May 2002 Archives

Mysteries of Pittsburgh

(No, not the Michael Chabon book. Just some things I noticed during last weekend's trip to Pittsburgh for the Catholic Forensic League's Grand National Tournament.)

*The 'Burgh is a much prettier town than I'd been led to expect. The hilliness gives it a certain intimacy, and the fact that the steep slopes are covered with a healthy number of trees makes it far greener than most American cities its size. You wind up seeing a lot more natural contours and a lot fewer buildings than you'd think. On Saturday night, we stood on the Point between the Allegheny and the Monongahela; a full moon was rising up the Monongahela, and Venus and Jupiter glowed fiercely over the Ohio; the lights of the inclined railways shone from the hillsides, and the roar of the baseball game reached us over the waters. I think I could enjoy another visit there, yeah.

*The two student speakers I was chaperoning hadn't been to the movies in some time, so I ended up seeing Spider-Man for the second time and Attack of the Clones for the third. The former definitely comes off better. The first hour or so of Spider-Man is just a joy to watch--a total wish-fulfillment flick for anybody who's ever been a nerd in high school, which, considering we're in an online journal, is most of us. As for Episode II, I find myself wondering if Yoda is really all that wise. After all, his lightsaber duel with Count Dooku is preceded by several examples of his ability to move huge objects using the Force, but when Dooku ends the fight by trying to drop a huge piece of machinery onto the floor where Obi-Wan and Anakin are lying helpless, what does Yoda do? He drops his saber and catches the huge piece of machinery with his mind. Uh, Yoda, couldn't you have just shoved Obi-Wan and Anakin out of the way? They couldn't weigh more than 300 pounds between them...

*We crossed the Roberto Clemente Bridge and went to the Pirates/Cardinals game on Friday night. I was delighted to discover a huge bronze statue of the legendary Clemente, right between the bridge and PNC Park. (There's a similar statue of Willie Stargell just down the street.) Clemente was one of the first ballplayers whose name I learned--thank you, 7-11 Slurpee Cups--and I remember being shocked and saddened when his plane went down in 1971. I was actually a little giddy going to the game, right until one of my students said "Who is Roberto Clemente?"

*I tried a Pittsburgh-style cheesesteak. They put the fries ON the sandwich. No, that just doesn't work. Sorry.

*I also ate at the Lemon Grass Cafe and had what's probably the best Pad Thai I've ever had. It was "Cambodian style," which I think means that it was a bit tangier and a bit less sweet than the usual Thai version.

*On Sunday morning, I had the opportunity to serve as a presiding officer of the semi-final round of the CFL's National Student Congress. I've been doing Congress for eleven years now--scary--and was happy to have a chance to prove I knew what I was doing in front of people who could appreciate the fact. My chamber of 16 speakers got through 46 speeches in just over 3 hours--not a bad pace, but one I thought was pretty reasonable. Several of the speakers and a couple of officials were apparently very impressed with that total, but the credit should really go to the students--they wanted to give speeches, rather than show off their knowledge of arcane parliamentary procedure, and I was more than willing to let them do so. Still, I have to feel good if I impressed people on the national debate/forensics circuit. We'll see if that and a buck will get me more than a cup of coffee at NFL Nationals in Charlotte in June.

*One birding note: at the Pirates game, I saw my first nighthawks in several years; perhaps I need to spend more time around large artificial light sources. There were dozens of the birds whirling through the lights, snagging insects, and displaying the distinctive white stripes on their wings. I got so distracted I almost missed one of shortstop Jack Wilson's base hits.

*Speaking of Jack, his theme song for plate appearances is "Jumpin' Jack Flash." Okay, not a bad song by any means, but c'mon, how can you ignore Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said"? A wasted opportunity.

*I set a new personal record by seeing Spider-Man on Screen 22 of Loew's Theater. The place was a sprawling Gormenghast of a multiplex, and I don't really know how many screens the place had. Hell, I grew up in a town where you could add up all the screens at all the theaters--the Plaza, the Carolina, the Varsity, the Ram--and still not hit double figures.

*I bought the kids a pair of bright yellow foam-rubber Pirates cutlasses. I am the King of Dads!

9:19 PM

The agony... the ecstasy... mostly the agony, actually.

