A Wedding in February

One of the better things I’ve done in my life was to get ordained online because under the laws of the State of Wisconsin this means I’m legally allowed to officiate weddings.

A proper wedding is a time of joy. Two people declare their love for each other and set off for their future together, and while you don’t necessarily need to be married to do that it is a fact that rituals matter in life and it is a lovely thing to mark the occasion with a ceremony.

I got to officiate a wedding today.

I’ve known Camrin and Jacob since they were in grade school. Camrin, in fact, invited Oliver to her birthday party when they were both in kindergarten. We’re all adults now and I consider both of them to be friends, and when they asked me to be the officiant for their wedding, well, of course I said yes. It would be a pleasure and an honor.

I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

It was a short, simple ceremony with just family in attendance. They’re planning a larger Celebration of Marriage ceremony for later but this was an important date for them so they wanted to have the actual wedding today.

There is much good in this world, and sometimes we get to be part of it.

Congratulations to Camrin and Jacob! May you know joy and love together all your days.

News and Updates

1. I forget – was the release of the three million or so pages of the Epstein files (still only part of the whole and thus still not compliance with federal law) that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is a pedophile who would likely not last three hours in prison before the other inmates fed pieces of him into a shower drain supposed to distract us from the continuing Fascist occupation of Minneapolis by poorly trained jackbooted ICE thugs who have kidnapped and trafficked citizens and immigrants alike, tried to arrest cops for being Brown In Public, actually did arrest multiple journalists because apparently the First Amendment only counts if you’re supporting the government, and publicly executed two American citizens in the streets while being filmed and then tried to lie about it both times or was that the other way around? Are both of these things supposed to distract us from the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump still talks about invading a NATO ally even though he “negotiated” a deal to get us exactly what we already had in Greenland before he decided to do Putin’s dirty work? Is all of that meant to distract us from the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are openly calling for the federalization (read: “partisan control”) of American elections in direct violation of the US Constitution? It’s hard to keep track. Are we great yet?

2. The madness of these times is exhausting, but we press forward because there is no other option. Fuck those clowns. It’s my country. They can’t have it.

3. So … yes, but aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

4. One of the strangest disconnects in my life right now is the simple fact that we are all living in the Worst Timeline Ever while at the same time my personal world is actually going along pretty well. Yes, this creates an obligation to use that privilege in the service of creating a better timeline in general and I do my best to fulfill that. But on a day-in, day-out basis, things are going well in my little corner of the world.

5. The semester is going along pretty well so far, a week and a half into it. My Zoom class is asking questions and seems engaged with the material so far – they’ve already asked me a couple of questions that I couldn’t answer, which I regard as the hallmark of a good class. Most of my advisees are enrolled though there are a few stragglers who apparently enjoy filling out forms to try to do that sort of thing after the deadlines have passed. And I seem to have found myself on a hiring committee where the candidates are all pretty good so I think we’ll be okay there. So far, so good.

6. I’m still not managing to read much, even though the book I’m currently working through is really good. I get to it when I can focus.

7. In these parlous times you just have to do things that make you happy no matter how ridiculous they are, and that is why there is a 5lb block of Cooper Sharp cheese in the fridge in the basement now, waiting for me to take it to one of the local supermarkets to be sliced. I am a happy Philadelphian.

8. I am currently avoiding the OS updates that Apple is pushing out to both my phone and my computer because from what I can tell both of them are poorly designed interfaces full of useless AI and I’m waiting until a) they figure out how to make updating at least not a step backward and/or b) I have no choice because they break the older OS that I’m using enough that I can’t do anything anymore. I have already noticed that the login shortcuts for both devices only work sporadically these days. We’ll see how it goes.

9. It’s getting back to more normal winter temperatures here – yesterday we nearly hit the freezing point, and it’s nice to have temperatures with real square roots – which means that the snow and ice melts a bit during the sunshine and that’s lovely but it also means that the salt on the roads gets picked up by the now-liquid water and splashed about by every car on the road and now both of our cars are white. I’m trying to think of it as camouflage.

10. The other day Kim and I were driving through Our Little Town when we noticed that there was a turkey sitting on the streetlight. This seemed odd. We took photos. And then we noticed the second turkey on top of the building behind the streetlight. As Les Nessman once noted, “It’s almost as if the turkeys were … organized.”

