certain shades of darkness

quarterfinals match 3:
World of Darkness vs Vampire: the Masquerade 5e

since opening match 1, our zombie-plagued World of Darkness chronicle has ended. my stubborn, workaholic Andi Garcia did survive, somehow. in the end, wrapped in a metaphorical shroud of mourning and dampened ambitions, she held on to just enough hope for teaching the younger survivors everything they could want to know about the technologies of the past. given the campaign's Lake Michican setting, Andi's epilogue has some real Station Eleven Museum of Civilization vibes-- in my imagination anyway. a little bit like that. but different.

sadly, I have not played any more Vampire this year. but I do think about the world and the system fairly often. driving past a self storage compound on the highway, I wonder how Anarch vampires could use such a space for hiding their renegade plans and secrets. hearing news snippets about a rapper on trial for drug trafficking, I wonder what kind of vampire story that might be, if the drug dealers were in thrall to vampires, or if the rapper himself were undead, using a late-night partying lifestyle to disguise his sun allergy. it would definitely be depressing to be a vampire in real life-- but isn't it interesting to ponder the logistics of living in darkness for decades on end? I can't be the only one who thinks so.

mechanically, these two games are almost identical. the one system encompasses the other entirely, pretty much, and the other is a sharply focused specialization of the first. on that point of my rubric, I cannot really distinguish them. 

in terms of relative approachability, there are perhaps some differences but not substantive ones, for me. World of Darkness can stand alone, just as this version of Vampire can. the possibilities for branching out or remixing other subsets of the world don't take away from that.  

so does that mean my only meaningful axis of comparison, other than past gameplay experience, is aesthetics?

I initially summed up the vibes of World of Darkness as "film noir–artsy" and "alternatingly grunge/emo/punk," with a heavy tinge of romance and mystery. then, in Vampire's opening match 6, I wrote, "let's take everything I said about World of Darkness in opening round #1, but add a few gallons of flawlessly immortal elegance and deep red, viscous blood."

so... which is more worthy of this arbitrary prize? the artsy black-and-white film noir? or the highly polished, classic gloss of black-and-white-and-blood? which one looks best posed against the backdrop of a perfectly staged alleyway at night?

 

SYSTEM	World of Darkness	Vampire: the Masquerade 5e
back cover tagline =	"Your greatest fears aren't make believe; they're real."	"Death is not the end."
publisher =	White Wolf	White Wolf
pub. date =	2004	2018
original cost =	$24.99	$55.00
length =	8 chapters / 223 pages	13 chapters / 400 pages
my exp. level =	more than some	lots

---

 

it is a difficult choice. both of these styles please me. both games and gameworlds have helped me experience visceral, intense struggles and tell sweeping, tragically beautiful stories. 

my decision comes down to a fairly small nuance, I guess. for all that these two systems share, the one is by design very broad and open-ended, accomodating of plenty fairly typical man-vs-monsters adventures. World of Darkness will most likely have you roleplay a communal struggle against encroaching supernatural evils from who-knows-what great beyond. and while that is is awfully heroic and awesome, it is a bit less unique. 

to instead struggle against a persistent, internal, irreversable corruption inside your own blood... that is different. it feels... more, somehow. less trite, less bounded by the rules of a proper hero's journey and all that. the focus of it, the individuality of it-- it makes the struggle a lonely, desperate, mostly hopeless one. how much more romantic can we get than that? and with the focus of Vampire, we get to fight-- for whatever idealistic or misguided or prideful reasons-- against something our own fallen selves have become. that dark conflict gives this game a more unique and interesting trajectory for stories than any other game I've ever played. so far.

 

next match-up review (the last before the semifinals!): The One Ring vs A Song of Ice and Fire

wintery mix

yesterday it snowed for hours.

so we opened the blinds and pulled aside our gauzy curtain to watch the flurry of sparkly white magic blow around in the chaotic winds. every texture of snow was represented-- icy shards of sleet, tiny flakes of snow-dust, and cottony pea-sized puffballs. it was mesmerizing.

on our after-dinner walk last night, we admired the pink sunset light glinting off the corners of windows in houses across the gully. all the cleanly snow-covered rooftops gave the suburban landscape a seasonal uniformity, and the smooth swathes of rosy, opalescent clouds glowing above it all made for a highly dramatic, majestic backdrop. everyone we saw on that walk was taking a photo of the sky: the neighbor with his two larger dogs paused at the end of the parking lot to document the loveliness; a woman on a third-floor balcony in the next building leaned out with her phone to capture the perfect light.

after months and months with a mere handful of days with any precipitation at all, this afternoon of winter was wholeheartedly welcome. despite all the blustering wind, I wanted to walk around in it all evening. only the older pug's protestations prevented this. Wesley hates these cold, cold days.

thankfully, our little layer of snow is still around (though as the Tuesday morning grey fades into the brightness of afternoon, I'm sure it will all melt away before long). thismorning the clouds to the north lengthened themselves into perfect ridges, like the tips of a heavenly mountain range. to the east the sky seemed to be auditioning for a role in a Bob Ross painting-- everything blended back into soft smoothness. 

the snow-dust and puffballs, for now, are plastered evenly around the west-facing sides of the tree trunks, draped over eaves and ledges and windowsills like thick frosting, and clumped in the leaves and needles of all the shrubbery. my inner child imagines all this fallen snow as lost and scattered fairy-pearls, broken free from their settings and necklace strings, blown frivolously into our world from some other enchanted dimension. while they're here-- before they melt back into magic-- we can shake them out of the trees, into the cold grey sky, onto our hatted heads. we can dent the clumps and layers of them with our footprints and fingerprints. most of all, we can inhale all the serene beauty that the whiteness has added to these days at end of the year.

maybe it will snow again this week. the weather channel gives it a 5% chance.

completely, partially

my latest LibriVox contribution-- The City of Din, by Dan McKenzie-- surprisingly made its final journey through the prooflistening stage rather quickly this week, and I am pleased to announce that it's been officially catalogued here for all the world to enjoy if they so desire.

the most unique part of this audiobook is that our pug Wesley has a role in it. in the middle of section 2, Mr. McKenzie is discussing whether to categorize dogs as noisy or not, and he re-enacts the inner monologue of a man trying to sleep while a dog barks somewhere out in the neighborhood. rather than boringly intoning the word "bark" myself, I conveniently captured some of Wesley's insistent barks and used those instead. it took a lot of editing work, but I think it was worth it.

