Meditations on Arriving at Age 30

Spock:  “Is it possible that we two, you and I, have grown so old and so inflexible that we have outlived our usefulness?”

Star Trek VI:  The Undiscovered Country.

 

 

            I have never posted a blog entry on my birthday. In and of itself, I suppose that doesn’t matter. Still, this is my 30th birthday, and the decade mark is another milestone. I’m remembering how a friend of mine felt when he passed the 30 mark about fifteen months ago. He was complaining about aging as many people do, bemoaning the coming of his thirties. What I didn’t understand is what was supposed to be so bad about it. He told me to wait a while, to wait until I saw 29 vanishing into 30. Then, he added, I might understand.

            Well, after 366 days of being 29—since that year was a leap year--it has vanished into 30, and I’ll tell you this much, I still don’t get it. For a long time I have wondered about our western, and particularly our American, obsession with youth, with being and with staying young or at least trying to. I found an August 2010 NY Times article on this topic quite revealing. The writer, one Robin Henig, opens the article with this question, “Why are so many people in their 20’’s taking so long to grow up.” [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html] It’s quite a lengthy piece, as you’ll see. Henig’s basic assertion is that people, both men and women, are taking longer to achieve those milestones of adulthood long held to be the traditional markers of adults, and the author cites five: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. Some people don’t complete all five in the same order or at all depending on their preferences and circumstances. I’ve been in school for twelve years because it has taken exactly that long to finish this humanities doctorate and that’s without any time off for rambling around to “find myself,” as the expression goes. What I’m focusing on right now are those who put off most or all of those milestones by choice. The median age for marriage has risen five years in only a generation, with many opting not to marry because, the reporter even admits, our society has become so accepting of other types of relationships outside of marriage. Indeed, I have many friends and acquaintances content to live for years on end with a partner, walking away with no fuss and no bother when they decide it’s not working anymore.

            I find it interesting that two people’s views, both psychologists, are distinctly at odds in this piece. Jeffrey Arnett argues that the 20’s should be considered a form of extended adolescence; ‘emergent adulthood,’ he calls it, in which people are exploring and finding themselves and basically taking the whole of their 20’s to decide who and what they want to be. He points to feelings of restlessness in folks in their 20’s and to a general desire to see what’s out there, a resistance to settling down. Arnett suggests that, just as we recognize adulthood and childhood as separate developmental stages of life, we ought to recognize the 20’s as its own distinct stage of life. His close friend Richard Lerner, who admires and respects Jeffrey both professionally and personally, claims this view is nonsense. Many people, Lerner points out, don’t go through this protracted self-discovery quest, and if you’re going to call it a ‘stage of life’ like childhood or old age, then, developmentally speaking, everybody goes through it or everybody doesn’t. End of options. He also adds that his friend Jeff, as a developmental psychologist, should really know better than to play around with the term ‘stage of life’ so sloppily. That’s my tongue in cheek paraphrase, of course. Lerner’s argument goes something like this:  the fact that Joe’s 20’s are marked by focusing on himself and that he screws around with whoever and that he holds seven different jobs in six years is, for example, balanced out by his neighbor John, who at age 26 is settled into his job after grad school and has been married for a year and who has a baby on the way. So the fact that some people experience this delay while others don’t, and that in many parts of the world this so-called life stage doesn’t seem to happen at all, invalidates Arnett’s claims in the eyes of his fellow psychologist. In mine too, I might add. I add too that Arnett seems to have done a bit of rambling in his own 20’s if his biographical sketch is to be believed, so perhaps he is better equipped to cater to it in others.

            I don’t take a psychological view of the question. I take a historical one. Looking back at old TV and radio ads, you find something interesting. Ads targeting teenagers didn’t start appearing in large numbers until the 1950’s. There were certainly people between 12 and 20 before the 50’s, to be sure, but that marketing demographic was created in the 50’s. Now we talk about teen pregnancy, teen violence, teen drugs, teen psychology, teen everything, and we talk about ‘teens’ per se, as though the notion of a teen per se has always existed. I’m neither condoning or condemning the rise of the teen demographic. I simply acknowledge it. Rock music and the word ‘teenager’ itself came out of the 1950’s, after all. In fact, though, adolescence itself is something of an invented demographic. The concept of an adolescent dates back to 1904, when G. Stanley Hall first published his ideas on the younger adults flooding the rapidly growing populations of America’s industrializing cities. In fact, research psychologist Robert Epstein, an outspoken critic of Arnett’s proposals, points out that adolescence as we understand the concept doesn’t exist at all in quite a few cultures, where children’s transition into adulthood is marked entirely differently from our western cultural paradigm. [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=yet-another-stage-of-life] Notice I say adolescence isn’t universal, and I mean adolescence as a life stage as distinct from puberty, the biological transition into adulthood with its hormonal and other physical changes, which undoubtedly is. What folks like Jeffrey Arnett want us to believe now is that ’20-somethings’ comprise just another life stage group whose needs, wants and feelings should be acknowledged and coped with like those of children, adults and the elderly.

