skip to main |
skip to sidebar
So it was February of 1991, and I was in Chicago, debating at the Northwestern tournament, and something unexpected happened. We were debating a team from Boston College, Craig Cerniello and Darren Schwiebert, who, to be frank, were better than we were. Not that there was any shortage of teams about whom that could've been said. And I should mention that by "we," I mean myself and Robert Scott McWilliams, current whereabouts unknown to me. We were affirmative. It was an affirmative that Rod Phares had dreamed up over Christmas break, concerning China and ozone depletion. Those details don't matter. My confidence had taken some stout blows from recent events. I don't think that mattered much either. It was round one, and we had a mediocre judge whom I won't name, since I just called that judge mediocre and this is an open blog, but a judge who knew us and had been very good for us before. Still, we were getting pretty clearly thrashed. It wasn't bad to the point of embarrassing, but it wasn't a debate anyone should have a hard time deciding. Something happened between the second negative rebuttal (Cerniello) and the second affirmative rebuttal (me):
I suddenly understood debate.
No angel choirs, no "click" in my head, nothing overt. I wasn't sitting under a banyan tree, and I didn't come up with any eightfold path. I just, all of a sudden, understood that all these zillions of different arguments that I was trying to take care of, like chasing drops of mercury after a spill, weren't zillions of arguments after all. It was all one big argument. It was one coherent whole.
I can put that into words today, and I could've put it into words before that day. Millions of times I'd had coaches tell me that the smart debating was about understanding the relationship between all the issues. I knew that. I could say those words. Doing it, though, was much more difficult. I'd been trying for years, which probably explains why I was such an unsuccessful debater. No false modesty there: year after year, I truly stunk. But in this round, all of a sudden, it wasn't a zillion little arguments anymore: just one. It was something like those Magic Eye 3d pictures, even though I've never yet gotten one of those to work. Maybe tomorrow I suddenly will, and that'll change my life again.
I think that may have been the single lesson that made all of my ten years as a debater (first debate in 1982, last in 1992) worth it. And it knocks me for a loop that I completely left this out of the study I'm currently hammering into shape about the effects that a debate career have on the skill set of someone who goes on to be an educator.
It absolutely changes every conversation. It's especially handy in the classroom, because I can hold an entire lesson in my head as one big set of interwoven claims, held together by relationships. If a student is having trouble with one concept, it's really easy for me to step out, grab the bigger picture, and use it to explain that one trouble spot to the student. It also comes up in meetings a lot: I find that I have an easy time asking, "Is this really where our trouble is? Are we really dealing with the issue, or are we spinning our wheels?" I can do that because I've got a good protection against tunnel vision.
Another study that someone ought to do someday would investigate whether former debaters are inoculated against sound-bite political strategies. In particular, the study ought to examine the relationship between success in debate and resistance to that kind of tactic. Plenty of debaters can handle lots and lots of separate statements, just like keeping lots of balls in the air. But the debaters who take it up a notch have to understand how those statements fit, how they cohere, and I get the feeling there would be an entirely different response from that group of people to the typical political campaign messages.
And the cynical part of me can't make up its mind whether debate coaches could use that to actually promote their programs, or whether it would become vitally necessary that we hide those results, so that elected officials don't get ahold of them.
The other thing I meant to mention is, I'm still struck to this day by how sudden it was. I am not exaggerating when I trace that entire realization, a realization that stuck, a realization that turned me from a mediocre debater into a decent, and occasionally quite good, debater; a realization that's been this turbo-charge to my career, descended on me in about a three minute window. Less than that. I am absolutely sure that there was a second when I couldn't make it come together, and one second later I could.
Other places I've noted my belief that people do not learn until they are ready to learn. That process can't be hurried through any trickery or force known to humankind. People either cannot, or will not, or the entire point might be that the two are not distinct. But when it was time for me to get it, suddenly I got it. And once I understood that about my students, it made many things about teaching make sense, and seem tolerable, that previously didn't and weren't.
Every few years I lose almost everything I own.
I moved from Georgia to Arizona in 1997, from Arizona to Texas in 1999, and from Texas to Oregon in 2007. Each time, I packed up my books and shipped them, but otherwise took only what I could fit in a Toyota Corolla. A tiny Toyota Corolla.
And on a bunch of occasions I've done this or that stupid thing and managed to wipe out every document I had on my computer. That meant I had to rewrite all my lectures, all my syllabi, all my assignment instructions and activity materials, from a blank page. Sometimes I could reconstruct what I'd done before from memory, but more often I had to just rack my brains and do a total rewrite.
It's surprisingly liberating. I don't necessarily look forward to that ruthless culling that precedes a move, but once I get started, it's actually pretty painless. I tend to find out that much of what I've accumulated is just junk, and that when I'm rid of it, I feel proud of the accomplishment.
Same thing with the computer disasters. I'm convinced that they're a big part of why I've never fallen into a rut in my teaching. Instead of doing the same thing over and over again, I get to reinvent a lot of things, and put to work the lessons I've learned from teaching prior classes. And if I weren't forced to do it, I would never exercise enough initiative and discipline on my own to get it accomplished. It takes a catastrophic wipeout to make it happen.
That's been on my mind lately as I hear news about the floods through Illinois, Iowa and Missouri. I do feel a good deal of concern and compassion for people who are in danger, who are afraid for their lives, but I really have a hard time having much empathy with people who lose a lot of possessions, and then say something like "My entire life has been destroyed." Really? Your life is made of stuff? Stuff is just stuff. Stuff gets tiresome and can always be replaced. Even when they're talking about things like photos, I don't really get why they treasure them quite so much. I've been fond of a few pictures in my life, and have even managed to lose one or two that I really wanted to keep, but it's not the kind of thing I lie awake at night and stare at the ceiling about. In most cases, I can remember in great detail what the photo looked like, and that's good enough.
So I can't decide whether that's a failure in my own heart, or a distortion in other people's values. But I do know I'm not wedded to stuff, and to date it's been a pretty good way to live.
So one of the things I get to do with my three months of vacation is work on my academic research. College professors try to write and publish in their academic fields for a few reasons:
- It keeps us up-to-date, both by putting us in touch with the outside world and by forcing us to read other scholars' research;
- It enhances the school's prestige;
- It gives administrators a way to measure performance, for purposes of hiring and promoting;
So over the past several years, I've submitted a lot of academic papers to conferences in the field of Communication. Most have been accepted, and a few even got what we call "Top Paper" recognition. Now, however, what I need to do is beat these projects into shape, which is to say that I need to improve them, tighten them up, and submit them to academic journals for publication. The standards that journals apply are a lot higher, so I need all the help I can get.
That's where you come in.
Honestly, I need fresh eyes. I've been working on some of these things for so long that I've stopped noticing details. I don't need other academics to comment on the finer point of this or that theory; I need someone to read what I've written and say, "You know, that makes me think of ..." no matter how tangential.
I've got a separate blog on Blogspot, this one set to private, which I'm using to develop three old conference papers in particular. Well, two conference papers, and the third project is actually my doctoral dissertation. If you'd be interested in reading up on what I do as an academic researcher, and giving me your reaction, then send me an email, ideally from a gmail account, and I'll send you an invite that'll let you read the blog.