Today we played our annual Faculty vs. Seniors softball game. I'm not bragging when I say that our faculty plays a mean game of softball; in my seven years of playing, we've lost exactly once, in the first game of a double-header, by one run. (In the second game, we went up by over ten runs and the slaughter rule ended the game.) This afternoon we once again proved that being young, in shape, and on the varsity baseball team isn't always better than being old, crafty, and experienced: we took the first game by a decisive score of 14-4 and then held on in the second to win 6-5.

My skills with ball, bat and glove have never been much to write home about; since second grade, my last year of organized baseball, I've favored games like soccer and basketball where you can contact the ball directly, instead of those like golf or baseball where you have to use some sort of pole-arm to score any points. In my mid-20s, though, I did play softball with my dad in an adult rec league; we joined the team organized by the hospital's gastrointerology department, in which my mother worked at the time, and which changed its official monicker soon after she signed on, meaning that for years she was required to answer the departmental phone with a cheery "Digestive Diseases!"

The team, comprised of a handful of fully-qualified gastrointerologists (including one of the nation's leading specialists in Crohn's Disease), a few lab assistants, and some ringers like Dad and me, was called the Eliminators, and our colors were a sickly yellow and a deep, bold brown. I felt as though these facts were fairly indicative of my skills. I wasn't much of an offensive threat, but in those days I was still light and fairly fleet of foot, and could at least score if I got on base. I couldn't pitch or throw from the outfield, though, so on defense I played mostly catcher, thanks primarily to my having the youngest knees on the team.

Today, however, I finally appreciated just how much time has gone by since those halcyon days. Squatting in my accustomed position behind the plate for the first time since last May's game, I felt twangs and twinges in my hamstrings and groin that must have been audible at first base. Nonetheless, I had a good outing for me--two hits, no errors, one run scored. I still can't do much more than place the ball into the shallow part of the outfield, but as long as no one's there to catch the ball--hey, I could stretch my career out for another decade or two.

But for this evening, I'm standing and moving with a certain degree of stiffness, as if someone had slipped a pair of two-by-fours down my pants legs. Maybe it's time I learned to pitch.



2:39 AM

It's not my intention to make this journal a kind of running obituary, but what else can I do? Stephen Jay Gould is dead. When it comes to writers who have influenced my thinking, there are very few who might rank ahead of Gould; from the moment I first picked up a copy of The Panda's Thumb nearly 20 years ago, I found his writing fascinating. It's hard enough to balance an essay on the wire between scientific precision and broad comprehensibility; to maintain that balance and still move forward into the realm of literature is a task requiring a whole new level of skill, and that skill is what drew me to his essays.

I have read almost every essay he ever published in Natural History magazine (with the exception of those in his two most recent collections, The Lying Stones of Marrakech and I Have Landed), as well as his book-length musings on racism (The Mismeasure of Man), the Burgess Shale (Wonderful Life), and the calendar (Questioning the Millennium). By comparison, I've read very little of the work of other essayists I love--G.K. Chesterton, E.B. White, Ralph Wiley--maybe just a book or three. But Gould's essays kept drawing me in. He never insulted my intelligence, for which I loved him; he always assumed that if he just laid out the facts and the terminology clearly, I'd be able to pick it up eventually. Even if that assumption wasn't always right, it gave me incentive to trust him, and an essayist who wins the trust of his reader is the greatest teacher of them all.

I've heard he was arrogant. If so, it was a generous arrogance. He did not treat the display of scientific knowledge as a form of conspicuous consumption, intending to inspire jealousy over the knowledge he had that we didn't; instead, he had the arrogance of the teacher, impatiently waiting for us to settle down so he could share his knowledge with us. He demanded that we look at facts for what they were, free from prejudice or assumption, but he also took great delight in examining facts of all sorts, even the trivia of baseball, Disney cartoons, or Gilbert and Sullivan.

The stories he told sometimes made me angry at human presumption, or bewildered at the astonishing variety of life, but now I find myself remembering the stories of sorrow: the Mauritian Calvaria major tree, whose seed's thick husk had to be abraded away before it could germinate, and whose reproduction therefore depended on a single bird--the dodo... the giant panda, guided into an evolutionary dead-end by overdependence on bamboo... the hermit crabs of the Caribbean, dependent on the fossilized shells of extinct snails for their protection.

