Completely True Stories of My Life

Me: I think it’s high time we watched Secret Silent Baby Hunter Episode.

[pause]

Scarily Erudite Beloved: You mean that “World’s Happiest Baby” DVD?

Me: Isn’t that what I said?

I’m a father. Mom and kids are healthy and happy. More info behind passwords in All The Usual Locations. At some point I will end up blogging something about my life as a father but finding the line between public and private in re: die kinder is tricky. So for now everyone who is need to know already knows. Cheers!

More details since Tom asked:

I use Things as a GTDish type device — to capture everything I need to do so I don’t worry about it and can focus on work. I also use it to schedule all events and deadlines. I can’t be bothered with ‘projects’ since I do a better job keeping track of those in my head than making lists in Things. I also don’t use it for contexts, except the library — I throw all the LOC #s for things I need to get out of library in there, print them up, and mark them off.

The biggest thing I’ve found Things useful for are repeating projects: everyday I wake up to find Things has added three tasks to my to-do list: “Read for :30″ “Write for :30″ and “Transcribe for :30″. If I do all three of these things — on top of my teaching and other responsibilities — then I allow myself to browse the web for all the books I’ll never have time to read.

In terms of note-taking programs for Mac, I tried: Yojimbo, Together, Scrivener, Notae2, Mori, Notebook, Evernote and a few more whose names escape me at the moment. What I was looking for was: price (they’re all about US$30-40), decent way to export data (for when I code fieldnotes or the sofware stops being developed), robus support and developer community (aka track record), ability to clip webpages (important for WoW research), get data in via the finder (pretty much all of these now have a button or drawer you can drag documents or highlighted text to to create new documents), and the ability to categorize entries by ‘tag’ or ‘smart folders’ (apparently increasingly called ‘saved searches’ these days). I was particularly interested in finding a program that would let me keep multiple databases open, each of which had its own separate category structure — that way my WoW Research categories do not get mixed up with my PNG research categories.

Pretty much all of these products can do this in more or less the same way — and they are all much better than what I started using 2 years ago. I went with DevonThink despite the fact that it has tons of features I will probably never use because of the ability to open and close multiple databases, tag/group with ease, and because I might grow into its features as I need it more. 2.0 is much easier to use than the earlier versions I attempted unsuccessfuly to love earlier.

Speaking of software I use regularly, but which I forgot to mention in my last post: Dropbox. It’s finally managed to hit the sweet spot of online storage and version control. Let’s all give it a big round of applause folks.

As for dissertation-writing books, I must say that I am taken by Demystifing Dissertation Writing by Peggy Boyle Single. Like most people I got to know the book through her columns in Inside Higher Ed (and really if you’ve read them you already know 70% of what is in the book). Despite the fruity cover and kinda-lame name her ‘Single System’ there is a lot to like in the book: a clear outline of how to write, a small but useful bibliograpy, and just the right amount of depth. The book sort of orients you to what successful method is like but does not micro-manage you. One of her main points — the writers block comes from not enough ‘prewriting’ — really resonated with me.

Also, I like the book because the process it describes is familiar to me from doing fieldwork: take a living, buzzing world, simplify it by putting it on paper, reduce it down more and more to just a few quotes, and then start building up in a new, parsed form. This complex -> simple -> complex dynamic is more or less what I teach in my field methods class and I think it really works. That said I have not actually inflicted the volume on anyone but me yet, so I can’t really say I have experience using it in teaching.

One more quick shout-out — Single’s publisher, Stylus, actually turns out a lot of good books on teaching. I’d be interested in exploring them more, but requesting review copies is burdensome and requires giving up WAY to much personal information, etc. Yo Stylus: make it easier for me to publicize your books.

On category of things that did not make the cut with me, there are two that did not make the cut with me: first, academic socialbookmarking services like CiteULike or Zotero. Let’s face it: the problem these days is not discovering new things to read. Zotero and CiteULike are great programs for some people. But for me, who already as a long to-read list, cares about easy storage of PDFs and metadata, it is just far far better to spend the money on Sente.

