A Wedding In New York

I really hate traveling.  But I really love weddings.  There are times when this becomes a quandary, and when that happens there really is only one thing to do.

Wedding, here I come!

Just ignore me while the traveling part is still going on, that’s all.

My cousin Chris and his longtime partner Chris (yes, there were a lot of last names being used for clarity this weekend) got married in upstate New York on Saturday, at a beautiful old mansion overlooking the Hudson River.  We hemmed and hawed about it – it’s a long way, it’s finals week here, the girls are still in school, on and on – but really we knew we were going to go anyway.  It’s a wedding.  It’s family.  We’re there.  Grandma came down to take care of the girls, and Kim and I headed out early Friday morning.

This was my first experience with Southwest Airlines, which is the RyanAir of America except with a slightly less insane boarding procedure.  You check in online and get a number and then you board in numerical order, except that there are no assigned seats so if you are anywhere in the C group (as we were both in and out) the odds of you actually sitting next to the person you’re traveling with are fairly minimal.  And they serve peanuts, which in this day and age is just bizarre, although my outbound seatmate got only one peanut in his packet so perhaps they’re just slowly weaning themselves from that practice.

We arrived at LaGuardia safe and hungry (they were small packets of peanuts), so on the way out of town we made an unscheduled stop at a tiny little Jamaican restaurant – one of those neighborhood places where there’s more room on the sidewalk than the inside – and had jerk chicken that was just amazing.  That is the wonderful thing about places like that – great food at reasonable prices in wholly unreasonable quantities.  Plus the counter guy essentially adopted us as pets.  Two white tourists in his restaurant in the middle of Queens just tickled him somehow.

We found our way to Poughkeepsie and checked in to the hotel. 

That night there was a reception at a restaurant whose name, translated out of French, means “The Chained Duck,” which is something I prefer not to think about any further.  It was quite a trip up to it – about 45 minutes north from the hotel, along a series of small state highways all of which were Rt. 9 in some variation or another.  All of the highways around that area of upstate New York are 9.  There’s 9N, 9S, 9W, 9G, 9D, and probably a few more that we didn’t drive on.  You know, guys, there is an infinite number of numbers out there.  You could try some of the others, just for fun.

But the food was lovely and the company was even better.  You never really get much of a chance to talk to the stars of the show at weddings – they’re always frantically tying down loose ends – but we did get to see the Chrises a few times, and we spent most of the evening happily noshing and hanging out with family members.  And we even managed to find our way back to the hotel without ending up back in Queens, so: Win.

We had most of Saturday to ourselves.  Most of my family hung out at the hotel, but Kim is an adventurer so she and I spent the day doing some of the touristy things that were in the booklet Chris and Chris gave us.  We had a grand time.

There is an old railroad bridge over the Hudson that is now a pedestrian crossing, so we headed toward that first. You park at one end, climb up the stairs, and head west.  The Hudson River Valley is just a beautiful place, so we took our time there on the bridge, looking up and down the river.

Just up one of the Rt. 9s from there is Hyde Park and the home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  For a man of such wealth and power it is a relatively restrained place – apparently his father wanted nothing to do with the extravagance of, say, the Vanderbilts, who were their neighbors to the north.  It’s also a cluttered place, as befits the style of the early 20th century.

There are all sorts of things to look at along the grounds as well.  There was a statue of FDR and Eleanor that we of course took photos with, because you are legally obligated to do that with such statues, for example.

Both Roosevelts (and their dogs) are buried on the grounds, and you can wander over to that as well.  My favorite bit on the grounds, though, was a statue dedicated to FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech and constructed out of bits of the Berlin Wall.  Apparently the sculptor was Winston Churchill’s granddaughter, which made a certain amount of sense.

And then it was time for the Main Event!

Chris and Chris had the foresight to rent buses to take us from the hotels up to the site of the wedding, which as near as we could tell was in southern Ontario, a straight shot up the various Rt. 9s.  It was a beautiful place – an old mansion overlooking the Hudson – and the sort of mild, slightly overcast (i.e. not dazzlingly bright) day that you hope for with events like this. 

We milled around for a while, oohing and aahing over the scenery until it was time for the ceremony.  And then there it was – what we all came to see.  It was a simple ceremony, heartfelt and lovely.

