Getting to Class

I'm really going to miss not taking a class at NYU next semester. I've done it for two semesters now, and I love it. The class itself this semester is really great. I wish I had time to read everything because I know I'd be getting more out of it than I already am. As of now, I already get ideas flowing for the projects I intended, but I often get more ideas for other projects, too. And the train ride is fantastic for reading and thinking, which I never, ever give myself the time to do.

Next semester, no classes really work out for the times I'd be willing to take them. In the falls, I teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which are also the days the university sets aside time for meetings (no classes are offer during lunch just so there's guaranteed time to meet). In the springs, I teach in Mondays and Wednesdays (and sometimes Fridays), but I then have meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I thought of just saying I'd skip all meetings on Thursdays, but there really wasn't anything I wanted to take then.

And I realized on the train yesterday that I really need to give myself time to work on the projects that I'm getting all these ideas for. Things just really flow, and I generate lots of random sentences and paragraphs and fragments. I need to start working with them. I'll still be a university associate, which means I can get into the library (virtual and literal). I will still take trips to give myself the reading and thinking time.

I know how much I'll benefit from doing so.

No Longer at This Address

My, goodness, the couple who lived here before us received every catalog known to humanity. Catalogs do not get forwarded, which is why they always add "or current resident" to the label. We must have received seventy-five different catalogs in our first month of living here. I've never even seen that much mail come to one location! It's kind of funny, too, because it might explain why we have the biggest mailbox in the group of boxes across the street from us. I didn't think there was any reason for it, but the amount of mail they must have gotten was probably nuts. There are tons from companies I've never even heard of. We now put more catalogs than magazines in recycling each week.

They also receive a lot of Republican-related mail (since that also now goes to "current resident"). There's a rather hotly contested Senate primary for the Republicans in Connecticut, so we're getting fliers we never would be getting otherwise. The ones for the woman running for the slot are rather interesting. And, no, I'm not naming her since she gets enough press. Her campaign is rather prominent. She is part of a business that features well-built men, which I only mention because some of my gay male friends have said they'd be happy to vote for her if it meant they could get private time with John Cena for a few hours. But I digress. I was just struck by the listing on one of her fliers of her social media sites. Sure, all candidates use Twitter and Facebook, but she also has Flickr, YouTube, and MySpace. MySpace is the one that gets me. I thought that was primarily used by independent musicians these days. I can't remember my username or password, so I haven't been back in years, but I thought it was a tad odd for her to have a site there. Maybe it's not, and I have no plans to check it out. It's also clear that she is spending a ton of money on her advertising. Wow, they are huge and incredibly well-designed.

I will be glad when our mail outnumbers theirs, though.

Putting the Books Away

After writing for a few decades, I've learned a lot about my writing process. I am a heavy reviser. I plan for a while, and a lot of that planning isn't formal. I tend to draft pretty quickly pretty much because it's the part of the process I hate the most. Oh, it can just feel like ripping open veins and pouring blood on the page (or keyboard, as it were). But I can spend all day--or at least a few hours a day--revising. I love having pages in front of me and a blue pen that I can use to mark out and scratch up and add to for quite a while. Da Man is the opposite. His drafting process takes forever. He writes very, very slowly, but what he writes is pretty much what will stick in the final draft. One of the things I always tell students is that they need to try a few things and figure out the right process for them, and I use us as examples.

What's funny is that Da Man and I have realized how much our writing process aligns with other parts of our life. When we moved here, we both had a ton of books, of course. We got all the bookshelves in their spots right away, deciding which ones we'd each take and putting our own books away on our own time. I'm getting close to getting mine all put away while he's been done for a bit. As with his writing process, he put his books away quite slowly, and once a book landed in a spot, that's where is has pretty much stayed and will stay. I, on the other hand, left my books in piles on the floor in my office, and I've been moving them around these past few days. As with writing, I've been dreading finding the right spots for them, so I made quick piles of major categories. I separated narrative books into fiction and nonfiction and separated those by gender. I had other categories like film/pop culture, medial humanities, feminist theory, porn and sexual culture studies, composition theory, and all that. After getting the big piles on their shelves, I've started going over the shelves slowly, dividing the big categories further, trying to make sure I can find things when I need them. I'm not done, and I won't be done for a bit.

But that's fine by me. I'm enjoying this part.

Professors are People, Too

Last night, I led another book discussion, this one at Avon Free Public Library. The book was Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. It's a very experimental novel with different narratives interspersed within a meta-narrative about reading, writing, publishing, and translating. The woman who coordinates the discussions was in the room when I arrived, and we discussed whether people would show up or whether they might have given up on the book and skipped this time around. Several people did show up, though, and we talked for well over an hour. It was actually almost ninety minutes.

