Some­times when life isn’t going well, I have to remind myself of every­thing that’s hap­pened in the past few decade. I fin­ish col­lege, get mar­ried, become a young father. The wife cheats and leaves, and I meet major depres­sion. Some­how, I get a Ph.D. and move to a new city, a new job and start over.

About the only thing that hasn’t hap­pened in the past decade is the death of a loved one.

Should I really expect that things be fan­tas­tic again so soon? I ought to be frus­trated from time to time. I should expect to be lonely now and then. I lost my wife and friend of seven years. How can I be so numb to all of this loss and change? I have this drive to move on and not let the past hold me down, but I think I take this detach­ment too far. I ignore the drama in my life because it brings me pain, when I know the only way I can move past it is to process it and feel it, until it leaves me.

I’m tired of griev­ing. I want to leave it behind. Yet all I see before me is the poten­tial for more pain, more loss. I’m scarred and scared.

today was a lit­tle nature dance,
with birds and deer, gnomes and cones
a mid­dle earthen rous­ing cheer
for a potent Pil­sner down the ear
think a lit­tle, thought
drink a lit­tle, hot
stink a lit­tle, rot
sink a lit­tle, lot

I’ve been debat­ing gay mar­riage rights with my uncle on Face­book. He recently replied with a bit about how lov­ing it was of God to cre­ate the world for us, and ought we not obey him and his detes­ta­tion of homosexuality?

Here was my reply (just under the 800 char­ac­ter posted item reply limit!):

“Hi, I’m God. I cre­ated this world for you. It’s com­plex, I admit. There’s plea­sure, there’s pain. Your pur­pose won’t always be clear. But I think it’s pretty cool.

“The thing is, there are some prob­lems. See, some of you will do every­thing right and die. Some of you will do every­thing wrong and live. Also, some of you will want to do harm­less things, but if you do them, you’ll go to hell, i.e., two men sleep­ing together. If you’re inter­sexed, you’re screwed.

“And some of you will do things that will harm lots, and I’ll praise you for it! For exam­ple, those gays I men­tioned? Don’t treat them the same. I know, they’re not hurt­ing any­one, but it’s just wrong, okay? They deserve to suf­fer more than you do.

“No, I won’t tell you why, it’s not impor­tant. It just is. Look, if you’re hav­ing a hard time, it’s not my fault. 

“Oh wait! Yes it is! 

“Look, just fol­low the rules. If you do, you get eter­nal hap­pi­ness. If you don’t, you’re screwed. Good luck!”

This is sadism, not love.

I ranted about grad­ing to my class today (that’s not my class above, that’s Joon­hwan Lee’s the­sis defense!). My basic argu­ment was that before grad­ing, approx­i­mately 150 years ago, we gave detailed, con­crete, faceted feed­back to stu­dents because there was no other way. We didn’t feel com­pelled to con­vert all of a student’s skills and knowl­edge into a sin­gle num­ber or a let­ter grade. And, not only were there won­der­ful ben­e­fits to this form of feed­back, but that form of assess­ment was devoid of all of the prob­lems of a numer­i­cal assess­ment. Stu­dents can­not “game” a ver­bal assess­ment, but they can game a test. Teach­ers could spend the time they would nor­mally spend grad­ing pay­ing closer atten­tion to their stu­dents’ progress.

The worst part about mod­ern grad­ing is that most employ­ers don’t care. They might use grades as a low-pass fil­ter, to ignore appli­cants with less than a 2.5, but what they really care about is what a per­son can do. They want exam­ples of writ­ing, of think­ing, of deci­sion mak­ing. They don’t want numer­i­cal prox­ies for these, they want to see the results of these skills.

So who cares about grades? Stu­dents, fac­ulty, and uni­ver­si­ties. That’s good news for me, since I’m uni­ver­si­ties are run by fac­ulty and fac­ulty guide stu­dents. Now its just up to me to con­vince a few thou­sand col­leagues over the next 50 years that I am right.

