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...

Quest is literally looking down on my work right now.  He seems so cute and tiny in this picture as compared to his belly shot on the left (see "The CDC Can't Map Me"...). I have been thinking about cats lately, even though the dog tends to occupy my imagination more fully.  Warren asked, on his Facebook page (!!!), "do pets make us better writers?" and of course the answer is yes.  Emmett is warming my chair right now.  Leah's 18 year old cat Fez passed away last week -- Arlene and Martha shepherded him through life without Leah and then a sad but safe acquiescence to age.  His passing inspired a whole host of poems and reminiscences, not surprising since Leah's world was full of writers and cat lovers.  Here is what I wrote to Arlene: I am just back from Baltimore -- no people home (they are out eating Japanese, something I am sure they do regularly when I am away) and after the dog has wiggled and jumped on me and made it clear that she hates when I l...

As those of you who actually read this schlock know, the last few years of my life have been profoundly shaped by the illness and loss of Leah Ryan.   I still find it impossible to capture my relationship to Leah in words (she was my friend -- that's good enough), although I struggle almost daily to honor it in the things I produce (schlock comments aside), whether it's cranky and irreverent or subversive and commercial, high brow theory or kitsch.   Leah's writing embodies all that and more and her outlook on life remains an enduring legacy that carries me through the day.   I know I still have a lot of work to do to live up to what she offered, even if it's just the ability to enjoy life as it comes at you.    This weekend had a lot of the usual mixture of seriously mundane annoyances and little pleasures.  The people here in Pittsburgh continue to challenge whatever tiny reservoir of patience I actually possess. (Today some parent tried to convince me that eggs were ...

So, we went to NYC for Zoe's gymnastics meet, in which she placed first all around, (level 7, age 13 and up).  Not so shabby, we think, but even better because afterwards we got to spent a lot of time in Chinatown and went to Canada (the gallery, not the place) and saw Xylor's work hanging up.  Here is one of her paintings -- to me, they feel a bit claustrophobic photographed this way, whereas in reality, you need the breathing space of a wall and the dimensionality of the canvas around it so the numbers and colors don't zonk you too hard.  Or maybe I'm missing the point... Anyway, we ate dim sum and went to the Armory show where Sarah's work was up in the Metropolitan 23 space. Here's the piece everyone liked the most.   Then we went with Saul to the top of the Empire State Building at night, which I'd never done before.  It's a gorgeous building with amazing marble and endless ropes to guide you through their attempts to get you to spend more money.  F...

'Tis a bit of a random Friday.   The Girl Scout cookies have come in, which is rather ironic given that it's Friday and it's Lent here in the highly Catholic suburbs of Pittsburgh.  Luckily for those that have not given up sweets, I am happy to point out that there is no lard listed in the ingredients... The dog reverted to a feral state when she discovered an injured deer on our walk and as I slogged after them through deep deep muddy swamps I decided that, as a form of exercise, this was clearly inferior to yoga.   I also take back anything I may have said earlier in this blog about her lack of instincts, which have now resulted in her being given some anti-inflammatory drugs, glucosamine, very harsh words, and an undefined term of house arrest. My sister sent me this lovely bit about how employees at Lego get little lego people with their names on them to give out instead of business cards.  If I worked for Lego, I would want a Xena the Warrior lego person to give out. ...

Ten Second Rant Tragic Misreadings, Gender Trouble, and Me On my way to teach Paris Is Burning , Judith Butler, and theories of gender and performance। Seat of the pants, as they say, which is probably crazy given the subject matter. For some reason when I type in a title to this blog entry, it automatically converts to Japanese. That all pretty much sums up the postmodern condition as it exists today, here, in Pittsburgh. Sometimes experiencing gender -- and drag in particular -- is a bit like cognitive dissonance. You know something's not quite as it appears, but you can't always name it, and in other ways, at the same time, everything is perfectly natural. Perhaps this is a drag life, in a way, since I have cognitive dissonance about my reality that goes way beyond the grumpy religion state of mind. Tragic misreadings of the map of power, indeed, Dr. Butler. Today it's knowing how to explain Althusser and interpellation, understanding how that works in the other ...