This Orientation Brought to You By Starbucks

Okay, sorry about the recent outburst. Last week was something of a low point, but I've turned the corner, seen the light, and come to Jesus. Kate got in on Sunday and, designated with the task of making everything better immediately, proceeded to do just that. Among other things (most of which, frankly, aren't any of your business), she found my coffee maker, which some fool had shoved in a drawer in my nightstand. Once I find out who packed all this junk, there's gonna be hell to pay.

I also now have home internet service, which is currently enabling this very blog post and will make the rest of my life much, much easier. Although it does mean no more trips to Panera, ever. Which is a bit of a drag, actually, as I was growing quite fond of their pumpkin muffies. More to the point, it turns out one of the Jonas Brothers was spotted Monday night at my Panera, the very one where I've been spending countless hours doing tedious textbook work and munching on muffies. Oh, to have been within spitball distance of such tousle-haired greatness would have sent me, quite literally, over the edge. And onto the floor. Into a pool of muffie crumbs.

(Actually, it's one of my persistent fears here in Nashville that I'll be eating dinner or drinking coffee right next to a bona-fide popular/country music celebrity and not have the slightest clue about it, so detached have I become from these things. The corollary of this is that I often assume that everyone I see is a popular/country music celebrity, a tendency that's facilitated by the large number of people around here who dress like they could be celebrities but are probably just starving singer-songwriters who spend all their disposable income on celebrityish clothes and accessories).

I have also been spending some time this week getting to know my new school. It's a much different place than I'm used to - a large, cash-strapped state school serving a regional studentship who are frequently the first in their families to attend college, and are doing so while working part-time, living at home, etc. There are good and bad things about this. The good mostly involves the greater impact I think I'll have by teaching students who are really working to be there, instead of affluent kids with a sense of entitlement for whom a college education was always a given (note that I'm generalizing grossly, in both directions). The bad mostly involves the lack of money. It sounds like things are pretty tight here even at the best of economic times, which these most certainly are not, and so many of the things I'm accustomed to having or would like to have - fully wired classrooms, attractive facilities, a living wage - are either entirely missing or in very short supply. Still, they make due pretty well with what they've got: the library looks great and has lots of online doohickeys for me to play with, I've got a small travel budget, and there are pretty good state-sponsored benefits, for instance.

At times, however, the school's desperate need for cash manifests itself in a sort of crass commercialism that is deeply obnoxious to my sophisticated, blue-state sensibilities. The fast food outlets in the dining hall are one thing - I encountered these at Tulane, too, a school which was by no means poverty-stricken - but the corporate-sponsored new-faculty orientation is quite another. I have to be careful here since, as I learned from my recent posting about Comcast, some corporations employ people to search through blogs looking for references to their companies - let's call them the brand police - and it would therefore be fairly easy for this particular corporation to track me down and kill me if I named them here. So I'll just say that, after three hours of power-point presentations about things like "the student culture" and "research and graduate students" - three hours in which countless administrators told us all about their giddy, almost unnatural love for the school, most of them working hard to outdo one another by bragging about how long they'd been there (one of them practically boasted that she'd been conceived right there on campus) - after three hours of this, we were marched over to the athletic stadium for lunch, where we were ambushed by representatives of a large regional bank

As we arranged ourselves around our tables we were told that we should leave one seat open for a banker - I repressed an involuntary quip that that's precisely what the entire country had been doing for some time now - and then we were all given personalized folders telling us what this wonderful regional bank could do for us. Then, as we tucked into something that looked like lasagna or maybe chicken parmesan, we listened as each of the bankers introduced themselves and urged us - pleaded with us, really - to come by their office and chat about anything at all, bank-related or not, anytime of the day or night. And then we had to listen while one or two administrators praised the bank, and the school's "relationship" with the bank, with an intensity that bordered on the unseemly. And then, after the speechifying was over, we all trotted over to collect our "goodie bags" full of candy, local maps, and a plastic device that looks like what would happen if a chip clip got into a menage-a-trois with a tablespoon and a fridge magnet.

