Reading in my office in North Quad, gray September day, 1:16pm EST
My last post here got some interesting reactions but the one that kicked me in the gut was Mark's remark that he knows the me I was recollecting, not the me from which I recollect from. So here's some evidence that we are not all that different--still reading surrounding by books and toys and photos of cute dogs. Just with big, fat reading glasses now. Clear glasses. That seems so wrong somehow.

"But I started drifting about the part about me acting my age...I do some magic tricks and...the...best imitation of myself."--Ben Folds

This week is cram-packed with meetings and messes and fires to be put out. I just want to have more time to read and write. And by read I mean a read a book, not a memo.

When I was Twenty-One

Each year, academic campuses brace for the onslaught of students whose lifespans are increasingly distinct and distant from those who teach and advise them. Often lists of data are compiled ("This year's freshmen..."). But sometimes I have to pause and think about where I was at twenty or twenty-one to get my head around where my students are at and what I can expect of them. Thinking back, I am more than simply temporally distinct from the person I was at twenty-one: my life has spanned disparate geographies, trials, losses, wonders since that time. And yet, had I not managed to live through that era and its particular challenges and triumphs, there'd be no one here typing right now. Trippy, eh?
When I was twenty-one:

• My hair was a rosey shade of plum. Then bright red. Then striped.
• I worked a lot--about 25 hours a week in addition to school: 2 jobs at the computer center, one at the art library, babysitting.
  
• I had a misdiagnosed mood disorder for which I was improperly medicated.
• I took advanced courses in my chosen field but didn't really take all they had to offer in--I wanted to but I struggled.
• My parents were separated and my mother had left my father and the country.
• I was financially dependent on others.
• My best friends were geeks, artists, stoners and the like. They meant the world to me.
• I spent my twenty-first birthday drinking with librarians.
• I chose to spend the holidays at school working rather than return to my family's home.
• I had an aquarium full of fish, plus one rubber carp that saved my life.
• I had begun to cultivate tastes: music (folk-pop), art (contemporary, modern), films (American indie), food (thai), coffee (latte) that I largely still have today. But it was the cultivation of these tastes--trips to museums, urban areas, beaux arts movie theaters, that mattered to me so much at the time.
• I cried a lot, probably cried more than the average Bear.
• I lived in a renovated Howard Johnson-esque motel.
• I was (silently, mostly passively) in love with a close friend who is still a close friend. He and his husband have now been happily together for many years. But at the time, some facts were unknown.
• I was clinically depressed but trying to read Derrida. Why do those two elements seem so linked in my mind?
• I thought the greatest thing I could ever become was a professor as wonderful as the ones who took the time and patience to deal with me. I still think that.
• I was still learning how to process, filter, talk, keep silent, be a grown-up. I still am. But for someone who is occasionally hyper-verbal, this led to problems for me.
  
• When I think back, my life was so much less stable, so much more uncertain and unknown it is remarkable to me that things worked out (or not) as they did.

I guess maybe this is why I am the professor who tends to error on the side of faith and belief in my students, even if I sometimes get burned by it. Mostly I believe they try, in the ways that they are capable of, with everything else they have going on and are going through. Because if there is one thing I do remember, most of the time when I was twenty-one I was trying with all my might to make it through each day, onto what was next: to the time when my life felt less like I was standing on a precipice.
The next year, when I graduated from college, my therapist (a woman who helped me save myself) gave me a beautiful art-glass mirror. She told me to hold it up to myself whenever I felt lost and I would see who I was and how far I'd come. Sometimes I wish I could hold up a mirror to my own students, to show them how remarkable their present selves are.
Yet all too often I forget and think instead about late papers, excuses, missed classes, busy stuff. I started writing this because I was so disappointed in someone else's unreasonable expectations of a student. But writing it has reminded me how it is our own expectations that often catch us offguard. When we're twenty-one or thirty-seven or sixty...

