After my earlier post on adjuncting, I thought I’d better qualify things by saying that I’m not bitter about academic life or the academic experience.

I know that some are, but I’m not.

I enjoyed my years of teaching immensely, as I did my years as a Ph.D. student and then candidate. And it’s these experiences that enable me to do the job that I do today, in which I’m often described as unflappable, productive, creative, and authoritative.

It was enrollment in campus life that led me to write and publish the books that I wrote over many years, and that nurtured in me the temperament that later enabled my appearance and participation in big media and as a public figure. Life in academic circles forms a large part of what has fueled this blog for seventeen years, even if the actual daily content of academic life is mostly absent from its pages.

In many very real ways, academic life ultimately beat both the “stupid” and the “young” right out of me, often for better in the end.

Had I not followed the academic path that I followed, I’d be a very different person from the person that I am today. And I am mostly glad to be the person that I am today.

So it bears repeating that I’m satisfied with, and embrace, the path I took, even if there are particular parts of the experience that I either regret or wish had been otherwise.

— § —

If I could earn a living at it, I’d spend the rest of my life on campus(es).

There’s something natural and right about an environment in which the young are trained by the older and more experienced and in which research and inquiry are married to production and an ethos of rigor and the pursuit of high standards.

Sadly, this arrangement—which recalls in many ways the guilds and apprenticeships of prior epochs, albeit with an emphasis on thought-work and knowledge-work rather than craftsmanship—is married to capitalist production and embedded in today’s larger neoliberal economic context.

The result is that to participate in it, whether as a student or as an instructor or mentor, requires that one suffer exploitation.

The very real benefits do justify this exploitation for a time. But there is a significant difference between, on the one hand, finding the cost-benefit calculation to make sense from the perspective of personal and career development, and on the other, trying to turn this particular mode and environment of exploitation into a career and method of economically sustaining oneself.

— § —

So:

Would I take it back, undo it all if I could? Absolutely not.

Am I grateful for the opportunity? Definitely.

Do I think that I also made the right choice in stopping, at least for the present, once I finished my Ph.D.? Without a doubt.

Do I rule out any thought of academic work in the future? Not at all, but the calculation involved in deciding whether or not to take it up again would be a significantly different one from the calculation that led me to pursue it as a student.

Am I happy to have the chance now to own, once again, who I am as a person, without worrying that it will affect my expenses, employment, or my future income potential? Yes.

— § —

Let me expand a bit on the way that I think about academic careers these days, at least amongst the faculties.

I think that such a career is best imagined as a kind of honor or award, not as a path to be actively pursued.

Professionals ought to follow their interests, do their work, and develop their careers without any particular regard for the academy. Be productive. Think. Write. If those are the things that you do.

If, after naturally doing what you do, the academy pursues you, and you are in a position to be receptive to these overtures, then you are the right person for the job. Otherwise, you’re better off just doing what you do, being interested in what you’re interested in, helping and/or mentoring those that you will, without expecting a university to pay you for these things.

There was a time when I would open up a new blog post and it would all just come pouring out, a flood of thoughts and feelings and words and ideas.

Now I have to mine myself to try to see what’s going on inside me, and much of the time I can’t access it.

That’s what years of relationships and years of graduate school will do to you.

— § —

For a time after our separation, whenever I was home alone, I would camp out on the couch, swill beer, eat pizza, and watch Top Gear.

Those times have, happily, gone by the wayside. But I do sometimes miss watching Top Gear.

On the other hand, I’ve seen pretty much the entirety of the UK series at this point, and I’m not really all that interested in watching the non-UK series.

— § —

All of us, every last one of us, even The Very Serious People with The Very Serious Outfits that give everyone else advice and instruction, and often even get paid for it, are human.

Pants one leg at a time.
Guilty pleasures.
Insecurities.
Daftness.

— § —

Speaking of, my wife turned me on to a paradox in myself tonight.

I’m totally unjealous of anything she does as long as she shares it with me, even just in passing.

