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Il mondo cambia
Tuesday, 11 Nov 2008, 1:32 AM (permalink).
Almost a week later, the significance of this year's election is slowly starting to dawn on me. My initial reaction was a feeling of anticlimax. I was in Rome on election day with only the most tenuous of Internet connections, and in any case polls had not even closed on the east coast by the time I went to bed, so I missed out on the actual deciding moment and had to wait until Wednesday morning to get confirmation of Barack Obama's victory. And while the training I've had as a supporter of the Phillies and other lost causes has taught me that failure is always a possibility, the tea leaves and entrails had been pointing pretty decisively toward the result for the past month, so I wasn't exactly at the edge of my seat. Mostly, I felt relief that the whole thing was finally over. But I am coming around to the view that this was, in fact, a watershed moment. Perhaps it was this poster  , which kept popping up in Rome over the following few days, that got me thinking. The world has changed. Holy Shit, We Elected a Black President
In the sheltered cocoon of academia in which I've spent most of my adult life, where everyone pays lip-service to the notion of equality (even if they aren't all that interested in actually promoting it), it is easy to forget just how big a deal race continues to be in America. And although race alone is not a qualification for being President, it will be hard for anything Obama does over the next four to eight years to overshadow the monumental importance of the breaking of the color line in the country's highest office. The Onion (of all places) captured the staggering significance of this event:
A black president for a nation whose entire history has been haunted by the specter of slavery and plagued by racism since before its inception. That this happened in our lifetime is remarkable; that it happened within 50 years of a time when segregation was still considered an acceptable institution is astonishing. Absolutely astonishing. This is an achievement on par with the moon landing.
Skeptics may complain that a President needs to be more than just a symbol, and I agree. But symbolism does matter. Firsts matter. We can never go back to the unstated assumption that the White House was an exclusive club for old white guys. Everyone from unreconstructed segregationists to black militants now has to adjust their understanding of the world to include the fact that a black man can be elected President of the United States.
Welcome Back, America!
Conservatives are dismissive, if not outright defiant, of world opinion, but many of the most urgent problems America must face (terrorism, the environment, the financial crisis) are global issues, and we will need friends around the world to address these problems. The damage the Bush administration did to America's reputation abroad is incalculable, but this election gives us the chance to turn the page on that legacy and begin again, if not with a clean slate, at least with the benefit of the doubt. In my interactions with Europeans the last few years, the most common attitude I've encountered has been less hostility than bemusement. We've been that guest at the party who's being rude and belligerent and whom everyone figures might actually be a little bit crazy and hopes will just leave before things get nasty. By electing Obama, we have signaled to the world that we have regained our senses and are ready to behave ourselves again. With any luck, they might even welcome us back. GOP Will Eat Itself
This is the point on which I am least certain, given that I seem to be chronically out of touch with the mainstream of American politics, but I am cautiously hopeful that this election was the death knell for the current incarnation of the Republican Party, by which I mean the curious alliance of big business plutocrats, evangelical theocrats, and jingoistic militarists which seem to have constituted the party since at least the Reagan administration. This has always struck me as an unlikely and fragile coalition, bound together by mutual hatred of "liberals" than anything else, and the backbiting and recriminations already spilling out from Team McCain suggest that defeat will not bring them closer together. As for the electorate as a whole, it remains to be seen if there's really been a "realignment" of the political map or just a temporary shuffling. The pessimist in me keeps pointing out how many things had to tilt in the Democrats' favor to produce this victory: an unprecedentedly unpopular outgoing Republican president; a major economic disaster only weeks before the election; a poorly organized and often contradictory campaign on the part of John McCain. On the other hand, most of those factors are in fact the direct result of cherished Republican policies (trickle-down economic strategies, rampant deregulation, international belligerence) which demonstrably failed under George W. Bush, so it does seem plausible that Americans have finally put two and two together.
I am especially encouraged by the fact that Republicans tried just about everything in their usual bag of campaign tricks (accusing their opponent of being elitist, of pandering to criminals, of being unpatriotic, of being a socialist) without success. And the naked racism and xenophobia that started bubbling out in the waning weeks of the campaign (Obama the secret Muslim, Obama the terrorist, and so on), while dispiriting to see, I think actually dragged out into the open some of the more shameful sentiments that have been fueling the Republican base for some time. People will remember the smears and the ugliness for a while, and as long as they do, it should be harder to deploy them again.
