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5
Feb 26

Left, on a jet plane

Want to guess where I am? You can guess where I am. Here’s your first hint, I am not at home. Here’s your second hint, it’s a quick trip. Here’s your third hint, here’s the mode of travel. Or, at least, part of it.

We are attending a wedding this weekend, meaning a few nights out in hotels and restaurants and with one or two people we know. We’ll be in and out in no time flat. Getting married is one of my lovely bride’s former students. (This is the third wedding we’ve been to out of that particular cohort.) It is a black tie affair. (No pressure, other former students.)

We are also chummy with the groom’s parents, who are delightful people and I am looking forward to seeing them all tomorrow.

From the airport, and after an easy direct flight, we took an Uber to the hotel. The woman that drove was was just adorable and hilarious. She told some stories about some of her clients. And she let me lean into a few jokes about them. A little small talk with a southern woman is a thing to behold. She dodged traffic and avoided idiots and got us to our hotel.

We checked in with no problem, and then had dinner at a newly opened hipster tavern a few blocks away. I had one of those burgers that was overstuffed with condiments. You had to be careful to lean all the way over your plate to avoid dripping anything on you. Also, they had spicy ketchup which was, authentically, spicy. I don’t know what inauthentically spicy ketchup tastes like, but this wasn’t that. It had a flavor profile that haunted the taste buds, lingering there like a hint, and a memory, a smoke that won’t leave the room, a spice that burned after its welcome was worn out. Fortunately, I could wash it down with a glass of sweet tea. Another thing to behold, and I held it, right there in my hand. And then I had a refill.

Maybe another. Who can count such a joyous thing?

Tomorrow, we have meetings, and then a welcome party for the wedding. And some virtual work on this tiny little desk in our little room. It’ll all be charming, and about 25 degrees warmer than home.

We started working on a survey instrument today in Rituals and Traditions. I’m going to have the class survey members of the campus community. The survey data will, hopefully, help them in their group projects. So there I sat, keyboard in hand, typing up the suggested questions that the class came up.

We started as a brainstorming session. No question too silly. Well, may not that question, that question is silly. We wound up with about 40 questions. And then we took a pass through the whole lot of them and struck a few that probably wouldn’t help too much. We re-framed some of the questions to shape them up a bit better. And now I have to cull the 30 or so that remain. Thirty is probably too many for the type of survey we’re going to conduct, so I have to get this list down to 15 or so. And then build the survey.

Great fun!

In Criticism we watched the HBO documentary Fists of Freedom, which covers the lead up, and protests in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

I like Lee Evans’ part of the story, because he seems like a fun guy. The best segment here is Bob Beamon’s record-breaking long jump. It’s a beautiful moment of filmmaking. Scrub ahead to 36:08 for that.

They called it the leap of the century, and it took something like 15 minutes to resolve the distance. In the end, he’d jumped 21 inches farther than the previous world record. (And the world record holder was in the field at those Games.) Beamon’s mark would stand for decades.

The whole documentary is well done. (Though there are some weird edits in the embedded video for some reason.) Released in 1999, almost all of the primary participants are included here. Bronze medal winner John Carlos, notably, is absent. And we’ll talk about that in class next week. This documentary, and next week’s will hopefully set the stage for how we think about documentaries over the rest of the term.

But I’m not going to think about that until Monday. For now, I’m going to relish these 35-degree lows and contemplate the sheer novelty of a 50+ degree day tomorrow. It is not that at home. Spring is about to hit, here, right on time. I know that because things will be budding by February 14th, when a normal spring should arrive. I know that because I have the curse of experience, which becomes an embittered thing in the second week of February and I see a low temperature of … 15.

At least, when it gets even colder at home this weekend we won’t be there. Until Sunday, when it gets even colder. But not here, and not right now.

baseball / journalism / photo / Rowan / sports / Wednesday — Comments Off
4
Feb 26

I found Bigfoot, he’s looking for money, same as everyone

Below the little banner is the summary of Tuesday. Here, above it, is a brief recounting of Wednesday.

I woke up, did all of the morning’s readings, did the email work. I had lunch. I had a meeting with faculty. I did more email. I wrote a message for my online class. I will send it, some 600 words of insight and updates and cheerful wisdom, tomorrow. I also finished prep for both of tomorrow’s classes. In one, we will talk about a few more typologies, I will stretch two pages of notes into 25 minutes and then we will develop questions for a survey. (I have seven of them already written down, but I’m only showing them three. Don’t tell.) In the other class we will watch a documentary. I also graded some stuff that needed grading. (Everyone did well, as expected; hopefully they’ll keep it up.)

