Alighting on Love

When I set out to collect oral histories, I did not expect to hear any love stories. After all, I was asking about neighborhood change, social services, Jewish communal politics, interethnic relations... heavy stuff! And yet, I've heard about how people met and fell in love and started families and raised children and shepherded those children towards love and families of their own. I did not anticipate this, and that was an oversight as a historian and as a human. I became too focused on conflict, too focused on struggles and tensions and negotiations--I began to overlook that the 1950s and 60's and '70s were also decades filled with love and growth. So I'm re-adjusting my perspective and trying to keep the pendulum from swinging too far in either direction, rosy sunshine to doomy gloom. 

I can't share the stories that I've collected here, so might I recommend checking out the New York Times' Summer Love feature? And I'll leave you with one of my favorite summer love songs: 

Democracy

I meant to post this before the holiday, but perhaps it's more meaningful to continue to reflect on the meaning of democracy in the days following the Fourth of July. I spend quite a few hours each week contemplating "democracy," because it was such a central principle of the Jewish Community Center during the the 1940s and '50s. The Center devoted itself to helping Jews belong both within their Jewish community and within American society. By coming to the Center, Jews affiliated with their ethno-religious group but separated themselves from non-Jews. How un-American! Centers resolved this tension by instituting democratic processes for decision making and by teaching the values of collaboration, pluralism, and individual self-determination. When Jews left the Center, the thinking went, they were prepared for democratic citizenship and participation. 

Defining "democracy," however, has never been easy--not then and not now. My favorite attempt was made in 1943 by master wordsmith E.B. White:

“We received a letter from the Writers’ War Board the other day asking for a statement on “The Meaning of Democracy.” It presumably is our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure.
Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.”

— E. B. White, The New Yorker, July 3, 1943

When I first read this, in my first year of college, I was less cynical and more enamored of the patriotism in White's "mustard on the hotdog" or "score at the beginning to the ninth." What continues to resonate with me, however, is this line: "Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time." It speaks to the trust that's inherent in collaborative decision making, that's necessary for communalism in the face of authoritarianism. Perhaps that's why I'm so attracted to studying mid-century JCCs. Jewish Center workers organized youth and teen members into clubs and asked each club to discuss and vote on all major decisions affecting the group--from their club name to their daily activities. These were low-stakes rulings, but it modeled the benefits ("the line that forms on the right") and frustrations ("the hole in the stuffed shirt through which sawdust slowly trickles") of the democratic process that members would encounter, greatly magnified, for the rest of their lives. 

Hiccups and Wheezing

While fending off a bout of bronchitis this week, I decided to undertake a major computer upgrade. The logic at the time was "heal the body, heal the hard drive." If I was resting the former, the latter was certainly resting too. And the best time to do work on your computer is when you're not in the midst of actively writing a dissertation chapter. 

I had been having problems with my MacBook Pro for a few months. My database and archival photos and oral history audio files filled up the last remaining storage space on my hard drive and I began getting a regular pop-up message from my OS that my start up drive was full. On a few occasions the entire computer shut down, unprompted, and I was lucky that nothing got lost. I knew I was playing with fire and about to get burned. After two months of research, I decided the most cost-effective solution would be to exchange my 320GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive for a 500 GB Samsung 850 EVO Solid State Drive (SSD). It cost me $200 on Amazon, and I took it to a local computer repair store and paid $170 for the privilege of blaming someone else if the transfer did not go well. 

Overall, I'm very happy with my decision. I decided to do a "clean install" of OS X Yosemite onto the new SSD and then move over my files. The benefit of this method, as opposed to "cloning" the old HD onto the new one, seems to be that you leave behind a lot of the small files and programs and metadata that invisibly begin to clog up your storage over the years. My computer now boots up faster and I am not experiencing the lags (spinning rainbow pinwheels) that I used to have each time I opened up an app. I've transferred every photo, audio track, movie file, and document that was on the old HD, and I still have 196 GB free! And I had no problems moving DEVONthink or Scrivener over--the dissertation re-appeared completely intact. 

The ONE problem I did have was with Zotero, my bibliography/citation management database. I'm confident that this was 100% user error. In my recent attempts to empty out the old hard drive, I may have unwittingly deleted the destination folder that stored that program's content. I was under the impression that it was being backed up both on the Zotero website and in my cloud backups. I somehow failed to implement either of those processes over the past year, and now it is too late. I'm bummed, but relative to the disaster that would have been losing my DEVONthink database (which has all of the archival documents and sources for my dissertation) I can't get too upset. It's a reminder to not make big computer decisions when you're too sick to triple check your backups. It's also an opportunity to re-build the bibliography with the insight gleaned over a year of dissertating. I'm using the tool differently and curating what I include to better suit my process. 

In summary, here is my Pro/Con list for why someone with a pre-2012 MacBook Pro should consider swapping in a new SSD:

Pro: For only $200 in parts, you can have a computer with the same specs as a new MacBook Pro retailing for around $1800. I also believe that my computer feels a little lighter to carry around, but I have no proof for this.

Con: You won't have a retina screen, and the place you take your computer to do the switch probably won't be able to replace those little bumps on the bottom of the chassis that you knocked off two years ago. They'll clean out the fan with the little can of air, but you'll still have a machine that has experienced wear and tear. I have also noticed that my battery life does not last as long.

My Quantified Work Week

Pomodoro Cycles ("Pomodori") Worked: 31

Paragraphs written: 12

Coffee shops visited: 2 

Total cups of coffee: 10

Books consulted: 6

Word Documents Currently Open: 11

PDFs found buried in Gmail, thank god, and not lost forever because I stupidly forgot to save them to the hard drive: 2

Seminar Papers Read: 2

(Successful) Dissertation Defenses Attended: 1 

Conference Proposal Abstracts Drafted: 2

Good Ideas Hatched: 1

Customer Service Victories: 1

Rooms Cleaned: 2

Mornings of Yoga Practice: 3

Grants Received: 1

It has been a good week, a productive week, a fulfilling week, and overall not too exhausting. I'm looking forward to the weekend and to celebrating achievements, both my own and those of my colleagues and friends.

Tax Day

My father in law, who does my taxes every year, always says that tax day is the adult iteration of opposite day. Whatever was good for you all year suddenly becomes a liability, while your drama and trauma and failure become valuable. At no time in my life has that been more true than during graduate school.

For 364 days each year, I wish that I did not have to think twice about whether or not to buy a $5 sandwich. On April 15, I embrace my low tax bracket and wait for the government to send me a check. From a tax standpoint, graduate school certainly beats working an entry level job!

Conversely, one of the few good things that happens to graduate students--grant funding--is very bad at tax time. A windfall of a few thousand dollars can add several hundred dollars of tax liability, and without careful financial planning you can end up with a very nasty shock in April. It's imperative to save part of your grant checks to cover taxes. 

I'm not delusional. I understand that my tax return effectively subsidizes my labor and empowers my employer to continue paying low wages to graduate students. For one day, though, I conveniently forget this fact. Tax day is a good day!