Morning 10,400 at your job (year 40), age 65.

Last night I was able to talk with my youngest brother for quite a while. At 21 he has one of the most solid, and wise foundations of conviction that I have experienced in someone of his age. He began to contemplate the twenty-something trend specific to young men, husbands, and fathers of restlessness in a career that leads them to quit and instead pursue a passion, a conviction (like faith, leading them to enroll in seminary), or a hobby, hoping to wake up everyday with more purpose than the grindstone affords.

He said that he's been convicted to begin a process of praying and discerning now, before he has committed to his future, to ensure that he will be a man of integrity and faithfulness when he does have a family to lead and has committed to a career. I think his way of phrasing it was, "I realized that I'm going to have to wake up for the next 50 years and go to work. I want to know that I am choosing something that fits with God's plan for me, and is something that I believe in." That was an imagined paraphrase because I really don't have a close memory of what he said, but it has made me think all day about 1) prudence and 2) careers.

Working with college students I find that their rational for choosing a major and career path falls into several repeated categories: they know someone who has held the position; it is easy; notoriously, the vocation makes a lot of money (still the doctor lawyer stigma); the schedule is flexible; it fulfills what he/she is passionate about; he/she took a class in a particular area during general education and found it interesting. Beyond these very brief considerations, students do not know about, or concern themselves with the skill, schedule, daily routine of waking up to perform the job, employment opportunities and availability of the position, the personality and compatibility required, the type of person attracted to the field, and whether the environment and coworkers would sustain the position's appeal for the duration of a 50 year career.

(Career counseling is intended to alleviate this naivety, but a nearly empty career development center mostly serves frustrated alums who are so desperate for employment as an [enter specialization] that they are willing to pay $4 for a daily parking permit to come to campus and receive counseling. Unfortunately, they find at best, a secretarial position at a construction company, or possibly a social media marketing internship, the only jobs for a [rock star major] who had a 2.0 GPA because he didn't invest in classes that didn't interest him.)

That is my only theory as to how/why people would end up in marketing of any kind. I'm not informed enough to critique or analyze (big M)Marketing, and I respect a few friends in the field to preserve the integrity of the industry. That said, my training in textual studies and rhetoric has led me to deconstruct marketing as a manipulative system of language and media that constructs social ideologies, creating need, desire, norms, stereotypes, and comparisons that compel human behavior; through rhetorical appeal, humans are enticed to bite the Apple (at the moment, the iphone 4s).

I've also done quite a bit of research regarding online marketing and the potential of digital interfaces to provide target-marketing through search engine spiders and shiny, free Google accounts that are an all-in-one word-bank of variables that plot a histogram of my online self. Yet, even though banner ads for the stores where I shop online appear on many webpages that I search, promising "30% off of sale items," I have never clicked, because when I'm researching "dog breeds that don't smell or shed" I am not interested in Fall's new line of cozy sweaters -NO! It's insulting that as a consumer I'm targeted in a way that assumes I am a mindless, frenzied, pathos-driven fool, tempted by a picture, a price tag, a pretty, slender young woman -promising that I might just look like her in the same pants, even though she's blond, and I'm not; she's 6' and I'm not; she's wearing make-up, size-2, 6-inch heels, and I'm not; further, I don't even like her image or the clothes! My first concern is to wonder on what type of human being this appeal is effective! And, why would someone wake up every day for 5o years assuming that humans are mindless beasts, and contrive of ways to trap them into hedonism? (Beast and hedonism are nuanced words, sadly, but I intended them. Beast meaning stripped of the solely human capacity to reason that separates man from animal, therefore denying a consumer his humanity, and hedonism as in the becoming god of oneself to the pursuit and fulfillment of every craving, lust, and passion in which man becomes a brute, not unlike an animal, once again insinuating that man becomes the means of his own demoralization and effacement of identity as a human being.) I hope marketers can sleep at night on their silky sheets and down featherbeds. While they may be making money, the purpose of their life is to instill a sense of instability and worthlessness in people and the natural world; they rob people of beauty and of the peace of contentment and worth.

I read this article today in the Economist. I like the magazine, and find this article, for the sake of the content, beyond irritating. Not because of the undercurrent of Orwellian superstition, -No, I am not quitting facebook, covering up my webcam, or throwing away my iphone and moving to a cave that wouldn't be detected by Google maps -I'm simply frustrated that people are still giving their lives to the destruction of humans. In the humanities we celebrate the human mind, spirit, soul, and intellect, pressing into and encouraging the ability of the common man to affect the natural world for the better -yet what is suggested in the article is another way of stripping humans of any dignity (especially given the opening line of the article: "IMAGINE browsing a website when a saucy ad for lingerie catches your eye."), reducing them to beasts through hedonism (even heart and respiration rates!). Make your own conclusions about the article, but as a consumer I felt responsible for adding my voice, though it's tempting to think that it falls deafly.