I've led a couple of other discussions there before on books I knew rather well. The last one was on The Bell Jar, which I could talk about in my sleep. This time around, I told the coordinator to let me know what she would like to have discussed. I was game for anything. This being such an odd, experimental text, I was a little concerned about what to say about it. I made it clear at the start that I'm not a Calvino expert or even all that knowledgeable about Italian literature, but I threw out some thoughts I had about why I think he might have written the book and what it was about his life that might have influenced this book.

Toward the end of our discussion, one of the participants brought up that he would not have finished the book if it weren't for the discussion, and he was interested in hearing what an expert would say about the book. I reminded him that I was an expert, and I told him how my background in rhetoric influences my reading of any book because it pushed me to think about such things as the cultural contexts in which books are written and how the author's life influenced the text, which is why I gave the speculations I did at the start.

He then asked me if I would have read this book on my own, and I said that I probably would have picked it up, found the beginning interesting, but stopped before the book was done. That gave everyone a good laugh, and he said he was glad to hear it. He'd said earlier that he wondered if he didn't get the book because he wasn't smart enough to get it, and I said that certainly was not the case.

It was one of those moments when I remembered that some people do look at university professors as a different breed of people, a group that is smarter and perhaps even more refined than the general population. Thoughts like that always make me laugh. Anyone who has earned a PhD knows many professors who want people to think we are a step above the masses, but we also know that's clearly not the case. As much as it would annoy some of the professoriate to hear me say, it's not intelligence that makes us who we are. Our education makes us look at things in a certain way in the same ways that any training affects anyone, but it sometimes takes effort more than intelligence to get that education.

Shh, don't tell anyone.

Starbucks References

The purpose of this post is mainly as a place for my students to have one place where they can find links they might want to use for their formal report on the rhetorics of Starbucks.

*Their official website is going to prove invaluable to most of you. You may also want to check their official Twitter feed, Facebook page, or YouTube channel. You may want to check out My Starbucks Idea, which is a site for people to share their thoughts with people at the Starbucks corporation.

*There are also the sites that are not affiliated with Starbucks, such as Starbucks Gossip and I Hate Starbucks. This blog entry makes some points worth exploring, too. This site is the one mentioned in class that is a guide to ordering at SB.

*Don't forget our own library's list of databases in business and economics. I always recommend LexisNexis Academic for any research project.

If anyone (in our class or not) has anything to add, please leave a comment. Based on our discussion on Tuesday, I'm really excited by what students might produce with this project.

Clarifications

I've been off-line for the past twenty-four hours or so, trying to process a few things. I made a comment on Twitter/Facebook that some people were critical of, and I'll admit the criticisms surprised me. What troubled me is that I thought people who have been part of my online world for the past few years would take what they knew about me and assume that I'm someone who tries to do the best I can to treat people respectfully and that I really try to do my job well. Instead, I encountered some assumptions that I was missing something, that I was in the wrong; therefore, I needed to be told what people assumed I was missing or wrong about. I thought people who did not know the specifics would give me the benefit of the doubt based on the history of what I have written here and elsewhere.

I often question what I post online just like I tell my students they shold be doing. In thinking about that particular comment, I knew how it could be read, but I really did tell myself, "the people who know you online know you get it and that this isn't about you." But that wasn't really the case. In a short time frame, I encountered several criticisms every time I clicked a link to go from Facebook to Twitter to email to elsewhere, and the collective effect stung.

It was probably pretty naive to think that specifics weren't necessary for those who have known me online for a few years to have shot me a "hang in there" or something. And many people did do that. I've tried to let the collective effect of the support outshine the collective effect of the criticisms, but that's hard for me. As I wrote in yesterday's entry, I have long been known as a highly sensitive person. I used to feel ashamed of that. One of the reasons I went into therapy in 2005 was to get a better handle on my emotions and how hard things can hit me. When I ended therapy a few months ago, I had actually learned to celebrate that sensitivity because it has helped lead me to a pretty good place in life.

This entry is not directed at anyone in particular, so I hope no one looks at any comments they might have seen in a specific space and think it's about them. No one has seen it all since no one has read my email. As I said, there were several criticisms that ran the gamut from minor to, frankly, direct and extreme. This entry is just meant to explain what I've been thinking for the past day and why I wrote yesterday's entry, which I've received a couple of kind, concerned questions about. I realized today how it might come across as passive-aggressive, and I didn't mean for that. I thought some clarification was in order.

Stop Crying, and Be a Man

I have spent my entire life being told to toughen up, develop a thick skin, grow a pair, stop taking things so personally. Basically, people have been telling me for forty years to be a man.

But sometimes I cry. I wear my emotions on my sleeve. I often don't have a wall around me but advertise when I'm hurt or when I'm ecstatic or when I feel whatever I feel.

I was told by a professor in college that my sensitivity was my greatest gift and my greatest curse. It has helped me get to a pretty good place in my life at forty, and I hope it helps me live the rest of my life just as well.

I wear that judgment like a badge of honor.