the red light

The light outside of my apartment turns red in the afternoon. Upstate New York has a lot of maple trees (yes, more places than Vermont and Canada can make maple syrup), and the red leaves have recently been catching rays as the sun descends. Light from the trees reflects onto the building and back, making the sidewalk glow with red light.

Transportation smells

I've been thinking a lot lately about how much smells matter in America. We're crazy about staying clean (and invent killer viruses as an excuse to perpetuate our goals. . .), which is great for the aroma of crowded subways, but does this hygiene hysteria hurt our anti-car culture?

I walk or bike to school, not a very long distance, but long enough to pump up my heart rate. When I get to school, I find I'm a little sweaty, whether it's hot out or not (the jacket always shifts from a good idea to a bad halfway through the trip). If I walk into my office sweaty or smelling like I just worked out, it's far less professional than were I to walk in with a low heart rate, pale-faced and composed-- the same as, say, had I just stepped out of a car.

When people move, they smell. Their hair might frizz or look messy. Maybe their face even turns a little red--these are all symptoms of the dangerous task of physical exertion. In American culture today, it seems that bodily exertion has a place and time, one that does not coincide with transportation to and from your place of work. Sweating at the gym might be great, but mixing the ideal of staying in shape with the necessity of transportation and you're either unbalanced or in financial straits.

We are so used to driving cars places that we have disconnected the energy required to travel somewhere from energy of our bodies. Because cars utilize petroleum energy that stays out of sight in the heated, fragrant, and oil-free automobile interior, transportation costs money rather than costing energy.

Even in this era, I still want to pay for my personal transportation with my bodily energy. Maybe this means I will smell; maybe my stomach will growl halfway through class, begging for a refill after the long trip; maybe I'll even look healthily flushed or have sweat stains under my armpits. Yet, despite the unprofessional air I may be drawing to myself, I won't stop. Until we realize the costs of transportation, we as Americans can't get in touch with our energy systems or even our bodily capabilities.

Only when we remember that our fuel stops are at the grocery store can we proudly smell the whole way back.

Apples in New York

Here's a fall story from a few weeks back:

This past Saturday, Kent and I decided to go to a "Farm Fest." It wasn't just one farm, but seven or so scattered in a five square mile radius north of the Mohwak River (I want to make an Indian/hair-do wordplay, but since the words are the same origin I guess that's not really a pun. . . ). We decided that since the terrain is rolling hills and all of the roads have only two lanes, we would ride our bikes between the farms (also a beautiful, sunny, 70 degree day).

Apparently, all of the bicyclists in upstate NY are not also apple eaters. The first man we approached told us we "could" ride up the dirt road, but to "be careful" (the road was (almost) one hundred yards long). At the next farm, the owners had placed a sign on the entry road reading "Cars Only: No Walkers Allowed." Kent and I decided since bikes are closer to cars than feet are, we should be allowed to go???. . . okay, we were really only justifying ourselves because we had already ridden so far to get there.

Well, no one yelled at us, but we had to wait in a line of cars to reach the first parking attendee, who gave us a map and told us we should probably wait in line so the next guy could tell us where to park (our bikes. . . ). We waited, feeling sort of silly that there there we were standing in the open air with our two bikes side-to-side and ten cars to either side of us. We didn't cut ahead though, figuring that we nobly displayed our civic duty by not assuming that, as bicyclists, we could cut to the front.

When we finally reached the parking lot, the first guy asked-- sort of slowly and with an inquisitive eye-- what we wanted. . . as if there weren't a MASSIVE apple orchard behind him full of ripe apples (what the hell else would we want???) The second person told us not to lock our bikes up to the fence, because it was pretty old (it was made of iron). When we left, the only way to pay for the apples we picked was by driving through little toll booths where someone stood to take your change. Needless to say, the girl we paid didn't seem too comfortable exchanging money without a car door separating us from her.

Moral of the story, apples and bicycles do not mix well in upstate New York. But the apples are delicious. . .

Why would I want to be that?

My PhD history program includes a one credit practicum in college teaching. The graduate director coordinates the class, but it functions as a parade of professors. Each has one class period (an hour in earth time but about 1 1/2 hours in professorial time) to discuss how they found themselves in the profession, their philosophy on teaching, and how they balance research with teaching. Relatively interesting stuff, because you are essentially getting the professional life story from each of these individuals.

Maybe in addition to "interesting" I should call this "stuff" they tell us demoralizing.

Today's professor has been teaching at the University at Albany, SUNY for 39 years-- he started in 1971 after grad school at Columbia (with some of America's leading historians at the time) and a two year fellowship in Rome. Sound impressive? He certainly thought it was.

He cemented the theme of the hour-and-then-some talk pretty early on. I wish I had kept a running total of the times I heard the words "idiots" and "mediocrity." He lamented undergraduates who know nothing--some of whom, he admitted, might even have potential, but unfortunately come from low-class backgrounds (not shitting you). Continuing on, he bemoaned scientists who are convinced that they seek ultimate truth and that their discoveries won't be reversed in a century, and then proceeded to tell us how he has, of course, succeeded in finding ultimate truths. His wafts of modesty came as he briefly referred to his former self as one of those "idiots," but carefully never left such a statement without returning to his older self's world-renowned expertise.

Probably the most insulting bit of the evening was his twenty minute tirade about the horrors of the SUNY system and the abysmal quality of students and teachers such mediocrity attracts. Need I remind you we are all first year graduate students at this very same school? I know it's not Harvard or Berkeley or even Wisconsin or Colorado, but it's an advanced degree. I'm not trying to be the world expert in my field--and even if I were, the place is probably already taken by a Columbia grad-- maybe someone who hates teaching undergraduates who grew up in steel towns.

If that's what being a professor is like, I like my place as an idiot very much, thank you.