Bring Back Firefly (No, Please Don't)

I was running an errand the other day when the announcer lady on our local NPR station (WUSF) had to read a sponsorship during All Things Considered. Apparently, it was sponsored by the revival of Mad about You... on Spectrum Originals!?

One. This show did not need to come back. Two. There doesn't need to be a special streaming service from Spectrum.

Are there hordes of people signing up for Spectrum because they want to see what the Mad about You characters are up to twenty years on? It seems unlikely that people pick their cable on the basis of streaming programming, and even if they did... Mad about You doesn't exactly have the draw of The Mandalorian, does it?

I was at a holiday party a couple weeks ago, just after the debut of Disney Plus. Was I, I was asked many times, watching The Mandalorian.

No, I said, I'm over it.

Over what?

Over serialized streaming versions of things I liked when I was a kid. As far as I can tell they're all that exist. Revivals, continuations, sequels, prequels, adaptations. The Mandalorian, His Dark Materials, Mystery Science Theatre 3000, Veronica Mars, Anne with an "E", The Magic School Bus, Animaniacs, Watchmen, Carmen Sandiego, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Girl Meets World, Battlestar Galactica, apparently twenty-seven different Marvel streaming shows for Disney Plus, and, of course, Star Trek.

And then you add on the revivals of things I could have been into but wasn't: Voltron, Samurai Jack, DuckTales, Queer Eye, Twin Peaks, Riverdale, The Tick, Gilmore Girls, Charmed, Roswell, Lost in Space, The X-Files, The Dark Crystal, Young Justice, The Clone Wars, Dune, Gremlins, Lizze McGuire...

Some of these are reboots, of course, but so many of them are revivals: shows that pick up years later with the same characters.

Why!? Well, obviously, nostalgia. And obviously it works. I couldn't move for people asking me about The Mandalorian. And obviously it works on me. There are exactly two tv shows I'm able to keep up with on a regular basis these days: Doctor Who and Star Trek, and the second of those is entirely a nostalgia-driven revival of something I liked when I was a kid... and is only about to get moreso, with the imminent release of Picard. What has Picard been up to since he last sailed into the unknown in 2003's Nemesis? I'm ready to find out, of course. So I might be opposed to this kind of thing in principle, but get the right show in practice, and I'll sign up for your dumb proprietary streaming service and watch it. The number of people I know who complain about the proliferation of unnecessary streaming services... and then turned around and picked up Disney Plus seems to indicate everyone has their weakness.

Why I don't I like these things? I guess it comes down to a feeling that, well, the moment has passed. I really, really liked Veronica Mars. But even by season two, it was clear the format was strained... and if you revive it twelve years later, is it even really the same show? Part of the enjoyment of the original was that it was about a high school girl who dared to investigate murders in her drama-ridden social circle... is a show about a 30-something P.I. the same show, even if it fills my desire to find out what happened to its main character When She Grew Up?* (I just read this spoiler-ridden article which makes it clear: no, it never can be.)

This was driven home when I posted a similar complaint on facebook a couple months ago. People popped up in the comments with what shows they wanted revived. The Middleman, Firefly, Community, Malcolm in the Middle (I think this is actually happening now), Gargoyles, Dead Like Me... Some of these, sure, whatever... but Firefly? C'mon, Joss Whedon, you had your chance, it didn't work, you had another chance with a whole movie, IT'S OVER. I can't even imagine that a Firefly revival would be very good. Everyone's seventeen years older and fatter (except for Morena Baccarin, who doesn't age), and what that show was trying to do is now done all over the place all the time. And could it even be as good as the show all the Browncoats have been imagining in their heads all this time? Of course not. The same friend is the one who suggested Community, though, so obviously his judgement is suspect.

I think these revivals also annoy me because there's less room for something dynamic and interesting. Adaptations can put very new spins on old material: the world would be a lesser place without, say, Battlestar Galactica. But revivals are by their nature backward-looking. This isn't reinventing an old story for a new age, but prolonging an old story in spite of a new age.

You might say, Steve, just don't watch these shows if they don't interest you. And, sure, yeah, I will probably never watch The Mandalorian or WandaVision, and I will certainly never watch Mad about You. But I think a lot about this thing that a friend of mine said:

Like, yes, I can not watch them... but even the few I do watch suck my personal bandwidth away from other, more original things-- and worse, culturally, I feel like our bandwidth is sucked up by them. If everyone is talking about Baby Yoda and the Skeksis, how will I know about what new original shows exist? How will they even get made?

All of this is to say: they can bring back Wonderfalls. That's a show cut down in its prime that utterly deserves five more seasons of brilliance.

But that's it. No more. Especially not Mad about You; maybe I just hallucinated Lisa Peakes saying that, and we're all safe.

#297: What old television shows would you bring back?

* Alternate title for this post, but I decided it didn't quite work: "A long time ago we used to be viewers, but I haven't watched you lately at all."

Price Check on Smiles!

If you went back to my old LiveJournal (don't), you would discover that when I was in college, I probably talked more about and treated more seriously my job at Scott Dining Hall than I did my studies. I started out working about 6 hours per week; by junior year I was a student manager, usually working around twenty.

I took a lot of pride in this job. I used to talk about it a lot, years later, presumably to the annoyance of those around me. I don't talk about it so much anymore, twelve years on. I hope not anyway.

Scott was à la carte, not buffet-style, was was subdivided into a number of different units. One of the most popular was the personal pizza/hot sub line. Customers could get as much toppings as they wanted, and because it had every pizza topping you could think of, people could get some imaginative toppings on their hot subs. You would get your stuff, then it would go through a little oven on a conveyor belt (3 minutes for subs, 6 minutes for pizzas), then at the other end toppings you didn't want toasted would be applied (e.g., lettuce, mayo). It was all pretty low-tech, very dependent on little receipts upon which customers' names were written.

At lunch, it was probably the most slammed unit we had. I took pride in my running of the pizza line. It usually had three students assigned to it (plus a cashier), so I would put all three student workers on the making end, and then me and a full-timer would man the oven end, which could be pretty grueling. I was good about keeping orders in the right order, and one full-timer refused to do it alongside anyone else. Plus I prided myself on remembering what kinds of stuff some regulars got; some people were astoundingly consistent, getting the same thing three days a week. I could recognize a name, put the toppings on, and then call them.

Okay, okay, whatever. Good job Steve. But I also learned something about how to manage people from this. Usually from my mistakes. When I first started as manager, I was nervous, and in the true Mollmann way, I defaulted to sarcasm. You can be a sarcastic underling or co-worker and be liked; that was when I learned that to be a sarcastic authority figure requires some careful modulation. Thankfully someone was like, "Steve, you're overdoing it. Chill out."