One more time: what you reply with doesn't have to be lofty or academic in tone. It could just be "Here's something funny that popped into my mind while I read this." That could help a great deal.
Hope you're having a good summer.
Okay. Apparently a big ol' segment of the human race needs a review of the flippin' obvious.
The sidewalk is for two-way traffic. That means that even though you've selected a direction, believe it or not, other people are permitted to choose to walk in the other direction. Almost all sidewalks are wide enough to accommodate this. Stay on your right, and they'll stay on their right, and everything will be fine. No, your right. Your other right. Get over on the right. The RIGHT! There you go.
But, yes, of course, how heartbreaking, you're walking with a friend, and the two of you really really really enjoy walking side-by-side. You enjoy it so much that you can't do without being abreast of one another for one single footstep. You've got to be able to see your BFF out of the corner of your eye, or the universe might explode. You can't even move closer to each other; you're the optimal distance apart! How dare these other people meddle in your perfect spacing?
Except that you need to. The typical sidewalk is wide enough for one person walking each direction. If you're walking side-by-side with a friend, and someone approaches from the other way, then you need to move over. It's not their duty to step off into what in Oregon is squishy and full of goose poop. You need to make room. You can go back to walking abreast one entire second later. You'll live.
No, no dirty looks. No, no indignant huffs. Just move the flip over, and be on your way.
No, no exemptions just because you're absorbed in a deafening conversation via your phone. Your joke stopped being funny the fifth time you had to shout the punchline. And even less so if you're texting. Instead, try being aware of the world around you. Yes, I left the word "revolves" out of that sentence; that was intentional.
These aren't difficult rules to live by. If you fail to, one of these days you're going to get shoved into traffic or thrown under the wheels of a thundering Schwinn. Get it together.
In the first place, I feel fully dressed in my T-shirt and boxers. My boxers are very definitely old-person undergarments; they're loose, they come down to my mid-thigh, and the fly has a button. I've answered the door in them, gone out to get the mail or to get something from my car, and felt completely covered.
In the second place, Oregon has wonderful evening breezes. I walk home from work, and the first thing I want to do when I get in the door is open the windows and the sliding glass door and let in some cool air. But I also want to shed my belt, and usually my pants as well. And here's where it gets slightly irrational. I always wait until my pants are off before I open the window.
And the reason I do doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I feel fully clothed in my boxers, but I feel very odd taking off my pants in front of an open window. I can't pin down how it's any different from taking off my coat, which I'd feel perfectly normal doing in front of an open window. Before, I'm fully clothed; after, I'm fully clothed. During, I'm fully clothed. So what's weird about it?
It seems to me that it's an example of some of the fuzzy-logic, very pragmatic cultural knowledge that most people soak up without thinking about it, but that a few people have a hard time handling. Clothing norms, in general, are more complicated than many of us realize, which is the chief reason young children don't grasp them too thoroughly. To a toddler, it's difficult to understand why it's okay to take off your hat in public, but not okay to take off your underwear. Both are discrete articles of clothing that cover specific body parts.
Even worse, the norms aren't universal; they're subject to extreme cultural variability. I've read about aboriginal cultures in which complete nudity is customary in just about all situations, but they'd find it deeply humiliating if anyone watched them eat. They build very solid shelters in which everyone can eat all alone, out of sight of everyone else. I can't imagine what they'd make of our restaurants. Probably the same thing we make of pictures of nekkid folks in National Geographic: we just roll our eyes and wonder at what weirdos they are.
Most folks walking around have some sense of what semantic meaning is, and all but a few recognize syntactic meaning with just a brief explanation and a couple of simple examples. But I think we way downplay the difficulties that crop up with the third dimension of meaning: pragmatics. I know that most folks understand what dyslexia is, and that more and more folks have a grasp on other learning disabilities, such as auditory processing, dysgraphia, etc., but surprisingly few have any idea about nonverbal learning disorders. We're beginning to recognize the problem in kids: they aren't sure when it's okay to enter a conversation, or how to use eye contact when interacting with others, or how much personal space others expect. Similarly, they may not understand what clothes to wear, or possibly how to wear them, which is an even more complex subject.
And I suppose I also think that we underestimate the degree to which the affective, pragmatic, nonverbal stream of information is becoming more complex all the time. We all take it as obvious that there are more things to know, that we swim in a sea of information, that advances in communication technology produce more and more data that everyone is expected to absorb and process, but I wonder if we recognize that the world is also a more complicated place in ways that aren't reducible to data? What with increasing immigration, the erosion of ethnocentrism, and in general growing understanding that difference is less a threat than a resource, there are more pragmatic modes, more ways of behaving, more fuzzy, complex formulas for complying with others' expectations than in the past.
I suspect we don't recognize it. I think we're still stuck on trying to persuade the recalcitrant that those who are different aren't necessarily wrong or bad, so we haven't made more than inching progress in the next step, which involves sizing up just how much we have to learn, and how we're going to do it. And when we do, and when we realize that these aren't things that fit neatly into formulas, textbooks or training sessions, I think we're probably in for a brand new type of information sickness, something like the overload people feel after the first few days in a new job or a new school, but far more intense. And along the way, I suspect we'll see symptoms that resemble those of data-driven information sickness, including memory lapses and other burps and slips in rational thinking.
Like odd depantsing rituals.
Over the past forty-eight hours, I fought my battle with coffee. It was over a lot sooner than I expected. All the same, I doubt I'll touch the stuff before August.
Coffee is addictive. And I don't mean that in any cute sense of the word: I mean that it creates physical dependency, and if a dependent person cuts down on coffee intake, there are withdrawal symptoms. That's simply a fact. A scary fact.
When I was in graduate school, about a decade ago, I went hog-wild on coffee. There was a very nice locally-owned coffee shop just about a block from my workspace, so I frequented it. This should give you an idea of just how frequent my frequenting was: they had, as many college-town businesses do, a punch card setup. Ten punches got you a free beverage. They weren't very smart about it, as they gave a punch for everything, even a small house blend, and the freebie was good for anything on the menu, no matter how expensive. But their foolish generosity was my boon, and I traded in a whole lot of punch cards. To be precise, it was not at all unusual for me to start a day with a brand new punch card, and, by the end of the day, fill it and claim the freebie. That was a lot of coffee. It gradually dawned on me that it was an unhealthy amount.
What saved me, I think, is that I hadn't been a coffee drinker before that. I started drinking coffee at that phase of my education, because my doctoral adviser was a hard man to pin down, but could often be enticed into stepping out for a cup of joe. At first, I had to have a mocha with a lot of whipped cream. Then I managed to choke down flavored coffee with lots of cream and sugar. The next step was unflavored coffee with cream and sugar, then just sugar, and now I drink it black. As a matter of fact, I like cafe Americanos, nothing added except, occasionally, an extra shot. The point of that little beverage history is that I worked my way up to my ridiculous overconsumption of caffeine pretty darned quickly, inside of a year or two. And I gather, from purely anecdotal evidence collected from friends and family, that what causes the addiction is heavy consumption of coffee over a long period of time. I wasn't able to put the serious hurt on myself in just two years, praise God; it takes year after year after year of steady coffee consumption.