My question is, what next? Perhaps 30-somethings should be considered as being in a distinct life stage. We could talk about the median age of divorced people and going back on the dating market again. Why not. We could create special branches of therapy and counseling devoted to counseling those dating divorced parents with kids. Actually, those services may already exist. Then—because why should we stop there—the 40-somethings can have their own life stage. We can talk about workaholism, second and third marriage breakdowns, the in-office affair as a cultural norm and so on. For the 50-somethings, … but do I really need to go on? Am I the only one who finds this bordering on the absurd? I certainly hope not. I actually laughed when I read this article about two years ago. Now that  I am 30, I simply wonder.

One thing that came out of Henig’s article is that Arnett, the psychologist who advocates emergent adulthood, was inspired by the work of another earlier psychologist, Ken Keniston, who observed some aspects of this emergent adulthood phenomenon in the young baby boomers back in the early 1970’s. Again, to take the historical point of view, the baby boomers were a unique generation. They grew up in a time of peace and prosperity. They had everything they wanted especially compared to their depression era parents, and they were the ones who set off the 60’s counterculture movement and everything, again I say everything, that came with it. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that the descendants of the baby boomers display some of their parents’ same early 20’s behaviors. After all, where does behavioral learning usually take place? It starts at home, of course. That’s not to say the baby boomers learned to be so carefree from their own parents. After all, as any sociologist or historian can tell you, cultural rebellion and upheaval often stems from frustration with the status quo. What I am saying is that since the upheavals of the 60’s, the behaviors that got started among the young have simply been passed down and have become quite the accepted thing. It will take a similar revolution in attitude amongst those of the younger generations for this trend in our society to be reversed.

 

It’s one thing if you don’t decide to have kids or get married. Not everybody is suited for those things. It’s one thing if you’re becoming a college professor or a medical doctor and your 20’s are eaten up by school. That school has a purpose, a purpose you presumably chose. Fair enough. Yet, feelings of wanderlust or general optimism about your burgeoning set of options do not comprise a life stage to me, and I cannot take this seriously. If you feel you have too many options, draw a tree diagram and put your favorites at the top.

What I have observed in my demographic, or perhaps I have to now say in my former demographic, is a lack of goal setting and planning. Like I said in my New Year’s resolution’s blog post a few weeks ago, setting a goal is one thing. Finding out the steps needed to achieve it and then doing those steps—that’s a whole other discussion. I will be the first to admit to not being goal obsessed on a day-to-day basis. I don’t get up every morning—as I have known some folks in grad school to do—an set out a list of that day’s goals, and if I don’t meet the goal I had for the day, I usually shrug, figure out why and meet it the next day along with that day’s goal as well. All that to say this: the reason my demographic is feeling at such loose ends is a distinct lack of willingness to first set goals and then to slog through the nasty work necessary to meet them.

It’s not for lack of intelligence and it’s not even because of laziness most of the time that all this has come to be. It’s a matter of what we are telling our younger adults. Our society is sending the young two messages. First, that it’s ok to put off life’s milestones. It’s quite acceptable. If you don’t want to do X right now, then don’t. You’ve got time. That’s the first message. The second is that we are societally obsessed with marketing youth. Youth is the prime stage of life in this country. You see it everywhere. You rarely see product ads targeting the middle aged or the retired or the elderly. What you do often see are companies seeking to hire “young and innovative” employees. “Young and innovative,” a phrase I’ve seen in various forms in many places. Never mind that older folks are capable of being innovative too, and never mind the fact that older employees or colleagues might be equipped with wisdom and insight that the young lack. We worship being young and staying young.

 

It’s time to rethink the whole mindset. Often, the only way to come by wisdom and insight is to live long enough and see much of life. That being said, the desire for the new and innovative you usually see among the young is a good one. Yet, it should be complimented by respect for the wisdom and the types of insight that often can only come with greater age. I don’t think I’ve obtained any particular wisdom at age 30, but I respect the benefits that age and more life experience can bring. I have lived through all of my 20’s, a decade of turbulent change as I continued marching through school and towards my chosen career path. Not marrying while in the throes of grad school was a good idea, and I have no regrets about marrying at 30. That being said, I can’t identify with giving control over to wanderlust and this inability to cope with so many options and choices that Arnett talked about. They were there in my own life, but I suppose I always had a different perspective than a lot of 20-somethings. What we need is not a new life stage. What we need is a new perspective.

Hobbies, Toils and Snares

            With my thirtieth birthday less than a week away, I’m feeling philosophical. Actually, I’m usually feeling philosophical, but my approaching birthday just gives me an excuse, were we to admit the truth. Still, this isn’t about age. That one’s going to be the topic of the next post. Today, I am reminded of a conversation I had ten years ago in a bar with a girl a couple years older than me.

Me, “So what do you do in your spare time?”

Her, “Honestly, I’m too busy for spare time.”

Me, “How so?”

Her, “I’m taking eighteen hours and double majoring in philosophy and English, so it just doesn’t leave me any time to spare.”

            Later on when I started my M.A. someone told me, “you won’t have time for hobbies or a social life. To us grad students, those tend to be foreign words.” Well, given that I do foreign languages, I tend to be pretty good about ‘foreign’ words. Now, here I am. I’m staring down the last several weeks of my doctorate, my dissertation in hand and grinding towards its completion, my job search well in hand and applying to more places every day, and even a wedding in hand, the subject of another future blog post. I’ve been a grad student for seven years and I’ve done it at two flagship state universities. I put these credentials out here so that you’ll know that I know what I’m talking about when I say that the typical grad student philosophy about time and hobbies in grad school—leastways as I’ve observed it—is bunk. TO those of you fellow grads who cling to your hobbies and resist the event horizon of your theses, I commend you. But there are far fewer people out there like us.

