Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Contracting Temperament

A couple approached the front door of our house this evening. Ding-dong! I opened the door. "Oh, you're moving?" Uh, yeah. I explained: The place is listed. Call the realtor on the sign. Then they said they weren't interested in buying. They planned to call our LaLo about renting it. ORLY? That's right. Come to find out, the same LaLo who slammed us with an imperative to move back in April has posted this very house for "sale or rent" at Orangehousing.com. The rent he's asking is $100 bucks more per month than we're paying now, but it looks like the lackluster real estate market has motivated him to rent again. The prospective renters who stopped by this evening weren't especially won over by my look of surprise (a genuine look...come again?). I showed them around and explained that we were happy enough with the place, that we would have stayed longer had we not been, in effect, forced out to appease some impulse of greed. *sigh*

Yesterday I called the *new* AT&T to check on upping the minutes on our cellular plan. We're land-line free and using a few more minutes than our current plan can bear. I climbed and swung through the number tree and arrived, much to my misfortunate I would later learn, on a "Sales" branch of the tree talking with someone called Betty. I told Betty I needed more minutes. Can I switch to a plan with more minutes? She answered back: "It says here you would have to upgrade your account and pay an upgrade fee of $18. If you upgrade, you would be voiding your current contract, so you would have to pay market value for new phones. You would also have to agree to a two-year contract." What the? Say, Betty, I like the phones we already have, and I just need more minutes. Betty and I talked past each other for several more minutes. Having gone through something like this before, I was fairly certain there was a way to do what I wanted without handing over an upgrade fee and shelling out for new phones. In the afternoon, I tried again. Talked someone called Lance who took care of everything in only a couple of minutes.

Here's the most striking irritant by far: a bitter pill from P.U. regarding the course development and upkeep work I've done over the past few years. Received word a couple of weeks ago that the existing royalty structure is being scrapped in the new contracts that have been foisted on existing developers. Developers of high-enrolling (mulitple-section) courses stand to lose a fair amount of money. The new development/maintenance contracts pay out $150 per term for courses with just one section and a flat-rate of $200 per term for courses with two or more sections. I got involved initially because the royalty structure at the time scaled according to the number of total sections of a given course. At the time (right after 9-11), everyone was in a clamor about deployed enrollments (an exodus of on-site students who would be TDY to Afghanistan or elsewhere). There was a rush to attract developers of high-enrolling courses, and this was done with the snake oil of two-year contracts which paid royalties of $3 per student (also, there were evil grins and promises to make decent pay for the work involved). Once the high-enrolling courses were developed and in place (all work-for-hire), there was a change in program leadership and a new contract. This one, around 2004, paid $60 per section to developers for ongoing maintenance (answering emails, writing new course materials, responding to inquiries from instructors, and so on). Again, two-year contracts. Only with these, because I knew I would be enrolling in a PhD program where the stipend, generous though it is, wouldn't be enough to do much more than pay rent, I met with then-director of the distance learning program and was given verbal reassurance that the contracts would be renewable, that I could count on that income provided P.U. thought highly of the design of those courses (this has never been raised as a question, for what it's worth). The new contracts depart radically from the former system. I talked to the new interim director by phone today and was told plainly that the contracts were a strictly legal matter, that the new contracts were all that was available, and that they understood some developers would lose out. Unfortunately, I happen to be one of them. If I don't want to continue as a developer, I was told, I have the right of first refusal. Noted.

They're making a lot of loot on the online courses. What's happened, as I see it, is that demand for the courses has shifted into the long tail of the curriculum--those courses that need to be developed even though there will only be one section. Redistributing the royalty structure gives the U. ways improve incentives for developers of low-enrolling courses. Another factor: the U. has brought "instructional designers" on staff who will collaborate with the less tech-savvy among the faculty. I could go on and on about this, but I'll stop. Nothing I can do about it, given that my energy must be directed elsewhere. What irks me the most? An institution stands to gain from these [adjective] employment practices that thrive when institutional memory is short (use of part-timers, work-for-hire, contingent staff and instructors, and also high turnover in administrative posts related to the online program). Part-timers, those whose contracts, like light bulbs, are good for about two years, have no union, no bargaining unit, no collective voice, and, in effect, not an ounce of leverage in decisions that position them as expendable labor. The contracts were never negotiable, not even up for discussion (difficult, even, to get a phone conversation in which I could ask questions).

Posted by at 10:15 PM | to Slouching Toward

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Bin Living

O ur summer moving saga commenced last weekend. The paces of moving now have us living out of boxes and plastic bins until the end of the month. Oh, well, and suitcases and duffels for an upcoming jaunt to the Great Lakes State. I will do everything I can to resist complaining again about the inconveniences of moving.

D. and Ph., after all, have been tremendous. Whatever D. packs, Ph. carries, stacks, carries again, etc. He took his last Regents exam for the year today and without complaint went about mowing the grass this afternoon while I was away at the local Honda garage yet again for the problem of intermittent brake noise (from the brand new brakes we had put on back in late February...this was the third (and final? final!) brake-adjustment visit in the interceding months). I will do what I can to resist complaining about the inconveniences of several hundred dollar brakes that squeak and grind so loudly that people turn their heads and stare.

Just three years ago, we lived in Kansas City. The move at the end of this month will deliver us to our third (and final? final!) home in Syracuse. The next move will not be local. Since I finished my BA in 1996, I have lived for more than one month in ten different places (four in Michigan, four in Kansas City, and two in Syracuse). Longest stretch at the same address: four years. It comes as a downer when I realize that six (and soon seven) of these moves have relocated Ph. over the last ten years. In these days leading up to moving yet again I feel desperate to live at the same address for four years again. You might have guessed it: We are expert in the forwarding of USPS mail.

I posted a bunch of stuff on Craigslist this week. Desks (too big and heavy for the new second-floor office space), a television, a Marantz stereophonic receiver, an exercise bike, some random wall hangings and knick-knacks. The Marantz was a hit. Swarms of technicians and hobbyists inquired by email. The TV has been claimed. The wall hangings swiped up just this afternoon.

The weight of paper is, more than anything else, the reason I dread moving. Paper and hide-a-beds. And washing machines. Those three things spoil what might otherwise be an occasion to celebrate a fresh start. Fortunately, the hide-a-bed loveseat has found a permanent new home (permanent as in I hope never to lift it again). We will move it there, say good-byes, and never own another one. The washing machine stays. This is an advantage of renting. But the paper, the books, the file cabinet. Ruthless. Saturday, Ph. and I carted four carloads of bins to the garage at the new place (where the new LaLo has been generous to give us a corner space and a head start on filling it in). Upon hoisting an especially heavy container, I put it back down again and lifted the lid. Rock collection? Inside were paper-filled binders--the Collected Life Works of Ph. No wonder he's so enthusiastic about the haul. Preparations for this move remind me that I have too many books (even if, deep down, I know it's always going to be too few), and that I have felt some struggle in organizing and focusing my work-a-day paces in anticipation of the looming, imminent upheaval.

Posted by at 11:00 PM | Comments (4) | to Slouching Toward

Thursday, April 5, 2007

A Continuance

A s you know from the previous entry, last week was a wash. A waste. A downer. Some things have changed since then.

First, I had a phone conversation with LaLo (lord of this land) and he conceded to a July 1 closing date (extra month) and threw in a modest "inconveniences felt" fee. Considering that we're under no legal obligation to accommodate the sharky realtors, those two gestures have brought me back from last week's fits to the world of the quasi-sane, quasi-cooperative.

