Tuesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Tuesday

Ungrounded thoughts

Much progress was made today on my Digital Media Processes class. This class is about the concepts and structures that drive our social media and their uses. I have taught this class seven times, but always online. This semester I was tasked with teaching it in person. Same material, different paces and styles and everything else. We wanted to put more of our online classes in the classroom, hence this transition, and the extra work on a class I know pretty well.

Today I counted the 28 pages of calendars and notes that comprise my preparation. This does not include actual class notes.

It is possible that I’m overthinking it.

(Next spring I am scheduled to teach it online again.)

Anyway, after a bunch of hours with it today, yesterday, and this weekend and however much else, I’m down to three things on my To Do list for that class. This is, without diving into the details when we’re already 150 words in, significant progress.

Here’s my daily lunch koan. I have a Trader Joe’s burrito for lunch each day. They come in packages of two, but I separate them for rationing purposes. And if you’ll note this rather large part of the dietary label on the packaging …

Did I eat the 490 calorie burrito today? Or did I eat the 500 calorie burrito today?

To be sure, they are different. They’re no doubt hand made because each one offers the possibility of a different flavor profile. There are three variables, really. It could be spicy, or not. It could be soft, as you would expect a burrito to be, or the tortilla could be, or the shell can sometimes be a bit tougher or even crunchy. This even though I heat it the same each time: slightly damp napkin, 1:45 on this side, and 1:45 on that side. Finally, when you open the package, if you look at both, it seems obvious that one is just a tiny bit larger than the other. I don’t know what 10 calories look like, of course, but I’m forced to make conclusions here.

If that conclusion is correct, I’ll be eating the 500 calorie burrito tomorrow.

I went outside in the evening, because I had to get away from work. I had to get away from work because I found myself thinking a few paragraphs on burrito differentiation would be an interesting read.

I’ve been thinking about what it is that we value in our day-to-day lives. I’ve really been thinking about how to add valuable things, or value. OK, I’ve actually been thinking about how to separate the required from the desired. I have been thinking about this for 20-something years with no great results, but I have optimism that a great realizations will come my way, somehow, in the first few days of this week.

I sat outside and made myself a weekly schedule for the semester. I’m trying to lock off time for work and time for not doing work. That’s reasonable. Achievable. I don’t work 24/7, obviously. I’m not pulling 80 hour weeks here, like I did two jobs ago. Nor am I doing two people’s jobs as a way to help out with no added personal benefit (but in fact criticism) as has also been the case in other places and times. There’s a big push with my employer to have some work-life balance, even though we should dissolve that terrible phrase in a vat of acid. I do my work and sometimes it feels like my share and sometimes it feels like a little less and sometimes it is perhaps a little more. It all works out in the end, I have no problem with the ebbs and flows of things, natural rhythms are both inescapable and a feature of the work. I can also be happy in doing good work, because I can see the value in it. I’m pleased with all of that. It’s nice if others see value in it, too.

What I’d like to do is turn it off when the circumstances allow for it. This I have never figured out how to do. I’d like to not spend all of my time thinking about the particulars, or the next thing that needs to be done, or this theory or that technique or this pedagogy or that paper. (Or, previously, the next production, or the next meeting, or the next call sheet or the last newscast, the good lead, the bad interview from last Tuesday, and so on.) I can do pretty good work at work. I’d like to be personally better at drawing lines between that and everything else.

I teach about identity a lot. (Here I go again, even now.) And this, I think, figures into it. But that’s not all of it. And, anyway, I need to go do more things like stare at the sky or the rock wall or listen to nothing or pursue any of the other things that I find interesting. I feel compelled to try to set aside times to do the things I want. Have we all become appointment hobbyists? Are we otherwise to be overbooked by the upcoming and ennui? And if I set aside an hour a day to read, and two hours a week to do this other, and sprinkle in some smaller things here and there, can I mentally remove myself from work for some of that time? That’s what I’ve been thinking about. This is not a mid-life crisis — because, again, my whole professional life I’ve had this little challenge. That’s what it is, a little personal challenge. Certainly it is not a crisis. It is pattern recognition, and a realization that sometimes patterns can be confounded. If you —

Oh look at this!