On the other hand, if she gets up to things and I find out about them only second-hand, I know that I do tend to get jealous in those cases.

Purely because she didn’t want to share and then I feel somehow excluded from something.

It’s daft and silly. It also is what it is.

— § —

When I was in the seventh grade, I wrote a paper on Dickens’ Oliver Twist in the semiprivate “program for gifted and talented children” that I attended. The instructor (I forget his name now, but he had a lisp and always came with dirty hair) returned my paper with a note at the top, saying that he could’t accept my paper because it was Ph.D. level work and I had obviously copied from someone or reused their work without citing them.

I had to have my parents visit him at home with assurances that I’d been working on it for a week before he’d even consider entering it into the gradebook. When he did, I received an ‘A’ grade.

The paper was on the structure of the relationship network in the book, and the way in which Twist himself was entirely incidental to the rising action, climax, and denoument, but for serving as a kind of fulcrum around and through which various other relationships and social tensions could be explored.

— § —

On a related note (and my reason for bringing it up) is the fact that my five-year-old daughter came to me tonight and said, out of the blue, that “Harry and the Bucket Full of Dinosaurs” and “Julius, Jr.” are “really just the same underneath.”

These are two animated childrens’ series that (1) she hasn’t seen in some time, and (2) aren’t particularly educational.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She proceeded to explain that in each program there was a “most important person” (Harry or Julius) and that in addition to this most important person in each case, there were secondary charcters that paralleled one another in the programs, each one having a mirror in the other with similar characteristics like “coolness” or “scaredness” or “silliness,” and that together these secondary characters help the “most important person” to see, and then solve, a problem of some kind that “lots of people have,” each character representing a particular feeling that the most important person also has.

She’s five. And without language to work through the details, she nonetheless made a very convincing argument for the very clear structural similarity between, and formulaic nature of, two distinct and unrelated programs, and the way in which their casts of characters together represent the psyches of their protagonists.

Familiar. Masterfully meta.

I hope she gets better treatment than I did.

— § —

Right now my life is full of little details that remind me of my wife. So many things in it are things that she chose and that I’d never have chosen, yet that I very much appreciate.

It all causes me to miss her, quite often.

I wish and wonder if there was some way we could have arrived at a better “us” without all of the heartache and complexity. I suppose not.

— § —

Once in Chicago, a friend and I broke into an abandoned church in the dead of winter in the middle of the night. It was freezing cold and damned near impossible to see.

I don’t mention that for any particular reason; it’s just a memory.

— § —

All of those classes on “memory” in my Ph.D. years, and all of those very earnest students, mostly from Europe, a few from Latin America. So earnest. So much concern.

I don’t suppose any American, myself included, can ever really understand at a fundamental level what that’s all about. Not without having lived there for a long period of time. We can conceptualize it rationally, but it doesn’t resonate.

Memories are just memories. The world is only 200 years old. A few generations back there was nothing but wild turkeys and bison. Live and let live.

We’re all future oriented here, concerned with what gets built next and who builds it. Because we have precious few “already built” things to consider that weren’t built within time spans that directly touch us in some way. Precious little need for social memory.

— § —

In another life that I’ll never have I want to be a nonbelieving priest.
And in yet another life that I’ll never have I want to be a federal agent.
And in yet another life that I’ll never have I want to be an organic baker that sells overpriced, second-class but always rationalized pastries at a farmers’ market.
And in yet another life that I’ll never have I want to die young in a car crash, like James Dean.

— § —

Oh come on, don’t get all smug on me.

It’s all nonsense anyway.

The notion of accountability, often misimagined as by endusers as transparency, was a key item of discussion in my dissertation.

When it comes to technology, questions that users may not even think to ask impact in significant ways technology’s usability. What is it doing? How is it doing what it is doing? What are the ground rules and operating parameters? Can these be expressed in simple, intuitive ways?