I met with a student and solved several problems. The first problem was how to make Zoom work for both of us. The second problem was about how to do an assignment. Happy to help! The third problem: “How I am explaining something so poorly to this crop of students, when I have explained this same thing, with precisely this same language, to students in 2025 and 2024?” Parts of that problem may never be solved.

I also set up a meeting for Friday. Now I have two Friday meetings. One is at a very precise time, because faculty are keen on precision of schedules. The other is right now “friday works !” But, dear student, Friday does not work. A specific time would work. It is to be a Zoom meeting, sure, but I’ve done the sit in front of a Zoom window waiting for someone to show up all day thing a few times (ahhhh, 2020 …) and that’s too big an ask at this point. Open up your daily planner and figure out a good, specific time and we will have a grand and productive chat.

We’ll get there.

After all of this, it was time to catch up on the evening’s worth of reading.

I do a lot of reading. I think more of it is going to start coming from international media, and also books.

Do not get me started on the Washington Post, lest I bring out my press section banner and write a thousand brisk words about the obvious incompatibility between oligarchs and watchdog journalism, and the cute way little masthead slogans presage the ending of legacy media.

Instead, yesterday!

This was the view on the way to campus Tuesday. Everything looks exactly like this. This all fell from the sky Saturday night and Sunday a week ago. Monday, I helped a neighbor dig out their sidewalk, because this stuff is going nowhere. The longterm useless forecast says we might see 39 degrees Wednesday of next week. Maybe 40 on Friday!

That’d be a full three weeks under 40. That seems … excessive.

In Rituals and Traditions — Rits and Trads if you’re in a hurry — we discussed why we watch sports. I had a list of typologies to share. As we talked about the reasons why people watched sports they managed to list five of the six typologies I had listed before I put them on the screen. So now I’m a magician.

Then I broke them into their groups, because group work will be an important part of the class, and we’re heading that direction rapidly now.

In my Criticism class we talked about our first two stories of the semester. We discussed this story out of Texas.

The Liga Venezolana is a local example of how the millions of Venezeulans who have scattered across the Americas have brought with them an invigorating enthusiasm for the “American Pastime.” Leaving behind a country rife with political and economic turbulence and arriving in new landscapes where they are often scapegoated in political rhetoric, they have used the sport they know best to root themselves in a sense of home.

The league immigrants have created in Austin is far from the popularly imagined recreational softball scene of on-field beers and calm. The Liga Venezolana’s fans know how to intimidate. Its teams operate social media accounts. Many of its players, like Mao, have recorded strikeouts or stolen bases as pros on minor league teams. The league keeps stats and operates livestreams. Its intensity has made it a social focal point for the fast-growing Venezuelan immigrant community that has settled in North Austin, Pflugerville, Cedar Park and Leander in recent years. Since 2021, the league has ballooned from four to 22 teams and from about 70 to 600 players.

We also talked about this story.

Dr. Christopher Ahmad, Tommy John expert and head team physician for the New York Yankees, has performed the surgery on some of the biggest names in baseball. But he has also been privy to the other side of the story.

“The alarms are going off on how devastating this problem is to the youngest players,” he says in an interview with CNN Sports.

“When I first started doing Tommy John surgery about 25 years ago, the population who I was operating on who needed the surgery were essentially very high-level players – they were college prospects destined to be professional, or professional players.

“Now, the population who needs the surgery most are kids.”

Of the 10-15 Tommy John surgeries that he performs every week, Ahmad estimates that between eight and 10 are on high school children, with some even still in middle school.

For a first week of talking about stories, the interactions were pretty good. Started strong, and faded away a bit, perhaps. But we’ll get it there.

I tried, during that class, to play some audio, but the sound was tricky. Knowing I was going to show a documentary, I stuck around to tinker with it. Eventually my lovely bride came in to look for me. Then a woman who had a later class came in to get ready. I don’t know how many degrees we all have, but it took that many degrees to solve the problem, a problem I finally figured out by … adjusting the volume.

To be fair, there are a lot of options and buttons and switches.

Opposite from the elevators in our building are TV monitors and they’re programmed with the time and weather and promoting various events and services. Pretty standard stuff, usually. Sometimes something interesting is on the screen and I can see it for 2.7 seconds, just long enough to realize it is interesting, but not long to read it all. And there are a lot of things to promote. No one, not even me, is going to stand there and wait for the interesting thing to pop back up again.

