Where our hero accomplishes things.

It's the end of the semester and I'm happy to say that things are proceeding smoothly. So happy, in fact, that I announced to my wife how smoothly things are proceeding. She helpfully offered some historical trivia: I say that every semester, approximately one week before I completely lose my shit and barricade myself in the office until I finish whatever I have to finish, leaving the room only to replenish my caffeine stores and to occasionally totter around the house in a paper-induced stupor, staring blankly at once-familiar people and objects as if I were suffering from Alzheimer's or some sort of South African fungal brain rot.

True enough. But it makes me feel better to validate my present state of calm by expressing it to others, even if they don't completely buy into it. And I do feel pretty good about things-- my chosen research topics are interesting and timely, and I've got useful things to say about them. But we'll see how it goes.

Oh, and according to the baby books our son could be born tomorrow and be perfectly healthy. This is is reassuring in the sense that if he were to be born tomorrow, I'd like very much for him to be healthy. It is not at all reassuring in the sense that it makes the possibility that he could be born tomorrow seem much more likely. We're supposed to have another month of life sans baby and I for one need at least two more weeks of it. So hopefully the heir to my kingdom does me a solid and keeps to himself for a bit longer. I'll make it up to him at some point.

In the meantime, I'm trying to keep my motivation high. Curiously enough, I become much more focused and productive when it's nice outside. This is unfortunate, since I'd really prefer to lock myself in a dark room all winter and crank out volumes of work so I can enjoy the kinder seasons. But that's not how my brain works-- I'm lethargic and easily-distracted when it's cold and crappy outside. But the good news is that I should be able to finish strong this semester.

So that's that. I'll probably post again when I've finished everything for the semester and am getting down to the business of making final baby preparations (and finding a summer job- yikes). But in the meantime you're once again left to your own insidious devices. Try not to do anything you'll regret between now and then.

School, Baby, Jiu-Jitsu

If you ask me how I'm doing, my response will inevitably involve one or more of the above topics. Exclusively. Don't ask me about politics, because I don't know anymore. Don't bother telling me about your favorite new band, because I haven't heard of them-- my iPod is still loaded with the same stuff I listened to at the turn of the millennium. And don't expect much sympathy about the recession (repression? decession?)-- although I make less than the average high school graduate and my savings have been halved by the stock market drop (meaning I can't responsibly sell anything until things get better), I am safely ensconced in my ivory tower and thus don't have to face the scariest parts of the economic downturn. But I can talk about any of the above three topics. And that's what I'm going to do now.

School.
Things have gone fairly well this semester, although the end-of-the-semester paper writing stressavaganza is looming. This is the Semester Where I Dare Not Bitch to Anyone, since I am A: on fellowship and thus absolved of any teaching or grading, and B: Taking three seminars, all of which cover topics in my primary areas of interest (self-knowledge, metaphysics of collectives and joint action, phil. of mind). But of course, grad school in any form is hard, and this semester has been as challenging as any I've had. When people ask me how I like school I tend to tell them to imagine being force-fed one hundred of their favorite candy bars every day. After a while you start to forget why you liked that candy bar so much, but you still wouldn't switch to a lesser confection because that would suck even more. And so it is with school here. At times my favorite topics no longer seem interesting and fun because I'm nose-deep in them all day, every day. But I know in the back of my mind that if I were to take some time away, I'd miss them. So, my family's traditionally preferred remedy emerges as a clear solution: suck it up, quit whining, rub some dirt on it and get back out there.

One also learns a lot about what kind of academic they're going to be in grad school. I won't get into details, but this semester (as with last semester) I've had a clear developmental curve: I try to do philosophy in a certain way, I fall on my face and get depressed about what a crappy philosopher I am, then I say screw it and start having fun with it, and then suddenly the (modest) praise from professors starts rolling in. As it is a law of nature that the grad student's feelings of self-worth are directly tethered to the amount of approval they receive from their faculty, I start to feel better about myself, and then I end the semester on a high note (I'm projecting that last part, but I hope it's true).

