The last thing I ever want to do is waste anyone’s time. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a house that was very organized and driven, or maybe because I spent enough hours in classrooms and settings where I found myself daydreaming instead of actually living or learning. Today, I had a quick migraine came on that was super-intense and I sent an email to cancel class — a good thing, since within an hour everything turned flat like a video game. I don’t really remember driving home, but Chris got me into bed and I woke up again at 6 and am semi-coherent right now. Only to find out the email never went out and my students showed up, sat in class, and wondered where I was. I *never* wanted to have that happen. I feel like just about the worst teacher in the world.
And then I realize that’s the second migraine this week and something is just NOT right. Honestly, I don’t know what it is, but I have to find better balance than this. I’m working right now, on my laptop in front of the tv, but I shouldn’t be on the computer at all if I don’t want to trigger another one. I haven’t worked out except for walking in months, and I don’t walk Willa nearly as often as I should. I was named a Teaching Fellow this week, but I haven’t seen my brother in months and he lives only 14 miles away. My publication record is pretty good, but I picked up my camera last week for the first time since the beginning of May. I weigh more than I ever have, and every time I see a baby or small child, my ovaries set up a call and response hymn that goes something like this: “When are you going to have the time in your life to do something really important. Like be a mother.”
What does it mean to have it all? What is balance? Will I ever be a mom, with a baby, two dogs, two cats, an old house with a garden, time to hike on the weekends, and summer trips overseas? When I daydream, it’s not usually about my vita, but about a curly-haired little girl who has Chris’ eyes and my funny little mouth.
I think I need to find better balance. Is that possible before tenure?
If you have been watching the tags for my del.icio.us account, you may see that there is quite a bit about school shootings and violence, including Columbine. Don’t worry, I don’t think I’m becoming obsessed but what I am seeing, across the stories of Columbine and Virginia Tech, are the ways in which technologies have changed in the eight years since, and the impact of those technologies on the lives of students. This isn’t some sort of diatribe against the Internet — or just about onling gaming and violence, but a sense that technologies have been integrated into students’ lives in complex ways. Students are supporting each other online, and reaching out to create connections across vast distances. On the other hand, the killers in both situations intentionally manipulated media through a sense of mania — used video, online postings, and their own writings to create a picture of themselves as anti-heroes, leaders in a world marked by violence, and martyrs to a hierarchical world. This may not make much sense yet, but I do think there’s a larger story here about the shifts in what it means to be a teenager in less than a decade.
Really what I’m saying is that I think that by looking at Columbine and Virginia Tech, we can see the positive and negative ways teenage life is now marked by technologies. These two terrible events can be seen as flash-points around which all the good and bad aspects of adolescence in the 21st century coalesce. Or something like that.
Something about this time of year has me acting like the punchline to a blonde joke. Things I should remember are gone from my head, my to-do list reads like hieroglyphics, and deadlines approach faster than physics should allow. I broke a key on my keyboard off, lost two prescriptions (those incredibly important pieces of blue paper), forgot to feed the cats and I think they were chewing on my toes in my sleep. It’s the end of the academic year home stretch and I just need to keep my eyes on the prize…
I’ve been watching a lot of the online videos about Virginia Tech — from students, tributes made by others, and coverage of the memorial service. I just watched Nikki Giovanni’s speech and the funny thing is that it wasn’t until she led the cry of “Let’s Go Hokies” that I teared up. To take something usually associated with the rhythm and tension of a game and infuse it with the spirit of surviving — it hit me, hard, how this college community has begun to embrace who it is and who it will become. A silly cheer, in some ways, but one that means the world to the chanters and now signifies much more to those of us in the larger community too.
See it at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=snuc1hDDSiI
I’ve decided to try this new layout for my blog, in part because I think it is pretty and fitting this time of year, and in part because it links to the tagging I am doing through de.licio.us on research and items of interest. If you don’t know what that is, Google it and become part of a whole world of wisdom through collective interest and categorization. It’s worth the trip.
NBC News made an incredibly difficult decision last night to run much of the “multimedia manifesto” sent by Seung Hui Cho to the network. On the one hand, the multimedia nature of the text speaks to the abilities and interests of students in making texts that are more than written — he sent words interspersed with pictures and a DVD of digital video footage. On the other hand, deciding to run it gave Cho (posthumously, I know) exactly what he was looking for: an international, captive audience. I know the newsworthiness of the package, but I have also always stood by the Colorado judge’s decision not to make the tapes made by the Columbine killers of their plans public. Those who want to follow in such horrific footsteps see the coverage as power, and the world as their public. I think we should do everything we can *not* to feed into that, no matter if it means running an analysis of the contents of his manifesto, rather than the images and words themselves. To someone who seeks to author himself in violence, this kind of press is irresistable, I fear.
Facebook has become an online gathering place, and students from all over the country are posting to groups in support of the students of Virginia Tech — using the phrase “Today, we are all Hokies.” The schools even come from Ecuador and Britain, as other college students imagine what this must have been like.
More and more information is coming out now about the ways in which VT students are using Facebook and IM, as well as blogs and online news sites, to communicate and connect. Some of the information is being run before being verified, including names of some of the dead. One unverified tidbit states that Cho, the named shooter in at least the second incident, may have posted to an online VT forum that day about his intentions:
According to school officials, Cho even had time to post a deadly warning on a school online forum.
“im going to kill people at vtech today,” they said he wrote.
I’m not going to link to the site because it hasn’t been verified and I want to make the point that we can and do get information out damned quickly, something all of us reading about this incident need to keep in mind. I remember well, both from journalism school and Columbine, that specific information like this often turns out to be true — but it seems people are at the point where they are looking for mistakes made and persons to blame. If Cho did post something like that to an online forum, how would others know to take it seriously? Should they? Should sites like that be policed, and by whom — and how should threats and statements be followed up? I know many schools and police organizations take very seriously “hit lists” on student sites about other students they would like to see dead. It’s a good thing they do, but that also must mean devoting scarce resources on what (I hope) are usually empty threats.
Yet again, I have no answers, just more and more questions. It really is a brave new world out here on the constantly changed electronic frontier, and I’m not sure we take some of the complications seriously enough.
