on graduate school, clifford geertz, and the process of finding peace.

Earlier this semester I swore off the academic study of religion.  It was an abrupt conclusion I came to as I realized that it put needless constraints on what topics I approached and how I approached them, so for the time being I decided to set it aside.  It’s been freeing to just hunker down and get to know the methods and possibilities of the field of political culture, especially in this odd moment when I don’t have any kind of major research going on. 

Of course, I got my start as a historian studying religion- going to a Lutheran school as a devout Mormon can have that effect on a person- and they say you can leave home but it never really leaves you.   (Now that I think about it, though, my efforts to swear off religious studies were in vain because I’m in a religion class right now- ok, so I’m around the study of religion but it’s so steeped in ethnic terms that I’m not noticing it.  Which probably gets to this whole other notion of “being present” in my life that I’m working on, for obvious reasons that include my forgetting that I just spent 3 hours of my day talking about Catholicism.)

At any rate, I don’t think a lot about religion as it relates to myself any more, that is perhaps the real change here. I am happy with my relatively unexamined life (which it turns out IS worth living).  I lack a religious identity rooted in present practice- the best I can usually muster is an oblique "I used to be Mormon." As the flat on the ODT remains unfixed and I find myself worshipping at the Church of the Folding Bike—a sacred space I tend to plow through so relentlessly that I do very little actual reflection—I just don’t have much of a spiritual focus anymore.  That realization, somewhat ironically, gave me  pause this evening.

I didn't come to it in overtly spiritual consideration, but more in pondering the question of what I might take from my experience in graduate school if I were to quit now and go to work full time.  I’m not necessarily contemplating dropping out as much as I am trying to extrapolate some meaning from this life that I chose a year ago—a life in Philadelphia that is intensely fulfilling and abundant, and simultaneously wrought with deprivation and uncertainty.  The best answer I could come up with was that my time in graduate school has given me a framework to help me understand and appreciate my world.  I felt that as an undergraduate, but there is something deeper and richer about that awareness in the midst of year three of graduate school and year twenty-five of life.  It is a feeling that is difficult to express.

So I was happy tonight, reading an essay to prepare me to start grading a stack of midterms tomorrow, to find an eloquent articulation of what I felt.  It was, perhaps not unsurprisingly, in an essay about religion.  Clifford Geertz writes:

"There are at least three points where chaos—a tumult of events which lack not just interpretations but interpretability—threatens to break in upon man: at the limits of his analytic capacities, at the limits of his powers of endurance, and at the limits of his moral insight.  Bafflement, suffering, and a sense of intractable ethical paradox are all, if they become intense enough or are sustained long enough, radical challenges to the proposition that life is comprehensible and that we can, but taking though, orient ourselves effectively within it—challenges with which any religion, however “primitive,” which hopes to persist must attempt somehow to cope."

(Here's the link for Geertz’s essay “Religion As a Cultural System”)

To some degree, as a historian, my supreme confidence in the interpretability of everything has made me somewhat impervious to chaos.  It’s a post-modern sense of confidence- there is so much gray area and there are so many possible right answers and explanations- but yet it''s a confidence that imposes a fair amount of order on my world.  The intensity of “bafflement, suffering, and a sense of intractable ethical paradox” is tempered both by the overwhelming scope of history and the inherent mysteries imposed by silences and forgetting and losses and suppressions.  To “do” history is to dedicate myself to the possibility that I am capable of understanding in spite of my limits, and maybe even because of my limits.  It is a simple, stark, and seldom acknowledged sense of hope that has relieved me of the constraints of what in the present seems possible, necessary, or planned.  Even adrift, I am oriented.

I would have never imagined finding the infinite and spiritual and plain in the secular realm of my work, but it is one of many unexpected encounters that has made this process  worth the effort. And for me, right now, that's the answer I need.

reflections on "the way 'we' live now."

