refreshing
My mother-in-law has no idea who Paris Hilton is. I’m sorta sorry we told her.
I’ve been in Pocola, Oklahoma for the past couple of days. Tomorrow, we start heading north.
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05.31.07
05.29.07
what I did before
There’s as many paths to PhD work as there are candidates, but not all that many that show what a working-class path might look like. Here’s what I did for the 13 years between my first job and my transformation into a full-time grad student in 2002.
Job #1: The Family Business
I hung around the family business (generally known among us as “The Shop”) for years growing up, but didn’t start working there until the summer I was 13. That summer and the next, I filed about a zillion invoices — all collated hard copies in actual filing cabinets. I made minimum wage, which, if I recall correctly, was $3.85 an hour.
Job #2: U.S. Pizza Sherwood
My second job was at the pizza joint kitty-corner across the street from the shop. An old family friend had run it for years, and she welcomed me as a general kitchen wench. This was the place that introduced me to a world separate from Baptist church society, and I met rednecks, goth girls, drag queens, and general hedonists. I loved them all. I started this gig with an underage work permit when I was barely 15 and stayed until I was almost 17. During my last year there, I dropped out of high school to go to college early and started at my next job, which I worked concurrently for about six months.
(MB, who ran the joint then, sold out about 5 years ago. It’s been through several owners since then, but evidently the current incarnation is doing pretty well.)
Job #3: The Catholic Diocese
During my first semester of college, I started doing proofreading for Arkansas Catholic, the weekly that my godmother edited. I liked the work and the schedule, especially since I had started taking Saturday courses that conflicted with the restaurant hours. The Diocese offices were also much closer to the University. D. hired me half-time at the paper in early 1993, I think, and my first official day was the day she was fired. I stayed for another year and half as a jill of all trades, writing articles, doing layout and paste-up (with actual paper and wax!), shooting photos, and running the film around town for processing. If memory serves, I capped out at $6 per hour with no health benefits.
Job #4: Old World Pizza
When I finally accepted the fact that my liberal self really had no business at the paper, I quit and went back to being a pizza queen for minimum wage plus tips. At the time, Old World was a primarily queer business, and we played host to a revolving cast of characters that included both the men and women's rugby teams. I dropped out of college about six months after starting here, and worked a number of odd jobs and temp jobs to fill the time and make some cash. One of those temp gigs was at UPS.
Job #5: UPS
I started temping at UPS in the summer of 1995 in the phone center that was scheduled for termination. Then I stayed on to work in the Sales Support Center, and then I became a Business Development Associate for the National Accounts sector. After five years I started to plan my escape, and I ultimately left almost seven years to the day after I started. No regrets, though — I learned a lot about myself and what I wanted from life, and the tuition reimbursement program paid for the rest of my undergraduate education. Plus I met D., who was my manager and close friend for most of those years. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if we're still friends in 50 years.
05.28.07
Little Red River, AR
This is the view from the dock at my grandparents' river house.
05.27.07
one of my Momo's quilts
My great-grandma made quite a few quilts back in her day. This one is in my parents' guest room right now.
Shark Ray!
A gift from Mister Husband for defending my proposal, and meant to be a companion to the other dissertation mascot. It came from the Newport Aquarium, which we visited last week.
05.25.07
Nashville
Doesn't make any difference if you're deaf or not, either
Ali Center
The Muhammad Ali Center was one of the best stops of the trip so far. If you’re in Louisville, make a point of seeing it — not just for boxing or cultural history, but for the multimodality of it all. It’s got the best-done multimodal installations of any museum I’ve visited in recent memory.
05.23.07
deploying Disney
Filing because it’s brilliant, and because I want to see how long it’s allowed to exist.
(via frizzyLogic)
05.22.07
Newport Aquarium
05.21.07
taste the rainbow
C&W 07
My attitude about Detroit and my attitude about Computers and Writing aren’t the same at all. This was my first time at C&W, and it was all kinds of fun. (After we got through presenting, anyway.)
I’ve finally made peace with the fact that my deafness makes me a lousy conference blogger, though. I’m always too busy listening and filling in the gaps of what I hear to actually take notes or report back on anything. But I can say that the several panels do stand out in my mind:
- first Ong panel, during which Michael Day critiqued his own earlier work in such as way as to give hope to grad students everywhere
- the Saturday panel with Jim Ridolfo, Doug Eyman and Jake McCarthy. (Jim’s presentation was particularly strong).
- Matt Barton and Bob Cumming’s talks on Wikipedia. I appreciated Matt’s observations about the organizational differences between Wikipedia a few years ago and the way it’s working these days, with a more guild-like arrangement.
