b l o g o s

anticipation

Waiting for Tuesday feels a little like waiting for a really important championship game, only the players will have gone home; many of the judges don't seem to have watched the same contest I did; and the scoring system may or may not work properly. In the meantime, though, lots and lots of things to keep me busy, in addition to shaking my head at the latest Palindrone: that the press's labeling her critiques of Obama as "attacks" threatens her freedom of speech. I mean, please. Pretty please?

Those scoreboards had better fucking work.

Anyway. My first full weekend at home since early September (and end of D.S.T no less) means catching up by tending to deadlines and promised reading and also some really, really good mountain biking. Nothing gives those endorphins a kick quite like riding at high speeds deep in the woods where the fall colors have turned the sun into a gigantic, super high wattage red/orange/yellow disco ball. I would have enjoyed it even more if not for our governor's plan to close down those trails, along with so many rape crisis centers, to balance his budget. Last week his approval rating was half--half!--that of W's.

Which brings me back around, worrying toward Tuesday. Get that vote on out, people.

sustenance, sustainability

This post by Ianqui Doodle, and this nonsense courtesy of the president who will be remembered (by me)  as the Nonsense President, and a discussion this evening on NPR about lifestyle changes people have made in response to the economy, food prices, and gas prices (all of course one complicated, inter-related bundle) all have me thinking too about what sort of future we're looking at in this here country.

Yesterday John and I walked eight blocks to our gym, and then on our walk home stopped to pick up this week's CSA bounty--arrow root and napa cabbages, red- and green-leaf lettuces, corn meal milled by the supply farm, broccoli, green onions, and something called kohlrabi (also kind of a cabbage). On the short walk home from there, we were marveling at how low maintenance life in Urbana is. Indeed, one of our many motivators for returning to Illinois was peak oil, news about which wasn't quite in the mainstream when we left Pittsburgh, but it was close. This is why we bought a house in the neighborhood close to campus, and it's why we invested in a bike trailer. We have train access to a major metro area, and we live in a walkable/bikeable small city that is surrounded--on the way outskirts--by farmland (which is key in the broad scheme of things). In other words, it's a relatively sustainable life. Oh, and as John pointed out, our good friends just moved nearby, so we have mostly everything we need--including our jobs--within a one mile radius.

Not bad.

But we are lucky. If we hadn't landed jobs at Illinois, we could easily be working in a place where it's not an option to live close to work, and where public transport (which is rather good here for a town of this size) sucks or is non-existent. My parents live in a rural area, and their fuel costs are climbing so high that my dad, ever the fan of a big roomy buick, just had a look at hybrids. (Hybrids really do need to become more affordable for more Americans, and frankly, they need to be even more fuel efficient, but that's another post.)  My sister's family lives in suburban Knoxville, where walking isn't an option--there aren't really even sidewalks. And my niece will start driving next year. I wonder how long it will take before teenagers just stop driving so soon? Or at all?

Ianqui and some of the folks on NPR suggest that perhaps people will start to migrate back to cities, and this may happen in a trickly kind of way, but it's hard to imagine what such a migration--even a trickly one--would do to housing markets, etc. Or what it would mean for food availability. It's all very disconcerting.

Of course all this could lead to a passionate appeal for people to vote for Obama in November, even though that's not what I intended to do (updated to add: appeal, that is! You're damn straight I intend to vote for him!). He has his eye on all this stuff and sees the folly of wasting so many lives and dollars in Iraq--dollars that would be far better spent developing alternative fuel sources, and building a new (and modest) economy around restructuring this country, sustainably.

around here

May is a nice time around these parts. The bike trails are all muddy but still (somewhat) ridable, the vegetables and plants are growing apace with the weeds, grad students are either scattering or hunkering down, colleagues are in the midst of their in-town moves, I remain in denial about the impending out-of-town moves, neighbors are spontaneously gathering in driveways, and as June comes on the days open up like the prairie itself. I like that there is still daylight for our evening dog walks, and I like that there are lots of noisy-ass birds yakking it up in the early morning. I also like that I'm going to be around here until mid-July. Now that I've finally (just today) unpacked my suitcases, and now that it's nearly June, it's time to settle in to a laid-back routine.

found time (and money)

We were going to go up to Chicago tomorrow, but the person who stays with our dogs has some heinous stomach flu (poor thing), so instead of taking pooches with to the dog-friendly hotel, we opted to cancel and stay home. It's going to be cold in Chicago anyway. Also, this means I  have more time to spend with Joseph Priestley, whose scientific experiments with cabbages and batteries are pretty entertaining. Also more time to cook. I'm going to try to talk JM into spending every penny we were going to spend on travel and lodging and dog care on something outlandish. Wish me luck.

spring! break!

