Syndicate and Hague

Despite the fact that I dislike Valentine’s day on principle (I find it obnoxious to have a holiday that seems to have the express purpose of making single people feel like crap), I couldn’t help but give Megan a present (a simple Wordpress and theme installation for her cooking blog). She, in return, made brownies.

About five years ago, when I was pondering going back to grad school yet again (because I am addicted or something), I ran into my old screenwriting teacher at Lunds and asked him what he thought.  He said “it will kill your writing.”

Not to be overly dramatic or anything, but he was mostly right.  Things like full-time jobs also kill your writing, but there is nothing like the brutally awful prose(?) of social science journals to make you forget that words can feel like something.

But between the 40 hours a week of work, the two classes, the prep work for conference proposals and accepted papers, and trying to round up scholarship money or grant money for travel - yeah, it kills not only your writing, but your creativity in general.

Reading shouldn’t be something you suffer through; even a scientific text can be rich and entrancing if you care about craft.  I know that isn’t a focus of the programs that generate scholars, but my life would be far more enjoyable if the craft of writing was at all evident in the world of research.

So today, after hours of torment, I set aside the texts and played guitar and spent the evening cooking with Megan and listening to the Valentine’s Day playlist on The Current.  Exercise and creative time are things I shouldn’t sacrifice, I will just have to force the time to appear out of nowhere. I’m so much happier this way.

The other day, I was reminiscing with my friend Kristen about our first Thanksgiving together in New York (10 years ago) - and how it was pretty much the best Thanksgiving that ever existed.

If you’ve never lived far enough away from your family that traveling back home was too much to do for both Thanksgiving and Christmas (or just that time of year), you’ve missed out on something awesome. New York is full of youngsters, as we were, who can’t afford to travel around much and every Thanksgiving was full of drinking and food and dessert.

But the first year was really the most special. Kristen and I had just moved to what would become a terrible place in Sunset Park in Brooklyn and we decided we were going to host Thanksgiving for our friends there. We bought a turkey, which we discovered was too big to thaw in the sink, so my sharpest memory of the night before was of Kristen setting the turkey to thaw in the bathtub, and petting it, thanking it for giving its life so we could have a party.

We made the traditional potatoes and green beans, and what Kristen reminded me of yesterday was that we didn’t have enough plates for everyone to eat off of, and so we ate off saucers and bowls and anything that was a flat enough surface.

Ah, New York, people may think of you as the crowded city, but I think of you as a place where your whole building makes Thanksgiving together and it is awesome. (And I miss you guys.)

(Move to Minnesota.)

Here is where I ramble on about my academic struggles. Just a warning.

As most of you who know me IRL know, I’m doing the PhD thing with a peculiar blend of program areas: Learning Technologies (education + technology in its myriad incarnations) and Culture & Teaching. I continue to be pretty bullheaded about the importance of merging the two, but this creates an almost constant sense of intellectual tension for me that I suppose is healthy and (in the long term) beneficial.

The core of my tension is this: as a front-end developer type and tech geek who finds no small amount of joy in embedding myself in the tools and flow of the online community, I’m concerned with creation and application. If I’m not making, I’m not learning; if I’m not learning, I’m already behind. I think this is elemental to those of us who create online designs, presences, websites, environments, applications, etc. We are doers and constructors. The attitudes and perspectives that fuel this type of person inevitably pour over into how they think about and what they focus on in research. The kind of action-oriented passion that drives the LT program is what drew me to it - especially after a year of reading about research done on mediocre projects, I cannot tell you what a relief it is that I wound up choosing a program in which the faculty create brilliantly designed applications for education.

But I’m not only focused on design/application creation. I’m also a writer whose primary fascination is the deconstruction of the political complexities that underlie our daily existences and our systemic structures. This also means I have a particular fascination with how what we build reinscribes modes of power or how (and for whom) the space is defined. This is why I needed the CAT program in tandem with LT. That sort of work is hardly ever done in the world of education + technology.

The problem/issue that arises with this disconnect is that most of the people who are studying technology and the digital sphere from what I would call an “outsider’s perspective” study this area from an “outdated perspective.” In this, I’m classifying people who do not create/do as “outsiders” and alleging that their separation from development results in a lack of understanding of what our technology is moving towards and therefore their studies and research are retrospective rather than current.