LibriVox relies on the Internet Archive for the bulk of its hosting needs. everything on that LibriVox.org page I linked to above is really pulled in from Internet Archive, where it's all displayed a little differently.

the Internet Archive is undeniably awesome. you probably agree, right? I hope so.

unfortunately the organization is dealing with a pretty awful lawsuit at the moment, one that has some terrible implications. this thread from author Cory Doctorow goes over the issues concisely and forcefully. there's been quite a lot of talk about the lawsuit all over twitter, lately. I very much hope that these greedy print publishers don't succeed in wrecking the Internet Archive's plans for facilitating free circulation of digital books. what an awful world it would be if we had to pay greedy corporations for even the most temporary access to any of media at all.

in all my researching and theorizing about the Internet Archive and similar projects, I've more regularly thought of it as what it has named itself-- an archive. a collection. a carefully stored pile of carefully gathered and curated and digitally infrastructured content. 

libraries are that, too. what's the real difference between a library and an archive? well, some archives are a little more closed-off to the public, but other than that, nothing. they are both, like so much else we humans are about, places to keep things.

sometimes I also think about these digital archives as communities, too. they are collections of things--artifacts, manuscripts, whatever... but those collections of things don't just happen without people. that's what my dissertation was all about: people working together to build archives by building tools that help them build and maintain and expand the archives. LibriVox is a really cool example of that.

I have gotten to know some of the other people who work with LibriVox, a tiny bit. some of them I feel like I know from studying the history of the site and listening to all of the old podcast episodes. some I have interacted with more closely on various projects. it would be fun to meet some of them someday, as I've done with other internet friends. who knows if that will happen or not.

two years ago I read the closing sections of this L. Frank Baum story, Phoebe Daring. the project had been initially started on LibriVox in 2015 as a solo, by a reader who worked on dozens and dozens of LibriVox projects but died before she could finish this one. when the community learned what had happened, they opened her project up and ten of us completed the recording and prooflistening work for it.

thinking about that makes me wonder what I'll leave unfinished. who will finish it. ideally I'll have several decades to keep thinking about that question.

this week, as I approached the end of this month of blogging, I kept coming back to the concept of ...well, I guess of incompleteness. but that word feels overly negative. what I was really thinking of were partly-complete things. partly-done, partly-finished. parts. partialities. my mind has been more or less fascinated lately by the idea of everything always being partial.

in some sense, that can be a negative thing. the partial nature of so much can leave me so unsatisfied. so paradoxically full of what isn't there or what I haven't collected.

in another sense it's comforting. there's still more. it isn't over yet. we have some space to add and grow and keep going. that's the side my wondering wants to be on the most.

July, however, will be complete after today. utterly in the past, over, done, gone, irretrievable. and my month of blogging will be, too. that, at least, is something finished. how I'll look back on everything I've posted in another year, or five years, who knows? but from here, it's done. perfect enough because that's what we (the royal we) decide to call it from this precious, precarious vantage point of now.

Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
those curves, angles, dots?

No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the
ground and sea,

They are in the air, they are in you.

   -- Walt Whitman, "A Song of the Rolling Earth"

wars, fictional, historical, or mythical

along with all the episodes of Hell's Kitchen, we've been watching tons of Star Wars movies and shows lately. 

why am I pairing this post about Star Wars with this set of very old photographs from the Alamo? well. mostly, I must admit, I'm doing so because these photographs of the Alamo have been sitting around in a draft blogpost for seven years now, at least. and when else besides blog-every-day-in-July am I going to turn that draft into an actual post?

most of what I know about the Alamo comes from pop culture references and the friends I hung out with when I lived in Lubbock, Texas. I had the pleasure of visiting the Alamo in person with friend Hannah in 2013, just as I was leaving Lubbock and moving to Indiana. I remember learning about the six flags Texas has flown, and I'm sure I learned a bunch more about the history of this landmark from plaques and tour guides-- but I've forgotten most of it. Wikipedia has refreshed and supplemented my crummy memory this evening.

1836. a hundred men against the Mexican army. a last stand. fighting. death. loss. 

and now it's transcended whatever really happened. it's become a symbol, wrapped up in reverence and honor and however much meaning we can make of such sacrifice.

part of what makes this connection between Star Wars and the Alamo actually interesting (rather than merely a random product of me wanting to mark one of these many old blogpost drafts off the list) is Rogue One.

if you haven't seen Rogue One and you care about spoilers, sorry. the story is only analogous to the Alamo's in that it too is a desperate-but-hopeful last stand, with plenty of fighting and loss. it's set in fictional outer space, not in actual 19th-century Texas. it's an infiltration mission, not a siege. perhaps unsurprisingly, I remember more about the Star Wars Rebel Alliance than I do about the Texas Revolution.

it all makes me think about stories and what they can do. in real life, stories shape so much. how we remember them and transmit them and reify them... it all matters as much as anything.

and stories about real events always have to leave things out, it seems. the legacy of the Alamo, whether we're talking then or now almost 200 years later, is surely oversimplified. complex, messy events-- a hundred men and their last stand-- all boiled down to a rallying cry.

stories about fictional events have to leave things out too... but it's also easier to come back to the bits you left out and fill them in interestingly, without worrying about getting it wrong or betraying historical truth.

in that vein, have you seen The Clone Wars? it's a good show, from the pieces I caught while husband watched it. (friend Patti included it with her epic Star Wars marathon some months back. I agree with her that Ahsoka is a gift; I love her.)