These things are the keys to predictability and interactivity, and they are questions that are also critical in human-to-human interaction, though we don’t often think about it in these terms. But they come up (as Garfinkel pointed out) when they are violated or when exceptions occur. This is one of the reasons that mental illness is so difficult and problematic for us; we struggle to interact with those that are mentally ill because they violate assumptions about precisely the questions above, rendering us unsure about the effects of our actions within the context of the ongoing interaction.

So I’m here to point out that the Google+ transition (from old to new) and Amazon’s author pages are amongst the most recent examples I’ve found of poorly accountable technologies. It’s not clear why they do what they do, what they’re doing, or what will happen as we interact with them. Only after the fact do we know, and of course by then it’s too late to make a decision about whether or not we’d like to do the things that we did—make the gestures that we made—as we related to one another.

Such accountability is often misframed as “transparency” or “documentation” and users tend to bemoan the lack of these when outcomes are unexpected, but in fact, nobody really wants transparency (i.e. understanding of the actual operations at the machine level). Those things are best left to machine state diagrams of the sort that I used to do as a computer science student all the way back in 1991 (when departments were still teaching in C and Pascal and assembly).

Instead, what people really want to know is what the ground rules of an interaction are and what the outcomes will be, as an interactive totality, of any particular interactive choice that they make. So—not “what is this software or hardware doing”—but rather “what will be the result for this interaction and relationship of any particular action that I might take in response to the system’s actions?”

On this level, these two bits of software fail miserably.

— § —

As a supplemental note, the term “accountability” does not imply “responsibility” but in fact Garfinkel’s discussion of the ability “to provide a sensible and defensible account of” what each party to an interaction is doing. Accountability is essential to interaction as it enables parties both to explain themselves (to others and to themselves) and to come to grips with the very same kinds of explanations provided by the counterparty. Unaccountable activity, particularly in social interaction, tends to lack sensibility—that is to say that people cannot make sense of or integrate the sensations of what has occurred. An “accounting” by both parties and the “accountability” of each party’s actions are thus critical both to individual and to mutual understanding.

One can easily see the ways in which such accountability is at the core of most problems in usability and interactivity in the technology space, as has been pointed out by both Suchman (first) and Dourish (later). As it turns out, this concept is also at the core of most of the problems we’ve had building AI systems, though such a point is beyond the scope of a complain-complain post like this one.

Here’s a note on academic and especially adjunct life.

I continue to receive mail, both electronic and printed, from every institution where I’ve ever taught (with the exception of St. John’s University). Some of it is even quite official, while other items ask me every semester to submit my syllabi (despite having no appointment), and still others inform me of “mandatory” processes, appearances, etc. for adjunct faculty or even for all faculty in general—which I regularly ignore, being in no substantive way involved in academic life just now. But they keep coming.

I haven’t taught anywhere at all, in fact, in well over a year and I haven’t taught at some of these institutions for half a decade.

This demonstrates just how much attention institutions pay to whom they count amongst their faculty at the adjunct level. They haven’t noticed that they didn’t renew appointments or that I didn’t ask for any, that I have moved half a nation away, that I haven’t set foot on the campus to scan-in with my ID card in years, etc.

No doubt I’m still sitting here and there on some websites listed as “faculty” in one way or another (they represent to students that adjuncts are faculty, though they clearly represent to adjuncts with their actions that we are not).

I’d like very much to teach again, and at the same time, I am as bothered as I ever was by the strange labor economy of the university. Yes, I know all the details, I’ve read countless articles in the Chronicle, papers in the journals, etc. on the nature, troubles, and future of the system, movements for change, administrative and economic realities, etc. Hell, I lived it. In multiple ways. For a lot of years. It’s a mess.

In an ideal world, I’d love to be an academic. But in the real world, as I pursued that option, I was pretty clearly undervalued, with little hope of advancement sans tremendous (and generally ridiculous) sacrifices that I wasn’t prepared to make. Finishing a Ph.D. was more than enough sacrifice for me. I might give the academic world a go again over the next couple of years, but in an entirely different way.

