moments and years

I missed the chance to commemorate the true birthday of this little blog, last Monday. but today, January 19, 2025, marks exactly 20 years since the first actual, fully-fledged post: a response to our first key reading assignment about webdesign and such.

what a different world. such a different place it was. or maybe twenty years ago wasn't so very different, and it only seems so because I and my perspective have changed so much since then. 

what happens if I stitch together a few snippets from all the blogged Januaries of each year since 2005? what new montage will spill into this digital page in between them all?

I tried my best to pull from sections nearest to the 13th and 19th of the month (a thing much easier to do from the posts before 2014ish, when the apex of graduate school + its aftermath slowed down my writing here so much).

what I notice amongst these snippets and what you notice will be different, I imagine. I notice the unending pulse of learning and academia. books and thoughts chasing each other in circles. comments about the weather seem to sit neatly in the background with questions of identity and all its tangly unspooling. these words always have been for me more than anything. does all this pontificating from past amelia still sound like useful advice? mostly yes, I think. but I would say that, wouldn't I?

2006

the fact that energy is behind it all is somehow unifying. simple

...

linguistic structures will be a low-key class. it is full of people i don't see in my other classes. the other english majors. non tech writing people: the lit majors, the teaching majors. it's weird.

2007

get used to the fear and the doubt. get used to being faced with new facets of your own ignorance. get used to the pain. embrace humility. you can't always feel in control.

but really, how comforting is that?

I don't know. I'd take humility over false confidence anyday. but then the humble rarely get much respect.

2008-2009 (a pause.)

2010

the world is big.

there's a lot going on in it. even in this mostly empty house, there's me sitting at the table, typing, stretching a bit of CSS out over a half-built website skeleton, scribbling a few what-ifs, listening to Radiohead. and I made banana nut muffins this morning.

2011

in the beginning, this blog was just a place for all my first impressions--all my doubts and worries about the usefulness or meaningfulness of all the stuff I was learning. after that semester, I decided to keep blogging--mainly about writing (Starcustard and random short stories), school (rhetoric, more webdesign, and Isotope), and life (philosophical thoughts about my job, vague complaints about boys, and so forth). and so it continued. I'm still here. I still blog.

...

what do those stories say about me?

I'm thinking about all the texture of my life. all the patterned and patternless history I've collected so far. telling stories is one way to remember it. and on the other hand... telling and retelling and re-remembering these stories is one way to completely revise the past. after a few months or years, it becomes easy to bend the details. to emphasize the funny parts. to leave out the things that make you look like a bit of an idiot.

how I envision myself is pretty complicated, I guess. perspective is weirdly limited like that.

2012

 

which we am I talking about, anyway? and when? and where? 

2013

it may not make any huge difference in the long run, but even so, the ultimate pointlessness of things should not be dragged up as an excuse for us to stay in bed all day. at least not more than once or twice a year, anyway, right?

2014

this seemingly misnamed semester will inch along to spring in due course. and when that happens, finals and stress will no doubt prevent me from enjoying it as thoroughly as I could, but for now... well for now, the semester is glowing with warm, cozy pillows full of insight and excitement. this might be the best January ever.

2015

I have spent much (but not enough) of this long, mostly-pleasant weekend sitting by the window, trying to focus on readings for classes. 

.... 2015 is here, still all new-feeling. gradually we'll get to see both how it changes my life and how it doesn't.

2016

today it is raining in spurts, like a chilly and unkempt spring. Tuesday's snow is long since melted. it'll be back this weekend. the universe is giving us yo-yo-ing seasons, somewhat drab all the way through, with occasional bright sunset smudges.

the trees are bare. my apartment windows open onto more distant views than they did in summer and fall. at night, more and more streetlights perpetually leak into my bedroom under the edges of the blinds. I notice the faces of buildings I have never seen from such an angle before.

2017

it's empowering to reflect on the background structure of your whole life. to actively participate and acknowledge your role in either accepting/reinforcing or resisting/revising the culture you swim in. and that seems important. that's what it takes to make all of that power and structure more open-book, more readable, more transparent and less like a vice.

2018

if I had the brainpower on this Friday evening to make some additional academicalish comments on how these beautifully-commentated marble races and our fascination with them could link up interestingly with some of the tenets of object-oriented ontology, I would. but I don't know all that much about object-oriented ontology myself, and should probably not let it distract me much more than the Marblelympics already have from writing up nicely finished dissertation chapters about digital ethnography and distributed commons-based peer-production and what that all may mean for technical communication and human culture and such.

2019

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?

2020

all this potent potential meaning curled up in to hold. and then there are all these phrasal verbs, too: hold back, hold up, hold out, hold off, hold against, beholden to...

to be held as a parent holds a young baby is to be safe. comfortable. cared for. right?

to be held is also to be restrained. controlled. and to be restrained isn't usually considered comfortable, though... right?

or is it?

2021

and when I listened to this recent episode of So Many Damn Books with George Saunders I felt more affinity for Saunders's love of teaching writing than perhaps I might once have felt. his advice is to remember that you're never just teaching 20-somethings who barely know what to do with their adulthood when you meet them-- you're also teaching the 40-something-year-olds that they'll become. I like that. (not all college students are 20-somethings, but the concept holds. we are all humans-in-progress.)

2022

why does this small saga of knitting woe and triumph deserve documentation in this little blog of mine? I don't know if there's an answer, other than my typical interest in capturing bits of experience and emotion in as vivid and accurate description as I can. I like to write these vignettes of where and when and how, with all the metaphor and adjectives they need to vibrate satisfyingly from my imagination to yours.

