the good fight

what does an average middleclass person in the developed world have to really fight for? stand up for? do capital-S Something about?

plenty of stuff, surely. but then again... fighting seems dangerous. difficult. as long as we have access to some safe-enough shelter, plentiful-enough groceries, functional-enough plumbing, a little companionship, what else could we need to really worry about? with those basic necessities secured, most of us will be content with the state of things, whatever mild to moderate chaos or metaphorical storm clouds may swirl around on the outskirts of our little routines. 

do I mean "be content with," or "get complacent about"?

both, I guess. the main difference between the terms is in the level of awareness each implies. complacency means ignorance. we can frame our implacable cockroach-like ignorance as blissful and cozy, or as a challenging opportunity to learn more stuff. or maybe as protective wall, willful and resolute. which way we see it (or if we see it at all, I suppose) is a decision to make. a mindset we get to set. more likely, multiple shifting mindsets that we trade in and out as days come and go. 

my list above of all the basics that would be worth fighting for if we had to didn't include any education, but really it should. what kind of teacher would I be if I couldn't say learning and knowledge are worth fighting for, standing up to demand, or working as hard as possible for, after all? we need good food and good information to really survive on this planet. we can't leave our brains out of the game. useful stories are what civilization is made of.

we've watched the newest Superman movie more than a few times this summer. is it a useful story? (perhaps I should ask "useful for what?" or "useful to whom?" here. stories can be made to do many kinds of work in the world. not every storyteller has the same kind of use in mind. not everyone understands their needs for safety, shelter, food, and information in the same terms as other people's.)

despite the comicbook/superhero genre not being my usual cup of tea, I did like the messages this one braided together for us. 

• your biological family and their cultural values aren't the be-all-end-all of who you are or can be. 
• seeking peace and justice is not easy; people will probably complain no matter what you try. 
• success of any kind at almost any level takes a ton of collaboration: there's work for the superheros, for journalists, and maybe for the unruly canines too. 

not all fighting is physical or violent (thank goodness). inasmuch as my daily work might be considered a figurative battle-- to wrangle my modest expertise in technical writing into a series of effective lessons for a bunch of college students every semester-- to apply decently rigorous empirical methods to relevantly articulated research questions in the field of media studies-- and all the other paperwork and collaboration and sitting through meetings that attend my little academic career-- then we can say I've fought to defend my few square feet of shelter and my $600/month grocery budget. perhaps I also fight here and there for recognition, for friendships, for leisure time, for a little peace and quiet. what advocacy my life entails beyond these selfish pursuits is very small. smaller than a pebble thrown into a puddle, it seems.

professionally, I advocate for all the podcasts to have transcripts. for inclusive and non-punitive learning-centered pedagogy where students get to make a lot of decisions for themselves instead of merely following arbitrary instructions. for a rejection of the workaholic mindset that still pervades academic culture. for everyone to do their best to read more and communicate clearly and vote in all the elections.

does all of that make a difference? I'll at least say that it doesn't not make a difference, so that's something. I won't always be able to measure the difference it might be making. there is plenty of hope involved.

could I make more of a difference if I were a scrappy investigative journalist? 

more or less is not the right question here though. it'd be a different kind of difference, on a different stage, but another form of education in any case. keeping people empowered with accurate and relevant information about the present universe. meaningful work, indeed. 

but also... maybe scathing exposés about the far-reaching misdeeds of tech billionaires only bring about lasting consequences in comicbook movies with happy endings. 

what does an average middleclass person in the developed world know, really, about all the bigger things out there to fight for? all the things we could/should/might/ought to/would do capital-S Something about before it's too late? nobody can be rationally informed about everything everywhere all at once. it's too much. even if we are informed enough about reality, learning/knowing/deciding what to do about it is another set of mental battles in itself.

my currently second-most-favorite podcast Never Post published a roundtable episode on this idea, back in May. the host (Mike Rugnetta--the one and only. I know, I know, will I ever shut up about Mike Rugnetta?) notes the tension between how we use the internet and how we might wish we could use the internet. it is a global medium--that's why it was made. one of the coolest things we do with the internet is "to socialize and connect globally, which, you know, that's powerful and that's important," Rugnetta says, "but we can't act globally. [...] it's even hard to act locally given the state of especially American politics.
"And, you know, I feel like even my ability to even know how to act locally has perhaps atrophied a bit because of my focus on the importance of familiarizing myself with national and global events."

are there information diet plans out there, something akin to the handy food pyramid, but for sources of news instead of calories? probably. 

do they teach such things in grade school so everyone grows up knowing that your brain will not thrive on a diet of nonsense and trash? maybe somewhere somehow. bless everyone who dares teach grade school.

there is so much information in the world to be had. maybe I shouldn't say "too much," because that depends. too much for what? for whom? 

sometimes it does seem necessary to just stop for a little while though. to push back on all the information (the firehose, the overload, the deluge, the six-lane highway traffic jam) with a little carefully cultivated ignorance: "I haven't looked into that myself," "that's not my lane," "I trust someone else to be smart about and work on that particular problem" and so on. (this brings to mind some of Hank Green's recent vlogbrothers video in which he touches on the difficult value of trusting our fellow humans.) we can all find our own good fight to fight-- there isn't just one. 

hopefully we aren't all fighting alone and/or at cross purposes though. hopefully we have some kind of justice gang/league/squad to back us up at least some of the time. smart and good people don't only exist in the comicbooks and movies. the Green brothers are on my list of people I admire for trying to make the world better. academic acquaintances are on the list. non-profit organizations managed by people whose names I may never know are on the list. 

its been a week or so since I read this detailed breakdown of "The Dark Internet Forest" as a concept for understanding the possibilities and risks of all our globally mediated connectedness and was thus suddenly enchanted with its author, Erin Kissane. she comes back to the centrality of place-- real or physical or digital or conceptual, place is important to remember. positionality. relationality. places matter. where are you? what other places are within reach right now? who else is there? how can you join forces and do Something?

I especially loved that Kissane cites this beautiful pushback against the classic "tragedy of the commons" idea. Elinor Ostrom's book helped me write my dissertation. I should read it again sometime. 

doing capital-S something is not always (probably not often) gonna be easy even when you have a team of active, collaborative superheros to work with. it's still messy. pebbles in ponds sometimes and big splashing ordeals other times. 

flip a switch somewhere and set your mind to care at least a little. doesn't have to be about everything. just don't get totally complacent.

fatefully

opening match 4: Changeling: the Lost vs Star Wars: Force and Destiny

the last few weeks have been full of traveling and sunshine, so this halfway mark of the opening round is a little later than planned. will I get through the next 4 before summer is over? hopefully yes.

I've been excited to write about these two-- they're unique, and they make an interesting pair. on one side, the first (2007) edition of White Wolf's Changeling sits in all its alluring glitter. on the other, we have the somewhat more austere yet still very colorful and fun Star Wars: Force and Destiny, from 2015.

Changeling enchants me with its concept alone. all that old lore come to life, wrapped in the shadowy politics of World of Darkness-- it seems like a perfect combination, reminiscent of the fairytale retellings and urban fantasy novels I used to love from Robin McKinley, Holly Black, Liani Taylor and the like. in writing this review I also remembered the handful of chapters I recorded for a LibriVox edition of Mr. Wirt Sikes 1880 folkloric anthropology book, British Goblins:Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions. there are so many small and mystical stories wiggling around in the history and culture of every place humans have ever lived. the source material for anything based on fairytales is pretty infinite, I imagine.

and who doesn't love Star Wars, right? it's got equally enchanting heroism and adventure threaded grandly throughout a seemingly endless galaxy. it's a place where one might encounter shiny droids and rugged smugglers in equal measure. a chance to be part of that galaxy is gonna be pretty cool, in any case.

