Hello SR readers. I am migrating to WP in the next few days and honestly I am not sure if you are subscribed to this blog via RSS that it will just transfer over. If you don’t get posts in the next few days, it is likely you may have to resubscribe, unless I find the plugin magic soon. Just a friendly warning… And f*ck it is HOT in Chicago.

A few folks people have been asking, so “what next?” The immediate next is that I am here in Puerto Rico, visitng my mom, and nursing my sinuses which of course got mucus-blasted with an infection due to the pressure and stress of finishing up. I have not been here since December and not much has changed although the temperature is characteristicaly HOT and actually my mom is doing better which is relief. The sinuses are recovering thanks to the salty ocean water and thick humid air. There was something remarakbly different about swimming in the ocean without a looming dissertation. Really… different. I am also lowering the caffeine intake which always seems easier to do here because there are less demands made on brain (although I have to do a lot of word catching for my mom) and I really think there is something about the sun and ocean water that makes the withdrawl effects much less severe. I think when I return in July I will go off of it entirely at least for a few weeks.

Back in Chicago, I am going to edit the diss before depositing, figure out how to format it (hell hell and more hell) and start reading because I basically stopped doing so in the last 2 months. I will also start catching up on emails that are starting to pile high here in my inbox. I will answer a number of those on the plane flight home now that I have a computer with a battery worth something.

I plan to take most of July off-off. Go back to PR for a number of weeks and then I hope attend and give a paper at What the Hack. But they are having a heck of a time getting a permit so that is somewhat up in the netherworld of government administration (it would seem smarter to grant the permit to what has been a very orderly hacker festival that to deny the permit to some very bright hackers…. but then again that is just my prespective).

Then I am moving to the Garden State for a postdoc fellowship at the CCAC at Rutgers. I am psyched.

Along with that I hope to perhaps learn how to windsurf?? The life of the mind now needs some body life to keep going…

Thanks for everyone who has passed along a congratulations!

In 1997 I moved to _________ to start ________. Little did I know that it would ______ my life. I started on one ________ which took me to the far away country of _______. But then someone introduced me to this wacky world of ________. These people, mostly _________ would spend hours on the _______ and then they would ______ away what they ______ for _______.

I was so struck by this world of _______ that I dropped my old _________ and started to work on _________ instead.

Entering this ______ was more than what I ever could have ________. It was ________ and ________. I could barely stop __________. Finally I finished with the __________ and returned to ___________ where I began the torturous process of writing a __________. Years ______, I finally __________ and then found myself in a __________ with a ________ people ______________ at me. But when the people left the _______ they had a _______ on their _______ and at that point I knew it was all ____.

Now I have a ______ and more than anything it feels just _________.

I am on the verge of finishing a large project. The defense date has been set and receiving the announcement on the anthropology mailing list was nothing short of strange. I could process my name and abstract. After all, I wrote it. But for the past eight years I have received these announcements never really believing that I would finally reach the end. My time in Chicago will soon be archived in the vaults of my memory, brought to bear probably when I am done with another project.

Whenever I finish off a largish project, I experience something akin to what seems like death. I mourn. And as part of this mourning, a flood of memories start to populate my mind. I enter into this revved up nostalgic mode where I travel into the past, unwillingly. Memories that I thought were lost start to cascade down from the mind and into the body, striking every sense of mine. The memories are a truly random assortment. The image may be a small detail, like the pink and purple wild flowers on the side of the road in West Virginia that were remarkably stunning as they waved in the wind. Or something more enveloping like the thunderstorms in Guyana South America that inspired fear and awe and left the capital under brown water. The list goes on and on. They are my fondest, most vibrant memories and I can’t, even if I tried, stop them from coming to me every time I am done with something that I will now consider as

Familiar? How many of us spend hours a day just like that ( + skin)? If you are a blog reader, I imagine you spend even more time in front of the blue screen than your mythological “average” computer user.

Well since my defense is on May 25th, which is a strange to contemplate, I am no longer in front of the computer for 16 hours a day, otherwise the norm during much of the winter and especially the spring. Hunched over, I sacrificied the self to one document. Part of the process was brutal but in other ways, it was entirely liberating and quite enjoyable. I always had a great exuse for why I had to say no to what was asked of me, and I never ever felt guilt about it.

I felt a little like I was living as an island castaway (minus the island and plus an internet connection), lodged entirely in my own world. I hope to get back to that place soon although there are many non-biella worldly affairs to deal with before I can retreat again, hunched over bathed by the hue of computer blue…

I am prone to the bad habit of liking sub-standard, low-brow movies, better if funny. But I do have standards, even if quite low. And tonight, one has fallen below the low bar Bong Water while the second met the bar, but got no higher (although the costumes were +++, teerific).

So I can’t remember the last time I woke up crying and so today when I woke up with a wet face stuck against a damp pillow after a horrid horrid nightmare, I was quite surprised. I had a dream that my childhood best friend was killed during her wedding (by some evil- doer and worse in the ocean) and then once dead was mostly gobbled by a bunch of hungry sharks. Since I chose not to attend the wedding, no one bothered to tell me she died, making me miss her funeral. When I found out of her death, I could not stop cyring until I woke up.

