Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

An overzealous American border guard has barred a Canadian telecommunications specialist from entering the U.S., even thought he has been working in the U.S. for over a decade with a NAFTA visa. He and his wife even owned a home in Utah and lived there. Their daughter married an American serviceman and so they also have grandchildren in the U.S. But they went back to Canada to visit relatives and are now barred from going back home. They’ve lost an estimated $100,000 in lost wages and home equity already. You can read more about the story here.

The really depressing thing is that there are hundreds of similar cases all the time. The only thing special about this one is that the person barred was a highly-qualified specialist and managed to get a bit of media attention. I find it astonishing that border guards at their discretion can permanently ban people from entering the U.S., with no appeal mechanism in place. Especially given the number of obviously incompetent border guards I’ve encountered in the past, i.e., ones who clearly did not understand the relevant entry conditions. Not to mention the one I met at one of the Buffalo crossings who had psychological issues.

Anyway, if needlessly aggravating everyone else helps keep a country secure, then the U.S. is on its way to becoming the paradigm of secure.

Sydney

The conference on Saturday was great.  A conference put on by grad students for grad students of this department, it meant I got to spend a Saturday learning what my friends and classmates have been doing since I last saw them.  Great time for catching up and for getting inspired to tackle my own work.  I’m always amazed to learn how differently we all think from each other.  Not only were the topics of the papers completely different from each other, but the very way the presenters approached the material was as well.  On the other hand, I also learned just how much the way critics approach a text is based, to a large extent, on their area of specialty.  Those who work on American literature were staring blankly at the way the Victorianists were tackling the very same material.  I, as one of the few 20th-century people there (and one who works on both American and British lit.), tried to cement in my mind the idea that each area of specialty gathers its own style, and thus reaching out to other areas and other scholars can really keep you from falling into a . . . rut?  trap?  black hole?

Not so fantastic was the major migraine I started to feel on Saturday night, and that continued until, well, Monday morning.  Way past “unpleasant” and deep into “Don’t scare Sydney.”  This being my third migraine of the week, I will be calling the doctor later this morning . . .

April means beautiful spring at our doorstep.  A bunch of my crocuses have appeared, bright-yellow and clustered together in a small section of our lawn.  Sydney also now insists on opening the window at night, which means that I awaken to birdsong each morning.  I love it!

April also, however, means a very, very busy time of year for academics.  Sydney and I are both gearing up for our pre-dissertation exams, so this blog may be either quiet or utterly boring for the next month or so.  Your only hopes lie in the possibility of us doing some creative procrastination, or in Sydney’s gardening itch.

The New York Times seems to think philosophy is on the rise in colleges.  Improved job options for Sydney?  Maybe, but the kind of philosophy described by the undergraduates who were interviewed doesn’t resemble anything I’ve lived with or read or any talk I’ve attended in the past three years.  I certainly haven’t noticed Sydney emanating any “existential torment”!  With that vision, I’ll leave you to a beautiful spring week.

Erin

Very shortly I’ll be taking off for a day-long conference on campus.  It’s being organized by friends and will feature mostly people from my department, so I’m anticipating much friendliness and catching-up during the breaks.  I’m also just interested to see what others have been working on during those long months when I haven’t seen them.

I am reluctant to go, however, because my productivity has been far from stellar, and I would love to stay home and get in some more reading.  Alas!  On our rounds yesterday, though, Sydney and I stopped by the grocery store to ensure that our unproductivity could go on without hindrance of food shortage.  While there I developed some film I’ve had sitting around in my camera for awhile.  Awhile indeed–the film held pictures of the beautiful park we visited during our anniversary trip last August!  It also held very funny pictures of Sydney sitting in the hammock in his shorts, looking down at a rabbit–who suddenly realized he had hopped into dangerous territory.

Now that we’re moving into digital-camera land, I don’t anticipate many more such pleasant surprises in our future filming.  Now Sydney loads the pictures directly to our computer, I load them to a photo website, and we get them in the mail a few days later!  Although handy, it does kind of take the fun out of it, never knowing what you’ll have stored in that little black canister!

Erin

Yesterday Sydney and I took a visiting student and his wife out to dinner.  As always when new people are visiting (their one chance to experience Ithaca before making big decisions, one day’s memories to hold on to until they move in in the fall), I was acutely aware of the weather.  And it was wild.  Some lovely spring rains fell in the afternoon, the kind that last for five minutes and often come down through sunshine, but by late afternoon the clouds had gathered and the wind was really picking up.

By the time we got home from the dinner at around 10:30, the trees were moving and loud sighs went through them every few minutes.  I didn’t grow up with trees, so I’ve had to become accustomed to having two acres of spruce trees behind the house moan, squeak, squeal, and sigh.  To top it off, the migraine I was nursing throughout the night greatly amplified my sensory acuteness, so I heard every sound as if it were right next to me.