Grant writ­ing is a curi­ous thing. I spent much of today sift­ing through com­ments from a co-PI and stu­dent and most of them were about what would “sell” and what would not. When we say sell, we’re talk­ing about rhetoric and argumentation.

So what sells? For one, coher­ent log­i­cal argu­ments. If an expla­na­tion does not fol­low log­i­cally, it will not sell. Logic is a nec­es­sary but insuf­fi­cient con­di­tion. Another cru­cial aspect is the argu­ment space to which an argu­ment leads. This space of argu­ments can be sparse or dense. For exam­ple, if I try to argue that chick­ens deserve free­dom, I’m enter­ing a space of argu­ments rife with con­tro­versy. Some­one might say that chick­ens are not peo­ple and only peo­ple deserve free­dom. Oth­ers might make a his­tor­i­cal argu­ment and argue that chick­ens have been bred by humans as food, so they were never intended to have free­dom. This is a dense argu­ment space.

If, on the other hand, I argue that chick­ens deserve feed, we enter a quite sparse argu­ment space. There is no con­tro­versy. Every­one will agree that chick­ens need food. Some might dis­agree about the form of the food, but they won’t con­test with much passion.

What “sells” in a grant are argu­ment spaces that are nei­ther too dense or too sparse. They are argu­ments that are just con­tro­ver­sial enough to be inter­est­ing, engag­ing and risky, but not so con­tro­ver­sial that they fail to per­suade. A chicken argu­ment that might sell:

Chick­ens need genet­i­cally engi­neered organic super feed that makes them both health­ier, tastier, and envi­ron­men­tally friendly

See how it tugs in mul­ti­ple direc­tions? It’s facetted. It involves genetic engi­neer­ing, but also helps human­ity. It seems fea­si­ble tech­ni­cally, but it’s not imme­di­ately obvi­ous how you might do it. It sells because it’s just barely fea­si­ble tech­ni­cally and politically.

Now if only it was logical.

My week­end was going to be awe­some; now as it’s wind­ing down, it was more mildly enter­tain­ing. I put teach­ing and grants out of my mind and started of with a lit­tle prop 8 protest­ing in vol­un­teer park. I decided to walk from Ravenna, since it was such a nice morn­ing, and on the way a friend appar­ently almost ran me over. Of course, I didn’t notice: I was in my head, prob­a­bly think­ing about the crunch of the leaves or some other innocu­ous detail about my surroundings.

The protest was great. There were at least a few thou­sand peo­ple there and lot of good signs. I caught up with my friend and ran in to a few oth­ers in the crowd. I even­tu­ally made my way back home and off to Kirk­land for Elle’s swim meet. She was in two events and did very well in both. After­wards, I planned on going to a fac­ulty party to chat with col­leagues, but it was a bit too late and their party was wind­ing down.

Instead, I went home and watched Mal­colm X. It started off with a scene where Mal­colm was get­ting his hair straight­ened and it seemed awfully famil­iar. I fast for­warded through the first 45 min­utes and real­ized at some point in the past decade, I’d seen it before. I jumped ahead another hour though and none of it was famil­iar. When did I have a chance to watch the first third and noth­ing else? It must have been some late night at a hotel while traveling.

Sun­day was a lit­tle less engag­ing. I had grand plans to escape the city with a friend in search of small bak­eries and com­fort food, but I checked my email this morn­ing around 7 and she’d come down with some­thing unpleas­ant. Instead, I spent my morn­ing doing laun­dry, clean­ing my bath­room, shop­ping for a hat and walk­ing in Ravenna park. I watched happy cou­ples play with their kids in the grass and friends prac­tic­ing tae bo in the park and sud­denly felt gravely lonely. Just a few years ago, that was me, with my ex and my daugh­ter. I’d felt so secure, had so much hope. There are some days where I’ve got all the energy in the world to rebuild my life; on oth­ers, it seems like an impos­si­ble task.

So I came home, lis­tened to some Pink Floyd and Blonde Red­head and drowned myself in “Rein­force­ment, Reward and Intrin­sic Moti­va­tion: A Meta-Analysis.” There’s noth­ing like a far afield jour­nal arti­cle to improve my mood!