Philosophy/television/tuna

Right now the most entertaining thing in my life is my philosophy class. I don’t expect Bethel to hire me again, so I teach however I want to. I’m always going on about which arguer bears the burden of proof. Not very riveting. … Well, too bad. I want my students to learn conscientiousness. I mean, I want them to acquire the habit of obsessing over who has the burden of proof.

(If they end up thinking in this way, I’ll have taught them something valuable: something which should serve them well during their marriages.)

(Dunno if I’ll ever write about my teaching at IUSB.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

After a long day of teaching, I walk over to Mary’s & Martin’s house and we all lie on couches in the living room. (M&M are high school teachers: always tired.) Eventually we all try to grade papers. Martin goes away to the dining room. Mary and I remain in the living room and try to grade while watching Blue Planet (David Attenborough’s TV show about predation in the seas). Orcas hunt down a gray whale calf. They separate it from its mother and then push it under water to drown it. Mary is horrified. It seems to me, though, that the plankton get the rawest deal.

Later, Mary complains that the dolphins are skanky with one another. This is how I can tell that Blue Planet is her kind of show.

The episode causes Mary to desire tuna. She gets off the couch and puts some into a bowl. Bianca, the cat, wakes up, sniffs the air, and walks over to Mary (oh yeah, I forgot to mention that M&M have a cat). Soon I also am craving tuna. I warm up some leftover tuna casserole. Bianca walks over to me, doe-eyed (but in the manner of a cat). No dice, babe.

Hipsters

What I miss from Xanga are the xangazons: the thumbnail pictures of movies, books, and music. Like this one:

[not a thumbnail picture]

Currently:

the bird and the bee

The Bird and the Bee

“Fucking Boyfriend”

Or like this one:

Currently:

Interpreting the Masters, Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates

The Bird and the Bee

“Private Eyes”

Before you pounce:

Listening to hipster music doesn’t make me a hipster. I enjoy reading certain Japanese novels, but that doesn’t make me Japanese (not even in spirit). An outsider can wallow in foreign ditches.

One time, Sabby and I went to Chicago and the female Sabby pointed at some youths and was like, look at those hipsters, hee hee, and we giggled at them. And then she said, John-Paul, you’re a natural hipster. And I was like, that’s impossible; being a hipster requires too much artifice; naturalness precludes it. (That is, hipsters can’t be genuinely cool.)

And she was like, well, I have in mind your sweaters. I said, you mean the sweaters that I bought at Old Navy, that super-hip store. Hee hee, she giggled, no, I mean your hideous, old, second-hand sweaters, the ones hipsters would like. Oh, I said, you mean the sweaters I’ve been using regularly since the 1990s (it isn’t my fault that it took so long for fashion to catch up). Hee hee, she giggled (all red in the face).

If somebody wants to make an entire album of Hall and Oates tributes, I can enjoy those songs. It’s difficult even for hipsters to ruin that music, despite its having been recalled into fashionableness.

The “Boyfriend” song just sounds pretty.

I return to Bethel

Finally, my Xanga has been shut down.

I moved into Mary’s & Martin’s new house. My helpers were M&M, my uncle, my brother Stephen, and Sabby — heroes.

Right now, M&M’s basement contains approx. 30 boxes of my books. Their garden contains my treadmill, abandoned to the recyclers. So long, Timothy. …

I teach just one section at Bethel but often walk across campus to get to IUSB. What an innocent place, Bethel. There isn’t much feeling of urgency …

… except in the class that I teach. There the students sit up straight, eyes wide open.

Through the grapevine I hear:

The readings are difficult;

When he lectures he uses big words.

(And I thought I was so colloquial!)

Our first textbook is Hume’s Dialogues, which many of the students have been supplementing with SparkNotes (not what I recommended, but OK). The class discussions are satisfactory. The students make good points. I wonder which points are from SparkNotes.

Yet somewhere a screw has come loose. In previous years I would quickly learn all the students’ names; this semester, so far, I haven’t bothered to. I know the names of the most frequent talkers. That’s all.

Maybe the reason is that I have so many students (one section at Bethel, two at IU). Even a few students’ faces seem unfamiliar. I never used to have this problem.

Or maybe, during the last year, something happened that is now preventing me from caring like I used to.

A new season

No tutoring this last week, but plenty of busyness: (1) attending meetings and turning in paperwork; (2) reading textbooks (and a few secondary sources); (3) writing essay prompts and syllabi.

(2) and (3) have been pretty exciting. I chose each textbook because of its fonts. And I’m writing my IUSB course documents in Plantin and my Bethel documents in Photina.

Next week — Monday! — I’ll begin teaching. And during the nights I’ll be packing up my books to move out of my apartment. This has been a convenient but pricey place in which to live.

Where will I end up? I don’t know. Mary & Martin have offered to host me until I find somewhere better.

They just bought a house near Bethel. Their yard has a hot tub in it, with a large fence for privacy. Between the fence and the sidewalk, flowers grow out of a narrow strip of dirt. I told Mary & Martin to clear out the flowers and to plant tomatoes for public use: “Mishawaka Unity Garden.”

Along the eastern boundary of the yard is a noisy road. The western boundary nearly touches a power station.

Others might recoil, but I find the scenery quite charming. Industrialism, traffic: I am able to glean comfort from such things. I will miss the river, though. And it will be sad not to be able to walk so easily to my church.

August fragments

And suddenly I’m a lot busier because I’ve been hired to teach one more course, Introduction to Philosophy. This will be at Bethel College, my alma mater.

Soon I’ll have taught in the Ivy League, at a state college, and at a Christian liberal arts college. How’s that for job experience?

Once again, I’m starting to appear halfway respectable. I can see it in people’s faces. I regarded my tutoring job pretty seriously, but I guess for most people it wasn’t so impressive.

(I expect to keep on tutoring for a few hours each week.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

And now I wish to complain of my injuries. Last weekend, playing soccer, I suffered a full-body collision with someone who probably has health insurance. (I don’t.) For a couple of days I was sore all over and couldn’t bend one of my knees. This has improved.

Then yesterday I was in the church nursery, and the children were merciless. They assaulted me with medicine balls.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Today Ecuador lost to Spain, but my laptop wasn’t working, so I didn’t get to watch it. The game was held in Guayaquil: the Spaniards were too afraid to play in Quito. That’s our moral victory, I suppose.