I've mostly followed the same outline for this match-up review: a quick table of metadata, summaries of past characters I've made in each system, thoughts on the books' aesthetics, mechanics, and approachability, and finally a note on my brand new/tournament-specific characters. the uniqueness of these two systems just seemed to warrant a discussion of mechanics before diving into details about new character concepts. and so, onward...

SYSTEM	Changeling: the Lost	Star Wars: Force and Destiny
back cover tagline =	"A storytelling game of beautiful madness."	"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."
publisher =	White Wolf	Fantasy Flight Games
pub. date =	2007	2015
original cost =	$34.99	$59.95
length =	7 major sections / 349 pages	13 chapters / 444 pages
my exp. level =	some	a bit more than some

---

previous characters

I've created and played two characters each from these two systems. both Changeling games were short and sweet. for one, little Synthia Starling, a birdlike young woman with a Beastly seeming in the Winter Court, explored derelict buildings and made deals with otherworldly creatures in just a couple one-on-one sessions; and then, Liv, another Beastly seeming (this time snakelike), joined up with two other lost souls to bravely infiltrate the Hedge and take down a twisted carnival ringleader. this was around Halloween time, so the short three-session game had a lovely autumn coziness mixed with spookiness underneath.

my Star Wars characters were created for longer campaigns, though the first didn't last all that long in the end. a friend in Louisiana was running a sort of mashup of Stars Without Number using templates from the Star Wars RPG books for some things. so I made a pink Twi'lek-- very rich and spoiled (or at least that's what she wanted people to think), also a talented enough smuggler. her name was Luura'blen and she had a sparkly pet vulptex (one of those crystal-fox-looking creatures). designing her was pretty fun. pink skin, darker pink/red freckles at the ends of her headtails, lots of shiny, pearly jewelry, and silky clothing. technically I must have used the Age of Rebellion core book for her stats (Force and Destiny doesn't have a smuggler path in it), but we'll call that close enough; it seems relevant to write about her here anyway.

some years later, we played an online Star Wars roleplaying game specifically with the Force and Destiny book. all four of us created young padawan characters who would ultimately live through the infamous Order 66. mine was Yahla Sota, a Togruta with golden coloring and a strong Jedi heritage in her family. for young Yahla, it was a privilege to be sent into Jedi training. she wanted so badly to prove herself worthy of that privilege. but in the end, after all the suffering and loss she endured, she couldn't always hold onto that happy trust in the Force. everything got more complicated than she ever thought it could.

the whole story was epic indeed, following us through training, building our lightsabers, surviving shipwreck, facing betrayal, and eventually fighting against the Sith directly. I wrote out a few segments of our adventures, centered on Yahla's perspective, over on this other blog of mine. that campaign was one of the longer and most satisfying I've ever been part of. and Yahla was a character I felt (increasingly, over time) that I could play quite distinctly and purposefully different from any vaguely-alternate version of myself. she was braver, steadier, yet more impulsive and almost vengeful at times.

the Changeling games I've played were small in scope, with relatively tiny, cozy stories. on the other hand Star Wars is built for sweeping space epics, and that's what Yahla's story grew into. big or small, both systems have given me very neat opportunities to explore ideas and circumstances and reactions outside my own experience.
  

aesthetics

underneath its vibrant, shiny, mottled deep-green cover, the Changeling book evokes a bit of creepiness-- it's not a hedge of glinting leaves, but one of menacingly sharp thorns. splintered bones. spiky antlers. every interior page is bordered with a Celtic-ish chain of thorns or vines. fancy drop capital letters stretch and curl ostentatiously at the beginnings of the interstitial vignettes. the tagline for this game invokes the idea of "beautiful madness," and there is beauty indeed, tinted with World of Darkness grime. 

parts of it feel ancient and mythic. other corners are more Grimm, marked with the well-worn wheel ruts of once-upon-a-time. all of it is a little bent, a little rusty-- unpolished and unpredictable. the ancient clocks of this enchanted place are looming and wrong somehow. time in the fae realms cannot be contained or measured like the mortals pretend. nothing works the way a scientist might insist it should. and those untouched by the wrenching trauma of an otherworldly kidnapping couldn't know just how evenly, how deceptively the glitter is mixed with the shadow, the darkness with the sparkle. inbetween-ness is a big theme in this system. you've been taken, lost, and you can't ever really go home. you've seen too much. your soul and your skin will always be a little twisted. a line from chapter 2 says it rather succinctly: "To survive is to carry scars" (p 98).

this game is a blood-stained alley leading to a hidden courtyard, a gleaming estate with endless gardens, where the most intoxicating music drifts through the air, where beautifully manicured topiary might dance with you if you ask nicely... but the overgrown path and tiny doorway only appear on Mondays during a new moon, only if you come alone.

this game is a dusty old cobwebbed attic with antique lace handkerchiefs wrapped around mysteriously half-burned scraps of sepia photographs, where your eyes chase imps and pixies around your peripheral vision, where your weeping waxy candle in its old-fashioned brass holder could betray you to the monsters at any moment.

 -

the vibe of Star Wars is more straightforward, I want to say. the book is colorful but understated, its type and layout mostly boxy and tactical-looking. but it's also got marvelous art folded in at almost every opportunity. chapter breaks come with gorgeous action scenes across a full spread, each of them with dynamic and cinematic depth. the end papers are panoramic landscapes of Tatooine's desert, and in one of the later chapters is a very awesome map of the whole galaxy. 

as you might expect, dichotomies of light and dark pervade this system. good vs. corruption, honor vs. selfishness. these tensions provide the core of Star Wars generally and of this book, Force and Destiny, in particular-- it's all geared toward Force users like Jedi or Jedi-in-training. the art and the tone of the rulebook contribute to a sweeping sense of destiny: every decision may echo with epic importance. we're all connected, after all. the Force will guide you like steady stepping stones across a muddy field, if only you trust it.

this is fairy tales in space after all. it's dramatic in a futuristic way, but the brushstrokes of action, adventure, and fantasy form familiar shapes with comforting trajectories: everyday people touched by something marvelous and huge that changes their lives, heroes-to-be discovering their destinies while navigating seedy hives of villainy and drudging through some version of a dark, despairing swamp, holding on to their light as best they can. 
 

mechanics

the mechanics of Changeling build on the World of Darkness system with added twists of whimsy and magic. we're using d10s again, with the same basic stats, merits, Virtues, Vices, and your character's attributes and skills will inform most of the dice rolls made to measure success at any given action. on top of all that, a changeling comes from one of 6 "seemings"-- the archetypes of faerie-ness (Beasts, Darklings, Elementals, Fairest, Ogres, or the Wizened) that influence how their looks have supernaturally changed-- and one of 4 season-themed Courts (5 if you count the Courtless as a Court, I suppose). Changeling-specific advantages include Glamour and Wyrd, both used to fuel some pretty cool magical abilities, like manipulating luck or disguising your face as someone else's.

as you progress and learn to control the wyrd powers instilled within you as a changeling, you'll learn more and more powerful Contracts and forge useful Pledges with others in changeling society. at character creation you get a certain number of these, and thereafter use XP to purchase more. 

choosing Contracts and thinking up Pledges feels, to me, a little like the rotes (pre-made spells) and improvised magics (anything you can think of and describe convincingly) of Mage. thankfully there seem to be fewer Contracts to choose among, most of which are limited by the seeming and the Court you belong to, which makes things a little simpler. Pledges, though, still intimidate me. they seem pretty hardcore in terms of all the levels of binding and consequence that can be built into them.

instead of human Morality, changelings measure Clarity-- how strong is your mental hold on what is real? how much has your magic use degraded your sense of self and continuity? living with knowledge of both the normal world and the Fae can be treacherous, but changelings know that the thorny paths inbetween-- the twisty Hedge that grows and shifts around the edges of reality-- those spaces and paths are useful, too. finding safe(ish) ways in and out is part of cultivating and maintaining magical power. the Hedge and the thorns are in large part what irrevocably changed you; you may as well bend that to your own benefit, and your allies, if you can.