We're home this evening from the tenth property we've seen in the past eight days. It won't do. It was like walking up on the set of This Old House. But it wasn't Bob Vila. More like Zed Vila and his two helper-friends, one of whom was smoking cigs and sipping beers as we made way through the thick curls of paint vapors awaiting us at each corner. Hundreds of corners there were! This joint had smaller rooms off of every main room. I kept having the feeling I would hit my head on the low archways or scrape it against a rusty nail while peering in on one of the seven or eight nooks. Worse still, when it is finished, it will rent for $1700/mo (four students, $425 apiece). Good luck, Zed.

Among the ten properties we've looked at three or four remain in the hunt. All of them require us to compromise something; Ph. will be in a new school, the space will be much less, the rents will be more, and so on. At the same time this means that we have checked out five or six properties that are no longer considered options. Five or six phone calls. Five or six walk-throughs. Five or six small talks with niceties like "this has possibilities" or "we really like the location" tossed in. One rejection was especially easy because the ad said "recently renovated" "grad students preferred" and "new appliances." When we arrived, however, two of the bedrooms were occupied, there was a gigantic water stain on the ceiling, the dried memory of a toilet plumbing crisis on the second floor some months earlier. Said LaLo, "I need to do something about that, but I'm not sure it will get done before I rent it out again." Nice. Then we saw the kitchen. The range was wrapped in sheets of aluminum foil which were covered over again by thick black carbons of weeks-old overboil and spillage. I had to ask: "The ad mentioned new appliances?" LaLo had answered this one before: "It's fairly new. Only five or six years old. It needs to be cleaned. But the grad students who live here are too busy with their studies to clean." Me: "Guess so."

We'll find a place. We will. We have to. It's just that I'm not so sure it'll be in the University neighborhoods. Might mean a new school for Ph. Might mean Yoki will be on the auctioning block. And it almost certainly means a few more headaches, a few more detours, and maybe even a few more visits to shabby, overpriced properties before we settle on the right one.

Posted by at 7:25 PM | Comments (3) | to Slouching Toward

Friday, March 30, 2007

In the Mood for a List?

A few reasons this week will contend for the shittiest ever when all the points are tallied:

1. I've been pummeled mercilessly from the inside by something diagnosed as just-shy-of-bronchitis. Had a fever of 102 for nearly three days, severe congestion, body aches, sweats, headaches, sore throat, and so on. My comeback has been made possible only by gallons of hot tea and a twice-daily palmful of pills, antigens, chemicals, and artificial defenders of dmueller.

2. As a result of no. 1, I've accomplished very little. Very very very little. You could fit all of my positive accomplishments this week on the head of a small pin.

3. We learned Monday that the house we so enjoy living in will be sold. A minion of the real estate megalopoly pounded the "for sale" sign into our front yard this very evening, in fact (no saintly tricks up his sleeve, far as I could tell). What's worse? We're being asked to move before the end of Ph.'s school year. What's worse than that? The suitable rents in the area are slim pickings. Most of the four bedroom joints get divided into per-student rates, where each student pays, say $375 or more. There are a few three bedroom flats we're looking at, but only a few of them allow pets. And Yoki, it turns out, despite expert training, remains a pet. What's still worse? We're invited to enable the sale by keeping a tidy house, putting away all valuables, and vacating the premises any time a realtor decides to call us up for a showing. What summons in me evils and furor deeper than I've known in some time? Yes...realtors calling to see whether they can show the house I'm being asked to vacate. You'll want to hide away the laptop in case any of the "speculators" are thieves.

4. In the spirit of list-making, a new item. But it's a carry-over. See, I'm still PO'ed about No. 3. Bent out of shape, I tell you. I get the side of the scenario that's grounded in business, profit, detachment, transactions, and so on. But then I see the other side, the side that spells big changes for us in the weeks ahead. It boils over to the neutral-transactive (mere business, my friend) rationale, makes a mess of it. And I think about the agent who called me last night when I was at Ph.'s indoor soccer game to comfort me with "I know how hard this must be for you" before asking if we would welcome her and her clients for a showing. Without going into the rest of the details about the conversation following the smarmy preamble, just know that this morning we switched the contact number to D.'s cell phone. Tks to goodness D.'s willing to take such calls.

5. As a result of no. 3 and no. 4, I've been studying orangehousing.com line by line more than pouring fresh filling into EWM's neglected shell.

6. After checking out an apartment this evening, the four of us grabbed up some Chinese takeout. Hot-n-sour soup is just what I need when my sinuses are recovering, when my throat is raw, phlegm-chaffed. Even if I don't eat the tofu and cabbage and [I have no idea what that was], the broth is perfect. Just the thing to top off this challenger for worst week. The soup was terrific, but I remain, for today at least, too jaded to accept the promise from my fortune cookie: "Happy life is just in front of you." Mr. Clumsy must've dropped that cookie in the wrong bag, handed it to the wrong person. But what if he didn't?

Posted by at 10:15 PM | Comments (10) | to Slouching Toward

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Dutiful

O r duty-filled. I'm home from this morning's jury duty and tremendously relieved to be relieved after just three hours at the courthouse. Other than this splitting headache.

It ended very much in the same way it started. Everyone showed up at 8:45 a.m. ('cept for the one dude who trotted in at 9:05 a.m. and was told he was too late. Don't mess with the courts of law, my tardy friend.) Everyone left at 10:55 a.m., forty dollars richer and carrying away a free pen, a free pocket calendar, and as many generic certificates of appreciation as anyone cared to grab from the unattended stack. "We appreciate your service," said the organizing clerk. "We appreciate your service," again and again, like water torture.

But there were no court cases for us to hear. We almost assembled into juries--sets of 6+2 alternates for the city court, laying down the law over misdemeanor offenses. After standing in line, filling out the paperwork, making small talk and exchanging niceties with strangers (Cold outside. Mm-hmm.), after reading the pamphlets ("Jury Handbook," "Jury Service in New York State"), newsletters (Jury Pool News), and whitepapers ("Conduct of Jurors"), listening to the commissioner of jurors reiterate the various one-liners in the jury handbook (you were selected from one of several lists), and after watching a twenty minute video covering everything from trials by ordeal (so unfair! the innocent sank while the guilty floated!) to some New York high court judge explaining that jury duty was more significant than voting because juries are few and voters are many, we took a ten minute break.

Thirty minutes later--seriously, if you can believe it, the duty was more exhausting than reading this entire entry about the duty--the organizing clerk returned to the large room and said, "Do you want the good news or the bad news?" The loud-mouth in the corner (he and his new friend one row ahead of where he sat had been carrying on all mourning long about how his employer wouldn't pay him for jury duty {cheap!}, how he hates one-way streets {un-navigable!}, how he had to pee {bathroom?}, how he hadn't had any breakfast yet and it was almost lunch time {hungry!}, how he likes to get up at 4:00 a.m. {ambitious!}, how taxes hit hardest those who work hardest {libertarian!}, how everyone in the room looked so dejected about their duty {concern!}...no, actually it was his unbroken yammering that poisoned the otherwise tolerable scene; I watched the people around me sigh, clear their throats, put away their reading materials, frown, look over the tops of their low-riding bifocals, and so on, as he talkity-talked on and on and on) spoke out: "We don't care." But the organizing clerk wouldn't hear it. She wanted us to choose from among the options: good news, bad news.

