london, 1665: zombie apocalypse

Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is a chilling account of the plague that hit London in 1665. It is also, in places, bears a striking resemblance to twentieth and twenty-first century zombie narratives.

For instance, there’s the rumor (which the narrator assures us is false) that those afflicted with the plague want to infect people who are well:

…those that did thus break out were generally people infected who, in their desperation, running about from one place to another, valued not whom they injured: and which perhaps, as I have said, might give birth to report that it was natural to the infected people to desire to infect others…

And their method of infection is compared to the bite of a rabid dog:

Some will have it to be in the nature of the disease, and that it impresses every one that is seized upon by it with a kind of rage, and a hatred against their own kind–as if there was a malignity not only in the distemper to communicate itself, but in the very nature of man, prompting him with evil will or an evil eye, that, as they say in the case of a mad dog, who though the gentlest creature before of any of his kind, yet then will fly upon and bite any one that comes next him, and those as soon as any who had been most observed by him before.

…if by the shutting up of houses the sick had not been confined, multitudes who in the height of their fever were delirious and distracted would have been continually running up and down the streets; and even as it was a very great number did so, and offered all sorts of violence to those they met, even just as a mad dog runs on and bites at every one he meets; nor can I doubt but that, should one of those infected, diseased creatures have bitten any man or woman while the frenzy of the distemper was upon them, they, I mean the person so wounded, would as certainly have been incurably infected as the one that was sick before…

The plague-afflicted wander in the fields:

…I seldom walked into the fields, except towards Bethnal Green and Hackney, or as hereafter.  But when I did walk, I always saw a great many poor wanderers at a distance; but I could know little of these cases, for whether if were in the street or in the fields, if we had seen anybody coming, it was a general method to walk away.

And there is an abundance of horrors, like this:

Sometimes the mother has died of the plague, and the infant, it may be, half born, or born but not parted from the mother.

And this:

…The houses in the same row with that house northward are built on the very same ground where the poor people were buried, and the bodies, on opening the ground for the foundations, were dug up, some of them remaining so plain to be seen that the women’s skulls were distinguished by their long hair, and of other the flesh was not quite perished…

In sum, Defoe’s account of the London plague has many of the necessary trappings of a zombie narrative.  What’s particularly hellish is that the account, while fictional, is based on a real event. I suspect that our pleasurable fear of and fascination with zombies is dependent on our general freedom from widespread infectious disease.  While there’s always the worry about new super-diseases, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, etc., there’s no illness we know of that threatens to wipe out a tenth of a large city’s population in a matter of months–knock on wood.

words about math about words

Tags

candidacy exams, grad school, reading

One of my less attractive personal habits is an impulse to reject as “stupid” those things that give me great difficulty.  Non-melodic music is stupid. Certain lines of literary theory are stupid. Running long distances is stupid.  Etc.

When I was about 11, my mom tried to teach me to “cross multiply and divide”–a mathematical procedure that I immediately and emphatically rejected as stupid.  I pigheadedly refused to learn this (shockingly simple) procedure until–eventually, and after much struggle–I realized its practical utility.  “Cross multiply and divide” (possibly also known as “proportions”?) is, now, the only mathematical procedure I regularly use to solve real world problems.

As I gear up to begin reading for candidacy exams, I find myself needing to cross multiply and divide in order to satisfy my compulsive need to organize.  For example:

If a grad student needs to read a total of 29,000 pages, and has about 205 days in which to do so, how many pages does she need to read per day?
29,000p/205days : Xp/1day
29,000×1=29,000   29,000/205=141.46 pages per day, or (141.46×7) 990.24 pages per week.

If she wants one day off each week?
990.24/6=165.04 pages/day.

And, if this grad student can read 60 pages in 1 hour and 52 minutes, how long will it take her to read 165 pages?
60p/112min : 165p/Xmin112x165=18,480  18,480/60=308 minutes–which, divided by 60 again, comes to 5.13 hours.

