A new “routine”…

 

Last week didn’t “count” — well, it did but it didn’t…  I say that because I spent almsot all of Friday in my pajamas…

That can’t be my new “routine” during my sabbatical… really, I won’t get it done.

I gave myself last week because, dang it, I deserve it… plus, Max was with us and we had more interesting things to do than have me work — like, watch most of “The Office” (him) and drink coffee while reading semi-trashy novels (me).  Now, Max is on the way back to his other home and starting school — and I’m thinking about being productive.

The trouble is, I’m not used to NOT having a schedule — at leas not while school is in session.  Sure, I adjusted to teaching online over the summer, but it was SUMMER… now it’s Fall and I need to figure out how I work best.

It helps that Andy is in school again, so I have some kind of schedule — if only by proxy.  The thing is, I’ve never had this kind of unstructured time to do research… and it’s a little daunting.

Like anything, I’ll probably get it done… by “it” I mean my dissertation project of developing two new courses…

I have a plan for the first part — namely, to develop the Ethical Theory section I’ll use in both classes… and I’m participating in a faculty group on Tuesday to get some ideas for my new classes…

But, still — the time between NOW and May (when summer classes start) is pretty daunting — wish me luck.

Too Late for Labor Day…

… but funny anyway…

We can choose to learn… or not…

…  and learning from the crappy crap that has happened to us.  The graphic above reminds me of when my sister, cousin Em and I were dancing in the rain when we were kids.  We were young and thought it would be fun to get goofy by the side of the road I grew up on… and it was.  Finally our Moms made us stop..

Sometimes the lessons aren’t what we think the will be — and I suppose I’m kind of a slow learner, as sometimes the lessons take longer to sink in than they should.

In my life I’ve had three people die who were very close to me — a parent, a sibling and a friend who was like a sibiling.. I’ve also considered my own mortality thanks to the boobie that was trying to kill me.

As I grow, I find that those four events have marked “before” and “after” times in my mind.  They were difficult to deal with and I learned a variety of things from each one.

Most recently, I’ve come to realize that what I thought would be my life’s path simply wasn’t what I wanted.  I thought I’d be a dean, maybe teach someplace with more prestige than my CC — I was pretty sure the rest of my life wouldn’t be spent in and around Minnesota.  Turns out, that’s not what I want.

How this is connected to the crappy crap I’ve lived with is that it’s shown me that life is too freaking short to be spent waiting until ________ happens.  Nope — life is now, it’s what you do every day and while making plans is important, living a good life while those plans are in the works is important too.

So — what do I want?  I want to travel.. I want to teach philosophy to students who may not want to learn it at first but come to see my course as important in their development.  I want to have close friends and be close to my family.  I want to spend my time with people who appreciate me, who support my current projects and help me see that there is more to life than academia and socially-rewarded successes.

I want to be with people who challenge me to be the best at whatever I want to do — and whose dreams, hopes and fears are both similar and different than my own.

I want to be independent.  I want to be able to pay my own bills and feel good about what I need to do to make that happen.

I think the first real, tangible purchase under this new way of looking at life was my new computer last may — perhaps the second will be an old conversion van… hmmmm…

Important qualities in a person…

As those of you who know me in person already know — I’ve had some life changes in the past few months..

So many of them have been the result of previous (and very difficult) life experiences we don’t need to get into now — suffice it to say that I see life, my life and the world in a very different way now than I did 5 years ago.

As Andy so rightly pointed out to me, I’m a philosopher at heart, so I over-think things — I try to categorize things, remember, recall and analyze things.  I think I’ve always been that way, but my perspective has shifted and I now find some things more or less important than I have in the past.  This may be disturbing to some, but it’s just the way things have ended up.

Part of that change is that I’m not so quick to judge people on past actions.  Strong and continuing patterns are another story, but when someone has done something wrong, realized it as wrong and avoids doing it in the future, I consider it old news.  I suppose it’s a bit of wisdom to realize that some good people can do bad things and it’s not my place to judge them on their prior bad choices.  period.