So, earlier this week, I finally asked myself why I was still brewing up coffee every morning. It's summer. I have no need to get out of bed until I feel like it. I have no particular need to be alert. Once I realized there was no positive reason for me to go straight from my warm bed to a warm cup of coffee, I decided this would be a good week to see if addiction had set in.
Oh boy.
Tuesday was the day. I didn't suffer any symptoms until about two or three in the afternoon, but then it hit: the caffeine deprivation headache. Boom. Boom boom boom boom boom, like a jackhammer. And the pain pulsed with my heartbeat, which meant when it came time for me to take my regular half-hour walk home, I felt the headache at quadruple intensity every time I climbed a hill. By the time I got home, I was so wrung out from pain that all I wanted to do was go straight to bed. I slept fourteen hours: 6 PM to 8 AM.
And then I felt fine.
Yesterday, I had a little ghost headache in the afternoon that didn't amount to anything. Today, we'll see, but I don't expect anything fierce. I think my body shook it off in one day. And I think it did so because of a choice I made about twelve years ago.
Around the time that my excess consumption of coffee started scaring me, I made a firm resolution and cut back to one very strong cup, very early in the morning. Except in special circumstances, such as when I have to stay awake to drive, I never drink coffee more than about an hour after I wake up, and I never have a second cup. On more than a few occasions, my colleagues have requested, or even demanded, an explanation for this. I tell them that I have quite enough trouble falling asleep at night without making matters worse with too much caffeine, and this is true. But it's not the chief reason. The idea of being deep into caffeine dependency, with no way out except through a lot of pain, is one I find quite unsettling. And even though I drink coffee just about every day, it seems as though limiting myself to one early cup makes for a shallow dependency that's easily dismissed. Every few years I go off coffee for a while, and the effects are mercifully brief, so I'm not inclined to mess with what works. Yes, this being the Pacific Northwest, I keep passing places where I can smell it, and oh, does it ever smell enticing. But some sacrifices are worth it.
Something like the above reasoning explains the majority of odd choices that I make: choices about food, about sleep, about spending money, about making friends, about driving a car, about how I teach my classes, and the list could go on. Much of what I do doesn't make sense to other people, but I'm not inclined to mess with what works.
For the most part, I love being a teacher, and I can't imagine doing anything else for a living. There's just one part of the job that I don't like.
It's very easy to get the wrong impression, and to think that just because students apparently are paying attention, giving good feedback, saying positive things about the class, that somehow I'm setting their feet on the right path and steering them away from mistakes. I thought that for the first few years I taught. Then, I had to learn the hard way: I never, never, never steer them away from a mistake. Never have, never will, can't. They steer themselves away, when they do. And they don't very often.
I am not saying my students are stupid. The run of them make better decisions than I did at their age. But what I learned the very hard, and painful, way, is that I cannot stop a student from making a mistake. They have to make their own mistakes. I can't protect them, I can't shield them, I can't get through to them. They do what they do because they decide it's what needs doing.
And really, that's the way it should be. I made a choice to teach college, and it has a lot of benefits. I don't talk to parents, ever. I deal with people who are young, energetic, creative, and fun, but still have at least a sketchy foundation of adult behaviors, so I don't get worn out and wrung out by excess childishness. I've had friends who taught younger students, and while they reap enormous rewards themselves, they also suffer from a particular kind of burnout that I think would claim me pretty quickly. College is the right age group for me to teach.
But the thing about college students is, it's a mistake to protect them. By this point, the time for protection has passed. Since this is their first stage of being out from under adult command, it's actually very important that they make and implement their own decisions, even if those decisions are disastrous. I can put it this way: it's more important for them to do an idiotic thing that they decided to do than it is for them to do a wise thing at someone else's insistence.
But it's more than a mistake to protect them: it's just plain impossible. I have, over the years, watched students of mine, students that I cared a lot about, destroy themselves. I've seen them spiral down into drug use. Some aren't alive anymore. At least one is in prison, and won't be out anytime soon. And I remember everything I said and did, chiefly because I go over and over it; and I remember moments when I thought I'd made a difference, only to find out later that I hadn't. No one ever actually teaches a college student; instead, college students take advantage of the resources around them, including but not limited to what their professors have to say, to teach themselves. And it simply doesn't matter how right I am, or how vividly I remember making the exact same mistake in my young adult years: if a student is hell-bent on doing the dumbest thing imaginable, then I am powerless.
And every once in a while I feel like Jeremiah. I explain to students that what they intend to do is a bad idea, even though I know full well that my words are bouncing off. What motivates me to do it anyway is a pretty dreary purpose: I don't want them to be able to claim that no one warned them. When a moment of accountability arrives, when a consequence comes thudding down, I don't want them to be able to lay the charge at my feet that I never cautioned them. I want to be innocent of their blood. What I want is really much more: I do want to reach them, to persuade them, to lead them away from danger, but I know better by now than to think that can happen. College students change their behavior for one reason, and one reason only: because they've decided it's the wise course of action. And while that's inescapable, it does also result in a lot of agonizing moments for their teachers, friends, and loved ones: moments of absolute paralysis and impotence.
The thing about it is, people do not learn what they are not yet ready to learn. People learn when they're ready, when they reach the proper spot in their developmental track, and not before. And there is zero, and I mean zero, and let me emphasize zero, way to speed up that process. It happens at its own pace. When a toddler is terrified of monsters under the bed, an older person may chuckle, may remember a similar fear at a similar age, but the older person cannot transfuse the knowledge that there are no monsters under the bed into the toddler's mind. To the toddler, they're there, waiting. And it's one of the toughest things for the older person to have empathy for the toddler, to experience what it's like for an irrational threat to be absolutely real in the mind.
Just one sore spot I'll get specific about, and then I'll put this behind me: moving, transferring, etc. to be closer to friends and family. I had an advisee do it, and I have a Sunday School student who's about to do it. It's their choice, and it's not my place to tell them it's not a good one. But it isn't. Life moves on. Surrendering to homesickness is not a move toward growth, but toward immaturity and stagnation. It's wonderful to be close to one's family members, but not wonderful to be stuck on the end of an umbilical cord. And being needy and dependent on one's high school friends to me seems uncomfortably similar to peaking in high school. Yes, those years are enormously influential, and most folks acquire wonderful friends and wonderful memories then. But it comes time to move on. There are hordes of people in the world ready to be wonderful friends. If an old friend shows up in the same neighborhood, or the same line of work, then that's great. But holding back and limiting one's options in order to stay close to high school friends really strikes me as tragic.
Despite all of the above, despite the frustration of being powerless, I still love being a teacher. It's actually somehow comforting to know that the students I teach are in control of what happens to them. Certainly limits my ability to screw things up.
I dodge cyclists. I do this by walking on the extreme edge of the sidewalk. Cyclists have this thing about blazing straight up the middle. I've trained myself to stay way over to the side, to avoid collisions. So far, I've been lucky; no collisions yet.
I dodge goose poop. There are lots and lots of Canada geese here, and their poop is at least as large as that of a mid-sized dog.
I dodge bootlicking. Most of my students seem to have a fair helping of integrity, but there are always a few who think the way to get what they want is to be excessively ingratiating. They don't appreciate how much that gives me the creeps. So, they'll try to find out my viewpoints on various issues, especially political ones, so they can parrot them back to me. I therefore try to be pretty hard to pin down.
