Tags: autobiography, theory
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, self-portrait, tucson
Current Location: 85704

Through fortuitous turns of events, my alma mater Cal will be playing my father's alma mater Syracuse in the men's NCAA tournament this evening, a.k.a March Madness. I haven't written about sports much here in recent years -- even less than the other stuff I haven't written much about -- but have continued to occupy myself that way as much as I ever did. Maybe even more, actually, since I spend so much time with my father, who usually has his television tuned to some game or other (and almost always has his television on, as is often the case with the mobility-challenged).

Amid all the tumult in my life this past decade, the painful realization of how tenuous what we care about really is, my fandom has provided a crucial sense of stability. That may sound silly to someone who has little interest in sports. And I freely acknowledge that there are plenty of other fine ways, some of them no doubt better, to ground oneself. But I suspect that a great deal of people -- men in particular, I'll hazard -- benefit from spectator sports the way I do.

At the very least, they provide an incentive to pay closer attention to what changes day to day. When I was a kid, my father would sometimes get out the letters his father sent him when he went away to college. My mother typically commented at how lacking in content many of them seemed, since little more than the weather was mentioned. I have come to see, though, that taking note of the weather is a way to measure change. And so is taking note of the "weather" in the sporting world.

I am fully aware of the major problems that spectator sports can be blamed for, including the ones that pertain to intercollegiate athletics. An awful lot of money gets directed towards a pursuit that provides only vicarious benefits to the vast majority of people. If those funds were redirected to social works, a much greater percentage of individuals could be directly helped by them. Or, failing that, if the arts received some of the attention that sports do, particularly the sort that ordinary citizens feel empowered to undertake themselves, the divide between performer and spectator could be broken down to a degree.

I see all that. Yet I also see that much of what makes sports meaningful to me and others I talk to isn't each to quantify for a cost-benefit analysis. My father and I talk all the time. For the most part, though, the conversations we have about subjects other than sports revolve around medical care and the tasks I do for him and my mother. Talking about sports provides us something to be interested in and excited about that is outside of the domain of immediate need and responsibility. It's a source of sustenance that partakes of fantasy, however circumscribed. And that's very important for us.

That's why this evening will be such a huge deal for us. Cal and Syracuse have almost never played during the regular season. And the odds of them meeting again in the Big Dance are slim indeed. Part of me wonders whether the experience can possibly live up to our anticipation of it. But the truth of the matter is that the anticipation has been more than enough. Even Skylar's mom, who never paid a great deal of attention to sports and who has pretty much tuned them out in recent years, busy as she is, recognized the significance of this evening's contest for my father and me. Could we be doing something else together that would enrich our lives more? Possibly. The odds of finding it at this stage of our lives, though, are remote. So I will be more than content with the boon that the lords of sport have provided us today.

Tags: autobiography, everyday, family, sports
Current Location: 85704

I'm at my parents' place, as I almost always am Wednesday mornings, which means performing the usual caregiving tasks for my mom -- getting her washed, medicated, dressed and fed -- but also the subtler sort that make a difference for my dad. I don't mean shopping for him, getting his mail, making sure all his household supplies are ready to hand, though those are all on my to-do list, so much as providing him the sort of intellectual sustenance that he isn't getting anywhere else.

I suppose "intellectual" isn't the right word, but I'm not able to summon a better word. When I'm over at the apartment, whether in the morning or the evening, I talk with him, help him with his New York Times crossword puzzles, read the articles he has set aside for me, watch classic movies and discuss whatever sporting event is currently capturing his attention. Mind you, those are all things I did with him when I was still living in his house, as a teenager, or when I'd visit in my twenties or thirties. But there's more of a sense of urgency now, as he has gotten older and, since having to tend to my mom every day, more tired.

Before my parents moved here in October of 2010, during the months after my mom had returned home from her time in a rehab facility following her terrible fall, it became painfully clear that his will to keep going was starting to waver. He had stopped doing his crosswords. His long-standing reclusiveness, coupled with the difficulty of getting my mom out of the house, had made it especially hard for him to find opportunities to talk with people in person. And watching sports by himself wasn't making him as happy as it usually did.

All those reasons motivated my sister to begin the process of getting him to consent to a move. Her plan was to have my parents join her in Boise. That would have worked out, I'm sure. But given the strenuous nature of her schedule, the fact that her son is seven years younger than Skylar, and the health problems her husband has been struggling with in recent years, I'm also sure that my dad wouldn't have had as much positive stimulation there as he does here in Tucson. There's also the fact that my own interests reflect his more than hers do, in part because I've always been a cultural chameleon, absorbing whatever the dominant influence in my environment is. And my dad, like Skylar's mom, has a way of dominating whatever space he occupies with his likes and dislikes.

I offer this lengthy prelude as a way of putting the importance of this week's activities into perspective. You see, as I sit here waiting for my mom to finish her tea, I'm also half-watching my dad's alma mater Syracuse play its first-game in the Big East Tournament. I've been watching the Orange play basketball with him since they were still called the Orangemen, back in the late 1970s. I watched them play in the very first Big East season and Big East Tournament with him. And I've been watching "alongside" with him, even when thousands of miles apart, ever since. Whenever something special would happen, we would talk on the phone afterwards, like we did after Gerry McNamara led Syracuse to improbable back-to-back titles in the Garden or when the Orange prevailed over Connecticut in an astonishing six-overtime affair.