Much more important is how they are now and what they want to do in the future.  A good person treats others with kindness, caring and respect — even when they don’t want something.  A great person accepts the flaws of others and realizes they themselves aren’t perfect, so why should perfection be expected.  A wonderful person accepts the whole person and their friends and family with open arms — realizing that a person doesn’t come to be who they are in some kind of weird vacuum.  Rather, their past and those close to them shape them in many ways… to really love someone is to accept the whole package not just parts.

So — this is a bit of a change from how I used to see the world and it’s an aspirational post at best — I still get judgy, snotty and mean sometimes, but now I feel bad when I do so.

The founding fathers…

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The conservatives, tea party people and all the other right-wing wackos seem to be all about the founding fathers’ intentions for the country…

For them, it’s mostly the case that they want their guns and they don’t want women to have abortions — because those are the conditions that the Founding Fathers had for themselves…

Andy got me thinking (in a post he hasn’t published yet) about the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — from the Declaration of Independence.  Some folks would argue the the Declaration isn’t the Constitution — but, I think it’s a good indication of what the founding fathers were thinking.

The context for the statement is important (yep, I’m a philosopher… get over it..)

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

There’s a lot in this paragraph… for my purposes, the idea of unalienable rights stands out.  This means that simply by being a human being you have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Just by being born human — to put it simply ALL human beings have a right to these things…in Venn diagram speak, this is an A claim… see below…

If every S (person) is P (a thing that has these rights) — then, there are no people who don’t have these rights…

The tricky part is that our system seems set up to be that only folks with cash have access to the means to continued life..

If you are in the lower-middle class economically, your healthcare is quite precarious.  You probably have a job that pays your small bills, but you have no savings.  You have no real safety net in case you miss a week or two of work for something like a mastectomy or chemo.  You’re faced with the prospect of being evicted because you can’t pay your rent, or death…

Not exactly a decent choice in a country with plenty of resources.

I’d also like to note that the Declaration indicates that the justification for government is to secure these rights for ALL persons… not just the wealthy.  If it’s the case that the government acts counter to this purpose, changing the government is justified.

hmmm…. revolution anybody?

Wanting –

A close friend asked me just now if wanting was wrong?

It’s a good question — because wanting something, in and of itself isn’t right or wrong — until action is taken… or, is it?

Maybe the answer is much more complex, because wanting something you are unlikely to get causes angst — and that angst causes a person to feel things like envy, jealousy and other negative feelings.

If you are willing to hurt others to achieve what you want — then those actions are wrong… but the wanting itself is not wrong.

As it is, my friend is young and doesn’t understand what I’ve come to see recently — that material things aren’t the key to happiness.  Instead, you need to surround yourself with good people, who inspire you and who support you.  You need to engage in activities that challenge you and that you find enjoyable.  Finally, you need to find a way to be happy with yourself who you are right now and where you are right now.

It took me a long time to come to this realization — and along the way I collected a lot of stuff that was purchased out of boredom or unhappiness — anybody want all my old cosmic junk?

“Thinking”

Some folks get all excited  or nervous when a computer beats a human at some “intellectual” feat…

I don’t – anymore — once I became convinced that machines as we know them now cannot actually “think”.

The fear is that the machines will take over the world and humans will be subject to their whims… no longer will the coffee maker make your coffee, you’ll make coffee for it…

The thing is, machines aren’t actually creative — they can only assemble what we tell them.  This is a problem facing military folks, as they’d like to have robots firing guns and making decisions between friend and foe– but, that just isn’t happening anytime soon.

Advantages…

I’ve been thinking a lot about unrecognized and institutional sexism…

Especially in Academia…

In a community in which outright sexism is now taboo, it still happens with shocking frequency.  Part of the problem is simply one of socialization, men have historically dominated academia — and they tend to hire people the perceive as similar to themselves — male.  Part of it is probably about communication styles, comfort and directions of research — but no matter what the cause, the effect is the same… and it sucks.