2023

I trust that learning is happening, little by little, in all of our spongey-curious brains.

2024

January, perhaps fittingly, seems so very long. all the transitions it spans-- all the shifting, deepening of the dark season, the post-holiday recoveries, the shiny new beginnings of a calendar year and of an academic semester-- all of that is a lot for 31 average winter days.

I don't know if it really did feel longer for me this year, or if I'm only saying that because it seems like an appropriate thing to sigh into this semi-bleak and impermanent world.

- - -

and now what? do I still blog? 

time will tell. if you'll indulge me, I have one more excerpt, this time from May of 2014, when so much of me was so unsettled and rearranging itself and I clung to my love of writing as if nothing else mattered:

from time to time I wonder what it is I'm trying to do here. does it matter what I'm trying to do here? I write. our reasons for enjoying things are seemingly inarticulable. is there irony in that? I claim that words can make everything better. is that true even when the words crumble into meaninglessness as they fail at encompassing feelings? do I mean that even crumbled words are worth something?

yes. crumbled and halfhearted attempts at capturing it all still beats blank silence. I know only so much stuff fits into one life. there are only so many live possibilities. this is the way it needs to be, I guess. but the way everything is carved up now isn't how it'll always need to be carved. our crumbled communications don't stand still; they change.

.... and even if I can't really say I know exactly what writing means, I can try to explain what I like about my practice of it.

I like the pausing and sifting through potential descriptions and the shuffling of parts of speech. I like the dancing of clauses and punctuation and space. I like the starts and stops and backtracking, the meandering fragments that stretch so subtly for their finish. I like the way these little symbols can twist and mold intangible thoughts into a dozen differently shaded shapes. I like unknotting a tangly draft, picking out the pieces that don't belong and pulling away each piece that does, tidying it all into a hopefully-clean curl of interesting prose. sometimes I save the scraps for later. sometimes I can't. .... I write for the writing's sake. I sketch and wonder and experience plenty of other things for the same reason. they don't have to be means to some other end, these creative processes. maybe all the best things are their own ends, or at least neatly wrapped around something like one.

after twenty years, does this blog count as art? as an end in itself?

doesn't matter. it's here. I'm here. for now.

sing, sing, sing

so I signed up for eight weeks of voice lessons this summer. it was kind of fun and random to enroll at the local community college and get a new email address and go actually check out their pretty Prescott campus.

it's nice. lots of cool sculpture gardens here and there. I was especially struck by this lovely little bench:

it hasn't been that long since I was a real student (and secretly/not-so-secretly, professorship is pretty much endless-studentship anyway), but it does feel like a long time. 4 years now I guess? 

but now, for this season at least, I am a part-time, non-degree-seeking Yavapai Rough Rider.

{ image borrowed from a local news piece about the YC softball team }

I had my first lesson this afternoon: 50 very enjoyable minutes with Dr. Audis, who earned her doctorate at none other than Texas Tech University. (interestingly, but not really coincidentally given all the myths and legends of our shared western/southwestern contexts out here, Texas Tech has a really similar mascot... only theirs is red-flavored instead of green...)

anyway, the first lesson was a great time. I tried not to be too nervous; I hummed warm-up scales through buzzing lips and emulated an ambulance siren with my voice as fully as I could. that last exercise was scary-exhilarating and hopefully that small thrill will help spur me to practice it even if it will likely frighten the pugs a little. 

then we sang through a few folk songs and a few show tunes, ultimately settling on these three as my summer repertoire: 

- the classic Irish folk song, "Danny Boy"

- one of the more heart-wrenching songs from Fiddler on the Roof, "Far From the Home I Love"

- and "Show Me," from My Fair Lady

I'm familiar with all three in some way or other, but despite their seeming simplicity they'll each make for an interesting challenge in terms of range, pacing, tone, emotion, and style. not to mention forcing me to sing the notes and timing as written and not just as I remember from musicals or popular culture or whatnot.

for these summer classes, there isn't a formal recital or presentation at the end of eight weeks, but it sounds like I'll at least get to perform for the other voice students at some point. that should be scary-exhilarating and cool also.

side note! in my googling for that .gif file from "Show Me," I discovered suddenly that Mr. Freddy Eynsford Hill is played, in the 1964 film adaptation of My Fair Lady, by none other than Jeremy Brett.

Jeremy Brett? whose name I mostly only know because of my longstanding, if lazy, adoration of all things Sherlock Holmes? 

yes indeed, that Jeremy Brett. I may have to move this whole playlist of his Sherlock Holmes performances up nearer to the top of my summer watching list.

blossoms, seeds, and shadows

I think this is a small shrubby redbud tree. not sure though.

it has a neighbor along our walking trail. the two trees are more like bushes, really, reaching not too far above my waist, spindly branches bent toward the road.

some months ago this spring, both trees burst into blossom--crowded little pink frothy blossoms all over--even though so many dried out seed pods still clung to all the branches.

it seemed like such a metaphor. 

last year's efforts, thin and pointless, weighing down the future. new life and color pushing onwards anyway. old baggage, getting in the way of everything you might want to blossom into.

by the time I took this photo, the pink flowery frills had wilted and shriveled quite a bit. the desert sun has taken no vacations this season. but there are still rows of orange seed pods holding fast, refusing to be blown away.

a tree, its seeds, its blossoms, all live in cycles just like everything and everyone else. times for growing and times for resting. times for bare bark, times for buds and leaves and blossoms. but all the parts of that cycle have residue from the others. none of them gets to be a clean slate starting from scratch. dried out seed pods, failures, sadness, winter cold, autumn loss-- all of it gets wrapped into the things that happen next. 

maybe sometimes it feels like so much heaviness to keep hold of, to keep track of. 

maybe it's simple. flowers leave behind seeds, and not all of those seeds go off to grow into anything.

the metaphor is very flawed, of course. the seeds are not the opposite of progress and beauty. just because convention paints pink flowers as more lovely does not mean that's truth.

