Archive for 'Family'

A very small sample of interactions with my son today:

Like all young children, my son enjoys repetitious games. He’ll ask: “Again?” And then: “Again?” On and on until I finally announce a countdown - a number of times we can play the game, before we hit the final time, and then have to stop. Around this time last year, I mentioned on the blog the first moment when it began to occur to him that perhaps there might be some way to evade the dreaded “Last time!” decree. That effort didn’t work, but this initial failure was no reason to stop trying to circumvent the system… The current strategy involves waiting for the “Last time!” - and then making a break for it. So, we might be playing ball, for example, and get to the last toss - and, instead of actually taking his “last time”, he’ll run off with the ball and shut himself in a room.

This doesn’t, however, mean that the adult with whom he’s been playing is free to go off and leave the game unfinished. If my son walks out, and - as normally happens - finds the adult has given up after a few minutes, and wandered off to do something else, this is the occasion for tears and indignation: “I want my last time!!!” So back to the game he and the adult will go, preparing for the final ball toss. But once again he makes a break for it, and ends up hiding with the ball in his room.

The desire, apparently, is that the moment should be frozen - the game must last forever - eternally suspended, hanging incomplete - as long as my son doesn’t effect the “last time” by enacting his side of the event.

I just dropped my son off at his childcare centre, and had a nice conversation with the woman who heads the teaching team in his room. I’m very happy with the centre and the staff - not least because they’ve dealt extremely well my son’s rather… non-institutional personality, allowing him an unusual amount of flexibility to drift around within their schedules and routines. Their tolerance is paired, though, with a fair amount of bemusement, and it’s not unusual for staff to pull me aside to share stories about my son’s strange combination of politeness and intractability (I’ve overheard staff joking with one another, describing the phrase “no thank you” as “classic Lyle”). He seems to be perceived as having a positive temperament, but staff seem genuinely puzzled, given this, by his desire to go off and do his own thing - as though politeness ought to correlate with instant compliance or desire for conformity… Thus is the stuff of parent-teacher conferences made…

This morning, the familiar conversation around these things took an unexpected turn: “So… what’s your son’s sign?”

Thinking I must have misheard: “His… what?”

“His astrological sign?”

“Uh… I have no idea…”

“That’s okay - what’s his birthdate?” I provided this, and then received his sign in return. I tend to respond to this kind of thing with a sort of extreme blankness, which for me signifies that I don’t really want to get into a discussion with someone about what they’ve just said, as I’m concerned that they’d find my reaction offensive, and I don’t think the issue is important enough to justify providing offence. This blank reaction, though, is often interpreted in strange ways by other people. In this case, the interpretation, apparently, was that I was struck speechless by how impressive it should be that they should be able to deduce the sign from the birth date. They blushed, and then tried to reassure, “I know - don’t worry - I can only do this because I studied it at university. Helps me with understanding the kids’ personalities.” I’m not sure I find this reassuring…

(Just a side point, from an immigrant’s perspective: astrology and other forms of new age spirituality or practice (often in instrumentalised form, as practice of manipulation or at least prediction of external events) come up startlingly often, in my experience, in professional settings in Melbourne. Every workplace I’ve been in here - the university is no exception - has quite casual, apparently sincere, discussion around new age themes, often by people who are quite scathing in their opinions of mainstream religion. And I’m not just talking about watercooler discussion or chats over coffee - I’m talking about discussion introduced into staff meetings or other formal contexts. Not that everyone or even the majority of people in a workplace participate - but there is no visible public disapprobation to airing these perspectives in a professional setting. I don’t know that I have a question here - more a sort of expression of… anthropological curiosity: what gives? What’s with the strange combination of reflexive scepticism toward older, established faiths, and the receptivity to demonstrably rather recent new age beliefs? Or have I just had profoundly atypical experiences, leading to a kind of strange new age bias in my selection of workplaces?)

The otherwise delightful Wildly Parenthetical has tagged me with a meme. I’ve been blogging since February 2005, and to my knowledge no one has ever tagged me with a meme (I won’t count Scott Eric Kaufman’s meme experiment, since that was a strictly impersonal exercise, conducted with proper scientific controls and everything). Dammit WP - I’ve worked so hard to save myself for someone special - and you, you, you seduce me into a night of reckless conversation, and I wake up to find myself saddled within incoming links, strangers from other sites dropping in, memes - all these responsibilities and connections to other people… What happened to my carefree blogging youth?!

Even with my personal integrity spent in this way, I still maintain my methodological integrity: what do you mean, asking for eight random facts about me? The facts you’ve listed about yourself aren’t random - random would include something like pinkie circumference or eyelet colour or some other agglomeration of largely meaningless details - but every detail you’ve listed is meaningful in some way or other - which I suppose tacitly commits me to doing the same. Here goes - from the beginning then:

1. My first word was “uh-oh”. One could argue that all subsequent words have been elaborations on this basic theme.

2. Sometime before I turned 2, I decided I wanted to be an astronaut. This ambition was tarnished fairly quickly, when someone used this information to try to get me to drink Tang (does this horrid stuff exist in Australia?). They said I should drink it because the astronauts did; I countered that, just because someone was an astronaut, this didn’t mean they had good taste. My response was what they used to call in Texas “being smart”. Being smart doesn’t go down well in Texas. Nevertheless, I would not drink Tang. At some point between that time and this, I seem to have settled on social theory as a means of gaining a perspective on what is happening on earth without leaving the planet.

