Lately, as part of her ongoing metamorphosis into a person with an even more complicated life -- and schedule -- my daughter has taken up running for her school. Her first meet is this coming Wednesday and she is both excited and nervous about it. I told her that, from a psychological perspective, it's not that different from a live theatrical or musical performance, which she knows how to do very well. But the fact that she still feels like the proverbial fish out of water with the sporty girls socially is surely amping up her anxiety, since the desire to do well in the race is only part of the pressure she is feeling.

Since she has never done this sort of thing before -- unless you count her single jujitsu competition, when an older boy who was a wrestler thrashed her badly -- I'm not sure what to expect. I do hope it goes well, or at least well enough, though, because she has serious talent. She has always had the long-build that's suited for distance running, but lacked the fitness or the will to put her physical advantages to use. Now, in the wake of the Olympics and her summer of constant exercise, she has both in abundance.

It's both thrilling and a little scary for me. My deeply ingrained habit is to not let myself dream big or even, in recent years, at all. Passed down from my mother in particular, this accession to the reality principle has the merit of warding off future disappointment. Yet as I'm starting to realize, though, the price is often disappointment, though smaller in scope, in the present and an evasion of challenges that ultimately leaves me even more disappointed than if I had tried something and failed. That's why I'm making every effort not to inflict this burden on my daughter. She is a dreamer, but also very determined, and deserves every opportunity to achieve her goals.

Mind you, those goals are frequently the sort that I would have ruled out for myself at her age, much less now. To give the most extreme illustration, she has said that her goal as a runner is to make an Olympic team. That sounds extraordinarily improbable, given the odds and her late start at serious athletic pursuits. Still, although I did tell her that making the team in four years, for Rio, is not very realistic, I also didn't tell her to aim lower.

Maybe if she didn't have the ability I would have thought it an act of kindness to do so. But given the improvements she has already made in her times for the 200, 400, 800 and 1500 meters and how fast she is currently running -- far faster than any just-started-running-track thirteen-year-old girl should be, by rights -- there's a chance, however slight, that she actually will achieve her goal. And the only way for her to do that is to keep it in front of her as a long-term goal, even if proves to be a mirage shimmering on the horizon in the end.

The more I consider the state of my own life, how hard things have been over the past five years, the more apparent it becomes that one of my biggest problems, if not the very biggest, is my failure to set those sort of goals for myself. When friends ask me where I see myself "down the road," I hem and haw about not being able to see the forest for the branches in my face. But the truth is that I've practically lost the ability to even imagine the forest or at least the sort of forest that I can travel through to a place I really want to be. I'm ever so grateful that the experience of spending time with my big-dreaming daughyter is helping me to see how badly I need a heading if I am to reach that clearing I clearly need to find.

Tags: autobiography, daughter, health
Current Location: 85704

Tags: photography, tucson, weather
Current Location: 85704

Tags: daughter, holiday, photography
Current Location: 85704

I'm in the process of trying to reestablish a connection to my older writing. All too often in recent years, I've closed the door on a piece shortly after its publication, as if the mere fact of its being out there in the world called its worthiness into question. The reasons for this debilitating attitude towards my own work are complex, but I'm making my best effort to sort through them in the hopes of feeling less fragmented.

People generally think of me as someone who spends too much time looking into the past, the prisoner of a melancholy relation to others and myself. Certainly, when it comes to my tendency to accumulate more stuff than I have the time to manage efficiently, this tendency comes to the fore. But this backward-glancing mode of existence is largely confined to material that I regard as still raw, not yet fully realized.

My published writing, on the other hand, has what I regard as the deathly aura of the finished product, something that is played out and therefore not available as an energy source to move me forward. The strange thing, though, is that this conviction directly contradicts the way I feel about other people's work. As a cultural critic, I am tuned into the way that old texts are able to become new. So why has it been so hard to grant myself the license I take for granted in others?

That's a question that extends beyond the scope of this topic. Indeed, it's probably the most crucial question I can ask of myself, the one that I have to at least attempt to answer if I am going to have a chance to set goals, as I discussed in a recent post, and achieve something meaningful in their pursuit. My hope is to be able to do some of that work here, among friends as it were. Rather than try to take on the full extent of the task at one time, though, my plan is to break it down into parts that can be more easily managed.