I'm reminded of the best song from Encanto. things don't need to be perfect; they just need to be. 

that's enough for the scrubby redbud trees, I guess. simply being. why do humans complicate it so?

waning crescent

this morning we woke up at first light, well enough rested, and after wrapping myself up in a fuzzy robe, I sat outside while the dogs sniffed around, watching the eastern edges of the sky turn colors.

I love seeing this happen. dawn. morning. sunrises. 

this time of year is especially great for it. the sun takes its time, the horizon for me today was obscured by the wall around our property, the tree on the left, more trees beyond that one.

but the sky is all still there, spread out behind everything, changing from dark to light under a mottled scrape of east-to-west cloud.

the cloud turned colors too-- from a grey smudge to grey-blue, then purple, before pink and flaming. I couldn't see the sun itself but I saw all the colors it was throwing around. 

my bare feet got cold. little Hamilton pawed at me to let him up on my lap. early hikers passed by on the trail behind our house. I noticed a mourning dove huddled on the edge of the back wall. a trio of crows swooped overhead. 

after a while, I stood up and walked a ways out from under our back-porch awning. up, up above the treeline and the blazing pink-gold clouds, the brilliant, bright white moon smiled down at us. it hung there tipped over on its side, a slim crescent against the blue morning. it surprised me, how solid and silvery and high it still was, with the sun right there on its tail.

I had to look this up to remind myself properly of the order of all the lunar phases, but as it happens, we're under a waning crescent moon today. at this point in her rhythm, she's pulling all her shine into her other half, turning and shrinking away, saving it for whoever is out on the other side. maybe it's just her, there with all the sunbeams-made-moonbeams. with no obligations to reflect it for anyone else at all. 

I've been thinking about that aspect of the moon for a while now. about how much value there is in that new moon phase-- how through all the never-ending cycles of waxing and waning and shining and spinning, there's plenty of time when the moon seems to keep her light to herself.

maybe that's a lesson I'm learning this year. this season. 

shining full-blast for everyone else all the time is a recipe for burnout and depression and resentment. and it's gotta be okay-- more than okay-- to use your talents just because you feel like it, even if nobody else will see or care or show up for it. my own reasons can be enough.

nature is pretty awesome, even if some portion of what we see as awesome in it is projected personifications and metaphors. so what? we are nature too. all of us and our stories have a place in the wild and shifting colors of the sky, clouds and moonlight and all.

I'm so grateful for cool, crisp morning sunrises and a tidy backyard to enjoy them in. so grateful for this space and time and everything I can learn from it.

not today's sunrise. just one sunrise of many

early February, now and then

yesterday, on a lark I looked at the date and trawled through my blogpost archive to find all the posts that just happened to be posted on February 7.

there are three:

an untitled Sunday scribbling from 2010.

reflections on who a person is or isn't after they run 5 whole kilometers for the first time (2012).

and these twice(now thrice?)-framed and re-framed ramblings about who a person is or isn't after dying their hair for the first time (2013/2004).

are there coincidences here? a theme of identity and the capacity for novel experience to encroach interestingly upon it. 

while I meandered through this blog archive timewarp (knowing I wouldn't write the rest of this until Monday) I also checked for old posts from today's date, February 8:

a meditation on parts of ourselves that are unknown, occasioned by a book and one verse of a hymn (2011).

and this "nostalgic little rant" about how we store old media and what to do with old dreams (2007). 

so?

present and past and future selves. all of them fluid, none of them ever fully left behind. 

and who am I this week? the sixth full week of this sixteenth year of blogging here? 

I am doing a little bit of yoga every day, pondering what it really means to have a good relationship with my own breath. the snow of late January is mostly melted. teaching and teaching prep are taking up the bulk of my days. our pugs still want to hibernate some mornings. we are soon to be buying a house, and the land under it, which seems both like a very weird, half-unthinkable but simultaneously perfectly logical, sensible life decision. 

what will owning this sliver of earth with a house on it mean for the selves we become over the rest of the year? 

I hope it means more time reading and writing outside on the back patio. I hope it means lovely neighbors and a quiet cul-de-sac. it will mean more responsibility and more space. more food storage, more crafts, more plants! more making. more stargazing. more driving for me but somewhat less for Jeremiah. 

and a lovely ancient volcanic hill down the road for both long and short hikes.

masklessness

I stepped out of my old blue car today without my blue cloth facemask on.

the sheer normality of doing such a thing... that normality and all the long-ago memories that come with it all try (and fail) to drown out the thin jolt of not-quite-panic about almost forgetting. it's not quite panic. nothing to panic about. just a deadly contagious respiratory disease, potentially lurking about in the ghostly residue of everyone's breath.

the almost forgetting has only happened one other time. it's usually easy to attend to these rules. face coverings are required at all times on campus. face coverings are incessantly encouraged at the grocery store. and all other stores. 

I only neglected it momentarily, only twice, and nobody noticed, anyway. I just have to duck back into the car, snatch the mask from the dashboard, and wrangle it around my lower face before I walk through the sunny parking lot to shop or to teach, and it's fine.

it's fine. 

this is normal now-- masks all the time.

my primary mask is blue paisley print. I made a few for myself and Jeremiah out of an old spare pillowcase. his has elastic loops for the ears. mine has a stretchy string tie. 

maybe I should invest in some more fashionable mask options. maybe that would make it slightly more fun to wrap one around my face every time I venture out into any of the very few public places I ever go these days.