I dodge socializing. Both at work and at church I have wonderful friends who frequently invite me to their homes, or to come out and meet them for dinner and fun. But one thing that hasn't changed, and probably won't, is that I'm much more happy in a room by myself with a good book than I am in crowd. Work involves being around people, and so does church, and as long as those are inescapable, I'd just as soon they be nice, interesting, fun people, but I still don't seek out people when I want to enjoy myself; I seek where they aren't.
I dodge stodginess. I don't do what I'm supposed to, what would make sense to other people. I'm an academic, which makes it okay to be eccentric, and I take full advantage of the privilege.
I dodge pain. I make light of too many things. I laugh at what really ought to be addressed. But I'm far from alone. I think it's a culture-wide sickness.
I dodge God. Fortunately, He's quicker.
I dodge androgenic alopecia. I use a Gillette Mach 3.
I dodge popular culture: no TV, few movies. With a breathtaking economy of movement, I simultaneously dodge dementia.
I dodge spiders. Once in a while, one of them catches up to me. He usually doesn't live too much longer.
I dodge easy categorization. When people find out I'm from Texas, they can't believe it. When people find out I'm a Southern Baptist, they can't believe it. And the list goes on.
I dodge raindrops. I find it does little good, but I love a challenge. I even find futility kind of charming.
I dodge sniper fire. I must be good at it, since they haven't hit me yet.
And even if everyone around me converts to Islam, I will not. I will stubbornly dodge the Hajj.
For this one, I need help, in the form of comments, from my fellow Oregonians.
I'm not taking a big out-of-town trip this summer. For one thing, I don't have the money. For another, I don't have time, as I have this steady dribble of little responsibilities and duties and chores that will keep me tethered to home.
This is not a bad thing, really. I've grown into a homebody in my middle age. What I've decided to do, though, is make a lot of little one-day excursions. And in Oregon, there are a lot of those available.
What's below is a draft list of places I plan to visit. If you spot good choices that I'm overlooking, do please put up a comment and add to them.
The criteria are pretty simple: it needs to be easy to get to. That means either it needs to be a two-hour drive or less from Eugene, or it needs to be accessible by Amtrak. (I love Amtrak!) And it needs to be worth the visit. And it can cost something, but it shouldn't be opulent. I can spend one night, or possibly two, but single day trips are what I'm really after.
Here's what I have so far:
- Portland/Seattle. I'm going there at the end of June. The Indigo Girls are playing in Eugene, Portland and Seattle on consecutive days, so I'm following them up the coast on Amtrak, then coming back home and getting back to work.
- Along the way, I do plan to swing out and see Multnomah Falls.
- And I may take in the Japanese Garden again; I saw it in December, but I'm told it's spectacular in the summer.
- And I've been commanded to go to OMSI.
- Coos Bay/Bandon. A couple of folks in my Sunday School class are Coos Bay natives, and they tell me there are all kinds of coolness to be found in these two towns, some of it little-known.
- And although I took one excursion to the coast last fall, and checked out both Florence and Newport, I by no means exhausted everything there was to see. I skipped Heceta Head, and rolled through a lot of towns like Yachats.
- The South Sister/Mount Pisgah. I haven't been much of a backpacker thus far, but I'm very okay with extremely long walks, even strenuous ones, and I'm told either or both of these treks would include some mind-slamming views. I'm also told I need to check out Sahalie Falls while I'm out that way.
- The church has an excursion to Triangle Lake in mid-July, so I'll get a good look at that.
- Speaking of the church, the college fellowship folks are talking about a road trip to Ashland for the Shakespeare festival. I'm quite intrigued by that.
- And closer to home, places I can reach on foot, include Spencer's Butte and Gillespie Butte.
That's the beginning of the list. Help me make it longer, eh? Thanks.
Fun is not the point. Fun is a by-product.
There's a difference between instrumental goals and terminal goals. I don't arrive at work on time because arriving at work on time will make the clouds part and the angels sing and my life suddenly feel complete and fulfilling. I arrive at work on time because it helps me to be a more effective educator: I can get my morning scut-work done before class, I can start class on time, and so forth. Many things in my life are subordinate to the goal of being a good educator of students.
But even that's not the terminal goal. The terminal goal is glorifying God. Whenever I do a good job of keeping that in mind, it settles a lot of unsettled things in my life.
But back to fun, I run into this problem all the time. I have too many students, and even the occasional colleague, who put fun too close to the core of their value array. And that's asking for trouble. I cannot think of a single endeavor about which I can say "I am doing this solely for the purpose of having fun," that won't wind up disappointing me. Many things that need doing can be fun along the way, but there's always a more substantive objective. I usually have fun when I teach, have fun when I work with my colleagues, have fun when I write test questions (it's so easy to write a good, rigorous test question that just happens to have a bit of a joke in one of the wrong answers), have fun when I do almost anything. But anytime I'm tempted to think, "I don't want to do this for the sole reason that it isn't fun," I'm straying from sound decision-making into frivolity.
It occurs to me that this has something in common with the kind of conceptual inflation, the kind of bubble, that surrounds efforts to raise people's self-esteem. That, I am convinced, is one of the most benign-sounding terrible ideas of all. If someone has a fever, it's a mistake to treat just the fever except in circumstances when the fever itself has become life-threatening. Those circumstances are pretty rare. Similarly, it is a mistake to treat low self-esteem except in that limited set of circumstances when cratered self-esteem is making suicide look like a good idea. Yes, in situations like that, I can see it. But the overwhelming majority of the time, it seems to me that addressing self-esteem without addressing the inputs that caused it to sag is cutting a corner, taking a shortcut, taking the easy way out, running away from confronting core issues. If you've got such a huge, festering boil in you that it's raising your body temperature a degree or two, then you accomplish nothing by popping an ice-pack on top of it to cool it off. Instead, it needs to be opened up and drained. And where people have complex, layered, multivariate distortions in their perceptions, their relationships, their expectations, their self-talk habits, etc. that are dragging their self-esteem down, then it's the inputs that have to be treated, not the symptom.
That was a bit of a digression, but it's an opinion I've arrived at after a bunch of years navigating the Communication Studies field and seeing what kinds of atrocious thinking we sometimes get up to. And my feelings about fun are closely related.
When you cut the corner and just try to raise someone's self-esteem, the outcome is bound to be inauthentic. If people compliment me just because they think I'm having a down day, then sooner or later I'm going to figure out that the compliments were just a product of sympathy, not an expression of genuine admiration. The whole "everyone gets a trophy, everyone gets to be valedictorian" perspective on self-esteem produces only phoniness. It doesn't produce enduring confidence that has a hard center and resists setbacks; it produces a fake, frothy ersatz self-esteem that can't stand up to an imagined cross look from a friend.
And I get the same dissatisfaction whenever I put my own enjoyment at the center of an activity and measure it by how successfully it entertains me. Things that are worth doing have a purpose, have a product, and are satisfying to complete because I know they needed doing. I get up and go to work every day knowing that I make a difference, that I help old children become young adults, that I encourage and nurture and cultivate and train and strengthen. It's all exhausting work, but at the end of it, I feel a very sturdy sense of joy at what I've racked up. And, along the way, there are endless opportunities to have fun.
