It did the thing. The horror movie thing where it descends silently behind you, reflected in the mirror.
Living alone, it is sometimes necessary to split yourself in two: the person who saw the giant bathroom spider, and the person who can kill the giant bathroom spider.
I’m not doing a Tweek in Review this week, as it would be almost entirely basketball stuff, and I’ve covered that more readably in my last couple of posts.
Aside from the occasional break to lose my mind watching NBA basketball, all my mental energy these days is bent towards the task of moving my life back to Texas. Lately this song has resonated, and been on heavy rotation.
Nonfiction:
Fiction:
I just submitted a rental application for an apartment, so this seems as good a time as any to announce that I’m moving back to Texas.
My life in Iowa has been wonderful in many ways, but after three Midwestern years I’m ready to resume real city living. I spent the last semester traveling all over the country looking for where I might want to relocate. I fell in love with Seattle, spent several glorious days in Portland, and had my eyes opened to the excitement of burgeoning Durham. And had you asked me a few years ago, I would have placed the odds of my ever living in Texas again at near-zero. But, three years later, I’ve realized that proximity to family is a much bigger motivator than I’d realized. Than I’d ever been in a position before to discover. So I’m splitting the difference between novelty and familiarity by moving to Austin, a city in which I’ve never lived, but where I have friends and will be an easy drive from my parents in San Antonio. All the other places I want to be will wait for me. I have unfinished business in the Lone Star State.
This week’s favstarred tweets.
https://twitter.com/ObiCynKenobi/statuses/472480567443726336
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Andres Alvarez was kind enough to invite me to be the voice of Spurs fandom on the BoxScoreGeeks Show. We discussed the narratives of this postseason run, and take a historical look at the Spurs’ accomplishments over the last seventeen years. There are also podcast versions of the show you can subscribe to if you like. Here’s the link.
This is Herky, the mascot for the University of Iowa sports teams, the Hawkeyes. When you live in Iowa City you see Herky every day, everywhere. Herky exudes defiant pride from license plates, store windows, chalk drawings on the sidewalk, and the back of innumerable loose-fitting sweatshirts. This year, Herky is even more prevalent, due to the Herky On Parade program, which has placed 83 individually decorated Herky statues all around town. One of these, down on the highly-trafficked ped mall, is named Checkmate Herky, presumably because once it sees you there is no escape.
Checkmate Herky is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen. Checkmate Herky will find you. Checkmate Herky will trap you. Checkmate Herky will chase you through the light and through the darkness. Life and death are trivial pastimes to Checkmate Herky, and struggle as we may, he will be there, waiting for us, in the endgame.
Some followup from my earlier discussion of this topic. My friend Keffy Kehrli, on twitter and in private conversation, emphasized the difference he sees between trigger warnings and content warnings. It’s a distinction I hadn’t thought about, but I think it’s a valuable one. A trigger warning implies an assumption of responsibility on the part of the teacher for particular traumas the students might have, and also reinforces the false idea that triggering is a predictable phenomenon. A content warning, on the other hand, is a way of being sensitive to the potential for troubled responses to difficult material, but still leaves the responsibility for self care with the student. Now that this distinction has been pointed out to me, I agree with Keffy that content warnings seem more appropriate than trigger warnings, and all of my thoughts in support of trigger warnings apply as well or better to content warnings.
Brittney Cooper published an essay in Salon titled, “No Trigger Warnings in My Class: why you won’t find them on my syllabi.” Cooper worries that trigger warnings will stifle education. She writes, “this call from students to censor their own education before they even receive it is designed to keep them from being challenged,” and makes several meaningful points about the importance of a classroom being a place where preconceived notions are questioned. I have two responses to Cooper’s article. First, that I also don’t think trigger or content warnings belong on a syllabus, for the same reasons she mentions. I think they should be part of classroom discussion. Second, a warning isn’t an invitation for students to excuse themselves from crucial material. In the anecdote I shared before, the triggering concepts were entirely unrelated to those that were pedagogically relevant to my class. If I, like Ms. Cooper, were a professor of gender studies classes, then content warnings for things like rape or racism wouldn’t be offered so students could ask for alternate assignments, but so students could determine if the class itself was right for them. Those who took the class would still be required to engage on difficult issues. And I’m personally not comfortable asserting that those who chose not to would be “censoring their own education before they receive it” as opposed to engaging in reasonable self-protective measures. Young though they may be, college students are adults, and deserve the benefit of the doubt that they are competent to design their plans of study.