when I pass a person on the street, they actually speak the local language.

In some ways, the business like attitude of Paris is more relaxing to me than Italy was. They have their thing; I have my thing. We’ll all go about our own lives. In Italy, it felt like everywhere I went, we all had the same thing. Everyone was trying to get the perfect photo, to see the same sights, to find the perfect souvenir (or if not, to profit off of the herd that was).

I was at the Saint Madeleine church listening to a free concert by the Groot Nederlands Mannenkoor that I’d stumbled upon when I realized it was 4:20 and I’d promised to meet Jenny at 5:00. Her office is on Boulevard Saint-Germaine, on the other side of the river and passed Notre Dame de Paris from where I was. With the convenience of hindsight and Google maps, I know I should have just taken the metro the two miles, but instead I walked, got a little lost, walked some more, and eventually got to her office about 15 minutes late. When Jenny says I look thinner than my recent photos on Facebook, it’s probably just because I’ve had so many times in the last few days when I end up miles away from my destination and have to hurriedly walk back.

Anyway, Jenny and Yann have a nice and comfortably large apartment in Gendarme housing. Tehani looks and acts almost exactly like I remember Vainui, who has now grown into a little lady with just the right amount of tomboyish attitude. Tehani keeps calling me “John” because that’s the name of their Canadian teacher at school. Like most kids that age, she seems to find it unthinkable that anyone might not understand what she is saying, but I really have no clue as to what the rules she made up to play with marbles. I just know I kept losing last night.

Today was dedicated solely to the Louvre. I arrived around 10:00 and didn’t leave until 4:00. While my sore feet will attest to six hours being a long time, I could have easily spent six more without running out of wonders to see.

I can’t begin to describe all the treasures bought, stolen or pillaged from around the world housed in the former Parisian residence of French monarchs, so I won’t try.

I spent much of the day thinking about the role decontextualization plays in elevating works to the status of “art.” Seeing art all collected together and mounted on plain walls juxtaposed with seeing it in the churches, temples and palaces it was created for are such different acts. You can take a mass-produced urinal and hang it on the wall of a gallery and call it art, and it will be (as the Dada movement proved). Of course, the problem with showing things in their original context is you’d have to travel far and wide to see everything, and it would be harder to express the connection between different styles and artists. I wonder what Michelangelo or the ancient Egyptian artisans would think seeing their work in the modern contrivance of a museum.

Anyway, I’m fading fast, so I need to post this and get to sleep. I think tomorrow I will try sleeping in then find another museum. I think I can figure how to go downtown and get back without an escort.

A new favorite thing: cyclists riding effortlessly with umbrellas in hand.

2009-09-16T15:32:00.001-05:00

My second day in Florence, I had a wonderful time at the municipal museums. I say, "municipal" because the national museums, such as the Uffizi and the Academy, were closed as they always are on Mondays. I really should have looked that up.

Another thing that would have been nice to know is that the streets would be clogged with festive teenagers. I’m not sure if it was the first day of school or not, but I had to practically swim to get through the crowds of them filling the streets outside of schools in the morning. I felt sorry for the drivers trying to get past the cliques of girls hugging and talking about their new outfits and the boys trying to mask their excitement with more manly sullenness.

Regardless of my negligence as a tourist, the tour I went on of Palazzo Vecchio was amazing. The tour guide is a professor of architecture who gives tours two days a week. You can imagine he had an interesting perspective on a structure that has been assembled in various styles over the course of the last 700 years. The only people on the tour were me and two British guys about my age. I'm not sure why they were in Florence because they didn't know who the Medici were and hadn't read any of the British authors who lived in Tuscany. But they were rather fun and very encouraging to the tour guide, and under those conditions, ignorance can be forgiven.

As we talked with the guide about the history of Florence, I found myself constantly drawn to "Tea with Mussolini" as my frame of reference for everything Tuscan. I took a whole class on the art and literature of Tuscany, and I don't know how many books I've read about it, but for some reason it keeps coming back to Judy Dench chaining herself to a medieval tower in San Gimignano.

It rained on and off most of the day, which is both a curse for tourists and a blessing, since the urine smell I have referred to so many times now vanished. During one of the breaks, I went to the Boboli Gardens at Palazzo Pitti. These were the private gardens of the Medici family, and quite beautiful. One of the highlights of the gardens was that there were a few birds there other than pigeons and crows. Namely, some kind of thrush and some kind of tit. I didn't bring my European bird book, but I’m going to pretend the thrush was the elusive Florence Nightingale.

Probably the most beautiful sight I saw in Florence though was in Santa Croce, the church which houses the funerary monuments and/or remains of many famous Florentines, including Machiavelli, Michaelangelo, Dante, Galileo, and Marconi. The church is being restored on the inside, so much of it was covered with scaffolding. In the dark church, the lights on the scaffolding used by the restoration artists were oddly beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that I almost wish I could design a church altar myself out of scaffolding. It was the perfect bookend to a day begun with a conversation with the guide/architect about how Florence needs to find a balance between preserving its history and participating in the 21st century.

After Santa Croce, I found a restaurant some friendly Canadians ("We're from Ottowa, that's the capital!") recommended at breakfast. Unfortunately, it was closed, so I went to the restaurant next door which was nothing like what they described (nor should I have expected it to be).

On the subject of food in Italy, I should comment that I have found some of it disappointing. Not that is has ever been anything but tasty and delightful; rather, it may suffer from too high of expectations. Most of it hasn't been the mind-blowing culinary excursion beyond the experience of average Americans that people like Francis Mayes (Under a Tuscan Sun) would have you believe. And counter intuitively, I think my favorite meal so far has also been the cheapest. The things I've found that are definitely better than America are:

Ice cream (which, by the way, was invented in Florence as part of a culinary competition by a chef who would later accompany Katherine Medici to France and help establish what we now consider French food)
Gnocchi (I've never had any in America that I enjoyed, so making it palatable is an accomplishment in itself)
Caprese (the salad with tomatoes and fresh mozzarella)

I think the thing I'll miss the most is the cheese. It really is worthy of any Francis Mayes-esque description, but otherwise, I think America has done pretty well at adopting Italian cuisine. And in a few things, Americans have improved upon the Italian original. I'm speaking, of course, of pizza. While the pizza was good, I've had better tasting pizza in a similar style in Germany, Ukraine and Poland. And when you compare it to Papa Murphy's gourmet vegetarian, well, you can't.

Having finished my last Italian meal (for now), I collected my bags from the nunnery and took a cab to the train station, where my computer could be plugged in. I really don't understand Italian outlets. There seems to be two different standards, which is about the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard. (P.S. And now it doesn't fit the plug in on the train. What is up?)

---

Here’s a quote from the heated conversation of the two Russian girls sitting next to me at the train station: “You see a basilica and say, ‘Ooh! Basilica! Let’s go inside!.’ Then we go inside. On the next street, again “Ooh! Basilica!” I think that’s as good an expression of the tourist condition as any.

I won the gelottery.

2009-09-16T00:41:00.002-05:00

This is a post I wrote after my first day in Florence, but didn't have the ability to post until now.

I'm a little frustrated tonight that my plug adapter doesn't fit into the electrical sockets in the convent in Florence. It worked beautifully in Rome, and I don't get how sockets in the same country can be different. Also, I'm fairly sure their Web site said this place has wifi access in the lobby. However, the nun at the front desk doesn't think so (and wasn't too clear on what "Internet" means), so despite being able to detect a strong but password-protected signal, I now have even less Internet access than I did in Rome. It's only for one night here though, than a night train to Paris. My plan is to work as long as I can on battery and then save things to a USB drive and go to an Internet cafe. (P.S. Internet guy wouldn't let me use a USB drive because of virus concerns. What was I paying for again?)

Despite all that and the continual smell of urine in the streets, Florence is wonderful. After breakfast in Rome, I got the 8:30 train to Florence and arrived just after 11:00 a.m. I was able to use the time to sort through and resize the photos from my first day in Rome, so hopefuly I can get those posted when the gods of fortune and Web access smile upon me again.

When I got on the city bus in Florence to go to the convent (and was able to identify the correct bus myself!), it was pretty empty, so I sat in one of the seats and put my luggage in the other. At the next stop, it quickly filled up, and left standing were two Spanish ladies, an older Italian woman, and two American guys, a college-aged son and his fifty-something father. Recalling discussions with students in Ukraine about examples politeness, I got up, moved my luggage, and offered seats to the ladies. Immediately, the two American men sat down. Sigh. There are names for people like that, but none of them are fit for polite company, which is actually kind of convenient, since it means I could share them with those two.

After dropping off my bags, I walked by the Palace Pitti, over Ponte Vecchio, ate lunch, and wandered around until I eventually found the Duomo, but not until after finding a lot of other places I should probably return to but wanted me to buy admission tickets I wasn't interested in paying for at the moment.

The Duomo is one of the most amazing churches I've ever seen on the outside, but inside it's surprisingly sparse and austere. It's a night and day difference from the ornate interiors of the basilicas of Rome.

I climbed the 414 steps of the campanile, which nearly caused heat stroke. The staircase is barely wider than my shoulders and with very little air circulation. Add in a steady stream of people headed both up and down plus the actual exertion of climbing the steps, and it all sums up to heat, exhaustion and uncomfortably close encounters with people just as hot and sweaty as you. The view is worth it though, and descending the staircase was much easier. In fact, coming down I felt like a conquering hero.

After the campanile, I went in search of more water. You would think someone would make a fortune selling water and little fans at the base of it (or better yet, at the security office at the top), but neither the guards nor the souvenir stands had any. I asked for mineral water at a nearby restaurant and they directed me to find a grocery store, which seems counterproductive for a restaurateur, since I know they had it on the menu. I eventually got a liter at a Gelateria. Anyway, I feel this all points to one of the problems with too much tourism. It makes the locals not really care about the well being of guests. If you go to someplace that rarely gets tourists, for instance, Alliance, Nebraska or Koszalin, Poland and look on the verge of a heat-related medical incident (I felt like I looked that way anyway), people will find you water.

I'm sorry to be so negative all the time. I really am enjoying myself and experiencing amazing sites and tastes. I guess one of the downsides of not having a traveling companion is not having anyone to vent to, so it all goes on the blog.

Anyway, by the time I finished all my Duomo-related sight seeing, I'd been walking for about three hours straight, so I went to the train station and got on one of the open-air sight seeing busses. I've decided they're a great way of getting a handle on sightseeing priorities, and a godsend when you're tired. (Thanks, Jaque!)

One of the stops was the belvedere overlooking the city. The view is amazing. You'll see what I mean whenever I have the ability to post photos. Camera and I were there for about half an hour.

I got back on the bus and continued around the city. At a little afer six I started falling asleep on the bus and it conveniently stopped a block away from my convent. That's when I came in and started getting frustrated about power outlets and Internet access.

Tommorrow I do all the things I didn't buy tickets for today.

For now though, I'm going to head out in search of gelato before bed.

Nothing that funny happened on the way to the forum

2009-09-12T15:34:00.001-05:00

In Rome, there’s no such thing as an anachronism. Everywhere you look there is Baroque, Romanesque, Classical, Neo-Classical, modernist, etc, and it all looks equally charming, and usually equally dingy. It’s kind of like my kitchen. It seems like no matter how long a time it’s been since I’ve cleaned it, it’s always about the same amount of messy, give or take a few dishes.

Anyway, I made a list of pros and cons of my time in Rome. Spoiler alert: the pros win.

Things I’m rather happy about:

1. My daily gelato

Gelato translates as ice cream. I don’t think it needs any further explanation.

2. My tour of the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel

I splurged and went on a guided tour. I had no illusions that I’d be able to see much in the museum, and at least with a guide, I learned a lot about the few things I saw. The guide had grown up in a bilingual home with an American mother and gone to college in the US, so both his English and episteme were more pleasant than most tours I’ve gone on.

His overarching thesis throughout the tour was that most of us had come to see Michelangelo’s work, but in order to understand it, you had to first explore the works that inspired him. The Pope first opened the Vatican collection to the public during Michelangelo’s childhood. Prior to that, only princes, high clergy and ambassadors ever saw the art of antiquity. The act of making art public, perhaps more than anything else, informed the renaissance style.

3. The “no flash” setting on my camera

I have a surprising number of fairly good, guilt-free photos. Enough, in fact, to make me glad I’m hauling the beast around instead of a more convenient point-and-shoot.

4. Open-air busses

Per Jacque’s orders, today I marched my self down to Termine Station and got on an open-air sightseeing bus. You get a ticket that’s good for the entire day and you can get on or get off the bus at any stop, and when you’re done there, just get on another one. They’re about 10 minutes apart, so there’s very little waiting. They have recorded tours in at least six languages too, so you can hear about all the places you’re passing in English, and then switch to German when you go around again.

5. Mozzarella

For lunch, I had colonelleni (I have no idea how to spell it, but I know it wasn’t something I’d seen written before), which was kind of like pasta blintzes baked in cream sauce. With it, I also had a tomato and mozzarella salad. Basically, it was big slices of tomato and fresh mozzerela cheese with salt and olive oil and a little lettuce to garnish the plate.

I don’t know how to describe the cheese, but it was unlike any mozzerella I’ve ever had. It was moist, tender, and full of flavor without being pungent. Perhaps the best explanation is that it was like a slice of a giant cottage cheese curd, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t do it justice.

6. Old ladies from Manchester

This morning at breakfast in the convent, I sat with British ladies. This is their 31st trip to Rome.

The more talkative of the two ladies told me that she was a teacher for many years and had been married to a Polish man who had only taught her one word of Polish: chleb (bread). One of her sons is now on the Liverpool city council and a former student of hers is Paul someone, whose name I probably should have recognized because he now plays for Manchester United. Despite those connections to rival teams, she’s more of a Man City supporter herself.

When I told them my former roommate is a Chelski fan, they found that very amusing.

Here’s a highlight from our conversation about her grandkids: “What do you do with a bachelor’s in theoretical physics? Fix computers, apparently.”

The other one gave me a lot of advice about sightseeing in Rome, much of which I found to be inaccurate, but I’d imagine 30 visits or so ago, it was very useful to them.

7. Friendly Germans

Probably because of my family background, or maybe because my first trip to Europe was to Austria and Germany, but I gravitate towards Germans. Since I didn’t bring a watch, and I haven’t gotten a SIM card for my phone yet, I have been asking my fellow tourists for the time every so often, and usually I chose to ask the Germans.

In St. Peter’s square, I asked an older German gentleman with a watch, and he told me 6:20. His wife corrected him, saying it was 4:30. They then had a brief argument about which was the big hand and which was the small hand. She won; it was 4:30.

Shortly after that, I discovered that I can check the time on my camera.

8. The Pantheon portico

The Pantheon was, I believe, the first pagan temple to be converted into a church, and it’s still an active place of worship today. I know this because when I got to the Pantheon, it was 6:00 p.m. and they had started saying mass inside. There was a large sign and a barricade at the door, saying it was closed to anyone not there to pray.

A lot of my fellow tourists were hanging out in the piazza in front of the Pantheon waiting for it to reopen when suddenly we heard from out of nowhere loud, crashing thunder and then the pitter-patter of rain.

Within a minute, there were at least two hundred other people taking shelter with me under the columns of the Pantheon, and the rain brought out a festive atmosphere in everyone. When it let up, we all headed our separate ways, and I managed to get as far as the Fontana di Trevi before it started up again.

9. Cats in ruins

There’s a large excavation out in the open in the middle of Largo di Torre Argentina in which several black cats live. I’m not sure what the story behind it is, I think the site was some sort of temple, and maybe it was associated with cats. Anyway, there was also a large sign in Italian and English at the site advertising an animal shelter a few blocks away and describing how they care for the cats. Strange and wonderful.

10. Understanding conversations … in foreign languages!

Most of the time, the conversations I overhear are exactly the sort of thing you hear in English. However, even the mundane becomes exotic and challenging when it’s foreign.

For example, at the Coliseum, I overheard this dialogue between two Russian teens:

Brother: “Stand over there so I can take your picture.”
Sister: “Why always me?”
Brother: “Mom said we must take pictures.”
Sister: “Why don’t you stand over there?”
Brother: “It’s my camera!”
(His logic is unassailable.)

Likewise at the Coliseum, there was a Ukrainian family who were quite peeved with the ticket cashier because they did not qualify for the “European” ticket price. Ukraine is the center (geographically) of Europe, whether it belongs to the EU or not!

I just wish I could understand the Italians who I actually have to rely on for goods and services.

11. Business casual clothes

While my original intent was mostly just to not look too American, there was a guy ahead of me in line the guards ordered to tie a shawl around his legs at St. Peter's today, and I was happy it wasn't me. Grown up clothes have their advantages.<>

12. Zen tourism

Douglas Adams described the Zen method of driving as picking a car that looks like it knows where it’s going and following it. While you might not get where you wanted to go, you usually end up where you truly need to be. Given my somewhat famous lack of directional orientation, I tend to apply Adams’ theory to sight seeing. I don’t think I would have ever found the Spanish steps if it weren’t for following a small family carrying groceries. Likewise, I didn’t even realize the church I stumbled upon following a Japanese couple was the one I was looking for until I’d already explored about half of it.

I may not know where I’m going, but I do a pretty good job of ending up where I need to be.

Things I could do without:

1. That smell

While walking down a dark alley, I overheard two Germans coming from the other way. The lady said something to the effect of, “Do you sense the stench I’m smelling?.”
The man replied, “Yes, urine.”

Their conversation could have easily narrated many other places around the city. It seems wherever there is an open archeological dig, someone has recently urinated there.

2. Cashiers

I don’t know what the deal is with cashiers here, but twice yesterday I was glared at and sparked a whiny conversation with a coworker for needing to break a twenty instead of having exact change.

Today I had a much better time with them because I had coins. I did, however, manage to drop my wallet and spill its contents on the floor of the restaurant I had supper at because I was trying to juggle an ice cream cone, my camera bag, and find exact change. The elderly cashier, who could almost pass for Santa Claus, was very kind about it, considering I was able to give him exact change.

3. Jet lag

I tried writing and going through photos last night and faded out sometime around 8:30 p.m., then awoke around 3:00 a.m. ready to meet the world. Since the world, particularly breakfast, was not yet ready to meet me, I eventually managed to go back to sleep and make it to 7:00 a.m.

4. Kodak

When the Vatican Museum decided to restore the Sistine Chapel, they found they had no budget for it. So, they had companies bid for the rights to the chapel. Long story short, Kodak owns exclusive rights to all photography or other reproductions of anything in the chapel for another fifteen years still. That means we can’t take photos inside, even without flash on. Epic P.R. fail. Kodak managed to take an overwhelming good they were doing for the world and turn it into a reason for tourists—the people most likely to purchase their products—to resent them.

5. Soreness

It doesn’t matter how good of shoes I have, my feet just aren’t used to this much walking anymore. Yesterday was actually worse than today, probably because of amount of time spent hauling my luggage around the streets of Rome trying to find the convent I’m staying at. Thank you, Thomas Jefferson, for America’s grid-pattern streets.

6. The tanness of everyone around me.

If there's anywhere that needs a civil rights movement for the ghastly pale, it's Italy. The few redheads and I stick out like sore thumbs. Perhaps that's why I've been gravitating toward the Germans.

I have, however, done my best to "get a little color" as Mom calls it, and currently that color is lobster red.

That's about it for my time in Rome, bright and early tomorrow morning I'm headed to Florence for the next two days. I will post photos at some point, but I need time to sort through them and also an internet connection that doesn't require begging a nun for a Cat-5 cable.

Winding my way to Rome

2009-09-11T07:20:00.005-05:00

I’m now in my convent/hotel in Rome. I’ve been in the city for about four hours now and still haven’t done any sight seeing. I have successfully taken the train from the airport, bought my next train ticket for Florence to Paris, took the metro to the stop nearest my hotel, and checked in to the hotel after about 40 minutes of wandering around wondering where street names might be on both my map and the streets themselves. Melinda’s yellow bag got quite a workout.

The smells of Rome remind me more of Ukraine than Western Europe. The train from the airport to the central station smelled like Sergey after a soccer match, and after my long flight, I’m sure I wasn’t helping any. At the train station, I stood in line to buy tickets behind a young American couple. I hope I didn’t creep them out by continually sniffing in their general direction. Admittedly, mass transit systems are generally the armpit of a city anyway, so I’ll see if the smell similarity holds up at the more touristy areas.

The flight over was perhaps the worst Transatlantic flight I have yet experienced. It didn’t help that the flight attendants didn’t have a vegetarian meal for me as I had requested and said it must be my fault. But the icing on the cake was the shrill woman from Kansas City who sat in front of me. She was a leaner. About an hour into the flight, she shoved her seat back into my knees and kept it there for the rest of the flight, even during and after touchdown when we had all been instructed to place our tray tables up and our seat backs in the full upright position. The result was seven hours of my knees at odd angles. Now, I know the ultimate fault lies with American Airlines for their seat design and spacing. However, I still feel it is always rude to lean back your seat if an adult is sitting behind you.

Even the lady sitting next to me tsked at the woman, but it went unnoticed and I didn’t want to cause a stir. You never know when there’s an air marshal on a power trip aboard.

My seatmate was a good part of the trip. We didn’t talk a lot, but when we did it was pleasant, she didn’t smell, didn’t drink, and stayed on her side. What more could you want in a seatmate? She was wearing hijab, so naturally I wanted to ask her all sorts of questions related to Little Mosque on the Prairie, but since she was from Los Angeles and not Canada, I decided that would be inappropriate on more than just the usual levels.