But sometimes the elevator is slow, and sometimes you can catch a good one.

That’s the total promo. No contact info, no club or school or department affiliation, no deadlines listed. But it’s intriguing enough, I guess. Unless they, whoever they are, are trying to tell people that winning a scholarship is as likely as seeing Nelly, or Bigfoot, or aliens. Clearly it raises more questions than answers. More space was needed, I guess.

Older analog styles are the way to go with sophisticated messaging that has a lot of words, or dates, or URLs. Our building doesn’t have a lot of bulletin boards, which is a bit of a shame. I love taking a few moments to read the useful things, the random things, learn about new clubs and interest groups, and enjoy the truly wacky stuff people produce for public billboards. It’s cleaner and neater, sure, but we are just a tiny bit the lesser for it.

OK, now, on Wednesday, I’ve written about Tuesday and Wednesday. You know what that means for tomorrow, then, right? Back on schedule again. You’re relieved, I can tell from here.

Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off
29
Jan 26

There’s no pattern like migratory patterns

I recorded this video, then forgot about this video. Then the platform wouldn’t let me upload the video. Then it did let me upload this video. So this Monday video is now a Thursday video. But it could just as well be from today.

These geese hang out in some fields a mile or two to the south. And they’re heading back there in this shot. They’re flying back from the sloughs a few miles to the north of here. I’m not sure their schedule, but lately they’ve been flying the other direction in the early evening.

I love the geese, and the honking. I love them because I hear them passing by, and because I don’t hear them constantly.

Let’s talk about work. That’s what that image just above is about. That’s on campus … somewhere. I do not work in that building. I haven’t seen that building.

One day, when it isn’t 5 degrees out, I’ll have to take a shot of our building to use as another banner.

I was dreading class today because I felt the need to try to cram in two days worth of material in one. Going slower is better, but owing to the weather, I feel behind, hence the urge to overfill one day. Also, these were designed as two important days.

Fortunately, I’d asked the students in my Rituals and Traditions class to write a brief paper about this topic in advance, and that told me exactly where we all are, so I can tailor the presentation and cut the superfluous. I also had a colleague stop by and talk to the class for a few minutes, just to help set the table. And so, somehow, the class moved along nicely.

Later in the afternoon I had to complete the stage setting for the Criticism class, and there’s a lot to establish at this point for the rest of the term. I prepared one slide deck out of two, and had to work through varying pages of notes all out of order, hoping to make it flow, determined to make sure it made sense.

We made it through. A lot of what we discussed, in both classes, will come up a lot throughout the term, of course. And in Criticism, at least, there aren’t a lot of lectures. As I joke, they don’t want me to lecture, and today they found out why. That class becomes more conversational and Socratic, and I’m glad for it. I just need to figure out a way to make Rits and Trads something like that, too.

Happily, it was still daylight when we left campus at 5 p.m., and a bracing 6 degrees, having warmed a full 20 percent from several hours earlier. It was dark by the time we got home, however, but the days are growing longer. In just two more weeks nautical twilight will be at 6:30, and that’s the second sign that there’s seasonal hope.

There’s eight inches of packed ice outside my window right now, so it feels like a bit of false hope, but nevertheless. The sun is telling us that winter is on its way out. We’re gonna win.

errands / Friday / Rowan — Comments Off
23
Jan 26

Winterpalooza is coming

With the beginning of a new semester — we wrapped the first week today — comes a whole slate of meetings. Friday is a big meeting day around here, and you can see them coming. Meetings, I mean. Sometimes, the Fridays are obscured. You can see the meetings coming. Mostly, because we have too many calendars.

So, today, I had meetings two and three of the semester. It was a faculty meeting Wednesday. Today I had a committee meeting I sit on a university-wide committee that aspires to work with students, helping them interact with other elements of the university. We meet every other week. We talk about helping students. And that is what we did today, most successfully. We also established the next two meetings, and some of the things we might work toward.

That was this morning. In the afternoon I had a sustainability meeting. It was a meeting about sustainability, but not, necessarily, a meeting about sustainable meetings. (Those usually come in the middle of the term, when we’re delirious, but not yet worn out.)

I wrote my online classes. They’ve heard from me three times this week. Usually it is twice a week. But, today, after sending normal class stuff Monday and Thursday, I sent out a campus resources email. I like this email. Shows you care. One of the great things about the university, the note starts, is all of the resources they devote to you. And then I just start listing them, with links, contact info, and details, until I’m worn out. Then, at the end, I remind them that this is not a complete list. There are always more services! I offer to help them find those things, because I care. I am also now in charge of our department’s running list of campus resources, because I volunteered, because I care.