A Selection of Memes on the Current Crisis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Dissent

Back in October, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, an executive order that basically overturned the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

Anyone who criticizes fascism suddenly became a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who criticizes the policies of the federal government in any way was likewise declared a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who criticizes “capitalism” – a term which I sincerely doubt Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump can actually define – was also a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who criticizes Christianity as defined not by churches or clergy or even individual believers but by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves, is also a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who isn’t a bootlicking toady for the current administration is now labeled a “domestic terrorist.”

This is an attempt to criminalize dissent.

The Founding Fathers understood that this was tyranny. They understood, as George Washington said, that “If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.”

Yeah, no.

I am a goddamned American patriot. I have devoted my life to the study of this country’s history and I literally have a PhD in the Founding Fathers to go with that. My family has been here for two hundred years. I have at least three ancestors who fought on the correct side of the Civil War, for the republic created by the Founding Fathers and against the treason of the slaveholding South. During World War II the United States of America gave medals to my ancestors for shooting Fascists and we called them The Greatest Generation. I will be damned if I will disgrace their memory by kowtowing to these fucking losers now. 

This country was built on dissent. This country was built by people who looked at the shit being thrown their way and told the people throwing it that they could go to hell. It’s an ongoing process and we have a long way to go before we reach our aspirations, but there is only one way to get there.

I dissent.

To Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slave, I dissent.

From your cruel and inhumane war on American cities, your rogue personal army, your executions in the street, your kidnapping and trafficking small children, and your tyranny, I dissent.

From your promotion and defense of bloodshed as long as the people you hate are the ones dying, I dissent.

From your equally cruel and inhumane war on the immigrants who are here making lives and communities, following the processes and still being kidnapped and trafficked to foreign countries for pretend offenses in direct violation of legally binding court orders, from your campaign of ethnic cleansing in a nation of immigrants, I dissent.

From your Fascist “show me your papers” policies, from your use of a small child as bait, from your lack of ethics, morality, humanity, and decency, from your violent authoritarianism and small-minded bigotry, I dissent.

From your reckless assaults on education, your totalitarian attempts to rewrite history to suit your ideological demands, your refusal to accept the absolute fact that this country has always been a multi-cultural, multi-lingual nation with great virtues and great flaws standing side by side, I dissent.

From your obvious white supremacy and white nationalism, your soul-destroying racism, your brutal ignorance of actual Americans and the people living here, I dissent.

From your assaults on democracy, from your overt attempts to rig elections, suppress votes, and overturn results that don’t support you, from your weaponizing voter rolls as a tool of authoritarian control, I dissent.

From your eviscerating the US Constitution and its system of checks and balances, its limits on executive authority, and its safeguards against tyranny, I dissent.

From your destruction of American standing in the world, your attacks on allies, your coddling dictators, your clear subservience to a foreign power, your destructive trade wars, your catastrophic abandonment of everything that has made the United States a reliable ally, your refusal to recognize the contributions of American allies and your callous and ignorant dismissal of their losses, I dissent.

From your cruelty to the poor, the outcast, and the powerless, I dissent.

From your blasphemous twisted version of Christianity, I dissent.

From your eagerness to see hungry people starve, sick people die, and poor people suffer, I dissent.

From your overt war on women, on women’s health care, on women’s political and economic rights, on everything that the majority of the population might do that marks them as separate from breeding stock, I dissent.

From your desperate protection of pedophiles, all the way up to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump himself, from your willingness to start wars and invade American cities to distract from the fact that you are now over a month late in releasing the Epstein files as required by federal law, from your lawless immorality, rampant perversion, and twisted sickness, I dissent.

From all of this and more, from the mere fact that you have installed yourselves into positions of power and are systematically destroying everything that better men and women than you have built over generations of sweat, blood, and effort, from everything that you are and everything that you represent, I dissent.

I am not alone.

We outnumber you.

We will not be intimidated.

We will be here when you are just a negative example in a textbook.

I dissent.

Christmas, Part 3 - Wisconsin

We had our last Christmas celebration on Sunday.

We’re a family that likes to stretch these things out, what can we say? I will admit that it was a bit more stretched than we’d planned since we were supposed to do this the previous Saturday, but the weather forecast looked snowy and Saturdays, it turns out, are not that great when you have multiple people who work as bartenders so it got pushed back a week.

Naturally it snowed Sunday too. But nobody was bartending, so we had that going for us.

