Double Post

I realize many of you read both Mad-Scientists and Adventures in Confusion . But for those of you who only read this blog:

Wo-hoo. I just got a FLAS award to go to Sweden this summer.

Yay.

They say history repeats itself, you know.

"People seem to think they are citizens of the Republican Party and that that is patriotism and sufficiently good patriotism. I prefer to be a citizen of the United States." (Mark Twain, 1884)

I don't hate the French.

I just hate French intellectuals.

In particular, the following French intellectuals:

Michel Foucault
Jacques Derrida

and currently

Pierre Bourdieu.

Dispatch from Pittsburgh

Most people go somewhere warm when Spring Break rolls around. Rich and I are in Pittsburgh. It snowed today.

At least this year we went somewhere somewhat south from Madison. Last year we went to Minneapolis. Of course, it didn't snow up there.

Anyway. Yesterday and the day before we were in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Home to the University of Michigan, of course. Something which allowed the following exchange to occur:

Rich: "You know we could do something really nerdy today."

Carly: "What's that?"

Rich: "We could go to this brownbag talk at the Institute of Humanities."

Carly: "What's the topic?"

Rich: " 'Citizenship, Statelessness and Social Exclusion' "

At this point, Carly's eyes light up.

Carly: "Very, very tempting"

Rich: "We're not going to a brownbag in the midst of our roadtrip."

Carly: "Bastard."



I know. I'm such a nerd.

SPAM Titles

I just deleted my Junkmail box by hand. Among the usual "hot stock" and "Try Viagra!" emails were a two interesting titles:

1.

"new scrapple!"

I suppose it's better than old scrapple. Although, really, no scrapple is good scrapple. Although, it is "arguably the first pork food invented in America"

2.

"Try Kafka!"

Well. I've tried Kafka. And I liked it. I really did.

I'm totally into that whole man-wakes-up-and-is-bug thing.

Carly goes it alone

Rich is off in Tennessee. Actually, I think he's probably sitting in the Detroit airport at this moment, on his way to Nashville. He'll be there for the week, at which point he'll come back to Madison and then the two of us are roadtripping it to Pittsburgh-via-Ann Arbor, returning via Indianapolis. When we get home from that trip, Rich is off to Nashville pretty much immediately. So he'll be pretty much out of Madison for the rest of the month.

This all means I've got to carry this blog all on my on for a while. As astute readers may have noticed, we've been kind of short on entries lately. This can be explained partially by my having my own blog to express myself on, and partially on the fact that we're very busy people who never actually do or think anything interesting.

OK, occasionally we do interesting things, I suppose. But I'd say a scarily high percentage of our waking hours are spent working in coffeeshops. So much so that I'm guessing our new housemate probably thinks we're freaks, as we're almost never home.

In fact, I'm in a coffeeshop right this very second. Ostensibly reading How Policies Make Citizens but mostly I've been fooling around. I need to stop taking my computer with me when I go to read because it's such a distraction.

In any case, hopefully I'll manage to bear the weight of two blogs at once without boring the heck out of y'all.

Conservative Wanted for Friendly Conversation, Possibly Coffee

You know, I miss Republicans.

As Rich wrote about, Frank Luntz came to speak last week on campus. One of the things he exhorted us, as college students, to do was to seek out people who have different opinions than us. And he, several times, pointed out that we, as an audience, weren't representative of America.

I know this. And, sometimes, it hurts.

For instance, the typical political conversation in Madison with a typical Madisonian goes something like this:

Person A says something liberal. Person B agrees and something more liberal. Person A nods vigorously and says something even more liberal. One might even say radical. Person B makes wild conspiracy theory. Person A & Person B walk off arm in arm to grab a cool Wisconsin brew.

Ok, so this is slightly exaggerated. But sometimes my experience in the city feels like that. The first couple years I loved it. I grew up in a pretty Republican area (we elected Democrats occasionally, but they were usually pretty conservative Democrats). A lot of my friends from high school were (and still are) Republicans. So being let loose in a liberal town was fantastic.... at first.

But I miss the conversations I used to have with very intelligent, engaged conservatives who had respect for me, and for whom I had respect. There's really something to having your ideas challenged and your beliefs interrogated in a way that is vigorous, but still respectful.

Academic Aspirations

I’ve noticed an interesting change in my own language which may belie an even more interesting change in my hopes/dreams/aspirations/etc. It’s a simple change. Just one word.

“If” has been replaced more and more often by “when.”

What am I talking about? Well, let me back up a bit.

A couple years ago as I was finishing up my undergraduate degree at this fine university, I knew I wanted to go to graduate school. I knew I wasn’t quite done with my education, and a master’s degree at the very least was in my future. What came after that, though, was pretty hazy. I had visions of me working at an embassy or in an NGO. Doing applied work. Because who wants to be stuck in academia forever. I never really dismissed the thought entirely, though. It was always a possibility, sort of, well, lurking in the background.

Occasionally, I talked about “if I become a professor.” Occasionally.

Those occasions started to grow more frequent my first semester of graduate school. I was enjoying teaching. The little bit of research I was doing was exciting. So that “if” statement became pretty frequent.

Towards the end of the semester “if” would every once in a while become “when.” “When I become a professor…”

I noticed lately, though, that the “if” has disappeared almost entirely. That NGO job doesn’t seem so likely, but research and teaching and advising sounds really plausible…and, dare I say…attractive.

Hmm.

Awwwww, ain't that cute.

My tutee moved away. This is sad. Apparently, the prospect of me helping her with math was a little too scary. I understand. Fully.

I did get a new tutee, though, and we had our first session yesterday. We worked on the concepts of “less than” and “greater than” (hey, it’s tougher than you thought!) and counting by fives. My tutee was a math-star out in the hall when no one else was around. Try taking him into the classroom though with all the other kids and he couldn’t concentrate for a second. Really, now, this is starting to sound a lot like me.

In the “funny interactions with kids”-file, he asked me what grade I was in. I said

“I’ve been in school so long that they stopped counting grades.”

This impressed him.

I’m glad it impresses somebody.

The Dangers of Sociological Learning

"To maintain and transmit a value system, human beings are punched, bullied, sent to jail, thrown into concentration camps, cajoled, bribed, made into heroes, encouraged to read newspapers, stood up against a wall and shot, and sometimes even taught sociology" (Barrington Moore, Jr.)


My, my, my. What have I gotten myself into?

I only hope that learning sociology is more like being "encouraged to read newspapers" than being "stood up against a wall and shot."