Monday, September 1, 2008
Let me return from my long blog absence to extol the virtues of melancholy. Or more specifically, let me recommend this link (via Andrew Sullivan) to someone else extolling the virtues of melancholy. I don't have much to add to it except that I think being dishonest and inauthentic does more damage to people than most anybody realizes. Pretending to be happy when you're sad, pretending to be ok when you're not, is a denial of who you are as a person. There are sometimes when self-restraint is called for - there's a quote I Iove from Catcher in the Rye, "I'm always saying 'Glad to've met you' to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though." - but when you start lying to yourself, when you start telling yourself that you're happy when you're not, that's when you are really hurting yourself. It's ok to be sad and down and depressed, but, in our society, it can really feel like it's not ok.
On a different note, the NFL season is about to start, which means another season of Loser Bowl. Loser Bowl is a league run by my sister-in-law, Leanne, in which you have to pick one losing football team every week of the football season. The catch is you can't pick the same team twice in a season. So the first few weeks are, theoretically, easy, but then you start having to pick better and better teams to be losers. I've never come close to winning the league. This year is going to be tough, I think.... the Chiefs seem pretty crummy, but they're not completely crummy, so as soon as I pick them, they'll surprise me with an out-of-the-blue win and ruin my Loser Bowl season. The Dolphins should stink, but they look like they're getting better. The Raiders are saying that they want to run the ball about 600 times this year, which is, um actually, a pretty good idea. But the thing is, for the run-heavy offense to work, you need to have a defense that, how should I put this diplomatically, lacks suckiness. Which the Raiders defense traditionally does not lack. So we'll see. Speaking of defenses that lack suckiness, it looks like Houston is willing to start anyone and everyone at cornerback, so be expecting a call. And the new quarterback in Arizona is Kurt Warner, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the old quarterback in Arizona, Kurt Warner, who also bears an uncanny resemblance to your grandfather. Because he's so old. It's a joke, laugh! Ok, well, I'm calling it a night.
Now that Barack Obama has more or less sewn up the Democratic nomination for President, you are going to start to hear a slew of stories about the next big dramatic event in the Presidential race - selection of the Vice Presidential candidates. Already, you might have caught news stories about John McCain inviting potential VP candidates to his house for a Memorial Day barbeque. As the last few Democratic primaries play out, you'll hear more and more stories speculating on whether Obama will offer the VP slot to Hillary Clinton as part of a deal to get her to leave the race. Regardless of what you hear, you should keep in mind that it doesn't matter. As this post at The Plank says: "[T]he evidence indicates that running-mate selections usually have zero impact on election outcomes, even in the running mate's home state." So feel free to ignore all the news stories that breathlessly speculate on all the possibilities, typically illustrating their points with bar graphs and poll data and quotes from inside each campaign.
Speaking about Vice Presidential candidate speculation, I read a story about Jim Webb, one of the leading Democratic VP possibilities, that made me not just enormously disappointed but also repulsed by someone whom I had admired until quite recently. One of the major knocks against Webb as a VP candidate is that he has made questionable comments about women in the past. I didn't quite realize the extent of his questionable comments until I read about the specifics of them in this post on Matthew Yglesias's blog, by guest poster Kathy G. In a 1979 article arguing that women don't belong in the military, Webb declared that no senior female in a leadership position at the Naval Academy won her rank by merit, thereby impugning the accomplishments of every female midshipman and throwing fuel on the smoldering resentments of a vocal minority of disgruntled midshipmen. This article had a very real effect on women at the Academy. Kathleen Murray, a 1984 Naval Academy graduate, said, "This article was brandished repeatedly. [Men] quoted and used it as an excuse to mistreat us." More recently, Webb has tried to minimize the sexual abuse of women by Navy and Marine officers in the Tailhook scandal, placing the blame on "social engineers" who were insistent on ever-increasing sexual mixing in the military and on feminists who seized upon the Tailhook scandal to attack military culture.
I hope that, for everyone reading this, I'm merely stating the obvious when I say that the time has long since passed when it was questionable whether women should be in the military or whether women should be officers in the military or whether women should have equal status to men in the military. It's amazing to me that people still argue, quite vociferously, that that's not the case. I have a feeling that 25 years from now, long after openly gay people will have been allowed in the military, there will be similar situations where hardline military folks, typically from traditional military families, will make ludicrous arguments about how much better the military was when the gays weren't messing everything up. Just like 35 years ago, I'm sure there were people arguing about how much better things were when blacks and whites were separated in the military. Like I said, it's discouraging that these things have to be fights. I don't claim to be more enlightened that anybody else, but when you're doing dangerous, difficult, stressful work, then it seems to be that anybody who can get the job done should be welcomed and accepted whether they are a person of color or whether they have boobs or whether they share their bed with a person of the same sex.
