Monday, March 21, 2005

tilting at windmills

You people, I love you to pieces, but you're posting too damn fast. There were so many great posts today that I want to savor and contemplate... and there are prizes to award!

I had a dream a couple of weeks ago that Husband and I went to play racquetball (as we do a few times a week), and in the court next to ours, there was an odd sort of treadmill thing installed in the middle of the court. It was just the conveyor-belt part built into the floor, without the usual upright handles or screens or anything. The idea seemed to be that you could get extra exercise (and work on your coordination!) by running in place on the treadmill, at the same time as you tried to keep the ball going. Imagine a George Jetson scenario, arms and legs windmilling around, going top speed just to keep from getting sucked under, and that's sort of what this was supposed to do. In the dream, there were a couple of other players who'd gotten assigned to that court, and they were asking us how the hell it worked, and I described to them what to do, but noted that it seemed a pretty damn stupid idea to me.

Anyhow, over the last few weeks I've been facing this volley of tasks that are getting fired at me (some scheduled from long ago, some unpleasantly unexpected): coordinating student presentations for Honors Week, setting up a student organization banquet, heading a hiring committee for a last-minute search, finishing book revisions that are due soon, working with an ad hoc scholarship committee, working on assessment for our undergraduate program (and merely typing the word "assessment" just made my blood pressure shoot up ten points), writing up and submitting program changes for our department, etc., etc. Every time a new thing comes up, the same image flashes into my head: me as George Jetson flailing around at top speed on the racquetball treadmill, doing a hell of a lot of work and accomplishing absolutely nothing.

But at least it makes me laugh.

And now Scrivener/Scurvy Dave has given me homework!! I mean, thanks. :) Stick around, folks, I'll post more as soon as I figure out how to do the racquetball-treadmill and type at the same time.

Sunday, March 13, 2005

Can you tell I'm not getting much grading done today?

Dedicated to Terminaldegree, who has discovered the evil lure of prizes.

1. IF YOU COULD BUILD A SECOND HOUSE ANYWHERE, WHERE WOULD IT BE?
La Adrada, a small town in the Guadarrama mountains outside Madrid. We’re actually hoping to do this someday.

2. WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE ARTICLES OF CLOTHING?
Flannel pajamas. To work in, not to sleep in. A good day is when I can spend all day in my plaid flannel PJs.

3. THE LAST CDs YOU BOUGHT?
Do people still buy CDs? I haven’t joined the iPod mobs, but I do subscribe to MusicMatch, and that’s on pretty much all day. But to answer the question, I think the last CD was Manu Chao, “Clandestino.” He’s what I listen to in the car, most of the time.

4. WHAT TIME DO YOU WAKE UP IN THE MORNING?
6 am, or what my nieces used to call “the butt-crack of dawn.” Husband had to start teaching 8 am classes a few semesters ago, so I started scheduling mine then too, figuring if I was going to be on campus, I’d might as well get something useful done. Then we realized that traffic is lighter, we get great parking, and early classes weed out lazy students. We’ve almost gotten to like it. Left to my own devices, I’ll stay up till 2 am and sleep till 9.

5. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE KITCHEN APPLIANCE?
I don’t really have an emotional attachment to my kitchen appliances – that’s more Husband’s territory. He’s having a genuine love affair with our new extra-snazzy toaster oven, though.

6. IF YOU COULD PLAY AN INSTRUMENT, WHAT WOULD IT BE?
Maybe banjo? I have a secret yearning to be Béla Fleck.

7. FAVORITE COLOR?
Totally depends on context, but I’m leaning towards pumpkin and pomegranate and paprika shades, lately. Maybe I just like colors that begin with ‘p’.

8. WHICH VEHICLE DO YOU PREFER, SPORTS CAR, MOTORCYCLE, OR SUV?
Bicycle! Combustion engines are evil.

9. DO YOU BELIEVE IN THE AFTERLIFE?
Kinda. I believe that the human brain is probably incapable of any real comprehension of most of the things in the universe, so I have my guesses, but nothing firm enough to call belief. I’m looking forward to finding out, though.