 -

to create a character for Force and Destiny, you choose from among 8 species (including human) and 6 careers, each of which offer 3 unique specializations. these options will grant custom bonuses to your basic stats, which comprise 6 base characteristics, not too different from those outlined in many other RPGs, and 34 skills in which you'll rank from 0 to 5. there's also a spot for custom skills, just in case there's something your character might know or learn that isn't already represented on the character sheet.

whichever career and specialization you choose will guide your character's progression along a skill tree, kind of like the ones they have in video games. all the Force powers have skill trees too, with prerequisite skills leading up to more potent or more efficient options for each type. there are Force powers involving speed and balance, some for mind control or sensing into the future, and others for telekenetics. it's all really fun to see these in actual gameplay.

the skill trees may seem overly structured, but there are enough options among the species, backgrounds, and careers to keep it feeling open-ended and full of possibility. you've got plenty of choices for what to spend XP on, and plenty of in-game story reasons to guide those choices.

the custom dice are the weirdest part of the Star Wars RPG system. you can buy a custom set along with your rulebook, or you can use regular d6s, d8s, and d12s in place of Boost dice (d6), Ability dice (d8), Proficiency dice (d12), Setback dice (d6), Difficulty dice (d8), Challenge dice (d12), and Force dice (d12). that is a lot of different kinds of dice, with not-so-normal symbols on all the different sides. during structured play (like combat or other risky contexts where you need dice to decide outcomes) it's common to roll a combination of all 6 of the main types for any given attempt. and the dice aren't just measuring success or failure-- they also indicate advantages and threats from the situation or environment, along with moments of triumph and despair. you can fail triumphantly, or you can succeed with a touch of despair. I like all the narrative possibilities of that, and the creativity it encourages. 

in addition to Force dice and the points of light or dark Force energy  they generate for each player to use, there's also the mechanic of Destiny points. at the beginning of each session, players roll one Force die and add its result to the Destiny pool. light side Force points are shared by the players, and dark side Force points are given to the GM. each time either side spends a point to upgrade their dice or trigger something beneficial for their characters, that Destiny point ebbs and flows into the opposite side-- light side points become dark side points, and vice versa. it's a pretty fun and dynamic way to represent the balance of the Force.
 

approachability

I rate the approachability levels of these books and systems as average, and just about equal. both books are neatly organized and consistently designed, though the newer publication has a cleaner style that seems easier and more accessible for the average reader. but Star Wars wins a few more aproachability points, simply because of its mainstream-ness and because the book is self-contained, rather than an extension of a larger set of RPG worlds.

surprisingly, I found that the core rulebook for Changeling barely mentions its World of Darkness base. there's a few lines about it, but it almost seems like they expect readers to know and already be in on that half of the system. maybe that's a fair assumption. if you're picking up Changeling and you don't have the core World of Darkness book already, you won't get too far with it. it's also fairly dense, just in terms of tight line spacing.

the popularity and ubiquity of Star Wars content in the media today does potentially make this RPG system a bit easier for the average person. but while its overall themes and stories may be more accessible, that may or may not matter in terms of the heavy levels of detail and technicality offered by this rulebook. it's got like a million tables and charts for everything, from a 100-point morality ranking system with strengths and weaknesses at each level, to fiddly weapon stats and dice conversions. there's a lot going on just with the dice, too! during our long campaign, we had a Discord bot handle dice for us and it wasn't so tricky to get the hang of... but you've still got to know which dice are for what and why, plus how to read the results. it's math with symbols instead of numbers, which some people might find more fun that regular math.

thankfully, the design and structure of the Force and Destiny book offset the nitty-gritty technicality of it for the most part. a detailed table of contents, headings and subsections in a really smooth Q&A format, plus the more relaxed and open page design make the towering expanse of the system feel pretty digestible.

 

new characters

given my prior experience here, I simply made one new character for each system as part of my tournament process.

starting with the base World of Darkness stats of Briella Jameson (outlined in opening match #1, in case you missed it), I had to remold her concept quite a bit more than I did for either Werewolf or for Mage. in those games, a fully formed person meets their magical transformation with their eyes more or less wide open, even if they don't have a choice about it. but in Changeling, there's no choice and much of the time no awareness of this transformation until it's already happened. the Fae steal away children, babies, and shape them into whatever they may want to play with in or control out in the absurd expanse of Arcadia. the child might not realize until eons later that there's something wrong, that there's a somewhere they were stolen from and could, with enough effort and luck, get back to.

so for Briella, I rewound the clock of her life and imagined her as a plucky 9-year-old on a family vacation. alongside her mom and dad and older brothers she goes out hiking, learns some basic bouldering, scrambles up red rocks without fear, all along the way collecting sunburn stripes and mosquito bites in total innocence... 

until she falls...

...and the malicious, arbitrary, hungering Fae spirits of a mirrored mountain domain push her down even further, through the plane of our reality and into another. they let her fall through the normal earth and into a broken alternate world. the Fae contrive to put a cobbled-together replacement daughter, lifeless, at the bottom of the trail for her parents to find, and Bri herself is trapped away from them, groomed by her Fae keeper to climb and climb and climb, up and up and up and up, endlessly traversing an Escher-esque mountainside that extends forever into the corroded sky. 

when she eventually, painstakingly, barely sane, crawls her way out again through a mere splinter-crack in that magical mirage, it's impossible for her to tell how long it's been. through the horrible purposelessness of endless climbing, she has become like the earth and sandstone, her skin baked into a bright tan, her eyelashes and brows the color of sagebrush, her pale hair like bleached desert grass. I gave her an Elemental seeming (earth, if you couldn't guess) and membership in the Summer Court. she's forgotten her true name, but the echoes of it bleed into what she calls herself now: Jamie Scree.

