Memento

The sun was shining through the window up until about a few minutes ago; then it was cloudy and even felt a bit cooler. Now that I've about finished the blog, the sun is coming back out (is that a sign?) and I think I'll be just on time to head home for lunch.

I got a nice table in the window and a cup of tea; they gave me a ceramic mug when I said I was staying here, even without my asking. That was pretty cool. I got through the stacks from both classes in a little more than an hour; that bodes pretty well for the workload over the summer. (It helped that a lost a lot of people from the evening class). What also bodes well is the the overall quality of the writing is pretty high; I don't think I'll have a lot of working herding stragglers into the main group. All in all, a pretty successful first assessment.

I woke up without an alarm about 6:30 am. I cleaned up all my stuff from the trip, updated budget for the end-of-the-month, answered emails, and like that. This week, we need to get the Company Picnic organized, and I spent a little time on that, too. Otis got up a little later and started prepping for her morning massage appointments. We had breakfast, and then I packed up the laptop and papers I had to respond and headed down to the Tully's in Wallingford.

We made it home before 9:30, but we were a bit fagged out. Some Red Envelopes had shown up, so we stuck Rabbit-Proof Fence into the spectrator and watched it pretty much in silence. It's a fairly serious film, anyway; I felt it was not so much Good as Important. The narrative arc is fairly flat, even though I found the young girl who played the lead very engaging. Kenneth Branagh, on the other hand, was in his standard Evil Englishman mode, giving more of a schematic than a performance. The scenery was spectacular. Perhaps the biggest event of the evening, however, was the first occasion of Otis reclining on the couch with both of the cats (on her chest and lap) at the same time. Needless to say, she loved it, and went to bed happy.

On the way back, we found a new place to eat: Thai Dish, a little restaurant off the outlet exit from I-5 at Centralia, just down from the Arco station. The food was passable if not extraordinary, but the proprietor is friendly and the service fast, and it was such a nice change from fast food or a Shari's/Denny's kind of place. I would suggest you try it on your next run down or up the corridor; our Cap Hill types will want to ask for extra spicy (they lean to mild).

Otis had managed to take a side trip to Lake Oswego on her way to pick me up at class; it's actually easy to do if you miss an exit in Portland, and coming back from Janzten Beach she did just that. Nonetheless, she was there right on time, and we even gave a classmate a ride to the train station before we hit the road to Seattle at about 5:30 pm or so.

The second day of class was much like the first, but with some technical glitches that required Scott to skip one lecture segment that I would have enjoyed; nonetheless, it was another productive day and I enjoyed it. I had pizza for lunch, but I had to go to the okay pizza place (Pizza Shmizza) because I couldn't find the good pizza place (Hot Lips) I had been told was in the area. During the afternoon session, I was one of the whiners who got Scott to critique our work first so we could leave on time. (I loved the class but we wanted to hit the road early.)

On Saturday morning, we availed ourselves of the complimentary breakfast at the motel. It was actually pretty good; I liked that they had hard-boiled eggs, even if Otis declined them. The coffee was awfully weak, though. After breakfast, Otis got ready for another day of adventuring that was to include the sales-tax-free shopping and I walked through the Pearl down to the school. (I noticed along the way that there are more runners in Portland than I see in Seattle.)

After dinner and our stroll, we just relaxed in our room and wound up watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith on the cable until we went to sleep. We both thought it was a bad movie and that even the action sequences (much less the "plot" or "story") were pretty boring, yet somehow we could not turn away...



After freshening up, we walked through the neighborhood. Otis was in the mood for Italian, so we ate at Pastina Pastaria. The food was good and pretty inexpensive; the ambiance could have been a little cozier. We skipped dessert in lieu of walking the neighborhood some some with gelato cones from a place down the street. The Pearl really is a cool neighborhood, perhaps a little self-consciously so, but the street life and shops and restaurants and wonderful combination of big, old houses, new condos, and converted industrial lofts are really tempting.

We broke for lunch and I ate at a nearby diner with a fellow from class; I had a good veggie burger and Jeff, my classmate, told me about his plans for a webcomic. The afternoon sped by with more studio work and we didn't even get through all the critique before we had to call it a day. I called Otis as I left and we met in the neighborhood and headed back to the motel to start the evening.

After tea, Otis headed off to see how early she could check in to the Holiday Inn Express (she'll tell you about her adventures on her own blog) and I walked the few blocks to the art school. I'll be posting details on the course and samples of my classwork on my comix blog, so I won't repeat that stuff here. Suffice it to say that even though the class felt more like confirmation than enlightenment, it was well worth it, and that Scott McCloud has an excellent classroom presence. The class started off with a lecture and then moved into a studio room, where we created pieces and worked in small groups to put Scott's theories into practice on paper all morning.

The alarm got me up at 4:00 am and we easily made it out of the house before 5:00 am, even with making coffee and toasting some mini-bagels for the road. The drive down was a piece of cake; the weather was mostly clear and we didn't hit any traffic to speak of until the Interstate Bridge. We got there early enough to take a little tour of the Pearl District, the gentrified industrial neighborhood that both our motel and the college are in (about twenty blocks apart). Ever since Weiden + Kennedy Advertising moved into the Pearl, more and more restaurants and hip hangouts have sprung up, more and more buildings have been converted to residences, Trendy-Third Avenue has extended north, and the city has put in a streetcar to connect the district to downtown. The result is something like what you'd get if you crossed Broadway with Belltown and added mass transit - totally cool. We stopped at the Tea Zone (a lot like Remedy Teas) and had some quiche and crumpets for a more proper brekkies.

Thursday passed according to plan: teaching, TCB, and more teaching. We actually went to bed pretty early, knowing that we were hitting the road in the morning for my class in Graphic Novel Storytelling with Scott McCloud down at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland.

