update

See post below for initial details of weird asshole old guy.

After one of my students left, the guy said, "So are your office hours over yet?"

And I mumbled something like, "We'll see, I guess." Then, I said, louder, "Since you bring up my office hours, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't interrupt me while I'm with a student." A request that I think is reasonable and appropriate.

Asshole says, "What, Vanderbilt doesn't give you people an office to do your shit in?"

Then, there was a stupid little "you were rude to me"; "no, you started talking to me first. you were rude to me." So, yeah, I could have handled it better.

To prevent a yelling match, I left to talk to the proprietor, Sam, about the escalating situation. This little asshole old guy followed me right up there, talking over me, and Sam said to him, "Just a minute."

Then, Sam talked to me about how I was a long-time, valued customer, and he'd take care of it. I went outside, Sam talked to the asshole, and the three of us sat together while Sam basically told us to play nice. Apparently, to the old guy, asking me to plug his computer in was less interruptive than just barging through. What would have been better would be for him to go around my chair and move the power strip so he could plug it in himself without bothering me.

While I appreciate the proprietor's need for diplomacy, the compromise he tried to create wasn't enough. I probably won't be coming here anymore. 

But at least the asshole old guy left. 

working at the coffee shop

I really like working at JJ's and meeting students here. Overall, it's a good experience. HOWEVER (didn't you know that was coming?) there's this older guy who often shows up, and he always sits next to me, which in itself is creepy. It's not like no other seats available near the powerstrip. 

Because of where he sits, he generally has to climb past me to plug his computer in, which also makes me uncomfortable because I don't like to be that close to strangers. He always apologizes for getting in my way, which isn't really an apology because it happens each fucking time.

There's a coffee table on which people rest their beverages. It's pretty big, which is great. So creepiness #3 is that he puts his stuff so close to mine that he has to lean toward me to pick up his coffee cup. Ew. And he tries to make conversation.

Now, if this series of events only happened once, that would be fine. It's easy to be generous and polite if the other person is as well. It's becomes less and less easy the more frequently it happens. I intended to ignore all of this as though this desperate old man just wants a little attention and perhaps camaraderie. The smile of an obviously married woman? The scent of clothes worn a third time, not really dirty but not totally clean either? Ick. Just ick. 

Today represents my last little nerve. I don't know what to do.

I was meeting with a student this morning when he sat down. Then, during an obvious conference (more obvious to someone sitting too close), he interrupts to ask me could I please plug his computer in so that he doesn't have to climb over me. Three things: 

1) don't interrupt my meeting/conference/conversation/whatever to make me do a favor for you. 

2) the favor itself is unreasonable because it is he who sat down after my student and I did. (He left for a moment, and my student leaned over and asked, "do you know that guy?" I explained that I didn't, and she said, "I thought maybe you did, but when you didn't say Hi, I wasn't sure. Yeah, he's weird.") Also unreasonable because the powerstrip is on a long cord, and he could move it so that he doesn't have to bother anyone ever.

3) Now I'm spitting mad, and I would say something, but I didn't at the moment, and now it's been about 10 minutes, and I don't really know what to do. The presence of my student made him sit a little farther than usual, so it's not like I can ask JJ's gunther to help me. When I look up, straight ahead in front of me (as I often do when I'm thinking and writing), he always looks at me. (It's pretty obvious.) I'm mad and creeped out, but I won't move because I don't want to cede my territory. This is where I sit. I shouldn't have to move, and this creepy guy is taking advantage of JJ's overall sense of decorum, so I feel I can't yell at him. Part of me is angry at myself that I didn't tell him immediately that he was interrupting a student conference (with the subtext that he could figure something else out about his stupid computer that didn't involve me plugging it in for him or him crawling over me to do it himself). 

What should I do? What would you do? If you know what to do, would you do it for me?

The pleasure of being anonymous

First: the eulogy of the world was written last Friday. Rest well, DFW. 

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One of the aspects of living in a small town (that I hated) is that everyone knows you. Or your dad or mom. Or your mom and dad's car. At least, they think they know you.

One of the things I loved about moving away from Arkadelphia was that I could leave that misremembered history that others associated with me. I apparently was a mud-flinger in kindergarten. Another girl (who I graduated with) bit someone once, which earned her a 15-year nickname. She might still have it—she never left.

When I left town, adults no longer said to me, "Oh, you're Dr. Murphy's daughter. I've heard about you." Which they had because my dad liked to tell "funny" stories about his daughters, in almost every situation, including his classroom. More than a couple of my teachers had been in one of his classes, and some of them had seen at least one "Murphy girl" demonstration of Piaget's developmental experiments. (It wasn't until I was in college that I realized that the psychologist Piaget was the same person as P-I-J.) I hate to say it, but it's embarrassing for someone to tell a story about how you ran out of a classroom when you were five because you were confused by a test you weren't supposed to pass anyway, and wasn't it so adorable.

