nerdmeyr & K

A strange day of rain.  The rain itself was not strange; its geophysical dropping is what made it strange, as this is by far the mildest winter I have ever experienced. (Today, case in point, is bright, sunny, and about 60 degrees).  I know that when Californians talk about the weather in wintertime it is usually destined to receive:

a1) good-natured ribbing

b2) outright scorn

c3) barely-disguised jealousy

from almost everyone north of 39 degrees latitude, but I don’t bring up the weather for any of these purposes. Rather I bring it up to inflect and inform the rest of the story, which is actually shorter than my discussion of the weather (and if _that_ isn’t midwestern, I don’t know what is.)

Anyway, I took advantage of a break in the rain to walk down to the local grocery store, which is a cross between high-falutin’ (I assume for the summer tourists), fancy (for the corporate raiders who can afford to buy up here now), and average (for everyone else). I was purchasing ingredients with which to make chili, which, although it always contains the same ingredients, always turns out differently from the time before.

At any rate, I had my standard moment of indecision when faced with joining a checkout line. 2 checkers, one line decidedly longer than the other. The shorter line had Chatty Checker, a younger woman who has the knack for launching into random conversation with every customer. Tossing my lot in with luck, I joined Chatty Checker’s line, only to patiently witness a conversation between her, Customer John, and another checker about how long they’ve all known each and the best way to broil eggplant and tomatoes.  I finally ascended to the front, only to somehow become ensconced in a conversation with Chatty Cathy about a movie. _I_ thought she was talking about the movie ‘Up’, which, if I had had a second to think about it, would be weird because it’s been out for quite awhile (but which was fresh in my mind, having just seen it via Netflix the night before).  I said, “Oh, yes, I would’ve figured that kids would be totally bored by it, but the animations were pretty incredible.” She cocked her head like a spaniel being addressed by its owner through a thick wooden door, and said, “Well, I thought George Clooney did a pretty good job….”  Oh, right, that _other_ movie called ‘Up in the Air’, that’s actually out right now and thus a reasonable subject for random stranger conversation. For some reason, I couldn’t explain my momentary confusion, so now Chatty Checker thinks I’m a certifiable nutter.

Oh, well.

The funny thing about being unemployed while still being employed is that its still not that fun.

When I attended a seminar on change management, the person leading the seminar showed a picture of a man, woman, and child walking down a road, toward the camera. The man and woman looked grim, eyebrows furrowed, and with a decidedly downcast aspect to their mouths. The child, on the other hand, was looking straight at the camera and appeared to be skipping. The backstory to the photo is that the three were walking away from what used to be their house, which had been blown away by a tornado. The tornado blew away much of their town, too.  And the takeaway from the story is that the tornado is just an event. What people do afterwards is the change management.

I am managing the change. I read Gawker to self-satisfy that its probably not about me, but rather a blown-up, over-generalized sad state of affairs in all regards. I dutifully put in my time, comparing the list of my occupational handinesses to varying lists of workplace demands. I keep my chin elevated, my interview shoes shined, my three-minute elevator speech at the ready. I spend a good amount of time thanking various entities that I still have income. I spend other time in repose, thinking about the legions of farmers and salespeople and streetfolk who have never known income security, even if they attain professional status in their class and work as hard as they can. I wonder about the length of the shadow this time of our lives will have – I seemingly came into the world with a Depression-era mentality, but for others, I imagine the thick slurry of the unemployed and the small holes of the want ads is a deeply de-stabling envisage.

Its Friday night, and as with all evenings nowadays, I am looking for work or thinking about how I should be looking for work. That seems to be a full-time job in itself.

[Ed. Note: This is a joint post between K and Nerdmeyr].

I’m happy to be putting the dishes away tonight. Because usually when you come home the evening before you move, its just you, a broom, and an empty room. But tonight doesn’t feel too different from any other Sunday night – the cats are hanging out and we’re doing dishes from yesterday’s dinner party.

I’m having a hard time making sense of this departure. This past week has made only one thing crystal clear: that our lives are full of grace.

The following are pictures are an experiment. We took them here in Bloomington with the express purpose of making Bloomington, our home,  not look like Bloomington, ™. As it turned out, we ended up documenting something very familiar.