One component I have in mind, to return to the beginning of this post, is a revisiting of work that I'd consigned to my mental trash bin. Just now I was reviewing some of the piece I wrote only a few years ago and was surprised to find how many I'd completely repressed. Despite the fact that neither my interests or my writing have changed much in the interim, I had lost all connection with these pieces. In some cases, this has led me to "reinvent the wheel" when covering related subject matter, an exercise that is even more wasteful than my proclivity for getting bogged down in sorting projects.

Yes, there is something self-indulgent about such an enterprise. It makes me squirm a but to contemplate. But I also know that it will only work if the project is public to a degree. I have to share it with others -- with you -- for it to bring about the changes I'm hoping to achieve. So I will just have to trust in your patience. If one of the pieces I bring to your attention catches your fancy, I would love to hear from you about it. In the end, though, merely having you here as a sort of "passive listener" will mean a lot to me.

vvvv

Tags: autobiography, health, revisited clips, writing
Current Location: 85704

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

Tags: photography, travel
Current Location: 85704

Tags: tucson, weather
Current Location: 85719

Two summers ago Skylar, who has often been in classes more advanced than her age, took the week-long camp session for ninth through twelfth graders at Live Theater Workshop here in Tucson. That experience was very beneficial for her from my perspective as a parent, but she struggled at the time with the more intense instruction -- she wasn't used to harsh criticism, even when it was directed at others -- and dealing with a passel of teenagers whose interests and mode of interacting were new to her and a little shocking. Her mom and I loved the resulting performance, which was very well done, but Skylar decided that she didn't want to take the same class last summer. This time around, though, she was eager to partake. After all, she now looks and acts like a teenager these days!

I was worried, given the extreme "night owl" ways she has adopted during her break from school, that the 8-5 format, which requires her to get up before 7 each morning, might annoy her too much to enjoy the camp. But she managed pretty well overall, even if she was a bit late some days. And she had a great time, despite the fact that this particular camp's co-directors didn't seem quite as savvy at dealing with her age group as other instructors she has had over the years. Theatrical games are a big part of these camp sessions, for example, and she missed some of her favorites from previous occasions. Still, they did a good job with the play itself, which is the main thing, and obviously helped to sustain a positive vibe that made the social aspects of the camp shine.

This was all the more impressive because they had decided to do a substantially abbreviated but still challenging version of The Taming of the Shrew. While Skylar had taken part in a humorous melange of Shakespeare plays a few years back, this was the first time she had to confront Elizabethan language at length in a context where making it comprehensible was crucial. Predictably, being the quick-to-pass-judgment teen that she is, she took issue with its antiquated qualities, railing at the "'thous' and 'thees'" and the unrealistic aspect to iambic pentameter. Both her mother and I tried to get her to see the positives, though, in working with a difficult text. As I pointed out to her, it's also the case that the very things that make Shakespeare's use of language alienating for contemporary readers are what make it easier to memorize.

Skylar eventually came around. And it was clear, watching yesterday's performance, that she really enjoyed herself. Her voice rang out strong and impressively clear as she declaimed the lines of her character Hortensio. She made the audience laugh and cut a fine figure in the process. Here she is delivering her short monologue, in which she forswears Kate's sister Bianca for the rich widow:

Afterwards, she changed into her tight-fitting new lace dress from H&M backstage -- no doubt because she wanted to show off the fruits of all her hard work at the gym -- and joined her mother and me for a delightful dinner at the Cup Café at the Hotel Congress to celebrate, followed by a family outing to Bookmans on Speedway and then the requisite trip to the "hood gym" after that with her mom.

During dinner, we all talked about the play, among other things. Skylar revealed that she had been unsure whether the risqué puns she had detected in Shakespeare's language would have meant the same things in 1600 as they do today and, further, whether one could be justified in presuming them to have been put there intentionally. Her mother and I assured her that, yes, they surely meant the same things then that they do now and that Shakespeare was notorious for putting that kind of salty content into his plays and not just in his comedies, either. This response clearly made Skylar think back on The Taming of the Shrew in a new, more favorable light and, I hope, inspired her to find the fun in the next plays of his that she will encounter.