Second, PDF management systems like Yep or various finder-enhancements that let you tag files etc: I think Alex Payne summed it up best when he said: “If you want to store data of differing types within a lightweight organization system, I encourage you to check out THE FILESYSTEM”. For academic books and articles I have a special program. For everything else, I have the finder. There is one exception: I wish there was a decent program for filing away syllabi as I download those things like a mother. Right now my half-solution is to store them in DevonThink. Ditto wih CVs.

In sum, one key to my recent optimization has been getting clear on what specifically I need programs to do, and then chosing one (1) program to do it. I resist programs that do more than one thing, and I resist the urge to do more than one thing with one program. Of course some things fall through the cracks this way — I no longer have long lists of books that I might someday read before I die. But that is the point: the stuff that I am not actually doing for a good reason does not fit in the system, and so I do not do it, which leaves me more time and focus to do the things that I need to do for a reason. Which is, of course, the goal.

Maybe it is the new apartment or (more likely) awareness of how little free time I will have once I’m a father, but I have spent a lot of time massaging out the kinks in my intellectual muscles.

First, I’ve rejiggered, reevaluated, and rethought the set up of my outboard brain. After testing a bunch of different combinations of note taking programs, PDF managers, and bibliographic software I’ve found that yes, the same combination of programs that everyone uses are in fact the best things to use: Sente for bibliography, Things for task management, Delicious for bookmarking, and DevonThink for notes. I tried Evernote, but I don’t have a Mobile Device and frankly, I fear the Cloud and want my data somewhere where I can lose or compromise it myself. Also it’s actually not that powerful in terms of bintiliions of ways to organize folders etc. Now if I can just take the 800 fieldnotes out of my OLD note taking program I’ll be really set…

Second, better scheduling. After years of sorta-using GTD I have finally shoved every bit of anxiety-provoking task into Things and my life really is much better. Also, I recently had a student come to me asking how I took notes or managed reading books for the purposes of writing articles, what my process was when it came to writing, etc. and I found that I basically had nothing to tell them — a mixture of intuition and a reliance on the power of enthusiasm to muscle my way through this process meant that I ultimately had little to pass on to anyone who wasn’t me. It also meant, I realized on reflection, that I was still relying on grad school strategies to do professorial work — and I mean here not only training students but also my own research and writing. And lets face it, how many of us really want our dissertation and first fieldwork to be the zenith of our research prowess?

So, having done some serious work on research methods over the summer I’ve spent the past semester doing a lot of work on handling ethnographic materials and writing them up. A lot of this, I’m not ashamed to admit, has involved trying out the various methods in the ‘how to write a dissertation’ books I have field-tested in course of learning how to be an adviser. Not surprisingly, a lot of them are really really good. In particular (I am ashamed to admit) I’ve started taking notes on readings in a structured and regular way for the first time. Like ever. This really beats surrounding yourself with dozens of opened, heavily underlined books and searching for quotes you remember in them.

Overall, it has been a good experience and all the rethinking is finally beginning to get amortized off in the form of actual productivity. Speaking of which… back to work!

I spent New Year’s Eve December 31, 1999, in the house of the pastor of the Lutheran Church in Waiwanda waiting for what many believed was the end of the world. On New Year’s Eve December 31, 2009, I spent the evening on the lanai with my wife watching fireworks and smoke — mostly smoke, actually — filling Manoa valley. A decade is a long time, especially if you’re only (only?) old enough to remember three of them. So one thing I spent the past couple of days trying to figure out what exactly I’ve done in the past ten years. My natural inclination has ganged up with the feelings that I share with a lot of guys entering middle age to do their best to make me feel that my time has been wasted, that I have not lived enough. But even the anxieties I have a strong elective affinity for have a pretty hard time making me feel like I’ve wasted the past ten years. I’ve gotten a Ph.D., gotten married, gotten a job, gotten an apartment, have kids on the way, lived in Paris, visited China and India, and, most importantly, written superb Jedi knight fan fiction featuring Michel Foucault and Hans-Georg Gadamer as characters. Not to mention the fact that on January 1 my blog turned nine. NINE. Good lord.

