What I miss

I think about summers when I was a kid, and summers now. And there are some things I miss, that I probably didn't fully appreciate when I was a kid.

One thing: Where I grew up, it got down into the fifties, or at least the lower sixties, every night. You could open your windows at bedtime and it would be cool enough to sleep. (This was also in the era before "boom cars" - my neighborhood was pretty quiet). Here, where I live now, we get a stretch (starting about now) where 80 is the low at night. And that just feels all kinds of wrong to me, and it makes me sad.

Also, along with the getting cool at night, every morning when you got up when I was a kid, the world felt fresh and new. There was usually dew and sometimes even fog, and the air smelled good. We'd get breezes overnight that would sweep away any funk of the previous day. Here, where I am now, we get persistent high pressure during the summer, and even though the dewpoint is very high it seems very dry out...and when I walk out of the house at seven in the morning to go to work, I can still smell the exhaust from the truck route a couple streets over, and the stale grease from the Dairy Queen, and if a skunk got hit out on the road, I smell that too...the world seems kind of tired, like it didn't get renewed overnight.

(It's entirely possible the "world made new"/"same sad old funky world" is mostly a construct of my mind, and is the difference between being 8 and being 43.)

Another thing I miss - not so much the freedom of a summer-off-school., because frankly, the freedom got a little boring after a while - but the way you could go out in the morning and the world felt bright and new. I don't get out in the mornings much, other than to head over to work. I get some inkling of that old feeling on the rare days off from school when I either head out to do field research early, or I head off to do something like early grocery shopping. The sun's just coming up and there's a feeling of POSSIBILITY. I guess that's what I remember as a child: waking up, getting dressed, eating breakfast, and then having a full day in which to do exciting things.

I went to a day camp for a couple years when I was a kid (I started going mainly because the person who was my BFF at the time was going). We'd show up early in the morning, just as the fog was starting to dissipate. I remember the activities: tennis first, then crafts, then swimming, then a rest period or sometimes organized games like capture the flag. Once a week (as I remember) they did away with that schedule and we either played big games all morning or took a field trip. (Usually the field-trip days were all days and we either packed lunches or had a box lunch). Now that I look back on it, I'm glad I had that experience. I was never that great of a tennis player, and the crafts weren't that exciting (the older girls got all the good colors of plastic lacing, and besides, I never got the hang of making lanyards). But I did conquer my fear of deep water in the swimming part, and actually got to be a pretty good swimmer. And also, just hanging out with friends and drinking "bug juice" (and making gross jokes about why it was called "bug juice") and running around the buildings of the big old prep school that I later attended for high school...

Another thing I miss from childhood summers: the weather was variable. Here, it gets hot, stays hot, and doesn't rain, usually from June until late September. When I was a kid, we'd have maybe a week or two of really hot days mid-August, but the rest of the time it bounced between the 70s and low 80s, and there was even the occasional day when a cold front came across the lake and cooled it down into the 60s. And some days were overcast, some days it rained. It didn't feel like every day was a carbon copy of the others, which is how it sometimes feels here, and I find that's not very good for my psyche. I find myself scanning the weather maps, hoping for a cold front (though they rarely bring any temperature relief) or any small chance of rain.

I'm sure part of the weather I experienced as a kid was due to it being a historically cool decade (the 1970s). I remember a few years in my late teenaged years when it got pretty dang hot - one summer we were flying back from vacation and there was some concern if we'd be able to take off on our connecting flight from Chicago to Cleveland because it was so hot....I think there was a report of a plane having a blowout on one of the landing gear that was blamed on the heat.

I wish we'd get another "historically cool" decade during what remains of my lifetime. (Though at this point I'd settle for the coming winter to be cold enough to kill off a few of the bugs).

Getting it off my chest.

I'm still thinking about what happened in Colorado. A lot of the Monday-morning quarterbacking makes me kind of sick, the idea that more gun laws, no, fewer gun laws, no, banning costumes at movies, no, rounding up "quiet" people and subjecting them to psych evaluations, no, whatever other thing....could have prevented it. I think I have two conclusions:

1. There's bad stuff that happens that can't be prevented. We can increasingly give up liberties, we can hide in our houses - but that won't stop bad stuff from happening. Granted, there are things you can do to lessen the risk of bad stuff happening to you - not walking alone late at night in a bad part of town springs to mind - but there comes a point where you have to live your life and just accept that there's a minute risk that something bad will happen.

By all means: get the "bad guys" off the streets. Allow people to protect themselves. But there's a point at which we're going to have to accept that bad stuff sometimes happens.

2. We're all looking for an explanation. We want to know why. I suppose on some level we want to know that because we think if we know "why," we can avoid something like this happening again. Look at how the news media jumps to (wrong) conclusions about the person's affiliation. People try to find some commonality. I was very put off on Sunday when one of the men in my Sunday school class remarked, "So often these shooters seem to be described as "highly intelligent and highly educated." " I realize I'm sensitive to that because I'm highly educated and arguably highly intelligent. I made some comment about that education doesn't necessarily grow a conscience, but at the same time I think blaming intelligence or education for this sort of thing is incredibly wrong-headed.

I think a lot of these violent crimes boil down to something very simple, and something that is unfortunately (in lesser degrees of severity of course) an epidemic in our society: not seeing the other people around you as fully human.

The only way I can imagine someone being able to kill civilian strangers (I exempt wartime situations here; that's sort of a form of self defense, or at least defense of one's country or way of life) is to dehumanize them to the point where they are like the enemies in a video game.

I've also commented in the past that I'm not a fan of separate hate-crimes legislation, because I believe any kind of crime against another human shows some level of hatred toward them. You can't beat up someone and steal their wallet without having hate in your heart on some level - whether it's a hatred born of feeling that life has wronged you and you are entitled to someone else's money, or a momentary hatred of the individual walking down the street because they refused to give up their wallet when asked, or whatever. It doesn't matter if that person is the same or different race from you, or sexual orientation, or gender, or religion, or whatever. There's still hate there.

