From the monthly archives: July 2010
I do have a degree in information technology and computer science from a very old, very well-respected engineering school, but I stayed miles away from anything resembling sci-fi while I was there. I was a senior before I saw the Star Wars trilogy, and my introduction to Star Trek was last year’s blockbuster film, plus a little bit in a grad school class on Moby-Dick. (Incidentally, I also never played video games until we bought a Wii last summer, and I still, well, never really play them. Those neural pathways continue in their dormancy.)
Yet since I was a kid, I have always had a strange fascination with space. Not space travel, or planets, really. More with the weird stuff that might go on out there.
After I was finally convinced to watch (and then converted to the cult of) Battlestar Galactica, the single most chilling moment for me is still when someone is shot out of their craft and freezes while free-floating in outer space. I think I may have had a recurring nightmare of a similar event in the past.
Sunshine, a flawed but deeply thought-provoking (and incredibly scary) sci-fi film that Danny Boyle made a couple years ago, has a similar theme of being abandoned in deep space, without plans or ability to return home. I only saw the film once, not long after it released to DVD, and I still find myself thinking of it, chilled by it. (Despite its flaws, I highly recommend it.)
Anyhow, the point of all this: We started watching X-Files earlier this year, when it came to Netflix (all nine seasons, streaming!), and I have been holding my breath all through the first season, knowing that this is going to bust wide open. I don’t really watch the hour-long drama genre – certainly not the vaguely cop/crime kind – but I got into this really fast. It’s been standalone episodes, but we just finished the first season and I’m delighted that an arc is emerging.
I do recognize that I’m the last person on earth (ahahaha) to actually watch the show, but that said, I insisted we dive directly into season 2. My hopes for this season include the Mulder/Scully romance that is obviously going to emerge, some kind of actual face-to-face alien contact, and, most obviously, a much better wardrobe for Scully.
If you’re inclined to comment, please resist the know-it-all urge and don’t ruin anything for me. 
Two announcements:
- My dear friend Jenni (who I have known from a distance for several years and am delighted to be rooming with at The Glen in a week or so) has been working very hard on the Art House America site – and it’s finished, as of last night. So go read, gawk at the loveliness, and enjoy.
- I’m delighted to be the faculty advisor for the newest women’s house at King’s, named for Corrie ten Boom. (You can read the announcement here from last spring.) I know several of the girls from my class last year, and I am very excited to be joining them as they embark on their first year, and to be able to engage in student life at King’s in my first year.
Things I am pondering:
- The perennial question: M.F.A. or Ph.D., or both, and in which order? Do I need to study craft or history? Where, how, when? Do I need prerequisites? And how can I avoid paying for it? These things roll around in my head a lot, and they’ve come back lately in a kind of aggravated existential crisis. (What do you think?)
- I asked this question of a number of teacher/writer friends in an email, but I’ll ask here, too: if you do both, how do you manage both? Do you schedule time for writing into your office time? Or is it haphazard?
- Similarly, blogging friends: do you find that blogging takes away from or enhances your writing time? I used to say that blogging was exercising the writing muscle. Then I stopped blogging. And I think maybe I was right, but it’s hard to start again.
- Jim Belcher’s book Deep Church, which, besides being incredibly engaging, compassionate, and reasoned, is also challenging, expanding, and clarifying my thinking in ways that few books have done of late (Jamie Smith‘s Desiring the Kingdom being one of those few). If you care about church and have been scurrying around the periphery of both relatively traditional evangelicalism and vaguely emergent churches for a while, like me, you can’t afford to skip this one. I promise: you haven’t read it before. And you’ll also enjoy it.
- Speaking of Desiring the Kingdom, I’m struggling with how to develop thick practices in my students through teaching. I’m already committed to not setting deadlines for big assignments for Sunday night or Monday morning, because I know students, and many will not make Sunday into a day of rest if they know a project is due. I don’t want to teach them that behavior – it will burn them out. I’ve been there. I know. And I also plan to focus on Sabbath the week we also focus on poetry and description in my first-semester writing class this fall. But what else? I’m thinking about, for instance, Andi’s article on shelter and my own new (even if shared) office.
You know, just an average Friday morning.
Dove straight back into real life after returning – Tom started his new job on Monday, and I feel like I’ve been climbing an endless mountain of to-dos. I can’t believe tomorrow’s Thursday already!