- Steve Krause, Robin Murphy, and Kimberly Lacey’s talks on Blogging, News Communities, and Rhetoric. Steve’s new project on EMU-Talk is interesting, and I like the fact that he’s still working with Bitzer. All sorts of folks have noted Bitzer’s flaws, and his idea has been rehabilitated in various ways. This project seems to provide a lot of room for extending it in a way that can account for audience agency, and for fluid movement between audience and author status. I’ll be curious to see what Steve’s come up with a year from now.
I probably won’t go to C&W next year, because it’s an RSA year and I do dearly love that conference. Plus, I haven’t been to Seattle yet. But I’ll most certainly be at C&W again in the future.
05.20.07
Fair Lane
We spent the afternoon at the Henry and Clara Ford Estate. It’s completely worth the time. The estate is vast, but not as vast as the typical robber baron estate. The engineering is marvelous, as one might expect — drainage experts still visit to see how the early 20c sprinkler system works. But most intriguing is the constant rhetoric about Ford’s environmentalism that’s woven through a space that demonstrates a heroic effort at beating the land into submission and turning nature into a “natural,” tame place.
prickly
so, Detroit...
My momma always told me that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.
At least the driving here is interesting. It’s like a combination of New Orleans (the functional, required u-turn), Omaha (no left turns ev0r!), and the UK (M+# freeway names).
05.19.07
dandelion wine
Waukegan was Green Town was Byzantium, with all the happiness that that means, with all the sadness that these names imply. The people there were gods and midgets and knew themselves mortal and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods and the gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home. And, after all, isn’t that what life is about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people’s heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that’s how you see it!?
— Ray Bradbury, 1974 preface to Dandelion Wine
candy
Mackinaw City, MI
05.18.07
yooped
General impressions of the Upper Peninsula, having just driven across it: They got lotsa trees up there. Of infinite variety. For miles and miles and miles. You can see the copper ore in the hills. The lakes are indeed great, and also pretty. And it’s the only place we’ve been where a wolf crossed the road just ahead of us.
We’re in Detroit now, baby. There’ll be none of that sort of thing here.
05.17.07
Lake Superior
This was the view outside our window in Duluth. About 60 degrees, slightly rainy, a little windy — my kind of weather. I could totally live here.
05.16.07
americana everywhere
The first full day of the 3rd Annual Kennedy-Ward Center-Sectional Tour was busy:
We started out wandering around downtown Bemidji, where we had spent the previous night. Paul and Babe are from Bemidji, dontcha know.
Then we went to Itasca State Park and walked across the headwaters of the Mississippi. This was a strange little travel milestone for me — I've now been to both ends of the Mississippi.
Then we went to the Judy Garland Museum in her hometown, Grand Rapids, MN. No ruby slippers, since they were stolen a couple of years ago, but it’s still marvelous. I’ll upload more photos from there later.
Today we’re headed across the Upper Peninsula and then tomorrow we’ll land in Detroit, just in time for Computers and Writing.
05.12.07
i am very skilled at procrastination
So I finally got around to buying Meshell Ndegeocello’s Plantation Lullabies. I’ve been meaning to do that since it came out. In 1993.
tulips
When I’m downtown at the Awesome Russian Lawyer's office, I park in an underground garage run by Africans. Usually I come up out of the ground, dart across Nicolette Mall, and then go up to the 38th floor offices and their amazing view of the Mississippi. Every time I’ve been there, the skies have been spitting rain or sleet or snow — weather that makes you scurry between buildings. On Thursday, though, I burst out the door straight into sunlight and accordion music, unexpectedly finding myself right in the middle of the first warm downtown Farmer's Market day. There were flowers and herbs everywhere, and it was evident that these tulips wished to come home with me.
05.09.07
a variety of closures
Thanks for all the kind comments on yesterday’s defense. I’m glad to be done with it and headed on my way with the diss. This May seems to be bringing more closure than the usual finality of spring semester:
1. The law suit is settled. I got what I wanted out of it, more or less. The final paperwork will be complete late this week, and that will be that.
2. I found out today that I won the department's graduate teaching award this year, which includes a lovely check and certificate. My colleagues are seriously awesome teachers, so this comes as a bit of a surprise. It’s based on faculty and student recommendations, evaluations, and the candidate's teaching materials and articulation of teaching philosophy. My primary materials were from an online class called Internet Tools and Issues that I redesigned under the title "Life in the Network." I've worked on parts of it since early last fall, so this was a nice finish to the whole thing.
3. Collin, Derek, Jeff, Donna and I will be panelizing at C&W. The panel is more or less a result of some of the conversations we had in Collin’s Networked Rhetorics course a couple of years ago, so it feels good to know that this will materialize in Detroit.
05.08.07
well, that's done
The prospectus, it is defended. And final grades for one course are submitted.
Tomorrow: more grading. Then more writing.