These numbers are, basically, encouraging.  I can easily imagine reading 5.13 hours per day, six days per week.  Of course, I timed my reading with Defoe’s Moll Flanders, which is a considerably easier read than, say, Kant’s Critique of Judgment or Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman.  And, of course, there’s always the chance I’ve done the math wrong.

In sum (heh…sum…), this whole reading thing is going to be hard, but it’s also going to be both doable and awesome.  And if, some weeks in and some pages behind, the process starts feeling less doable and less awesome, I promise to try, at the very least, to make an effort not to call it stupid.

 

10 reasons why grad school is the best thing ever

Tags

eighteenth century, grad school, reading, research, teaching, thoughts, writing

If you’re interested in keeping up with all the ways in which grad school is a corrupt sinkhole that gobbles up money, dreams, and potential, your reading load must be as interminable and exhausting as, well, a grad student’s.  The ever-cheery Chronicle of Higher Education, supplemented by blogs like 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Grad School and other posts, offers plenty material for pessimism.  Dissent is usually labeled naivete or denial.  But, to me, the biggest bummer about grad school (and academia generally) is our collective eagerness to dump on what we do.  After all, no one is making anyone go to grad school.  If people go to grad school, stay in grad school, and finish grad school, it is presumably because they enjoy what they’re doing.  I know I do.  So, at the risk of being branded an out-of-touch optimist, I offer a list of 10 reasons why grad school–in the humanities!–is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made:

I have a sense of purpose.  Because of the structure of the program, I’m always pretty clear on what my next step(s) should be.  There are usually several goals I’m working toward, and those goals are complex and difficult enough that I feel justifiably pleased with myself when I accomplish them.  And, particularly with regard to teaching, I actually feel like I’m doing some good.

The people I hang around with make me smarter. It’s more than just having remarkably smart friends (I had those long before grad school).  There’s something particularly great about crowding together a bunch of people who are actively accumulating knowledge of the abstract and esoteric.  The new things I learn every day are often properly weird (the long history of the jackalope, the plot of the Canadian novel Bear, the case for the USA’s founding by pirates, &c.) and thus properly awesome.  And, trivia aside, I have to work at it–hard–to keep any sort of intellectual pace with my friends and colleagues.  One could frame this as undue pressure, or unhealthy competition, but in my experience attempting to keep company with inveterate smartypantses is generative and exhilarating.

I have a job. Sure, it doesn’t pay much.  But being a graduate teaching associate helps me develop valuable future job skillage, waives tuition, and makes ends meet.  And, barring unforeseen weirdness, my job will last 6 whole years.  In a nation where postsecondary education costs an ever-increasing bundle, during a time of economic recession, I don’t think I can stress enough how badass it is that I have a paying job with a certain amount of permanence and security and that one of the “perks” of that job is that I get a free education.

My work schedule is hectic, but entirely flexible. Yeah, I don’t really have time to be writing this blog post right now.  But I can.  It’s my call.  And I can make up for the lost time at two o’clock on Saturday morning, or mid afternoon on Wednesday, or whenever seems best.

I have resources and benefits. Did I mention I have a job?  My job also has insurance! Really good, affordably subsidized insurance that includes free visits to university doctors, cheap access to university dentistry and optometry, and free sessions with university counselors.  I also get to use the fancy gym facilities, the big shiny library, and all the other institutional resources of a large university.  Grad school might make you sick, tired, and crazy, but it also makes available the antidotes to those conditions.

I still get to have hobbies. I’m actually more caught up on pop culture than ever before in my (admittedly pitifully out of touch) life.  At the end of a long work day, passive absorption sounds fantastic–so I’m able to talk knowledgeably about important topics like Mad Men, Girls, and Downton Abbey.  I do some piano plunking here and some picture doodling there.  I knit, slowly, and jog, slowly. I wouldn’t say I live a balanced life, but I do live an enjoyable one.