Tags: daughter, still
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, nostalgia, photography, travel
Current Location: 85704

Since my parents moved out to Tucson in October, 2010, the rhythm of my days has changed rather drastically. At first, overloaded as I was that fall, I only stopped by a few times throughout the week. Most of my helping out consisted of running errands. But after my mother had to be hospitalized with a chronic urinary tract infection which had severely weakened her, I found myself having to go over to my parents' apartment more in order to keep my dad company.

Once my mother had returned, it became clear that my father's own increasing frailty from a physical standpoint would require that I help him get my mother to bed several nights each week. That shift put a lot of stress on my domestic situation, since it meant that my daughter either had to spend a good deal of time home alone -- her mother was often away evenings -- or accompany me to my parents' place. At first she often chose the latter option, but gradually became more comfortable on her own. As a twelve-year-old, she had reached an age when she was ready for the greater sense of autonomy.

From her perspective, what started out a source of stress has ended up being one of relief. No matter how much she loves her parents, she needed alone time. Most teenagers-to-be get that by spending lots of time in their rooms or out of the house with friends. Not Skylar, though. Her favorite alone time turned out to be the sort that comes when she can be in the biggest room of the house without the possibility of parental intrusion. Frequently she would use her hour or so of truly free time to bounce on her trampoline to her favorite songs, an elementary-school activity that she thankfully rediscovered in middle school, since she was at that delicate stage of development when the path to fitness diverges rather dramatically from the path of sedentary pursuits.

Now, as I wrote here a few days ago, she has significantly upped the exercise ante, literally spending hours each day engaged in physical activity. Bouncing on her trampoline has gone from being her only significant form of aerobics to a comfort pastime she indulges when she is feeling agitated or wants to take a break from what she deems "real" exercise. There are many reasons to applaud this metamorphosis, first and foremost the fact that the habits she is hardening now will stay with her throughout her adult life, at least to a degree. But it has also complicated her parents' life a good deal, since the activities she prefers now -- running on the treadmill at the gym, lifting weights, swimming and bicycling -- are all ones that require one of us to either drive or accompany her. (I'm sure she would love the opportunity to bike or jog by herself, but there are too many potential dangers for us to permit that yet.)

What this means in practical terms on my end is that much of the time that I'm not spending at my parents' place -- roughly five hours a day, seven days a week -- is now devoted to Skylar's fitness regimen. I love the quality one-on-one time this carves out for us, as does her mother, who takes her to the gym all the time now. But the loss of so many hours is also taxing. I have several important writing projects underway, as well as the seemingly endless task of reorganizing the house, garage and storage space, yet find myself with very few uninterrupted stretches in which to build up the momentum I need to make serious progress. Indeed, just writing this entry, which I have been doing at my parents' apartment while my mom is eating or in the bathroom, has taken me two weeks of five-minutes-here, five-minutes-there sit downs with the laptop.

I mention all this not to complain -- I have so much to be grateful for, despite the trials and tribulations of the past half decade -- but to provide an explanation for my absence from Live Journal since early 2011, one which I am making a concerted effort to address right now. Those of you who are friends with me on Facebook will know that I have continued to post regularly there during the past year and a half. My reasons for doing so, though, have less to do with a preference for that particular social network than the simple fact that it's the only one that I can use without too much trouble on my phone, a benighted Blackberry -- Blackberries, to be specific, since I'm currently on my third replacement device -- that makes Web-based applications into sheer torture. If there were an app that worked well for LJ on my phone -- or for Google+, for that matter -- I would have been spreading myself around a lot more than I have.

Tags: blogging, daughter, everyday, family, technology
Current Location: 85704

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

In the past two-and-a-half years, my daughter has gone from being the sort of kid parents worry about because she exercises so little to the sort that parents worry about because she exercises too much. She looks great, mind you, and is developing the stamina of a world-class athlete. But her level of commitment can reach scary proportions.

Then again, I'm sure that part of the reservations her mother and I have about her fixation on fitness derive from self-interest. She is running us both ragged! Today, for example, she asked her mom to take her to what they call the "hood gym" after a family outing to see Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window at the Fox Theater downtown. Three hours later, they still hadn't left. And then later, after I'd finished getting my mother to bed -- my parents now live in an apartment a little over a mile away -- I came home to find that Skylar was still insisting on going on one of the late-night bicycle rides I recently introduced her to.