            The average graduate student, especially in the humanities, is buried in stacks and stacks of reading. They tend to hate non-curricular reading by the time they’re done, mostly because they haven’t had the time, so to speak, to pick up a book whose reading was purely for pleasure. They tend to loathe writing, mostly because what they’ve written over the past half-decade, aside from tweets, Facebook statuses or the odd blog post, has been in the way of term papers, projects or lesson plans and teaching materials, not to mention whatever terminal thesis they’re putting together. Finally, the average grad student sees themselves as swamped: no time for this, no time for that, and barely time enough for all the rest. I understand the mentality, but after all of these years and after as much work as all the rest of my peers, and a visual disability making it a lot harder I might add, I still disagree with the mindset.

 

            I was invited to sit on a panel of grad students a couple years back that was giving advice and answering questions for new grads in our department. They got to me and I was asked what advice I would give. My response? Sleep. I felt the silence rippling out towards the four corners of the room. My explanation was simple: most grad students stay up until 4:00 in the morning desperately working on papers and lessons under the mistaken impression that that is exactly what’s expected of them. Well, the working on papers and lessons definitely is expected, but the sleep deprivation, the emotionally ragged and precarious state of exhaustion and the feelings of hopeless time crunch and no life were, however, never intended at all. The first thing it all boils down to is sleep. I always got six to eight hours of sleep a night, not because I’m some super genius, but because I swore to myself, “this will not be me.” My peers laughed at me over the years, especially ones a bit farther along. “Oh, you just wait, Brad,” they’d say. “You’ll learn.” Well, I’m here now, and guess what! My philosophy is unchanged. I am finishing grad school no less sane than when I started—and how sane that was is indeed an open question—I still get eight hours of sleep a night, and I have my hobbies. And you know what else? My dissertation, job search and wedding planning are coming along fine.

            This is not to say I’m just tooting my own horn. But I do want to challenge my colleagues. Before I get to this exhortation, let me describe my own research life if just a little. When you want to write a paper or a thesis, you simply go to the library, check out what you want, and go. Rare books collection? No problem! Microfilm readers? Got that. Special one-hour reserve manuscripts? Right here. For me, it’s much harder. I first conduct exhaustive online searches, reading as much about the book as I can. Then I check it out, pick it up and take it to Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES). We sit down and slog through the table of contents and usually read a few chapter headings. I select what portions of the book I want, and as long as those selections don’t amount to most of the volume, we’re fine. If they do, I then have to buy the volume in question. Once I either have my selections picked out or the volume is bought, I then have to have the massive amount of material scanned and made accessible to me. This is in an ideal situation with an excellent disability resources office, which U. of I. has. If I was, say, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, additional steps would need to be taken, possibly including hiring human readers who would likely have to be paid for out of my own pocket, to read and record the material. And none of this, I might add, guarantees that the book I checked out will be useful to me. It might be invaluable, or it might prove as useless as a meat cleaver at a green salad convention.

            So for me to conduct research, the hurdles and the investment of time are far greater, on average, than they are for the average sighted grad student. Yet, I still have my hobbies. I keep my star trek DVD’s in a safe place and I still love playing chess. Am I busy? I am. Will I get busier? You can bet on it. However, I just refuse, flatly and without apology, to allow my work, as time consuming and fulfilling as it is, to become my existence.

 

            To bring this to a close, then, if you who read this are one of my friends or acquaintances who suffers from what a friend once called the black hole of grad student life, my recommendations are these:  first, reallocate your time so that you can sleep. Treat sleep as the single most important thing you’ll do in the next twenty-four hours, and build your whole day on the premise that you will get six to eight hours of sleep. Once done, then start thinking about relaxation. Resurrect at least one hobby and do it, whatever it is, as often as makes sense, once a day, once a week, something. Finally, once done, evaluate your stress levels. I can almost guarantee you they will have lowered. I hope to pass this advice on to students and advisees in the future, because I have found that, crazy-sounding or no, it still works.

2013 Boston Convention Highlights

Hello Everybody!         How to talk about Boston. I’m leaving the Bay State today, heading off to Logan Airport and then back to Illinois. Thank you to all those who have supported me thus far in my interviewing and job searching. It’s been hectic, and this blog post is an attempt to talk about some of that for those who haven’t had the benefit of my recaps on the phone. It’s also something of a permanent record for me that I will look back on in times to come. So, Boston … if you’ve never been there, know that it’s expensive. Even residents admit that it’s comparatively expensive. That being said, I found it to be a place with a sense of its heritage and identity. Boston definitely knows where it comes from.

 

            I landed at Logan just before 4:00 on Wednesday afternoon, and the first thing I heard was the Boston accent. Anyone who knows me at all knows how passionate I am about accents, and I couldn’t resist. I find that if I tell people that I do language and linguistics and that accents are interesting to me, they open up. So I got three people’s tips on my own Boston accent while I was here starting with Gale in the airport. Some of you may be cringing, imagining this conversation, but being a linguist, I can ask about sounds and vowels and what not and nearly always get away with it without causing offense. The folks I asked about it seemed intrigued that someone actually makes it a business to study how accents work, though that’s not my main research as you know. My talk of languages continued with Constantine, the Russian cab driver, who talked about what a great international city Boston is and how Russian’s such an interesting language, which it absolutely is. The staff at the hotel spoke with me in Spanish from time to time, and I’d never heard the types of Spanish that some of these folks spoke. In a word, it was intriguing.

