I cite

But is it habitable?

We were in New Mexico about 10 days and are now in San Antonio. We were transported primarily in a very, very large SUV-type truck and also by horses. We also walked. In hail. Down a slippery mountain. Carrying large packs. Other challenges included gale force winds and a kid who couldn't keep food and water down. We were worried about having to take her to an emergency room after we got off the mountain. She said she just really needed ice cream.

The drive from San Antonio to Santa Fe is shocking. Some might call it scenic, haunting, a reminder of geologic age. I wonder why people live out here at all. Some towns are ghost towns in becoming, becoming abandoned, beginning to haunt and remind and warn of unsustainable practices. Most vehicles I saw were very big and the speed limit in Texas is 80. A half tank of gas for my father's massive vehicle was $97.83.

Apparently sustainable living experiments are becoming more popular out here--like the earthship design in the photo. We drove past an earthship settlement outside Taos. I can't figure out how they are sustainable--the houses are spread out from each other and are relatively far outside the city. Folks will need a lot of gas. They also rely on rentals, nightly or weekly or more. The Taos pueblo (the longest continuously inhabited settlement in North America) made more sense--folks living as a community, closer together, more cooperative.

As we drove--12 hours yesterday--I kept thinking that left critiques of normativity were no different from the libertarianism of the wild west, wanting to be left alone, accountable for nothing to no one (a better way to think about it: there is nothing for which we are not accountable). Get far away enough from others, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. But that's a fantasy, a fantasy of living without encountering the enjoyment of the other.

giving up

I can't do it anymore. I give up.

The demands of kids and work are too much and I fail at both. I'm getting nothing done and more and more calls and pressures and demands for something. Stupid stuff like 'a synopsis for the marketing people, the catalog' and 'just one more pass through' and 'an additional bibliography' and 'find a reviewer for this one' adds up; when each takes at least an hour, where can I take the hour from? Even friends are too much to bear: here, just read this one thing; or, when you have an extra hour, take a look at this. WTF? Extra hour?

Last week: I'm 10 minutes late picking up a kid from a party--the last parent there. My kid in front of the building in the dark, waiting, while the host parent keeps asking where I am. This week: in and out of meetings to a get a kid to soccer. 3 minutes after I've dropped him off, practice is canceled. Someone else, annoyed, brings him home. But I'm in a meeting--which also means I can't make some informational session on advanced math at the middle school. Yesterday: I scramble to get dinner together so that the kids can eat between 6:30 and 7:00--the time gap between practices and rehearsals. I get a call at 6:20--there's pizza. We'll eat here. Then ten minutes later: can you bring money for the pizza?

My fourth grade daughter wanted to walk home from school. It's a half day. 45 minutes after school was out, she wasn't here. I panicked. But only really lost it after she showed up.

Flow: assorted details of the nonevental

Ninety degrees--or so. Very humid and overcast. Since we are upstate, we don't have air-conditioning (we are going camping in New Mexico with my father at the end of the month--not my idea; since our house isn't sealed, it feels already like camping, sorta). How do we spend our time?

Yesterday, Paul and I replaced the kitchen faucet all by ourselves. Really. I couldn't believe it. Paul had to double-wrench some of the moves. I was so impressed that I bought him dinner. My role: innuendo and tightening the weight on the spray hose. The faucet is German. I considered posting a photo of it, but it's too hot to be bothered. The cool design adds to my faux-Euro pretensions and delusions.

Two days ago Paul accidentally got a moth caught in his throat. He had to make the call--spit or swallow. He tried to hack it up, but moth was having none of it. So he drowned in scotch. The moth, not Paul. Paul's fine. But he thought I wasn't sympathetic since I didn't stop reading my book during the whole thing. I thought that I should have been commended for not getting in the way.

Today we took 13 year old boys to play laser tag. In the first game, I came in 14th. Bad strategy--I tried to stay out of the line of fire. This also meant that no one was in my line of fire. The second game: I won. No kidding. I think it was my shamelessness. I had no problem following around small kids and shooting them repeatedly. One kid (probably six years old) followed me around, shooting me even when I was down, out of commission, momentarily disabled. At one point, I snuck behind a wall, up behind him. He looked at me "you think you can sneak up on me?" Then he shot me. I think he got at least 50 points off me. But I got about 190 off him. So I won. My son (we were there for his birthday) came in second.

