It was a very good year

Soaking

Q: What do you call two days of rain in Eugene?
A: A weekend.

Spoken

"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.

Sunlessness

Someone just apprised me of the local saying: "We don't tan; we rust."

Nice.

Selection

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.

Speed

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.

Sous-chef

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.

Snow

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.

Nice

"You're really onto something. Either that, or you're really on something."

My colleague Kendal, who teaches math and physics.

Navigation

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.

Neglect

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.