That fun needs to be kept to the edges, at the periphery, so it doesn't dilute the actual serious work, but just flavors it and makes it a bit more palatable. Fun can be energizing, and the energy can flow back into the effort. But fun for the sake of fun just doesn't compute. It just reminds me too much of empty calories. Good, nutritious food can be prepared in appealing ways, but when we pull out all the stops to just slap together chemicals that have a pleasing flavor, the outcome is an abomination. Or at least that's how it strikes me.
A comely looking bunch.
Bye, folks.
I wouldn't want to be the person assigned to pick thank-you gifts for academics. That seems to me like a bug of a job.
From time to time, I get asked to show up at this or that function and help out. Just about every time I've done so, I've had a good time. And people around here are awfully good about writing thank-you notes for that kind of thing. But a half-dozen or so times this year, they've gone a step further and given me a Starbucks gift card, so I've been steadily accumulating a stake in Starbucks' inventory.
Problem is, I can't stand Starbucks.
Now, don't think I don't appreciate their effort. Their motive is entirely generous, and I do feel a momentary flash of pleasure when I see evidence of such consideration. But only momentary. A moment later, I think "What am I going to do with this? I haven't even tapped into the first five they gave me." And I think it points up the problem with trying to deal with a group as iconoclastic as academics tend to be.
So, yesterday I managed to put a tiny dent in my accumulated wealth by using a walk to Starbucks and a free beverage as an excuse to have a needed conversation with a very good student. I even left it unclear whether the student needed to give me the gift card back. But back it came, so this morning I went and stocked up on the one Starbucks item I actually do enjoy:
I couldn't really tell you why I like Starbucks mints so much. And it has to be the peppermint ones; the others just aren't the same. But, well, there it is. I could probably attribute it to the same kink in my taste that has me going back and back to Pizza Research Institute in hopes that they've whipped up my favorite soup.
On my walk back, I had all five tins stuffed in my pocket, so every step I took with that foot made this wonderful crunching sound. A lady I encountered apparently noticed it, because she looked down at my leg, and then made eye contact, with a tiny knit to her brow. "Old war wound," I said. God knows what she thought.
In this kind of thing, I'm far from alone. If you talk to a dozen academics, you'll soon uncover a dozen zillion quirks. And yet, from time to time, the poor staff folks have to try to select a treat, answer a question, project an opinion, from the perspective of a generic faculty member. That's like trying to find one drop of water that's representative of the ocean.
My hat's off to them. Certainly not a job I would want.
I've never liked my name.
And I do mean never. I distinctly remember disliking it when I was in Kindergarten, and announcing to my mother from time to time that I had changed my name. I don't remember any of the names I came up with, but they were all radically different.
It's a nickname magnet, for one thing. "Doily." Yes, yes, I get it; a little lace thing associated with old ladies, and it's my name with a little flourish on the end. How droll. Speaking of "Droll," that's what one upperclassman decided to nickname me during my freshman year in college. Funny once; not all that funny nine months later. Then there was "Bananas," which was a reference to the Dole fruit company, "Doyle in boiling oil," which has a slightly more sinister cast in the post-Guantanamo world, and my personal favorite, "Doyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyle," intoned like the twang of a plucked spring. That last one is the only one that, looking back, I think was actually reasonably cute. But when I was eleven years old and it was still fresh, I hated it.
That, I think, is just one sign of how wound up I was as a child. I was a bad-tempered little kid. I have another memory from one of the first days in second grade: a friend of mine, with the unfortunate name of Christy Slaughter, whom I'd loved to play with during Kindergarten and first grade, told me one day, "You're a lot meaner than you used to be." And I remember thinking that, as startling as it was to hear it, she wasn't wrong. I had a big vocabulary and fast reflexes, and I didn't like myself very much, so I put into play the strategy of making the best defense out of a good offense, and I hurt a whole lot of people's feelings over the years.
Debate pulled that tendency in two different directions. In one sense, it made it worse, since debaters tend to have a taste for an artful cheap shot, and I certainly didn't need any encouragement to be more creative with my cruelty. But for several years, that's exactly what I got. The pull in the other direction was, for want of a better phrase, combat fatigue. Eventually I just got fed up with all the nastiness, and jaded and cynical about the scrappiness that most debaters have. It's much easier, in the wake of that, to turn loose of aggravation and walk away from arguments.
Not that I've banished that flaw. No, no, not by any stretch. That side of me still comes out from time to time, especially when students probe a little too hard for loopholes, or when someone I care about is falling short of what they're capable of. But I like to think I grew into someone who was pretty adept at letting unimportant things roll off, and saving my fire for the fights that needed to happen.
This started out being about my name, didn't it? It wandered away. I know that in the Bible, often people's names were changed when they reached turning points in what God had planned for them. What I can say here is that although I've never exactly fallen in love with my name, I'm at least at peace with it now. I don't hate it, although I certainly would never pass it on to any hypothetical kids. So maybe in a sense I did experience a name change to go with my mellowing.
One or two people who read this may burst out laughing and say to themselves, "If this is mellow Doyle, I would hate to have met angry Doyle." All I can say to that is, yes, you would. And there's a longer story that goes with that, but it'll have to wait for another day when I don't have unfinished grading still tugging at my sleeve. It would make a great country song -- maybe I'll slide it to Brad -- because the best title for it would be, "God spoke to me at the Wal-Mart."
So, every now and then I get to daydreaming about synaesthesia. There's a kink in my brain wiring that may qualify as an example, but I've never been sure. I am blessed to have a natural ability to spot spelling and grammar mistakes effortlessly. A few years back, it struck me that what actually happens is that a sentence will taste wrong; I actually feel an unpleasant sensation that closely parallels the jolt of an unexpected flavor. I'm not just talking about food that's burnt, or badly made, but also food in odd combinations that just don't seem right. Years and years ago, when I was ten, I actually spotted, plunked down money for, and chewed, (brace yourself) chocolate bubble gum. It was just as awful as it sounds. I had to spit it out after a few seconds.
At any rate, I get a similar bump when someone sneaks a comma splice, or a misspelled word, or a misuse of punctuation, into their writing. It certainly streamlines the process of grading written work, although not enough to raise it above the level of sheer drudgery. But this morning, it got me to thinking about one of my favorite subjects, which I've already treated in an earlier post here: deliberative versus associative thinking.
Spoken language is arbitrary and conventionalized. Objects and concepts are attached to particular words for the sole reason that we've decided they are, and because we are confident that others will recognize those words when we use them. Written language is mostly functional, but at the margins it's governed by aesthetics and heritage: we spell the way we do and arrange sentences the way we do to maximize understanding and minimize error, to please ourselves with prettiness, and because others have done it a certain way and we follow their pattern. (Pattern. Here comes the associative part.)
Grammar is, mostly, rule-governed. But, as I've described above, I usually attack it with no conscious attention to the rules. I go at my grammar-policing in an almost entirely associative mindset: does this sentence taste right? And that's a typical and predictable behavior, as most people make most decisions through both a deliberative and an associative process, deriving confidence in the result from the degree of overlap between the output of the two processes.