That plane is going to London. I sat next to the shrubs and the long bladed grass things and watched three planes go by, hoping to see just one more plane reflect the sunset off its fuselage. Sun: nature’s livery. I saw one. Missed a photograph of it. And, anyway, that’s just off my phone and this particular flight path has them circling over us, from about two miles away, and climbing through several thousand feet. My phone’s camera is no match for that. But, then again, my DSLR can’t tell me that plane is going to London, that the previous one was headed to Portland, Maine, or that the one before that was bound for Edinburgh.

I was thinking about all of this while watching those planes fly threw and some left-sided corner of my brain said to the rest of me, “I should sit under those bushes and watch more planes fly by.” The rest of my brain laughed at the idea.

Tomorrow I’m going to wrap up the DMP class. (Probably.) I need to double-check my recent work on the org comm class to reassure myself it is in good shape. And then start in on these other courses. And, also, the above. Maybe tomorrow i’ll figure it out.

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11
Aug 26

There are basically three stories here

Spent the day sweating. I was in my office, and so it was only a low-grade sweat. Nevertheless, the 10 or so feet of elevation difference from the ground floor to the second floor is important in terms of the sun. That extra .2 degrees is a real nudge on the ol’ Endothermic Me Meter. I think we got up to 98 degrees today. I find I could do more of the things I need to do outside if I could get outside. It was a productive time inside, though.

I devoted the day to steps that will bring my online class into a real-world classroom. I have taught nine sections of it online, and feel confident in saying this one works well as an online class. Not all courses do, but that’s OK. The university is leaping into more online spaces. We wanted to put the class about digital media back in the classroom.

All of the material is there. It is a well designed class. (One of my colleagues built this class and she has been very kind and generous of her time and thoughts and resources and I’m just trying to do it well and make the smallest changes necessary from time to time, just for relevance. I like the class, and when I compliment it, I am complimenting her work. She certainly deserves the acknowledgement.) But I have to bring online order into a real world chaos. Or vice versa. This is how that’s going.

I have printed out a general calendar to keep track of the happenings in the course. I started by highlighting the days of the class, marking the beginning of the term, the final, and dates it will meet. I counted the weeks. I printed another calendar, one for last spring, so I could write out the proper sequence of events. This rough draft calendar helps to visualize all of the moving parts. I did this because it occurred to me, just last night, how much of the class will shake out in the classroom. I’ll take elements from the online version that would feel vestigial in a classroom and turn them into big talking points. We also have prepped lectures, reading materials, and several long videos we’ll watch over the semester. The elaborate, messy, and ultimately redundant calendar system helped me bring it all into order today. Now all I have to do in that class is make sure all of the assignment dates on Canvas make sense. (While it is an in-person class we are also encouraged to use Canvas.) I have to consider the finalized version of the module setup in Canvas. And I have to update the lectures. That’s all I have to do.

I also made a spreadsheet for the lectures, so that I might keep track of my progress with them over the course of the term. I prepped up the first lecture today, too. Fourteen more weeks of that to go.

For my other classes, I have to finish polishing one class. I made a To Do list today and that class only has three items on the list. My final class has one item. It says: Everything.

So I am caught up on everything except work, which is where I am behind.

In the evening, I went outside, just to cool down. It helped.

Let me tell you what I did last night. We watched Sunday’s stage of the Tour de France Femmes, completing the nine-day event. No surprises there, but some nice racing and the strongest rider won. My lovely bride announced she was going upstairs, which meant it was time for me to do the dishes. We had spaghetti, which was tasty, and I had a frying pan, the great big pot, and various complementary things to clean. I cleaned them with varying degrees of success. I stepped outside to retrieve the garbage can which, having fulfilled its weekly chore, deserved a happy return to the normal resting place.

Then I pulled out one of those new tape measures I bought this weekend. You have to put a little thought into what the first task will be. A stereo needs a great first song, the first movie you call up needs to be worthwhile, and tools need a meaningful first effort. And so I measured the parts of a fly rod that my father-in-law left with us on his recent visit. And, now, every time I pull out that tape measure I’ll think of that.

And probably also this. That’s a silly thing. Tape measures don’t need nostalgic firsts.

Anyway, he left this rod here and it needed to be safely stored and tonight was the night I was determined to find which bin in the basement had all of my old poster tubes. It took some doing, but I did. And wouldn’t you know it? Each one was about two inches too short.