Weddings are wonderful things, because you have two people who love each other and are making a commitment to one another in front of the people who matter to them.  Everything else is extra. 

Such as the reception, because at that point the hard work is over and it is time to kick back and celebrate. 

Although, as Chris and Chris pointed out, these days it is not really an official marriage until you update your Facebook status (which they did right there on their phones, so it’s all proper now).  We ate, we drank, we talked, we even danced for certain values of dancing, and then the bus took us back. 

For me one of the best things about this was the chance to see my family.  We’re a scattered group these days and such events come all too infrequently, so when we get the chance we try to enjoy it as much as possible.

It’s easy to enjoy good things when you have good people to enjoy them with.

Chris and Chris have been together a long time.  We’ve long considered them married regardless of the state of the law.  On Saturday they reaffirmed that commitment openly and freely, before friends and family, and there is no lovelier thing in the world than that.

Congratulations, Chris and Chris.

Aliens!

So where were you this past Saturday morning?

The correct answer, by the way, is “I was attending the 4H Drama Festival down at Home Campus, thank you!”  Because that’s where you should have been.

Every year the local 4H clubs have a Drama Festival.  Like most things involving 4H it is a fair amount of fun, a whole lot of work, and a genuine time-sink, but one that you end up doing again next year because it was worth it in retrospect.  Each club gets about half an hour total for their play, including set-up, performance, and strike, and it runs pretty much all day.

We’ve been rehearsing this for a couple of months, in between the snowstorms that always magically seemed to appear on Tuesdays this winter.  The kids put a lot of effort into it.

Mostly this is about teaching kids theater, since they have to do it all – how to write a play, how to act in a play, and in our case how to do tech.  We’re one of the few groups that does any real tech stuff for their play, which is probably a function of a) the fact that I’m one of the leaders of this outfit (below Kim and Jamie, who handle everything else) and b) I have the keys to the theater so we can actually get in there and do some tech stuff.  Tech doesn’t just happen on the day of the show – you have to prepare.

This year Tabitha once again was running the lighting board, which involved a number of cues where the lights flickered off and on as well as several “solo bump” cues where one lighting instrument comes up full and everything else cuts to black.  Her buddy Taryn handled the sound cues on her own keyboard, which we plugged into the system in the theater.

This year’s play (written by Addie, one of the kids in the troop) centered around the idea of a bunch of aliens invading the annual 4H Fair on “Detective Day,” when – naturally – the Scooby-Doo gang, Sherlock Holmes, and the Men In Black would be attending.  

That backdrop is actually tied to a bar that rises up into the flyspace above the stage – Tabitha, Taryn and I came in one Sunday night to tie it onto the bar.  Part of my job as the tech guy was to teach Tabitha, Taryn and Addie (who ended up being the one running that part of the tech, as the other two were in the rear of the house running sound and lights) how to work the ropes to bring it in and out.  It’s an interesting task, and one that I didn’t get to learn until much later in my theatrical career.

Back at the Fair, several items go missing (“Jinkies!”).

Getting those items to go up was a trick.  The same night we tied the backdrop up, we also rigged up a pulley system on another bar where each of the three items that disappears gets clipped to a fishing line that runs up, over, and down.  At the appropriate moment, Addie would haul on the correct line while Tabitha made the lights flicker and Taryn added eerie sounds.

The problem with getting a review of a performance from the tech guy is that you hear an awful lot about the tech.

With the missing items causing consternation among the 4H fairgoers, the various detectives jump in to try to solve the case (“Elementary, my dear Watson!”).  Lauren played Scooby-Doo, much to her eternal delight, and ended up with a number of speaking lines.

Eventually we discover that it was in fact the aliens who were making the items disappear – not Professor Moriarity, or even Old Man Jenkins.  Aliens say “beep,” by the way.

There is an interlude of crisis, as one would imagine there would be given the discovery that what you thought was a garden-variety theft has suddenly morphed into First Contact, which may or may not be an improvement from the “we’re having a crisis” standpoint.  (“Ruh-roh!  Raliens!”)

But it all works out in the end.  The aliens return the missing items and go home to set up their own fair, and the MIBs erase everyone’s memory (“Would you look right here, please…”).

