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Friday, April 19, 2002

Shit, how did it get to be Friday already? Not that I'm complaining or anything, but ...

Oh yeah. Crazy week, that's right, time flies when etc. We're back in Registration Hell, every day solid with student appointments. Among the items on today's entree platter:

--the student who phones me from the emergency room to tell me the aged relative for whose care she's responsible is in the ER with a medical crisis, who therefore can't make her appointment and needs me to log on and do her registration for her so she won't miss her queue spot, and also to call her profs and explain why she has to miss class;
--the student who has to be sat down and told that, since he's flunking calc for the second time, he's never going to get into engineering school, he needs to find other options, who tells me there is no other option, because his family will never forgive him if he doesn't get into engineering school;
--the student who wants to transfer to a nursing program somewhere else, but who's too intimidated by the computer to look up other nursing programs, and who needs to be shown how to use Google, how to navigate menus, and who needs instantaneous determination of course equivalencies from schools I'm wholly unfamiliar with;
--the attitude princess from the 'burbs, who's going to be starting here in fall, and who'd planned to go to a much tonier private college except her parents decided they didn't want to pay for it, who needs to be listened to, condoled on her disappointment, gently confronted on her attitude, given the pep talk, toured around the building, and convinced that it will be possible for her to ride the city bus without getting molested by lowlifes or dying of chagrin;
--the student coming back after 20 years away from college, who's trying to compose a letter of appeal to the Scholastic Committe, and who needs me to listen to a long and horrific tale of domestic abuse and raising five kids by herself, which she offers up in shame as an explanation for her past poor grades, and which I have to persuade her doesn't need to all go in the letter, and encourage her to find other ways to write out and come to terms with;
--the student who can't decide if he wants to do pharmacy or graphic design, and who needs some in-depth conversation about his life goals and values;
--the student who's applying for a broadcast internship and needs someone to help her rewrite her resume;
--and of course a half-dozen others who simply need to be helped in picking out their courses for the fall.

All of these in no more than 30 minutes apiece, of course. During a day in which my computer was also crashing at least once an hour. And in which I somehow managed to get finagled into being on not one, but two committees for next year. Oh, and in which I also was handed the fourteen packets of vitae and supporting materials for the grad-assistant position, which I need to review and rank. By Monday.