Yes, I'm getting sentimental writing about this because, as any basketball fan will tell you, this is the end of line for the Big East Conference as my father and I have known and loved it. Next year Syracuse will play in the Atlantic Coast Conference, the other league that my father and I used to follow with some degree of regularity during my teenage years in Maryland. That will make for some exciting new match-ups -- Duke in the Carrier dome, North Carolina in Chapel Hill -- but also a good deal of cognitive dissonance. And for me and my father both, the prospect serves as a reminder of the inevitability of change, the fact that nothing lasts forever.

I look forward to watching games with him next year and will do everything in my power to make sure that he stays healthy enough for our daily rituals to continue as they have been since my parents moved here. But the sense of dislocation that he has already experienced in a physical sense moving to Tucson will now saturate one of the bedrocks of his old life. And mine, to a degree. While it might be hard for someone who doesn't care for sports to appreciate the full significance of this change, I know that the desire to preserve a sense of continuity in the face of serious obstacles will resonate regardless. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what the basis of a ritual is, provided that it facilitate a feeling of togetherness that isn't at the mercy of time's passing.

Tags: everyday, family, sports
Current Location: 85704

It has been quite a fortnight. Two Fridays before last, Skylar fell off her horse Spot. She cried at first, but than clambered back into the saddle and proceeded to finish her lesson with aplomb. Her instructor, who thinks of Skylar -- with some justification -- as an unusually sensitive person, was extremely impressed with what both of us took for a newfound maturity.

Saturday, Skylar woke up sore, but got ready for Live Theater Workshop, where she's preparing a production of The Music Man, without incident. She was in a really good space, actually, as I drove her down, singing along to her music with exuberance. When we got there, however, we realized that there was no class that week. Unlike her fellow performers, she missed the announcement the previous week because she was unable to attend.

Having made the long trek from Oro Valley to Speedway and Beverly, however -- made longer by the madness of the Gem and Mineral Show -- I wasn't about to drive straight back. So we went to Park Place Mall instead, where Skylar found some nice clothes at H&M, replaced her favorite headphones from Typo, and had a generally relaxing time. We then had a nice meal at P.F. Chang's before heading home. And she seemed to be on the mend, though clearly still not 100%.

Sunday was a day for taking it easy. Since her mom was out of town and I had to attend to my mom in the morning -- her nursing aide only comes for nine hours per week now -- Skylar had lots of alone time, which she is always demanding more of these days. Then, in the late afternoon, I retreated into the bedroom to watch the Cal-Arizona game while she did her usual reading of fan fiction on the couch. Although the game started somewhat poorly by the standards of a Bears fan, it ended with a glorious and extremely surprising triumph that lifted my spirits greatly.

I was feeling happy as I emerged into the Teenager Zone, so much so that I volunteered to leave the house earlier than usual -- I typically put my mom to bed starting around 9:15pm -- to give Skylar more time to do her singing and bouncing on the trampoline, activities she prefers to perform when her parents are elsewhere. I decided to head to Barnes & Noble before driving over to my parents' place because looking at books is something that always makes my good moods better.

Unfortunately, the volume on my phone got turned down accidentally and I missed the many calls that first Skylar, then her mom, and then my dad, on her mom's behalf, were all placing to me. Had I not glanced down at the screen for a minute, it might have taken me even longer to realize that there was a crisis. As it was, I knew within fifteen minutes. But when your daughter is home alone, in pain and unable to walk, fifteen minutes seems like fifteen hours.

I rushed home, trying to piece the details together by phone. She hadn't fallen or done anything otherwise dramatic. She had simply turned her ankle a bit while bouncing. Given the trampoline's forgiving surface and the fact that she had done something similar on numerous previous occasions without significant consequences, I was pretty sure that she was exaggerating her distress in order to tighten the screws on her mom, who was already feeling guilty for not being at home.

I didn't say any of this to Skylar upon arriving home, naturally. But when I noticed that her ankle wasn't swelling, I figured that the pain would go away with some rest. So I did my best to calm her down and got her to bed, making a mental note to wake up earlier than usual, since it would surely take her even longer than usual -- she is a fourteen-year-old girl, after all -- to get ready for school.

When I got her up the next morning, however, it was immediately apparent that she wasn't going to be get around campus. Although her ankle was barely swollen and not discolored in the least, she couldn't but any weight on it at all. I decided to let her rest a while longer, then took her to Urgent Care. After a long wait and two sets of X-Rays, the doctor on-call informed us that the ankle appeared to be broken, which really did come as a surprise to both of us. He referred us to Tucson Orthopedic Center to confirm the diagnosis and figure out what kind of immobilization and protection the injury would need to heal.