Does this make sense? Or am I getting to hung up in my own mental space?

What I worry about is that the middle ground that I want to exist - doing and deconstructing - doesn’t really exist. I worry that I will inevitably fall into one camp or the other and lose something as a result.

Anyway, I could go on, but we have an out of town visitor who just arrived - so that’s enough of that!

I spent much of the latter part of last week doing one of the things I do best (and enjoy most): being a thorn in the side of lockstep thinking. Even though I’m too much of a speck to truly change anything in this instance, the least I can do is challenge the assumptions people put forth as “common sense” (or even “commonly agreed upon”).

In my experience, it is very easy in marketing meeting type situations for people to blindly acquire and use the language presented as their baseline. What I mean by this is that, if the people running a meeting use a word like “spin,” the people in the meeting will think in terms of spin. This happens for a variety of reasons: people want to impress those who have more power and therefore don’t question underlying premises of a discussion; people are afraid of losing their jobs so they play along even if they’re annoyed; or people - when faced with contributing to something they disagree with - hold their tongues rather than speak up. The reluctance to speak up is sensible. It’s self-protection, but it’s just as likely a result of the speed with which and the manner in which people construct thoughts and arguments. Some people need to take time to dissect and construct and are marvelous thinkers - but aren’t quick thinkers.

Anyway, the series of discussions was about something of a pretty broad scope. It’s something I consider both potentially incredibly beneficial and dangerous simultaneously and my hunch is that it will be used in both ways, which I can’t do anything about. The most I can do is try to help construct and frame positive uses. But that’s not what I’m talking about here (if I tried to sum up everything I said, we’d be looking at an even more long-winded blog post than usual).

What I want to talk about is how we develop a lexicon and how destructive a lexicon can be once it is assimilated into regular speech. In this instance, the term “spin” came up (as in: how to “spin” the U in a positive light), as did the term “loyalty” (as in: how do we create loyalty to the U - implicitly, how do we create loyalty to the brand of the U?)

Let’s take on the word “spin” first, because it’s easier to deconstruct. In fact, Jon Stewart did it quite well several years ago when he deconstructed what “Spin Alley” (the place the cable news people cut to when discussing a debate) actually means during his infamous Crossfire appearance:

You go to spin alley, the place called spin alley. Now, don’t you think that, for people watching at home, that’s kind of a drag, that you’re literally walking to a place called deception lane?

…

But what I believe is, they’re not making honest arguments. So what they’re doing is, in their mind, the ends justify the means.

Honesty is the core here. In “spin alley” you’re talking about dishonest argument, in “spinning the U” you’re talking about a dishonest presentation of the University. Nothing is inherently positive. No one is going to have exclusively positive interactions with anything ever. So the question is this: are you going to try to artificially force positivity or are you going to spend your time and money creating experiences and opportunities that people actually feel happy to be a part of?

For instance, if I say that the faculty of my PhD program areas of Culture & Teaching and Learning Technologies are freakin awesome, that isn’t spin. That is genuine sentiment based on a positive and ongoing experience. Creating positive experiences and painting positive pictures are very, very different things.

You get the picture. Let’s move on to the concept of loyalty.

In the context of this discussion, we’re essentially talking about getting people affiliated with the U to be loyal to the U. And here is where the problem of the lexicon comes in. If there is a group and those leading a session ask a question that is (paraphrased) “how do we increase people’s loyalty to the U?” then the group’s job is to respond to that without actually questioning the question. You respond with ways in which to increase loyalty, rather than to ask whether loyalty is what we should be working towards.

Since we’re talking broad scope here, we’re talking students, alums, external folks, faculty, staff…can anyone see the issue of using a term like loyalty with all its connotations (faithfulness, obedience, devotion) in regard to people whose economic and professional fates are tied to the institution? Additionally, the notion that we ought to be loyal to an institution rather than committed to a collective purpose strikes me as terribly hollow. If the U is merely a shell or a brand, then commitment is meaningless. It’s the U’s purpose that people are committed to, not a tagline or an institutional brand.