Garden Assessment, August 2011

This year I had more time to garden but my results were less than stellar. That said, I experimented with a lot of new plants and methods so perhaps a mixed result is simply the result of my semi-scientific method.
Here's the scoop:
2011 Successes
-brandywine tomato: that sucker has grown into the tree and finally has lots of fruit on it
-san marzano and burpee longkeeper tomatoes: these have done gangbusters
-perennial border: hostas, coral bells, a hydrangea, perennial geranium, toad lily. looks good and my first hosta transplants have done well.
-grass: between tree roots, dogs and overall dryness makes it very hard to grow grass here but we've increased our grass footprint a lot this year. I think a lot of the success is due to straw as grass seed insulation.
-gladiolas
-got rid of horrible bamboo (mostly)
-staking and twine "florida weave" system for tomatoes

2011 "Failures" aka Learning Experiences:
-patty pan squash--vine got sick and had to pull, leaving half of raised bed unused (bummer!)
-backyard raised bed--too weedy and buggy an area, not enough sun. am converting to shade/sun perennial bed.
-growing heirloom tomatoes--too much work, not enough fruit
-tomatoes from seed--put my schedule back too far. only 3 plants made it through transfer stage. I still am awaiting ripe fruit from most of my plants. This makes me nervous because we need a couple of hot hot days for them to finish up.

Summertime

Had a good week in Traverse City. Loved some of the films I saw, esp. If a Tree Falls, Windfall, Fordson. Ate pretty well and got to hang at the Grand Traverse Commons. I so wish I lived in this old sanitarium. It's beautiful and has such wonderful trees and grounds and peacefulness.
Garden is cranking along. My squashes mostly died but the butternut is still giving it a go. Tomatoes are going crazy but I'm disappointed in the Pruden's Purple, which is all growth and no fruit. The San Marzano is a winner and two of my tomatoes from seed--the burpee's long keeper and roma, are laden with fruit.
I've been thinking a lot about balance (life out of). I hope if I get more balance, some of my chronic health issues might flare up less. To that end, I'm loving Kombucha lately. I'm sure it is some kind of magic beans thing but I do feel better when I drink it. I'm also meeting with a fitness person this week. And I want to take an art class in the fall. Something non-school related!
Winston had another seizure on Sunday, which scares me. On Thursday it will be the seventh anniversary of our meeting: true love.

Gearing up for Superheroes

I'm excited about my fall courses--it's been too long since I got to do my superheroes and cyborgs course on Virtuality and Digital Identity. Gawd I should do a course on Roleplaying and Everyday Life. It's everywhere.
That would be an exciting class to plan--very interdisciplinary--novels, games, films, etc.

I heart the food journalism and blogs

Okay, this is one of those posts that is mostly just a bunch of annotated links. So be it.
I have always liked to read about food. I collect cookbooks and have read them eagerly since I was a child, when my mother collected the kind that Pillsbury published and you could purchase at the grocery store checkout. I have a sizeable cookbook collection of both historical and contemporary titles and I cook from it quite a bit. Ironically, I don't usually follow recipes but instead use them as a base and improvise a whole lot based on experience. I'll have to do another post about cookbooks I actually use regularly.
One of my favorite things about the Internet has always been the opportunity to read new recipes and food journalism. I used to read and sometimes post to the newsgroup rec.food.recipes in pre-web days. Now I read a whole lot of food stuff online.
Online versions of food journalism:

• I love Meredith Brody (even though I will never forgive her review of Tristan's 7th birthday party in the LA Weekly and she is hard to find these days. She is a terrific writer who writes about food and cinema together--my dream!) and Jonathan Gold's work so I'll read that when I can. I also read Mark Bittman's work for NYTimes and occasionally read Washington Post style/food sections. I read the Epicurious blog every weekday b/c it is so good.
  
• Francis Lam's Salon column rocks and Serious Eats "A Hamburger Today" and "Slice" blogs make me very happy. HuffPo has a delightful aggragated section of Food News, as does The Food Section. GOOP sometimes does "Make" issues about food that are really good and have great photography. And I believe WhatTheFuckShouldIMakeForDinner.com is my favorite "web 2.0" site. I even showed it in class to discuss the database-driven web.
  