Another thing: No one had set shifts on Friday nights; instead we rotated responsibilities. One Friday evening I was paired with another manager who had literally never worked on that entire side of the dining hall before. She was trying her best, but out of her depth. I might have been obnoxious about it. What I remember in particular doing was something along the lines of telling the student workers not to worry about her too much. I had thought I was helping (relieving the pressure of her responsibilities), but what I had really done was undermine her authority and her competence. She, I think nearly in tears, rightfully called me out on it.

I think much of what I know about working with people, I learned there. I had to do a lot of it in grad school, especially during the two years I had an administrative GA, and I'd like to think I did an okay job, and I think that's partially because of skills I developed making Italian subs.

Also there was this other manager named Josh. When I was working the sub line, he was usually on the wok line. I don't quite know how this evolved, but when things got really crowded and busy, I would shout out across the dining hall, "Josh, can I get a price check on smiles?"

"Steve," he would shout back, "the smiles are free!"

Random people would see me on campus and go "the smiles are free!" at me.

#457: Do you have a job?

The Rise and Fall of Paradise City: LEGO in the Basement

When my brother Andy and I were kids, we had a lot of LEGO. Andy was always better at building than I, but I was the storyteller. Together, we came up with elaborate stories about the residents of Paradise City. I recently found a trove of photographs of Paradise City on an external hard drive, because apparently at age 14 I built a web site to chronicle its adventures and happenings.

This is the best photo of the overall city I could find. (Apparently the photos were taken with a literal potato.) Basically half of the basement was given over to the LEGO city. The train took citizens of Paradise over to the neighboring town of Muddville, which I think was where we let my dad build stuff. Here's another angle:

That table in the background is now mine and Hayley's dining room table! It has been with the Mollmanns since my late grandfather was a boy, I think. The web files I found indicate we had a lot of backstory for every aspect of the city; that sphere in the bottom left of the photo (a Megabloks piece, I think) was an "agridome and power plant":

Paradise City was a hopping town, with a roller coaster...

...a cycle rental...

...a garbage dump...

...a rescue operations center ("RES-Q: Rescue Everything Squad Q")...

...a church (St. Bob's)...

...a drawbridge...

...a very forbidding looking jail ("Mt. Jailus")...

...and even a spaceport!

I seem to recall that the necessity of tying our Space LEGO into the story meant the city was constantly being invaded by aliens. But this also gave us an excuse to blow up the town and rebuild everything whenever we got bored of a particular configuration.

My web site indicates we had histories and personalities for tons of town residents: the owner of the junkyard, the mayor (a Civil War vet, apparently), a guy called the Infomaniac (a character from the LEGO computer game) who had a Q&A newspaper column, and so on. Every police officer was named "Bob."

The best set of developments, though, usually came from my mother. For example, my brother once put window washers on the tall tower in the center of the city. They had a little platform hanging on a string. One day we woke up and one of the strings had disconnected, the window washers were hanging on for dear life, and news helicopters were in position to record the whole thing.

Or another time, we woke up to a shark in the water and a swimmer cut in half and a panicked crowd on the beaches.

The only one my hard drive includes pictures of is when a bunch of protestors sat on the train line and the train ran them all over:

My mother has a macabre imagination, I guess.

Also the town was periodically invaded by Cat Kong.

#159: What things did you create when you were a child?

The Most I Could Do

When I was in grad school, I was heavily involved in graduate student government. I spent a year as senator for the English graduate students, two years on the Graduate Student Senate Executive Committee as Parliamentarian, one year as a senator again, and then one final year as Vice President. The responsibilities of the VP were running meetings and chairing the Student Life Committee, which had a very vague remit of essentially dealing with all the stuff that the other standing committees did not.

I came in as Vice President at a pretty fraught time. The year prior, the administration had unilaterally changed the health insurance for graduate assistants. We had been on a great plan, basically identical to the state employees plan, but administrative factors caused the administration to get rid of our plan and put us on the student plan (mostly for undergraduates who didn't have insurance from their parents), but offered subsidies. This plan offered fewer benefits than the old plan, was more expensive for GAs, and was administered by an utterly incompetent corporation, Bailey Agencies. But when the new plan was presented to the outgoing Executive Committee, the presentation highlighted all of the benefits and none of the drawbacks, which only slowly emerged as GAs dug into the plan details and began using it.*

So this is what I came into, and what I spent most of my time as VP dealing with-- meeting with administrators, surveying GAs. Parallel to my efforts in the GSS, this is when the UConn graduate employee unionization effort exploded. It wasn't just this (we had seen a number of fee hikes over the past few years, including a substantive one to build a new gym that something like 98% of surveyed graduate students were against, but flat stipends), but it was one of the major contributing factors.

Things got worse as the school year rolled along. When the spring semester came, and GAs began filing taxes, it was discovered that the university subsidy counted as income, and therefore had to be reported on your taxes. This meant that if you were on the family plan, which the university subsidized at $10,000, you had to pay taxes on your $20,000 of actual income as if you made $30,000 of income.

To me what was particularly irritating was that UConn's administration seemed entirely uninterested in the actual effects that this policy change was having on the lives of actual people. Members of HR continued to smile and insist it was a better plan even when presented with evidence that this was demonstrably untrue; one particularly loathsome HR employee, Lori Vivian, kept rattling on about "total compensation packages," insisting GAs were just blinkered because they didn't appreciate how much money they got in the form of tuition wavers even as they struggled to make ends meet.

The new plan wasn't even achieving its goal of being cheaper for the university, so in January, the Dean of the Graduate School came to us to tell us it was getting even worse, and asking us to pick the way in which was getting even worse. To his credit, he had about as much power as we did in all this, and this visit was because he wanted to do us the courtesy of keeping us in the loop, unlike other administrators. The GSS rejected the choices as a false binary, a tactic of making it look like we consented to what was happening; the resolution ended with a statement that "that the Graduate Student Senate finds the recognition by the University administration of the right of graduate assistants to collectively bargain with the University as the only viable recourse for negotiating the terms of graduate assistants’ employment and for ensuring the well-being of graduate assistants, the Graduate School, and the University of Connecticut."

Nothing else was working, nor would it work. The thing that continually stymied me in my every effort to do something was that no one was obligated to do anything. No one had to listen to graduate students, because graduate students had no power.

The point where things really got bad was when the tax thing became apparent. Because UConn reported its subsidy of our health insurance as a scholarship, refunds were going down by about $650. But no one could tell me why. Eventually we managed to figure out it was because the new plan did not count as "employer-provided" even though it was provided by our employer... but no one could tell me what that meant. UConn's tax and compliance accountant didn't answer my e-mails, but thankfully the Dean of the Graduate School eventually got me into a meeting with him and a number of other relevant administrators.

That meeting was horrifying in how abstractly it treated the lives of real human beings. The guy from the Comptroller's office provided his explanation of why GAs were losing this money... and clearly considered it all good, and the meeting over.

I was like... "Wait... but what are we actually doing? Now that we know why this is happening, how are we using this information?" And the answer was basically that we were not. Lori Vivian from HR just apologized and said, "We didn't know." Which just infuriated me even more. It was her job to know! (It still baffles me that she has a job. Thanks to her poorly implemented health insurance change, GAs unionized, and UConn surely lost much more money due to that than it ever even could gained from downgrading our benefits.)