The guy sitting behind me in O’Hare sounded almost eerily like Lowell Hagele when he talked: pitch, cadence, intonation, all of it very Hagelian. When I turned around just to make sure it Lowell wasn’t stalking me, I saw his mohawk and the dragon tattoos on his scalp flanking his hair were less like Lowell. He did talk about living in Japan though …

In Omaha, the 20-something Latino woman sitting next to me was speaking to a friend on the phone in a mixture of Spanish and English. During one break in the Spanish, she said, “I want to be on the hot tamale train.” I was reading a very funny book, so my laughter may or may not have seemed related to her conversation.

Well, considering I only meant to write that I’m here safe and sound, I should probably get going. My goals are to 1) find a bankomat (ATM) 2) find something to eat and 3) go to the Coliseum. From there on, it’s anyone’s guess.

P.S. The "free Internet" the convent advertised is not, in fact, Wifi, but rather a cord I can plug in only in the lobby. So, I won't be doing a lot of updating from here.

The black cat determined to cross my path.

2007-08-27T16:30:00.001-05:00

There's a little black cat that lives about half a block away from me on Prescott. Every time I walk by, it runs out from its hiding place near the porch and wants to be petted. It meows plantively and follows for the rest of the block whether it gets petted or not. It's really cute, and I'm not superstitious. Still, it seems a bit odd to me that, out of all the multitude of cats, the one who wants to be my friend--to get "familiar" if you will--is a black one.

2007-07-06T13:46:00.000-05:00

For a good time, search for "Mormon Commercial" on YouTube.com. You'll find hilarious treats like these three from Deseret Bank:

Searching for "Mormon Missionary Dance" is pretty fun too.

Eurotrash that I love

2007-05-09T20:47:00.000-05:00

One of those things that I should be more embarrassed to admit than I obviously am is my enduring love for Eurovision. This song contest, now in it's 51st year, is something of the original European Idol with an Olympic-esque twist. Tomorrow is the semi-finals and Friday is the final. I can't wait.

I've already listened to all the songs, and you can too since they're all posted on YouTube. Just search for "ESC 2007" and you'll find them. Anyway, here are my predictions for this year:

The song that would win if Europeans had any sense (but won’t because they don’t):

France. Les Fatals Picards, “L’Amour a la Francaise.”
This is the song I most want to listen to again and again … indeed, I have been listening to it again and again and I still don’t mind it. Even my resident European listens to it on repeat, so it may have some hope.
Honorable mention goes to Israel for "Push the Button" by Teapacks.

The TurboEthnoPop that you secretly like:

Bulgaria. Elitsa and Stoyan, “Voda”

The TurboEthnoPop that makes you denounce entire people groups:

Greece. Sarbel, "Geia Sou Maria."

Most blatant use of multiple languages to win votes:

Romania. Todo Mondo, "Liubi, Liubi, I Love You."

Most obviously a wish for the good old days when the Eastern Bloc couldn’t vote:

Sweden. The Ark, "The Worrying Kind."
Honorable mention goes to Ireland, but I don't even want to talk about that one.

Least likely to surprise you on an American top 40 station:

Andorra. Anonymous, “Salvem Al Mon.”

Most likely to make the world wonder what they were smoking when they voted (and how they can get some too): Tie.

Ukraine. Verka Serduchka's "Danzing." Ukraine's most famous transvestite comedian's song has a lot of confused things about it, not the least of which is that, while much of it is in German, there is a bit in Mongolian.

Switzerland. DJ Bobo, “Vampires are Alive.” The title says it all. Seriously?

I'm disturbed.

2007-03-20T22:45:00.000-05:00

Sergey went to 300 opening weekend and he (surprisingly) didn't like it. When he told me about it, I was even more disturbed by it than he was. Rather than being loyal to historical fact ... even by Hollywood standards ... they tried to be loyal to a comic book. The result is a film more like The Lord of the Rings than I Claudius.

The Persians are coded racially as black and brown and physically as either weak, handicapped, deformed, or monstrous--always inhuman and objectively evil. This takes any complication out of the battle, and also removes any real potential for literary value from the film. Of course, this is a necessary part of war. Soldiers and civilians alike can't commit and support the atrocities it takes to win if they define the enemy as fellow humans. This is why ideologies of racial and ethnic superiority are so important in war times. It's also why we always have a name for our enemy other than "people:" gook, commie, jap, jerry, rag head ... whatever is in vogue this year.

In direct contrast, the Spartans employ the rhetoric of freedom fighters. They are shown as the saviors of Western civilization (debatable) and as supporters of democracy against a tyrant (definitely false). There was a reason Spartans had such a reputation as warriors. They trained constantly out of fear. Spartan society was totally dependant on slave labour, more so than other Greek city states. The hollow speeches about freedom in the film are much like a Polish oligarch's speech before the Long Sejm about guarding their "golden freedom" against the interests of the serfs. The Spartans were aristocrats living in a monarchy who trained in violence to suppress any revolt mounted by the slaves upon which their economy depended.

It's not the historical inaccuracy that really gets me. As you can no doubt already see, this is a politically charged film. Every war seems to start with oligarchs making speeches about freedom, and the current war/s is/are no different. What's most distressing is that, at a time when an already over-extended America seems determined to invade Iran, the most popular film in the country dehumanizes Iranians.

That was my gut reaction first hearing about the film, and I now know I wasn't alone. About half the critics world wide who have reviewed it have found it lacking and in poor taste. The Iranians are really upset about it. And the director and producer say again and again that it has nothing to do with modern politics. Of course, they've also praised themselves for its "accuracy."

So, here's my conclusion, I'm certainly not going to spend money on that movie. And I invite you to avoid it as well if you haven't already seen it. I realize the filmmakers won't notice my little boycott, but I will know I had no part in this travesty.

If you'd like to see a truly excellent film that can simultaneously makes you think and restore your belief in humanity, I suggest you watch Amazing Grace. It's a fairly accurate telling of William Wilburforce's fight against slavery in the British Empire. He was a man who truly represented freedom. I can't express in words how good that movie is, so you'll just have to see it for yourself.

Daylight savings crime

2007-03-11T22:14:00.001-05:00

Today, proving Tanya and I were not operating on well-rested minds, we started wondering what would happen if someone committed a crime during the hour that is lost for daylight savings time. How would the police report it? As long as you did something verifiable an hour later, you'd have an air-tight alibi for the time of death. And does the crime really happen the following fall when the hour is returned to us?

Or, what happens if you check in to work at 1:00 a.m. and then check out one hour later at when it is again 1:00 a.m., do you get paid for your hard work? I almost wish I were hourly so I could test it out next year ... or even better, get paid for that extra hour next fall.

Cushman, Scott. Oris Alfred Cushman, 1921-2007. Eulogy presented 27 Feb. 2007. Kramer Funeral Home, Omaha, Nebraska.

2007-02-27T10:57:00.000-06:00

We are here to remember the life of Oris Alfred Cushman. He meant something different to each of us. For some, he was a brother or a father or a fellow church member. Some of you knew him as “Lightening.” For me he was Grandpa. My profession is public relations and despite that, I shall endeavor to be straight forward and honest with you today.

Grandpa was born on July 8, 1921 in Herman, Nebraska, 13 pounds of bouncing baby boy. He grew up on the farm and enjoyed the distractions of small-town life.

In 1943, Grandpa went to war. Like so many who return from war, he did not like to talk about this part of his life. Once, after I had returned from Poland and when he was first showing signs of memory loss, he told me more about the war than he had ever told his sons. He described flying from Texas to Brazil and the humidity when they got off the plane. He told of flying next to dry North Africa where they waited for the invasion of Sicily and Italy. Of the invasion itself, he simply said they “drove straight up the boot,” providing no descriptions of cathedrals, vineyards, local resistance or even the weather. He made it sound more like a car race than anything else, and perhaps that was how he wanted to remember it.

Sometime after he returned home but before he stopped wearing his uniform to the dance halls, he met Betty Ann Moyer of Fremont, Nebraska. He was handsome in his uniform and light on his feet. Before they even really got to know each other, they drove to Marysville, Kansas, just across the state line, and got married on Dec. 21, 1946.

They were very different people. She was a school teacher who prided herself on her intelligence. He had always struggled in school. She detested sports, he would plan his life around ball games. He spent most of his adult life working in meat processing plants. She became a vegetarian. Somehow they made it work.

Their first son, Robert, was born almost exactly nine months after their wedding. Their second son, Dennis, my dad, was born in 1948.

One day, a lady stopped by their home selling religious books. Grandma didn’t have the money to spend on anything extra, but showed interest. The colporteur gave her an issue of Signs of the Times for free. Grandma read it from cover to cover and mailed a response card inside asking for more information about the Seventh-day Adventist church. In 1952, when she was six months pregnant with Bruce, Grandma was baptized in the Omaha Memorial Seventh-day Adventist Church. On December 27th of that same year, Grandpa followed her example.

Grandpa found the lifestyle restrictions of the Seventh-day Adventist culture were not for him. He wanted smoking breaks at work. I’m not sure if he really valued smoking, but he definitely wanted smoking breaks. He wanted to watch ball games on Saturdays. These habits became points of contention between my grandparents and eventually an agreement to disagree. Largely because of Grandma, Grandpa was disfellowshipped from the Adventist church. When he gave up smoking and was re-baptized on Aug. 25, 1984, Grandma was elated.

In many ways, Grandma had been the leader in their relationship. When she started losing her memory in the late ‘90s, Grandpa became her care giver, a role she’d never let him fill before. To the end, she wanted him near her and he wanted her close to him. On good days, they acted more in love than I’d ever seen them before. The horrible disease that has now taken them both from us gave them an opportunity to discover true love together. Grandma died in May 2005 and we stoic Cushmans mourned her loss in our own ways. Grandpa’s decline accelerated after her death.

This brief sketch of a life does not have the makings of a New York Times bestseller. Grandpa was neither famous nor infamous. Neither a saint nor a notable sinner. Not a philanthropist, Nobel laureate, political visionary or military mastermind. When histories of his generation are written, his name will not even be a footnote. And that would be O.K. with him. He never sought that sort of success.

At times like these, we are tempted to evaluate the life that has passed. It is only natural. However, the standards we employ in such an evaluation say more about us than about the departed. How can we measure someone like my grandfather?

A couple years ago I had a creative writing professor who approached grading from a very post-modern prospective. Rather than using any received notions of what good writing is or isn’t, she graded based on how well her students achieved the goals they set for themselves. If we examine the life of Oris Alfred Cushman based on his own values system rather than any received notions of success, we find that Grandpa was indeed an accomplished man.

As I’ve spoken with our family over the last few days, four themes from Grandpa’s life have emerged:

1. His sweet tooth.
2. His love of spectacle.
3. His craving for social outlet
4. His wish for his sons to be comfortable with their lives.

The first item, his love affair with sugar, is almost legendary in our family. He was not a man who accepted an ice cream truck was only for children. The first story my mom remembers my dad telling her about Grandpa was the disastrous baking of a purple cake (not purple frosting, mind you, a purple cake). Even on his death bed last Tuesday, as Mom handed out candy to the gathered family, the mention of the word and sound of wrappers opened his eyes and revived him slightly.

The second characteristic, his love of spectacle, earned him his nickname of “Lightening.” If a carnival or baseball game was going on in town, he would disappear from his chores as fast as lightening. In later years, he enjoyed watching televangelists, not because he had a burning religious fire for them to feed, but because of the circus-like spectacle they created.

His love of spectacle was inextricably linked with his yearning for social contact. He always wanted to see people and be among them. He was known for always getting to work early … not because he had any wish to work more than an eight-hour day, but because he wanted to have morning coffee with his coworkers. When he retired, he continued waking up early to have coffee with his cronies, walking daily to Crossroads Mall food court. I believe he watched sports not because he cared who won, but because he wanted to have something to talk about. He loved watering the lawn with a hose rather than a sprinkler so he could watch the cars and greet passersby. When the Omaha Memorial church was constructing their school building, he walked there nearly every day and worked hard—again, not because he had a particularly strong work ethic, but because that was where Al Workman and his other friends were.

And finally, his relationship with his sons was not contingent upon their successes and failures. He may not have won awards for being the best father, but at least he never assigned his sons notions of what is and isn’t valuable achievement. I can respect that legacy and can see echoes of that in the way my father has supported my brother and my sometimes hair-brained ideas of achievement.

If we remember Grandpa’s life in terms of these values, it was a good life. Thoreau wrote that “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” That was not my grandfather. His life was quiet, he was, after all, Lightening and not thunder. A quiet life, surrounded by friends, family, charming spectacles and sweet food, in his estimation, was quite enough.

We here today are a testament to his particular brand of success.

The official cast signing entry

2007-02-13T18:49:00.000-06:00

That's it, my armored arm (and if I were more intelligent, I'd figure out a way to include "amore" in that sentence). This new-fangled cast technology makes signing casts hard, so I'm overcoming with technology. Leave a comment below and consider my cast signed.

I'm feeling much better this week. I can even type with it though it's harder to use letters on the bottom row (B is a witch) and I have to avoid rotating too much when I use the shift and other far left keys. I can even lift the arm without using my other hand. My biggest problems are:
1. I can't close my coat and baby, it's cold outside.
2. I start out sleeping with the best of intentions to keep my arm elevated over my heart but wake up in the morning with it fat and swollen and either at or below heart level.
4. I shun water like Elphaba, the Wicked Witch (by the way, I love Wicked). I can't get the cast wet and I can't sweat, so there goes my participation in the employee wellness campaign.

Honestly, there was a third point, but I can't remember what it was.

Happy signing everyone, I look forward to seeing what you'd write on my cast if it were more conducive to writing on.

Corollary: two legs bad, two wheels bad

2007-02-07T14:18:00.000-06:00

This morning I broke my left ulna riding my bike on the way to work. Well, now that I think about it, it was more like a second after an unplanned and volatile dismount from my bike. Part of the ulna that forms a joint with the carpals has set itself free and is floating in my arm.

It hurts to articulate my wrist, which is why they put it in a brace. It doesn't help as much as it could. Neither do the pain meds, which I suspect to have psychotropic qualities since I just thought this week's Gilmore Girls was well written for a change. As long as the wrist is elevated and not moving it's OK.

I'm considering typing only with letters on the right side. I on' hink i ok I'll go bk o noml.

Tomorrow I have an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon to learn more about my future. I'm hoping for Callie from Grey's Anatomy.

I'm starting a list of things I now dislike intensely:

* buttons

* broken reflectors

* the letters q, w, e, r, t, a, s, d, f, g, z, x, c, v; numbers 1-5 and corresponding symbols.

* anything not in the proximity of my right arm is dead to me.

More to follow.

"Two legs good, two wheels better," chant the sheep

2007-01-31T21:48:00.000-06:00

This morning, like most mornings, I rode my bike to work. It's my not-so-secret weapon in the Union College faculty and staff wellness competition. Between the high winds and cold, it took twice as much time to get to work than it did this summer. After I got to the office, the snow started coming down.

Most of this winter I've been trying to avoid biking in the snow. I didn't think it was as safe as walking. That is, until lunch time.

Tanya and I are developing habits and one of them is lunching at her place on Mondays and Wednesdays. So, around 12:20 I was on my way down Prescott to dine on tasty black bean chili and quesadillas. Crossing a street, I stepped on extremely slick ice cleverly masked by snow. My right ankle turned left, my knee turned right, and I sat on top of them both.

It hurt a lot at first and then I realized the cracking sound I'd heard (and on which I based my rationale for being in pain) was the ice and not my bones. I got up and hobbled along. By the time I got to Tanya's, I'd decided I hadn't done any permanent damage. I don't think I even sprained it. And yet it's kind of a dull pain all the time and a sharp pain when ascending or descending stairs.

That's not really the point though. Tonight I worked until 8:30, partly because I have plenty to do, partly because it's a Tanya and Scott space night, and mostly because I didn't really want to ride home with the awkward ankle and the snow, ice and wind.

Finally I did leave and got on the bike with some trepidation. And it was great.

It's amazing how much traction a bike actually has on snow and ice. I slid a lot less on my two wheels than on my two feet. It just goes to show that sometimes I'm wrong.

But please, don't tell anyone.

The heartbreak of adult acne

2007-01-19T13:43:00.000-06:00

Figure 1: Artist's depiction of Scott and Ellen.
Note the accurate paleness of Scott's skin and the huge zit.

Right in the middle of my forehead, something is growing. I'm becoming a frakking unicorn.

I'm just glad Ellen and her taxidermy dreams are a couple states away.

In a culture that pines after youth, I had hoped that age would at least give me the advantage of clear skin. Nope. Frakking unicorn.

Schemes set to music

2007-01-14T23:55:00.000-06:00

I've got a song stuck in my head. It's the tune of "Hal-la-la-la-la-la-le-lujah," which happened to be a Pictionary word from earlier this evening at Ashley B's birthday party. The word, however, has evolved into, "Ono-ma-no-ma-no-ma-topoeia," which is actually quite a tongue twister to sing.

Meanwhile, I'm not sold on the "advantages" of Windows Vista, but Microsoft's marketing team has again showed they're the more intelligent arm of the corporation. They hired Demetri Martin to subtly pitch the product. I can spend hours on this site before getting bored or brain numb. Indeed, not long ago Tanya and I did spend an extended period of time listening to it.

On another technology front, it's amazing what a good dusting can do for a computer. My laptop has a crappy Prescott core Pentium 4 (world-renown for running hotter than hades and crashing), which means the fans must spin constantly and I can't set it flat on anything for fear of blocking the air intakes. Recently the fans had gotten so loud you could hear them in the next room and I was sure the system would die soon. So, today I dusted. It's purring rather than hacking and wheezing now. I'm still not happy with Intel or Toshiba for selling this crap, but I'm much happier with the crap itself. It's always hard to believe that a low-tech solution like dusting can improve the quality of life for such a high-tech gadget.

And finally, with my birthday just a month away (exactly), I want to say if anyone out there is looking for a way to dispose of $600+, I'm currently in techno-lust with Apple's iPhones and Benq's 24-inch monitors. I don't really need either of them, but that's not the point. For those of my readers looking to spend significantly less than that, please no tea. I love tea and appreciate it; I even nearly ran out before Christmas. However, now I have more tea than I can deal with. And no Ukrainians. I'm up to my ears in Ukrainian.

Sweet Land

2007-01-14T00:18:00.000-06:00

If you ever have an opportunity to go see this film, do not hesitate to take it. Sweet Land is one of the best films I've seen in a while. It's beautiful, relevant, erotic without anything you'd make the kids leave the room for, and emotionally charged. Language learners and teachers will have a special relationship with it, but so will just about anyone else. You can see it at the Ross before Thursday the 18th.

And if you're more interested in staying home and having a good laugh, rent Idiocracy. It's a fun romp through a future filled with stupid people begat by stupid people. Idiocracy takes current trends in consumerism and media to their extreme conclusions with hilarious and brilliant effect. It's the brainchild of Mike Judge, the creator of Office Space, King of the Hill, and Beavis and Butthead. It never got released in theatres because it couldn't be essentialized into a marketable trailer.

2.5 items

2006-12-22T11:56:00.000-06:00

Tanya in her pretty dress.

First, and most importantly, the biggest news in my life recently is that I'm off the market. Which is not to say I was ever advertising. Her name is Tanya Cochran, she's an assistant professor of English at Union, energetic, smart, sweet, funny and other fine adjectives. And when I say smart and funny, I don't just mean that she understands my jokes and finds them amusing, though she does and that's incredibly attractive.

Secondly, the blogspot domain has been blocked by the company that Union contracts with to keep the icky bits of the Internet from being accessed on campus. Though I realize there are icky bits using the blogspot domain, blocking all of it is rather heavy handed. This was not a decision made by our Information Systems on campus, but they can unblock it if they wish. I've written to the proper authorities and they said they'd look into it. If you are also an employee or student at Union and would like to be able to read blogs on campus, I suggest you also write or call Information Systems so they realize it's not just me being a squeaky wheel ... yet again. Update: I was able to access blogs from Union today, oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

Overheard:
Very young boy: Mommy, some daddies have hair.
Mommy: Yes, but not your daddy.

The tangled Web we weave

2006-12-06T19:46:00.000-06:00

Today I feel like I accomplished more than I did all last week combined. And yet I get paid no more or less ... but I do get to keep the job. Anyway, I have a work-related inquiry for you all.

Let's say that in the enchanted gum-drop kingdom of Make-Believe-aska, there was an institution of higher learning with a Web site that looked a bit like this (hypothetically speaking, of course). It wanted to have a Web site that was cool, dynamic, useful and attracted students, especially since its traditional method of getting students (liberating them from dungeons) was no longer viable because all the dungeons were empty. You have been chosen as this institution's Web champion. What would you do in such a fantasy scenario to improve the Web site for our forlorn institution of higher learning to make it more attractive, better organized, more interesting and more useful?

I'm asking because before I can get my shiny new content management system, I need to "evaluate needs"--in other words, make a list and check it twice to find out to what extent our current system is naughty and/or nice.

If you'd like to leave a comment, go ahead, or you can e-mail me. I use my ucollege.edu account mostly and I'm guessing all of my limited readership know what that is.

In other work-y news, Jacque is out of the office for the rest of the week and she has a good excuse so I can't begrudge her the time. However, this evening I saw international rescue and relief majors in climbing gear on top of the clock tower. It reminded me that if someone dies while she's gone, I'm going to have to write the press release and that is not cool. So for any Unionites out there, please check to make sure Jacque is back in the office before you go act like fools in ways that attract the attention of the media.