I realize I'm very late to be jumping on the happy holidays train of emails (or very early to be starting off the happy valentine's day train of emails) but it's been so nice hearing from everyone that I didn't want to be left out. And I also wanted everyone to know that I haven't dropped off the face of the Earth, which some of you may have thought based on how terrible I've been at replying to emails for the last few months.
I don't have any big news or revelations. I went home to Pittsburgh for the holidays and had a wonderful time with my family. I even took a detour to visit my brother in Rochester, NY and see his new house. As you all know, I started a new job teaching introductory physics at the U.S. Air Force Academy in August. This is what's made me a terrible email correspondent. Teaching is the most amazing, difficult, and time-consuming job I've had by a longshot. My student evaluations were average (compared to other physics teachers) and my students performed a little below-average in the class, so I can't say I was a rousing success right off the bat, but I absolutely love being in the classroom and towards the end of the semester, when I realized that classes were going to be over, I realized how much I was going to be missing those 19-year old kids who probably wanted to be anywhere except in physics class three days a week, but who were amazing people to get to know and work with. I don't want to tarnish my reputation as a rock-hard cold-as-ice manly man, but I choked up a little, or maybe a lot, on the last day of classes. I hate being such a crybaby anymore, but it seems like I'm always saying goodbye to people I adore.
Anyway, I'm teaching a new set of students this year, and I'm just as busy and just as much loving the job. We have a long weekend this weekend, which is how I'm finding the time to write this long email. I read some teaching handbooks over the break, so I'm hoping the students like the class a little better and do a little better on the tests. We'll see. I've already been told, unofficially, that I'm hired on for another year. I'm going to be course director for the intro. physics classes this summer. Course director, I'm told, is Latin for "work your ass off", so I'm hoping to squeeze a vacation in before the class starts in July, after which I'll have no time whatsoever.
Well, I wish you all the best and I hope you know that you're all in my thoughts often. That little two week trip really does seem to have been a life-changing experience for many of us in both large and small ways, and it makes me so excited to hear about where we've all gone from then.
Os extrano muchismo,
"Total Eclipse of the Heart" falls into the group of songs, best epitomized by Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", of rock drama ballads that sound and feel momentous, but upon further analysis, are mostly just confused imagery with orchestral backing. Which doesn't make them bad songs, but doesn't make them good songs either. Led Zeppelin's "D'yer Maker" is a cousin of these songs. It's a love song that forgoes sappy love lyrics and uses mostly nonsense lyrics - "Oh oh oh oh oh, you don't have to go oh oh oh oh":
I was a little disappointed by the Espenson article because for whatever weird reason I'm endlessly fascinated by the economics of Hollywood. Edward Jay Epstein wrote a book called The Big Picture about how Hollywood really makes money off of movies. The Washington Post, in their review of the book, wrote:
Each week the box-office grosses rung up by the big new movies are published, and each week it is near universally assumed, reflexively and reverentially, that they represent not merely an accurate ranking of current films but also an accurate record of how much they are making for the studios that produced them. Tommyrot, says Epstein. These seemingly huge earnings are wildly misleading, as the cost of making, distributing and showing new movies almost always far exceeds what they earn in theaters. Hollywood's highly imaginative accounting practices disguise this reality, but more to the point, theaters aren't where movies make money any more.
And Epstein writes in the book:
The main task of today's studio is to collect fees for the use of the intellectual properties they control in one form or another and then to allocate those fees among the parties -- including themselves -- who create, develop, and finance the properties. It is now essentially a service organization, a dream clearinghouse rather than a dream factory. As clearinghouses, they are very different creatures from their predecessors, and this difference is as apparent from looking at their financial reporting as it is from looking at their products.
Epstein also wrote a regular column for Slate called the The Hollywood Economist where he examined different aspects of the Hollywood money-making system, talking about, among other things, why Tom Cruise might be a wacky Scientology nut, but he's a brilliant businessman, and describing what steps you have to go through if you want to make an indie film, and telling why, until recent changes to their tax codes, Germany is an awesome place to find investors for your film. Anyway, people like me who watch movies to see something good and artistic would be well-served to never lose sight of the idea that, in a very direct way, films released in theaters are a vehicle to sell action figures in America and DVDs in Europe and Asia. If artistry manages to seep through, it is more a side effect rather than an intention of the film business.
