b l o g o s

Xmas driving

A few years ago I made the happy discovery of what it's like to make a long solo drive on Christmas day. At first it sounds sad, or even--to the melodramatic--tragic. But it's really, really not bad, as long solo drives go. There are, for starters, about 90% fewer trucks on the highway, and even if it rains the whole day--which it did--you aren't constantly engulfed by the powerwash that is the highway spray. I can count on two hands the number of trucks I passed. Gas stations are all open, and as long as you remember to bring a cooler, and as long as you charged the cell phone and ipod and your dad doesn't trash your half-eaten, carefully saved bags of salty snacks from the trip down along with all the aluminum cans you were going to recycle when you got back, you'll have plenty of yummy fun stuff for driving. And plus, if you are staying where there are kids, as I was, you can be assured of a nice, stretchy morning, beginning with thumps, giggles, and whisper-shouts "I'll wake her up!" "No I'll do it!"

While I am accustomed to waking up before 6:30, I'm not, I realized, accustomed to being videotaped only 4 minutes later.

But! All of this leaves plenty of time for setting up the wireless router for the niece's new laptop; failing to help the nephew open that pain-in-the-ass thief-proof (because human-proof) hard plastic gadget packaging; hopping around on the outdoor trampoline--I can still, 20 years later, do the seated twister!--; making a batch of mini-biscuits for the annual fambily brunch; performing a last minute sweep-save when the nephew feeds Jada a mini-cream puff; making digital, dancing elves out of the entire family, and keeping Tillie from chasing the nephew's remote-control motorcycle to downtown Knoxville (most easily achieved by having the nephew direct said motorcycle back to the house). And there's still time to load the sacked whippets in the car and make the eight hour return trek to Urbana--closer to seven if you're driving on Christmas day.   

things to love about tennessee

pressies for smart kids

If memory serves, I was the only kid in my kindergarten who could read. This meant at least two things: 1) that I would have to get up at our school's Christmas event, cross the stage covered with vomit-stained orange carpet, and read a passage from the bible (this was the South, remember, and apparently after school hours, church and state were permitted to mingle), and 2) that when our teachers bought us presents that year--who knows why they bought us all presents? teachers in my county didn't get paid that much--they took special care to buy all the other kids dolls and cool posters and lunch boxes, and they bought me a book. When I ripped off the paper, my little face fell. I mean, I was happy that I could read, but I didn't want to do it on Christmas. I was bummed, that is, until a classmate offered to trade her sweet smelling thumb-sucking dolly for my book, exclaiming that the book I'd been given was scratch and sniff.

Scratch and sniff was a whole other ball game, and so I politely refused the trade. It was a sesame street scratch and sniff, and I still remember being the most drawn to (because repelled by) the vile, fishy smell of Oscar the Grouch who lived in the trash. I scratched him until his body faded and peeled. Grover, the goofy purple guy, made my nails smell of grapes.

The whole reason I thought of this little anecdote is that this week I thought it'd be nice to buy a little present for the person who is going to watch our dogs over break. That person also happens to be my exam-writing advisee. I don't want to get her hopes up too much so I'll say it here: I doubt if anyone will want to trade, especially since it will only smell like ink and pulp, and even though it's cute and red, it's still half Latin. Maybe I'll buy some wine to go with.

beer, boots, and curly hair

road trip!

This morning Tracy and I are loading up her car with snacks and tunes and heading south--ducking out of the mid-October insanity to visit a certain someone who is on sabbatical.

As D(Jx3) likes to say, w00t!

[update]:

This photo should affectionately be titled 'when academic nerds take a road trip'

information

Where I'm from, community bears on statistics, making them sag and wail. And so it seems like every year there around this time, it's always someone--young, often a boy--and a motorcycle, a car, or water. Headlines dumbly chase phone calls. But this time, the headline reached me first, at a public library, in an email message, among stock tips and sale notices, departmental announcements, and friendly hellos. Murky hints of an accident, paralysis, death; a broken link refusing to fill in what a shaky google search otherwise can, in excess: a boat, my coach, his son.

summer rules

Write. I recently posted on my chapter dilemma and am glad to announce that all is well. If, that is, "well" means that I'm reading a fair amount about insulin shock therapy in the 30s and now have several new pages of writing to work with on it.

