Safety first

The new "in-thing" this Thanksgiving is being sick, so grab your SARS masks, Swine Flu anti-venom, and slice up the bird.

Armistice

I have waited a long time to write about the most intense challenge in my life over the last several years. I may write about the specifics of that another time somewhere else, but it seems important to reflect on what happened while I was waiting for it to be over.

I have had three different jobs, have slept in at least four different houses, and have been on three different health insurance plans. Other things have happened, too – I have made or re-made three sterling friendships, gained confidence acquiring new skills, and rediscovered a cultural environment where I feel more at home. I found someone who cares about me like no one else ever has.

This last part is a key point that took a while to understand. As a passionately independent person, I have never had the feeling that I ever needed anyone. Often, this inclination has had negative consequences. Regardless, people around me could be there or not depending on their preference or mine, but I have never wanted to rely on anyone. I have heard from multiple people that this means I need counseling for, but to me it seems rather self-preservative. If you depend on someone emotionally, on some level, he or she always holds the key to your satisfaction. People are often disappointing each other, so why not operate on a level where you take the good with the bad but can always walk away clean.

The relationships I have built over the last two-plus years have consisted of mutual enjoyment, trust, community, and commiseration. Ironically different from the kind of community I sought in different church communities, my urban family has supported me through my changes, my extreme feelings of failure, minor tragedies, mistakes, and triumphs. We support each other and enjoy each other's diversity. It's not a centralized community, but rather like a social octopus, with a couple of stable legs that are often picking up new people and ideas.

The closest of these relationships, the one with my partner, significant other, co-captain (however one wants to define these things), becomes more secure, comforting, and loving as time goes on. I said at the beginning that I didn't believe in romantic love anymore, that the only relevant application of the word applied in a Gandhi-Buddha sense. Love of everyone, the Oversoul (thanks to Emerson for the concept). She changed my mind and has patiently stood aside while I went without sleep, got sick, ate too much fast food, argued too much, and forgot important errands.

My blood family has offered support and encouragement to me through the process as well. From sending messages of support and embracing me in a knowing way, to listening to me spin out the tale. In particular, my mother and father have demonstrated the patience of three Jobs and, more importantly, the ability to listen and understand someone with whom you don't immediately agree.

My three beautiful shooting stars have been by my side the whole time. True, sometimes adult concerns and debates needed an appropriate editing-out, but they have shown me joy, wonder, forgiveness, and belief that I sometimes forgot existed in the world. My beliefs about larger questions have changed significantly in the last two years, but they have been the root which I use to discern goodness and truth. I read several years ago that having a baby was like hiring a zen tutor for 18 years – one that can teach you patience, sacrifice, mystery, etc. They have not failed me in this regard, and they continue to be my strongest connection to something I can only describe as holy.

If you are wondering, no, this is not the speech I am offering upon completion of my Ph.D. That one is still a ways off. But the pen, above, was the instrument that closed this chapter of my life today. It was disorienting, exhausting, and pugilistic, but it is over.

Parental fragments

My recent priority of media digestion means that I skim, as fast as I can, any articles that (1) seem culturally aware and (2) mention my media triumvirate: debates on belief, parenting narratives, and independent music. Today, the Internet chefs produced a feast of parenting morsels including bad parents, boyhood studies, and the praises of being bored. Here are my parenting fragments for the day:

Time's most recent cover story, "The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting," is here.

I am reminded of a college-student acquaintance of mine who was recently expelled from his dorm for behavior un-befitting of a freshman in a drug-free zone. Now he was having to move all of his belongings back to his parents' house. Someone else close by said "That's not too bad. Maybe there really aren't any consequences for you!" He shot her a look. "Yes there are! I don't want to be there through all of both breaks! That's like torture." (I paraphrase; freshman men do not speak like this). Is it overparenting when you take your nearly-grown kids back after a mistake?

"The Puzzle of Boys," an academic review of gender-anxious psyche books in The Chronicle of Higher Education is here.

Yesterday on the phone my son was talking about how great the next couple of days would be. "I can be on the computer all day for, like, two days!" I was shocked. "Really? Doing what?" I asked.  He rattled of the names of the couple of games he was looking forward to playing. I thought: I give these guys, an hour of "screen time" on a weekend day, and we don't have a television feed. How does he think he is going to play on the computer all day? I realized how much time we spend playing cards, building Legos, drawing, and reading together, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Then, I inoculated myself for the free-time debates that might arise in the next five days.