While thankfully none of my childhood friends have had this fate, many of them have tied the knot in the past year and I have missed two of those weddings because of various reasons, mostly having to do with time and money. Clearly missing these events has had more of a profound effect on me than I am willing to admit.

This has been one of the tougher years mostly because of my mom’s illness, leaving me with very little literal and at times emotional time for others. I feel like my friendships have suffered some and often this is because I am not so good at letting others know at the toll, time-wise and emotionally, that this can take on one, especially when finishing your dissertation (which also means you are broke).

So anyway, if I have missed your wedding or keep saying no to your invitations or am not reciprocating like Marcel Mauss tells me I should, well at least I still dream about my friends although I hope that the nightmares end, replaced with dreams of a lighter nature..

So it has been a long time since I have taken a full day off of work/school/errands/teaching/moping-lounging etc. But since my friend Jake is in town, visiting the midst of a traveling spree, I decided to take the day off and do some serious hanging. The highlight of the day was going to see Body Worlds in Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. It was pretty fantastic, at once utterly intoxicating, at times a little gross, and always stunningly stark because of its evocative brilliance. Some of the human muscle meat, looks quite coarse. As M said, “just like beef jerkey” while other fragments of the body, like the arterial system, were presented as a delicate flowering network, the marvel being how mr. science-art man rendered the system in tact as much as the biological system itself.

The show is a little pricey but well worth the dollars although I would skip over the movie. Way too much cheese about the marvel of pregnancy.

So, being that Jake is a hacker-turned-photo-journalist, he has captured some really superb photos of Chicago including the exhibit, which he did undercover (amazingly because he has a large camera). So warning, there are a lot of pictures all on one page (299) so it will take a bit to load. But it is worth the wait. Make sure to scroll down to catch the corpses!

So I am coming to the end of my grad school career and I am feeling that I am not so sure how much of a mark on the world I have made in the last 8 years. But really that is ok because I just checked up on a place of my past, that consumed most of my days while in college: the Columbia women’s ultimate team and I was pretty stoked to see that they have kept on with the name: New York Phat Disc, that I came up with in 1995. I may not have touched a disc in years but I am super happy to see the name lives on. And even better is that on their extra’s page, they have a link to some classic school girrl karaoke

The quarter is over and I am for now, done teaching. It had been years since I had taught, the last time being the summer of 2001 when I taught a version of the hacker course as well as another one on medical anthropology. This time around, I confronted new challenges that layered a subject already quite idiosyncratic. Instead of having 8 students, there were over 20. While my students before were all mostly anthropology majors or geeks, this time I had students from 5-6 departments, ranging from economics to gender studies, anthropology to classics, and of course a few inquiring computer science students.

But during the last ten weeks probably one of the hardest parts was seeing my mom take a irreversible plunge, for the worse. Knowing this, there were days I had to perform when it was the last thing I wanted to do. But human psychology I guess is remarkable; resilient and in some ways remarkably warped. I could for the most part, for at least an hour and twenty minutes, shove it aside and act as if everything was ok.

Though most of her problems are perceptual, my mother is now afflicted with more of the classical Alzheimers symptoms: she has a lot of difficulty recalling words which leaves her more angry and frustrated than ever. Some of her friends have stopped calling her and I had to call her brothers to let them know that if they would like to have her sister recognize them, they should think about visiting sometime soon.

There have been at least some positive developments. We convinced my older sister to move back with her which was great to see (both for my mom and my sister) and my father and his current wife who have been in PR for months have helped out a lot.

But as she gets worse, a routine reaction to her situation is deception. Since she refuses to get outside help we have gotten help for her, pretending the woman who comes over is a volunteer, although she works for a wage. My mother is also the one footing the bill though she has no idea because she “trusts” her daughter’s to manage her money because she can’t see and she is having more trouble than ever dealing with numbers.

It feels awful to deceive, to break her trust, but I guess it would also feel awful to get the phone call where I am told she has been hit by a bus since crossing the street is a life or death challenge. It would also feel pretty awful to take her to court to make her get help. I think this would rip away at the last shreds of her dignity, which she is clinging to hard, because she is so humilated by her loss of mind, of sight, of self, of independence.

My mom of course thinks that a 6 day a week, 8 hrs a day volunteer is a bit odd. She is not that gone and she has always had a good 6th sense, a bit too good perhaps. So, to address her suspicions, we have had to layer upon another swath of deception: “Why not pay her a little money Mami?” to which she assented, although her top price was $5 a day. My mom is pretty confused about the value of money too, thinking somedays, for example, $100 is $1000 dollars. It is sort of humorous and cute that she thinks she is paying this woman $5 a day (which could for all I know mean $50 because it is hard to tell what she means by numbers but it is probably $5), all the while it is pretty depressing too. And I wonder how long the arrangement will last.

But while deception often feels pretty wrong (at least if you find it generally questionable), it is never so clear cut because context, the living moment of the situation, is essential to making ethical choices, to understanding what role deception may or may not take. To take ethics as a set of abstracted norms that bear in the same way and directly across time and place, is what Bakhtin called ethically