It’s Friday, you can do a lot of caring on Friday. Monday night, Tuesday morning, all day Thursday, not quite as much.

We are bracing for weather. This is how I am bracing. I went into the laundry room and rearranged two cabinets. The idea was that the handwarmers can be right up front, right in the center of the room, and easily accessible in the dark.

I pulled the phone bank chargers from their storage space, because I had the bright idea sometime back that all of these should be in one place should we need them, or if we are packing for a trip. I got four of those. I need to grab the one out of my backpack to complete the set.

I dug out the battery-powered lantern that I bought from a closing K-Mart in 2016. I grabbed every AA battery we have to power that lantern. Next to it is a lithium-powered work light that was a Christmas gift a few years ago. I pulled out the running headlamps. I got my bike flashlight and two backup batteries for it. (Others are stored elsewhere, and I can get to them if it gets desperate.) I made a note of where a few other little emergency lights are hanging around, should we need them.

I started charging all of these, and made two neat piles on the bar. Charged, and waiting in line.

Two shovels and the snowblower are in the garage. There’s a new quart of oil waiting to be put to use. I’ll top off the gas tank in my car and the gas can for the blower tomorrow. The fridge is also getting stocked tomorrow, if there are any groceries left to be had. The university announced today — and this is no easy decision, multiple campuses in various places, a hospital, commuters, etc. — that most of its operations will be closed Sunday and Monday.

We have one thing to do tomorrow, but we’ll beat the weather back home. Winter rolls in tomorrow night. We will be getting somewhere between two and 84 inches, depending on which forecast you check, and when you look.

Here’s my prediction: this will be one of the first big clues that killing so many of our national weather resources last year was a fundamentally stupid idea.

If you’re getting bad weather this weekend, I hope you can stay indoors, safe and warm. See you Monday, when we will hopefully all begin digging out.

photo / Rowan / Thursday — Comments Off
22
Jan 26

How you get there

So focused was I on the tasks of the day that I was about three-quarters of the way to campus before I realized that I’d gone the wrong way. There are several routes, of course. But you might want to wind up one one side of campus, and so you go this way. Or, if you want to arrive on the other side of the place, you’d take this turn, much earlier.

I wanted to do the latter, but we were almost there when I realized I’d done the former.

You’d like a story to start better than that. I mean that both the general and the specific sense. You’d like a story to start better than that. And you’d like a story to start better than that. But this is what else I’ve got. I woke up, did the morning reading, had a bite to eat. I sent a note to my online students. (I write them several times a week.) I finished getting ready — swapping out pocket squares several times — and then pulled my backpack together for the day.

The drive was far, far, more interesting, I know.

Two classes today. I walked right into the Rituals and Traditions class and we talked about sports for an hour, which was good fun. At the end, I summed it up, how all of these things allow us, encourages us, and gives us permission to feel passionately about something as silly as sports. Sure, I said, it’s important. And you can make that case in a number of ways. But, really, boil all of that away, and it is silly. And it is also important. That’s why we’re all here, in this class, in this program, after all.

After, I held office hours. No one stopped by. I did a bunch of work. I wrote a former student back. I received a lovely thank you note yesterday, and it deserved a careful reply. The rest of that time I spent making sure my Criticism class was ready. In that one, we also talked sports for a while, just trying to get everyone talking. And then I gave them two quick pages of notes, just the basics of criticism, what it might mean and how we’re going to apply it.

I started to learn a few names today. There are 46 or 47 people. I’m bad at that. It’s a shortcoming. I’m aware of it, and I dislike it. It takes me forever, but this term I have a head start. I know about 10 of these students already, and I look forward to getting to know the rest.

The days are getting a bit longer. Oh, such a happy sentence! We drove home and admired the sunset along the way.

There was an explosion in the sky. Unfortunately, the power lines were on the west side of the road for that portion of our commute. It took a while to get to an open space. By then, the colors had shifted, growing smaller but no less intense. In a way, it was better. Sunset photos are wonderful, but just watching the thing is better.

And, also, driving, of course.

Being in the moment was so much better than this, where I pulled off the side of the road, next to a field that is quietly waiting for spring. Me too, field.

But here was that view.

At least, I thought when I started this evening’s drive, I’m going the right direction.