Logios Dolios Eriounios

Signing Off

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 00:37:00 +0000

Hello all!

So, I'm officially ending Logios Dolios Eriounios.

I've started a new blog, Mr. Wright's Blog, which will record the next stage in my life. It's going to be similar to LDE, but will hopefully emphasize issues in education and, specifically, special education. You know, to illustrate the fact that I am no longer an unemployed grad student in philosophy living in Chicago, and am now an unemployed grad student in education living in Champaign, IL!

I'm going to keep this blog open, of course, and please continue to read an comment at your leisure. I'll keep coming back every once in a while, but if you want any new pieces, come on over!

Thanks,

Joel

Hipsters are not the problem

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 00:32:00 +0000

A point-by-point response to "20 Ways to be Popular at a Liberal Arts School": (Sarah Lawrence, Amherst, Bard, Bates, Hampshire), by Ben Saucier. (The title is a bit of a misnomer. It's really, "Things that many people do at liberal arts schools." My responses are based on whether or not large amounts of folks at Bard did what the author is claiming were "popular.")

1) This is true. However, more people should support Palestine. A lot of what is wrong with the world is because of America's perverse relationship with Israel.

2) Yeah, I never got the appeal of Parliaments. I smoked Camels, that nice, bland, middle class white brand of cigarette.

3) Not true. Bard had school spirit up the wazoo. That was awesome.

4) True. But also true about the Real World, e.g., vague complaints about immigration, the economy, kids these days. Hipsters do not have a monopoly on vague, self-serving bitching.

5) I'm sad that nobody ever occupied a building when I was at Bard. There were some protests about the new performing arts building or the new science building, but these, I believe, tended to devolve into surrealist circus-type antics and drinking.

6) All college kids smoke weed and don't do homework.

7) See #1. Sure, a lot of kids may not understand why they should be offended by sexist or racist language, and some may only be taking on being offended as an affect. But I think that's better than not caring at all, calling everyone "fag" and everything "gay", etc. In other words, wouldn't the world be a better place if more people, not fewer, took offense at homophobic speech?

8) Sure, you could skip class. But then you'll probably fail, and, deep down, you actually do care about what you're learning.

9) This is very true, and I never understood it. So many people were always talking about the inevitably of transferring specifically to NYU, and then never did. Mysterious.

10) Very True. And hilarious.

11) Yeah, this happened more than it should have. The funny thing is that I never saw anyone ever get anything done on Adderall. Mostly it just led to chain smoking and writing and rewriting the same one paragraph for days on end.

12) Yup.

13) Yeah, there were a couple of students I could name who never seemed to get the point, who always somehow changed the class conversation to that one dream they had last night, or whatever. But they were pretty well outnumbered by people who worked hard, cared about the material, and respected other people's opinions.

Furthermore, now that I am at a big, state school, I am shocked at how many students do not do the reading. This is not a quality of rich hipsters at small liberal arts schools; they largely did their homework. It's the students at the big, faceless universities that never do their reading because they're just gonna be sitting at the back of that 200-student lecture hall, so why fucking bother, eh?

14) Philosophy is awesome, so back off. Although, to be fair, I spent way too much of my time building arguments to precisely refute people saying, “Well, your entire point hinges on the false assumption that a physical reality actually exists.”

15) Sure, why not.

16) This one passed me up. I was either wearing the same hoodie and pair of dungarees I had been wearing for two weeks, or a suit.

17) OK, I'm actually too old for this one. Some folks would wear Hannah-Barbara t-shirts, or weird shit with, like, Voltron or some obscure anime characters on it. But Spongebob had yet to become a "thing" yet, as far as I am aware.

18) Fun is totally in the eye of the beholder. In my opinion, drinking games like beer pong are simply not fun. The only drinking games I have enjoyed are card games like Presidents and Assholes and Drunk Driver, which is essentially one person dealing him or herself an entire deck of cards and drinking whenever a face card is played. (Flip Cup is OK, but it stresses me out.) Having said that, implying that standing in the cold drinking and smoking a cigarette is lame overlooks the fact that a lot can take place during that smoke. As I have said before, any evening that begins in the gentlemen's club, discussing Wittgenstein, is an evening well spent.

On the other hand, no one should ever judge any one else for having a good time at a party (within limits). I ain't gonna judge anyone inside the party whooping it up, but, you know, there are important things to be talking about.

19) There's a lot in this one. a) Is "governmentality" a word? b) Everyone should learn to love Foucault and Derrida. c) I have an uncle who plays the banjo and it is awesome. d) "Deconstructionalism" is definitely not a word and if Mr. Saucier had done his readings he would know that. e) Always throw it at them.

20) Thought about getting a tattoo. Never did. Do not regret that decision.

