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Sporadic

Writing over the course of our Philippine visit proved impracticable. We didn’t just have sporadic access to the internet; we had sporadic access to electrical outlets and even our laptops, which got shuffled around as much to avoid theft as to perform their jobs as computers. But we’re home, safe if not sound—jet lag and possibly intestinal bugs are taking their toll—and it’s past time to begin writing again.

I don’t even know where to begin. There is much to report on odd moments in Manila, but starting tomorrow I’ll begin my student teaching as well, not to mention news events occurring in my absence. No doubt this journal will reflect the dislocations to my obsessively cultivated routine for some time to come.

Which, for all my anxiety over disruptions to routine, is surely good and healthy. Life feels rather crazy right now, but there is no growth without change, and if you aren’t growing, you’re dying. I wish I could be confident the stress of it weren’t contributing to the considerable discomforts of settling back home.

2011 01 17 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Hell Flight

12/27/10

If this isn’t the longest day of my life, it’s at least in the top twenty—probably because it’s more like two days, literally.

Old man winter vented his fury on the New York area yesterday morning, just as I was to return home from visiting my folks: a foot or more of snow in a day. As early as 7am, flights scheduled to land that afternoon had been canceled pretty much across the board, and a lot of train and bus lines were shut down, as well. My flight was among them.

If this were the only problem, I’d just dig in for another day or three with my parents, camp out on the overburdened American Airlines customer service line until I got a much later flight, and wait out the storm. Sadly, that is not an option this year, as I’m also supposed to join the Coscolluela clan in the Philippines, on a flight taking off tomorrow. That schedule would not have left much time to pack and relax between flights even had everything gone to plan, but has become a nightmare now.

Thanks to an early-morning call from Eileene, I rapidly weighed my options, all bad, ultimately settling on an early trip to O’Hare, hoping against hope to get ahead of the crowd and catch an early flight today, fate granting the snow dies down. I got one. (Thanks, Kevin!) It takes me trough a connection in Charlotte, NC, and won’t get to New York until 1:30 this afternoon, and takes me to La Guardia rather than to Newark, but it’s a flight that will allow me to make the Philippines flight, and I’ve got a ticket, rather than merely being placed on standby. Things could have been ever so much worse.

That still leaves me with the vast gulf of time between 10am yesterday and 1:30pm today, plus a hefty hour-and-a-half drive from my folks’ place to O’Hare. A long, long day with no shower, no bed, no proper food, no companionship, and no secure internet access.

UPDATE:

I said the situation could have been so much worse. It now is. LaGuardia closed, stranding me in Charlotte. Not only am I no closer to home, but the detour leaves me worse off: Charlotte offers far fewer alternatives than O’Hare, and if everything breaks down and I can’t get to the New York area at all—which seems likely at this point—I can’t (easily) get back to my parents. And now Eileene tells me Newark is accepting flights out of O’Hare. (Postscript: this later proved false.)

Infuriatingly, American seems to have no staff on hand. After dropping off its passengers, my plane promptly loaded a new batch and took off, leaving behind only one service rep, who was so rude as to reply, when I was paged by name to the service desk, “Well, I didn’t call for you.” She also simply turned and walked away as I sought help with my situation: alternative routes, reimbursement for canceled flights, or even some information on my options. Bitch.

Now I’m caught in an airport in a strange city, no friends or family near, due in less than 24 hours to depart Newark, and the airline I’m flying doesn’t even have any staff in evidence.

UPDATE:

An hour or two has passed, and a new round of service reps came through. I had to wait through the boarding of some other flight, but this American staffer did what she could. The plan is now to travel via DC to Philadelphia, where Eileene will pick me up—a four-hour round trip for her even in good weather. She has to handle the packing for both of us and is having a thoroughly miserable time at home trying to handle the sudden travel complications while finishing pre-vacation work.

I just want to be home.

UPDATE:

I reached DC only to learn that a third flight has been canceled out from under me. The Philadelphia airport is closed. After nearly two straight days of anxiety without sleep, shower, or decent food, I’m having a hard time thinking clearly. Panic is taking over.

In desperation, we’re giving up on the plane tickets. For another $179, Eileene purchased train tickets for me. I will travel from DC directly to Newark airport, there to make the connection to Shanghai on the way to Manila. I am now in the train station, waiting for a 3am departure. So tired. Can’t sleep, for fear of missing the train. There will be no time to return home; I must travel like this to Shanghai. (Honestly, even my arrival at Newark is later than it should be for a comfortable margin of error before a departing international flight.) I calculate that, by the end of the trip, I will have spent over 72 straight hours without bed, shower, or proper food.

There must be more thorough ways to make a person wish not to take a planned vacation than this, but none come to mind.