They did a really nice job with the play.  Everyone remembered their lines and projected them to the back of the house.  The tech stuff went off without a hitch.  And the judges liked it.

Did I mention there were judges?

Because there were.

This is a competition.  Like most 4H events, there are categories of ribbons – blue category, red category, white category.  This is our third year doing this, and every year we have been in the blue ribbon category.  That’s where we like to be.

This year, however, the judges liked us so much that they awarded us the championship.  On the one hand, this is quite a nice honor.  The kids worked very hard on this, and it’s good to see them get recognized for it.  On the other hand, well, this means that they want us to do it at the State Fair in August.

For those of you who have not been to the Wisconsin State Fair, it is about what you would expect you would find when you put far too many residents of a state known for beer consumption together on a hot summer day and give them carnival rides and livestock.  It’s fun in a chaotic, “protect the weak and the slow” sort of way.  Putting on a 4H play in that environment is really not something we were hoping to achieve.  You know all that tech?  Part of that was there to inoculate us against such a possibility, since the stage at the State Fair has no flyspace and is open to the sun (which makes lighting cues sort of hard to do).

We’re still trying to figure out how that’s going to work.  I’ll keep you posted.

Tabitha and I had to leave the Drama Festival immediately after our play so I could take her to another social engagement about half an hour south of here, so I missed Lauren’s musical number.

The overall 4H organization had asked if anyone wanted to do short acts between the plays, and Lauren and a few of her buddies took them up on it.  They practiced a few songs in the weeks leading up to the show, and finally settled on Rhett and Link’s Nilla Wafer Top Hat Time.

Because it made sense at the time.

Well, actually, no.  It didn’t make any sense then either, and that was part of its charm.

It was a good day for theater.

To Have and to Hold

Today is my parents’ fiftieth anniversary.

They’ve been together even longer than that, of course.  They were voted the Cutest Couple of their graduating high school class in 1958 – it says so, right in the yearbook.  It was a busy five years between that yearbook and their wedding – my mother graduated from the same university where I would go, in my time; my dad spent time in the Navy before entering into the workplace (and eventually getting a degree of his own).  They stayed together.  They got married.

Fifty years is a long time.  The world was a very different place on this date in 1963.  Jack Kennedy was still alive and President.  Doctor Who was months from being aired for the first time and the Beatles were one album removed from being a club band.  Computers had vacuum tubes.  Televisions were furniture, with solid wood cases, and the picture came in two colors (black and white).  The average American car weighed more than the average American home. 

Things change, though.  Cars are smaller and homes are larger.  Doctor Who remains popular while, sadly, I find I have to explain who the Beatles were to my students.  The whole idea of black and white images strikes modern Americans as quaint.  It’s a different world.

But my parents are still here, still married.  And that is important.

They have been my role models since before I knew what role models were.  I learned how to be a person from them – how to treat people and how to expect to be treated by them, how to stand on my own and how to care for others, how to think and question and answer.  I learned how to be part of a marriage from them – what it means to be part of someone’s world, day in and day out, to love them without being absorbed by them or taking them for granted.  I learned how to be a parent from them – how to pass on all these lessons to my children, and other lessons besides.

My parents are the sort of people that my friends would hang out with even when I wasn’t around.  My friends still do sometimes, even now.  Even as a teenager I could leave my parents alone with my girlfriends and know that they would care for them and make them feel not only welcome but truly at home.  So many people cannot say such things.  All I can say is how fortunate I am.  I always look forward to spending time with them, and it never happens often enough.

Next month we will gather in Philadelphia to celebrate, because that’s just how the timing worked out – lives are so busy these days, and people are so spread out.  Fortunately we have a Movable Feast tradition in my family – people are more important than deadlines, and holidays happen when you’ve got time for them to happen.

We will celebrate, because my parents are worth celebrating.   We will celebrate because finding someone to love and being able to make and keep that kind of commitment to them is a rare and wonderful thing.  We will celebrate because they are still my role models, even now.

Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad.