P.S. Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I surprise myself.

P.P.S. I can't get enough Frisky Dingo on Adult Swim. If you don't mind rotting your brains with cartoons, you can watch all the episodes on youtube.com

Getting to my roots

2006-12-04T00:33:00.000-06:00

For Halloween, I went to a party as Borat, everyone's favorite fake Kazakh journalist.

"Jak się masz, I am Borat"

I thought I looked rather dashing with dark eyebrows and jokingly speculated about dying my hair--all of my hair because dying the eyebrows alone would just be weird. Friend Wanda, who is a bit of an instigator, encouraged these thoughts. And let's face it, with the way things have been going at work, I need every bit of intelligence I can muster--perhaps leaving the ranks of the blonds is a good thing.

One thing led to another and Wanda came over and dyed my hair tonight. There's still a bit of discoloration of the skin around the eyebrows, but it should be gone soon.

"Living room skeptic"

I feel it's obligatory to also post a flash-in-a-dirty-mirror picture to commemorate the event.

"At least only the camera is flashing you."

Besides the normal dishwater blond, I've temporarily had green, metallic red, and powder grey hair for very short periods. This is the first time I've permanently dyed my hair, but it's not the first time I've had black hair. According to expert testimony (Mom), I was born with a head full of black hair.

P.S. Please don't call me a "blackhead."

The 56th street windtunnel

2006-11-29T19:26:00.000-06:00

In Nebraska, one quickly learns certain laws of nature are just ignored by our dear state. For instance, the rule that says wind only comes from one direction at a time. It doesn't matter which direction I'm going on 56th, to work, from work, when I turn east or west--the wind always blows from whichever direction I'm facing.

That's on a normal day. Yesterday's high temperature was in the sixties; today was in the low twenties. As we all know, wind is generated by a temperature differential between the ground and the air. Warm ground, cold air. Today there were times I was pedaling with all my might just to keep from rolling backwards.

I knew it would be cold, so I wore my Tiffany-made hat that wraps around my neck and is the warmest thing ever. I also wore my new wool Royal Mail sweater vest under my big winter coat. The legs were burning, so thin dress pants weren't a problem. The loose chink in my warmth armor were my hands. Because Fortuna is a crotchety old hag, I haven't been able to find my gloves since it started getting cold.

I will be buying new gloves tomorrow.

This morning I rode to work at the same time other people were arriving, a rare event indeed. A few people recognized me under all my winter gear and no doubt lost all respect for my decision making abilities.

At lunch, I sat at the faculty/staff table, Kyle sat next to me and we made small talk about bicycles. Dr. Russell overheard and said he'd felt guilty today since he'd forsaken his bicycle for a warm ride in his wife's car. "When I got to campus I felt even more guilty because I saw someone riding past the (Everett) Dick Building ... without gloves on!" Dr. Russell said. "That's dedication."

"Uh, that was probably me. I couldn't find my gloves."

It just goes to prove that one person's dedication is another's stupidity.

Tomorrow I need to be at President's Council at 9:00 a.m., so I have to show up to work at the high-profile time again. And since I'm buying gloves tomorrow and not tonight, I'll be on parade with freezing, chapped hands.

###

Overheard in the hall of my apartment building:
Woman: Wait, I've got to go back for my purse
Man: Oh come on, why do women always got to have a purse?
Woman: Because you never pay the damn bill.

Он ядовйто усмехнусля

2006-11-24T11:21:00.000-06:00

This morning I caught myself rejoicing in the suffering of a Fox News anchor. Shame on me. I'd been flipping through channels while eating a breakfast of stuffing and wretched mashed potatoes and heard a Russian name. Naturally I stopped to watch, not realizing until too late that I'd landed on Fox News.

The anchor (who will remain nameless since, well, I just can't be asked to care) was interviewing Mark Brzezinski about the deaths of Alexandr Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya. Many Slavic names were being tossed about and regardless of how many times he said them or heard Brzezinski pronounce them correctly, the anchor could just not get the names out without adding extra sounds, pausing awkwardly in the middle or forgetting whole sections of the name. He was obviously getting a bit flustered by the nation-wide display linguistic incompetence, but was trying to hide his frustration.

It was a joy to behold, especially because he was being a control freak about the interview and yet this one thing remained out of his control.

Next time a top story of the day includes "difficult" foreign names or just unavoidable "big" words, Fox will definitely be my news source of choice. Why do I delight so in the miserableness and misery of others?

Regarding the content of the news story, I think finding Polonium 120 in Litvinenko's system clears up the mystery. It wasn't Putin or his cronies, it was obviously the Polish nationalist, Marie Curie.

Also, before starting the process of making mashed potatoes, check and make sure you actually own a potato masher.

Serhiy quote du jour: (Pointing at red lines left on his arm and chest from sleeping on bunched-up sheets) "I want a tattoo like this."

Fat pants

2006-11-17T20:21:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I bought new pants. They're a solid grey and I've wanted some like this for a while now. They are also larger than I've previously worn--I guess I'm getting both old and fat. The funny thing is I have plenty of pants in the previous size that fit fine--I think the current fashions have just changed the way the pants are being cut in ways that are unflattering to my particular anatomy. Plus, I'm probably getting old and fat. However, I am happy with these pants. I'm sure you're wondering at this point why you should care.

Well, one of the tags on these pants advertises their astounding technology. It says, "Repels stains, wrinkles, and most everything else." I think when advertising pants to men, they might want to mention specifically and in large letters, "... except women."

Also, I got a couple compliments on my sweater which I bought to match the pants. It's OK, but I really think people were just confused. They knew something looked good and assumed it was the sweater, but it was really the pants. So I'll say it myself, "those are some phat pants, Scott."

And now for the piece of this blog everyone will enjoy, the Serhiy quote of the day: "What happens at vespers stays at vespers."

Ich bin kranky

2006-10-19T14:50:00.000-05:00

I'm sick. I took off yesterday from work and did some serious sleeping. Today I'm hopped up on Dayquil. It feels like there is a vast expanse between the top of my brain and my scull. Clouds live there. They kicked out the higher motor functions and creativity that weren't paying their rent. Sergey offered to perform a home trapanation procedure yesterday. I think the meds beat him too it.

Fantastic technology.

2006-06-13T23:28:00.000-05:00

Obviously importing my blog into WordPress was not as painless as advertised, and the only saved template I found was this very old one. At least it has most of the links, but not all. I'm sorry. However, it might be appropriate though because I'm going back to carhenge this weekend. It should be fun.

I've been workin' on the homepage, all the live-long day.

2006-06-08T07:50:00.000-05:00

I'd like some advice. I've been doing minor surgery to the Ucollege.edu homepage the last couple days. I can't do anything major like change the colors or much of the design, but I have done small things like add flags to foreign language content, add a search bar (which IE, Firefox, and Safari all insist on positioning differently), and moved the news. What do you think of it? Can you think of a better way to deal with the news? Do you have any suggestions for small but useful changes?

Such sweet sorrow.

2006-06-07T23:29:00.000-05:00

I taught my last class at Southeast tonight. I'm going to miss it. The hardest part of it though is the single-sphere friends. Most of my students have been fascinating people and we grow close, share genuine affection, and then part to perhaps wave uncomfortably from across the street at some later date. At least at Union the faculty have 4-6 years to spend with the students; Southeast feels like a much more pedagogical one-night stand. Tonight we had a little party thing. Everyone brought way too much food. One of my Adventist students brought chips and papousas. When one of the other students saw the chips, she exclaimed, "I made these!" She works at a tortilla chip factory, so even the store bought food had a personal touch.

The decline of chivalry and the service industry.

2006-06-05T21:24:00.000-05:00

This evening as I was leaving the Senior Center where I teach my class ESL class, I held the door open for the other teacher and one of her students. As I stood there, two girls walked by and one said with honest amazement in her voice, "Wow, they have a doorman for that place!" She was obviously impressed. Briefly, I considered a career as a doorman--the crisp uniform, greeting everyone with a smile and occasionally getting my palm greased with tips. What a low-stress life that must be. Don't worry, for now I'll keep my day job.

The convergence of divergent strands.

2006-06-02T19:57:00.000-05:00

It's not so much that I don't like competition, there's a delicious taste of adrenalin and blood to it that appeals to the repressed carnivorous in me. And that's just the point. I don't hate competition, I hate the parts of myself that emerge when I'm competitive. I can watch myself act like a true red-blooded jerk as though it were an out-of-body experience and I see and hear each and every nerve-grating gesture and inflection without being able to stop myself. This distaste for the competitive has led me to enjoy what I call "cooperative games." For example, I like ping pong when the players try to keep the ball going back and forth as long as possible rather than scoring points. The downside of enjoying cooperative games is that there are so few of them. As I've been getting older and watching my body mass change to jello, I've started regretting the lack of physical exercise that comes along with avoiding competitive sports, but I think I'd rather be a jiggly bum than a competitive prig. There are ways around the problem of competition even in competitive sports. One way is just to train for them and not play them. You have exercise, team work, and all the other positives without ever defeating anyone. Another way is to play bean bags with Daniel or soccer with Sergey. It's liberating. I know I have absolutely no chance of winning save divine intervention, so I just do my best and have fun. But this doesn't really address the central problem of competition: it's simply an early acceptance of defeat. So what is the problem? Games are usually win or lose with no middle ground and amount to zero-sum systems. What you take from the game hasn't been made through the process of playing, but taken from others, the same as most economic systems really just redistribute wealth rather than creating it. I've also been thinking a bit about Lackoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (a line of thought no doubt inspired by the names of stations in Union Market, the college cafeteria). I keep remembering some truthy-ism I heard as a child about Americans strategize for war like it's a football game and Russians strategize like it's a chess game. True or not, there is a preponderance of game metaphors in our military conflicts. And here we have a life and death problem. If we go to a country looking to save lives (like Somalia or Bosnia) or to ostensibly free the people from a dictator (as in Iraq), we need to use win-win metaphors that our socialization has ill-equipped us to conceptualize. And so the THEY in question are all enemies, terrorists, combatants of some sort because the metaphors we use don't allow for the THEM to be on our side. We are predestined to failure as long as keep thinking in terms of opposing teams. This afternoon, Jacque and I talked briefly about my lack of nationalist fervor in a conversation stretching between my parent's anniversary and her recent return from Italy. The problem with overt shows of patriotism is that the self I see reflected is the same self that emerges during competition. I win. You lose. I cringe.

Scenarios for the demise of Serhiy

2006-05-15T11:23:00.000-05:00

I keep imagining the many ways in which Serhiy will die over the next three days. These are not the usual visions of his evisceration that dance in my head when I see yellowing mayonnaise left out on the counter or peanut butter spread on the computer keyboard. These are heartfelt nightmares regarding his trip from Lincoln to Ukraine. This morning he left on Amtrak's California Zephyr for Chicago. It was over two and a half hours late, which deeply frustrated my sleeping schedule (read that metonymically). If it was this late in getting here, how late will it be arriving in Chicago? Serhiy will have to change trains in Chicago and currently has a three hour lay over. But if this one is late and that one is on time, I can envision him lost and homeless in the Windy City. At least there I know people close enough to go get him. Assuming he makes his connection, he'll be in New York tomorrow (Tuesday) around 3:00 p.m. and meet Seth at Penn Station around 3:20. Now here's a part of this trip planning that makes me wonder if it wasn't meant to weed out the poor planners from the gene pool: they have to stay overnight in NYC, but didn't have any arrangements made for shelter. I found this out yesterday when Serhiy was talking about finding ways to bathe in the city. I asked how long he was going to be there and when he replied, "overnight," I said he should bathe wherever they had arranged to stay. It seems their plans up to that point were to either sleep in the airport (where they couldn't check in to get to the comfortable sections until the next morning) or a park. In New York City. So, last night we reserved a room for two at a hostel in the West End, one block off Broadway. It's about two blocks from a subway station that connects to Penn Station, but they'll still have to haul their luggage (in Serhiy's case, two gigantic suitcases and a backpack) through the subway system and then down the street. Growing up in the Midwest, I have certain prejudices regarding the dangers of New York, especially for fish so obviously out of water. Scenes pass through my mind of the NRA-card-wielding South Carolinian and the Uke of Hazard getting mugged on their two block walk through posh Manhattan. Who knows what carousing/sight-seeing they'll do in the afternoon, but I'm sure it will involve unsafe activities. This is, after all, a boy who manages to make mayonnaise a hazardous material. The next morning, they'll have to find their way to the airport, and Serhiy doesn't know which one it is. Hopefully Seth knows. I told Serhiy to just take a cab, but I can imagine they'll try to find a cheaper method that involves lugging large suitcases through public transportation that goes through Brooklyn and Queens. Once at the airport, I see them being unable to understand the thick accent of the TSA agent and being held for questioning, Seth will be given an ultimatum by the judge and end up joining the army, Serhiy will be one of the uncounted, nameless inmates in Gitmo. If he makes it through Chicago, NYC, his transfer in London, and all the way to Kyiv, I still don't think he's out of danger, but at least he'll have friends meeting him at the airport to mitigate the odds of having everything stolen as they make their way by bus then subway to the train station. The real problem will come when he decides he needs to use his Visa card somewhere and a Ukrainian bank will steal all his money and leave him with overdraft fees. Unlike other people who I know that this has happened to, he won't have an embassy to complain to and won't get legal services for free. But at least once he's at home in Kazatin he'll have his real mother to worry about him and it won't be my problem anymore. Of course, this is all just in my imagination. What will probably happen is that, if anything goes wrong anywhere along the way, he'll be approached by some nice stranger who wants to help and probably get a ride, for free, all the way from Chicago to NYC without ever learning their name. They’ll even stick around to drive him to their airport. That's just how things work in Serhiy's world. UPDATE: I was right about the train being late. He got to Chicago 8 hours late and, since he'd missed his connection, Amtrak refunded his ticket and he got a flight to NYC and arrived several hours earlier than he expected. He checked into the hostel, walked around town, and met up with Seth whose train was more than 3 hours late. So, as always, things turned out better than expected through sheer luck.

The nickle scheme worked.

2006-05-10T23:02:00.000-05:00

As I emerged from the mailroom at SeCC's Energy Square office, the office manager walked by, paused, and said, "Your Momma must have raised you right." If I looked surprised, it was not because I doubted her statement. She explained herself, reaching into the room and flicking the light switch, "You turn off lights when you leave rooms." As the bulbs flickered back to life she continued, "but we leave these lights on."

The big news.

2006-05-02T19:12:00.000-05:00

Call me Laura. On second thought, no. Laura Poblete has moved on to do bigger things and I was hired today to replace her at Union's Marketing and Communications department. This means a real salary, benefits, and, if I'm lucky, business cards. The whole shebang. All I have to do is put in forty hours a week. It helps that I already know I like my coworkers. My responsiblities will include writing, editing, and web content management. I'll have a padded cell in the Carnegie building from which to do it. So, if you're in the neighborhood, stop in and see me. I'll be starting part time next week and full time the week thereafter.

Dear Blog,

2006-04-17T08:08:00.001-05:00

I've been distracted recently, blog. I'm sorry I haven't been paying you much attention. You do have a way of eating up all my time though. We should talk about that later. I saw the bright lady again this week and meant to tell you. She was wearing blue and lavendar with lavendar butterfly clips around her bright red hair that stood straight up. She is so cool. I still want to tell you about her outragous outfit that looks so ironic on a 70-something year old lady, but maybe later. You're over a year old now and we didn't even celebrate your birthday. I'm sorry. I've been distracted by other personal, professional, and academic interests. I'm trying to learn how to code real HTML, not just blogger, so a lot of my online time has been spent working on a website. In a couple weeks, maybe you'll get some delicious links out of the project. Also, I've been apartment hunting and I can't forget grading and researching. So much to do, so little time. My Heila, your best friend and my laptop, has also been missing in action, making you even more lonely. She's in Omaha getting fixed right now. Without her, I have to share the desktop with Spaniel and Rozha. So, I'll try to return to you sometime, but for now, let's just enjoy a little vacation. Love, xoxoxoxox, etc, Scott

Metablog blogging

2006-04-10T09:53:00.000-05:00

I spent my procrastination time this weekend working on a new blog layout that you will probably never see. However, it was a great learning experience and I wanted to share with you some of the sites that I think are helpful for bloggers. 1. Statcounter. This is an idiot-proof way of getting information about your visitors. A free account only gives you access to data about your last 100 visitors. If you're like me, you don't rack up the hits too quickly and you certainly don't like spending money, so 100 does the trick. What I really like about statcounter is that it shows you the city from which your visitor came (so I can guess whose been checking without commenting) and also what links they followed to get to you. For instance, this Google search shows that someone who speaks Russian, lives in Lincoln, and uses a different internet service than I do (so not Serhiy) was looking for me. I think it was a former student and that just warms my heart. 2. Browsercam. Have you ever wondered what your page looks like on different platforms with different screen resolutions? This is your site. They give a free 24 hour trial that lets you see how your page is displayed on all major web browsers on all major operating systems. After struggling to get opacity settings right in both Firefox and IE7, I was able to find out that they still looked fine in Safari, Netscape, and most legacy IEs, but were, unfortunately, still completely opaque on Opera 8 (but not 7), IE for Mac, and Konqueror. It still doesn't help with my colors scheme pet peeves though because that's dependent on monitor, not software. 3. Color Scheme Generator. I wish there were a good way to ensure your colors look good to everyone, but there just isn't. The color scheme generator is the closest I've found. It makes color theory simple, giving you a clickable color wheel with two-, three-, and four-color scheme options for different hues of the selected color. Perhaps the most "ooh" but least useful aspect is the ability to select colors as they would be seen by people with various forms of colorblindness. The colors still might appear different on other monitors, but theoretically they will look good because of the use of the color theory. 4. Blogger Help. I find it rather annoying to have to go to a seperate page to read comments. I often even forget what the post said, then I have to go back and forth. That's where "peek-a-boo comments" come in. It's just one of the marvelous things you can learn from Blogger's help pages. 5. Favicon from Pics. There are plenty of favicon generators out there. I like this one. It's easy and will verify the thing for you. 6. Tripod. You've got to host that favicon and any php scripts you use somewhere, right? 7. An HTML validator plugin for Firefox. Blogger comes with enough nonstandard html to cause every blog to have warnings, but this will help you fix the most egregious errors. 8. Finally, when you're generating multimedia content, the most useful tools I've found are The Gimp for photo editing and VirtualDub for video processing. Play with them. They're dreamy. Feel free to add sites you find useful when designing a template. I'd love to hear about them.

This one's for Angie

2006-04-05T21:21:00.000-05:00

No, but seriously, I love Paris in the springtime.

Dear Blog,

2006-04-03T21:57:00.000-05:00

I have a student who has taken a vow of silence. Surprisingly, it has changed class very little. The vow will be up on Wednesday, which is convenient since he is scheduled to present a chapter from our textbook. Last night I was up late grading. I was so tired today in class that I nearly fell asleep. Twice I felt my head jerk up after drifting off. That's bad when you're the teacher. I'm either sick, have allergies, or have got the black lung. Regardless, one of the least sound pedagogical tools I can think of is coughing on the students. In my ESL class tonight, I was hacking before class, had no problems for the entirety of the two hour lesson, then started hacking again when students were asking me questions afterwards. The worst part is that when I start coughing, I also tear up. On the bright side, I might be mistaken for someone who cares. Love, Scott

Why I love ESL, part 3432685.9

2006-03-30T11:50:00.000-06:00

I love new classes. Meeting them for the first time, getting to know each other, scaring them with new vocabulary and grammar on the first day. It's so much fun. Last night was an opportunity to meet my new class at Southeast Community College. On the first night, I like to have people talk to each other then introduce their partner (WWMBD - "What Would Mr. Blake Do?"). Incidentally, this is the first time I've ever taught Colombians (I collect student nationalities like some people collect commemorative flatware; I've had Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Russia, Bosnia, Belarus, Vietnam, Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Brazil, Sudan, Congo, South Africa, Ethiopia, Canada, the US, and now Columbia). After introductions, I like to jump in and talk about the vocabulary we need to know in order to learn a language: noun, verb, auxiliary, modal, infinitive, participle, adverb, adjective, pronoun, conjunction, etc. The students usually know the basic ones, but it still ends up being a bit overwhelming, just as the first day of class should be. At least I'm not as demanding as my Lesen und Aussprach teacher at Bogi, the dapper Herr Felix, who made us memorize the anatomy of the mouth auf Deutsch. By the time we're done discussing subjects, objects, and objects of prepositions, they're usually in desperate need of a break. Last night, our break happened to coincide with the break Elizabeth gave her level four students. These were my students from last semester, and I was secretly elated when they wanted to talk to me. It's not like I have control over their grades anymore, they just like me. It's a good feeling, this being liked. I love old classes. As I talked to Francisco from last semester, some of my new students kept glancing over, wondering who this person was who talked to the teacher like they're old friends. They just don't realize that in another three months, we'll be old friends too.

My newfound dislike for CRTs

2006-03-29T12:37:00.000-06:00

Perhaps it's not a problem with Cathode Ray Tube monitors, maybe it's just my laptop. The LCD screen on my laptop makes things look vibrant and beautiful. It's one reason I call her my Heila (It's a Saami word; look it up). The downside is that when I change the color scheme on my blog/myspace/etc, it looks gorgeous on Heila's beguiling screen but it may look hideous on other screens. In particular, the colors I choose yesterday looked really bad on my work computer. Now they look better on my work computer, but less compelling on Heila. Right now it's supposed to be a dark maroon background, ivory text box, and dark organge highlights. That might not be what you see. Tell me what you think. Lighter shades? Darker shades? Scrap it and start over?