Perhaps I've grown too dependent on Gould for my own intellectual stimulation, and now must make do with some less satisfactory alternative. At least there will be a time during which I can peruse his last works, including his recently-published magnum opus The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. But still, I find myself wishing that my niche had not grown so suddenly and visibly narrow.

It's funny. Gould was a materialist, fascinated with the richness of earthly life but not expecting anything beyond it. Most of his work was intended to persuade people that, in Darwin's words, "there is grandeur in this view of life." But today I find myself hoping that somewhere he's waking up, looking around, observing the facts of this new world in which he finds himself, and writing them down. It would be so comforting to me.

If only I could believe that he'd been wrong.



4:41 PM

This is the last Saturday I'll have to teach this year. Our school has classes on Saturday mornings from 8:00 to 11:00, which has a profound effect on everyone here, for better or for worse:

For worse:
*Travel on the weekend becomes a real challenge; when you don't get free until 11:00 on Saturday and have to be back on campus at 6:00 Sunday evening, you can't go very far. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that you can't stay very long once you get there.
*Visitors (such as the family members staying at my house right now) don't get to see much of you when they come for the weekend.
*You have only one real weekend night; you can't really get wild on Friday night if you have an 8:00 class the next morning.
*We have no breaks in the schedule on Saturday, so if you have all four classes, you're going straight through for three hours; you don't have much of a chance to hit the xerox machine, the phone, the coffee maker, etc., or do any last-minute preparation for classes. Everything has to be ready to go AT 8:00.
*If your kids have Saturday morning activities--soccer games, classes, play dates--they happen without you. I have yet to see my younger son's soccer team play this spring.
*Students are often absent on Saturdays due to athletic commitments, special trips, or their occasional weekends at home. This sometimes makes it difficult to conduct classes on some Saturdays, knowing that you'll have to bring the absent kids up to date when they return.

For better:
*Every Saturday meeting means a weekday meeting we don't have to have. As a result, our breaks are long; we end school around Memorial Day and don't start again until mid-September. We also have a week at Thanksgiving, two weeks at Xmas, a real three-day weekend at the end of January, and a two-week Spring Break in early March.
*Saturday morning classes mean we have no afternoon classes on Tuesday or Friday. Those mid-week breaks can be very helpful if you need a few hours to get off campus and do something with your family. Of course, there are usually athletic contests scheduled for those days, so the coaches don't get much of a break.
*Having classes spread out over six days gives the students a better chance to keep up with their assignments.

On Saturdays themselves, I really don't like the idea of having to teach, but when I'm on break, Saturday classes seem like a pretty good idea.

I will say this, however: this year has been the first in which I've had all four Saturday classes, and THAT sucks harder than Charybdis. Our old schedule had periods F, A, D and E on Saturday; the sequence is now D, E, F, A, but the local expression "FADE into the weekend" has a resonance for me now that it never had before.

Next year will be different. I feel sure of it. And just in case, I'll be bribing the Academic Dean...

4:47 PM

LBJs

*I worked at the Record Bar in Chapel Hill for three years during & just after grad school; since we got a 40% discount on the stuff we bought there, a significant chunk of my paycheck went home in the form of CDs and albums. My exposure to pop music from 1987-1990 was therefore about as good as it could have been. I'm therefore sometimes amazed that people don't aren't familiar with a particular album from those days, especially if it's a good one. Right now I'm listening to Squeeze's 1989 release Frank, a simply wonderful album that apparently had no commercial impact whatsoever. What the heck? Go buy it.

*Our school has a summer reading program in which faculty members, their spouses, and other people in the community sponsor certain books for the students to read for pleasure while they're on vacation; when the students return in the fall, they discuss their books with the sponsors. Last year my wife sponsored Neil Gaiman's urban fantasy Neverwhere, and today one of the kids who'd read it came in to sign up with me to read Good Omens, Neil's hilarious and apocalyptic collaboration with Terry Pratchett. I am pleased that we're creating new readers for him.