Events, They Just Keep Coming

It’s been a frantically busy time here in Our Little Town, as the ends of semesters tend to be.  Between the grading, exam prep and class prep that are part of the academic lifestyle (along with being a political football, griping about how students aren’t as prepared as they were back when we were in school [what psychologists refer to as “amnesia”], and a general obsession with office supplies) on the one hand and all of the events, occasions, and “volunteer opportunities” on the other, things can get pretty blurred.

But you need to write things down, because otherwise they get forgotten.  And there are times when that is the main function of this blog.

I’m not going to get into the academic side, because that is still ongoing and – at this point of the semester – not really something I want to dwell on right now, in large part because I live there every waking minute and more than a few non-waking minutes – it’s a bad thing when your dreams revolve around grading essays.  Instead, there are events to report!  And those are more fun.

Every year Not Bad President Elementary hosts its Art Show, where the students have various projects mounted all over the school and the parents cruise the halls in search of the ones produced by their children.  We’ve been doing this for nine years now, and it is kind of odd to think that next year will be our last one. 

After nine years you learn a few things.  Notably, you learn not to get there right when it starts, because the phrase for that is “mob scene.”  The art isn’t going anywhere, and if you wait until about halfway through you can take the time to absorb your child’s craft without feeling like you’re at the Louvre and being carried away by the crowd before you even get your camera focused.

Lauren knew right where her art was, and it was lovely.

We’ve also been back at the 4H Cat Show.  Well, Tabitha and I were.  Lauren joined us late, and Kim mostly spent the day frantically trying to catch up on her new administrative post – a job that, at least until finals are in, she is doing on top of the other job she is doing.  She’s kind of Doppler-shifted these days.

So once more I spent a Friday night setting things up – getting the food booth ready, mostly.  We got there after the tables and chairs were up, which my back appreciated, but there’s always something to be done.

The next morning I got there way to early and once again tried to figure out how to make coffee.  Fortunately once again someone else stepped in, and thus nobody got mad.  I spent the rest of the day at the food booth, dishing out nachos and barbecue beef (sometimes combined, which is surprisingly tasty even though it provides negative nutritional value) until we ran out.  Kim dropped Tabitha and Midgie off a bit later before heading off to get Lauren from her friend’s house (another sleepover!) and taking her to Home Campus for a while.  Lauren spent her time on campus making a giant TARDIS for Kim’s office door.

That makes me astonishingly happy.

The results of this second cat show were largely the same as the results from the last one.  Midgie was put in a class with seven other cats.  Two were declared “blue ribbon” kitties, one of whom got the top prize of a trophy.  Four, including Midgie, were placed in the red ribbon category.  And the two who drew blood from the judge got white ribbons, which are the 4H’s way of saying, “Thanks for playing – better luck next time.”  It’s better than a year’s supply of Rice-A-Roni, I suppose, though a friend of mine did point out that perhaps a red ribbon would have been more appropriate for a cat who draws blood.

Tabitha did very well managing Midgie through this process.  All of the cats were grumpy because of the oncoming rainstorm, so it was not easy.

Finally for this post, there was the annual Music Recital.  Both girls take music lessons from a friend of ours, and every year she rents out one of the local halls (the same one where Kim and I had our wedding reception) for a recital.  It’s a friendly event with a supportive audience, and then there is food.

Lauren was the first up, which was not something she wanted to be.  But she did a good job with her piece – most importantly, when she made a mistake she figured out how to correct it and then soldiered on, which is a valuable lesson in life.  Then a friend of hers joined her up there and they did a duet.

Tabitha was the only violinist on the program, and she too did a nice job with her pieces.  It was a good change of pace, amid all those pianists. 

This was also when Lauren received her Gold Cup.  This recital is just for our friend's students (and, this year, a number of students from another teacher as well), but in February there is the official Music Festival.  That's quite an event.  Music students from all over the county come to be judged by professionals on two memorized pieces.  You get graded on a 5-point scale, and once you hit 15 points you get a Gold Cup.  So if you do the math, you realize that to get one of these things you have to be really good for three straight years, or mostly good for longer.

This was Lauren's third year.

There is a delay while they actually get the cups engraved, so you don't actually get it until May.  But it's good to know that it's coming.

And then there was food.  Because in Wisconsin, there is always food.  It's one of the things I like about Wisconsin.