As it turned out, the day had turned improbably wet and cold, after a warm and sunny weekend, which made getting around especially difficult. I took Skylar home for a while to rest, then forced her, against her will, to head back out for a same-day appointment. The wait was very long and she was very grumpy, as the full import of her injury started to sink in. By the time the doctor was able to see her, she was feeling very sorry for herself indeed. And once he told her that she would need to be in a cast for at least a month, the gloom outside was no match for the gloom inside.

Although the doctor couldn't be 100% sure what had happened, he conjectured that she had sustained a stress fracture -- the break was on Skylar's almost-closed growth plate, the ankle's weakest point -- and then widened it later, which probably means that the initial injury was sustained when she fell off her horse, since she came down hard on that leg.

Somehow, I managed to get her to school early the next morning for high-school registration. I was permitted the rare privilege of accompanying her around campus until her first-period class started -- she didn't even give me the Death Glare -- and was made viscerally aware of just how big a burden it was going to be for her to spend a month in a cast. Because even though she has moment of wanting to be the center of attention, she prefers to spend most of her time on the margins. Almost everyone who saw her when I was there was nice to her, expressing concern, but that only accentuated her sense of being under constant surveillance.

Predictably, the rest of the week was a huge struggle for both of us. Getting around on crutches exhausted her, what with having to make heavy use of muscle groups she hadn't really needed much before. The next morning, I could barely get out of bed and was the target of a massive tantrum once I did. But she did make it to school, though a few minutes late. Thursday was better, in large measure because her friends gave her Valentine's Day treats. When I picked her up to take her to her flute lesson, however, she threw another fuss, saying she just didn't have the energy to go. Although I was able, finally, to persuade her not to cancel, her arms were so tired from the crutches that she couldn't hold her flute up without shaking. Luckily, her instructor was understanding and let her experiment on the lighter, shorter piccolo instead.

When we got home Thursday, Skylar talked to her mom, who then communicated with me that she should be allowed to stay home Friday. I concurred, in part because I just didn't want to have another day of stressful solo-parenting. As it turned out, though, Kim had clearly made the right decision, since Skylar slept in until 2:30 in the afternoon and was still able to get to bed at a somewhat reasonable time Friday night. The body does need time to heal, after all.

By this time I couldn't wait for Kim to get back home. I love my father-daughter time normally, but the circumstances had made it hard to enjoy the week the way I had hoped to. It didn't help that Kim was also dealing with some difficulties at the end of her trip. It may seem strange to have been craving the normalcy of our hardly-normal domestic situation, but that's what I was doing.

When you're the parent of a fourteen-year-old girl, though, the search for stability often seems futile. As I told a friend on the phone last night, this age reminds me of those periods in babyhood and the pre-school years when developmental milestones come fast and furious and often simultaneously. The difference, of course, is that the ones Skylar is going through right now are challenging in a different way.

Breaking one's ankle may not be a universal milestone, but it seemed to signal to her that it was time for other "breaks" to occur. For example, although she had already confessed to me that she had joined her friends in using bad language at school, she hadn't really used it around her parents. All of a sudden, though, the minute she realized that she was going to be laid up for a while, she started cussing like the proverbial sailor. That made the many outbursts during my week of solo-parenting interesting to say the least. Sometimes I started to laugh at the incongruity of Skylar suddenly sounding like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, but that only enraged her more.

It helped somewhat when she discovered South Park shortly before her mom's return home. Although the show definitely contributes to her newfound foul-mouthedness, it also leavens the linguistic barrage and makes it easier to not take personally. While I wouldn't go so far as to say that suddenly falling in love with South Park can be considered a developmental milestone, it does mark a significant change in the way Skylar views the world, the logical counterpoint to her fixation on The Exorcist this past fall. Even if she remains very much the teenager in turmoil, it's much easier to detect an adult sensibility -- at least the ironic sort that both of her parents prefer -- rising to the surface of her consciousness.

While I was relieved that Kim was back, the past week was more fraught than I had hoped. For one thing, Kim was still sorting through problems that had arisen on her trip, combined with having to return to the workplace in an extremely stressful time. For another, Skylar still had her cast on and was in some ways even less happy about it than she had been in the initial aftermath of her diagnosis. The novelty had worn off and the claustrophobia was mounting.

That's why I was selfishly glad that they persisted in their plans for a mother-daughter trip to Los Angeles, though it would obviously be harder to pull off than either had been thinking. I knew it would be good for them, of course, and wanted them to be happy. But I also needed a break, at least to a degree. And I had big plans for making serious headway on my reorganization project that has been delayed over and over by a combination of my attention-deficit issues and all of the other must-be-done-now tasks that inevitably get in the way.

Unfortunately, as was the case on the last few trips the two of them had taken together since my parents moved out to Tucson, I found that much of the free time I'd been eager to enjoy ended up getting absorbed by my caregiving responsibilities. Sure, I could have rushed through my time at my parents' place the way I usually do. And maybe I should have. It's hard, though, to sustain that level of frenzy when it's not necessary to do so, particularly when I can see that both my mother and father do a lot better when I adjust to their pace of existence.

It was also the case that I still need to catch up on my rest from the walking pneumonia that I couldn't shake the whole month of January. My body -- and mind -- were definitely still running an energy deficit and did benefit significantly from the opportunity to slow down and get a little extra sleep. I know that I haven't been sleeping enough since I began taking care of my mom, so it was good to be able to get closer to my goal of seven hours a night.