David Brooks' column really got me today. I have been following the Sotomayor confirmation pretty closely because I've found it all together horrifying. The questions mustered under the euphemistic concern over her "identity"- her race, ethnic heritage, and gender (pick your construct!) have angered me deeply. Is this the America I live in? Why is her racial identity an issue when John Roberts' wasn't?

So I've been mad because it's so out of control and as a homeless person I can't open the safety valve with a quick email to my elected representative (Utahns, do you know what your senior senator has been up to today?). Fortunately the Brooks column helped me to see a different side of things. He looks at Sotomayor's biography and says, yah, it's an awesome American story about civil rights coming a long way, but also, "It’s the upward mobility story — about a person who worked hard and contributes profoundly to society, but who also sacrificed things along the way."

Brooks then goes on to catalog Sotomayor's relationships throughout her life- an extended family as a child, mentors, friends, and a spouse as an adult. This was the part of the piece that really hit me. Excuse the lengthy quote:

"This isn’t the old story of a career woman trying to balance work and family. This is the story of pressures that affect men as well as women ... It’s the story of people in a meritocracy that gets more purified and competitive by the year, with the time demands growing more and more insistent.

These profiles give an authentic glimpse of a style of life that hasn’t yet been captured by a novel or a movie — the subtle blend of high-achiever successes, trade-offs and deep commitments to others. In the profiles, you see the intoxicating lure of work, which provides an organizing purpose and identity. You see the web of mentor-mentee relationships — the courtship between the young and the middle-aged, and then the tensions as the mentees break off on their own. You see the strains of a multicultural establishment, in which people try to preserve their ethnic heritage as they ascend into the ranks of the elite. "

I wish I didn't feel this so deeply. I'm not pretentious enough to say I'm apart of the "elite" or to seriously self-identify as "a high achiever," nor am I naive enough to think that these strains are limited to those of a particular educational level or class attainment. But, I can say wholeheartedly that I have felt what Brooks describes, and to see it on 'paper' freaked me out, but it also gave me a lot of comfort. Particularly when I consider the crazy semester I just finished, where the work I loved started to feel like my undoing and I struggled to negotiate my role as a "mentee," it was nice for someone in the world to point out that yes, this is common.

Brooks concludes powerfully that in Sotomayor's story, "You see the way people not only choose a profession, it chooses them. It changes them in a way they probably didn’t anticipate at first.... You don’t succeed at that level without developing a single-minded focus, and struggling against its consequences."

Every time I read that quote, the tears come right into my eyes. I don't think I ever could have comprehended how consuming graduate school would be- the development of my single-mindedness was for me a somewhat painful process. It happened as soon as I started my program, as I confronted what it meant to miss my nieces' birthday and how little time and energy I had to manage the significant issues I had with my faith. It wasn't that those things quit mattering or that I became immune to the sting I felt from them, but like pioneers chucking stuff out of a wagon to lighten the load, I learned how to tune stuff out that wasn't right in front of me so I could handle the tasks at hand. I think that's been the craziest part-- somewhere between those heartrending first couple of months and the moment towards the end when moving east didn't seem like such a big deal because it felt like the only deal. It's still something that's constantly being reconciled, but I would say by and large, at some point the consequences stopped feeling sad and ultimately I've gotten to the point where doing what needs to be done so I can do what I want to do makes me really happy.

Nobody told me that that would happen.

(Brooks doesn't talk about the happiness element much, but that's what this article made me think about. Being successful isn't entirely about surrendering relationships as he runs the risk of implying, but man, you do learn how to become happy spending time with yourself).

don't bunt.

My cousin posted this picture on facebook this week. It brought back a lot of memories. Back during my days as a receptionist, I always looked forward to when it was my turn to take the company cars for cleaning at the Elephant Car Wash. It was an hour and a half out of the claustrophobic hallway office that I shared with three other women, a kind of sacred time for listening to NPR and The Mountain. It's funny what a picture brings back. I can almost hear the Tom Petty coming out of the radio as I headed down 5th Avenue.

I was connected yet again to that transitonary period of my life (between educational institutions, and, little did I know, out of the church) when I discovered a cannister of change in one of my dresser drawers as I was packing today. In addition to the change, there were barrettes and other detritus that I'd been stashing for no real reason. I was happy to find one of the bits was meaningful.