We have discovered in the humanities that when humans are treated as beasts, they begin to act that way: see Sinclair, Lawrence, Elliot, Orwell, and nearly every other literary or philosophical text.

It leads me to wonder What do you/will you wake up to contribute or destroy every day for 50 years?

In the absence of a fail-safe

My affinity for sour gummy worms, and the frequency with which I visit Sprouts to get them from the bulk bin is getting out of hand, again. I had curbed this obsession once, when I seemed to lose my appetite for everything during the past four months, but it's back, voraciously! 3/4lb. is nearly gone, and it's been 3.5 days.

In addition to eating gummy worms I have been reading A Tale of Two Cities, Utopia, and re-thinking about Tess of The D'Urbivilles, which I read a few years ago. Last night in a discussion with some friends I shared that the feature of these books, from very different points in British history, are indicative of the religious extremism that was violent, brutal, and dark --BUT, that even in its extremism, provided a moral and ethical fail-safe for political and public society.

For example, stealing, forging, rioting, trespassing, violent crimes, adultery, witchcraft/sorcery, and verbal defamation were all punishable by some form of "Off with your ___," sometimes head, hand, freedom (as criminals were thrown into prison), respectability and reputation, etc. Dickens makes light of this, but satire is generally indicative of truth to some degree. At least in the expression of society as a whole, tolerance was not permissible, and was punishable by death. "God's laws" were a justified front for political enforcement of moral and ethical law. I say this loosely because there were divisions between the church, political state, and social codes of ethics, but largely the texts which I am referring to use religious figures as the satirical, heretical presence of these institutions, merged on many fronts.

Even with the institutional governance of the church and the monarchy, a strain of violence persisted: the private crimes against one's own family, against children and women, minority groups, and social outcasts. A husband has been forgiven in Hardy's text, not by the author, but within his public circles for beating his wife and children or verbally abusing them at home. A wealthy man takes freely of other men as slaves, and of women, amply, as mistresses or to curb his lust but momentarily, because his private affairs reached an impasse. Systems of accountability did not embed in the interpersonal relationships of characters; In Hardy's novel, innocent Tess implores her mother, "Why didn't you tell me there was danger in men? Why didn't you warn me? You did not help me!" Her mother replied, "I thought if I spoke of his fine feelings and what they might lead to, you would be evasive with him and lose your chance." It makes me sick, sick to read the "realism" of a novel, in which a mother would risk her daughter's purity and innocence for the opportunity of marrying a clearly disreputable man for the economic and social privilege that it would grant. I had hoped when I was less schooled in literary studies that the depravity of authors would sometime be censored, until I matured to realize that they recounted what they saw, both the ethical surface, and the frothing heart of private violence.

The dual nature of public and private has been balanced, albeit perversely, by regulation of the public self. The routine of dressing, behaving, addressing others, using body language or social signifiers to promote civility, genteel manners, respect, and courtesy have denoted the public figure to be who one "ought" to be, adhering to a loose moral and ethical standard. However, the deconstruction of such ideologies, the final accomplishment of the last millennium, largely dismembered the ethical front of the public face. Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and their liege of contemporaries took language, institutions, material being, and stripped it of an accessible public interface so that the remnants: disconnected, empty motions became meaningless. In its place, the private man, often indulgent, crude, and motivated by self, without the check of a universal ethic, is carried into public life to taint an entire culture. Our friend said last night, "We are a society degrading once again into sloppy, smelly, barbarians," and he motioned to his frumpy green sweatshirt. "We're nearly 3o, but because we are single, without 'real jobs,' we are still considered guys and girls. We wear the same clothes we wore when we were twelve: t-shirts with a faded picture, comfortable jeans, and a worn-in sweatshirt."

And the history master's student shook her head regretfully when we posed this question, what happens when in 50 years we have done away with a moral and ethical system that has acted as a fail-safe for the world implicitly until this time? How long will it take the private sinful nature to prosper infectiously, or will a new ethic emerge? If not from the church, what will be the source?

In the same way that I eat gummy worms shamelessly, a young friend of a little boy that we know was playing at our friend's house. Our friend Mr. King walked into his kitchen to find the little guy devouring yogurt from the refrigerator, and intending to go back for a can of soda. "Hey man, you're eating my yogurt," Mr. King said. Little Mr. shrugged, "So. I wanted it."

In the wake of post-modernism I find my responsibility as a scholar. I admire the theorists who tore down systems of meaning brilliantly, and have spent much of my time as a scholar critiquing and praising their work. However, I don't believe that in the absence of a public ethic and perverse religious dogma, which governed systems and institutions, is gaping meaninglessness and the advent of exclusive private expression and indulgence. There is instead opportunity for meaning to be found beyond the material; one place where we can go is into the metaphysical or spiritual realm, a dimension of real that only now has the opportunity of being explored because the end of the material is meaninglessness, suggesting that there is something more.