I can remove my face covering when I'm alone in my office (as I am in this photo showing off my new glasses), as long as the door is closed. 

on the rest of this quaint desert campus, I have not seen a single maskless soul since I was here in January for my job interview. 

...unless you count a student here or a student there who lets their ill-fitting mask droop a little. or a student here or there who is eating or drinking in class and removes their mask for a few minutes to do so. 

at the grocery store, most other shoppers wear masks too. the employees all do. all kinds of shapes and colors and designs. stripes. prints. slogans. solid-colored t-shirt fabric.

it would be creepier if they were government-issued, matching beige or navy or grey masks. if every face were obscured with the exact same shape and color of cloth.

wouldn't it be?

nothing momentous

can these miscellaneous photos become something else if I throw them together in a blogpost today? can they tell a real story or scaffold the lines of a poem?

for me there are wispy old memories inside each one. the past curls up, loose and wriggling, in little mental pockets marked with "autumn 2015" or "July 2016" or "that one conference in Rochester, NY."

but what are they for you? 

evidence? or art? or both? it probably depends on who you are.

plants in a garden. plants on a windowsill.
all in the middle of growing, dying.

or both. 

all of it part of some cycle. up. down.
rainfall, rainbows,
showered on or sheltered from.

or both.

 

writing or drawing, or both. seeing or listening, or both

being or breathing. 

but not or-- and.

always trying for and.
or failing. 

or both. 

along with the wispy memories, there are deep and unpredictable tides of emotion, too. a longing for the pieces of these pasts that have faded too far. a fear of losing all the people and connections that once felt so close and certain. amusement and nostalgia drizzling from clouds of wonder about why everything feels so impossible.

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"

throwback

I like to look back at things my past self was thinking/writing about quite often.

but all my old real paper journals are in storage right now, our apartment being a little bit too tiny and shelf space therein too limited.

so instead I scroll way back through various digital scrapbooks. what random stuff did I link to in 2013? what random photographs did I post?

dorset cereals and their lovely packaging.

aw, this game about squares that I used to be so into.

an ebook called Articulating Betweenity that I heard about at a conference one time.

was this trip to DC really only two years ago?

surely if this lost photo of a quartet of missionaries got shared enough times in enough social media places, someone out there would recognize its subjects and perhaps even its setting, right? I guess someone just has to care enough to do enough sharing. (half-relatedly, should I keep my flickr account? even though I cannot remember the password for it or even the password to the never-used yahoo email account that it is attached to? probably I should.)

I miss our old, first apartment. the balcony. the space, strangely-shaped thought it was. I miss all the windows it had, and the character of the claw-foot tub and the radiators and the tiled fireplace. how beautiful it was to walk almost everywhere from that corner. and how often we had people visit us for games and dinner parties.

will there be dinner parties again? when?

all my old journals and calendar books are in storage. but before we moved I took some photos of the calendar books. they're so eclectic and neat, all in a row. 

ten and a half years of weekly plans of various sorts.

taped-together binding. sticky notes. rough-sketched maps.

"more yoga, more sleep, more love, more writing, more open," from January, 2012.

 

lists and lists of things to do, things done. I'm sure 84% of all the list items are variations on this one: "write."

this year's is more than half-full now, just as scribbled in and check-marked as all the others are.

despite all that's going on, the summer feels strangely, blessedly empty. a paradox of having such long days and so few demanding tasks.

some things, thankfully, can stay the same for us, no matter how far away we've moved from everything we now drape in nostalgia.

one last throwback link, trawled up from the ancient depths of my twitter: belong to where you are. the whole album/stream is pretty interesting, too.

affection, safety, and a puppy

I learned just today that the German word halten can mean in English to hold or to stop.

this seems profound for some reason. the sentence in my Duolingo German lesson was "die Eltern halten ihr Babies (the parents are holding their babies)" and when my first instinct was to translate that verb as are stopping, I figured I should check the app's hints for it first. they did show both options, but the context seemed to call for are holding instead. depending on the age of one's baby, there aren't that many things you need to or can stop one from doing, really.

if I stop to think for a moment about the same range of meanings in all the history and senses of to hold in English, does that make the whole thing less profound?

the word's etymology is a long one. some snippets that resonate this afternoon:
"to contain; to grasp; to retain"
"to possess, control, rule; to detain, lock up"
"to foster, cherish, keep watch over"
"to keep back from action"

all this potent potential meaning curled up in to hold. and then there are all these phrasal verbs, too: hold back, hold up, hold out, hold off, hold against, beholden to...

to be held as a parent holds a young baby is to be safe. comfortable. cared for. right?

to be held is also to be restrained. controlled. and to be restrained isn't usually considered comfortable, though... right?

or is it?

maybe it is.

paradoxically.

in a "limits are possibilities" sort of way.

I don't remember when exactly this photo is from. September 2016 when we went to the National Zoo? probably. it's been sitting on hold in a blogpost draft for at least three years or so.

to hold also has a sense of continuation. to hold a note. to hold your position. to uphold a ruling. to have and to hold.

sometimes all of that isn't comfortable either. but sometimes it is.

I've been doing this year's 30 days of yoga. it's wonderful even when I don't think I have the time or energy for it-- alternating movement and holding, centering body and mind and breath so all is balanced. not always easy. but it is enough.