The deeper I go in to life, however, the bigger the challenges get and the longer and more complex the work becomes. I think if I feel anxious about anything it is about the decade to come, not the decade that has passed. I’ve always joked that my goal in life, starting as a very young child, was to be a middle-aged professor and NOW AT LONG LAST THAT GOAL IS IN REACH. I even got ahead of the game by going bald a decade early. Hells yes. Middle age here I come! Stay tuned.

Last night before falling asleep I read How To Write And Use Educational Objectives, Fifth Edition by Norman Gronlund. That evening, I dreamed that I was enrolled in one of my colleague’s classes and had showed up to the midterm completely unprepared — a humiliating and embarrassing thing to do. But then as the test was handed out I realized with relief that it was not the a midterm but rather a mid-term feedback sheet on his teaching. And then my humiliation turned to smug satisfaction as I noted how poorly his assessment rubric was designed.

That was the whole dream. True story.

Last night my wife watched Mary Poppins while I watched the second season of Dexter. I think this says something about our relationship — namely, that there is a lot more Mary Poppins in my future and a lot less Dexter. I told her who knows the kids might like Dexter more than Mary Poppins, but she thinks I am wrong on this one.

In other news it is the end of the semester over here and I’ve been shifting my readings habits away from fieldwork and virtual worlds (the topics of last semester) to discussion classes and ethnographies of businessmen (the topics of the break). It is hard to steer yourself off a trail of reading after sixteen weeks on it. Like the steady, deep resistance you feel as you move a rudder — at least until it slips into place and then it becomes just as steadily and deeply unmovable as it was before.

I recently read two popular members of that small genre entitled ‘academic self-help books’: Mortimer Adler’s How To Read A Book and Magnum’s Teaching What You Don’t Know. They have a lot of similarities — both based on a mixture of experience and the psychological literature (such as it existed in the 30s, when Mortimer first published his book), padded up with cutsey anecdotes that slow down the pace, and both end with a list of great books. I wish I had Magnum’s book back when I was teaching what I didn’t know more often, and that Adler’s book was more easily excerpted for undergraduates. But there you go.

This blog will become more active in the near future as I have more than 144 characters worth of things to say and I get the back-end cleaned up and easier to use. However a few big public updates for people who might not have heard already, and listed in reverse order of importance:

1. Duke University Press has agreed to publish the revised version of my dissertation. Thank you very much Duke University Press!
2. I am in the process of closing on my first home.
3. My wife is pregnant. With TWINS. I’m going to be a father!

These are all great news and I’m very happy and humbled that my life is going so well at the moment. As soon as I plug my blog facebook into my rss twitter mobile internet device flows and clean up the backend to improve performance (and get a stable Internet connection in my house) (and finish up grading for the semester) I’ll be blogging more.

What might it mean to undergo violation, to insist upon _not_ resolving grief and staunching vulberability too quickly through a turn to violence, and to practice, as an experiment in living otherwise, nonviolence in an emphatically nonreciprocal response? What might it mean to make an ethic from the region of the uwilled? It might mean that one does not foreclose upon that primary exposure to the Other, that one does not try to transform the unwilled into the willed, but, rather, to take the very unbearability of exposure as a sign, the reminder, of a common vulberability, a common physicality and risk. It delineates a physical vulnerability from which we cannot slip away, which we cannot finally resolve in the name of the subject, but which can provide a way to understand that none of us is fully bounded, utterly separate, but, rather, we are in our skins, given over, in each other’s hands, at each other’s mercy. This is a situation we do not choose. It forms the horizon of choice, and it grounds our responsibility. We did not create it, and therefore it is what we must heed.
-Judtih Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself

This is the way I go through life:

This morning I woke up in Cairns, where I landed last night in the first leg of my flight from Honolulu to Papua New Guinea. I woke up and got on the Internet to check my email. My wife was on IM and we were talking back and forth and she said “It will be nice for you to have a day in Cairns to spend before you head to Moresby” (from now on POM = Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea). I said to her: “No, I have a day stop in Cairns on my way back. I am leaving for the airport in an hour to fly to POM.” Then I got in the taxi, went to the airport, and went to the Air Niugini ticket counter, where they told me I was travelling the next day, and that I should have listened to my wife.

