Day 13: Salute Your Shorts

cardio: 10 mins jumprope, 10 mins Wii Fit
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty-five
crunches: forty
breakfast: egg salad, baguette, vitamins
lunch: Whole Foods salad bar (pea shoots, dandelion shoots or whatever, peas, corn, bleu cheese, Diestel turkey, falafel)
apartment clean?: reasonably

Ask me whether I made it all the way to the men's locker room before I realized that I had not packed my gym shorts, and thus was unable to work out. I had already left the house for the Old English Reading Group, which I was late for; I was not supposed to use up my one day per week (note the change) of working out at home on a day when I had already left the house; I am already behind in a workweek in which I am supposed to complete a draft of my play (by Sunday evening), a full dissertation chapter draft (by Monday evening), and a novel (by Monday 11:59pm). And I should definitely not be wasting my time on the English Grads list-serv:

"The videos [of police brutality at the UC protests] are horrifying indeed.

But to anyone teaching a composition course this semester: remember, as Paolo Freire and Miss Jean Brodie have both pointed out, that to educate is to lead out -- not to put in or deposit or inculcate, which would indeed be the opposite, and which, regardless of your own politics or opinions, is an inherently oppressive act in the classroom.

It is far more revolutionary, and far more effective, to allow the students to reach their own decisions about what is happening here (rather than to inform them about your own), and to provide them with the critical thinking tools to make their own opinions, and actions, duly complex and mature. Rather than simply swaying people one way or another, you'll help build a group of educated people who is not so easily swayed.

In other words, the most revolutionary thing you can possibly do is what you were already doing, assuming you were doing it right in the first place, since our composition classes are supposed to center on critical thought. Lead out, draw out, the natural instincts for critical thinking that are already in place. Guide them the tools to go out and research, deeply, what is going on. Never present them with any material, however straightforward it may seem, that is 'just the way it is.' Because no one, and certainly not any of us, is capable of a statement free of subjectivity, and that is exactly what we're trying to teach these students.

If there are students in your classroom (and there are) whose current reading of the situation is opposed to yours (and mine), it is still your job to encourage those students to find the words and voice to think through, investigate, and communicate their reading. And once such a reading is exposed to the critical thought necessary for such an investigation, the reading will change because the student will change. Any other approach will cause a dissenting mind to (rightly) clam up at the back of the room and grumble about 'these liberals, making assumptions, wouldn't hear me anyway, wasting more of our time.'

At NYU, in September 2001, when our chancellor ordered classes to reconvene after only a week (part of the 'return to normalcy' thing -- you want to talk euphemistic emails?) my TA walked into our 45A recitation and said, 'In the coming months, you are going to be bombarded with text. You probably already have been. It is our job, as literary scholars, to parse, analyze, and closely read texts, to uncover not only what they say, or what they appear to say, but how they say it. So in the coming months, you will discover just how important our work can be.' And then she produced three handouts, each one with a different text that represented a different 'side' of the 9/11 attacks -- Pat Robertson, who blamed LGBT and Communist New Yorkers for bringing down God's wrath, a blogger in Palestine who laid the blame entirely on aggressive US foreign policy in the Middle East, and a conscpicuously 'centrist' article. And then she said, 'Well? Go. Analyze. Let's discuss the form, not just the content, of these texts, and how they relate to agenda (or the construction of an agenda), etc etc.'

I would suggest that if anyone is going to bring up recent UC events in their classroom, they run a similar exercise, bring in texts for interpretation, etc. In any case, open a discussion, but don't comandeer it. Know that you, too, have an agenda, and that in that classroom, you are very powerful and loud -- though it is on you to get students to claim more power, and more voice, for themselves, regardless of whether you completely disagree with them. Feel free to steal my TA's ideas, as I have. I will not post this to bSpace.

Let's remember that a video from the grassroots, like an email from the top down, like our own classroom plans, is a text, one that we cannot simply take at face value. It is part of our job description not to take it at face value. Or we can do it on our own time; but when we are educating, our responsibility is to train students to read more deeply, think more complexly, and so forth."

Day 12: Wiiiiii

cardio: 10 mins (figuring out the) jumprope, 10 mins (remembering how to use the) Wii Fit
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: leftover vegetable pie, an apple, vitamins
lunch: dry salami, maple yogurt (Australian-style), beans on toast, bread and cheese
apartment clean?: passably

I must be quick, since I'm rushing out to go see Performing Diaspora at CounterPulse. Quick updates:

1) I was wrong. Old school protest can have significant effects -- if the protestors are willing to step out of their comfort zones. They have, and the media is paying attention.