Fine, bad news first. "You won't get to see me again for another six years." Now if that's the bad news, the good news was going to be something really special. And it was. We were sent home. The day's three cases had been settled and juries weren't needed.

I won't dwell on the process (this one's it, no more entries about j-duty), but what tired me most of all was the feeling of being plucked randomly out of Onondaga's middle (a jury of quasi-peers), being hewn toward a kind of dulled perspective (abandon all predisposition; put away all electronics), and then enjoy the significant contribution you are making to democracy. In fact, the movie--very important stuff on why juries matter and how to be a good juror, narrated by Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer--seemed strangely propagandistic. The video must have been ten years old; a much younger looking Diane Sawyer motivated us, more or less like this, "It might seem like you're just sitting around, but you're not. You should be proud that you're getting ready to contribute to one of the most cherished processes in America." Shouldering the mother lode of American justice, and so on. But it was hard to concentrate on the second thing she said, right as it was, because the first one was completely contradictory to the experience of the morning.

Anyway, I'm off the list for six years (should have my diss together before then, knock on wood), and I managed, despite the loud-talkers to pace through a few more pages of Latour's Reassembling, the chapter on matters of fact and matters of concern.

Posted by at 1:50 PM | to Slouching Toward

Wednesday, January 3, 2007

Jury Doody

S ays the summons that came in the mail today:

DEAR JUROR:

You have been selected for jury duty. Welcome!

Your mandated participation in jury service...[and so on].

Don't get me wrong. I'm 100% for due process (A big ole yes to justice, I say). But can you imagine a more onerous scheduling system than this? "You must call 671-1010 each evening after 5:00 p.m. starting on Friday 1/12/2006 and listen for a recorded message." The friendly bot on the other end of the connection, I guess, tells me whether I'm supposed to report to the courthouse on the following morning. Still worse, I'm teaching online this spring and getting going on the diss, which means that I can't very well bother my employer for a work accommodation. Excused because I blog? Possibly, but I'd have to actually post to this thing from time to time and broach more scandalous topics than I'm usually inclined to take up.

Anyway, if the phone's busy next Friday evening after 5:00 p.m., you'll know who I'm talking with. And may you, too, celebrate a jurisprudent 2007.

Posted by at 3:35 PM | Comments (7) | to Slouching Toward

Monday, May 22, 2006

Stalemates.com and Content Locking

I have two petty annoyances to report on. Sharing them will in no way enlighten you, but neither will these problems continue to weigh on me like lead sinkers in my pants pockets.

The first problem I have is with Classmates.com. Classmates.com represents the worst of the worst of social networking apps. The site and its heavily constrained database are engorged with advertising and fees. Classmates.com: a poster child for frame-jacking. The site is, at its best, un-navigable; at its worst, an e-robber baron donning "social networking" clothing. Why should I care?

All the way back in 1991, the year of my high school commencement, I was class prez. Quite an honor at the time, of course, and I had a hand in the post-H.S. leadership, cheering on the many admirable folks far more dedicated than me (D. included) who orchestrated the five- and ten-year reunions. Today, an email came from Classmates.com: "Thus-n-such has sent you a Classmates Email." Cool. I remembered the sender. Classmates stood as an interceptor, an intermediary, walling apart the participants in the interchange, but the message has links leading me to think I could retrieve the message. And I could. For 15 bucks.... (the fee for signing on with a three month gold membership). The subject line, however, came across clearly: "Class Reunion."

I get it. Cryptic, but at least I knew the email message concerned our impending reunion, the reunion I've done absolutely nothing to plan. Rather than pay the moolah, I used the Classmates.com system to send a response. It's filtered, but maybe J., the sender, has fronted a few bucks for a membership (hey, I'm a grad student; many former classmates, no doubt, are collecting a bigger bag of chips each year than my TA stipend).

Later in the afternoon, another message from J. Again, I couldn't access the content, but I could tell, because he hadn't emailed me directly the way I asked him to, that he didn't have access to the body of my message. Like me, he lacks the much coveted Gold Membership and the many social advantages that come with full access to Classmates.com (post a bio about yourself! post photos! search!). Oy. Okay, so what else is there? A few minutes ago I typed up one final message, this time using the subject line as the message space. Classmates.com has plugged many of the gaps that would allow information to stream freely through its toll-burdened sluices, but not this one. The subject line is the only space that shows up, the only space that is readable. I may as well try to use it to communicate. One more thought: an improvement to the site would be just the thing I need: a Teflon membership or, that is, one email for $.05.

Whether or not I get in touch with J. is less the point than that Classmates.com is distressingly obtuse. For the cost of an annual membership, I can host a site that floats my name well into the top ten for Google queries searching my name. I'd google J., but his name is among the most generic combos possible (59.9 million results). Maybe it will work to use the subject line; maybe it won't. Maybe a few minutes on fiascomates.com is all the cosmological force I need to warrant resigning my esteemed post. It's not as though I have the faintest thought about getting involved with 15-year reunion, after all.

The second issue is somewhat less perturbing, but I still rate its annoyance quotient quite high--above the peace and calm that should characterize these last few days of my May break (before a June of exam reading, teaching online and so on). Here's the thing: I developed a few courses for Former U., and I continue to occupy the developer's role. It requires a small amount of work from me: updates when book editions change, minor adjustments to assignments, etc. There's a place in the CMS for developer's notes. That's good; I'd like to put the space to use. Fill it in with rationale for the design of the course, add comments about how I imagine the course moving along. But each time I log into the developer's section of the course, where the basic or stable content is kept, I find the developer's notes locked, uneditable. Did I mention that I'm the developer? Yes, I did. For the bazillionth time, I sent a request to the folks who have access to the settings. And I heard back from them. The developer's notes have been unlocked temporarily. Apparently unlocking that area of the course means that instructors can edit the developer's notes, too. Once I'm finished with the developer's notes, they'll be locked again so that nobody can tamper with them, "notes" being so refined and permanent, I guess. And this confounding loop will complete its cycle, only to recur again and again.

Posted by at 8:30 PM | Comments (5) | to Slouching Toward

Wednesday, April 5, 2006

On Notice

N otice! Things the final month of coursework (EVER) will compel a body do to:

I signed up for a Snubster account after reading about it in Wired News. Antisocial Software, a place for crabasses and cranks. Down with the network! You basically get to enter the names of things and give them a full-over ranting. Also you can designate the objects of critique as "on notice" or "dead to me," followed by hyperbolic explanations. Others who feel compelled to bitch and moan about the same things might designate you as a contact with thoughtful messages (i.e. "Piss off. I didn't want you as a contact anyway."). For my first entry, coursework's on notice. Yeah, that's right.  Namby-pamby coursework. Just the thing I needed to snub so I could restore a happy grin to my Wednesday. ;)

You can try to resist, but I don't know how.

Posted by at 11:30 AM | Comments (3) | to Slouching Toward

Monday, February 27, 2006

Meniscouraged

I concur with the orthopedic doc's hunch about my knee: it's the meniscus. And since I'll be needing healthy ones of those as I get on in years, I'm going ahead with the MRI and, more than likely, some sort of repair. The diagnosis is uncertain, but all indications have convinced me of the high likelihood that there's a tear somewhere in the middle cartilage. The kind folks at SOS (yeah...Syracuse Ortho...) are going to call me with the schedule for when I get to climb into the narrow tube to have my magnetic resonance imaged. It's been ten years since I had one, and as I recall, it's close to what I imagine beam-type space travel would be like. So that I would be insurance-eligible for the MRI, I filled out a form, and I think I might have answered one of the two bold questions incorrectly. Feel free to guess which one: "Are you claustrophobic?" or "Have you had a previous MRI?" However, I answered all of the plain text questions honestly and correctly, including "Eyelid/eyeliner tattoo?" My answer was no, but I was tempted to check yes if only as a conversation starter and simply to find out what that's got to do with the scan.