Teaching Philosophy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 01:04:00 +0000

I made this film today as a part of my "e-portfolio" for my teaching certificate. I'll probably revise it later, but thought that it was worthwhile sharing now nonetheless.

Philosophy - What's The Use?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:10:00 +0000

Gary Gutting, who is one of my favorite living philosophers - has a rather curious post at the NY Times' philosophy blog. I kind of think he's missing the point about why so many people tend to be so dismissive of philosophy, but I think his post is worth reading nonetheless.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/philosophy-whats-the-use/

Philosophy is the Most Important Thing

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 23:46:00 +0000

"A man's maturity: that is to have rediscovered the seriousness he possessed as a child at play." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

It was a nice, cold, sunny morning in December when I left my practicum placement at Urbana High School and walked towards the bus stop, where I would catch a bus headed back to the U of I campus. There was another student waiting there, an undergraduate, and she started asking me questions about the Education Department at U of I. She had just come from an observation at Urbana Middle School, and has been considering majoring in education, although not special education in particular, like me, and so she had a lot of questions to ask.

Unfortunately, I'm not the best person to ask these sorts of questions, not because I'm uninformed - although I guess I could educate myself a little better - but because I am a very atypical SPED student. I am a 27-year old graduate student in classes of mostly undergrads. I am a male in a class that is overwhelmingly (more than 90 percent) female. I am the only student in the class with a visible disability. Finally - and I guess this is kind of related to that first difference - I did not major in education as an undergrad. No, as I eventually came around to telling this sophomore as we waited for the No. 5 Green W Bus*, I majored in philosophy.

Upon learning this, my undergraduate bus-waiting compatriot remarked that, oh, he had taken an Intro to Phil. class last year and, um... well, what she remembered most about it is that the professor spent four weeks discussing whether or not anyone could know whether or not the sun would rise tomorrow, and that it was about that point when she decided that she had better things to spend her time doing and worrying about.

It was here where I wished that I could have called a "time out." Because, look, whether or not inductive inferences do or do not count as knowledge is actually really important, and is highly relevant to how the scientific method functions. And I would've loved to have talked to her about it, and about how tragic is was that the lesson that she got out of it was that philosophy was that spending time doing philosophy is a big, fat waste of time.

But I was tired, and anxious about my upcoming meeting with my adviser, and didn't really feel like this was the appropriate venue to get into an epistemological discussion**, so instead, I muttered something like, "Oh, yeah, you gotta know if the sun is gonna rise.." and proceeded to quiz her about what other ~~"Most Boring"~~ "Greatest Hits of Philosophy" that they covered in her Phil 101 class:

"Evil demon?"

- Yup

"Brains in vats?"

- Yes.

"The Matrix?"

- Um, we watched a few scenes. Mostly we talked about robots.

What she got out of the class, of course, was that philosophy was wasting her time and her energies; that she could and should be doing more productive things with her life, like volunteering at the local middle school and pursuing her degree as a math teacher. And it's not like I could blame her. The tragedy, however, is that these are the concepts that everybody ought to know. Understanding them ought to enrich everyone's lives, regardless of profession, and yet they are taught within the "academy" as obscure and esoteric things, and the professors and the T.A.'s - really, in a large university setting, the responsibility here falls on the T.A.'s shoulders - reinforce this attitude that philosophy is not worth the time or the effort of people who are not "serious" about philosophy. So someone like my bus-riding friend gets the message loud and clear that those who aren't prepared to sacrifice the rest of their lives for the sake of brains in vats and evil demons shouldn't even bother.

I caught the Green, with these thoughts in my mind, and went to my weekly meeting with one of my advisers on campus. I walked into her office, and we chatted about my morning, and about how my instructional program with one of my students, Ajax, was going. And then, when we were finished with our order of business, she asked me how I was doing. And I told her about my conversation that morning, and about how it got me thinking about how frustrating it is for me to feel like philosophy is the most relevant thing in the world, that it is relevant to everything, and is useful for everyone in every situation, and yet the way that it is handled, specifically the way that it is taught to young people, ensures that the field and the study of philosophy remains enshrined within a few very specific contexts.

I went on to talk about how happy I would be if I could spend my mornings in a special education class, helping and encouraging students who have been chronically disadvantaged, and then spend my evenings in a college philosophy course, reminding students that they are incredibly privileged in our country.

"Yeah, Joel," said my adviser. "You should make that job." (She's good at being supportive. She used to be a special ed teacher.)

*C-U has a super complicated bus system.

**That's disingenuous of me. It is always a good time to talk epistemology.

Update

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 06:27:00 +0000

Feelin' fine...