A quick restaurant warning

2006-03-28T19:14:00.000-06:00

For those of you living in Lincoln, I just have to tell you, Taco del Mar is a waste of time and money. It's not that the food is particularly bad, it's just not particularly good. On top of that, they're skimpy compared to their competitors. For the same price as a burrito at Oso or Chipotle, you get something 2/3rds the size and flavor. If you pay a little more, you can get five chips and a dab of salsa. It's on O Street downtown between Pita Pit and Oso Burrito, both of which are much better choices for a meal and have a very similar business models (namely, take a flat bread and let the customer choose what goes inside). Subway and Jimmy John's, across the street, change the formula by adding leavening to the bread and are still better options than Taco del Mar. If you've got a little energy, you could also walk to Bison Witches, Sher-E-Punjab or go to something more swanky like the Blue Orchid in Federal Place. The Blue Orchid, by the way, is very reasonably priced but it feels and tastes pricey.

How I spent my snow day

2006-03-21T14:27:00.000-06:00

To see photos of Ellen, Serhiy, an abominable snow woman, and myself frolicking in the snow, visit my gallery here. The pictures are terribly artistic, by which I mean the lens was fogged over most of the time. I tried to make Ellen happy by posting these on Flickr, but the effort only confirmed that the upload limit is unreasonable and I still loathe the interface, so Zoto it is.

Snow Days

2006-03-20T13:40:00.000-06:00

No, it's not at all ironic that the first day of spring is the biggest snow of the year. OK, so maybe it is a little ironic. Last night when I looked up Union's weather closure webpage, I thought they were being a optimistic. Then this morning around 6:30, I looked it up again and they had decided to close for the day. I was so happy I actually got out of bed and did things. Serhiy was so happy with the news that he rolled over and slept until 12:30. I do believe his reaction was more in the spirit of the day than my own. Slightly distressing, however, is the cancellation of Southeast's classes. Today was supposed to be the final exam and, well, I suppose we'll have to do it on Wednesday. But they need their final scores to know if they can go on to the next level, which starts next Monday. Oh well. There's nothing I can do about it. Looking outside though, it doesn't seem the storm has held up to its end of the bargain. I'm sure driving is not too fun, but it hasn't exactly been a blizzard. In fact, most of the day has been hovering right around freezing which is warmer than I had hoped. If we have a snow day, I want it to be the snow day to end all snow days.

When did I get the point?

2006-03-10T19:26:00.000-06:00

The exclamation point, that is. I have long detested exclamation marks. They are emblematic of weak writing, just like smilies. Both are used as crutches to convey emotion by writers who find they haven't got the vocabulary to communicate nuanced meanings. And yet, despite my disgust with this particular punctuation, I have started employing it with distressing frequency! The problem, you see, is grading. I don't think I'm alone in this regard. Many composition teachers try to stifle the exclamations in their student's work with comments like, "Avoid exclamation points!" or "Let the words lend their own emphasis!" Alright, so those examples are a bit over the top. Still, when I'm writing "show, don't tell" or "cite sources" for the fifteenth time in that sitting, exclamation points just sneak in there. And I'm not alone. Other teachers with much more experience than me have commented on the phenomenon. So why does it happen? Is exclamation frenzy a manifestation of the axiom, "By behold we become changed," like in my ESL class when I suddenly start speaking with poor grammar? Or is it just an indication of brewing frustration? Either way, I'm becoming an exclaimer and I need to cut it out!

One of Many Downsides to American Exceptionalism

2006-03-08T22:01:00.000-06:00

I hope you've all had a happy Women's Day. That's right, Women's Day, 8 March, because the other 364 are men's days. At Union today, neither my students nor the few other people to whom I mentioned the holiday had ever heard of such a thing. Tonight in my ELL class, things were quite the opposite. I figured the women in the class would be missing the special treatment the day engenders (ha ha) at home, so I brought them roses. I thought I would have to explain myself to some of them, but no, it turned out that everyone in class knew about the significance of 8 March. I have students from Africa, the Middle East, Central America, and Eastern Europe. That's a wide variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, but they all celebrate Women's Day on the same day. Just like they all know about the first of May (Labor Day). This got me thinking, if the rest of the world celebrates this holiday, why not America? Apparently, like the real Labor Day, it grew out of the international Socialist movement. America, once the voice of liberalism in the world, had become rather stodgy and conservative politically and economically by the early 20th century when the Socialist movement began. So while the rest of the world embraced it to one degree or the other, Socialism has been unjustly smeared in the United States for a long time (usually with straw man or slippery slope arguments). Therefore, we reject the holidays that Socialism bestowed upon the world that even the United Nations advocates. You can read a little more about Women's Day here, it's fascinating. Perhaps it's symbolic that Monopoly was invented on the same day Socialists set aside to celebrate the contributions of women. Ladies, let me tell you a little about what you're missing. In Eastern Europe, Women's Day is like Valentine's Day here, except without all that awful romantic tension. It doesn't matter if you are dating or married to someone; that doesn't have to define your participation in this day like it does Valentine's Day. And unlike Mother's Day, you don't actually have to have given birth to anyone to be honored. Every guy you're close to, even if you're just friends or related, should give you flowers, candy, or other fun little gifts on this day and they will. Why? Because they don't have all that pressure of second guessing what message each little thing means. I can't think of a better way to feed women's voracious appetite for flowers, candy, and scented candles. And if the guys don't cough up, remember the good old days of 1917 when a Women's Day "Bread for Peace" strike helped topple the Russian government.

The Bus People

2006-03-08T09:31:00.000-06:00

Today on my bus to Union, I sat watching as droplets traced their peculiar paths across the window, only to have their individual identities lost with a splash each time we plowed through a puddle. Two rows behind me, a man held a conversation with himself. At first I thought he was using a cellphone, but a collection of quick glances confirmed he was not. If he's not a paranoid schizophrenic, he sure does a good impression of one. He commiserated with an imaginary friend about the persistence of other voices. He's plagued by questions as part of a government plot to keep him from thinking straight, because, "That's what They want." Musical interludes accompanied his rants and occasional guffaws. He had a rather nice voice, but the do-do-dobeys he sang were largely tuneless. Up at the front, an obese woman talked to the bus driver about "negative people," complaining that one of the drivers never said anything positive the whole time he was driving this route. The irony of her complaint never donned on her. A third man sat, head leaned against the cold glass, with earphones constructing his own private world away from the rest of us. I like to think it was a forest of Grieg or Mozart meadow, but, most likely, it was less pastoral. Perhaps his music drowned in dark notes, as grey and damp as the day. As we turned onto Calvert Street, I wondered if there was a puddle so great the splash could unite us all.

"Alas, it is I, a poor girl from the village of Ghent in present day the Netherlands."

2006-03-06T14:30:00.000-06:00

I remember, back in the day, back when we were young and I was beautiful, back when I thought Latin was funny and just before I asked Buffy to the Celtic-themed banquet (which Angela so expertly orchestrated), Mr. Blake, the legend himself, assigned his creative writing class (of which I was a part), the task of writing bad leads for creative prose, an homage to the master of regrettable leads himself, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, praise be unto him; I remember it with fond rememberance. Now I'll stop trying to write poorly. In all seriousness, this is what Bulwer-Lytton wrote that immortalized him in the world of wretched writing:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness (Paul Clifford, 1830).

Today I was reminded of the author and exercise when I found the website of the Bulwer-Lytton contest. They have been promulgating painful prose for the last 23 years with hilarious effect. In 2005, the contest winner was Dan McKay of North Dakota. He wrote:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

You can find these and many, many more hilariously bad leads here and here.

Smacznego!

2006-03-05T12:09:00.000-06:00

Before you read my post, you may want to visit Angie's blog. Always insightful, her most recent post incited this post. It started as a comment, but it soon became evident that it's a post of its own. We often say that "there's no accounting for taste," and yet experts on a given subject, people who immerse themselves in it and study it, usually agree on what constitutes the pinnacle of an art form. Only people without a grounding in the fundamentals and history of painting would say Da Vinci or Rothko or Rafael suck. Often, "it sucks" is synonymous with "I don't understand it." Perhaps we should recognize a difference between an educated opinion and an uneducated one. In the realm of TV, we can relate these to critical acclaim and ratings, respectively. And when we discover ourselves in disagreement with the educated opinion, we should view it as an opportunity to learn why people in the know appreciate what we do not. That doesn't mean we have to like it, but we should try to understand it. We might even be surprised; once we understand it, we may love it. "Taste" may be a dangerous cognitive linguistic metaphor, conflating our bodily reaction to food with our emotional and mental reactions to art. (Lackoff and Johnson list it as a subset of the Mind as Body metaphor. Here are a few interesting reads relating to cognitive linguistic metaphors.) On the other hand, it's the metaphor we've been working with, so let's run with it. With food, I don't have to like it, but I can understand what appeals to people about the edibles in question. For instance, I have an aversion to chocolate. However, reading about the chemical properties and effects of chocolate as well as listening to chocoholics describe their passion for it makes me able to appreciate the stuff even if I don't want to eat it myself. Likewise, I've never personally found Rothko terribly inspiring, but when I listen to people who do "get it," I appreciate his importance and beauty all the more. More to the point, when a knowledgeable person gives a well-founded reason for why they don't like something, it colors my opinion and begins the process of my own rejection of it. Acolytes to a field often have a sophomoric disdain for what others find beautiful. We try to position ourselves in opposition to those who have gone before us in order to carve out a niche and establish ourselves as having higher sensibilities than our peers and teachers. After all, it's much easier to rip something apart than build it up. I have not been using the first person plural we in vain. I catch myself doing this all the time, and I'm not proud of it. The underlying assumption of these attacks on educated taste is that we are playing a zero-sum game in which accolades for one person or support of their taste detracts from my/our standing in the field. Hogwash. As we have seen, experts sometimes disagree for various reasons, but more often than not, they share commonalities of taste because they know the history and craft of the field. If we can accept that the only real difference between them and us is their grounding in a discipline, then there is accounting for taste and the lack thereof.

Research Poem: compound noun, a literary work into which the author put effort.

2006-03-02T15:53:00.000-06:00

When I included a research poem in my syllabus, the "other" in me (the voice of reason/society/normalcy/etc) was saying the whole time that it was a bad idea. Bad bad bad. I hate naysayers. The undying optimist tried to throttle Mr. "Other" and said, nah, it'll be fine, besides, who's making this syllabus, me or you? The answer, of course, was both of us. Anyway, after receiving treatment for my multiple personality disorder, I put it in the syllabus and made lesson plans to condense what I've learned about poetry in two graduate seminars into a couple class periods. The highlights of this lecture are my ten commandments of dominant mode poetry: 1. Show, don't tell. Let images make your argument for you. 2. Avoid gerunds, they're a copout. 3. Words like stuff, thing, and to be in its many forms are wasted opportunities. 4. Make the poem work on different levels of meaning. 5. Rhyme and meter are there to propel content, not the other way around. If they get in the way of meaning, drop them. 6. Don't assume your reader is an idiot. Allow them to find their own meaning and don't spell it all out for them in the envoy. 7. Formal verse (sonnet, haiku, sestina, etc) gives you limits to work with and can help in the creative process. 8. Pay attention to how the poem works on the page. White space can be employed to further your message. 9. The end of the line is the point of emphasis, so end on content words. Also, you can deemphasize the rhyme scheme by moving it to the interior of the line. 10. Create tension with line breaks. Enjambe! Ten is really an arbitrary number with cultural significance only, and I could think of more if pressed. However, I dare say if people took these to heart, the world would have less doggerel (which is not to say a bit of doggerel does not have its place). I realize that I cannot expect miracles, that these are just freshmen, that I was writing excrement at that stage of life, etc. Still, most of the literary achievements I received seemed to have been written by alien beings who had not listened to one word of my lecture, at least not the content words. It is very, very hard to give much feedback on an uninspiring poem. I tried to provide positive and constructive comments. But, when I read a few of my comments out loud to Ellen, she intimated that I am an unfeeling monster. I had been a bit harsh, despite my best attempts at gentleness. For a while, the naysayer I'd tried to suppress was coming back and I was going to keep poetry out of the freshmen comp. classroom. Then I got my glimmer of hope. I noticed that many of the students who regularly underachieve actually had the best poems. Now I have a defense for poetry in pedagogy (besides self indulgence). It may act as an equalizer, giving a different group of students a chance to shine. Of course, I'll have to test this theory, which means many more years of poetry assignments. Let's pretend this next story has nothing to do with the previous ramblings. On my way to work the other day, I was thinking about the stereotypical mean teachers. I thought of Zulfia's computer science teacher in Tajikistan that didn't let the kids program on computers until they demonstrated they could write code well by hand. I thought about the old-fashioned music teachers who don't let children touch a piano until they can demonstrate proficiency on a cardboard keyboard. With these brilliant pedagogies in mind, I decided that I shouldn't let students touch paper until they demonstrate to me orally that they can compose elegant and organized essays. Perhaps I'd allow them slates, but certainly nothing more permanent. I had a private laugh which I later shared with Ashley, then returned to the real world. Even if I regulated their paper supply, they'd just find it on the streets.

I'd be happy with third.

2006-02-26T12:15:00.000-06:00

Last night (the 25th) was the Mr. and Ms. World Pageant at Union. Serhiy represented Ukraine and, indirectly, all of Europe. He got third place and $25. An Okimi of BC came in second and Wael of Egypt came in first in the men's catagory. For women, a Samoan girl deservedly got first place. Anyone who can wear a dress made of bark and look fabulous deserves a prize. More importantly, before the pageant, there was a performance by a competitive clogging group from Lincoln. There was only one man in the troupe and he had a wedding band on. The lesson is, if you want to get married, join an all-women's sport. Sign me up for rhythmic gymnastics.

Hajib and TSA

2006-02-22T22:33:00.000-06:00

I had a student turn in a rough draft of a research poem discussing women's issues in the Middle East. Now, whenever someone tackles issues they have no personal experience with, it raises red flags. I know it would take an awful lot of research before I would ever try and write a poem about, oh, say, menopause. Even then, I'm not sure how I would establish any authority over the issue. I might know more about the subject than most men (were I to research it), but I still would feel comfortable only writing a man's perspective on the issue. I believe in learning and offering divergent voices in poetry, but some things are outside of my purview. And unlike some poets, I don't believe in channelling. My point is, she has little expertise on the subject, ergo the red flags. Anyway, this poem posited that the standards regarding hajib ("modest dress") are tools of male oppression of women. Besides being terribly cliche, this is a pretty uncomplicated view. In my experience, uncomplicated views are cop outs and truth is rarely (if ever) simple. We must learn to accept a degree of uncertainty and live between extremes. I would think for many women hajib is very freeing. If we want to talk about tools of male social dominance, what about high heals and miniskirts? More importantly, most of these standards are not imposed by men, but by women. In The Scarlett Letter, it is the women who deal most severly with the adulteress. Likewise, the horror stories of genital mutilations we hear about from Africa and the middle east are almost always carried out by women. I go even further and say that in our culture, women dress in their unhealthy and painful couture not for men but to compete with other women. I for one don't like high heels much or makeup, but women keep wearing them. What do you think? Further on the Muslim v. America culture war, the current "huh?" in the media is the proposed management of US naval ports by a state-owned firm from the UAE. Bush, who has never vetoed any bill, threatened to veto any action Congress would take to block the deal. We all know the individuals comprising the Bush administration have a lot of financial ties to the Middle East, so when he makes these strong statements in support of the UAE, we can only imagine there must be money moving in the background. That doesn't make me say "huh?" though. The astounding thing to me is that this could even be an issue. Congress wants to make a law restricting port management to only US firms. This doesn't answer my basic concern. How can I put this delicately: WHY ON EARTH AREN'T PORTS NATIONALIZED? What is wrong with our nation? If we say that it isn't secure for a staunch ally of ours to administer them, why are we leaving the job to any money hungry corporation? I'm a big believer in nationalization of key industries. Contrary to popular belief, the nationalized industries are often more efficient than privately run ones. Just consider Medicare. While traditional Medicare programs costs $0.02 per dollar to administer, the newfangled Medicare HMOs cost $0.10-$0.20 per dollar to administer because profit taking has been added to the system. Even that is efficient compared to private insurance which costs $0.25 or more per dollar to administer. I also know that Amtrak is a failure of nationalization, but again, it's because it was poorly done. It became an everlasting profit generator for the banks that control it, the board of directors is made up of bankers who borrow money from themselves then let government bailouts pay off the interest without ever paying back the principle. That doesn't stop the principle of nationalization. Perhaps our most recent example of nationalization in the US is the TSA. Regardless what we think about them, at least we can now expect uniform harassment and humiliation at every airport. The Administration thought that the security of our air-ports was too important to leave to private corporations. So why are water ports less important? Huh?

Lefties can be vitriolic too.

2006-02-22T16:56:00.000-06:00

I am proud to be a lefty and anyone who knows me already realizes that. Part of my personal liberal agenda is pacifism. That's part of why I avoid listening to the screaming right. The very sound of Limbaugh's, O'Reilly's, or Bush's voice sends me into an unchristian and unpeaceful state. Their malevolence seems to be contagious. Generally speaking, matching fire with fire doesn't work. I recently watched a BBC documentary called Lefties: Angry Wimmin and thought the rage they harboured served only to reinscribe the system they fought; had they gained power, they would have been little different or worse than the system they replaced. If your argument is for rational and human discourse, you just can't let yourself get mired in anger and hate. That brings me to The BEAST's 50 Most Loathsome People in America. I read it today. It's funny. Really funny. Sure, there are a few that I don't agree with, overall it says the things I wish I could let myself feel. Each entry brings charges against a well-known American, cites one peice of evidence against them, then sentences them to a fitting punishment. For instance:

15. Karl Rove Charges: A greasy pig whose only distinction in life is his total lack of decency. Rove is decidedly not a genius; he is simply missing the part of his soul that prevents the rest of us from kicking elderly women in the face. His admirers have elevated fanatical, amoral ambition to the status of a virtue, along with lying, cheating, and negligent homicide, all in the name of "values." Quite possibly the worst person in the worst White House in American history. Exhibit A: "As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing." Sentence: Lowered head first into oil refinery smokestack.

It's irreverant, irrational, and oh-so-fun. I read through the list, relished each punishment more than a good pacifist should, and now I will try my best to return to the world of reason and forgiveness. There's only one I can't let myself forget, number 4.

Strange Thoughts on Queer Films

2006-02-16T16:33:00.000-06:00

When I wrote about Transamerica, I wondered whether or not it was a good movie because of its literary value or simply because it's about a maligned and slighted segment of our population. I've been wondering the same thing about Brokeback Mountain, and when I heard this broadcast on NPR about the film, I thoroughly agreed. "If not for the twist of the two main characters being gay cowboys," says Betty Baye, "would Brokeback Mountain be stirring up such a fuss? Would the movie be being talked about as if it was the best thing since sliced bread and undoubtedly a shoe-in for Oscars? I mean, I guess what troubles me in this case is the deliberate hype perpetrated by the spin machines to strongly suggest that the movie contains lots of hot sex scenes between two men. And if I was gay, and I'm not, I wouldn't necessarily think of Brokeback Mountain as the great break-through movie that many suggest it is. It's a fine movie. It's better than average in fact. But I believe that gay people will really know they've arrived when their special relationships aren't treated as oddities for which movie oddities have to be conned into seeing with promises of soft porn. Sex isn't what Brokeback Mountain is about." I'm not sure about her "soft porn" statement, it didn't seem to me that anyone was selling it that way (perhaps condemning it for that). She is right though, it's not a terribly erotic movie. The average B horror flick is closer to homoerotica than Brokeback Mountain. Like Ms. Baye says, it's a better than average movie. But it's not all that and a bottle of ketchup. It never embraces the romance of its premise. It never comes to terms with its tragedy. Much of the movie exists is an emotional limbo, and don't get me wrong, I like limbo. But I've even seen limbo done better. What does this movie have that other GLBT movies don't? Stars. The only GLBT film I know of to have bigger names was Philadelphia. If I know my readership (and I probably don't), we need education on GLBT issues more than anyone because of our rather sheltered upbringings and conservative lifestyles. Movies are a great way of learning. They're just about the best things since books. Really. So you are probably saying, "Well, if not Transamerica and Brokeback Mountain, what then?" Don't get me wrong, you can still watch them, learn, and love it, but there are films that deserve more praise and a wider viewership. For example, Bad Education and Breakfast on Pluto both were much more memorable transgendered movies than Transamerica. And if any film, gay or straight, deserves an Oscar nomination this year, it's the Canadian film C.R.A.Z.Y (indeed, I dare say if you want to see gay-themed films that have artistic merit above and beyond their social statements, you had better get used to watching Francophonic cinema). Those are my thoughts du jour. The rest of this post will be thoughtless, yet related. Yesterday in class at Union we were discussing research-based poems and they had all (supposedly) read a handout I'd given them that featured poems written by some of my former classmates. One of the poems was the result of a research project on taxidermy and I was telling the students that, though I still loved the poem, it wasn't exactly my favorite from that writer. However, most of his taxidermy series had so much homoeroticism in the poems I'd probably be sacked for sharing it with students at Union, bastion of decency that it is. One of the students exclaimed, "You mean he's gay?" "Yes," I replied. "And a really great guy." "Oh. I didn't think a gay guy would write about hunting." Perhaps, if nothing else, Brokeback Mountain can teach America that "the gays" can shoot animals too.