Blue House next to cemetery

Juniper tree at the cemetery

Wall outside the graveyard off of W. Kirkwood

Garden at the Wonderlab

Garden on the B-Line rails-to-trail

Art on the B-Line rails-to-trail...not the official art, though

Backside of B-Line

Johnson Smoke Stack

Green Apartment Bldg. across from Wonderlab garden

Dinner Party at Keith's/our house

Breakfast time out at the spencer farm...thanks jd/bruce/yifot/silvan!

I posted something a thousand months ago about having trouble figuring out what to wear for my flag football games. well, it’s been a lot of growing pains, some tough lessons, and not a few shoulder bruises but our team (Collective Action) won the championship last weekend, dashing what little hope The Lushes had of taking home the coveted gray t-shirts! When the season started, I didn’t know how to throw, catch, or defend. By championship night, I could tell – in a blink – when we were playing offense or defense. The QB’s (as in quarterback!) instructions during the huddle were always a mystery to me and mostly I hoped they didn’t involve me, but I got to hike the ball, which was, and I’m completely dead serious, awesome because those Collective Action ladies mean business and when they get into formation on the line, they are not messing around! I have a crush on like six of them.

Here’s our championship photo and my very first teammates!

Hear ye, o poor Middel childe. Ye Suffered under the Tyrannicality of your Ye Olde and Grumpie Sister for nigh on a fortnight of Years, and now all you get is a video.  I hope the amount of stoniness and sparkles lets you know that I do thank you falettinme be mice elf agin – you’re never stiff all in the collar or fluffy in the face.

For the past five years I’ve lived within the 812 area code, and for the past four years, the number of my apartment building has also been 812. This summer I I am moving moved to a house, but before I leave, I wanted to say farewell to the apartment. I’ve moved with some frequency in the last eight years, sometimes twice a year. When I moved into the 812 apartment, I promised myself I would stay for two years just so I could have a break from moving. As it turned out, I stayed four years. It was a third story apartment in an old (but renovated) building that sported warm hardwood floors, a green kitchen, two bedrooms, and loads of windows that look out at tree level across the neighborhood. Even the shower had a view of trees. For half the year, the only thing you could see out the windows were trees, and for the other half, after all the leaves dropped, you could see the houses two blocks away. The first few years that we lived there, mourning doves nested on our window sills. We had a total of one (1) raging party a few years back that was rudely shut down by the troll who lived in the house next door. In the mornings, we could hear our neighbor walk his kid and dog in the alleyway below. In the winter, light streamed into the living room.

I don’t really miss the apartment, which is a little weird since I was always really happy to go home. It was the first place that Nerdmeyr and I moved into together and our decor tastes were amazingly similar – not much intentional design but a general coherency. Someone once described it as a cabinet of curiosities. Until I moved in to the 812, I privileged lots of space – houses seemed better than apartments, and if you had to live in an apartment, then preferable one with big rooms and tall ceilings.

But, small spaces have their charm. They are, if nothing else, a lesson in order. The one thing we missed most was direct access to the outdoors. We left the windows open all the time, but it’s not quite the same as sitting on a porch.

All the photos above were taken in the same room. The second is the view from the living room window. This last photo is of our bedroom after we got rid of the bed. It kind of looks like we’re lodgers, which is also how it felt…in the best possible way.

I know you’re BFF with Prince, but I’m BFF with The Jets, and I told them to sing this to you. Even though it totally looks 1986, its still for real.

This came in at 7am today:

There has been a waterline break close to the 10th and Bypass intersection, this water main break has affected the water flow to the U school building complex (WCC, E-Buildings, Telecom). Please be advised there will be no running water for the bathrooms, fountains and kitchens within the buildings. At this time they are not sure when the water will be restored.

Since everyone knows that a computer nerd is a device to turn coffee into code, and now there is no coffee (on the input side) or bathrooms (on the output side)… how, pray tell, is anything actually going to get done today?

