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September 28, 2005

should be grading

I'm almost through the stack though, so a moment to yearn:

What I would *really* like right now is a yogi. I know, I know, I'm busier than crap and I need another activity like I need a hole in the head.

But hear me out. I've come around some kind of corner in the past month. I feel somehow older, wiser, quieter, more introspective, even, and more ready to really ramp up my yoga practice.

But it's as though I've kind of plateau-ed, if you will, in practicing on my own. Not that my asana nor pranayama are "perfect"--far from it. But I need someone who can challenge me in ways that a video, book, or even a class can't. So frequently classes (and videos) are geared toward "fitness"--I want to move from that into something more meditative, more life-transforming.

I have no idea what something like a private yoga session would cost. I'm thinking once a week, for a 1.5 or 2 hour session--anyone ever done such a thing?

I want to regain that part of me that used to be serene. I want to be less cynical, less skeptical, less hardened.

AND I wanted to post that I ran my first ever sub-hour 10K last weekend at the Bud Run here in Baldwinsville. It was tres fab. That's another race we'll return to next year. Great organization, great goodies, great route, great weather, etc etc.

Yonker, Madeline 57:54 9:19 (avg mile pace)

and because she kicks my ass:

Patterson, Deborah 54:16 8:44

Posted by mryonker at 11:37 PM | Comments (3)

thought I couldn't be madder

I've been sitting here for nearly a half hour, looking for some acknowledgment on the web of what Jim Amoss, edtior at the Times-Picayune, said this morning on GMA. I want a quote. I want more than what my meager brain is remembering. I actually want someone to show me that HE DIDN'T say what I think he said.

What I think he said was, in fewer, more well-chosen (or not-so-well-chosen) words: if there had been middle class white people locked in the Superdome and in the convention center, these rumors of rapings and beatings and murders would never have come up.

Basically, he said that white people would have handled the trauma in a more civilized, non-incendiary fashion. (??!!!!!)

He said it. He said, "Had it been middle class white people..." Because I looked at B, who looked back at me, mirroring my dumbfoundedness, and asked, "Did he just SAY THAT?"

B nodded. "He sure did."

Somebody help me with this! They have the clip on the front of GMA page that was the lead-in to the interview with the Times-Picayune editor. But I might have the guy's name wrong. (?)

Now I'm mad.

Posted by mryonker at 12:36 PM | Comments (3)

September 20, 2005

god knows i don't have time for this

A student of mine today told me, "I just know that what I write for this unit will be bad."

Ugh.

I introduced the new unit today, one that models Wendy Hesford's family photo analysis (no link, sorry).

He said, "I have no photos."

I said, "Any photo can be subjected to close observation and analysis. ANY photo."

He said, "I have no photos."

I said, "None? None of you graduating? Playing sports? Hanging out with friends? Birthday parties when you were younger? Call your mom, she'll send you some."

He said, "Yes, but I couldn't write anything about them. They didn't have any meaning behind them. They were just football games, parties. Those things don't mean anything."

Ugh This is the point. They do mean something. This will be a hard unit, I guess.

In other, better news: I came across this gem at kottke.org:

"everything i do always comes back to me"

"trying to look good limits my life"

"everybody thinks they are right"

"money does not make me happy"

"thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. i have to live now"

"complaining is silly. act or forget."

"having guts always works out for me"

I love every ONE of these. I need to put them on stickies stash them in places I'll find them frequently. Not sure who Sagmeister is, but he's onto something. If only I could get my freshman to worry less about how they look.

Posted by mryonker at 08:47 PM | Comments (2)

September 15, 2005

I let it happen again

I let the white space creep up again.

Sorry. I am on a mini-hiatus right now. I'll post when I can, but things are just too busy for me--all free moments are used prepping, grading, or reading for exams.

Be back full-on in a few months.

Posted by mryonker at 10:06 PM | Comments (3)

September 07, 2005

still at it

Matt Kirschenbaum explains Why I Blog Under My Own Name (and a Modest Proposal) (via).

The overall message: blogging can have great benefits if done properly.

My fingers itched to put scare quotes around the word properly. But really, I'm not being disrespectful.