Birthdays are the New Black

2006-02-15T23:52:00.000-06:00

Today I amused myself greatly and consistently. Inside jokes are like that. They have great staying power. And this joke was waaaayy inside. I never verbalized it. I never shared it with anyone else (until now). It was my joke and mine alone. You see, today, February 15, besides being the Roman holiday of Lupercalia, is my birthday. And I wore a suit. It’s a new suit. I bought it in January, but this is the first I’ve actually worn it as a suit. You could say, it’s my birthday suit. That’s the joke. I know it might not be very funny, but I have low expectations and it’s my joke. Though now that I think about it, Home Movies may have mentioned something to this effect in an episode. Anyway, no one put the two together all day, probably because they didn’t know it was my birthday. Even then though, my students who inexplicably knew it was my birthday didn’t make the connection. But now you all know, so it’s a public joke. And I’m still way too pleased with myself. However, I’ve now changed out of the suit and will start working on not starting my sentences with conjunctions. Or something like that.

Feel free to skim.

2006-02-14T22:04:00.000-06:00

On Tuesdays I wear t-shirts. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I must work and therefore feel the need pull out my teacherly identity-kit; but on my days off, I still wear t-shirts. I like wearing red t-shirts. I have my CCCP “red” shirt, a Union College red shirt, a Project Impact red shirt, a Nebraska Cornhuskers red shirt, and a few others. Each makes a definite statement about who I am and where my loyalties lie. Clothes are always entwined in identity. Rarely do I have to think twice about which red shirt to wear. The only normal limitation is that I don’t wear the Huskers shirt when I know I’ll be at UNL because it’s just so conformist to wear it on campus. Today, being associated with hearts and other bloody matters, I wanted to wear red. Since I wasn’t planning on visiting UNL, my options were wide open. I grabbed something red, and as I was putting it on, I realized I had a new factor to take into account when choosing a red shirt. It was my Danmark shirt. Back in 2000, I’d taken the ferry from Świnoujście, Poland, to Copenhagen, Denmark. It was a lovely ride and a lovely city. With the exception of the rather obtuse fellows at passport control, I found the place quite homey. The people were friendly and well kempt, the city was beautiful in the expected Scandinavian ways, but had a bit of flamboyance too. The museums even went out of their way to be fun and informative. It seemed like everyone rode bikes and hardly anyone felt the need to lock them. There was one rather stunning thing. The people had an odd habit regarding rubbish bins. I saw many people—young, old, well-dressed, or a bit on the tawdry side—opening the lids on garbage cans and dumpsters and taking a looksy. It’s not something you expect in America, at least not from well-dressed people, but on the other hand, if you and I didn’t feel any social restraint, how many of us wouldn’t look in the garbage out of curiosity? As the saying goes, “One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.” All in all, I was impressed by the place. It was one of the few cities in which I felt more at home than I do when I’m actually at home. There are some places like that; they almost make you believe in reincarnation. And to express my love for the country, I bought a t-shirt, red with a white cross, just like the flag and printed across the font, the word, “Danmark.” Back in 2003, when Denmark declared war on Iraq, I was a bit disappointed. I mean, it was the first time they had declared war since 1864 (I think). Even in World War II, while occupied and fighting the Germans, they were officially neutral. At least they had the decency to declare war before invading though, the US can’t seem to be bothered anymore (our most recent declaration of war was against Romania in 1942). And then I heard about a group of 24 Danes suing their Anders Fogh Rasmussen (the Danish PM) for misleading their country into war and that restored my faith in the Danish people, if not their government. That brings my relationship with Denmark to the present. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about the ongoing hullabaloo around the world regarding some satirical caricatures published by the Jyllands-Posten. There have been demonstrations and riots around the world. Embassies have been burnt. Denmark may face a recession if the boycott on Danish goods continues; they've already had people lose jobs as a direct result of the boycott. Nestle and other European companies have started advertising their lack of Danish connections. In South Africa, a newspaper decided to publish the cartoons and the editor, a Muslim woman, has received a backlash from her own family. It has also been reported that the cartoons circulating in many Islamic countries are not even the same cartoons that the Jyllands-Posten originally printed. (This also makes one question who they should be protesting. Shouldn’t the demonstrations target the Imams and other leaders who circulated such images to achieve their own aims?) The problem, it seems, is quite complicated. For one, Sunni Hadith (Islamic tradition) forbids any depictions of, well, pretty much anything. That’s why Sunni art tends to be abstract, decorative, or calligraphic. That hasn’t stopped images from becoming a regular part of most Muslim’s lives, but in regards to Allah (Praise be unto Him) or the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), they usually observe the ban. However, Shi’ite and Sufi Muslims have, on occasion, created depictions of Allah (PBUH) and Muhammad (PBUH). So, the real issue isn't so much the publications of depictions as the widespread belief that all Arabs and all Muslims are terrorists, which the caricatures reinforced. The protestors often identify the source of their anger as really being the secularism of the west and not the images. I'm sure there are plenty of little things that added up to this. Of course, we in the Occident value freedom of expression (praise be unto it) as highly as the protestors value their prophet (PBUH). And in this case, the Muslim's greatest ally in the west, the Liberals and Radicals, are the greatest supporters of what has offended them. To most of us (and I locate myself as a politically liberal Westerner here), these protests are incomprehensible and destructive. Seeing the flag of a "mostly harmless" sort of nation like Denmark being burnt hurts much more than seeing my own national symbols destroyed. My gut reaction is to join the nationalists/fascists in our country in supporting the continued culture war. That's how much I love freedom of expression (pbui). I will of course refrain from any such rash action. Reactionary thinking is what leads to these situations in which both sides operate on the theory that two wrongs make a right. They don't. And the eye for an eye stuff will make us all blind (thank you Gandhi). Because the two sides have different assumptions from which they build their arguments, they will never arrive at a mutually acceptable conclusion. The war between the West and the Muslim world has been described as World War IV and I'm starting to believe it. Competing ideologies have grown to the point where they turn to violence and intimations there of to achieve dominance. I, of course, object to all wars, even cold ones (which this is not). Let me illustrate the sort of differences in assumptions. The Jyllands-Posten has already apologized; the protestors want the national government to apologize. The government had nothing to do with the publication. But in much of the world, it's assumed that anything that gets printed is the government’s opinion. This reveals the protestors have no concept of what the freedom of expression (pbui) the Westerners say they are defending really is. Meanwhile, a French paper printed the cartoons along side a number of caricatures lampooning other religions to make the point that they are not treating Islam differently than any other religion. The Muslim response to this has been that they believe in showing respect for all prophets and gods, not just their own. Of course, there is some debate over this. But this reveals a the West’s inability to revere the sacred. The West's case is complicated by our self-imposed limits on free expression (pbui). For example, we don't print pictures of dead soldiers anymore, I guess to show our "support for the troops." Likewise, we don't show bin Laden's videos on our TV, in case we help the "terrorists." If we've already arrived at certain conventions to limit that freedom, why not add one more that's important to such a large population? As much a believer as I am in free expression (pbui), I limit my own all the time. When I was writing for Around the Clock News, I knew there were things about Union College and its students that I wouldn't publish. But if someone wrote them in another forum, I'd still support their right to do so. In front of a class, I might not say everything I want because I know I'm representing more than just myself—a college, an academic field, and a religious group. When I lived in Poland and Ukraine, I was always cognizant of creating a representation of America and protestants. On several occasions, people told me that I had changed their opinion of America. I’m not representative, but that doesn’t matter to others. We are never just ourselves . . . which brings me back to my choice of shirts. Who would I be associated with, in my Danmark shirt? Why, the British National Party (BNP) for one. They are the national anti-Socialist party of modern Britain, quite similar to our own right wing Republicans actually. Their website is selling a pro-Denmark shirt. I might also be in the company of Italy's Northern League Party. I don't particularly like either of them, and a quick survey of the links that come up when I search for "support Denmark" doesn't really encourage me to wear the shirt either. I’ve always had a hard time with my German identity. Even Johnnes Rau said it's hard to be proud to be German. When Ted bought me a shirt celebrating our German heritage long ago, I usually avoided wearing it in public. Increasingly it's also hard to take pride in American citizenship. That's one reason I always tell people I'm from Nebraska and let them wonder which country that's in. I never thought that my Danish heritage would become an equally avoidable subject. I really do side with Denmark on this one. Not the newspaper, but with the State. The law shouldn’t change. If anything, we need laws regarding freedom of expression (pbui) relaxed. But we need to also show voluntary respect and a sense of good taste. Even taking the side of the Danish state, I decided not to wear the shirt. I may support them, but I don’t want to be associated with their supporters and I don’t want to alienate anyone with a different opinion. So, I think for now, I will pray for a peaceful resolution and wear my Soviet shirt. It's red and much less controversial. P.S. Here's a fun little clip from a recent episode of Hyperdrive. The Danes are heading an international force to stop drug runners in space and a British captain finds that the Danes are actually helping the smugglers.

Quiz

2006-02-13T15:00:00.000-06:00

Given Murphy's Law and my often slipshod typestry, which letter was I predestined to leave out of the following sentence when I typed it as part of a handout for my innocent Union College students?

Then, shirts billowing like parachutes,

It's a line from Courtney Davis' poem "Every Day, the Pregnant Teenagers" in her collection, Leopold's Maneuvers.

Weird Coincidence 3240597743.1

2006-02-04T13:13:00.000-06:00

A few, very few, of you might remember Nick Owen's love seat. It was red and blue plaid with a few other colors. And thanks to a broken central support, it really was a love seat. Anyone sitting on it would sink to the middle; any two people would end up cuddling whether they wanted to or not. When Stephan Kaiser asked Nick to help him plan a special evening with Crystal Schauer, Nick arranged the evening around the plaid loveseat. They are now married (Stephan and Crystal that is, Nick's still single). Anway, I have now seen three low budget movies in which the same type of loveseat with the same upholstery has been used as part of the set. The best of them was Sons of Provo, in which they reused it, making it seem like every character had at least one in their home (the nephew/manager had two). Strange coincidence or near miracle? On a completely unrelated topic, Daniel was feeling sick and is now better while Serhiy and I are now suffering. A few, very few, of you might know that Melinda and I seem to share an immune system. When she is sick, I am well and vice versa. She has had a few maladies this year and is now feeling well. This has happened so many times it is well beyond coincidence. The logical conclusion to all of this is that one of us should just bite the bullet and spend the rest of their life hospitalized for the good of the other. I'd say I'd armwrestle Melinda for it, but she'd win. As you know, armwrestling is how disputes should be solved. Imagine Saddam Hussein and George W. with two scorpions on the table, and you'll see what I mean. Petty and irrational prigs everywhere who need to feed their dominance addiction would have their needs met without the massacre of so many others. Also, all diplomatic meetings should be conducted in a jacuzzi. It would reduce the stress and world leaders almost always look ridiculous in bathing suits. I just think it would lead to a better world.

Catching up with the movies.

2006-01-26T15:28:00.000-06:00

Today I watched Unconditional Love, a movie which I somehow missed three years ago. It's great, and has inspired me to campaign for Julie Andrews for Prime Minister of Great Britain. In the movie Drop Dead Gorgeous, one of the contestants says that her serial-killer mother ought to be president because, among other things, she could bring world peace with a song. Well, Julie Andrews has the chops to do just that. And while we're putting people into office, I say Kathy Bates would make quite a president. I mean, Dolores Claiborne is less scary than the current office holder. Speaking of politics, the other day I watched a documentary on Gay Republicans. Several times in the movie "gay on the street"-style interviews compared them to "Jews voting for Hitler" and "Blacks joining the KKK." Now, as a person who cannot understand why anyone, regardless of race, religion, sexuality, etc, would vote Republican, it was a particularly interesting look into the psyche of everyday sociopaths. Most of them seemed fairly lucid. They are fiscal conservatives and generally outraged by the direction towards cultural conservatism their party has taken. I can, to a degree, understand fiscal conservatives. I just can't understand why they would vote Republican. Republicans talk about reducing debt and spending cuts, but they are responsible for the current levels of the national debt. Just look at this chart. Clinton managed to get things undercontrol, then Bush II came along and has spent more than ever. It would seem to me that fiscal conservatives are in the wrong party! (Gasp! I used an exclamation point, make that two! Er . . . three. I should get off this topic before I get more worked up.) The point is, there is little excuse to vote Republican, even the richest of the rich have to be incredibly shortsighted to do it and for people shunned by the Party for being gay to vote for them takes a very special sort of masochism. In other news, one of my Bosniak students was once on his country's junior national football (read "soccer") team.

Tit et Tat

2006-01-13T01:05:00.000-06:00

So, at UNL today I heard two people whose taste and intelligence is unquestionable discussing "Lazy Sunday," the SNL music video many people know as the "Chronic-what-cles of Narnia." Wendi already provided a link to the video, but it reminded me that I've been meaning to direct everyone to Andy, Jorma, and Akiva's website. They are the geniuses behind this and other really funny videos. They've been putting their work online for people to enjoy for much longer than they've been employed by SNL. My introduction to them was "Just 2 Guyz" and I still think it's my favorite. Enjoy. Tonight, while reading the BBC website, I was reminded why I don't often read news. It depresses me. For example, In France, about 200 members of parliament blame rap music for the riots last year. They are particularly targetting Monsieur R's song, "FranSSe." (That link, by the way, was the only place where I could actually find the full text on the internet.) Among other things, it refers to France as a prostitute (finally a rap song the Republicans can enjoy). In my opinion, if a writer can generate art that actually sparks riots, it's an amazing piece of work and should be canonized. For a take that's bound to spark some conversation on the subject of rap and volatile political action in France, I'll direct you to this charmingly named blog. Another story told of plastic surgery in Moscow using stem cells. They harvest them from the stomach of one person and then, for around $10,000, another person has them injected into their face. The trophy wives of the Nouveaux Russes can even buy facial creams containing human skin cells at fashionable pharmacies. On the one hand, I'm quite in favor of stem cell research, on the other, this seems like a pretty silly and reckless procedure, especially since it hasn't gone through anything approaching rigorous testing (some doctors originally tried it on themselves and thought they saw a difference). Oh well, where would any new technology be without silly applications (like the Univac without "Mary Has a Little Lamb"). Anyway, one final thing to note is that Angela Merkel is in Washington for a visit. Let's hope she doesn't go too soft on the Cokehead-in-Chief. Goodnight and good riddance.

2006-01-11T21:28:00.000-06:00

Before I even say what I have to say, let me clarify. I realize I don't have enough time or experience yet to make an accurate judgement. So, to make a rash and hasty overgeneralization, teaching ESL is more fun. Of course, that does depend on the course, I've had some ESL classes that just never worked as a group and never built a rapport. But just comparing the three classes I have now, the ESL by far has the most fun. College freshmen are still too much like high school students I think. Which isn't to say I don't enjoy the class, teaching a rough class is still way more fun than, say, washing dishes for a living. And the morning class can almost carry on a conversation. I just wish they would ask half as inciteful questions as my ESL students. For instance, tonight we were saying things we "would like" and Amir (Bosnian) asked if "I'd" is also "I had" and how to tell the difference. I really liked that question and it took us in interesting directions. Most of what I've been asked in my ENGL 112 class has been, "So what do you expect us to do for this assignment." Well, since we couldn't actually generate a working definition of plagiarism in class, not much. Anyway, Ben asked something about what if my students read my blog. Well, they are seperate worlds and it would be nice to keep them seperate, just like I'd rather not be Serhiy's teacher (ever). But when it comes down to it, it really doesn't matter. There's nothing here I wouldn't say to their faces, with perhaps a bit more qualification. It's not as if the universe will explode and be replaced with something more complicated. Ado and 42. P.S. I wrote this while watching Elizabethtown which surprisingly doesn't suck. Perhaps I'm just tired but the overearnest bits play well tonight.

Busy again.

2006-01-10T21:48:00.000-06:00

The last two days I feel as though I accomplished more than in the previous two weeks. I probably did. Monday night was the beginning of the new term at SeCC. I think it's going to be a good group. They are quite good at asking questions and that's always a good sign. My blind student, Hector, is really great. He has partial vision in one eye, so he can see light and dark and which way I point, just not details like writing or faces. I have two Bosnians who sit with a Russian between them which I think is a fun microcosm of politics. I also have two Iraqis, and for the first time, they are Arabic speakers (previously I've had an Iraqi who spoke Farsi and Sudanese who spoke Arabic but never an Arabic speaking-Iraqi). Also, I have one Congolese Francophone. Then there's the normal contingent of Spanish speakers and a higher number of them are there in the hopes of getting a degree eventually than in my previous classes. For the first time at SeCC, I won't have any East Asian students. Then today I started with my first classes at Union. Basically it was just getting to know each other and going over the syllabus today, trying to put the fear of the Lord and of Scott into their freshmen hearts. It's much easier to start off as a meany in an iron mask than as a softie in a clown suit then expect them to take you seriously. That's a bit of pedagogy I learned from Ms. Perry. Speaking of being derivitive, a lot of how I approach the class is definately Blakish (which I hope doesn't include how I approach returning papers). However, when I went outside myself and listened to myself today, I couldn't quite figure out whose voice I was hearing. Then I visitted with wacky Jacque Smith a bit after lunch. I think my in-class, Comp teacher voice owes a lot to PR-mode Jacque. It might also have something to do with Dr. Minter, one of the Composition professors at UNL who talks just like Jacque (but more like relaxed-mode Jacque). This isn't to say that anyone else would notice the similarities, but I definately felt it again in the second class. It's strange how we construct ourselves in new settings. I'd like to say there was intentionality to the identity I compose, but I think I just fall into patterns without conscious decisions being made. Having said that, I can think of few people better to be derivitive of than Jacque or Dr. Minter, but of course any construction of myself will be quite different from the original. I should ask Jacque whence PR-mode Jacque is derived. Anyway, the first class will be great, I think they will be very participative. The second class, and it may just be because it's right after lunch, is much more interested in talking to their neighbors than as a group, which might be a problem. We'll see how it is as the semester progresses. Ashley, who is an eternal goddess of Light and Goodness, is looking into relocating my classes someplace with a bit more technology. It was my understanding back in the day that Union was moving towards having multimedia projectors in every classroom. You can imagine my mild coronary when I got to class and there was an overhead projector but no computer system. I felt as though I'd walked into the 1950s. Of course, until more teachers at Union realize how wonderful teaching in the 21st century can be, I doubt things will change much. If I can't play my clip from Man to Man to illustrate conflicting epistemes, I can't be responsible for my language. In other news, Serhiy has an insane schedule. He has two evening classes and, combined with his work schedule, that means he'll only be home on Saturday evenings. That's fine, but when you factor in that he also has a 7:30 AM swimming class and that he can never go to sleep right away when he gets home, I don't know when he's going to sleep. More importantly, with alarms going off that early in the morning, I don't know when I'll sleep.

Transamerica

2005-12-27T23:20:00.000-06:00

I just finished watching this movie, I had high expectations and it surpassed them. In case you haven't heard about Transamerica, Felicity Huffman (Desperate Housewive's Lynette) is a pre-operative transsexual woman who finds out that she has a son from her past life. Her therapist says she has to deal with this new issue before having the operation. So, she goes out to New York to meet her rent-boy son, played by Kevin Zegers from Air Bud. They proceed to cross the country and have many adventures, all the while the dramatic irony of the kid not knowing the woman is his father is palatable to the viewer. It's an Erziehungsroman (education story) in that the the characters grow from learning about each other and, in a deeper sense, it seeks to educate the audience. It's not about civil rights. Transsexuals actually fit well in existing laws, unlike homosexuals. It's about social rights, which is much more important, because where society goes, laws will follow. Above all, it humanizes a situation completely alien to most of us. When I watch such films though, I'm always left wondering how they'll be viewed in fifty years. When I see a film like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner nowadays, it's hard to comprehend the attitudes of its intended audience. That's not to say that interracial marriages are completely accepted in our society, but personally I can't understand why anyone ever had a problem with them. And I realize that movies and other cultural emissions were a major part of adjusting attitudes. I mean, I am a white boy of terrorist descent (i.e. KKK konections in the family tree) but as a reflection of my society, I'm a very different person than my Great Grandfather; I even have much different attitudes than my parents. I think I've gotten over the virulent forms of nationalism, racism, sexism, and religious intolerance. But I must admit, despite my best postmodern intentions, I still have hang ups regarding sexuality and sexual identity. Because of that, I seek out movies that deal with those themes, like Latter Days, Stonewall, Dependencia Sexual, La Mala Educacion, Greg Araki films, and Transamerica. More often than not, such films are worthless beyond their social commentary (though I tried to give examples that contradict this statement). So much effort is put into the message that the literary quality is ignored. There's more art in documentaries than many of these camp films. I'm sure plenty of equally earnest civil rights flicks were made that are pointless to watch these days. Then there are the few that transcend the social issue du jour and connect across time and culture. Only time will tell if Transamerica is such a film, but I hope that when people fifty years from now watch it, they'll wonder why anyone would have a problem with an individual's right to choose their own biological and gendered identity. On a side note, those who want to know more about transsexuals and their families might enjoy reading Trans, a book of poems by one of my favorite professors about her daughter becoming her son.

How am I not myself?