Nonetheless sometimes the absurdity of it all, particularly when you receive a notice from an institution that clearly thinks you’ve been there all along—despite the fact that you’re long, long gone—can really hit home and lead you to realize once more just how f**ked up the entire system is right now for everyone. This is particularly true, however for adjuncts. Permanent faculty are suffering as well, but despite claims of worry and solidarity, they are able to throw their hands up and claim helplessness. I don’t hold any particular grudge against permanent faculty for this; the reality, however, is that whatever actions are being taken by them, verbal or otherwise, are not all that useful to struggling adjuncts with bills to pay.

On a full-time basis I make three times annually, as a relatively anonymous marketing manager at a small company—no particular credentials required—what I would as an adjunct with a Ph.D. at very large universities, where I was put on the website to sell tickets to the show and the workload was much, much, much heavier. This even while as an adjunct job security was literally nil (Reapply three times a year for the same job! Yay! Even more work, and with zero guarantees!), respect from colleagues (or even their awareness that you exist) generally absent, and benefits nonexistent.

And meanwhile the departments haven’t even realized that I am teaching no courses, have taught no courses in years, and have not been paid by them in a long, long time. They’re still asking me to submit my syllabus, turn up to a meeting, or manage my ID cards and accounts.

They don’t even know I’m long gone.

Hrmz. A person that many hundreds of handsomely-paying students have called “professor” (appropriately or not) and that has written countless recommendation letters, mentored in dozens of research projects, participated in curricular development and departmental planning, and so on. Surely there was some value there. Yet they haven’t even invested the resources to discern the difference between “is an employee and a member of our faculty” and “haven’t seen him in many years.”

Think about that.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with single issue activism. After decades of watching activist culture play out, it seems as though it merely entrenches both sides of an issue. Open combat and a complete end to dialogue; moral absolutes and the justifications of victimhood rather than actual solutions to problems.

At a deeper level, I also can’t help but feel as though there’s something adolescent about it—as though, as an end result, we have come to live in a society largely devoid of grown-ups capable of thinking deeply about problems or understanding diverse points of view. Instead, the politics of self-absorption, of “my” rights and “my” problems reigns supreme.

I feel that a lot looking at candidates this election. Precious little acknowledgment of the human dignity and legitimacy of different ways of living or points of view, much less of the need to respect, acknowledge, and accept these—and the significant difficulty for all that this involves—if the collective is to thrive. Indeed, precious little acknowledgment of a diverse collective at all. Each view seems to verbally enact the collective merely as an issue-directed aggregate of like-minded selves in pursuit of particular goals.

It’s a kind of instrumentalism with what seems to me to be a childish naiveté about the nature of being woven throughout. You can always get what you want if only you fight hard enough for it and get others onto your team to do the same. The question is one of applied moral, physical, and political force, with no acknowledgment that it may be that nobody ever gets everything that they want, no matter how much force can be applied.

Maybe I’m just getting older and starting to feel protective of my lawn, so to speak.

— § —

– I have transitioned entirely to using prime lenses, which surprises me
– From a distance, the academic world can look like a circus
– But so do the criticisms of it
– Society as a collection of warring circuses
– I’ve always liked Old Spice but not always used it
– The Galaxy Tab S 8.4 is easily the best tablet yet made
– In general, both more stuff and more space mean more work
– I am not looking forward to mowing the lawn at all
– My universe is the smallest it’s been in decades
– Mechanical automatic watches are seductive things
– There are multiple phone calls today that I’m not eager to make
– Diamond polishing paste works very slowly on glass
– I am frustrated beyond measure with my current career status

— § —

It’s been six years since I last used Linux as my main, day-to-day creative computing platform, after seventeen years using Linux and an entire career (that seems aeons ago) as a Linux expert, author, and contributor.