Now Skylar and Kim are back home, though, and I'm annoyed with myself for not getting more done in their absence. I have a feeling that getting Skylar to school tomorrow will not be easy, since Mondays are tough under the best of circumstances. And I worry that the usual domestic stresses will now come to the for now that the fortnight of exceptional problems has drawn to a close. That said, I'm happy that they are both home and am looking forward to watching the Oscars with them tonight, something we weren't able to do last year, as had been our practice for years, because Kim was out of town.

Tags: everyday, parenting
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, photography, tucson, weather
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, nostalgia
Current Location: 85704

Life has been stressful and strange since the holidays. I had gone several years without getting really sick and even longer since I experienced one of those will-not-go-gently ailments that used to plague me regularly during my early years in Tucson. But I came down with something right before Christmas Eve, felt so dreadful on Christmas that I barely remember it, then spent over a month seeming to get better one day only to relapse the next.

Luckily, although Christmas was a blur, I ended up enjoying New Year's Eve a lot more than I usually do. I was feeling relatively good that night, for one thing. Plus, despite all the centrifugal forces dispersing my οἶκος, we ended up celebrating family-style, with a bang. Quite a few, actually.

As vexing as it was to have my sleep challenged by bouts of severe coughing, however, the biggest impediments to normalcy lay elsewhere.

My daughter and her mom were both out of sorts a good deal and, often at odds with each other. Having a fourteen-year-old girl is not the easiest thing to do as a parent, I'll tell you that. Of course, the fact that Skylar and her classmates have had to confront the reality of high school in a big way this past month -- band auditions, open houses, tours and now course registration -- has been a huge factor in destabilizing the household's already precarious hold on stability. Thanks to a great deal of hard work on everyone's part -- we're all exhausted emotionally -- I am cautiously optimistic that the worst is over. But I am compelled to knock on simulated wood grain in the process of articulating that assessment.



And then there was the rapid decline of our cat Thing One, a.k.a Budder, who all of a sudden stopped eating. Just a few months before, he had made a remarkable improvement after being put on Prozac. But this time there was no denying that he had run out of time, though not even twelve. It was very sad to lose such a crucial presence in our everyday lives -- Skylar was two when we got him -- and remains so now. We're going to get Punka and Smokey a kitten to help get them over their grief and keep them active as soon as we can, which will be nice. Right now, though, the house still feels empty.

I think that's one of the reasons why Skylar has been taking the preparations for high school so hard. Although Budder could be a difficult cat to deal with, he was in many respects the sun for us to revolve around as a family unit, since we had to structure our activities around his twice-daily insulin shots and anti-depressant doses. Maybe that's why, when I picked her up after school on the evening of the big orientation, she asked me to take her back to her elementary school to visit her favorite spots. She gave me a tour of the trees on the perimeter of the lower field, explaining what she and her friends used to like doing with each.



The orientation ended up being rather anti-climactic, since she had just been there for her flute audition. I think at this point she has been on the campus frequently enough to feel comfortable there. Architecture has always been very important to her. She loved the tall buildings of San Francisco's Financial District as a toddler and took to the JCC here, where she attended pre-school, because it is one of the few structures in the Tucson suburbs that actually feels spacious. The high school, with its mildly postmodern design, gorgeous views of the city and mountains to the south, and professional-looking auditorium and theater -- yes, they have two -- will please her aesthetically even when it is frustrating her otherwise.

I have been thinking a good deal about high schools in recent years, wondering if I could teach in one successfully without driving myself mad. The time may come when I need to purse that option. Right now, though, with the responsibility I take caring for my parents, the daily schedule would be very hard to manage. Skylar's mom is always very busy, but is now dealing with even more complex time management since she is splitting her time between two offices nearly a half hour apart. There's only so much driving around she can do, so it's good that I'm able to help, even though I wish the reasons I can were less depressing.

I am feeling a little better about my situation lately, however, since returning to the classroom to teach New Media. Thanks to the grave economic conditions in Arizona and the even graver ones at its universities, together with other factors that work against me, I was starting to think that I was never going to put my academic training to proper use again. Yet I had some rare good luck and now find myself once again teaching what I'm best at. Although my circumstances are still far from ideal, I am counting my blessings and hoping that they will prove a building block for something better in the not-so-distant future.



The week ahead will be challenging from the perspective of scheduling, since Skylar's mom is away on a long trip. But I think it will be good for all concerned. After all the fraught interactions since the holidays, abetted by illness and other physiological troubles, it's high time for a familial "time out" in which each of us can regroup. That's why I barely spoke to my daughter last night and did my best to stay out of sight and out of mind. Alone time is especially important for her at this crucial juncture in her life. Most teenagers seek solitude in their rooms. Skylar, however, being a naturally claustrophobic person, wants the whole house to herself!

