the educated serf

Hey! Take your shoes off!  Yes, well, it's still mud season here in western PA (and I'm sure it's just barely that in western MA), but Tom's Shoes, the great company that sends shoes to developing countries (NICE new beautiful shoes, too, not just your worn out Nikes...), is sponsoring an event on the 16th -- it's go shoeless day.    I explained the event in detail on the Green Connoisseur Blog on April 14th (today, underneath the morel mushroom mention...) so take a look and consider kicking off your shoes while your tooling around the office, walking over to lunch, or hanging out on campus.  And if you've got the bucks, Tom's shoes come in an amazing variety of colors, shapes, styles (vegan, less vegan, yoga-inspired, and so on), and for each pair you buy, one pair gets donated to a kid somewhere who might get to school and back without risking infection and parasite-borne diseases through their feet.   

If I were able to do this more, pretty much every single post would be about my friends.  It's no accident that somehow the things I write about are, underneath, really about how we strive for these relationships despite all the obstacles.    I don't want to write about how much I miss the community of people who held me together in Pelham and Amherst.  It's one of the other critical aspects of my life where words fail.  I have been working hard on finding local friends. I'm doing okay at it. Not great, mind you, but okay.  The cultural divide is sometimes uncrossable, the geography of suburbia unforgiving, and the weirdness of academia infuriating.   The other day I compared it to how my African American students feel when they are in the minority in class and everyone expects them to "speak" for the black experience.   As. if. there. were. just. one.   Through all this, I am unaccountably blessed (and I almost never use that word) with a far-flung network of