It goes beyond hiring — even when women are hired into tenure-track positions, they tend to do more service and get paid less.  Because they do more service, they publish less and are promoted less often.  They are also less likely to be invited to do “key note” presentations, because they tend to have less time to do the mountains of research and publishing necessary to catch the attention of the folks who make those decisions…

I think the roots of this are very deep — girls internalize the idea that being smart isn’t something boys like.  They tend to go for “soft” majors in college and thus are a large percentage of some fields and a minority in others… philosophy is one of the fields in which women are a minority.

I think that, in the end, girls turn into women who sell themselves intellectually short.  This makes me sad– mostly because I see so much of it in my younger self.  I also think that women are more likely to take school/life considerations into account when choosing both undergraduate and graduate schools.  Men, on the other hand, are given reasons to believe in and pursue their academic goals, and considerations of life are simply less important to them.

I suppose what’s really bothering me about this is the fact that a male academic I know well had many advantages — support of his department, a great committee, time to write and lots of encouragement from his family and faculty — and he still hasn’t finished his dissertation.

When he went on the academic job market, part of his frustration was that women in his field seemed to get hired and he didn’t… but — he didn’t have a completed dissertation either… hmmm…

I contrast his circumstances with my own.  I made the best academic choices I could, within the set of limited choices I had.  I went to an affordable undergraduate school and only really had one choice in terms of grad school.  Partially because of the perception that they wouldn’t lose me if they didn’t give me funding, I also got very little financial support from my grad school.  I took out loans, worked / taught the whole time and finished my courses.

Two months after finishing my coursework, I moved back to Minnesota because Hubby was accepted to grad school.  I was happy to move back here, no question — but, I left Nebraska with only an idea about what my dissertation would look like — having not even passed my Ph.D. candidacy qualifying papers (at my grad school, in my discipline, we don’t do comps — we write papers that have to be passed by a committee).

It took several years for me to reach “Doctoral Candidate” status.  I’m sure it took longer because I was 400 miles away AND because I was teaching full-time, most of it at Century.  My dissertation took equally long to complete, for many of the same reasons.  The one summer I took off of teaching to write, I had cancer…

The thing is,  I still finished — AND I have a tenured teaching position.  In order to do it, I spent much of my available free time writing, revising, researching and traveling back to Nebraska for meetings with my advisor.  In other words, I worked my ass off…

I can’t say for sure — but, I think I’m as smart or smarter than my male colleague.  I know that my work is as interesting as his — and in retrospect, because I finished, I was a better “bet” for the support I didn’t get, partially because of my gender and geographical limitations.

The male colleague hasn’t finished and still complains of sexism in academia… pal, don’t talk to me about sexism until you’ve walked the halls of academia in my heels.

Neat girl vs. Sweet girl…

I’ll never forget a debate van trip many years ago when a male debater exclaimed, a bit in sarcasm and a bit in surprise, that “women are people” — ummmm, yea.

This article got me a thinkin…about women my age and younger and their relationship with feminism. It’s also an interesting peek into Mormon female culture without being a negative stereotype.  What struck me about this article, besides the message that sweet girls get married early and nice girls explore the world for a few years before getting married at 25, was the way those roles seemed to be transmitted and clarified by the author’s mother.  The author is Mormon and so is her mother — those roles are both relatively acceptable in Mormon culture, so the question wasn’t exactly one of one being better than the other, but rather one of classification of the girls.

I was not raised Mormon, but Hubby was and my in-laws are a good Mormon family.  I was raised by a mom who was between first and second wave feminism… a bit too young to be among the pioneer generation (my Great Aunt Kay was a staunch first-waver), and not quite young enough to be of the “burn your bra, men suck” club… perhaps her younger sibling was that for a while…

As a result, I have a kind of different relationship to feminism than many women my age or older.  For me, feminism has been a constant message in my life — ‘you can do whatever you’d like’ — grow up, do “boy stuff” if you want etc. without the negative message about men that seems to pervade second-wave feminism.

