Space Needle, Rainier, Aquarium

I've put a small batch of Seattle photos up on Flickr. Space needle, aquarium, Rainier: typical stuff, except that we're in some of it. Slideshow. The great number of photos of the Westin are a fairly reliable indication of how much time I put in at the conference.

Groceries, Lot

A one-hop red-eye from Seattle to JFK to Syracuse delivered us--splat!--into Hancock International Airport yesterday mid-morning. With a stroke of good fortune (what some would call a blessing), Is. slept for the entire route, but the rest of us are still returning to shape from the weakened and dismantled lumps of exhaustion we were transformed into. In the spirit of slowly rebuilding, yesterday early afternoon I dropped Ph. at school (on his insistence), retrieved the dog from his generous caretakers, and later chased down a meal's worth of groceries. The grocery trip:

Since early March I have been experiencing what I can only explain as "dairy cooler" trauma. That's what happens when, upon returning from some time out of town, you gather up fresh groceries only to realize that the milk (soy, organic whole, etc., whatever dated stuff you consume) cartons are all up in your face with expiration dates that foretell another trip (or deadline, as may be the case) on the horizon. I withstood another such milk aisle assault yesterday when the cartons all bore the date I will be leaving (in appr. two weeks) for Albuquerque. On the bright side, it beats drinking curdled whatnot. Although it would be nice if the milks would lay off.

Today, after a meeting with one of my committee members about more or less successful Chs. Zero and One, and after I few errands, which included replacing a cell phone whose display has been on the blink (i.e., has been blank) for ten days, I stopped through a different grocery store for a second consecutive day of one-meal shopping. After offloading the foodstuff, I wheeled the empty cart toward the corral, where an old man was gathering them. He said, "Thanks," as I rolled the cart toward him, and then, "Hang in there, okay?"

Okay. Strangely nice to hear, and when I least expected it.

Challunge!

Wrapped up my first ever RSA late this afternoon with a role on O.09 on textual machinery and the interrelationship of agency and automation. Good company, smart papers, and an alert, question-raising audience: what more can you ask for? My list of (entirely self-inflicted) concerns is short, but I left with the sense that I fumbled through parts of the Q&A. Nothing horribly embarrassing. Just rambly-schmambly, swing-and-miss kinds of half-answers. There was a lot of rich conversation during the Q&A, but, frankly, I would like to have do-over tokens for some of it. Another do-over: while I was giving my paper, I was so distracted by the fact of not having water at hand that I was focused on the moisture levels in my throat almost to the total neglect of what I was saying.

Once rested, maybe I can push on through a couple of blog entries that will make up for some of my loafing through it today: on the long tail of citation freq., on automation/agency rel. to colloids and compounds, on letting concepts get away from us (or being understood as if). Or not (like I really need to promise more phantom EWM entries?). For now, I will drain a Lazy Boy IPA to celebrate the end of the 07-08 conferencing tour and then look ahead to enjoying another two days of visiting with family before jetting back to CNY.

Everywhere Drafting

Earlier this afternoon, during the A-session of the 13th biennial Rhetoric Society of America conference, I was involved with a panel called "Novice Topoi: A Special Session on the Amateur." I hope to have time to say more about it later. For now, I thought I'd mark the occasion by posting what I contributed--an experimental Flash map that uses movie clips as place-markers. There are a few things in the map I'd like to adjust, but all in all I accomplished what I set out for: 1.) square with something I didn't know how to do when I agreed back in September to be a part of the panel and 2.) push my thinking about what is possible (and what is pleasurably worthwhile) where mapping and distant reading intersect (this for Ch. Five of the diss., which I will be drafting throughout June; maybe I should say "everywhere drafting" given that June includes those trips to Albuquerque and Hershey, Pa.).