I do now use Linux constantly (as Android) on my mobile devices. In the end, the “OS wars” became entirely moot as personal computing turned into a universe of client/server (mobile/cloud) interactions. I made the transition implicitly in 2010 after getting my first iPhone about a year before that. Somehow I knew that the writing was on the wall right away, and off to Mac OS I went.

— § —

– I am going gray
– Everything in life is destined to become bittersweet one day
– Making music, even if bad music, makes a person feel better
– I need to service my aquarium rather badly

— § —

“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”

I am socially awkward.

I bristle when people tell me this, but so help me I am. Not in the “weird quiet guy” way, but in the “people don’t know what to make of me” and the “they can tell that I’m not entirely engaged in the same way as them” way. So help me it’s true.

I can work a crowd of hundreds until they’re eager to invade the deepest circle of hell by my side armed only with toothpicks, a hairbrush, and an assortment of broken shoelaces. And I’m comfortable standing in front of them and grandstanding. But in small groups or one-on-one, I’m never quite comfortable.

At this point in my life, I should accept that this is probably not going away.

“Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?”

I recast painful questions as onanistic public reflection about me. That’s one of the things that I do. When, in fact, often the things that I’m meditating on concern my relationships with others in the world.

But because I have a distaste for confrontation and for its consequences—a discomfort that exists only with people that I care about, never with strangers—it becomes easier to make it a meditation about myself and my responses to others, in the rather solipsistic abstract, rather than in concrete events, thoughts, and terms.

See? I’m doing it again.

There is also some justification for this; many private things can’t be aired publicly with ethical justification, yet it is the public airing of things that makes me feel better.

So—then twist the knobs until only the part about me is left. Then, blog about it. The catharsis isn’t complete, but it’s better than nothing, and no-one gets hurt. Not right away, anyway. There is, of course, the quiet boil factor, that I now know can go on for years.

— § —

One of the things that’s hardest for me right now is not knowing the rules of engagement. I suppose a wise person would say that they are all being renegotiated, and that those about which I’m unsure are in fact hidden in shadow because they haven’t yet come up since all the rules changed or were dissolved.

Problems with this are twofold:

1) I find myself hesitant to engage anything about which I’m uncertain. Because, first, I am so emotionally exhausted by so many things (a long-term exhaustion that will take some time to overcome) that the thought of “renegotiation” is almost too much, not to mention that I’m likely not in the best frame of mind to interact with a clear head about sensitive issues. And because, second, anything that I raise may result in an outcome that is painful, so it is almost better to let sleeping dogs lie, as they say.

2) Partially as a result of circumstance and partially as a result of (1) above, new circumstances and realities are wont, just now, to come out of the shadows without my intervention and without any negotiation, and often it is painful anyway.

None of this is thus ideal, and yet I’m sort of along for the ride at this point. Because space has been an explicit request. Because I often don’t have energy for much else anyway. And because I don’t know any other way to live.

— § —

I’m haven’t generally thought of myself over the years as someone that was bothered by uncertainty in life, but my life in general is now testing this self-understanding. Turns out that the right kinds of uncertainty will get me just as good as they’ll get anyone else.

One meeting down. Not sure how many to go.

Much to be done. Working on developing the motivation to actually do it.

— § —

Mobile/responsive CSS is now in place here.
Updated favicon (or rather, restored it).
Added sharing.

We’re getting there.

— § —

Read a story in the New York Times about a couple that “consciously uncouples” and then, after many years, “consciously couples” again.

And read a bunch of comments debating divorce. The positions seem to be:

1) It’s always better to stay together.
2) It’s better to divorce, respectfully, to avoid just fighting all the time.

The problem with #1 is that some couples are simply miserable, and simply make their children and their own lives miserable, with all of their hate and discomfort.

The problem with #2 is that any couple that is just fighting all the time by definition can’t do anything respectfully, so the divorce will be a hairy one.