Football Poetry and Prose

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 02:51:00 +0000

I spent most of today compiling a master list of pre-season top 25 lists for college football - because Robyn is out of town and because I am done with work (for now!). Anyways, I will not torture you with my statistics (maybe I'll do that on my sports blog) but I did stumble across maybe the greatest college football related blog post ever.

This blogger on zimbio.com has posted his own personal top 25 list - which is cool, I fuckin' love lists - but it seems like his post was originally written in, like, Mandarin or Russian or something and then translated using BabelFish. For example, Mr. Zimbio (I don't know if that's his name, but that's what I've been calling him in my head) has Oklahoma as his #1 team, a popular pick amongst the blogs. But this is how he explains his choice:

It is formidable not to collect Oklahoma as the preseason top-ranked group in the nation. They accomplished impassioned in 2010 and lapse 16 starters from a group which won the Fiesta Fool around final year.

He's right. It is formidable not to collect Oklahoma as the preseason top-ranked in the nation. But the "Fiesta Fool?" That sounds like someone you'd meet at the Renaissance Fair.

The best part is that Mr. Zimbio has some excellent observations about the state of college football, if only you can decipher his prose. Here is what he has to say about his #8 team, the Boise State Broncos:

Let me initial proceed by observant which I cannot mount the “underdog” or the “little guy” teams in college football, and it heedfulness me to say which Boise State has the possibility to be a BCS buster yet again in 2011.

This is amazing. It's like, the Shakespeare of sports blogging. I think that he means that Boise State can no longer be considered an "underdog" or "little guy", and that they could get to the BCS again in 2011. Why? Because:

Losing far-reaching receivers Austin Pettis and Titus Immature will be tough, but not severe. The Boise State offense should still upsurge similar to it customarily does.

I love the idea of an offense "upsurging" rather than "coming up big." (Yawn.) Also, Titus Young should totally change his name to Titus Immature.

At first, Zimbio can be difficult to understand. But once you get used to his particular prose-stylings, he becomes a thoroughly enjoyable read.

On #10 South Carolina:

The Gamecocks have a auspicious SEC report subsequent deteriorate which should concede them a possibility to repeat as SEC East champions.

They have an easy schedule.

#11 Stanford:

Stanford will be one of the many engaging teams in the republic subsequent season. This offseason, they mislaid their conduct manager (Jim Harbaugh), many of their descent line and 5 defensive starters.

I agree, Stanford will be one of the most engaging teams in our glorious republic this year. And what is a coach if not a "conduct manager"?

He's got defending champ Auburn at #23. Why? Because:

Auburn is not a BCS pretension contender for 2011. They fool around in the toughest multiplication in college football and fool around a heartless report which includes games at South Carolina, Arkansas, LSU and Georgia.

Yeah, that report is heartless. But maybe they would do better if they would just quit fooling around in the SEC.

And what does he have to say about the #3 Ducks?

There is really small disbelief which Oregon’s offense will be unstoppable again in 2011. They are returning quarterback Darren Thomas and Heisman claimant using behind LaMichael James. If which isn’t sufficient to similar to about the offense, they are additionally returning parsimonious end David Paulson and special teamer extraordinaire Kenjon Barner.

I think by "using behind" he means "tailback." You know - full behind, half behind, quarter behind. And "parsimonious end" is a way better term than "tight end" - especially since David Paulson is such a frugal player. But I'm sure that Kenjon Barner will appreciate being labeled a "special teamer extraordinaire." If only all sports writers were this imaginative.

Memorial Day 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 30 May 2011 22:29:00 +0000

Well... it's Memorial Day again, and the weather outside is nice and warm and breezy, and our neighbors have been shooting off buzzing fireworks all evening, and it's frightening Coraline but making Marlowe all excited. Over the years, I suppose that I have come to really love this holiday, what with it's signifying of the beginning of Summer, and it's delicious smells, and nice weather, and time off from work.

However, I've never really connected with the holiday as one where it is time to remember all those slain in war. I guess I've only ever understood the more profane aspects of the holiday, baseball and bar-be-que and lake trips, et al. How can it be a somber period of remembrance and mourning when it's nice outside, and the changing of the seasons that are all about excitement and expectation and possibility?

I've never understood Memorial Day, nor have I ever really tried to. I've always assumed that the nation needed some kind of holiday between Easter and the Fourth of July, and we didn't want to celebrate May Day because it was a socialist holiday, so we kind of inserted in Memorial Day. Veteran's Day made sense to me, because it's actually Armistice Day, and because it's in November when everything is dying and the ground is frozen. Robyn has already linked to this article from the Times about Memorial Day's Civil War origins. My favorite quote from it is, "In the struggle over memory and meaning in any society, some stories just get lost while others attain mainstream recognition."