She asks for that a lot. Sometimes I get annoyed that complying with this request means going into temporary exile. Recently, though, I decided to start turning this time into something more positive by heading to cafés where I can get some work done and also have the chance for unexpected socializing. The best venue for the latter is Cartel Coffee Lab on Campbell, because of its quasi-family-style arrangement of tables. The last time I went there, on Groundhog Day Eve, I meant to write the entry that I'm finally completing today, but instead got in a great conversation with an electrical engineer, Linux fan and would-be author of fantasy novels. I hope to run into him again some time.



Thankfully, Skylar's quest for alone time does not prevent us from doing things together. Yesterday I had the pleasure of taking her to her English horseback riding lessons for the first time in over a month. It's a long drive -- her stable's new location is out past Pantano on Tanque Verde -- which gives us plenty of time to talk and listen to music. I also need to get her fed so that her blood sugar doesn't drop to dangerous levels -- in terms of attitude, that is -- during her lesson. I realized that I really missed interacting with horses, particularly her steed of choice, the well-mannered "unicorn" Spot. I'm looking forward to taking her out to the Pima County Fairgrounds on Sunday to watch her elders from Ashbrook Farm compete in various "hunter" and "jumper" events. Spot will be there too! Alright, that's enough for now. Peace out. . .

Tags: autobiography, everyday, family, health
Current Location: 85704
Muse: My daughter singing in the other room

Tags: blogging, everyday, health, via ljapp

For so long now, I've been holding off making work on my long-term pursuits public, because I can't seem to find a format that suits them or, better said, me. Years ago, I'd hoped to turn this Live Journal into such a place, but it always felt a little too self-indulgent to go on at great length about the same topics over and over and over.

The problem with this reluctance, though, is that it has deprived me of the benefits of what I'll pretentiously and awkwardly call "externalization." When I do post something here, I remember it better and usually end up referring back to my post later on, as I return to the topic.

It could be that Google+ ends up providing that kind of "placeholder" medium in the future, once I get my new phone. Right now, though, because I was inspired by siyeh's reappearance on Live Journal today, I'm going to take tentative steps towards repurposing this mostly fallow blog towards that end.

Anyway, one of the projects I've been working on for a long, long time -- the project that motivated me to start this journal and title it "De File", in fact -- concerns a cluster of related topics: archives, collecting, memorabilia, what I call the "documentary impulse." And this Nick Paumgarten article, in this week's issue of The New Yorker, does a remarkable job of provoking questions about all of them.

Yes, it's about the Grateful Dead, which, with all due respect to my Deadhead friends, have never been a significant preoccupation of mine, musically or otherwise. But I remember, during the brief period when I attended their shows, being fascinated by the people who were set up to record them. I had the distinct impression that I was witnessing the future in that strange sight, even though the equipment was there to keep the past close at hand.

It wasn't simply that the band's openness to being documented in that way, without strings attached, pointed the way towards a world where sharing content, however legally, was paramount. I also recognized, on a crude, pre-theoretical level, that the unique perspective captured by each taper was as important as the concert itself, in the abstract, if not more so. That is, what was being documented wasn't the show from the simulated "God's Ear" of the soundboard, but the experience of listening from a location that could never aspire to the illusion of objectivity.

Here's a telling passage from Paumgarten's piece (which, because of the way The New Yorker configures their site, is easiest to reproduce as an image):

That final sentence, "We like what we like," is one that resonates for me in relation to my other big long-term project, centered on questions of taste. But the take-home point from this paragraph where my interest in the "documentary impulse" is concerned is the way in which a sense of perspective, of distinctly mortal "thereness", is precisely what makes the recording in question special to those who care about it.

There's a wealth of good reading in this piece, if you are anywhere as interested in this kind of thing as a I am, as well as plenty to excite any of you who may be Grateful Dead fans. I don't want this placeholder of a post to reach the length where I will start feeling bad for its fragmentary, hastily assembled character, so I'll bring this entry to a close simply by noting the title I gave it and how that bears on my project. Specifically, I'm always fascinated to ponder the paradox that the urge to capture an experience by recording it, in some fashion, ends up either creating a backlog of archives that bear heavily on the present -- often literally -- because they are stored away and not reexperienced or leads to a situation in which spending time reexperiencing the past through these recordings takes time away from living in the now.

Tags: archive, defile, documentary impulse
Current Location: 85704

Tags: daughter, family, holiday
Current Location: 85704

Tags: archive, autobiography, love, nostalgia
Current Location: 85704

Tags: daughter, everyday, photography
Current Location: 85704

Tags: daughter, everyday, home, photography, self-portrait
Current Location: 85704

I'm probably the last person who should be writing about the link between memory and our sense of smell. As anyone who knows me well will attest, my allergies and the medications I take for them have rendered me insensitive to a vast array of odors. Someone will walk into a room and declare, "That smells terrible! How can you just sit there?" But despite having been right near the source of the offense, I will be baffled by the query.