 

            I got to the hotel, The Boston Hilton Back Bay, and God’s sense of humor was visited upon me. I was originally booked into room 1700. Being the perverse person I am, I asked whether room 1701 was available. The poor hotel desk clerk had no idea why I would even ask, but she bemusedly rebooked my room assignment when I indicated I wanted 1701 instead. John, the concierge who walked with me up to 1701, understood immediately. Being a fan of the original star trek himself, he knew that 1701 is the serial number of the U.S.S. Enterprise, and his amusement was reserved but plain. My amusement was and is unreserved. So I wound up in 1701, what I call the Enterprise Room.

            I found the Hilton easy to get around. Most of what I needed was right off the lobby, and the Hilton employs so-called ‘journey ambassadors,’ roving concierges as it were whose job is to watch for guests who appear to need something and then to fill that need with dispatch. The first thing I needed was to find a relieving area for Delaney. John’s first suggestion was, “well, there’s a park a couple hundred yards down the way. That might work. “No, I’m afraid not. I settled on this poor, miserable little sapling planted in front of the hotel in its own patch of dirt. There is a row of trees in front of the hotel, and I’m sure in Spring they’re beautiful. When it’s 8 degrees in early January though, they’re probably not at their best. I had to train Delaney to pee and poop here, showing her that it was an ok spot and that, small as it was, it was all the spot she was going to get. I couldn’t let her range on her leash and walk back and forth, because on one side of the tree there was an active parking lane with cabs zooming in and out, while on the other side, guests arrived and left, walking up and down the sidewalk where I was standing. One illustrative moment happened the first day. There I am, bending down with a baggy over my freezing right hand,. A cab was pulling in at my left ear in the parking lane, and on my right side, I hear this cultured, older gentleman’s voice say in a classic Boston accent, “a bit backwaads, farthah back, there you aa.” Nice!

            Now on to food. I’ve had more clam chowder in the last five days than I’ve had in the last five months, and every bowl was delicious. The hotel’s chowder and that of the Cheesecake Factory were what I normally expect in a cream-based chowder, but the Summer Shack, a seafood restaurant adjacent to the hotel, has a spicy fish and crab chowder made with a dark rum that is to die for. The food was excellent overall, and I was able to find decent prices. My father watched me eating corned beef hash and eggs with some skepticism, but for my own part I liked it.

 

            The interviews started the next day. I first had to replace my convention badge. Then there was the question of how to get to the interviews. Had I chosen, I could have walked the extensive indoor mall of the Prudential Center and made it, eventually, to the Weston where the interviews were taking place. It was more practical, however, to take the ADA shuttle there and back. I needed to ask for directions to the ballroom and thence to the tables where my interviewers were sitting. That was not the easiest place to negotiate. In one case, a professor from one of my schools came to meet me at the door to the ballroom and took me to the table himself. I was not expecting that, and it was very kind of him. For the Grinnell interview, rather than going to the big exhibit ballroom where most interviews took place, I went to the 34^th floor of the hotel. Thank Heaven there was braille signage on the doors, because I walked around that whole floor, Delaney in tow, before locating the room I needed. Note to blind job seekers everywhere:  get to the location early, always. Delaney attended all the interviews and she was perfectly behaved.

            The interviews themselves were challenging, but thanks to the extensive preparation and advice I had from my present and past professors, I went in loaded with information and strategies for dealing with the questions I knew would come. They happened in this order:  Kansas Thursday, Georgia and Grinnell on Friday. For each interview, I carried a manila folder containing stacks of photocopied course outlines, both for courses they have that I could teach and for courses they don’t have which I could offer. The Hilton’s staff was invaluable here, because I chose to use the business center to print and sort my materials. Each course outline was copied for the number of interviewers that were there, and the folders each contained different sets, depending on who got what course outlines. So every time a course was mentioned, the folder opened, and out came the outline. This is, I hope, being taken as evidence of my preparedness and forethought. With Georgia, it actually became humorous since course outlines just kept coming out. At one point, one interviewer asked, “now I’d like to switch gears a little bit and talk about Germanic linguistics. You don’t have anything about that in your folder, do you?” Pulling out sets of outlines for two relevant courses, I said, “I do, as it happens.” And in a follow-up question, another professor on that committee went, “my syllabus for next week isn’t finished yet. That’s not in your folder too, is it?” As I said, a humorous moment.

            The questions were not unusual, though one school did ask some disability-related questions. Rather than do what a blind professor friend of mine did and tell them they can’t ask those questions—the best way of insuring that you don’t get any more offers from them—I faced the questions head on, answered them calmly and thoroughly, and invited them to ask any other blindness-related questions they might have had. They seemed to appreciate my willingness to be open about my disability, and while there were no more questions bearing on blindness and my work, I suspect that how I handled those very tricky questions at the start may have set the tone for the rest of the interview. Let’s face it. The interview could have died right there, but I decided that openness and being receptive to their very real questions was a much sounder strategy than dwelling on what is or isn’t a ‘legal’ question or taking any offense at the questions they asked. While I wasn’t sure how that interview was going to go since it started there, I was pleased to see that it turned into a relaxing and enjoyable experience. That’s not to say the questions were easy. They weren’t. But I wasn’t caught flatfooted by anything. Mind you, I can think of better ways to answer just about everything I was asked, but while I am totally blind, my own hindsight is still 20/20.