I officially graduated from my DFP orientation today. I can now work on preparing lessons pretty much full-time until classes start on August 9, except I have one more all-day DF orientation thing to go to on Thursday... And now you're asking DFP, DF, WTF??? Or else you've already gotten bored and clicked over to Go Fug Yourself to find out what fashion atrocity Sienna Miller is currently perpertrating (sample quote from one of today's entries on the site: "The makers of Kate Mara's dress would like to apologize to Ms. Mara, to the fans, and to the fine people at the premiere of Stardust: The Movie With Tons Of Famous People In It Like Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert DeNiro, Yet Which Somehow I Had No Idea Was Even Being Made.") Anywho, the military loves loves loves abbreviations. So DF stands for Department of the Faculty, DFP is Department of the Faculty - Physics, the U.S. Air Force Academy is USAFA, which is pronounced you-soff-a, if I go to a conference, I'm going TDY, and I have no idea what that means, and so on and so forth. So what happened today was that I finished by physics deparment orientation, but I still have one more general faculty orientation thing to go to this week. Most of the orientation stuff has centered on the learning focused approach to teaching that is being pushed across the Academy. Learning focus is a teaching technique that, tautologically, focuses on what students are learning rather than on what teachers are teaching. It seems obvious, but most traditional college teaching has been based on the assumption that students are just dump trucks waiting for teachers to shovel knowledge into them. Under that assumption, anything the teacher writes on the board is new knowledge for the student. But recent studies have shown that students don't learn that way. Just because something gets written on the board doesn't mean that students know it. Learning focus says that you have to actively engage the students in the learning process. Prompt them to arrive at knowledge rather than feeding it to them, motivate them to want to learn rather than just have them sit zombified in class just because their major or a general education requirement says they have to be there. There are also some other aspects that are a bit more difficult for me to see. One of the things is that you have to form a trust relationship with students, which in itself is fairly noncontroversial. In order to have a good learning environment, you have to trust students and they have to trust you. But one aspect of the trust relationship, at least according to one of the books we had to read, is that we should try to avoid forcing students to do work by grading them on it. So, if we want students to read the textbook, we shouldn't have a graded quiz every few days to make sure they are keeping up with their reading. We should trust that they are doing the reading. But the thing is, I've been a student, and no matter how exciting or stimulating the class is, I'm not reading that stinking textbook. I still hate reading textbooks, even when I understand what they're talking about. So I don't know if I can ever see that happening - motivating students to read their text just through trusting and inspiring them. But who knows, maybe I'm more inspiring than I know.
The Thing Called Love, River Phoenix's last movie (I think, Wikipedia says it was one of his last roles), also starring Sandra Bullock and Samantha Mathis, who is totally off the radar now but gets a blue ribbon for awesomeness if for no other reason than her role in Pump Up the Volume, is an amazing underrated movie about up-and-coming country music stars and about Dermot Mulroney constantly getting screwed over, both movie-worthy subjects in my book. Anyway, from that movie came one of my favorite songs, "Blame It On Your Lyin Cheatin Cold Dead-Beatin Two-Timing Double-Dealin Me-Mistreating Lovin Heart", known more often by it's short name "Blame It On Your Heart". Below is the movie version of the song, and below that is the real version of the song, by Patty Loveless.
I've spent most of July alternating between being exhausted at work and being a lazy bum at home. As I write, I have a load of laundry waiting to be unloaded from the dryer, and I have absolutely no intention of getting off my ass tonight and doing it. But before I became a lazy lump on the couch, I did a full moon hike at the end of June. The hike was arranged through a mountain-climbing website I visit, 14ers.com. The woman organizing the hike, Charla, was planning on doing the full-moon hike on the Mt. Belford/Mt. Oxford combo, but she herself was planning on climbing Mt. Elbert, the tallest mountain in Colorado, on the morning before the full moon hike. I emailed her and asked if I could climb Elbert with her, and she said sure. Another guy, Lou, was also going to join us. So we all three climbed Mt. Elbert on the morning of June 30. Unfortunately, Charla got really ill climbing Elbert, so she couldn't do the full moon hike. Lou and I were so tired from climbing that morning that we only did the Belford part of the Belford/Oxford combo, but I wasn't too disappointed. You can read my trip report about the Mt. Elbert climb here, and you can see my pictures from the two climbs here.
Yay, I'm back writing on my poor neglected blog. I just finished doing three practice lessons this week in front of the physics department faculty. And even though they were very nice to me, it was still hellish to have to go through. It's one thing to teach 18- and 19-year-old kids who think you're the smartest person on Earth, and it's another thing to "teach" 30- and 40-year-old professors whose main job is to examine your lecture for every flaw, which will be pointed out to you immediately afterwards. Anyway, like I said, they were very nice to me and had many more good things to say than bad, so I stressed myself out way more than I should have about the practice lectures.