Having said that, my sense of smell has improved a good deal in recent years. Ever since I finally consented to steroid treatments for my asthma and allergies -- treatments which, it must be noted, I do take protracted breaks from whenever possible -- I have been experiencing moments of olfactory clarity now and then. Suddenly, the keen perception of an odor will distract me from whatever I'm doing and compel me to a deeper mindfulness. Even when the smell is unpleasant, this heightened awareness is a welcome change from my how I used to experience the world,

I'm starting to wonder, though, whether my past was really as aroma-deprived as I believed. Not only am I noticing smells a lot more than before, I'm finding that memories of my pre-steroid days have a way of flooding into consciousness to accompany those smells. Recently, for example, I had an intense, smell-triggered recollection that inspired me to pursue this topic further. I was cleaning up in the front bathroom of my parents' apartment after helping my mom off the toilet and wheeling her into the dining room when I was suddenly transported back to my teenage years in the Washington D.C. area.

The strange part is that even though the combination of lingering smells in the bathroom was not particularly pleasant, it made me recall one from a place with which I have highly positive associations: the Smithsonian Institution. More specifically, as I soon realized, it reminded me of being inside the Museum of Natural History. Not the National Gallery, the Air and Space Museum or any of the other buildings on the Mall. Those smell differently. Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more it become clear that many of them have a unique aroma that I identify with them or, to be more accurate, an aroma which I have used to identify them.

Because I spent my those years living in a suburban Maryland house without air conditioning, where the midnight temperature was regularly in the 90s with a relative humidity that often seemed to be approaching that figure as well, I spent as much of the summer as possible in the District. I'd get up early, despite my night owl proclivities, to accompany my father on his drive to work. I would then sit with him for a while in his office while he read the newspaper as he waited for the workday to begin, reading the articles he would periodically pass my way. Then, when public buildings started to open, I would head out on my peripatetic adventures, all of which were planned to provide extended sojourns in buildings with excellent air conditioning.

Since this was the era of the personal computer's ascendancy, I would frequently stop by the showrooms near my father's building at 16th and M Street NW. For a time, I would spend long hours laboriously entering programs into the Texas Instruments machine with a novel color graphics display at ComputerLand so that I could show off its brilliance and, I hoped, my own. Then, when Apple introduced the Macintosh to great fanfare, I shifted my allegiance to the store that would let me have extended sessions exploring its exciting features. I do remember being troubled by the way the latter were idiot-proofed and inaccessible to the sort of coding I was capable of. But the graphical user interface was too compelling to pass up.

These and other computer emporia were characterized by the same bland neutrality that characterized the consulting firms, non-profits and financial institutions in that part of Washington D.C., the "K Street Corridor" that was attracting so much attention in the Reagan Era, when lobbyists were practically celebrities. And yet for all of their deliberate blandness, these places had a smell that I can now recall quite distinctly, one defined by the conflict between hot electrical technology and air conditioning turned way down, a kind of olfactory storm front that made the air prickle, for an aspiring tech-head like possible, with the air of possibility.

When I was really in need of cool-down, though, I made my way to the Smithsonian. Something about the need to ward off decay and the high ceilings of those museums made them monuments to the potential of artificial temperature control. The Air and Space Museum was the best of all. Sometimes I would walk inside and just sit on a bench to breathe in the absence of heat and humidity. But all the buildings on the Mall were attractive to me for their air conditioning. At the National Gallery's West Wing, the marble reinforced the sense of cool. And at the Natural History Museum, the groups of school-age children and rather dated displays conspired to soften the air, making it feel warm without actually being warm.

In retrospect, I suppose the Natural History Museum, being older than the rest of the main Smithsonian exhibition areas, retained the aroma of preservation methods that left stronger, less pleasant smells than the ones deployed in recent decades. And the older ductwork no doubt contributed to this effect, which was never overpowering. My guess is that what I was smelling in the bathroom was similar enough to those traces that it conjured the memory of going there on hot days. I also suspect that the incongruity of the involuntary association, that conjoining of a present to be endured with a past fondly recalled, made the sensation particularly strong and, yes, memorable.

Tags: everyday, history, memory, nostalgia, theory
Current Location: 85704

Tags: daughter, photography, tucson
Current Location: 85704

Nine years ago today, I began this journal. As I've explained before, my reasons for doing so were complex. Part of the motivation was my desire to do "field research," as a participant observer, on the fate of the confessional mode in the internet age. Part of it was the fact that, after three years of living in Tucson, I still felt isolated and was hoping to find a substitute for the sort of casual interactions with friends and friendly acquaintances that had made my years in the San Francisco Bay Area so rewarding. And part of it, as I've been reluctant to explain publicly until now, was the damage done to my professional life by something that had happened that spring, an incident that threw me into an abyss of self-doubt and ultimately consolidated my ambivalence about academia to the point where it overshadowed everything I tried to accomplish at work.

In other words, while I wasn't exactly in a state of total despair, the impulse to start blogging was bound up with a good deal of stress and disappointment. Put another way, it was compensatory from the get-go. Not surprisingly, I suppose, it didn't exactly make my life happier. It made me busier, of course. But I could never completely suppress the nagging awareness that I was using this journal as a distraction, a way to pretend that I was more in control of my life than I really was. Even at the very beginning, when I only had two or three readers, this performance aspect was clear to me.