 

            My father and his wife arrived in Boston Friday afternoon, and he took us to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory Friday evening where we all had rib eyes. Diabetes be darned, I had one of their cheesecakes. I felt bad for him, because I knew I was exhausted, worn-out from two interviews in one day. He understood though. I took that opportunity to tell him about Nicole’s and my wedding plans, and his reaction was good. While not without reservations, he said that, given all the contributing factors, it makes a certain logistical sense for us to marry when and where we are just so long as we don’t have kids right away. We’re going to take steps to see that we do not. So it was good to have his support, reserved though it might be. Having a job offer in hand would, of course, be much more ideal, and I’m working hard to see that happen.

            Yesterday, Saturday, was another important day. I was scheduled to present my dissertation data in a conference session. My father was apparently thrilled to see my name on the actual program. While I hadn’t thought about the fact that it was there, I suppose if I had a son, that would be a thrill for me too. I had to get the two of them special badges so that they could attend the session. It took place in the early afternoon, and only two of us made it in to present. I kept my presentation short, around 15 minutes. The questions I fielded were many, and my father, who was observing the audience, told me later that the audience was highly engaged with my material, nodding, looking at me as I spoke, etc. Overall, the presentation went very well, and for my part, I enjoyed the questions more than the talk. The talk, after all, I can give any time. I’ll give it at my doctoral defense, but not every audience has those people who will ask those questions.

 

            I passed a quiet evening last night. Though, I did venture out to the Summer Shack a block over. I wanted to have the full experience and to order food that I couldn’t get just anywhere, at Red Lobster, for example. So the fish and crab chowder was excellent, as was the swordfish. They also had bananas Foster, and I had it. I’d never had bananas Foster before. It’s the sort of dessert you see in the movies or in books, but no one seems to really serve it. What can I say? It was great! I had all this, including an appetizer of fried clams and a soft drink, for $50. I call that a bargain. So I recommend the Summer Shack at 50 Dalton Street in Boston if you’re ever in downtown.

 

            That’s it for Boston. Now, I keep my fingers crossed for callbacks. In this case they’ll be emails. The schools told me they’ll notify applicants from mid-January to early February depending on the school, and they intend, it seems, to let us know regardless of whether we succeed in being invited to a second-round interview. So, I’ll be praying now for second-round interviews. My thanks to all my professors, past and present, who have helped and who continue to help me prepare, and my thanks and love to Nicole, who literally watched all of this since the first cover letter was drafted over three months ago. Now, it’s time to head back to Champaign.

 

 

Better New Year's Resolutions

            Hello and Happy New Year’s. Come to think of it, I’ve never posted a New Year’s Day blog before. So here goes. I’m not hung over this morning. The most I indulged in was a double pepperoni pizza from Papa John’s. Nicole and I intended to split a double pepperoni and black olive, her olives on her half, my pepperoni on my half. Well, they got the pepperoni right, but the olives covered the whole pizza. Needless to say, I couldn’t eat the thing and the store kindly brought me a free pizza to make up for the mistake. And we all had pizza happily ever after, world without end, amen.

            As I sit here writing on this first morning of 2013, the tornado alert siren is sounding outside as it does on every first Tuesday of the month for testing, and Delaney is trying valiantly to get me to play with her. This dog has an unerring ability to know just when I’m busy and to get hyper just then. But I wouldn’t trade her in for all the tea in China, though whether or not the tea in China is worth having is a question to which I don’t know the answer at present. Until I do, nothing would be a proper trade in exchange for it anyway. But, to quote Dickens, “the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile, and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it or the country’s done for.”

 

            Yesterday, as a way to prepare, after a fashion, for writing this blog entry about the new year, I looked back over my blog. I expected to find—once I’d collected all the entries together—that I had produced fifty or maybe eighty pages of material. Some of my posts were rather long, admittedly. What I came up with was a hundred and seventy pages and some 115,000 words. Maybe that can just be my dissertation. Somehow, I just don’t think my advisor would go for it. I collected it all together because this year I want to copy edit it. Some of the entries are rather rough-looking in places owing to my less than proficient handling of the web tools involved, and it helps that Blogspot has made changes making it easier for me to use. So I want to clean it up. Is that a New Year’s resolution? Well, it is a resolution at any rate.

 

            My one trouble with New Year’s resolutions has nothing to do with the resolutions themselves. On the whole, the resolutions most people make are well-intended and would be helpful. If most people succeeded in carrying out just one typical New Year’s resolution to its conclusion, most of us would probably feel happier about our ability to set and meet goals. No, I say there’s nothing wrong with resolving to lose weight or do a better job in school or work or with resolving to be a better spouse or parent or friend etc. Nor do I see any problem with making these resolutions at the start of the new year. Years are just there so that we can divide and mark time, after all, and New Year’s Day makes for a good starting point. New year, new plan. I understand.