After that meeting, I went and spoke at the next Board of Trustees meeting, during the open comment session. This is how my speech ended:

I recently attended a meeting on this topic with the Dean of Graduate School, the Director of Student Health Services, the Controller, and representatives from Human Resources. The purpose of this meeting was not to fix the problem, but simply to explain it. It was explained to me that UConn was legally in the right, and everyone said they were very sorry and expressed surprise that this had happened. Legally, I am sure UConn is sound—ethically, I am not so sure. When a GA loses $600 or $1,500 or more for the privilege of having worse health insurance, UConn has done something wrong. When no one informs GAs in advance that they will lose this money, either because they didn’t know or because they forgot, UConn has done something wrong. When a roomful of administrators throw up their hands and says there’s nothing to be done about this, UConn has done something wrong.

I don't think this did any good but at that point it felt like all I could do.

I turned out to be a frustrating and unenjoyable year to be Vice President; I had just wanted to make jokes while chairing meetings.

#619: When have you spoken out about something you felt had to change?

* The new plan was so bad that the some GAs opted instead to go on the state-subsidized Medicaid plan for low-income families. The owner of Bailey Agencies, John Scott, was a state senator and corrupt as hell, so he introduced a bill in the state legislature to make it illegal for people to go on Medicaid if they were students!

On the Road Again?: The Mollmanns and the National Parks

When you're a Mollmann, everything is hard work-- especially relaxation.

I was reminded of his recently by finding a departure "schedule" for a family trip from back when I was in high school. the purpose of the schedule is to make fun of my father's propensity for declaring "it's time to go" but then being the last one ready to go.

The real grueling schedule, however, was the trips themselves. Though we occasionally did relaxing beach vacations, the true Mollmann vacation was the national park road trip, where we would try to hit up as many parks as we could in a few weeks. Mom, I think, would do most of the plotting, working out a schedule and making reservations. the last one I ever went on was in 2006, which was during my LiveJournal Era, which means I am able to reconsruct a pretty detailed blow-by-blow account of it.

We landed in San Francisco, drove south to Sequoia National Park, then north to Yosemite National Park, Mount Lassen Volcanic National Park, hitting our northernmost at Crescent City, and then turned south to Fort Bragg, flying back out of San Francisco once more. Using Google Maps to estimate, that's a least 1,355 in 11 days, or 25 hours of driving. that's a little over two hours of driving per day, but of course there were days we did no driving, so there were days we did a lot of driving. (Of course, this trip doesn't hold a candle to the legendary 24-hour-with-no-overnight-stops drive from Cincinnati to Colorado.)

This could be pretty taxing on our family togetherness; I remember one trip where we arrived at a hotel and my father got out of the car and crossed the street and stood by himself over there just to get away from us all for a while. We were pretty annoying kids, even (especially?) a he ages of 15, 19, and 21.

The upshot of this, though, was that I got to go to a lot of national parks and see a lot of amazing things. We might have spent a lot of time in the car (Dad was forever telling us to put our books down and look out the window!), but we also spent a lot of time hiking in some of the most gorgeous places on Earth. I liked Rocky Mountain National Park so much that's where I insisted Hayley and I honeymoon, and I would definitely class it in my top five favorite places I've ever been. Being on top of Sentinel Dome during sunset in Yosemite is probably another.

Across all our trips we racked up a ton of parks; I didn't quite realize how many until I took a Geology of U.S. National Parks class my freshman year of college. A the beginning of each new park, the professor would ask everyone who'd ever been to that park to stand (it was a big lecture class, 100+ students). A couple years later I ran into a girl who said she recognized me from that class. "I sat behind you," she said, "and you stood up every time." I don't know if it was quite every time, but it was frequently. At a quick count, I've been to 21 of the 61 national parks.

Now that I make that count, it doesn't feel like enough. It's only one third! I made a map; there are so many big ones I still haven't been to, the most significant being Yellowstone. (I have been to eight of the top ten by annual visitors; the other one I'm missing from that list is Grand Teton.)

I haven't been to any of the three here in Florida; gotta get on that. It's a mere 876 miles (15 hours) round trip by car (plus a two-hour ferry ride). A good starter road trip for our son?

#496: Where in the world would you most like to vacation?

Summer Driving, Summer Reading

One of Hayley's and my concerns about parenting has been screen time. I try to not judge, as someone who has only been a parent for nine months; you can entertain our kid just by dumping him on the floor with some plastic cups. I am sure this gets harder as your kid gets older. But I do judge. Recently we ate out and the two eight-year-olds at the table next to us needed tablets the whole time to make it through the meal. Is that a grim vision of my own future? Or can I forestall that if we follow the WHO guidelines? I would say we've been pretty good about it so far. Sometimes he wakes up when we're watching tv, and so ends up seeing a little bit of it, and sometimes he's been so upset in the middle of the night that Hayley has shown him a couple episodes of My Little Pony when we've been at wit's end.

But you have to occupy the kiddo somehow, right? Especially in situations where your kids are doing boring things for long stretches. Back in the day my parents needed to do this because of the Mollmann propensity for long road trips. We didn't stop places overnight, but trucked on through, my parents just switching off. Infamously, we once drove from Cincinnati, Ohio to Pike's Peak, Colorado, only stopping for gas and bathroom breaks; it took twenty-four hours. It takes a lot of keep a bunch of kids occupied for twenty-four hours, and there were no tablets to be had.

From coast to coast (well, not really) in this!

For the Mollmanns, the answer was books. In fact, books were what kept us occupied all summer. There was a summer reading program at the library, sure, but my mom ran her own. For every ten (I think) books you read, she would buy you one for the trip. We kept track with lists on the fridge. (Maybe this is the seed of my own exhaustive reading tracking? I never thought about that before.) Things got even better, though-- if you were willing to get your books at a used bookstore, since they were half-price, you got twice as many! So I would read library books furiously to get as many books as possible.

I still have plenty of books that must have come from those shopping sprees, because I have plenty of Asimov and Star Trek books with the stamp of the Book Rack on Colerain Ave. in them. The reading of the books was as exciting as the getting of the books.

I didn't have summer reading for a long time after growing up, but I actually have it again now, thanks to my commitment to voting in the Hugos. As the summer kicks off, I know I have six novels, six novellas, six novelettes, six short stories, six graphic novels, six nonfiction books, and six young adult books to read. Plus my new yearly goal of reading a Charles Dickens novel!

I look to see if our local public library had a summer reading program, but apparently you have to be 5 years old! So it will be some time before our little one can participate.

#583: What's on your summer reading list?

"the harmonious voice of all science fiction": The St. Xavier High School Science Fiction Club, 2004-????

Like most hairbrained things I did in high school, I think the Science Fiction Club can be blamed on Chris.