In giving thought to why I more or less abandoned Live Journal last year, after diligently updating for years, I finally reached the conclusion that I simply couldn't go through the motions of sustaining a performance that anyone who knew me at all could tell was fraudulent. Mind you, I did try to restore the authenticity of my performance by broaching subjects that I had previously exerted myself to conceal. In the end, though, I found this new approach to the confessional mode too upsetting to bear. So I radically scaled back on my involvement here, posting a photo every month or so as a place-holder to indicate that I was still around, but otherwise absent.

Now, for some reason, I'm feeling better about sharing in this context. Something inside me has hardened to the point where it doesn't seem as painful to admit how much I've struggled. At the same time, though, it's not easy to go back and read the evidence of where I was at in 2003 and compare it to where I am now:

After reading others online journals for ages, I have finally taken the plunge. It will take me a while to get used to doing this, so apologies for the boredom any of my initial entries will inspire.

Today I'm sorting more of my papers, returning to some work I've held over from last week, and going to dinner at my in-laws and, if I can win control of the television on a football Sunday, watching my San Francisco Giants against the Arizona Diamondbacks -- Jason Schmidt pitching against Brandon Webb -- on a big-screen TV.

Tomorrow I go to Phoenix to "the Bob" to see the Giants live, which I'm greatly looking forward to, not having seen them in person during the regular season since around June of 2000.

In the news in our household today:

1) My four-year-old daughter Skylar is once again obsessing on death. She says she had a dream last night that her mother died. It was "Mom's night out", so there's a good chance that she did. But, even if she didn't, she's still going to talk about it as a way of "processing" her anxieties surrounding Kim's absence.

Today they were in Kim's art room working on the mobile for Skylar's new pre-school class. Kim got out some of her metallic glitter shapes, the sort that have supplanted confetti, and Skylar picked up some Christmas tree ones and began asking about Tibbs, our cat who died shortly after we moved to Tucson in March, 2001. You see, those Christmas tree shapes were part of the contents of the Christmas poppers that we had on Christmas morning in 2000. They went everywhere, including all over Tibbs's fur, which amused the then-two-year-old Skylar greatly. And, of course, since she remembers EVERYTHING with the slightest provocation, her mind made the connection between the shiny trees in her hand and the loss of her cat, prompting periodic bouts of sadness relieved by Kim's hugs and long conversations about death, heaven etc.

Skylar is one intense kid.

2) Our reptiles were unusually active this morning as we worked in the back yard. First Tim, the full-grown box turtle who, along with his companion Marie, is FINALLY getting used to his new home after six months, was out waiting for snacks and got the scraps from the peach Kim had cut up for Skylar's breakfast. Then Max, our two-year-old desert tortoise who belies the reputation of his species as sedentary, came out when Kim was weeding and got some breakfast of his own, then motored about the yard at, for a tortoise, high speed, munching on weeds. Then his sister Felicia, more shy and slow, came out and ate almost all of one weed that she liked. Marie, alas, didn't come out, but Kim saw her in one of her favorite spots.

3) Kim and Skylar have driven to Home Depot/Petco/Target in Oro Valley to run a series of errands. They're going to have lunch at Rubio's Baja Grill. Usually I would have accompanied them, but felt like staying here and reading.

The first priority, however, is lunch. It's tuna casserole from Kim's mom. Kim hates tuna casserole, but I like it.

In lots of ways, my life is very similar now. Only two of the tortoises mentioned here are still with us -- Tim and Felicia passed away, sadly -- but we still see the elusive Marie occasionally. And Max, well, he's a mainstay of our summertime routine. Putting out lots of food for him is a daily requirement, as is giving him head rubs and, on very hot days, a sojourn inside the house.

Skylar is now a tall and very talented teenager, yet still the deep thinker she was in pre-school, someone I never tire of talking with, not only because she is my daughter and I love her more than anything, but because she is a whole lot more interesting than the vast majority of the adults I know. Part of the reason is that she remains in touch with earlier stages of her childhood, even as she embarks on more mature pursuits. Just today, in fact, we were singing along to some of her favorite Live Theater Workshop songs in the car, which got me thinking about the kind of nasal sounds that drove our cat Tibbs into a frenzy. I told Skylar that the word "house" was particularly well-suited to that effect, which inspired her to recall the shiny Christmas trees, one of her earliest memories.

Kim, as it happens, is having one of her "Mom's night out" adventures tonight, as she often does these days. Skylar, being a thirteen-year-old girl, has many battles with her mother. The underlying insecurities reflected in that dream from 2003, however, still surface on a regular basis. She needs space in order to separate from both her parents, an inevitable component of the growing-up process. But she is also worried about losing the "classic" Mom of the past (and, no doubt, the "classic" Dad of the past as well). The thing is, that worry was already in play when her mother started to have nights out by herself.

Other things haven't changed much either. Kim and I worked together today to fix a dresser drawer in Skylar's room. I helped with various tasks that Kim can't manage in her current post-operative, semi-one-armed state. And the two of us spent a long time conferring about our daughter, as we do on a pretty much daily basis. For all that sense of continuity, though, I can't ignore the fact that the structural elements in my life have been radically reconfigured in the past nine years. By any measure, I'm much worse off now than I was then. So are the majority of Americans, of course. Yet that doesn't make the state I'm in seem any less like a personal failure. I'm starting to wonder, though, whether having that impression and being willing to share it here might not be the first step towards a more positive relation to my present circumstances and future possibilities.