I figured I would make do. Brought them upstairs, set about making do and found he’d also left the actual tube in which fly rods are stored. Excuse me, the fly rod carrier. And give fly fishers this: they have a strong accessory game. Inside the tub was a little cloth roll that held the actual parts of the rod. Once filled, you slide that into the tube, then put on the classy aluminum cap. The carrier is a rich dark green and the cap looks bronze and the whole thing looks like it should be in The Study.

I left this one in our library.

Some magic happened in the basement. I discovered a computer monitor I’d forgotten I had. (Haven’t we all been there? Forgetting high end computer equipment for years at a time? I know I have. How many monitors do I have? If I knew that I wouldn’t be rediscovering them, now, would I? Also, three, if you don’t count the laptop monitor.) I can do something with this, I thought. And I’ll only need to find an HDMI cable. Wouldn’t you know it, right there, in that same bin, there was an HDMI cable. These things could have stayed there, but they are meant to be used, and so they would come upstairs. But that was only the beginning! I found a few empty storage bins, and now I have started a stack of empty storage bins. And this is the beginning of reorganizing that corner of the basement. One of those empty bins just had bubble wrap in it from the last move. Couldn’t throw that away, so it stayed there. But now I wanted an empty bin. I also wanted the bubble wrap, so I set about looking for somewhere to put it and, wouldn’t you know it, at the center of the wads of bubble wrap was a plastic bag. So I laid out the bubble wrap. Then I flattened the bubble wrap.

I did not iron the bubble wrap. That’d be ridiculous. Also, it would melt.

Wouldn’t it?

Hang on.

Yeah, bubble wrap melts under the iron. Don’t do that.

So I smoothed it out with my hands, and then I folded it over. Then I stuffed the smoothed out, folded over bubble wrap into that bag and put the bag in a cabinet, where it will sit until we need to wrap something, or someone else needs bubble wrap, or I think of a better use for that cabinet.

This is momentum. Because before and after the bubble wrap diversion I found the three empty bins, I was able to re-sort a few things on shelves and I’ll remember none of this the next time the mood strikes, in four months.

Also, I changed the air filter.

Back upstairs, I cleaned the rando cabinet. Our refrigerator sits inside the wall, basically, and there are two cabinets above the fridge — one of them is famously for Poseidon) — and then there’s a vertical cabinet that holds a lot of cookbooks, but may soon get re-purposed. And below that there’s the cabinet that is the junk drawer of cabinets. It holds our flashlights, 1/64ths of the North American supply of batteries, some tools, some cat treats, and so on. It is the so on that’s the problem. I want one of those new tape measures to stay in that cabinet, with those tools. These are the basics. Two screwdriver sets, a cheaper hammer, some stuff that came with furniture, etc. They live there so we don’t have to fumble about the garage for a small indoors project. And so you can see where all of this is going. Everything is getting reorganized. Well, it is one day. Last night a handful of things that had landed in there for no reason got thrown away. I prioritized the cabinet based on assumed frequency of need. Most important things going on the top shelf and descending from there. It was not done to the degree of my recent linen closet re-organization, but I was able to find three percent more shelf space, and the tape measure or the cat snacks won’t fall out the next time we open the door.

And, thus, I am caught up on everything except work, which is where I am behind. But I have a growing awareness of that behindedness, and also some time to remedy the situation. Not much, so I must step into the task with some alacrity, but time.

I have all of the material in place for two of my three classes. I’ll probably need to add a bit more to the third class. I also need to sort some things out. That scheduling is important and busy work and, experience has shown me, one prone to overthinking. Fortunately, I never do anything of the sort. But I might start! I might step into overthinking with some alacrity.

That’s how I usually do it. The overthinking, I mean.

I also find myself in the healthy activity of dreaming about things I’d like to do. Things I want to do when the weather breaks. When there’s less to do. When I’m not busy. When I have six days in a row of not doing other things when it isn’t almost 100 degrees. But there will always be obligations and obstacles. I am thinking about the things I’ll do after my next travel trip, things I want to do on the site, but should in no way start now because, see above.

And this, friends, is how you find yourself looking into the etymology of “marcescent.” Probably Latin, but definitely also proto-Italian, or Lithuanian. Possibly Ukranian. Could be Greek. As for the word itself, look it up.

