wait five weeks?

how could i have gone five weeks without writing here?

so how to summarize:

d.c. good time to visit with family and friends. it was such fun to visit face to face with pals. and to eat a load of great food. especially fresh seafood. it was great to practice sometimes twice a day at flow. and it was good to be in such a familiar place.

back to college corner.

back to work at miami.

into the thick of it.

it's been a busy start to year.

i spent the week before school in meetings with fellow american studies members and with a faculty learning community in a retreat. we have a campus center devoted to teaching. they put some money into it too so that if you join a learning community, you attend meetings (a retreat and then monthly workshops/seminars) throughout the year. in exchange for your time, you earn $1000 to spend as research funds/travel money. and the other major thing is that the people in the provost's office really really want junior tenure track people to participate. in fact, if you have struggled with teaching, i understand that they insist you join these groups. i am in for the money and the promise of working with some librarians. it's an okay group of colleagues, at least one is way too self-important (philosopher) and fun and funny other people. but our last meeting lapsed into one of my least favorite genres of conversation: in the spirt of "kids these days.....something about technology....something about spoiled....something about how little they know." i find these conversations way too unproductive. so students use facebook! me too. (so does my mutha for that matter.) i am afraid that way too often faculty members -- especially junior ones -- assume that students should arrive in each of their classes ready to research. somehow we junior people have missed a step about how to teach students to do research. i know for certain that i wrote a lot as an undergrad, much of it wasn't very good, but i wrote a lot and was assigned to read a lot. i didn't really learn how to do historical research until grad school. what do we think that 19 year olds can do? and it's not fun to sit around and make fun of them. okay, it may be a little entertaining, but eventually, it is tired. i have been in way way way too many meetings already this year where faculty get into this groove and it is gross and unwelcome to me. (including in our faculty meetings in American Studies). i do not like it not one bit.

back to work at the sprouts.
i have spent saturday mornings at the market with the sprouts children ... working on local foods and fun with little people. yesterday i realized that i have spent a ton ton ton of time with the market this year. i am glad that i declined to accept the position of president of the council. i will serve on the market council, but preside over the group...no thanks. not now. i have developed some good things for the programming including a great memory match game with pictures of the produce that i have made over the summer. and i should probably do something with this aside from file it under service to the community on my faculty activity report?

back to the classroom.
so far so fine. they laugh at my jokes. i realize that it is hard to win the audience and the argument at 9 a.m. with 45 students shoe-horned into a small room with terrible acoustics.

the storytelling class is fine. they are pretty earnest and pretty literal. there are about three students in the mix whom i admire. i am accustomed to admiring more than this. the others are fine...pleasant, somewhat diligent, fine. but they aren't inspired. those few are pretty fab and often i want to embrace them and suck the goodness from their little selves, but i don't want to be a vampire preying on the young left-leaning students in the class. for example, this year again i developed a program for the september project, david and sarah's excellent library-based collaborative international project that is now in something like >1200 libraries in >40 countries. last year, the students were into it and they were decidedly uninterested in making it a legibly patriotic event. this year, the students wanted star-spangled red white and blue everything. it was a larger, more structured program, but it was very red white and blue. that blue me away.

speaking of being blown away,
the remnants of ike arrived here last sunday with 80 mph winds. i lost power for 48 hours. i had potable water, but it was tepid. no high speed intertubes. no gossip girl. no season finale of weeds. no rachel maddow. no the view. no nothing.

something like 2 million people lost power in the state. many (>100,000) in this region have not had power restored. it's been a terrible mess. and there are loads and loads of downed trees and great damage all over the county.

3,000 students created a scene on monday night at the president's house...was it a riot? a protest? a rally? it seemed more like a party following the accounts of the students i know who went along. ostensibly, a handful of students who live off campus were concerned about school re-opening when so many who live off campus still didn't have power. it ended up being a spectacle that involved crowd-surfing, tree climbing, weed smoking, music blaring, hanging out. it wasn't miami's finest moment. as i gather, no one wanted to miss out -- so they documented it with text messages, snapshots, and quicktime movies. four students were arrested, including a knucklehead i have already tangled with in one of my classes.

two colleagues wanted me to organize some storycircles and follow-up events with the student body to debrief the event. i barely had the wearwithall to get myself fed and cleaned and to campus in the dark let alone being emotionally available to students who were distressed about returning to class. no thanks. i talked about the events with my students in class yesterday but i really don't have time or energy to absorb their concerns about being in the dark.


and now, as i type, i hear sarah palin's stupid self on the radio. it stinks being in a battleground state. i like to follow national politics. ordinarily, i enjoy watching cable news, but it's too demanding and tense to follow closely while living here in the heartland. i should hasten to add that evidently, a number of obama organizers turned out at the president's house on monday night with their clipboards in hand, attempting to register votes and to sway impressionable young people. hey, they reasoned, why not? it's where the people are.



i miss where my people are. and i realize that this is total fantasy in my mind. my own people are scattered across the country. but the point is i am not close to them. to you. i am here in the heartland.

with a very very clean refrigerator with fresh ice and fresh staples and a very full trash and compost bin.