Brighter news is that I had the tire fixed on the Element. Goodyear, like PepBoys, wouldn't patch/wad the tire (too much risk with the punctum being in the sidewall), so I had to produce a big-handed grab of dough to get a new one. I had no idea the tires on our car were so precious. Then I was insulted to learn--from an obnoxiously proud/aggressive manager-type--that we missed our annual NY motor vehicle inspection. Oh? Add twenty-one bucks. I should be grateful, but I still can't figure out why NY grants two year registrations while requiring annual inspections. In Missouri (brace yourself; this is the part where I confirm that some Missouri laws are smarter than those in New York), inspections were due at the same time as registration, and two-year registrations/inspections were available for vehicles less than seven years old or so. The high-priced tire replacement: that was the high-!-light of my day.

Posted by at 5:30 PM | Comments (13) | to Slouching Toward

Friday, February 3, 2006

Genu Muchwobbly

N o swollen joint photos to document this case of pain from the hardwoods, but in my weekly Friday afternoon basketball game(s) I did something tendenciously nastytastic to my left knee.  I've never suffered knee problems before (all shoulders and ankles, my long-ago surgeries), but I've observed more than a teammate or two who suffered season-enders with bad knees.  Only one of them was able to walk off the floor with a torn ACL (must've been partially torn), and he was back to playing just a few weeks after surgery if I remember correctly.  Notably, he was also a guy who referred to sprained ankles as "sprung ankles," and so, because I'm not a doctor yet, I think it's excusable to adopt just this kind of neologism to lighten the self-diagnosis: sprung left knobbler. If, by tomorrow morning, the pain intensifies, maybe it's worse than I've determined.  But I can hobble on it, so I'm counting on the injury to be much less severe than some of the worst cases I've witnessed.  Prognosis for watching Superbowl XL: Probable.

Posted by at 8:30 PM | Comments (4) | to Slouching Toward

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Margarinalia

B ecause I fail to shop with a grocery list and I also fail to perform an exhaustive inventory before heading off to P&C every other week to collect things for eating, I often make the mistake I made today: picking up stuff we already have. Such as margarine. We hardly even eat margarine. So why I bought two squares of it this afternoon is unexplainable. Even worse, I returned home (thinking I'd done well to accumulate substantial meal-makings and cakehole pleasers while also staying within the food budget) to find three unopened squares and a more-than-half-filled tub of margarine in the fridge, enough to bring on in me a margaraine headache.

Posted by at 9:00 PM | Comments (4) | to Slouching Toward

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Hexagonal

T oday in sixes:

6.1. Number of hours in seminars (GEO781 followed by CCR712 after a 15-minute break).
6.2. So I went to the gym.  The guy I was guarding...he dunked six times in two games.  All on fast breaks, but still. 
6.3 Number of times I thought to myself, Am I really so terrible at the sport I grew up playing all those years?
6.4 Number of times I thought, Yep.
6.5 Number of seconds I sucked for air after taking an elbow to the midriff and before getting up off of the floor.
6.6 Number of worksheets in the math packet--due tomorrow--that Ph. and I just finished working through.  Lots of shapes and drawings, protractor work, etc.

And the next fourteen Tuesdays stand a good chance of being equally overloaded.  Still, I can say that classes went well.  And the math packet: done.  Hoops? Well, besides having every waft of air knocked from my lungs that one time (it wasn't a charge?), I'm just happy for good-enough-to-walk-away health.

Posted by at 10:30 PM | to Slouching Toward

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Among the Shortcomings of New Media

N ew media is no help with

• forming a voting bloc when the family is reduced to democratic channel-flipping.  Texas vs. West Virginia or crappy sitcom re-runs? I could've used another vote, NM.
• packing and taping boxes.
• carrying and loading boxes, furniture.
• unloading and carrying boxes, furniture.
• diffusing the weather system set to deliver several inches of fresh snow while we dollycart the heavy stuff into a truck (drive...drive) and then into the new pad.
• delivering Ph.'s socks to the office in time for the start of gym class.

And, uh, these aren't my notes on Manovich.  I'll have those up v. soon, however (end of the week?).

Posted by at 10:30 AM | Comments (5) | to Slouching Toward

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Qualms and Counter-qualms

Q ualms

1. Half.com of nothing.com equals nothing. When I ordered my books for fall semester from half.com all the way back on August 5, I never would have believed that one still would not be delivered as of today.

I've ordered more than 50 books from half.com, and all of them (except the malodorous copy of Comp in Four Keys) arrived as promised, in great shape.  Until I ordered Sidewalk.  And then waited.  And sent an email to the seller.  And waited.  And sent an email to half.com customer service.  And another email to the seller.  Finally! a reply from the seller.  "I'll check its shipping status when I get to work."  That was two weeks ago.  The seller is in NY.  Did you make it to work?  Or do you work for half.com customer service?, because I haven't heard anything from anybody.  See, I'm supposed to be reading the appendix for next week (what's left for the week after that), and I still don't have a copy of the book, which means that I have to go to the bookstore and buy another.

2. I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow for unbearably sharp jabs of pain on the left side of my neck.  They're sporadic and come mostly late in the day...after days of reading and computing and writing.  Everything I know about pain hints at a pinched nerve (exacerbated by sitting poorly for hours on end). First appt. since we've been in town, and I'm hoping for a chiropractic referral (long torso+ hereditary back pain+ abominable posture...accumulates to painful crooks).  But I need a proper metaphor for the doc.  I've tentatively decided to go with "...like I was speared by a throwing star."  But I'm open to better suggestions. 

And now, counter-qualms:

1. You can keep up with Ph.'s soccer results on the schedule I posted a few weeks ago.  They're faring well this season, and I've been updating the schedule with Ws and Ls.  Yesterday they played a surprise match at home (not on the schedule until the day before).  I've attended most of the matches this fall, but I had projects to read and grade and a few other things to do at home, so I skipped.  When he got back, I asked him how it went (a 1-0 win...closer than other matches this season), then ribbed him with, "You got the goal?"  Sure enough.  Figures I'd miss the one game when....  And today--a day off from practice--after I picked Ph. up from school, he told me he's thinking more seriously than ever about starting a weblog.  The concept is fuzzy (the time to really learn how everything works, including the design, even more ethereal), but we settled on a snappy domain name (goalorio.us), and it's pointing here temporarily.  Goalorio.us on soccer-related stuff.  Can't go wrong with that.

2. Even if you're not a Washington Wizards fan--or maybe especially because you're not a Washington Wizards fan, check out Etan Thomas's talk last weekend (via).  Fine with me if you skimp on reading the comments at True Hoop, but then you wouldn't know what's in them. 

3. Lost in exactly one hour (2.1) and exactly two hours (2.2). Even if I have to rest my neck on couch pillows to make it through two hours of television.

My next entry at EWM had better be reading notes on Mitchell's Picture Theory or else(!) I'm slacking.

Posted by at 7:00 PM | to Slouching Toward

Saturday, September 3, 2005

Off Perch

F ly-bye discomfitures.