The thing that fills me with sadness and dismay is the realization how common lesser forms of this hatred are. Look at a lot of the political commentary on places like Twitter - short bursts, often saying something horrible about the "other side." I've seen people actually wish death (or so it seems, if the statement is interpreted literally) on someone who opposes something they support. (And so often what is going on in the world canNOT be boiled down to 140 characters).

Or you see how people treat each other on the highways or in the grocery store or where ever. People shoving in front of others in line, people weaving in and out of traffic and cutting other people off. Recently I had someone cut me off on the highway and then give me the finger because I wasn't going quite fast enough to suit them. (I was driving at the speed limit). And while a lot of that is just anger and frustration, and I get that - still, it's so easy to see that person in the other car as less than human.

One thing a pastor once suggested struck me: that that person who is driving a little fast and a little recklessly, maybe they just got word their child was in the hospital and they were rushing to see him or see her. Or by a similar token, maybe the person driving slowly and cautiously just had a warning light come on on their dashboard, and they were trying to get to a place to pull off and see what was wrong without causing too much danger. There are sometimes extenuating circumstances.

I see this kind of behavior a lot at the grocery store. People yelling at cashiers, people pushing in front of other customers, people doing things like talking on their cell phones and nearly running into other people because they literally do not "see" them. And while I realize it's a long stretch from a person being selfish on a cell phone to a person harming other people....it seems in our culture right now selfishness is growing, that there are some people who seem to encourage "not seeing" the other person...or rejecting them as somehow "less" because of their beliefs or attitudes, or whatever.

I've decided that I'm going to try my best to, if I criticize, criticize POSITIONS or ATTITUDES and not turn it into an ad hominem attack. There's too much of that already and it does make me repulsed when I see, for example, the woman screaming at a person in the Wal-mart because that person got the last whatever off the shelf when the woman really wanted it. I'm tired of the ugliness winning.

What would you do?

(No, this isn't about the theater shooting. All I have to say about that is how sad it is, how awful for the families of the dead and injured, and how fed up I always get at the Monday-morning quarterbacking about gun control/stopping showing violent movies/"introverts and loners are ticking time bombs"/etc.)

I had to run over to the next largest town last night: I have to use a special kind of antiperspirant (because my underarms are delicate flowers that get upset if I use a scented, non hypoallergenic kind). Of course, my small town doesn't sell the brand I have to use. And yes, I can order it online - but I'm going on a trip in about a week and wasn't at all sure that it would arrive in time, and I was close enough to being out that I could see running out just before I left.

So I figured, heck, I'll run over there, go get my antiperspirant, go to the big bookstore, do some grocery shopping, grab dinner out. I went to one of those "casual dining places" - a sort of sandwich shop. Places that are fairly family-friendly, and I'd seen families in there before when I ate there. Generally happy families, happy kids, the place has a "play zone" where the kids can hang out.

Well. Last night, as I had just been served my food, a mother and three kids came in. Two were tween/early teen girls and were perfectly well behaved, they seemed happy about the treat of dinner out. The third was a boy of somewhere between seven and nine. Who was throwing a fit:

"NO I DON'T WANT TO EAT HERE! I DON'T WANT ANYTHING TO EAT! I JUST WANT TO GO HOME! I JUST WANT TO GO HOME! I JUST WANT TO GO HOME!"

Screaming and sobbing as his mom dragged him up to the counter where you order (his sisters looked mortified and told their mom what they wanted and went to find a table).

The kid continued to scream and cry and throw a tantrum. EVERYONE in the restaurant could hear him. He didn't shut up. His mom spoke quietly to him but I could not hear what she said.

He continued to fuss through part of their meal, finally he curled up on the floor and grumbled.

Okay: dismissing any kind of issue-beyond-his-control (he did not SEEM like someone on the Autism spectrum, and yes, I've known a few kids who were), what's a mom to do?

I know what I'd do if it were me and it was just me and him. I'd look at him the moment he started screaming (even before getting to the counter) and say, "Okay, we are going home. But you are obviously not feeling well so as soon as we go home you are going to BED and you will not be watching any television or playing any video games or reading any comic books (...or whatever), and I do not expect you to get out of bed before 6 am tomorrow." (It was a little bit after 6 pm at that point). And I'd do it. I would enforce the "you're going to bed because you obviously don't feel well" because (a) I don't want the kid to learn that he can get just what he wants (I assumed part of his upset was that maybe there was something on tv he wanted to see that he was missing) by screaming, and also (b) reinforce the idea that throwing a fit in public is not normal behavior.

But I don't know what I'd do if I had two other children with me, kids who were well-behaved and enjoying themselves. The girls were not old enough to be left for any length of time (or at least, I thought so), so the mom couldn't take the boy and say, "Okay, we are going OUTSIDE until you settle down." And it was 105 degrees out so she couldn't make him go sit in the car. If it were me? I'd hate to tell my daughters, "Sorry, your brother's being a pill, we're going to go home and eat peanut butter sandwiches" because that seems like caving to the little kid's behavior - teaching him that he can get what he wants by making a scene, and he can make his sisters' lives miserable by doing so.

Perhaps I would have said to him, gotten really in his face, "You will be quiet RIGHT NOW. Any further outburst from you, each outburst earns you a day of being banned from television/videogames/internet/whatever else you like to do" and I would enforce that. Maybe even do like my mom used to do and make the punished kid do housework and gardening alongside of me.

But, gah, what an awful situation. I started out being annoyed by the mom ("Why doesn't she take that brat outdoors?") and then feeling bad for her ("She can't just leave, what about her two daughters? It would be unjust to deprive them of a treat just because their brother is being a baby"). I shot the mom a sympathetic look but I have to admit the kid's screaming kind of ruined my dinner.

And people ask me if I'm "sad" because I never had kids...

Friday flip-off

Or Thursday, whatever. Thursday is my Friday in summers because we have a four day week.

But this week I want to administer a hearty go-soak-your-head to administrators who want to micromanage every aspect of our lives - down to, apparently, our e-mail signatures - we're now told what font to use and what information to include, and we MUST have the campus logo. And yet, there are some big problems (for example, campus buildings losing power in the late afternoon because of insufficient capacity for power demand) that won't be addressed, or "there's no money for that."

I can guess why we've been dictated what to have in our signatures, though, and that leads to my second, my go-fall-off-a-log: the people who felt the need to put information of a personal/political nature in their signature files, and thus make everyone else have to read it when they sent out an e-mail. I know of several people who had Bible verses in their signature lines, and while that doesn't bother me, I know people who would be greatly bothered by it. (Also, the fact that we are a state school raises some questions...) I guess I'd include a go-pound-sand for the people who are so hair-trigger offended by stuff that they called someone up and complained to them, and so rather than calling the person in question and asking them to remove the verse, the someone decided instead that we ALL will have ALL UNIFORM signatures.

The problem is I'm unsure of how to append the logo image. My chair has offered to help me do it but gah...neither she nor I should have to be dealing with this.

it makes me think of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

Heh.

I'm teaching two summer classes. One is a majors-oriented class for upper-level students. My class this summer is small but mostly diligent, they ask interesting questions, they work hard.

I'm also teaching the non-majors class again (after a year off to teach the intro majors class, which I have to say I enjoyed teaching and hope I get to do again). These guys are mostly incoming freshmen. VERY incoming freshmen, as in, this summer is their first semester on a college campus.

They're very immature but it's kind of a fun immaturity. They're not jaded yet and most of them still have enough fear of the professor (me) that they treat me with a certain level of respect - they may joke around and harass each other before class, but when I start talking, they (mostly) shut up and pay attention.

Lab gets kind of crazy. And you know, I like teaching labs because that's where you see more of a person's personality, I think: if they're a whiner it tends to come out more in lab, if they're chronically clumsy, you see that. And even with having all these students together in lab for four hours every week, I still pretty much like them. Like I said, they're immature and a few of them do whine a bit - but it's almost a good-natured whining, like "I know it's expected that I complain about the workload but you know I don't really mind it." Or at least they seem to understand why they have to do the stuff they're expected to do.

Also, after having the awful, super-sense-of-entitlement student I had this spring - the guy who would buttonhole me after lecture EVERY DAY and tell me about his pathetic life and how much it sucked to be him, while I was calmly saying "I have another class I need to go and teach, I cannot discuss now, come to my office hours" (and he bitched me out - or at least, I assume it's him - on my evaluations for "not being available." Yeah, not being available when you want me to be). So I'm kind of inoculated against the sort of garden-variety shenanigans that these students pull.

Anyway. I guess my TA is not. I have a lab TA and she's excellent but she's not as patient as I am. (Well, she's also probably 20 years younger; I think age can teach you a lot of patience). One of the students - actually, one of the more vocal guys, who I kind of like because though he complains about stuff he's at least funny about it, and he's polite and respectful to me - seems to get under her skin. (Like I said: I think my age and prior experience has inoculated me against being bugged by his goofiness, it seems very mild by comparison to some things I've dealt with).

Anyway, the lab yesterday included measuring blood pressures before and after exercise. The idea is, you get a baseline pre-exercise (though the bps are not taken in ideal conditions- it's not quiet enough and no one follows the "put your feet flat on the floor and lay your arm on the table" directions). Then the student has to go and run for 2 minutes. Normally, we make them run in place in the lab, but in the summer - we're the only class in the building at that time so I told the students it was OK to run in the halls, or to run out the back door of the room, run around the building, and come back in the front.

So the guy was picked by his group to be the "exercise subject" (well: one of the other people in the group had a walking cast on her foot, and the guy in question plays intramural soccer). He griped about it, good naturedly of course, and got ready to run out the back door. As he was heading out, my TA yelled out,

"RUN, FORREST! RUN!"

It was totally unexpected and everyone else in the class burst out laughing. (I couldn't help it; I laughed too).

The good thing is the student wasn't at all insulted by it. You do have to be a little careful what you say to people in class and sometimes a joke or an innocent comment can really blow up, but this guy is jovial enough that it didn't bug him. (I think the fact that the class is a pretty cohesive group - they really all pretty much like each other - helped. I've had classes that were split into factions or where there were two people who REALLY disliked each other, and keeping the drama/insults to a minimum can be a challenge).

Is it just me? (a question)

Am I just being cranky, or is "Betting on America" a really *awful* campaign slogan?

To me, it sounds like giving up. It sounds like the person I know whose 401k tanked and who said, "I guess 'winning the lottery' is my new retirement plan."

I dunno. While I tend to be somewhat laissez-faire about gambling as an entertainment, it's a truly lousy way to plan your future. (I know too many people who have planned on "winning big" and who wound up losing more than they - or their families - could stand to lose).

Childish, but it made me feel better

As some of you know, I make an effort to work out for an hour a day, four to five days a week. (I am still fat. There is no justice in the world). I do this because I am healthier when I am working out, I feel better, and usually doctors shut up about the weight-loss pills when I give them the stink-eye and say, "I work out an hour a day and strive to eat a healthful diet." (If they don't shut up, or accuse me of lying, I fire them.  One of the reasons the "healthcare reform" concerns me is that if I have less choice of doctors, I may wind up having to see someone who constantly hounds me until I give in and wind up destroying my heart valves or something by taking whatever kind of synthetic speed they're pushing for "weight loss" these days)

Anyway, to keep from being bored to craziness by it (an hour on the equivalent of a treadmill is no fun), I listen to music or to the radio. Yesterday afternoon I was listening to Dennis Prager, whom I rather like listening to, but I LOATHE the ads the radio station plays. About 90% of them are about...guess what...weight loss.

One of them strikes me as particularly egregious. It's for Hoodia, which is an extract of an African milkweed plant (I looked it up. Incidentally, many milkweeds are toxic, that is why so few animals eat them). The guy pushing the stuff talked about how the hoodia made him forget to eat...he boasted about how he went to bed one night and realized he had "forgotten" to eat at all that day. (That just seems very disordered-eating to me. It's one thing to carefully control portion size, as I do, and consider what you eat to be sure you're getting the essential nutrients....but to miss a day's nourishment and be happy about it? That seems very screwed up.)

And I hit the breaking point. I said out loud, "Your ad is bad and you should feel bad." (reference, for those unfamiliar with the meme). And you know? It made me feel a lot better.

Childish, but it made me feel better.

I may be using that same line on political ads as this campaign season ramps up.

Celebrating freedom

Yeah, yeah, I know: in some areas especially, it's under assault. (I'm looking at you, Mayor Bloomberg.)

But still, we have an awful lot of freedom in this nation (and at this point in time) that people in other places and at other times do not have.

I particularly think of women in Muslim-dominated countries, as I am a woman myself. Here in America, I enjoy the freedom of being employed, owning my own house, owning and driving my own car, being able to go shopping without a man to 'chaperone' me. I can dress however I want provided I conform to minimal laws concerning not disturbing the peace by being extremely immodest. I will not be arrested for wearing a short skirt or a low-cut top.

I also have freedom of conscience. I can go to whatever house of worship best fits my conception of God, or I can choose to go to none at all. There is no state religion (no matter what some may claim) that is compelling me to worship in a particular way or even worship at all. I can give money to any religious group I believe in, or not give money to any at all.

I do not have to show papers if I cross a state border. I do not have to have proof of why I am traveling somewhere and whether that travel is "essential." I can go alone if I choose, or I can take along any person I wish. If I am stopped on the street and asked to show identification, I can demand to be told why.

I can spend my take-home pay however I choose. No one will question me if I buy loads of books and only buy a new car when my old one is worn out. No one will question me over WHICH books I buy. And while there are plenty busybodies who would presume to tell me what foods I should or should not buy, or what entertainment I should or should not engage in, there still are no laws allowing them to enforce that - or preventing me from telling them to go pound sand.

(I can still find incandescent bulbs in some stores and buy them.)

If I disagree with the government and what it's doing, I can write about it here. No one from the government can come and arrest me for that. Likewise, if a group of people and I decided that there was something wrong, we could go and stand in a public place and talk about it, and no one could arrest us for that. Every four years I get to vote for who I think makes the best president (well, of the choices we have...) and every two years I get to vote for representatives. And I get to vote on a variety of "state questions" as well. Had I lived as a woman one hundred years ago in this nation, I could not do that.

Regardless of what some people say, I do not fear the police breaking down my door in the middle of the night. And there are places in the world where that was a real possibility for some people. (Probably still is, in some parts of the world).

If I were accused of a crime, I would have a right to a 'speedy' trial. And the right to have my case heard by and decided upon by twelve other citizens. And I would have the right to have a professional to represent me and present my case.

Sure, there are problems in our nation. Some of the problems are rooted in the people we have chosen in the past number of years as our representatives; some of the problems may be that a lot of us seem to want to get something for nothing. And yet, despite those problems, we still have a lot of greatness and freedom beyond what many countries can even dream of.

Did I hear this right?

Item on the radio news: Starting next year, every car to be sold in Europe must be equipped with a Breathalyzer.

So, I assume: you're gonna have to blow every time you plan on driving somewhere?

I can totally see the nanny staters here being all over this. And that offends me. I don't even drink, so why treat me as a potential DUI? And even beyond the whole ethical thing of suddenly treating everyone like potential lawbreakers even when they would never do anything so witless as driving drunk, there's another issue:

What happens if the technology fails? What happens if John Q. Employee gets into his car at 7 am on Monday morning after having drunk nothing stronger than Coffea arabica and the car won't start up, because the breathalyzer is crapped out? Sure, John's wife Jane could probably drive him to work as long as her car's breathalyzer was working, but what about Single John or Single Jane - or one-car families?

I really don't like this idea. Therefore, I expect we'll see it here within ten years.

A little nonsense, now and then

I know how Willie Wonka ended that phrase, but today I'm gonna say, "Can keep your head from exploding." (I've put myself on a news fast. Because everything I see is either someone "spiking the football" or lots of handwringing about how the Obesity Police (and the Smoking Police, and the Too Many Medications police, and the Doesn't Exercise Enough Police) are on their way.

So I'm watching a lot of Cartoon Network. One of my favorite shows (either on there or really, at all) is Regular Show. Yes, it's rude and crude and kids emulating the characters could get in a lot of trouble. But it's the kind of stupid that makes me laugh - there is annoying stupid and there's funny stupid, and Regular Show is definitely funny stupid.

Well, in one episode, Mordecai and Rigby made a fake band - while hopped up on soda, they ordered t-shirts. And then decided they had to be a real band, because walking around in fake band t-shirts was lame. So, they formed "Mordecai and the Rigbys." Oh, there's more to it, lip-synching and their future selves and Mordecai having a rare instance of clarity and doing-the-right-thing. (And getting stood up yet again by Margaret).

But, the song they sang? Has been turned into a "real" music video. I love this greatly, because it reminds me of every self-consciously arty music video I saw in the late 80s and early 90s. (I also love the little allusions to the show: note the "My Mom" on Muscle Man's drum kit).

You can kind of tell

One thing I've learned in teaching, is that you can often tell what kind of a student a person will be by their ability to follow instructions, level of attention to detail, and little stuff they do. Not always, because there are some brilliant people who are just big messes on the life-management front, but, by and large, someone who is conscientious in some ways is conscientious in lots of things.

Like my students. I have them write short papers (this is part of a writing-across-the-curriculum thing which is set to expand - wharrrgarblll - to EVERY! class on campus. Yes, even the phys ed classes. Yes, even the absolutely dead-basic non majors classes. Though now that I think of it? I already have all of my students write papers, so nothing will change for me.)

Anyway. When they hand in the papers, some of them have them stapled. Nine times out of ten, the paper that comes in to me already stapled and with a cover sheet (like most of them do) is going to be a better than average paper. Other students hand me a wad of pages, not stapled, and go, "I couldn't find a stapler."

Um, yeah. Every computer lab on campus is supposed to have one. Every secretary has one in her office. And ministaplers - several of my more conscientious students actually CARRY them in their backpacks - cost about a buck fifty.

But no, they expect me to staple their papers for them. (And I do. Because it's too much of a PITA to deal with them otherwise). I could refuse to grade papers that were not stapled, I know some profs do, but you have to choose your battles in life and I don't want to deal with the level of butthurt refusing an unstapled paper would cause. And in many cases, the unstapled papers are incomplete. I had several this round that scored less than 50% because the students didn't bother to look up citations. (Of the stapled papers? They ALL had citations and literature citeds.)

One guy even said to me: "The topic seemed like something kind of futuristic, you know? So I didn't look for resources."

I gave him the Jackie Chan my-brain-is-full-of-**** look (reference for those unfamiliar)

I didn't SAY anything, but I sure said what I wanted to say in my grading of the paper. (For the record: the question was on citizen DNA banks for crime solving. One of the best students in the class came to me the day before it was due and said, "I know you don't like us using direct quotations, but I'd really like to quote the Fourth Amendment in mine, is that OK?" I grinned at her (okay, I don't like to reveal my politics too much but sometimes maybe I do) and told her in that case it was completely appropriate to quote. So there are ways of arguing the topic with sources! (some people who supported the idea also found valid sources. So they're out there. I think "futuristic" dude was just being lazy and seeing what he could get away with.)

But, again and again, I see that people who pay attention to detail, who listen to the instructions and try to follow them, and who ask questions when they don't know for sure, succeed and people who decide they're just going to seat-of-the-pants it, don't always.

Two thoughts

On today's decision:

1. "Oh ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffudge."

2. I'm seeing some spectacularly ugly and unseemly spiking-the-football going on. THAT is why I hate so much of politics. It's not enough to "win," you must "win" and then say ugly things about the people who disagree with you.


I'm afraid that if things continue as planned, there will be a couple states winding up bankrupted by the required expansion of Medicare. That's the main thing I'm wrapping my head around right now. (I can't even think what this may mean for Catholic hospitals or for how I get my own insurance/healthcare). I'm concerned that states will either have to severely cut other things (road maintenance, education) or else steeply raise taxes.

Thoughts on the bus

Doubtless you've heard or seen the news story about the 13 year old boys who drove a 68 year old bus monitor to tears with their rude comments.

It was interesting to follow the story and how people responded to it as it developed. Early on, people were tossing around stuff like "This is what our culture has become" and "These kids are dead inside" and "How uninvolved must their parents be, for them to be able to do this?"

And I admit, the comment about sticking a knife in her belly was pretty horrifying. (And I thought the kids were GIRLS at first, but then again, that might be my experience speaking).

My reaction was a little different: "These kids are 13. Thirteen is a BRUTAL age to be. Thirteen year olds can be so mindlessly cruel it will amaze you."

I remember being 13. I remember the hatefulness I got from my classmates - and I remember, to my shame, doling out some hatefulness myself, mostly to kids less-popular than I was. That's one of the things I will never understand as an adult, and about which I fully expect to be sternly questioned On The Other Side. I don't KNOW why I did it. I look at it know and I'm horrified by it: how could I be so nasty to another kid, especially when I knew what it was like to be called rude names and be belittled myself?

I guess the only explanation is that 13 year olds can be really, really immature. They know what to say to hurt someone's feelings, but they've not yet developed the tact or compassion to not want to say it. And they want to be accepted by their peers, sometimes at almost any cost.

That said, I don't remember being that openly cruel to an adult. Oh, my classmates and I tried to goof on substitutes when we had them, and probably contributed to the early burnout of some substitute teachers (and again: why did I do that? I suppose it was because I felt taking part might win me a few moments of acceptance from the "pack," and might temporarily deflect the teasing away from me). But regular people - bus drivers and hall monitors and teachers, generally I was pretty respectful of them.

I do think the whole pack mentality was another thing that came into play in this incident. It's a pretty powerful feeling as a teen (and sometimes even as an adult) to want to fit in with the group and be part of the "pack." And it can drive you to do things you wouldn't ordinarily do - things that, in the quiet of your own room later, you (even as a teen) smack your forehead and go, "Why was I so STUPID?"

All of that said: what those boys did was wrong and cruel. (Though my own grandma, if they had done it to her? She was a pretty tough lady and I bet she would have figured out a way to make those boys regret what they had said and even cry "uncle"). It's really ugly to hear what they're doing to the lady, and it made me cringe and recoil.

However, I don't think - unlike some commentators I've heard - that these kids should be sent to Juvie. That will only teach them to be meaner and more violent. I suspect in a way, some of them have already suffered the best discipline they could have: the public embarrassment of being revealed in their cruelty, of people saying things like, "What kind of a coward bullies a 68 year old lady?" And it sounds like, in at least one case, the parents are going to make sure the kid thinks twice before doing something like this again.

I do think putting the kids off the bus - I don't know how much more of their school year remains, but put them off the bus for the rest of the year, and maybe the first half of the next year - so they can think about what they did might be a valid idea. Yes, the parents are taxpayers and they pay for the bus service. But I think these things should STILL be viewed as a privilege and not a right, and by behaving badly, the boys violated their privilege.

Or make them get up and publicly apologize to the lady, and talk about how what they did was wrong.

I don't think these kids are "lost," unlike what some commentators are saying. I think they do have the capacity to become "lost," if no one intervenes and teaches them, or if they face no consequences of what they did - but from what I've seen, that may not be the case here. It's possible for people who are pretty nasty teenagers to grow up to be decent adults if they are molded a bit and are shown some discipline.

The other thing: I don't think they were that much worse than kids were 30 years ago when I was that age. Riding the bus when I was a kid was brutal and I have blocked much of that time out of my memory - stuff like getting your lunch and homework stolen, or being refused a seat, or being called really awful, dreadful names or having ugly things said to your face: that's kind of part and parcel of the bus ride for middle schoolers, and it's been that way for a long time. Would the nasty kids on my bus have bullied a grandmotherly bus monitor? Some of them might have; some of them were pretty rude to the driver. Which is why I'm not quite so quick to say that these kids' action is a symptom of society suddenly becoming much worse or more violent. I don't know if thirteen year olds in the 1920s or 1870s or 1730s were as rude and unpleasant as they were in the 1980s, but I know thirteen year olds were pretty awful when I was one myself....I could be pretty awful as a 13 year old. So I don't think it's that "everything is suddenly worse," I think it's more "For all our talk of anti-bullying efforts, there still will be bullies." They may just turn on different people...

O RLY

I dealt today with one of those Smugtrons. You know the kind: the people who think they're better than everyone else by virtue of the purity of their diet, or how small the carbon emissions of their car are, or what extreme lengths they go to to buy all "sustainable" products.

This was someone claiming that her body was "really, really smart" because it "told" her not to like things bad for her (I think processed sugar was an example).

Because I am in large part a lady, and also in large part not interested in getting involved in an argument where at least one parties' positions are purely emotionally held, I refrained from chirpily telling her, "Oh, then broccoli must be really bad for me, because I hate it! My body's so smart, I never eat it! I should listen to my body more....oh, hey, it's telling me I need a cupcake."

But yeah. I really get tired of people with the holier than thou attitude.

my dad

It's Father's Day.

I was thinking about all the stuff I've learned from my dad over the years. I was one of the lucky ones; I had an involved dad who took part in the parenting, and who was concerned that his kids grew up to be good citizens. (I'm also lucky in that I still have my dad, and yes, I called him today).

He taught me how to read maps when I was a kid...as a result, I'm rarely lost.

He showed me how to manage money and not spend wastefully....as a result, I have zero debt.

He told me "I know you can do this" even when I suffered a serious reverse the first time I was in grad school....and as a result, I picked myself back up, started again, and eventually was successful.

He never thought I could do less than a boy could when it came to math or science, and on the other hand, he never expected me to get special dispensation because of my gender...and as a result, I grew up tough enough to say, "Yeah? That's your opinion" when someone makes a sexist comment to me.

He took me to church...which formed a lifelong habit for me that has enriched my life and made me a better person.

He listened to me cry when I was a little kid and the other kids at school were mean to me...and helped me to know that I wasn't a reject, that sometimes people are just jerks to other people.

He often said, "Do the right thing even if it makes you unpopular"....and I hope I will have the strength to do that if it ever comes to it for me.

He modeled honesty and hard work and kindness...and I hope to live up to that myself.

I love my dad; I think he knows that. I'm grateful that I got the chance to know him as an adult as well as knowing him as "Daddy" when I was a kid. Some of my friends were not so lucky.

Summer labs

It is surprising how different the summer and regular-semester students are.

It was our first lab, "Scientific Measurement." While I did have to show a few people which side of the ruler was metric (ack), I didn't have anyone shutting down and going, "I don't need to know this crap. I'm going to run my own business. I don't need to care about metric."

That kind of attitude frustrates me because there have been several occasions in my life where knowing "outside" information - that is, outside my basic field of study - has really helped me greatly. Most stuff you learn will not be wasted.

This group, though some of them may not have known which scale was metric (which surprises me a little, but then again, I was part of the "Metric by 1985!" generation, and maybe the educators have since given up on metric), once they figured out what they had to do, they did it without complaint.

One guy actually said, "Oh! I get it now! I never got it before!" when I showed him how you went from one decimal unit to another - like, centimeters to meters, or meters to kilometers. And he showed me that in fact he DID get it, by doing the rest of the questions correctly and showing me how he got his answers.

I don't know. Is there some kind of nativist sentiment against metric I don't know about? As a scientist, I use it all the time and have a decent handle on roughly what a meter is, a kilogram is, a liter is, etc., in terms of "how big" it would be. I often have to get after even my upper-division students because they want to measure things in feet and inches, and some of the formulas we use don't WORK with data in feet and inches. (If they do report the data in feet and inches, I make everyone in the class do the conversion with the data. For one thing, it's handy to know how to do it, for another, it might give a little positive peer pressure to the people NOT to do the measurement that way next time.)

I will say I don't have problems with the English or Imperial or whatever you call it system being used alongside metric, for some applications. - apparently some countries have effectively banned that system, but there are cases where it's useful. I still think of buying fabric in terms of yards and fractions of yards, and I do quilt cutting using inches. And in a lot of case, rejiggering a pattern to make it metric either would not work, or would not work smoothly. But I'm not sure I see why people can't think in and use both systems.

But metric is pretty much expected in the sciences! You don't have to like it, but that's the way it is.

You know what?

I'd be not at all opposed to imposing the death penalty on serial child molesters.

Yes, I'm talking about the Penn State scandal, but I'm also talking about several ugly cases in the news here locally. One guy was arrested, bonded out after giving a sob story to the judge...and then molested another kid (allegedly) while he was out on bond. (He's pleading not guilty, but it looks like a pretty clear case from what I've seen).

This summer's teaching

I didn't teach last summer, and I had forgotten how fun it could be.

On the one hand, it's a crazy-fast pace: we are traveling at twice the rate of the regular semester, which means you have to be fairly organized to remember to be on top of things like doing necessary lab-prep work, or having tests ready in time, that kind of thing.

I am in the classroom 18 hours a week, if the lab classes go the full four hours budgeted for them. (They do not always do so). That's more than during the regular semester most semesters, and I'm teaching a smaller number of courses.

However, we don't have classes on Friday...they instituted some kind of budget-saving measure so offices are not open Fridays. (The amount of time total they are open over the course of the week is about the same; the expectation is they open a couple hours earlier and close a couple hours later M-Th). I assume it's to save electricity because I've noticed when I come in to work on Fridays that it's a lot hotter in the building - they turn the airconditioning to a higher temperature when we're not having classes.

It is kind of nice having Fridays off. I can come in and catch up on grading or prepwork, or do research work, and not worry about someone NEEDING me for something. Or, I don't have to plan to head off to class and teach. (Teaching takes more energy than you'd think. I'm usually pretty tired after class). And yet, I still have Saturday for errands or just living my own life.

I don't think the four-day-a-week schedule could work in the regular semester but it's really nice for summer.

I also like my summer students. I still shake my head over the fact that one of my Physics profs (I took Physics in the summer at a local community college - it transferred to my university, it was cheap for me to do, and it meant I didn't wind up taking Physics and Organic Chem together, something numerous people had warned me off of) claimed that he "knew" why people were taking the class in the summer - that it was because they could not pass in the regular semester and thought summer would be easier.

(And from that, I got a big lesson in What Not To Do When Teaching A Class: never, ever assume a class is stupid or slackerish, and never tell them you think they are even if you kind of think they are. It's just really ugly and offputting, and it makes the diligent students angry).

Because, I find my summer students tend to be more motivated. By and large, they are taking summer classes because they want to graduate early - or because they can make more room in their semester schedule for things like internships or higher-level specialized classes. Or they're incoming freshmen who want to get a head start on their distribution classes.

Oh, once in a while I have someone who can't hack it, or is a blow-off, or acts like a jerk to the other students, but mostly the students I get in the summer are good students and nice people and I really enjoy having them. (The money is nice too. Secondary, but nice to have. I could survive without a summer paycheck but having one means I have more flexibility and don't have to budget so tightly during the year).

This semester I have one upper-division and one lower-division (nonmajors) class. The upper division class is small - 8 people - but they let it run because two people need it to graduate this summer. (Normally, classes with enrollments below 10 are cancelled). I know it's not economically feasible to run such small classes, but I really love teaching them: you can give more attention to each student, you can get to know who they are better. And I feel more comfortable and relaxed and able to joke around with them and go off on tangents if someone asks an interesting question or stuff. Also, in a small class, it's really hard for a student to "hide" and not pull their weight in lab or discussion. And I also think there is some positive energy that goes on: someone has to be a real jerk to be able to fight off the "positive peer pressure" of a group fo committed students in the class, and continue to be apathetic and rude.

The lower-division class I have is about 20, and it's harder to get a handle on them. A lot of them are absolutely new freshmen, and they're scared to death. I try to be reassuring - if someone is a diligent student and they give a darn about learning and they're working, I'm not going to go after them for some tiny little infraction (A guy brought coffee to class and asked me if it was okay for him to have it. I said sure, as long as he didn't leave a mess). With the nonmajors class I do have to be a little careful; I find more than any other class I teach this is the place where I get the 'too cool for school' people who don't want to work and don't want to discuss and don't care about the material, and it's hard to keep them from checking out. (And sometimes I wonder: is it really my JOB to knock myself out to keep them from checking out, or is it more my job to teach for the people who do care?) So far, this crew looks pretty much okay but I will have to go through a full lab period with them to see for sure. (You learn more about how a person is when they are working in lab....some people who are not so hot in the lecture part of class are really good with the lab stuff, and some people who seem pretty smart in lecture turn out to be really apathetic about actually doing stuff in lab.)

But so far, so good.

Hobby farm daydreaming

My mom gets a couple of magazines I don't get, and when I was up visiting my parents I spent some time reading the back issues.

One of them is "Grit." Yes, Grit still publishes, they're just not in that newspaper format any more. (I remember even when I was a kid, they still advertised in the back of comic books: the idea was, I guess, that kids sold Grit door to door. I hated selling anything and I was smart enough to know that a farming magazine would be met with bewilderment or disdain in the bedroom community where we lived).

Grit is a very practical magazine. They talk about how to build stuff or repair stuff or how to can food or grow food....they have features on different livestock breeds. And they do have some fun stories on people's reminiscences about growing up on the farm. It's a nice magazine, I feel like I can learn stuff from it.

I admit it: I still hold some dreams of someday owning something like a hobby farm. I know I couldn't do it now, not as a college professor, because some days I can barely manage to feed MYSELF, let alone find time to feed chickens or goats or something. But it's an appealing idea.

Oh, I know, in reality, that farming is really hard work and it's probably not feasible for a single person to try to run even a small farm all on their lonesome - too much work, too many chances for stuff to go wrong. And the whole economic-insecurity thing would be scary: I like having a regular paycheck I can depend on.