            What troubles me is how we go about making our resolutions. We usually make them on New Year’s Eve at a party with a glass of champagne in one hand. Then we set about them in January with a will, but by February or late March, we’ve flagged in our efforts. Life intervenes. Taxes come due. Work gets in the way, and we think, “Oh well. Guess I’ll try that again next year.” I see this as such a commonplace pattern because two things are usually missing.

            The first thing missing is a plan. Some people are great at planning, so good at it that they have no idea how to do anything spontaneously. Others are so bad at planning that the easiest tasks are hardest on them if they have to plan them. If you are anything like me, you’re somewhere in the middle. I have no problem with detailed planning, but I also know how to let a day be whatever it’s going to be without my feeling the need to plan it all out. A New Year’s resolution is essentially a goal. I’m going to lose weight. I’m going to budget more wisely, whatever it is. When we state our resolutions at midnight, we state the goals themselves. What we forget is that most of those goals take strategizing and careful execution. You want to lose weight? Ok, fine. How are you going to do it. You want to be a better husband or wife? Ok, that’s very good. Where will you start? You want to be a better manager of your money? Alright, where is your money going now, and do you have a monthly or weekly budget? We set goals without making the plans necessary to attain them, and so our New Year’s resolutions often fall flat.

            I said there were two things missing, however. The other thing is the resolve itself. Some would call it the stick-to-itness. Exercising is no fun at all. Budgeting is no fun at all. Maybe counseling or whatever is no fun at all. So we slack off after a few weeks because we’re not seeing any results come March or April. The problem with this mindset is that a year as twelve months long. It may be next December before your goal is realized! Most folks from what I have seen, however, don't consider that there New Year’s resolution may take the whole of this new year to make it happen. Or, they don’t realize that if you really mean it, you’re just as bound to that resolution in September as you were in mid-January.

 

So then, our resolutions should be good ones, things worth doing. But they should also be carefully planned out. I know one of mine is to increase charitable giving of my money. That’s going to require me to do a few things:  to decide how much and when to give, and to whom to give it. Some of it’s purely logistical. If I want to contribute regularly to my church, and I do, then I have to work in an ATM stop at some point to collect the money to do that. That’s not my only New Year’s resolution, but it’s the one I’ll share for today. It’ll require budgeting and planning on my part, not to mention resolve.

 

            I hope your New Year’s Eve was safe and enjoyable. I’m glad to see we didn’t start the new year by diving off the fiscal cliff. Though Congress, in its usual fashion, walked right up to the edge of the cliff and stared out over the abyss before deciding not to jump. I knew they would. I told all my friends and family that we wouldn’t see a deal until December 31, and that’s just when we did see one. Here’s a hint, resolve not to plan your lives the way Congress plans its affairs. You’ll be happier and so will everyone else. Have a good one.

On the Gun Control Discourse

            Hi Everyone! I hope your Christmas was joyful and peaceful. Here it is, New Year’s Eve, eve, so to speak. The week since Christmas was quiet and mostly uneventful. There were a couple of exceptions. Aren’t there usually? One of our packages, sent by Nicole’s family, won’t be delivered until January thanks to UPS’s high degree of logistical competence. It contains a lot of homemade Christmas candy and what not, so we hope it’s still good by the time it arrives. Meanwhile, I came down with a minor something or other a few days ago after eating a philli-cheesesteak sandwich, which I’ll never be having again. That’s alright. A sleeve of saltine crackers and a two liter of ginger ale saw me through. I’ve never appreciated how good the real Canada Dry actually is until now. It’s now the Sunday before the conference, and while I do have a special post planned for New Year’s Eve, I wanted to take a few minutes and weigh in, finally, on one of the issues facing us today.

 

            In light of the recent massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, we’ve embarked on a nationwide discussion about guns in America, who should have them, who should not have them, and so on and so forth. In the main, this discourse is a good thing. I see nothing wrong with a healthy airing of divergent views that might lead to positive legislative changes. To that end I commend the NRA for at least taking part in the national conversation. What interests me is that a lot of folks who are in my age bracket and who are university-related are advocating a total ban on the ownership of handguns or, at least, bans so restrictive as to amount to the same such as the existing bans in the United Kingdom and Japan, or the controls found in countries like Germany. Such ban advocates argue, reasonably enough, that the number of handgun incidents per capita is much lower in those countries than here. In fact, in Britain it’s 40 times lower. Japanese firearm possession is extremely heavily regulated and has been since the seventeenth-century, and without a license, a Japanese citizen may not even hold a firearm in his or her hands. In Germany, gun ownership is restricted to those who can prove a valid reason for ownership, not including self-defense, and licenses are forbidden to those who don’t meet the eligibility criteria including mental competency. In addition, the ‘Waffengesetz’ or Weapons Act, bans automatic weapons in German civilians’ hands altogether. So that being said, why not ban them here, some ask? Why indeed.

 

            I learned to target shoot on a farm outside Clarksville, Tennessee. The man who taught me, who I call my godfather, had a hard time figuring out a teaching method as you can imagine. A friend of his suggested he stand next to the target and strike it with a wrench. Somehow, my godfather just didn’t think that one was a good idea. Ultimately, we developed a method whereby he would peg a stone at the upright metal target and I would aim and shoot. We eventually developed such a streamlined technique that I was ultimately able to go off the sound of the stone striking the first target and to hit all five in the line of standup targets from my knowledge of their positions alone. It was neat to watch it happen from what I’m told. As a totally blind guy, I’m here to tell you it was even neater to pull it off.