Of course, purpose is a tricky thing: it actually needs to be actively developed and worked at. A brand can coast on its merits and has sale value. A purpose is a moral imperative; veiling that moral imperative in branding language allows people to forget the purpose exists, it allows people to pursue the game of marketing for its own end rather than the higher purpose they are supposed to be serving.

Loyalty, however, if induced - the concept of “raving fans” was discussed - is a blind, emotional, and arbitrary tie. What does it mean to be a fan of the Vikings who paints his/her face purple? Who cares! They come to the game, buy the jersey, drink beer in the stands…they give us money.

That is the source of my aggravation. The thing that twists me in knots. If the goal is loyalty - a word chosen in a winnowing process of meeting after meeting after meeting - then it appears we want nothing more than consumers. We’ll provide them as much as the bare minimum they require in order to come back and purchase something another day.

And this is why language is important. If, instead of asking how to create “raving fans,” we asked questions about facilitating and building community, and how to maintain our own authenticity so that the actual experiences people have with us are positive/beneficial (rather than just spun to be so), we would be asking far better questions and getting entirely different answers.

(Now, one could say that my professors/TAs back in undergrad at the U did a pretty damn good job of helping me develop my critical reasoning skills, but none of these discussions are really about quality - just perception - so it’s kind of irrelevant.)

This isn’t really a movie review.

I sometimes wonder why sooo many crappy awful movies for dudes get made. And then I came across statistics - via Traction - that in 2008:

• Women comprised only 16% of all directors, executive producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films (a decline of 3% since 2001 and of 1% since 2007).
• Only 9% of directors were women - no change since 1998
• 22% of the films released in 2008 employed no women directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, or editors. No films failed to employ a man in at least one of these roles.
• 90% of the films had no female directors.
• 43% of the films had no female producers.
• 79% of the films had no female editors.
• 96% of the films had no female cinematographers.

If you take a moment to think about what that means - that the vision behind the movies, how things are interpreted, how things are portrayed, how our attention is directed, how a story is cut, how a story is told, who the protagonist is, who we should care about, who we should forgive, all of it is predominantly controlled by the male perspective - it’s a bit overwhelming.

It seems beneficial to remind ourselves that as self-congratulatory as we can be about women’s progress, we started at such a position of disadvantage that we’re still not even close.  Actually, there was an article in Jezebel back in August that got this topic stewing around in my head.

In an article about an NY Times scan of the big studio schedules by Michael Cieply, they highlight one of his paragraphs trying to explain the disproportionate dominance of male directors.

In one respect, homogeneity among its film directors might actually help Hollywood in a business sense. Studio films, year in and year out, continue to pull in crowds worldwide at least in part because they look, sound and feel like what has gone before.

What can you say to that? I’ve been under the impression that Hollywood has actually not been pulling in the box office numbers they need to in order to sustain their business model, but whatever. It also completely ignores how movies influence our culture at large, and how alienating it is for people to rarely see accurate representations of their lives in film. That was one theme that came up in The Celluloid Closet in regard to queer representation in film - that there were almost no representations of real queer lives in film (this was in 1995ish).

So when we went to Whip It last night, I was thinking about all of this and paying attention to how the movie showed women’s bodies, lives, sexualities, and humor in a female-directed, female-written film. I’m not saying that the movie was some groundbreaking work of feminism - it was a fluffy, feel-good, entertaining movie - but the representation of these different aspects that I noted were actually significantly different from other mainstream films I’ve seen recently.

• The skating scenes, of which there were many, were striking in that they focused on the competition, athleticism, brutality, and sexiness of roller derby - as opposed to focusing just on the sexiness and turning the female characters into playboy versions of roller derby girls
• It is really nice to see the quirky, female character as protagonist - the character that gets to develop and discover aspects of herself and become a more complete person - rather than as the girlfriend of and foil for male protagonist development
• Speaking of that, it’s also nice that though the romantic relationship had an impact on the main character, it wasn’t the core of the female protagonist’s transformation. I hate how hugely rare that is, but it’s refreshing to see
• I just really liked the range of female characters, the ways the different ages of the female characters contributed to friendships and relationships and their interactions with each other

What I want: more movies with female protagonists, written/directed by women. Let’s just balance things out.