There's something to be said for recognizing one's own individual talents and seeing them as valuable, even if it's not what the folks around you are doing. I'm slowly coming to learn that there are different styles of doing philosophy, and I'm far more successful (and happy, and prone to original thought) if I stay true to the way I naturally tend to do it. I'm also getting good at discriminating these different styles in the stuff I'm reading. This is comforting-- while I won't ever be like Philosopher X, I could actually approximate to Philosopher Y if I played my cards right. Now I just have to learn to play cards, which is what the next four and a half years are for.

Baby.
We have a baby on the way. He's very much on the way, in fact-- in about a month and a half our lives are going to be turned upside-down and they won't be rightside-upped again until we're well into our 40s. Mrs. DJ and I have been building a nursery for him and it's been a pretty amazing experience. She's taken the lead on design and quality control. I open cans, lift things, and handle the labor that a man of my limited handiness and motor skills can perform. The results have been pretty amazing, and I'll post the progression of pictures once I've got all of the furniture assembled and in the right places. The above picture, by the way, is a very old ultrasound-- the baby has grown a huge amount since then. Although we don't have any current ultrasounds of him, I would project that he presently looks more like this:




He clearly takes after his old man.







We're working our way through birthing classes now, which, contrary to what my friends have unanimously declared, have been really helpful. Of course, we're taking them through BABS (Bloomington Area Birth Services), which is a non-profit organization that organizes things like pre-natal yoga, birthing classes, and other educational stuff. I think if we took the generic hospital class we'd be really bored, but our BABS classes have taught us a lot about what to expect on the big day and what to expect after that. And we've done the boring stuff, too-- interviewed pediatricians, looked into health insurance, done insane amounts of baby laundry (Mrs. DJ did all the laundry, actually- hooray for random bursts of pregnant lady energy!). In short, we've done all we can to be 100% totally prepared to be completely bewildered and terrified when the baby arrives and we start realizing all of the stuff we don't know about parenting. But that's how it is with everyone, I hear, so we're just learning to do everything we can now to take care of a possible baby, with the expectation that we'll have to re-learn it all once there's an actual baby with actual needs involved. But I'm happy to know that I'm very good at taking care of a possible baby.

I occasionally have dad moments now. I define a "dad moment" as falling into one of three categories:
1) Getting a warm, fuzzy feeling when I see a father teaching his son something on TV.
2) Discovering I don't know how to do something (fixing, building) and making a mental note of it: "I need to learn how to do this before the boy is old enough to recognize that I don't know how to do it".
3) An odd, unfamiliar feeling that I ought to be setting a good example ("I can't stress enough how unfamiliar this feeling is", typed the man in his pajamas at 11:30).

I'm sure there's a potent mix of cultural and biological pressures that effect this sort of thing. Growing up, we wonder how our parents turned from normal human beings into, well, parents. Adding a child isn't enough-- there's a parenty aspect to parents that doesn't just emerge when you put a small person next to them. I think I'm going through that change now, and I've resolved to be acutely aware of it as it happens. Because some parents are amazing-- supportive, strict but fair, and deserving of respect from their kids (whether they get it or not). Other parents are petty, prying, clingy, indulgent, and self-absorbed. Everybody wants to be the awesome parent, but a lot of them turn into crappy ones. I'm interested in seeing how this happens, both because it's interesting and because I want to avoid the mistakes that a lot of other people are making. I'm hopeful that the very fact that I'm keeping a close eye on this transition is going to make a big difference in how I turn out as a father. Because, if you'll permit me a little self-indulgent boo-hooing, my dad died when I was 12 and he wasn't around all that much before then. He made more money in six months than I'll make in grad school. Nice as that may have been, it would have been nice to have a role model around. I never had a role model-- in high school, when I was asked to write essays on role models I either didn't turn the assignment in or wrote something about Bruce Lee. But I had no interest in turning out like Bruce Lee-- I just thought he was cool and I realized that I needed to write something down to get credit for the assignment. I decided, with the teenage hubris that I'm sure I'll have to deal with from my own son: "I'll be my own role-model". I've only realized in the last year or two what a bad strategy that was, and I've had a steep adult learning curve as a result. So I'd like to find a way to be that kind of person for my son- an available exemplar of how a human being ought to act. That will require changes, but I think I'm at the point in my life where I'd like to make them. One can't stay in their pajamas forever, after all.