I read somewhere recently that a person should have five hobbies. This hipster think piece of Instagram-quality was implying you’d be more well-rounded, or you could keep them fresh — a new task for every night of the week! — or these things could be seasonal. So I invite you to count the things that are your active hobbies. This does not include work, sleep, family responsibilities, etc.

How many did you get?

Can you see your way into finding the time to adding that third or fourth or fifth hobby? Pretty tricky, right? I would say I have four and practice at three of them. I wonder where the fourth or fifth hobby would go. In this line of reasoning it is something like “At least one of your hobbies takes up too much of your time and gets in the way of other hobbies.”

Well, OK, I do read a lot. Got me there.

I’d like to do more with the website, which has been a state of catch-up since May. But I’m caught up. Now school work time is here. No hard feelings; work must be done. It is happy work, generally speaking.

Can’t ride less. I need to ride more! Fulfilling that hobby’s true ambition would get in the way of other hobbies. Also, there are things I need to build. Critically, there are things I need to finish building. The story of me can’t be the half-finished guy, or the ha-fin-gu, if you will.

That loosely covers the present hobbies, without digressing into their ROI, and says nothing about adding another.

Maybe it was a TikTok-quality piece. Typing this out it doesn’t seem to rise to the caliber of rigor and taste that an Instagram-quality piece would demand. It has the necessary saccharine vibes and FOMO necessary, but challenging you to pick up hobbies that TikTok element of lemmings to it. Who cares how many hobbies you have? Have one. Have 14. Be as good or as bad at them as you like. Pour exactly the right amount of time and money into it as you require. Get out of them exactly what you need.

I had a brief chat with the linguist and author Gretchen McCulloch recently when she was talking about what she called “the great joys” in realizing that she can just go learn to do a new thing once in a while. Take a weekly class for a bit, meet new people, and get, as she called it “medium proficient” at the thing.

This made me smile. I often tell students one of the perks of my job is staying in touch with former students (the one that choose to do so) because it is gratifying to see them develop interests of their own, not what the state or their parents or this curriculum insisted on. So now I have former students who are running for local office, one just received a prominent national AI innovation award (when he isn’t lawyering), softball, travel volleyball tournaments, wandering abroad, hiking close to home, and of course they spend their time with family, have side hustles, or just try new things. I talk about one former student in particular in class too, because it’s not all about curriculum. You want that Paper in college, but my point is always that there’s much, much more to it than that. This of course applies to the rest of life, too. I’m writing about those people and the rest of you and myself, too.

What do we want to do with our time? It’s not a selfish question.

I diverged at some great length into a great deal of text about Type 1 and Type 2 fun. After I deleted that I spent some time writing three more paragraphs about it, that time it was grounded in the idea of how you might find an additional hobby. There are plenty of opportunity and this should be easy, is what I was saying. First you have to define what you want — learn a process, gain a product, make more friends, try the thing that has always astounded you? You can work on these questions for a while.

I’m beginning to see, just now, where my days go.

Speaking of reading and learning new things, we return now to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second installment in his Revolutionary War trilogy. It’s excellent. Highly recommended.

From time to time I look up the people he’s writing about. No way in the world you’ve ever come across this young man’s name. And it stands out well enough that we should be able to find him online despite the mists of time.

By the time young Barnardous Swartout Jr. played his part in the largest drama of his life at the ripe old age of 16, at least one branch of his family had been in the colonies for four generations. His great-grandfather made the trip over from the Netherlands sometime before 1660. They’d all lived and died in New York, as did Barnardous. The 2nd New York regiment was a part of the invasion of Canada, at Valcour Island, and participated in the battle of Saratoga and Monmouth, which is where we meet him. They were also at Yorktown. How many of those Swartout was at remains beyond me at the moment. We do know he survived the war. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow. I wonder if he knew of Washington Irving’s tale, which was published just four years before he died. I wonder if Sleepy Hollow itself had strong feelings about it at the time.