2) The jumprope workout will work perfectly, I think, and since it is a bit more intense than the cardiomachines, I can unguiltily bolster it with some Wii Fit stuff, which means I'll get to start reporting back here on my weight and BMI and such (didn't get a chance to write it down today, but the cute little computerized voice made fun of me for not having reported back in months, then called me overweight). This will make it much easier to balance fitness and dissertation. Three weeks and counting -- woot.

Day 11: Mr. Roper

cardiomachine: 20 mins leakybeaky, 15 mins ellipsis
(read James Joyce's Ulysses)
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: one eggs, beans on toast because I wish I were British, an apple, vitamins
lunch: dry salami, maple yogurt (Australian-style), cold cauliflower soup (Ara's mom's recipe), a few brussels sprouts
apartment clean?: reasonably

Last weekend we saw DV8's To Be Straight With You at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and it was one of those rare pieces of art that was both politically effective and artistically virtuosic. Not least because of a monologue, made up of text from an interview with a young Caribbean homosexual whose father stabbed him when he came out of the closet, a monologue which a dancer performed while performing Olympic-level feats -- with a jumprope.

A fucking JUMPROPE.

Keith (see yesterday's post), who is friends with that dancer, and told me that the dancer had once been a competitive jumproper, and that the director just decided that he'd have his performers use what they know. Keith said, "You know, they say that ten minutes with a jumprope is as intense a workout as a thirty-minute run." The Jump Rope Institute (yup) confirms that this is true (click here). Of course, I could never jog because the impact is bad for my bad arches, and so, the elliptical and exercise bike are my albatrosses.

Cut to me in the stretch room at the gym today. One of the biggest difficulties in this new fitness plan is simply getting to the gym -- when I need all the time I can to deal with pressing dissertation deadlines, and plays that just won't get written, an unnecessary trip away from the home office fucking sucks. And I hear this Indiana Jones whoop-crack sound and I look up from my downward-facing-dog and see, again,

a fucking JUMPROPE.

One of the other things I hate about the gym is how laws of probability necessitate that most of the people at the gym on any given day will be people who go to the gym regularly. Fucking in-shape undergrads walking around in muscle shirts while I grunt through my paltry twenty pushups don't you judge me. And one of those very fit undergrads was right there, jumproping.

And it was so cool. Criss-cross, double spins, or whatever the hell, superfast, I just watched in awe for a second, which was embarrassing, and besides, at the gym, you're not supposed to look directly at anyone, which is another reason why I hate it.

And another thing I hate about the gym is the elliptical, because all that work doesn't go anywhere, because elliptical-walking is neither a transferable nor an impressive skill. But jumproping, as we have seen, is. And if I do that frequently enough, I could have something neat to whip out at parties.

So I bought a jumprope. Weighted handles, for my fitness enjoyment. And now, two days out of my weekly four, I can get my cardio in without going all the way to the gym. The foot impact, which is light if you're doing it right, shouldn't be a problem for my feet. In fact, I think it might make me lighter on my feet.

Oddly, I just realized that the dance piece we saw at Yerba Buena the week before that had a major section that mimed a jumprope, which we discussed at some length in the car on the way home. THE FATES HAVE TOLD ME TO JUMPROPE.

Day 10: Everybody's Fight

cardiomachine: 20 mins psychbike, 15 mins ellipsicle
(William Tydeman's The Medieval European Stage, 500-1550)
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: two eggs, potatoes and toast at Ann's Soup Kitchen, vitamins
lunch: root vegetable tostada from Tacubaya in West Berkeley (compliments of my lovely wife)
apartment clean?: certainly

Ann's Soup Kitchen has a 15% discount for anyone wearing UC Berkeley gear. Before I stepped up to the counter, I quickly grabbed my Cal gym shorts from out of my bag and put them on over my jeans -- the cashier told me that the discount only applies on Fridays, but that, yes, the shorts would have counted.

On the way from Ann's to the gym, I bumped into a former student of mine. She asked if I was going to the rally. We spoke for a few seconds, I awkwardly said "Well, I'm not teaching this year, so I've got nothing to strike from... it isn't my fight, I guess," then she went to the rally, and I to the gym.