I was interested in the boys' car conversation. One criticized the little kids in the game: "they took it so seriously; but it's a game." The boys also quickly turned on each other--in the game, I mean. Instead of acting like a squadron, they shot each other. It's just a game. It seemed very 'whatever' to me. Don't take things too seriously. It's not worth it.

I think it is.

Montreal (a little more)

Montreal

Rain

  Rain goes to Palmela's castle 
  Originally uploaded by MissBlythe.

A couple of years ago I posted lots of dolls on I Cite. Today I liked that this one showed up under "rain." It rained the entire graduation. Cold and wet.  I was so glad not to be the Colleges' president. Other faculty shrugged and said that's why he gets the big bucks. I'm now done being the chair of the faculty, a bureaucrat. It sucked so much, like perpetually trying not to step in shit. Only after it's done does anyone say something supportive (and I just learned about about a future student with familial ties to both the Supreme Court and organized crime; this is so cool).

Anyway, back, to graduation: we (the faculty and trustees) were under a tent. The graduates and families got soaked. Oddly, none looked like wet rats. The utility of the mortarboard and polyester of the gowns. I liked that graduates invited us to their parties. It seems to me that earlier in my career I was invited to more, but maybe that's because the fraternities liked that I wrote on aliens. Or because I was younger.

I finished the grading before the ceremony today. And so the melancholy and assorted displacements and cathexes have dissipated. And here, too, is a loss, although perversely I can enjoy my symptom and store my attachments and losses into a file for future publications. Some who are dear to me loathe this aspect of my personality, my distancing or incorporating which is odd when you think of it insofar as these are actually opposing directions.

The best: partying with physicists. I love them. One can be a Stalinist with them. There's such a thing as truth. Prove me wrong. Really, I can't say enough about my admiration for physicists. One just built a turkey blind in his yard--in the city. They don't mock my survivalist paranoia but instead advise me on how to install solar panels in the roof. And one was parliamentarian while I did this faculty business. And he totally saved my ass as I had to chair the last meeting of the faculty (we voted the degrees for crying outl oud--hundreds of students may not graduated, ok I exaggerate... this reminds me: a neat part of my recent trip to NYC was overhearing some guy on the street say to some other guys: "so, ask me about how fast zombies are, like can they run or what?).

Graduation

  bw graduates 
  Originally uploaded by gapplewagen.

Another colleges' employee asked me the other day if I was going to graduation. I tried to remain noncommittal, "we'll see," "pretty busy," "I sometimes go." He was impassive enough for me to presume criticism and disappointment, to feel guilty. Then he said that really graduation was more for us than the students, the way that we break with them, close off not just the year but relationships to them as students that have built up over four (or more) years.

I've been caught in my own reveries, likely a turn to melancholy so as to avoid the grading that still isn't done. I've labeled what I feel as 'envy' but I don't think that is quite right. Still, I envy the seniors this time that seems to be completely free, completely pleasurable. Nearly a week of organized festivities and disorganized debauchery--hot air balloon rides, champagne toasts, dinners, barbecues, parties, fireworks, and celebrations. No responsibilities.

This might be just a fantasy. There might be worries about what happens now. But many have jobs, graduate school, and internships lined up. Some are headed directly to vacations. So these days may really be an interlude of freedom from responsibility.

But maybe not. I see the faces of the seniors as they walk the campus with their families. It's as if their families reinscribe them with identities they have tried to shed: the hippy kid accompanied by high strung Wall Street-type parents; the conservative prep trailed by over-dressed, insecure, overweight parents; the feminist with her father, his trophy wife, and their infant twins in a double-wide stroller. For all the celebration in the air, the families are like cracks in the surface, reminders that responsibility starts Monday, responsibility for the past as well as the future.

And I can't decide if I want this interlude really to be a time of freedom or if  I want simply to pretend, to revel in the fantasy of such a time. My graduation didn't feel free at all. I cried most of the week. Although I had been accepted into graduate school, I wasn't excited about going. I wanted to work a year in NYC but didn't have a job. I felt like an idiot who knew nothing, who hadn't read or learned much at all. I knew that my friends and I would grow apart and this made it difficult to focus on the summer of travel I would be beginning in a couple of weeks. So I wonder what function the fantasy plays for me as I drive my kids' from piano recitals to band competitions, squeezing in the laundry, glancing too quickly through the articles I have to summarize in the introduction to another issue of the journal, and seeing in the low exam grades clear indications of my inadequacies as a teacher. What would it be like to have none of this at all?

So you had a bad day...

I suspected middle school would be tough.