At least I can say that the map, at any rate, is the largest item of its kind I've ever seen:



As another example of this sort of crassness - or, to be charitable, let's call it a collective tin ear for how such things appear to ubersophisticated newcomers like myself - I'll just point out that the one book every incoming freshman is being required to read is not, as it was at BC some years back, Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains, about a doctor's humanitarian work in Haiti, nor is it any of the thousands of other books that can impart important life lessons in a thoughtful and provocative way. No, the one book all incoming freshman are required to read is How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill, who will be speaking at this year's Convocation. Now this is a book that I haven't read, so I might be way off the mark here, but from all the reviews I've read, the book - which tells the story of how a wealthy man, Gill, loses his fancy corporate job but finds redemption slumming with the lower orders while working at a local Starbucks - is essentially a love letter to the Starbucks corporation. Right there on Amazon's homepage there's a review from Booklist that says, "Other corporate giants can only envy the sheer goodwill that this memoir will inevitably generate for Starbucks," while Publishers Weekly says, "The book reads too much like an employee handbook, as Gill details his duties or explains how the company chooses its coffee. Gill's devotion to the superchain has obviously changed his life for the better, but that same devotion makes for a repetitive, unsatisfying read."

So this is the book they went with? Of all the millions of books that could have imparted essentially the same message - hard work, not wealth, creates happiness (never mind the dubiousness of that assertion) - they chose a poorly written paean to a multinational coffee company? Maybe he was the only Convocation speaker they could get. Or maybe they're getting a bit of consideration from the Starbucks corporation itself, which, incidentally, does have an outlet on campus.

In any case, I can see that I have my work cut out for me.

Addendum to Previous Post

Guess I'm not quite done:

11) I have no electricity. After making my inaugural Trader Joe's run this evening, I returned home with a bucketful of frozen lasagnas and burritos to find the electricity in my neighborhood had gone missing. Initially I thought it was just me, but it turns out a power line pole down the road somehow snapped itself in half, and there are about 700 of us without lights, air conditioning, etc. The power went off about 4pm. It's now 11, and it's still not on, so I'm staying the night with friends. My frozen TJ's items, meanwhile, are sitting in my nonfunctioning freezer and have, by now, melted into lukewarm puddles of sauce and gluten. I don't even want to think about what's happened at the popsicle shop a few doors down.

Blurg.

I Hate Nashville and I Want to Come Home

The following things are currently wrong:

1) Our apartment, while 92% done, is not 100% done. Almost three weeks after we were initially assured it would be. Things still needed include

a. smoke detector(s)

b. bathroom fan

c. the removal of massive gobs of paint from the outside of the windows

d. blinds or shades or something to keep the light out

e. a new front door

f. two interior doors

g. a washer/dryer.

This last is our responsibility, and if something doesn't happen soon I'm gonna have to go buy new clothes.

2) The apartment is too small for all of our stuff, and, despite initial assurances that we'd have storage in the basement, we will not, in fact, have storage in the basement. This is because the landlord is turning the basement into another apartment. This is part of a larger problem wherein the landlord is kind of a pain in the ass. There is therefore no room for our bikes, for instance. I may have to build a shack out back.

3) My cellphone doesn't work in the apartment.

4) There's no internet in the apartment. This very serious, and has led me to get on the phone (in the park across the street, where I can get a signal) and call Comcast, AT&T, etc. An initial flirtation with Comcast proved fruitless when the Comcast guy failed to show up yesterday between 1pm and 4pm, as promised (while waiting alone in the apartment, of course, I had no internet to distract me). AT&T has been more helpful, but they're unable to get a guy out to install a jack before Aug. 31. In the meantime, I have a bazillion things to do that require internet access. The solution I've hit upon is to spend the greater part of every day in coffee shops. This is something I tend to do anyway, but not to this extent. It's starting to get quite expensive, and I always feel uncomfortable taking up space somewhere for hours on end. As a partial solution to this problem, I've headed to a Panera at the mall. Not only is there more seating here, but I also don't feel at all bad about mooching Panera's wireless as I do at more local establishments. This plan has two drawbacks, however:

a. I have to spend money at Panera.

b. I have to spend time at Panera.

5) I have a bazillion things to do. In addition to the normal teaching prep, which would be time-consuming enough, I also have an article to write for a conference in Paris that I was hoping to finish before school starts. That's not gonna happen, however, because I've recently been saddled with 80+ hours of freelance textbook work. I'd agreed to do these projects earlier in the summer, when I had time, but they didn't get them to me until last week. Under normal conditions I'd tell them to shove their projects in their pie holes, but it's paying outrageously well and will, in fact, finance my trip to Paris to present the article that I haven't written. And then some.