I’m fascinated by my work. Not only do I have a job, but my job is super interesting.  I get to read stuff from and about the eighteenth century, which is the best and weirdest of centuries.  I get to think about that stuff.  And then, I get to write down my thoughts and see what other people think about them.  It makes me stressed, obsessed, frustrated, and exhausted, but never, never, never bored.

I work in an environment that encourages me to be a better person. Have you ever worked in a place where racism, sexism, and homophobia are unremarkable commonplaces?  I have.  It sucks.  Sure, the atmosphere and internal politics of academic departments aren’t perfect, but at least the people in them tend to be critical thinker types, and there’s a high level of awareness when it comes to systemic power imbalances and such.  Not only is this environment a more comfortable one in which to work, but it also pushes me to be critical of some of the thinking I developed growing up in a very homogenous suburb, and to generally keep an eye on the ways I interact with other people.

Teaching has helped me feel like an adult.  Maybe this sounds like a silly one, but I was 22 when I came to grad school and 23 when I taught my first college writing class.  Especially in the company of my older colleagues, I felt very young indeed.  Adopting an authoritative persona and learning to confidently and successfully instruct people who are, in many cases, not much younger than I am, has been immensely helpful in making me feel like the grown up that I now (at a full 24 and 1/2 years of age, thank you very much) properly am.

I am constantly challenged.  I find that while my work gets more comfortable, it never actually gets comfortable.  Sometimes I’m confronted with tasks that are just too hard for me to do successfully.  And even when I am capable, I’m still aware of the ways in which I could be doing better.  As I try to tell my students, the recursiveness of good thinking and writing and the impossibility of producing work without room for improvement is a very good thing.  It doesn’t mean that you can’t do good work; it just means that you can’t stop trying to do better work.

If I had come to grad school to coast easily into a cushy job, I guess I’d be disappointed and disillusioned by the fact that I’m working as hard as I can toward an uncertain end.  As it is, I’m getting exactly what I signed on for, and I think it’s good for me.

fun with failure

Tags

failure, plans, thoughts

When I was a little kid, I came in second in Pepin Wisconsin’s annual Laura Ingalls Wilder Days Little Laura Lookalike Pageant.  I had come nowhere close to winning in past years, and that had been just fine with me.  The obvious point of the pageant was the fun of dressing up (and the subsequent parade, in which candy rained down from the floats like the locusts that destroyed Pa’s wheat crop in On the Banks of Plum Creek).  But coming in second made me realize that this was the sort of event that one could succeed or fail at: and I hadn’t succeeded.  I cried, publicly (but fortunately not on stage), like the sore loser I was.

The outfit in question, but a different event.

I would like to say I’ve changed in the fifteenish years since I didn’t quite become the nineteen ninety-something Little Laura Lookalike.  Unfortunately, I’m still crappy at failure.  When I stopped to walk 3/4 of the way through my first 5K run last weekend, I cried a little bit again–not so much like a sore loser, since I was hardly in it to win it, but like a person who believes that falling short of a stated goal (to run the whole race) invalidates the entire attempt (including deciding to run even though I’m no good at it, the successful completion of the first 3/4 of the course, and the bit where I decided to start running again after a few blocks and was able to finish strong).

While there may be merit in holding oneself to high standards, consistently failing at failure is not an attractive or a productive quality.  My ideal self is (paradoxically?), an accomplished failer.  And at the end of an extremely long semester during which I’ve been rather sloppy about trying to be a better person, I feel like it’s about time for a new self-improvement project.

Improved failing will require not avoiding things that might (or probably will) lead to failure.  (It’s obviously no good trying to fail at these things–that kind of failure is actually a success, which leads to all kinds of confusion. Also, it’s cheating.) I’ll need to try things that are really hard and potentially scary, and care enough about them that messing up is a proper disappointment.  I’ll need to be bad at things in front of other people.  And I’ll need to engage with my failures, rather than rationalizing them away and/or moping.