Last week I finished reading the Harry Potter series and for several days after was mildly alarmed at how much of the books’ terminology and logic had enveloped my brain. It seemed that I could only think in terms of Hufflepuffs and Blast-ended Skewts (look for a future post on the botany of Harry Potter). My friend David even noticed that Potter references had creeped into my conversations. I thought the effect had worn off after a few days, but the other night I had a dream about the film TransAmerica, which I had watched for the first time that evening, and in the dream I drew an analogy between transpeople and Squibs. My dreams are often filled with popular culture references that have mutated into each other, but this seemed an especially clear example of the degree to which popular culture frames our understanding of the world. What’s more, it seemed an unexpected or unintended analogy to come out of a series that lends itself to a number of obvious ones.
The point of this post is to try to make sense of the analogy, but let me underscore that it came out of a dream state, and dreams adhere only to their own mysterious logic and tend to dissolve when exposed to the demands of the waking world.
A Squib is a non-magical person who is born to magical parents. The lineage of the Squib is what makes them distinct from a Muggle, a non-magical person born to non-magical parents who know nothing of the magical world. Muggles and Squibs are sort of key to the whole Harry Potter series (HP) since their existence is the rationale for racism within the wizard world. In my mind, however, the obsession with wizard blood-lines is less an analogy for racism than it is for homophobia and this is because there are magical people, such as Hermione, who are born to Muggle parents. For some reason, Rowling offers no special name for such people.
Because of people like Hermione, the question of nature vs. nurture runs through HP. Are people born with magical abilities or do they learn them? Given that the primary location of the series is a school and the primary focus of the narrative the education of young wizards, this question is not easily answered (and complicated all the more when Voldemort’s followers accuse Muggles of stealing magic). The answer would seem to be a combination of nature and nurture: people are born with magical abilities and then learn to develop those abilities. Easy enough, except that Hogwarts offers courses in a number of subjects, such as Herbology, Potions, and History that do not appear to require magical ability. One of the main characters, Neville Longbottom, has some magical ability but finds that he excels at non-magical subject areas. There is just enough uncertainty in HP to hook those of us who believe that everything is a matter of nurture (that is to say, culture and technology). Suffice it to say that without that tension, HP would be dreadfully boring.
The interest in nature vs. nurture along with the fact that the wizarding world is hidden from the normal world, has its own shops and bars, and faces persecution at the hands of non-magical people begs a (limited) comparison between wizards and gay people. I didn’t consciously read the series that way, but my dream signals that I was, on some level, entertaining such comparisons.
Any such comparison between wizarding and queer worlds would be confounded, I think, by the Squib. One could argue that straight children are raised by queer parents, but the analogy doesn’t really hold in part because the Squib occupies a lowly status within the wizarding world; they are the shame of pure blood wizards. A Squib in the queer world would have to be a person who knows of the magic of gender-bending and sexual deviancy, and who might want the ability, but who is unable to access it. For some reason, my unconscious mind read the main character in TransAmerica as such a person. To be clear: I didn’t read her as shameful, or even ashamed (which is what we mean when we call someone closeted). I read her as unable to access queer culture. She was, by any definition, living within the queer world while she passed over from one sex to another, but in the end she seemed very isolated from that world (and its protective charms?). I think my dream was an attempt to understand how lonely that could be. Or maybe it was an attempt to understand how queer culture could be so vibrant right now and still so unavailable. The way the film portrays the character as cut off from her family and past, living alone and working in a restaurant in which English is the second language lends itself to that reading. Or the analogy was my earnest attempt to understand a queer person’s claim to biological determinism. Admittedly, that’s a hard one for me. In my mind, queer = anti-nature and anyone can be queer if they put their mind to it. If that’s what I was attempting then the Squib analogy doesn’t hold: if the leap that transfolks make is really truly unavailable to the rest of us (and I’m willing to entertain that possibility), then that would make them more like wizards than squibs. Or perhaps my dream was an attempt to understand someone who lives in the queer world, but who choses not to lay claim to a queer identity, which also doesn’t really fit the Squib, unless there are Squibs who are in fact magical but hate the magical world. Maybe I wasn’t trying to understand transpeople, but was trying to understand Squibs. Maybe there’s more to the Squib than a person who can’t do magic.
Predictably, I don’t feel that I’ve fully explained my dream. There is some sort of excess that I can’t articulate. It’s for the best. Good analogies usually lead to bad things.