I don't know how or why he came up with it, only that he did. It was our sophomore year. We would meet weekly to watch or otherwise discuss science fiction. Us being us, I think we put more work into the organizational structure than anything else. According to our Constitution (written by Chris and revised by our friend James):

We the fans of science fiction declare in one voice, not a voice of Star Trek, Star Wars, or Babylon 5, but the harmonious voice of all science fiction, that this document shall bring order to chaos, provide an open forum for all of science fiction, and secure the Blessings of the future to ourselves and our school, and thus do ordain and establish this Constitution of the Science Fiction Club.

Additionally, according to Article V, Section 2: "Membership as well as suffrage cannot be denied due to grade level, science fiction preferences, or political preferences. Membership and suffrage is a right of all students of St. Xavier High School."

Other clubs had presidents; presidents were boring. We would have a Lord Chancellor. Other clubs had vice presidents; vice presidents were boring. We would have a Vice Chancellor. Other clubs had treasurers; treasurers were boring. We would have a Minister of the Purse. Other clubs had secretaries; secretaries were boring. We would have a Minister of Information.

Though then we ran into the problem that our core friend group ran five deep, and we had only come up with four positions. Well, why not an ominously titled organization with a vague remit so that we could enact secret powers? Hence, we had a Minister of Internal Affairs.

Our executive committee equivalent was called "Starfleet Command."

I don't know how I ended up Lord Chancellor, because no one would ever want me to run anything, especially not at age 15. Chris was Vice Chancellor (I think he wanted the real power, but to avoid scrutiny.) The Lord Chancellor ran for election and appointed his Starfleet Command, but we always worked hard to suppress any opposition, so that the same five of us filled the same positions for all three years.

Soon executive departments were proliferating (I think this is what other people would call ad hoc committees). According to my executive orders (still saved on an external hard drive!), we had a Party Commission, a Book Commission, a Commission on Patches and Shirts, a Bureau of Web Affairs, a National Interests Authority, and a Department of Organization and Rules. Somewhat astoundingly, in retrospect, I wasn't part of that last one.

(According to the public document, the NIA "[a]ssist[ed] in the smooth functioning of the Science Fiction Club by providing cross-departmental coordination," but according to a secret document, it "defend[ed] the Science Fiction Club from outside forces and protects its well-being. Also provides for a militia." The DOR had the secret task of "[f]urther[ing] Starfleet Command’s control of the Science Fiction Club by creating slowdown procedures and extensive paperwork to stifle unwanted resolutions"!)

((I'm not sure why this was needed at all, because the constitution itself was pretty un-democratic. The Lord Chancellor got to decide if issues submitted by members were major or minor; minor issues got voted on by the whole club directly with a simple majority, but major issues needed first majority approval by Starfleet Command, and then two-thirds approval by the membership. So I could basically kill any unwanted motion by declaring it major. Starfleet Command was appointed by me, so it's not likely they'd go against my wishes!))

Most of the time we'd watch random movies. That's where I first saw Stargate, Gattaca, the John Hurt 1984, and Blade Runner, for example. Sometime we'd do theme months: for a Cyborg Month, we watched one installment of Remembrance of the Daleks a week and then an episode of another show featuring a cyborg (e.g., "The Best of Both Worlds"). My senior year, I was responsible for driving home my brother and his friend Kurt and the German exchange student living with Kurt; Kurt was a participant. I remember Kurt making fun of the Daleks during episode one of Remembrance... and him excitingly explaining to Georg how awesome the Special Weapons Dalek when we were driving home after watching episode four.

We had a Time Travel Month, and every year we did an Anime Month. (That was to appease the club's anime-lovers; without that sort of designated slot, I think they would have pushed for us to watch anime all the time.) I complained a lot at the time, but given it was my introduction to Patlabor, I probably shouldn't.

Some of the best stuff was not movies, though. We had a Klingon Month. Weeks one and two we watched Star Trek VI, but week three we did Federation vs. Klingons capture the flag, and then week four we did a Klingon feast. I made bloodwine by mixing red koolaid with red Jello. I think someone else made bloodworm pie with gummy worms. We played the Star Trek: The Next Generation VCR Board Game and Star Trek Monopoly. We borrowed buzzers from the Quiz Team to do a Star Wars trivia match (using cards from Star Wars Trivial Pursuit), and I was made quizmaster, because everyone knew I would win if I played.

We occasionally did "literary bonanzas" where people read bits of books aloud. I don't remember specifically, but I am sure James probably read a political treatise part of 1984; it's exactly what he would do. I remember reading all of Italo Calvino's tremendous "The Light Years," which took a lot longer than I expected (I think 30 minutes!) but seemed to go over well.

I have some pretty good memories of those days.

It's because of Science Fiction Club that I ended up making Doctor Who audio dramas for fun, and from there Star Trek and Star Wars and original sf ones. One of those Star Trek audio dramas provided the kernel for (and shares a title with) my Star Trek novel, A Choice of Catastrophes.

It did persist beyond the five of us. I don't know exactly how long, but Chris once went back and talked to a group of club members, none of whom had ever actually known us, just knew our names from the founding documents, and approached us with awe and respect. (Like the Thermians in Galaxy Quest, at least according to Chris's telling.)

I went back once myself; they were watching Red vs. Blue. It was dreadfully unfunny. Like all once-great institutions, it had decayed into a shadow of its former self. I don't know if it still exists, though it seems unlikely to me.

I don't know if my friends did, but I always listed the SFC on my extracurriculars when applying to college. At a scholarship interview at Xavier University, an admissions official asked me, "...but why Lord Chancellor?"

"Because it's cooler than a president."

#417: What role do school clubs and teams play in your life?

Oh my!

This happened to me some time ago, but back then I didn't blog about actual life events a whole lot; I recounted the story to someone a couple weeks ago, and it seems worth recounting here for posterity.

Back in 2014, when I was still a graduate student at UConn, George Takei was announced as coming to campus.

Of course, like any Star Trek fan I have an appreciation for George Takei. Captain Sulu, "oh my!", and so on. But I have a particular appreciation for George Takei because mine and Michael's first Star Trek book was Myriad Universe: The Tears of Eridanus. Set in an alternate reality where the Andorians dominate the Federation instead of humanity, it focuses on Captain Hikaru Sulu, captain of the largely Andorian crew of the Kumari, sent on a rescue mission to save his daughter on a desert planet. I wrote the Hikaru chapters, and I really enjoyed writing them. I think this Sulu is fundamentally the same as the Prime universe Sulu: a fundamentally inquisitive, personable man capable of steel when the situation calls for. I drew on how Sulu was an astrophysicist in the second pilot to make him a scientist, here struggling in the more militaristic environment of this universe.

Takei was appearing, I think, as part of his promotion of Allegiance, his musical that would debut on Broadway about a year later; the talk was co-sponsored by the Asian-American Studies Institute, the director of whom was on English faculty, and I knew, just knew that there had to be a dinner. There's always a dinner in academia.