Some activities rich in potential failure include: sticking to a disciplined work schedule, running, trying to get stuff published, karaoke, playing piano in front of people, bowling, math, learning Spanish, sewing projects, all kinds of art, cooking and baking with complicated recipes, teaching, studenting, knitting things more complicated than scarves… [I welcome additional suggestions]

My hope is that this isn’t just a masochistic exercise (although it might be that, too).  I’m generally pretty good at thinking about gray areas, but I’m not very good at experiencing them comfortably.  Working on failure will produce gray areas–if I succeed, I fail, and if I fail, I succeed, and either way there’s an inseparable experience of good and bad.  Just putting myself in situations where I’m not sure whether I’ve succeeded or failed will hopefully, in itself, be a useful exercise in complexity and ambiguity, which, as I tell my students, we all ought to value and embrace.

i want you because no one wants you, or, reflections on two decades of emotionally manipulative personified inanimate objects

Tags

family, thoughts

When I was a young kid I didn’t like bananas, because of the strings (you know…the strings?).  But if I refused to eat, my mom would say that the banana was sad because I rejected it.  Sometimes the bananas would even cry.  I could never stand up to their tears–so I ate them, strings and all.

…banana strings.  ugh.

In junior high the vice principal sat in the lunchroom every day for about a month trying to sell these blue and yellow knockoff beanie baby lions to raise money for the school.  The lions were cheaply made and kind of ugly, but the utter indifference of the student body to the vice principal’s project–and the deep sadness of all those unwanted lions–broke my heart, so I bought one.
Later, in high school, my brother tried to get me to go halfsies on a discounted but still obscenely expensive Droopy McCool figurine by suggesting that it was on sale because nobody wanted it.  Despite a very low investment in marginal Star Wars characters, I very nearly gave in.

There was also that time with the big foam chair, which was moldy.  Like the bananas, the chair didn’t even have a face to recommend it to my sympathies.  But still, I choked up as we rolled its moldy carcass out of the basement on its journey to the dump.

Given the amount of real rejection and loneliness in the world, it seems stupid–and potentially unethical–to waste tears on the inanimate.  Confusion between things and people is, arguably, one of the Big Problems of the day.  We substitute images and status updates for people, political rhetoric for people, corporations for people.  This slippage is something I think we need to attend to and resist.  But, in defense of the knot that still ties in my chest when I see a thing rejected or abandoned, perhaps the old idea that our capacities for sympathy and compassion improve with practice might, in a small way, redeem my foolishness.  Maybe kids who have sympathy for bananas and their perverse, self-destructive desire to be eaten also have sympathy for people and their sometimes perverse, sometimes self-destructive desire to be wanted.  If we’re going to be mixed up about people and things, I think it’s better to fruitlessly apply sentience and vulnerability to things (as well as people), than to treat people with the carelessness and instrumentality with which we treat our things.

big bad: buffy and body

Tags

body, TV, women

I just want to say at the outset that I am a fan of Joss Whedon and nearly all his work (Dollhouse was a little meh, but whatever), and that I absolutely adore Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  I’ve recently been re-watching the seventh season for like the fifth or sixth time, and can honestly say that my love for the show is ardent and abiding.  But if we can’t point out potential flaws in the things we love, then what good is love, right?  Right.

