Operation Dumbo Drop*

In the fall of 2006, after having worked as a carpenter for a couple years, I became acutely aware that I was in need of a change - that we, my family and I, were in need of a change. At that point I had been married for over four years, my daughter had just turned two, and I was going to be 28 years old the following spring. I perceived my life as having a certain lazy, quasi-fatalist arc to it: I had done what had come my way, trusting - loosely - that everything would work out for me in terms of stability, success, etc. Having scrutinized the narrative of my life following my graduation from high school almost ten years prior to that point (and even before), I realized that it was pointedly lacking in the personal volition department. That is, I hardly ever asserted my will to live as deliberately as I, ironically enough, always knew I wanted to live. At the close of 2006 this began to change, and I still distinctly remember waking up to a brave new world on January 1st, 2007.

After a brief but victorious skirmish with the kind folks in Admissions I was admitted as a nontraditional undergraduate transfer student at the University of Kansas, and the transition began. At the time, as I mentioned, I was building houses with a local sub-contractor in Lawrence. He agreed to let me work 3/4 time in order to begin attending classes part-time. That summer I took a course at the Edwards campus, taking advantage of the K-10 connector, and by the following Fall I was taking classes part time, having shuffled off the mantle of blue collar hard labor (at least for the time being). This was the Fall semester of 2007.

The following semester my wife and I's second child was born, a boy, and the difficulty in sustaining a successful academic career was raised a couple of notches.

At the time of this writing he is just over a year old, while his older sister is almost 4 1/2. They are used to their Papa leaving early in the morning with a bag full of books, returning to eat and play for a bit before sitting down to shuffle papers, push pens, click the keyboard and jump through the various hair-graying hoops of academic life. What is next in this story involves them even to a greater extent, and is the purpose of this series of posts: the transition from undergraduate student to graduate student, and the subsequent and impending exodus.

The reality that in a little over a year from now my family and I will be packing up and moving to a new city in order for me to continue my studies is one we've anticipated. It has always been part of the plan to see this new track through to the end, but now it seems as though it has crossed the threshold of the horizon, and is creeping ever more perceptibly towards us.

Knowing that my time here will soon be up inculcates everything with a sense of significance. I basically grew up here in Lawrence. Growing up in a small town 15 minutes northwest of here, I spent the vast majority of my teenage years haunting Mass street. I was as far west as Manhattan, Kansas, for a couple of years before I ended up in Kansas City for a couple more. Seven years ago this summer my wife and I were married and moved to Lawrence, and the rest, as they say, is history (albeit recent). As reflective pieces like this often do, I'm tempted to descend into a number of tropes that illustrate perfectly the position I find myself in, but in the process of writing this sentence I've lost it. Something about a chapter in my life coming to an end, whatever.

So in the future this series of posts will address our impending move by reflecting both on the past - my experiences at KU, my family at Liberty Hall and St. Sophia Orthodox Church, my former educational experiences, etc. - as well as the future: my search for a graduate program, the logistics of moving a family of four to an as-of-yet unknown locale in the near future, our plans, etc.

My first order of business is to give this operation a name: I was thinking "Operation Exodus" but that seemed too obvious. Then I thought "Operation Get Those Children Out of The Muddy, Muddy" but that seemed a bit much. After that I thought "Operation Dumbo Drop," but realized that was something altogether different. So as a first order of business I'm soliciting a title that will work both for the physical act of moving as well as the title of this series of posts.

Operation __________________?

tooter-pated

Unlike the over popular/rated "micro" blog site "Twitter" (where the name has no material relation to what you do there), my new site "Tooter.com" will be a social networking site where users can document when and where they pass gas. This especially comes in handy if you have an iPhone, because sometimes you fart when you're not at your computer, but you always have your cell phone on your person at all times. Future plans include a quick-code system to easily document your toots' musicality, olfactory quality, etc. Hopes for the site's popularity are high, with designers anticipating spontaneous "Toot-ups" to begin forming in cramped spaces across the country.

EPIC WIN.

New developments concerning the so-called "robber's council" of the lately formed Ad Hoc Committee on the Formation of Great Ideas - a sub-committee of the slightly less lately formed Pan-handle-nic Society, which is itself a standing committee of the even soer-called Shadow Citizenry, a nebulous hodge podge of people who are actually only thoughts in my brain that refuse to sit down:

WHEREAS, the formation of a club whose primary focus is the appreciation of Epic poetry and it's recitation, re-enactment (to a reasonable degree), and general ethos, and

WHEREAS a pitifully small number of opportunities to don a wooden sword tucked into one's belt whilst reciting epic poetry with a small group of comrades exist for the bettering of our young(ish) people and the lifting up of our women-folk,

BE IT HEREBY EXCLAIMED WITH UTMOST ENTHUSIASM that the formation of a club whose primary goal is the above stated recitation of appreciated classic epic poems and whose secondary goal is to wear wooden swords in our belts and/or belt loops, waving them around at befitted and/or spontaneous instances during the recitation of the text - like, say, during a battle or nefarious murder - be undertaken as soon as possible.

