2012

...the humans are dead (Flight of the Conchords).
...only heteronormative family units can survive the apocalypse.
...remain calm, enjoy the view and settle in for a full term of Digital Media Theory.

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!