So: Buffy and Whedon and feminism and the female body.  Whedon is usually–and usually should be–talked about as a feminist, although there are an essay here and a blog post there that scrutinize his pro-womanpower credentials.  These critiques focus primarily on the behavior of the female characters in his shows.  Personally, I think the fact that the characters don’t always act in perfectly empowered, perfectly feminist ways is fine, so long as we as viewers notice it.  Showing that traditional systems of power can influence even strong, independent women (and the men that ostensibly support their strength and independence) is not necessarily the same as promoting those systems.  Well-handled, it’s potentially an important way to portray the realities of twenty-first century almost-but-really-not-quite-there-yet gender politics.  That’s not, however, what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is how all the smart, strong, powerful women on Buffy are itty bitty.  S.E. Smith, author of the blog post referenced above, touches on this.  I would like to dwell on it.  Buffy: tiny.  Willow: tiny.  Anya: tiny.  Faith: tiny.  Cordelia: tiny. Dawn: tiny.  Frankly, it’s hard to notice how tiny everyone is because there’s no variety, no point of comparison….until Tara.  Tara is awesome, strong, beautiful, and has a slightly different body type than other Buffy women.  Wikipedia notes this difference, and some fan responses.  Notably:

• Fans characterized actress Amber Benson “as fat and unattractive.”
• Benson “was referred to as ‘astoundingly non-Hollywood’ by a Scottish journalist.”
• Benson responded by “protesting that she was at 5 feet, 4 inches (1.63 m) and 118 pounds (54 kg), not at all overweight, although she appears heavier than her more petite costars.”

Tara

I noticed the difference, too.  When Tara showed up I was like, “oh, she’s chubby…wait, no, she’s totally not…hmmm…those other girls must be hella-skinny.”  Or something along those lines.  Unlike the more judgy (“fat and unattractive”?!) fans, I was psyched.  Tara’s body gave the show a (very) little balance, showed that there could be (a small amount of) range and variety to female beauty within the Buffyverse, and reminded viewers that some neat ladies have hips and suchwhat.

All well and good.  The thing that makes me grumpy enough to write long, disgruntled blog posts about the issue is something Whedon said in the featurette “Casting Buffy” on disk 3 of the Season 5 DVD set.  Speaking about casting Benson as Tara, he says:

I had always imagined her as, you know, very tiny and birdlike…Amber came in and physically was not the type, you know, she was more womanly and voluptuous, and she gave this incredible read…but physically it wasn’t what I had been thinking about.

Oh, yes, tiny and birdlike.  Because that’s original…

It annoys me that Whedon’s original scheme was for Tara to be just one more skinny girl.  Yeah, sure, there’s something cool about small, frail-looking chicks kicking muscly vampire ass–it’s important to represent as powerful the body that appears to lack power.  But if you want to empower bodies that really lack power–especially on screen, but really everywhere–you need to look at women larger than a size 4.  Writing a “feminist” TV show that depicts women as uniformly skinny and petite–with one anomalous 118-pound “big” girl cast despite her deviance from the character’s intended aesthetics–is extending power only to those women whose body types already meet society’s approval.

And certainly, I’m not claiming that this issue is exclusive to Buffy.  It’s been said a million times, but I’ll say it again: until we regularly see a greater diversity in actress body shape and size, it’ll be hard for me to see TV shows and movies as adequately feminist, regardless of their content.  Glee does an ok job with this: Mercedes (Amber Riley) and Lauren (Ashley Fink) both play larger women with a pretty powerful supply of confidence and talent, and character development that extends (to some extent) beyond the “issue” of their weight.  In addition, Glee’s Tina (Jenna Ushkowitz) represents that remarkably elusive being, a medium-sized lady on TV.  And despite its constant emphasis on the rampant misogyny of the ’60s, Mad Men too wins points for Joan Holloway’s (Christina Hendricks) attitude and extravagant sexiness.

Joan

We’re not nearly there yet, though, and not likely to get closer if feminist-y shows don’t take the lead.  Without body diversity consistently represented on screen, it’s too easy to narrow the range of “normal” body types to a ridiculously tiny wedge of those represented by actual female bodies.   It’s sort of like how my students fail to notice the presence of race in all-white shows/movies/commercials: the repetition and lack of contrast in an all-skinny female cast creates an unrepresentative sense of the female body for the viewer.  The thin body becomes the neutral body, and all other bodies–including the 5′ 4″, 118 lb. body of Amber Benson–are marked as Other.

willy wonka and the gothic chocolate factory, etc.