Postscript: Made the Newark connection, exhausted and a little crazy. The flight took off an hour late, causing us to miss our connection in Shanghai, along with considerable hassling from the officious and quite probably corrupt Chinese airport staff.

I should be thinking the hell of travel continues, but It’s not all bad. Not for me. Being forced to overnight in a hotel means I get a hot shower. And a bed. It’s rather small and hard as a board, but oh, god, it’s a bed…

2010 12 27 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Wrigley

Aunt Linda has arrived early to spend Christmas Eve as well as Christmas Day with us, and with her comes Wrigley, the dog she stole from Mom and Dad’s next door neighbor.

Good job, too; that jerk thoroughly neglected Wrigley. And he a minister.

After lifetime penned alone in the back yard, and after a battery of veterinary treatment long overdue—infections dosed, parasites poisoned, open sores bandaged, malnutrition fed—Wrigley is making the transition to household pet just fine. But the signs of years of neglect are still there.

He doesn’t beg properly, for one. He knows he can get table scraps, but hasn’t developed the technique for pumping humans for tidbits, not even soft touch Aunt Linda. He thoroughly enjoys being pet, but isn’t okay with being pet unexpectedly. He still finds a gentle hand from behind alarming. It’s heartbreaking.

No dog deserves neglect, but a golden retriever least of all. No breed is sweeter and more loving. Hell, no creature on earth is sweeter or more loving than a golden.

2010 12 24 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Art Crud

We visited the Rockford Art Museum today, to see the “Spaces Within” exhibit. Very disappointing, and I say that relative to the modest expectations one might have of any large, suburban art museum.

Judging modern, abstract art can be difficult even for aficionados; merely saying something meaningful about it lies on the edge of art-ignorant yahoos like yours truly. One can judge representational art by how accurately it represents objects. One can judge surrealism by how effectively it shocks. But abstract expressionism? There’s no solid landmarks, no fixed points of reference; anything that becomes so fixed is, almost by definition, obsolete. And without such standards, it’s hard to distinguish real talent from con artists—pun intended—especially for us art yahoos. Most of the “Spaces Within” exhibit just looked ugly and amateurish.

But how can someone without an art education dare stand up and say so? “I don’t know much about art but I know what I like” isn’t enough. If we don’t appreciate art, is it because we’re insufficiently sensitive to see it, or because there’s nothing worth seeing?

I’ve worked out my own method to answer to that question. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start to understanding. If people, art sophisticate or not, react more-or-less consistently to a piece, the artist is doing something; I choose to give him the benefit of the doubt as to whether they’re sufficiently skillful to be doing what he intends.

The Nicholas Sistler pieces produced a consistent reaction. I could not have put it into so many words, but having developed an intellectual reaction of my own, I’d have to agree with the critique I read afterwards, describing a tension created between the viewers sense of being big before postcard-sized frames and a sense of being small created by a low, exaggerated perspective in those frames. I’m not sure we needed twenty or more paintings doing precisely the same thing, but I can only conclude Sistler was communicating what he intended, since both I and the curator saw something similar.

The rest of it, however, looked like the work of an art student faking his way through a course: aimless squiggles, repeated figures, and commentary looping around the subject with vague comments about the juxtaposition of arcs and lines and a sense of being both inside and outside. Whatever the hell that means. None of it gave me a sense of being inside or outside. My parents didn’t see anything worth comment in the paintings and sculptures, either. My conclusion: this was bullshit trying to slide by on Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome.

Satisfied we’d seen all there was to see of the exhibit, we visited the basement exhibit, and e contrast was stark. Most of it looked pretty neat, even if I couldn’t tell you why. I haven’t the vocabulary of artistic theory to do so, but I liked virtually everything downstairs better than virtually everything upstairs. And no, it wasn’t for being more concrete and representational. My favorite piece, titled “Storefront I-J,” depicted a fire in a prisn-like residential block that had a sketchy quality reminiscent of Bill Plympton, but there were two curious portraits on brown paper and a drawing of surreal totem-pole figures meant as lakeside signs taken from a photo, all at least worth looking over for a minute or two. Mom and Dad felt the same, reactions developed independently since we’d drifted apart taking the main exhibit at different paces. The uniform sense that this was all better than the stuff upstairs reinforced a sense that the main exhibit was trash posing as real art.

2010 12 23 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Bread and Shaving Water

No cloud but has its silver lining. My parents have hard water. It’s not so bad as the private well water they had when they lived on the farm just outside Rockford, but it’s still palpably hard water. That makes it somewhat unpleasant to drink, and I’m still on my 48-unwanted-ounces-of-water-a-day diet to prevent kidney stones, but I notice it even more when showering.