Tags: autobiography, blogging, daughter
Current Location: 85704

As I'll explain in a subsequent entry, I've been trying to reconnect with some of the writing I've published and, with it, a part of myself I have had a tendency to keep boxed up. To that end, I am going to be revisiting various pieces here. The first is "After the Storm", written last year for my latest venture Souciant. It's one I find especially difficult to read now, since it reflects the end of a period in which I opened up about my life with decidedly mixed results.

But the subject, driving through the territory ravaged by Hurricane Katrina at a time of great stress in my personal life, is too topical right now, as Hurricane Isaac bears down on New Orleans, for me to ignore. There's a ton I could say about this piece, but it would probably be more sensible to let it speak for itself. The photographs -- and their captions -- are an important part of it, though, so I do want to draw attention to them. This one is probably my favorite, which makes it a shame that its selection as the WordPress "featured image" shrinks it so much in the piece itself:

Something about those twisted nails brings home the force of the storm and, on a metaphoric note, how hard it is to maintain attachments amid so much turmoil.

Like many of my longer pieces, this one takes detours that may seem rather strange at first. As a devoted fan of W.G. Sebald's work, I love the effect that dislocations can conjure. In this instance, though, the conceptual link between my reflections on traveling through a post-Katrina landscape in 2010 and my trip to East Berlin in 1987 is pretty clear, if you stop to think about it for a moment:

I was as intrigued as the other Western students by the strange “mirror world” we encountered there. But I also felt sheepish that my companions were mocking the East for its ugly goods and unattractive people. Whether it was because of my nascent political sympathies or just the realization that I had grown up wearing not-quite-good-enough brands myself, I was more inclined to note the ways that Communist everyday life was like my own than to remark its eccentricities.

That’s why I soon left the group I’d crossed over with to strike out on my own, camera and tripod in tow. Soon, I found a much more compelling sight than imitation 501s or Eastern Bloc rock albums. Unlike every West German city I’d visited, Communist Berlin was still studded with rubble from the war. While some tourist attractions had been restored, much of the central city looked like a set from a Hollywood movie about the Berlin Airlift. I rapidly overcame my fear of taking photographs outside of tourist attractions and began trying to capture my impressions of a life interrupted.

Finding ruins there didn’t require the complicated mental exercise of overlaying post-bombing photographs over a contemporary view of the cityscape. Far from having been erased, visible reminders of the destruction were so prominent in East Berlin that they seemed like a point of pride, a strange modern-day analogy to the splendors of Ancient Rome. And that comforted me somehow.

So did the Berlin Wall. I loved its brightly colored Western side, a powerful testament to freedom of expression. But I also took solace in the Wall’s less attractive aspects. The void presided over by the watchtowers in the East, the way it looked like a scar bisecting the city from above, the stark contrast between the buildings on its two sides: all were powerful reminders that history can’t be wished away.

That theme, of not wanting the evidence of historical trauma to be hidden away, is one I've consistently articulated since I was a teenager. And, come to think of it, it jibes quite nicely with the move to revisit this piece now.

Tags: autobiography, photography, revisited clips, travel, writing
Current Location: 85704

Part of Skylar's dream of making the Olympic team for Rio in 2016 involves meeting some of her heroes from the 2012 London Games, particularly swimmers. Since Michael Phelps has declared that he won't be going as a participant, she has turned her attention to people like Missy Franklin. And being on Team Phelps, she has also expressed a desire to not fall in with the Ryan Lochte fan club.

She is having fun when she talks about these plans, serious about her competitive goals, but also clear on the fact that achieving them, at least that early, is at best a remote possibility. But the Olympics were clearly a huge positive influence on her during a summer when she could easily have gone down a less healthy path, so indulging in fantasies surrounding Rio is a way for her to ground herself in something good for her.

Not to mention that she's at an age when fantasy is both fraught and immensely important. Her interest in Michael Phelps is pretty much the first fannish interest of a teenage sort that she has had in anyone, male or female. I think she recognizes, though, that he may not be the best role model, much less boyfriend, given his partying ways. To paraphrase her comment from today, "It's like he was saying, 'I can smoke marijuana and still beat you all most of the time.'" That's why, as she was looking at photos of the Copa Cabana tonight, I decided to draw her attention to another potential interest, someone who is likely to make the American Olympic team in 2016: Nathan Adrian.

Once Skylar remembered what he looked like, it didn't take long for her to endorse this alternative. The fact that he was a Cal Bear was a plus, too. Then we watched his Olympic performances. It was his manner after winning his gold, both in the pool and being interviewed afterwards, that really sold her (along with thousands and thousands of other people):

Given the fact that extensive internet searching reveals nothing at all about Adrian's past girlfriends, though, he may not be available. When asked directly, as in this interview from four months prior to London, he says he has "no time." But Lochte and Phelps haven't had any time either, have they?

Tags: daughter, everyday, humor, sports
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, photography, self-portrait, tucson
Current Location: 85704