Kim’s parents came down for the concert.  It’s a long drive, and the girls appreciate that kind of support.  Plus, it’s always nice to see them anyway.

I am proud of my girls.

Documenting, 101

What I do for my students.

All this week I have been frantically trying to get my last online discussion set up for my compressed video class.  I had no idea, when I structured the course this way, that these assignments would take so long to create.  But each one requires me to locate six to nine documents regarding a specific time and issue – documents that are not only relevant to whatever question I wish to ask (which is a whole added layer of trying to figure out the assignment) but which are also, preferably, available in a digital format that can be transferred over to my assignment without retyping them entirely.

This last one turns out to be a fairly impossible qualification, sometimes.  I end up doing a lot of typing.  Fortunately I am now a relatively quick typist.

As the class has moved closer to the present, finding documents has become both easier and more challenging.  On the one hand, there are a lot of documents to choose from, as the modern era is easily the most overdocumented period in American history.  On the other hand, well, there are a lot of documents to choose from. 

I remember reading a memoir by a spy, a long time ago, who put it best.  People think intelligence is listening in the silence for that faint signal that nobody else can hear, he said, but it isn’t that at all.  Most of the time it’s being stuck in a roaring crowd trying to pick out a single conversation.

So I do a lot of reading, in other words.

Sometimes this is fun.  For the previous assignment I had them take a position on whether Ford pardoning Nixon was the correct thing to do, and once I figured out that this was the question I wanted to ask the documents just flowed right onto the page.  It’s also not an issue I address directly in my lectures, so it was interesting to see how they responded without getting my interpretation.  Sometimes I worry that no matter how often I stress that my interpretation of historical events is just that – as opposed to, say, absolute truth – and they need to evaluate it just as they would any other secondary source, this is not an action that comes naturally to students.  It takes a few times for them to believe me.

But this time?  No fun at all.

For this final assignment I wanted to do something with the onset of the Culture Wars, and since most of what we will be covering in class during the week this discussion is open will be the late 1970s and the 1980s, I figured the emergence of the Religious Right would be a good topic.  And it is a good topic – one almost guaranteed to get some interesting comments.

But it did mean that in order to find the right documents – including enough on both sides so that the students could pick either side and still have abundant evidence to work with – I ended up reading an astonishing amount of blather from the Moral Majority and its defenders, promoters and partisans.  They were so blithely arrogant about their ability to read the mind of God and declare His will on secular issues, and so utterly clueless about the devastation they would wreak on the American ideal of Constitutional law.

It made my head hurt.

So long as my students conform to the structural requirements in these discussions – thesis statement, supporting evidence, connections explaining how the latter actually works to confirm the former, citations – then they will be fine.  Agreeing with the professor is specifically listed in the syllabus as being worth 0% of their grade.  My goal here is twofold – a) to get them to think critically about a specific issue, and b) to teach them how to argue in a historically appropriate manner, to think like historians.

And if that means slogging through Jerry Falwell’s purple prose, well there you go.  I knew the job was dangerous when I took it.

A glass of wine would be good right about now, though.

Fade to Black

The upstairs TV is slowly dying.

Well, that’s not quite true.  There’s nothing wrong with the TV itself.  Kim and I bought it with our pocket change about a dozen years ago (which is what happens when you throw your change in a bucket for half a decade, though we did deposit in the bank first and pay with a check, much to the salesman’s relief) and it is still going strong from a reliability standpoint.  It got moved upstairs when we got the snazzy flatscreen TV a few years back, but otherwise it continues to show us things that will deaden our brains for as long as we choose to watch them, and that’s pretty much all you can ask of one of those things.

Except that it is an analogue TV, and apparently this is just Prehistoric.  Stone-Age, daddy-o, like the first halting step in evolution’s long ladder.

A couple of months ago I noticed that there were a couple of channels we couldn’t get upstairs.  They would come in fine downstairs on the flatscreen, but not on the old TV upstairs.  I made a mental note to ask the cable company about this. 

This was about as effective as most such notes, and it was weeks before I finally remembered to call them.

“Hey – I’m losing channels on my television!”

“Yes, you are.”

Well, okay then.  I was hoping for a more concerned response than that, though, so I tried again.

