Thoughts on Things That Have Come and Gone

Lord willing and the creeks don't rise, I am moving to New York (upstate, that it is) in less than a week. I have been places before: I spent a few weeks in Paris, I've traveled on both coasts of Canada, I've been to conferences in southern California and the Rustbelt, and there was a brief gig as a farmhand and cowboy in rural Virginia. But Moscow, Idaho has been "home" for twenty-two years. Statistically, the chances are that there will not be another locale which I will call "home" for a longer period of time. Most people would call this turning the page on another chapter of their lives, but for me, it is more like turning the page on Book I of my life.

I'm not old. (I'm still in my early twenties.) But that doesn't mean I'm younger than the world that we live in now; I'm actually quite a bit older than it (or at least I have lived long enough to remember when it was not.) This brave new world that I am referring to is the world of the computer, of mass communication, of globalization. I remember a time when I had trouble believing that the Soviet Union could be breaking apart; that America could want any president other than George H. W. Bush; that history was the last victim of itself, consigned to the archives where only those who made a living by reinterpreting it bothered to follow. I remember I time when I could not remember where I was when the World Trade Centers came down.

This world is a new world; or else I am like a man who turned around in Socrates's hypothetical cave and saw what had been all along, though he was unaware of it. (It is not that this is an impossibility; I avoided getting an email address for as long as I could; I was twenty-one when I finally obtained a cellular phone.) In this new world, it has become easier to keep track of people, which is why no one bothers to do it anymore. We have advanced to a point where it has become polite to lie by saying "I'll keep in touch" but perhaps impolite to annul that lie by actually keeping in touch.

But, for all of that, the frontier still beckons. The world can still be remade, but not until it remakes us first. And, if the primary facet of this current world has been trivialization, what will the next era bring I wonder?

Musing on Temporary Retirement

Unless they change my transcript within the next month, my degree will be pretty much inviolable by the university. I've been musing about it, though. When I was in school, I couldn't wait to get done. Now that I'm done with it, I almost miss it already. I enjoyed my undergraduate years, but I haven't lost my memory and I remember that most of the time I was concentrating on getting through the curriculum for the degree. The point is that, years from now, I really hope that I don't look on my three-and-a-half years of undergraduate studies as a golden age.

Thinking About Thanksgiving

I think that this is going to be the fourth or fifth Thanksgiving during which I have not had turkey. I'm actually pretty glad about it. Turkey is a highly overrated bird. People ought to have some variety of duck or drake instead.

First Lecture

Gave my first lecture in 8th grade history today. Talked about ancient Egypt and touched a bit on Hammurabi. My task for this year is to get all of the way from Egypt to Iraq (that is, post-U.S. invasion Iraq) and the U.S. Presidential elections, 2008. It's going to be an interesting year.