I wanted in on that dinner.

After much hemming and hawing and I finally decided I would approach the professor, who I had taken one class with, and who was (I thought) friendly enough with me. I begged her to let me in somehow.

Thankfully, she acceded, with the condition that I would have to earn my keep by helping her. She was on crutches, so I would be her dogsbody, transporting her to and from the event, and doing any needed fetching and carrying. Of course I agreed.

The dinner wasn't one of those things where it's a speaker and six university types at the local Chinese place; it was a whole room of tables, with UConn catering. I was not at George Takei's table-- such an honor was reserved for the UConn president and provost and their like. (The provost, an Asian-American nerd himself, was the most human I ever saw him.) I had a copy of Tears with me, which I had made out to him, and I had wanted to give it to him at the dinner, but the whole time he was chatting up a storm and I couldn't work up the nerve to interrupt. He was doing a signing after his talk, so I figured I just give it to him then.

(Incidentally, the whole of UConn's Undergraduate Student Government executive was there, apparently having been invited as a matter of course. Was such courtesy extended to the Graduate Student Senate executive, of which I was then a member? At UConn in 2014, you don't even have to ask. I did get to chat with the president briefly... she failed to recognize me in any way shape or form even though we had had several interactions over the past couple years. Say what you will about our ruthless provost, but he knew to smile as he slipped in the knife.)

After his talk, I stood in the autograph line. This turned out to be quite long and I was quite a ways toward the end. Eventually it was declared that beyond a certain point no one was going to get to talk to him. Thankfully, the woman managing this was someone I had sat next to and explained my backstory to during dinner, so she let me stay in line. As the very last person in line, I was able to present George Takei with my autograph, telling him I had written a novel of Captain Sulu. He graciously accepted it and said some kind words, I think.

And that was it! I sometimes wonder what happened to that book. I doubt he read it. I read somewhere that some celebrities auction off stuff fans give them and donate the money to charity. Has some random fan gotten a copy of Tears of Eridanus with my inscription to George Takei? Or is the book in a pride of place on his bookshelf, as THE definitive Sulu novel?

#646: What famous person would you like to visit your school?

The Mollmann Call

When I was in grad school, I used to workshop my creative writing with a group of fellow graduate students. I think it was when we were doing my novel about Doctor McCoy, that one of my friends observed, "Doctor McCoy is the quintessential Steve Mollmann protagonist: in love with the world, and in love with complaining about the world." Like so many things people say when critiquing your work, I immediately realized it was true even though I'd never thought of it before; many of the characters in my attempts at original sf could be described along similar lines.

I think this is the location the song was coined, St. Mary's Falls in Colorado.

This is something I picked up from my family. (Though I think maybe I'm more in love with the world than they are.) My mom once changed the lyrics of the camp classic "The Beaver Song" to be about the Mollmanns:

I'm a Mollmann,
You're a Mollmann,
We are Mollmanns all,
And when we get together
We do our Mollmann call:
Whine whine whine whine whine whine
Crab crab crab crab crab
Whine whine whine whine whine whine
Crab crab crab crab crab.

I'm not exactly sure what this can be blamed on. Like, I don't think my father is responsible; I think it used to frustrate him how much we call complained, which we did sort of as a default reaction, not necessarily meaning anything by it. So I guess that means my mother's to blame?

Sometimes I worry that happiness expressed via complaining is just, like much irony, a way of refraining from the danger of earnestness. If you don't directly say what you like, no one can attack you for it. As Augustine St. Clare says in Uncle Tom's Cabin, "I am one of the sort that lives by throwing stones at other people’s glass houses, but I never mean to put up one for them to stone." Sarcasm is, of course, often a defense mechanism, and I find I go overboard on it when I'm nervous about something, like when I first became a student manager at the dining hall, or when I went on a cross-country road trip with someone I'd only known for a couple months. I find that as I've gotten older I've engaged in it a lot less, and it's sometimes jarring to go back home and step into it all over again. I don't think I complain as much as I used to.

Once my brother texted me and asked if he and his fiancée could copy what me and Hayley did for wedding rings. I said, "Sure, but I reserve the right to complain that you copied us." He texted back: "Like a true Mollmann." But I was happy.

#32: What makes you happy?

U.S. 20 in 20

Some people, I think, are born yearning for a road trip, born with the desire to hit the open road and discover America. Though I went on my fair share as a child, I don't think that I ever tapped into that particular quintessential Americanism myself. Journeys are all about where you end up, of course, and maybe reading a book in the back seat. ("Look out the window!" my father used to shout, perhaps the only man in America whose children liked reading too much.)

Moving to Connecticut gave me a greater appreciation for America's vast network of highways, as I drove between Ohio and Connecticut some two through four times per year. I became familiar with the ascending lift of I-71, the never-ending straightness of I-80, the mountainous wiggling of I-81, and the treacherous turns and left exits of I-84. I began to delight in plotting out courses, in figuring out weird and off-beat ways of getting where I wanted to go, that shaved off one minute or took me through an interesting sight. After so many years of the 84-81-80-71 cycle, I began to switch it up, taking the Merritt Parkway out of Connecticut, and plunging the mysterious depths of the Delaware Water Gap on I-80.

(I realized that Ben Wyatt was my Parks and Rec character in the episode "How a Bill Becomes a Law" when he excitedly tries to explain the alternate route he made up to April, and she doesn't care a bit. I didn't even realize I was part of a type.)

I'm not sure exactly when my desire to drive U.S. 20 began to emerge, but I think it was because in relatively quick succession I ended up driving on U.S. 20 in the Cleveland area (it passes within three miles of my father-in-law's house) and in the Boston area (use it right, and you can get out of Cambridge without paying any tolls). Separated by six miles, but the same road. And like all the 0-ending U.S. highways, it just keeps going west, out to Newport, Oregon.

Looking at the map, I started to realize it actually went some neat places-- Chicago, the Nebraska Sandhills, Yellowstone National Park, Craters of the Moon. And somehow I got it my head that I should drive. In 20 days. (Why? I mean, obviously it sounds good, that's why.) U.S. 20 is the longest U.S. numbered highway, and in travelling it, I could discover America. I worked it out years ago already, dividing it into 20 segments of 150-200 miles apiece.

This is the road trip I want to make. God knows when I actually will. Well, if I actually will.

#498: What would your fantasy road trip be like?

How Much Literature Does a Man Need?

Jim Downie (right) at Gethsemani Abbey
from the summer 2017 St. Xavier alumni magazine

Like a lot of kids, I went through a number of potential adult occupations. My junior year of high school, I figured out what I wanted to do in Mr. Jim Downie's English literature class.

He wasn't one of those teachers who was a wide favorite, but Mr. Downie was without a doubt my favorite teacher from my four years at St. Xavier. A confirmed bachelor, he would spend his summers travelling the world; one time he brought in a tray of relics from the Middle East.