            I have no problem with responsible folks owning firearms. America is, and has always been, a gun culture. The first colonists bore muskets for hunting and self-defense. That they also sometimes used them to perpetrate slaughters of their own against the various Native American tribes they encountered is a fact I won’t ignore, so I mention it lest I be accused of lacking a balanced view of our history. Every period of our history has been replete with the image of the gun. Like it or not, Americans are people of the firearm. Unlike countries like Great Britain, the firearm wasn’t something we developed here and then regulated. We brought it here and then developed it further. It has always been with us. Some guns, such as the Colt pistols of the late nineteenth-century, are historical symbols of our past. The settling of the West comes to mind.

            While I don’t own firearms myself and likely never will, I recognize the role they have played in our cultural history. Then there’s the perennial question of Second Amendment rights. Regardless of the volumes of case law surrounding it, the best place to look for an interpretation of the thing is the text itself. The amendment, as it was ratified by the states and approved by Jefferson, reads, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

            A militia unit was made of civilians who bore arms on occasion for local defense. They were by no means a standing army, and militia units were essential in the days before standing armies were both large enough and logistically worthwhile enough to have in the U.S. The rough equivalent today would be our various states’ national guard units, which can be called up by the governor. So, I have to remind two groups of people of something here. To the gun nuts, the Second Amendment was never intended to be a license for rampant gun hoarding. To the “Ban Most or All Guns” crowd, you will find that the Second Amendment will prevent this from happening unless we amend the Constitution yet again. While the drafters of the Constitution didn’t see any reason people should own forty or fifty guns at a time for giggles, they certainly didn’t intend to have a disarmed populace.

 

            The biggest problem I have with these proposals of total bans or near-total bans is this:  they won’t work. This isn’t Britain or Japan. If we swept in and tried to relieve most folks of their guns, we’d have a second revolution on our hands. More practically, however, is the fact of the black market. Remember prohibition? Ok, so maybe you weren’t as geeky as me and you didn’t pay attention in high school or college history classes. That’s alright. The bottom-line is prohibition failed. It failed utterly, and part of its results were rings of gangsters and profiteering bootleggers smuggling booze across the borders into the United States. Ultimately, the prohibition amendment was overturned. The same and worse would happen with guns. Do you think most of the street gangs and organized crime syndicates are walking around carrying legally registered handguns? If you think they are, stop a member and ask for his permit to carry or PC. Let me know how that goes. So to conclude, I’m all for responsible ownership and responsible oversight of purchase. I could even understand banning certain types of military-grade hardware. I see no reason for Joe Smith to own an AK47 or an H and K submachine gun. In fact, for quite a while, those items were illegal. They may still be in some areas. But I am very cautious about this enthusiasm I’m seeing for banning all or most guns or trying to turn America into a gun-free society. Guns are part of the American identity much like the dollar or the flag or, though I’m only somewhat certain about this anymore, the bible. So I think that whatever we do, we should take our cultural heritage into account and act sensibly with respect towards the future.

My Christmas Day Contemplations

            Good Morning Everybody, and Merry Christmas to all. Just as I posted a short blog entry back on Thanksgiving, I want to put up a short one today. Today of all days. First a bit of catch-up. Since I last posted anything, three of the places I applied to have contacted me for initial job interviews, the University of Georgia, Kansas State, and Grinnell College, a small, highly selective liberal arts college in eastern Iowa. That last isn’t a professor position. It’s a two-year postdoc for teaching and research. All of these interviews happen next week starting on Thursday in Boston. I have one final week to prepare, and I like to think I will use the time wisely. However, yesterday and today, I’ve resolutely stayed away from university-related things, because it is Christmas! It’s also my guide dog’s birthday today, and that’s just convenient. She’s a Christmas puppy, and this guarantees I can’t ever forget her birthday.

 

            Today what’s on my mind are the Christmas haters. I’m talking about the relatively small and very vocal minority of folks who think that Christmas should be done away with or at least that all public displays of Christmas that have any religious overtones whatever should be banned in case anyone, like themselves, gets offended. This would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that many places across the country have banned everything from the singing of Christmas carols to displays of Christmas colors or nativity scenes, and the usual rout to use when taking away such things is the civil court. Here’s one example,  http://www.wnd.com/2004/12/28047/. That’s an old case, but things like it still go on. Just read that article and see what you think.

            Now, before I go on, let me pause to acknowledge one fact. I know that there are groups of people who, either collectively or individually, don’t celebrate Christmas in America. That’s fine. There have always been groups of people in this country who don’t celebrate it, and I don’t think they should have to if they don’t want to. I’m not going to go into their houses and make them exchange gifts or sing “O Come All Ye Faithful.” What I object to, vehemently and passionately, is this:  I can’t stand it when I see people trying to use the First Amendment as a weapon to take away my own First Amendment liberties.