Hard water doesn’t rinse off properly. It leaves a film behind. While still wet, before drying entirely and depositing a mineral crust, it feels faintly oily, like the film left behind by a soft soap. (Also, my parents favor soft soap…) When showering, I end up rinsing for several extra minutes in a futile effort to rinse off the water itself, mistaking it for soap film.

This morning, I discovered the brighter side of this situation: lacking shaving cream thanks to airport security, I found that one can shave quite effectively without, if using hard water.

I’m sure shaving cream salesmen would squawk at the claim, spinning some elaborate explanation of how ingredients in shaving cream or lotion not only slicken the skin but close up pores, thus raising whiskers for closer cropping, with the same fervor that razor manufacturers want you to think that using twin razor blades means you’re shaving twice a day. There may be some microscopic difference between whiskers shaved with hard water and whiskers shaved with shaving cream, but I can’t confirm it with my fingertips.

2010 12 22 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Cold Front, Home Front

I flew into O’Hare today feeling somewhat harried by the season. I rode the bus into Rockford with a swelling Christmas spirit.

What made the difference? A few inches of snow. It blankets the fields, turning the ugly stubble of November into winter wonderland. It dusts the trees, especially icing the evergreens. It feeds icicles on the rooftops. It stretches to the broad Illinois horizon. I’m home, and it’s Christmas.

In truth, home is New Jersey now. That’s where my love is, my stuff is, and thus I suppose, where my heart is. But it’s not where I grew up. With snowfall so light and late, and winter garb universally black, it fights an uphill battle trying to make me feel home for Christmas, with all the Norman Rockwell trimmings.

2010 12 21 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Joy to the World

Because the radio couldn’t pick up NPR in our basement, where I was wrapping Christmas packages, I was forced to search the dial for another station. When I came across one playing Christmas carols, I stopped. Without any snow, I need all the seasonal signals I can find to get into the holiday spirit.

They were good, too: proper carols like “Adeste Fidelis,” as opposed to the more commercialized secular carols safe enough for shopping centers to blast at their customers. Not even dubious rock-n-roll versions, either, but old-school choral arrangements. So I uppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to find I was listening to a right-wing Christian station. Every fifteen minutes or so an announcer would come on to remind us to pray for the heathens in Libya, support US soldiers, distribute evangelical business cards, and similar blandishments that don’t match my estimation of Christian virtues.

But periodic religious dumbassery is a small price to pay, I suppose, to preserve such fine music. Those songs belong to me as much as they do to fundamentalist Christians, but it seems corporate America isn’t prepared to do its part to preserve that portion of our cultural heritage. Too much potential for religious controversy and bad press, I suppose, but even more, no copyright fees. So unless these fine old songs are to become the exclusive property of religious extremism, more secular people like me are just going to have to sing Christmas carols more often.

2010 12 20 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Center of the World

As regular readers realize by now, I’m a fan of the Great Lectures series, whichever name it goes by. Only the Egyptian history lectures have disappointed so far—but I have to say, the lectures on religion in the classical Mediterranean world come close. On the whole, the lectures are enjoyable, informative, and well narrated. But I, for one, found the lecturer’s apparent favoritism for his own religion occasionally annoying.

The effect is subtle; pointing to a particular statement and shouting “There! That’s religious bias and/or historically inaccurate!” is impossible. But the lectures contain a palpable if implicit tendency to frame religious traditions more sympathetically according to how closely they resemble the speaker’s own beliefs, and to treat the history of religion as an ongoing advance towards the pinnacle of modern religious sophistication, a process akin to technological progress. Once noticed, the tendency is impossible to ignore.

For example, I noticed that Professor and Bishop Glenn S. Holland describes shortcomings of several ancient religions as a problem with the religions: Egyptian religion is unsatisfactory because it provides no comprehensive ethical guidance, Mesopotamian religion is unsatisfactory because it offers no hope of a better life to come, Greek religion is unsatisfactory because the gods can be openly cruel. Shortcomings of Christianity, however, including those it shares with its Judaic parent, are described as problems for the religion: Holland addresses the Problem of Pain—how an omnipotent and loving god could permit human suffering, much less knowingly create a world with suffering—in introducing Judaism, but does so as a question to be resolved, and goes on to “resolve” it by anticipating the answers of the much later Catholic church. Whether those answers resolve anything is open to considerable question.

Similarly, practices that might seem unpalatable to 20th century Americans are treated as shortcomings of the religion, unless those practices are Christian, in which case, they are shortcomings of the practitioners, who aren’t doing it right. Holland eagerly explains that the earliest years of the Christian church—the “Jesus movement,” as he calls it—was egalitarian in nature, notably including women in prominent roles, in contrast to the exclusively male priesthoods of other religions of the region. This struck me immediately as a false contrast; whatever its roots, Christian leadership rapidly became exclusively male, so it hardly deserves distinction from other religions that had already had centuries and devolve into sexism. After five to ten minutes of praising Christian gender equality, Holland spends twenty seconds admitting that, within a generation, that equality broke down, shaking his head sadly at the appearance of a doctrine not inherent to the church.

