Tag: window

Februaryisms 📅

/ dmueller
One-Off Non Series #00 “The Disentangler.”

A commitment to attend a youth basketball game, the schedules grandmotherly texted to us, now holds one last opportunity to attend on Monday evening at 7:30 p.m.

A phone call to Virginia Department of Transportation on February 8, and a neighbor’s phone call to VDOT that same week, ‘pot holes multiplying and deeper by the day,’ brought the gravel loader and grater to Rosemary Road for the first time since July 17, 2023.

An impressively steady and unchanging headache all day today confirms that I am afflicted by a cold but have withstood the evidently harsher version of it, which so many around me seem to be hosting, sneezecasting, muling to and fro.

Eighth and ninth class observations within a three week window happened this morning in the two farthest-from-Shanks buildings; I have managed to put together the 600-word write-ups during each class session, then conference with the teachers while walking back to Shanks together. Five more, Friday, Monday, and Wednesday.

A stop-off at Cburg Kroger today had me carrying home sweet potatoes, garlic paste, and Gatorade, with the first two elevating a sriracha peanut butter broth ramen brewed to tame this blerg.

A side-shed hour standing with the chickens as they free-ranged a bit, turning their time in the sunlight to dust bathing, except for Tiny Honey who chose instead to scratch leaves and pull worms.

A book award committee with an intermediate deadline of March 3, so there is time to get to these last two titles (in the first round) but the first ten have me going to the refrigerator for that Gatorade.

A sighting of yellow flowers across the road near the mailboxes tells us the daffodils have bloomed on February 21 for the second year in a row.

And that sighting is through a today-installed picture window, which replaced the one that inexplicably presented us with an expanding diagonal crack in one pane, lower left to upper right, sometime in early December, after which my brother quipped as chemists do “you do realize that glass only appears stable and is actually in a flow state?”.

An air dancer (guardian) is on a timer near the coop and run, set to intervals of fan-fed animation during daylight, unevenly but more or less for 20 minutes each hour, and this afternoon, despite its flailing or perhaps because of it, high above and circling intently were a trio of turkey vultures and a pair of red-tailed hawks (whose earnestness about actually attacking the chickens we have yet to confirm; today they remained distant).

Along with the daffodils, today bloomed 2024’s first invitation to do an external promotion review this summer; rules of the house, strictly enforced, are no more than two because three last year was one too many and four the year before were two too many.

Being-before-a-window 🪟

/ dmueller

“Being-before-a-window,” another unshakeable phrase, albeit in German-made-English translation, from Byung-Chul Han’s Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization, a 2005 book recirculated in English in 2022. Han discusses windowing as a semi-stable in-between, a kind of high perch that gives the exhilaration of looking upon so much all at once, while also being isolated and closed off. “Windowing is thus the hypertextual mode of experience” (44), he writes. In the multimonitorium, tabs abound.

We read the first three chapters of Hyperculture for last evening’s class session in ENGL6344: Rhetoric in Digital Environments, but we didn’t read through to this point in the book about how “windowing […] can produce monads with windows whose Being-in-the-world turns out to be a Being-before-a-window” (45).

This was on my mind and even on my tongue! late this morning after we stopped at Virginia Tech’s Parking Services building there along the midslope of Chicken Hill, immediately adjacent to those noticeably dilapidated and windowless “poultry research houses.” We agreed, how unusual is it that those stinky sheds linger right there at the edge of the football stadium parking lot. But then as we drove along Beamer Way, pedestrian after pedestrian was walking, along the sidewalk and sometimes without warning veering into the street (many obstackled was the driving course), but walking with a cell phone up, with a cell phone appearing to hold each walker’s weighted focus. Being-windowed, being-windowless, it’s a close close call, which is living better and which is living least.

As a driver of a car with a glass windshield, I, too, was a being-before-a-window, in a sense, but the device-held walkers were beings-before-a-window in an even more conspicuous way. How is this anything new? It’s not, not really. Han was onto this in 2005. Beings-before-a-window have proliferated cellular multiplicative ever since. What I noticed today was that, with the fresh, unquittable phrase, Being-before-a-window, I felt a certain some kind of way about our evidently become yet more glassboxed, homo fenestra ogling panes and light meanderingly if bumpily. That some kind of way is faintly longing but not quite sad, blue-hued, sort of wishing Being-in-the-world was still in the lead. I know better because I know the changeover and the fight, because I know too what it is to walk about as a being-before-a-window. Han draws a parallel between Leibniz’s (possibly soulless) monad and this being-before-a-window, though the shift is from one kind of closed-offness to a slightly different state of existence, the window open to the world, and the window sealing off from the world.

Gym

/ dmueller

Rec-IM Eastward

I took this Friday just before 10 a.m. as I wrapped up a short workout in Olds-Robb, or Rec-IM (this second one is the better-known of the building’s names, I’m told). The photo is East-facing, a view of Pray-Harrold and other structures on either side whose names I don’t know (education on the far right; health services, I think, on the near left). I opted for a day-pass on Tuesday to try out the facility and found the small satellite fitness cove on the fourth floor was exactly what I was looking for. The weight equipment is slightly worn, but it works. It is heavy. And the cardio options are adequate, even a cut above adequate. A row of bikes, ellipticals, and treadmills face East, which means I can see all of Pray-Harrold (pictured). Pray-Harrold: my office is there, my department, the classroom where I teach this semester.

Friday I signed up for a year-long membership and took as a gift of appreciation a sturdy green umbrella. The full year membership ensures that I’ll be back, back for the Tuesday-Thursday faculty-staff noon-time pick-up games or for a couple of laps in the 50-meter pool or for yet another circuit on the fourth floor.

Things II

/ dmueller

Where we live now the office has new Pella windows. Lalo explained to
me that they have ties to Iowa and were, on that basis alone, compelled to order
and install Pella windows from

Pella, Iowa.

Lot

All of the other surfaces in the office are new, too: walls, flooring,
lights, outlets, wall plates, and so on. There are two windows. One
looks toward the house next door; the other faces the back yard–a marvelous
double lot overgrown with blackberries, wild garlic, wild grapes, choke
cherries, and so on. What we’ve gained in yard, however, we have compromised in
the kitchen and eating area. The office is a newly finished walk-in attic.
Neither of the windows is positioned such that a desk would sit comfortably in
front of it. This means that the pleasure of staring out through a Pella window
must be indulged on breaks, on intermittent standing stretching book-retrieving
breaks from whatever is happening at the wall-facing desk-table. Like the
fancy windows, this work space is, compared to all of the places we’ve lived in
Syracuse, "viewed to be the best."