Run. Including the first one, John and I have now completed 5 rounds of 400s. Our times have decreased, but the most noticeable thing is our improved ability to get through the things, as in, the gasping/heaving effect seems to be gone. And also, relatedly, our recovery times have gotten remarkably speedier. We've been heading to the track every 3 or 4 days or so, though yesterday we made the mistake of trying them on the heels of (as in the day after) a 3-4 mile run. Not a good idea. Not when it's this hot outside. And not when both parties have foot pain that lends that phrase 'on the heels of a 3-4 mile run' a more literal force. Otherwise, they're trucking along, the 3-4 miler was noticeably easier than other times (a great sign!), and I'm not nearly as sore.

Eat. Last night we enjoyed the classic southern summer meal: bbq chicken, corn on the cob, and I even made a batch of biscuits, hot kitchen be damned. (Does anyone else like to cook after a long day of writing? mmm.)

post script

"We ate a lot of meat. And then we went to Graceland."

--Jeff Walker, describing his post-conference Memorial Day afternoon with Don Bialostosky

thinking toward memphis

An instant: Late summer, 1977, I was perched on the end of my mom's poolside chair--the kind with the wide rubbery blue and white slats that brand your behind in the Tennessee August--cracking open a nutty buddy. It was adult swim, the dreaded period when the kids get whistled out of the pool so that the adults might take a dip without getting their oversized sunglasses or oversprayed hair splashed by kicking floatied children or chubby teens belly-flopping off the high dive. No adults, it occurs to me now, ever swam laps; maybe that's not something people did in the 70s, or in Greeneville, and besides, adult swim could only last so long before the poolside concrete became a sweltering site of whining protest. Me, I had my nutty buddy to stem my impatience and the heat, so all seemed okay, until the music stopped.

The a.m. radio in the pool office, that dank, puddly, coppertone-smelling place where most of the teenaged lifeguards were breaking from the sun, switched mid-song to clipped and crackly words, but I didn't bother to make out what they were; I was too busy diagonally peeling the paper wrapping for phase 2 of my nutty buddy, the phase that comes after the hard chocolate/nut topping, but before the first bite of actual cone, the phase when the vanilla ice cream licks clean and smooth. I had to work quickly. It was melting fast.

A red-shorted lifeguard bolted from the office shouting something over and over, bumping kids waiting in the snack line. Someone's change clanked on the walk. Women swiveled from their mostly still spots in the pool to see what could be interrupting their sacred  'swim.'

I finally looked up from my nutty buddy at this lifeguard and his flailing arms, and made out the panicked words "Elvis died, y'all! ELVIS IS DEAD!"

Melted ice cream began streaming down my wrist, joining with the drying pool water for a race to my elbow. I'm not sure why, but people started to behave like they did at the first low rumble of thunder, quickly packing up their things, piling into searing cars, and heading home, in spite of the clear skies and the obvious fact that Graceland was clear across the state. On our way out I tossed the nutty buddy top-down in a barrel by the chain-linked gate and pictured the milky remains oozing between sandwich wrappers, coke cans, and empty cigarette packs.

the tenure gods are winking (+ ten year redux)

At long last, more than a year after I turned in my tenure documents, they have rolled out of the top of the bureaucracy bearing a stamp marked "yeah, all right, let's keep her." Or something like that. It's customary to get a phone call from the department head with the news, and mine came while I was at the gym, its only trace a U of IL number on my caller ID. So the head of English, after also trying my office (fat chance! I'm almost tenured!) sent an email with the news. And here's the wink part: the email was directed to my junk mail.

Oh, and (wink number two): this is the shirt I'm wearing today.

To mark the occasion here at blogos and to maintain the somewhat coincidental southern theme, I'm re-posting an entry I composed at the Ex-Comm phase back in December with apologies to those half-dozen or so people who've been with blogos since the very beginning. Damn. I've blogged as much as Bérubé today. I must have tenure or something.

ten year

My first memory of the word tenure is from the third grade. A new governor was about to be elected in Tennessee, and our teacher got us involved. I’m not sure how the teacher thought she was replicating democracy, but I do know that I was assigned to learn about—and campaign for—Lamar Alexander, the guy who would go on to become Bush Sr.'s secretary of education. I gathered information about some of Alexander’s proposals (many later, upon his election, became policy), and quickly learned that the most controversial of them had to do with a complete overhaul of the state’s education system. I didn’t know why, but I did gather, especially from the horrified look on my third grade teacher’s face when I presented Alexander’s proposals to my class, that this word—tenure—was a massive source of anxiety. All I knew is that Alexander wanted to get rid of it because, as he put it, it kept bad teachers in the system. I’d had a bad teacher in first grade who yelled at me for using the stapler improperly—even continued yelling at me after I’d bloodied my little thumb—and so the proposal made sense to me. I was, recall, in third grade, and so I didn’t know that Alexander’s proposal really had much more to do with stemming union “control” over raises and job security, which my thirty-something self would most definitely oppose.