School started up again yesterday. This is usually a very exciting time for me because excessive brain exercise=happy. However, I’m suffering from what I’m going to call “recession malaise.” I think a lot of us have this right now - it’s the knowledge that the people in power are screwing us combined with the knowledge that everything could be much worse, so count your blessings.

It’s hard to quell the discontent, though.

As I’ve said before, people in general like to say that we become more conservative with age. It was Winston Churchill who said “Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.” Personally, I see that as both a cop out and as arrogantly self-interested. (As it’s Churchill, I shouldn’t be surprised by the latter).

The older I get, the less patience I have with how business (non-profit, government, education, private industry, whoever) operates. The “tough decisions” rarely affect the bottom lines of the top administration’s remunerations/benefits or those of the people in their peer group. The “tough decisions” always, always, always result in stripped away benefits from low-/middle-wage workers, with a disproportionate burden of layoffs falling upon low-wage workers.

I understand the basic human nature behind these decisions. You want to protect yourself, you want to protect your friends, you want to ensure that - when it’s your colleague’s turn to make a “tough decision” that they spare you. People don’t want to give up the trappings of power or power itself.

It’s still wrong, though. It’s still unethical and immoral. And I know that many people think ethics and morals have nothing to do with business, and I thank them for allowing the financial sector to become what it is today - you know, the financial sector that almost singlehandedly set up the environment that would most easily facilitate an economic collapse. But hey, you can’t even live like a pauper in NYC on a salary of less than a million, right?

The thought process embedded in our organizations by this kind of lunacy - that executives should make obscene amounts more than their underlings - has infiltrated pretty much every aspect of our society, and this is a problem. It means that when terrible times come and a terrible governor makes the worst possible decisions about a great state’s welfare…well, sacrifice becomes the keyword of all state organizations. It’s not proportionate sacrifice, of course, because we operate with an oligarchy and: in good times salaries are justified by the good times and in bad times salaries are justified by how hard it is to retain such valuable employees in bad times.

The entrenchment of power never ends.

And so…malaise…

Two things happened this week.  First, we now own a house.  Second, we had the wedding reception. That one followed the day after the other was a fluke.

I’ve hesitated to write anything in detail about our experience in buying the house this summer because I was unsure if anything I said would come back to hurt us before it was all over.  But now it’s over.

We bought a short sale from a nice guy who had a whole hell of a lot of bad luck.  I know we live in America and all - currently the land of “I’ve got mine and if you don’t then there must be something wrong about you” - but there hasn’t been a day when my excitement and joy about this beautiful house that we now own hasn’t been tempered with a sadness and resignation about the only way we could afford something like this.  And that is by someone else being in desperate circumstances.

When I’ve told people that, they tend to become remarkably uncomfortable.  They usually try to justify the whole exchange as simply financial and amoral, but there is a large part of me that fully believes the amount of pain M & I have suffered this summer in our transience has been some sort of penance for the way we’ve come to own such a special place.

To buy a short sale, a house that is still owned by the person who is losing it, you must have an element of vulture to you.  The ability to rationalize that their loss is inevitable and it may as well be  you who gains.  And I suppose that is good enough for many people, and, despite rationalizing in that way myself, the guilt of it would overtake me at times.

I’ve seen the destruction left in the wake of other houses people were financially forced to vacate: the appliances pulled from the walls, glass doorknobs stripped and sold along with any other valuables that could be harvested from the house.  Those houses are filled with anger and despair.  You can feel it when you walk in.

When we came to see the place that is now our home, it was a last minute thing and the owner was here.  The moment I stepped into the house, I was blown away by the feel of it and how beautiful it is.  We talked with the owner for a while afterward on the porch and decided to come back the next day and look at it in the daylight.  We were smitten with the house, and he made it clear that he wanted us to have it.  I think what he recognized in us was that, despite our status as vultures, we saw the same kind of beauty in the house.  We weren’t going to tear it apart; we weren’t going to flip it.