The thing is, I've noticed more and more that I do the same thing for arguments, for reasoning. On more occasions than I can count, I've heard someone stake out and defend a position, and I've thought "That's a really bad argument." Back in the day, it used to be the case that I would have in mind what, exactly, the problem was with the argument: the flaw, the answer I would use to refute it if the need arose. Now, more and more, I just get the same unpleasant jolt that I get with bad writing. Somehow, bad reasoning has some unfinished abrasion to it that knocks up against my critical faculties and makes me gag on it.
I was thinking about this as I walked to work this morning, and I thought "This is all getting to be a little too yin-yang, a little too much in line of tired variations on dialectical tension." But the more I thought about it, the more I decided it wasn't. From my vantage, it seems as though the two modes of reasoning operate independently of one another, although they're brought to bear on the same questions. But what they don't do is, they don't necessarily, or even very often, move to opposing poles and generate tension. Very often my gut and my brain tell me exactly the same thing. When my gut tells me a sentence isn't properly constructed, often my understanding of grammar rules is just one step behind, ready to label the mistake and explain to a student what it would take to salvage the idea.
It also got me to thinking about salvation, about being justified through Christ's death on the cross, being sanctified by the work of the Spirit, and daily putting to death the Old Man of the flesh. On the one hand, through the law I learned what sin was, and through the Bible I learned how, of my own free will and without fear, to conduct my life in a way that it is an offering of love and gratitude to the God who forgave my sins. On the other hand, God judges the contents of my heart to the exclusion of the nuts and bolts of my deeds. I can do what's good and right with a loving heart, or I can do it without sincerity; I can fall down and make a terrible mess of things even as I try my best to seek God's face and follow in obedience, or I can make the same terrible mess as a result of my selfishness. The choices I make and the deeds I enact are concrete, perceptible, sequential, deliberative; the condition of my heart is associative and impressionistic. They're both part of the equation, sometimes allied, sometimes opposed, sometimes in some odd configuration that I can't quite pin down.
And the last thing I chewed on this morning was, which one is prior to the other? When we're newborns, we have sensations and notice repetitive patterns before we ever have the concepts or language to categorize them, but it's also the case that our experience is fundamentally incomplete until we interpret it. From the study of emotion in my field, we know that the set of physical sensations associated with any particular feeling can be assigned any one of a dozen or more labels, which is why self-talk makes such a difference. What one person finds exciting, another may find terrifying, even if their measurable physical outputs are identical. So, I'm not sure it's possible to assign one priority over the other.
Anyway.
Q: What do you call two days of rain in Eugene?
A: A weekend.
"You kiss your mother with that mouth?"
"My mother's dead."
"Oh. Well. Better wipe your mouth after, then."
No, I didn't say that to a student. But part of me would be tempted to.
Someone just apprised me of the local saying: "We don't tan; we rust."
Nice.
That's an unfortunate name for a blog entry, what with the Nazi death camp connotations and all, but it was the best I could come up with that started with the letter S. At least I didn't replace the C with a K.
Anyway, every morning I have to stop at the door and decide what kind of outerwear to put on. It's winter in Oregon, so I have to form an instant opinion of whether it's cold enough to be uncomfortable, and I also have to predict the future and gauge the likelihood of rain. I have the weather forecast to help, I suppose, but most mornings I listen to OPB, which originates from Portland. Even though they typically have something to say about the likely weather in the Willamette valley, it's pretty sketchy and incomplete. So I pays my money and takes my chances.
And almost every morning I choose the raincoat.
Some days, this means I look ridiculous. It's bright and sunny out, and I'm walking around in a raincoat. In fact, when we got our little five inch dump of snow, about two weeks ago, I actually wore my raincoat that day. The previous day I'd guessed wrong and worn the warm coat (actually a hoodie with a zipper down the front -- surprisingly warm for something so lightweight), and then it had rained, and I'd spent most of the day fairly uncomfortable and wishing I had my raincoat. So I made up for it the following day by determinedly putting on the raincoat and zipping it all the way up. The problem was, when I opened the door and saw heavy snowfall, I was so stunned that I didn't think to step back inside and change, so I showed up to church still in my raincoat, to the amusement of my church brothers and sisters.
Once in a while, I wear both. But that's rarely a good idea. It doesn't get that cold here, but it does get cold enough that if I overdress and break a sweat, the cold can make me wish that I hadn't. So I tend to choose one or the other.
The only reason I find this remotely interesting is that my reason for choosing the raincoat has a lot to do, I think, with adult decisionmaking. Or my adult decisionmaking, at least. When I choose outerwear, the calculation I do at blinding speed in my head is, what are the odds that I'm wrong, and how badly will it suck if those odds turn up? By that formula, even if the forecast says no rain, and even if I look outside and the sky is clear and the pavement is dry, I'm still likely to grab the raincoat a lot of the time, just because not having the raincoat when I wish I did is a much more unpleasant experience, especially in February, than having it when I don't need it.
When I was younger, my decisions were all about "What's the most rational choice? What are the upsides and downsides of each option?" Now, all of that is just a sideshow. The main event is, "If things go wrong, how far up poop creek can I find myself?" I've become quite risk averse. And I think that's a symptom of premature senescence.
But it does cut down on the number of times I've been unexpectedly caught in the rain.
Monday nights I take Japanese lessons. This past Monday, we reviewed numbers between ten and a hundred. I'd learned them before, but I hadn't noticed one in particular: fifty-five.
I remember fifty-five as the maximum speed limit nationwide, a long time ago when I was a lad.
Ten in Japanese is "juu," and five is "go." The Japanese way of saying fifty-five is five-ten-five.
Spoken aloud, it sounds exactly like "Go, Jew, go!"
I wasted not one second in notifying Marcia of the good news.
I think I'm pregnant.
I know this is far-fetched, me not having a womb, ovaries, that kind of thing. But I'm having alliterative cravings.
I'm just coming off about ten years' obsession with sushi. That started when someone tricked me into trying eel at a party for international students. After I'd tasted it and loved it, they told me it was eel, and my worldview changed. I spent far more money than was wise on sushi when I lived in Phoenix, then moved out to Nacogdoches and could only dream of it for a few years. Some brave soul finally started a sushi restaurant in town, and it was decidedly mediocre, but its availability made it good enough to simulate wonderful.
Eugene has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to sushi places. There are five that are open, a sixth that is remodeling, and a seventh that is coming to town. Of the five, three are very good, and two of those three are a sensual explosion. The only problem is, I've had too much of a good thing. I arrived here in August, and through the beginning of January I had sushi every single week: usually on Friday, to celebrate surviving the week, but sometimes on the weekend. The last three or four weeks, I've actually not been able to work up enthusiasm for sushi, something I never thought would happen.
My new fascination is what has me a bit worried.
Eugene has wonderful soup. I mean, wonderful. Anyone who's known me for a while and taken meals with me will be startled to hear that I actually eat the soup here slowly. That's huge. I've never in my life eaten anything slowly. But if I eat the soup too quickly, it's gone so soon that I almost feel despair welling up inside me. So I savor the soup.
