Ever since I returned from a four day break in Port­land, my cat Trou­ble has been par­tic­u­larly affec­tion­ate and noisy. The day I returned, he meowed through the night right next to me bed. I felt really guilty for mak­ing him so lonely, but even­tu­ally, he returned to normal.

Or so I thought. Lately, he’s been climb­ing high places, point­ing his tail straight up and then twitch­ing it like a big furry vibra­tor while he meows at me plead­ingly. I pet him, I stroke him, I feed him treats, but noth­ing pla­cates his strange new behavior.

I searched for twitch­ing tails online and some sites sug­gest that he’s “offer­ing a friendly, cheer­ful greet­ing” except for the twitch­ing, which is asso­ci­ated with either being intensely annoyed or intensely happy. Is he still pissed off at me for leav­ing him alone so long? Or is he happy that haven’t left again?

Maybe I should just get him a lit­tle kit­ten to pick on while I’m gone.

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!

Thurs­day evening I was dri­ving to Kit’s house to pick up Ellen for a short night before St. Louis. While I was wait­ing at a light in Wilkins­burg, there were some teens walk­ing  the side­walk shout­ing. Groups of teens are loud by default. I ignored them. But they started shout­ing louder and repeat­ing them­selves, so I started lis­ten­ing. “White cracker piece of shit! Hey, white cracker piece of SHIT!” I looked around for their tar­get, think­ing I might see a mug­ging. Then one of them approached my win­dow and start­ing bang­ing his fist. “HEY! Mother fuckin’ white cracker piece … of … SHIT!” Bang bang bang. I looked out at him into his brown eyes, the dark brown frown. Half amused, I leaned to the win­dow and tipped my head, offer­ing a lit­tle smile and a lit­tle wave. Hi formed on my lips as I inno­cently and silently inquired, what can I do for you? The light turned green. I con­tin­ued down the road. I’m white. Peo­ple see me as white. Every­one does. Every­one except white peo­ple. To white peo­ple, or white pee wee soc­cer play­mates, I’m wussy brownie boy. These names are inked in the shades of my skin.

few are here to hear me tear
but bits are near to quell my fear
bits on discs, bits in air,
bits in print are here and there
bits of peo­ple bro­ken down
played and paused in sight and sound
biotic bonds dis­cretely wound
to mimic life, erase my frown
hear me bits—
quell me bits—
help me up from feel­ing down

honk, they say
get out of my way
i cant sit here,
wait­ing all day
i hear them,
wait,
im sure its okay
if i give no reply
to their urban cliche