I also learned by example that, to quote mom, “you don’t die from being tired.”  Which she said often when we’d complain about long work shifts etc… and we knew that she was speaking from example, in that she was a nurse who worked nights, weekends and holidays to support me and my sister.

Mom is also the epitome of a ‘lifelong learner’ who loves to read, think, analyze and explore the world of ideas.  I’m sure I got my philosophical bent from her.  I also know I got my book obsession from her, so she owes an apology to anybody who has ever helped me move .

As a result of my upbringing, I see folks in different categories — Instead of “sweet girl”, I think “didn’t go to college, married young, had kids” — which many of my friends did — vs. “went to college, maybe I’ll get married sometime” — which was a choice other friends made.

Oddly enough, I’m a living example of the confluence of those categories — a “married at 21 but no kids, went back to college at 24 (I think..) — Ph.D kinda girl.”  Maybe I moved back and forth between the categories or maybe I made my own up as I went along.  Maybe I’m more like the third-wave feminists than I even see… making my own choices and getting along.

As Andy said to me last night, “remember, it’s  your life” — and, he’s right — but, the life that’s mine is the result of a lot of influences shaping me, teaching me and supporting me — so — while it’s my life to lead and make decisions about — I’m also a reflection of both my mom and my times — my feminism.

Do we have a duty to help others?

As usual, one of Andy’s posts has me thinking… this time it’s the one on Anthony Bourdain…

Andy argues that we ought to do what we can to help others, and I agree in general — the question is why?

One way to justify that answer is that it’s good for us to help others.  As a young married LDS woman, I accidentally helped the wrong family move.  A group of us went after church to help someone moving into our ward.  We didn’t know them and we simply showed up en masse to help a couple of guys in a rental truck.  We’d loaded most of their apartment when they asked where we’d come from — we looked surprised and told them the LDS church.  Turns out they weren’t the family we’d intended to help, but they were the family who needed the help the most.  It made us feel good and we stayed the extra hour or so it took to finish the job.

Afterward, we felt good that we’d helped someone who was clearly in a pinch…

The other reason to help is because helping actually benefits the person who gets the help.  This is a bit more complicated, as it needs to be separated from instances like the first — where helping others helps us.  Maybe helping others isn’t much of a sacrifice for us, so we don’t notice — perhaps if you’re wealthy and give anonymously via your money manager, you don’t know who you’re helping and they can’t thank you…

Is there an obligation to help others in this kind of situation — were you don’t benefit? I tend to think so, I think that you have a prima facie duty (ala Ross) of beneficence –the duty to help when  you can.  This duty is based on the fact that you CAN help someone have a better life, so you ought to do so.

The conditions surrounding the prima facie duty are pretty simple.  1) there must be a person who can be helped, and 2) it must be the case that you can help them.  There is nothing else grounding this duty.

Are there limits on this obligation?  Perhaps, but it doesn’t seem to me that most of us are anyplace close to reaching those limits.

Another of Andy’s comments in his post has me thinking about this dude — Kant…

IF a photographer takes photos of a dying person in order to help other dying persons, is the original dying person being used as a means only?

Perhaps what a person can do is take photos, compelling photos that will prompt others to give more than they otherwise would.  The photographer is using their unique skill and talent,  doing what perhaps only they can to relieve suffering, even if they are using the image of a suffering person who won’t live long enough to see the relief.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative says, roughly, persons should treat themselves and others as ends in themselves and never as means only.  What that translates into is that we ought not take advantage of others’ in order to achieve our own goals.  This doesn’t seem to exactly rule out the photographer’s actions — especially when you take into consideration the photographer’s good motive (which is Kant’s main deal… you must have a good motive), namely helping others.  IF the photographer’s motive is to get rich and others are helped accidentally, then it doesn’t seem to be OK by Kant.

So — these were a couple of mostly unrelated ramblings about our obligations to others… what do you think?