The Clone Wars uses the backdrop of everything we got in the prequel trilogy to tell so many more stories-- stories with plenty of nuance and emotion and thought-provoking themes. it seems quite timely in some ways, the episodic adventures of government officials trying their best to keep the peace and uphold democratic order in their republic despite all the evil and selfishness in the galaxy. even though I hadn't attentively watched every episode, the final scene of the final episode of season seven brought a few tears to my eyes. these movies refer to the Jedi way as a religion plenty, but no other scene in any other piece of this saga has ever actually made me feel that definition so poignantly.

husband has moved on to the Star Wars: Rebels series now. it takes place during the original trilogy and it also seems pretty awesome in terms of nuance and grown-up themes. loyalty and selflessness, honor, trust, sacrifice and the painful legacies it can leave in its wake.

so anyway, I recommend both The Clone Wars and Rebels as meaningful stories. they transcend the original Star Wars movies in ways I find pretty impressive.

I also recommend visiting the Alamo. even though it's a rebuilt monument and not the actual Alamo of 1836, it has plenty of beauty and meaning of its own.

generosity and gratitude

basically we have one week left in this quaint little Louisiana town.

no, we haven't managed to sit ourselves down to watch Steel Magnolias yet. should we still try? (part of me does want to.)

one week!

and there is so much to do. food to use up from the fridge. piles of things-we-don't-need-anymore to organize and donate somehow. fragile dishes and art and knickknacks to wrap and stuff into boxes.

if times were even a tiny bit more normal than they are now, we'd have a goodbye party. we'd schedule in plenty of time to visit one last time all the friends we've made here. we'd go out to that Mexican place one last time. have another end-of-semester karaoke thing. 

but times are not very normal. so instead of all that... what will we do?

I'll distantly and carefully turn in my office keys next Monday morning, distantly contrive to drop off  a few spare houseplants and some spare yarn at a few dear colleague's doorsteps, and perhaps write short goodbye notes to leave in everyone's mailboxes on campus. I'll assume, for now, that campus will return to something like normal eventually.

right now, there are thirteen days until grades are due for Spring 2020. not long after that, my contract with NSULA will officially end. the summer will start to uncurl and stretch its scaly paws, and I'll have three months to play and write and daydream before my next job starts in August. will those three months go by as slowly and weirdly as the last eight weeks have gone by?

right now, I am lucky. my contract with the new institution was signed a few weeks before all of this happened. we've been able to find a new apartment and afford all the headachey moving expenses, so far. I can do my job remotely, for as long as I have to, without too much trouble.

we are lucky, so far. 

my students? most of them are hanging in there, keeping up with things despite everything. this semester has been the opposite of ideal in about a thousand ways. it's been seven weeks since normal classes in normal classrooms. some learning opportunities have worked out okay and many others have not worked out very okay at all. but by now we've adjusted our earlier definitions of "okay."

through all this uncertain weirdness, I've tried to be as generous and patient and responsive with all the students as possible, even moreso than usual. I don't know yet how that generosity is going to finally and concretely translate into course grades next week. I hope to still see evidence that learning about professional writing has been attempted by all the students, whatever else is happening. I hope to read some thoughtful and thorough reflection from everyone before the end. learning is more important than grades.

despite all the important considerations reflected in this recent post and this less-recent post, I'm not sure if all my students will pass or not. I'm not sure how far my responsibility to be generous right now extends in relationship to students' responsibilities both pre- and post-pandemic. maybe all of these things need their definitions adjusted, too.

I haven't read Kathleen Fitzpatrick's (who keeps a very nice blog) new book Generous Thinking yet, but I want to. the whole idea-- generosity, open collaborations, re-imagining our institutions so that they serve more people more equitably-- feels so lovely.

despite the loveliness, I can't help but ask questions. who can afford to be generous and in what ways? what are the little hidden costs of personal generosity? it seems so cynical to ask such things.

in terms of my students, I can definitely afford to be outrageously generous about their grades. I hope the students and their brains can afford it too.

in terms of everything else, I can probably afford more than I think I can.

right now, there's just enough time to ponder everything I'll be leaving behind next week. there's time to feel a few puddles of regret and a whole mountain range of gratitude. we haven't been here long, but friends and colleagues and students and neighbors have been very generous to us. lucky. grateful. and hopefully, in my own ways, just as generous.

family pieces

last month, there was a funeral.

it was the first of my grandparents' funerals that I've been able to actually attend.

I worried for a minute about the cost, the time, how I'd find a substitute for my undergraduates. and after that I worried a little about the risks of traveling by air during what has now become a rather more alarming global pandemic.

but being there last month felt more and more important than any of those worries. I'm glad they didn't stop me.

in the week leading up to this family gathering, my aunts and uncles asked us to write down some of our memories. mine are flickery at first, like an old-school slide projector. the more recent ones are smoother.

my very earliest memories of Grandma and her home and that whole side of the family are of the basement with seemingly endless bedrooms. every corner of that basement was made up to welcome a whole bundle of little grandkids. there was room for all of us, it seemed like. I remember so many bookshelves and books. under the stairs, along the hallways-- books everywhere. on my own bookshelves now I have a book that I must have "borrowed" from Grandma at some point. The Best Known Works of William Shakespeare--pages of Elizabethan drama in double columned layout, in a tattery black cover. I devoured most those plays as a teenager. how grateful and lucky we were to have grandparents that lived right down the street from the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

I remember tagging along with Grandma to a summer writing group on the SUU campus at some point between college semesters. I was trying to write some good short stories. Grandma worked on poems and song lyrics and things. it felt like such an honor to be included in that.

we talked about family history, too. before I went off to study abroad in England in 2003, Grandma gave me a folder of family trees and other history, so I would know what names to look for if I had a chance to explore the areas our family came from. even though I never did make it to any cemeteries or archives or genealogy centers in Kent, I loved having those stories and names anyway-- hints at memories and lives that predate me and everyone I know.

last summer Jeremiah and I were able to visit and spend two or three days with Grandma, playing cards just like always, doing puzzles, singing a few songs, sitting out on the porch in the mornings and late afternoons. she was as welcoming and lovely and serene as ever, though the house was so much quieter and calmer than it was when we are all little grandkids. I'm going to miss those visits. the house.

the idea of Grandma not being there at all anymore-- all her things boxed up to be given away, all the space so empty and different-- it's still a little unreal.