He was very dry but sometimes slyly funny. Every now and then he would drop a witticism into his lectures. (He was the kind of teacher, though, where one suspected he had penned the joke into the margins of his lecture notes years ago, and told the same joke at the same point every year.) He was good-- for this sixteen-year-old at least-- at bringing the themes and potentials of literature to life. I had him for British literature, where we made it from Beowulf up to the middle of the twentieth century; it was in his class that I first read Nevil Shute's On the Beach, a novel I went on to teach myself.

We used to chat about NPR, as both of us listened to WGUC, Cincinnati's classical music station, on our drive into school in the morning. For a while, there was this surreal thing going where one day in class he would mention a classical piece (like Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance," during a lecture on And Quiet Flows the Don) and then the next morning I would hear it on WGUC, like he was tied directly into the classical music zeitgeist.

As seniors, we had lots of options for English; you needed a full year of it, but could pick between a number of one-semester courses. I actually took a full year of AP Lit, a semester of creative writing, and a semester of European literature, the latter with Mr. Downie. Mr. Downie had an appreciation of the dark and the depressing; we read Candide and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Kafka and Joyce in that class, and he was good at bringing out the despair in these stories cued to the end of class. "And so human life is meaningless: all you have at the end of it is the grave," he would say, and the bell would ring.

It was in one of those moment, I think, where it flashed across my mind, This is what I want to be doing.

I don't think I'm quite him as a teacher, but I often think about him. He was a good teacher, not just in his ability to explicate the literature, but also in his ability to apply the literature to life. Perhaps naïvely (one of my colleagues just gave a lecture where he called this middlebrow populism or something), I think literature can teach us how to live our lives, and I think at least partially this derives from how Jim Downie taught.

One of my favorite assignments during European literature is that he had all of us look up the etymology of our names to verify our origins. It was from this that I learned möll was a German root related to "mill," and thus that one of my ancestors must have been a mill-man, i.e., a miller. After we did this, he met with each of us individually to help us pick a book from our country of origin that he thought we would like. It was thanks to this that I read Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, which for some time I went around trumpeting as my favorite book. Perhaps it still would be, but I haven't read it in thirteen years!

I began my academic career as a language arts education major, though I ended up teaching college, not high school. It was thanks to his example that I wanted to. Probably many teachers have such a story, but Mr. Downie is mine.

It's been a long time since I've seen him. At least twice during my college years; I remember stopping by St. X and telling him I was taking or had taken a Victorian literature class, and he asked if I had read any Thomas Hardy. All I'd read was some short fiction (it had been a summer class, so we'd hardly done any novels), and he bemoaned that I hadn't read The Mayor of Casterbridge. I picked it up next time I went to the used bookstore, and thus began a lifelong love.

Searching my old LiveJournal reveals that I bumped into him once after that, a week into my relationship with Hayley, when we went to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. (He was a big fan, and my parents would bump into him a lot.) All I recorded in my LJ was that seeing him "was nice"; I wonder if he was disappointed that I'd decided to not be a high school English teacher after all.

This whole post was spurred by a question about role models, and it's perhaps odd, I've ended up writing not about a model for living, but a model for work, and there's so much of life that's not work. But it's not about work, it's about literature, and for me, literature is a wellspring for both work and for living. And a large part of how I view literature goes back to Jim Downie, and I hope I live up to his example in some small way.

#71: Who is your role model?

First Fandom

I like to say my first fan love was Star Trek, but my true fan love was Doctor Who. That's true to an extent, but it's not completely accurate.

I'm not sure what makes you a fan of something per se. Like, I'm definitely a Star Trek and Doctor Who and Star Wars fan. I'm definitely not a Primeval fan even though I enjoyed the show. But am I a Legend of the Galactic Heroes fan? I've seen every episode of the (main) series and I own six of the novels? Yet I would be hesitant to declare myself a fan. Am I an Avatar: The Last Airbender fan? I own the whole show on DVD (well, co-own with my wife) and own all the comics. But is really liking something-- even to the extent of buying tie-ins or soundtracks or what have you-- enough to be a fan, or is there something more?

"Fan," of course, is an abbreviation of "fanatic." The OED, surprisingly, dates the first citation as "phan," actually, in 1682! From something titled New News from Bedlam, or More Work for Towzer and His Brother Ravanscroft: Alias Hocus Pocus Whipt and Script, or A Ra-ree New Fashion Cupping Glass Most Humbly Represented to the Observator by Theophilus Rationalis. (Actually, there are a lot more subtitles, but that gives you a sense.) The OED indicates that on page 13 it says, "The Loyal Phans to abuse," and then on page 40, "To be here Nurs'd up, Loyal Fanns to defame, And damn all Dissenters on purpose for gain." I don't have any more context, so I can't really tell if Mr. Rationalis is using the word the way we use it now.

The next citation is from 1889, which uses it to describe enthusiasts of baseball. A lot of its early usage describes sports-related enthusiasm, but it broadens out pretty quickly, to give us something matching one of the senses the OED records: "a keen follower of a specified hobby or amusement." Well, I definitely "keen[ly] follow[ ]" Star Trek. Maybe my following of Avatar is less keen.

But what, then, is keen following? I'm not sure I can answer that question for everyone, but for me I feel like it involves a sense of commitment to the object of enthusiasm as real. (Though then how can I be a fan of, say, an author?) I know I'm a fan of Star Trek because not only did I pore over my copy of the Star Trek Omnipedia, I also started transcribing its timeline information into a Word document so that I could add information from the books. This was a laborious process because you couldn't select text from the Omnipedia entries, so I had to screenshot them, paste the screenshot into Paint, then invert the colors (the Omnipedia displayed LCARS-style, white on black), and print out, so that I could place the reference in front of me as I typed it back in. I must have been... eleven? twelve? If that's not fandom, I don't know what is.

It's hard for me to remember a time I wasn't a fan of Star Trek. I remember my uncle showing me The Wrath of Khan. I remember watching The Motion Picture at a point where I believed it took place before the original series. I remember watching The Voyage Home at a point where I must not have known what a Klingon was because I parsed the Klingon ship they use as "cling-on ship," i.e., a ship that clings on to the main ship. And with its wings in the down position, you can imagine the bird-of-prey snugly settling onto the rounded secondary hull of the Enterprise. But I feel like I actually owned a MicroMachine of the bird-of-prey at that point? How could I own such a thing and still not correctly parse "Klingon ship"?

Yet if all that means "fandom" then maybe my first fandom is really the Land of Oz? This far out it's hard to know the chronology of it all. I do remember drawing my own map, because I found the ones included in the front of my books insufficient. I do remember trying to work out how Ozma's father could be called Pastoria in Marvellous Land and Oz in Dorothy and the Wizard, and puzzling over the inconsistencies of pre-Wizard history in those two books plus the original Wonderful Wizard. I remember my mother buying me all the ones in the original fourteen I didn't already own for my birthday one year, complete with scavenger hunt. I remember ILLing all the Ruth Plumly Thompson novels; in the days of dial-up catalogue access, this was like a mystical incantation. I remember that The Purple Prince of Oz was ineligible for ILL because our library owned a copy-- a noncirculating one. So my family made a trip to the downtown library and amused themselves while I sat in a chair for a couple hours and read the whole book straight through in one go!