“But I am paying for channels, and see no reason to pay for channels that are no longer coming in.  Please to explain the meaning of this lack of channels that is not matched by my lack of payment?”

This seemed to help.  You can always count on fiscal descriptions of problems to get people’s attention when it comes to customer complaints.

Eventually we worked out that the channels were in fact disappearing and that this was planned.  All of the channels were switching over to digital signals this spring, and when they did so I would no longer be able to receive them on my analogue TV.  “By mid-May you probably won’t have anything coming in on that TV,” they said.

Of course there was a solution.  There is always a solution in today’s economy, for those who choose to pay for it.  For a nearly nominal monthly fee, they said, they would gladly hook me up with a converter which would step down that digital signal and return my channels.

Now, a more stupid solution to a problem has never been formulated.  I could just buy myself a brand new TV, one that would not need their converter, and in about a year and a half it would have paid for itself, and I would have a nice new TV that I could probably plug into the plethora of devices that already exist in this house until it reaches the Singularity and calls the cable company on its own initiative just to blow digital raspberries at them.

Or, I could just let the whole problem fade away and not bother with an upstairs television.  Beyond the occasional sporting event, the weather, and whatever blockbuster highbrow soap opera PBS has convinced Maggie Smith to star in now, we really don’t watch much television anymore.  Even the girls have largely moved on to other media.  Indeed, most of what ends up on the flatscreen downstairs comes through the Netflix archives – we have now made it halfway through David Tennant’s first season as Doctor Who, for example, and Kim likes to watch Merlin now and then.  We’ve seriously considered just dumping the cable entirely, and this summer we may well do so.

So it’s a quandary.

What Has I Gots In My Baggins?

The other day it occurred to me that the black shoulder bag that I use to carry my supplies from home to my various jobs was getting a bit heavier than usual.  This is not an uncommon occurrence for me, as I do tend to toss things into it far more often than I take things out of it. You never know when you will need a specific something, I suppose, although sometimes the need has to be startlingly specific to require that particular something.

But then I’ll have it.  And won’t I be the hero then?

However, having reached an age where wear and tear is starting to get a bit more obvious than it used to be, notably about the shoulders in this case, I decided that it would be a good time to take an inventory of my bag to see what could be offloaded for the time being.  There is no point in being a hero if it means having to resort to ibuprofen merely to haul around your gear.

This is what I found.

Two umbrellas, one black and one black with fluorescent polka dots.

It has rained for most of the last several weeks here in Baja Canada and the only reason we’re not up to our eyes in sprouting vegetation is that the high temperatures have only barely been enough to keep the rain from being snow.  Once in a while I manage to impress upon my children that they should carry appropriate gear in the face of this weather, but invariably it ends up forgotten – if I’m lucky, in my car, and if I’m not lucky then somewhere at school, at a 4H meeting, or some other destination.  The polka-dotted one came from my car.  I put it in my bag to take into the house and forgot it there, next to the other one that I had forgotten there after using it myself.  So apparently my children get this trait from somewhere very close by.

Twenty-three partially graded Western Civ II exams, focusing on the Enlightenment and the Long 19th Century (since returned, fully graded).

I grade these thing by problem rather than by student, so I end up going through each exam eight or nine times.  While it is a wonderful process for making sure that my standards are consistent across exams, it does mean that nothing is ever finished until the very end of the process.  This can get a tad discouraging after a while.

One excuse note submitted by a Western Civ student to justify taking the exam late, okayed by me.

When a student who hasn’t shown up more than a couple of times requests an extension for an exam, I want it documented.  If they’ve been attending, participating and generally making themselves known and trustworthy, then I tend not to worry about it.

One answer key for the exam.

This is how I usually spend the first part of the exam itself.  I figure if I can’t whip through it in a third of the time, they’ll never be able to do it in the full time.  It’s a handy barometer.

One wooden clipboard, with roughly a quarter inch of scratch paper attached to it, on top of which was a grading sheet for the Western Civ exams.

I have learned not to put the final scores on these exams until the very end, as otherwise I box myself in.  Sometimes you go through and realize about halfway through that your standards should have been adjusted, and it’s just easier to do that on my sheet than on each individual exam.  When I’m done, I transfer it all over onto their exams.