My guide and commiserator in the adventure and tragedy of (half) single-parenthood, Sandra Tsing Loh's newest article in The Atlantic, "On Being a Bad Mother" is here. I adore her honest self-exposure and the portrait she draws of her girls.

A friend-of-a-friend and a parent of a 9 year-old regularly watches The Family Guy with her daughter along with some other adult-themed programs. She purchased a book for her daughter attempting to introduce her to sex education, maybe something like this. Her daughter handed the book back to her, saying "Mom, this is inappropriate." Where have the permissive part and the authoritarian part of culture caught each other in the neck to produce this result?

Music Monday Annex: Avett Brothers meet Funny or Die

Please. If you have a moment, watch this Avett Brothers video which is embedded in a hilarious faux-home-shopping-network sketch. This piece of entertainment is a genre blending gem!

Music Monday: Web tools for feeding your music appetite

New technologies abound for music lovers who want to sample exotic new genres or bands they have always heard about but never obtained. Here are some web tools that have changed how I access music over the last two years of my musical re-awakening.

eMusic
I never liked Napster or its variations. I was late to the iTunes/iPod/iHaveStuffYouDon'tHave party, so I just avoided it. However, in 2007, when I was given 50 music credits on eMusic to start an account, I was immediately impressed. The music is less popular (eMusic can only get the rights to distribute music that is not major label), experimental, wickedly diverse, and wrapped in tons of great text. eMusic's reviewers recommend things that I really like, they evaluate music honestly (unlike most commercial venues), and the fans write prescient text about albums as well. Also, songs work out being about half as expensive as iTunes. When I buy music from iTunes, I feel like I am buying a coffee at Starbucks, even if it's really good. When I use my subscription credits every month at eMusic, I have the feeling that I am buying music closer to the source because of the independent ethic of the site. If you want me to send you some free credits to try it out, let me know!

My favorite new music from eMusic in the last two years: the Rural Alberta Advantage and Thao.

iTunes - the program not the store
Yes, it took me years after iTunes existed to learn that I did not have to have a Mac to use it. However, those darling Apple program developers -- it was less than a year between my first of iTunes and my first purchase of a Mac. The ability to analyze, collect, and store music in the iTunes program is fantastic. Mostly everyone knows this already, but  iTunes is free to download and to use in playing and organizing digitally stored music, you can go here to grab it for free.

My favorite use of iTunes: the ability to make a getting-ready-for-school-in-the-morning playlist for each one of my kids.

Mojo
I keep wondering how Mojo is legal. When I try to log in to the server and it's down (rare), I always think, well, the music police must have gotten to them. But it always comes back. Mojo is a free program that one user downloads onto his computer, creates a profile, and then logs into the Mojo server where she can find other listeners. If you download Mojo and download it too, then we can both log onto the server at the same time, friend each other, and listen to AND download each other's music straight out of iTunes. Mojo tests my digial music ethics statement, which is becoming rather puritanical, because I am not sure how I feel about getting something I really like for free.

N.B.: The main Mojo site is currently unavailable this morning as I write, but it will be back up at some point. You can download the software here.


Music blogs
Since starting my blog a month ago, I have come across hundreds of music blogs and only a handful that I enjoy. Most of them are listed to the right as links, but primarily I like JP's blog, HearYa, Radio Exile, 17dots, and Daytrotter. These hubs are great for learning about albums that have just released (so I can turn around and download them on eMusic), artist-team ups that happen (Monsters of Folk), freshly announced tours, new bands worth sampling, and making connections with similar music palates.

Most recent knowledge gained on a music blog: one of the reviewers on HearYa just moved cross country from somewhere in California to Atlanta, my hood.

Recently I have been using another site called LaLa. I will have more to say about it in a couple of weeks when I have really worked it out, but the concept seems pretty fresh. If you give it a peep, let me know what you think.

Happy music digestion!

A holiday of imperial expansion ...

... is somehow excused by turkey-craft this cute.

Things you get when you turn 10

My daughter's first decade is in the bag. May I finish my diss. before she's 20.

Ditch the couch and find your mouse.