So here we are. The world has changed. Changing the world has not made our problems go away, but it just might be the first step toward solving them.
File under: Politics, Ego, Travel.
Of two minds
Sunday, 26 Oct 2008, 10:33 PM (permalink).
Phase 2 of The Great Adventure is now in full swing. I've managed to get into something like a routine in my new career as a telecommuter, and it is going surprisingly well. Indeed, the thing that I thought would be hardest—simply disciplining myself to 'go to work'—has actually been quite easy. School/daycare for the kids, as well as other domestic obligations, provide a built-in structure to the day and working just becomes part of that, much as it was back home. I also have the advantage of being able to hole up in Sylvia's university office on her non-teaching days, which helps with focus. And of course, I am quite aware of the fact that I've been given something of a gift by my employer being able to do this, so I'm all the more motivated to prove to them it was not ill-advised. The part that is taking some getting used to is a sense of being divided, literally of two minds, one of which is trying to function in Morehead, KY, while the other functions in Hannover, Germany. Part of this has to do with he time difference. Since I am in regular communication with people in the US, I am constantly having to calculate the time there, whether to plan a time for a phone call or just to gauge when I might get a response to an email. And with the six-hour time difference, I am reaching the end of my workday right about the time that people are rolling in and becoming active in the US. (With the Phillies in the World Series for the first time since 1993, the time difference is especially painful: tonight's game starts at 1AM my time. Sleep can wait until after the playoffs.) Another source of strangeness is language. I've never been dedicated enough to do a 'total immersion' language experience, but normally when I spend time in Germany, I spend a fair amount of time hearing, reading and speaking German. I'm far from fluent, but I can communicate and to a certain extent think in German. But my working hours basically involve going into an English-only bubble for seven or eight hours at a time (even when I am at the university I don't really interact with people there except for the occasional foray to the Mensa to get coffee). When I leave that bubble at the end of a workday, it feels doubly strange to suddenly be surrounded by this whole other language and culture.
As a result, I sometimes feel guilty that I'm not having a sufficiently 'German' experience while I am here, although in the few weeks we've been here I've been to the Opera and the Sprengel Museum, toured the Altstatdt and the Eilenriede, gone to the movies and browsed the markets. I have nothing to complain of, it's just the difference between visiting a place and living there, and I am doing the latter, if only temporarily. File under: Ego, Travel.
The Great Adventure: Phase 1 Complete (Thank God)
Monday, 29 Sep 2008, 11:02 PM (permalink).
So, the first phase of the Great Adventure wrapped up 10 days ago, when I again made the trek from Kentucky through New Jersey and thence to Germany and rejoined the family in Germany. While Phase 2 carries with it its own set of challenges (notably my adjustment to telecommuting and learning to function in Germany at something above an advanced tourist level), my feeling is that this is going to be a piece of cake compared to the previous two months, which were, in the final analysis, pretty sucky. What I learned during my period of enforced bachelorhood is that I've become completely unfit for single life. Living with someone in a relationship (as I have with Sylvia for some 14 years) changes one considerably; having a child changes one utterly; having another child changes everything yet again. Large parts of myself are invested in these three other people, and without them around, I feel literally empty. I don't just miss them, I miss a part of me that only exists when I'm with them.
I'm not writing this to boast about what a devoted husband and father I am. There's actually something kind of disturbing about this. Put in the worst light, I think I may use my family as a crutch to get myself to do things that, as a supposedly functioning adult, I ought to be able to do under my own power: things ranging from the mundane (eating healthily and picking up after myself) to the existential (leaving the house and talking to other people). I'm not saying I was completely unable to do these things without them there, but I'll admit they took a more conscious act of will to accomplish than otherwise.
(A more charitable version of the above might be to say that one's family becomes part of the fabric of one's life, and just as with a real fabric, one cannot arbitrarily remove some threads without damaging the whole. This may be true, but it also raises the question of why some types of cloth unravel more precipitously than others.)
Well, self-pity and philosophizing aside, I am ecstatically happy to be reunited, and that is carrying me through the inconveniences entailed by the transplantation. I expect I'll be grousing about them plenty in time, but for now I am just appreciating feeling whole again.
File under: Ego, Travel, Grouses.
Tiny Changes
Monday, 22 Sep 2008, 2:23 AM (permalink).