Here's what I'm chewing on. Properly, I think for MGK, means professionally. It means talking about your research, research that is in various stages of progress. Other stuff: politics, current events, and "midnight anxieties"--off limits.

And I respect this. I have enormous respect for this, esp in light of his blog living on his public U's server.

(Pick your comparative transition), this to me feels patriarchal. Or masculinist. Forgive me while I spew out some terms I'm literally wrestling with. All of those things that have been traditionally marked (indicted) as feminine: the emotion, the daily living, the embodiment of the writer and hir experience is rendered useless. None if it has a place in/on the medium, or genre.

The line between public and private is a gendered one? I don't think I'm that far afield. In fact, that's somewhere in what I'm reading for exams. Somewhere.

Posted by mryonker at 01:10 PM | Comments (3)

September 05, 2005

insight in strange places

OK, a quick confession: I'm reading a book,Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld.

Just a small defense: only reading it in bed at night, when I would be worthless to read anything for exams.

So, I'm reading this book, which I picked up at our library because I liked the cover and because Wally Lamb wrote a glowing blurb for the back cover, and it catalogues a midwestern girl's 4 years through an elite prep school in New England. It has been OK. I'm still reading, anyway. I'm not getting as much gritty social commentary as I am kind of liking the characters and etc.

But the real reason I'm blogging this book is the nearly obvious insight it offered me (why hadn't I really thought of this before, smack-yourself-on-the-forehead kind of duh) in this scene:

The protagonist sits in English class, and the popular rich girls pass her a rubric for her to rate the teacher's dress, makeup, and shoes.

I let the piece of paper sit untouched on my lap, like a napkin. But the truth was, I felt cornered by it. Yes there were things I didn't like about Ms. Moray, but they had little to do with her clothes. And besides, didn't Aspeth and Dede understand that written words trapped you? A piece of paper could slip from a notebook, flutter out a window, be lifted from the trash and uncrumpled, whereas an incriminating remark made in conversation was weightless and invisible, deniable in a later moment. (147)

I think Lee (protagonist) feels trapped in other ways; for instance, she feels required to contribute to the rubric in order to be accepted. But this is a theme of the book: the tension between shaping one's identity to fit in and preserving oneself at the cost of being in with the community. For Lee to NOT write in the rubric would have been just as damning as if she were to write in it and were to get caught.

It's this kind of choice, the choice between the person and the people, that writers make. Delicately. Writers write because it's in them to do so. But so much of what is in us is hurtfully honest, or jarring, or scary, or something that people might not want to look at. A thin line. A kind of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't.

Gah. I could go on, I suppose, about the implications between the spoken and written word (just from this quote). Like, the spoken word is "deniable," and somehow more prone to things like deceit, while the written word, though "incriminating," is unflinching, concrete, static, and therefore closer to truth. A reach, I know.

Right. Whatever, I'll stop my Lit 101 essay now. But the cool thing, then, is that blogs are both written and not-written. It can exist and then disappear. It can grow and change. ?

Here's where, while writing that Lit 101 essay, I'd get up and get some Doritos, 'cause now I'm not sure what I'm saying anymore.

Posted by mryonker at 11:51 PM | Comments (6)

making some sense

iBeth points to an interview with Heather Armstrong, where she advises would-be bloggers to suppose that the one person you wouldn't want reading your blog, reads it. And that this should provide some sort of beacon concerning what you should write and what you shouldn't.

Add this to the stuff swirling around Ivan Tribble at the Chronicle of Higher Ed telling academes to RUN! RUN away from the blog! if they ever want to get hired, and I'm listening.

Not because I care, particularly, whether Ivan will be on the hiring committee that doesn't hire me because I have a blog.

What strikes me, or why I care, is that this advice from both Ivan and Heather is pretty standard by now. I mean, we've been hearing about people getting fired about what they've said on their blogs for a year or more. Yet people keep publishing stuff that will make, obviously, someone angry.

Why?

Why do many (not all, of course) bloggers insist on talking about the people that surround them? iBeth's greenhouse saga is the perfect example. She is working in real life to communicate with people, f2f, and is not really getting anywhere. The written, publicked communication, however, creates action, re-action.