• More proper, single author food blogs: Orangette is good and makes me miss Seattle's food scene; Smitten Kitchen is my fave and I always want to try her recipes. Stay At Stove Dad is good.
• Locally, Ann Arbor has some good but less regularly updated blogs, including The FarmersMarketer, Ed Viemetti's cooking stuff, Mother's Kitchen and more.
  
• Then there are food-related apps: UrbanSpoon, Epi's app, Everyday Food's Dinner Tonight app (love that).

See, I like to read about this topic a lot! I also do like to cook quite a bit too, but after a long workday I'd probably prefer reading about food online than making it myself. Luckily in the summer I get to grow stuff and cook it and that is way fun!

I'm totally excited for this IFC show!

On June 24, 2011, IFC will premiere the new show Rhett & Link: Commercial Kings. Now the premise of this show--it follows two indie commercial makers who make and love wacky local TV commercials--is already wonderful. What makes me totally excited for it though is that, according to the trailer, they appear to do a commercial for Super Shmuttle!!!
I heart Super Shmuttle for oh-so many reasons. My dear friend Anne was a client and huge supporter of Judy Rudin and her dogcare business in Los Angeles. Judy was, in fact, a favorite of Nemo, one of my most beloved canine friends. Since Nemo passed away several years ago, Judy's business has taken off and become the Super Shmuttle, complete with artwork by my favorite OC artist Shag. I think Judy has a dream job--picking up pooches and ferrying them to parks and canyons for walks and wags and so forth. I'd be her intern any day! So I'm super-happy to see that she and her pack might be on IFC soon. As Anne might have said, "Woof!"
My own gorgeous PWD Allie would adore a day in the Shmuttle.

Best Website Ever!

I love this site. It has everything I adore about the internet--user-submitted content, horrific images produced unintentionally, and a celebration of embarrassing, unplanned moments. What's not to love?
Awkward Family Photos
I found it via BBC via today's Since You Asked column by Cary Tennis on Salon.com. I've been reading Cary's columns since the late 1990s and he is a brilliant writer and someone who has been through much and learned from it. I really admire him and adore his writing voice, which is simultaneously smart, real, literate and empathetic. Good stuff. I can't believe how long he has been doing this column (with breaks for serious life-threatening illness). He took it over after Garrison Keillor stopped writing his Ask Mr. Blue column for Salon, back in the day (as they say).
In honor of Awkward Family Photos I'm including my own awkward self-portrait. Call it "SCMY as TinTin, or My Hair After a Night in New Orleans."

Garden update

I planted some of my tomato seedlings this week--a Burpee Long Keeper, a Roma and a Super Italian Paste. Already in ground are transplanted Brandywine, Amish Paste, Purple something or other (a Frog Holler I paid $ for at Downtown Home and Garden), San Marzano. Sense a pattern? I like paste tomatoes for sauce and drying.
Also in this year's line-up: butternut squash, patty pan summer squash, blue lake beans, peas, black simpson and romaine lettuces, arugula, thyme, basil of different sorts, rosemary. Still figuring out where I will put the pie pumpkin.
I'm up to three raised beds now and have my eye on the spot where S. cleared out his horrible bamboo invasive plant creature. it gets good sun...
Also reading garden stuff at You Grow Girl and elsewhere.

Our House Guest

Pickles is with us for the rest of the week. Three legs and lots of fun...I think she looks a bit like Nipper the RCA dog.

America's Subsidy Garden

From Huffpo, what the White House Garden would look like if planted according to farm subsidies:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/01/white-house-garden-subsidized-crops_n_869616.html

New Book Meet Book

Now that the winter term is waning, I'm soon to have much more time to really get cracking on my new book project. My last book project took an insanely long time (9 years) and an insanely short time (8 months!!!) to come into the world. With this project I'm hoping the timeline will be less " wibbly-wobbly, tiny-whiny" as The Doctor might say.
Right now the title of this project is All the world's a Screen: The Emergence of Internet Visuality. My plan is to analyze the historical emergence of images onto the Internet and the rise of moving images online, in conjunction with an analysis of shifts in Internet modes of access, software, and design aesthetics. And of course such a project would be no fun without a consideration of users online and their relationships with/in/as online image culture. And let's face it, online culture today=image culture=culture. Right?
Hopefully I have not bitten off more than I can chew. Thankfully I'm dusting off and rebooting some of my earlier work on online visuality in this project and I'm excited to go, go, go. Along for the ride this summer are Dmitri and Julia, my graduate student accomplices.