So let it be written, so let it be done, so say we all, sew, a needle pulling thread, la, a note to follow sew, etc.

Help Yourself.

The gentle stereo sound of library patrons snoring, the constant mild white-noise rush of the air conditioning. In honor of "National Library Workers Day" a gallon of Ocean Spray Light Cranberry has been set out on one end of the long table in the northwest corner of the third floor of Watson, with two stacks of cups and a stack of green napkins and a handwritten sign that says "Help Yourself." On the door another sign reads "No food or drink in the library." I'd be conflicted if I weren't so thirsty.

Presidential Skepticism

I've been skeptical - okay, critical - of the president since before he was our president. One of the things I was not crit/skeptical about concerning him was his allegedly dower appearance. I can remember commentators constantly nagging on why the man never smiled, whether or not he was too serious, was he too dispassionate, removed, robot-like? That was probably the only thing I really liked about him, besides the fact that he's black. Today, however, something occurred to me. Picture after picture of the president in Europe for the G20 conference showed me a side of the man I hadn't known through pictures before. It took me awhile to figure out what it was, but then it hit me:




DUDE. What are you smiling about? Seriously: what is going on? You're at the G20 while the world is on the verge of economic meltdown. Something is going on behind the scenes. What is it? Is he excited to see Big Ben? The Tower of London? Was Tea-Time really so amazing?

It was interesting, though, to see all the old country people flock around him for photos:



Now that I think about it, I know why Barack is smiling: he's thinking Dude, I totally own all these white people.

"The Sequel of Today Unsolders Us All"

I grew up with King Arthur, not literally - that's impossible silly! I grew up reading King Arthur stories of all sorts. Tennyson's "The Passing of Arthur" was and continues to be as monumental to me as the passing of Superman in the summer of 1992.

Quote of the Day:

"I found Him in the shining of the stars,
I marked Him in the flowering of His fields,
But in His ways with men I find Him not.
I waged His wars, and now I pass and die...

I know not what I am,
nor whence I am, nor whether I be King
Behold, I seem but a King among the Dead."

Challenging the Definition/ Meaning Binary

The following is the declassified version of the latest meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee for Great Ideas, as commissioned by the Shadow Citizen's Civilian Council's commission on Things To Do While We Should Be Doing Something Else.

1. The subcommittee on language discussed the altering of as many words as possible to better reflect and, if possible, perfectly reflect the word's meaning. Some candidates for improvement are as follows:

A. Old form: redundant. Adjective, meaning "characterized by verbosity or unnecessary repetition in expressing ideas." New form: reredundundantdant

B. Old form: Palindrome. Noun, meaning "a word, line, verse, number, sentence, etc., reading the same backward as forward, as Madam, I'm Adam or Poor Dan is in a droop." New form: Palindromemordnilap

C. Old form: dissonance. Noun, meaning "inharmonious or harsh sound; discord; cacophony." New form: XnGlanThscrmQN

Possible problems: the committee found that in drawing the meaning of a word closer to its form - in an attempt to obliterate the arbitrariness of sound-labels - an exponential descent into absurd bodily function words became all too tempting, therefore the word for whistle became the act of whistling, the word for burping became the act of burping, and the word for flatulence became the act of making a strawberry with one's lips and tongue. It then followed that the committee's discussion led to the question of whether or not the definition of the use of words was predicated on the a priori assumption that one had to use one's mouth to form them. If not, this would lead to a massive definition revision effort on the part of common terms like "Potty Mouth."

2. The subcommittee on the establishment of a "Ministry of Art and Advertising" discussed the possibility of using the strategy of Caption Revisionism in order to alter history, in those cases where history is in need of altering, or where it's funny. An example of this might be as follows:
"Socrates seen foolishly accepting a bet by fellow Fraternity members that he can, indeed, consume an entire gallon of Hemlock in under one hour without vomiting."

3. Finally, the subcommittee on possible future forms of government lackadaisically discussed the importance of both taxes and voting, pitting the two against each other in a battle of virtues. While it was noted that one theoretically has the right to vote and concordantly not to vote, one also theoretically does not have the right NOT to pay taxes. It followed in the discussion whether having the right to pay taxes without the right not to pay taxes suitably fulfilled the definition of "right," and the question was raised if that definition needed altered as well. Before lunch we were talking about whether or not it was taxes or votes that made a good society, and subsequently whether it was the establishment of good business or good government that should occupy our time during the next meeting.

End of Report.

As an aside or an addendum, I've also taken the time to write a new post for my Palestine blog, as well as post the second third of an old short story on this whole other blog I have. That's blogtastic!