I'm not sure if it is a measure of how much I miss my family or just an indication that I am going soft in my old age, but when a friend pointed me, some weeks ago, toward the following video for Frightened Rabbit's "Head Rolls Off," I found myself sitting in my office, transfixed and teary-eyed. And what's a little bit odd about all this is that I'd already been listening the hell out of the album it comes from—Midnight Organ Fight (2008)—for several weeks, and this song hadn't particularly impressed itself on me ("The Modern Leper," "Good Arms vs. Bad Arms," "Old Old Fashioned," and "Keep Yourself Warm"—to name a few—had all gotten my attention by that point). But now, thanks to a rather low-key and, frankly, nonsensical video of kids dancing madly (but also looking bored and even distressed) to a song about Jesus and the dead in Heaven, pulling at my heart-strings for reasons having nothing really to do with the song, I am positively obsessed with it. In particular, I've been dwelling on part of the refrain: "But while I'm alive / I'll make tiny changes to Earth."
Music does weird things.
File under: Ego, Music, Digital culture.
42.5 minutes of hope
Wednesday, 3 Sep 2008, 1:35 AM (permalink).
For almost three decades—my entire adult life and then some—I have been utterly baffled and frequently saddened by American politics. I just cannot fathom what it is about the Republican Party's melange of fear-mongering, intolerance, and plutocracy that "average Americans" find so comforting. Nor have I understood why the Democratic Party has been more or less in retreat ever since Reagan's landslide election in 1980 (yes, I am aware of Bill Clinton's presidency). Feeling so completely alienated from this climate, I've watched my own politics devolve into a mixture of cynicism and naiveté: expecting little from politicians and still finding ways to be profoundly disappointed by them.
So it's maybe not surprising that I did my best last week to ignore the Democratic National Convention. There's no question of how I am going to vote, so all I stood to gain by listening to speeches, I figured, was increasing my already vast reserves of disillusionment.
And I almost made it. But on the night of Barack Obama's acceptance speech, I got hit by an atypically strong case of insomnia that carried me well into the wee hours of Friday morning. Somewhere around 4:00 am, I landed on the video of the speech posted at Talking Points Memo ( official campaign copy of the speech here). For the next 42 and a half minutes, I was captivated as I don't think I have ever been by a piece of political oratory. Here was a politician, a candidate for president no less, suggesting such political anathemas as the idea that we should help the unfortunate, protect the vulnerable, and be tolerant of others. Doing so unapologetically and indeed forcefully. There has been, of course, a torrent of analysis, praise and abuse unleashed on the speech; it is sometime conservative Andrew Sullivan that comes closest to matching my feelings:
It was a liberal speech, more unabashedly, unashamedly liberal than any Democratic acceptance speech since the great era of American liberalism. But it made the case for that liberalism - in the context of the decline of the American dream, and the rise of cynicism and the collapse of cultural unity. His ability to portray that liberalism as a patriotic, unifying, ennobling tradition makes him the most lethal and remarkable Democratic figure since John F Kennedy.
For those 42 and a half minutes, and for maybe half a day afterward, my cynicism buckled, and I allowed myself to bask in the glow of the basic decency and good sense of that speech, to harbor a little hope that America actually is "better than the last eight years."
Of course, the next day, McCain announced his vice-presidential pick and the tawdry circus that has erupted over Sarah Palin, her past, and her family has dragged American political discourse back into the cesspool that seems to be its natural habitat. My cynicism is back in place, and I am hiding from political speeches again.
File under: Politics, Ego.
"She moved so easily, all I could think of was sunlight"
Monday, 28 Jul 2008, 8:20 PM (permalink).
At the risk of looking like I am bragging (when, really, I am just trying to bask in some reflected glory), I have to announce that Sylvia's been awarded a Fulbright fellowship for the coming year. This was part of the plan for the Great Adventure all along, but the Fulbright people took their sweet time in making their decision, so we had to decide whether we were going to go through with it regardless of the result or not. Obviously, we chose the former, and we were prepared to make it work that way. But the award makes it all easier, not to mention more glamorous. Mostly, I am happy for Sylvia because it provides the culmination of tremendous effort and initiative on her part. In the 15 years I've known her, I've never seen her fail to accomplish something once she put her mind to it. I am proud to know her, and if the fact that this intelligent, dedicated, and consummately professional woman allows me to associate with her casts me in a somewhat better light, well, I'll ride those coat-tails as far as they'll take me. File under: Ego, Academe.
The great adventure: Single life begins
Saturday, 19 Jul 2008, 2:16 PM (permalink).
