Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

Bill Ayers has been a teacher at U of Illinois since 1987, and Christopher Kennedy just urged the university board to reject his emeritus status because he intends to "vote against conferring the honorific title of our university to a man whose body of work includes a book dedicated in part to the man who murdered my father, Robert F. Kennedy. There can be no place in a democracy to celebrate political assassinations or to honor those who do so." The professor already has the vote of confidence of the university by being hired there in the first place.  I guess I had a little more belief in Camelot than I thought because I'm really disappointed to see this from a Kennedy. When Emeritus Isn't Automatic from Inside Higher Ed

I got some goodies lately. Story in 12 words, courtesy of Australia. From someone else in the US.  I love it! Who even knows the national symbol of Singapore is a Merlion??

I'm having an emotionally strange day in which I feel like there are two very distinct versions of me.  First, there's the me that's feeling uncaccountably sad.  Contributing factors:     I'm single.  I maybe could go out with someone, but I'm not emotionally ready to do that and even if I was, I don't think this person would be a good fit for me.  I refuse to date or fall in love with anyone else who isn't good enough for me, or just plain isn't good to me.  I foresee being single for a while.  Even people with convictions get lonely.     I recently hung out with the person who I could probably date.  I've tried to be clear about that not happening, but I worry that it's not, so I'm a little uncomfortable all the time, and instead of it being a good time, it just makes me sad because I know this person is lonely too, and I don't want to contribute to that.     A friend from middle school just posted al...

I've been randomly picking things off my Netflix instant queue, added at some time or another because it was on a list or some blog I read commented on it.  It is an odd assortment of films that don't really seem to follow any rhyme or reason.  Hence, in the middle of this beautiful almost fall day, I ended up watching Blue Velvet . My fiction class last semester, Monsieur Woody Jones , and this random dart Netflixing have somehow added up to a recent introduction to film noire, a genre I really haven't enjoyed previously.  I'm not sure I'd say I enjoy it now, but I have been intrigued by the portrayal of women in these films.  Blue Velvet was released in 1986, and I'll admit I don't know much about the film history of that period.  Older classics and modern films I'm pretty familiar with, but in general I seemed to have skipped over much of the 80s. Because I don't know much about film from the 80s, I don't know much about how women were com...

Today via email, for the first time, I was referred to as David's "assistant."  Yes, I know that my title is Research Assistant, but my business card title is Project Manager.  And I do research and work for the center, and yes, I suppose I assist David.  I have met and come to rely on a number of assistants, administrative and otherwise, in the past couple weeks.  They are some of the hardest working people here, and I deeply respect what they do and how underappreciated they are.  And yet, today, I felt my entire body stiffen.  My parents did not raise me to be someone else's assistant. I think this just hit me at a vulnerable time.  I've been watching my boss carefully lately.  He's fairly young to have the amount of academic responsibility he has, and I'm going to soak it all up like a sponge.  I'm also going to learn about university finances and I'm sure one day that will come in handy too.  And in the past couple years...

Joe Purdy is inducing melancholia today, the kind that comes on quiet afternoons when I'm alone here.  Today I realized I've been here long enough that I needed to dust the bookshelves.  In my mind, and occasionally in conversation, I still refer to Columbia as home.  I'm settling here, but it still doesn't feel like home.  It feels like this house is home, but it's just in a neighborhood that's very far from the town I live in. It's been a whirlwind few weeks.  My job officially started, and I'm learning all about how university finances work.  It's a lot of stuff I never thought I'd know or even need to know, about how grant funds work, how hard it is sometimes to just buy a stapler, and how many different kinds of funds there are and what you can and cannot do with each one.  It turns out to all be distressingly complicated.  It's my job though now, and I knew that coming here.  On the bright side, I like knowing how things work, and I...

Snow by George Bilgere A heavy snow, and men my age   all over the city are having heart attacks in their driveways, dropping their nice new shovels   with the ergonomic handles that finally did them no good. Gray-headed men who meant no harm,   who abided by the rules and worked hard for modest rewards, are slipping softly from their mortgages,   falling out of their marriages. How gracefully they swoon— that lovely, old-fashioned word—   from dinner parties, grandkids, vacations in Florida. They should have known better   than to shovel snow at their age. If only they'd heeded the sensible advice of their wives   and hired a snow-removal service. But there's more to life than merely being sensible. Sometimes   a man must take up his shovel and head out alone into the snow. from the Writer's Almanac