Pizza Research Institute is as cool as all the reviewers say, but one of its best-kept strengths is its soup. I would be their heartiest cheerleader if they changed their name to Soup Research Institute and offered the pizza as an appetizer. Last fall I had coconut curried squash soup, and it was one of the most amazing things I've ever tasted in my life. When I went back two weeks ago, I had basil pesto tomato soup, and I ordered a second cup of it for dessert.
More recently, I've discovered the soups at Barry's, which is a bakery about half a football field from my office. They have five selections every day, including vegan and gluten-free choices. Some of the highlights so far include creamy Thai pumpkin, Hungarian mushroom, and coconut curried lentil soup. Today I had just plain tomato soup, but it had chunks of tomato in it and a mix of spices that would tempt me to give up government secrets. Soup is now my daily lunch, or at least the first half of it. It's a great deal, too; three dollars and fifty cents gets me a cup of soup and a big slice of fresh-baked bread.
It probably has something to do with the cold, wet weather in these parts, and I can see how decade after decade of life in these conditions would create pressure to find comfort in soup, to make soup that could provide that comfort. Whatever the cause, it's astonishing.
All of that sets up my problem. Say the following out loud: Soup. Sushi.
See my problem? There's a clear pattern here. I'm becoming obsessed with foods that begin with "Sue."
Most of the sushi restaurants also offer sukiyaki, so I'm sure that's next. And somewhere along the line I'll probably start dumping entire bottles of Sue Bee honey on top, which will prove I'm pregnant.
One of the ladies I go to church with is named Sue. She plays flute in the worship band. She's in my Sunday School class. And, yes, she loves to pitch in and cook every time there's a function involving food, which, we being Baptists and all, means every function that includes the use of molecules. And it's only a matter of time until I lock on to Sue's food as my new obsession and begin stalking her.
Eventually I'll be tossed in jail, lose my job, bottom out, live in the street. Then, yes, I'll develop an unaccountable craving for raw sewage.
It's almost too much to bear. I might actually have to end it all by biting into a suitcase nuke.
Yes, all of the above is sue-real. I'm an academic. That's what I do. Sue me.
On Sunday, we were blessed with five inches of snow. Overnight we had a fresh layer of an inch or so, and we've had the occasional flurry on Tuesday and Wednesday as well. At first, I thought "Score! This is the good part of living up north!" But the locals assure me, unfortunately, that this is far from typical. The paper said it's the most snow Eugene has seen since 1996. Oh well. I certainly lived it up.
While it lasted, it provided a strenuous round of brain yoga.
On Sunday, with a bunch of snow on the ground and a heavy fall still coming down, I had to drive to church. Now, I don't live anywhere near my church; on bone-dry ground, in broad daylight, with light traffic, it takes me fifteen minutes to make the trip. Sunday I drove like a little old lady, and I can proudly report that only once did my car even shimmy. The trip to church was a complete success, and I was giddy with my winter-survival beginner's luck.
Problem number one, the stealth ditch. The church has a nice, fairly large main parking lot that's paved and level and easily traversed, and then an overflow parking lot that amounts to gravel on a field. On Sundays I park in the overflow in order to maximize the availability of closer spaces for senior members, visitors, etc. I'm young and healthy and can walk a few extra feet with no stress. But between the overflow lot and the road, there's a fairly wide ditch, and the driveway into the lot is pretty narrow, so I have to watch and steer carefully in order to avoid the ditch. I've done it enough times that it's not a huge challenge, but the number of times I've done it also made me a bit hasty, and when it came time for me to leave, I didn't consider the possible difficulty of gauging the edge of the ditch by guesswork. It's easily spotted on a normal day, but not when it's filled up almost entirely with snow. I ballparked where it was, and my ballparking wasn't very good.
Thunk. My car lurched over at an alarming angle, half on the driveway and half in the ditch. This was not good. I gunned the car to try to pull out, and was reminded that if my Toyota Corolla ever decided to be a boxer, it could fight in the Hot Wheels division. It weighs about an ounce, and snow chains are something I read about in the paper but have never actually seen. Brilliant me, I thought I might have better luck if I put it in reverse and tried to back out. The laws of physics failed to miraculously repeal themselves for me on the basis of a gear shift movement, and I remained stuck. But one nice thing about the time right after a church service is the steady flow of people heading off in every direction, and our church, unusually, happens to have a whole lot of men in the membership. Three or four of them stepped right up and gave the car a push, and I was free. It probably didn't require all of them; any one of them probably could've picked the car up with one hand and spun it around on a fingertip, but I definitely appreciated the overkill. If they'd pushed any harder, they probably could've given me enough momentum to coast home.
Obstacle #1 down, I lurched ahead to obstacle #2: walking to work on Monday morning.
That wasn't as bad as I expected. The extra inch or two of snow on Sunday night meant I could crunch-crunch-crunch through new, fairly wet, powder, and I had plenty of purchase. The only alarming moments came when I tried to cross the street. The cars had melted the snow, and the streets looked pretty snow-free, but the air temperature was still below freezing, so the streets were actually the only slick part of the trip. This was a bit alarming when I got to ninth street, which is a huge intersection, and had to make it across in the twenty-eight seconds or so that the crosswalk allotted. On an ordinary day, I could hop across on one foot in that time, but this was no ordinary day. I was picking my feet up and putting them down most carefully, and the audible countdown was not helping my blood pressure at all. But Oregon drivers are fairly polite, and I was confident that if my time ran out and the light turned green while I was still in the street, someone in a nice, warm car would probably take pity on me and let me finish crossing without blowing their horn or squashing me like a grape. In other places I've lived, I would've had no such confidence, but here I think that confidence is pretty well merited.
Then came Tuesday.
The thing about Tuesday is that the rules reversed themselves. On Monday, sidewalks were okay, but streets were scary. Then, Monday afternoon, the sun came out and did some serious business, melting down almost all the snow. The problem is, it also rained part of the day, and there was a good deal of freezing rain overnight, so on Tuesday, the sidewalks suddenly became the hard part, and the car traffic managed to dry out the streets.
Another rule reversed itself, this one after a much longer run of unbroken reliability. Part of my walk to work takes me across the parking lot for the University of Oregon stadium. As with my church, the stadium has nice, paved, cement areas close up, and then graveled dirt further out. And since I first took the walk back in August, I've preferred the cement parts for reasons that a moment's reflection should make obvious: they're nice and level. Walking through gravel is a slightly less ankle-straining operation than walking on a beach; the purchase for each footstep is slightly different, so I have to make constant adjustments to step properly and not stumble or lose my balance. They aren't big adjustments, but they require about one scrap of attention, so they're annoying. For that reason, I've plotted a course through the unavoidable graveled stretch on one end of the parking lot that's been heavily traveled by the bikers, so a lot of the gravel has been knocked away, and there's a thin path of raw, packed dirt. I usually follow that, because it's as level as I'm going to get.
But on Tuesday morning, level was bad, because it provided a nice, clean platform for a lethal slick of ice to build itself up to several inches' thickness. The gravel was suddenly a blessing, because no matter how badly the ice wants to slick up the gravel and lie in wait to take my life, icy gravel is still gravel, and when I step on it, it crunches satisfyingly and gives me something under my feet that I can walk on without fear of falling.
