the fog

"Look at the fog."

"I'm looking."  The fog was not yellow, but a flat, opaque gray that looked more dry than wet.  It crept slowly along the wall, teasing around a corner, never rising above their knees.

"Does it look like a cat to you?"

He paused.  "Yeah.  Yeah, I guess it kind of does."

"Isn't it weird to think that T.S. Eliot did that to us? Even now?"

"What?"

"T.S. Eliot.  The reason the fog looks like a cat."

"Baby, I'm not even sure who T.S. Eliot is.  I'm pretty sure it's not his fault the fog looks like a cat."

She stared at the fog, sinuous, serpentine, not feline in the slightest.  "I don't know," she said.  "I think we don't get to pick what we see when we look at things.  I think everything that came before means we -"

"It probably looks like an otter, too.  And a puppy.  Come on, it's cold."

"And when I look at you -"

He turned to leave, and the fog wrapped itself around his ankles, and her mind made a sudden leap.

developing other interests

The article: about John McEnroe's new tennis academy

The quote:  "He said that they play too much tennis when they would be better off working harder in shorter periods of time and developing other interests, including different sports."

Love it.  Tennis students playing too much tennis.  Cut back and get good at other things as well.  Is the notorious Chinese gymnast-coaching strategy a counterargument?  

life, photoshopped

i want to live in a soft-focus world, all sepia-colored, blurred in all the right places, the sun perpetually glowing somewhere out of sight.  i want the kind of face with the eyes glowing bright, color shining like joy defined to CMYK values, hue and saturation amped so my pale skin recedes and my eyes catch everybody else's.  i want perfect skin in quirky-cropped portraits.  but i want it to seem so real, authentic, natural, images that make your belly clinch with wistfulness.  i want polaroids, off-center, with the taste of authenticity woven in with the chemicals and the paper.

Shake, shake.

desaturated shots of me laughing with a background of a place you've never been, vague enough to make you long to go.  hair blowing in a breeze.  eyes knowing over the edge of a coffee cup, my body bending as I lean into the frame from a world outside - a rich and beautiful, soft-focus, hazy-edge, perpetually young world where it's clear I live, yes, all the time, only occasionally stepping into this neat rectangle so you can glimpse my life in its hazy, carefully-carelessly-composed and lightly edited glory.

click, click.

animal encounters

Last night jenny and I were driving through the darkness and we glimpsed a tail - an enormous tail, bushy as a squirrel's, far bigger than a beaver's.  It looked like a brown skunk tail, if skunks came that big, and in brown, but I've never seen a skunk that moved that fast.  I'm not used to my neighborhood containing mysteries that scuttle away like that.

Today as I was biking home a vulture descended from the sky right before me, black wings filling my vision and startling me nearly off my bike.  I think its wingspan was as wide as I am tall.  I was never good at the bird IDs, but it wasn't a turkey vulture - the head was an unsettling white (cf: Moby Dick, chapter 42) instead of red.  It watched me as I rode past, like an omen centuries out of place.

The other week I asked William: Are we primates?  A silly thing to forget, I know.  Yes, he said, not laughing at me.  Definitely primates.  I touched my fingers to my thumb and listened to him talk.

what gender do your ads think you are?

I 100% ought to be asleep right now, but THIS IS INTERESTING!

Click here: www.google.com/ads/preferences/view (via Ta-Nehisi Coates - the follow-up to his nail-on-the-head commentary on Condaleeza Rice, Hillary Clinton and babies)

If your cookies are on, at that handy link you will find the general categories of sites that Google has been creepily watching you visit.

That's mostly pretty boring, because you presumably knew this already - if you are shocked to find what sort of things you do on the internet, that's your own problem - but look a little lower!  Check out that bottom item and its explanation -

"Based on the websites you've visited, we think you're interested in topics that mostly interest men."

What is it, do you think?  The coupons?  The humanities reference sites?  The wildlife?  (That's adorable baby videos, by the way).  The Business and Industrial - Chemicals might be throwing them off (I think that came from a digression after searching for "melamine") but then I've also got cooking and bed and bath.... Really, I can only assume that my minor obsession with webcomics is marking me as masculine.

Is this an assumption - an obviously wrong assumption - based on data?  I should hope so, since they're Google... man, I'd love to see that data.  And I would really love to know just how many people they've got wrong.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.

— The American Scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1837.

New blog title: Camila Talks About Going To College Because That's All She Does

no but seriously.  The only exception is that I also read about what other people write about going to college, which brings me to...

NEW RESEARCH!  Academically Adrift: Limited Learning in College is the catchy title of this new book.

From the NYT gloss:  "The study, by two sociologists, Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia... found that half of the students surveyed did not take any classes requiring 20 pages of writing in their prior semester, and one-third did not take any courses requiring 40 pages of reading a week."

Side note:  This fairly-representative week, from 4 classes, I have 368 pages of reading.  But of those same four classes, the approximate number of pages of formal writing due for the entire semester are 28, 14-17, 10-14, and 8-10. So I only scrape above their standard there.  Um, yay?

Obviously quantity of work and depth of learning are not necessarily correlated.  I mean, it's obvious to me.  The really shocking part of this research - or so I hear - concerns scores on the CLA, a test supposed to measure overall writing, reasoning and analytical skills.  Tested freshman year and then senior year, 36% of students showed no improvement.  But the book just focuses on the first two years, when 45% of students showed no real difference in scores.

This neither startles nor alarms me, really... The tests don't measure how much people learn in their own major, and I expect that somebody very interested in learning enough biology and chemistry to go to med school could get certainly the education they want without necessarily improving their scores on the CLA.  And then there's the question of what the CLA (or any test) really measures anyway.  And then the fact that what you get out is correlated to what you put in, and there's certainly a percentage of a college's population that ain't putting in much.  

And, of course, that it's mostly the liberal arts students who do improve, and the business and communication majors who don't...

Add all those up and consider that, for whatever it's worth, a clear majority of college students are showing improvement on the test anyway, and frankly I think we're all doing fine.  I understand why people might be upset by these results (especially if they're paying for somebody's massive tuition) but we should all take some deep breaths before we start freaking out.

That said... studying less than five hours a week (37% of students)  is just appalling.  Step it up, kiddos.