Clay Shirky, a writer, teacher, and Internet theorist, published the text of a speech he gave, "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus," on his blog last year. It's true; I have a passion for trio-list titles.

Shirky analyzes the "cognitive surplus" of societies and contrasts the differences in how free time has been used in the Western world in the Industrial Revolution (gin), the mid-20th century (television), and our current era (participation). Because the speech is cultural critique, because it provides a re-vision of history, and because hits its climax with a narrative that involves kids and culture, I excerpt it here.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

Shirky tells a great story that supports an interesting theory. All is telling.

Malcolm Gladwell, racism, and the attack of the comments

Malcolm Gladwell is interesting. Uncompromisingly so. His recent book, What the Dog Saw, drew a salty review from Steven Pinker at the New York Times earlier this month. In reviewing Gladwell's blog today, I came across his response to Pinker. He coyly accepts Pinker's title of "minor genius," but then recounts Pinker's citation of a blogger named Steve Sailer, whom he dismisses as a closet racist marauding as a statistician.

What happens next is something I have only recently learned to appreciate. The compliments pile on Gladwell, but then Sailer shows up to start battling it out with his own justifications. He posts four times in two hours! Long posts, too.

Kudos to Gladwell. I don't think he will miss the irony of a "minor genius" able to start a roiling blogosphere cage fight over football quarterback stats.

Newsflash

DIYFather.com, a paternally oriented web collective, published one of my previous posts yesterday. You can go directly to the article here.

Music Monday: LaLa Music, the Avett Brothers, and Norah Jones

Thanks to my cousin Tim for introducing me to LaLa. Once you create a free profile for yourself, somehow this site allows you to stream-on-request lots of music, entire albums at a time. Between us, we can't figure out how their business model works, but for now, it's amazing. So far, with my not-terribly-obsure-but-certainly-not-commercial tastes, I have found everything on LaLa that I wanted to peep while at my computer.

I spent the last week listening to . . .

The Avett Brothers

I couldn't go anywhere online without having this band recommended to me because of other preferences (probably M. Ward, the RAA, and the Jayhawks. The album's title track, "I and Love and You," is quiet and haunting. At first singer xx's voice reminded me of xx from The National (not encouraging), but it worked on me. The lyrics are sound.

I And Love And You - The Avett...

I expect to spend time this week listening to . . .

Norah Jones

Her new album, The Fall, released this week has been a long time coming and finds her collaborating with Will Sheff and Ryan Adams. Norah has never disappointed me. I also didn't know, until press for this album, that she's such a fan of Tom Waites. More and more reason to keep listening.

Underployment, its misgivings, and the skin of my teeth

As an academic, or a critical thinker anywhere, it's important to define your terms (see recent post here). Recently I found a lengthy post on dealing with unemployment on Moose in the Kitchen, skimmed it, gave it a comment vote of confidence, and digested it later. Having been severely busy but underemployed for close to two years now, I have some seasoned reflections.

It is true that having a family makes you look at the possibility of poverty differently. When I was fresh out of undergrad working my first couple of jobs, being poor was nearly a point of pride. I am, on some days, a closet socialist. If that sounds too noble, I'm at least a material minimalist. I prefer experiences much more than things. However, being responsible for the success, happiness, and occasional enlightenment of beautiful, small, innocent creatures, makes you downright terrified about being without money.

More on single-parenthood, the divorce process, and academic paralysis in another post. Here are some ways I have been able to make (or imagine that I can make if I really need to) money since I voluntarily left my last post that included health benefits, seasonal vacation time, and the socially-frilly though confidence-inflating title of "real job".

Elance: I have looked hard at it for months. I don't do well jumping into things that I don't know; I have to build familiarity. However, it appears that someone who can write, edit, program, design, translate, or provide other corporately valuable skills, could make go of things there. I will be throwing my hat in the ring shortly. Currently they are hosting a competition themed around "The New Way to Work" that sounds pretty interesting.

New Media Consultant: For the last several months I have worked with the textbook company Bedford/St. Martin's on its online course space for composition instructors, CompClass. This has meant many things, but among them: providing curricular support for instructors new to using the tool at my university, promoting its use to new teachers, writing chapters for a "Best Practices" guide, and serving as a test user for the newest generation of the space. Because I bill consulting hours, I can complete the work more flexibly than if I were having to show up at a desk every day.