It was a world you could believe in. You could map it and write out its history, even if it didn't add up. (And in a way, doesn't not adding up help?) I think that's what's needed to let me be a fan of something. You can follow the map and the history, keenly.

#483: Does being a fan help define who you are?

Personal (lack of) Fitness

When I was in the fifth grade, I wanted to be an astronaut. (Maybe we all do.) My teacher told me that that would never happen: I was not fit enough.

Exercise was my eternal nemesis in the Boy Scouts. I think all of the first three rank levels have a fitness requirement? It's been a long while, I don't know where my The Boy Scout Handbook, tenth edition, is, and no one on-line seems to have duplicated this information.

I do know that I started the Personal Fitness merit badge at least three times. Alas, Personal Fitness was required for Eagle, and thus one of the reasons I never attained the rank. I would always start the badge at summer camp, but it required some amount of work on your own, and then a re-evaluation after some period of time (thirty days?), and I never had any follow-through. No discipline. I am by nature an undisciplined person, but can force myself to be disciplined when I need to (though I understood this about myself much less well when I was seventeen). Or perhaps "want to" would be more accurate, and I never wanted to.

(Why? This might require more introspection than I am capable of, but I feel like my main objection is that exercise is fundamentally boring. Or it seems to me that it would be, anyway, given I so rarely undertake formal exercise. As an adult, I have found that I do like swimming laps even though I am awful at it, and walking is always nice, especially if I have an iPod or a human companion. But I would rather be eaten by a bear than run.)

((I've always struggled to tie short-term actions to long-term goals (yet somehow decided it would be a good idea to get a Ph.D.), and I think that's part of my problem with exercise, with the added difficulty that my opinion about my physical fitness is basically that I'd rather not be dead, and that feels a long way off, and so it isn't a great motivation for exercising now.))

(((Maybe the real reason is that I am sure I will be awful at it, and if there's anything I abide by, it's never do things you're not going to succeed at, because then how can you be the best?)))

Stadium was not this nice in my day. Also I can't find a picture on-line with the track visible.

When I was in high school, we had to take a year of gym. I was miserable; Coach Rasso once pulled me aside during a volleyball game and worked with me one-on-one for like fifteen minutes. It didn't help. When we did our running unit, the climax of it was a timed six-lap run around the track. (I assume this equaled a mile, but I don't really remember.) Coach pulled a number of boys aside and said they only had to do five laps. And then he looked at me and said, "Mollmann, you only have to do four."

Well, so help me, I was elated. So elated, in fact, that I ran the fastest I had run that entire unit. With the consequence that when I finished my four laps, I was done so quickly, Coach didn't believe I'd really run four laps, and so made me run one more... which meant I was completely exhausted and finished in last, absolutely miserable. Oh well, I guess he tried to help.

Still, I'll take what I can get. My grade school gym teacher told me I was so bad at exercise I'd be dead by the time I turned thirty. Two years later, I'm still alive, so I guess I'm doing okay.

#528: How has exercise changed your health, your body or your life?

Summer Is for Learning and LEGO

When I was a kid, there were three of us, and our mother was a stay-at-home mom. So, I am convinced it was her mission to pack us off to as many summer camps as possible. There was always the week of camping with the Boy Scouts, of course, but there was also rocketry camp, science camp, bible camp, nature camp, and LEGO robotics camp.

Outside of Boy Scout camp, these were all day camps. Go to the local high school everyday and build model rockets while learning about space. Go to some local park everyday and put pepper and soap into water for some reason. Go to the church gym everyday and make Jesus out of macaroni. Go to the woods everyday and be dared into eating leg-less daddy-long-legs. Mom got me out of the house, I learned stuff about surface tension and explosions and dirt and Father Abraham's many sons, many sons had Father Abraham.

Other than Boy Scout camp, which was probably the most fun, LEGO robotics camp was the best. This was probably like 1995 or 1996? I would have been in middle school. I was a self-taught programming whiz in those days, which is to say I taught myself QBasic with the help of a book from the library and could do pretty simple stuff on my own. My brother and I were sent off to LEGO robotics camp together, and we naturally selected each other as partners.

This was pre-LEGO Mindstorms. LEGO robotics in those days was through "Dacta," LEGO's educational line, which had their own programming language. There doesn't seem to be much out there about it on the Internet, but you could write code to test the input of various sensors, and output commands to motors. There were temperature and touch sensors, and various motors and lights and stuff. This thing here was the interface between the PC and the LEGO:

from Eurobricks

It's kind of hard to see in the picture, but the studs on that have metallic rims; the sensors and motors connected to them so data could move through. The core of the whole thing was, I believe, LEGO set 9701, the "Control Lab Building Set," which contained parts and directions for a variety of things you could do.

My kid brother and I were an amazing team; I would write the code and he would build the LEGO. We quickly moved through all the easy stuff and soon we were making the greenhouse. The greenhouse had a temperature sensor inside, so when it got too warm, the door would open; then when it got too cool, it would close up again. Here's the cover page to the directions:

from bricks.argz.com

The interior didn't really heat up, to be honest; I think we had to cheat the whole thing by squeezing the temperature sensor with our fingers. But we accomplished it together. In researching this, I've even found a bit of what I think is the actual code floating around on the Internet:

to open
tto "motora setright on
waituntil [angle5 > 16]
tto "motora off
end

to close
tto "motora seleft on
waituntil [angle5 < 1]
tto "motora off
end

to greenhouse
loop [if temp1 > 22 [open] if temp1 < 22 [close]]
end

There were directions and code for a scanner, even, which used a light sensor moving slowly across a piece of paper to feed into the computer its light/darkness bit by bit. Even for us this was too ambitious. (I should note that memories conflict on this point; Andy insists we did build the scanner, and says he remembers scanning in a picture of Mickey Mouse. But I was ten and he was eight, so I know whose recollections I trust more here.)

The next year we went back, but we were too good, and the camp director broke us up, and we accomplished much less paired with others than with each other.

I remember the LEGO sets having this air of age to them, but the LEGO wiki tells me set 9701 came out in 1995, so clearly not. Perhaps it was just that even in what was 1996-ish, the graphic design was sparse, but I guess in retrospect that was probably because it was an educational product, not available commercially, and done on the cheap in some ways.

As a result of these experiences we were so hyped up for LEGO Mindstorms when it came out a couple years later... and we were profoundly disappointed. The GUI-optimized puzzle piece code of Mindstorms was nowhere near as robust as the Dacta programming language, and we lost interest pretty quickly. Which, in retrospect, makes me feel bad, because I suspect it hadn't been a cheap buy for our parents.