Tags

DMAC, teaching, writing

My final project for DMAC is a series of assignments for my fall writing course that ask my students to engage in multimodal composition related to our course topic, the Gothic.  In addition to building a (not yet functional) website to publish the finished projects, I’ve also developed rough drafts of two assignment prompts, and examples of finished products to accompany those prompts.

Assignment one is fairly simple and quick.  It’s designed to provide an introduction to the Gothic, to visual design, to textual composition, and to fairly low-stakes public speaking, all within the first couple weeks of class.

My example for Assignment 1 defines and provides examples of “claustrophobia”.  I embedded sound with PowerPoint’s “record audio” feature, and used AuthorStream to upload the finished presentation to the web.  Although AuthorStream doesn’t deal perfectly with Macs, and thus there is some unintentional messing with the design (things like centering, image placement, etc.), it seems to be the best platform for embedding PowerPoint presentations in my Dreamweaver site.  Click on the image below to watch and listen to the sample project:

My class will then revisit multimodal composition at the end of the semester with a more involved, argument based modified PechaKucha-style presentation.  After a semester of getting familiar with the Gothic, this final assignment asks the students to apply this knowledge to works that fall outside of what is conventionally considered “Gothic.”

My example project for this deals with the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  I chose this film, rather than the 2005 Tim Burton re-make with Johnny Depp, because the latter is I think too overtly creepy in aesthetic to count as “unexpected” Gothic.  This project uses the same technical processes as the first, but the thinking involved is a little more complex (this time students are asked to make an argument, and demonstrate their understanding of the Gothic) and the assignment requires sustained engagement with the PechaKucha form.  Click on the image below to watch and listen to the sample project:

For both projects, I will provide storyboarding worksheets on which students can plan out their presentations and consider the way text and image will work together in the finished project.  I will also encourage considered, feedback-based revision before uploading content to the website (which will, of course, be optional).

At this point, I’m pretty confident that these assignments have multiple and valuable pedagogical purposes (see “Objectives” sections of each assignment prompt).  What I’m less sure about is how my students will respond to the assignments.  Is image and text and verbal presentation too much to ask in the first couple weeks of the semester?  How comfortable are they already with the technology I’m asking them to use (basically just PowerPoint, but they will be asked to add embedded sound if they want to contribute to the website content) and will I have adequate time to instruct them on technology if necessary?  Will this be too easy, too hard, or just right?  Do I know how to teach visual rhetoric?  Are my assignment prompts relatively clear to the average student (they are in draft-form at the moment, of course)?  Are these projects my students will find useful and interesting, or tedious?

These are some of the questions I’ll be working through this summer as I plan my course, and inevitably also next fall as I teach it.  Of course, I welcome any feedback on my plans and materials that can help me have a successful course in the fall.

the time i talked about the time i made a book with my dad

Tags

DMAC, family, writing

Today at DMAC–this really exciting two-week digital media institute I’m doing here at Ohio State–we recorded literacy narratives.  Literacy narratives are stories of experiences with literacy, broadly defined (reading and writing, yes, but also interpreting and composing in various media).  Using nifty voice recorders, we told a four to five minute narrative, and then added a two minute reflection on why that narrative is significant in our experience of literacy. Here’s the link to mine, in which I talk about the poetry book I compiled and constructed with my dad when I was 17.

The flyleaf and title page of my copy of my book. All of the copies we made use different materials for the cover and fly leaves.

The Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, where I uploaded my story, has thousands of literacy narratives that are free and available to the public.  They come from all sorts of people, and cover all sorts of topics within literacy.  It’s a neat resource!

The book includes poems ordered chronologically by year from age 5 through age 16, as well roughly contemporaneous drawings.