 { 1928–2020 }
 
just a few months ago, I wrote Grandma a postcard from Prescott, Arizona. I was out there for a job interview (for a job I later was offered, and accepted). I hope it put a smile on her face when it arrived.

I wish I'd called to share the news about the job-- it meant we'd be moving 16 hours closer! we could've reveled in that prospect, enjoyed the happy thought of seeing her more often. but in between the job offer in mid-February and my official acceptance at the end of the month, she passed on.

as empty as her absence leaves us, there's still plenty of family in sunny southern Utah. it'll still only be a six hour drive from where we're moving this summer. there will still be reunions. and family will always include Grandma.

commence contentment

it feels like I used to have so much to say. I was just ambitious enough to be confident enough to recognize all my self-doubt and still ignore it.

is ambition something you grow out of? it does seem easier to have when you're young--when you haven't yet heard so much of what other people have said or thought or done, the world feels so much more ripe and open for everything your little human brain could possibly imagine into it.

and then you grow up, and get tired, and everyone around you and before you is doing so much already. how can you keep up?

I know it's a bit silly to worry about keeping up. I'm in my own lane and it isn't a race anyway. 

today I attended fall commencement at NSU. gymnasium full of chairs, lots of bright purple, congratulatory speeches, cheering, decorated mortarboards, lines and lines of accomplished humans, etc. the music was gorgeous, too--a string quartet and a vocal quartet performed excellently during the processional, the anthem, and the alma mater. I came away from it all thinking about the value of letting yourself appreciate things as fully as possible. that might become my mantra for 2020: appreciation.

I never attended my own college or grad school commencements. I probably didn't miss much, really. it just now so happens to be part of my job to go and sit with the other faculty and applaud on cue. it's nice to feel like a part of something and to pay attention to all these students' achievement.

the speaker this year was Denise Lewis Patrick--prolific writer, Natchitoches local, and 1977 alumna (she has a blog too, such as it is). I appreciated her talk for its down-to-earth encouragement and its brevity. she spoke about all the post-college things she'd learned--about people, organizations, and changing technologies. she promised today's graduates that they would similarly need to learn many new things, no matter how prepared they might feel for their futures.

feeling prepared might be a little overrated, anyway. how much ambition does a person really need in their life, after all? I might be just fine with a little contentment now and then and a decent supply of curiosity.

goodbye, facebookland

this week I deactivated my 15-year-old facebook account.

why?

many reasons. mainly, it's a new year, time for trying new things. facebook's role in my recent life has largely been a passive, bad-habit-esque waste of time, and I'm increasingly convinced that its recent roles in spreading terrible ideologies and misleading nonsense makes it problematic for anyone to continue supporting it at all.

so I want to live a year or so truly without it and see what happens. perhaps I'll have more time to write and blog and exercise and knit and make phone calls.

speaking of more time for blogging, over the past months I have been (as is usual) sifting through a dozen different ideas of what I might blog about, with new ideas poking at my brain every few days, too. there are podcasts to blog about, and the upcoming semester to blog about, and gardening plans to blog about. but when? I can't feasibly blog about everything all at once, sadly.

for now, I guess I'm blogging about facebook.

somewhere in the depths of all my old blog drafts, I've had a collection of notes sitting here, from a talk given by a facebook executive or employee of some sort. it was hosted in the student union at Purdue University, where I sat and took notes in the blogger app on my old phone.

here's me, kicking off my mild resolution to blog here more often in 2019, attempting to reconstitute and expand these old notes and snippets into something intelligible and interesting.

facebook's goal/mission/quest/thing has been, for as long as I've heard them talking about having one, is to connect the world.

is this a noble and valiant thing for facebook to be doing? does it seem like a mission that we should trust facebook with?

well, in any case, the speaker opened by stating facebook's mission. and then he spoke excitedly about new developments like live video, virtual reality, and artificial intelligences. oh and about how many new jobs facebook was creating every day. hurray for tech jobs.

he also, unaviodably, had to address issues of privacy and tracking, and he did touch on the ethics of selling users' data to marketers. I'm reminded now, several facebook privacy and ethics scandals later, of this twitter thread about ethics and technology:

The thing about ethics codes is that, like many other forms of “code,” we code around our current way of working. The industry will never create and adopt and enforce an ethical code that disrupts their present flow of capital.

— Emily G (@EmilyGorcenski) January 8, 2019

Gorcenski writes in her informal critique there that there are no universal codes of ethics. ethics standards are always situated. they're constructed, imperfect, with plenty of ambiguity-- often just enough ambiguity to make companies and other institutions feel halfway okay about carrying out very questionable actions in the world.

from my notes, I see that most of my interest and my strongest reactions to this talk had to do with what the speaker said about facebook-as-governing agent. he shared his experience dealing with the many challenges of managing, filtering, and/or censoring public and semi-public online expression across national borders. he reminded us that facebook has employees and users all over the world. what's legal and appropriate in one country doesn't always match what's legal and appropriate in others. but somehow, facebook's own community standards have to make the whole world happy, to at least some extent.
in negotiating with governments about how to enforce or uphold various local standards, the speaker explained, facebook does as much as they can to push their own values. yes, there are tensions between how a borderless online community wants to function and how more traditional global powers want to run their more traditional, border-bound nations.

facebook, the speaker emphasized, tries to be an agent of empowerment. a platform for making invisible things visible. shining light into dark corners. facilitating new and more transparent conversations. changing the balance of power.

and then the speaker said something about facebook hopefully having a major role in someday establishing some kind of global online government. after that, according to my notes, I typed out this:

"eeeeek."

does the world want and need to be connected by a central online platform, really? is the capitalist interest that facebook has in being the medium by which everyone is connected anything we can trust?

