in your dreams

I doubt any of you will be surprised to learn that I watch a lot of HGTV.  I watch all the shows, pretty much, and would watch even more if we hadn't canceled our premium cable package. I love all renovations shows, and indeed, my childhood home was a renovation project, so my early years were sort of like growing up with the property brothers. My whole family just really loves real estate: going to open houses was a regular Sunday afternoon activity in my family. And then I met Josh, who works in real estate, and so the love affair continues.

All this to say: I understand real estate aspirations! What I do not understand, however, is the idea of a "dream house." I also do not understand the idea of a "dream job," but I'll get to that in a minute.

The people on HGTV shows are constantly talking about their dream house. The most fascinating part, for me, is that they all seem to have the same dream. They want an open floor plan, they want 3-4 four bedrooms, they want to stay in their current neighborhood (unless they are on House Hunters International), they want a "master" with a spa-like bathroom. They all have a very specific price range, but are OK with blowing past it so they can have the Carrera marble or the gas fireplace or the wine fridge they have their heart set on. And, most annoyingly, they are always ecstatically happy with the final result. They are so happy they cry. 

After a few episodes, watching people achieve their dreams so consistently ends up feeling pretty oppressive. I start to think these people's dreams must also be my dreams. Suddenly, the popcorn ceiling in my apartment brings down my mood. My parquet floors begin to nag at me. The laminate counters in my bathroom become unacceptable. If only I could do a renovation! Then I too could be living in dreams!

Then Josh turns off the TV and insists we go outside, and I remember that I actually like my apartment. And then I walk around the block and remember that I don't have dreams about housing at all! I dream about living in Paris, I dream about getting a call from Marilynne Robinson asking for my opinion about an essay she's writing, I dream about writing a bestselling romance/mystery novel under a clever nom de plume, I dream about reading all the Platonic dialogues in order, but I don't dream about houses.

And just a few weeks ago a friend inquired about my future job plans, and when I replied without much gusto I was told I that I need to conceptualize my "dream job" in order to achieve my full career potential. When I insisted that I have never once dreamed about working, she was somewhat taken aback. I don't have a dream job—I have dreams about what I would do if I didn't have to have a job.

This conversation irked me, and I realize now that it's for the same reasons that people crying with happiness when they see new hardwood floors irks me. The whole point of dreaming is that it's not real! Why would you dream about bathroom tiles when you could dream about your long-lost great-aunt bequeathing you a palazzo in Italy? Why would you dream about working when you could dream about stumbling upon buried treasure and only doing whatever you want for the rest of your life?

I do understand that most contentious people have goals, and those goals may include getting particular jobs, purchasing certain houses, and acquiring specific wine fridges. Good for them! But I sincerely hope their dreams involve more interesting flights of fancy. 

Then again, I've never cried with happiness about anything, so maybe I really just need to loosen up and take more pleasure in interior decoration.  

a perfect word

"I have an experience of recognition, not just in response to others’ ideas, but on the order of a single word. It happens, in my own writing, in those moments when you know there’s a perfect word, even though you have not written it yet. You cast about for it, and over time, some obscure word will come to you — your mind knows it’s there. Often, it’s a word with such an extraordinary precision that you wonder how it survived. You think, This must have come down from early modern English or Anglo-Saxon — how did it come to birth? How did it survive? Who was it that needed this word first and coined it? It’s amazing. You wonder how many people have had any use for it over the last 300 years, but there it is."

—Marilynne Robinson 

petty cultural tyrannies

Why is not wanting to see Hamilton treated as a minor form of heresy? I never thought I'd see the day when I felt oppressed by the need to feign interest in a musical. I'm not even trying to be a contrarian (...mostly?) and yet otherwise polite people become visibly annoyed when I don't want to listen to them sing along to the soundtrack. Who wants to listen to anyone sing along to a soundtrack?? (Seriously. Find me that person and I will buy you an expensive cocktail.)

And why is it that these same people who are so peeved by my lack of interest in seeing Hamilton have never read any Hamilton? I mention the Federalist Papers and all I get is a blank stare. Or a look of total disinterest not dissimilar to the face I pull when people extol the virtues of Broadway musicals.

And now that I think about it, that's is a pretty succinct illustration of the gaping intellectual void that undercuts all of modern culture. You're welcome! 

the &^#@*! side of history

Somewhat masochistically, I now keep an eye out for uses of my least favorite phrase. In case you're interested, here are some recent gems:

• From HuffPost, "Donald Trump once again cemented himself on the wrong side of history, pleading Tuesday not to remove statues honoring the Confederacy."
• From the NYTimes, "Sometimes standing on the wrong side of history in defense of a cause you think is right is still just standing on the wrong side of history."
• From Vice, "Let's keep it simple: The statues should come down because they honor men who fought on the wrong side of history."
• From The Cut, "But then, Google might simply want to be on the right side of history. Using science to explain the differences between groups of people is a look that has never aged well."

(As an aside: while my frustration extends equally to anyone making claims about the right or the wrong sides of history, the latter formulation seems more popular these days. We are clearly feeling less triumphant and more reproachful.)