Anonymity is glorious. It means you can be no one's daughter, no one's test subject, no one's cute story. It means you don't have to wave at every passing car because one in five people knows your parents or was your nursery-school teacher or some shit like that.

Anonymity on the web is a little harder to achieve. But it is still glorious. You belong to no one, not even yourself because it's not your name. It's a different name, and the difference doesn't matter because you're speaking to strangers anyway. You finally write your worst memories, your worst parts of yourself even, to the world. Who writes back. Because who doesn't like to watch a train wreck? Who never is one?

I don't even know what to call this, it's so awesome.

Now this is the Hillary Clinton I grew up with and loved:

My diamond shoes are too tight

Okay. I recognize that none of you is probably going to read the post that proceeds this one. Thinking about it, though, I realized that I could use that nifty website link for a number of other questions. Like: Am I working right now?

So, yeah, I'm not, and not just because it's lunch time. When I start working again, I'll probably go until around 12-1 at night. Maybe longer if I'm on a roll. It's kind of like working a second shift. My two responsibilities (work-wise) are teaching a TTh class and working on dissertation stuff. The class lasts for an hour and fifteen minutes, and I determine how to distribute the rest of my time. It may sound great to someone bound  by routine, and it pretty much is. I won't lie. But it also means that this weekend, I'll be working (at minimum) 12-hour days, outside of grading and teaching preparation.

Which means that today is like tomorrow will be (except, I hope, I'll muster enough discipline to get started earlier). It's a weird kind of disjunction from everyone else's work week, especially when I wake up on non-class days thinking it's Sunday when really it's Wednesday. (Then I get excited because Wednesday is a great prime-time tv day.) Conversely, the only advantage to weekends is that everyone else plans to do fun things, and I can make time for those things in my work schedule.

Now I'm going to eat the last half of yesterday's sandwich (turkey, avocado, and bacon!) and watch The People's Court. A sandwich that Sam wrapped up for me because he makes sure I'm fed and have everything I need to be productive. I can't say it enough: he's wonderful, and I love him.

On a more serious note, I send my condolences to J-P and his family and wish both him and Melissa safe travels.

Actual, for-real water bears in space AND the best atom-smashing machine ever; or, yes, yes, I'm a nerd

Two exciting science-y things happened this week. 

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ONE: Wired reported the findings of a study in the journal Current Biology in which some scientists shot tardigrades, aka water bears (which are a kind of invertebrate animal), out into space, exposing them to radiation, and they survived. If you wanted, you could easily see one  without a microscope. They can slow their metabolisms by a factor of 10,000 (the article says) which allows them to survive vacuums, starvation, total disappearanence of water, and extreme temperatures (above 300F and below -240F).

Not only did they survive, one group was able to repair the DNA damaged by the radiation and reproduce at the same rate as the control group, making normal little water bear babies. Amazing.  Seriously awesome. Now that we know that these tiny creatures can survive in space, scientists can start to figure out some stuff, like improving human DNA repair (e.g., aging much more slowly) and adapting to space.

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TWO: Yesterday, international scientists turned on the Large Hadron Collider and shot its first beam of protons, which traveled the entire 17-mile track. In a few weeks, they'll shoot lots and lots of beams, at which point atoms will begin to smash into each other, creating particles and possibly subparticles. This thing is incredible. It can generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than our sun.

The importance of the Large Hadron Collider cannot be underestimated. They'll be able to test such ideas as the Big Bang Theory, String Theory, the Multiverse Theory, and the Dark Matter Theory. The scientists who have been working on this thing say that the worst-case scenario is that they'll find out nothing, a waste of roughly 7,000 scientists from 20 countries at the cost of about $10 billion. Which isn't too bad, I guess, considering that the cost is still less than we spend in Iraq each month. (Data source: Congressional Research Service, as of 2/2/2008)

One of the worst case scenarios, floated by "crackpots," (i.e., physicists who aren't down with Einstein), is that the Large Hadron Collider could create a Large Black Hole. No more student loan debts!

Britain's Astronomer Royal put the odds of the Large Hadron Collider destroying the earth  at 1 in 50 million. An analogy: if my math's right, if everyone in the world (6.6 billion) participated in a lottery, and the lottery money had to be equally divided among all of the winners, 36,000 people would walk away with some cash. And then blip out of existence.

See if that might happen.

Sarah Palin

Four legs good. Two legs bad.