 -

for Star Wars, I created a Zabrak named Proxa Tonaullu. she's from the planet Iridonia, where in ancient times the Sith had close ties with Zabrak high council. she's heard these legends and wondered what they may mean for her once she feels the Force awakening in her own life. I made her a Warrior with the Shii-Cho Knight specialization. Proxa feels called to greatness, ambitious to the point of obsession, but also merciful and kind when circumstances dictate. she's just 18, strong in mind and body, with green eyes, bark-brown facial tattoos in her family's traditional design, and two small polished horns at each of her temples. she is still learning to channel and use the Force, but she knows she'll be an absolutely unrivaled fighter for the Jedi soon enough.

preliminary verdicts

this is another difficult one.

like I mentioned, our Star Wars campaign from a few years back was above and beyond one of the most excellent games. it's a unique system and it was hugely fun to play. largely that's down to the other players being marvelous and of course dearest Jeremiah being great at running such things.

but then I've always felt drawn to the intricate ins and outs of all the faerie magics and mysticalness in Changeling, and I get pretty excited about the character design aspects of the system. I could spend hours and hours daydreaming, imagining all the cool looks you could give a Changeling character with this or that seeming, sketching and spinning little vignettes about all those little details and how they show up. 

yet I'm highly aware that, just as with Mage, my enchantment with the concept and aesthetics vs my actual experience with the roleplaying system might not balance out in the most practical or fun way. character design is one thing, but cool imagery in my head all by itself doesn't mean much for roleplaying unless I can fit it into the world of the game. the actual playthroughs I have done came with more brightness and whimsy than I expected (though perhaps I should have expected more). the wild, improvisational nature of RPGs strikes again, I suppose.

I haven't played as long or as much within the world of Changeling yet, so I don't feel like I can properly measure how well it lives up to what I think I want it to be. someday... if we can find the right roleplaying group and the right stretch of months for meetups, I might try to run a Changeling campaign. I have half a notebook full of setting notes and NPC ideas already. when I started brainstorming, I took inspiration from the show Killing Eve mixed with the film Primal Fear... who knows if that'll still work out if I ever go back to it. I should probably aim a bit lower and run some World of Darkness one-shots first.

so if I had to finalize this judgement today, based on gameplay alone it would tilt towards Star Wars. simple and mainstream though it may be with all that overarching light vs. dark dichotomy, its lore and world do still make room for plenty of depth and nuance. and even if the dice are pretty weird, that's part of what makes it so fun and unique.

 

next new one-shot: The One Ring

next match-up review: The One Ring vs. Scion: Hero

warm weather and vulnerabilities

I love being barefoot.

I love the feeling of clean carpet or tile or concrete under my feet. love walking on cool grass or warm sand or slick mud.

thankfully Arizona gives us plenty of good being-barefoot weather, overall. I avoid socks at all costs unless I'm jogging or hiking in actual shoes.

being-barefoot weather is upon us for good now. spring! summer break mere 3 weeks hence!

it's exhilarating and intimidating, the idea of summer. I won't be teaching. what will I do? how will I choose between all the crafts and writing and projects and excursions and naps I want to fit in? 

maybe I can figure out a way to do it all. (there was a pretty cool podcast episode from Maisie Hill about that, just last month.)

we shall see.

first I need to survive the semester and all its grading, meetings, lesson plans, presentations, and commencement shenanigans. 

I will. we all will. all 97 of my students and I and my colleagues too. 

somehow.

April is national poetry month, isn't it? 

I'm not a poet-- not really. but sometimes my brain thinks very poetically.

I like to read poetry. 

even more I like to hear poetry read aloud. seeing it on a page isn't quite good enough usually.

this poem, "The Hill We Climb," from a whole fifteen months ago, is a good and grand tear-jerking hopeful poem to listen to. 

to read it silently-- well, it might still be good. or it might seem long and uneven, or as the post I linked to just there has it, too dense.

what are the best parts? it is hard to choose. and pasting them here won't do any justice to how they sound in Amanda Gorman's own voice.

listen and watch the whole thing first:

and now, here are the most moving sections for me-- these three from near the beginning, middle, and end:

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it.
Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

and

So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us? 

and the last few lines, singed with cliche just at the edges--

When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid. The new dawn balloons as we free it.
For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

maybe I ought to go looking for more of Ms. Gorman's poetry.

 

for the record, I've been reading various other non-poetry lately, including:

The Echo Wife, by Sarah Gailey  (not the winner of this year's Tournament of Books)

Poet Warrior, by Joy Harjo (recommended via yoga church friends)

Trigger Warning, short stories by Neil Gaiman

The Marvelous Clouds, by John Durham Peters

and 

A Primer for Forgetting, by Lewis Hyde (the same one who wrote Common as Air, which I managed to cite in my dissertation) 

 

here's to springtime and reading and being barefoot as much as possible. 

editing work and so-called "educational technologies"

it's not the most important volunteer gig in the world, but I am on the official Board of Copy Editors for a scholarly journal in the field of social work.

see? (I still need to have them update my institutional affiliation, I know. soon.)

the article I'm editing now is about perceptions of social work and advocacy organizations in Ireland. it's pretty interesting. part of the fun of this position is getting to dip my brain into current scholarship from another field, from lots of other perspectives. one of the pieces I previously edited was all about volunteerism-- something not unrelated to my own scholarship.

today I've been combing through this forthcoming article's reference list, checking for completeness and formatting. like most social science journals, this one uses APA style, which I'm thankfully pretty familiar with.

my editing process can be a little haphazard for a project like this. but generally it follows these broad strokes:

1. read through the piece once and make notes about persistent issues or anything else that stands out, tidying up a few of the easy things (commas, spelling, other punctuation) along the way

2. check that everything listed in the references is actually cited in the text, and vice versa (this is something I learned from Dr. Hawkins as part of her teaching in Bibliography & Research Methods many years ago)

3. attend to citation formatting (all the periods in the right spots, capitalization as APA dictates, and so on)

4. make sure all the headings and subheadings are styled properly (and I'd usually check tables and figures here too, but this particular article doesn't have any)

5. draft a makeshift style sheet for any judgement calls I get to make about hyphenation or capitalization of terms (these are always really informal sticky-note things, if that)

6. go through again, adding queries for the author where needed, making decisions and changes for the major issues previously noted, watching for consistency and fluency at the word- and sentence-level.

7. spot check one last time for the things on the style sheet, review the queries and comments to make sure they make sense, and then send the whole thing off after appending my initials to the filename.

if it's work for hire, I'll prep an invoice and send that along with my edits. I've done a huge amount of editing for hire this summer, it seems like. dissertation proposals, articles about orthodontics, computer graphics, and GPS, and even several book chapters about analytic software programs. but for this particular job I'm only getting paid in collegial respect and academic clout. it makes a nice line on my CV and boosts my ethos as a person with practical, ongoing experience editing. plus, I enjoy it.

there's about a day or two more of work left on the piece. the references and headings are sorted, so all that's left, roughly, are steps 5 through 7. from this point on, I shouldn't need to keep opening and closing the section on APA style at the Purdue OWL. it's down to the less tedious part of the job now. I could, I know, be a lot more meticulous about how I approach the work and how I track the time I spend on it. for now, this is what works for me.

the tedium of citation-tidying, I'll add, is pretty pleasant tedium. actually one of my favourite things about editing scholarly work like this is replacing all the default hyphens with en-dashes in all the page ranges of the references that have them. APA doesn't strictly care about that detail, but the beautiful differences between hyphens and dashes were irrevocably drilled into me back when I worked with the more comprehensive Chicago style at Texas Tech University Press.

style guides like Chicago and APA and resources like the OWL that grow up around them all count as educational technology, don't they? sure, the term is burdened with connotations of electronics, computers, digital connectivity, and such, but books are technologies too. I'd count these guides' paper-based versions as technologies just as much as I'd count their websites at https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html and https://apastyle.apa.org/.

the Purdue OWL has always been a website, though its offline home, the regular Purdue Writing Lab, predates it by almost twenty years.

educational technologies. any technology that serves a process of education, right? well, one would hope.

about a year and a half ago, the dear Purdue OWL entered into a partnership with a purveyor of so-called educational technologies called Chegg. shortly thereafter, citation generator banners appeared all over every page of the OWL, offering quick and easy auto-citations in MLA or APA style. I reacted with great disappointment and irritation at the time. and so did plenty of other people.

since then, the powers-that-be over at the OWL have toned it down a bit. the citation generation tools are still there, but not on every single page. still, it feels odd. one tool, the OWL, gives students valuable reference information and examples and helps them learn to apply that knowledge in their writing. the other just black-boxes it all away and says, more or less, "trust us, we'll handle it, you don't have to think too hard. or at all."