I love my job, actually; I love that it stretches me, it pushes me to find reservoirs of patience and empathy that I didn't think I had in me. It makes me a better person than I thought I could be. But boy, some days it makes me feel like it wouldn't be so bad just being a slacking-off slob.

~~~~
In other news, I finally went to see Lord of the Rings last night, thereby sustaining my always-late-to-the-party credentials. My strategy of waiting for a weekday night late in the run paid off; there were only eight other people in the entire theatre, all adults, all of whom gave off an air of being repeat viewers, and they were quiet throughout.

The film was satisfying in the ways I expected (respectful of source, intelligently executed, visually spectacular), and also unsatisfying in the ways I expected; heroic/epic adventure, especially when portrayed on the big screen, with lots of attention given to battles, monsters, landscape, etc., doesn't lend itself to intricate character exploration, after all, but that's what mostly interests me these days. I enjoyed myself, never felt the three-hour-length dragging as I'd feared (in general, 90 minutes is to me about the right length for a film), oohed and aahed at the visual grandeur; and I also left with a craving for something more, something that would get below the surface of these characters and their feelings, into their inner lives and relationships. In other words -- um -- well, OK, a certain craving for the kinds of stuff that fanfiction can give.

Not that I am trolling for LotR fanfic recs, heavens no; especially not for really good stories that get into that whole extremely interesting Aragorn/Boromir vibe (quit snickering over there, Dargie). Not that I'm at all taken with . . . OK OK OK, can I help it that I really like 'em long, lean, dark, mysterious and scruffy? Especially with, y'know, the cheekbones and all? (Just shoot me now . . . )

Actually, though, I'm not really looking for slash in this fandom; perversely, one thing I really enjoy about this universe is that it has emotional space for all sorts of male intimacy that have nothing to do with sexuality. Over time, I've come to realize that I'm not someone who's really in slash for the sex; that, as often as not, sex is to me the shortcut to, or the shorthand for, other kinds of intimacy, the emotional opening-up that I think is in some ways even more fraught with danger and taboo, for men or between men, than the sexual.

Um. I typed that last paragraph about an hour ago, and since then have been messing around doing puzzles and dipping into random blogs, and every so often returning to this and thinking that there's more I want to say about it, but damned if I can make my brain work right now. Tired. Very tired. Going to fall into bed now.

Posted @ 10:09 PM CST [Link]10 comments

Tuesday, April 16, 2002

The storms are rolling in, as I type. We've been in the Great Heat-Wave that's gripped the midwest (90 degree in mid-April? it's Bizarro!Minnesota!) and now I have the Weather Channel on, muted, as I type, and can watch the big orange-red storm centers blooming just to the west of me, billowing eastward. Outside, it's totally black; a huge wind is gusting around the house and rattling the blinds, and I can smell rain on the wind, and feel a foreboding heaviness in the air. I may be woken up by hail falling, in a few hours, or the tornado-sirens wailing.

God, I love storms. I could likely do without the twenty-below-zero, and the ninety-above, if I were to move away from here, but I'd really miss the big storms. They're a sort of weird Janus-reverse-face to midwestern reserve, midwestern repression -- great huge tempestuous blowouts of passion and melodramatic extravagance; they're probably the safety valve or pressure release that makes life here liveable. (I find myself wondering if anyone's written Smallville fiction that really takes account of, and does justice to, the nature of Kansas weather, and its omni-presence as a force in daily life. Though I'm not Kansan, my parents both grew up there, I've spent time there, and I know that you really can't deal with that part of the world authentically without having landscape, climate, weather, lurking perpetually in the background as a kind of climatological Greek chorus.)

Whoooo. Huge gust. I'm going out to move my rosemary shrub under cover, and make sure the upstairs neighbors haven't left any of their grandson's toys where they could get blown away.

Posted @ 09:45 PM CST [Link]3 comments

Monday, April 15, 2002

One of the comforting things about reading others' blogs--especially those in which people natter about their personal lives--is the reminder that I'm not the only one who falls into these intermittent spells of unfocused, drain-circling, time-frittering torpor [waving to Anna and Destina]. Over the weekend I started four lengthy philosophical list-posts, and two or three deep-type blog entries, all of which wittered away into a tangle of unfinished thoughts and now languish on my hard drive. I got maybe three paragraphs added to the story. This, after a weekend that I largely spent sitting in front of the computer.

This morning, I read three blog entries on the general topic of intellectualizing in fandom -- Naomi's, and then Jenny-O's response, and Sarah T's rejoinder to Jenny. One thing that interests me is that all three of them seem to be making at least one common point: "Don't tell me how to have fun, dammit!" With, in Naomi's and Jenny's case, some undercurrent of "And my way of having fun is better than yours."

What makes these conversations so emotionally fraught, I think, is that in American society at least, whether we like it or not, there is a substantial prestige and class loading on being an academic, being an intellectual. I'm chronically aware of this because, while I come from an upper-middle-class academic background, I work on a daily basis, in an academic setting, with people who emphatically do not -- students from poor or working-class backgrounds, who are often the first in their families to go to college. So I've had to become more aware of the various traps I can get myself into: how my accustomed ways of talking can have the unintended effect of establishing superiority, putting down; how my default assumptions about others' interests, goals, motives for being in college can come across as elitist or (at best) utopian; and how my efforts to downplay all this stuff can seem (and can be) offensively patronizing. For me, academia's my home country, and like any citizen I can veer back and forth between patriotism and mockery, loyalty and criticism, with the basic security of someone on home turf. But these students are immigrants, trying to learn the customs and the language, and torn (as I think immigrants must usually be) between the aspirational desire to belong, fit in, achieve, and a fierce loyalty to where they came from, defensiveness about the ways they feel put down, and a resentful need to belittle that to which they aspire, to take the stuffing out of these people who seem to think they're so damn much better.

I have my own conflictedness about intellectual discussion, which grows out of the fact that I used to be an intellectual, and am not, really, any longer. "Intellectual" defined here as someone whose deepest joy is playing with ideas, theorizing, analyzing and re-synthesizing, working concepts out to their conclusion. For most of my younger life, that was it for me, my defining reason for being on the planet. But at some point -- well, I remember quite clearly when I stepped off that path; it was the end of my stint at UC Santa Cruz, when I was finishing up my protracted BA, twenty years ago. I'd been studying normative political philosophy, with considerable intensity, and the natural next step, the one my profs were nudging me toward, would have been to go into a doctoral program in some theory-dense field. I considered it; I even filled out a few applications. But at the same time ... it was like I'd been spending a lot of time living in the high mountains, and while that's exhilarating -- very clean, very pure, huge epic vistas -- at the same time, the air was getting a bit thin for me, it was cold up there, and I started losing my grip on what I was doing, having bad falling dreams, and finally I decided it was time for me to pack up and haul ass back down into the lowlands, with all the proles <g>, and do other things with my life. Which I did.

So nowadays I feel like the aging ex-jock, with the bad knees and the incipient beer-gut, standing on the sidelines and watching the kids at play. I remember what it was like to be in the game, the pure, exhilarating, soaring joy of it; and it's still fun sometimes to go out and knock the ball around, even though I can't really get it out of the infield any longer. But I'm not in the game; I won't, or I can't, suit up and go out for the full nine innings. By which I mean -- dumping the sports metaphors, and circling back to where this entry started -- that while I still like tossing ideas around, I no longer have whatever it takes to carry them through to conclusions, tie the pieces together, do the thinking-through and summarizing. And to me, that's the defining element of being an intellectual--taking responsibility for your ideas, working them out to the end. I take that kind of responsibility for my writing, mostly; I don't for my theoretical pifflings. Which makes it less fun, for me, because the pleasure really comes in taking it seriously enough to give it everything you have. Taking it seriously enough to really play, the way the great players do.

Posted @ 08:30 AM CST [Link]7 comments