With base camp more or less established and my annual allowance of vacation consumed, I am back home again. Nothing very remarkable to report about it all, except that it took a damn long time (from 4:30am taxi pickup to arrival at my doorstep here, with stops in Moorestown, NJ and Elkview, WV, was about 60 hours). This week has been spent getting caught up at work and vaguely trying to reorganize myself for the next couple months.
It's extremely weird being on my own here. Aside from a few days here and there, this is the first time in about seven years since before we had children) that I've lived on my own. I won't lie: there's something very liberating about the prospect—no interruptions, no delays, no being responsible for anyone's needs but my own. But most of all, it feels tremendously empty: I keep having these twitches of expectation that Sylvia and the kids are about to walk through the door, followed by a sinking realization that they aren't.
The biggest challenge of the next few months will be keeping myself on some kind of reasonable schedule. I've become so accustomed to the patterns of (mostly child-driven) family life structuring my day that I find myself turning in circles wondering what to do with myself next. Work gives me some structure, but with it being summer, the university is half-deserted and works feels almost as fluid as the rest of my day.
And that's where things stand. If nothing else, basic survival needs will dictate that I do a few things like shop for food, which is the currently the most pressing item on my bachelor agenda.
File under: Ego.
Adventures in Wi-Fi poaching
Monday, 7 Jul 2008, 11:36 PM (permalink).
Day 7 without internet, and panic is starting to kick in. Yesterday, I made a solo expedition down the Lister Meile, a long shopping street extending, spoke-like, from the Hannover Hauptbahnhof out to the edge of List (our neighborhood), ostensibly for the purpose of obtaining a couple useful things (money and a subway map), but really an attempt to track down an Internet café or otherwise get myself online. After a couple hours of marching past closed shopfronts (it was a Sunday after all), I finally managed to land in a restaurant that, while not exactly advertising itself as an Internet cafe, did offer free wireless access. For the price of a cappuccino and having to endure an episode of MTV's That's Amore! with German subtitles, I was able to connect long enough to do some emergency email maintenance and download some new podcast episodes (which should make my return flight a little more bearable). I did not get around to uploading blog entries, however. Ah well.
Today, I found a two-square-foot area in the corner of our bedroom where for a few hours, I managed to pick up a fairly continuous (and unprotected) wireless signal from, presumably, one of our neighbors. Unfortunately, this window of connectivity fell during the late-afternoon to kinds' bedtime gauntlet, so I wasn't able to make the best use of it. I caught up on my web comics, Twitter, and a few favorite blogs and that was about it. Again, did no get around to updating Donut Age. Sorry. I'm starting to feel a bit like a digital hobo with all this grubbing about for wifi signals. I'm not just being cheap, though. I'd be happy to pay for my Internet. Its just those sluggards at Deutsche Telecomm who can't be bothered to come out and give us a phone and DSL in less than 2 and a half weeks.
File under: Geekery, Ego, Travel.
Domestic affairs
Sunday, 6 Jul 2008, 12:24 AM (permalink).
It is Day 4 of the Great Adventure. We are still working on establishing Base Camp, but . We've succeeded in unpacking, and actually finding places for the heaps of things we brought with us from the US. (We've also already started the list of critical things we forgot to bring.) We have also successfully used all of the major appliances in the apartment at least once (admittedly, the oven was only used to make toast; we haven't actually cooked a proper meal yet). We don't have Internet yet—except for the irregular interludes when we can mooch off some neighbor's unprotected wireless signal—and it won't be set up until after I leave (which means that if you are reading this I have already returned or I discovered an Internet cafe somewhere nearby). Since the Adventure has not exactly generated much of a narrative yet, I'll fall back on making a few random observations at this juncture. - I have caught myself conducting a series of odd little rituals—spreading my possessions around more thinly than either necessity or practicality demands, rearranging things like the utensil drawer in the kitchen, poking around in random nooks and crannies for no particular reason—that I suddenly recognize as being my standard reaction to inhabiting a new space. It's strange that I never noticed before because it now seems rather exaggerated and not a little compulsive, and I now feel embarrassed after the fact for every hotel room, apartment, and house in which I've taken up residence.
- The lack of an internet connection has given me a remarkable amount of free time: time enough to write blog entries again, obviously, but also to read (I finished Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree [2004] in just a few days), and to finally watch episodes 3-6 of the BBC miniseries Jekyll, which have been sitting in my iTunes library for seemingly forever. At the same time, I feel vaguely uneasy about being disconnected. Since getting my iPhone, I've become accustomed to having "the Internet in my pants," so it's especially hard not having that crutch to fill idle minutes.