I guess there are probably times when not having to think too hard about some process or technology is perfectly okay, but in academia? it seems thoroughly wrong. this kind of thing doesn't really serve education. does it?

such over-reliance on technology goes beyond students, too. a related "educational technology" here is plagiarism-detection software like Turnitin and other such tools. these companies give lip service to academic integrity and education, but their true goal is profit. they're invested in manufacturing some kind of vague ethical crisis so they can sell software subscriptions.

using software to catch students "cheating" is not education. it's barely relevant to education by any stretch of the imagination. and if you have to rely on such tools to figure out if your students are cheating on their writing assignments or not, then you haven't given your students or their writing enough of your attention, and you haven't designed very good writing assignments.

what has bugged me most about Turnitin and the like is the fact that it copies piles and piles of student work for its own databases and uses those copies as a core part of its function. and I suppose they think that because their terms of service say this is all perfectly fine to do, it is.

I say not. if students had any real choice in the matter, then maybe. but given the power dynamics of your typical college classroom, they don't. if their professor says upload your work via this tool, then students are more or less forced to do so, whether or not they care about the implications.

copyright is a whole mess in itself, but any logical understanding of intellectual property should acknowledge that students own their creative work, even within the relatively convoluted confines of formal education. for a third-party technology company to copy that work and profit from its application is pretty clearly unfair. unjust. messed up. all because some teachers are so worried about cheating they're willing to outsource part of their job to a for-profit company rather than design more robust assignments and trust their students half an inch.

for further reading:

"A Guide for Resisting Edtech: the Case against Turnitin."

"Plagiarism Policing and Profit: Great news! Our students produced $1.75 billion in profit! Too bad they won't get any of it."

"Re-Thinking Plagiarism as Unfair Competition."

wonder + a survey

with most of this year in quarantine and isolation mode, it seems unthinkable that it can feel so overwhelming. what's so overwhelming about staying home all the time?

of course there are a billion valid answers to why things are overwhelming for me or for anyone right now. the world is a mess. we moved thirteen hundred miles across the country. I barely know what my work life will be like when it officially starts next month.

the good news? nobody in my family is sick. we have what we need, for now, to stay safe and comfortable. the worst of my immediate, concrete complaints involve dishes in the sink and headaches that won't go away. that's plenty to be grateful for, really.

instead of blogging so incessantly about myself today though, I'm going to point to some stuff other people are doing (one past, one present).

this one is from artist Austin Kleon, twelve years ago. I saved it as something worth remembering during my graduate school journey.

thing two is a very neat project my brother-in-law Ruben (he has a blog too, I recently discovered) is involved in. the team is working to develop a universal remote control that's accessible to people with cerebral palsy and/or other disabilities that make it hard to handle a typical remote with tiny buttons. 

their first step is gathering input from their eventual users. so if you know anyone or know anyone who knows anyone who could benefit from such a universal remote, share this survey with them.

the project page makes a pretty excellent illustration of professional collaboration to benefit a non-profit. I might point it out to my future students in technical writing and business communication as a useful example. it'll be especially cool to see what they post about their progress and final product, once the two month sprint is up.

charismatic forest spirits

this was the podcast that came up in my long queue of podcast episodes (37 hours' worth, my podcast app tells me) today: "Return of the Yokai" from 99% Invisible. very worth listening to.

near the end of their discussion about the yokai-- which they note is "a pretty broad term that includes everything from shape-shifting demons to cuddly animal-like creatures as well as spirited inanimate objects and ghosts"-- the podcast hosts recognize echoes of the Yokai in the work of several famous Japanese artists, among them Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli. 

I nodded and smiled at hearing his name, remembering the kodama forest spirits from Princess Mononoke. they're adorable and enigmatic, as well as generally helpful.

aren't they cute?

we had actually just recently rewatched the movie with my niece and nephews. beforehand, we asked my sister's family to think about who the "good guys" and "bad guys" are in this movie and have an answer to share at the end. since we're all a pretty taciturn bunch, the post-movie discussion wasn't so very lively, but I am sure it gave them all something to think about. perhaps it will inspire some of the stories they'll invent and share with the world.

Princess Mononoke is just as poignant and lovely this year as it ever was, and being more familiar with the story this time I found myself attending more closely to the art, the lines and textures and colors and movement of it all. not long ago friend Chris pointed me towards this essay on the impact of art style on the story and affective messages of Princess Mononoke (it does spoil the plot, in case that matters to you). having read that, I was primed to notice variations in clarity and level of detail. messier art for the things we're afraid of. sharper portraits of everything calm and safe.

the yokai story from 99% Invisible transitions from pointing out Miyazaki and Pokemon as vessels for the continuation of yokai into making a broader philosophical point about our unquenchable thirst for wonder and mystery, even (and perhaps especially) in the face of deeply frightening unknowns. one of the guests on this episode explains that "putting a form and a face and sometimes a name and various attributes to something gives you a sense of control over it." in the absence of real control, a story can at least give us a feeling of it. a layer of calm to cover the fear.

science may have replaced spirits and legends in how we explain and understand nature, but it hasn't explained away everything. there's room for a few enigmatic stories here and there to help us personify nature and appreciate its variably fearful or wondrous mysteries and rhythms.

muscle memory

this song by the singer-actor-musician-person Hilary Duff seems to play every time I stop at the local grocery store. you can listen to it over here if you don't remember how it goes.

I, somehow, remember it pretty well now that I keep hearing it.

even on first re-hearing it a few weeks ago, it astonished me how deeply and fully I recognize and remember this song. this song from 2003 that I don't have particular memories connected to or anything. as far as I remember, it was just popular back then. on the radio all the time.

and now it seems to be on all the time again. or the grocery store has limited music on rotation. who knows.

does anyone still listen to music on the radio?

lately I have been biking around town and to campus a little bit. around the neighborhood for exercise. across the river for lunch.

the feeling of being on a bike in a small college town takes me back to the early 2000s in a way similar to the lyrics of "So Yesterday," but it is much less surprising that this happens. muscle memory is supposed to be deep. riding a bike is supposed to be unforgettable.

as a Purdue student, I think I biked to campus a total of six times the whole five years I was there. West Lafayette had too many steep hills in it.