I do love riding at night on the back streets of our neighborhood, when the traffic is minimal and I can "see" what's coming up behind me from the way headlights light up the scenery in front of me. And I especially love it during this time of year, the Monsoon, when the moisture rising up from the ground sends all manner of creatures out and about and ensures that my otherwise compromised respiratory system, which always does better when there's humidity, is functioning at its best. So it would be disingenuous of me to complain about being forced to do what I would want to be doing anyway. But Skylar's strength of will is ensuring that I end up doing what I would want to be doing anyway, yet might not actually get around to doing, a lot more often than would otherwise be the case.

She also makes me go with her to the gym at the JCC a couple times each week. My preference would be to be using the basketball courts, normally, but since they are occupied by summer camps right now, I don't mind wandering around from one machine to the next, doing weights to pass the time while Skylar is on the treadmill. It also seems likely that the interest she developed in tennis last year will be rekindled if we play on the JCC's lovely clay-esque courts, rather than the beat-to-hell concrete ones at middle school near our house.

In short, without making my usual vow to get in shape during my lungs' happy time in Tucson, I am rapidly getting in the kind of shape I was in back in 2006, when a year's worth of turmoil had convinced me that preserving some semblance of sanity demanded that I lose twenty pounds and teach myself how to jog and bike in this 100+ degree climate. Instead of using the time spent exercising to listen to music on my iPod, though -- a favorite pursuit -- I am passing it in conversation with my daughter, which makes me forget that I'm working out 3/4 of the time. Just as Skylar's mom is really coming to treasure their long sessions at the hood gym, I am so, so delighted to be having so much quality time with her during our daily bicycle rides, even if it does mean that my already compressed free time -- I spend, on average, five hours a day caring for my mom and, by extension, dad -- has been reduced to very little indeed.

Tags: daughter, everyday, health
Current Location: 85704

Tags: nostalgia, photography
Current Location: 85704

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

Nearly every year of the past decade we have returned from our vacation along the ocean in northern San Diego County to the onset of what Skylar's mother aptly refers to as "the blast furnace." By the time June arrives, the relentless heat of Tucson's first summer season, the dry one, is usually in full effect. This year, though, a mild winter and a couple early heat waves ensured that we had already been exposed to some pretty brutal weather before leaving for California.

I had hoped that this preparation would make the transition back to Tucson easier. But we came back Friday, a day in which the temperature climbed to an all-time high of 107 for that date, and forest fire-impaired air quality which, while less sensitive individuals might not bemoan it too much, has my lungs in an uproar. The first two nights back I coughed and coughed instead of sleeping, which made my "waking" hours really unpleasant.

I really don't want to lose the getting-my-life-in-order momentum I'd built up prior to our trip, which has always been a risk at this time of year. That's why I tried to force myself to nap yesterday -- unsuccessfully, alas -- and why I'm proceeding as of today with my plan to get in better shape. If nothing else, building my lung power through aerobic activity should make me less prone to asthma attacks and more likely to be tired enough to sleep through respiratory irritation. I think I'll go to the JCC later to play basketball and then sit a good long while in the steam room. Nothing helps me more at this time of year than humidity.

Tags: everyday, health, tucson, weather
Current Location: 85704

As I noted in yesterday's long entry, I have visited the Carlsbad-Leucadia-Encinitas corridor in northern San Diego County many times in the past eleven years. My memories of those trips are broken into different segments, to a degree, in keeping with what was going on in my life at the time. But the biggest fracture, what I like to think of half-seriously as an "epistemic break" in the sense Foucault pioneered, is the one that divides the pre-laptop, pre-wireless, pre-blogging part of my life from the mode of traveling I commenced in February, 2004, on my first trip to Louisville, Kentucky.

I used to think that September 11th, 2001 would hold on to its status as the biggest rupture in my life after moving to Tucson. It certainly was momentous for me, pushing me in a direction that had dire consequences for me both personally and professionally. When I'm here on the Southern California coast, however, what stands out most forcefully is not the aftermath of that international tragedy -- see Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc. -- but the difficulty of remembering what it was like to go on vacation without seeking out places where I could post commentary on my vacationing.