Political theory friends told me about their kids...hell on earth, amazing they made it through it, the worst part of their lives.  And now these kids have finished college and become political theorists themselves. Paul says that this is not necessarily the best case scenario, not a cause for optimism. I have another drink and decide to blog about it.

I was horrible in seventh and eighth grades (Paul was good but had no friends). Not quite Gus Van Sant level, but not nothing. I ran away (got caught before the night was done), did drugs (just pot but it was Alabama, and maybe I shouldn't erase the prescription drugs I scrounged out of our bathrooms), cut classes, got caught smoking in the locker room (I thought the teacher was an old hag, but she didn't turn me in), rounded more bases than Disney would acknowledge.

But not my kid, not my perfect brilliant angel, my musician, my math kid, the ethical kid who weeps for the outcasts, the kid who tells me about his life, who still hugs me, who endures the stuffed animals I place on his head and around his neck before he goes to sleep.

Change. Hormones. Who am I? Where do I belong? Do I have a place? Don't lock me in. I'm not you. You don't know me. You can't make me. But I did. I do. Don't I?

My students help. They tell me I over-analyze. Seventh graders don't think like political theorists (or do they? we've been reading Nietzsche. It fits: we saw kids playing king of the mountain outside our windows-- the perfect Nietzschean game).

He got beat up. The message from the nurse was that they weren't sending him to the hospital. The ice packs were enough. He started it. Provoked it. I'll see the footage tomorrow. Provoking a fight and then getting the shit beat out of him. And crying. Wanting respect, wanting to set the stage, the pace, wanting to call the shots, to be the man. And getting pummeled into black and blue and red.

He started it. He put a dirty broom on another kid, said "Mexican," and mocked him. That was last week. Or so it appears in the recap I head I heard this morning, the three minute version of days of his life, days I know too little about, but can't really ever know.

And also last week: "moose." Why does it hurt him to be called "moose"?  I don't get it. It's a gesture to a logo on the clothes we get for free, from another family whose son outgrows them. "Moose." Does this mean preppy? white? privileged? Weak?

I thought about making him delete or erase all his WOW levels. Start at the beginning. My students said this was way too harsh.

But still I navigate a terrain where the familiarities are deceptive and any move will have repercussions I cannot foresee but only regret.

Stealth video

A friend of my son's got suspended from seventh grade for secretly videoing one of his teachers. Naturally, he posted the video on YouTube. It had a caption like "Mrs. Jones Dancing," although she wasn't dancing. She was just talking. Some kids made funny or almost funny comments. And then they forgot about it until someone told the teacher and they figured out who had posted it. It seems like the charges that led to the suspension are "having a camera in the classroom" and "videoing a person without her permission."

My son asked me what I would have done if he had done this. I'm not sure about the law here. I didn't think it was illegal to video another person in a public place without their permission as long as the video was not for commercial use. I'm squeamish about videoing kids. It seems kinda stalker-ish.

At this point our chat led me into a long excursus on Althusser's ideological state apparatuses and Foucault's account of discipline. My son didn't even seem to mind. He actually agreed ("school sucks"). And so we concluded that if he and his friends formed a "coalition of those who think it was unfair to suspend that kid" and made videos of teachers and vice-principals and posted them as an act of rebellion that I wouldn't be mad.

As long as he keeps his grades up.

Pie

The best pie I ever tasted was made with strawberries and pecans.

Food, particularly gifts of food and hospitality, particularly desserts and sweet food, can set off strong chains of association. Pecans remind me of the tastes of my childhood, pecan pie, pecans in the stuffing, pecans in cookies and fudge, pecans in the crusts and batter of fried chicken and shrimp. Pecans comfort and reassure. In the deep South, we had lots of pecans. We'd pick them off the ground, sometimes, hoping we could eat them. I wasn't much for shelling pecans, myself, although I enjoyed seeing my grandfather's ever-changing arsenal of devices for excising pecans from their shells. Perhaps because of the work it takes to get the meat out of the shell, pecans were special and common, familiar treats.

My mother and grandmothers didn't make many strawberry pies. There was one that was oddly gelatinous. Strawberries were sliced, sprinkled with sugar, and served on top of homemade vanilla ice cream or waffles. So strawberries weren't common or familiar; they were part of another cookbook, a different lexicon of flavors.

And so the combinations of old and new in the strawberry pecan pie I ate this weekend sent me in different directions, into Southern memories and unknown, rather cosmopolitan associations. There was something reassuring yet a little surprising, like a new friend one has known for quite a while.