6) It's hot.

7) It's muggy.

8) People here talk funny and drive very large vehicles.

9) All my stuff is in boxes still and I can't find anything. I currently need to know the locations of the following:

a. Sponges

b. Assorted spray bottles

c. Dish towels

d. My favorite mug.

e. A certain Charlie Daniels bobblehead.

10) I'm all alone and I miss Kate.

There, I'm done griping. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. Everything will be better shortly, I know - it's always this way when moving to a new place, as I know all too well. Combine that with the transition from not-busy to holy-shit-am-I-busy-and-oh-yeah-all-my-stuff-is-in-boxes, and a person would have to be made of stone not to feel at least a little disheartened.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to spend the next three hours working on a spreadsheet. If Panera's musak doesn't drive me away sooner.

18 Things I've Learned Since Leaving the Valley

It's been over a week since I left the Valley, and I'm already starting to feel a bit bucolic-deficient: I haven't seen a tobacco barn or a creamery or a sugar shack in ages, haven't had a cider donut in eons, and haven't picked-my-own anythings in forever (excepting, perhaps, my nose). Still, I'm bearing up quite well under the circumstances, largely because I'm managing to keep my mind active. It remains to be seen just how active it will remain once I've settled into the languorous rhythms of the South - I've accepted the possibility that my brain muscles, pummelled by the politics and made turgid by the climate, might not retain their accustomed vigor for long - but for now my intellect is still in fighting form. As evidence of which, I hereby present eighteen things I've learned in the past week-and-a-half:

1) Mentor, OH, is the birthplace of James A. Garfield, and for this reason it can be a very difficult place to find a motel room at 11pm on a summer weekend.

2) Red Roof Inns are, despite their charming names, complete dumps. For evidence of this, I advise you to stay at the Red Roof Inn in Mentor, OH, where the rooms have more beds than towels.

3) People in the South drive very rapidly and don't like to use turn signals. I'm unsure why this is, but for now I'm blaming NASCAR.

4) Christ is the answer.

5) Jesus died for me.

6) I may call it abortion, but God calls it murder.

7) It is more expensive to move from Massachusetts to Tennessee via U-Haul than to do so by hiring movers.

8) Some landlords have very primitive understandings of how long it takes to renovate apartments. They also have somewhat underdeveloped notions of just how much communication is necessary or desirable between themselves and tenants expecting to move into said apartments.

9) Relatedly, Tuesday is not Saturday, and Saturday is not Thursday.

10) A tenant's annoyance with a delinquent landlord may be mitigated slightly upon being informed that the reason the landlord is always going "out of town" is that he is a member of a funk band whose members conceal their identities with costumes. Upon acquiring this information, a tenant may be inclined to view the landlord's apparent unscrupulousness as mere flakiness.

11) In the South, macaroni and cheese is a vegetable, and most everything else, including green beans and turnip greens and black-eyed-peas, is not suitable for vegetarians.

12) Ben Folds lives in our neighborhood.

13) The dude who runs two of the coffee shops in which I'll be spending much of my time is dating the chick who runs the popsicle stand at which I'll be spending much of my money.

14) In order to get a parking space for my 8am class, I'll need to arrive on campus by 7am. In order to do that, I'll need to leave home by 6am. And in order to do that, I'll need to be awake by 5:55am.

15) Children in Tennessee have to ride in car seats until they are eight years old.

16) Stacked, all-in-one-unit washer/dryer combos are more expensive than stackable, separate-unit, front-loading washers and dryers.

17) A significant Civil War event happened approximately every twenty feet in the South, and these events are stirringly described by signs more numerous than hairs on a monkey.

18) Custard pie is one of life's great pleasures.

Okay, that's all the larnin' you're gettin' for today. Now get back to work.

Hotel Lives

Not so very long ago, it was a common thing for people to live in hotels. I've always found the idea romantic, probably because I watch too many black and white movies. There's the friendly bellboy who greets everyone by name, the well-stocked liquor cabinets and linen-draped room-service carts, the mailboxes for long-term guests, the elevator operator who knows everyone's floor, the dapper gentleman on some urgent mission who strolls up to the front desk and asks, "Any messages for me, Sam?" It all seems such a long way from our current world of interchangeable chain motels with names like Motel 6 and Super 8 and Blue 22 (I made that last one up), of "continental breakfasts" comprised of a box of cold, greasy donuts and orange juice in little plastic cups sealed with tinfoil, of televisions that can be used either for express checkout or downloading adult entertainment, in both cases making what was once a transaction between human beings into a solitary endeavor.