One CD case containing two CDs: Blue Moo (Sandra Boynton) and English Rebel Songs (Chumbawamba)

When I go over WWI in my Western Civ class, I don’t really go through the blow-by-blow of the war.  The textbook does a good enough job with that, and I spend my time going through the lead-in to the war (an interlocking series of tripwires set up between 1870 and 1914 that pretty much guaranteed the sort of continent-wide disaster that followed), the conduct of the war (trenches and what that actually meant on the ground), and the dispiriting conclusion of the Armistice (“They never knew they were beaten.  It will have to be done all over again.”  -John Pershing, Commander, US forces).  Chumbawamba’s CD has any number of protest songs from English history, but the one I play for my class is “The Old Barbed Wire.”  If you want to find the general he’s pinning another medal on his chest, but the private is hanging from the old barbed wire in No Man’s Land, between the trenches.  It’s a beautiful song if you don’t listen too closely to the lyrics.

I’ve largely given up trying to figure out how to play CDs in the various computers I find in classrooms – even when I do know how to make whatever version of whatever program they have actually work, the odds of it getting set up in time to be useful are pretty minimal.  So I bring in a CD player.  This one happened to have Blue Moo in it, and a fine CD it is in most circumstances though not really appropriate for WWI.  Unfortunately the CD player died, so my class never did hear any music this semester.  I didn’t even bring the CD player home from Not Quite So Far Away Campus.  Just the CDs.

The power cord from the above-described recently deceased CD player.

You can never have enough power cords.  This I did save.

One roll book containing:

Class records for two of my three current classes (the third being online), as well as several previous classes.

Yes, I’m one of those old-fashioned professors who doesn’t use an online grade book. 

A post-it note with the four-digit copier code I need to make copies at Not Quite So Far Away Campus

This is not to be confused with the copier code I had at NQSFAC two years ago, or the one I have at Home Campus.  Apparently they expire every so often and have to be renewed with some new random collection of numbers.  Because you never know if other faculty members will just jump your code and copy quizzes on your account.

Academic crime: it’s a mean old world out there.

Lecture notes for two Western Civ classes (WWI, and Post-WWI Chaos [Including the Russian Revolution]) and one US2 class (The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s).

Sometimes it’s hard to keep everything straight.

General Board Outlines for Western Civ II.

I throw a lot of information at my students, and I have found that if I put an outline of the lecture on the board beforehand they do a much better job of getting the main points.  And if I have an outline printed up and ready to go before I walk in, so do I.

The SCUM Manifesto.

This was a prop for my Civil Rights Movement class, in which we completed our discussion of the Civil Rights Movement (begun the class before) and moved on to discuss the Youth Movement and the Feminist Movement.  All of those social protest movements went through roughly the same arc, starting out fairly moderate and getting progressively more radical.  The SCUM Manifesto is an example of the radical stage of the feminist movement – the kind of shrill bogeymen (bogeywymyn?) who continue to haunt the fevered imagination of right-wing talk radio hosts even now.  It was written by Valerie Solanas (whose other claim to fame was shooting Andy Warhol) and it’s basic argument is 1) men are scum, 2) no, you don’t understand, men are just scum, 3) getting rid of men would solve all of the world’s problems [thus the title of the manifesto, which is an acronym for “the Society for Cutting Up Men”], and 4) men really are scum.  She makes this argument in what can generously be described as an obscene and borderline incoherent rage, and as a cultural monument to a specific moment in American history it is simply unsurpassable.

A syllabus for my Western Civ II class

Because sometimes even the professor forgets what comes next.

Accommodation plans for two Western Civ students

The university has a very nice system for students with documented issues regarding exams and such, and so long as they have the proper paperwork they can take those exams in much more conducive environments.  While I have never noticed any particular difference in terms of the grades they earn, I suppose it is a good thing for such students to have this available as an option.

Discussion 7 Feedback Notes for US2

Grading online discussions is a laborious and time-consuming process, at least the way I do it.  I read through each post (each student has to make at least three posts in my class, and it’s easier to read them in their proper threads while commenting on a central sheet than it is to read each student’s posts separately), making notes to myself as I go.  Then I summarize those notes into a feedback paragraph for each student, which then gets posted individually to each student.

A program from Lauren’s school play from February

The trees!  They talk!