            The First Amendment, in so far as it concerns freedom of religion, only guarantees two things. First, it guarantees that the government won’t impose a church on you. There will never be a First American Church with the president as its religious leader in the same way that the British monarch has headed the head of the Anglican church since Henry VIII. That won’t happen. It also guarantees that you can celebrate your religion in your own way as long as your religion doesn’t involve human sacrifice or other generally disruptive practices. I’m happy to say most don’t. So, you’ll never see the government banning the practice of Islam or Judaism or Hinduism or Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy or Wicca. Leastways if a government makes that attempt, and there have been times when I wonder about Obama, anyone challenging the law based on the First Amendment would have an irrefutable case. That’s it! That’s all the First Amendment guarantees as far as religion is concerned. I’ve read it.

            So having said that, if you don’t celebrate Christmas, that’s fine. I celebrate it. My family celebrates it. Everyone I know personally celebrates it, and most of the people I’m only nodding acquaintances with (including quite a number of visitors from other countries) celebrate it. In fact, over 70% of people in this country celebrate it in some way, and I’m not even talking about the religious observances. My point is this:  we have that right. If I choose to wish someone a Merry Christmas, so be it. It’s on them to tell me they don’t celebrate it. My experience with this has been, however, that most ordinary folks who don’t observe Christmas, that is, most people not inclined to rush to court because you have a nativity painting on your door, will either return your ‘Merry Christmas’ in the spirit it was offered or they’ll tell you very nicely that they don’t celebrate Christmas, but they wish you a great holiday anyway. Either approach is just fine. As I said, I’m not trying to make anyone celebrate Christmas who doesn’t want to.

            Having said that, my patience with political correctness is limited in the extreme. The fact of the matter is that most folks in America celebrate Christmas in one way or another. That’s our right and we’ll continue to insist on it, but my question to Christmas haters is this:  what are you really objecting to? What exactly is wrong with a holiday that commemorates peace and good will towards one’s fellow human beings? The answer, of course, is nothing. So if I choose, as some professors of mine in the past have done, to have pictures of Christmas scenes on my desk or my office door, what of it? If my Jewish colleague across the way has a small menorah in their desk, is that supposed to offend me? Should I insist that that person not celebrate Chanukah because it imposes their morality on me? Should we German teachers, for example, not teach our students about German Christmas celebrations because someone in the classroom may not celebrate it? Of course not! This feels like common sense to me. But if there is one thing I have learned, it’s that common sense isn’t common at all.

            My one piece of advice to the Christmas haters in America is this. To quote Ebenezer Scrooge, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.” The difference here is that unlike the Christmas haters, I’ll actually leave you alone if you don’t celebrate it. God forbid that my home or neighborhood or town should celebrate it though. Then all hell breaks loose. I’m put in mind of the last line of James Finn Garner’s satirical poem “’Twas the Night Before Solstice.” Santa’s amused and exasperated parting words sum up my feelings about these people quite nicely, “Happy Christmas to all, but get over yourselves.”

A Short Thanksgiving Day Post

            Happy Thanksgiving Day! I’m sitting here on a leather (or maybe it’s a pleather) sofa in the Donnellson part of Nashville Tennessee. The cooking will start in a while. Thankfully, it’s not one of those Thanksgivings where you have to get up at 4:00 in the morning to start the turkey, dressing and crescent rolls. Actually, we’re doing up a 9.5 lb. boneless smoked ham. I have high expectations for it. This year is a team effort. Nick’s doing the ham, I’m doing the mashed potatoes, Nick’s doing the green bean casserole and Ashley’s doing squash casserole. Dessert was supplied by our friend Jen who won’t be here for most of today. So between the four of us, it’s set.

 

I decided, this being the 22^nd day of the gratitude tradition that’s been taking place on Facebook, to make this Thanksgiving Day posting a bit more substantial even if no one reads it. It’s interesting to me that Thanksgiving falls on November 22 this year. In fact, this is the earliest possible date it could fall on, because Thanksgiving always falls on the fourth Thursday in November, and November began on a Thursday this year. Today I’ll start by looking back to 1963. Most people know 11/22/63 as the day Kennedy was assassinated. Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63 has definitely brought that back to public awareness. What fewer people know is that on that same day, 11/22/63, the authors C. S. Lewis, known for his Narnia Chronicles among other things, and Aldous Huxley, known for Brave New World among other things, also died, three very influential men. Peter Kreeft, a Catholic theologian and author wrote the novel Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley, where the three men gather and chat in purgatory. I mean to read that book at some point.

            Today is a day to count your blessings. We should do this every day, but if we never do it any other day of the year, Thanksgiving Day seems to be the right one to do it on. I am grateful for so many things: for a great fiancé who will soon be a great wife, for friends who really are quality friends e.g. the people I’m here with today, for family that is supportive (not something many people have), for job opportunities whose applications are in hand, for an advisor that continues to coach me towards the end of that dissertation and the start of that first job, for access to books, something that used to be exceptionally limited for the blind and something many blind now seem to take for granted, and, lastly, for my own health which is a lot better than it otherwise might be. Today, my friend Ashley’s father is spending his Thanksgiving in the hospital with a tracheotomy tube in his throat. So if anyone out there is complaining about their lower back pain or their diabetes or what have you, I can personally attest that it can always be worse.

            This is going to be a short blog post, and it’s time to wrap it up. I thank God for all of the blessings listed above, and I hope you take a moment to thank him as well. I’ll leave you with this blessing: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace” (Numbers 6:24-26). Be good to each other.