Eight Legged Freaks

In this house we had a pet for roughly 4 days. He was very quiet and I'm not quite sure where he went, but now that he's gone, I'm not sure I'm even impacted.

Let me rewind. I walked into the bathroom about a week or so ago to find an upturned glass sitting on the little plastic wal*mart-esque dresser that contains toiletries.

"That's odd," I thought I neared the glass, "why on earth would someone upturn a glass in the bathrOOOOHHH MY GOD THAT IS THE BIGGEST DAMN SPIDER I'VE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE!" I'm not kidding, this spider inside the glass was so damn big we could have put a lamp on it used it as an end table. It was so large that it warranted a sign warning people not to feed it, lest it get any bigger and start demanding its own bedroom. A few days later I found that the glass (and massive spider) had disappeared. I'm hoping that someone released the fellow into the wild to wreak havoc on someone else's bathroom.

This episode isn't COMPLETELY unexpected, as we do have a number of spiders that tend to make a commute through the various rooms of our house. I don't know where they come from, but there's like some sort of perverse spidery highway running through our house. Usually I'm not big on killing things, but since our house became the set for Charlotte's Web VII: The Spidering, I've adapted my harm no living thing rule to: "Harm no living thing that doesn't have more than 7 limbs and is larger than your palm and is skittering across your floor." Thankfully the little devils have yet to make it into my room. It will become a guaranteed arachnocidal hotspot the minute they do.

Now that I've scared my girlfriend away from ever visiting me, let me tell you about my day. I went to a my first geography class of the year, and guess what? It was about geography! We talked about real, honest-to-goodness geography. Not statistics. Not interviews. Space! SPACE! How refreshing.

I am torn, however, because of one of the readings we had for the class. Some of you may know of the eminent Marxist geographer, David Harvey. And some of you may know of my general disdain for Marxist geography. (If you don't know what Marxist geography, wait for the bottom where I'll explain it.) Well, my first readings for todays class were David Harvey writings, the first of which was a piece that ripped into the RAE and the subsequent effect that it has on British Academia and the output of work.

Woah woah woah, Trenary, you didn't tell us you were going to go into academic mumbo jumbo. And what in the sam hill is an RAE?

Okay, I'll make this easy. RAE stands for Research Assessment Exercise. To make it even easier, it's like No Child Left Behind but for higher education. Essentially, this means that unless academics put out enough published research of a certain caliber, funding money can be withheld by the British government. And while we're at this, let get a few things straight. "A certain caliber" doesn't necessarily mean that the work is good. It just means that the committee of scholars that judges the works submitted from any department in whatever university have to approve of it. Oh, and even though geographers will oversee geographers, the specialties of the graders doesn't necessarily coincide with that of the work being submitted. A problem since geography is a widespread discipline (or undiscipline.) So you have these academics investing a shit tonne of energy into putting out as much research as possible so that they have a chance of getting money. What's more, according to David Harvey, is that the governments desire for certain types of work has led to a decrease in the actual quality of the scholarship. Once again, think No Child Left Behind. 

And here I am thinking, "Hmmm... this makes sense." 

So here I am, having an academic that is at the bottom of my list of favorites (Aside from one particular fellow at Nottingham who serves as my "absolute zero" against which all other professors may be gauged.) championing my assertion that many (but not all) British academics are in-the-box-thinking research drones. Not necessarily a bad thing to be if you like writing stuff more than you like disseminating knowledge. (These things aren't the same thing at all.) 

Unsurprisingly the 3-professor panel that was hosting the class all argued against this, citing things like differences in how much American university costs and bringing up the protection that tenure brings about. But really it's all excuses. It wasn't acceptable for me to write about the wrong topic and it isn't alright for them to pawn off their academic and teaching failings on the Academic system. But I digress. The class is really good, and I'm looking forward to it.

And with that in mind, Imma retire and do some reading, cause that's what I pay the University lots of money to do.

You can dance if you want to, folks.