Logan, Utah also had some steep hills (like the one this building sat on), but I was younger back then and it wasn't so hot and humid all the time either.

as an undergraduate, too, I had particularly limited choices about transportation. unless the car-owning people in my life were willing to offer rides, I had to bike or bus or walk myself everywhere. and thankfully there were wide roads and sidewalks and plenty of space for all those things. and free buses, too. (I miss a good handful of things about Indiana now that it's almost 2 months since we left it, and the relatively sleek public transport is among that handful of things.)

the feeling of being on a bike is a somewhat precarious feeling. balancing. weaving. it's familiar, but my muscles and my breathing are still readjusting.

a new fall semester always requires readjusting. remembering, but also putting away the past to face new things. it probably feels more precarious than it really is.

reflect, revise, reset

I am preparing to teach an online technical communication course for a handful of graduate students.

it is an exciting and slightly daunting prospect, and I'm really grateful for the opportunity. teaching online is fun. teaching graduate students will be new. hopefully I will love it. hopefully the students will love it too, at least a little bit.

as I've started putting together assignment sheets and syllabus sections, I've gone back to the files I have from my first semesters as a graduate student, way back seven years ago. my experiences from then are inspiring my preparations now in a messy but helpful sort of way.

the class I will be teaching is not going to be exactly like the first technical communication course I took in 2011. there are no PhD students at my new Louisiana institution, and there isn't quite a full tech comm graduate program, either. we offer a certificate in Writing for Business, Industry, and Technology and a related MA degree in Writing and Linguistics. my work here will fit into the little tech-comm-shaped niches around and among those programs and the offerings for our undergraduate emphasis in professional writing.

it's been interesting to look back at the work I did as a brand new graduate course and revisit the thoughts I was thinking about everything I was learning. one of the essays I turned in to Dr. Kelli Cargile Cook at Texas Tech in 2011 starts out, after one boring sentence that sets the stage, with a million semi-rhetorical questions:

"Who is qualified to create or enforce a definition of technical writing? In the face of rapidly changing technologies, will a static definition be at all important or useful? What is the clearest, most accurate way to make sense of our place as people who write and communicate among extremely diverse communities? What commonalities among those communities are worth emphasizing? Are any of the basic truths about technical communication universal enough build a profession upon? Will it be possible to include all the essentials without being completely vague? These questions and many more continue to shape the process of figuring out who we are, what we do, and why it matters."

that's six questions, all crammed into one opening paragraph. another professor of mine, Dr. Richard Johnson-Sheehan, always gave me pointed critiques when I included too many rhetorical questions in essays for his courses at Purdue: "your reader is going to lose patience with these," he would say, implying his own quickly waning interest.

I think I've learned to agree with him, by now. I do still love questions, but I understand now that they can be a tiresomely slow way to introduce one's main point.

one day soon I may remediate that whole long, rambly essay into a less-long, less-rambly blogpost. that could be fun. for me anyway. possibly useful for anyone out there who might wonder what I really think I'm doing with my academic life, too.

definitions of technical communication (and of rhetoric, or writing, or art) are still, forever, being debated. my own place in this disciplinary debate is still debatable too. malleable. amorphous. emerging.

I know a lot more now than I did in 2011. and I know much, much more now than I did seven years before that when I returned from studying abroad, declared myself an English major at Utah State University, and eventually started this blog. a whole decade and a half of experience has ways of teaching one things. sometimes without you even noticing.

it's August, 2018. new things are happening. the world and me look so different than they used to. it feels like a beginning--expansive, wild, wide, and uncharted. a chance for new rules. better habits. but it's hard to know what the best new habits might be. so much of this new life is going to be unfamiliar for a while. disorienting.

teaching experience and academic credentials have piled up on top of me over the years. those things have given me some grounding amid all the chaos of finishing one thing and beginning another. the transition has felt long. May 18 was almost a dozen weeks ago, and my new semester at Northwestern State is still weeks away. as much as this feels like a beginning, it's just as much middle, and partially an ending, too. as soon as August 4 gets here and Purdue's commencement ceremonies are over, I'll officially officially be Dr. Amelia Chesley, with a real PhD and a diploma in the mail, with an exciting tenure-track job as an Assistant Professor. soon enough I'll have this office in Keyser Hall arranged just how I want it. I'll have a phone in that office, and faculty meetings to go to and everything. 

I still have a million things to learn, at least.

the impossibility of defaultlessness

it seems so easy to be in a marvelously good mood when one is recovered from awful sickness. the work of spring semester is over. I have little margins of space all around in which to read whatever I want. and today is the first day in a week that I haven't felt like a half-rotten zombie full of slime.

so today I attended the second half of a Digital Humanities Symposium. it was exciting--interdisciplinary and spark-full--and there were pastries, too.

I might call myself a newly minted fan-girl of Amanda Visconti, a DH scholar with Purdue's libraries, who talked about her dissertation project, Infinite Ulysses. social reading, they call this. digital text, networked, layered with your reactions and my reactions and anyone else's.

socially-mediated, communal reading experience. Michael Widner from Stanford talked about it too, in the context of his project Lacuna. I have so many questions about this tool that I did not ask during the question-time of the last panel. would it work for a technical writing class? would it work for an online class? can I download it and play around with it on my own for a week or so?

during his presentation, Widner made a small aside about default settings. in building Lacuna, he and his team had millions of decisions to make about how it would function for users. as students add reading notes and annotations to these digital texts, what kind of tags should they be able to chose from in categorizing those notes? should annotations be public by default, or private? in their user testing, it turned out that unless a category tag is selected by default, most users won't select any. if readers' annotations are set by default to public, most of them stay that way. if the default setting is private, most of them stay that way. based on these observations, Widner's comment/advice was: "whatever the default is, that's what most users will do, so your defaults should promote the kind of engagement you want to see."

ah, the weight of those decisions. it's arbitrary, to some extent, which little settings are default or not. privileged, or not.

at this little comment, my brain started whirring and wondering. Widner described various options they'd tried out as the defaults for the Lacuna reading environment. only one arrangement of settings can be default at once though--that's just how it seems to work.

and then I wondered, what if we wanted defaultlessness? no defaults at all--nothing privileged or pre-set for anyone... some purely customizable, blank, open, transparent, full-of-possibility canvas of un-made decisions?

it wouldn't work. it wouldn't ever work. nobody would ever get anything done, if they had to set their own defaults from scratch.

what would 'from scratch' even mean, in a default-less world?

these thoughts reminded me of these thoughts. another word for default mode might be dominant. the default orthography for most sentences includes a capitalized first word and a period at the end. the dominant discourse about education is that official degrees from official institutions are pretty darn valuable. these aren't the only ways of working with sentences or the only ways of learning things.

my dad used to tell us, don't live your life on auto-pilot. don't walk around on default. usually the context was some kind of cleaning frenzy, and the subtext swirling around in my memory, at least, implies that a default life is one that won't stay very neat or tidy, one that might not look very respectable to any important visitors who stop by. I'm sure that's not all he meant, though. a default life is one where you give away all your choices. or one where you don't think enough about making any choices at all, even when you have the chance.

for anyone to live a non-default life, there have to be some default settings to start with, I guess. I wonder how many different defaults there are out there. mine probably weren't the same as everybody's.

shiny emerald wisps of inspiration

sometimes, though not so much lately, I feel like I am fighting inspiration off with a stick--making great efforts to do one thing at a time and actually finish a project before yet another wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-I-also... comes along to take me in some new direction.

inspiration, for me at least, isn't always the most useful thing. it can be distracting. or infuriating, the way it tantalizes me. I tend to be plagued with flighty, wispy kinds of inspiration. the kinds that hover just out of reach, just beyond practical-possible priority.

an hour or so ago I read this piece about teaching abroad. about the prospect of "relocating to a continent renowned for civil unrest, poverty, and disease-- but also for untarnished landscapes, wildlife, many cultures, and a complex history." high daydream potential, this sort of thing.