There's somewhere in here an argument about people who have lost jobs *wanted* to lose them, but that's not really where I'm going with this, because I don't believe that. What I do believe, though, is that it is easy to slam a door in someone's face without anyone to witness it, and harder to slam a door in someone's face when the neighbors are looking on. And it's easier to fire someone than it is to deal with what that someone has to say about drunk people at office parties, etc.

My hope for the blog and similar social software is that it will pave the way for a communication revolution, one in which people must be held accountable for their sometimes unseen actions and their sometimes unheard words. Instead of "What would Jesus do?" people would ask themselves "What would a blogger report if I say/do this?"

Posted by mryonker at 12:30 PM | Comments (2)

do you smell french fries cookin?

Over at Crooked Timber, Maria posts and entry titled Myths about America. As I talked to my mom on the phone this morning about outrageous gas prices, I mentioned that I had read this post, which points out that European gas prices have always been nearly twice what Americans pay.

Because gas has always been affordable to me, it has never occurred to me that I should live near (ie within walking, biking or even public bus distance) where I work and shop. In fact, as B and I have "grown up," we've slowly moved away from urban areas, giving primacy to things like yards big enough for decent gardens, space for the kids to play, little traffic, etc.

We are fortunate that our current home is in a small village that sports a little market, library, post office, hardware, and elementary school all within walking distance. But one of the schools I'm teaching for this semester is over 40 miles away. There is no bus I can take, there is no car pool, no metro, and sadly, I cannot walk, or even run to get there. And I must work. And I must pay 3.50 a gallon to do so.

I feel somehow buoyed by this. Now, hopefully, we Americans will start doing what we should have been doing all along: conserving our resources AND start thinking hard about alternative energy.

When I travel into town to the big grocery store to shop, I call my neighbor to see if she'd like to ride in with me or if I can grab her something while I'm out. When any trip is planned, we work extra hard to consolidate purposes. I am less likely to "run into town" to pick up one or two things for dinner and more likely to be creative with what I've got in the cupboard. I'm more apt to plan ahead; when we were out yesterday, I got supplies for our first Girl Scout meeting next week (normally I'd wait until the day before). Etc.

Most exciting, though, is B's ramped up research on vegie diesel. Our boiler that heats our house and our water right now runs on "fuel oil," which is the same as diesel fuel (without the road taxes built into the price). When we ran out last winter because they had delivered fuel to our old address, B ran down to the gas station and bought a few gallons of diesel to hold us until they could send us a truck out. (I had no idea it was the same stuff.)

He's found plans online for building a vegie boiler. It's either that or put one of the several wood stoves from the garage into the house. Personally, I'm pulling for the vegie boiler, because I've heated with wood before. While it's warm and dry (line drying clothes in a room heated with a woodstove is sometimes faster than using a conventionall dryer), it's also dusty, labor intensive, ashy, you have to get up in the middle of the night to feed it, dusty, dirty, and hard work. Did I mention it's messy? And hard work?

I've seen this man take an engine from a Subaru Legacy and put it into a Vanagon. I've seen him plan and build a strawbale cabin. I've seen him bake amazing bread. I've seen him build computers for gifts. I've seen him pry open a computer he's never been inside before, spot the tiny part that needs replaced, and replace it. I've seen him fix plumbing, install dishwashers, wire electrical outlets, build puppet show stages.

He delivered Jackson, our second child, who came before the midwife arrived.

In short, I'm convinced that anything he puts his mind to, he can pretty much do. And while my house might smell a little like french fries cooking this winter, I'm excited.

And I don't think I'll be complaining too much about gas prices. Too much.

Posted by mryonker at 11:18 AM | Comments (4)

September 02, 2005

sickening

Yahoo news has taken the photo down where "white people find food."

They have left up the photo of the young black man who "loots." I won't link to it, b/c I'm sickened. Finally I heard Matt Lauer, FINALLY after how many days of coverage, ask Tim Russert about the fact that nearly all the people who are stranded and DYING in NO are black and poor. Tim's response? "It's sad." (!!??)

I want to strangle someone. Harry Connick is down there (in Baton Rouge), talking about how he could load up with water, hop in his car RIGHT now and get to the convention center in an hour. But they won't let him.

Posted by mryonker at 08:41 AM | Comments (5)