Frogs and Ravens

Hobbies

Riffing off Lance's post...

My brother and I both had hobbies, both individual and through 4-H, and we also spent a lot of time by ourselves or with only a few friends. Both of our parents worked, and both believed in raising independent children. I don't know if any of my hobbies pass the "obsession" part of the test, but between the two of us we managed the following: sewing, ceramics, knots, painting D&D figures, building forts, constructing houses and equipment for our toys, collecting comic books, raising rabbits, catching toads, photography, leatherwork, cooking...

Looking at that list, I think that the most notable aspect of our activities is that, with the exception of my brother's water polo years, my years in dance, and our shared years in ju-jitsu, none of these were things we did collectively in larger groups. Indeed, except for the water polo, none of this was done in teams.

We are not team players, my family. We're too independent, outspoken, and unlikely to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise.

Sometimes I think that this is a detriment, at least when it comes to work. On the other hand, all of us are pretty interesting people.

Anyway, back to hobbies. I think it's not simply having "alone" time, though that helps. It's thinking of oneself as an independent actor, able to act on one's own, rather than going along with the group, that encourages hobbies rather than fad-following - the kid who creates her own radio or writes his own music is going to be a quirkier, independent kid than the ones who prefer getting together with their friends to share the latest pop hits at parent-supervised get-togethers. I'd say encouragement of (or at least lack of concern over) such independence is likely also part of the mix. How can kids develop independent activities of their own (hobbies) if they're never really encouraged to be independent in the first place?

What are/were your hobbies, if you had them?  If you have children of an age to have hobbies, do they have them, or not?

Contemplating the Blog

A couple of weeks ago I was in a situation where I needed to be able to describe my blog concisely to other people.  A friend of mine said (roughly paraphrasing), "That's easy.  It's a rant blog.  You post whenever you feel like you're taking up comments threads ranting about something."

I have to say, this stung a bit.  It stung because I felt that this description ignored the other things I write about.  It also stung because it's not untrue.

So.

I'm trying to figure out what I want this blog to be, if I don't want it to devolve into a "rant blog."

This may take awhile.

Twitter Made Me Do It

A post in which I rant about lazy jeremiads against technology.

Campus Trail

I walk the narrow, muddy pathway, wending my way among the trees.  The foreground is an abundance of leaves and flowers, the middle a pattern of thin straight trunks against the new green of spring.  There is no distance. 

My forehead strikes a series of spiderwebs as the air condenses, a humid presence smelling of mud and honeysuckle.  I startle three white-tailed deer, brown shapes crashing through the green.

Beneath the mayapples are white flowers shaped like satellite dishes; above me are vines.

The world is green and brown, punctuated with snippets of white.

Late Spring

The semester is almost over and I am chafing at the bit, wanting to get out there with my camera and explore again.  (Stupid grading.)

The trees continue to green up as the wave of flowers ebbs, and the grass grows thick and long under the afternoon rains.  Birds have been making their nests, and the sides and medians of the roads are dotted with the swelling bodies of unlucky young squirrels and raccoons seeking new territories. 

Wanderlust is upon me, and I am stuck here with the blue books and the essays.  I am feeling irritable and ingrown, pushing against the walls of my responsibilities.  I want to shed the semester like a skin rubbed off against rough rocks and damp bark, gliding new and fresh over the muddy ground of spring.  If I look hard, I can see potential through the haze of my outgrown self.

One More Year of Teaching

This last semester has been a slog.  Interesting topic, interesting, engaged students - and a ton of work.  Work that at no point did I ever feel all that much enthusiasm for. 

So I've decided that I will cast a critical eye on my teaching next fall (I am already slated for a class then) and spring (if the class I proposed is accepted).  If things don't improve, I will declare myself officially Done With Teaching.

I have long suspected that I was burning out on teaching, back when my dream of full-time academic employment was still alive, but it really came to a head this term.  Some days I literally had cramps in my gut during the drive to campus, cramps that somehow never manifested on non-teaching days.  About the only part of it that I liked was talking with my students outside of class, or reading the books I'd assigned.  The rest, though, ranged from painful to boring. 

These are not good attitudes for a teacher to have.