10. FAVORITE CHILDREN'S BOOK?
I really don’t remember much of my childhood, and I was reading grown-up books at a fairly early age. (Family lore has it that I was reading Shakespeare by the age of 5, which is true in that I spent an afternoon paging through Macbeth, but I didn’t really get any of it – I just liked the bits about the witches.) Anyway, the only children’s book I have any memory of at all was about a dog (named Henry?) for whom someone had knitted a sweater. The children’s books I like best now are the ones that Scott Simon and Daniel Pinkwater read on NPR. :)

11. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE SEASON?
All of them. I revel in spending time outside, though I don’t do nearly enough of that these days.

12. IF YOU HAVE A TATTOO, WHAT IS IT?
Joseph Campbell once spoke about “leaving space for the gods to find you,” and I always imagined that a physical symbol of that space for me would be a sort of upside-down omega, like a little cauldron. I haven’t gotten a tattoo, but that’s what I’d get if I did.

13. IF YOU COULD HAVE ONE SUPERPOWER, WHAT WOULD IT BE?
To eradicate idiocy and selfishness. Zap!

14. CAN YOU JUGGLE?
Not a chance. My brother can, though, and he used to work as a mime, too. I think he got all the circus genes.

15. ONE PERSON/PEOPLE FROM YOUR PAST YOU WISH YOU COULD GO BACK AND TALK TO?
A guy I had an extraordinary e-mail relationship with once, that ended under odd circumstances - we both sent e-mails to each other the same day, and both messages disappeared, so we each thought the other had stopped writing, and by the time we figured out what had happened, the magic was lost and we drifted out of touch. Sam, if you’re out there and this sounds familiar, drop me a line sometime.

16. WHAT IS UNDER YOUR BED?
You want to know, you go look. No way am I going under there.

17. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DAY?
Thursdays are good. I love looking forward to weekends, though when they come I usually spend them dreading Monday.

18. WHICH DO YOU PREFER, SUSHI OR HAMBURGER?
Mmmmm, both. Sushi from IchiBan in Omaha, burgers from Matt’s in Minneapolis!

19. FROM THE PEOPLE WHO NORMALLY READ YOUR BLOG, WHO IS THE MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND FIRST?
I’ll carry on terminaldegree’s tradition of awarding a prize to the first. Ready, set, go!

20. ON WHICH BLOG DID YOU FIND THIS MEME?
Terminaldegree!

21. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE FLOWER?
Why narrow it down? All of them, especially those that are hardy and natural – not the fragile hothouse kind. I don’t much like things that need to be coddled.

23. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE MEAL?
Real Spanish tapas – little plates of manchego cheese, olives, patatas bravas, octopus, morcilla, chorizo, boquerones en vinagre.

24. DESCRIBE YOUR PJS.
I’m a fan of sleeping in a big old T-shirt worn soft with age. Current T is grey with a big piranha fish cartoon from New Orleans.

25. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE BREAKFAST?
I don’t do breakfast most days. But on Sundays, I lounge in bed a little later than usual (sometimes as late as 9 am! oh, the decadence!), and Husband brings me coffee and toast while I read in bed. It’s the best.

26. DO YOU LIKE YOUR JOB?
Absolutely.

27. WHAT IS YOUR DREAM JOB?
Teaching “How to be a decent and constructive citizen and human being 101” to eager, curious students at a small, well-funded liberal arts college, in a city that feels like Seattle but is much farther east and doesn’t rain quite so much.

28. WHAT AGE DO YOU PLAN TO RETIRE?
When I no longer love what I do.

29. WHERE DID YOU MEET YOUR SPOUSE OR SIGNIFICANT OTHER?
At a friend’s house, watching a soccer game in Madrid. I had absolutely no intention of dating anyone while I lived in Madrid, but it was very much love at first sight.

30. SOMETHING YOU WOULD LIKE TO DO THAT YOU HAVE NEVER DONE BEFORE.
Lotsa things. Walk the Appalachian Trail, learn Arabic, learn to dance, go to China, change the world.

Randomness, Catalan and blogger-pilgrims

Hi Ianqui! Blogger comments are still screwy, so I'll answer your question here: no, sadly I don't speak much Catalan, just a handful of phrases, and enough to wish you a happy birthday. :) My Spanish roots are mostly in Madrid, where my husband's family revels in their soccer rivalry with Barcelona, and insists on referring to Catalans as "polacks," because they live in the east and speak a funny language. (I need to learn it sometime just to horrify them.)