If my tone in the last couple words of my narrative sounds inconclusive, it’s because it isn’t the conclusion.  I didn’t say a fourth of what I might have about the book project.  Since this afternoon I’ve been continuing to reflect on my feelings about the book, finishing the narrative in my head, and this has made several things clearer.  For instance, I am absolutely certain now that the value of working with my dad to make this book far outweighs any embarrassment I feel about its contents.  I say in the reflection part of the narrative that “I would prefer to forget that I did that.”  Reflecting on my reflection, it’s clear to me that this isn’t true at all.

memento mori

Tags

body, death, thoughts

Yesterday evening the head of our department sent an email informing us of the death of a colleague, a grad student who had just defended her dissertation and landed an academic job.  I didn’t know her.  It’s a big department, and I haven’t met a lot of the grad students further ahead in the program.  But although I didn’t know her, her death shook me.  I thought about her family, her partner, her friends, her professors, and her students.  I thought about how she was about to graduate, having just achieved goals she had worked for years to accomplish.  I thought about how she was young, and how death was sudden.  I cried a little.

Today, I kept thinking.  I was working on finishing up a paper in which I begin to explore some of my thoughts about the grotesque body in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.  Essentially, I’m suggesting that John Belford, a character who narrates two grotesque death scenes and is himself an ugly man, acts as a memento mori in the text, a reminder that all who live will die.  The grotesque body is particularly useful as a memento mori because it reflects in life the decay of the body in death (the medieval and early modern memento mori is often particularly grisly; artists and sculptors had no scruples about representing the corpse in all states of decay).

Browsing the internet for background info on the memento mori in English culture, I came across a blog post on Victorian photographs of the recently deceased.  I’ve always considered this practice disturbing and morbid, and never really looked at such images outside the context of horror films (in which they are inevitably creepy as hell).  However, these photographs surprised me–they are the opposite of the images of decay common in earlier periods.  Where the earlier memento mori emphasizes the corruption of the flesh and the decay of the body into something barely recognizable as human, these images emphasize the likeness of the deceased to the living, and the wholeness of the body after death.  I found the pictures moving and sad; yes, they still weird me out a little, but the obvious dignity and love they reveal is touching more than disturbing.

For hundreds of years the memento mori was a staple of Western art and literature.  It seems, however, to have gone somewhat out of style in the twentieth and twenty first centuries.  We don’t want to be reminded of death.  It makes us uncomfortable.  It makes me uncomfortable.  I don’t want to be reminded of death because it profoundly frightens me.  But I wonder if perhaps I ought to be–if, perhaps, we all ought to be?  If death comes unpredictably, in youth as well as age, even in moments of triumph, then we ought to think about it.  How else will we remember that the work we do is valuable, beyond the extent to which it helps us achieve our goals?  How else will we remember that each day should be lived, not lived through in anticipation of the next big thing?  How else will we remember that nothing is boring?

It’s the nature of life to make these things difficult to remember, and the nature of death to make them difficult to forget.

project frugality

Tags

frugality, plans, shopping

Thinking and talking about money always makes me uncomfortable.  The obvious solution to this discomfort is committing to a summer of thinking extensively about money, and then blogging about it.  Here I go:

Project Frugality: Theory

As a grad student, my means are small, and sometimes I live beyond them.  Generally, I think it’s good to do things I enjoy, and sometimes that involves spending money.  Particularly, I think it’s good to be generous with my friends, and sometimes that involves spending money, too.  But, it also seems like a good thing not to spend down my savings going over-budget on unnecessary extravagances.  So, in the slightly-less-busy-than-usual summer weeks, I’m going to experiment with a more consciously frugal way of living.

When you’re an English major, or have an M.A. in English, or are going for a Ph.D. in English, people are happy to tell you that you will never have any money.  And I’m always happy to say, “Hey, I’m ok with that.  I’d rather be frugal and happy, than rich and bored.”  And that’s true.  But you can’t be frugal and happy without being mindful of where your money is going.  If you’re going to have less of a thing, you’ve got to take better care of it.  I feel like until I am confident in the way I manage money, I will not really be able to respond confidently to those who challenge my career choice.

