So much depends on the weather

2010.09.08
Days Remaining: 265

1. Last night I went into downtown New Aldwych* to meet Octavian at the Amtrak station. His train was due at 909pm, and I arrived at approximately 840pm. There was a time in my life, thankfully the majority of my adult life, when I was extremely punctual, and even made a habit of arriving early. In the past five or so years (it would be convenient to blame it on my marriage, but the truth is it started before then) I have developed the very bad habit of being late almost all of the time. The downside to being late is that one is, effectively, always crying wolf and so, when one is legitimately late (i.e., there was an accident on the highway, the George Washington Bridge is backed up again, a student began crying during a meeting and needed to be dealt with, etc.), it doesn't really matter, because no one expected you on time anyway. Remember, I used (I realize that that "used" = 6+ years ago, but I still remember) to make a habit of being early, which, given travel conditions, often meant that I was just on time. But for half a decade now, I've been late. I'm trying, though I suspect this will take a while, to amend this bad habit. Maybe sometime when I'm doing a theme post I'll talk more about being late, on time, or early. Anyway, last night I got to the train station in New Aldwych 30 minutes early.

2. Yes, yes, it's wonderful that I'm trying to behave like a basically considerate adult and all, but I mentioned the above point because getting there early gave me time to walk around the riverfront area (there's a boardwalk/park directly next to the train station, and several plazas around it). I lived in Philadelphia for 6 years, and the last 4 of them were very close to the Delaware River. I loved living near the water. Most of my favorite vacations have taken place very near the ocean, and discovering last week that I'm living in easy walk of the seashore park has been a highlight of moving here. But that park is a place for mornings, and the riverside park was better at night. There is something I find inherently soothing about the sound of water rhythmically lapping against jetties and pilings concrete barriers. When I came up here to find a place to live a few weeks ago, I had hoped that it would be somewhere near downtown. The 25+ minutes I spent on the riverwalk last night reminded me why. I have heard, though I have not followed up on, a claim that human beings respond positively, in psychological and emotional states, to regular exposure to the natural world. If we become caught in artificial environments too long, we're prone to depression, anxiety, and various other problems. This is something that I've noted in my own life: proximity to the natural world revivifies me and helps me to get an even keel when in mid-crisis. Last night, and the morning walks I've been doing, reminded me that some types of (more or less natural) environment have a stronger emotional resonance than others; I would hate to live too far away from the ocean or a river flowing into the ocean. I don't even make a habit of going to the beach very often, but I think I may start doing so whenever I can.

3. Related to that is something that occurred to me yesterday while I was on campus walking between classes: I love sunlight. That probably sounds either banal or foolish, but one of the unfortunate facts of my current apartment is that it's not very bright during the day. It's not dark, mind you, but direct sunlight doesn't happen, and the brightest period is about 6 hours long, this time of year, at most. Walking around yesterday, in the open, and feeling the breezes' coolness and the sun's heat, was like eating good sushi: it kind of cleansed my palate. On class days I don't walk to the beach in the morning but maybe I need to wake up earlier and do so anyway. If I ever build a house, it will have lots of windows and ceiling fans to let in light and help the air flow freely.

4. One of my students came to office hours yesterday and asked me to be her adviser for the Religious Studies Minor. As Visiting Faculty I'm not allowed to do that, so I sent an email to the two professors who have the best reputations as advisers in the department, and recommended the student to them. One of them, who is the senior faculty member in my department, sent me an email today saying that I could send my student to him. He also said that some of my other students who are in one of his classes this semester told him about (I'm not making this up) "the bucket." This is the metaphor that I use to explain a wonderful analytical approach (itself metaphorical) developed initially by a sociologist named Ann Swidler. Her work led her to think of culture as less totalizing than many other scholars tend to; instead she developed the idea that "culture" is a repertoire; an on-the-go grab bag of various ideas, words, actions, objects, etc. that we pick up over time (discarding some things, modifying others), all of which we use to do stuff. This means that what unites people into a single culture is the number of specific things that their individual repertoires have in common. The absolutely first-rate historian of religion Robert Ford Campany took this idea and pointed out that the repertoire metaphor works for pretty much any large group of humans, in his particular case, members of "a" religion. But since repertoires overlap between individuals rather than being homogenous, that helps us think better about what people in a single religious tradition have in common, and why they might be dissimilar in varyingly important ways.

5. My students liked this idea when I went over it with them, but they struggled with applying it until I suggested that they think of all human beings carrying buckets (one per person). As they grow up, their families, friends, neighbors, etc. socialize them, which means that they give them stuff to go into their bucket. But from the beginning the kids play with the things in their buckets, they take some things back out, pick up new things (think about how many kids learn important cultural behaviors from peers at school in entirely informal interactions), etc. The process of acquiring, modifying, discarding, etc. goes on throughout our lives, and you can figure out someone's cultural background (with greater or lesser degrees of precision) by figuring out what their repertoire consists of (ways of talking, ways of moving, ideas they take for granted, skills, etc.). My students got this concept when I used the bucket metaphor, and apparently they're using it to make sense of work in other classes. That's really emotionally and professionally rewarding, but I also realized that my intellectual legacy at Baskerville College might boil down to: "the bucket." Seriously. The other professor I had emailed responded to the "they told me about the bucket" email by saying, "I don't know what the bucket is, and I'm dying to find out." This is how I'm going to be remembered by my colleagues.

6. Today has been very quiet. I'm actually really tired after staying up until 1am last night (I dropped Octavian off at his hotel around midnight, and then didn't go right to bed when I got home). I woke up on my own at 7am, and am clearly running down now. I started experimenting with Gmail's "phone" feature, and it seems to work pretty well. So if you get a call from Escondido, CA, that's probably me.

7. Happy Rosh Hashanah to all who celebrate it! I think honey at you all.


*I'm such a child. I'm really enjoying the pseudonym-making.