A friend and I, however, are engaged in the project of teaching ourselves Basque, which has been enormously entertaining and humbling. We're planning on trying it out in a trip to the Basque Country this summer (which will probably be even more humbling). While I'm there, I may check out the condition of that stretch of the pilgrimage trail, to see if there's any chance of getting this blogger-trip out of the realm of fantasy and into some serious hiking boots. After my trip in 2001 I was both inspired to do it again and determined to wait a while, because with the sharp increase in popularity over the past few years, the trail is becoming decidedly crowded, which is bad for pilgrims and locals both. The whole hospitality-thing crumbles pretty quickly when you have hungry, lost, blistered, helpless people wandering through your back yard on a daily basis. (and I suspect that many of the same travelers who simply trust in the charity of others when they are hungry or in pain as pilgrims, wouldn't stop to offer that same charity to those who are hungry and lost in their own neighborhoods back home. But that's another story.)

So I'll check things out while I'm there, and once the pilgrimage-as-latest-trend has petered out enough, I'm serious about picking up my staff again and readying the thick socks. Ianqui, Rana, Jo(e), Phantom, Scrivener, PPBear, Dale, anyone else, wanna come?

Humans these days

One of the reasons I became a historian is because I am fascinated by the variety of human ability and experience. Humans are capable of creating the most extraordinary things: the pyramids of Egypt, the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, the laptop computer, the furnaces of Auschwitz, Stonehenge, the Slinky. Some sacrifice themselves and others to their gods; some deny the existence of anything they cannot see. Some put themselves confidently at the absolute center of the universe; some believe that the universe is random and chaotic and that they are only a momentary speck in its grander existence (which may itself only be a momentary speck in something even more incomprehensibly large). Sometimes they know, in all certainty, that the world is a place of progress and reason and reward for those who work hard. Or they know, with equal certainty, that the world is permeated by dangerous spirits, who must be pacified by the proper rituals. Some deeply respect the power and beauty and fragility of the earth on which they live; some know that they are its masters and that it is meant to be shaped and made productive in their service. Some celebrate the accomplishments of the individual; some work hardest in the interest of the community. At times, they work together in bursts of energy to build cities or explore beyond what they know or rescue those in danger; at times they work together to viciously exterminate people who used to be neighbors and have somehow come to be perceived as enemies.

I try to share this with my students, and I tell them, Look. History shows us some of these possibilities. There is more than one way to believe. There is more than one way to organize your government. There is more than one way to understand who is your family, to evaluate crime and impose punishment, to produce food, to create law, to treat others who look different, to impose social conformity, to marry, to use the resources of the earth. None of these is perfect, but you need to understand the nearly infinite possibilities of what humans do, and then use these to understand better your own choices, for they are choices, and they both reflect and perpetuate who we are along this long spectrum of human possibility.

Usually this variety fascinates me, but lately it has become overwhelming, because so many contradictions exist within my own society. In recent decades we have made so much progress in civil rights and equality for minorities and women, but black men are dragged to death behind trucks, and white supremacist organizations are growing. We fiercely defend the rights guaranteed by our constitution, while we defend our right to deny those rights to others, as we perpetuate torture and humiliation. We have created a society of more prosperity and freedom than nearly anything the world has yet seen, yet we are creating a growing gulf between a small, powerful, wealthy elite and an underpaid, uninsured, poorly nourished populace. We have exponentially broadened our scientific understanding of the world, but we are poisoning our air and approaching genuine crises in our reckless consumption of petroleum and water. And so on.

All this came to my head because this morning I read Jimbo’s post about our impending doom here, and then Psycho Kitty’s about compassion and acceptance here, and I’m still thinking about the beauty of Jo(e)’s posts about her monastery. The variety of human experience is echoed in the variety of things we write about, even in this relatively small circle of bloggers. I am touched by our deep capacity for simplicity and respect and compassion, and horrified by our tendency toward hubris and ignorance and greed. This echoes the confusion I feel about modern Americans, and modern humans: are we great inventors, liberators of the oppressed, believers in freedom and opportunity, creators of possibility, curers of disease, rescuers who help others in times of crisis? Are we oppressors of others, manipulators of the weak, destroyers of the planet, heartless towards the helpless, disdainful of our poor?