Cue sheet, tech specs and introductory notes from Friday’s Performing Arts act down at Home Campus

My job as Performing Arts Guy down at Home Campus covers everything from negotiating contracts to hanging lights to making sure there is bottled water in the dressing room.  When acts come in after lunch and expect to perform three hours later, this can be a paperwork- and energy-intensive experience.

A crescent wrench

For hanging lights, what else?  I’ve had this one since college – it was, in fact, given to me by one of the theater groups on campus, and for most of my college years I simply kept it in my backpack.  You never knew when somebody would come running over to you as you walked between classes and beg you to hang or focus lights, and it was just easier to have it than have to walk all the way back to my dorm room to find it.  This actually happened a lot, given that a) there were 8-10 major student drama groups on campus, depending on how you counted, and b) there were maybe a dozen and a half of us who did lighting.

Of course, this could get me into trouble.  The first time I ever flew abroad I forgot to take the wrench out of my backpack, which I was using as a carry-on.  The security people hemmed and hawed about it for a bit, but ultimately decided – in that pre-9/11 era – that unbolting the wing would probably not be a very effective terrorist strategy anyway, so they let me pass.  It is a well-traveled wrench.

A random plastic grocery bag

I think I stuffed that in there because of the rain, when I wanted to keep something dry.  I hope whatever it was stayed dry.

One copy of Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

My reading material for much of the week.  A classic.

A plastic spoon

No, I have no idea why this is in there.  I assume there was a reason once, but even that might be unwarranted.  Spoons just seem to accumulate.

Coins totaling 1.25 euros and 1 American cent.

The euros are there because I use them as a prop in my Western Civ class, when we get around to discussing the lurching steps toward European unification after World War II.  It’s more real to students when they have actual physical objects to hold on to.

The penny is there because dark, enclosed spaces of less than two cubic feet in volume located anywhere in the United States create pennies.  Certainly the mint knows better than to make any more of the things – nobody uses them for anything other than filling up change jars.  Spontaneous generation is really the only possible reason for them.  Nice of the penny fairies to have changed the design on the back recently so we don’t take them for granted.

Twelve pens in various stages of functionality, along with one pencil, one mechanical pencil, two highlighters, and nine dry-erase markers.

Writing implements are just the coin of the realm in academia.  I have no idea how the highlighters got there, though, since I regard them as evil.

A pen for a smart-screen computer.

This is a special pen and thus resides in its own pocket.  It only works on a touch screen computer, and it allows me to draw things that my compressed video class can see with a reliability that approaches 60% on good days. 

A set of keys for the theater and neighboring areas of Home Campus.

A lot of life in these modern times is simply the slow accumulation of metal keys and plastic cards.  As part of my role Performing Arts Guy on campus, I have an entire key ring for the various doors that make up the ins and outs of the theater, art and music building on campus, plus a key for the classrooms in the new building.  That much metal I didn’t want on my regular key ring because very early on I learned that trying to fit all those keys onto one ring would rip out the pockets on any pair of pants in the world.  So I transferred all but my campus office key to the extra ring and left it in my office.  But since they are now asking us to lock up our classrooms all the time in the wake of a series of thefts, I find that I need to carry it around in order to get into my classes.  I’m not carrying that set of keys in my pocket.  And thus we return to the refrain.

A wad of paper napkins.

It’s always good to have napkins.

A copy of a letter, dated 2004, from Tabitha’s allergist to any airport security personnel who reads it regarding Epi-Pens and why they should not be confiscated as a security threat.

So far we’ve never been questioned by security regarding Epi-Pens, which is nice, but you can never be too careful.  Some day some overzealous rental cop is going to try to force my child to travel without the life-saving medicine she would need in the event of anaphylaxis, and the results of such an attempt will not be pretty.  Best to have the paperwork and avoid that … unpleasantness.

A pile of unused 3x5 cards.

Because that’s how I roll.

A pile of used 3x5 cards from my Western Civ class, with student contact information should I need it.

If I leave them in my office, I won’t have them when I need them.  If I leave them at home, the same is true.  So they travel with me.  At the end of the semester they’ll get shredded, as I really don’t need to preserve that information.

No wonder my shoulder hurts.