I'll end this post with two more brief thoughts (the second of which is more of a gesture towards some other people's thoughts, really).

1. it is worth admitting explicitly that the phone-typed notes I took on this nameless facebook employee's presentation are at least three years old at this point. I wish I had included the fellow's name and title and the date of the talk and all that, but I did not. it is also worth admitting that I have not included every single thing I made notes on. what I have done is shape the more timeless bits into a satisfying order and fit them carefully into real sentences. in any case, I make no pretense that my reconstituted representation of the talk and its mood is fully accurate.

2. one of the many awesome podcasts I've listened to inbetween semesters has been ZigZag's end-of-season offering, "If Capitalism and Socialism Had a Baby." they interview Rufus Pollock, who wrote a book called Open Revolution (which you can read online in PDF form over here). I love the ZigZag podcast, and their whole second season was a carnival of great interrogations and important questions about technology and humans. go listen to it!

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.

a negative amount of sense

I don't know enough about anything. I don't know enough. this is both true and an excuse to stand back, to distantly question and wonder, to pretend for a while to put myself in other people's shoes and to still fail at understanding why they do this or that, and then to shrug those other perspectives away because I can't know enough about anything.

I don't watch the news. I get news filtered through friends and internet icons. I stay out of it; I have the privilege of class and skin color and education enough to stay out of the news and let my little life sail on. the most affecting mishap I've had to personally deal with lately was watching one of my cute handmade clay bowls slip off the counter and shatter into pieces. I'll make a new one. it'll probably be just the same as the old one.

what are broken dishes when meanwhile, death threats and gun violence and rape and bigotry, brutality, corruption, hatred, and anger seem to fill the world and the internet? there is all this anger and rage and tragedy, all swirling around my privilege and the blissful ignorance it tends to afford.

have you seen this video?


I keep re-watching it, wanting to re-watch it and re-watch it as if my re-watching it might mean that everyone else were watching it, learning something.

I should be grading student drafts, and working on my own drafts, yet I feel like I have to write this instead. and what do I really want to do in a post like this? what can I even hope to halfway-decently attempt, when writers more invested and more practiced and more attended-to than I will probably ever be are already saying more powerful and more meaningful things than I could about this latest ugliness?

I remember marveling--two years ago, November 2014--at this court decision. it made negative amounts of sense. I don't know enough about anything, but I remember that I started looking at uniformed officers differently that year. I told friend Chris, as we watched people on twitter rage and mourn, that I wanted to walk over to our municipal building on 6th and South Street, where all those cop cars are always parked outside, and I wanted to stop at least one officer and ask them questions, and hope they'd sit down and take time for answering. I didn't. I haven't. I still pause when I see uniformed officers, still wonder to the end of the sky what they think about all of this swirling injustice and death. I'm sure there would be miles of red tape, or at least buckets of busy dismissiveness, if not paranoia about whether I'd be likely to spin their comments into some kind of sensational media story.

I am not a journalist. I don't watch the news. I have too many silly podcasts to listen to. today, it happened to be this one from a Sporkful series on Other People's Food. an interview and an audio collage about segregation. about the negative amounts of sense that used to mean strictly separate water fountains, train cars, restrooms, and--more happily--about the activism that eventually changed things.

my instinct is to question. my reactions are questions. why? why? why not talk, and listen, and leave your weapons out of it? why make excuses, why not call this systemic awfulness what it is? why not confront the racism in it? wouldn't it be better to confront and wrestle with, rather than ignore and excuse and backpedal and victim-blame and cover-up? why not trust people? why not put some real faith in the "innocent until proven guilty" principle? why panic? why suspect the worst? why put this woman in handcuffs, why not trust her to keep cooperating? why not trust people? why not treat people like they are, can be, will be good?

I keep thinking about my interactions with uniformed officers. speeding tickets. warnings. nothing bloody, nothing that warrants any screaming. I keep thinking that if I were pulled over for a burned out taillight, I would have been trusted to stand and wait and do as I was told--no handcuffs, no guns. more patience. I would be suspected of nothing beyond failing to maintain a tiny lightbulb within my vehicle. my skin color makes it safer and calmer and pretty much normal, if inconvenient, for me to interact with law enforcement people if I ever have to, and that is puzzlingly unfair beyond unfair.

what am I doing with a post like this? I am reacting. I don't know enough about anything--not about any victim or any officer, not about what the weather is like in Baton Rouge or in Minneapolis this week, not about the political or legal webs within which the cities I've lived in are being maintained, and not at all enough about the biases that insidiously sit in my own head. I do not know who wrote all the news articles or what kind of slant their publishers may have expected. I do not know exactly what kind of methods were used in compiling which kinds of data from what sources. I do not know if the world will ever be different enough from the depressing way it is for certain groups of people in this country.

but ever since this Hank Green fellow made this video about democratic engagement I have been meaning to use up some paper and ink and stamps with more pointed and purposeful reactions to things. now is all there is, so it may as well be now.

and back

almost a week ago, prelims were suddenly over. finished. behind me.

it's a weird feeling. for so much of the year, prelims loomed like this thing beyond which nothing at all could exist. like death, almost. but I'm on the other side now and there is all this open space and crazy playground equipment.

okay, I don't mean playground equipment. I mean more phd-land. a prospectus proposal and a dissertation plan and all that. (sometimes it's like a playground. other times it's like a hamster wheel.)

but at least prelims are finished.

on the unfinished side of things are... well, almost everything else. 

these coloring pages, for example.

dear friends Trinity and Patti separately sent coloring accoutrements in their pre-prelim care packages. Patti even sent shimmery crayons.

theses tools were marvelous for giving the back burner of my brain time to simmer away with whatever problem/question/hurdle I was stuck on.