Jiu-Jitsu
A refresher: When I started at IU one of the bits of advice I received was to get a hobby so as to stave off insanity. As it turns out IU has the 2nd best martial arts program in the country (next to UCLA-- you can actually get a degree in martial arts management here), I thought I'd join the brazilian jiu-jitsu club. That was in July. Now I'm training 3x a week for about 2.5hrs each, plus attending a few of the classes during the week when I have time. And I'm actually pretty good at it: I competed at my first tournament (the obnoxiously-titled Extreme Grappling Open) and finished 2nd in two separate weight classes. Over the course of the day I went 6-2, with 4 wins by submission. I'm in the best shape I've been in since my deployment (I weighed in at 170lbs-- my high school sophomore weight), and my learning curve has yet to plateau. So I think I'm going to stick with this for a long time. Depending on how well you know me, this is either very strange or totally expected. It's strange because I have the hand-eye coordination of a toddler. I have, for my entire life, failed miserably at any sport that required throwing, catching, or (God forbid) actually hitting something that was thrown at me. So I'm not much of a sports guy in that respect. But despite that crippling deficiency in my kinesthetic intelligence, I'm actually a decent athlete, and that part of me has always found a way to sneak out. I ran track in junior high. My parents started me in karate when I was 5 and I competed in state and national competition from age 10 to age 17 (at which time I got a girlfriend and, oddly enough, my attendance at our thrice-a-week training sessions dropped way off). I wrestled throughout high school. After a year of spinning my wheels in college I joined the Army. And now that I'm done with that nonsense I find myself spending my evenings strangling undergraduates. And I couldn't be happier. I'll never be a world-class athlete, but there's a part of my brain that desperately needs this kind of activity. So it's weird to come to seminar with gi burns on my neck and bruises all over my arms, but it's totally worth it.

So that's what this particular time-slice of DJ looks like. Future time-slices will be described sometime in the not-so-distant future.

Some Facts

FACT 1: My fetus has a penis and he kicks like a mule.
FACT 2: This blog's traffic stays about the same whether I post anything or not.
FACT 3: Confidence is not an sufficient defense against illness.
FACT 4: I am presently sick and am no longer so cocky about my immune system.
FACT 5: Wikipedia's definition of "Fact" is arguably not a fact, given that definition.
FACT 5: No matter how much it snows in Indiana, it's still better than Texas.
FACT 6: If you invert the p and the s in this blog's URL, you get taken to a very exciting place (TST at Digestion du Jour discovered the same thing about her much-more-frequently-updated-and-interesting-blog).
FACT 7: This website is funny in small doses.
FACT 8: Fact 9 is, in fact, not a fact.
FACT 9: Fact 8 is, in fact, not a fact.
FACT 10: I don't especially care if you didn't like my visual pun.
FACT 11: Posting will remain infrequent during the rest of this semester because school is an all-consuming endeavor. When the boy is born this summer, posting will probably pick back up but will largely be about learning to live with the baby. Those readers who are both pro-me and anti-baby will likely want to take a break from UOE for the next six months to three years, give or take.

G'Bye, George.

And to commemorate the occasion, here's a happy lil' song by a band that I'm pretty sure will not be playing the inauguration.

