express blogging

you have ten minutes remaining on your express session terminal

i'm blogging from the express terminal at the library.

one would think that such restrictions might help such an over-expressor be a bit more succinct.

but maybe not, since i'm just in it for the experience.

what is it like to live in fast fifteen minute increments?

we sit in lines at fast-food to-go windows, we order out or order for delivery.

at school we learn the great classics in fifty minute time slots.

i just read about a playwriting contest that is for ONE PAGE plays.

music videos collapse the filmic tradition, popular music and marketing blitzes into a six minute visual poem that should express the breadth and depth of meaning and feeling in a song (and/or available on that artists album)

one minute dating allows people to have one minute conversations with a number of available and interested partners in a noisy restaurant room.

hot or not condenses the experience to an even quicker click of the mouse.

outside the window suvs and trucks and minivans zip by into the next fifteen minute increment of their worlds.

but the sunshine and the cedar trees and the unevenly faded red bricks of the Hoover Plant feel much less ephemeral. They seem to be unphased by all the zipping and zapping.

Christian once commented on a blog that one of the best reasons to affiliate and jump into an institution's life -- and out of the chaos of liminality is because insittutions slow down the experience of time.

I'm intrigued. Because the pop window that just warned me to save and exit (i have four minutes remaining) tick, tick, tick, is making me almost as nervous as the boundless energy of the two three year olds dancing around their mother next to me -- as she tries to move away from their insistence into a focused zone of choosing a book on kitchen rennovations.

tick, tick, tick.

playwriting oscar party

i'd like to interupt our regularly scheduled programming to let all

PLAYWRITING alumni that you're invited to the RUDDS at 7 pm on Sunday night.

This years prolific playwrights will be coming too.

Please pass the word along to your peers who I've lost contact with!

Peace~

just about perfect

inappropriate blog disclosure number 543:

543. I go to the bathroom to find peace. solace. respite.

You know there's something to be said for just being by one's self.

the advent of toddlers in our world has decreased the privacy of the loo -- but not gotten rid of it altogether.

strangely enough, i think that going to the bathroom here would be perfect.

You still have the solace,

but you don't have to worry that you don't have the perfect reading material.

its endlessly entertaining.

even a little thrilling?

may your trips to the lavatory be full of --

peace~

into the shit

(a modified version of a talk i gave to the general faculty body yesterday)

Its Ash Wednesday. A day when much of the Christian world chooses to wear a sign of humiliation and weakness upon our foreheads.

My friend Dave resigned from his job this past fall without knowing where he’d go. He’s my age with a wife and family and a mortgage.

Ryan blogged about the discouraging dimensions of this stage in her life. She’s a bright, talented, driven writer who is struggling to find a sense of vocation in the jobs available to her.

“Somewhere along the way I have lost this strong sense of self/identity that has always been a very prominent part of me. I have become really weak, which is hard for me to admit, because I am such a dominant person, but this is something I have had to face also.”

Dez’s dad has even worse frustrations with a job he’s poured his heart and his career into.

One of my cousins has all kinds of shit happening to her right now. One of my brother’s jobs is full of it, too.

As I drove home from work the other day, I had a slow motion moment. Do you have those? Where something, for whatever reason, captures your attention and stands out? Slows down the time you’re experiencing?

A dad and a little girl stood hand in hand poised and ready to cross 25th street. The Malone Rush Hour Traffic kept pouring by, though. I’m sure to her three year old eyes the crossing of that road seemed as wide as the Red Sea, or maybe as daunting as forty years in the Siani Desert.

For Dave, for Ryan, for Dez, my cousin, my brother, for the three year old girl ~ waiting. Is hard. Being between is shitty.

I mentioned Lubrano’s book LIMBO before -- where he talks about the experience of growing up in a blue collar home and living in white collar middle class society. He calls himself a “STRADDLER” someone with one foot in his blue collar heritage and the other in the occupation and social network of a white collar world.

And I know the idea of liminality isn’t a new concept for you blog readers – I write about it a bit on my front burner site.

Anthropologist Victor Turner refers to this position of between-ness – as a LIMINAL state. Limin simply means threshold. When you’re in a threshold you’re neither in the hallway nor in the room. No longer that, but not quite this either. Turner was intrigued by the possibilities of liminality. Limin offers a unique opportunity to its inhabitants to transform themselves and it often allows the group who bestows the new status (job, promotion, graduation, membership, completion) the opportunity to clarify the standards of the community.

Are you already seeing how the college experience is one that’s full of liminal experiences? At Malone (my front burner employer), demographic data suggests that many of our students, as first generation college graduates, will emerge from college as “straddlers” – Lubrano writes ambivalently about this experience for him – “the academy renders you incomprehensible to the very people who formed you.”

But its not just students. For all honest people, there are dimensions of our work and our families and our identity which we experience as being profoundly between. Between that which we’ve come from, and that which we work toward.

On the other hand, one of the difficult parts of life is that for everyone who feels between – there are several people around her or him who are finding the world to be their oyster. Josiah and Nathan won a debate tournament this weekend. Dave decided on a job. My friend Garry wrapped a movie last week. Cliff finished a really great documentary film. I got tenure. Lynn’s big inservice at the downtown school district went really well. The world feels underwritten by a big generous disco beat and flashing glorious rotating light bulbs.

It is fun for us to emerge into status, isn’t it? To find a job, to find meaning in our job, when our friendships feel good and secure, to finally reach safely the other side of twenty fifth street. the finish line of a long race, a promotion, a graduating child, a completed campaign. Crossing the Jordan. Leaving behind the wilderness of temptation and wandering and fasting. It’s natural to enter into the celebration of completion and accomplishment.