It always made more sense to me to celebrate America's war dead on D-Day - one week later - than on Memorial Day. When I was in France during college in 2004, I even made a pilgrimage to Omaha Beach for the sixtieth anniversary of the battle. That's the closest I ever physically got to George W. Bush, although I never did see him inside that big old hotel in Caen. I guess that, as a child, the narrative of World War Two was always more tangible for me than the Civil War. The story of D-Day made sense to me because it did a good job of explaining the country that I lived in. Sixty years ago, Americans got into little boats and sailed across the English Channel to save Western Civilization. (From itself, it turns out, but that wasn't added until later. The Huns and all, you know.) We did that, and now we are the keepers of that light, now we have to be the guardians of the world.

When I was eight years old, we were in Hawaii, and I got to go to Pearl Harbor for my birthday. I saw the U.S.S. Arizona beneath a glass floor underwater. That was the other end of that narrative, that we were not the aggressors, that the Asians were, and that we were acting as avengers, with justice on our side. I think that that's why the Iraq War was so unnerving, because it was some kind of gross mutation, abomination, of that tale.

I was a history buff about the Civil War as a kid, too, but it was never quite as meaningful for me. The narrative was always too messy. I remember reading too many accounts of heroic Confederates to be able to vilify them, it was Americans killing other Americans. And it just never helped to explain the world that I lived in. I'm sure it's different for someone living in Charleston or Baltimore or New York, but for me, that wasn't the story that I connected to.

I Am Ready for Baseball

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 May 2011 01:16:00 +0000

Five World Series Match-Ups Joel Would Like to See (In Order of Descending Plausibility):

1) Boston Red Sox (25-22) vs San Francisco Giants (27-19): In 107 years, the Giants and the Red Sox have met each other exactly once in the World Series: In 1912, a 4-3-1 win for the Red Sox, marked by the great pitching of Smoky Joe Wood and an exciting 10th inning win by the Red Sox in Game 8 of the series. A match-up this year would pit the reigning NL champ against one of the most popular franchises in all of baseball, and the champions from 2004 and 2007. Also, it would highlight two awesome cities, and would be the ultimate anti-NY-LA World Series.

2) Cleveland Indians (30-15) vs Cincinnati Reds (25-23): I keep waiting for the Indians to fall apart, but it's the end of May now and and they are at a .667 winning percentage and have a 7 game lead in the division, by far the largest in baseball. Meanwhile, Cincinnati benefits from both awesome hitting and awesome pitching. And can you say "Battle of Ohio"? Or how about, "first Cleveland championship in 64 years"?

3) Tampa Bay Rays (26-22) vs Florida Marlins (26-19): I don't really know why neither of these teams have really been able to catch on with their respective fan bases. The Marlins have championships in 1997 and 2003, and Tampa Bay losing one in 2008. Combined, these teams have made the state of Florida one of the most successful in the country over the course of the past 15 years. But then, how come nobody ever comes to their games? Maybe this World Series match-up will teach everyone to love the Rays and the Marlins. More likely it will lead to record low TV ratings and mass rioting and looting along the eastern seaboard.

4) Seattle Mariners (23-24) vs Milwaukee Brewers (25-23): With the Texas Rangers' winning of the AL pennant last year, Seattle is now the only AL team never to make it to the World Series. (The Washington Nationals are the only NL team never to do so.) Milwaukee, meanwhile, used to be from Seattle, until 1969, as the Seattle Pilots, and used to play in the American League, until 1997. Also, Milwaukee has only been to the World Series once, in 1982, when they lost to the St. Louis Cardinals. So this would just be fun.

5) Chicago White Sox (22-27) vs Chicago Cubs (20-25): This would be a stupid and boring World Series between two stupid and boring teams.

The End.

Good Morning!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 24 May 2011 12:49:00 +0000

A vignette from the first thing this morning at the middle school:

S: Good morning, Mr. Wright.
Me: Good morning!
S: Guess what?* I'm the grasshopper today in the play in Ms. C's class.
Me: That's exciting!
S: Yeah, and K- is playing the ant and E- is going to be the narrator.
Me: That's great. Are you playing the lazy grasshopper?
S: No.
Me: Oh, what kind of a grasshopper are you playing?
S: A green one.

Duh, Mr. Wright.

* Dude, you have got to give me time to guess!

5 Thoughts on a Thursday

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 22:58:00 +0000

1) My phone is dead. For some reason I can never remember to plug in my computer and my phone at night. It's always just one or the other.

2) Hurray! Baseball season is here again. Really, that's another reason I stopped blogging; between the Ducks losing the BCS game, and the endless, meaningless events that are NBA games in February, I had nothing sports related to buoy my spirits. (I care so little about professional football that Robyn and I watched "Twin Peaks" during the Superbowl.) But now baseball is here again, along with promises of summer and barbecues and puppies and everything that is right with America and the world. And steroid scandals.