I am enough. now is enough. I hope.

in other news-- last week we added to our household a new puppy.

his name is Hamilton.

or, if you're feeling extra fancy, Hamilton Chidi Chewbacca Chesley Alonzo. he's already learned to come when called and to sit on command. Wesley's still warming up to his rambunctious, half-tamed puppy energy, but they're getting along pretty well so far.

what good pugs.

images, tendencies, and commandments

the local public library is doing free Monday night yoga this summer, led by one of the proprietors of this local yoga place that I haven't yet visited.

I've been to Monday night library yoga twice so far. it's nice. last week, I lay there and breathed and thought a bit about about my ideal self.


{ image borrowed from this kind soul on Flickr } 

past versions of my ideal self have taken various shapes and sizes and attitudes. but one thing seems to always happen when I think about this future maybe-barely-realistically-attainable person. I think about what she looks like. 

draped over an armchair. surrounded by books and children in a sepia-looking library. wearing comfy (but very stylish) grey loungewear. surrounded by plants, accompanied by a fluffy orange cat and a cup of tea. dressed in homemade and perfectly-tailored dresses. slender but not too tall of course. curly (not frizzy) hair in a perfect messy bun. the perfect pair of glasses on a thoughtful face with a flawless complexion.

why is most of what I think about when I think about her centered on what she looks like? dresses like? what her body is shaped like and how her hair is styled? I picture her in short bursts of vivid-- with this kind of dress. that kind of toned abdomen. a certain kind of skin.

why don't I think half so much about what she does? how she spends her time and energy?
I do think about that too. but it's less easy to fixate on. visuals are easier. for some reason actions don't print themselves so firmly on my thoughts. they don't fit into the short bursts.

why not?

{ favourite oatmeal-chocolate-chip muffins } 

I’ve read so many blogs that have praised Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. Smacksy is the one that comes to mind most readily at the moment but I'm 76% sure I've seen the book mentioned by at least twelve other bloggers, too. 

maybe I'll read it someday. (probably not really though)

for now, I'm skim-reading Rubin's blog. which I came across not long ago, as one does, via another blog entirely, when a fellow-academic on twitter linked to this handy blog about building robust academic writing habits, in that post, under habit #6, there was a link.

this link: The Four Tendencies Quiz.

academic writing habit blogger, Dr. Katelyn Knox, advises that knowing what your tendencies are when it comes to meeting expectations (whether your own or other people's) is helpful for knowing how to nurture good habits.

so I took the quiz, and at the end I was supremely interested (though not really surprised) to learn that I am a Questioner.

of course I am. I would have to be, eh? (I suspect that most of my family members are also questioners-- we like to understand the reasons for doing a thing before we're gonna set out and do it.)

now, I know very well from skim-reading the rest of Gretchen Rubin's blog and website that she is using this quiz and her blog and her online presence generally to sell books and to book speaking gigs and such. and books with titles like "The Happiness Project" pretty much always sound hokey to me. it seems sales-pitchy, snake-oil-y, just a little bit. "buy my book! be happier!" yeah, okay.
but I'm also not unconvinced that there is value in these ideas. the knowledge that I tend to Question before I commit to any course of action or acquiesce to any expectations about how I should do things is kind of eye-opening, however much it also confirms what I already know about myself. it seems like there’s something to it. something insightful, something that feels mind-expanding and practical. it’s not The Answer or The Solution to anything-- no silver bullet-- but it is a starting point, perhaps.

elswhere on Rubin's blog there is a post about writing custom personal commandments for your life, as aspirational guideposts or whatnot. maybe this is hokey and maybe it's helpful. it can be both at once.

the first custom amelia commandment that came to mind was "always whip your own cream," which is an easy one, but also a synecdoche for my general preference for homemade and handmade stuff. if there is ever a plastic tub of cool whip in my kitchen, it will not be because I wanted it there.

it's kind of fun to try thinking of personalized commandments. I could probably articulate a few unconscious ones I follow already, about word usage and getting enough sleep and such.

maybe "take photographs of your old beat-up shoes" is another one I could formally adopt?

{ black flats from Goodwill }

{ polka-dot flip-flips from a Ross in Hawaii }


last week while I was laying in savasana at the end of yoga practice at the library, letting my thoughts drift, I thought of one more custom commandment: refuse the numbness. I guess this one is also shorthand. it's about a deep hope that I'll always be able to be surprised by things, to be affected by things instead of jaded and uninterested. that I'll always be able to listen to the universe sending me messages about itself, about me, about everything. it's easy to let default mode take over, but I don't want that. I want to always be looking for connections, finding things to care about, practicing sensitivity to the world and what I can do in it.

numbers, words, process, and "progress"

at some point about a year ago, in the midst of my dissertation labors, I wrote down the in-progress word counts (and page counts) of all five not-yet-actual-chapters.

why did I do this? I can't remember exactly. but I was probably curious, of course. and I probably also very much needed a brief numerical distraction from the laboriousness of actually writing. I thought, perhaps, that quantifying some of the work I was doing would illuminate the process, somehow.

here are the numbers I documented:

chapter 1 = 27,589 (70 pages mostly single-spaced)
chapter 2 = 8,822 (24 pages mostly single-spaced)
chapter 3 = 3,998 (16 pages mostly single-spaced)
chapter 4 = 6,799 (33 pages mostly double-spaced)
chapter 5 = 18,442 (61 pages mostly single-spaced)

for a grand, messy total of 65,650 words.