2005-12-24T22:33:00.000-06:00

I just watched I Heart Huckabees again. "Do you love me, with the bonnet?" I love that movie, especially around the holidays when the existential question comes to the forefront. And today I had a surreal moment that reminded me of a time that such questions were meaningless to me. When I was a child, my brother and I tried to be ourselves to such an extreme that we may have failed. If something was popular, we wanted nothing to do with it. Once when my Mom was given hand-me-downs from another family at church for us, we were looking through them and our cousin Heidi, hoping to be helpful, told us that they were very popular brand names. It was the opposite of helpful and we didn't wear the clothes. As I said in the last post, I have long been a self-styled iconoclast. That's the background you need to understand today's event. Dad introduced me to a lovely young lady at church, saying we knew each other when we were children. Well, we did, but we were hardly in the same age group. She was much younger. She remembers me quite well apparently, she said I was one of the "cool boys" and she said it with such conviction I almost felt cool now. Yet, I've certainly never tried to be a hipster. (Who can put up with the obligatory Republican?) It's odd to find out that your childhood was a lie. I was not myself. My inner picture (iconoclast, avoiding anything cool) didn't mesh with my outer image (apparently cool); when the two competing narratives are juxtaposed, I had a strange vertigo feeling. And the kicker is that, like every other primate operating on a fourth circuit level, I was viscerally happy to have a fetching girl bat her eyes and call me cool, even if it was in the past tense. In other news, today I got the wireless router working for my parents, cleaned their keyboard and monitor, went to church, turned on as much charm as I could muster at Aunt Rosie's Christmas get-together, and worked on my laundry. Not all in that order. I have not, however, felt the least bit of Christmas spirit. The closest I've come this year was at Greenfield village, and then it was only because of the incessant carolling. Perhaps Christmas spirit, like coolness, is something left in one's childhood.

Goin' Mainstream

2005-12-21T10:42:00.000-06:00

I'm over-proud of being an iconoclast. I also tend to feel more at home in areas that have decent mass transit systems (i.e. not this continent). Many of you know that these two features of my personality work together to keep me healthy. By which I mean, walking a lot. And not hurtling myself along the road encased in metal. However, being hired by Union and having plenty of experience missing the number 3 bus, I've admitted to myself that I need to get a car, at least until I can get out of this hive of fascism . . . but I digress. The problem is that I haven't really driven for a while. In fact, the last car I had was long enough ago that the accident is no longer on my record. So, I was a bit chagrinned today when I had to drive a car. It's not like I don't have a valid license, just not a belief in the validity of the whole shebang. Anyway, I drove. In snow. No one died. Now here's the kicker: after getting over the initial jitters, it was fine. This is the slippery slope down which I will be sliding. First I drive, next thing you know, I'll be buying an SUV, fighting over parking spots, and voting Republican. I definately need to get out of this country.

For Katja

2005-12-20T20:59:00.000-06:00

Popo and Itza After Marsden Hartley’s “Popocatepetl, One Morning” (1932) At my feet she lies, her shroud, my blanket. If in fair Verona our scene were set, we would be a play, she my Capulet, or some other languid pentameter, but Nahuatl remembers us in land, great humps of land, immortal as a name. Our sex and fears have crystallized in soot, dark, noxious air, hungry, muddy slopes. Platitudes aren't written in loam and magma. Itza, my love, is long cold under our quilt, but I have heat enough for both. Violet my slopes, and blue-white, I froth eternally. --- Portrait of the Artist If my picture should ever hang in a gallery, know it's not me. Mount a disclaimer to the side, just to the right, perhaps include a list of other people of whom it's not: Einstein, Sophia Loren, Bobby Kennedy, Grant Wood, Whistler's mother, a swan-necked model enjoyed by the artist himself. Say my accoutrement may not be representative of my time. Let them know my smile, or frown, wasn’t for the picture. Say there was a wise-cracking girl they can’t see. Ask if it's not a picture of themselves. Call them liars when they disagree. Direct them to look at the light and shadow. Note the blending of pigments. Tell them again: it's not me. Make sure they know that oils, clay, chemical burns, words, or other mummified corpses can’t be trusted to steal souls. Reiterate: all art is abstraction.

2005-12-20T16:31:00.000-06:00

Sorry I haven't updated lately, I've been busy. End of the year, travelling . . . the whole kurfuffle. If you're interested, you can view my new gallery of pictures from Buffy and Michael's wedding. And now, let's see if this clip works for you. Just a hint: don't scroll while playing video.
View this clip on Vimeo

Scott for the visually impaired.

2005-12-07T13:43:00.000-06:00

Normally, I try to tailor classes to the needs of the students. At least that's what I tell myself. For instance, I only give quizzes when I'm not sure if people are really getting things or not. And the tests and homework tend to focus more on "problem areas" than surveying everything we studied. Likewise, when I make the questions and sample sentences, I like to include the names of my students. It's a pleasant way to integrate them into the materials and usually results in a few snickers during the otherwise somber and stressful testing situation. Like I said, tailored. This also means I don't know at the beginning of the semester what quizzes I'll be giving and when and they certainly aren't pre-made. So far, it's never been an issue. Until now. I got an e-mail yesterday from my boss at SeCC. Next semester I'll have a visually impaired student in my class. They have already converted his text book into an audio book and he has a tutor to assist him. They just need me to give them every quiz and test that I plan on administering for the entire semester and they need it NOW. Oh crap. I can easily just give them the materials I used this semester, but I don't think that's as good a deal for the other students. Besides which, I have no idea how I'll need to change my pedagogy to deal with a visually impaired student, this will be my first time. Maybe some of my TLC and Christian Records peeps can give me a shout-out. (Sorry, I'm trying to be more accepting of non-"standard" English, which means using it on occaision. Clearly it isn't working.) Anyway, now I have that, on top of my final projects, to add to the procrastination list. In other news, I've been trying to get my syllabus in order for ENGL 112 at Union next semester. Since most of my loyal readers have taken College Writing 2 at Union, and, if not, at a similar institution, what can you tell me should definately be included? What are the things you liked the most? What things did you hate? What things have you actually used? Since the focus is on writing research papers, I've included several assignments of the sort I wish I'd had, but as we can clearly see from my previous post, I may not be . . . er . . . representative.

Nerdalism

2005-12-06T00:08:00.000-06:00

I realize this blog can get "unbelievably nerdy" but I hope it's always believable. Here's what I've been thinking about today: liaisons in English. For example, when a word ending in /d/ comes in front of an unstressed syllable beginning in /y/, and extra /zh/ sound is added. The same phenomenon occurse with /t/ followed by /y/, except in the unvoiced form. So, the added sound is /ch/. Say this sentence fast: "I want you to want me, I need you to need me." Do you hear it? wan-tchyou need-zhyou. Yes, we were studying past/conditional modals today in my class. Ah could, would, and should. So much phonological fun lies therein. Besides that rule, there are plenty of other times that English adds and "extra" sound between stressed-unstressed syllables or two unstressed syllables. We also do it between vowels with slides. Consider Who are you anyway? In this case, we add /w/ sounds, Who-[w]ar you-[w]an-y-way? So, my obsession du jour has been similar glides added internally to words. Consider the difference between "die" and diet. In the first, the ie can be considered one vowel because the second letter only exists to specify the sound of the first. In Spanish or Polish though, both vowels would be distinctly pronounced: Dee-eh. So, when it comes to the two syllable version (diet), one would think it would be pronounced Deet by Anglophones. And I'm sure many children do. But, we soon learn it's two syllables. Then you'd think it would be pronounced Di-et. But it's not. We add a /j/ glide: Di-[y]et. (Actually, it should be more like Day-[y]et but then you'd think day as in 1/365 of a year. When I started this post I decided not to fool use IPA since it might be more difficult for casual readers, as if they would make it past the first line. Now I must live with my poor judgement.) Similarly, odious becomes o-dee-[ya]us. Now, this is perhaps my own lack of imagination, but I cannot, for the life of me, think of examples in English of two pronounced, vowel sounds, at least one unstressed, together that aren't linked by a glide like /j/ or /w/. But, though similar glides do occur in Spanish (?) and Polish, they have no problem with having similar situations without a glide. In Polish, this could be because they have very unusual intonation for a stress language. Still, I have a hypothesis. I know, everyone's been waiting with baited breath for this moment (and honey, we need to talk about eating bait. Seriously). I think it's related to our system of using two vowel symbols to make one vowel sign (as earlier discussed with the die example). But I still need to flesh this all out. So, are you bored yet? Well, I've secretly been watching "Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law" while writing this, so I've been incredibly entertained.

Tele makes me tubby.

2005-12-01T19:42:00.000-06:00

If you haven't seen The Boondocks, you should. I read the comic strips a bit a few years ago, but the anime version one can see on Cartoon Network is amazingly good. Social commentary, common sense, and humor. It plays off the totalization and essentialization of race and embraces it just enough to subvert it. Unfortunately, it tends to be shown only at the most inconvenient times, but those with a DV-R or a little know-how can watch it when you please. There's only been four episodes so far, so it's easy to catch up. Besides that, I've been procrastinating with Veronica Mars. I enjoy the show. Angie introduced it to me last week and has sworn me to watch the episodes in order and keep her filled in on my interactions with the show. If only I were in a cultural critisism class so I could use the TV shows as a text for study. What I should be doing is working on a lesson plan for using ballet as a way of looking at sexuality and gender construction during the 19th century, my poetry portfolio, and my final paper for linguistics. But I just like TV more.

2005-11-30T16:16:00.000-06:00

I've got a question for ya'll: does the Bible support prescriptivist or descriptivist linguistics? Prescriptivism is the traditional way of thinking about a language. There is either right or wrong and right means conforming to a set of pretty arbitrary rules. It's these people who tell us to use whom in the objective cases rather than who or never to end a sentence on a preposition (as I just did). These people are also known by the technical terms jerk and snob. Descriptivists say that language rules should describe how people speak rather than tell people how to speak. So, when people say "I is here" or "He be working," they don't respond, "that's wrong," but look for how the rules that these constructions follow. They like to point out that the prescriptivists really are class-mongering descriptivists. Instead of accepting all language variations, prescriptivists just identify the language of those who hold power and describe it, using that system of symbols to keep the man down. Descriptivists can also be called post-moderists, hippies, and lilly-livered. So, with this brief background, what do you think about Biblical writers. It occurs to me that the Shibboleth incident was an archtypical proscriptivist moment. And what did Jesus really mean about nay and yea? And what about the jot and tittle stuff?

I haven't updated for an unconscionable period.

2005-11-28T00:12:00.000-06:00

Thanksgiving is over. Fun was had by all, with the probable exception of the turkey. And the various plants that were sacrificed, assuming plants ever have fun. I doubt it. They seem a bit dour to me. We had the ritual meal chez moi then I went to Omaha for the weekend. Laundered. Churched. Zooed. Laundered. Anyway. Recently I've seen a couple films worth mentioning. The first was The Other Side of Heaven. It's based on the true story of a missionary who went to the Tongan Islands in the 1950s. It's absolutely wonderful IF you can forget he's Mormon (and don't get me started on that institutional insanity). When my Mom first watched it she thought he was Adventist because it deals with health message issues. The themes that attracted me were cross-cultural living and hybridity. Naturally, that invites a post colonial reading, but more important personally was the reminders of my own othered moments. Ukraine and Poland have very little in common with Tonga, and I'm thankful for the differences. For example, I was never truly starving. I always had ways of communicating with my friends and family at home. But still, there are plenty of commonalities of situation that made it hit home. I was drug through memories of Poland especially: the idiotic mistakes I made, the goodbyes I said. The naive idealism I came with. If you've been a student missionary and you watch it at a vulnerable moment, you might end up crying in the fetal position. Or not. Either way, you'll probably like it. The second was The Human Stain, another one of those fun-with-post-colonial-theory films. It deals with issues of age, race, and the general human condition in the US, both in the 50s and "today" using the lens of an ethnically-confused classics professor. There is also the requisite love story. If that isn't enough to convince you of its merits, it's got the Anthony Hopkins I enjoy--more Meet Joe Black than Silence of the Lambs. Anyway. Another week awaits. It will be tiring. I can't wait until the next break . . . assuming I get everything done that I need to.

Representations of Adventists

2005-11-21T16:45:00.000-06:00

I'd imagine that most of us are familiar with the occaisional reference to Adventists in Gilmore Girls. It's always connected to Lane's incredibly strict family and her mother's choice of college for her. We've heard that Adventists don't dance, smoke, drink, or bowl. Well, most of us don't mind bowling anymore, but for the most part, they aren't too far off. They just tend to focus on one very small aspect of our culture. Well, today I was watching Hex (season two, episode 9) and heard a rather different view of Seventh-day Adventists. First, a bit about the show. It's one of those Buffy-wanna-be shows that takes a shades-of-grey approach to the war between good and evil. There's a demon posing as a priest, a witch that got pregnant by the devil with a messiah for demons (who now is six months old but supposedly looks 17), a 446 year old "annointed one" demon hunter who is supposed to look 17 years old, a frustrated lesbian ghost (the best character), and an assortment of characters who are "normal" to one degree or another. Normally, such shows are a bit off-putting to me, but the British accents make the angst of posh teens palatable. Plus, the theme tune is Garbage. That brings us somewhere close to the moment in question. Annointed goth chick is falling in love with Demon Messiah whom she is sworn to kill. Both sides are upset about this Romeo and Juliet twist and are punishing the lovers. The girl is smitten with boils by an angel (who is a bit creepy and has a French accent) and the boy has gone blind. While the angel pleads with the demon slayer to return to the righteous path, he says, "There is another in your heart. A good man. A better man." She thinks he's referring to God/Jesus/who knows and says "What are you, a Seventh-day Adventist?" Actually, the French angel was referring to her ex-boyfriend Leon, but that is beside the point. In Hex, Adventists are coded as touchy-feeling Jesus-loves-you Christians. That seems quite the opposite of Gilmore Girls. What makes the difference?

Smith, Rad. Distant Early Warnings.

2005-11-17T19:49:00.000-06:00

I loved the book, especially the first half. You can read three of the poems, including my favorite, "Writing in Water," elsewhere online. If you're curious about Rad, you can read a very short biography of him and praise for his book, but I suggest you read the poetry first because biographies and praise are sometimes unnecessary baggage to bring to a poem. Also from the poetry department of Scott's brain comes a somewhat L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-y poem: Red Barons Ant plants peonies, four to one odds on red. Sticky wet red and black war nectar, four reds on black, blacks on red flakes, petal falls to Sisyphus volcano. Sticky wet war dances. Black, red, Pebble volcanoes, heroin pollen. Snipped and encircled, snippet lovelies filling veins, opalescent blue vase second place to battlefields. Petals unraveled. Table cloth tapestry, table topped red, black. Chess swans float, drawn, drown, no longer holding blooms ruffled in ant dog fights, casualties in the glass distortion. Green scales pulled back; Trojan unfolded. Snoopy dances in the rain singing. Apple red from pulpy apple green, plain broad edges, chiffon war's all the rage. I stole the phrases "ant plants" and "snoopy dances" from somewhere and I can't remember whence. Fortunately, in poetry it's homage whereas in fiction writing it's plagiarism. The exceptional thing about this poem is that it's the only one I can remember ever getting back from Hilda without any significant recommendations and the highest attainable grade. This time I'm all out tooting my own horn. The thing is, I can never predict the grade's I'll get. Sometimes I'll do something I think is just wonderful and it fails to impress; other times it's like this, I write something out of deadline desperation, have little confidence in it and little time for revision and people love it. It's the same thing in my 19th century class. I write reaction papers that I think are excellent and they get a C; I dash something off at the last minute with little preparation, confidence, or inspiration and I get a perfect score. Perhaps procrastination really is an academic survival skill.

The Nut Case

2005-11-16T21:24:00.000-06:00

I am so flying by the seat of my pants this week. Monday it was a presentation over a book I didn't actually read. Today I was a bit more prepared, but not nearly as much as my classmates. In my 19th century studies class we began our group project presentations (group, in this case, means two people). Our teachers (there's a group of them) assigned us partners based on some arcane wisdom unknown to me, and the only two people in the class with y chromosomes were put together. David is a lieutenant in the US Army who plans to one day teach English at West Point. I'm a pacifist who rejects the validity of a large standing army as an institution. A match made in heaven. It eased things considerably that he was interested in my topic choice so we didn't have to go through another tired civil war presentation. My idea? The relationship between botany and imperialism, focusing on the invention of the Wardian case. We now call Wardian cases aquariums, terreriums, or vivariums (depending on what you keep in side, and if you keep a hamster in an aquarium, I recommend you get a vivarium before the poor animal drowns). It increased the survival rate of plants being transported aboard ship from 5% to 95%, allowing the British to send double-O-botanists into restricted areas of China and South America to steal plants and transport them back to the Kew Gardens in England. From there they were sent out to British colonies to create a sort of ecological mercantile system. So, Malaysian rubber and Indian tea wouldn't exist without the Wardian case. The spread of useful plants did help many people. Long before the Wardian case, New World species had already improved European diets, allowing for an incredible increase in population without a similar increase in medical technology. With the Wardian case, Cinchona trees could be taken from South America and spread throughout the tropical world so people could produce quinine locally. It's so nice to not have to depend on sickle cell anemia for survival. So, though I'm not a big fan of mercantilism or introduced species, I'm not going to argue against the effects of it. However, a little literary theory (post colonialism and Bourdeau) mixed in and one can argue a lot of things about the symbolism of the case, the ecological violence, the exoticism of house plants plants, the "democratization of colonialism in the motherland" . . . you get the point. Unfortunately, reading a theory-heavy paper doesn't make for the most engaging class time (a fact of which some people need to be reminded). So, after an introduction to 19th century botany and the cases, Dave and I decided to focus on discussion questions. The convenient thing about discussion-based pedagogy is that you don't have to prepare nearly as much material for presentation. While the other groups presented their research like a seminar paper, Dave and I hadn't done half the work they must have, well, maybe Dave had (who am I to say?). After the class, Dr. Winkle came up to me to talk more about the presentation and he was really excited about it. He loved it. He'd been more fascinated by it, apparently, than the "Myth of Acadia Constructed in Longfellow's Evangeline" or "Barbwire as a Refutation of the American Narrative." I'm not really trying to toot my own horn (well, maybe a little). The point is, I feel I did much less than anyone else and yet it was my idea and presentation that the professor was most taken with--someday all this positive affirmation of my slacking will catch up with me. I am setting myself up for failure. Which all brings me to a thesis I've long harped on: negative advisors. Clearly, many teachers are unable to sort out slackers from overachievers. So, in addition to the cheerleader-supportive-advisors universities assign students, we should have negative advisors who tell us we will be failures and no matter what we do is never enough to please them. Biographies of "great" people are replete with the archetypical narrative: Mr/Ms Successful was once told they would never make it and then they work even harder to prove that authority figure wrong. How can schools expect to produce future cults of personality if they fail to discourage students?

Lakoff, Robin. "The Language War."

2005-11-14T10:08:00.000-06:00

I just gave a presentation on a book I haven't actually read. And I nailed it. Go me. I wish I could say it was the first time I've successfully impressed teachers with bluffing, but it's not. On an unrelated note, yay blueberry smoothies.

Birthday Bunco

2005-11-13T14:28:00.000-06:00

Last night was Terri Krovoza's half-century celebration. We had fun, I took pictures. You can view them here. I don't like using the flash, but indoors at night, I really should. Instead I used high ISO (many of these are at ISO800) which can give the pictures a fuzzy or blotchy appearance. One reason I like the new Fujis is that they do high ISOs better than any other; most stop at 400 and have horrible results, whereas this can produce decent prints at 800 and its ISO1600 quality is equivalent to other's 400. But, I digress. Some of the pictures are great, some aren't so much. Still, you might enjoy them, particularly if you were there or wanted to be. Also, you can download a .zip file containing three short clips from the nights activities at megaupload. It's 11 meg and the videos are in the divx format (if you can't play them, install ffdshow). Oh, and for all the Valentino's haters out there (you know who you are, Wendi), we had a Pizza taste test and of the competitors (Dominoes, Papa Johns, [Jabba the] Pizza Hut, Godfather's, and Valentino's), Val's came in first, followed by Godfather's. P.S. On the naming of the videos: I know the dance is the Hokie Pokey. I though "Hanky Panky" was funnier at the time. Perhaps not in retrospect.

Myspace, Schmyspace

2005-11-10T23:47:00.000-06:00

In order to post on Wendi's Myspace blog, I had to register and make a profile. Part of that profile is location and Myspace allows you to search by place. So, you can type in a zip code and find the profiles of people within 5, 20, or 50 miles of you. I'll admit, I've done it. I've recognized a couple faces from UNL and Union (speaking of which, you can also search schools). There is a certain voyeuristic entertainment value to the whole thing. You can even filter the results, for example, by sexual preference. Blogger doesn't offer that. Why? Because it's raison d'être isn't to serve as a "meet market." I've never tried to develop a relationship with people online. I mean, if my life leads me to someone, that's one thing. If they have a similar and distinctive interest, I might think about it. But neither existance nor propinquity is enough for me to seek out a relationship with these people. That brings me up to the other day. When I logged in to post on Wendi's blog, I saw I had a message. I read the message. It was from some girl I'd never seen before. She lives in Omaha and had found me by doing a location search. She wants to "be friends." She has rather revealing pictures on her profile. I haven't responded. These online communities are fascinating, and particularly so since one of my classmates did a research share on online identity construction. Just check out whimit.com and tell me it's not a worthwhile site for composition research. But, my fascination is with the medium more than the people. When I view it as a site of research though, that invites a lot of ethical questions into the situation. Since I'm a firm believer in participant research, I really should interact. It just seems like a granfalloon to me though. Anyway, do you think I should reply to this chica, even if it's just to politely say I'm not that interested? Random randomocity: "I've always wanted to be in a band." "Really, what do you play?" "I play with minds. Go home and think about that. Oh, and don't look under your bed."