Rebooting the Blog with Big News

So according to my hit counter some people are still poking this site every few days to see if it's dead or not. It isn't, though it's certainly been laying on the side of the road for some time and is surely starting to smell a bit. I have good reasons for this: Between grading papers and writing a few of my own I didn't have much time to write, and what little writing I could have done would have been nonstop whining about how much work I still had to do. So in some sense I did everyone a favor by not posting here. But now things have cooled down a bit, I did very well last semester (thereby proving to myself that I do belong in this program), and I can now take some time to report on how I'm livin' in the oh-nine.

The first and most important thing I can disclose is that, in yet another cosmic demonstration that there is nothing intelligent guiding the workings of the universe, I have managed to reproduce. Well, almost: Mrs. DJ is halfway through the pregnancy. She has been amazing so far: years of sitcoms had taught me that the second blastocyst forms inside her ovaries a woman turns into a bile-spewing gila monster, gnawing on the furniture and kicking out windows until their bizarre demands for pickle-and-strawberry milkshakes are met. No such change has taken place in Mrs. DJ-- she' s handled the stresses of pregnancy extraordinarily well, and probably a lot better than I would have. She won't admit to this, of course, but I'm very proud of her.

We haven't found out the gender of the baby yet, but we will next week. I've never understood the "wait and see" crowd on this issue... it seems that discovery of the baby's gender will be a surprise regardless of when you find out, and if you find out early you have some time to paint the nursery the right kind of color, etc. Of course, you can paint the nursery in modern, gender-neutral colors, but I feel like that if you go too modern on these things you run the risk of making the nursery a bit like the set of Sprockets:


But decor isn't the only issue at hand here: what we really want right now is a pronoun. As the child now has reasonably well-developed central nervous system I'm ready to tentatively attribute personhood to it... it's "close enough for government work", as they say (indeed, from my military experience I can say that my fetus could at this point probably serve effectively as a Captain in the Army). But people aren't "it"s. They're "he"s or "she"s or something else in the case of genetic bad luck or costly overseas surgery. I always feel like I'm somehow devaluing the baby-to-be by referring to it as "it". So it would be nice to know the gender for that reason. Furthermore, we already have a boy name and a girl name picked out, so if we know the gender we can dive right into calling it by name. So we're very excited to see how everything goes.

The prospect of fatherhood hasn't changed much yet for me, but it promises to change a lot. Not just the parts where I start changing a bunch of diapers and stop saying "fuck" at the breakfast nook, but the long-term ramifications of being responsible for another human life. At some point this little person is going to look at me as a role model, and there's a bit of pressure not to screw that up. The missus and I have already set conditions for parenting failure: Whatever may become of our baby, he or she cannot turn out like this:


If our child turns out to be a self-centered, vapid idiot, we will have failed miserably as parents. I'd rather our child turn out to be a bank robber or a carnival worker. As a secondary condition, I'd also prefer to avoid this if it's at all possible:

So there's that. And, of course, the spectre of fatherhood also adds a certain degree of scholastic pressure. I've come a long way from the carefree undergrad days of "it doesn't matter what grade I get-- I've learned what I wanted to learn and I've done enough to pass". The Grad school hunt straightened me out: non-vowels are toxic for one's transcript, so I eventually managed to cultivate something vaguely resembling a work ethic and I've managed to keep improving it to this day. But now there's a new worry: At some point my child is going to be old enough to take a critical look at his father and decide whether or not he's worth anything. Gainfully-employed-tenure-track-professor dad will, I hope, be pretty cool. Struggling-to-pay-the-bills-with-five-adjunct-positions dad will be considerably less so. So now there's this worry even when I do well in a class: "Sure, you got an A on this paper but there's no way you could publish it. And if you can't publish anything you'll never get a good job, and if you never get a good job at some point the fetus gestating in your wife's belly is going to take a good long look at you and decide that you're not deserving of its respect".

So the prospect of fatherhood leads to me setting failure conditions for myself not only as a parent, but as an academic. This is a weird thought, both motivating and frightening, and I'm not sure I've totally come to terms with it. It's partially associated with the general growing-up process that tends to be slowed in those of us who are lucky enough to spend an extra decade in school. But it was bound to happen sometime, so it might as well be now.