Barnardus was married the same year as this battle. He and his wife, Mary, had 13 children, at least 11 of which survived into adulthood. He becomes a merchant, and apparently a successful one. He was also a local tax collector, and otherwise paid close attention to politics. He had farmland on the Hudson. If you’ve ever driven over the Cuomo or Tappane Zee bridges you’ve looked down upon his land, some 300+ acres of what he knew as woods, orchards, pastures and meadows. He becomes the sort of local fixture that when other property is written about in the newspapers of the day his place is mentioned as a fixed point. He was also a charter member of The Society of the Cincinnati. He had a two-floor home, multiple barns, and good livestock when he died in 1824.

If you click around enough you can see some of his descendants beginning to move around. I looked at the grandchildren he might have known, mathematically at least. One, was a housewife in Brooklyn, who died at 71. Another stayed in Sleepy Hollow. One served in the navy and two in the army, one of whom died of an illness during the Civil War. Two of his grandchildren survived into the 20th century. (There’s one man, Steuben Jr., that did not know his grandfather, Barnardus, but did live long enough to read about the horrors of World War I.) Some lived in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa. Some had large families themselves; others, perhaps did not. Maybe having that many brothers and sisters was enough. (Online record caveats also apply.) They were Masons, Quakers, they had spiritual epitaphs, they were American. If there had only been a reference in here to a canal this man’s family would have been a complete reference to early white U.S. history.

That family name is also still in New York. Hopefully they’re in good order.

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4
Aug 26

If the sunset doesn’t distract you the scoreboard might

Sometimes conceptualizing work requires several different techniques. Today’s involved handwriting a bunch of outline-style things from an old semester. Then I had to scribble between all of the lines, merging some things and separating other things. And then I typed all of that up and did it again, removing some things as I went. It sounds easy, and it is, but there’s a lot of thinking that goes on in between those scribbles and merging and separating. Eventually, that became a good stopping point, and I needed to clear the old cobweb attic so that I can return to this again later this week.

Next I need to go through, line by line, lesson by lesson, to make sure all of the dates and the units and the lectures and so on all line up. After that, I’ll have to go back through it once more and make sure the assignments all line up. And then that class will be prepared.

Then I’ll do all of that, more or less (sometimes more) for two more classes. Later this week, maybe by the weekend, this will pick up speed.

You know what didn’t pick up speed today? Me. I set out for an afternoon ride and there was no wind and no legs and that’s really all of there was to it. I did the first half of our river run, which takes you seven miles to, you guessed it, the river. Instead of turning left to follow the route I did something unusual and I turned right. A mile and change down the river road I turned right again, creating the beginning of my double back, as I pedaled through Warehouse Town. I found a map of that area that goes back to 1927. All of the roads we know today are on that map. The land would have been different, of course, they built those warehouses right up to the muddy edges of the slough.

That that road was there a century ago means some kind of bridge was there, too. Now I want to know how long that’s been the route. The little crossroads town has been around since the late 17th or early 18th century. People have probably used that little water inlet in one way or another for all of that time. What all is sitting out there in that muck?

Anyway, you can think about that when you aren’t riding too fast. But when I got into that town I turned left and headed home. For a change, there was no headwind, no wind at all, and so I just tried to keep my tempo up as well as I could and timed myself on little segments, to that tree line, to this stop sign, and so on. I had to get home, get cooled down and cleaned up.

We went across the river this evening to see a baseball game with some friends. Sat in the shade that the parking lot affords (the shade of a car, that is). Someone brought chicken nuggets and other people brought cookies and drinks and we brought some fancy bread snacks. The conversation was pleasant until the appointed time of walking into the stadium. We got in just in time to see the first run scored on a TV screen.

Tonight we were sitting well down the first base line, close to the fair pole. It was a warm evening in the sun until …

And then the latter ends turned into a perfectly lovely evening. And how could it not be a lovely evening? Nice people on either side of us, beautiful views, some woman taking her social media influencer photos below us. The good guys with a lead.

Also, the video board operator likes it when the all-star pitcher gets two strikes on batters on a bad team.

When the hometown team is at bat they have some slickly produced montages. I assume this is meant to be evocative of the city’s iconic clock tower.

Anyway, the good guys scored early, put three more up in the third and added an insurance run in the seventh. Jesus Luzardo scattered four hits across eight innings before giving way to Caleb Kilian, who closed out the game in just his second appearance. The big star of the night was the other new guy, three-time batting champ and four-time All-Star Luis Arraez, who was traded yesterday and drove in two tonight. He was somewhere between San Diego and Dallas when San Francisco moved him. I wonder if he even knows what hotel he’s staying in right now.