Later on, I sent her this email:

"It was nice to run into you today -- just to let you know, I did end up attending the end of the rally, and marched through the streets of Berkeley in the protest. Two minutes after we spoke on Bancroft, I realized that I had actually said the words 'this isn't my fight,' which is untrue anyway, especially because any fight, anywhere, that affects access to education is a fight I shohuld consider 'mine.' I
don't agree with everything that the protestors were saying, but I reminded myself that marching in solidarity is not the same as marching in lockstep, and that an imperfect gesture is still sometimes better than no gesture at all. So, thanks for reminding me, if only accidentally, of what my priorities are."

My voice is hoarse from the chant-yelling (when I do such things, I do them right, and yes, I did get on the mike for the giant speaker system so that I could rustle up the crowd); my favorite part was when we marched outside Berkeley High and did a special cheer just for them:

This is everybody's fight!
Berkeley High is hella tight!

As usual, the Berkeley protesters have offered up a massive prix fixe spread of broadly-defined and often half-baked demands and philosophies; I prefer to order a la carte. At the march, between the deafening calls and responses, I discussed with Keith (from Performance Studies at UC Davis) all of the points I complained about in yesterday's post, particularly because Keith's thesis is on a relevant topic. Keith shrugged after a while and said, "Yeah. It's hard to be smart at a protest." I said, "Exactly. Exactly." And we marched on, in solidarity but by no means in lockstep.

Day 9: Stupor Mario

cardiomachine: 20 mins excitebike, 15 mins ellipsical
(William Tydeman's The Medieval European Stage, 500-1550)
stretching: yes
pushups: twenty
crunches: thirty
breakfast: top sirloin, one egg, half Ara's apple, vitamins
lunch: Musical Offering Cafe -- lentil vegetable soup, salad, bread
apartment clean?: particularly

There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, well, not for three days, but then it's of course back to business as usual. And while putting your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, would make the machine stop, it would also result in hurt feelings all around, and potential physical injury -- and so, the owners of the machine have kindly cordoned off a specific time and place in a "free speech zone" that will keep protestors away from the dangerous gears. And in that zone, when you use your safe, inoffensive, glib, and generalized chants and signs to protest the machine, you've got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine could theoretically be prevented from working at all, if it ever came to that, though of course it will not.

Seriously: exactly what member of senior management ever shook in his boots for a strike that had a predetermined end date? With all due respect, I am glad I am not teaching this year -- because, though solidarity would compel me to cancel my classes in honor of the strike, I would do it grudgingly. (I hope that going to the library and gym doesn't count as crossing the picket line.) This kind of nonsense is more of the typical snakeoil that makes a continually abused body of students, educators, and staff feel like "well, at least I'm doing something."

Either strike or don't; no real strike could be as safe and pleasant as this one is promising to be. I wonder what Mario Savio would say.

Today, I broke my promise to myself that I would not read any emails at all related to the budget crisis. And it cost me work hours on my dissertation -- what could have been time spent in a worthwhile and relevant scholarly pursuit was instead squandered on an endless, facile, discourse. Which is exactly why I made the promise to myself. And I will not break it again.

But I kept the promise that counts -- and I think I took out my frustration on the exercise bike.

Day 8: Chutes and Ladders

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(skimmed notes and biblio for William Tydeman's The Medieval European Stage, 500-1550)
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: one egg, baguette, cheese, vitamins
lunch: I simply do not remember, but I did eat lunch
apartment clean: yes

My new hard drive has arrived, as has my old one. The thingy that Dell made me buy in order to extract the old data has failed completely, and so I dropped the old hard drive at the Used Computer Store on Shatuck (for a forty-five-buck diagnostic, they said they'd give it a shot) and moved on as if the data was lost for sure. I've kept various projects -- my dissertation, my play, my National Novel Writers' Month project, this fitness blog thing, etc -- in purgatory for weeks now, and they're all too time-sensitive for that. So I'm calling it a done deal, and if the brain cavalry does come riding in at some point, all the better.

Or, rather, another day of re-organizing and backing up everything. I'm technically posting this on Monday, two days after my last trip to the gym (this, like the prior few posts, are backdated because of all the computer trouble). And I've spent the last 48 hours installing Windows 7 (might as well do it now, and yes, it is much better), adjusting and replacing various programs, and then sifting through all the data I have left, salvaging what I can, and organizing my entire external hard drive while I was at it (except music, which is an ongoing project and all doubled on Ara's Mac anyway), so that future backups can be quick, easy, and frequent. Then I triplicated all scholarly and non-scholarly writing onto my flash drive. And I uploaded most of my photos to Picasa, in neat, safe little albums that will sync to my hard drive periodically.