I think that increasing my financial consciousness is important for two other reasons, beyond simply the practical matter of not squandering what money I’m fortunate enough to have.  First, personally, I am aware that I often use money (or, rather, the stuff money buys) to prevent myself from fully experiencing negative feelings.  I stress shop.  I stress eat.  I buy new things so I can focus my attention on those things when it becomes less pleasant to focus attention on myself.  The pressures of getting my M.A. this spring have made clear to me both the extent to which I do this, and the fact that it’s about as helpful as making paper airplanes out of dollar bills and flying them off the top of a tall building.  So, my hope is that resisting impulsive money-spending will help me a) focus attention on other people when it becomes uncomfortable to focus too much attention on myself, and b) accept, feel, and resolve negative feelings rather than avoiding them. That is, I hope to be a better, happier person and have more money!

Second, when I think about the way I spend money, I feel socially irresponsible.  Obviously, even though I don’t make much as a graduate teaching associate, I am wealthier than a lot of people in the world, the US, and my community.  I don’t think it’s wrong for me to spend what money I have, but I do think it’s wrong for me to spend it thoughtlessly, when resources are so unequally distributed and I have access to many goods and opportunities that are not available to everyone.  Also, I need to think more about the impact my consumption has on the earth.  When I buy new instead of used, it both hurts me financially and is an unnecessary overuse of the world’s limited resources.

For these reasons, I feel that I need to make a change in my spending habits and attitude toward money and consumption.

I don’t need all of it to have it all (wheeeee…cliches!)

Project Frugality: Practice

Basically, in practice, Project Frugality involves articulating a rationale for all purchases.  I imagine that this will work a little differently depending on the nature of the potential purchase:

Clothes, shoes, accessories: I will only buy second-hand unless I have a Very Good Reason.  Goodwill often has really lovely stuff, and things that I buy from Target or Kohls or H&M often fit me worse and are of lower quality, despite their much higher prices.  I can be satisfied with used, and with less.

Food: Food is tricky, because I need my meals to be delicious, quick, healthy, vegetarian, and cheap.  It’s easy to find recipes for a combo of 2 of these criteria, but fitting in all five is a challenge.  Plus, I like food.  I really like food.  I like fancy cheeses and gourmet ice cream and fresh produce.  Food decisions will probably be the most complex part the project, but the plan is to try for a balance of health and pleasure while also keeping cost in mind (shopping with the sales, finding low-cost substitutions for high-cost products, etc.)

Entertainment: I will take advantage of free activities (parks, campus activities, biking, hiking, friends with pools, etc.) and student discounts.  I will minimize dining out, and when buying restaurant food, I will do so with deliberation (i.e. splurge infrequently on things that I will really enjoy, make more frugal choices otherwise).

Necessities that get used up: I’m not going to deprive myself of toothpaste and shampoo.  And I’m not going to buy the rock-bottom-priced face wash when I know it makes me break out.  But, I’m also not going to buy the $7 bottle of body wash because it smells slightly nicer than the $3 bottle–essentially, the plan is to choose the cheapest effective product.

Books, etc.: I will buy books if I need to read them, but not just because they’re pretty or I imagine that I will want to read them at some future time.  Other items will be evaluated on an item by item basis, with a strong bias toward not buying (unless, of course, I have a Very Good Reason).

I photographed this beautiful rose at the Whetstone Park of Roses in Clintonville. It was beautiful, and fun, and free!

My hope is that by being mindful about where and how I lay out my funds, I’ll save money, consume fewer resources, and have a fuller appreciation of the things that I do consume.  The other basic parameters are:

• I’m committed to this from the beginning of June through the end of July.
• I will blog regularly about successes, challenges, and tips for frugal living.
• I will be generous with myself if I make mistakes–no guilt, no shame, and no giving up.