I also made a note that the smaller word counts signified the most finished and most actual-chapter-like chapters. chapter 4 at that point was the very closest. the hardest chapters to finish were the first and the last-- last most of all. that 61-page draft of chapter 5 had all the potential citations I'd eventually have to put into my reference list. all of the drafts contained many, many blabbering notes-to-self.

now that it's almost the end of March, my dissertation monster has been finished and tied up with ribbons for about nine months. I recently added it to the Humanities Commons. I'm trying to keep my profile there alive and up to date. it seems useful and Humanities Commons generally seems like a platform worth supporting.

but anyway, when I came across this old saved list of in-progress word counts, I started to wonder... what were the final numbers?

so I had my word processor calculate them for me again.

chapter 1 = 6,081 (20 pages double-spaced)
chapter 2 = 10,045 (31 pages double-spaced)
chapter 3 = 9,842 (34 pages double-spaced)
chapter 4 = 8,144 (28 pages double-spaced)
chapter 5 = 3,644 (12 pages double-spaced)

plus... 20 more pages of references and almost 80 pages of various appendices. the whole fat document, title page, abstract, acknowledgements and all, comes out to 53,845 words.

the five chapters alone are 37,756 words. that's 27,894 words that got smushed together with other words or chopped out entirely or maybe were only ever there as mental scaffolding for the words that got to stay.

do these numbers illuminate some of amelia's writing process? perhaps. I've long known that I'm the type to over-write and cut-and-paste and whittle the thing-that-will-be-written out of a giant boulder of words-that-could-be-the-thing. I don't think I'm the only one who writes that way. writing is not linear. progress of all kinds is zig-zagging and loopy. there isn't a true end to it.

whatever illumination is there also casts some shadowy questions. why is chapter 2 so long? could I have done more with that tiny conclusion chapter? what does everyone else's dissertation chapter word count table look like?

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.

re-reading and un-liking stuff on twitter and elsewhere

yesterday I did some re-reading. first, I re-read six months or so of things I've liked on twitter. a confession: sometimes as I skim through things I once liked on twitter, I end up un-liking things I once liked in the past. liking never has to be permanent, does it? nothing is permanent. some twitter things are not things I feel like my likes need to stay on-record for. is that okay?

second, I re-read three months or so of my file of semi-daily meta-scholarly writing. it was good to remember some of the fun, inspired conference notes and see little inches of progress on projects. that file is 370 pages long now. messy, and not truly daily, but still an accomplishment.

I'm sure most of the stuff in that file is sixteen thousand times more boring to the world than most of the stuff I've liked and not yet un-liked on twitter. if we could quantify boringness, anyway.

the twitterings that I like on twitter seem to fall into pretty clear categories:

1. there are links to things that exist and that just seem wonderful--

A Searchable Database for Every Bob Ross Canvas from Joy of Painting https://t.co/lryPrbN95J I WILL MISS YOU PRODUCTIVITY.

— Lee Skallerup (@readywriting) March 30, 2017

A librarian has matched @librivox audiobooks to his community’s walking trails! So clever! https://t.co/dqzCDh17O7

— Kara Shallenberg (@kayray) May 14, 2017

2. there are lovely impressive and/or brave pieces of micro-blogged inspiration--

Happiness is the capacity to be surprised. pic.twitter.com/cN2Jt5kxoj

— Edward Tufte (@EdwardTufte) March 9, 2017

A Writer, I Think, Is Someone Who Pays Attention To The World. -Susan Sontag #AmWriting pic.twitter.com/dTXp6WEInS

— Writer's Edit (@WritersEdit) April 20, 2017

white people using their privilege to educate, a concept! pic.twitter.com/6ugbTtxSOH

— con(no)r (@ctfuconnor) May 12, 2017

Here's the cheat sheet for the 4 conundrums of the universe that our brains attempt to solve with what we call biases: pic.twitter.com/cMwHJhElVL

— Buster (@buster) January 8, 2017

or do some of these count as lessons? instructions, perhaps?


3. there are cool, amusing blips of nothing all that important--

My next d&d character may or may not work in service of a deity modeled after Donna Haraway.

— Mike, but furious (@mikerugnetta) June 6, 2017

Word of the day: "undersong" - the underlying sounds of a landscape; the ambient murmur of an environment, often hard to hear or tune in to. pic.twitter.com/BHxQUS5X4y

— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) June 6, 2017

4. there are attitudes and ideas that I find myself agreeing with, resonating with--

One more thing: No matter what we write, we write as a witnesses to our time. We do it involuntarily, like sap trapping bugs in amber.

— Alyssa Harad (@alyssaharad) February 7, 2017

My new teaching goal in life is to make sure everyone knows how to delete the blank extra page of that document they send out to everyone.

— Casey Boyle (@caseyboyle) January 8, 2017

that is a valid life goal, right there. don't leave blank pages at the end of your documents, people. it's all part of that "paying attention to the world" thing.


and 5. there are links to longform stuff that I imagine I'll go back to read later--

“...people are changing public space for their own purposes ... because they want to create something.” https://t.co/gooRfsyzU9

— Chris Jordan (@mantweed) February 20, 2017

.@edwardsdusty Dustin Edwards has brought home the 2016 Hugh Burns Best Dissertation Award! Wanna read his diss? https://t.co/Zz8NDmiW2c

— UCF Writing&Rhetoric (@UCF_DWR) June 6, 2017

sometimes I do go back and read them. sometimes I change my mind when later arrives. sometimes I forget entirely. I can't read everything. and twitter is not really meant to be a bookmarking service. but I'll use twitter however I want, okay?

from machine, toward what?

most people who know me know I get incredibly picky about movies. it is an awful snobbishness, an unshakeable sensitivity to predictable tropes and shallow sappy mush. in my silly opinion, most films are tolerable, a few are worth having seen but not much else, and a few are utter wastes of time. and a very, very few are masterful, provocative constructions that I'd definitely watch multiple times in order to get the most out of them that can possibly be gotten.

my list of movies I find significant fault with is pretty long. much of the time it's endings-- they're too neat, or too pathetic, or too conventional. I'm incredibly picky about endings of things.

my list of movies I hate is short, and my list of movies I love is somewhere in the middle. former favourites or near-favourites have included The Princess Bride, the BBC's Pride and Prejudice, A Beautiful Mind, Fight Club, Seven Pounds. maybe Inception.