Posted by at 10:30 PM | to Slouching Toward

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Whelp's Delight

N ow what you hear is not a test; Landlord's new puppy is filling our airwaves with rhythm-less all-night-long crying.  Sunday night was almost tolerable.  The young German shepherd-black lab mix broke into lonely-night-in-a-cage dirge just twice, at midnight and 5:00 a.m. (followed by the bustle of mess mopping?  who knows...I was half-asleep).  But last night, the sorrowful pup yipped and whined all night long, like he was staging a concert for the dead.  I tried to wrap my head in pillows, tried to block out the excruciating sound, even wished for a Sugar Hill Gang earworm, and not because I was still thinking about B. Midler (an all-time low at EWM mentioning that song "did I ever tell you you're my..."  geez.  Hope you'll forgive me for that.), but because I would go for just about anything that would make it stop.    Not only am I going to really struggle to like the dog, I'm also struggling to think of this as a very suitable living arrangement for as long as the dog's yapping fills my ears when I should be sleeping (ironic that L'lord has two dogs now and we have a no pets clause in our lease).  Lest I go far enough to upset or offend anyone (en route to becoming the first blogger to be evicted for posting living-space critique), I'll stop here, relieved to know that puppy so exhausted himself in the nighttime hours that the quiet suggests he's finally resting soundlessly this morning.

Posted by at 8:30 AM | to Slouching Toward

Tuesday, June 7, 2005

The Roselius Fog

S ymptoms: faint and dingy-feeling headache, irritability, cravings, mild and temporary (but noticeable) shift in blood pressure. 

I'm now enduring a self-induced Ludwig Roselius Fog.  Feeling it.  It's the name I'm giving to caffeine detox.  Fifty hours now, caffeine free.  Not a single soda.  Not a sip of coffee.  Not a nibble of chocolate. 

Roselius is the German scientist credited with salvaging some bad coffee beans back in 1906 and finding a decaffeination process as a result.  In my present state, how can you blame me for not researching it more in-depth than Wikipedia? 

The purge is temporary.  I figured I'd lay off the usual routine of morning coffee and an afternoon caffeinated drink for the next ten days, then allow myself one or the other less regularly.  Over the past year I've gradually given in to a whole line of succulent caffeinated drinks, fallen in with a robust caffeine addiction.  In the never-ending battle between exhaustion and spry wakefulness (late-early reading, etc.), a proven ally in caffeine.

With this I say farewell to you, caffeine.  But it's not good-bye forever.  ; )

Posted by at 8:16 PM | Comments (3) | to Slouching Toward

Friday, June 3, 2005

Where's My Money, BP?

I don't watch it often enough, that zany MTV program--Boiling Points--in which unsuspecting victims are taunted (in front of a hidden camera) by actors whose idiocy is meant to induce fits of rage--spitting, fuming, cursing rage.  If the victim clings to rationality/patience/kindness long enough, s.he wins a hundred bucks.  I think that's how it goes, anyway.  Every once in a while I imagine I must be on the program, like somebody's trying to frustrate me and taping the whole sequence.

On TV lots of folks lose at the game; they rupture temperamentally, letting loose the accumulating vitriol, venting.  I like to believe I could win the prize money, that I could sweat through twenty minutes of somebody's bull-crap antics instigating me to fury.  It's that little hopeful half-lie I tell myself when I'm particularly short-tempered.  Sometimes I'm great at refraining, breathing deeply, etc.; other times, less so.

Take today for example.  I'll leave the personal/family factors aside (they're just small pinches, fast-fading stings--all for which I'm thinking of adopting M.'s twist-tie technique or this and this).  A whole bunch of day-ruining crap-o-la starts caking up.  Now I'm going to have to switch into a certain necessary fuzziness--a cryptic gloss to cover the trails of this certain set of irritations. 

One has to do with systematically broken links.  Um...links matter?
No. two: content locking.  Here, in MD5 format, is what I think about locking: 52FB604B42D39836C4A2179A73CF2A82.  And that's putting it nicely.  Unconditional locking (imho)=distrust.
Three: Customer service phone trees with thousand ten-thousand-forked branches.  And! at the end of the last branch.  Leave a message. 
4.1. A "solution": When dealing with locked content, delete it, then add a new module and paste in the edited contents.

Me?  I'm trying to keep it together, practice my own little satyagraha of the everyday variety.  Voice inside is telling I probably should lay off with this before I wind up getting reprimanded for being vaguely critical.  It's just that I'm almost certain somebody's going to reveal the whole gag any time now, pull out a hundred bucks, and make my day bright again.  Any slow-passing minute.

Meanwhile, I should go back to writing entries on genre theory.

Posted by at 12:39 PM | Comments (4) | to Slouching Toward

Wednesday, May 4, 2005

Problem and Solution

P roblems
1.  Fifteen sources jamming into a ten-page essay draft.  +Eight pages in. -I've ref'ed three. 
2.  Examination upcoming Monday.  In comes an email: You'll want to read this and this and this.  Oh, and this.  And this.  And this. [It keeps going.]  Plus review your notes and the fifteen books and fourteen articles we read this semester.  Two hours?  Insufficient time for the test.  Let's go with 2.5 hours. Note:  This is *not* excerpted from the actual email, but I've done my best to capture the gist of the message.  Have I ever confessed how much I love exams? 
3.  Eighth grade is really a pain in the ass. 
4.  Another birthday fast-approaching.
5.  Back pain.
6.  A Bush'it administration and I scored a -20% on the Republicant quiz.
7. Gas prices.  Oh wait, I walk. 
8.  B'day card from my dad showed up early (everything okay?!), and inside--"Happy Belated."  Maybe it's for last year. Or maybe I wasn't supposed to open it. ; )

Solutions (in no particular order):
A.  Blog it; B. Ah yes, youth; C. Taxation; D. Kick where it hurts; E. Three pages of notes (weee!); F. Lunch, get out and walk around; G. Continue to write; H. Holarchy; I. Cake.

Posted by at 2:08 PM | Comments (10) | to Slouching Toward

Sunday, May 1, 2005

Sluggish

P h. had another indoor soccer match this morning--Sunday morning--at 7:00 a.m.  A crazy-maker to scurry around so early on a weekend morning for a sporting event.  They have two games left--both next Sunday afternoon; following that we can get back to keeping pace with one sport at a time.  Lacrosse runs until late May or early June.  And then a busy summer (me: take one class, teach two), including D. and Ph. making a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Kenya (I'll say more another time).

Why Sunday, 7:00 a.m.?  Something to do with devout church-goers needing to keep 9 'til noon soccer-free, as I understand it.  There were just two 7 a.m. games on the schedule.  The other one was last week.  We managed to miss the first half of that one.  Completely my fault.  Team manager sent an email last Saturday reminding us the game was at 7 a.m., and I even responded to the note with a "We'll be there!"  Only that in my mind, 7:55 a.m. hijacked all other schedule awareness.  I discovered the error and we sped over to the facility by 7:25 a.m.  Chalk it up to the fail-at-parenting log, entry no. 992. 

Languor, too, in the sense that I'm slugging through a project this weekend.  It's felt like such a laborious stretch, but so much of that's the result of my own mania.  I care too much about getting this one right.  And instead I've resorted to drafting a circular, winding, exploratory draft due for some serious restructuring.  Should say I'm relieved that there's time for that, at least. 

In the extended entry I've folded yet another image experiment.  When I downloaded Wink the other day I came across WinMorph, a freeware app for warping images or morphing two (or more) images and rendering them into a short movie (Flash or MPG1).  Spectacular?  Either way, something to be said for the irreconcilable ambiguity of conceptual (gone act-ual) blending.