I went to my friend Bob's wedding last weekend in Uniontown, PA, about an hour outside of Pittsburgh. I had just the awesomest time. I break-danced, which is never a good idea, but what're you gonna do? This is about the fourth or fifth wedding in the last two years in which I've been a groomsman, and people keep telling me that weddings are the perfect places to meet hot bridesmaids. It's never worked out that way for me, but I actually had a pretty good time with the bridesmaid I escorted. She's married and has a little boy, who I had a ball playing with before the wedding, so nothing extracurricular happened, but she's a teacher too, a kindergarten teacher, so we talked about that, and other stuff. And then the brothers of Bob's now-wife, Carolyn, hung out with me and my friends both nights I was there, and they were pretty fun, so we all had a good time. When I got home, I realized I completely forgot to bring my present for Bob and Carolyn to the wedding. I know Bob reads this blog, so ummm, the present's in the mail. Sorry about that. I also realized when I unpacked that I somehow lost a dress shirt that I had worn to the rehearsal dinner. On a completely unrelated subject, did I mention that I downed a few alcoholic drinks during the weekend? Anyway, the lost dress shirt is a BIG PROBLEM, because I have to dress up for my new job, and I have very few dressy clothes, so I'm going to have to go out tomorrow and buy a dress shirt to replace the one I lost. I despise clothes shopping. But it's only one shirt, so I think I'll survive. They played the Electric Slide at the wedding, and I totally worked it. The DJ even extended the song because we were kicking so much ass. Later on they played another group dance song, but I had no clue how to do that. You had to cha-cha and step left and step right and well I didn't even try. One song they didn't play was Madonna's "Cherish", but it does happen to be a completely great song, and also a completely great video, not the least because Madonna prances around in the video wearing a clingy, soaking wet little black dress and rolling around on the beach and in the surf while looking smoking hot, and she's trying to save a little girl mermaid or something as well. It's all artistic and black-and-white and stuff. Did I mention that Madonna is smoking hot in the video? Anyway, here it is, enjoy!
A few weeks before my trip, I got an email from GAP Adventures giving me the final details of what I needed to know before I left. One of the things that was included in the email was a link to a forum on the GAP website where you can, I don't know, talk about trip stuff. I like Internet forums about as much as I like waking up in the morning, which is to say not at all, so I avoided the link until the week before my trip. But then I figured what's the harm in checking it out. And sure enough, there were posts from people going on the Project Choquequirao trip with me. The main thing I noticed was that everyone posting seemed to be female. And here's the part where I should make a joke like, "All women and one man-- ME! Now those are the kind of odds I like, if you know what I mean. And I think you do. Hubba Hubba." But I'm not going to make those jokes... um, except for that one. In fact, let's just get this out of the way right now. It turns out there were 8 women and 2 men (including myself) on the trip, which is not atypical, apparently, since women tend to feel safer on group trips rather than by themselves in foreign countries, for good reason. And while I made plenty of "Hubba Hubba" type joking remarks with the girls, I honestly wasn't looking for or interested in romance, since the whole romance thing was one of the things I was taking a vacation from. So if you're looking for a story involving whispered sweet nothings and heaving bosoms and me unleashing my imprisoned pecs from the cruel trappings of a tight T-shirt, that ain't gonna happen here. But anyway, I posted on the forum, and then exchanged emails with some of the people coming on the trip, and most of them were pretty much like me-- late 20s, early 30s, single, at some kind of transition period in their lives. So, it was nice that in a lot of ways we were in similar situations.
My flight was arriving in Lima pretty late, around 11 PM, but I was still going to try to meet two of the women, Margaret and Vel, for drinks that night. The rest of the people, as far as we knew, were coming in the next day. But my flight got delayed two hours in Atlanta, and I didn't get into Lima until 1 in the morning. I had to wake up at 3:30 the morning before in Colorado Springs, so it was turning out to be an incredibly long day for me. I stumbled around the Lima airport with my incredibly heavy bags, changed some U.S. currency to Peruvian soles, and found a taxi to take me to my hotel. The taxi driver didn't speak English, but I had the address of the hotel written on a piece of paper, which was all that he needed. We got to the hotel, and I tipped the taxi driver 10 soles, which is about 3 bucks. I found out the next day at the meeting with our group leader that pretty much every one who interacts with you in Peru, from taxi drivers to bellhops to waiters to bathroom attendants, is supposed to be tipped, although 10 soles was overly generous for the taxi driver. Anyway, I stumbled into the hotel and got my room key. Margaret was supposed to leave a note for me telling me where they went for drinks, but the person at the desk didn't mention anything about a note, and I was going to sleep note or no note, so I didn't care much. The bellhop took my bags up, and I tried in my half-asleep state to explain to him in Spanglish that all I had were 50 and 100 soles notes, so I didn't have any change to tip him with. The bellhop picked up my gist and said that that was OK, he could make change for me. I think I ended up giving him 5 soles.