I went to see Ex Machina pretty much on a whim. because I'm so dreadfully picky about films, I don't often bother with seeing things in theatres. but friend Eric had mentioned he was going; I idly looked up the trailer and decided to tag along. I'd done the same with various other films friend Eric and/or friend Sam planned to see. Guardians of the Galaxy was alright. Mr. Holmes was alright.

Ex Machina was astonishingly good. magnificently astonishing.


{ borrowed from this kind soul on Flickr }

it had all the thought-provoking subtlety that I demand of a good film, along with great art and believable/relatable characters, and nothing at all slow or boring or in-the-way of the story. the settings and sequences carry such spotlessness and shine

the ending spun to a stop with a thrilling momentum, yet at the same time with all the delicate, delicious unpredictability I could ever want.

writing about it now, I'm reminded a little of the way Seven Pounds winds back on itself with its puzzling pieces of morbid evidence. but Ex Machina only barely leaves room for us to recognize our own disbelief or suspense--by the time its beautiful twists were unfolding I just had to let them wash over me and my expectations like an avalanche of something wide-open different, ambiguous and unsettling.

I immediately wanted to see it again. in the dark of that theater, gaping, speechless, I just wanted to start all over and keep thinking about the story and the future and the brilliant composition of words-pictures-acting I'd just seen.

if you haven't seen it yet, I'll watch it with you. just name the weekend.


here are a few miscellaneous and relatively unimportant footnotes, for anyone interested in reading more about Amelia's new very favourite film:
- summary and info from the production studio
- other films from the same studio, some of which I should find and watch to see if I enjoy them as much as I did this one.

- a conversation with director and actors

- some words on the fancy, remote, Scandinavian locations

solitary confinements

according to my goodreads account, I read Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own, by Kate Bolick, in March. maybe this is sort of cheating, to review it here today even though I have, technically, written a short review on goodreads already. I'll include that here, because why not?

I liked this incredibly much more than I thought I would. memoirs can be so narrow, but all the history woven through this was wonderfully interesting. all of it adds up to poke holes in my culture's assumptions. and some of my assumptions too. I want all my sisters and girlfriends to read this book.

what else do I have to say? well, one of the references Bolick makes in this memoir/history has stuck with me for months and months. it's the idea of a trap you walk into. a prison you are happy to be trapped in. coincidentally, a similar sort of thought came up around the same time I was reading this, on a RadioLab episode about Korean pop music and celebrity culture. I made a note of the cross-over, knowing I'd eventually blog about it from one angle or another.

Bolick brings it up along with a reference to Doris Lessing's book/lecture called Prisons We Choose To Live Inside, which I have never read and know next to nothing about.

maybe I should go look it up and see for myself what it's about.

the quote Bolick slices in there, though, is quite cool: "all of us, male and female, are 'part of the great comforting illusions and part illusions which every society uses to keep up its confidence in itself' " (p. 14)

that the traps-you-choose idea is still hanging out in my head is probably a sign I haven't thought about it as much as I want to think about it, yet. so many questions. if you know something is a trap, and you walk into it anyway, does it cease to be a trap? or will there always be walls and bars and invisible electric fences around that you somehow won't even notice or won't ever even be able to find? if you are happy in a cage, is that sad, or is it beautiful, or somewhere in between? maybe these are impossible to answer. so dependent on who and where, what's important to them, when, and why.

I'll keep thinking about it.

is there a collective noun for lists?

foods I should eat more often (but not too often) because I love them so much:

- brie
- beets
- gnocchi
- sweetcorn
- dark chocolate

half-finished blogposts that I need to either finish or give up on:

- one about things I did this summer (with lots of photos)
- one about my first official co-authored publication thing
- one about things facebook seems to be up to
- one about whoever Prince is, and music, and theatre
- one about urbanity (specifically, maybe, traffic, insects, and cinder blocks)
- one with a bunch of links that seem to be broken or dead now (except for this one and this one?)
- one about Chagall and repetition and shared-ness
- one about memorable vehicles belonging to people I used to know
- one about my little brother's axe handle and other technologies
- a few with many, many photos from Austin and San Antonio
- a few about generosity and gratitude
- a few about books (The Myth of Sisyphus and Spinster)

books from this year's Tournament of Books long list I still want to read:

- Delicious Foods, by James Hannaham
- Signs Preceding the End of the World, by Yuri Herrera
- Submission, by Michel Houellebecq
- The Tsar of Love and Techno, by Anthony Marra


a few things that happened today, September 7, 2016:

- I sent 3 emails and 6 text messages
- I met with several colleagues and several students
- I cut my left-hand index finger on the pop-top of a small can of ginger ale, one that Ellery left at my house after some sort of social gathering once upon a time
- I read this fascinating little article about linguistics, language, reality and aliens
- I made pie crust, and used half of it to make a peach galette (the other half will be a butternut-squash-and-onion galette, I think)
- I planned to go to the gym after choir practice but got into a car wreck instead (not my fault, not too devastating, could've been a million-billion-trillion times worse)
- I skipped choir and the gym and took a long soak in the tub instead, with one of my awesome sister's grapefruit-scented bath bombs

more dogeared pages

longer ago than really matters to say at this point, I finished reading Lewis Hyde's Common as Air: Revolution, Art, & Scholarship. I was reading it not for a class, but to fulfill my own scholarly whimsy, which was very nice. but it was also somewhat aimless-feeling... which feeling is probably something I should work on disciplining, now that coursework is nearly behind me and I'll be reading at my own discretion for most of the rest of this academic career, I imagine. reading lists for dissertationing are under construction in various corners, I promise.

this blogpost, though, is full of quotes from most of the pages I dogeared from Common as Air. do I remember now why I dogeared them? no, not really. and looking back at them here, I don't think all of these segments make tons of sense on their own, outside of the narrative history of Hyde's book. but nobody is stopping you from going out and reading it yourself, I don't think. if you're into culture and history and Benjamin Franklin, you'll probably like it.