Posted by at 10:37 PM | Comments (4) | to Slouching Toward

Thursday, March 31, 2005

Disturbance Report I

6 :29 a.m.  Hop up, tidy the bedcovers.
6:31 a.m.  Flick on the laptop.  Three comments in the nighttime hours.  Cool.
6:45 a.m. Good morning, Ph. (D. was already up and about).
7:20 a.m.  Prepare for shower.  Discover plugged shower drain.
7:25 a.m. Commence vigorous plunging.  Curse the drain-stopper cap allowing the pipe to breath. "$%^& you, drain-stopper cap!"
7:31 a.m. Fever pitch plunging.  Breaking a sweat, new found back pains.
7:32 a.m.  Wearing a towel, search the basement for hand auger.  Did we sell it in the garage sale last summer? 
7:45 a.m. Shower in ankle deep crud-water. Disgusting, I know, but what the hell was I supposed to do?
8:01 a.m. In an effort to get back on track, I refresh on De Certau for a few minutes.  Hermeneutics of the Other...and "A Variant: Hagio-graphical Edification": "Thus hagiography enters into ecclesiastical literature only through effraction; in other words, through the back door" (274). And so on.
8:42 a.m.  See a penny on the sidewalk; keep on walking.
8:45 a.m.  (On the walk to campus) Beautiful day! One...two...three blisters.
9:01 a.m. Coffee from Dunkin' Donuts.  Hope!
9:09 a.m. Bagel and banana from Blinker.
9:13 a.m.  In the midst of peeling the banana, it broke, toppling from the place where I was opening it to the keyboard of my laptop. 
9:31 a.m. CCR 611 Composition Histories

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Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Spilt

(via via)

Posted by at 8:53 PM | Comments (4) | to Slouching Toward

Tuesday, March 8, 2005

Disappoint-ensity

W hen a watchful mentor emailed me a link to Attensity over the weekend, I was encouraged, finding, from a quick glance at their web site, that some of the same data-mining they market, as their hallmark, matches up with a few of the configurations defining a project I have underway.  Attensity claims to process data and analyze that which is otherwise difficult to discern.  Their software churns away like some kind of high-powered heuristic meaning-cruncher--a processor of mass quantities of text into readable metadata.  NORA (non-obvious relationship awareness) for large-scale discourse. 

So I sent them an email inquiring about the whole plot, all-the-while-recalling that the only other text parser I looked up asked $2k per year for software licensing.  Did I mention I'm a grad student?

Well, I did mention that in the email to Attensity, the email inquiring about their project.  And I heard back today--a polite note, something about serving the US Intelligence community and a starting fee of $50,000. And something about wishing me the best in my quest.  Thanks.  But no thank-you. 

The proliferation of textual analysis apps self-identifying as the devices built to root out terrorism piques my interest.  Perhaps because of the sheer volume of text to be analyzed for particular patterns (suspicious patterns! watch the parentheticals, Attensity!), mass-discourse text parsers are up and coming.  And so unbelievably over-priced that they're no use whatsoever to the project I'm working on.

Posted by at 10:47 PM | Comments (4) | to Slouching Toward

Monday, February 21, 2005

Savage Journeys

I started the day by glancing through a few feeds in Bloglines and there I learned about Hunter S. Thompson's suicide, which so many others have taken up in entries today.  These two pages sat open in separate Firefox tabs all day, tucked behind other more active tabs, although today has been, by and large, rather quiet in terms of blogging, blog-reading.  I'm writing an essay for a class tomorrow morning, and it has been a drudge working through saying saying saying stuff that reads as careful, polished and seamless.  And I walked (a rather deep-snow high-knee march across the park) to campus for a 670 (teacher-practicum) meeting.  But that essay has tied me up.

I haven't even read the articles about Hunter S., and I haven't been moved to dig into the entries posted by others.  It's an effect of other presiding forces that such an event hasn't really drawn more than a few minutes of my attention.  Family in town.  And that essay.

I didn't know what I'd blog tonight, or even if I'd have time.  Still need to scrape smooth the many rough edges of the essay, an essay yet in need of expanding by another paragraph or two (especially brilliant ones, the sort that rescue us from textual disasters, if possible).  I just printed a copy in the office, and when I went to grab it from the printer, instead I took Fear and Loathing from the shelf, flipped through it quickly to see whether I'd left any notes or paper scraps in there when I last read it, maybe three years ago.  Just one page is dog-eared; a folded sticky note book-marks another page.  Hmm.  And I returned to crank out this entry (over the noise of Ph. and T. playing silly chess, UConn vs. Notre Dame on the tube, and a match of bickering wits between J. and three-year-old T.) without even thinking to grab the draft of that disappointing essay from the printer.  It's still there, ink drying.

So it's enough, for today, to post the two paragraphs I think I must have been flagging with the bent page a few years ago.  They're sufficiently panegyric, insufficiently funereal:

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas.  Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era--the kind of peak that never comes again.  San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to run...but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch the sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world.  Whatever it meant...

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long find flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time--and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. (67)

Posted by at 8:16 PM | Comments (2) | to Slouching Toward

Friday, February 11, 2005

Why Some Weekends Go By So Quickly

P h. indoor soccer match Sunday AM at 7:50
Run down Ph.'s uniform (call, pick a time, drive around, etc.)
Read, respond to 18 essays from WRT205ers (leafed through 'em)
Read Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined for 711 (net-rhets) (ch. 1-2)
Tax prep appointment
Set up dentist appointment
Wiki futzing (had to set up one of my own for experimentiking)
Develop/refine the assignment for essay-project two in 205
Re-read first-three chapters of Barabasi's Linked
Regular blogging (forever ongoing)
Dig around for CCCC funding app paperwork
For 611 (comp histories):
Read ch. 5 "The Fictions of Factual Representation" and ch. 6 "The Irrational and the Problem of Historical Knowledge in the Enlightenment" from White's Tropics of Discourse
Read ch. 2 "Shaping Tools: Textbooks and the Development of Composition-Rhetoric" from Robert Connors' Composition-Rhetoric
For 720 (making meaning)--for Tuesday morning discussion-leading, re/read/visit:
From the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. 1999. On Computational Theory of Mind, Situatedness/Embededness, and Schemata.
Phelps, Louise. "Cross-Sections in an Emerging Psychology of Composition." 1984.
Bransford, John and Nancy McCarrell. "A Sketch of a Cognitive Approach to Comprehension." 1974.
Norman, Donald. "Twelve Issues for Cognitive Science." 1981.
Tannen, Deborah. "What's in a Frame? Surface Evidence and Underlying Expectations." 1979.
Spiro, Rand. "Constructive Processes in Prose Comprehension and Recall." 1980.
Adams, Marilyn J. and Allan Collins. "A Schema-Theoretic View of Reading." 1979.
Plunk out notes on the whole lot (this might get dropped)
Catch a few minutes of college hoops on the TV set (this might get dropped, too)
Leave incoherent blog comments a few carefully selected places
Pick up more Advil

So that's most of what I'll be doing (with lots of help from D., of course) between now and Monday night (to say nothing of pitching in on meals, laundry, groceries, Valentining and tidying house).

Posted by at 7:12 PM | Comments (4) | to Slouching Toward

Saturday, January 22, 2005

Patch Footography

W arning: nasty ankle photo herein.