For months, we waited.  We moved.  We lost the futon to mold, we lost the sofa, area rug, and chair to moths in the storage space.  We moved four times by the end of the summer, living out of suitcases and hardly anything to cook with or eat on.  I reminded myself constantly that our homelessness was - to an extent - of our own making. It was a waiting game.  Would the house win? Or would we give it up and move to an apartment and call it quits?

Obviously the house won.  But not until we gave up and decided to abandon it, only to be talked back into trying a new loan.

This weekend, the former owner of the house routed an email through his realtor to our realtor to us.  He said that leaving this house was the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, but that he’s glad that we’re the ones who got it.  He told us the history of the house, of its former owners before him, of the things he’d done to the house to make it look the way it should (things that I had assumed were original to the house).  Though some people may find the email guilt-inducing (being reminded of the kind of work and care poured into this place), I found it a relief.  I cannot forget how I’ve profited on someone else’s misery - and despite people wanting to make me feel better about it, I don’t think I should forget it - but having that person feel that their love of a place wasn’t in vain, that he trusts us to do right by the house means a lot to me.

My father likes to tease me and is currently saying that nothing makes you a capitalist like becoming a homeowner, but I think he’s wrong.  I think the loss of community identity is tied to a feeling of entitlement.  If you continually question that entitlement, if you dig down and look at the privilege you have and what the effects of your choices are, then the often-repeated triteness that we become more conservative as we age doesn’t have to become true.

And to the former owner: Thank you for giving us so much in this house.  I know the house itself wasn’t voluntary, but everything you carefully added to the house over the years was your choice to leave and I recognize that as a gift.

We moved our books out of storage today.  The living room is now overrun by piles and piles of novels and poetry and political theory.  It’s the first time I’ve felt semi-calm in four months.  It’s the first time I’ve seen any of my books in four months.  Hell, it’s the first time I’ve seen 95% of my things in four months.

I love my books.  It is not unusual for Megan and I to be having a conversation which I interrupt by running off to get a book that either contains information helpful for the conversation, some tangential but related information, or just to share something I have on the shelves that our conversation made me think of.  Being without them…well…it’s not so interesting to say “let’s remember this moment, because I have a book in storage that is perfect for this.”

It was so exciting to unpack those today - and though this whole saga is not quite over yet - I can see the light (aka: the closing) at the end of the tunnel and the books are back and that is beautiful.  My greedy eyes have missed the poetry I regularly take off the shelves and read and I’m so happy to return to that part of life.

Megan and I were coming home from an evening at Spyhouse (me desperately writing a paper for a conference, a sad excuse for a paper; Megan reading) and caught the end of The Story on our glorious Minnesota Public Radio. This is what it was about:

Jessica Zichichi and her husband Sal have held onto good jobs - their problem is the housing market.

Jess and Sal were living in a small house in Cape Cod that they loved. Then Sal took a job in South Carolina. It was 2006 and they figured they could easily sell the house. In the meantime, they’d live on their 33-foot boat.

Then the bottom fell out of the housing market. Jess and Sal were stuck living on the boat while they rented their house to a nightmare tenant and tried to rustle up enough funds to build a one-room barn to live in. And then Jess got pregnant. She talks with Dick about some of the good that’s come from her family’s ordeal.

With all the awfulness of our own buying(?) a short sale ordeal overwhelming most aspects of our lives at the moment, hearing Jess’s story was like a moment of light. I think this may have been a rerun because I vaguely remember the story, and I remember originally thinking “oh how terrible!!” - but this time it just delighted us. We laughed and gave each other big smiles every time Jess’s story intersected with ours. Just knowing someone else was going through things as ridiculous as ours - and more so, at least we’re not living on a boat, right? - made our transient life a little less lonely and tragic.

It’s not perspective really, more of a relief at shared troubles. I guess that’s perspective in a way.

All I know is that MPR brings me so much joy so frequently. And I love listening to it with Megan.

***

By the way, I haven’t even talked about how we got married. But it was so fantastic. I’ve started a few posts about it, but things have been so nuts with the house stuff that I haven’t even had the level of concentration necessary to finish writing the posts and do the wedding justice.