This is all it took today

Dear Gmail: I would love to consider including David Gillner. More than anything in this world, I would love to do that. In fact, that is all I think of. I consider including him at the dinner table when I count the plates. I consider including him when I find a piece of great new music, and when I hear Danish on the train and wonder what it means. I consider including him in the group of us traveling together, and in the list of Christmas presents, and the people who should be wishing me a happy birthday. I consider including David Gillner in choosing the names for my children and writing my eulogy. I consider including him in the tally of who should ride in which car to the funeral, only to realize it is his.

The thing these days, however, is that I can't include him. I wish your fancy algorithms were right this time, but death does not figure too well in your formula. How about if you consider fucking yourself.

Lord Have Mercy

I have been speaking to a very godly man recently, much to my frustration. He is very rational and intelligent and has a very systematic and air tight theology that is very difficult to penetrate if you disagree with him. In fact disagreeing with him often ends, for me, in feeling unintelligible or irrational. I admit that I do have an irrational streak in me yet I reject the negative associations with that word. I have come to realize that there are two different types of folks in this world, those who are lovers of beauty and those who are lovers of logic. Now I believe that neither of these are inherently better than the other yet both have a lot to learn from one another. My wife ,for example, is a lover of logic and I am a lover of beauty. She needs to understand the systematic rationale for believing in a certain idea before she will believe it where as I will often use my intuition to determine whether something is true or not and then possibly come up with rational reasons afterward( or not, much to the frustration of lovers of logic) The goal, I believe, is to attempt not to look down on one another's orientation yet learn from one another.

However, I have noticed in my conversations with this godly man that we both are very set in our ways. He with his arguments and I with my intuitions, and we come to very different conclusions on matters. Despite being confident in my beliefs I find that after talking to this man I start to wonder how one of us, if not both of us, are wrong and how on earth are we going to be able to change if we are both so stuck in our ways? At the present moment I don't have any inkling of changing my positions and I am pretty sure this man is not going to change his mind. So it seems that we are at an impasse. Which scares me. I think in some sense we all think we are right about what we believe and it seems like it would take a miracle for either one of us to change our beliefs. There is probably no argument that I could muster that would change this man's mind and I have to admit I have my doubts whether he could show me any beauty that would sway me. So how then do we change? Do we simply wait for the resurrection and the Deus ex machina? Or God, do you have any miracles up your sleeve? Lord have mercy on us and our deeply held convictions.

Why I don't blog about academia

Somebody asked me today why I rarely blog about my graduate program or the work that I do at the university. It is a fair question - I have the rare privilege of studying something I truly care about, and I get paid to think and write about these things in my job... So why not write about that?

Reason #1: I have a pervasive fear of turning into a boring academic whose friends flee at the very mention of the words "dissertation" or "research findings." I realize that many of my friends and family still shake their heads in disbelief at my choice to stay in school for any longer than absolutely necessary, and it would just not be fair to bore you with the details of university governance structures or strategies for graduate employability.

Reason #2: I stare at a computer and write academic papers for my job. Then I go to class, where I listen to academic lectures, or write assignments for these classes that require more intense thinking and staring at a computer screen. When I get any time in between these activities, I think and write and tear my hair out over another big academic paper called a dissertation. In the rare occasion when I have it in me to stay at the computer screen just a bit longer to write a blog post, theoretical frameworks or research paradigms are about the last thing I want to think about.

That being said, I have recently been inspired to chip away at this self-constructed wall between work and life by two distinct sparks. One of them was an article by C.W. Mills on the sociological imagination, which is academic in nature and so will remain undiscussed until my inspiration turns into reality. ;) The second spark is my new friend Thomas, who is a political scientist and an expert on the Middle East. He has a vast and deep knowledge of his subject area, and he consciously breaks outside of academic circles by writing for newspapers, submitting corrections about untrue press reports, posting headlines and commentaries on Facebook, attending protests, etc. He has perfected the ability of bringing his knowledge to bear on the life that goes on around him every day, be it the protests in Tunisia, unrest in Egypt, or the arrest of a Chechen man in Austria. He has inspired me to bring my daily work to bear on what I see in the news or talk about with friends. My field, after all, is education, which affects pretty much everyone. So I conclude this post about why I don't blog about academia with the concession that it is perhaps only right that I should.

Rachel getting pregnant

My friend Rachel is pregnant. She and her husband Darren are the first in our immediate group of friends to pass this big milestone, and Rachel is the first close friend whose pregnancy I've gotten to witness in a day-to-day fashion. We used to joke around about who would have kids first, but it was always rather obvious it would be her - my labor phobia combined with our itinerant life plan pretty much guaranteed that. We even once went to an art fair together, and I bought a card especially for her that said in big letters "I'm glad you're having a baby," and in small letters "and I'm not." After the card gathered dust for a few years, I finally got to dig it up a couple of weeks ago, and I had a moment of profound awe as I placed it in the mailbox. I've had a similar feeling every time I see Rachel with her tummy slightly bigger than the week before. While the message of the card still holds true, and I do not feel anywhere close to ready to join in the club, I find it moving and, well yes, sort of epic, that my friend is becoming a part of a story that will reach so far beyond her and be told long after she is gone. To her little baby boy, she will be the first Woman. She will be somebody's mom, that defining figure he will associate with warmth and love; the mysterious force he will one day try to describe to a partner or decipher in therapy like I still try to decipher my parents. Maybe one day he will say to me: You knew my mom before I was born. What was she like back then? And I will answer - yes, I knew her. I saved a card for her for three years before you were born, saw her belly grow each week, and helped paint your baby room in their first house. Let me tell you about the art she made everywhere she turned, from stationery to food. In fact, let me tell you about the time...

I know kids don't usually ask these sorts of questions about their parents, at least until all their parents' friends are dead; I know these sorts of narratives are more common in literature than in real life. Yet I can't help but realize the good fortune of having friends close enough that the birth of their kids is a major event in my own life, inspiring dreamy and tender thoughts about their future as well as my own.