Hit refresh.

2005-11-09T10:54:00.000-06:00

Now do it again. And again. I could do this all day. There are 31 different sidebar images picked at random. For some reason, random sometimes seems to favor one over the others. Anyway, it's way too much fun. Some of the pictures were taken by myself or Wendi, but many are lifted from other sources. All of them are of places I've been though. I think it fits with the wanderer theme. And for the Carhenge lovers, don't worry, you have a 1 in 10 chance of seeing Nebraska's greatest monument. And now I have to read about Onate's foot (that's not what I have to read, but I can't give everyone access to the paper by Doug Seefeldt) and write about contested memories of ballet for my 19th century class. And no, Onate doesn't have anything to do with ballet, it's just an example of contested memory theory. Have a wonderful day, and just for fun, reload again.

New Template!

2005-11-08T14:52:00.000-06:00

I love messing around with the template. What do you think of my new one? It's based off of this one, but with rather significant modifications. It's working fine for me on my computer (tested in Opera, Firefox, and Avant), but I'm interested in how it works on other people's monitors. Also, I'm considering whether to keep the side photo in color or colorize it so it's only shades on one color (such as a deep red or an orange). Any comments are helpful, including color scheme critiques. Update: I've been trying to randomize my side image. And I can't seem to. I've used three different methods but none seem to actually work. So, if anyone has actually gotten such things to work, I'd like to know how.

Two more.

2005-11-06T21:34:00.000-06:00

I'm obsessing on one form of artistic expression (visual) when I really am procrastinating about another (poetry). Hilda made this rule several weeks ago that we all need to submit a poem every week for workshop instead of every other week, which is getting a bit draining. At least it's not like the creative writing class at Union last year that I heard was a nightmare.

I've done nothing constructive today.

2005-11-06T16:15:00.000-06:00

. . . but yesterday was pretty active, at least until seven when I fell asleep and didn't wake up until 1:30 am at which point I did a few things then went back to sleep. At Capital View Church yesterday (which Serhiy insisted on calling "CVC"), I saw a banner on which this was written: It was good company. Anyway, my November gallery has been updated with pictures from yesterday, both church and Pioneer's park with people from Carrington (the daughter grade's Serhiy's papers for Beth Rodacker-Borgans). And here's another church art. I was told by someone to draw a picture of him and I replied, "I'll draw Yu." Yu Huang Shandi, that is. Homophones are fun despite my penchant for making mistakes when I comment on blogs. The lines don't look so bad at a smaller size, but I scanned it at 3157X4746 to edit and I can see every pen stroke at that size. Curiously, getting up close to see paintstrokes is my favorite part of going to an art gallery.

Shedding Leaves and Hair

2005-11-05T02:05:00.000-06:00

Take a gander at my new gallery. I wish you could see the RAW format versions of the pictures, they look much better than the JPGs, but unfortunately, they are around 10 meg each and not viewable through a web browser. So, we'll have to settle for lossy compression schemes. The gallery begins with Thursday night. Between class, the poetry reading, and making copies for my presentation, I was on or around campus from 12:30 til 9:30. And I'd brought my camera. Naturally I was busy, so it wasn't like I was shooting all day, but I did come up with a couple good ones. One is of a fall tree at night that looks beautifully orange, much more beautiful than during the daytime. Why? Because of the neon glow of the Nebraska Bookstore sign. The only problem is that I seem to get Parkinson's disease whenever there's a camera in my hands. Later I was fascinated by the public discourse written on the bathroom stall in the library. Someday, when I'm more adventurous, perhaps I'll compare men's and women's bathroom graffiti. To tell you the truth, one of the things written on the stall door may have been added by myself (one could say the damage had already been done). You can guess which comment. The final photos of the night were of the exterior of Love Library, my on-campus haunt. That brings us to Friday. Serhiy and I went to our friendly neighborhood College of Hair Design for to get new 'dos. Now, this is something his Mom has been begging him to do for a while. I don't think he got it cut as short as she'd like, but it is shorter. When he asked how it looks, I answered that he looks like a woman. I brought along a camera and got some pictures of the foliage (because I want to be like Ceri and Ellen) and also of the haircutting process. Afterwards, we went to Bison Witches for their a half-sandwich and soup each. Their veggie sandwich is so good I hypothesize it includes crack (thank you, Pauline for the expression). Anyway, there is a smashing sequence of me attacking the remains of my bread bowl. I think the violence of it makes me look manly. One last thing before I bid you "ado." I've been trying to convert my church art, aka doodles done to keep myself attentive, to a digital medium. So, I scanned some with rather mixed results. A line that looks acceptable on paper is rather crooked and unfulfilling when blown up on the screen. Maybe my Parkinson's isn't only camera activated. I've tried various methods to deal with the noise and such, but short of retracing everything in Photoshop, I'm not sure how to make them look decent for digital exhibition. Anyway, here's one that I've touched up a bit (but not excessively and without spending too much time on it). If anyone has a quick fix recommendation, please tell me.

(Click for a larger size)

Positively Williams

2005-11-03T22:39:00.000-06:00

No one has asked me about my celebrity crushes, but I'm volunteering one: Helen Thomas. Wow. But that's not what I wanted to post about. Tonight I went to a reading by Rynn Williams, the 2004 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry winner. She's also a life-long New Yorker and a professor at NYU. She had come to our class to answer questions earlier in the day so we got to know a bit about her before the reading. Anyway, I recommend Adonis Garage. Williams deals with issues like divorce, HIV/AIDS, city life, and desire in general. The praise on the back comes from people like Judith Ortiz Cofer and Jonathan Holden, and their recommendations are worth much more than mine. Williams doesn't employ the feel-good Kooser lift, but she's worth reading. Here's a series she wrote that I thought was particularly masterful. Positive 1. READING THE RESULTS I don't move, but the inside corner of my right eye turns glassy, then shatters, hands focus more sharply. I don't move, but the pigeon shudders on the sill. The door opens to a maze of wallpaper, family photos-- their bliss-frieze burns the last unaffected corner of my sight, like molten Karo. My husband's mouth collapses, and the air about his shoulders has crystallized. We don't say a word, all the noise is around us, the letter, half-folded, on the desk, an abatross, a dove. 2. POSITIVE Because in those days there were no words for such things I took handfuls of vitamins and slept with a trumpet flower under my pillow, I ate at the Kiev on Second Avenue at four every morning: enormous boiled potato pierogis shivering in pools of butter, little sides of sauteed onions, paper cups of pure sour cream, Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray, no ice, as a chaser, but now when the call comes I'm sitting in the kitchen with two plastic funnels over my breast and pump on the counter with its hydraulic suck and the cast iron sputtering of eggs, the kids already bickering at table, milk flowing into baby bottles, even now the word heroin makes me feel the lovely way a body can go slack from inside out. 3. A SINGLE DROP I'd never paid much mind to my implements, but now I paint "Fire Engine Red" on the handle of my razor, a single drop on my nail clippers, one long stroke on my lethal toothbrush to cordon off my blood, I tend and sop each splash or seep, soiled band-aids, love-smeared sheets-- every bleeding gum, torn hangnail, paper cut, scrape, gully of cracked lip another hazard, each infectious throb now forever watched as I patrol my body's raging arroyo in the family bathroom, to keep my children safe from me. 4. PAPER GOWNS X-rays, lab coat, and me wearing those delicate petals (gaping, cold through the sleeves). He asks me to extend my palms: the motion is of pushing away. Breathe with your mouth, he says, soft tup, tup tup, along my spine, as if checking a cantaloupe. There is a piece of gum beneath the windowsill, green imprint of a thub. We're talking percentages, genotypes, we're talking bundled pharmaceuticals. Studies, it seems, are inconclusive. I try to look at the big picture: a talc-free rubber glove at the edge of the trash, neither in, nor out. On the insurance card, raised numbers, black ink worn away. there's a girl on the street with her head back, the strap of her dress falling carelessly.

"The Good Old Days" or "Stupid Modern English"

2005-11-03T10:30:00.000-06:00

Last week and this week we've been covering questions in the simple past tense in my ELL class. Generally speaking, the formula is regular, you just have to remember the rules. 1. If a sentence uses a modal, auxiliary, or to be, simply invert subject and verb. "Kilroy was here" becomes "Was Kilroy here?" "We could smile" --> "Could we smile?" 2. If the sentence contains only an action verb, it needs do for support. "We went to purgatory" --> "Did we go to purgatory?" 3. If you employ a question word (wh-word), then the formula is "wh- + do/be + subject + verb (if be, then +ing; if do, then use base form) + optional components" In these cases, the wh- takes the place of the direct object. "I went to MalWart" --> "Where did you go?" "You are stupid" --> "What are you?" 4. I won't go into tag questions or questions that have no grammatical change, only inflected vocalization because we haven't studied these in class. This can get confusing though, as it did last night, because who and what questions have two common forms (it's possible with the other question words, but less common), one if you are inquiring about the subject and the other if you are asking about the direct object. Take, for example, "Natasha helped Boris catch Moose and Skwirrel." If you ask about the direct object you get "Whom did Natasha help catch Moose and Skwirrel?" and if you inquire regarding the subject, it is "Who helped Boris catch Moose and Skwirrel?" (Wh- + tensed verb + subject + optional components.) The same rule applies to questions about non-human subjects. "The squirrel flew" --> "What flew?" You never need do support if you are asking about a subject. For some reason though, no matter how many ways I explained it, it took people a long time to catch on. And then the book gave us examples that ended in prepositions. Ugh. I try to make sure the students know the "rules" but also how people actually speak, so I explained that who almost always replaces whom and that ending sentences on prepositions is discouraged in formal situations. "I talked to the Queen" --> (normal) "Who did you talk to?" --> ("proper") "To whom did you talk?" Strangely, after the whole direct object vs. subject tribulation, they picked this one up right away. What I dislike about Ms. Azar and this book in general is that they do this to me all the time. They insist on using examples of things without explaining them. Another rough day was when they decided to use some phrasal verbs out of the blue and I was stuck explaining them even though the students shouldn't have to face down that particular monster at this level. My point (and I do have one): We need to go back to Middle or Early Modern English. You know, like Shakespeare. Back then, do support was rare and optional. You could make a negative statement without it. Today we have to say, "I didn't go on a mad shooting spree," while back then they could say "I went not on a mad shooting spree." And you could ask the question, "Went you postal?" "Did you go postal?" is just so cumbersome. Simple subject/verb inversion. That's all I'm asking for. Other Germanic langauges managed to keep it simple, why not English?

2005-11-01T23:10:00.000-06:00

Andrea's in a magazine. It's nothing that you can't see at her artfully-designed site, but it's nice to see her getting some recognition. If you happen to be in Minneapolis before 12 November, stop by the Bockley Gallery. Besides Andrea, it's got some pretty big 'shinob names like Norval Morrisseau and George Morrison. And with that, I will get back to my exposition of the role ~~presupposition~~ context plays in the ~~usage~~ semantic selection of the definite article. If you beg, I might just post my findings. I say this knowing full well that few if any people care.

2005-11-01T03:58:00.000-06:00

I just posted, but I also happen to think at least one person in the world might be interested in this dancing monkey posting more poetry. This is the poem I've been revising this evening (and my reason for still being awake). I just e-mailed it out to be workshopped at our next class (ENGL 853, Seminar in Poetry) and perhaps some of you would like to take a stab at being my editors as well. I can't say I consider it finished, but it has reached the point where other's eyes are necessary for it's continued growth.

Thoughts Concerning the Fountain in front of the Nebraska Union

Catapulted, kinetic force loaded, Drop finds himself suddenly independent, an organism distinct from the uncountable noun of his birth.

He shoots skyward, looks around, hopes someone is watching, sure of his role in life: to go high, to go higher, if possible, higher than any other energetic

drop, to refract particles of sun. He trades kinetic energy for potential and climbs until, transfer complete, for a moment,

just. one. moment .

he hangs motionless in the air. Perhaps he wonders at the majestic view, the colonnades, backpacks, and concrete—thinks the universe

conspired to create one sublime instant just for him. Or maybe the universe was created for this now? Perhaps he’s unsure of his role. Could I

have gone higher? Slowly curves the parabola, Drop grabs what light he can manage. The ascent dictated how he would fall: moment. one. just.

the descent felt in his molecules, ineffably wrong, ominous, but necessary; molecules know the way, they traveled this path as past drops, the way

back to uncountable. With a plunk and splash, Drop will be forgotten, dissected, and replaced in the spray by newer drops whom I will admire equally.

---

Background: This is not a Wordsworth poem, but somewhere in my head it deserves the title, “Intimations of Immortality.” Watching the mathematical chaos of a fountain can be mesmerizing and numinous. When I dig at those feelings, I find religious thoughts of transience and the beauty thereof. I hope this poem makes the instant of life something beautiful though it cannot quite replicate the beauty of the instant of refraction. It was written while reading Gaspar and thematic comparisons to him are in order though stylistically it is a very different creature.

Class and Coupling

2005-11-01T03:09:00.000-06:00

Tonight in my ELL¹ class, we talked about Halloween, All Saints' Day, Samhain, etc. I love these students so much. They ask great questions, which is to say, ones to which I have at least some answer and yet still invite further investigation. What's best is that the holiday opened up a way to talk about beliefs in our secular classroom in a very non-dogmatic way. Also, I'd brought candy and apparently some of my students don't eat before class. Later, after we'd done enough grammar exercises for the night and taken our quiz, I had them practice wh- questions by allowing them to ask me anything. It's a great rapport-building exercise and I only answer grammatically correct questions, which gives some incentive to practice good form. Anyway, the first question was "Why don't you married?" Given this exercise, most classes eventually ask this question, but these precocious noodles² are more upfront than most. When we'd arrived at "Why aren't you married," I told them that the problem is inherent in the sacrament³; it takes two and I haven't got my numero dos. Salvador suggested Maria and it took about five minutes to get the class on track after that. After class, I walked home again with Natasha, my Russian student, her husband, and their twin infants. They live on 11^th and Washington, so our paths coincide for a while. Professionally, he is, according to his wife, "a mice killer." No, that is not the same as an exterminator; he's actually a bio-chemistry researcher at UNL. For being guilty of crimes against the most intelligent lifeforms on the planet, he's a really great guy. They're the sort of couple one would love to do couple type things with if they were only paired off themselves. You will notice though that there is a complete lack of *sigh* here. Why? I don't know. For now I'm quite alright with my "don't married" status. And if this couple can't inspire matrimony-envy, nothing will. All in all, it's been a good All Hallows' Eve⁴. ¹ I object to ESL and EFL as misnomers, so for now I'm going with English for Language Learners ² Rotini. ³ Of course I didn't use those terms silly, I do know how to communicate despite the tenor of my last post. ⁴ What can I say? I just love footnotes and I found the html tag for superscript.

Unasking a Divide

2005-10-31T14:55:00.000-06:00

Then we sat on the sand for some time and observed How the oceans that cover this world were perturbed By the tides from the orbiting moon overhead "How relaxing the sound of the waves is," you said. I began to expound upon tidal effects When you told me to stop, looking somewhat perplexed So I did not explain why the sunset turned red And we watched the occurrence in silence instead.

Lt. Commander Data, "Schisms."

StarTrek: The Next Generation. Stardate 46154.2.

The point of this poem (and the subsequent "Ode to Spot") was to reinforce the difference between Man and Machine. And though Ode to Spot is something I'd expect from a third grader with an exceptional grasp of meter, this fragment seems rather poetic to me. I mean, I grok Data on this point. It is the problem of having too much information on a given subject; in humans, it is concurrent with specialization. Last semester one of my classmates was doing a project on anti-intellectualism in the public school where he teaches. He shared with us four videos of student interviews. In one of those videos, we saw a girl with a complete proto-academician attitude. She's the sort who sits on the front row [". . . the potential for mischief varies inversely with one's proximity to the authority figure!" (Martin, The Simpsons. Oct. 11, 1990)], she considers herself an intellectual, she worries about her GPA. Most of all, she was talkative, with a thoughtful and long-winded answer to every question. Quite a change from some of the sub-verbal boys previously interviewed. When she was asked about her future plans, she said, "I want to get my PhD" "Why?" "Because then I'll have something to say and people will listen." The room full of PhD and MA students erupted in laughter. It's really just the opposite and we all knew it. The more immersed we become in our discipline, the less capable we are of talking to anyone else. We have our own lexicons and theoretical paradigms we bring along to our interactions with others. While people in closely related disciplines might understand, even that is often a stretch because we might be using the same words to quite different effect. Student missionaries and exchange students have a similar problem upon their return. A large part of their life is divorced from the experience of those around them. That's why they gravitate together to talk about the life they lived in the other place. And it doesn't really matter if one went to Korea and the other to Ecuador; talking about their new otherness is therapeutic. And when it comes to talking to others, sometimes it's best to just censor what you know and want to share, and just focus on the moment.

So I did not explain why the sunset turned red And we watched the occurrence in silence instead.

---

On an unrelated subject, the abundance of military recruiting commercials annoys me to no end. It seems to me that we could save a lot of taxpayer money by just killing our young people at home. It would be nice if pacifists had as much funding to get our message out.

Fotki

2005-10-30T14:38:00.000-06:00

I'm still figuring out all the settings on my camera and how best to post the pictures. With the amount of blur I keep getting, it's pretty obvious I'm not meant to be a surgeon. Anyway, I think it will work best for me to give you the link to a gallery instead of posting photos here and using up your bandwidth everytime you check the blog for updates. So, if you're interested, you can see the pictures I took for Serhiy's mom or a gallery in-progress of other people (right now it just has Tanya and me).

A Metablog Post

2005-10-29T00:29:00.000-05:00

I think I actually enjoy editing the blog template more than I like posting. And regarding the subject of the template, I'd like feedback on what works and what doesn't. How about the link colors? Is it too hard knowing where links are after they turn dark green? It the purple too bright? Do you like links underlined or not? How about the bullets? I'm seriously thinking of nixing them. Maybe I'll replace them with Wizards. That's a joke. Ha ha. Sigh. I wish you would have laughed. Then there's commenting--someone has given you a jumping off place and you can run with it. Earlier I kind of went off on a tangent about the possible etymology of Indian Summer over at Mrs. Krovoza's blog. It was probably uncalled for, but fun. To state the obvious though, it doesn't really matter what someone says in their comments; they're terribly affirming just to see that someone's interacting with your words. Blogs are all about seeing and being seen (performance) but unfortunately, you can't actually see the audience to get primary feedback and have to rely on a trickle of comments. Anyway, yesterday I got my new camera. I love it. It fits in the hand perfectly and the pictures seem to be pretty good. Even better, it works well in low-light situations, such as gymnasiums and my apartment. I shot Serhiy for his mother today (as opposed to shooting him for Daniel which would require an altogether different instrument)and I'll probably post a couple of those shots this weekend. So, this may return to the original purpose of photoblogging.

Meat substitute teacher

2005-10-28T01:49:00.000-05:00

Watching The Daily Show tonight, I was fascinated by the segment on Hufu™, a new tofu meat analog. The stated goal of its invention was to let anthropology students experience cannibalism legally. That's right. Hufu™ is human-flavored tofu. How did they do product testing? Did they just make it taste like chicken? (Actually, it's supposed to be more like a sweet beef.) I'd love to see a Folger's Crystals™-style commercial for Hufu™: "We secretly switched these Cannibals' meal of ceremonially-sacrificed human flesh with our own textured vegetable protein to see if they notice . . ." But I digress. Recently, Serhiy asked me about my opinion on cannibalism. He brings these topics up out of left field fairly consistently and I'm becoming used to it. He had been reading a Russian news source about a restaurant in China that serves aborted fetuses. Since Russian reporters are incapable of being critical of their own society, they like to criticize other societies. It was a fnord article. Even worse, it is a hoax that feeds on virulent orientalism (links: 1,2). For that matter, "cannibalism always turns out to have been suppressed shortly before the observer's arrival, or is imputed by his informants to other people" (Bitterli 9), which makes me suspect any report of it. The falsehood that inspired the question does not, however, negate the question. I, being a materialist and existentialist, said, "Waste not, want not." My feeling is that it's better to be useful in death than taking up space in a medical waste dump or a cemetery (and don't even get me started about how irrational the American cemetery system is). Serhiy brought up the compelling comeback, "but they're human." Not anymore. Now they are CHON like any other biological matter. I've seen Soylent Green. I disagreed with their society, but being useful after death is fine. Fight Club's use of human fat to make soap was disgusting to watch (and even more so to read about when you realize the first batch of soap used Marla's mother)—but I've got no problem with the concept itself. I think lard is disgusting too, no matter how Ukrainians dress it. To bring it out of the realm of fiction, I can't understand why anyone objects to stem cell research. Just let me add the important caveat that the person must be dead already and this postmortem utility did not facilitate the death in anyway. Even if you believe in the existence of an ethereal, non-corporal soul (unlike us materialist Adventists) I still don't understand the objection to postmortem utilization of humans. I mean, in that cosmogony, the body is nothing without the soul. Mainstream Christianity emphasizes the sinfulness and dirtiness of the flesh but somehow after death it's supposed to be sacred? How can people hold so many conflicting beliefs at one time? (Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency discusses this phenomenon in depth.) Personally, I want to be used as fertilizer, and though Brett has decided not to farm, I hope he's still up to his promise to disc me under in a field. I don't understand why people who eat pigs or dogs, animals with genomes remarkably similar to humans and therefore efficient disease vectors, would have problems with human flesh. When Serhiy asked me if I would ever eat a person, the answer was a simple negative. Why? Well, it's certainly not because I think corpses should enjoy involate sanctity. It's simply because I'm vegetarian and even if I weren't, I would follow the Biblical clean and unclean guidelines. But now with Hufu™, maybe I'll get the chance to experience human meat analogue. I don't think I want to pay for such expensive veggie food right now, but if you're interested, you can order some and find some traditional human-based recipes.