Here's the informal statement I handed out at the gallery/panel:

In this experimental Flash map, I have tried to create a simple, direct cartographic experience fashioned from twenty years of author-location metadata derived from College Composition and Communication. Sixteen frames are assigned to each issue of the journal (i.e., 64 frames per year; the file progresses at 12 frames per second); in the first frame for each issue, a series of short movie clips (or "blips") initiate, touching off at each of the institutional locations from which an article was published in the journal. For each subsequent publication from a given institutional location, the instance of the blip appears slightly larger (i.e., the diameter grows by two pixels). Thus, markers associated with programs such as Michigan Tech and Ohio State, appear larger and larger over the span of the two-minute piece. By factoring in a temporal dimension, the map is coded with what Denis Wood, in The Power of Maps, identifies as "thickness." From "Everywhere Drafting," perhaps we can apprehend patterns at a scale not commonly available to readers of individual articles within the journal.

But this is a gallery/panel on the amateur, right? And so I should acknowledge that I had no certain idea how this would work or whether it would work at all. I set out to see what would happen, taking another Flash-based mapping project as one I would try to approximate. And I know very little about Flash. I dabble with it, find myself confused, often uncertain of all that a knowing user could create. I do know that such a map can be generated automatically from a data-set (one day I will learn how), but I produced the map by hand from a twelve-page list of articles and institutions. Roughly half-way in, I realized that my method for "placing" the slowly growing increments was flawed. Because I was using constant X-Y coordinates for each institution, as the movie clips grew larger, they gradually became farther and farther displaced from the anchor point, which was, I learned (the hard way--by messing it up), not at the center of the clip but at the upper left-hand corner. Painstakingly, amateurishly, I managed to correct the problem.

In Seattle, More or Less

We managed to travel across the country by plane late last night, landing safely in Sea-Tac around midnight local time. And then the flawed directions from Google Maps (Why south on International Blvd. out of SeaTac?) put us on a minor roundabout, so that along with a slow rental car check out (the antithesis of supersonic, let's say) a hotel check-in, and parking in a garage where all spaces are labeled "compact," we weren't setting heads to pillows until 2:30 a.m. local (i.e., 5:30 a.m. in CNY). Suffering a great soul delay from this--all of the lag and fog-headedness you would expect.

The flight was uneventful except for two small matters. One: Is. was not interested in sleeping, but there were others near us who wanted to rest. Three restless hours, seat kicking, loud rather than quiet voice, and so on. We felt sheepish about the noise and activity until our friend in 8B began to snore with such great violence and volume that we all quietly worried whether he would be okay. Two: in JFK, she championed a cheese-eating contest (and was the only contestant in this private game of indulgence). But there were consequences whose details I won't relay except to say that she over-celebrated with a lot of jumping up and down and that I now understand why JFK always smells a little bit like the throw-up.

Today's upshot: our hotel is two blocks from the Space Needle and also three blocks from a Whole Foods Market, where we ate breakfast and shopped for fruits, milks, and other stuff to sustain our breakfasts for the few days were are here. Nice to have a hotel room with a kitchenette, refridge, and so on. Mid-morning we walked about ten blocks to Pike's Market, browsed a couple of shops, and scaled the 10 or 11 flights of stairs to get down to the Seattle Aquarium where we glanced at fishlife for a couple of hours. Next: back at the hotel for Is.'s nap. When she wakes up in an hour or so we will drive across town to have dinner with my grandparents. Tomorrow, on to the conference.