Scriptwriter: I have written about this briefly before, but I have been working with a co-author on a script, spanning half of the 20th century, about the bootlegging and outlaw culture of a small town in North Georgia. The meetings have reawakened a passion for script work that I developed years ago as a creative writing student and launched us both on an exciting project. I won't have any official news about marketing the script until it's finished next spring.

Freelance editor: I served as the editor for a self-help book being published next year through Author House. They appear to provide other freelance opportunities that I have yet to pursue.

In my memoir and culture writing, I am trying to stay flexible, relevant, and grounded in narrative. As a freelancer, I just want to keep the lights on, gas in the tank, and food in all our mouths. As far as my research, I just want to make a lightening rod argument about the place where art, religion, and history mingle.

Five for Friday: Scary (Lego) things

N.B. -- I came across this article on the 15 best villains of all time on Digg this morning. Interesting to note that there's no crossover.

I asked my 4yr old for some help with my Friday list. "What are the scariest things you can think of from movies or stories," I asked him. Here's his list and brief explanations. It speaks highly for Lego's ability to stay relevant to kids that a picture of everything he named was available in a Lego image format. Here's the list, not in any particular order:

1. The Joker

"The Joker is scary is because he tries to get Batman and because he was trying to get Robin. The Joker has a gun and a poisonous gas box, so he is dangerous."

2. Mummy

 "The Mummy is scary because it has big shoes, and it tries to get people."

3. The Wampa

"The Wampa is scary because it tries to eat people. Luke Skywalker hurt him in the ice cave, but he is still scary."

4. Ghost

"Ghosts are scary because they say 'Boo.'" My daughter added that it's also scary that no one has ever seen them before.

5. Vampire

"Vampires are scary because they have sharp teeth and they can try to bite you."

At this point he began losing interest because it was his turn to play Wii.

Vocabulary. Definition.

Recession. Somehow, for most of the last month, I have been carving out a little time for narrative, media, photo, or "other" blog postings and, in the last two days, it just hasn't happened. So, today, we are experiencing, officially, a recession.

Blogdrawl. This is what happens when you have developed a habit of thinking, reading, doing, or taking a picture of something interesting and posting about it, and then, for a couple of days, you can't.

Illness. And not the hip-hop kind. Everyone is sick: 2/3 of my children, myself, my upstairs neighbor, and all those people I ran into at the health center (coincidence?).

Bills. I dread them, but then face them head on, like a kid throwing himself into waves at the beach. "Take me down," I yell, with a mouthful of salt water while I swirl in the aftermath and barely find my footing. "I dare you."

Google Analytics. Replacing my morning cup of coffee. How can you learn that much information about something so narrow for free? And where do all of the one page views from other countries come from? They really mess with a writer's sense of audience.

Work remotely. What I want to do, for an organization or company that values self-education, literary interpretation, parenting commentary, album and concert reviews, and facilitating cultural exchange.

Joho. The person whose band I listened to with my daughter today, with huge smiles on our faces.

Sleep. Period.

Being home sick from school . . .

. . . means you have a lot of cursive "P"s to catch up on.
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Danger!

No, I have not suddenly decided to review thrash-metal albums from the 90's.

I went to the doctor today and wanted a photo momento. Ever think about how the international BIOHAZARD icon is not that scary . . . but just a bunch of circles? It could be just the stains of a four cups of coffee on a orange table cloth.

Telephone narratives introduced and explained

Originally this post appeared right after Telephone narrative, pt. I several days ago. Its purpose was to concretize my commitment to spin a story out of a telephone conversation for each one of my children this week. I have reset it, and the first narrative, so that they all appear together for your reading enjoyment.

To know why I did this, please refer to one of my reading file stories, "The internet is killing storytelling" by Ben Mcintyre in The Times. I have become quite attentive to articles about how digital media and online habits are affecting our culture. I wrote these posts not to prove Mcintyre wrong, but to make sure that I am staying true to one of overarching goals on this blog: to tell back life in stories.

But here is some information you should know, that provides more depth: I am divorcing and my children are with me half of the time (seven out of fourteen days, to be exact). Remaining a parent, under these conditions, makes our telephone conversations like the fruit that gets pressed on the spike to make juice. If I squeeze it hard enough, I will get the sweetest, largest beverage. With every question, every detail, I squeeze and twist harder.