I didn't finish any of the coloring, but that's okay. there will be more stressful days when I'll want to do something semi-mindless, creative, and calming. there are plenty of pages left, and the crayons will surely last a while too.

so thanks to everyone who cheered me on and/or left me alone throughout the prelim madness. I'm glad I have you. don't go away, okay? the whole dissertation thing is not going to be a coloring book, I'm pretty sure.

paused

disappointment paralysis: when all narrativium sloshes from one side of your life to the other and spills away uncontrollably, leaving you to tremble at the center of it and wonder where the story is going. when things aren't making sense, nothing is fitting into a plot quite yet and there aren't any conflicts to address (they've all walked remorselessly out the door on you) and you can't find any of your props (they've all misplaced themselves in distant, locked rooms) and your character list seems suddenly erased (subject to immediate and serious revision for no reason at all).

it's a feeling I can't quite keep in my head to describe. a robotic feeling. a half-turned-off immobility of a sort. a creaking passionlessness attended by drifts of lethargic, unmotivated thoughts. from that place it seems like the story will never un-empty itself back into any useful channel.

have you ever felt like that? like you could almost relate to this guy here?

{ photo by this kind soul on flickr. }

but seeing all these June lilies in all their gorgeous smeary, speckled orange...

even if they aren't my favourite flowers, seeing them everywhere has been sort of awakening.

they didn't show up in any bouquets. they just seem to be in everyone's yards this time of year. nodding and swaying and sprawling because it is June and they are June lilies. and in my noticing of them there is something not exactly, but almost sort of akin to what the flowers at the bottom of this old blogpost had to say.

by itself it isn't much. but it makes the ramshackle haltedness and sticky ground where we are feel more like a pause in the story arc than an utter abandonment of it. flowers and fireflies. still worth smiling about.

twentynine: penultimate

noticing more grey hairs.

more stray longings.

more could-be what-if alternate universes.

not noticing enough of everything else, it feels like.

the grey hairs are real. I'm not sure if these other spectres are or not.

I am also craving beaches.

{ not a beach, just a sand dune }

{ also not really a beach. a lake and pier } 

{ maybe there are beaches somewhere down there? }

{ a real beach. California, 2009. }

{ also a real beach. Rhode Island, 2013. } 

beaches are my own personal metaphor for escapism. I blog about the idea of them off and on, here and there. I don't blog as often about real beaches. real beaches are as rare as.

ends-of-semesters always come with dreams about living lazily on a beach. silly dreams, but they keep me company while I stress about writing projects. 

twentyfour: numbers, calories, feelings

let it be known that I am having a giant, imaginary shouting match with Apple and all their employees right now.

also let it be known that there are one thousand posts sitting around behind the scenes of this blog. see there in that right-hand column? one thousand. eighteen of those are drafts (including this one). a lovely palendromical 303 of them are mere sunday-scribbles posts. 109 are tagged with the label 'random'.

so after this, I will have seventeen more posts (of which six will appear within the next week) to think up some fabulous celebratory thing to write here for the one thousandth actual published post. does my blog audience have any suggestions for me? should I hold some silly contest or scavenger hunt or game? hmm.

while I ponder, and while I mourn the death of this melodramatic semester and this fickle April and--most stressfully and traumatically of all--my dear old nameless macbook, I'm going to talk about food.

yesterday, I made chicken and rice. I think (not counting the recent occasion of Easter) this was the first time I've cooked chicken since Thanksgiving or something.

usually it's canned cream-of-mushroom soup you do this with. I didn't have any, so I made do with almond milk and actual mushrooms and random spices. turned out gorgeously, if I do say so myself.


a few weeks ago, inspired by Ms. MacKenzie Smith of the grilled cheese social blog, I made pear/gruyere grilled cheese.

these are awful photographs, with too much yellow light in them, but nevertheless, they are evidence of grilled-cheese-bliss on a plate.


I also baked my genius brother's famous savage chocolate-chip cookies the other night. I have eaten way too many of them today. so? aren't Fridays meant to be days that you eat hardly anything besides exceptionally awesome chocolate-chip cookies? good. I thought so.

other planned baking adventures for the near future include more fresh bread, cream cheese wontons, and pie crust. comfort food. yeah.

six: but too soon for bare feet

today was quite grey. I am weighed down with exams to write and books to read, review, takes notes on. this time of year--it is excruciatingly stressful and/or teasingly wonderful and/or wrackingly mixed. depends on the day.