For The Third or Fourth Time

From today's IHE, a piece on double-dipping conference presentations. This is a practice that has been on my mind somewhat during this, the most conference-intensive stretch of my current program of study. Of course, the very idea of "double-dipping" resonates with the bucket (or well) model of invention that, at its best, smacks of individualism and zero-sum economics and, at its worst, echoes of such horrifying social (and professional) improprieties as standing over a vegetable tray at a faculty gathering and using, re-using, and re-re-using the same celery stalk as a salivated dipping stick for that zesty ("Maybe dill?") salad dressing. The views included in the short article range from the cynical to the more generous-spirited. From the cynical camp, a shot about dumbfounded graduate students who are oblivious to the ethics of reperforming (revising, retooling, redelivering, etc.) one's work:

As Nelson C. Dometrius, a professor of political science at Texas Tech University, writes in his introduction to [the debate featured in PS: Political Science and Politics], when he raised the question with senior faculty members, he received mixed reactions, with people quickly outlining special cases where they viewed such "double dipping" as justified. When he posed the same question to graduate students, Dometrius relates, "the modal reply was a blank stare -- a lack of comprehension that presenting the same paper as many times as you wished would be viewed by anyone as an unusual or questionable practice."

I don't know whether this says more about Dometrius, about the graduate students at Texas Tech (less likely), or about advanced graduate study in political science (even less likely), but it's a take that doesn't carry all that well over into my own experience developing and giving conference talks in recent years. If we are not to be flavor-of-the-week-ademics, isn't some return inevitable? What's implied here is that carry-over is suspicious, an indication that someone is slacking off or falsifying a work record.

On a more nuanced note, the exec. director of MLA--who was quoted in the article--suggests that re-use is smart and appropriate, especially when you take audience into account. If the audience is not the same from conference to conference, the matter of "double-dipping" becomes less a question of conferencing ethics and more a question of growing one's vita by dubious means (i.e., double-dipping as the HGH of higher ed). I would guess this works very differently when, for a dissertating graduate student, the list of life's work is fairly short and centered on a small number of projects than it would around year six or seven of an assistant professorship, after the chance to give the dissertation a rest, pour your heart into a couple of different projects, and perhaps even land a book contract. Artificial vita cultivation and re-tread scholarship: who really believes there will not come a day of reckoning for these practices?

One of the messages I return to from early in coursework: you can write insightfully and meaningfully about your work from any point in it, whether you are just beginning to find a research question, whether you have written full articles on the matter, or whether you have dedicated twenty years to this or that interest. Could this be construed as a kind of one-trick-ponyism? Perhaps. But it is not easy to decide without knowing better the work in question. Of course it's possible to re-use one's own stuff lazily, but all re-use, all "self-plagiarism," need not fall into that category of suspicion.

I am tempted to leap to personal anecdotes as a way to wander through this question a bit more. Those (i.e., the three of you) who have heard more than one of my conference papers in recent years will recognize overlaps, recurring interests, and ideas that re-appear because they click. But I am not giving the same paper in any two cases. Not exactly. Neither am I writing what I think of as purely original conference papers, since they all rise from an accumulating slosh of ideas and clusters of interests (providing copies of them is one measure of verification, but what about those extemporaneous talks?). The conferencing record is like a listing of cousins, not strangers, not siblings (most certainly not twins, which seem to be the concern of the article). But then again, perhaps I am merely invoking (to the point of abusing?) that graduate student exemption that grants greater leniency to experimentation, to trying ideas and presentational styles on for size, while trudging through all of those pre-professional uncertainties.

I have to stop here, but there are a couple of other matters of interest touched off by the piece:

• Self-plagiarism as a concept (closely related: self-citation). Also as a hypocritical practice (i.e., teachers forbid undergraduates from re-using papers across the curriculum, but themselves--allegedly--do it). The article does not provide examples, and the only ones I can think of (aside from the obvious sharing of curricular materials, syllabi, etc.) are where an article evolves into a book chapter, but this practice is, as far as I know, widely accepted.
• Whether publishing formalities apply to the conferencing circuits. If published articles have much greater purchase for tenure, wouldn't self-duplication in formal publications reflect the lackadaisical attitudes toward re-used conference materials? Some of this goes back to acceptance systems, double-blind peer review, etc.
• What of the practice of re-using conference proposals? Some lore about this circulates--the conference-goer who got in [to XYZ national conference] using the exact same proposal. Ethically objectionable? Change the title, re-submit the proposal. Does it matter whether the conference presentation was "original" if the proposal was a duplicate?
• Do political scientists study Bakhtin?
• The table, "Duplicate Presentations, by Year Doctorate Received," is fascinating in the trend it projects: by the year 3,000--for better or worse--all conference presentations will be double-dipped.

Chamber of Absences

I haven't been taking great notes while reading Prairyerth, but I did dog-ear a page for this:

There are several ways not to walk in the prairie, and one of them is with your eye on a far goal, because then you begin to believe you're not closing the distance any more than you would with a mirage. My woodland sense of scale and time didn't fit this country, and I started wondering whether I could reach the summit before dark. On the prairie, distance and the miles of air turn movement to stasis and openness to a wall, a thing as difficult to penetrate as dense forest. I was hiking in a chamber of absences where the near was the same as the far, and it seemed every time I raised a step the earth rotated under me so that my foot feel just where it had lifted from. Limits and markers make travel possible for people: circumscribe our lines of sight and we can really get somewhere. Before me lay the Kansas of popular conception from Coronado on--that place you have to get through, that purgatory of mileage. (82)

"That purgatory of mileage"--the horizontal vista of Chase County draws Least Heat-Moon in. The expanse of long grasses is at times disorienting. He feels lost, but knows that no line can be walked for five miles without crossing a road. He is a journalist, a chronicler, a gatherer of stories. Sometimes he consults a map, such as when he stands in Cottonwood Falls with "an 1878 bird's-eye-view engraving of the town" (52), but he also--sector by county sector--sketches his own. This last point is important, I think. It is the practice where his methods live up to the "deep mapping"--an ethnographic presence in graceful suspense (not unlike North's ten years of "walking among"), part Geertzian "thick description," but also meta-, also interested in the up and out--the topography. This prairie topography can be experienced on foot.

I'm mulling over the relationship between Least Heat-Moon's "chamber of absences"--the "distance" and "openness" of the prairie topography and (yet again) de Certeau's "wave of verticals," the "scopic drive" he chides after looking out onto NYC from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. What is strange--exciting, even--is that Least Heat-Moon cannot figure out how to organize his book until he appropriates a form from the grid of his hand-drawn maps. About maps, de Certeau says, "They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection.... These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice" (97). If I may put that last sentence through a tumbler, what if, "the trace left behind is the practice" or "the trace left behind invigorates the practice (of walking in the city/prairie)"? This windy adventure forks yet again at the distinction between the general-use map (with common place names, consensus, etc.) and that other, more self-selective attunement (an experiential, even egotistical sketch).

About my own chamber of absences: I am warming up to the idea that none of this belongs in Chapter Five. But I nevertheless find myself happily stuck (not stranded) on the problem of "What about maps as a (databasic, interested) writing practice?". I don't know. Yet there is a promising something (a fantastic thingamabob) at the theoretical fulcrum between de Certeau's high-up perch (fraught with verticality) and Least Heat-Moon's more moderate, walking-the-prairie sensibility (fraught with horizontality). I would be thrumming again on matters of scale, I suppose, to wonder whether that's all it amounts to when Least Heat-Moon breaks into his intimate portraits of people and places, interrupting with his private, deliberative excursions to the various plateaus or flint shelves for reorientations from time to time. Don't we all need (or at least desire) such reorientations?

Foraging/Summer Reading

Writing a dissertation involves a lot of what my director calls foraging. Having worked on my dissertation for a year and a day, I appreciate this distinction more than ever between foraging and reading, even if "reading" remains too capacious a practice to pin down. Foraging (i.e., picking back through stacks of stuff one has already read before, already encountered) is necessary for writing a dissertation, but I don't find that it brings with it the same sort of inventive lift I find in reading new stuff. Yet, striking a reasonable balance between the two--between, that it, revisiting familiar materials and ideas and taking up new materials and ideas--has been tremendously difficult. In 366 days of dissertating, I have foraged well enough to draft several chapters and revise two of them sufficiently that they're off to committee. What I haven't done well enough is read new stuff that's not directly involved in the dissertation. Sure, I suppose some of this is unavoidable, but it nevertheless has felt like a void, especially so because it follows on the heels of coursework and preparing for comprehensive exams--three years of intensively reading new gatherings of texts that gravitate like this <---> rather than --><--. Another way to put it: reading up to the dissertation favors centrifugal force (i.e., tends away from center) rather than centripetal force (i.e., tends toward the center). When I have that feeling of mental drought, I believe it is--in part--because of not enough of this first sort of reading (whatever forms it might take: books, journal articles, blogs, etc.).

I still have some dissertation left to write. Thus, there will be more foraging this summer, more orbits around familiar work. But I also want to renew some of the purely-for-the-spark-of-it reading that I have been missing. Might be too ambitious to hope for a whole lot of time for this in the summer months given that I am teaching a course, working in the writing center, mentoring three new online instructors, wrapping up the draft of the diss, polishing job materials, and traveling to Seattle, Albuquerque, and Hershey, Pa., and, as importantly, grilling out, sipping margaritas, playing bolo toss, cutting the lawn, and so on, but that's a chance I must take. For summer reading, then, the start of a list:

*A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah (SU shared reading)
Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink
For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals, Wayne Booth
^PrairyErth (a deep map), William Least Heat-Moon (Is this for this diss?)
A Counter-History of Composition, Byron Hawk (Is this?)
The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson (How about this?)
The Back of the Napkin, Dan Roam (Might this?)

* I still need to pick up a copy of this.
^ This one's underway. A few striking moments in the first one-third (up to where I am now). On the other hand, it will push you to the brink of toxicity with details about Chase County, Kansas.

To end, I should add a nod of credit to those who have said interesting things about one or more of these books and, thus, recommended them.

Fox News

Foxes Next Door
Originally uploaded by ewidem

Returned from a couple of errands yesterday afternoon to find three young foxes wrestling in front of the barn next door. The property is vacant (clung to for nostalgia's sake by a man who grew up there). In exchange for shoveling the drive and making the place appear minimally kept up, Ph. gets to park the '90 bucket-o-bolts there--that's the ultra cheap set of wheels we picked up in February so Ph. could learn properly to drive. I don't know whether the foxes are a threat to much of anything. They're young and small--innocent seeming. One was pawing at an old tire. The other two were rolling around on the ground, grappling with each other. Of course, I'm sure they have parents. Will they run off the other barn-friendly vermin (esp. the skunks, who take every opportunity to make their presence known)? I don't know. A family of foxes also cannot be good for field mice, squirrels, and outdoor cats. But are they dangerous enough to call in animal control? As long as they don't bring Bill O'Reilly sniffing around these parts, they're harmless, right?

About the photo: I snapped it on my cell phone, a freebie from AT&T. The only way your cell phone would take crappier pictures is if you didn't have a cell phone. Even then your impressions might be crisper than this. But, hey, work with what you've got, no?

Of Value To The World

In a recent Chronicle column, "Tales of Western Adventure," (via) historian Patricia Limerick writes on the challenges facing "public" scholars. The public scholar vs. "scholar of the esoteric" dichotomy is fraught with brambles (might the passionate pursuer of the arcane run afoul of hasty caricatures?), of course, but nevertheless the column is a must read. I was especially taken in by her bulleted lists. The first one, halfway into the short piece, weighs reasons for not encouraging newcomers to pursue academic careers in the humanities. The second list consists of Limerick's everyday techniques or manners for delivering "on the promise that university-based academics are of value to the world." Among them:

• Face up to the fact that your own convictions may not be the final word in human wisdom. Surrender the pretension that can poison professorial efforts to communicate with the public.
• Apply to the world around you the methods you were taught you in graduate school for assessing evidence. Take in information carefully; keep your hypotheses in a limber state; do not leap to conclusions; resist the common human habit of celebrating the evidence that supports your pre-existing point of view, while dismissing the evidence that invites you to question your assumptions.