*I called Neil Gaiman "Neil" above because it seemed more appropriate than "Gaiman," somehow. Odd, because I don't really know him. I've exchanged comments with him online in Readerville, yes, and he seems like a perfectly splendid fellow, but he wouldn't know me from Adam's housecat if we met in real life. As far as I know.

*We've all Googled our own names, haven't we? Soon after I started using Google as my search engine of choice, I of course tried my own name, and discovered that Michigan State University has archived a collection of old Comics Journal issues featuring my reviews. The possibility that some undergraduate in East Lansing may someday cite my pan of Wild Dog in a critical analysis of the works of Max Allan Collins fills me with utter bewilderment.

*And how about old friends? Old girlfriends? I Googled one of the latter a while ago. Found a picture, biographical info, all sorts of stuff. She seems to be doing all right; better than when I last saw her, and better than when we were together, certainly. Maybe she's even Googled my name. For all I know, she's checking this journal.

I haven't gotten in touch. It's odd to be certain that a decision is the right one without quite knowing one's motivation for making it.


9:08 PM

Yesterday's weather was sunny and beautiful, so I decided to accompany the cycling team on its afternoon ride. We were only a mile or so from the school when one of my colleagues noticed a dog lying in the shallow ditch at the side of the road. He was a scruffy white dog, small and harmless-looking, and he lay on his side amidst the creepers and leaves at the bottom of the ditch; his chest was heaving, but he seemed unable to move. The two of us dismounted and clambered into the ditch. The dog saw us, and he licked my hand when I offered it, but he didn't wag his tail or move his hindquarters at all. I immediately worried that his spinal cord was damaged.

Two grossly swollen ticks had dug into the flesh of his left ear, and he was covered with flies, greenbottles and bluebottles and loudly buzzing black flies that clustered under his tail. I peered closer and saw signs of internal bleeding. "My god," said my friend. "I wonder how long he's been lying here."

The dog had no collar or identification, but my friend jumped back onto his bike and rode to the nearest house, thinking the dog might belong to the people there. I grabbed one of my water bottles and began dribbling water into the dog's mouth; he lapped it up greedily, despite being unable to raise his head from its awkward position at the bottom of the ditch. I was scared that moving him might do more damage, but the few drops of water and strokes on his fur that I gave him struck me as utterly inadequate to comfort him. The swarm of flies moved away while I stood over him, but the minute I stepped back to my bike--the minute my shadow no longer fell on his body--they came back in a metallic rush.

My friend returned with a deeply unconcerned-looking man who looked down from the edge of the ditch and said the dog belonged to the owner of the house, not to him. He said he'd call the owner and make sure it was taken care of. Another dog accompanied him, a smallish hound mix, rail-thin, friendly and collarless, with ticks bulging through its smooth brown fur. .

We didn't know what else to do at that point. The man returned to the house, my friend accompanying him partway. I laid my hand on the injured dog's side once more and said quietly, "Go in peace." There didn't seem to be anything else to do.

We rode away.

After we returned to campus a few hours later, my friend drove back out and found the dog still lying where we'd left him. He loaded him into the car and drove him to the vet's office. The vet's report: severed spinal cord, almost certainly from a car's impact, probably occurring twelve to twenty-four hours before my friend lifted him from the ditch. At about 4:30 p.m., on Friday, May 10th, the vet ended his misery at last.

I feel as though I should learn something from this experience. I should perhaps focus on the compassion shown by my friend, or the mercy shown by the vet. But somehow I keep hearing the buzzing of insects in the sun, and the moral keeps coming back as "People can be such bastards." It's not a lesson I needed or wanted, and the cost of tuition is too high.

2:42 AM

I named the bike. It's made by Trek, and since its purpose is to keep me from being too fat to reach the control panel, I named it "Scotty." (It's black and beautiful, so I thought about "Uhura," but I thought the wife might take that the wrong way.)