I am wanting to rearrange furniture, and walk outside in the rain, and sing or dance or leave. 

but I have exams to write. 

this song and Jason Mraz's very nice voice accompanied me home from the bus stop earlier. the match of grey anxious twilight longing seemed beyond perfect.

the point is to live everything

I picked up Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet for a few moments at a party in October. sometimes, I behave rather anti-socially at parties. music, small talk, and hors d'oeuvres aren't always quite enough. I want my eyes to have more to look at, my hands to have some kind of project or game. so at certain kinds of parties, even though it might be weird to be embroidering while the music blares, or crocheting as the small talk happens, or browsing bookshelves inbetween hors d'oeuvres, these are things I have been known to do.

the music and food and company at this particular October party was all lovely. the bookshelf of poetry in the corner took up a small set of moments that night, but those moments popped back into my head when I came across a quote from Rilke's book earlier. recently, On Being joined the handful of podcasts on my iPod, and I have been letting old episodes play in the background of my housework and bus riding. they are sometimes a little too earnest, these soft, meandering conversations between curious, profound people. there is almost an overly-tender, tenuous idealism hanging over it all. but usually they're interesting despite this. so when a friend posted a link to the On Being blogpost of today, I let my intrigue follow it, trailing its author from Anne Hillman's poem and the Rilke quote to the five questions below-- and eventually to google where I found this digitization of all ten letters. the inspirational tidbit in question is from letter 4. "have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language," translated Rilke advises. I was talking to my clever sister about this earlier--about the complex value of holding pluralities and indeterminacy in one's head. uncertainty is precious. ignorance is room for discovery. darkness and shadows make cradles for the candles and the lightbulbs. the blogpost at On Being suggests that to not know = to be alive.

these are the questions Parker J. Palmer has come up with, remixing Rilke and Hillman into New Year's inspiration:

• How can I let go of my need for fixed answers in favor of aliveness?
• What is my next challenge in daring to be human?
• How can I open myself to the beauty of nature and human nature?
• Who or what do I need to learn to love next? And next? And next?
• What is the new creation that wants to be born in and through me?

I love questions. how they lead to more and more and more unknown, unsettled, untraveled spaces. the idea of living in the moment, living in questions, feels excessively appealing. and here, in no particular order, are my pondering, tentative responses:

• keep asking questions. around and about and underneath all the answers you think you might be setting in with, there are always more questions.
• prepare for and take responsibility for the things you want, even if you aren't sure you want them, even if you aren't sure how or why or when or what will happen as a result.
• get a haircut.
• walk to school one or two mornings every week.
• collect and cultivate a few more potted plants.
• listen more selflessly.
• write on paper. take more notes. make more connections among the books and articles and conversations.

these aren't all. I'll come back and keep pondering.

years and their turnings are indeed arbitrary temporal thresholds. every millisecond could be just as momentous as this one we're waiting for at midnight tonight. that the digit at the end of 2014 is switching by one is pretty neat, and this sort of switch does only happen once every thirty-one-and-a-half-million seconds, but given the way we quantify time, every single moment some digit of the timestamp is switching, spinning, ticking away. we could use every one of those ticks as an excuse to throw confetti, to dance, to live. every moment is a beautiful new question.

intoxicating reasons

last week our readings for Professional Writing Theory included two chapters from a book called Lines: A Brief History. I fell in love with this book, and I want to read the whole thing, even if at the expense of the Hugh Blair and Adam Smith and all the other reading.

Lines seems to be about everything--my favourite topic. there is a section asking why musical notation and alphabetic writing are considered so differently. there are chapters on weaving vs. knitting vs. embroidery. there are illustrations of all sorts, mapping traces and threads. the connections are intoxicating.

last month my podcast-listening included a Radiolab episode called In the Dust of this Planet. it's about a book with the same title, plus a subtitle: Horror of Philosophy Volume 1. its author says something during this podcast that I come back to every now and then. he's talking about his writing process and how he came to finish this book. in the middle of all the research and work, he thought to himself, would I write this book even if no other human being in the world was ever going to read it? his answer was yes.

can I say the same about things I write?

I think so.

I think I am enough of an audience for myself. but then again, maybe my future self counts as separate human being. does that change the question? if no human being, not even my future self, were allowed to go back and read all the writing I'm scraping out of my head onto paper or screen, would I keep writing?

that's not so easy to answer. writing and reading aren't very separable activities anyway. but if they were... and if I weren't only disallowed but also wholly unable to go back and re-read... if all the lines and traces of my own writing forever disappeared into some irretrievable somewhere else...

then what?

if that were the case, would it be so for everyone else? would the function of writing be permanently altered for all of humanity? would we revert to a primarily oral culture, or would we develop some alternative system of recording ideas?

there are a dozen ways to imagine this kind of scenario. what if we all forgot how to read, and the alphabet became a string of curly artistic shapes with no definable meanings? what if there was no such thing as ink or graphite or paint or any other way of making lines on things? what if our hands weren't shaped right for holding pens or stroking keys? what if textless, animated gifs become the one and only medium of communication anyone ever uses?

would I write this even if no human being in the world was ever going to read it? 

if a tree falls, or a bird sings, or a kitten meows, in a forest or a cage or a box far far away from any observers... do those things have reasons for existing at all?

this thoughtful little post on change and sadness was written a long time ago. I've blogged every week since then, pretty much. I've been blogging every week since forever. there is a chain (a line, a thread) of checkmarks six years long or more fluttering along behind this silly little blog's march into the future.

but people say blogging is dead.

this one isn't. this internet space is not an irretrievable elsewhere. not yet. my future self, and all your future selves, can keep coming back to my silly little blog.

does that mean it, along with the trees and birds and kittens, has a reason for existing at all?

inhale envy

Saturday I was out running errands (legitimize the new car, donate all those excess clothes, pick the last two zucchini from the garden plot) and had a few moments to kill in between places of business that open at 8:30am on weekends and stores that didn't open until 10:00. Barnes and Noble presented itself, conveniently in between these times, and I wandered in to browse.

my favourite shelves in bookstores are the ones with the blank books. there's only so long you can gush over those, though, so I also explored the games aisles and the news aisles and the clearance bins. there were tempting boxes of chocolate in the clearance bins... but I was only there to kill time, not spend any money. I'm still subsisting on the tail end of tiny slash nonexistent summer paychecks, so I'm putting off as much spending as possible until next month.

my other favourite shelves are the ones with new books. Barnes and Noble has one of these too, perpendicular to the coffee-dispensing section of the store.

I picked up and perused the first pages of a little paperback with a yellow-pea-coated girl on the cover. white block letters, out-of-focus trees in the background. it was the title that caught my eye. The Opposite of Loneliness. Marina Keegan. Introduction by Anne Fadiman.