Ties between the heart and the imagination

I imagine that being in these places would let me feel things buried deep inside.

Literary romance, secret, lurking muse, tragic flaw; time does not seal what words and images preserve. Love seems eternal on earth, I wonder whether in heaven.

We always sit and talk. Just once I wish that wicker were cushioned, and ivy so dark green that it would soak the weight from our words and leave us with thoughts, light, so that they float through the air, fragrant, charming, and audible like flowers and wind chimes.

Brooding spirits reside in a beautiful place; it is not ominous with darkness, but peacefully shelters the numinous self from oversimplification.

Stables bridle free spirits for their journey into unknown wildernesses.

A treasure sought among cobbles and brick will never be found until one meets himself in concrete's sturdy cell.

Contrarily. Books are not precious for their decomposing ideas, but for their metaphor, of thought, enriched by the discipline to write.

The journey ends in a small room, with small windows, beside a small mantle, at a small table, with small company. This is the very best conclusion for any heroine.

Higher Education

The University of Chicago: where I hope to go soon!

I made a rather shocking discovery last night: I really like school, and learning. This, coming from a person whose hand had to be pried off of the car door handle every single morning of elementary school and junior high, who purposely walked .2 mph to the bus stop to "accidentally" miss the bus, who dreaded back to school supplies, clothes, and even avoided playing with friends from school outside of the school premises, is quite surprising. Even college was disagreeable, well, my time at Biola and Abilene ; I had to force myself to attend droll classes because of attendance policies, and even ended up with mediocre grades simply for this fact. CSUB was a bit more fulfilling. I liked learning from people who loved their subjects, even geology!, because their expertise and enthusiasm made learning fascinating, and convinced me that my time studying silt layers actually mattered for something.

The point is that I'm not the cookie cutter "good student," and in fact my grades display a correlation between classes that I felt had a point, beyond just checking in, and those that did not. Enter graduate school, where classes are aimed solely at cultivating area-specific expertise, taught by THE people whose work keeps these disciplines alive. Beyond the ideal, this just means a bunch or quirky, somewhat radical enthusiasts toting books and specialized vocabulary from conferences to the classroom -it's awesome! How I loved night classes after daylight savings time that began at 7:30. We gathered after dark to discuss Samuel Johnson's application of ethics and reason to human nature, and often got onto a tangent about his contemporaries, biography, etc. And the previous semester Patrick and I sat through readings of middle English tales, and the influence of Germanic Anglo Saxon legend on enchantresses, Merlin, and Sir Gawain's Green Knight. Though I complained often about the tangents in this class -modern adaptations of medieval legend, sword fighting and medieval martial arts, and the woman as a temptress, it was nice to sit beside Patrick, exchange knowing and bored looks with a few friends, and to engage my mind in patience.

I conclude that a part of me is missing. I feel a gaping hole in my mind, for fellowship, intellectual collaboration, ideas, and scholarship. I still pursue my own study, but it isn't as satisfying to debate with myself, or take notes that will remain in a notebook.

And secondly, I think I miss my students. I would have admitted in the past that "I hate teaching," but to be honest, it's just hard work, so very hard because students break your heart. Their pride, stubbornness, insecurity, rude behavior, disrespect, and fear of worthlessness all display that they just need to be loved; as children becoming adults, it's crucial that they receive a sense of identity that I, in part, have an opportunity to instill, and it's more my disappointment rather than offense that causes me to respond in anger.

One of my professor friends sent me an email today containing this section from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

All you need is love. Well, maybe that's not all you need to be a good teacher. It helps to have an advanced degree, and maybe some actual knowledge of the subject matter. But in teaching, as in other human relationships, a little love goes a long way.
When I talk about love, I mean, first and foremost, love for students. Of course you're not going to experience strong feelings of affection for each and every student, and that's probably just as well. There will be some students you don't like much at all. That's normal.
But a good teacher has a love for students in general, students as a group. I make that point because I've known so many teachers who seem to dislike students, even to hold them in contempt. You can tell by what they say about students in private.
Whenever I hear a faculty member constantly talking about how stupid or rude students are, I think to myself, "Then why are you doing this?" It's little wonder that their teaching ratings show that students don't care much for them, either.
Also when I talk about love, I'm referring to love of the subject matter. We've all had teachers who appeared bored with their own lectures, disenchanted with their assignments, and indifferent to class discussion. Then we've had teachers whose passion for their subject matter made us feel passionate about it, too. For many of us, it was the latter group who inspired us to become teachers.
Of course, even if you clearly love teaching, grant students adult status, give an Oscar-worthy performance every day, and resist your jerkier impulses, that doesn't mean your students will come to love your class. But at least maybe they won't hate it—or you—quite as much.
-Rob Jenkins