In any case, tenure, I learned, was something someone didn’t really mess with. Only the thing is, since I gathered my information from mostly oral sources (my teachers, television, our neighbors), and since my school was within view of the Appalachian mountain range, I thought this word that was kicking up such a fuss was actually not one word but two: “ten year,” emphasis on ten, often pronounced “tin.” For those of you not as familiar with the East Tennessee strain of the Appalachian dialect, with the twangy hurried-up way words get crushed together, especially when those words appear in excited contexts, this “mishearing” might come as a surprise. In this case it was less the Appalachian tongue than my well-honed Appalachian ear that interpreted the Latin rooted word as two and found it not all that curious that the “s” was dropped (since that too is a feature of this particular dialect). It also fit the context. I’d gathered that the concept related to the number of years a teacher logged, and so, I presumed, that number was ten. As in after ten years, ya git tenyear. I wasn’t even ten at the time, so as you might imagine, this number of years impressed me. And so tenure, for me, was long associated with 1) anxiety; 2) working an unimaginably long time, and 3) the republican gubernatorial candidate who always wore a plaid shirt and chopped wood with regular folk.

Despite my mishearing, my original associations, especially 1 and 2, still pretty much obtain. Though I have admittedly and somewhat idiosyncratically flashed on that plaid shirted wood chopper (cartoonish emphasis on his gleaming ax) when certain colleagues reminded me that I didn't have it. And so when word came down this week that the Executive Committee had approved my and my three other colleagues’ cases for tenure, I flashed tenyear, and I thought about how my youthful hick-ear scheme was really quite accurate, because even though it’s technically “sixyear,” it’s really, let’s face it, at least ten years' worth of work.

My first memory of the word tenure is from the third grade. A new governor was about to be elected in Tennessee, and our teacher got us involved. I’m not sure how the teacher thought she was replicating democracy, but I do know that I was assigned to learn about—and campaign for—Lamar Alexander, the guy who would go on to become Bush Sr.'s secretary of education. I gathered information about some of Alexander’s proposals (many later, upon his election, became policy), and quickly learned that the most controversial of them had to do with a complete overhaul of the state’s education system. I didn’t know why, but I did gather, especially from the horrified look on my third grade teacher’s face when I presented Alexander’s proposals to my class, that this word—tenure—was a massive source of anxiety. All I knew is that Alexander wanted to get rid of it because, as he put it, it kept bad teachers in the system. I’d had a bad teacher in first grade who yelled at me for using the stapler improperly—even continued yelling at me after I’d bloodied my little thumb—and so the proposal made sense to me. I was, recall, in third grade, and so I didn’t know that Alexander’s proposal really had much more to do with stemming union “control” over raises and job security, which my thirty-something self would most definitely oppose.

In any case, tenure, I learned, was something someone didn’t really mess with. Only the thing is, since I gathered my information from mostly oral sources (my teachers, television, our neighbors), and since my school was within view of the Appalachian mountain range, I thought this word that was kicking up such a fuss was actually not one word but two: “ten year,” emphasis on ten, often pronounced “tin.” For those of you not as familiar with the East Tennessee strain of the Appalachian dialect, with the twangy hurried-up way words get crushed together, especially when those words appear in excited contexts, this “mishearing” might come as a surprise. In this case it was less the Appalachian tongue than my well-honed Appalachian ear that interpreted the Latin rooted word as two and found it not all that curious that the “s” was dropped (since that too is a feature of this particular dialect). It also fit the context. I’d gathered that the concept related to the number of years a teacher logged, and so, I presumed, that number was ten. As in after ten years, ya git tenyear. I wasn’t even ten at the time, so as you might imagine, this number of years impressed me. And so tenure, for me, was long associated with 1) anxiety; 2) working an unimaginably long time, and 3) the republican gubernatorial candidate who always wore a plaid shirt and chopped wood with regular folk.

Despite my mishearing, my original associations, especially 1 and 2, still pretty much obtain. Though I have admittedly and somewhat idiosyncratically flashed on that plaid shirted wood chopper (cartoonish emphasis on his gleaming ax) when certain colleagues reminded me that I didn't have it. And so when word came down this week that the Executive Committee had approved my and my three other colleagues’ cases for tenure, I flashed tenyear, and I thought about how my youthful hick-ear scheme was really quite accurate, because even though it’s technically “sixyear,” it’s really, let’s face it, at least ten years' worth of work.