Speaking of which...

3) Joel's totally boring baseball picks for 2011:

AL: Red Sox, White Sox, A's, Yankees
NL: Giants, Cards, Phillies, Reds
ALCS: A's over Red Sox
NLCS: Phillies over Reds
World Series: Phillies over A's

4) I may never be a college professor, but today I was thinking, while eating some noodles at the Noodles & Company on Green Street here in the heart of Campustown, that if I am ever a professor - or even a TA - I am going to make my students wear pants. That means no sweat pants, no pajama pants, (especially not those X-Box-themed pajama pants I saw today!) no gym shorts, no hot pants with the word "PINK" on the ass, no leggings trying to pass as pants! Dammit, if you have enough time to get out of bed, then you have enough time to put on pants. If anyone came to any of my classes pantsless, I would yell obscenities at them until they left to go put some on. Then I would return to my Irish coffee and rambling incoherently about Nietzsche.

5) Of course in that case, I would have to come down equally hard on the annoying idiosyncrasies of philosophy students, i.e., only fully-grown and well-trimmed and clean beards, sweaters and pony-tails must be washed at least every other day, matching socks only, no coffee stains on your Oxford shirts, ironic t-shirts allowed only on Tuesdays, etc.

Seriously, we'd be like the New York Yankees of the philosophy department.

Furthermore...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 10:48:00 +0000

So, yes, the reason why I haven't been writing for the past three months or so is because The World has been dark and cold and stupid. (And icy!) But now it is Daylight Savings Time, and suddenly my outlook is much sunnier. (Although it is still really quite cold here in Illinois.)

The one item that I bought while in New York City that was neither edible nor drinkable was a collection of essays by Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I bought it at The Strand. I really love Didion, and am actually quite embarrassed that I'd never heard of her before last year. Anyways, she got me really thinking about The End of Days - the eponymous essay in her book is about the sense of the Apocalypse in San Francisco in 1968, and takes its title in turn from the W.B. Yeats poem, "The Second Coming," - and it seems to me that The World is always and forever ending.

I mean, take 1968 as an example. Boy, the World was really ending them. Riots, rock and roll, LSD, Russian tanks invading Prague. Only an idiot would ignore those signs. Yeats wrote his poem in 1919; that, I believe was right after the World had just finished ending. In 1941, the World was ending for everybody except the Nazis. After the stock market crashed on October 29, 1929, eleven men decided that the World was close enough to ending for them, so they killed themselves. And that's just in the 20th Century! What about the Civil War, the French Revolution, the Black freakin' Death?!?! Those all seem like reasonable, rational times to believe that The End Is Nigh.

Robyn said something very wise to me the other day, something that I wish I could remember the exact wording to, but cannot. She said that the World is always ending, and new Worlds are always being made. And I don't want to trivialize the matter by saying something like, "We always say the World is going to end, but it never does..." No, the World is ending, is constantly ending, has always and forever been ending...

More Signs of the Apocalypse

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 05:00:00 +0000

I was sitting in my friends’ living room this week in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, smoking cigarettes and drinking Budweiser out of tall-boy cans. It was late in the afternoon, and every one except me and S- was out, either still asleep or in the bathroom or at work. The news was on - NBC, six o’clock nightly news - and the anchorman was just wrapping up a story about the threat of nuclear disaster in Japan.

“This is it, this is what I was talking about.” said S-, “They keep having these stories on the news about how this is not the Apocalypse.”

There was going to be a full moon that night, and, because of the unique position of the Earth and the moon in their orbits, it would be the largest that the moon would appear in the night sky for 18 years. The news had segued into a story about the Indian Point nuclear power plant, up the Hudson River from New York, and how, if the East Coast were to suffer a comparable natural disaster to the earthquake and tsunami that has devastated Japan, then the entire city of New York would have to be evacuated.

“We have no way of knowing what the future will hold,” said the news caster, “and the events of the last several months, from the uprisings and subsequent violence in North Africa and the Middle East...” a shot of many angry Arab men chanting, followed by an explosion in the desert, “... to the tragedy in Japan...” cue crying families amid devastation, over the bodies of their families, “...have caused many to ponder whether or not this is truly the end of days.” And then a shot of a massive, blood-red moon rising over the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

I leaned forward in my chair. “But...” I prompted the man on the television. S- suddenly had his curiosity piqued also, as the silence left by the unspoken clause grew longer and longer, the unsaid reassurance from The Most Trusted Men in America that this, indeed, was not the end of the world, that there is no reason to panic, that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. “But... but...”