As Metaspencer mentions, and as I expect the now not-so-anonymous Oronte Churm might soon reveal, the University's spring break started today. Hooray! Even though I'm on sabbatical, I still feel this break, because email has trickled to a halt, and I also feel this spring, because it was a nice sunny day here. Somehow running a bunch of errands is easier without a big poofy coat.

Also the beginning of break corresponded with payday and a Friday, which means we stood in line at the bank. Later, post-grocery shopping, we decided that we wanted to enjoy the sunshine but our feet were too sore from running yesterday, so we hopped on our bikes and rode down to the pretty prairie park and threw frisbee and also played catch. And now we're going to make some fish curry and spicy cabbage. Tomorrow we're driving out to the CSA-farm to buy some eggs and some meat and generally to tour the countryside. We both have talks to write over break, but toward the end, we're going to reward ourselves by training to Chicago for some fun city time.

I quite like living here. There it is.   

prairie snow walk

if traveling, remember turn around, don't drown.

that's the (ahem) lyrical advice scrolling across the bottom of my tv along with the flood warnings. on multiple channels.

time for change, indeed.

they don't call it central Illinois for nothing.

With tornadoes projected for south of us, and blizzards to the north of us, I suppose it makes sense that we are having the worst kind of blowy, whirly, snowy, mess. It's a neither-nor, but also kind of a both-and. A sucky middlin'.

Oh, and thanks to everyone for the well-wishes. The virus seems to have heeded my command (or more likely there was nothing left for it, so it moved on), and we're waiting to see if it takes the other human member of this household as its victim.

universities these days

After two awesome brunch events today, I just got around to reading the Sunday Times, and the front page section left me a feeling a little sad. Such a response to the Sunday Times is not really surprising. What is surprising is that a national paper left me feeling sad about my own university. The U of Illinois appears in two A-section articles, one about Max Levchin, the creator of Paypal, who graduated from here in 1997, and who was recently made a very, very rich young man when ebay bought his company. The other one focuses on the University's decision to reverse the Illiniwek ban for the Homecoming parade.

To be honest, I was sad about the Levchin story even before I got to the part where they mentioned his degree, and I was sad about the other story long before it hit the Times (okay, about 48-hours before; this was a last-minute decision). While the news that Levchin was a state-school grad heartened me a little, his own hollowed-out notion of success left me feeling a little dead inside.

Those of you who saw the article know that it's really about Levchin's aimless ambition. How a follow-up venture will feel like a failure to him unless it yields more than Paypal's 1.54 billion. How he claims to take "'a perverse pleasure in seeing if [he] could make someone cry.'" How he would "'probably think about slitting [his] wrists'" if he couldn't start businesses. How he growls when a rival company's name is mentioned. And yet none of this ambition is really all that directed; the article quotes him as saying "I knew I wanted to be a C.E.O, I just didn't know the C.E.O. of what."

That kind of roving and empty urge to conquer feels structurally very similar to the photo of students bearing "Chief Forever" signs in the parade article a few pages later. The people quoted in the article seem to bobble their heads and contradict themselves--what do you expect when the University is not itself solid on the issue? One senior says "'To me it is a very honorable and loyal symbol . . . I love the chief and I wish it was still here, but I also understand how it can be offensive. Now I want to know, is he around or not around? What's the decision?"

Even worse than the University's turnabout is the student newspaper's decision not to publish an editorial on the chancellor's decision about the rule reversal. Daily Illini staff  would also not comment to the Times. What?! Sadly, I don't think such lack of engagement is limited to student newspapers, but is pretty widespread on this campus and perhaps others.

Backing away from real, hard issues signifies a refusal to get people to really think about what is right and what is wrong and fails to develop tools that might help to determine one's values and formulate ethical stances. Such refusal might be one contributor to the lostness of someone like Levchin.