and yes, some of the descriptions in this piece are on the sweeping, sensationalish side. but you can at least see what I mean about the distance stretched out between me and such prospects. this inspiring stuff always seems to float just six inches or so higher than my hands seem to reach-- things to daydream about but not things I could actually do-- not yet anyway. and perhaps that's the way daydreaming is supposed to work. before you can reach a thing with your hands, you can settle for reaching it with your brain. imagining it. a first step, of sorts.

on Monday I attended a very nice talk by a former professor of mine: Dr. Cheryl Ball. she taught my professional writing capstone course ten whole years ago. since that far-away semester, she has worked at three other institutions and done many more boundary-pushing academic things. she taught and researched in Norway on a Fulbright scholarship. she is developing this fancy-looking revolutionary publishing system.

sometimes inspiration starts out as envy.

or maybe they are secretly long-lost twins, envy and inspiration. yeah.

anyway. the talk on Monday was about digital humanities + digital publishing and the paths Dr. Ball has wandered in getting to where she is now. now she is scholaring in an emerging field she calls publishing studies, a place full of multimodal and digital work, editing, technology, infrastructure, and lots of other finicky processes that have to do with making things public.

she began the talk with childhood tales featuring inspirational words like vision and initiative. and she ended with this slide, of which I took a crooked and slightly fuzzy photograph:

there are, I saw on facebook earlier, several much better photos of Dr. Ball's visit to Indiana in an album here.

her concluding list of lessons learned isn't earth-shatteringly inspirational in general, but in this specific sub-section of academia it counts. for me, swimming in semi-aimless circles in the middle of my PhD, it very much counts. so I have typed these points out again for ease-of-reading and for the thought-provoking reminders they might be to my current and future overly-inspired but somewhat lost, less-motivated self.

publishing studies has taught me [Dr. Cheryl Ball]...
- editing praxis for media-based texts
- the arbitrariness of style guides
- the ethics of access/ibility and preservation
- the importance of building communities and infrastructure
- the importance of global communication practices
- the necessity of teaching writing in use-contexts
- the necessity of teaching multimodal communication
- that vocational training isn't a dirty word for liberal arts.

there were examples and stories referenced at each of these points, but stories and examples are not as easy to transcribe into a neat list. I will have to trust my memory to weave the stories from her life into and alongside stories from my own.

the paths I'm wandering aren't the same. ten whole years is a long time and lots of things are different in the world. the wouldn't-it-be-nice-ifs that I follow around (or don't) will be unique to my brain and my habits.

at the moment, one of the wouldn't-it-be-nice-ifs that I have wrapped my fingers around is reading audiobook snippets for LibriVox. I have an official page in their catalogue as a reader, even. I've only just started. the project is wide and ambitious. it's not the exact same kind of digital publishing Dr. Ball presented, but it is a digital publishing project nonetheless, and a fascinating one. we'll see what it teaches me.

twenty: image

before I left Kentucky, I visited a place called Bernheim forest. full name: Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest.

it was a lovely and interesting place. the photo I slapped up with day eleven's post is from the hike I spent the afternoon in that day.

this photo here is from just outside one of their visitor centers.

imagine a building like a tree. 

there are a lot of ways of imagining a building like a tree. 

there are a lot of ways of imagining most things. 

an old, old post of mine from 2006 came to mind today. I'm thinking about which self is which. which pieces of me are okay how they are, which need polishing, which to accept, and which to shelve.

there are a lot of ways of imagining myself. 

three: unlearning

I shared this quote with my students this week, pulling it up right here where it lives on the little tumblr quote blog I keep. (who even knows what the students thought of the fact that their English teacher has a tumblr. are tumblrs cool anymore? were they ever? does it matter?)

“the most successful of our students have a worldview shift during our program, an entire change in their demeanor towards the built world around them. They come to see rules as malleable, power structures as changeable, and culture as embodied. They see design as a vehicle for slow but influential behavior change, and they recognize that over time, this behavior change impacts the landscape of the world. Over the course of the program, they see that they can design things (products, services, interactions, and policies), and these things cause the world to change.”

the quote is from this piece by Jon Kolko. he is interestingly the Vice President of Design at Blackboard, and Blackboard is the online course software I've been using to teach my writing class. my twenty students are analyzing space and the rhetoric of the built world around them. I am asking them to break apart the ways staircases and windows and furniture send certain kinds of messages. I want them to see that the way things are is not an accident, nor is it inescapable. the first step is paying attention.

reading Kolko's article made me feel a few millimeters better about my teaching. that failure and frustration are okay--that they are even crucial in the learning process--is something I always forget. or don't think about. I get too idealistic about the whole endeavor, too enamored of that Dead-Poets-Society-style magic, and then when almost nothing about the five hours a week I spend in a classroom every semester actually goes so smoothly or culminates in such exciting epiphany, teaching becomes very meh.

there are other articles and bits research and pedagogical theory I've latched on to with similar reaction. Robert Brooke's “Underlife and Writing Instruction” is one. the little summary comment-note I added to the top of my pdf copy includes the line "I found this very, very comforting."

teaching is hard. and it seems like we talk about it too much in extremes. that lesson you planned either falls on deaf ears or it lights up with fantastic sparks of insight. or maybe it's just that I selectively remember those extremes. class time is great or it's awful. we are either completely failing our students or we are doing all the right things for them. and our students are either complete slackers or overachieving superstars. these extreme stories are the most fun to tell, after all, whether to yourself or to your colleagues.

there are a million other stories.

learning doesn't necessarily happen on paper and it doesn't have anything to do with points for writing smooth transitions or points for drafting a logical thesis statement. it doesn't have much to do with the lesson plans you scribble in your notebook or the not-so-fabulous teaching evaluations you get.

I need to remember that getting things wrong and messing things up and wandering around on the wrong track are all useful learning activities. failures are probably more useful than "perfect teaching" or "perfect studenting" could ever be (not that either ideal is at all easy to imagine, from here). my frustration and faltering with this teaching gig... that's part of my own shift, too. don't forget. the failure is useful, for them and for you.

atypical adventuring

my Friday began as ordinarily as any Friday. I waited at bus stops, sat in my office prepping for class, eeked a few moments of good class discussion out of my students, talked about our Empirical readings and micro-studies. but inbetween all those things--as I walked across campus from here to there, as I rushed through the halls from office to classroom and back and forth, my insides were nuzzling up to a great and impatient longing for adventure. like burrs will collect on your trouser cuffs when you walk through an unkept field, adventurousness collected around me with every step I took that morning.