But, you know, I'd had the second most fun I ever had at summer camp. (I kind of do miss programming at times.)

#579: What would your ideal summer camp be like?

Charting course

Kids, I know, go through "what do you want to do when you grow up"s on a pretty frequent basis. Or at least I did. I definitely wanted to be an astronaut (of course) at one point in middle school but I was told that was unobtainable in the kind of shape I was in.

My favorite high school teacher was Jim Downie. Mr. Downie was old, well-read, single, well-traveled, and very dry. He knew his stuff, and his stuff was depression. He knew exactly how to time a lesson on Anton Chekhov so that he said something like, "And life really is meaningless," and then the bell would ring. On one such occasion, I realized, I want to do this.

So I was an English education major in college. I had some good teachers, but to be honest, nothing doesn't prepare you to teach like an education degree. Or at least it didn't prepare me, as someone who can really only learn how to do things by doing them. But it did teach me that I was pretty certain I didn't want to teach high school after all.

In retrospect this seems like a big decision, but to be honest, I don't remember much about it. But I do have a way of learning what I thought at the time, which is to say I read some posts on my old LiveJournal.* This change of heart kind of comes up as an aside in a post about my attempts to file the bureaucratic requirements of graduating with an ed degree but not student teaching:

I learned that graduating without student teaching is actually a routine thing for education majors who undergo a change of heart. Not student teaching means you don't get your teaching license when you graduate-- but that tied into my other recent revelation, which was that I don't think teaching high school is what I want to do with my life. What I've learned about the profession over the past year or so has shown me that it's not the environment I want, it's not the sort of teaching I want to do. I think of high school as being like St. X†--and high schools are by and large, not like St. X.

I'm not entirely sure what I want to do, but I think graduate school is my best option for now. I might go on for a doctorate and do the whole professor thing--I think that would be neat--but I'm not entirely sure.

I'm writing this post because of one of the New York Times writing prompts I like to do on occasion. This one is about what you would do to land your "dream job." It turns out that to get my dream job, I was willing to stay in school for another eight years, make very little money, write a dissertation, work long and weird hours, and move anywhere in the country whether I wanted to live there or not. I was talking about this with one of my classes the other day (they're chatty folks), and they were like, "Geeze, you did all that!" Somehow the AP test had also come up, and I'd mentioned my scores on AP Bio and AP Calculus BC, and one student was like, "You could have been an engineer or the other kind of doctor!"

And, I mean, I guess I could have? Except, like, why would I? I never had a desire to do these things; my dream, such as it was, has been to teach English and to write. My students asked me when I decided to become a professor, and I was like, "Hm, that's a good question." I was actually surprised to see just now that I was explicitly toying with it when I was a senior in college, because my memory is that grad school was more of a convenient holding pattern than anything else. I did my M.A., and was like, "Well, this is good," and so I went on for the Ph.D., and once you've got that, what can you do other than be a professor?

To accomplish it, though, I had to work harder than I've ever worked at anything in my life. I like to say that I've always been an "achiever"-- underachievers are lazy, overachievers are doing too much. I just do what you need to do to achieve. But in graduate school the bar for achievement became way high! So I guess I was willing to do a lot to get my dream job.

Or, you know, do a lot to not get my dream job, as often happens to Ph.D.s. And, let's be clear, I'm in a good job now but it's actually not my dream job, either. Gotta figure out how to get on that tenure track!

I wrote that LiveJournal post in September 2006. Eleven years later, I finally achieved that desire. I guess it is "neat."

#444: What investment are you willing to make to get your dream job?

* I also learned that I was smug and boring as a college student. No wonder I didn't have any friends. Man, my blog was terrible.

† You might infer from context that this was the high school I went to.

My Car Is Not Clean, Though: On Advice

My father has several pieces of advice he trots out on occasion. One is to keep your car clean, so that when things aren't going well, you can say to yourself, "Well, at least my car's clean."

This e-mail exchange between my father and his children from a few years back probably sums them all up:

---

SUBJECT: dad says
FROM: Dad
TO: Catherine, Andy, Steve

it's time to check your tire pressure.

---

FROM: Steve
TO: Dad, Catherine, Andy

I kinda think I want a daily "dad says" e-mail with life tips.

"dad says at least your car is clean"

"dad says that you can just clear your air filter with a pressure washer"

"dad says make a little extra money by opening a coffee bar"

"dad says just throw strikes"

---

FROM: Dad
TO: Steve, Catherine, Andy

I was thinking the same thing!
Kind of a daily advice thing!
That could be so helpful to you guys! Straighten you out!
Someday, it could even turn into a syndicated column or something!

interestingly, I washed my car yesterday, and sent mom a text, "well, at least my car is clean"
and
somebody at work complimented me on the conclusion of a big important project, on Thursday. I said, "i just try to throw strikes"

---

(I like that my father-- like me-- doesn't take himself too seriously, and sometimes purposefully self-parodizes.)

"Just throw strikes" is one he trots out a lot, and is obviously derived from baseball. He also occasionally tells us to "reach back for something extra" when attempting something difficult (I think he told me both these things before my dissertation defense), which is also a baseball one.

When I decided to write this blog post, I called my dad and asked if there was some kind of origin to the phrases-- I had a vague memory of some story he'd told me as a kid that involved one or both of them. He said, not that he could remember, they were just things people in baseball said, I told him he wasn't much help, and then he started asking me how my home improvement projects were going. (Slowly. There are still a lot of things in boxes in here.)

But once we were done talking he called me back like five minutes later, and he said, "Do you know what 'just throw strikes' means?"

"Does it mean something beyond the obvious?"

"It means don't overthink it. Don't throw fancy balls or anything, just focus on landing each pitch in the strike zone. Don't worry about what's outside your control and get the job done."

I guess I had always thought it meant just strike the guy out, but it's a little different to that. Keep going, don't overthink it. Like many kids, I probably went through a phase where I thought the things my father said were dumb, but I do see its useful wisdom as an adult.

In that way it's similar to a piece of advice my dissertation director used a lot, from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1836):

"[L]et him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept well to heart, which to me was of invaluable service: 'Do the Duty which lies nearest thee,' which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer."

Or put slightly simpler (as I usually remember it): "Do the duty that lies nearest to you, and your next duty will become apparent." That is, when you're overwhelmed by the tasks you have to perform, and don't know what you should be doing, do the thing you know needs doing now, and then worry about the next thing. I've never actually read Sartor Resartus, but I always remember this line from Tom Recchio, and it has-- like "just throw strikes"-- helped carry me through some moments where I've been overwhelmed by what I have to do.

(At the Nineteenth Century Studies Association conference in 2017 I was on a panel with someone presenting on Sartor Resartus, and I told her about my advisor's use of it, and she said really the whole book is satire and not meant to be taken earnestly as my advisor was doing. Oh well.)

#76: What's the best advice you’ve gotten?