On my first day at Callison, my co-workers took me out to lunch at Palomino, a restaurant in the building we worked in. I felt so grown-up and professional-- until we sat down at the table. There were little cards on the table with inspirational quotes inside. I saved mine because it horrified me at the time-- here I was starting a new job, only to realize on my very first day that it was not enough.


Needless to say, it set the tone for my employment there. I finally reconciled my aspirations with my faith (at least temporarily), secretly applied to graduate school and ended up here in Utah. I was glad to find this little reminder of my time in Seattle, that profound year of deciding to be somebody. For all the doubts I've had lately about where I decided to do my PhD, it was reassuring to remember that this is not the first time I've gone jobless in my little Honda car towards the unknown.

attack of the listicle.

I am posting because that random Ahmadinejad bit is kind of lame to leave at the top of my blog for days at a time. I haven't been posting because I've been:

1. Conquering Word in the Great Thesis Reformat of 2009. It was just complicated enough for me to put it off for a month, and easy enough to finish in about an hour. But it's been submitted and I can now focus on the other stuff I need to write before the semester's up (focus here means "passively pick at." give me a week and it will mean "intensely author").

2. Riding my bike in 75 degree weather.

3. Eating popsicles to recover from said rides.

4. Trying to figure out how to live without a microwave. I'm already tired of sandwiches, chicken nuggets and cooking on the stove. Current solutions to this problem (which comes with the added hitch of moving in 2 weeks and not wanting to buy anything) include going to the store to buy some crackers and Hostess cupcakes or consuming only things I've got that don't require cooking. I am pretty sure I have enough calories in my liquor box to sustain me for two weeks.

5. Packing. Yep, I've starting packing. So what if it's non-essentials like coats and church clothes (what church?) and sweaters (god help me if it snows again) (first parenthetical comment negates possibility of the second?).

6. Watching good movies. Serpico last night, Doubt tonight. Tomorrow I'm watching Step Brothers because everything I've been watching is way too dark, emotional, and high quality. Total Netflix binge.

7. Feeling jealous of Big Brother's new Madsen. Don't tell ODT (though really, I don't have a kid, let alone many kids, to necessitate an entire bucket bike). Don't forget to make a donation while you're at his page. I've upped my donation-- up yours.

I've done other stuff too, but I just realized that it's finally not Earth Day anymore so I can drive my car to the store. You didn't really expect me to live on tonic water, Maker's Mark and tins of tuna, did you?

this blog is turning into a bunch of emotional crap. somebody find me a video of a dog running into a wall or something, stat.

It's funny to me the way my perceptions have changed since I decided to move away from this place. Tonight I was looking for a qtip when I happened upon the giant jug of handsoap refill. I refilled the soap dispenser and realized that I probably won't need to fill up the handsoap again before I leave, and alas the jug of handsoap was magically transformed into a jug of bubble bath.*

Everything's been like that the past few days. I drive down the Sunnyside-- the street I drive down the most in this town--and I think about how there will be a time in my life, quite soon really, when I don't drive down that street, when I won't have occasion to recall how I almost ran over some extras from "High School Musical 3" on that very road last summer during a freak rain storm.** And the mountains, yes, today-- absolutely pissed that I had to put on my puffy coat-- I looked at the mountains and noted to myself that this could be the last time I get to see snow on those mountains as one who lives in Utah.***

I did this when I left Tacoma, but having lived here just nineteen months I find it striking. So I order that pizza from The Pie, drop in to see my favorite people in the department, and take another longing look at the valley because I know I will miss Utah when I'm gone.****



*About eight ounces will do if you are going for an effect similar to "Pretty Woman."
**Yes, that was one sentence. Lately I've been rewriting the newspaper articles in my head as I read them... I'm in a strange place with words these days.
***Who am I kidding? This is Utah!
****Which is not to say I'm not excited about leaving, but that's another post all together.