But nothing.

He signed off, leaving an eerie image of that bloody moon over the nation’s capitol and a provocative closing statement. Later that night, S- and my sister and I tried to go look at the bad moon rising from the roof of his apartment, but apparently S-’s landlord had an alarm installed, after having found the roof littered with cigarette butts and tall-boy cans, so that when we reached the top landing, we were assaulted by a loud and repetitive noise that caused us to run back down the stairs and out the front door, where we could see the moon just fine.

And so there we were, standing outside S-’s apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, smoking cigarettes, looking up at the moon, which was big but, y’know, had already risen, and so was not all that impressive. And we were laughing about how ridiculous the news anchor had been, and S- said something like, “Well, maybe this is the beginning of the end.” And I put out my cigarette and said, “Yeah, well... I think it’s more like the middle of the end.”

I tell you these things because I have been asked several times - mostly by my mom and by Jesse K. - why I have not been writing here since last December. And I guess that it’s mostly because things like this happen; that we can have months of cold and darkness, and that tsunamis can hit Japan and revolutions Libya, and that nobody - not even the anchorman on television, who is paid to do so, is willing to tell us that “Everything is going to be OK.” No, instead we have doom and soothsayers, folks who feed the panic, and layer after layer of insidious fear. There never seemed to be to me at least any one who would say something like, “DON’T PANIC” or “Everything is going to be OK.”

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 12:12:00 +0000

"Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity." - Nietzsche

Fuck. Forgot to wear green today.

Christmas in Bend

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 01:06:00 +0000

So it's 11 o'clock at night, and I'm in the men's room at the D&D, the day before Christmas Eve. A gentleman with a big, gray moustache sidles up to the urinal next to me, and starts chatting. This is something that I have noticed about Oregonians, or something that I used to take for granted - they're always willing to tell you about themselves, on the airplane, at the bookstore, in line at Target, in the men's room at the bar.

"I've been drinkin' at the D&D for forty years," he sighed, "And now I'm here drinkin' with my son."

"Hm." I said.

"Alot's changed in this town, over those forty years. But not this place. Been the same since as long as I can remember."

It was going to be one of those conversations. Drunk. Nostalgic. Flashing our Old Bend credentials. Fine.

"Yeah, I know," I said, "I was born in Bend, and this bar has been here for as long as I can remember."

"You were born here?"

"Yeah, my mom used to own Knickers, just around the corner from here."

"Knickers? I loved Knickers! I used to take my kids there all the time! They would sit and play with those train sets for hours!"

He smiled, and flushed the urinal. Then while he was washing his hands, he said, really to himself, "And now I'm here at the D&D, drinking with one of them." I like to think that he left the bathroom in a better mood than how he entered it.

Winter Solstice

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:18:00 +0000

I guess we're not going to be seeing the lunar eclipse tonight... it has been snowing all day today, turning to a frozen rain in the afternoon, and then back into snow again after the sun went down, creating a nice cake-like layer on the pavement of snow, ice, snow. Nonetheless, there is something pretty cool about an astronomical event that* occurs only once every five hundred years, and something a bit ominous about a full lunar eclipse on the winter solstice. Perhaps it is one more reason why the Mayans predicted certain cataclysmic changes for about this time.

Friday was my last day of work before the winter break. The kids are always asking me about what I think about 2012, "Isn't it true that the world is going to end?" "Aren't we all going to die?" and so on. They always look so disappointed when I tell them, no, the world will not end in 2012, don't listen to what the television says. I can be so boring sometimes. But I guess that it's just a bit of human nature to secretly hope that you get to live to see the End Times. It might give existence meaning, who knows?

Also, kids fucking love vampires. I found a notebook lying on the muddy ground by the bus stop a few weeks ago. It had two pages of long division followed by several pages of vampires:

This vampire makes me think of Trent Reznor, circa 1989.

This one has a beard. Because it must have been cold that day.

I think that kids - people - are fascinated by 2012 for the same reason that they are fascinated by vampires. Supernatural, thrilling, mysterious. Give you some insight into Death - What Lies Beyond - Etc. Also, both may give you the opportunity to prove how heroic you can be, a la Left Behind or Dead Rising or Dawn of the Dead or Twilight.

*Initially wrote, "astronomical event hat." If anyone has any last minute Christmas shopping to do, I would like one of those.

Often, My Job Is Weird

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 00:45:00 +0000

So I'm sitting in English class, sitting at a desk and helping a student with her work, when D- comes up from behind me, carefully inspects the top of my head, and then gleefully pronounces, "So, Mr. Wright is finally going gray!"