I have shuffled the order for the sake of giving these all a slightly more coherent vibe. make of them what you will.

"How are we to imagine the creative self? Is it an individual and unique, or is it collective and common? Myself, I think it is always both of these, and that the question proposes a false distinction." p. 178

"...where does talent come from, and what is the right relationship between it and the ego, the thing that so swiftly makes a 'me' out of the sea of the given world?" p. 203 

"Belonging simultaneously to the private and the public, we each must distinguish between what is our own (idios) and what we hold in common (koinon). The first of these terms gives rise to the word 'idiot,' for it was the Greek assumption that any life spent wholly on one's own is by nature idiotic." p. 183

that notion there is probably what keeps me from running away and living in a cave on a beach somewhere. my own inner mind all by itself, as much as I love it, would devolve into idiocy quicker than blinking if I didn't have anyone to talk to, listen to, or answer to.

"The freely choosing self is a small part of the whole; larger is the 'encumbered self,' as Michael Sandel calls it, asking that we remember how often we are 'obliged to fulfill ends we have not chosen.' ... It doesn't sound all that attractive, to be encumbered, and yet these things that constrain us (nature, family, convictions) are not things we can easily dispose of, either, and in fact accepting the limitations they bring can lay the foundation for freedoms unavailable without them." p. 217

one of the coolest points in this book, to me, was Hyde's distinctions between freedom of speech and freedom of listening. he describes the concept of a meeting hall "built to serve the eighteenth-century idea of replacing the partial self with a plural or public self, one who is a host to many voices, even those otherwise at odds with the singular being you thought you were when you first walked in the door." (p. 229)

"The freedom to listen we have in our collectivity, not in our individuality. It is a common freedom, not an individual or private one." 229

we forget about that freedom to listen part, quite often. I want to remember it more.

and then this brilliant so-what of the whole story Hyde is working with:

"our practices around cultural property allow us to be certain kinds of selves; with them we enable or disable ways of being human." 213

I love that, all its grandness and stretchy huge meaning. mm. I say this all the time when I read cool books, I know--but what else is there to say?--I want to write a book like this one, someday soon. if this PhD and its aftermath does nothing else for me but help me get to that point, then thank heaven and all the universe, it will have been worth all the five+ long years.

stuck reading

if you would, my dear audience, take a moment and read (or skim, whichever) two pieces of internet journalism-ish writing.

first, a year-old personal blogpost by Nicky Case piece, once that I might be tempted to assign as reading for students someday. it is about rhetoric without using the word, though Aristotle's ethos, pathos, and logos are in there everywhere.
The Science of Social Change.

and second, Astra Taylor's article about the terminologies wrapped up in trying to change the world.
Against Activism.

these were recommended to me in the reverse order that I've just recommended them to you in. I read them in this order though-- they are both long (for things-published-on-the-internet, anyway), but the playful, casual tone and the sans-serif of the Case piece made it easier. the curly, dense criticism of the other was not the most enticing for my distracted end-of-semester brain.

pertinent (says me) excerpts from each:

Case:

...for most people claiming to be 'apolitical,' it's usually just code for 'don't challenge the status quo.'  

if we want to make social change, the logical content of an argument is crucial, but not enough. We need to carefully and compassionately(!!!) craft the emotional content, too.

Taylor:

... for it matters less what we call ourselves and more what we do...

In our increasingly sorted and labeled society, activists are analogous to skateboarders or foodies or dead heads, each inhabiting a particular niche in America’s grand and heterogeneous cultural ecosystem [...]. Worse still, Smucker contends, is the fact that many activists seem to relish their marginalization, interpreting their small numbers as evidence of their specialness, their membership in an exclusive and righteous clique, effectiveness be damned.

the vagueness and politics of the word activism are not the only hangups I personally have. my own privileges (privileges of skin and body, of citizenship and education) have bred lots of apathy, it seems. it's not that I blatantly don't want to challenge the status quo... but I allow myself to wonder if it's worth the effort. it's not that I wouldn't mind if the status quo got challenged to bits... but am I haven't felt any pressing obligation to get involved. do I think I should? do you think I should?

my answers to that question changes from day to day. yes, the world needs changing. yes, it can be changed--I think I believe that. or do I? can it? if the world--or even a piece of it--changes for me or for you or for anyone, will the change stick, or will everything just change back next week?

most days, I am having too much fun thinking about all of this to do very much that might change the world in an obvious way.

maybe I'll work on this. the thing is, all the things I really most deeply seem to want to change about the world may not make sense to very many people. could we kill the custom of applauding so much for so many things? can waterslides be prettier on the outside?

perhaps that's an excuse though. change is difficult.

less relatedly, I'm also in the middle of reading this piece on humans + world + time by Glenna Albrecht. if you finish reading it before I do, tell me what you think. or tell me what you think anyway.