The next day I slept in till noon. When I finally got up, I went down to the desk to check to see if there were any notes for me. There weren't. Then I checked to see what room Margaret was staying in. I was going to give her a call and see if she and Vel wanted to go out for lunch with me. But they had nobody staying there under Margaret's name. I didn't know Vel's last name, so I couldn't get them to check for her. They also asked me if I was supposed to check out today. No, I'm staying one more night I said. **Foreshadowing alert** Ahem, so I went out to lunch by myself. After lunch, I walked around the neighborhood, Miraflores, for a while, and got back to the hotel around 3. I read my book, Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day for about an hour, and then I got tired again so I took a nap. At 6, my room phone rang. It was the front desk, and they said I had to be at a meeting at another hotel for my tour group. I had to leave now. RIGHT NOW, the front desk person said. I'm still half asleep. 5 minutes give me? I asked. Yes, 5 minutes, right now, she said. Well OK. So I hurried up and threw my stuff in my bag and ran downstairs. The front desk person called me a taxi, and I went to the other hotel to meet with the rest of my tour group.
What had happened was that because I had arrived a day earlier than the tour started, GAP had to book me in a different hotel for the first night; there was no room in the hotel where we were to meet up with the rest of the group. And I had misunderstood the instructions that I was supposed to change hotels after the first night. And my original hotel, the one I stayed in the first night, was supposed to give me a welcome letter from GAP which explained this. So, basically, I was confused and the hotel dropped the ball. I ended up running upstairs to where our group was meeting with bags flung over every arm and the whole group applauding, since they had been waiting for me for a while, I'm guessing, and many of them knew from my emails before the trip that this was my first time outside the U.S., so they were likely worried that I had taken a wrong turn on my way to lunch and ended up being a gringo in the wrong neighborhood. Anyway, that wasn't the case of course, but it didn't matter since I was there. I sat down and met everyone. I won't go through all their names here, but I will mention that our group leader was Martin, an incredibly nice, patient German guy. Margaret and Vel were both there and had successfully done the whole changing hotels thing that I completely flubbed. Also, there was one other guy there, Dean, which made me a little disappointed. Not because of the whole Hubba Hubba reason, but because I would have to share a room, since they pair up guys and girls in rooms, and if I was the only guy, I think I would have gotten a single. Dean turned out to be a blast, though, so it was well worth sharing a room. At the meeting, we discussed our plans for the next few days. The next morning, we were going to be flying out to Cusco, the ancient capitol of the Incan empire and starting point for modern-day hikes to Machu Picchu. We would have a free day in Cusco after we landed, and then we would spend the next two days at a drop-in center for Cusco street children (we found out later that none of the children actually live on the streets, but all of them come from very poor families and they usually have to spend many hours a day working to make money for their families).
So, the next day we flew out to Cusco. When we got there and after we checked in to our hotel, Martin took us to the main city square, where a street celebration was taking place. We asked Martin what the celebration was for, and he told us that there's always a celebration for something going on. Or a protest. But basically, there's always people in the street doing stuff. The city square was surrounded by old Spanish churches and touristy restaurants with balconies and a statue right in the middle. The dancers in the celebration were everywhere, and at one point I had to jump out of the way so I wouldn't get run over by them. We walked around the square for a while and had lunch. After lunch, Margaret, Dean, Carrie, Anna, and I decided to just walk around the whole town, or as much as we could explore before dinner. We ended up in a back alleyway that went up, up, and up some more. We kept on following it up as far as it would go, figuring that we would end up some place interesting and/or some place with a wonderful view of the whole city. We were far from the touristy section of the city, and we were surrounded on both sides by dingy houses and little hole-in-the-wall businesses. We were the only gringoes in sight, but it wasn't scary. I should point out here that I was never actually scared of getting mugged, pickpocketed, or anything else the whole time I was in Peru. The street vendors were pushy, but otherwise the locals were all very nice or left you alone. Also, I was almost always with a group of people when I walked around. Anyway, the alley eventually led to a dirt road, and we followed the dirt road up for a little while, but it didn't seem to go anywhere promising, so we stopped and took some pictures and walked back to the hotel.