- Jonathan "Death From Above" Trenary

*Marxist geography is a subset of social and economic geography that basically looks for spaces of inequality concerning class and money. The most irritating thing about Marxist geography, though, is that there's always gotta be some conflict or crisis acting as an agent of change. Stuff can't just happen. Always gotta be something. Bah.

Polar Bears And My House (Separately)

Who are you?

I'm Bapman.

Hello boys and girls. Today we're gonna talk about acclimation. More specifically, surprise-acclimation. (Surpracclimation?) I got off the boat from China and walked back into England to find a strange feeling of familiarity. It almost felt like coming home. Home? Is that right? Can England be my home? It's a strange notion for me. I didn't grow up here and although when in the presence of three or more limeys I might get an accent from time to time, I'm pretty American about the way I do things. (For instance, I tolerate queues. I don't revel in them.) I don't feel like it's right for me to call England my home, as I'm not English, nor do I ever plan to be. And yet, chere Angleterre feels more familiar to me than Virginia these days. It's an odd realization to stumble on (as I and countless others in history have) that while you're away from the place you deem home, that place and the people in are still moving and living and doing the things that people do, whether you're there or not. This isn't an Earth-shattering revelation, to be sure. But I think it's important to remember this.  

I know that I will come back to Purcellville to find a Taco Bell, but what other surprises does the old girl have in store for me? New roads? New speed limits? New houses spawned by malevolent, avarice-fueled developers, dumped without abandon in the countryside like a bad case of diarrhea? I don't know. It's a mystery to me. But Nottingham, it feels natural these days. If a Taco Bell shows up, I'll damn well know about it. 

This whole line of thinking creates some rather interesting geographical questions of a cognitive nature. Can homes be mobile things? Surely anyone who's lived in a trailer park will say yes. Ah, says I, but those are places to live. A home is more abstract than a simple box with furniture in it. It is a thing of meaning. And how about the multiplicity of a home? Is it possible to have more than one? In the past I would have said, "yes," but now that I think on it, England and Virginia have never shared home status for me at the same time. There's never an easy footing in this realm of geography. Cognitive geography is such a hazy place all of the time. Until technology reaches a point where humans can share their cognitive geographies, contemplating it is merely mental masturbation.

Since coming back to England, I've noticed or have been re-reminded of things in the country. The first is somewhat pleasant. It seems that every time I go through customs, the person processing me through is always super-interested in me and what I do. My ever-sagacious Uncle Gene would tell me it's because I look like a terrorist. I don't think this is the reason. It's more of a general human interest that these customs officials seem to have. When I came into the country a few days ago, the fellow at the desk asked me all sorts of questions. "Why did you decide to study in England?" "How are you finding it here?" "What's your favorite pub food?" "Do you like pina coladas or taking walks in the rain?" That's par for the course. It's kind of nice, actually. 

I've also come to love the bap. Black American Princess? No, a bap is a fluffy on the inside, crispy on the outside sandwich bun.

This is a bap. A Bacon Bap to be more precise.

Anyone that knows me, knows my love of the sandwich. Given the ability to give high fives to historic figures, Jesus would receive the first, but the Earl of Sandwich would get the second. The sandwich is, without a doubt, the finest and most important invention in the history of mankind. More important than the alphabet, the automobile or even the printing press. I could go through life illiterate and riding a donkey as long as the sandwich still existed. Automatically, you might understand why bread plays such an important part in my life. I don't know why it took me so long to start using baps for my sandwiches, but since I have, the game has changed. I believe I have experienced  a point akin to when the first cave-people discovered that they didn't have to sit around waiting for lightning to strike a tree in order to cook their meals. Baps are that good.  Fixin's are also crucial, but in England fixin's are called *"salad." And I've known about "salad" for some time.

I've been having some intestinal issues of late, that I suspect result from the difference in foods since coming back from China. As a result, I must take my leave of you. And although we shall part, take solace in the fact that the toilets in this house have wide pipes and are nigh uncloggable.

May it never rain on your parade.

-Jonathan "I'm Baptastic Thankyouverymuch" Trenary

*It should be noted that the "salad" referred to here is not the code-name for steak and cheese sandwiches that my father used to use when he was trying to convince my mother he was eating healthy lunches.