Addendum: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

The weight of 750.5 mg

A little over 3/4 of a gram. 11.58 grains. About 2% of an ounce. If you're talking Newtons (force, not figs) .007 359 890 846 5 units, or roughly 736 dynes.

I like the idea of weight as measured in units of force, as gravity pinning something down to the earth. According to Newton's third law--all forces occur in pairs, each opposite and equal in magnitude--when a person falls, the earth falls in the opposite direction. Or, I suppose, each leaps to meet the other. 

When you fall and you feel the earth is rising rapidly toward you, you're right. It is. 

And (to misappropriate Flannery O'Connor's use of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's phrase) everything that rises must converge.

As my meds and I converge every morning and evening. 750.5 milligrams is the amount of medication I take in the morning. When I take the 5 pills that weigh so little, they pin me down to an inescapable truth: taking psychotropic (qu'est-ce que c'est?), psychiatric medications will be a lifelong ritual, part of my and Sam's management of my incurable, major mental illness.

When a person is depressed, she can fend off bad decisions by deciding to wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow might be better. When I take my meds, I remember that, at some unpredictable time, tomorrow will be much, much worse.  

I remember that the same is true for you, dear reader.

So, to lift our moods, let's hear something from Ms. Dickinson, from her posthumous Complete Poems 1924):

Today or this noon

She dwelt so close, 

I almost touched her;

Tonight she lies

Past neighborhood--

And bough and steeple--

Now past surmise.

Wilde's amazing rocket

Okay. So I'm going to reframe this Clinton/Tubman thing a bit. Sam, as you know, I think you're right. I believe that Clinton appropriated Tubman's achievements to score political points for herself. At its very best, the analogy was hyperbolic and inappropriate. At its worst, the analogy fails on racial, sexual, and regional bases. Do we really want to raise the specter of slavery at a time when Democrats are trying to win southern states? Also, it strikes me as odd that many commenters have referred to Tubman as an African American. A lot of white people use "African American" when they mean "person of color" (or, more commonly, "black"). Tubman wasn't a citizen, and to call her an American strikes me as disrespectful. 

More important, Obama is not a slave who has to Keep Going, nor are the voters, nor is the DNP, nor is America. Obama is a Democrat I am going to vote for so that no McCain administration can dig the U.S. further into debt, war, and despair. 

As a Democrat, I recognize the importance of the narrative arc we've constructed. But Clinton's use of Tubman pains me.

It's not about Tubman as a role model. It's not about feeling part of the struggle for basic human rights. It's not even about using an analogy based on a common history of the fight against racism and sexism. The problem is that the senator used Tubman as a symbol that conveniently incorporates the categories of woman and negritude. (Here, I'm choosing Sartre's version of negritude, rather than Benjamin Rush's or Fanon's.) The Tubman symbol itself provided an image of unity, and it was a short step from there to find an opportune piece of rhetoric produced by the Tubman symbol.  

Unity by itself as a piece of rhetoric has tremendous political charge. Just ask President Wilson about his White House screening of the infamous D.W. Griffith film about post-Civil War unity. Cue the footage, accompanied by that Wagner tune.

If this part of this post seems a little too strong, consider its scale beside the scale of Senator Clinton's rhetoric. My invective doesn't even hold a taper.

**Another caveat: Only the next part of this post is directed specifically at another person.

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Ed: I've concluded that you no longer get to talk to me. You can spend your life believing that women are as good as men only to the extent that they resemble men, that you are always the smartest person in the room, that tucking your t-shirt into your pants is a good idea, and that Sam should step out on his crazy wife. But you will never spend another moment of your sad, silly life interacting with me. Another tip: if you want to commit passive suicide by yelling at men with guns, try a little harder. It's not rocket science.

Imaginary writing

I do quite a bit of imaginary composition. Manifestos when I'm in traffic (or fantastic, involved, 12-minute intricacies about why I might be late). The beginnings of a story as I walk to meeting on campus. Partial sestinas when I'm in the shower. (I like to take long showers, but it's hard to remember the pattern for that form.) Movie scenarios while my students are peer reviewing each other's papers.

That kind of composition is fleeting, and I think blogging sometimes resembles it. 

Recently, I've been composing my first class of this semester. Monday is the first official day of classes, and my TTh class starts Tuesday at 8am. Freshman Composition. Maybe I'll ask them about their mental essays, poems, and songs. 

I've actually written lots of posts between now and the last one I posted. A lot is going on right now for me mentally, physically, socially, politically. I'm not sure how much of it I want to disclose, so I've discarded pages of stuff. Instead I've been doing quite a bit of imaginary writing. It's written in lemon juice, invisible. Hold it over a flame to see the muddle.