Admissions like that are what make the bias of the lectures subtle, and forestall accusations of bias by dipping briefly into other perspectives. The recognition of Christian failings is there, but the attention, mind you, was lavished on that virtuous first generation, and not the millennia of bigotry to follow. The recognition of the Problem of Pain is there, though rapidly written off with promises of an afterlife that doesn’t really explain why pain should exist at all. The tone of perpetual improvement in religious thought made me curious whether Islam would be treated as yet a further improvement on Christianity. At the very least, its early, reform-minded days would highlight a cycle common to religions of early virtue hardening into authoritarian doctrine. But, alas, Islam is not mentioned at all. Perhaps it was ignored as not truly Mediterranean, but that raises the question of why Scythian mystery cults made the list; perhaps it was ignored as not truly belonging to the classical era, but that raises the question of why paleolithic religions made the list.

As an atheist regularly frustrated by religious bias, perhaps I am hypersensitive to the favoritism shown here. However sensitive I am, however, the bias is indeed there. At one point, Holland warns his students that few speakers on religion are free of bias, and openly counts himself among religious historians with a definite preference for one over another. Well, all right…but realizing that, part of a religious historian’s job is policing himself and seeking to correct, or at least compensate for, that bias. Admission of sin is not a license to practice that sin, as I’m sure His Excellency understands.

2010 12 03 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Watch and Learn

Observational instruction—“student teaching,” to use a familiar but not-technically-accurate term—varies with the subject, but even more by the student teacher’s supervisory instructor. The difference between strictly observing and “hands-on” observation is particularly significant.

The latter is tiring, to be sure, and often frustrating. The exhaustion, at least, is a good sort of exhaustion. But just watching it done? Exhausting in a bad way, the exhaustion of sitting up straight in the slow-motion purgatory of boredom. If you thought Gauss-Jordan elimination, the generalized algorithm for solving a system of n linear equations in n variables, was tedious when first learning it, imagine watching it after mastering the advanced professional methods built upon it.

2010 12 01 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Matter of Trust

I dunno; this is getting kinda sketchy.

Just a few weeks ago, I voiced support for Wikileaks, when it helped release classified documents confirming that the US knowingly abetted torture of political prisoners in Iraq, with hints of active participation. At the time, I argued that somebody has to act as government watchdog. I would prefer a professional and adversarial press corps, but since news media have largely abandoned their custodial role, we should be grateful for whistleblowers and enablers like Wikileaks, despite a somewhat lower standard of journalistic integrity—for example, less thorough fact-checking.

I still feel that way. Exposing corruption and criminality that citizens of a democracy have a right to know about their government and their officials—indeed must know if it is to enjoy the actual benefits of democracy is vital. Without public knowledge, there is no government accountability. When our government breaks the law or lies to the public, say, for example, to start a war in the Persian Gulf or torture civilians, whistleblowing is right and proper, even if doing so breaks laws concerning classified information; exposing the greater crime is more important, and some very great crimes indeed hide behind the fig leaf of “national security.”

When there is no crime to expose, however, leaking government documents is not admirable. The recent Wikileaks release of State Department documents contained awkward and embarrassing material: unflattering characterizations of foreign leaders, and even a few US figures. But I have yet to hear any evidence of wrongdoing of any kind, much less criminal corruption. The state papers do not, therefore, contain information the public has a right to know, nor a need to know. Consequently, the release of the documents, which embarrassing but ultimately insignificant statements, damages the country without accomplishing a greater good. Our enemies (and allies!) can mine these documents for advantages in negotiations, and the sudden awareness that speaking one’s mind even internally can lead to embarrassment can only have a chilling effect on the free exchange of ideas withing the State Department and between nations.

Further, in releasing documents that do not damn but merely make trouble, Wikileaks invites just reprisal from the government. So long as they stick to painful exposes, a government that professes a love for liberty cannot act to shut the site down without risking a backlash, most especially demands to see just what makes a given leak so terrifying to authorities. But when leaks interfere with the operation of government to no clear end, the exposed government appears the victim, justified in shutting down Wikileaks, seizing its documents, or even apprehending its staff.

With professional journalism giving way to mere editorializing, he-said-she-said reporting, and “infotainment,” we need Wikileaks, or something like it. The price we must pay to keep it in place is clearly going to be high, for public as well as government agencies and officials. Leaking information simply because they can is no way for a watchdog to act. If only we still had watchdogs who knew how to do the job properly.

2010 11 29 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink