Besides a few random spurts on particular topics, I now know of three individuals in the whole wide world who've actually read considerable portions of this blog. :-) There *may* be more of you out there, but I'm not THAT optimistic. Talking to the void....funny how it pacifies....a warping of subjectivity to which I seem particularly prone. %-/
oh...just me: July 2004 Archives
Enduring one of those essentially sleepless nights, I thought I'd try to find what's worse than a "hot potato." A Google search generated a definition for this idiom: a situation likely to cause trouble to the person handling it. This is, of course, quite different than a "hot ticket": a popular item, a product that people want. While we KNOW I'm not operating at the hot ticket end of the spectrum with the hot dogs(sigh), am I missing the mark at the hot potato end? Candidates are (in no particular order): horse's ass, hothead, hotshot. I self-tease about being a menace, but maybe I really am more scary to people than seems plausible from the vantage point of my own insecurities?
But the personal way that "In America" resonated with me is my own impossible fantasy of starting over.
Besides the Toddlet?
The best thing might be a real house from 18th century China!
The house is part of the Peabody Essex Museum. The Witch Museum is also in Salem - it's not like a haunted house or anything, but tells the story of the Salem Witch Trials in a kinda scary voice. There are also beaches and wonderful rocky seashores all around.
~ from Carolyn's and my visit on July 5, 2004.
Sweet time with Hannah Mae today. She's working on memorizing the keyboard, so she was typing words that include letters she mostly already knows:
Say tree hannah you a steph jo kent pee poop rain sleet
Hannah reichel is smart unlike her stupid dog Franiek
Dad was full of complaints today; Carolyn says its a sign of vigor - it means he's getting some energy and is over the sheer relief of still being alive. Ok, if she says so! ;-)
He did say today it was his liver that had 1/3 sliced off of it; I'm pretty sure yesterday he said kidney. Maybe I heard it wrong, maybe he was confused. Anyway, all seems on track although they've decided he has a cracked rib, and the fractures in his pelvis are right at the joint with the tibia, so while he needs to start exercising he has to be careful not to put too much weight on it or it will "explode." He was definitely moving around more, even though it hurts. Supposedly he'll move into a room on the orthopedic floor, which will give him more access to PT and other rehab equipment. go dad go!
Dad was in a car wreck last Friday; I just learned about it yesterday afternoon. Put a bit of a kink in my recent improved mood by highlighting my relational aloneness. :-(
It seems he will be ok but I still have some questions, such as, why was he in ICU for two days? Why did it take six days before someone called to let me know? He guessed he'd be in the hospital for another week or so while his blood production gets in gear - they're monitoring his platelet count among other things.
He was in good spirits - cracking jokes and generally making light of the whole thing. Said the doc had told him to "eat like a pig", and Dad told me "You'd have to BE a pig to eat a lot of this food!" :-) He hasn't had much appetite anyway but I guess they're worried about his energy level and weight.
I said he was on a roll and could stop now. He said he now knows two things he never wants to do again [stroke and car accident], and that he has a lot more empathy for others who've been in wrecks. He was "looking forward" to his first PT appointment; said he can hardly move his entire left side. Seems he's even taking the pain in stride. Kindof a wry guy.
I despaired a bit yesterday while readying Zohar and considering my own communicative actions - the ways in which I "collapsed the wave function" to participate in a certain nonlocal, synchronous discourse. I need to tease these two aspects apart - assuming they're not one and the same? :-(
Been thinking a lot about families of origin and families of choice. Anthropologists use this term fictive kinship to describe familial relations that are not tied by blood.
Just read a chapter by Jenny B. White on kinship in working-class neighborhoods in Istanbul: "kinship is metaphorically conferred on those people who do what kin do: that is, participate in relations of collective reciprocal assistance with no calculation of return" (p. 124). A reviewer describes the essay as "showing how the idiom of kinship is used to organise production and exploitation". So it is all about economics, too (which I've also been thinking about a lot, sadly).
Bought myself a Linson Head turtle the other day handmade from Kapinga Village in Kolonia, Ponape.
http://store.treocentral.com/accessories_cases.php
http://www.gethightech.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?&Screen=PROD&Product_Code=IT-BLKN&Category_Code=BATT
http://www.mobileplanet.com/product.asp?cat_id=102&cat_name=Palm+OS+Handhelds&pf_id=MP800100&dept_id=3732&listing=1
http://www.tuff-as-nuts.com/Treo-600_203.html
gotta find a balance to all the things I need to do. so scattered with this project and that idea popping up here and there hard to get momentum focused on ONE THING. ;-)
Been reading Zohar (slowly); and my mind wanders:
a name for my business? complementarity? discontinuity? indeterminancy?
what's the difference between a quanta and a wave packet?
Of course - I'm linking this to the poststructuralist conversation with George, and hoping my new buddies, Koushik and Ambaresh will come to my rescue. :-)
Next follows a paragraph from Zohar on "movement".
I've meant to post something since Gloria Anzaldua died in May. Her co-edited book, This Bridge Called My Back, not only launched my education but provided shape and direction to my activism.
~ I learned of her death via the social justice listserv, to which Elrey Mateo and Christopher McDonald-Dennis both forwarded email.
The weather was perfect! Not too hot and very few people. :-)
We started with The Teacup but then moved directly to the waterpark. We spent an hour in Monsoon Lagoon jumping the wave then the girls had me test four of the water slides to find "Myrtle" (supposedly the easiest and least scary). Once I made the identification, they both chickened out!
Next the swings - which they ended up riding four times! Hannah went rockclimbing twice, made it up about halfway each time; Kayla went once - her very first time. We rode the gondola twice (Hannah calls it, "the balls"), and did the Scrambler twice. We had a private ride on the Around the World "hot air balloons" and the girls went on the kiddie rollercoaster. The only ride I rode alone with Hannah was "Rodeo" - a scrambler type ride that was super fast. We laughed wildly. H: "Steph, you're being so loud!" S: "Is that new information?" H: "I never noticed!" :-)
On our way out to the car for lunch, the girls calmed down on the Carousel. That was also their last ride on the way out at the end of the day - after 9 hours!
We went straight back to the waterpark upon re-entry. No slides, but some serious goofing-off. :-) The girls finally got confident enough to hang out on their own so I chilled in the shade while they body-surfed. After the last round of rides (and fried dough), we finally left, ending up the decadent day with dinner at McDonald's.
We hit the midnight pavers in Brattleboro and, even though they were exhausted, Kayla said, "It's ok, I'm not in a hurry." Hannah said, "Steph might be, after she drops us off she has to drive all the way back to her house in Amherst. It's an hour drive." They debated what time I'd get there....Hannah said, "I wish Steph had her own cabin here." ;-) Not quite as good as actually living in my own house, but better than a temporary place in another state!
Hannah and Kayla and I are supposed to go to Six Flags today....weather is spotty. Rained heavy all night - hopefully the storm system is moving on so we can enjoy Hurricane Harbor.
It looks like it's going to ease up throughout the morning and be perfect by afternoon. Yahoo! :-)
Sarbjeet says, "Have a great day with hannah and her friend at 6 flags. it is okay to lose a couple of heartbeats on the rollercoaster. you may hold hannah if you get a little scared :-)"
Well, Qun's mother left today and I got invited to my first hot pot party to bid her farewell last night. It was Szechuan not Mongolian although there were some jokes about Mongolian barbeque. Besides dumping rice noodles all over the table and providing other foreigner faux paux's all evening, I *think* I managed to participate more-or-less appropriately. :-)
"Dan" (his critique of Zohar's book below) is a contributor to sparkchamber, "an alchemical vessel for the transformation of ideas." I tried to subscribe but the URL came back, "page not found." :-(
Started Zohar's book last night, I read half of it about 7 years ago. Interesting to note what I underlined or marked then and what grabs my attention (or is more sensible, smile) to me now. Reinforces my desire to catch up with Enoch Page and try to take his "anthropology of consciousness" course.
Zohar paints quantum physics as a metaphor for our age. "In this book I shall be considering very seriously the possibility that consciousness, like matter, emerges from the world of quantum events; that the two, though wholly different from each other, have a common 'mother' in quantum reality. If so, our thought patterns - and beyond that, our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the world at large - might in some ways be explained by, and in other ways mirror, the same laws and behavior patterns that govern the world of electrons and photons" (italics mine, p. 23).
Her work is highly speculative because she's working in the realm of analogy. Physicists' reluctance to condone such parallelism may be because, as Zohar explains: "Quantum theory is our most successful physical theory ever. It can predict correct experimental rsults to an accuracy of several decimal points. But its inability to explain either the predictions or the results has meant that no one, new picture of reality itself has emerged..." (italics in original, p. 22).
This short critique of the book is extremely helpful in pointing out its weaknesses (scientistic positivism) and strengths (a relationally-created world).
http://www.viceking.net/bubblewrap.swf.
~ thanks Iris! :-)
yesterday while I was at the house [the FP] was complaining about the redundancy in "bird aviary". Hannah and I were teasing: "the English teacher strikes again." Later, after Hannah and I were coming back from getting ice cream I was talking about something being "functional" because it "works." Hannah accused me of being "redumdant."
Kinda sums everything up, don'tcha think? :-)
I woke up this morning perseverating on housecleaning. Berating myself, more like. Thinking about listening, and what I didn't hear. :-( Maybe part of the pathological tit-for-tat?
Sarbjeet and I made it out yesterday evening into a warm, misty rain. We were cowards of potential lightening so didn't stay out too long, but we did it! Hopefully, it's the beginning of a trend.
Have I had a few fleeting glimpses of happiness lately? My old joyful self re-emerging? It could be true. Then I woke up at 4 am (go figure). ;-)
"[Informant] Thomas Speigal['s] warning about judging the past from the perspective of the present, about the simultaneous solidification of boundaries and blurring of distinctions between victims and perpetrators" (p. 217).
This quote continues her analysis of the commemoration parade, in a chapter she calls "Dis-membered Border". This seems (to me, smile) to parallel my relational struggle - we are contesting who was/is "victim" and who was/is "perpetrator." I see the ways in which both of us did both, AND my "20/20 hindsight" perceives the discursive evidence (what was said and what was not said) in much sharper relief than I heard at the time. I need to learn to hear/interpret differently (or at least with other possibilities in mind) and I think this is the crux of acting into a new discursive future when one recognizes a PM.
Berdahl's work doesn't ground the discursive "collision" in any specific microsocial instant of real interaction - she juxtaposes what people said in one context with what they say in another context. This is what I hope to do with the critical discourse analysis paper that I intend to write analysing the key new finding (a discovery!) from the workshop in Alaska. At any rate, I'm also wondering if there is something here that might lend itself to James' and my history paper. I've been struggling with the Churchill/Bush examples and need to work out more clearly why I don't think they will work....or at least, that they represent a very different strategy/approach than anything we've done previously.
This book by Berdahl is amazing. I think it has some gems that James and I could use for the history paper. And the parallelism with/for me and [the FP] is serendipitous, to say the least. Check this out:
"..memory is an interactive, malleable, and highly contested phenomenon...asymmetrical...and the interplay between local and extralocal processes of remembering" (p. 207). And this quote from an informant in the study: "The further we come away, the more we scrub ourselves clean" (p. 215).
Berdahl is exploring the change between the lived day-to-day experience of residents of this small town on the border between East and West Germany and their later commemoration of it after �the Wende� � reunification. Many things have occurred in the larger national discourse that allows these residents to discursively position themselves as victims (and accuse others of perpetration)�.the parallels I see are simply around how each person constructs memory and how the telling of events builds toward stories which can become reified. The deepest level of struggle now, for me, is to resist the momentum of my own discursive story and find a way to hear and take in another story without overlaying an habitualized interpretation upon it. Just to allow the possibility would be a significant change�
I've been working on this email to Meem - the ostensive "mother-in-law". It's been a terrific intellectual and personal exercise. I'm seeing much more clearly how my own communicative reactions have fit an historical trajectory, as well as getting a grip on how discourses (viewed as a metacommunicative phenomena) can collide in interpersonal, microsocial interaction.
Biked from Amherst to Northampton this morning with the crew from India. We probably did about 14-15 miles. My knees hurt! But I've got to get in shape for Ms. Hannah Mae, whose record is currently 22 miles! Is she trying to show me up or what?!!
I was telling Sarbjeet about the "one worst year" that Koreans believe in, and he upped the ante. In India, a folk belief (which he professes not to believe) is that everyone has a 7-year spell of not-so-great luck. Some years within this period may be worse than others, but overall the seven years suck. Once you're through THAT, then your life begins to pick up.
Lucky for me I'm surrounded by so many optimists, eh? :-)
This book was an amazing distractor.
It got me interested in "Shiva, as Nataraja, the cosmic lord of the dance, who controls the motions of the universe and the flow of time" (p. 46-47).
This part reminds me of the conversation I had at Sarbjeet's the other night with Koushik and Ambarish, in which I tried to parallel social interaction from a communicational point-of-view and quantum physics. My main metaphor was Shroedinger's Cat. Here's a translation of the original paper for the seriously inclined! I think they were both a bit dismayed that such application could be made (j?), and even by respected physicists like David Bohm (not just poorly informed laypersons like myself!). Since my original exposure to these ideas comes from Shemaya and a book she and her friends discussed some years ago, The Quantum Self, I suppose I ought to salvage it from my shelf and finish reading it.
Here is how Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, describes Hinduism:
"There is Brahmin, the world soul, the sustaining frame upon which is woven, warp and weft, the cloth of being, with all its decorative elements of space and time. There is Brahmin nirguna, without qualities, which lies beyond understanding, beyond description, beyond approach; with our poor words we sew a suit for it - One, Truth, Unity, Absolute, Ultimate Reality, Ground of Being - and try to make it fit, but Brahmin nirguna always bursts the seams. We are left speechless. But there is also Brahmin saguna, with qualities, where the suit fits..." (p. 48).
and I must stop :-(
As with everything these days, I'm also reading it through the lens (or fog, as the case may be) of my current AFGE (Another F*eaking Growth Experience). To wit:
Lukacs makes the point that while Britain could not win the war, and didn't (the US and Russia won it), "Churchill was the one who did not lose it" (p. 2). While the historical implications of my struggle for continued parenthood can't possibly rate with WWII (1), I do feel that somehow this is a critical period in which I must not lose, even if I cannot "win." One of Churchill's comments summarizes my convictions (with a substitution of "daughter" for "world"):
"Nothing which may happen in this battle can in any way relieve us of our duty to defend the world cause to which we have vowed ourselves; nor should it destroy our confidence in our power to make our way, as on former occasions...through disaster and grief..." (p. 3).
Bringing to mind the current discussion about the extent (if any?) of my role in decision-making about Hannah's welfare:
"...this was how things seemed, and while what happens may not be identical with what people think happens in the long run, the two are inseparable in the short run" (p. 16).
Reflections by May Allingham, a regular British countryfolk in response to an address by Queen Wilhelmina, in which the Queen conveyed that "Courage was not going to be enough."
Then there is bit on Chamberlain (the previous Prime Minister who didn't like Churchill), describing him as not having a quick mind "which is not always a handicap" (p. 55) - I hope such holds true for moi! Certainly, I do change my mind once evidence accumulates, and yes, without changing character.
tough time getting online....dead sound card in the pizmo and time to just suck it in and replace the sucker. It's been giving me a problem a month. :-(
Jst bumped into one of my students from COM118 - she'd read the blog and said, "I didn't know all that happened to you! Why didn't you tell us?" She asked about my daughter and gave me a big hug. Wow. Felt great! :-) A bit of an antidote for the awful evaluations I received. (Yes, they really were bad. Carolyn and I went over them together and it was a grim conversation. She said, "Students punish you for doing innovative things, it isn't right, but it's what happens." OUCH!