So, hearing their stories gives me, for part of the week, their tell-able past. It's a past that I cannot have but can at least hear told, so I cling to their stories.

Telephone narrative, pt. I

I spoke with my children tonight on the telephone, and it reminded me of how each one of them has become a story in his or her own right.

My oldest son told me: "Dad, I got a battle scar today," and launched into the story of his topple-over on a bicycle and resulting elbow scrape. In order to explain the cause of his fall, he had to engage physics by describing an unusually high elevation between the asphalt on the street and the concrete of the curb. "You know that little lip," he said, "between the road and the curb? Well, on this particular road, the lip was higher than normal. Like, when you are riding toward it, you need to hit it straight on, and not at an angle. My tire slipped over it and kicked the wheel out from under me. I scraped up my elbow pretty badly, but guess what? I did not cry at all." To which I added, strangely nostalgic for his less macho-self, "you know what? Sometimes it's ok to cry, I mean, if it hurts really badly."

He was so strong in his description, a physical, concrete presentation of events. I got the picture that he just wanted to sketch it out: the difference between the two patches of road, the angle of the tire, the torque of the wheel. It was a narrative of physical detail that left emotion in the dust. It was a narrative of growing up. He is a great storyteller, my son. I want to hold him close to me and remind him of the reason that we tell stories to each other -- to explain things that are confusing, or troubling, or terrifying, or beautiful. To assemble and order them. To distance ourselves from the actual past and strengthen our present selves with a tell-able, ordered past.

Telephone narrative, pt. II

On the phone tonight, my youngest recounted to me the expected events of the next couple of days. "Tomorrow, after pre-school, I go to . . . and then, I go to . . . and then I come to your house!" He often does this, and it illuminates another habit of his: stating questions as facts. His logic works like this: if I say something that is wrong, Dad will correct it; if I say what I think is going to happen, or what I want to happen, and he does not correct me, then I can expect that thing.

It keeps me on my toes because I can't let a statement slip by that has an unplanned or incorrect event without negotiating with it. Here's another example: after dinner, I will have ice cream and candy for dessert. False. You will have one or the other. Crisis averted; because he is fine with amendments in the planning stage. It's just that when he thinks he knows how something is going to go down, he does not adapt well to being disappointed. Just like teaching, it's all in the planning.

Here's another beautiful linguistic trick he has developed, in addition to the several words that we have made up over the years for a various things (na-na for milk; babababika for a really serious tickle session). I call it the mathematical equation: tomorrow(x)=event. If something will happen tomorrow, he says "tomorrow." If it will happen the day after tomorrow, he says "tomorrow-tomorrow." We can go on like this through most of the week, because, to him "tomorrow-tomorrow-tomorrow" can mean much more than "that happens on Saturday."

Telephone narrative, pt. III

I grilled her hard today. She was home sick, my daugher. I told her that I needed her to tell me a story on the phone, so I could complete my telephone narratives. She is usually like an anthology, but sick, at her mom's house it went like this:

How was the sleep-over on Friday? Good.
What did you guys eat? Taquitos.
What was in the taquitos? Chicken.
You really don't have a good story in mind right now, do you? No.

So, I am taking another route. Here is a story that we built together, all four of us at various times, but, in the beginning, it was mostly me and her. I will write it with her as a children's novel one day, but maybe we will serial it, Dickens-style, on here first.

Three girls are new to an elementary school, and because they feel like social outcasts, they take to sitting next to each other at the sandbox during recess every day while everyone else plays. Sometimes they talk; sometimes not. Every day they sit in the same place. Eventually they notice that their feet have made nearly permanent indentions in the sand, which is fine. Normal. Boring. Until one girl experiments with wearing two different shoes one day to "trick" the sand, but as the trio walks up to the box, the shoe outlines in the sand correspond to the mismatched shoes and her own place on the bench. Somehow, the sand knows something. They experiment further, trying to switch their order right before they approach their sitting place, but the sand is always ready for them. This is weird, but does not compare to the inexplicability of the designs that begin to show up around one pair of shoes at a time: an eyeball, a question mark, a dotted line. The girls learn that not only do the designs in the sandbox foretell their choices, but they can sometime predict the onset of certain temporary abilities that cannot be explained. Or mentioned to adults.

See there, my beautiful daughter. You did have a story in you today. We just had to get it from the archive.