- Just a thought, but could it be that a there's an exact correlation between civilization and the ubiquity of sidewalks? (By which measure, vast swathes of the USA earn, at best, only "developing nation" status.)
With that, I'll call it a night.
File under: Travel, Ego.
Beginning of a great adventure
Thursday, 3 Jul 2008, 8:57 PM (permalink).
I am writing from Hannover, Germany, at the outset of what will be a year-long adventure for our family. Like any real adventure, it involves a foray into unknown territory and an element of danger but also the promise of great rewards. Summarized, it is simply this: Sylvia is on sabbatical this coming year and she is spending that year as a visiting professor at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität here. Stated that way, it hardly seems like Indiana Jones material, but the repercussions of that one decision are what bring in the element of adventure. Dante and Licia are also spending the year in Germany: Licia will complete first grade in a German school, while Dante will enter a German Kinderladen. I am only here for a couple weeks (my annual vacational allowance) while everyone gets settled; then it's back to Kentucky and work for me. However, I've negotiated a six-month work-from-home arrangement with my dean that will allow me to come back in September and be here for all of Sylvia's first semester of teaching (we are choosing to interpret "home" very liberally in this arrangement). So, there are challenges for everyone. Sylvia has to be a single parent for two months now and four more next summer while teaching new classes in an unfamiliar university environment. The kids get all the usual trauma of moving—new home, new environment, new school, new friends—plus the added challenge of being thrown into the deep end with the German language. As for myself, I'll be splitting time between two existences, both rather different than my current one: country bachelor while I am in Kentucky and globe-trotting telecommuter while I am here. I'm not sure which one of those scares me more. Both will require degrees of discipline I am not sure I possess.
Fortunately, we aren't undertaking this adventure unprepared. Sylvia did massive amounts of research and organization over the past several months to triangulate living-, school-, and daycare arrangements. We also have allies: one of Sylvia's best friends from growing up lives here with her family, literally a few blocks away; various members of Sylvia's family live within a couple hours' drive as well. It also doesn't hurt that this is Sylvia's home town, although having been away from it for almost 20 years, she is finding there's a lot of readjustment for her too.
So far, so good
At this point, not quite 48 hours into the adventure, it is going as well as could reasonably be expected. The flights to get here went without incident (to their credit, Dante and Licia are real troopers when it comes to travel). All 12 pieces of luggage (9 suitcases, 2 car seats, and a stroller*) made it to our destination, intact no less. The apartment we rented sight-almost-unseen (we did have pictures to go on, and our agent on the ground reported on it favorably) is really quite nice and well-situated in quiet cul-de-sac in the List neighborhood (also only a stone's throw from a Netto supermarket). We are recovering from jet-lag reasonably well, and attacks of homesickness have been mild thus far. A bank account has been established, and our friends' spare cell phone ('Handy' auf deutsch) plus a prepaid SIM card gives us basic communications capability. The next major logistical objective is Internet access (which, if you are reading this, you can assume to have been achieved).
Which brings us me pretty much up to date. I am going to make a real effort to blog semi-regularly at least during this initial phase. We'll see what the rest of the coming year brings. If nothing else, it will upset routine, which is probably a good thing at this point. I've been in a bit of a rut, both professionally and personally, of late, so perhaps adventure is precisely what I need.
---
- This is one bag over the limit for an international flight (one car seat and one stroller-type item per child are allowed beyond the usual 2 bags/person allowance—one of the few breaks the airline industry offers parents). We were prepared to pay the $100 extra bag fee (which compares favorably pound for pound with transatlantic shipping rates), but the US Airways people either forgot to charge us or were so impressed with the fact that all our bags weighed in at almost exactly 50 lbs. (one was 50 lb. on the nose, two were 49.5 lb., and the rest ranged down to a minimum of 44 lb.) that we earned ourselves a bonus bag.
File under: Travel, Ego.
Apple WWDC Keynote, summarized
Tuesday, 10 Jun 2008, 10:25 AM (permalink).
This is a pretty meager way to break my nearly half-year blogging hiatus, but Ben McCorkle told me I had to do this, and who am I to refuse him? So, here is my pictorial synopsis of Steve Jobs's keynote at WWDC yesterday: 
Back into my cave now.
File under: Digital culture.
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