In the spirit of nearly copying (but not quite) my esteemed professor who has dangled brightly manicured toes on her internet weblog, I'm showing you what I've been doing all day with my sprained ankle, the (naturally) purple balloon of inexorable pain that it is.  Cranked it while landing with a rebound (from my own missed shot) during the usual Friday afternoon basketball workout.  And we were winning, too: ahead 9-3 in a game to 11 (it matters, this is no loser's limp).  Was me, Ph., J. (math education prof) and C., an undergrad we'd just picked up to take on four other students in the last game of the day. But now I've got healing to do.  Here's how. 

1. From the yard, gather one plastic storage bin half-full of cold, cold snow.  Make that cold, clean snow, please.

2. Mash the sprained ankle into the snow for twenty minutes, until numb (longer will make it swell worse, shorter will be ineffective).  Repeat every two hours. Wrap, prop and do not disturb during the in-between.

3.  After 48 hours, start the hot/cold/hot/cold contrast baths (wrenched extremity only). 

4.  Pain killers, college hoops muted on TV, reading for coursework, relax.  Been through it a zillion times before.  And the snowfall outside will reduce all the swelling my bum ankle can produce.

[Note to studious-minded self: Is this link-logging or life-logging?]

[Added to clarify | 7:25 p.m.: D. and Ph. harvest the snow, not me. The foot photo is slightly skewed because of the contorted position I was in (from the recliner) to accomplish a photo of the outside of the right ankle. My dogs are not normally so crooked.]

Posted by at 6:00 PM | Comments (9) | to Slouching Toward

Monday, January 17, 2005

Para-site's Fair

I 'm getting ready for Semester, and I don't have much to say (or blog) right now.  Spent quite a while today balancing my checkbook from the last several months. Same vein: why not tidy up some of the kept new stuff cluttering Bloglines?  Good as anything, right?  On with the show then.  Here, in no particular order, stowed for no particlar reason, are ten links green-checked as "Keep New" from the last month.

Feedspeaker (RSS into digitized voice, I think)
Photospace
Building a better blog
Bubblewrap
Crumpled paper toss
Museum of Food Anomalies
Money Wallet
Botablog (wuh?)
Google Suggest
Comixpedia

1-3, credit to unmediated; all the rest from metafilter

And now I'll go back to reading the last of four essay-articles on the formation of composition's multidiscplinary, many-armed fieldish-ness.  Bingo. I'm still reading the never-ending one, and it's up for discussion tomorrow morning.

Posted by at 9:01 PM | to Slouching Toward

Wednesday, January 5, 2005

The Start of More?

T he "new" Blockbuster has riddled us with promises of abandoning late fees. The slogan says, "The end of late fees.  The start of more."  Good enough.  We rent movies from Blockbuster, and we have returned them to the store late, paid the fees, felt stupid, absolved our delinquency.

So when a postcard showed up in the mail the other day telling me we owed twelve bucks in late fees to Blockbuster, you can imagine my surprise.  I was stunned.  But your ad campaign, I thought, it promises the end of fees.  Is this the start of more?  According to the notice, we'd returned The Day After Tomorrow five days late when we picked it up in mid-November.  And my memory isn't the sharpest (still working on getting the new phone number right every time), but I'm sure The Day After Tomorrow was a week-long rental.  We only rent movies one or two times each month; the infelicity of a late return is generally fresh with us.  We usually expect the late charge. But not this time.  "The end of late fees.  The start of more."

When we rented Hero and I, Robot the other day, D. and Ph. went to the new release wall while I wandered up to the counter (at the store on Erie Blvd. here in Syracuse). 

"Can I talk with somebody about this late fee notice?  It's for a movie we rented in November.  Says we returned it five days late, but I'm almost certain it was a week-long rental."

Clerk looks at the note card, eyebrows furrowed accusatorily.  "Yeah, The Day After Tomorrow was returned five days late. It's [something incoherent involving long division] per day."

"We're generally good about returning movies on time [granted, a fuzzy assertion].  Is it possible that the DVD case said 'one week rental'?  When we were in here a few weeks ago renting Supersize Me, I saw that several of your new releases were shelved in mixed cases.  Some of the cases said 'two day rental,' others 'one week rental.'" 

Clerk: We run out of cases, but all the new releases are two-day rentals.  If it's in the wrong case, you have to read the slip inside.

"The slip?  Is that the same as the receipt?"

Clerk: Yeah.  You should read the receipt to be sure you're getting it for a full week instead of two days.

Friends, read your Blockbuster receipts. 

*~*

Denouement: To delay the charges, sleep on it, etc., we rented on my card rather than D.'s.  Then, to clear our names, salvage our fragile credit ratings, and restore decency to our lives, D. slinked back to the store a few days later and coughed up the twelve bucks.  But insult to injury, those goldang ads.  "The end of fees.  The start of more."

Posted by at 8:55 AM | Comments (8) | to Slouching Toward

Saturday, December 18, 2004

Z is for

Y ou will drink too much gin and Newcastle Brown Ale. Not the worst way to die, but you won't remember too much of your life. Hey, at least you made some people laugh! To say nothing of the masterful seminar projects wrapping up.

What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?
brought to you by Quizilla, inspired by Arete

Posted by at 8:04 PM | to Slouching Toward

Saturday, December 11, 2004

Blog-dry

I t's gotten that bad around here.  I'm comparing blogging to laun-dry.  If only...

I'm sweating out end-o-semester projects all weekend.  Due dates: Wednesday, Friday and next Monday.  And that's mostly all there is to say.  I can't believe how the writing demands have made me over, reconstituted a once energetic, vroom-ish rhythm into flub-dub-flub-dub.  I'm fairly stoic about it all (shrug-eh-dee-do-dah), but I *feel* distinctly different about writing.  Period.  I don't know whether it's the exhaustion of X-treme reading for four months. Who knows.  I'm ready to try anything to crawl these creatures onto the monitor.  My latest ploy is munching on leftover fortune cookies when I get stuck.  I've posted the unfortunate read-outs here, but they're not quite the boost I need. "Good journey"? "Showered with good luck"? C'mon! More than luck, I need a sentence on Barthes and Lakoff and myth on the right. 

BTW, anybody know how to cite a fortune cookie?

Posted by at 6:24 PM | Comments (8) | to Slouching Toward

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

With the Lights On

I just set out to key in a few notes I could post at EWM--say anything about registering entries less frequently in the weeks ahead, about the mid-semester curve which, now rounded, reveals three seminar projects with deadlines in clear view, about new ideas and whatnot, about biking through the lovely fall weather we're having in Syracuse--to a meeting at Ph.'s school, to campus for CCR732--today's session on service learning as the latest momentous shift in composition, then pedaling over to Barry Park after class so Ph. doesn't have to walk home from soccer practice alone in the rain. 

To end, Judith Butler's Excitable Speech wins the mid-semester prestige of most compelling read (and it helps that it was set up by Austin's lectures collected in How to Do Things With Words).  It's got me thinking about a whole bunch of stuff; a cloudy project emerging from Davis's archisemiotics and performative architecture(s) is now jockeying with my other half-plan--a stir-pot of Barthes, Saper with a yet-to-be IDed ingredient.  Still something missing and a heap of reading to take up.  One other project involving weblogs, and one other project on walled classrooms and their antitheses, deep cyberia.  And in the upcoming week, it's Lakoff's Moral Politics, the final bit--on mapping--in Comp in Four Keys, and selections from Gamsci's Notebooks.

Fade to air up the tires.