I believe we are all of these things, but it’s hard to fit them all in my head at the same time, and I don’t know whether to celebrate or despair. Most days I do a little of both.

Thursday, March 10, 2005

Mostly, we just walked a heck of a long way.

This one’s for Phantom, and also for Jo(e), whose posts on the Appalachian trail and monastery visits revived some wonderful memories.

Four years ago, I went with a colleague and fourteen students to Spain to walk three hundred miles’ worth of the ancient pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela. In the eleventh century, Santiago was the most important pilgrimage center in Europe; Dante wrote in La Vita Nuova that “in the wider sense, a pilgrim is whoever is outside his fatherland, but in the narrow sense, none is called a pilgrim save he who is journeying towards the sanctuary of Saint James of Compostela.” Some traveled to express their thanks for the protection of the saint, some hoped for miracles, some walked as penitence for their crimes. I proposed the trip as a unique way to experience the history and culture of Spain, to literally walk in the footsteps of hundreds of thousands of medieval Europeans.

I love telling travel stories (I should post sometime about being spit upon by elephants; that’s one of my favorites) but for some reason I don’t talk much about the Santiago trip, and I’ve never written about it. This is partly because there were so many different facets to the trip: I experienced it as a professor, as a guardian of students, as a lone walker, as a friend, as a historian, as a foreigner, as a spiritual explorer, and even though those all overlap in my own consciousness, they’re all very different perspectives and I don’t know how to begin to make a coherent narrative out of them.

It’s also because I didn’t construct any narratives for myself in the process: I chose to take neither journal nor camera on the trip, though I usually travel with both. It’s too easy for me to fall into the role of narrator of my own life, imagining a third-person description of what I’m doing or a viewpoint through a camera lens. But much of the impact of pilgrimage lies the experience, to be acutely aware of your own existence and the world around you in each and every moment as you pass through time and space, and I wanted to develop that awareness as much as possible. The journey itself was more intense and felt as a consequence, but not in a way that fits well into words, because I didn’t fit it into words at the time. I’m glad of that, even though it makes the stories harder to share.

What I remember most is the routine of each day. The trail has gained renewed popularity in recent decades, so you’ll always share the road with other pilgrims. You’re up early, slipping out of bunk beds and silently arranging your backpacks, making sure the weight is balanced just so. Everyone’s on the road not long after dawn. You walk with your students, until they gain confidence and dare to venture out on their own, at least until you gather them back together at the end of the day like wayward sheep. You join a group for a while, chatting and exchanging stories; you walk alone, seeing more of the unfamiliar flowers and skies and small stone villages where someone will always pause from tending the sheep to wave and wish you buen camino, a good road.

While the sun is still casting long early-morning shadows, you might pause to sit in a field to share your yogurt with the military guy from Wisconsin, who gives the best advice about how to avoid blisters; later you’ll sit on a rock wall on the outskirts of a town to break a chocolate bar with the funny Portuguese girls who know all the gossip about everyone else on the trail that day. You’re not in a hurry; everyone develops their own pace and rhythm, and it’s almost impossible to change yours once you have it. Sometimes you see the same people over several days as your paths leapfrog each other; sometimes you’ll have a single intimate conversation with someone, and after they move on you never see them again. You can always seek people out if you want companionship, or you can walk alone for weeks; people recognize the signals either way.

If the priest in the next village sees you coming, a group of pilgrims trudging in from the horizon, he may ring the church bells and come out on the steps to entice you in, to stamp your pilgrim-passport and tell you proud stories of his town and the church and the saints who watch over it. He’ll tell you the best place in the village that offers a good hot lunch. Every little restaurant along the camino has a “pilgrim special,” a pot of stew or soup that’s easy to make in large amounts and is delicious and sustaining to people who walk all day.