We all met at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, with me and Kim coming up from Our Little Town while Lauren and Shai drove in from Main Campus University. Oliver was already off at school and rather too far away for a quick visit so he was unable to make the event, but we have reached the point where we just try for the maximum number who can. Rory and Amy and most of their group were there, as were Justin and Christine, and we had a lovely time.

There is a certain pattern that happens at these events. For the most part we cycle between hanging out, eating, and gifts, and as far as patterns go it’s a pretty tough one to beat though given the prevalence of snacks laid out – heavy on the home baked cookies but not limited to them, of course – the line between eating and any of the other activities can be pretty thin.

Good food in good company – that’s the secret to life.

So we hung out for a while.

Eventually it was dinner time, which is a fairly amorphous sort of thing with this group since it involves a constant swirl of people sitting, eating, leaving, and being replaced by others doing the same thing so specifying a precise beginning and ending point is probably more trouble than it would be worth. It starts with the Call For Borscht and spreads outward from there into a feast of Ukrainian food and if you left hungry well whose fault was that?

This was followed by the gifts given to those who were not playing the Dice Game, which is mostly the younger children and Uncle Randall these days. It was a joyous swirl of paper and things and a good time was had by all, even those who had remained at the table to fill in the edges a bit.

This was followed by further hanging about because we could.

And then it was time for the Dice Game. This started years ago as a way for the people in my generation on both sides of the family to cut down on the chaos of Christmas shopping and has since become something of a rite of passage. Only the younger kids do the regular gifts these days – when you’re old enough, you’ll play the Dice Game. And play it we did, with abandon.

You never really know what you’re going to end up with when you play the Dice Game and that’s most of the fun. Also, it’s nice when people like the stuff you brought. I was pretty happy that the gifts I brought got traded for a few times. After the dust settled I gave away both of the things I ended up with to people who wanted them more which at this point in my life is a good way to end the game really.

This was, of course, followed by more hanging out.

Though not too much more, since we had to get home. Lauren and Shai came back as well since she had an appointment the next day that was easier to get to from our house than from Main Campus University. The snow had mostly but not entirely ended for the drive home and while it was a sloppy drive (and Kim and I had to stop to get more washer fluid about halfway home) we all got back without changing the shape of anything on the road.

We ended up in the living room for a while, just sitting and talking and sampling the ginger and hops flavored mead that I had received for my birthday from a friend. It was very tasty, and a nice way to end a good day.

Time and Tide

My dad would have been 87 today.

He’s been gone for almost a decade now. There are still days when I think of things that I’d like to tell him, mostly little things like finding a wheat cent in change or going over whatever the Eagles did in their most recent game. We didn’t have any big things left unsaid, after all.

The ghosts accumulate as you get older.

My grandmother – my dad’s mother – died forty years ago exactly, a hell of a birthday present for my dad when you think of it. My other grandparents both died in 2000. My mom died a bit over four years ago. Julia’s been gone for over a decade.  Uncle Ed. Mr. and Mrs. Watts. A small but growing list of UCF friends. Various colleagues. Some old friends. Some new. So many people. Time and demographics only flow in one direction, and all we can do is be there for the time we have with those we care about.

You think about these things more with each passing birthday.

And each year there are new people to hold in your life as well. Family. Friends. Even just passersby who take a small moment to share some humanity. It’s a cycle.

It’s been a while now and for as long as there are people who remember he will be with us still. I do my best.

Happy birthday, Dad.

One Less Task, More Or Less

I spent this morning not grading essays. It was nice.

Most of my Saturday mornings since 2019 have been devoted to the Never-Ending Online Class, which I signed up for because I’m an adjunct instructor who has managed to cobble together a career in academia without a tenure-track job and you don’t do that by saying no to offers when they come by. The first thing you learn as an adjunct is that the people who offer you jobs have a memory that has room for exactly one item and that item is whatever you told them the last time they offered you a job. If you say no to any offer, they will never offer you another thing again. So I’ve said yes to a lot of offers over the last few years and I’ve learned things I never thought I would know and managed to pay bills at the same time, so I suppose it’s worked out.

The Never-Ending Online Class works on a subscription model. Students sign up for a three-month period and they get access to the course. All of the material is already there on the website and they complete the course at their own pace. I grade the essays as they come in, provide feedback so they can do better on the next one, and answer questions as needed. I’m also required to have one hour per week of virtual office hours, to which not a single student ever came. These students will email if they have a question. Every month one cohort leaves and another comes in so there are always three different cohorts in the class. It runs year-round, every month new names on the screen.