Posted by at 11:57 AM | Comments (4) | to Slouching Toward

Monday, October 11, 2004

Five-Throb Frontal Lobe

1 .  One more conversation about authoritative sources and research via the i-net. Roughly: "Never use .com sources; prefer .edu or .gov domains."
2.  Toothache (or some more general category of mouth pain).
3.  How the hell did my copy of Comp in Four Keys (ordered from half.com and sent with a friendly note from a Big Ten alum) get to be so rotten smelling? It really stinks.  Pets and smoke and gin-breath-belch. As I read, the odor makes me wonder whether the person who read it before me reached the end. One of my office mates suggested dashing the smelly book with baby powder. I'm ready to smear on some Vicks vapor rub just to get through this next article.
4.  Read it by tomorrow. Oh, and this too (attachment PDF, 27 pages). And while you're checking your email--this.
5.  News you won't find in the sports section of your local paper: I've been playing Friday evening basketball this semester.  Won a pair of three v. three games on Friday, but I wrenched my lower back so horribly that even today I can barely pull on socks, tie my shoes, etc. Unofficial status for this Friday: questionable. Official status when playing competitive basketball for the rest of my adult life: idiotic.

Posted by at 10:58 PM | Comments (7) | to Slouching Toward

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Tempo

I plunked out a long lamentation about workload, strain and self-pity, then blew it off the monitor with an Elbovian wisp: 'DEL'.  This looks like it's going to take a lot of work.  With a few small exceptions--nothing shocking or out of the ordinary--I'm getting exactly what I bargained for.  My only immediate concern is reconciling rhythm with tempo. Thinking +/- 250 BPM.

So after class tonight I wedged in another mini-span for family time--frozen (then baked) pizzas and an hour straight of The Family Guy.  Probably could've found tickets to hear Michael Moore talk about humor at the Carrier Dome, but running between classes and colloquia and office hours from 8:30 a.m. this morning until 7:15 p.m. this evening had me feeling like enough was enough. Figure, as well, that anything remarkable from the talk will hover over campus for the next few days.

And the final bit, I suppose, is common enough.  When I try to write anything lately, I feel over-stimulated--jammed. I record reading notes, even post them to my  other tinderblog (mostly unlinked scraps, fragments, orts...or the new fave word of the week: melange).  And I've been typing a whole bunch of stuff--response papers and so on.  But when I try to write, I struggle.  Ebb?

Posted by at 10:42 PM | Comments (6) | to Slouching Toward

Tuesday, September 7, 2004

Giddy-up

H ow's my evening going?  Glad you care to know.

Twenty-two adware busts and seven five viruses scrubbed from the coffers of this ill-behaving PC.  

Gone from Ad-Aware 6.0 to Spybot S&D 1.3 to AVG.  Still need a personal firewall from Sygate.  And my brother recommended www.helponthe.net rather than wailing at him through my cellphone about this fine tangle.

But I still can't get a handle on BackDoor.Agent.2.H.  Sneaky trojan horse, that one.  Two instances of it will have to sit stable for now.  Behave!  I teach in the morning, and I'm flat out of time for battling tech villains. Granted, I could have been more careful to see that everything was properly calibrated when the Road Runner folks departed.

Posted by at 10:33 PM | Comments (18) | to Slouching Toward

Sunday, August 29, 2004

What's in your bag?

W hat I thought yesterday was a good idea has me struggling over the whole revelatory ethic.  This entry proves the struggle's status for now.  For a few months, I've been fielding questions from family and friends who ask, "Now what exactly will you be doing at Syracuse?".  Teaching, reading, writing, thinking, walking, biking and so on.  And maybe the better question is what I'll be carrying around with me while I'm doing all of that other stuff.  So the meme goes: What's in your bag for these sixteen weeks? (Fine.  It's not a meme until somebody else does it, too, but this is by all means memable.) And so

I'm toting around lime Tic-Tacs, a small bottle of Advil, a 64MB jump drive (in need of upsizing, I think), a few electronic gadgets, a Sharpie marker, a Guadalupe charm, office and house keys (but no car keys!...wait, what's this?...a valet key for the Honda in my bag? Wha?), a file thick with collected papers relating to this and that, a piece of chalk, two dry-erase markers, a legal pad, (for one day only) a pile of 40 syllabi for two sections of WRT105, and a shifting array of articles to accompany what follows for the semester of study: 

601 Introduction to Scholarship in Composition and Rhetoric
Handa, Carolyn, ed. Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook ( 2004)
Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays (1998)
Wiley, Mark, Barbara Gleason, and Louise Phelps, eds. Composition in Four Keys: Inquiring into the Field (1996)
Marable, Manning. The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in America (2003)
Gilyard, Keith and Vorris Nunley, eds. Rhetoric and Ethnicity (2004)
Smitherman, Geneva and Victor Villanueva, eds. Language Diversity in the Classroom: from Intention to Practice (2003)
Selfe, Cynthia L. Technology and Literacy in the Twenty First Century: the Importance of Paying Attention (1999)

631 Twentieth Century Rhetorical Studies
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words ( 1975)
R. Barthes, Mythologies ( 1973)
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech : A Politics of the Performative ( 1997)
Terry Eagleton, Idea of Culture ( 2000)
Frantz Fanon , Black Skin, White Masks ( 1991)
Michel Foucault, Order of Things : An Archaeology of the Human Sciences ( 1994)
Rosemary Hennessy, Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Difference (1993)
Lakoff, George, Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't ( 1996)
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed ( 2000)
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature ( 1985)

732 Critical Studies in Writing Curriculum
Ira Shor, Critical Teaching and Everyday Life (1987) 
A. Suresh Canagarajah, A Geopolitics of Academic Writing (2002)
Andrea Lunsford, Crossing Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies (2004)
Arjuna Parakrama, Language and Rebellion : Discursive Unities and the Possibility of Protest (1990)
[??] Lyons, Espejos y Ventanas
Gil Ott, No Restraints : An Anthology of Disability Culture in Philadelphia (2002)
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971) 
Ellen Cushman, Literacy : A Critical Sourcebook (2001)
[??] Deans, Writing Partnership

Note to sore back:  We won't be carrying everything at once. 

What's in your bag?

Posted by at 3:56 PM | Comments (16) | to Slouching Toward

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

I Herd You The First Time

I won't be able to post this until tomorrow morning. My net access tonight was restricted to a short sprint of email checking in the CCR lounge and mailroom just before walking back home from a full day of orientation sessions with the graduate school.

So that's it: orientation. We're toggling between large groups sessions and smaller, mini-groups, for things such as microteaching presentations. My dog and pony show danced to the beat of the five-minute version of aggregation and feedlines as the latest informatics of the WWW (as if from an introductory research writing course). The microteaching demos are taped; we'll watch and critique them tomorrow.

One of the large group sessions today was on "active learning." We were asked to--quick!-- think up a list of qualifiers that constitute active learning as something distinctly different from passive learning, I guess. I was thinking along the lines of, if it burns calories, it's active, when someone in the front piped up with "learning by doing." This was one among many on the list, of course. Then the session speaker took up the problem of learning something abstract or dead, something that cannot be done. Something about doing 5th c. B.C. Greece. You can't do that, right? [Rhetoric? Olympics?]

Another side of this session, in front of all the U.'s TAs called on us to think of ways we'll prefer active learning in our teaching this fall (rather than advocating couch potato essayism or worse). Working from a volunteered example course--WRT105, someone in the front again--lots of TAs started chiming in with their experiences in writing classes.