When you arrive at the refugio, the hostel-like accomodations for pilgrims that you’ll find at regular intervals along the road, the first thing you do is wash your socks. Socks are to a pilgrim what oxygen bottles are to the climbers of Mount Everest. Everyone has three pairs: the ones you have on, the clean ones in your bag for tomorrow, and the ones you washed last night, maybe still hanging on the outside of your bag to dry. You don’t always know where the next refugio is where you’ll spend the night, but you know you’re home when you see any building with rows and rows of socks hanging in the breeze like little welcome banners. One refugio in the countryside didn’t have any clotheslines set up, but there were several young trees in front of the dormitory, and their lowest branches were always festooned with pilgrim socks.

Then, in the late afternoon, there’s almost always a period of silence and reflection. Travelers trickle in one by one to the refugio; after they find a bunk and ease off their packs, they sit outside on rocks or under trees, writing in journals or just enjoying the stillness. After twelve or fifteen miles of walking, you savor stillness, letting all your joints finally stop moving. Sometimes pilgrims will chat quietly or tell stories, but until sunset, it’s more common to find an appreciative silence.

In the evening, revived by the rest, everyone gathers in the refugio’s big stone kitchen to compose a stone-soup kind of dinner: you offer your cheese, the Brazilian brings some meat from the market good for stew, the Italian couple tosses in their vegetables, others bring bread and fruit, everyone mixes and shares and laughs and communicates in gestures and fragments of any language they know a word of. Someone always has a guitar; everyone is generous and cheerful. It’s easier to be thankful when you’re a pilgrim: you’re thankful for a smooth path, for not being lost, for having found a place to sleep, for having food to share, for having clean socks. I think much of the spiritual experience of the road comes from being surrounded by thankfulness; it brings out the kindest in people.

There’s no way to know how much the experience of being a pilgrim to Santiago in the twenty-first century echoes the experiences of previous centuries. Sometimes you walk through villages that have seen little change over the centuries; your feet follow Roman roads past ancient Celtic forts and Visigothic churches. Occasionally you walk along the shoulders of highways, shrinking from the noise of passing traffic. Our understandings of religion and travel are certainly different from the medieval pilgrim’s. But there’s something about pilgrim-ness that I’m sure is the same. Pilgrims are outsiders; there’s an inescapable air of otherness about them, and they recognize each other no matter what the circumstances. There are the obvious clues, of course: Santiago travelers always carry a scallop shell somewhere on their hat or their pack, and if you see a person with a walking staff and a backpack anywhere in northern Spain, chances are he’s a pilgrim. But even if you go to the refugio and clean yourself up, put on your ordinary clothes to tour the town as if you were any other tourist, there’s a pilgrim-aura about you, and the locals greet you with particular hospitality. You instantly recognize any other fellow traveler, and they wink back and wish you a buen camino.

But the pilgrim-aura lasts precisely as long as the pilgrimage. You meet so many fascinating people on the trail, and you marvel at sharing a common experience with people from such extraordinarily different backgrounds. Everyone exchanges addresses and promises to keep in touch, but you know that you won’t. Your bond to each other is the journey itself, and part of its magic is that it cannot last.

The object of the pilgrimage is to reach the cathedral of St. James in Santiago de Compostela, to greet the saint and thank him for the successful completion of your travels. Most are elated at their arrival, celebrating their accomplishment; others, like me, are a little sad, knowing that the journey meant more than the destination. It doesn’t take long to readjust to the twenty-first century, though for a day or two you’re dizzied by the sensation of riding in a car, and you still have the urge to wash your socks in the evening. You’ll always keep the scallop shell that you wore on your pack.

Sunday, March 06, 2005

greed for sloth

Last night we had friends over for dinner, and our cats, overstimulated by the Unaccustomed Presence of Other Human Beings, rampaged around the house all evening. Today, recovering, they’ve been sacked out all day long, sprawled in the middle of the floor and audibly snoring.

So grading midterms is bad enough, without this spectacle of sloth before me. I’ve decided that although I have a mountain of things to tackle over spring break, the very first day will be spent doing not a damn thing but lounging in bed like the cats. My poor fried little brain can’t imagine anything more luxurious (except maybe making popcorn, and eating it while lounging in bed. Oh yeah.)

That’s how tired I am. My fantasy life, once rich and creative, has been pared down (forget Hawaii, no more hitchhiking around the world, who cares about frolicking with Adrian Brody and Andy Garcia) to the idea of spending just one whole day in bed, with popcorn. That’s as good as it gets.