Thessaly's Tooth

And so I’m back, from outer space. So, it seems a month has gone by with nary a blog post from me. And what do I have to show for it?
Well, Andy and I visited Ann Arbor one weekend. It was lots of fun. We made the tour of used bookstores and other quirky shops, and ate at a variety of restaurants. We also checked out the art & archaeology museums and the arboretum.
I’ve been wrangling with plans for my trip to Turkey later this summer. I’ll be at an excavation site from the beginning of August to the beginning of October, and Andy and I are hoping to do some traveling in Europe before or after. I’ve been trying to work on booking the flights, which has proved to be surprisingly difficult. Turns out it costs $200 more to stay a week or two in a European city on the way back, than to buy an entirely new ticket home. I think I have a workable plan now, it requires me to spend two consecutive nights on a plan on the way out, but it gets me to where I need to be on time.
That’s been occupying most of my mental energy lately. I’m also trying to learn German and Turkish and re-learn Biblical Hebrew and, oh yeah, that dissertation thing.

Andy and I have embarked on a new project–a history blog! Please let us know what you think–and contributions as well as comments will be gratefully accepted!

If everyone lived like me, we’d need 3.6 planets.
Thanks…Happy Earth Day to you too.
Reminiscense Alert: On Earth Day in 1990, I attended a little Earth Day festival at Pioneers Park near Lincoln. I was still in high school and was very into environmentalism, but then who wasn’t. Even at the time it seemed like a bit of a fad: I clearly remember one all-star environmentalism special on TV starring Bette Midler as Mother Earth. Disturbing.
A lot of things from those heady days have now become institutionalized: lots of towns have recycling facilities available, and now hybrid cars are getting popular (this spike in gasoline prices might turn out to be great for the environment), but gradually people seem to have lost interest on an individual level. For example, back in the day one of the big things was less packaging and not using disposable items; while over the past five to ten years it seems that more and more disposable items–one-use detergent-soaked cleansing towels and the like–have crept back onto the market.
My interest in environmental issues has been renewed of late. It never really waned, but when I lived in Chicago I just didn’t have many options. On the plus side (environmentally speaking) I didn’t have a car, so I had to walk or take public transportation. I couldn’t afford an air conditioner, so I had to just deal with the summers. On the other hand, though, I wasn’t able to recycle much stuff. I could haul paper, glass, and aluminum to campus or to the grocer store to recycle, but everything else had to go in the trash. Chicago supposedly had some kind of recycling pick-up, but I don’t think it worked for apartment-dwellers–at least, I never figured out how it could work.
Here in GR, my options, or lack thereof, are different. I have a car and it’s really the only practical means of transportation for me. I can walk to local stores, but the grocery store is really too far to pack groceries home from. Walking or biking into the city, however, would be all but impossible: back roads are convoluted and don’t link up in logical ways, and biking on the highways would be extremely dangerous and probably illegal. The bus is an option, but takes about 3x as long as driving if you have to transfer; and while I would actually prefer taking the bus to driving it’s not a very efficient use of time. On the other hand, having a car gives me access to recycling facilities and farmer’s markets–so it’s a bit of a toss-up.
A lot of the issues which drive my need for 3.6 earths come not from my preferred behavior, but from available options. I’d like to buy more locally-produced food, but this is Michigan: it’s only available a few months of the year; of course, I could be better about seeking it out when it is available. Unfortunately, driving is the least efficient mode of transportation, but it’s also the only choice in a lot of cases, and it allows me to access the recycling facilities and the locally-produced food.
I’m not really one to propose governmental solutions to every problem, but more and more I’ve been wishing we had more public transportation options in this country. It would be great to be able to travel within and between cities by bus or train like in Europe, but the problem is that we have much larger spaces to deal with here than in European countries, and most people still prefer the convenience of driving their own cars. But if traffic congestion, smog, and gas prices get much worse, and if public transportation were a more attractive option (besides the time thing, I have to admit that the bus does get a bit dingy, and when you go over those picturesque brick streets downtown you’re shaken around like a maraca), maybe it could happen. I would love to have more efficient public transportation in town, and to be able take a bus or train out to the beach in the summer, or even to be able to get to Chicago using public transportation instead of driving (yes, there’s Amtrak, but it’s expensive, unreliable, and its schedule makes it all but useless to me).
Anyhow, that’s my issue this Earth Day: public transportation. I’d love to see some candidate try to make political capital off of that one.

An odd thing happened to me as I was walking along a mall yesterday. I passed a Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and I felt my pace slacken, my head turn, and I thought to myself, “Oh, I would like to go in there to look around.”
Then I thought, why? Why after all these years of indifference to towels, sheets, and the like, do I suddenly want to take time out of my life to browse around amongst them? I don’t need any towels or sheets, and even if I did, up until yesterday I’d have thought it would be one of those errands I kept putting off in hopes it would take care of itself.
A similar thing happened to me with country music. I grew up loathing the genre, and then one day in my early twenties I suddenly liked it. I don’t know why. Nothing about it had changed, so it must be me. I figured it was just an occupational hazard of living in Nebraska: I held out for so long, then it wormed its way around and over my mental block (as Lucy of Peanuts fame once put it).
Or maybe it’s buried in the genes, hidden away until I reach a particular point in my life span when it suddenly manifests itself. At 22 it was country music, at 31 it’s linens. What could possibly be next?

“APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”
I’m back…sans witty comments or insightful ideas, I’m afraid. Mellow spring weather puts me out of the mood to be strident. I’ve been caged indoors with my own personality all winter, and now seems a good time to give it a rest.
So…we went to Chicago on Saturday–me, Andy, and a friend of ours. They went to a game store and I spent the afternoon at the U of C library. The library, like most, if not all, other aspects of the U of C, has given me quite a few moments of pure aggravation. Books are frequently not where they are supposed to be, due, I guess, to the fact that they get read a lot. But, I got some stuff done, turned in some dumb paperwork to my advisor’s empty office, and visited the C-Shop (that’s me on the left; at least it feels like I’ve been at the U of C for at least 63 years). So all’s well once it’s finally over, to adapt a quotation (not that it is over yet, I still have a dissertation to write).
Today, I must go to work and try to put together something to say for my proposal hearing, which is a week from today. Guess I’ll get on that.

The snow has finally receded enough from the patio to reveal that my bulbs are up! It’s Spring!

All of this DSL stuff will probably mean we are getting rid of cable, which means, to all intents and purposes, we are getting rid of TV. I confidently assured Andy that we could get bunny ear antennae for the TV and still get Arrested Development and so forth. But we all know that that might or might not be true. I had a TV with bunny ears for a while, and using it involved turning the TV itself as well as the bunny ears this way and that depending on what channel you were trying to get and what kind of weather we were having. It’s a challenge, and it keeps you from taking TV for granted–you get a workout while watching as you continuously adjust the television, your chair, and your position within the room.
The only other time I’ve lived in a place where I had regular access to cable television was my senior year in college, when the lounge TV was controlled by a cabal of females instead of the usual beer-drinking sports-watching males. (The lounge was actually habitable by persons in their normal states of consciousness because it was a substance-free dorm (meaning no drinking or smoking, obviously, not that we were ethereal. The folks in the Bill were the ethereal ones, having stolen actual ether from the bio department for…well, you know what for. Their particular brand of licentiousness was shut down shortly thereafter when the administration changed their dorm to all-female. I shouldn’t be telling this story), hence the upholstery had not been soaked with beer and even less pleasant semi-liquid matter which I don’t want to think about any more, thanks).
Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh, yeah, cable. Our feminine cabal didn’t make particularly good use of it; I remember watching a good bit of a Tammy marathon one Saturday afternoon, for example. But though I’ve watched more than my share of TV over the years, I’ve hardly watched it at all here, for whatever reason. When I turn on the TV now, I can hardly stand the commercials–so many of them, and all so annoying. And the TV shows are not much better. I was reading on a blog the other day about how TV show writers have to “please the red-stater,” meaning they have to dumb down their content so that those mouth-breathing morons in the middle of the country won’t get mad becaue they’re too stupid to understand TV. Too stupid to understand TV…what a sad thought. And as a red-stater, I guess I should hold myself responsible for this unfunny waste of a gazillion dollars a year that would be of more use absolutely anywhere else. But I don’t, of course.
Hang on, how did this turn into a rant? I was talking about TV. I think. What was I talking about? Maybe watching too much TV really does have an affect on one’s attention…span…thingy…hey, a shiny thing!
p.s. Horrors, it looks like I linked you to the wrong “Tammy” earlier. Good thing I took plenty of time to click links on my own blog this afternoon, instead of working on my dissertation proposal that’s due next week. This grievous oversight has now been remedied.

This doesn’t sound that bad to me. Emotions are tiring, and for the most part I’m not sure what they’re good for. For example, this morning I was in a bad mood, but I didn’t feel like being in a bad mood so I tried to ignore it. But it just kept creeping up on me. Eventually, it dissipated. So, what was the point of all that? I ask you.

I like taking buses. You can meet interesting people, eavesdrop on some interesting conversations, and see interesting parts of the city. True, some of these are more “interesting” than interesting. For example, you can find yourself involved in the oddest conversations without warning and with no effort on your part. Like the time I was standing waiting for the bus, and some guy walked up to me and abruptly started telling me all about his teeth, and the various dental work he’d had done recently. Then there was the fellow who appeared at the bus stop and started giving me job-search advice, stopping occasionally to inform me that he looked like Walter Matthau (he sort of did) and that he should “marry a woman.” Well okay.
In Lincoln, there was this local cult-type thing which aggressively proselytized to people, buttonholing them on the street and peppering them with questions about their spiritual life. One of three times this happened to me was while I was waiting for the bus–annoying, I couldn’t escape until the bus came. Simply assuring these people that I was a Christian and had a church wasn’t enough, they were determined to find out all about my religious practices. The other two times I can remember encountering them was (1) while innocently walking down the street and (2) at a new job I had when someone from that church acted like they wished to befriend me–really just wanted me to join the church. This is exactly the sort of thing that made me not want to be a Christian before I was one, so good thing I already was by that time, I guess.
But, back to the bus. I’ve taken the bus to work twice in the last two weeks. I’ve already found myself involved in one peculiar conversation, and have stood witness to many others. I’ve been through parts of GR I’ve never seen before in my nearly two years here, including some that I want to explore more. And, the bus would give me plenty of time to sit and read, if I could ever remember to bring a book.

A week or so ago, I told Andy about a specific concern that I wanted to start praying about. Less than two days later, we had an Answer. Not an answer we were expecting, and not one which provided an answer to the exact question, but one which pointed in a slightly different direction and gave us both hope. A pretty good kind of answer. Just wanted to let you all know, and may continue to blog about it as the situation develops. (It’s a pretty uninteresting issue, so I felt free to not explain exactly what it is since you aren’t missing anything).