Well, tonight, at least, he’s on a winning team trying to move back up in their division. After tonight’s win they’re about five games back, I believe.

The production crew was excited to use the winning graphics package, for sure. The Liberty Bell light lit up and the fans went home happy.

Perhaps no one does local imagery better than these guys. They have a lot they can use, and they incorporate it all. The old Fightin Phils are haunting the stadium, a replica of the Liberty Bell is parked just outside. There are statues, there’s that clock imagery from above. And there’s the graphics with the bell, and a little restaurant bar in the park named after John Pass and John Stow, the two founders who cast, and recast, the bell.

They need more Ben Franklin and cheesesteaks, but there’s enough here they could just rotate through the years. Maybe it’s down to the whims of the Phanatic, himself now a timeless institution. Many schools and professional teams are steeped in their local or manufactured iconography, and they should be — it’s important. I’d tell you why, but I’m saving that for an in-class lecture this fall. Enroll and find out!

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28
Jul 26

Back to work, a little, sorta

I made the mistake of thinking ahead today, and now my head hurts. But sometimes you must do that — thinking ahead, I mean, not self-induced cephalgia — so that’s what I did today. I printed out calendars, September through December. I did this three times. And this is the start of my fall semester. The work begins anew, with a smile, and no pay until September, etc. This work will continue until mid-December, which will roll immediately into the spring term. The second thing I did was to look at all of the academic calendars. Classes begin this day, Thanksgiving is that day, finals will occur on those days. The next five months are defined.

I accidentally glanced at the spring calendar, then quickly distracted myself by figuring out my weekly schedule and office hours for the term. That took three Post-it notes. Now they’re just hanging on the corner of my monitor. Taunting me.

There’s a lot of preparation to do in the next month. But not as much as in some other semesters. One class I must convert from an online class to an in-person format. That’s going to be a task, with some things coming out, some things need to go in the newly vacant spaces, plus there’s the simple trick of doing a class twice a week as opposed to via email.

To build momentum, I’ll start somewhere else. Two classes must be converted from twice-a-week to once-a-week. One of them is get an structural overhaul. The other, just needs to be redone to accommodate the new term. Maybe some more theories. Seemed light last semester. That means more studying on my part, which is fine, great even.

And this, friends, is how I will fill a month-and-change of work. Hence the headache. But I’ll be pacing myself. There’s time for that.

The feature act we saw this weekend was Barenaked Ladies. I hadn’t realized it, but we’ve now established a little tradition of seeing them every summer. We went from my lovely bride, a few years ago, having never seen them to now having an annual appointment. I think this is her fifth time seeing them. And that means she has seen five of Jim Creeggan’s upright bass solos. Here’s one now.

Ed Robertson did a freestyle rap. They did the medley that started with “Pink Pony Club” and ended with “Highway to Hell” and included stuff like “Texas Hold ‘Em,” “The Gambler,” and “Hot to Go” in between. They played the hits. I still miss Steve Page. I suppose I forever will.

When BNL are the headliner I still think, Maybe this is the tour, maybe this is the night they bring it all back together.

I try not to think about how he’s been out of the band for longer than I knew him in the band.

It’s been, what, eight years now since they had the Hall of Fame reunion?

Time really has sped up. If the full band ever has the appetite to get back together I hope it slows down so I can see several of those shows. I would go to see several of those shows.

We’re glancing at Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy, which I am enjoying reading a great deal. If you like history of the period and you’ve somehow missed this best seller, go get it. Or get the first book, then this one. Atkinson is aces, as ever.

This is something I’ve always wondered about, ever since some history or social studies class began to teach us about the American Revolution in whatever grade that really began, I’ve always had questions about how one group of people came to find themselves in a position to upset the paradigm (I knew big words as a kid) and the ability to explain their will to others, and win the day. While doing all that, of course, you have to build resources, prepare and fight elements of the best army and navy in the world, and so on.

Representation got them into meetings, and local “committees,” general hooliganism, brute force, and some policy that they managed to institutionalize led to enforcing the new rules of the road (before they were laws of the land). If you were on the fence you got persuaded, or you went to Canada, the islands, or back to Europe. Persuasion came in many forms, not all of it terribly polite. But that’s revolution for you.