But its less natural to want to enter into the shit.

But Lent is the season of the church year when we choose to go into the shit.

I hope you’re not hung up on the word. I hope the severity of its ugliness just draws you into thinking about the exquisite complexities off its reality.

Shit is stinky and vulgar and mushy. Until relatively recently in history it was pervasive (for many people and places, it still is). You couldn’t separate yourself so easily and completely from the ugliness your body produces with a quick flick of a silver lever. Some of the tribes Turner studied in employed shit to mark the liminal beings. It’s disgusting but true – they would smear themselves with it as costume, marker and protection (from the evil spirits). Which reminds me that we shouldn’t forget the liminal nature of shit – the fertilizing capacity of our own waste…

In lent, we choose to enter this middle ground. This difficult, ugly betweeness.

We choose to lay aside status, step away from stability, reduce our comfort. We enter the wilderness, we don sackcloth. We do not sate our appetites.

When we enter in to lent…we recognize the fullness of our own weakness and our dependence upon God’s mercy and grace.

In lent…we remember the depths of darkness that lie within our own histories and lives. The virtue of hopefulness & anticipation, become vital in that darkness.

In lent…we experience solidarity with the under-resourced, with the liminal, as a celebration of faith and reconciliation.

And maybe most of all – we participate in the Great Divine Gesture – we give up our riches to participate in the suffering of the world. We choose to become less.

Like Jesus, we go – into the shit.

I know that there’s a rich diversity of faith tradition in the readership. Whether you’re giving something up for lent or not – can I invite you to participate in the spirit of lent?

When you realize you are losing some control. When you feel overwhelmed by the flow of tasks. When you recognize that the light at the end of the tunnel is far away and getting dimmer. Or when you miss desperately that thing you’ve chosen to abstain from.

Now. Here. In weakness, in humiliation, in darkness. Join in the Great Divine Gesture.

happy fat tuesday

which reminds me of the theory that my friend Greg used to have -- that there are two types of people in the world. People who are skinny and sad and hungry and people who are -- happy fat.

and so -- happy fat -- became a kind of entelechial state. something to admire, to aspire toward.

hope y'all are wolfing down your paczis today -- a last celebratory moment in the season of epiphany...

peace~

yellow chair

I've been thinking a lot about the uses and meanings of space lately. (go and read -- its very good -- a bit of a kindred spirit)

the debate tournament happened in a place called the Philomathesian Lecture Hall at Kenyon College. It felt like a pub, and britain and dead poets society and like the place where all the honorable white guys have been gathering for all these centuries to think collectively about how they're going to shape things.

so no wonder -- since they've been shaping things for so long -- no wonder that i like the way that space feels.

sometimes i feel like i have more of an emotional connection with wood. but then i wonder if that's real or just conditioning. most of my office is old metal surfaces and concrete block, cement floor with an industrial weave rug over it and (worst of all) ceiling tile.

Do you already know how i feel about ceiling tile?

but sometimes this space can be a little bit sacred. mostly in moments when people are sitting in the yellow chair.

some of you know the yellow chair, others do not. Here's a photo:



Its been in my office ever since Grandma Erman's altzheimers forced her to give up her old house on the Erle Farm (century old log house, carefully covered and recovered in shiny white aluminium (please use british pronunciation on aluminium)). My father in law, Garry and my brother in law Brian looked at me as if I were a space alien when I suggested that I wanted the chair, and no, they shouldn't throw it out...but its lent itself to brilliant creative brainstorming, honest confrontation, broken expressions of pain, and mostly -- laughter and mundane conversation.

I think that the yellow chair, when read as an icon, indicates that i live a fortunate life. Sacred space in the profane world of concrete, steel and drop ceilings.

hope you find a yellow chair -- an airport where God can land in your day --

peace ~

(btw ~ if someone you know asks for prayer requests maybe you could mention the yellow chair. She's fallen on hard times, and I'm not sure if her springs are worth salvaging...any suggestions?)

i keep checking my blog

but there's never any new posts. It's been like a week.

crazy!

i travelled to Kenyon College with the Debate Team this weekend and as i drove through the hills and curves of southeastern ohio i listened to local radio. it's like a whole different world. they're still playing the hits on the pop and country charts, but the rest of the programming sounds like a completely other universe than format radio in the city sounds.

There's none of the ethereal other worldly zooms or zaps or beeps. No thunderously echoing DJ voices giving station promos between each ad and after each program. The ads don't sound like they rolled out of New York and Nashville.

Instead, DJs chat with their call-in listeners for twenty minutes. They chat about characters around town. Old friends hijinks. They laugh about ridiculous what-ifs. They speculate about the high school basketball game in two nights. The ads are read by the business owners and sound as raw as spoofs on Saturday Night Live. The drive-time DJ makes guest appearances at Spitlers restaurant every weekend and broadcasts live from Fiedler's Ford every thursday morning. He also calls the high school ball game, and intersperses his commentary with information about recent team injuries, family facts about the players and stories about how the two coaches got along when they were on the high school team together way back in the day.

Local radio reminds me of blogging. The broadcasts seem idiosyncratic, quirky and unpredictable. The cast of characters on many blogs is as expansive and unique as any one person's world.

But usually you can take comfort that no matter what happens in the lives of the DJs down at WTNS or WHBC -- the broadcast signal will not keep rolling.

So...I'll try to do better. The plan is NOT to slack off on my backburner since i have tenure. the *plan* is to slack off on my *frontburner* -- but I've got such a conscientious streak runnin through me...it's so hard to leave behind those habits...but that's a different blog.

peace out, faithful listeners~