3. Given the chance, though, I’d leave the planet in an instant. While I have little time to indulge it these days, I have a lifelong fascination with astronomy, sometimes pursued through leisure reading in astronomy and physics, sometimes pursued in a more direct wish-fulfilment way through reading science fiction. I have particular interest in authors who try to throw their readers into radically different forms of subjectivity, or to explore the potential development of very different human forms, but am sadly out-of-date in the genre. Well before I started work in history or anthropology, I acquired a sense of the provisionalness and potential mutability of our current experience by pursuing these sorts of interests.

4. I was given my first pet - a dachshund named Ginger - when I was undergoing intensive speech therapy as a young child. I decided to try some of the speech therapy techniques out on the dog. To my knowledge, she never learned to say anything, but she learned an interesting set of words. Among other things, I taught her to sneeze and yawn on command. Guests would come over, and the dog would start sneezing feverishly. This was her way of begging for food, but the guests would just look puzzled, make moves to shield their plates and, with worried looks, ask, “Is your dog coming down with something?” Then she would start yawning, and they would look even more confused.

5. My relationships to other animals have not always gone so well. Horses as a species are united in their intense and immediate dislike for me. This is a problem, growing up in Texas. I have yet to attempt to ride a horse without it trying to scrape me off against a tree, roll over on its back to wipe me off, or buck maniacally to try and dislodge me. As a consequence, I am fairly skilled at dismounting from horses. Riding them, not so much.

6. And while we’re talking about things I can’t ride: I do not know how to ride a bike. I was a peripatetic child, and had access to a bike only for one very brief period in childhood. Its brakes didn’t work. I am therefore also fairly skilled at dismounting from bikes while they are still moving. Generally right before they crash into trees. I also have some experience crashing into trees with them. I decided at one point as an adult that I really must learn how to ride a bike. Unfortunately, I was living in Arizona at the time. Every time I went out with the intention of riding, I promptly ran over a cactus spike. This gave me lots of practice lugging around bikes with flat tyres.

7. Speaking of flats: I tried to work my way through university by remodelling them. Unfortunately, the company I was working for ran into financial trouble, and couldn’t pay me for four years. This led to a steady diet of beans and rice, with the occasional splurge on a vegetable or two, for much of my undergraduate years. Then they suddenly paid me, all in a lump sum, once I’d graduated and was no longer in particular financial distress. This made it possible for me to go France, where I did a great deal of research that I then didn’t use for my MA.

8. I did, however, have coffee for the first time after arriving in France. When I returned to the US, I realised what a wise decision this had been, and promptly abandoned my European coffee habit. Melbourne has restored my faith in the possibility of excellent coffee outside of Europe, and I currently do much of my work (as well as much of my procrastination, like writing this post) in a coffee shop sporting an enormous Garden of Eden mural that depicts a process of mutual temptation. I can’t blog the contents of the other murals, this being a family site and all.

I’m meant to tag eight people now, but I decline as a matter of principle, and refer the bad karma back to WP, who has offered to accept it (you did intend that offer to apply to any and all flow-on effects from your post, didn’t you?). Although I wouldn’t mind if some of the folks who occasionally post around these parts, who haven’t been posting regularly here or on their own blogs, feel like they’ve been implicitly tagged - just so I can hear something from them. Any non-bloggers who feel the impulse could add their responses in the comments. And anyone else lurking who feels inclined…

A senior colleague called me at home very early this morning. Of course, since my son had taken the phone off the hook, I didn’t hear the call. Then they sent an email - one of those horrible “could you please call me immediately” messages that doesn’t explain what the problem is (do people think email charges by the word or something?). This message was even more frightening than the normal cryptic “call me” emails I receive, because it made clear that they had tried to reach me at home, and left their home number so that I could get back to them even before business hours, if possible. So of course I race to the phone to see whether the message they left there is more specific. No. Of course not. (Do people think voice mail charges by the word or something?)

I’ve been very ill, it’s physically painful for me to talk, and frankly I didn’t want to call anyone, so I risked the delay of responding via email to ask whether it might be possible to provide a more specific description of the urgent issue. Meanwhile, of course, my imagination is running riot, speculating about what issue might be so pressing that a senior colleague might feel it necessary to call me so early in the morning, when they are at home on their own day off - what issue might so sensitive that they simply couldn’t commit it to writing or leave some permanent recording. I winced my way through cascading pangs of guilt for every student email this term that I haven’t turned around within a day, for how I took eleven days, rather than the originally promised seven, to mark my last round of student assessments, for the fact that I’ve recently adopted a policy of refusing to meet with students outside of class when they fail (ever) to attend my lectures or tutorials, for how exhausted I often am by the time I get to the class I jointly teach with this senior colleague, because the course occurs at the very end of a 12-hour workday… I wondered which of these or other horrible teaching sins might have suddenly rendered it necessary for my senior colleague to call me, from home, on a day off, at the crack of dawn, because the situation simply could not be allowed to stand one moment longer.

As it turned out, the urgent problem was that the biscuit tin wouldn’t be stocked at an all-day seminar I’m running tomorrow.

I need a less guilt-ridden imagination. And a certain colleague might need some more excitement in their life, if they think an empty biscuit tin is an “urgent” issue.