I must admit I didn't remember any of that information over the weekend. I didn't remember what it was called or what it looked like or how it was bound. all I remembered was the twist that jumped out from the middle of that glowing Introduction by Anne Fadiman, and the reason I put the book down.

but in order to write about that, I needed to remember all the other details. an isolated, poignant twist with no detailed context wouldn't quite be a story worth telling, would it?

as anyone else would have in this forgetful situation, I turned to the world's favourite (or least favourite?) external memory aid slash search algorithm.

these are the words I ventured to feed into the search box:

writing student dies dead student publishes collection

and there I've given away the whole sad, slow, sinking, twist, so there may not be much hope of painting for you the sense of holding a lovely book of essays in your hands, of reading along about the quirks and dreams and pleadings of its author, starting to wonder, to envy, and feeling even a bit anxious to skim through this Introduction and taste the insides of this collection--to traipse right into the essays this student of Anne Fadiman's must have had such writerly fun drafting and polishing...

...and then realizing, without knowing why it took you so long, that Anne Fadiman's past tense was is not the regular, innocent past tense was.

I snapped the book shut and half-tossed it back on its shelf, not even bothering to straighten it up with its fellow copies.

her last Yale Daily News column comes up first in the search results.

a Huffington Post eulogy-esque review (or is it more a review-esque eulogy? I'm not sure) is second.

I'm not sure what made me so suddenly give up on that shiny new book. maybe, after hearing so much praise and promise, it seemed unfair. maybe the praise and promise seemed pasted-on and obligatory to me, too thick, once I knew their recipient wasn't around anymore. I felt cheated, disbelieving. maybe I couldn't swallow the implications of envying a talented but tragically dead Yale graduate.

answerless

puzzles make very neat metaphors. much like black boxes, the concept could be hiding almost anywhere. and like so, so many other words (wave, pencil, etc.) it is both a noun and a verb.

you don't exactly puzzle a puzzle though. you solve it, if you can.

most of the time we puzzle over other stuff: puzzling, bewildering things that may or not literally be puzzles.

this week I am puzzling over the syllabus I'm supposed to be polishing up and the worthiness of owning this or that sort of gas-powered vehicle.

literal puzzles are more fun. they have such low stakes and predetermined answers. the crossword kind might be my favourite. mm.

{ photo via this kind soul on flickr. }

I think words are more interesting than paintings... but jigsaws can be just the thing if you've got the space and a few uninterrupted weekends with family.

so many kinds of puzzles, there are. once upon a time ten years ago friend Wilson introduced me to this infamously most difficult of all internet riddles. I didn't finish it.

a few days ago I ran across this maddening puzzle via twitter. I spent a few stop-and-go days getting up to level 31. I have been there for ages now. please, if anyone gets past this one... tell me the secret.

it must be solvable. I just can't figure it out yet.

regular life is not a jigsaw or a game, I don't think. definitely not one with neat, pre-cut, smooth-edged pieces. no... life is more like this image from a poem I read recently:

When the wind comes, and the snow repeats us,
 / how like our warped lives it is,
Melting objects, disappearing sounds,
Like lichen on gnarled rocks.
For we have lived in the wind, and loosened ourselves like ice
 / melt.
Nothing can hold us, I've come to know. 

it's from "My Old Clinch Mountain Home" by Charles Wright. his book Caribou was on the new books shelf (how I love new books shelves) at the library and I brought it home, not expecting much. I like it though. I didn't get the line spacing quite right in my excerpt, but hopefully the language conjures something poignant for you anyway. as I was thinking about puzzles and their solutions, this poem countered with its un-polished un-clear scenery. wind and water melting and eating away at everything, transforming and being transformed. all of that seems very, very beyond a puzzle.

we like puzzles so much because they have answers and we can hold those answers in our heads and hands and figure them out. this Vsauce video on games gets at this idea, comparing/contrasting life and play. we can win at Poker or Chess or Tennis... but how can we tell if anyone ever wins at Justice or Teenagerhood or Making A Difference? games and life don't work the same. unless they do...

unless it's only that nobody's figured out exactly how yet.

yes, go, go...

for a long string of months my flashbacks have been looping through a single three week section of my semi-recent history. blips of Eastern Europe--its food, its weather, its languages--crowd my memory.

the streets and skylines of Budapest and Bratislava...

so many days we spent cozying up with Budapest. and then buying cheap ice cream cones from every streetcorner vendor in Bratislava....

trying and imagining we could manage to shake the tourist vibe at least a little bit.

haggling helplessly with Romanian women at the bakery in Sighişoara.

coffeeshops and cathedrals. everso shy snatches of German. endlessly perplexed eavesdropping, all over Vienna.

but now, after nearly two years since the seedling idea of that trip was planted in my head, its flashback loop is being infiltrated by and remixed with other further-past memory scenes: the last time I was in England... 

airports and train stations. platforms, terminals, tickets, timetables.

layovers in California. January sun and shore.

Hawaii sand and sunburns.

before that, Canada.

Celsius, scriptures, and snow.

such a comfortable, tight routine that was. such a dear, irreplaceable microcosm.

how the sequences of these travel- and place-themed flashbacks are arranged inside my brain, I don't know. there is no recognizable order to it. I can never tell what will remind me of when. all of it reminds me, subtly, that here and now don't have to be exactly here and now. I'm incredibly lucky to have access beyond my little academic slice of Indiana, to then and there and elsewhere.

soon it'll be this particular elsewhere. I am going to Paris next week.

{ photo borrowed from this kind soul on tumblr. }

what will France add to my mixed flashback-reel? which vividnesses will I fruitlessly long for as I move non-flashingly forward through time in the normal fashion? what kinds of faces and voices and scenery will join the everywhere and everywhen I've already collected?