Poèmes du Jour

2005-10-26T12:51:00.000-05:00

Water If I were called in To construct a religion I should make use of water. Going to church Would entail a fording To dry, different clothes; My litany would employ Images of sousing, A furious devout drench, And I should raise in the east A glass of water Where any-angled light Would congregate endlessly. (Philip Larkin) In my poetry class (853, taught by Hilda Raz), I'm doing a project focussing on water, especially on its chemical and spiritual aspects. Doing some background reading, I came across this poem. Oh Philip Larkin, why do you taunt me with your talent? For contrast, here is the first poem that I wrote for the project. It's been workshopped, but like nearly all of my own writing, I think it could be improved (feel free to leave comments). Cohesion/Tension: H2-O...H-O-H...O-H2 The drop starts slowly and gathers condensed steam. Darkly red, it traces the curve of jaw until gravity overcomes cohesion and pulls blood into water to blossom like fire and dissipate. In the pool I see myself; foam around the mouth, stubble still in patches, another drop forming just above the lip. The second drop follows the same path to chaos. And the breath of god fluttered the face of the waters, in mayim he saw his reflection— piss, semen, blood. Positive and negative, the poles of waters called to each other. Water pulls its world downward, forms a skin of tension broken by the flower of blood. Ashes to ashes, some say, dust to dust. And water? What man convinced me of my solidity? My own face flutters in the water, I patch the leak with a shred of tissue and try to restore the fiction. (Scott Cushman) I was reading about Apam Napat (Aryan god, “Son of the Waters”) and Enki/Ea (Sumerian god of water) and thinking about the role of water in the Genesis creation account. A little research into a language I have not studied (Hebrew) revealed that the word Genesis uses for water, mayim, can also mean urine, blood, or semen. Somehow this conflation of water with bodily fluids clicked in my mind with the idea of cohesion, the attraction of two identical molecules, such as the negative pole of a water molecule being attracted to the positive pole of a second water molecule. As the surface molecules are pulled downward by their attraction to the water molecules below them (unlike the molecules in the middle which are attracted equally in all directions), they create surface tension, the skin-like layer on the surface of a liquid. (An alert reader may have noticed that where I used cohesion in line 4, I should have said adhesion because the blood was clinging to a dissimilar substance—the response to this is that my point was flesh, blood, and water are the same: mayim). These two narratives of water, one theological and the other chemical, mingled in my mind in a way I felt was poetic, or at least as poetic as the wave theory of light must have seemed to Shelley when he wrote Prometheus Unbound. But like Shelley, I knew I needed a frame to make these ideas accessible. And that’s where the image of shaving comes in; it easily flows into thoughts of water and blood mixing and is a fairly regular and universal experience in a society obsessed with hair removal. One could say I went about writing completely backwards, starting with the lesson and ending with an image.

Finally, people watching without the inconvenience.

2005-10-26T02:33:00.000-05:00

Well, apparently absolutely everyone is blogging, so I'll try to be better at it. For now, let me give you all a "game" to try. I love doing this. Go to an album hosting site with a search feature (Webshots is my recommendation because it has the best search engine and the largest user base, but Flickr and pBase work too). Type in a search phrase like Lincoln Nebraska or Adventist or towel and see what comes up. Webshots allows for boolian operators, so a search like Lincoln (NE OR Nebraska OR Neb OR Nebr) helps you get a more complete listing if you are obsessive compulsive. (Since I am well versed in this feature, you can guess about my own level of obsession.) It is endlessly fascinating what is associated with certain words. For example, towel will lead you to photos of people's monogrammed towels, towels folded like origami, and people of various makes and models wearing towels. It entertains me, perhaps it will entertain you too.

Serhiy is here.

2005-08-23T11:24:00.000-05:00

Since many people (well, two at least) have expressed an interest in recent events regarding the arrival of Sergey and his adjustment to life in Nebraska, I thought I'd continue this blog I started earlier this summer. The advantage to a blog in this case is that it is a pull media rather than a push media. A mass e-mail arrives in your mailbox whether you like it or not, and one feels guilty for including photos and using large chunks of disk space. A blog is just out there for you to choose to read, or not, and if pictures are included, well, it doesn't result in sleepless, guilt-ridden nights. Last Tuesday (Aug. 16), Sergey went to the American embassy in Kyiv to try to get his visa again. He'd been there the week before and the consul had asked for a few more papers. Well, thanks to a quick response by Huda in Union's admissions department, he had the papers in hand by Monday. But having the right papers does not guarantee a visa. He waited in line for seven hours (a pretty typical queue at the US Embassy) and of the 300+ people there, only about a tenth got visas. A girl near him, also wanting to study in America, got up to the window, had everything reviewed by the consul and was rejected. The consul said that all the papers were correct and in order, but she had the feeling the girl would try to stay in America--just a feeling--and therefore denied the visa. The girl had just paid the US government at least $1,200 to be rejected on a feeling. For the average Ukrainian, that's just over a year's wages. The US Department of State does not just reject a visa applicant though, they salt the wounds by marking in the passport that the visa was denied. The US is the only nation in the world to do this and once such a mark appears in your passport, it makes it harder to get a visa to anywhere and almost impossible to get one to the United States in the future. So, you can imagine Sergey had some apprehensions as he came up to the counter and handed over his documents. On his first visit, he knew that he would be allowed to try again, but if he were to be rejected this time, he would have had to start the entire process over again. Plus, he'd have that awful stamp on his passport. He says the consul didn't even scrutinize them. She just glanced at each, said everything looked good this time and approved the visa. Of course, he had about three hours of other hoops to jump through at the embassy before the visa was physically in his passport, but he was approved in only a few minutes. The next day he was able to buy a reasonably priced ticket for a flight less than 24 hours in the future (a miracle in itself) and by 8:00 am Thursday morning Kyiv time, he was sitting on the plane for his first trip out of the former Soviet Union. He hadn't slept at all the night before and he only slept for a couple of hours on the whole trip. He arrived in the Central Time Zone at 8:13 pm Thursday night, meaning his total traveling time was about 20 hours. When we met him at the airport, he was tired but still excited. Unfortunately, Austrian Airlines had no way of getting him to Omaha or Lincoln, the closest place on such short notice was St. Louis. I had told him earlier that Chicago would be fine--partly because I know people in the area to stay the night with or even meet us half way. St. Louis wasn't a bad drive though. Dad and I went to pick him up and the drive was about 6 hours each direction. The only difficult part was a thunderstorm we ran into around St. Joseph, which Sergey managed to sleep through entirely. Since he has vocational training in carpentry, hair on the longish side, and is a Theology major, I can't help but think he intentionally tries to sleep through storms as part of a regimen of Christ-likeness. We got to Lincoln around 3:00 am and were at Union trying to register by 10:00 am. One of our first stops was the ESL department and we were told they were just about to start administering the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) and he wouldn't have to wait. Personally, I thought he should have the weekend to recover before taking the test that determines which classes he takes, but he chose to take the test then. We didn't get much of registration done since the test took two and a half hours and all the offices close down at noon on Friday. Since we couldn't finish getting him registered, I led an informal campus tour when he finished testing. The college has had significant changes since I graduated, but since I was privy to the planning stages of many of the changes as an ASB officer, I can still talk about those areas in depth. Perhaps the most interesting part of the tour was in the computer lab on the third floor of the Everett Building. I was trying to tell him about logging in and he kept looking at this cute little redhead. He said he thought he knew that girl and I was thinking, "yeah, right." She looked up and said, "Sergey? What are you doing here?" Apparently, she and her older sister had visited Ukraine on a short-term mission trip a couple years ago and he had spent quite a bit of time with them, especially the older sister. They are both Union students now. The old saying deserves repeating: the Adventist world is small. After accomplishing everything we could at Union, we came home and ate. By 7:00 pm, he was dead to the world. The next morning we went to Sabbath Experience (Union's way of saying "Sabbath School") and then church at CVC (College View Church). He'd seen the church on a video Union had sent me in Ukraine, so he was quite as awestruck by the windows or the organ as most first-timers. After church, he went home with McClellands for lunch. Huda McClelland is the head of admissions with whom I worked getting the I-20 sorted out, her husband Jim teaches art at Union, and their daughter Laurel is an Associate Professor of ESL at Union. The family sees taking care of international students as part of their special mission--Mr. McClelland even donates the profits from his artwork to scholarship funds for them. Anyway, they had all of the newly enrolled ESL students over to their home for lunch and kept them until about 8:30 pm. I called them to make sure he would get to the ASB Handshake on time and Huda mentioned something about just adopting him. As I have said before in different venues, he's a likable fellow. The theme of Handshake was superheroes so he needed something special to wear. Daniel, who considers himself Union College staff when it's convenient, was going to Handshake anyway, so I found Sergey's Orange Revolution paraphernalia and sent it along. The million protesters who forced democratic elections on a corrupt government last winter might not be superheroes per se, but they certainly accomplished more than some character in an escapist comic book. He said a lot of people asked about the orange garb and some even knew what it was about. Sunday we went shopping. Earlier in the summer he had asked how much certain things cost in America and had decided it would actually be cheaper to buy most things here, so he saved the money he earned this summer. We still need to find some more things, but he was able to get a pair of shorts, a pair of jeans, a pair of pants that can turn into shorts, and a pair of dress shoes. He wears the same size dress shoes I do (13) and the same size of pants I wore back in high school (32/34) so I think we can keep him clothed at least, though not as fashionably as one might hope. In Ukraine, it's very important to most people to be in style, so most people only have a few outfits that they wear over and over again and by the time the fashion has changed significantly, they need new clothes. In America, we place more of a premium on washing our clothes between each wearing, which means having a lot of clothes to go through between laundry days and, unless one is rich, caring a lot less about fashion. In this respect, I think we will try to Americanize him for the time being. Oh, and Sunday evening he was finally able to get a hold of his parents on the phone. He'd been able to contact some friends and his sister before to tell them he'd arrived safely and all was well, but he hadn't been able to talk to his mom and dad directly. Interestingly, all of his other conversations were in Russian, but when he talks to his mom, it's pure Ukrainian. Which means I could eavesdrop better. From his responses, I could interpolate that his mom was asking him what the apartment was like, if he was eating well, what he was eating, if he was helping out around the apartment . . . in other words, the exact same questions my mom usually asks me. This brings us up to yesterday. I had class at UNL first thing in the morning, but afterwards we went to Union to finish registering. This time I managed to avoid ESL until we had just about everything done. As we met people like Jacque and Osa he kept saying how friendly and happy everyone seems. That is the thing about Americans that Eastern Europeans find enchanting, but I have also met many who became rather disenchanted when they found out how often it is just a mask we wear. But at Union, the vast majority of the smiles are genuine. Around 11:20 we finally ventured into ESL territory to get his class schedule worked out and find out the results of the TOEFL. He scored 470. 475 is the when Union allows students to enroll in normal classes and 550 is when they say a student does not need any assistance with language learning. His listening, reading, and essay scores were all at an advanced level, but his grammar was intermediate and he needs to build his vocabulary. So, as planned, he will spend this semester taking ESL classes and then he'll begin regular classes in January, though he'll probably need to take one more ESL grammar class along with them. Since the advisor he was assigned was in class at the time and she needed to clear him in the computer before we could finish registration, he went off to take his first two Union College classes and I went to the library to grade tests from my class at SeCC (Southeast Community College). At 1:30, we met at his advisor's office. He'd just been in class with her and they were talking as I walked in. After only an hour of teaching him, she was suggesting he meet and marry her niece who's about to graduate from UCDavis. Ah, that American subtlety. This conversation, combined with the reaction of one rather pleasant office worker in admissions and one very good friend of mine upon meeting him ("He's so cute!") make me think there are going to be powerful forces keeping him from his homework and his eventual return to Ukraine. Being tall and foreign goes a long way with girls. But I think I prefer it when I'm the foreign one. During the registration process he's had to use his name as transliterated from Ukrainian (Serhiy, pronounced "ser hee") rather than Russian (Sergey, pronounced "ser gay") and he decided Monday to have people call him by the Ukrianian pronunciation. He says it will be less confusing for them that way, but I think it's because the Ukranian version is harder to make fun of in English. It's the same reason why he doesn't like it in Ukraine when people call him by the diminutive form Serozha--rozha means an ugly face so it's easy to make jokes. Sabbath morning he was asking Daniel if he could call him Dan or Danny, both of which Daniel hates, so I told him that if he calls Daniel, Danny, then we'll start calling him Serozhichka (something like "little Sergeylet"). But, as usual, I digress. We finished registering him, we got him a job in plant services and got home in time for me to finish my grading and go to class. When I got home, he and Daniel were watching an American Football game on TV and Daniel was explaining the rules. It's nice to see them getting along and I took the opportunity to put on my headphones and watch German TV on the computer. Today is Serhiy's first full day of classes and work, so I'm sure there will be interesting opinions to hear this evening. Anyway, here is a picture of him outside the apartment Sunday morning. As you can see, he let his hair grow this year, but I don't think it looks bad on him.

Home again, well, Omaha anyway

2005-03-17T15:23:00.000-06:00

I'm back now, the flight yesterday was terribly uninteresting. Except of course for the security check. I was chosen for extra special attention and got my carry-on and person checked in detail. The TSA folks said that the airlines sometimes single people out for extra security checks but they did not know what criteria the airlines follow. When I was finally through (and thank goodness I'd come early), I asked a Delta representative who said that such decisions were the TSAs alone and Delta had nothing to do with it. One of the two organizations were lying, and since it was Delta's computers who printed the "SSSSS" on my boarding pass, I'm going to guess it's them. The more I think about it, I think what singled me out was my inability to understand the fellow at the desk when he asked for my ID. It's not my fault that the fellow mumbled and was generally sub-verbal. It's not like he even had an accent, I mean, I'm pretty good with variations in speech patterns. He just didn't enunciate. I need to write a nasty letter to Delta asking for an explanation of their system and if I don't get a satisfactory answer, I think I'll boycott them. Well, the service all day was so poor compared to any other airline I've ever been on (including Eastern European and South American airlines) that I'll probably avoid them at all costs. The letter really only will determine if I encourage other people to treat them like the plague as well. We'll see if I can make an airport poem out of it anyway, writing angry is easy. Unfortunately, it wasn't until after my more-than-two-hour lay-over in Salt Lake City that I found out about the free shuttles and tours to the historic part of the city that anyone with over two hours can take advantage of. Instead of seeing the Mormon Mecca, I sat in the airport and videoed myself yawning.

A day with George

2005-03-16T10:56:00.000-06:00

Sunday, Aunt Mary and I went hiking and got just a little lost. There were plenty of beautiful flowers, most of which we took pictures of too close for them to show up well. We did get to chase some Wood Ducks for a while, but also, pictures of them were impossible. Such is life. Here are a few pictures to give you a sense of the scene. Monday night, after picking Melinda up from the airport, I went to stay the night at her place in Newberg. I'm loath to call it an apartment since it's two stories and stands alone, but it's not a house or cabin either. The most accurate term would be stable or carriage house, but those imply too untoward things about Melinda (and Daisy, Simon, and Garfunkle). It certainly has some trappings of elegance, particularly the bathroom which has not one but two ways to flush the toilet. Luxury. She also has lots of storage space, but my kitchen is better (as if there ever were a contest). In the morning we listened to some of her music collection that would haunt us the rest of the day and I got Melinda to model for a couple pictures. Here she is as the spokeswoman for Quaker Instant Oatmeal. And her she's selling that hairdryer. I also got a couple pictures of the cats, but strangely enough the one that hid the most, Daisy, was the one I got the best photo of. While Melinda did a little laundry, I got a tour of her land lady's home. Amazing. It dates back to the 1890s and is considered a historic site. She has decorated it with antiques that reinforce the history of the place. Plus, they have a servant's staircase, which I think is an enviable discussion piece. I want to get one for my apartment. Daniel and I have neither an upstairs nor a servant, but I still want one. I did not, however, think to take any pictures of the place, so you'll just have to trust me on it's pink and blue coolness. When the jeans finally dried, Melinda gave me a tour of two recycling facilities and the mail room at George Fox University. Now that I think of it, maybe the "tour" was actually running errands, but we did have fun. Herbert Hoover, about whom I recently wrote a poem, moved to Newberg after his parent's had finished dying in Iowa and attended George Fox. We drove by the Hoover/Minthorn house and saw a little display about Herbert and Lou. I really do love that old Quaker, despite my poetry. He still hasn't replaced Millard Fillmore as my favorite president though. I also have no photos from this part of the trip. However, when we stopped by the falls at Oregon City, I did take a few snapshots there. These falls once stretched all the way across the Willamette River, forcing anyone traveling by boat to portage here, but then they destroyed about half the falls and put in a loch system. Ah, progress. The reason we were in Oregon City was to see the End of the Oregon Trail Museum. Since I don't live too far from the trail, I can now say I've made it all the way to the end. Melinda and I were the only visitors, so the tour guide was very informal and let us play with the pioneer's artifacts. Since Scott's Bluff was a major resting spot on the trail, they had the name in their steps and I had to get a picture with it. Also, Melinda took a picture of our feet at the End of the Oregon Trail Museum, which is her favorite picture of the day, so I suppose it should be included. Then we were off to Powell's, which is one of the largest book stores in the world. I couldn't help drooling just a little. I think if I were ever given three wishes, one would be the ability to consume (i.e. read and analyze) a book instantly simply by touching it. I would run through the isles of Powell's with both arms outstretched again and again, grazing every book on every shelf. Melinda may be even more of a bibliophile than me though, so this is a dangerous destination for the both of us. The rare book room and the foreign language sections captivated me the most. Both of us bought two books, mine were both poetry: a collection poems by Ахматова in both English and Russian and Hilda Raz's Trans. Hilda is one of my professors at UNL. And of course, I got Melinda to model again. The next stop was Lebanese food. We picked up one of Melinda's classmates and met three more (plus Kaylie, the daughter of one who seems to have been adopted by all). The food was great and Melinda's friends all seem like pleasant and interesting people. Kaylie was the center of attention (NO, I was NOT jealous . . . ) as she was practicing her cursive and spelling. Apparently they're starting kids off with cursive rather than print these days. Half of us graduate students had forgotten the art of cursive writing, which leads me to wonder how much use the skill is anyway. There were also a few games of hangman, though Kaylie generally needed help remembering which letters were in her words. After saying good-bye to everyone, we went back to Vancouver so I could spend the night there since Melinda has class today and I have to get to the airport. I'll be home tonight at eight. It's been a good trip, but I could use some vegetative time. Oh, and one last thing. Uncle Bruce and I have a word. It's together with a lot of words that seem to make no sense as part of the narration at the end of a documentary (Gizmo). We've rather taken to the word, but are still not sure what it might, should, or could mean. So, if you have any suggestions for the proper usage of craminate, please, post comments on that subject. Of course, if you want to post comments on non-craminating topics, feel free as well.

Oregon and Bust

2005-03-14T14:19:00.000-06:00

Naturally, I'm quite capable of writing a thousand words on the subject of my Oregon trip, but I've been told a picture will do the same work. So here are a few, with context. When I arrived, Melinda met me at the airport, a lovely airport by the way, though we only had a couple hours before her own plane was to leave. After lunch and getting Melinda back to the airport, Aunt Mary and I went along the Columbia Gorge looking at water falls. We found them. We saw them from the front: From the rear: And from above: Then the next day, after a few rounds of darts with Uncle Bruce, Cherilyn picked me up, took me out for pizza, to an art gallery, and eventually to meet her new boyfriend, Todd, of whom I approve, despite his name's similarity to the German word for death. Here's out little Cherilynskiego all grown up: Unfortunately, most of the pictures of her had horrible, nightmarish red-eye. Then Sabbath after church we drove down the coast to Newport, stopping along the way. We got to see the replica of the fort Lewis and Clark spent a miserable winter in. And got a hug from Sacagawea. Then we went to the coast, where we saw whales, which you can't actually see in this picture, but believe me, they were there. I think they were Gray Whales. And here's Aunt Mary whale watching. The sunset was almost as lovely as on the prairie. After the night in Newport, we went to the beach in the morning near low tide. The tide pools had beautiful creatures, mysterious monsters for those of us who spend out lives in the middle of the continent. Starfish Anenomes Chitons Crabs (living crabs not pictured) Sea urchins Harlequin Ducks Oyster Catchers Harbor Seals Relatives and me. Later, we went to the bay at Newport where the Steller's Sea Lions were making a racket. And some Common Loons were acting surprisingly friendly. There were also some shorebirds I haven't identified yet flocked around a fishy-smelling place. We had also stopped at a completely different sort of beach, one of those broad, sandy ones. We found a lot of broken shells, but no agates (it was called "Agate Beach"). We found the remains of Sand Dollars, but actually none of them where whole, so we called them Sand 50 cent peices. Such is life. Here's Aunt Mary collecting them. That concludes the photo essay for now. Melinda gets back tonight, so we'll be seeing more of her soon. Oh, and if anyone really, desperately needs larger versions of the pictures, they can e-mail me. Most of them are automatically resized by photobucket, my picture hosting service.