Homework sucks and I slept until noon today

Just kidding, of course. Go read An Unpublished Life and wish Yojimbo a happy blogoversary.

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I may not have slept until noon yesterday, but I might as well have, for all the "productive" work I got done. It was weekend without papers to grade, and I reveled in doing nothing. I have three more classes left this quarter, and one more stack of papers to read (which I will collect today), and then we're done. Here's to the last sprint toward the finish line and a lap around the infield!

Part of the doing nothing included watching The Patriot, the Mel Gibson vehicle about the American Revolution from a few years back. The characterizations were pretty flat and the acting pedestrian, and the art direction reminded me too much of a Disney version of Johnny Tremaine, and yet the movie was trying to grapple with some important and interesting themes: the pull of duty versus the responsibilities of family, the conflicting impulses of justice and mercy and vengeance, the possibility of honor and the brutal reality of war, the hope of redemption. Much of the investigation of these themes was undercut by cliched plot points and character development, but it' was there under the the surface. I was left with the feeling that this might have been a much better movie than it was.

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I got my first Utilikilt, a khaki neotraditional, right at the beginning of this millennium; I wore it that first weekend that I picked it up, to the Folklife festival and to a party. Even then, it didn't get too much notice or too many remarks here in Seattle.

I was living in Vancouver, Washington at the time, and I didn't wear it much down there. I did wear it to my graduation from a community leadership program in June of '02, and as part of my dress uniform in my last days as head of college security the following September. I picked up another neotrad before I moved to Spokane for grad school, but didn't wear them at all over there.

When I returned to live in Seattle in 2003, I didn't wear the kilts at work, either at the writing center or then teaching, but I often wore them at home or when going out. I remember in particular New Year's Eve '03 -'04, when it was pretty darn cold wandering around Cap Hill.

In the summer of '05, I decided to start wearing a kilt to work while teaching at Cascadia, because it was hot summer and they were comfortable. I continued the practice into the fall, at all the schools I taught at, and all of a sudden all I was wearing was kilts all the time. It became my trademark, in a way. Students knew me as "the teacher who wears a kilt"; I met people and made friends who wound up never seen me in anything else. I never had a really bad experience in Seattle or Portland wearing the kilt, and the many positive remarks and compliments overshadowed the few nasty remarks that I ran into. (Most women loved the kilt.)

It got to the point that I didn't even think about it much anymore; I still liked the gender-bending response it could evoke, particularly in children, and the signal hipness it carried in certain circles, but mostly it became just what I wore, like my Chuck Taylors or hooded sweatshirts. I knew it was still unusual and atypical, but really didn't think about it much. I picked up a heavier "workman" kilt for winter and a nylon "Spartan" sport kilt for summer, as well as more formal gray twill. I wore kilts grocery shopping and at weddings, playing badminton and hosting parties - pretty much all the time.

Now this year, I have picked up some three-quarter length pants - knickers, if you will. One thing that kilts aren't quite suited for is bike-riding, and since I want to do a lot of riding to school from here on in, and because I don't like teaching in shorts, I thought that knickers would be a nice alternative. But here's the funny thing: people seem disappointed that I am not wearing a kilt. I have gotten more remarks lately about my lack of a kilt than I think I got when I first started wearing one, from friends, casual acquaintances, students, and colleagues.

It's a bit odd. If my wearing a kilt was a statement of anything, it was that clothing choices should not be as restrictive as we (as a culture) have made them, but actually I wasn't really trying to make any statement at all - I just like kilts. Switching to knickers doesn't really matter, does it? I don't mind being associated with a trademark article of clothing - heck, the blog is named for three - but at the same time, I certainly hope it's not the only thing that defines me.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is most often thought of as a hero for the African American community. His contribution to the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties in America will never be forgotten, and it is important to remember that Dr. King was also a crusader for social justice in all its forms. Sometimes to the dismay of his colleagues, Dr. King spoke out publicly against the Vietnam War, with his usual eloquence. A longtime ally of organized labor, Dr. King was on his way to support a garbage workers' strike when he was assassinated. This is why I recall Dr. King not only as a Black leader, but as a man of conscience and an example of the best we all could be in all ways.

"At the heart of all that civilization has meant and developed is 'community' – the mutually cooperative and voluntary venture of man to assume a semblance of responsibility for his brother."

Auld lang syne

I wonder about New Year's Eve sometimes. This whole December 31 to January 1 transition seems to have significance only because we say it does. It's not an astronomical or seasonal marker; it doesn't even have a very long history as a end-start time socially: March 1 was the original date of choice under the Roman calendar, and although it was dropped in 153 BC, it hung on in some jurisdictions until the 18th century. The Jewish new year occurs between September 5 and October 5, by Gregorian reckoning; the Chinese year changes sometime between January 21 and February 21. The Islamic calendar is lunar, so they have a movable new year every eleven months. The Tibetans, the Tamil and the Thai all use other dates than December 31 to mark the new year, as do the Bengali and Punjabi.

The January to December run marks the IRS year, but not most fiscal budget years. (How does that happen, anyway?) The academic year has its own measures, and terms of office in government rarely match the calendar year.

In any case, the new year is upon us, and the arbitrary nature of the date does not negate its significance as a social occasion or its usefulness as a milestone.

So I take this moment to reflect and to give thanks for the world I was lucky enough to be born into and for the people I have been fortunate enough to meet along the way. I generally have the same two resolutions every year; this year I add one more:

I will try to talk less and listen more.
I will try to ask more questions and make fewer statements.
I will look at the situations in which I find myself and ask how a little kindness might help.

Happy New Year, everyone!