Right now, for example, I'm sitting in the Starbucks attached to the Encinitas Barnes & Noble, where I've come many, many times since 2004 in order to post updates and, before I had a smart phone, check e-mail. Indeed, pretty much the only reason I've come here is for the wireless. There are numerous strip malls and intersections in this area that I know only because I was searching for free wireless access. Even the old trailer park -- a gentrified one, as you might imagine -- across from our campground at South Carlsbad State Beach is a place I know well because I would drive around its streets in search of a signal. It's a strange kind of mapping, somehow both impersonal and the result of deep personal investment.

Tags: autobiography, history, technology
Current Location: 92024

I'm sitting at the E Street Café in Encinitas, a place about which I used to have mixed feelings. Five years ago, coming here felt like a betrayal of my favorite local spot, Pannikin Coffee & Tea in Leucadia, just down the Pacific Coast Highway. Five years ago, I spent a lot of time insisting on the importance of fidelity to places bound up with a past that was in danger of being irreparably cut off from the present.

Things are different now. The complex network of attachments that made me reluctant to come here back then now serves to make me feel that there is still order in my world, however differently configured than it used to be. Just like yesterday afternoon and this morning, my daughter is sitting apart from me in one direction, using her laptop in isolation. And just like yesterday afternoon and this morning, her mother is sitting apart from me in the other direction, using her laptop in isolation. And here I am, just like yesterday afternoon and this morning, doing the same thing in a seat near the window. Yet this dispersal is making me feel more closely connected to them than if we were all sitting at the same table. Why? Because the ritual of coming here revives memories of our previous visits, even as it further blurs the distinctions between our previous visits.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the ways in which people travel. For the most part, my childhood vacations were devoted to seeing new sights. Even when my family traveled somewhere we had been before, we almost always did something to differentiate the trip from its predecessors. Indeed, at my elementary school, making this distinction was a prerequisite for vacations that happened during the academic year, which is when my father's business-related excursions made travel the most economically feasible.

I knew at a young age, though, that my mother had reservations about this approach to travel. When she was growing up in the immediate post-World War II era, her parents had taken her and her sister to Cape Cod year after year, gradually turning the place into the proverbial "home away from home." While their lodging was often in different locations, they visited their favorite spots each time. During the peripatetic excursions my father planned, she missed the feeling of being doubly grounded that those childhood vacations had given her. I remember once, when I was nine, we took an uncharacteristic trip to New Orleans, where my father was attending a conference. My mother was delighted to have a week in the same place, because it enabled her to do nothing without feeling guilty about it.

I loved that trip, too, though I didn't mind the rigid touring format my father preferred. Even then, back in 1977, I perceived how different it was to stay in one place on vacation. Seeing the same street corners and shops over and over, as we did in New Orleans, made them familiar even as it made remembering specific moments in time more difficult. While I wouldn't have put this insight so abstractly as a grade-schooler, I intuited that this form of travel was a way of turning time into space. In place of history, where the "when" takes precedence, it gives us habit.

But that shift of emphasis eventually gets twisted back on itself if you visit the same place year after year. A week in New Orleans makes the city familiar; an annual week in New Orleans counterposes this familiarity with the realization that the physical landmarks that secure it are destined to metamorphose, getting out of sync with one's memories. When I returned to the city after nineteen years in 1996, for my honeymoon, and again, after another fourteen years, in 2010, after Hurricane Katrina -- an experience I wrote about for Souciant -- this perception of mutability was heightened, even as I did my best to find those places that had retained a feeling of familiarity for me despite the passage of time.

Here in the Carslbad-Leucadia-Encinitas corridor in northern San Diego County, where I have vacationed with my daughter and her mother at least once a year since 2001, there are enough landmarks that haven't changed significantly to keep things familiar. At the same time, a number of locations are bound up with momentous changes in our lives in a way that makes them resonate with an uncanny power for me. E Street Café is one such place. I can't forget what led us to start coming here. But there is comfort in the fact that the place hasn't changed much in the intervening years. Even the access code for the café's wireless network, which you're supposed to get off your receipt, was still programmed into my laptop from last year so that I could access the internet without buying anything (though I did, of course, buy something).