So I’ll give my more nuanced position. If you can be respectful, you should stay together. You made the commitment. Hold your nuts and make it work. If you can’t be respectful, then you’ll divorce anyway, since you’re likely immature enough that no position, reasoning, commitment, etc. matters to you anyway. It’s a kind of tautological thing. Couples that can’t do anything but fight contain at least one, and probably two, individuals that simply want what they want, and the rest of the world be damned. At that level of maturity, the question of the ethics of divorce doesn’t even come up.

You can thus presume that anyone that divorces is immature and unable to honor their commitments respectfully and/or that their spouse met these conditions (in fact, likely both, since mutualism implies an active mirroring of interactive proclivities, given that such mirroring is one of the proclivities of interaction).

I say this with full recognition that we used to be a household embroiled constantly in either excessive displays of emotion or in extended bouts of the “silent treatment.”

I also say it knowing that now we are not any longer, and that hopefully we never will be again. We’ve both grown up, I think, this year. Though the process is not complete, it is certainly underway. And as a result, we can now be respectful. And for that reason, we now have the self-awareness (the obligation itself was always there, for both of us) to hold to each other and to our commitments to each other, provided we can avoid losing our minds.

— § —

Of course, hanging onto your mind is easier said than done, as we’re finding out.

But I have a very good amount of faith at this point.

— § —

Flex work is both beautiful and dangerous.

Beautiful because it gives you the space to structure your life in ways that make sense.

Dangerous because with that space, you are still free to do things that don’t make sense, perhaps even more free than you would otherwise be. Successful flex work depends on a certain amount of maturity as well.

— § —

Maturity is not something that western society, and in particular American culture, excels at producing. Case in point: me. In 1999 when I started this thing, I was twenty-three years old. And it reads to my forty-year-old self as if I were a naive, self-absorbed ass.

Twenty-three ought to be old enough to run the farm, or even run for office. Instead, it’s about the age when most young men finally can afford their own video game consoles. I say this with some experience, and having lived and made friends in Los Angeles and Chicago with people that were in their twenties and doing exactly that: buying all the booze they could get their hands on, playing video games nonstop, and turning up for work only because they had to in order to support their booze and gaming habits.

Such people are the precisely why employers continue to tend to shy away from flex-work. Because our “adults” can’t handle it until they’re in their late thirties.

— § —

Does this national culture infantilize its young adults? Superhero Anti-Capitalism Man says, “Yes!”

Meanwhile, arch-villain Capitalism Man says, “Buy an XBox 360, a twelve-pack of Bud Light, and then hit the clubs! The more you’ve earned, the more you can spend on yourself!”

Keep the jealousy in check. You’re forty years old for God’s sake, and it’s as much your fault as anyone’s.

And the frustration. Keep that in check, too.

Be and accept.

— § —

“The bright path seems dim;
Going forward seems like retreat;
The easy way seems hard;
The highest virtue seems empty;
Great purity seems sullied;
A wealth of virtue seems inadequate;
The strength of virtue seems frail;
Real virtue seems unreal;
The perfect square has no corners;
Great talents ripen late;
The highest notes are hard to hear;
The greatest form has no shape.”

I got asked why I’m supporting Sanders. Here’s why.

1) Sanders is to the left of Clinton and I’m to the left of them both.

2) If Clinton wins, then by the end of her first year I’ll have spent the majority of my entire life under the governance of just two wealthy nuclear (not extended) families. If I’m to believe in American democracy at all, much less someday try to defend it to my kids, that can’t happen. I’ve already spent exactly half of my entire life being governed by just these two families. And it’s already too much.

It really is as simple as these two points. I could go issue by issue, but the result would be the same.

To put it another way, Sanders is too far right for me on:

– Guns

While Clinton is too far right for me on:

– Pretty much every issue of importance, from finance to defense to healthcare to diplomacy

I think Clinton acquitted herself well as Secretary of State. And I hold her in reasonably high regard as an individual. It’s just that her policy positions are too centrist for me. Hell, Obama is too centrist for me and Clinton’s significantly to his right.