In every instance, "the wrong side of history" could be replaced with a simple normative statement and the sentence would be all the better for it: "defending a unjust position, even in defense of a just cause, is still wrong"; "the statues should come down because they honor men who fought for an unjust cause"; "but then, Google might want to do the right thing," etc, etc.

Clearly the authors are uncomfortable with making simple judgments about right and wrong. I sympathize: it's often hard to demonstrate why something is wrong. So they appeal to history instead, as though doing so would definitively show the reader how people ought to act now. But most people have no idea what to do when confronted with political or moral dilemmas, and history (at least none that I've read) does not give us any reason to believe otherwise.

Yes, slavery has been eliminated, the confederacy was defeated, and scientific sexism and racism have been proven wrong, but that doesn't mean we've moved beyond injustice. The one thing history does show is that humans are brilliant at finding new and interesting ways to torment each other. 

learn to cook

From a NYTimes profile of the novelist Claire Messud:

"I had a sense that the costs [of having a family] were high,’’ she said later. ‘‘And I had a sense that I didn’t want that to be my fate. I had a sense that I’d better not learn to cook, which I never did."

From a Harper's magazine article on women in the alt-right:

In late 2016, two pundits started an online advice column...a female reader looking for an alt-right spouse got [this] advice.“Become as attractive as you are capable of. Commit to having many white babies!...Learn to cook.”

Why is a woman learning to cook making a "traditional" statement of some kind? Cooking is a skill, and a crucial one at that.  You will eat thousands and thousands of meals in your lifetime. Why would you cede the responsibility for preparing all of those meals to others? By learning to cook you are neither resigning yourself to a lifetime of drudgery nor preparing to find an alt-right husband: you are learning a basic skill. 

Obviously this applies to all humans, regardless of gender. It always seemed insane to me that anyone could make it to adulthood without learning to prepare a simple meal for themselves. This is poor parenting! Learning to crochet can be optional, learning to feed yourself should be mandatory.

And maybe if Claire Messud ever learned to cook, her husband—who, according to the article, is an excellent cook—could finally be free to have a career! Poor man. 

values ≠ morals

There's an article from Harper's Bazaar floating around the interwebs, which argues that if you should happen to find yourself married to a Trump supporter you should divorce them. Here's a part with only minimal hyperbole:

Supporting Trump at this point does not indicate a difference of opinions. It indicates a difference of values. Values aren’t like hobbies or interests. They don’t change over time, and they more or less define who you are. Trump’s administration may have been, for some of us, a time when what we value has become much clearer to us.

Re: Trump divorces, all I have to say is that people get divorced for a lot of stupid reasons and we hardly need another one.

Also, can I pause here to kvetch about how writers (who are presumably paid to choose their words carefully?) use the word values when what they actually mean is morals. Value pertains first of all to the monetary worth of something. So the word you use to justify the price of the used bathing suit you just posted on eBay should not be the same one you use to discuss morality. I know that using value as a synonym for moral is here to stay—thank you, Nietzsche—I just wish that writers would, you know, think about words more.

Anyway, all of that aside, my true beef here is with the idea that people's morals don't change. I'm going to take the author seriously and assume she really believes this. If so, then she's suggesting that she was born with the correct political and moral ideas and that absolutely nothing has changed since. (I would really like to speak to her middle school classmates to verify this.) Or maybe let's be generous and say that by the age of 20 she was morally developed enough to be able to make just decisions about absolutely everything for the rest of her life. I guess in a perfect world this is conceivable—after all, she could be Jesus!

And Jesus would be totally chill about your divorce if it was for totally justifiable Trump Reasons, right? And if you don't currently agree with this lady about Trump (for any reason) then he would totally understand that you are not just irredeemable during this election cycle, you are irredeemable forever. You cannot change! Not even if she tries really, really hard to persuade you one afternoon on twitter! No. If you voted for Trump you deserve to be divorced and, most likely, expelled from the Republic. This woman is clearly the soul of moral probity. You should most definitely take marriage advice from her. 

dead time

It's my first day back from a week's vacation, and I just spent the entire afternoon moderating two separate panels on a subject I know next to nothing about and had very little time to prepare for. And knowing next to nothing is the worst kind of know-nothingness, as I've said before, because you know enough to be acutely aware that you know nothing, which makes you self-conscious and stupid, as opposed to being just stupid. I've found that I consistently do better in these situations when I'm full-on ignorant, rather than just mostly ignorant.

And of course, I could not manage to pry any questions out of the participants and one of the panelists was a no-show. There was a lot of "dead time" to fill, and I did so, flailingly and with much sweating.

It felt a lot like the worst semester of my life, when I was a teaching assistant for a class on a subject I had never studied. Except this time, instead of a bunch of students looking at me blankly, it was a bunch of adult professionals. Which, I have to say, feels worse.

The upside: it only lasted four hours, as opposed to the semester, which lasted a never-ending, infinite, endless, immeasurable number of weeks. Also: I did at least receive a living wage to make a fool of myself today.

Suddenly, I feel so much better! I here reaffirm that really there is NOTHING worse than grad school. Though some days may come very close.