The gravel, and the parts cars had driven over, were the only parts of the walk on which I could get a stride going and actually enjoy my typical traveling daydream. For the rest of it, I had to pick my way very carefully, lifting a foot and experimentally putting it down, monitoring its placement as I lifted the other foot and making lightning adjustments if I felt it start to slide. The one nifty thing about that is that walking turned into a mindfulness exercise. I teach mindfulness in a couple of communication classes: the idea is that we do too many things in our daily routine with our brains on autopilot, and this habit is one of the major roots of most people's difficulty in focusing, as well as a magnifier of stress, a concentrator of physical pain, etc. It's a most healthy thing to break out of routine and actually observe, moment by moment, things that we do. So, I managed to break out of my grouchiness and frustration at the slick walking conditions by thinking of it as a mindfulness workout.
Yesterday and today, the ground was back to normal. There's still one huge heap of snow in my apartment complex, where a couple of my neighbors made a gigantic snow sculpture. It was an arch, and it was taller than I was. And since there was so much snow, and it's stayed on the cold side every day since Sunday, the mass has refrigerated itself and refused to go away. I'm glad, because it was wonderful to see how the snow brought out the playful side in everyone. And I've always learned best by playing, so the lessons I learned from dealing with the snow were actually pretty satisfying in the end.
"You're really onto something. Either that, or you're really on something."
My colleague Kendal, who teaches math and physics.
This morning, for the first time, I walked to work in the snow. I think I missed out, growing up, on how much joy can come from the presence of snow. Yes, I know, after a few days the fun wears off, and the travel hazard it poses can rack up injuries and even deaths, but this morning was fantastic. Not only is a snow-covered landscape just a peaceful place, but I was treated to the sight of snowpeople, snow-sculptures (including one impressive arch) and this quiet crunch crunch under my feet. It was great. The only scary part was crossing streets; whenever I had to walk through ruts left by tires, I hit a ton of slick spots and ran the risk of getting dumped on my tuchus.
Yesterday, on the other hand, was an adventure. My church has a main parking lot, and then a small overflow lot that amounts to an open field with a bit of crumbly asphalt laid down. It's separated from the street by a big, and fairly deep, ditch, and the driveway across that ditch is just wide enough for one vehicle. When I went to leave, I didn't see the ditch at all because it was filled with snow, so my car lurched down into it and got stuck. The wonderful thing is, since a steady stream of people was flowing out of the church, a bunch of men saw it happen, and three or four of them ran up and pushed my tiny little Hot Wheels car out of the ditch. I yelled my thanks and kept going. The plastic cover popped off my turn-signal, but otherwise my car came away unscathed.
And that got me thinking this morning, and I spotted another neat connection. Last November, when I was at the NCA Convention, I watched part of a panel that consisted of argument people examining how argumentation works for characteristics that were spatial in nature. One talked about the battlefield and giving ground. Another talked about premises examined and unexamined. It was pretty interesting stuff. I'd aimlessly ruminated for years over the spatial qualities of knowledge, so I enjoyed the panel. But this morning I got to thinking about how I navigate, and how it relates to people's reasoning processes.
In the study of human reasoning and heuristics, there is a theory called dual processing. My rough summary of it is that people engage in systematic thinking, but also in associative thinking. People will go step by step and reason their way through a tough dilemma, but they'll also come up with a rough answer by comparing it to other situations they've encountered. The thing is, they tend to use both reasoning modes, and proceed with more or less confidence depending on how well they agree. If your reasoning confirms your gut, or your past experience, or your intuition, then you're likely to feel quite confident. But if they give different answers, then the matter might require further contemplation.
For years I've distinguished between directed navigating, which I do every time someone tells me step by step how to travel to someplace unfamiliar, and visual navigating, which I'm quite good at and greatly prefer. If you're headed for a spot you've never visited before, and you've got directions that take you street by street, turn by turn, landmark by landmark, then you're navigating according to directions. It's pretty reliable, depending on the quality of the directions in the first place, but it's also hard work. It requires concentration. Visual navigating, on the other hand, involves deciding which way to go based on what looks familiar. Most people navigate visually when they follow their routine ways to and from work, the grocery store, etc. I often navigate visually even when I probably should consult directions, just because I've got a pretty happy history of doing it. I very rarely get lost.
The idea that tickled me this morning was a realization that the split between systematic and associative reasoning matched almost perfectly the split between directed and visual navigating, which probably says something important about formal and informal logic. Directed navigation is more communicative, because typically the directions come from one person to another, whereas visual navigating can be the work of a single traveler. Directed navigation is more structured, and therefore if the directions are good, the navigator is almost guaranteed to arrive at the destination. Directed navigation is also more efficient and speedy, simply because visual navigation can require a good deal of hit and miss, trial and error. But visual navigation is far more flexible, and a better option when unexpected things happen. If a road is closed, then the person following directions may have no idea how to try a different route, while a visual navigator is already in the middle of an experiment, and can simply absorb the roadblock into the experiment's parameters.
I have no idea where that idea winds up. But I enjoyed chewing it over.
The idea that we feel broken up into pieces that are claimed by different obligations in our lives is not original with me. Part of me belongs to my job. Part of me belongs to my family. Part of me belongs to my friends. All of those are jointly possessed by myself and the other claimants, and we negotiate whose wishes will win out, like roommates deciding what TV channel to watch. That's an allocation of resources that a lot of people experience.
It's also not original with me to point out that there often doesn't seem to be enough of me to go around, that I'm being pulled into pieces that are too small and that I can't pull together, that more and more duties keep staking out new pieces, which, since I'm finite, are all smaller and less up to the task of covering the exigences that split them off. That, I would venture to say, is just about a universal human experience.
But this morning it struck me that my own odd response to this might go a ways toward explaining my eccentricities.
Whenever I play one of those games that involve getting an allotment of "money" at the start and then deciding what equipment, or even character traits, to spend it on, I have a habit of picking a few choice bits that to me seem to be of primary importance, and then I pour the "money" into them. And I think I do that with my life.
I have an incredibly disorderly house. I know where everything is, and I'm not bothered by my clutter, because I'm the one who made it to begin with. Some whiny part of me complaints that successful, organized grown-ups don't live this way, and I do admit that I like being in surroundings that are neat and orderly. On the few occasions in my life when I've succeeded in keeping a neat house, I've felt a powerful sense of accomplishment. All that aside, I simply am unwilling to break off a piece of myself that is dedicated to the keeping of a clean house. I choose instead to make the job, family, and church pieces that much bigger, and give things like housekeeping no share at all in my finite fund of direct involvement.
The thing is, when I put everything I've got into my priorities, it really seems as though, in the intermediate term, my capacity actually grows. I did this in Nacogdoches, and by doing it I worked my teaching and my church work up to a level of completeness under which they chugged along on their own without nearly as much need for my constant involvement. Then, because I had more capacity to spare, I went to work and cleaned my house up and kept it clean. And that gave me a boost of confidence that came in quite handy. Moving here to Oregon has undone a lot of what I built up, so I'm back to living in a post-apocalyptic state of chaos, but I'm falling back into the pattern of allotting big chunks of myself for the top priorities and simply letting the lower priorities slide for the moment. I know they're there, and at the proper time, when I work up some spare capacity by doing a finished job on more demanding obligations, then I can give them some of the attention I've withheld.