I haven't biked in a couple of weeks now; the preparations for departure ate up all my time last week, and the week before that was the Week I Was On Duty. One thing about teaching at a boarding school is that you're called upon to serve in a bewildering variety of capacities. During the WIWOD, I spent Saturday afternoon & evening chaperoning a bus full of boys at a mixer at the Madeira School, returning home at about 1:00 a.m. The next morning I had to be at our outdoor ropes course to supervise the climbing instructors; they don't need much supervision, luckily, but that ate my day until 3:00. We have seated Sunday dinner with our advisees at 6:15 every week, and then it was time to start grading. Grades were due at noon on Tuesday, so I spent most of the day and night Monday and most of Tuesday working on them (no, I didn't make the deadline) before crashing and burning Tuesday night. I was on dorm duty Wednesday, which involves being on call all day and monitoring the dorm during study hall (7:45-10:00) and after lights out, so I got home a little after midnight. And then on Thursday we had our end-of-the-marking period faculty meeting.

Oh, and did I mention classes? I had those, too.

Don't mistake me--none of the above is terribly unusual in the busy world of boarding-school teaching; it's just that having it all come in a single week is a bit--intense.

As a result, I didn't find a lot of time to get out and pedal the metal. Today, I'm going to try to get out and wear off some of the calories provided by John and Flane (Hi, John and Flane!) at their nuptial celebrations. It's looking kind of grey and rainy, though. Perfect weather for a Romulan ambush...

6:36 PM

A Few More LBJs:
*Just saw a wonderfully anarchic version of The Compleat Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) in our school's black box theater. One of the great things about teaching is getting to see lots and lots of plays enacted by the young & energetic who don't know their limitations, and who therefore frequently exceed them.

*My son brought a Nintendo Gamecube into our house, and it is evil, eeeeeeeevil I tell you. My thumb is sore and all I have to show for it is a score of slightly over 13,000 on the Simpsons' Road Rage game he bought.

*It's May, and the weather has finally made up its mind. It flirted directly with summer for a while, with highs topping 90, and then panicked and shifted back to winter, giving us a frost at the end of April. Now it's decided to give fall and winter a miss and go straight into spring. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a Terry Gilliam animation.

*I doubt they're going to notice, and I doubt most of you who don't already know it will care, but this weekend our friends John and Flane are getting married? Aren't they an adorable couple? Wave to the nice people, John and Flane! We'll be heading up their way for the weekend, so my journal will be on a short hiatus. (Note that I didn't say "for retooling," which would indicate that I wasn't coming back. I'll be back, just not until Kelly and I have seen our Maid of Honor safely in the bonds of her own holy wedlock.)

*An online acquaintance just told me a story, apparently an old Jewish folk tale, about two people who meet after they've died. One of them is wandering around, manic, upset, frustrated, and bored out of his mind because there's nothing to do. The other is sitting happily, studying, thinking and dreaming. They're in the same place, but the latter guy is in Heaven and the former is in Hell.

Which, I noted, is a perfect description of Earth.


4:03 AM

A Few More LBJs:
*Just saw a wonderfully anarchic version of The Compleat Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) in our school's black box theater. One of the great things about teaching is getting to see lots and lots of plays enacted by the young & energetic who don't know their limitations, and who therefore frequently exceed them.

*My son brought a Nintendo Gamecube into our house, and it is evil, eeeeeeeevil I tell you. My thumb is sore and all I have to show for it is a score of slightly over 13,000 on the Simpsons' Road Rage game he bought.

*It's May, and the weather has finally made up its mind. It flirted directly with summer for a while, with highs topping 90, and then panicked and shifted back to winter, giving us a frost at the end of April. Now it's decided to give fall and winter a miss and go straight into spring. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a Terry Gilliam animation.

*I doubt they're going to notice, and I doubt most of you who don't already know it will care, but this weekend our friends John and Flane are getting married? Aren't they an adorable couple? Wave to the nice people, John and Flane! We'll be heading up their way for the weekend, so my journal will be on a short hiatus. (Note that I didn't say "for retooling," which would indicate that I wasn't coming back. I'll be back, just not until Kelly and I have seen our Maid of Honor safely in the bonds of her own holy wedlock.)

*An online acquaintance just told me a story, apparently an old Jewish folk tale, about two people who meet after they've died. One of them is wandering around, manic, upset, frustrated, and bored out of his mind because there's nothing to do. The other is sitting happily, studying, thinking and dreaming. They're in the same place, but the latter guy is in Heaven and the former is in Hell.

Which, I noted, is a perfect description of Earth.



3:58 AM