Lou's Records, by contrast, forcefully reminds me -- as I also wrote about for Souciant -- how fragile this sense of permanence is. I first visited the famous "North County" music emporium back in the summer of 2001, along with Pannikin, on a exploratory jaunt I took to check out places that a friend from the area had recommended. Back then the store was a complex of several buildings, with separate spaces for new and used music and also for video. Over time, in keeping with the music industry's steady decline, Lou's has shrunk several times. Now, the only part of the original complex that remains is the smallish space that used to be devoted exclusively to used material. The past few times I'm stopped by to pay my respects, the atmosphere has been so saturated with a mixture of bitterness and regret that I could barely stand to look for something to purchase "in solidarity." I'll probably force myself to stop by before we leave on Friday, but it will take a real force of will to push me over the threshold.

I suppose it's fitting that the most permanent feature of this part of the world, the reason we come here in the first place, is also the most compelling reminder of change. Every year I look down from our cliffside camping spot at South Carlsbad State Beach to marvel at the ocean's splendor and vastness. At first glance, it radiates intimations of the eternal. But the closer I look, the more I notice details that will never be repeated exactly the same way. Even the beach impresses this lesson. In the ten years we've been camping there, the cliffs have eroded sufficiently to destroy one of the stairways to the beach for good and force extensive repairs of others. And the beach itself has shrunk in scope almost as fast as Lou's. A decade ago, there was a wide strand to walk upon long before low tide had been achieved. These days, we're lucky to find a stretch of rock-free sand on which to disport ourselves at any point in the day.

The biggest change of all, though, is the one I see in my daughter. Even if I'm regularly reminded back home of how much she has grown up, it's here along the Pacific that this lesson is most powerfully communicated. Because I've taken pictures of her every year on our vacations here, the photographic record of our visits doubles as a time-lapse log of her metamorphosis from toddler to little girl to confident grad-schooler to sometimes-surly and sometimes-delightful teenager. The photos of her interspersed throughout this entry, presented in reverse chronological order, give a sense of what I mean. As much as she has changed, though, the underlying person I got to know when I was watching her as a baby -- her identity was well defined long before she could crawl -- is still there, to my mind, as mutably immutable as the sea.

Tags: autobiography, daughter, photography, travel
Current Location: 92024

Tags: daughter, everyday, photography
Current Location: 85704

I was reading Sports Illustrated just now before bed, the Hunger Games soundtrack blasting in the background, when I came across this passage about former Arizona Wildcat Andre Iguodala in a story on this year's Philadelphia 76ers:

Iguodala grew up in Springfield, Ill., at the height of the Bulls dynasty, and patterned himself after Scottie Pippen. He was not the leading scorer at Lanphier High, where he deferred to a gunner named Richard McBride, or at Arizona, where he averaged 12.9 points and set up sniper Salim Stoudamire. "He likes being the guy who does everything else," says Lawrence Thomas, a coach in Springfield who has worked with Iguodala since ninth grade. His road roommate at Arizona was team manager Jack Murphy, and before Iguodala left after his sophomore year, Murphy gave him a copy of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. "I didn't want him to ever think he went unrecognized," says Murphy, now an assistant at Memphis. Iguodala, who churns through three books at a time, had already read it.

Jack was my student in the fall of 2000, but stayed in touch afterwards, stopping by to talk basketball on a regular basis. I treasured those conversations, which taught me a great deal about the game -- not to mention Jack, who was doing a remarkable job of turning personal adversity into the life he had long desired -- and also helped me feel more rooted in a community I was still reluctant to claim membership in.

Years later, after he had finished his undergraduate degree, Jack returned to me while enrolled in a graduate program to ask if I'd be willing to direct him in an independent study on African-American literature. I don't know that he needed much help from me -- Jack was always very inner-directed -- but I do remember talking to him at length about my love for Invisible Man and the excessive length of the chapter I devoted to the novel in my doctoral dissertation. It's a real treat, well over half a decade later, to see evidence of my legacy as a teacher in such an unlikely place.

Tags: autobiograpyhy, sports, teaching
Current Location: 85704

Tags: autobiography, photography, travel
Current Location: 10003
Muse: The Oasis - Rainer - Luz de Vida