When the previous instructor had to bow out of the class because his campus wouldn’t let him continue on with it, he offered it to me and I said “yes” because, as noted, that’s what you do as an adjunct.

And pretty much every Saturday morning since then I have fired up the Internet Machine wherever I was and graded whatever essays came in the previous week. I’ve graded essays on laptops in Philadelphia, New York, and Tennessee and on my phone in Italy, Portugal, and Hungary. Sometimes there have been two dozen essays to grade – all of them somewhere around 1000 words – and sometimes there have only been one or two. Once in a great while I get a week without them, but since 2019 I can count those weeks on my fingers.

You get to know the patterns. The class is set up with four units of three essays, and they have to do two from each unit for a total of eight. Some questions almost never get answered while others seem to appeal to every student. Most students submit work as they complete it so they can get the feedback for the next one, but some wait until the last minute to submit all eight, hoping for the best. If they submit all of them in the first week of the course, that’s usually a bad sign. So is doing the first eight assignments without bothering to check how many from each unit to do.

And each year the class would pay me somewhere around the equivalent of one or two adjunct classes, which was enough to cover bills and perhaps parts of vacations, but not enough to be the wealthy and powerful professor that so many elected officials seem to think I am. It was a nice gig that way.

But after six and a half years it was time to move on.

My kids are both in graduate school now, and we no longer have to save for college. The house and the cars are paid off. And I am at the point in my life where I wanted my Saturday mornings back.

Plus, AI has been a catastrophe and I got tired of reading essays that nobody wrote. Most students know better, but there are always a select few who think that outsourcing their brain to a hallucinating machine is an acceptable way to live, and that wears on a body after a while. There will come a day when everyone will regard AI with the same dripping contempt that we now reserve for diploma mills and industrial toxic waste producers but today is not that day. Tomorrow doesn’t look good either.

So I turned in my notice and as of the first of this year I am no longer the instructor for that course.

It turns out, though, that leaving the Never-Ending Online Class is about on par with leaving the Mafia since they have constantly been trying to pull me back into the life even though everyone involved is perfectly fine with me moving on.

I understand this, really I do. I fall through a whole pile of HR cracks in this system and trying to get anything done that involves HR has always been far more complicated than it should be. The Never-Ending Online Class is offered by one of the current iterations of the Online Campus (there are several) but for bureaucratic reasons that do make sense when someone explains them slowly enough my contract for that class was actually with R1 University. My advising job and most of my classes are at Home Campus and my US1/US2 Zoom class is at Far Away Campus, both of which are glommed onto larger campuses these days and many but not all of the HR decisions that affect me in those jobs come from the larger campuses rather than the ones I actually do the work for. Combine that with the fact that my advising job is a) grant-funded, which is a whole other kettle of weird, and b) considered “non-academic staff” rather than the “academic staff” category that my teaching jobs fall into and it gets complicated. I have so many different supervisors and provosts that even routine things can be tricky.

Three summers ago, for example, the folks who run the Never-Ending Online Class asked me to revise the course, which is something that they like to see happen every so often. I spent the summer doing that – reorganizing the web page, revising and in some cases replacing some of the essay assignments, and so on. The new version went live on October 1 that year. I’d been promised a small stipend to do all of this work, and at some point in September when they were sure I’d actually finish the job they started that process. The form required signatures from my immediate supervisor and the relevant provost. Which ones were those? Why, son, that’s a verrrrry interesting question, ain’t it? Yes, indeed, it was. Let’s just say that I didn’t get paid until nearly Christmas and leave it at that. At one point even the guy who hires adjuncts at Far Away Campus got involved, much to his bewilderment.

The new instructor taking over the Never-Ending Online Class officially started on January 1. We had a meeting in December with the guy in charge of the program to iron out the transition and I got the October cohort’s grades posted before I left, so it seemed like we were on the right track.

But I kept getting notifications for the course and students kept emailing me about things. I asked the guy in charge of the program to take me off the course, but it turns out he can’t do that. And IT said they couldn’t do that either. Eventually the R1 Campus IT folks said they could do it if the program made a formal request, so they did. That turned out to be incorrect. Apparently someone at R1 has to make this request. I’m not sure whether they have or not. So I just forward stuff over to my successor, ignore the notifications, and try not to think about Marlon Brando.