So there's that. Everything else sort of pales in comparison, so I'll make it brief: Tough semester ahead but it's loaded with classes I genuinely care about so I'm very excited about it; spent the entire winter break researching and writing a term paper that I turned in 12hrs before this semester started; yay fellowship that absolves me of teaching duties (for the semester) and schedule that gives me Fridays off; boo snowy roads, yay Obama in '09. That should cover it.

It's Not You, It's Me

The semester is drawing to a close, which means that my already infrequent posting will taper off even further. With two term papers, a logic exam and entirely too much grading still to do, there just aren't enough hours in the day to write anything here. This isn't anything to be particularly upset about, as my finals-induced tunnel vision would limit the set of possible topics to unfinished philosophical thoughts and delirious 4am "the goddamned paper isn't coming together- I'm doomed!" cries for help.

Fun Fact about the Author: Since I started taking school seriously (read: since I started my graduate work) I have had at least one "I'm doomed!" moment per semester. Thus far, such projections have been almost entirely inaccurate.

At any rate, here's a final update on life as I'm presently experiencing it:

1. I've learned a valuable lesson this semester-- whatever sort of person I turn out to be after my time at Indiana, it's nearly certain that that person will not be a historian of philosophy. I don't have the attention span or the patience to wade nose-deep into an extended body of work and engage it on its own terms. The sorts of discoveries that constitute real progress in the history of philosophy-- claims of the form "scholars think Philosopher x meant such-and-such when he said this, but he couldn't have meant that because it's inconsistent with his claims in this paper, this paper, his letter to so-and-so and the postscript of this book"-- just aren't the sorts of discoveries I'm interested in making. Of course, I value the contributions these historical figures have made, but I want to sift through those contributions, learn what I can from them and see what can be used to solve contemporary problems. To paraphrase another grad student, I tend to value historical works only as a source of plunder. Historical debates just don't grip me the way current problems do, and I appear to be wired for problem-solving, not historical analysis.

2. On a related note I've taken a keen interest in experimental philosophy, which is a rising enfant terrible in the philosophical world. The idea is to bring experimental and statistical methods to bear on the way contextual and environmental conditions affect our intuitions about different problems, stories and situations. This is important because philosophers tend to do a lot of reasoning "from the armchair" and thus regard our intuitions (surely everybody would think that THIS was immoral/a case of knowledge/etc) as real evidence for the truth of some claim or other. If those intuitions aren't as stable as people think they are, then arguments that rely on them are going to be in trouble (and some of the arguments in question have been very influential on modern thought). The Experimental Epistemology Lab (EEL) at Indiana has been doing a lot of really interesting work in this area, and after talking with several members of the lab I've taken a real interest in the subject. One really exciting thing about working in a brand spankin' new area of research-- every goofy question you ask is a potential avenue of research, and I think I have some legitimate questions I'd like to answer. I'm hoping to affiliate myself in some way with the lab soon, and possibly join after I've finished my coursework next year.

3. In non-philosophical news: Each fall, all of the incoming graduate students have to attend a series of talks on topics ranging from the location of the library to why it's a bad idea to have sex with your students. Somewhere along the way the topic of hobbies as a means to stave off work-related insanity came up, and since I no longer have my one-weekend-a-month-two-weeks-a-year-and-sometimes-eighteen-months-whenever-we-feel-like-it hobby (which did absolutely nothing to relieve stress, by the way), it occurred to me that I needed a new one. In July I checked out the Indiana Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu club, and I've been hooked ever since. It's a strong organization with about 20 regular members and has ties to the larger BJJ/MMA community throughout Indiana-- several former students have opened their own schools and keep in touch with the IU club. If you're curious about what BJJ is all about, here's a nice YouTube video that demonstrates some of the basic and intermediate techniques:

Training lasts for about 2.5 hours a session 3x/week, with 30min conditioning, 1hr technique drilling, and 1hr free sparring. Every three months the club founder, 30 year BJJ veteran Caique Elias, comes back to campus to run clinics and promote students. Here's one guy with a kickass beard getting his first stripe:

It's a traditional club, and although we have a few people who do some local cage fighting everything in the club is focused on jiu-jitsu. This was important for me, as I was worried that the club would be stacked with a bunch of UFC-wannabe meatheads. But so far it's been a really good group, and it seems like this is something I could stick with throughout my time at IU. Having wrestled throughout high school it was a good fit for me , and I've been picking things up very quickly. The conditioning has also been a huge help-- I weigh in the low 170s these days, which is a pretty good feeling considering that I was pushing 220 a few years ago. The downsides are that I'm frequently covered in bruises and mat burns and I have a bad habit of chipping my teeth, and as a result have already had a "Fight Club" moment in my discussion section. But students actually seem to respond fairly well to the idea-- they like the idea that their philosophy instructor does more than think about philosophy all day. So I'll keep this up for a while and see how it all pans out.

----

So that's it for now. I've got a lot to work on between now and the break, but I believe I can guarantee at least one interesting post in December. Happy holidays!

The sky is falling, comrades!

Today I'm indulging myself in a wonderfully dark schadenfreude as I watch hysterical conservatives make their plans for the End of Days when the Dark One (But Not In A Racist Way) swoops down upon them astride his transgendered gryphon "Ryanne", taking all of their money away and using it to disband the Armed Forces and pass legislation mandating earmarks that give socialized health care to terrorist abortionists and teach preschoolers how to properly perform the Reverse Cowgirl.

They're hoarding canned goods, bottled water and firearms in anticipation of the looming dark (but still not in a racist way) times where the Dow tanks (???), they all lose their jobs-- which are promptly given to hobos and meth addicts by the newly-developed Ministry of Fuck Joe The Plumber-- and they are forced to spend their days waiting in line for government handouts of bread, water and toilet paper, all the while living in fear of attack from grotesque carnivorous abominations-- products both of deregulated stem cell research and the legions of pallid, malnourished Rush Limbaugh supporters who, having the object of their fetishistic devotion publicly beheaded by a surprisingly strongly-worded version of the Fairness In Media Act, have left their bomb shelters and now roam the land eating the brains of intellectual elites and others who have the audacity to use grammatical subjects with predicates at a nearly 1:1 ratio.

But of course they know none of this truly matters because by the end of the first year the new Democratic Majority will have already doomed the planet by appointing a bisexual llama to the Supreme Court, giving illegal aliens special laser guns that destroy patriotism, replacing the American flag with a "postmodern" flag that, being entirely blank, can be interpreted to be whatever you want it to be, mandating that all adults over age of 20 must marry at least one piece of furniture and consummate the union in a place of worship, renaming the country "New Europe", replacing the National Anthem with Kajagoogoo's 1983 hit "Too Shy" and adding a constitutional amendment randomly shuffling the definitions of "man", "woman" and "wanksta" twice every calendar year.
_

Their final acts-- Subpoenaing God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit for "possession of suspicious metaphysical properties" and replacing Christmas with a state holiday devoted to the activity of throwing unwrapped condoms at a bust of Ronald Reagan-- will finally push the Almighty over the edge and trigger an immediate snuffing-out of all material substance. God will shake his head sadly at his failed experiment and move on to other pursuits, though it is likely he will, after a few millenia, break down and recreate a pocket-sized Sean Hannity to keep around for company and occasional moral advice.
_

So to my conservative friends-- cheer up! It probably won't be quite this bad for you. In fact-- and I don't want to suggest that some of the things you've heard about Obama's platform were wrong or anything-- it might actually be pretty good. So, much as I'd like to parrot the Right's challenge in '04: "If you don't like it, you can leave", I'd invite you to stick around for a while and see how things go. Maybe you'll actually like it here after a year or three. But you should probably also call dibs on your favorite piece of furniture, just in case. You don't want to get stuck with that end table with the bad leg when the revolution comes, after all.