I have been sitting here at the living room table, doing all this. And there's still more catching up to do. But I'm glad I'm finally moving forward, yo. And I get mad props for continuing the fitness thing into a second week, even as my data disappeared beneath me.

Day 7: The Date is a Lie

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Lambert Danaeus's "On True and Christian Friendship")
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: Mom's pumpkin bread, vitamins
lunch: tapas at the Musical Offering Cafe
apartment clean: yes

I had limited computer access this week while I waited for my new hard drive from Dell. I'm posting these entries after the fact, but I promise they're all true.

Day 6: The Date is a Lie

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Gilbert Walker's "A Manifest Detection of Diceplay")
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: leftover miso-cornmeal porkchop and Annie's mac and cheese, vitamins
lunch: leftover slider and fries from the gourmet burger place on College Avenue
apartment clean: yes

I had limited computer access this week while I waited for my new hard drive from Dell. I'm posting these entries after the fact, but I promise they're all true.

Day 5: Bakhtin Stings

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike (no elliptical: there was a long waiting line, and I had run out of reading material)
(read Mikhail Bakhtin's "The Role of Games in Rabelais")
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: leftover miso-cornmeal porkchop and Annie's mac and cheese, vitamins
lunch: leftover slider and fries from the gourmet burger place on College Avenue
apartment clean: yes

I so almost did not make it to the gym today. As in I didn't make it there until about 5:30pm, when the post-work rush makes the place very crowded, and when the people who run the place do not adjust the lights for the fact that the sun has long set below the skylights, so the place is just a sweaty tired and dim chore. But I went.

Don't judge me for cutting out the elliptical for time's sake. The only way I can even allow myself to go to the gym is because I spend the majority of my time there going through dissertation-related reading. It is just too boring otherwise. Meanwhile, Bakhtin's writing is so fucking frustrating that it made me pedal extra fast on the bike. I mean, he is the classic example of a 60's/70's French theorist whose sense of fact-checking and objectivity is more unreliable than that of the medieval period which he studies.

Day 4: No Dice

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Felicity Heal's REFORMATION IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND)
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: leftover pot pie, vitamins
lunch: the remains of the pot pie; it is now all gone
apartment clean: yes, I even mopped the floor

Today was my first really productive day in a little while. Of course, it was productive only in the sense that I learned that the major editors' commentary on a key passage of the Chester plays (the dice game), around which my second chapter is supposed to orbit, is, well... completely wrong. Their grasp of medieval dicing terminology is not as tight as they made it sound. It's a minor point to the editors, surely, but to me... well. Then again, this whole hard drive thing has shaken up my dissertation brain in some good ways, potentially really productive ways, and the upheaval about the dice game is probably going to turn out to reveal something more complex and interesting than I had planned.

In other words, I AM ONLY EVEN CONSIDERING OPTIMISM ON ALL FRONTS UNTIL MY HARD DRIVE IS RETURNED TO ME.

Day 3: I'm a PC

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read James Simpson's OXFORD ENGLISH LITERARY HISTORY)
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: a pear, baguette, carrot juice, vitamins
lunch: chicken pot pie (see below)
apartment clean: yes

Excuses, excuses. Okay, maybe I'm using the computer failure thing as an excuse to procrastinate on my dissertation work and the whole thing is pretty flagrant. But I am very particular, and have always been, about my work environment: everything must be just so. Working on my wife's Mac is not just so; it is just so frustrating. There doesn't seem to be any organizing logic behind all of these pretty bubbles, bells and whistles. Even the keyboard is different. And I swear that the space bar is sticking, ever so slightly, since I uh, spilled a little bit (only a little bit!) of carrot juice on the keyboard (on a PC, I could easily pry off the space bar, wipe it off, and reattach). Plus, it takes time to be on the phone with Dell Technical Support, to get to FedEx or the computer store (with no car), and so forth -- about half of my work day for the past few days, actually.