It's not the fact that I'm going gray that concerns me, or that D- noticed, but the odd interjection of "finally" into his pronouncement. Why finally? I know that being 26 is ancient to a 13-year old, but surely he knows at what age most folks go gray? And he's only known me for 2 years - has he been waiting this whole time for me to start show signs of aging? Of weakness? Of the daily grind of working in a middle school?

Or has he been working on a hex to cause me to age prematurely so that he won't have to stay after school with me and serve his detentions?

Saturday New York Times

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 21:53:00 +0000

Lots of good and hilarious stuff in the NY Times today. Via Sociological Images, is this map showing the 1860 census of slaves in the South:

Cool, n'est-ce pas? You can even see how the heavy-slave populated counties continue today as the South's democratic voting "black belt". Follow this link to the map of this year's U.S. House of representatives and you'll see what I mean. But also follow the link to Sociological Images, because they have an excellent blog post about this.

The other interesting article in the Times today is this one, entitled "In Tapes, Nixon Rails About Jews and Blacks." First off, didn't we know already about Nixon's racism and anti-semitism? Well, yes, of course, But apparently he also had rather low opinions of Irish and Italians. Oh, yes, and he was cra-azy:

“The Jews have certain traits,” [Nixon] said. “The Irish have certain — for example, the Irish can’t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.”
Nixon continued: “The Italians, of course, those people course don’t have their heads screwed on tight. They are wonderful people, but,” and his voice trailed off.
A moment later, Nixon returned to Jews: “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”

Whaddaya mean the Irish can't drink??? Of course they can! But I may have the quote: "What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean." framed and put over my doorway.

Of course, the real chilling quote comes not from Nixon but from that Jew, Kissinger:

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger said. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Wow. That is some cold-blooded Realpolitik right there. Not, I think, incorrect, but very revealing, and also it ought to put a lot of neo-conservative foreign policy thinking in a new light.

Sometimes, My Job Is Awesome

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 03:37:00 +0000

I am currently working in a 6th grade drama class, aiding an autistic, semi-verbal student named M-. Today, we were designing posters for our play that we will be putting on later this year, School Daze, by Lindsay Price. The parameters for our project were simple: include the title and author, the time and place where we will be putting on the play, use color, and make your poster somehow relevant to the play. (i.e., illustrate a scene or a major theme from the play, etc.) It seemed pretty straight forward, right?

Like a doofus, I went ahead with making my own poster, an ingenious illustration of a cartoon middle schooler stuffed into a locker with all of his school accoutrements. However, after about twenty minutes, I looked over my shoulder, and saw what M- had been busy at:

A beautiful, 11x18 work of art depicting what I believe to be several vampires attacking and slaughtering what looked like Santa's elves.

In color.

I think he ought to get at least partial credit.

Checklist

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:12:00 +0000

Where I Have Been: Barberton, Ohio. population: 27,899.

What I Have Been Doing: Eating turkey, visiting future in-laws, watching football.

What I Have Been Reading: The White Album, by Joan Didion
Homo Sacer, by Giorgio Agamben

What I Have Been Watching: Moonstruck, A Christmas Story, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

How I Have Been Feeling: Fatigued, content

What I Have Been Thinking: Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window could be an excellent model for how to engage certain cognitively impaired students, especially those with certain autistic-type symptoms.

I Feel Like I'm in an Eliot Poem

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 20:35:00 +0000

It's November, cold and rainy, for the first time really. I am blogging while I watch college football, and Robyn is listening to a book-on-tape (or book-on-mp3, whatever) while she works on her homework. Coraline is perched on the back of the futon behind me, and Marlowe is asleep on a blanket. All-in-all, kind of a quiet fall day.

The trees are more or less completely bare now. This week, the weather has been mostly sunny and in the 70's, uncanny for the middle of November, but today it is cold and gray and muted. A good day for self-reflection, I suppose, and the strange thing is that even Facebook seems to be in a state of melancholy today. From coast-to-coast, my Facebook Friends all seem kind of sad today. Coincidence, or do you think that there really is something in the air, something about the Earth slowly dying, that is making everyone just a little more thoughtful today?

Pictures Of A Cat And Several Trees

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 17:13:00 +0000

Columbus Day Postcard

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 10:49:00 +0000

Things are good. The weather here has been beautiful this past week, although generally I have been too sick to be able to take advantage of it. A nasty cold has been going around the middle school where I work, and it finally caught up to me, laying me down from about Wednesday through Sunday. But I feel better now.

Columbus Day has been one of my favorite holidays for awhile now, and so that made me feel a little awkward this weekend when several of my friends were circulating this video about "Reconsidering Columbus Day." At first I was put off, but then I began to think about why I have such strong feelings for this holiday, and I realized that it had nothing to do with Christopher Columbus or patriotism or history or whatever. I just like it because the weather is usually nice, and I think that it is ideally situated between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, and I have good memories about sneaking off to New York City by myself during "Fall Break" when I was in college. So I guess that I'd be down with changing this holiday's name, or changing it's emphasis towards Native American history, just as long as I still get the second Monday in October off.