The people who used to live in hotels were usually bachelors, young couples, or old folks. I just read a Peter Taylor story about newlyweds who are forced to spend the first night of their honeymoon in the hotel in which the groom used to live, a circumstance that was most embarrassing for the young bride, since everyone was bound to know what they were up to. These days, of course, bachelors live with roommates or parents or rent their own apartments, and young brides don't get embarrassed about much of anything at all. The old folks who used to live in hotels now live in Assisted Living Communities, which is actually very much like living in a hotel, only with more bingo. As for the rest of us, living in a hotel simply isn't a viable option. Who has that kind of money? And where would we put all our stuff?

Nevertheless, the past decade has seen an explosion in the number of so-called extended-stay hotels that charge a reasonably affordable weekly rate for guests who commit to stay long-term. I've yet to figure out who stays at these places, but my hunch is that it's primarily business travelers - a company may rent a couple of rooms in a residence hotel and rotate people through, or individual businesspeople may live in a room for an extended period while they take care of business. This, essentially, is what my grandfather did back in the 1970s when he started traveling from Oklahoma City up to Bartlesville, OK, to work on a case for the oil company based there (he was a lawyer for the company), until it became clear that the case would take years and he and my grandmother might as well just move to Bartlesville.

The other people who stay in extended-stay hotels are probably people who can more easily pay a weekly rate than a monthly one - poor people, intermittently employed people, migrant workers, people forced out of their own homes due to flooding or tornadoes or whatever. These people are likely to live in different hotels than the business travelers. Often it'll be one of those run-down "motor inns" from the 1960s that you and I drive by and shake our heads wondering how such places stay in business. Or it may be one of Motel 6's new line of extended-stay motels (ingeniously named Studio 6) that go for about $140 a week. These people will often sleep several to a room, and they will often not get much in the way of free high-speed internet. It goes without saying, I suppose, that there's not much romance in these arrangements, either for the wealthy or the poor, although you're more likely to find romance in a Four Seasons than in a Studio 6.

For the last four days, I've been somewhere between those extremes, in a Hilton Suites in Brentwood, TN, just a few miles south of Nashville. The apartment Kate and I are moving into isn't quite done yet, a fact that is less surprising now than it would have been a month ago, before I knew our new landlord better. We've been assured it'll be inhabitable by Saturday, so in the meantime I've splurged on a nice hotel in a tony suburb for a few days. Well, okay, I didn't really splurge - I'm actually paying less than half the normal rate, thanks to some mad internetting skills - but it still feels like a bit of an indulgence. I've got a living room, a bedroom, a huge bathroom with a closet in it, a microwave, a little fridge, a nice couch, two sinks, and two televisions (one for express checkout, one for adult entertainment). There's a heated pool, a weight room, a coin-op laundry room, and every morning they bring me a free USA Today, which, since I don't have any birdcages to line or fish to wrap, is perfectly useless - but it's a nice gesture. My principal complaint is that the bed is essentially one giant, squishy pillow covered in hundreds of smaller squishy pillows, and this is making it a bit hard to get a good night's sleep. My principal joy is that the hotel is within walking distance of a barbecue restaurant where last night I managed to have a big meal of pulled pork, green beans, cornbread, and fried corn-on-the-cob*, plus a gigantic bowl of apple cobbler with ice cream, for under $10. It's also near a bakery called the Puffy Muffin, which, now that I think of it, is probably what I should nickname my bed. Pity this'll be my last night on it.

Tomorrow Kate comes in to do some interviews, and we'll be staying with a friend of her mother's for a couple of nights. I'm most grateful for the hospitality, but I'm actually a bit sad to see the end of this little interlude at the Hilton. I didn't get to know any bellboys, I haven't seen any elevator operators, and I haven't received any mail or messages at the front desk, but I think if I were to stay here just a little longer all of those things just - and more - would definitely happen.

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* Fried corn-on-the-cob is, apparently, a thing here. A very delicious thing, as it happens, and something that I can't believe I'd never imagined before. I am going to get very fat in Nashville.