Which is, I guess, to say that I would have been terrible in the moment.

Who gave you the right? What are the rights? What are your rights? What are my rights? Who said you could speak for all of us? What if we don’t agree? No king, sure, but there’s a lot of you and you suddenly have a lot of rules and I could see a time, in another 250 years, when it is truly burdensome and sure they’ll have powers baked in by representation and precedent but, you, here, now, who gave you the right?

They might only thought up the idea of tarring and feathering people when they came across someone like that.

Here’s James Allen’s diary that Atkinson is quoting. And therein is yet another way for us to realize and recall that people had their positions for unique and, sometimes, changing reasons. The Allens were a prominent Pennsylvania family. They were loyalists but, as James Allen said once when talking his way out of a bit of trouble, didn’t actively work against it. At various moments people on both sides took a for-us-or-against-us approach, the most basic history can do that, too, but that didn’t always apply to everyone in those years, for all sorts of reasons like laws and history and fear and risk and religion and class and a feeling of what is just or what is at stake and on and on. We never think on that enough. Hard is the fate, indeed.

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21
Jul 26

Skin, I have it

I had a dermatology checkup today. The short version: I have skin. The slightly longer version: I have skin and it is in good condition and there’s nothing to be alarmed about.

I am alarmed. The guy that called my name in the waiting room and escorted me to an exam room asked me, I am sure, the basic array of triage questions. I was going to give him two more questions before I asked him how old he was and what time his mom was picking up today.

But it is a dermatology office, maybe he just knows how to take care of his skin.

Then the doctor came in with his two PAs in tow. We shook hands. I made the acquaintance of his PA-in-training and was trying, for some reason, to make sure she felt seen. The dermatologist interrupted me with all of the dermatology questions.

We discussed my poison ivy, which has cleared up right on schedule. Apparently they’re seeing a lot of that this year. Makes you wonder about the down years. Are there years when urushiol oil is in short supply? How does this never make the news? What does that mean for issues beyond the local ecological environment? People are going to tell you it is good for animals and insects. People are also going to tell you that climate change promotes more poison ivy and, thus urushiol oil. Don’t believe Big Poison Ivy. This is what you need to remember:

When the oil gets into your skin, your immune system’s sensor cells recognize urushiol as foreign to your body. These sensor cells then call in protector cells to the area, warning them of the invasion. The protector cells defend your body against the intruder by attacking the urushiol in the skin. Unfortunately, some of your body’s normal skin cells are casualties of this war, which is what leads to the itchiness and swelling of a poison ivy rash.

I think that the PA-in-training needs to both know these things (and I’m sure she does) but also how to deal with people who bring this sort of information with them. And what she learned from that experience, from her mentor, was “Keep the patient on task.”

We’ve all got roles to play, and that’s the one I played there today.

Anyway, an exam was taken. I passed for another year.

I was given a shopping list by my lovely bride. I volunteered to take the grocery shopping off her schedule if she gave me a list and some aisle direction, and she did. I don’t mind the store. I dislike aimlessly wandering from aisle to aisle, squinting at signs, dodging people and peering on every shelf for that One Weird Thing that will make my skin as young and as fresh as that 14-year-old I just met. So she give me a list and gave me some directions for some of the slightly more obscure things.

And then — confident that I’d saved her virtually no time while I happily texted away at her, aisle-by-aisle — as I approached the checkout, I got a message for additional things. Oh, these are for dessert. Which is the only reason I went back into the fray — also because checkout was a bit of a mess itself at the moment, but dessert. If it had been, say, brussels sprouts, I would have said, Nope. Not on the list. Not on the contract. Can’t have it.

Instead, I got an additional request for these things … entirely off-setting all of the healthy things I’d picked up. But, I also picked up something else. A mystery. What kind of dessert is this?

I guess we’ll find out in a few days.

Also, hon, they were out of brussels sprouts. So sorry. Couldn’t be helped. They’re selling like … well, whatever undesirable vegetables sell like.

And now the storms are rolling in, anyway. Can’t cook brussels sprouts in bad weather. That’s like a rule, or something. Might effect the flavor. I’m sure that’s one of those old wives tales that’s true.