So next year is a test.  Either this spring was a fluke, and it was just a bad combination of things, or it wasn't, and I am in fact no longer interested in teaching. 

I will not be surprised if the latter is the case; it feels lately like I'm groping my way back to the person I was before grad school, rediscovering the things that excited me and brought me pleasure.  Teaching was never something to which I aspired; indeed, part of the reason I went for the doctorate was to ensure that I'd never have to teach high-schoolers, figuring that college students were at least there voluntarily.  (Shows how much I knew!)

Research, writing, reading - and photography, art, the outdoors, and tinkering with things - those are (and have long been) the sources of my lasting satisfaction.  They are wells that never run dry.

This is a useful thing to realize now, in my sixth year of blogging, a process that started when I fell out of the academic tree onto my head.  The forest is large, and I know how to climb more than one kind of tree.

The Clade

A new community environmental blog, The Clade, launches today.  Go check it out - there are a lot of good writers already signed up. 

(Good job, Chris!)

Swine-Bird Flu and Anti-Immigrant Hysteria

Here's a couple of things to point out to the people who want to "blame the Mexicans" or who think that tightening our borders or cracking down on illegal immigration is the answer:

One, most of the vectors into the United States have been U.S. citizens with the money and time to travel to Mexico. Some poor dude who is infected with swine flu is not going to be healthy enough to make his way across the desert to infect you. It's your wealthy globe-trotting neighbors who are more likely to be a problem.

Two, because citizens traveling legally are the dominant vector, going after people who are in the country illegally is not going to be effective in terms of preventing disease outbreaks. For one thing, they're not the primary vectors at the moment; for another, wasting time, energy and money in an effort to deport or contain people is going to cut into funds needed elsewhere and scare people away from medical care at a time when it is important. Fear-mongering makes the situation worse.

Third, the only way to prevent disease entering this country would be to seal the borders entirely. This is unfeasible for three reasons:

(a) Our borders are long and poorly monitored, and we simply don't have the money or personnel needed to do that. Even if we decided to do this to prevent future disease entering the country, it would be prohibitively expensive. It's simply not the most efficient way to prevent the spread of disease.   Our inability to keep out exotic species - which sneak into the country in cargo holds, and which are brought in by breeders who lobby Congress to keep the gates open - is a useful illustration of how hard it would be to seal the borders physically.

(b) Not only would sealing the border be ridiculously expensive, it would be the most damaging thing we could do to our economy right now. Go into your average store and see what percentage of things there are "made in China" or elsewhere outside the United States. Now imagine that store without those things on the shelves. Then imagine the effects on US manufacturers and distributers with foreign markets. Closing our borders to people requires closing them to trade as well, and it would be economic suicide to do this.

(c) Swine flu is already in the country. It's too late. And there is no guarantee that a future epidemic will originate outside the U.S. - a number of U.S. factory farms are as unsafe as those elsewhere (remember the peanut butter plant?) It is far better to put money and time into things like inspectors, the CDC and disaster training and medical research - it increases flexibility, is more effective, and - hey, bonus - increases jobs and demand for U.S. scientists and doctors.

Fear-mongering calls to close our borders and blaming "illegals" are the equivalent of telling people that they should protect themselves by pulling a blanket over their heads so tightly that they smother. (And that's not even a metaphor - remember the people who sealed themselves up to protect themselves from anthrax?) Worse, it ramps up existing fear and hatred, and puts the lives of innocent people - and yes, even illegal immigrants may be innocents - at risk.

It's simply not a good idea.

(Revised from a comment on a post at Shakesville.)

Lakeshore Trail - 04/22/09

I decided to celebrate Earth Day by driving out to one of the nearby state parks.  The part of the country I'm in is one of pocket landscapes; there's nothing huge and sweeping, no sublime vistas, no wildernesses big enough to get lost in.  There are, however, a surprising number of small trails good for an afternoon's ramble.  Most of them are under a mile or two in length, so I was excited by this trail, which is nearly 3 miles, out and back.

Green Trail - 04/16/09

Finally got a chance to go back out to the environmental center and see how spring's progressing out there.  Lots of green, above and below, lots of bird song.  Not many insects as yet.  The ground's still squelchy in spots.