This is a lesson I have learned many times before as she has patiently and lovingly remembered — indeed, created — both of our schedules. But I guess that even in the relatively high-stakes realm of international travel, plainly and clearly written itineraries, and reminders THAT SAME DAY from my Wife who is thousands of miles away and has much better things to do than deal with someone as hopeless as me still did not help. At any rate the price of taking the cab to town and then back to the airport again was about the same as just changing the ticket, so I decided to go to Por Moresby early. So here I am.

On the plane, the Kindle started paying for itself and I read some science fiction: The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell and The Birthday of the World by Ursula K. Leguin (which I am still reading, the LeGuin). The Sparrow is a really famous novel, apparently, and deals with several of my favorite themes: imaginations of alien culture, first contact, small-group personal dynamics, religion. I admired how well-written the book was, but ultimately it didn’t appeal to me. I guess Russell is a lapsed Catholic who converted to Judaism and the book centers on a priest’s struggle to live with, to make a long story short, the experience of absolute evil. It is supposed to be a piece of holocaust literature with a Jesuit overlay, but I ultimately found the central dilemmas of the books — celibacy for religion’s sake versus secular, sexually fulfilling relationships, the possibility that God wants us to suffer and is evil, etc — way too Christian or, perhaps more narrowly, Catholic. The idea that God demands that you give up true love in the name of faith just sounds silly to me. Equally, the idea that God is responsible for the holocaust rather than say, oh I don’t know, the Nazis doesn’t really parse for me, and neither does the idea that this piece is some sort of apologia for the colonization of the New World because it reminds us that sixteenth century colonizers ought not be considered culpable for the crimes of colonization and missionization because they didn’t share our moral code so should not be held ur standards. Again: not working for me. As a portrayal of a man’s inner struggle with the uncertainties of the Catholic religious experience it was compelling, I suppose, but at the end of the day I just found the terms of that experience extremely, shall we say, unintuitive. Apart from people saying the shehekianu like seventeen times in the course of the book, it didn’t seem particularly Jewish to me — or at least it didn’t resonate with my flavor of Judaism.

The LeGuin, on the other hand, is absurdly well-designed. When I was in China with The Scarily Erudite Beloved we visited the oldest wooden building in the world still standing. It was a Buddhist temple from the Tang dynasty. It looked like most of the Buddhist temples I was dragged in the course of our Buddhist Temple Tour Of China’s Coal Producing Regions. However it had a sort of broad, thickened proportionality to it, and was well but simply made. There was a family or two who looked after it and the government gave them some buckets full of sand in case there was a fire. It was gorgeous, and it was a hundred centuries old. LeGuin’s book is like that. Just marvelous.

One of the stories is set on a world ruled by women with a small minority of men who are forced to do nothing all day but play sports and visit ‘fuckeries’ where guy-obsessed women pay them for sex. It’s a world where the women have all the power and the men have all the privileges. Men who want to, say, read or help raise the children they have conceived are viewed as abominations (I think you can see where she goes with this). This world presents us with an exaggerated version of the crisis faced on our own college campuses, where men struggle to be successful academically because intelligence and studying are seen as ‘feminine’. I am going to the story the next time I teach intro anthro and then teach the literature on male underachivement in college, just to let my male students know that they have the option of seeing a world of compulsory athletics and casual sex as a place to flee from, rather than to.

I am leaving tomorrow to fly to Papua New Guinea. I have known this for quite some time — I didn’t just pick up the traveller’s checks from the bank the other day on a lark — but it really hit me this morning, for some reason. Yowch. Time to get packing.

I think that is what I study: the performativity of collectivity. What does it mean? I’m still working that part out.

I spent 45 minutes today trying to remember the name of the early-oughts blogger who had a side website with MP3s of acoustic covers of, among other things, “Going Through The Motions” from Once More With Feeling and, my favorite, Mr. Rogers’s “Its You I Like”. Some desperate googling later and I not only find it is “Kevin Fanning”:http://www.kevinfanning.com/ author of “Whygodwhy”:http://www.whygodwhy.com/about/ but the “entries for the lounge are still around”:http://www.whygodwhy.com/category/lounge/, but the mp3s aren’t there anymore and the Mr. Rogers number seems to have disappeared completely. If you’re reading this, Kfan, hook me up.