So that’s that.

Reading back through years of posts here, I’m shocked at how far I’ve come and how much I’ve changed. I suppose it all stands to reason; people grow, gain wisdom and experience, age into a kind of good humor that most of us recognize as being age’s unfailing counterpart.

Even so, I don’t honestly remember feeling as out of control, or as dark as some of the posts in the past clearly are. The old Defarge/Knit! posts from my years at the University of Chicago show a young malcontent—at once both smart and deliriously stupid—clearly losing his shit. I’m glad I wasn’t accepted into the Ph.D. program there because I’d probably have gone. Looking back at those posts now, it’s obvious how that would have turned out. I wonder if I’d have even survived.

Certainly I’d never have had the chance to teach at university for years, to be a marketing manager, or likely to ever do much of anything again. I’d have consumed myself well before I finished. I almost finished consuming myself while I was there.

— § —

The other reason I’m glad that I was’t accepted to, and didn’t attend, the University of Chicago for my Ph.D. is of course because I met my wife in New York at The New School.

Even then, as we met, and long before we married, people that read me regularly contacted me to ask what had changed in my life. They said they could tell, just by reading, that something was different for me than it had ever been before.

And it was.

Whatever else has happened since we met, married, and became a family with kids, I can see here just how much life changed for me—for the better—when I met her. I honestly wonder whether I’d have survived as long as I have without her. I wasn’t burning the candle at both ends; I’d thrown the candle into the fire and I was about to jump in after it. New York was like a last chance at some sort of a real, regular life. By some miracle, I found it when she found me.

She was the first and only person to ever make me want to be a responsible adult.

I used to think I missed the wild creative energy that I felt in years past. I suppose I still do sometimes, but the cost was high.

— § —

“They’re a family, a family together, just like it should be.”

That’s what M— said tonight as we all sat together at mom’s house while she played with four large holiday ornaments, just before they disappeared into the closet for the year.

Before that moment, I’d felt a kind of bittersweet ambivalence about them. They were strange to me, bought by my wife after our separation, a symbol of everything that is exotic and, at times, frightening about the present. Yet at the same time, they were just the sorts of ornaments my wife—whom I know very well and in whom everything in the universe that is familiar lives for me—would buy. Impish. Rustic. Playful. Cute. And so they have for weeks been familiar at the same time that they were unfamiliar, lovable even as they seemed in a way to represent love’s failures, at once elements of home and elements of the strangest, most forbidding land I’ve ever visited.

And then M— made them into a little family, together, just like it should be.

Many forty year old men tend to think that they’re beyond being touched by kids’ play, but many also aren’t living the combination of deep love and insistent awkwardness, of dreams of togetherness matched with a reality of apartness, that we have been living now for months.

For M—, it’s all very simple. Together as a family. Like it should be. This forty year old man was touched. And challenged, challenged by a little girl to grow. And full of love, for all of them.

— § —

For his part, O— decided that one ornament in particular, the one that my wife was making talk, was called “little one.”

That had much the same effect.

Bittersweet is the wrong word, in fact. They’re not joined, these two things; they don’t touch one another. It’s “each,” not “both.” Separate and simultaneous, two feelings pulling in their own directions and quite separate from the other even as they both live inside me.

Much love. Much uncertainty. Much love.

— § —

“Drown, drown
Sailors run aground
In a sea change nothing is safe
Strange waves
Push us every way
In a stolen boat we’ll float away
Little one
Hold on…”

— § —

I love my wife. There is precious little truth in the world, but at the end of the day, that is one invaluable piece of it, come what may, mean whatever it may for the future. Our future, one hopes. One hopes very much.

I believe it, with everything I am. And yet, at the same time, I also know that I believe it because I have no choice but to believe it. Seventeen years of blogging tells the story well.

Moved the entire superstructure across to a new database on the old domain.