I didn't know what kind of adventure to look for. of course my imagination was swirling with the kinds you read about in fantasy novels: meeting mysterious figures with intriguing secrets--wandering up to an irresistibly inviting magical doorway--suddenly confronting some supernatural abnormality in grave need of investigation--getting gradually but totally lost on some other plane of existence-- you know.

that sort of thing seemed unlikely even for such a deeply ordinary Friday, so I realized I would probably need to plot my own excitements. they didn't include anything very supernatural. they weren't particularly hazardous or daring. they involved spending bunches of money at various random spots on my way home, and then a speck of a town called Buck Creek, and then an empty cornfield. let adventure be in the attitude of the adventurer.

first, I ducked into Von's books and acquired the $70 text I needed for my Empirical class. perhaps that was the most harrowing part of the day. the semi-grizzled old bookstore clerk was nice enough, though. book in hand, I poked through a few other shelves (of books, of hats, of coin purses, of beads and stockings and scarves and trinkets) while I was there. noticed Jessica Hische's dropcap covers all lined up on one side. stepped around an employee sorting through a massive pile of aqua pendants and baubles on my way out. kept walking, very cheerfully, taking in all the grey chill of the weekend-to-be, thinking about how it didn't really matter what I spent the rest of the afternoon doing. we'd gotten out of class early. I had no particular obligations.

on my way, I grabbed chips and guacamole from Chipotle. I puzzled at their little posted sign about not having any pork while I waited, and then waltzed out, munching (probably awkwardly) my way from there to town across the pedestrian bridge. the river was completely thawed, all the grimy-looking, jagged chunks of ice from a few days earlier were gone.

before I got home, I wandered into the candy store on Main Street. last year I made it a tradition to buy myself chocolates from this lovely shop at all ends of all semesters, but fall of 2014 left me no time. so on this adventuresome Friday, I made up for it. raspberry cremes, caramel truffles, dark chocolate everything.

it was a long walk from there to my apartment, mainly because I wouldn't let myself eat any chocolates yet. once home, I unladened myself of books and bags, tossed some trail mix + a few cookies and chocolates into a container, and took my car out of its lonely parking spot for a drive. going on drives without destinations is not usually a thing I do. the newness of such an activity gives it at least a few extra adventure points, I say.

we went north, mainly. east-ish, sometimes. west-ish other times. I think. I never once looked at the map in my back seat. my sense of direction has no reliable anchor out here in this flat place. no mountains, no visible-from-everywhere landmarks. the sun wasn't even shining. in the face of such a horizon of nothingness, I trusted a few roadsigns and knew that if I needed it, that GPS I got from my brother for Christmas was right there.

but I didn't need it. maybe that's a sign of failure. I didn't let my adventure get me lost enough. or maybe it's a sign of awesomeness--that I have at least partially, subconsciously, mastered the Indiana landscape within a certain radius of where I live. or maybe both.

I still haven't looked at a map to see where exactly my meandering drive led me. my mental map would say my path traces something like a wonkily stretched-out figure eight with prongs. way out to the northeast, around in a bit of a circle across highway 25, and then back west to where I started recognizing things. like this absolutely striking one-lane bridge over the Wabash:

months and months back, friend Priya and I got lost here, too. we were looking for the Wabash Heritage Trail but we kept missing it, for some reason. we had a glorious time anyway, and there was ice cream afterwards.

I knew where I was at this point, but it was still too early to go home. so I turned north again. and then east again. there were acres and acres of half-frozen fields. cornstalk stubs prickling from the ground for miles. I pulled over and sat in the middle of all that for a while, rolled down the window, listened, waited, hoped nobody thought I was crazy or stranded or lost.

only one (nice-looking, scruffy, young-ish) farmboy slowed down his massive truck to make sure I was alright. a few other cars drove by, adding an unfortunate layer of self-consciousness to my sitting. I regret not bringing a notebook. I could have soaked in that nowhere till it got dark. wouldn't that have been nice?

instead, I returned to the road, wound my way a few inches north, back south, further west, and west, and then southwest, southsouth, southeast, and back to town. home. I rolled out some pie crust and folded it over some turkey-pot-pie-ish filling. I continued snacking on trail mix. I put on a show and pulled out my embroidery floss. I am making my own version of one of Gina's handstitched hats.

the rest of my evening was not quite as expansively calm as an empty cornfield. but it was cozy. I didn't save the world or anything, but I'm calling it all an adventure anyway.

the world we are creating

if there are things you love on the internet, save copies of them. this is advice that Dr. Sullivan is alway giving us with respect to our wandering research. if you even sort of think you might want to use it someday for an object lesson, class project, seminar paper, conference illustration, or article-fodder, download the thing. as endless and un-erasable as the internet seems most days, the stuff of it doesn't always stay there. you cannot trust the cloud.

(whether you can trust the integrity and/or longevity of your harddrive to any significantly greater extent is a separate though not unrelated question. all is temporary, and the scales of temporariness are complicated.)

if there are people you love on the internet, I don't know what to tell you. so far, there's no way to download people. that's probably a good thing.

early thismorning I saw people linking to a new post by Kathy Sierra. it is a long post, personal, a tad meandering, but it seems everso soul-questioningly, heart-wrenchingly important.

read it. go on. I've linked to it twice now, redundantly, asking you to read this long meandering story even if you have not been a Kathy Sierra fangirl since at least 2005, and even if you have no clue who this Andrew Auernheimer fellow (hm... he blogs on livejournal. how old-fashioned...) might think he is, and even if you, like me, find life much more effective without worrying very much about the hopeless-seeming, headache-inducing state of the universe.

Sierra's post might not be there very long. I have made a copy of it, in case the original disappears. it's also on Wired, for the moment. (if Wired and Dropbox disappear, who knows what we shall do).

two-thirds in, Sierra shifts into saying we. "This is the world we have created."

not only does that make us sound so implicated, so conspiratorially close to culpable... it also makes us sound so finished. so final. we've hit send. we've checked enough boxes. the world has been published. editing is over and this is the product we're stuck with.

not so. please, not so. I'd rather say "this is the world we are creating."

the we is still there. I don't see any ways of getting around that we, though parts of me are tempted to pick we apart and subdivide it into some sort of graph with axes like experience, influence, responsibility, investment, and such.

all the other words could stand to be picked at too. which exact this? creating how?

in one of those neat serendipitous internet moments, the following video was posted today. Mr. Rugnetta says a few things on cultural (re)production that answer that last question. the how is discourse. pens, not swords. writing and media, not sticks or stones or construction equipment. it's actions too, of course, but what we say about how we act, and how we storify things that happen = way incredibly powerful. Sierra's story similarly notes that stories with enough inertia and spin can permanently warp one's perspective. even the most disturbingly inaccurate stories, like the kind you might hear about scaly, murderous llamas, can stick in your head and tint everything you see. all the Pratchett you've ever read will say the same thing--narrativium is not to be trifled with.

I wonder sometimes if the stories we tell about the stories we tell carve ruts as deep or as damaging. those are thoughts for future blogposts, I think.

as long as I'm being redundant today, I'm going to include another video--yes, more of this silly Rugnetta fellow and his ponderings. it's relevant, I promise. and the followup comments/responses over here are also enlightening and chewy. (my brain has been particularly hung up over the 8:40 mark. it's a part of me that's been trained to meekly accept and swallow all things as somehow divinely-permitted-side-effects-of-this-fallen-mortal-experience-which-will-ultimately-all-work-together-for-my-everlasting-good that wants to say, "yeah, shrug off those death threats, everything will be fine." what does that mean? who does that make me? am I supposed to squash this attitude? or unravel it away? maybe all I can do is wait to see how I actual feel when or if death threats are ever made in my direction, and keep my mouth shut about the concept until then.)

anyway. this whole situation--trolls, women, internet, life--is more than a story. we can uses stories and conversations and videos and blogs to reach out for little parts of it, and build what we see into some sensible structure, with sections and headings and terms lined up for convenient deconstruction. but labels make me squirm, generally. what we mean by troll and or victim obviously isn't easy. it's not even always useful. the definitional blurriness between criticism/harassment is another thing that might deserve plenty of more discussion. my own experiences of such things aren't the same as anyone else's. that's why we need to tell the stories, after all. that's why we invented ways of sharing all the crazy insides of our heads.

maybe all this talking and thinking will help. somehow.