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I might go a-fishing.
Sep. 12th, 2012 01:24 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 17. High today: 24.
Given the recent frostiness up in the Bancroft area, I've been wondering how likely it is we'll have frost in Toronto before the end of the month (or, more to the point, before a good number of my groundhog-delayed squash ripen). Looking back over the last decade of records at Pearson, I see that we've come nowhere close to frost in September. So I jumped back to the end of the frigid '70s, and saw that, sure enough, it got below freezing in 1979, and again in 1980, and again in 1981 ... and not again until 1989, and then once more in 1991, and then, so far, never again (although the 1993 records are incomplete, and from what's there, it looks like it might have happened then, too). Pearson has continuous September records (1993 notwithstanding) going back to 1940; since then, there have been sixteen Septembers with below-freezing temperatures at Pearson: three in each decade from the '40s to the '80s, one in the '90s, and none in the 2000s.
This term I'm teaching my first course outside of a philosophy department, although it's an applied ethics course not fundamentally different from an applied ethics course I have taught before as a philosophy course. But it is the first course I've taught since my rather exhilarating and emboldening Heidegger course, and it is the first course I've taught outside my "specializations" in a couple of years, so it may (but may not) be a fairly important test. If I'm going to make a living in academia, I'm probably going to have to teach courses like this, maybe this particular one, regularly. (Next term I've actually ended up with something completely different and nominally outside my competences, but of more intrinsic interest to me, namely, a philosophy of education course.) If it ends up feeling essentially like a mercenary thing, I'll keep looking for if not finding a way out (especially if I don't end up with any more Heidegger or Plato or Nietzsche in the next year). So, we'll see. The one applied ethics course I taught before was actually the course I ended up most satisfied with prior to the Heidegger course--but that was because at that point I felt like I had very little idea what I was doing as a teacher and applied ethics is relatively easy to deal with. (Sorry, applied ethicists.) That was the first course I felt like I "passed". (I mean as opposed to failed, not as opposed to, um, what you do when you don't pass as a woman or white or whatever. Actually, I probably still didn't particularly pass as a professor then. I'm not sure to what extent I do now. Of course, feeling like you pass is largely constitutive of passing.) At this point, I don't want to be passing (in teaching as in writing), although the question as ever remains, what are the alternatives....
Mostly, probably, these weeks, I am just resenting the fallingness of the world, as usual.
I wonder how many people who have looked at this didn't think this is exactly my life. Although I guess there are many different variations on this, and running around between balloons is not really mine. Mine is sitting here in front of my computer cringing with a crushing vague awareness of so many balloons what are they oh my god so many balloons they're getting away I can't look internet forever oh no.
Erratum: Joe-Pye weed, despite its milkweed-like flowers and belovedness of butterflies and caterpillars, is not actually a milkweed. It is in fact a member of the tribe (eh?) of Eupatoriae (as opposed to milkweed's Asclepiadeae), like this common boneset:
Just so you know.
Given the recent frostiness up in the Bancroft area, I've been wondering how likely it is we'll have frost in Toronto before the end of the month (or, more to the point, before a good number of my groundhog-delayed squash ripen). Looking back over the last decade of records at Pearson, I see that we've come nowhere close to frost in September. So I jumped back to the end of the frigid '70s, and saw that, sure enough, it got below freezing in 1979, and again in 1980, and again in 1981 ... and not again until 1989, and then once more in 1991, and then, so far, never again (although the 1993 records are incomplete, and from what's there, it looks like it might have happened then, too). Pearson has continuous September records (1993 notwithstanding) going back to 1940; since then, there have been sixteen Septembers with below-freezing temperatures at Pearson: three in each decade from the '40s to the '80s, one in the '90s, and none in the 2000s.
This term I'm teaching my first course outside of a philosophy department, although it's an applied ethics course not fundamentally different from an applied ethics course I have taught before as a philosophy course. But it is the first course I've taught since my rather exhilarating and emboldening Heidegger course, and it is the first course I've taught outside my "specializations" in a couple of years, so it may (but may not) be a fairly important test. If I'm going to make a living in academia, I'm probably going to have to teach courses like this, maybe this particular one, regularly. (Next term I've actually ended up with something completely different and nominally outside my competences, but of more intrinsic interest to me, namely, a philosophy of education course.) If it ends up feeling essentially like a mercenary thing, I'll keep looking for if not finding a way out (especially if I don't end up with any more Heidegger or Plato or Nietzsche in the next year). So, we'll see. The one applied ethics course I taught before was actually the course I ended up most satisfied with prior to the Heidegger course--but that was because at that point I felt like I had very little idea what I was doing as a teacher and applied ethics is relatively easy to deal with. (Sorry, applied ethicists.) That was the first course I felt like I "passed". (I mean as opposed to failed, not as opposed to, um, what you do when you don't pass as a woman or white or whatever. Actually, I probably still didn't particularly pass as a professor then. I'm not sure to what extent I do now. Of course, feeling like you pass is largely constitutive of passing.) At this point, I don't want to be passing (in teaching as in writing), although the question as ever remains, what are the alternatives....
Mostly, probably, these weeks, I am just resenting the fallingness of the world, as usual.
I wonder how many people who have looked at this didn't think this is exactly my life. Although I guess there are many different variations on this, and running around between balloons is not really mine. Mine is sitting here in front of my computer cringing with a crushing vague awareness of so many balloons what are they oh my god so many balloons they're getting away I can't look internet forever oh no.
Erratum: Joe-Pye weed, despite its milkweed-like flowers and belovedness of butterflies and caterpillars, is not actually a milkweed. It is in fact a member of the tribe (eh?) of Eupatoriae (as opposed to milkweed's Asclepiadeae), like this common boneset:
Just so you know.