Projection Dejection

I'm getting ready for RSA in Seattle next week, entering data for years eight and nine of what will be a twenty-years thick map, when I realized that I've been calculating the grid coordinates all wrong. The place markers draggg to the south and east with each new instance. Then again, that's the point (of one of the two panels I am involved with): wallow in your amateurism.

About RSA: Seattle from NY is a long, expensive trip. I called the Westin (i.e., the conference hotel) today to learn how much I would be paying for six nights of parking--six because we are making an extended family trip of it. The Westin gets $35 for parking. Eeeach night. Oh? That's more than the rental itself costs. I also read this about their Business Center on the Westin web site:

The following services are available in the Business Center:

Pricing:

• $5.95 per 15 minute session.

The following services are available in the Business Center:

• Time countdown window that allows each guest to see exactly how much time they have left in their 15 minute session.

I wouldn't quibble over a few bucks, normally, but my 07-08 conferencing fund was sapped by CCCC, and since RSA's theme is "The Responsibilities of Rhetoric," I have a conference-goers obligation to question whether it is responsible of me to shell out better than 200 chips to park a rental car for less than a week. After some thought, I decided: it's not. So I jumped on Priceline.com, grabbed a better deal (much better, in fact: two room suite for less per night than the Westin's "conference rate" and $10 parking), and doing so simultaneously motivated me to drop in a bid on a cheaper rental, which shaved $170 off of the bottom line of the vehicle rental for the six days we'll be out there. I can hear the Space Needle scratching up a grungy melody already. (Yes, consider this a plug for Priceline.com).

Did I mention that this is my first RSA? Another first: the first time in four years that I will give a paper without projection of any sort other than vocal. No projector, no slideshow. Just me and my crumpled, sweat-dampened paper. And! a handout. Since 2004, since we moved to Syracuse, I have done eight live-in-person conference presentations. LED projectors have been available at every one of them. But my co-panelists and I learned last week that RSA could accommodate only 80% of the A/V requests. The conference provides six projectors (one is the old shadow-on-the-wall, bright-bulb-and-transparency type, another is a TV w/ VCR), so that makes six rooms with projectors and each room will hold panels during nineteen different time slots (A-S sessions, right?): 114 panels with projectors. And with just one more projector, another 19 panels would be accommodated (in this, the HQ of Microsoft). I suppose it sounds like I am grousing about this. I don't mean to. It's just that I find it surprising and a little bit disappointing, even if the total ratio of projectable panels, at 114/266, is over 40% (.429). Better than most conferences?

Elmowhere You Look

Let's just say Is. is intensely fond of her red monster friend in his many instances. You'd think we (all) live on Sesame Street. Upon request, we improvisationally add his name into songs we sing (i.e., "Elmo goes marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah"). No lyrics are exempt from this practice. We must carry him along when we do London Bridge in the living room. Unrelenting elmogrification these days and learning much about the passional impulses of one delightful toddler.

Absolut Aztlán

About a month ago, Absolut Vodka ran an advertisement in selected publications in Mexico titled "In An Absolut World" and showing a modified pre-1845 political map of North America. Evidently the ad (produced by Mexico City-based Teran/TWBA) stirred up quite a bit of discussion ranging from hard-lined close-the-borders remakes to characterizations of Absolut as exceedingly leftist, from calls for boycotts of the vodka to more nuanced historical reflections on the Mexican-American War and reconquest movements. That's quite a bit to come from a localized print advertisement. Absolut apologized before retracting the ads just a few days later. And though many of the spin-offs reflect entrenched anti-Mexico perspectives, there are more takes on Flickr here and here. I've collected some of the links in this entry because I can imagine returning to this fracas as an example of the rhetoricity of maps--an extended foray into what Denis Wood might have been thinking when he suggested in The Power of Maps that maps are always, unavoidably interested. Yes, advertisements even more so--or more overtly so. By no means am I well read or well studied on reconquest movements, but glancing the few threads of conversation linked above does remind me of a line in Silko's Almanac of the Dead when she mentions the quiet celebrations each time a Spanish-speaking leader is elected to public office in the southwestern U.S.