Today I went to the library to look for a book called something like “First Steps Towards Cyberspace”. It is an early collection from like 1991, which is pretty early for people academics to be thinking about Cyberspace.

It turns out that back in 1991 when librarians got books about Cyberspace they were still rare enough that they didn’t say “Ah, yet another volume about cyberspace”. In this case, they said “Space, huh? Well we have a call number for that.” And they filed is under QC173.59.S65, which is the Library of Congress catalog number for studies of space and time — like as in Einstein space and time.

It was a unique and special time for me, because I think there is very little chance I will ever visit QC173.59.S65 again in my life. It is not that I am not interested in theories of relativity — although I am not — but rather that it is one of the few areas of the library where I can literally physically not understand a damned thing they are talking about inside of the books there. Like, not even a little bit.

As it turned out, QC173.59.S65 was extremely poorly shelved and none of the books were in order. Or perhaps there was just a disturbance in the space-time continuum that moved them. At any rate the book I was looking for wasn’t there. So maybe I will have to go back again, someday.

As I reflect on this post, I realize I have gained insight into two things.

First, that many of my students will not have the physical ability to find stuff in the library that I do because they did not grow up learning to check to see if books had fallen behind the rest of the books in the stack, had been misfilled, etc. They just lack (I imagine) those sorts of physical shelf-searching skills oldsters like me have.

Second, this blog has probably become like the #1 google hit for the string QC173.59.S65.

Or maybe not.

An entry level vouvray and almond tofu go together pretty well together, actually.

Yesterday was a very important one in our history — you can “read the full patch notes for yesterday’s update here”:http://www.chromecow.com/2009/01/20/us-democracy-server-patch-day/

So I have a question for all you readers.

For years I was very proud of the fact that I didn’t own a television because I considered the vast majority of what came out of it to be pollution. However times have changed — TV has gotten better, and DVRs help filter and timeshift it. More and more these days, televisions have stopped being receivers of broadcast and screen to show content on with everything from tivo’d shows to downloaded movies, to streaming Netflix etc. We might even get a Wii.

So the scarily erudite beloved and I have been thinking about getting serious about digital content and investing in… something. That’s where you come in. What should we get? We are thinking either a big TV with a DVR or, perhaps, even just getting a bigger monitor and showing stuff off the computer. It seems like there are a number of options. What do you think the best way would be to get content onto a screen? Are all TVs hookupable to computers now? What is your setup, and how does it work for you?

Remember that scene in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom where the ridiculously othered and exoticized evil south asian priest puts the mojo on Indy and turns him into a bad guy and then Short Round realizes that fire will break the spell and grabs a torch and stabs Indie in the heart with it and he wakes up and is a good guy again and is like “omg we’ve got to get out of here and save the world!”? I woke up this morning realizing that Indiana Jones is our country, Short Round is our 349 electoral votes, and the torch is Barack Obama.

Two quick notes:
1. A Savage Minds entry of mine “got the nod”:http://www.boingboing.net/2008/05/29/indiana-jones-a-pink.html at either Boing Boing or the Boston Globe, depending which one you think is more important.

2. A forthcoming article of mine got a nod in a “Chron article by Siva Vaidyanathan”:http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=k8yk3t00wchd2kvvxpfmm7rkcl0n7lpt — or so I’ve been told, since its behind a content wall.

3. No, I have no idea what happened to the formatting on my blog. I kind of like it, though — harkens back to the _just one column_ days.

The past few days have been really unfortunate — people who I know or who have played an important role in my life have passed on, including:

“Gargy Gygax”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/2008/03/05/gary_gygax_cocreator_of_dd_dies_at_69.html – Creator not just of D&D but opener up of geekdom as a possibility or movement

“Joe Williams”:http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1280 – the author of the best book on how to write ever

“Chris Kosmidis”:http://www.littler.com/people/index.cfm?event=getPerson&contactID=3326&office=406 – I used to work for Chris when he did computing stuff. His loss — especially at his young age — is tragic.

Rest in peace, each and every one.