But there's also something attractive about it. The immediacy - the fact that you can see what effect your work is having as you do it (whether it's weeding or canning or something like that). I like the idea of growing at least some of my own food. (I have a tiny garden and grew beets and green beans this spring, and I have tomato plants but they've not made fruit yet. And I keep thinking someday I'll try growing sweet potatoes). If I had more space in my back yard, I'd put in raspberry canes or grapes, even if I'd have to remember to cover them as they were setting fruit to keep the birds out.

I also like the idea of earning my bread by MAKING something...something tangible, something people could hold in their hands, whether that something is soap or tomatoes or lavender or whatever. Don't get me wrong: I still love teaching, it's just some days it really does feel like I'm just pushing invisible imaginary things around and there's nothing that feels very "real" about it.

I think I may also (rightly or wrongly) think that success in having a hobby farm is, to a greater degree, the result of one's own hard work. In teaching, if you get a difficult class, or you wind up with an administrator who has problems with your discipline, or if the school's budget gets cut...you can see your job go from "wonderful" to "awful" in a short time. (Of course, with farming, drought, insects, natural disasters....all of those are beyond your control).

The other magazine is called "Mary Jane's Farm." This magazine has some good stories and good information, but....how do I put it? Sometimes it gets a bit precious for my tastes. There's a lot of talk about organic gardening/organic produce and while some of the reasons and justifications are true, others of them border on "woo." For example: I choose organic salad greens because I figure there's enough pesticide residue (at least, based on what I've read) possible on the conventional ones that it's worth it to ME to spend a bit more and seek out the organic ones. And I tend to think the "cage free chicken" eggs taste better...but I'm not going to say that everyone has to do this. And sometimes the "organic lifestyle" folks get a little evangelical about it, like "if everyone did this one thing, IT WOULD SAVE THE WORLD" and of course things are more complicated than that.

(Also, I wonder: is the state of the art of organic farming such that it's even possible to produce all food using standard organic methods? I mean, I might occasionally buy a box of cookies made from organic flour...but I wonder if all the flour used in the world or even the U.S. could be produced using small-scale methods? I kind of think that small-scale farming, like what my great-grandparents did, kind of wouldn't be capable of producing enough to meet demand. But I could be wrong; I haven't tried to calculate it out).

All the "woo" and evangelism aside, though, one idea in both magazines I like is this: that there are a lot of people out there (apparently) who ARE doing small-scale specialty farming, and they're providing a product to people who want it. (And in some cases, the product is considerably better than the conventionally produced kind). I've said before that I enjoy shopping at farmer's markets and small businesses and u-pick farms and places like that....it's more fun than going to a giant brightly-lit supermarket for food. (Though I admit I can do without the "oh, aren't we so much better than the hoi polloi" I see from some farmer's market/natural-foods-store attendees.)

So, I don't know. If I had a hobby farm, what would I raise? What would I raise for market, what would I raise just for myself? I think if I had enough land and space I'd want to raise chickens for the eggs. (This provided I had a good way of protecting them from predators, and also sealing up the feed so I didn't get rats....one problem with some "city chickens' is that the feed can attract rodents). I might have goats, though it would be for milk rather than meat. (Then again: there's apparently a growing market for goat meat, and while I might not be up to slaughtering and butchering my own...the animals could be sold). No, I've never had goat's milk and of course I'd have to try to to see if I liked it. (This is all in the realm of daydream for me right now).

In terms of crops....where I live, a lot of the things I like don't do so well. It's mostly too hot and too dry (unless you have a good well) for berries. And often tomatoes are a disappointment: it gets so hot the plants won't set fruit.

But herbs seem to do well. If I had a decent market for herbs, either as culinary herbs (I know in some areas, fancy restaurants buy their herbs from small farmers) or something like lavender that is used in scent. I admit I like the idea of running a lavender farm, as impossibly unprofitable that might be in real life.

Or maybe I'd learn how to keep bees. (Or do that in addition to having the herb farm...then I could sell lavender honey and stuff like that; in some specialty markets you can get really good prices for "fancy" honeys).

Again, I think a lot of this falls into the realm of "If I weren't teaching, I'd want a career where I felt like I was 'making' something." And at any rate, as I said: it's probably not realistic. I don't live near enough a really wealthy area that doesn't already have a market saturated with specialty food sales or such.

But it's nice to daydream about.

Poetry break

Sometimes you hear what you need when you most need it. One of the hymns we sang yesterday was "Dear Lord and Father of mankind" by Whittier. (Thank goodness my particular congregation hasn't decided to use the "updated" hymnals....where all language has been made gender-neutral and "less warlike," some of the new wordings are really clunky and unpleasant to sing).

Whittier is a poet I don't know too much about. I know he was an abolitionist in New England and was generally considered to be a "good man." I also think some of the critics derided his verse as not sufficiently deep or simplistic. I don't know; in some ways I am a simple woman and I have to say I like this poem.

The hymn version of it (at least the version we sing) does not use all the stanzas in the poem, but here is the complete poem:

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
forgive our foolish ways!
Re-clothe us in our rightful mind,
in purer lives thy service find,
in deeper reverence, praise;
in deeper reverence, praise.

In simple trust like theirs who heard,
beside the Syrian sea,
the gracious calling of the Lord,
let us, like them, without a word,
rise up and follow thee;
rise up and follow thee.

O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
where Jesus knelt to share with thee
the silence of eternity
interpreted by love!
interpreted by love!

Drop thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease;
take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace;
the beauty of thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
thy coolness and thy balm;
let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm;
O still, small voice of calm.

I particularly needed the "Take from our souls the strain and stress, and let our ordered lives confess, the beauty of thy peace" part of it, yesterday.