One of the more compelling responses I've seen comes from a commenter to the blog Conservative Dialysis who points to the hypocrisy in the great outrage over the "In An Absolut World" ad when postcards like the one below still circulate in the Lone Star State and beyond (also featured on Strange Maps). Of course, it's not as simple to establish the tie that connects the circulation of one to the circulation of the other.  But, that both of them circulate (or rather that one is retracted while the other one is so mundane as to go unnoticed) makes their pairing (possibly) electric.

I'm intrigued by, as much as anything here, the small leap from (interested?) map to worldview. What are those interests? Whose are they? How are they coded in the map's symbology? Written into or inscribed in the layers of the map itself? These few examples, slowly aging among my "starred items" in Google Reader, seem to get at that leap fairly well (well enough for a future assignment on map writing practices or something?).

Calendar Says

Again it's that day of the year when the calendar kicks a certain Fifth-Fifther in the pants and says, "Get your lazy hiney out of bed, birthday boy." On a Monday, no less.

In response to the calendar, I say, "Let 34 be that year when I defend the dissertation and put grad school properly to rest."

And, uh, yes, that is me on the left. First birthday (or perhaps first-ish; might be my brother's fourth b-day). In the background, a vintage Cootie game and B/W kitchen cabinets made to look like windows to the outdoors (with tree branches, etc.).

Contains Less Than 1% Juice

Maybe I can hoist up an entry in the few minutes I have between halves of the Pistons-Magic series opener.

I've got one more day's worth of antibiotic to take tomorrow, but I can tell I'm leaving Chest Crud in the dust now that I'm getting my usual energy back (not that my usual energy is like jet fuel, but anything beats on-your-back full-body lethargy). I have an absolutely sluggish week to show for it, but I knew that would be the case after all of the driving the week before. I managed to bike to campus and back on Friday for the semester's final 2.5 hours in the Writing Center: three appointments with students I've come to know fairly well this semester. I was winded on the ride home after consulting; could tell I'd been sitting around for a week, especially after I held on through the one bona fide hill on the route. Probably would've been smarter to hop off and walk my rickety wheels to the top. Today I went out twice with Is. in the bike seat for short spins around the neighborhood. Nothing too rigorous, but Is. has become quite the personal trainer with her motivational "That way!" and "I want more!" every time we coast back into the driveway, no matter how long we've been riding. Her tirelessness helps me forget my own tiredness.

Looks like I will be returning to the Writing Center for SU's Summer 2 session: six weeks of 15 hours per week beginning in late June.

The title above refers to how I have begun to feel about May conferences. RSA is up in three weeks, and it involves cross-country travel. I still have a bit of work to do on the one presentation. That one still suffers from too broad of a scope for the eighteen minutes I'm aiming for. And the other piece--an installation of sorts--is close, close enough that I need only to resolve myself to the premise of amateurism grounding the gathering and not fret about perfecting it over the next three weeks. I'm looking forward to RSA, but the last two years have given me reason to re-think May conferences. Of course, about the title: orange blossoms, too, don't contain much juice, but we all know how that turns out with a little bit of time.

Late yesterday I scraped together a draft-entry about the Sneakitin.com kerfluffle re: sponsored CCCC panels. An interesting set of issues here, but I haven't given it the nuance it deserves, especially when there seems to be a fair amount of strong objection percolating on the lists. Much to add? No, not me. But I do think it brings up some fairly timely national convention what ifs about the proposal system, etc.

Second half's underway...