Hyperbole and a half makes me laugh...alot

Hyberbole and a Half is a webcomic I find utterly LOL, if I were the kind of person who used non-words like LOL.

1. The intentionally bad art is HI-larious, what with the kooky eyeballs of the heroine, which remind me of Admiral Ackbar, and the plethora of toothy grins in her draw-rings.
   
2. I relate to people who both resist adulthood and are grammar snobs. My peeps!
3. I also have a dog of the, um, mentally challenged variety who provides me with side-splitting laughs, total costernation, and the occasional dog-joy related injury in equal measure. Alot.
   

Everything Old is New Again

Hasbro's newly launched my3D goggles seem like they have 2 helpings of old/remediation mixed with one helping of new (handheld mobile media): The Stereoscope gets remediated as the Viewmaster, which gets remediated as my3D.
Mostly I am fond of them because they apparently make tropical fish swim into your eyeballs! I'd kind of be on board with that idea. I like the suggestion that 3D remains the domain of nature imagery and documentary, like travel films or Imax. But seriously, wouldn't that first fish have penetrated your brain cavity by now if you were wearing the my3D? I know the ad has a disclaimer that this is a visualization but wow, it is a good one.

Digital Media Theory Faire

Yesterday my students gave excellent presentations about what they learned in my digital media theory course. I was pleased to see a number of cats and toilets and cute animal photos made it in, as did video games, visual effects, Baudrillard, memes, Wikileaks, hypertext, music, surveillance, frightening surveillance-based pranks, Cleverbot, DJ-ing, remixing, a stop-motion minifig action movie, some performance art (with candle!), virtual identities, and even in-class freestyle hip-hop about new media!

Mostly I was happy to see that they appear to really be thinking about these things, which means I did something right. See, theory is your friend after all!
One student who couldn't make it to the Faire (yes I put an "E" in there), sent me this awesome LOLcatBORG. I love it.

I plan to put some time in here this summer

UM Computer and Video Game Archive
See The Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus article
Of course, I often plan to go here but don't make it that much. North Campus is like another planet...that's five miles away.

Ray Bradbury: you have invaded my brain

Every winter of my life I think of a television film I once saw on PBS that I can barely remember, yet it haunts me. It is an adaptation of Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day," in which a young girl living on Mars misses the few hours of sunshine a year because her playmates have locked her indoors and then been too dazzled by the light to remember she is trapped away from it.
This is how winter feels to me, like someone turned the contrast down on my world. My only question now is why must winter keep going on so long?

Ricky Jay rocks my world

This past week's episode of The Simpsons was about magic and its guest stars included the inimitable Ricky Jay, who even threw some cards around in animated form.
I think Ricky Jay is most amazing: he is a historian of the finest caliber, a publisher of good things, a magician in an era when magic is hard to find and a talented actor too.
Plus my friend Anne adored him and his fireproof pigs and that goes a long way for vouching for someone's greatness in my book.

On my radar: Yes my master

Little Girl Pledges Sith

Images in my head these days

Welcome to My Optic Dome!

I guess one has to be a certain age to get that reference, right? After nearly two decades online, I've decided to put myself and my stuff out there a bit more. This delurking is nicely timed to coincide with the publication of my book How Television Invented New Media, which can be purchased here or from my publisher directly--the lovely and good folks at Rutgers University Press.

My plan for this space is to include a wide range of semi-academic musings, links, beloved virtual objects and other such frivolties for my own and your amusement. Think of it like a Museum of Sheila-tastic Technologies.

When I write I use my own voice, in the first person and my own experiences to illuminate that which fascinates me. Typically those objects and experiences fall under the rubric of visual and digital cultures, hence My Optic. Hopefully this optic, or perspective, will not be myopic but instead will illuminate what life is like here in my end of the universe. Just remember to always bring a towel, to spellcheck and proofread if you can and keep an eye out for your giant panda.