Sometimes life seems settled, and I know roughly what to do next and have a manageable list of things to accomplish. Other times it is crazy. Inevitably the craziness hits when I want to be reading books and spending time outdoors and planning for the months ahead. But today I agreed to a position of some influence on the lives of some students, which I am terribly excited to announce soon, and that makes me realize anew how blessed I am in the work I do, or rather the work I fell into quite unexpectedly.
My friend Allison’s piece on growing into a teaching vocation reminded me today that teaching comes naturally to no one, that it’s something we learn. Some get to learn it from great classroom teachers. I didn’t have many of those before I began teaching (a couple great professors in college and one in grad school excepted), but her observation is heartening:
Often we see vocation as something to claim, not something to grow into. We do this, I think, because vocation identifies us, not only to the world, but to ourselves; carrying a label wards off fear, insecurity and mystery. And we label ourselves as “masters,” our insecurities hidden, the future predictable and bright.
A true leap of faith.
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One small note: this Sunday, our dear, dear friend Angela is getting married to the very best of Peters at the New York Botanical Garden, something we’ve been very much looking forward to since we, well, met Peter on New Year’s Day this year. Tom will also be taking a few photos, not as the primary photographer but filling in a few gaps, and I’ll be playing the piano for two congregational hymns. (And we’re very much looking forward to dim sum the day before.)
On Wednesday, June 16, I was waiting for my plane at LaGuardia, en route to a work trip to Hamilton, Ontario (which also, by extension, is filled with a lot of fun), when Apple called and said that no, my dead computer wasn’t covered under warranty because it was showing liquid damage to the logic board and I could either pay $750 to fix it or just cut my losses.
It’s two years old, so I chose the latter option, which of course means I’ve been computerless, since I immediately hopped on a plane (with my husband’s laptop), came home two days later for twenty-four hours or so, then boarded another plane at another airport bound for Dublin. (After much deliberation, I ended up ordering a netbook from Asus. I hate Windows – a feeling that has not abated but grown since I started using it again – but the iPad lacks a lot of functionality I need from a portable computer, and I lack the funds to buy another MacBook.)
Dublin, though, was great. We immediately rented a car and headed out of the city for a few days to Cashel and other places, spent the night in Kilkenny, then climbed a very tall hill in Glendalough before returning to Dublin:
Not nearly a good-enough photo. It looks quite low and uninteresting here. More pictures to come.
Back in the city, we visited galleries, museums, old buildings, new sights, and more, winding up at the end at the Guinness Storehouse (as one does in Dublin). We spent evenings in pubs, watching the football, and had a great time.
A week later we moved on to Glasgow, where we stayed with very kind friends, and spent a few days tooling around Glasgow and Edinburgh – two very different but very interesting cities. We saw the Queen’s Scottish home and some underground streets and the fabulous cathedral in Glasgow, above which towers, perhaps ironically, a statue of John Knox:
John Knox atop the necropolis behind the cathedral in Glasgow, the only one to survive the Reformation in the country. Irony?
England was last: first Bristol, where we stayed with the marvelously longsuffering and generous Beldmans, and visited both beautiful Bristol and the best place in the world – Bath – where we went to the contemporary hot baths and soaked in a warm pool on the roof overlooking the Georgian town, and visited Jamie’s Italian twice in one day; then London for two nights, where we went on the London Eye, ate Indian food, and spent a day in the Tower of London, which is enormous and fascinating.
We got home Saturday and have been running around madly since – Tom to D.C. to see his grandpa, me unpacking and cleaning and sneaking in the World Cup finals yesterday in a Hell’s Kitchen bar full of yelling Americans, who, after all, were a bit more enthusiastic than any pub crowd we ran into in the British Isles – go figure.
So here we are – back home. Three weeks and I head to the Glen in Santa Fe. Tom’s working on an action flick in Manhattan beginning today. I’m finishing out my tenure at IAM this month and getting my syllabi put together for my three classes this fall at King’s. We’re attending a dear friend’s wedding at the Botanical Gardens on Sunday. And hopefully squeezing in the Philharmonic’s performances in the parks this week.
Traveling, we find, always reminds us why we’re happy to live in New York, a place where people are friendly when they need to be, where they walk quickly on the sidewalks, where it’s easy to carve out a small corner in a big city if you want it enough, where you can get food or really anything you want past 6pm, and where the subways are VERY cheap (1/4 the price of the Tube!). We’re grateful that we have such a wonderful town to come back to, filled with wonderful people.
Be it ever so humble – or maybe not so humble! – there’s really no place like home.