Around 5am Sydney and I heard an animal cry, so he got up and, after a few moments, I followed him to the front door.  He had turned on the lights in the yard and there, under the lights, we saw a large owl with the rabbit he had caught.  We watched him for several minutes before returning to bed.  Kind of strange to have an animal with its back to you suddenly turn its whole head around and look straight at you without moving its torso!

After that, I abandoned any thought of getting up at 6 to grade papers.  I needed a few hours of normal time to recover my equilibrium!

Erin

I learned in college that, no matter what hour of the day, someone on campus would always be taking a break from work.  Sleeping, partying, playing Frisbee, getting coffee–something that made you feel like an idiot for being at your desk, working.  And this was at a fairly nerdy school!

Each year I’ve taught I’ve seen my students facing the same situation, seeing another student abandon the books, and feeling that one would have to be a fool not to join him.  Most of the time, I smile in recognition and feel pity.  If you give into that desire to join in too often, you’ll realize eventually that you’ve been left behind academically (as all of those other people take turns keeping you at play, using their “off” time to get work done–usually at some wee hour of the morning).

What I forgot, however, was that the same thing happens in a marriage.  You just get ready to settle into a work day at a nice and early hour of the morning when your spouse appears, ready to go to school.  So you go too, glad for the chance to hit the gym.  Going to the gym will, of course, help you kick the twitches and settle into your books.  Good plan.  But after the gym time, just as you’re starting to feel the pull of the books again, your spouse decides that he needs a break: after spending the morning in class, he wants to go birdwatching.  Alrighty.  So an hour strolling around the lake, looking for birds, and then both of you are hungry.  Gotta get some fruit before heading home!  So by the time you arrive home, you, dumb spouse, have been sucked into the “take a break” phenomenon, and only have two hours left in the sun-lit day to get some real work done before you need to leave to take a visiting student and his wife out to dinner.  Oops.  So you give up and do laundry and, in the last five hours of that precious “work” time, write a blog post admitting defeat.

Erin

I seem to crave the unhealthy.  Sugar, to be precise.  I love fruit, sure, but it’s a bit harder to turn my tastes to vegetables.  Take that, and thne imagine being married to Sydney, who has no sweet tooth and who was raised to eat veggies like no other.  It’s difficult being a constant disappointment to one’s spouse! 🙂

But thankfully, I recently discovered something for which I prefer the healthier choice: rice.  White rice makes me shrug, and I don’t care for the creamy “milk” of white-rice risotto.  But basmati rice, wild rice, I love it.  This desire for taste and texture extends to other nutty grains like quinoa and oats.  Finally, at least one small part of my body is inclined in the right direction!  Woohoo!

Erin

After almost two weeks of low-forties flirtation with spring, Ithaca got hit with another snow storm. This would, of course, be the same day that a) our housemate was coming home from the airport in Syracuse after two weeks in England and b) the day the visiting grad student needs to leave early for a long drive back home.

Thankfully, the snow wasn’t overwhelming. It was, however, wet, heavy, and quite beautiful. So, in addition to being grateful that Sydney is finally back home to help me shovel, I am grateful that he took our camera outside to capture the scene. Although I will always love the Midwest and its blankets of snow, one thing I’ve really liked about living in Ithaca is the way winter here has lots of texture: ice and snow highlighting the rugged gorges and outlining hundreds of different kinds of trees. And for those visiting prospective students who don’t like snow: well, I guess we can’t help you. Ta ta.

Erin

The Washington Post has a lovely piece on that recent oxymoronic development called ‘green consumerism’. Here’s the opening of the piece:

Congregation of the Church of the Holy Organic, let us buy.

Let us buy Anna Sova Luxury Organics Turkish towels, 900 grams per square meter, $58 apiece. Let us buy the eco-friendly 600-thread-count bed sheets, milled in Switzerland with U.S. cotton, $570 for queen-size.

Let us purge our closets of those sinful synthetics, purify ourselves in the flame of the soy candle at the altar of the immaculate Earth Weave rug, and let us buy, buy, buy until we are whipped into a beatific froth of free-range fulfillment.

And let us never consider the other organic option — not buying — because the new green consumer wants to consume, to be more celadon than emerald, in the right color family but muted, without all the hand-me-down baby clothes and out-of-date carpet.

Sydney

This week Sydney and I are hosting a visiting prospective graduate student for the philosophy department.  He, like Sydney, studies medieval philosophy, and so I find myself with two tall, serious, nearly-silent medieval philosophers in what is, after all, a very small house.

Medieval philosophers in stereo. Whoa.

Erin

Alright, I’ve finally gotten around to loading the promised photos. Clicking on the below photo should open a file with a bunch more (the file is rather sizable):