None of this really explains why I spent a good hour and a half today making a chicken pot pie. But who knew that it would be as easy as making chicken in a pot, and putting it in a pie crust, and then baking? It came out exactly as I'd hoped, the chicken slighly overdone (better to err on the side of dry than of salmonella), but the black eyed peas, parsnip, carrots, onions, white wine/cheese sauce, and crust were all right where I wanted them. I've been doing an Eric Cartman voice since then.

And I made it to FedEx, which was farther away than I remembered, and the laptop is now sent. I've resigned myself to the probability that no data will be saved. But I have hope.

Day 2: Screw This

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Felicity Heal's REFORMATION IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND)
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: one egg, baguette, carrot juice, grapes, vitamins
lunch: leftover chinese from that good place on college near ashby
apartment clean: yes

The computer situation has worsened. I finally succeeded in getting the Dell Customer Care rep to understand that not only was my hard drive suddenly not working, but the tops of the screws were becoming stripped, so that I was worried that each time he had me remove and replace the hard drive would be my last. And lo and behold, after I hung up and tried to remove the hard drive one last time -- bam. One of the screws simply will not budge, is no longer a screw by any definition. I tried. Ara tried. The hardware store tried -- actually, various members of the family-owned business emerged one by one, trying an array of different gadgets. The used computer store guys tried. We tried everything, every home remedy, every online suggestion, there are none left, don't bother, and you know what? It's Dell's problem now. I called Customer Care back and now I'm sending the whole damn thing in, and they will either extract my hard drive or they won't and if they don't then it's on them to replace everything, because everything is under bloody warranty.

Except, as the Customer Care rep pointed out, my data. Let's be honest: the chances that I will retrieve anything off of my hard drive... are low. The next person to say, "Well, I guess that's why they say you should back up every week" gets a kick to the face. I don't know why anyone (my wife, my mother) has had even the slightest impulse to say that to me. Honestly. Thanks for the life lesson.

But anyway: the last backup -- only a partial backup, really -- was in late July, it seems. Beyond that, my dissertation is relatively safe because I have been emailing various drafts of everything to various readers. Some notes have been lost, but a lot of it was deadendage anyway. My teaching files are intact as far as the middle of the summer: the second half of summer teaching is gone forever. Files I kept for fellowship apps are gone; tax forms are still there. All our music is safe. All our photographs, I'm pretty sure, are safe (except possibly for unmemorable recent ones -- not sure).

And then there is the creative stuff. I wrote a ten-minute play over the past few weeks, and as I sent it out to a contest, I kept a hard copy for myself. It is now the only copy left. I made quite a few changes, some of them very good, to my full length play GLORY FOR YOU. All of those changes are gone, and the play is reset back to the state it was in when we held a private reading of it some weeks ago. Also lost are the massive notes and drafting that went into GFY, which has taken a fuckload of research. The only other creative pursuit that has received my attention since the July backup is my NaNoWriMo project, THE PHANTOM TUTORIAL, which I only began a couple of days ago anyway (and which, miraculously, I partially emailed to myself on the first day). Still, it will be tragic to watch the NaNoWriMo progress meter drop, rather than rise, when I confirm that 3500 words of progress are indeed gone forever.

In the meantime, there are some brightsides to this. It will force me to upgrade to Windows 7 (when I get my fixed computer back), and it will give me a sense of "new beginnings" in all of these pursuits, a good few of which (the play, the chapter) had grown a bit stale in recent weeks. I just wish my new beginning didn't have to happen on my wife's Mac.

Day 1: Just Not There

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Leah S. Marcus's THE POLITICS OF MIRTH)
stretching: yes
pushups: 14
crunches: 30
breakfast: one egg, baguette, pear, vitamins
lunch: breaded cod filets, malt vinegar, brie and crackers
apartment clean: yes

Today is not a fitting beginning for yet another new health resolution to begin. I just spent the last four hours on the phone with, and recovering from, Dell Customer Service. The service was nice enough, it's just that the product sucks: suddenly, for no reason, it's not detecting my harddrive. It's just not there.

And the data may never be recovered. Things I lost: my ten-minute play FOUND (spent most of last week writing it, though it survives in hard copy); my first three days' work for National Novel Writing Month (5100 words); some really massive changes to GLORY FOR YOU, my full-length play; and thankfully only useless bits of my second dissertation chapter (I've been dragging my feet... and I'm glad I did).

Give me one good reason why I shouldn't switch to a Mac this Christmas. Fuck Windows. I'm serious. I'm maybe serious.