Implemented some redirect rules to point old URLs here. One thing I forgot is that many of the old CMS installations were hanging off of year subdirectories on this domain (/2010 and so on). Oh well, those will just have to go. It’s time to move on. Consolidate. Be reborn.

— § —

I’m a bit nervous. Hope it all hangs together…

— § —

Next tasks:

– Styling niggles, esp. for commenting, e.g. width of FB plugin, adding comment links to archive pages
– Image styling stuff, maybe even with timthumb for featured image or something, who knows
– Implement some responsive CSS for mobile
– Get the OG:Meta stuff implemented and right, then adding share buttons
– Build persona and pages around the blog stuff

When these are done, I will declare Leapdragon.net reborn after all these years, and will re-share to Facebook.

I haven’t decided what to do with aa-hsiao.net yet. For the moment, I’ll let it continue to house my online business card and not much else. I’ve been using it for email, so I hate to wind hosting down there entirely, but maybe I’ll scale it back.

It all seems rather nerve-racking, but also good. Changes were a long time coming.

1) Two thousand seven hundred and forty-six.
2) Seventeen.
3) Sixteen hundred.

#1 = The number of posts now online on this blog.
#2 = The number of years represented.
#3 = Approximate number of printed pages represented.

— § —

That’s right, a full seventeen years of my personal blog, now for the first time all wrapped into one single WordPress database dating back to 1999.

Included:

– All previous Leapdragon entries.
– All Leapdragon § Academe entries.
– All entries from side project Defarge/Knit! from 2004 that were written by me.

Three raw HTML entries from the 694 of that period (1999-2004) were lost. I’m not sure which ones, but the parser I hacked up tonight to comb through them and toss the results into a CSV that I could import choked on three. I didn’t bother to find out which ones. That’s a 0.04% loss rate, which is acceptable to me on a project of this size that I want done now.

Also, about 3-4 of the Defarge/Knit! posts got truncated in mid post. That’s okay. They’re interspersed throughout the first half of 2004. Most of the Defarge/Knit! posts were about anger and drugs and life in the University of Chicago pressure cooker and so they’re incoherent and borderline insane. Which is fine, because that’s what Defarge/Knit! was about. So it’s not like you can tell anyway.

And of course, the farther back you go, the looser consistency and style get. I’m integrating platforms that had no graphics styling with some that did, at various image sizes. Some with titles, some without. Some with timestamps, some without.

— § —

In fact, there is a certain amount of risk to all of this. Over seventeen years, particularly at the beginning, there is much here that is:

– Naive
– Embarrassing
– Vile
– Profane
– etc.

But it is all me and who I have been. And it is time to own it and put my name on it because without realizing it, this is one of the four biggest things I’ve ever done, the other three being:

– Marriage and kids
– Ph.D.
– My oeuvre of books

So to deny it would be tremendously uneconomical. Plus, I’m tired of hiding from myself and who I was last year with each new year that appears.

— § —

Next step: Slide this all back over to Leapdragon.net where it belongs, and redirect from aa-hsiao.net/leapdragon-2014, after some updates to the theme.

Also, one bug: Some of the merged data was created without timestamps because my code (in the pre-CMS days) didn’t bother to ask for timestamps, only datestamps. Those currently show as midnight posts. I need to write some code that looks for the precise 00:00:00 timestamp and, if present, instead shows “unknown time” or something similar for the timestamp.

But that can be done later. I just need to remember. Which is why I’m mentioning it here.

— § —

Yes, I am aware that it is well after 3:00 in the morning.

That’s okay when you have wild piles of blog stuff to do.

I feel good.

And now—now I can go to bed.

I am in dangerous waters today. I don’t want to be, but I am.

The one thing that therapy can’t address is the most fundamental: what you want.

We are both attending together, but we are not necessarily together in the fundamentals.

Sometimes, it worries me.

Sometimes, it makes me feel strong.

When it makes me feel strong, I worry even more.

— § —

Or, as I find out as I’m writing this post, perhaps we are.

What is wrong with me?