Addendum: I'm going to start putting most of my sports-related posts here. If I think that something I write is particularly clever or interesting, I'll post it on this blog. But I found myself just making one inane sports list after another, and felt like they needed their own space.

College Football Saturday!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 13:25:00 +0000

It's a gray and rainy morning in Urbana, IL, and I am sitting in the sun room in my underwear while Robyn is making french toast in the kitchen. Soon, I'll be leaving to take Coraline to the vet for her shots, while Robyn readies the house for her BIG DANCE PARTY tonight. If you're anywhere around central Illinois tonight, stop on by for some totally geek chic dancing.

I went out by myself last night, toting along a book about Schopenhauer, sporting my Oregon sweatshirt. Champaign has been invaded this weekend by hordes of scarlet-wearing Ohio State fans. Illinois plays the Buckeyes today (in about two hours, at this point) and I'm definitely not expecting an upset. But it was fun last night chatting with some of Buckeye fans at the Blind Pig about football and the BCS and the Rose Bowl, and how freaking good the Ducks are this year. I think that it's a sign of the times that, on a day when Florida plays Alabama and Oklahoma plays Texas, ESPN's College Gameday is in Eugene, Ore. (Although I guess there's a big caveat to that because Florida-Alabama is on CBS.)

Also, on a weird sidenote: I got a cheeseburger last night, and my waiter was all, "Oh, Oregon! I love the Ducks!" For a while, I was suspecting that he just said that whenever he had a customer who wears any team's gear - "Oh, Mississippi Valley State! I love the Delta Devils!" - but then it turned out that he has family in Eugene. So we chatted about Bachelor for awhile. (But I did give him a good tip.... maybe he just does extensive research and concocts elaborate storylines about his fake lives in every possible region of the country. In which case, I think he would deserve a good tip.)

Also also: We're getting cat #2!

Though he be wee, he is fierce.

We'll be picking him up from the Hugh-mane Society next week, after he gets neutered and receives a clean bill of health. Any thoughts for names? His institutional name is something lame, like Tiger or Garfield or something. We're thinking "Lucius," because he's tough and has red hair, and might have a bit of a Gallic look to him.

The likeness is uncanny.

Also, and this is completely unrelated to anything, but I like to think of Micheal Strahan as being the bizarro version of Peyton Manning. I feel like he has all these product endorsements, but their all slightly odd, like Dick's Sporting Goods, and Dr. Pepper.

5 Thoughts on a Thursday

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 04:03:00 +0000

1) I missed my bus for work this morning. I walked out of the door just in time to see that 6:35 bus go by. Then I walked over to the university campus to catch the next bus that was going to the middle school at which I work. It took me exactly 16 minutes to walk there, and that bus leaves at 7:08. So, here's the question: Is it worth it to get to sleep in an extra 17 minutes if that means that I have to walk 16 minutes to catch my bus? Or should I wake up early in order to avoid taking that walk?

2) I voted for my union for the first time today! I'm excited about getting involved with my union; I am decidedly pro-union. Of course, that's kind of a moot point here because I am not actually knowledgeable about any of the pertinent issues that we're faced with right now. So I just voted for the guy who came up to me and said, "Hey Joel, vote for me!" And I did. After all, isn't that just the essence of politics?

3) I had the craziest dream last week. I was taking all of my middle school students on a field trip, but our bus got lost in the forest and crashed. We then got picked up by this guy, who then took us to his lodge in the woods and tried to poison us all. We managed to get away, and then ended up wandering the woods until we met another guy who had a campfire and let us sleep there. All of the students fell asleep, and just he and I were awake. He then turned into an eagle and, um, went "into" me, let's say he possessed me, and said that, "They dwell within us." I'm usually not very big on the meaning of dreams ... one of my favorite Wittgenstein anecdotes is about how queer he thought it was that Freud identified sexual desires as such a primal cause for our dreams, and yet Freud never actually discusses sex dreams, which are incredibly common... but this one seemed kind of important. I'm chalking it up to the copious amounts of Plato that I've been reading lately, but, nonetheless, I would feel amiss - and I would feel like I were risking the wrath of the gods - if I didn't pass on that "They dwell within us."

4) I just finished reading Revolutionary Road, the book that the movie starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio is based on. It's really good, and I think that it ought to replace The Catcher in the Rye in our public school curriculum.

5) Saw Built to Spill last week during the Pygmalion Festival. They were old and it was awesome.