Dave’s Midlife Blog

I’ve never been a real “car person.” Although I grew up in NASCAR country, I never managed to develop the fascination with cars that other guys my age in my community shared.

For a long time I managed without a car. I lived in New York City for almost four years, and a car would have just been in the way. (I car-sat for a friend of mine who parked his van on the street while his band was touring Europe. For just one month. Biggest pain in the ass I had ever experienced.) For eleven years in Nashville and another seven years in the Washington suburbs, our family of four managed with only one car. It was a challenge, but we made it work.

But a year and a quarter ago, we bought a 2005 Toyota Prius, and the Prius became my car to drive. I had been fascinated with the idea of the Prius for a long time, and when my brother got one in 2003, I knew I would have to have one of these cars someday. It’s not only environmentally friendly, it’s also economical. It’s also the “green car” of choice for a lot of celebrities, like Arianna Huffington. And the great surprise is, it’s a fantastic car in general. Roomy, comfortable, and replete with high-tech gadgets.

I’ve taken better care of the Prius than I ever have maintained any car. In the first year I waxed it three times. I’ve never missed a service interval by more than 100 odometer miles.

Last Tuesday, on my way to school after a teacher workday, I was driving in the center lane with the flow of traffic, at about the speed limit. Suddenly a car that was lined up to turn left in the left turn lane jerked in front of me. No warning, no notice, no time to prepare. I stepped on the brakes, jerked the wheel to the right to avoid contact–and the front left corner of my car hit his car so hard it knocked his bumper off.

So my new Prius is no longer new. My car was smashed in pretty badly on the left front corner. The body damage and the wheel alignment will be straightforward fixes–but if anything’s wrong under the hood, I’m worried.

The fire department guys who arrived at the accident scene gingerly lifted the hood of my car and then took a step back. They didn’t know what was safe to touch in one of those gas-electric hybrid cars until I told them. (Answer: don’t touch anything insulated with orange plastic. Orange is the warning color.)

After four or five days of playing tow-truck-telephone-tag, my car is now at the body shop that the Toyota dealership recommended to work on Priuses. What they’ll do with it, I don’t know. I’ll call tomorrow and express my anxiety (as if that’s going to do any good).

The ultimate irony is this: right after my car was towed to a storage lot, I called the car rental agency recommended by my insurance company. They had only one car free–a Dodge Ram 4X4 pickup truck. A huge beast of a car, the anti-Prius. At least they didn’t put me in a Hummer.

Within 24 hours I made them give me a Dodge Neon. I’m now driving around in a reasonable little car–awaiting word on my beloved Prius.

Categories: prius, hybrid,toyota, car, accident

Today, Monday January 16, is designated as Martin Luther King Day in the United States. Although this date is not his actual birthday (he was born January 15, 1929), the U.S. government usually puts federal holidays on Mondays. This holiday has been officially observed by the federal government since 1984, resulting in a long weekend off work for many people for the last 22 years.

Dr. King was a man as important in American history as Abraham Lincoln. In the 1950s and 60s he worked bravely, tirelessly, and persuasivly to save us from ourselves. When I started school in North Carolina in 1960 the schools were racially segregated. There was not a black kid in any of my classes until I was in the fifth grade. Nowadays, government-sanctioned racial segregation is impossible to imagine in the U.S. And that is a direct reflection on Dr. King’s work to teach Americans that they should build a just society, once and for all.

So what did I do to observe this holiday? I slept late, since I didn’t have to teach school today; I did a 25-minute exercise workout with FitTV; I shopped for hardware for the new doors for my house; and I went to the movies.

Some commemoration.

I participated in no special commemoration of how far Dr. King brought this country in the thirteen active years of his career. For thirteen years–from 1955 until he was killed in 1968–he put himself in harm’s way again and again. In the 1950s black people in the southern U.S. could be arrested for using the same water fountain as white people. When folks like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and the students at the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter started just saying no to this American apartheid, it began to change everything.

Yesterday I was thinking about how hollow this holiday has become for a lot of white people as I was sitting in the choir at my church.

Now, like a lot of churches in the U.S., my church has an aging membership. The church was founded in 1955, the very year Dr. King started his work on the national stage, as an overt gesture of racial integration.

The founding ideals of this church remain at the center of its philosophy, and most of its members can remember the days before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They can remember when the simple idea of “mixing the races” was a powerful notion, when black people as a group were completely disconnected from mainstream, middle-class (read: white) America. In 2005 this view seems quaint, but 40 years ago it was anything but.

As we celebrated MLK Day in church yesterday, we made the standard one-time shift in our musical selections: both the choir and the congregation sang “Negro spirituals” instead of the 19th- and 20th-century European-American hymns we usually sing.

The ephemerality of this one-time change has bothered me for several years now. If these songs are so worthwhile, why do we save them up for the Sunday before the third Monday in January? What point are we making by singing these songs this weekend in particular? And what does it say that practically all the people doing the singing are European-Americans from the suburbs? When we as a choir try to infuse a bit more “rhythm” into our performance, isn’t it a rather lame gesture? (In any event, it’s usually a futile effort. Our choir remains resolutely locked into square eighth notes and diatonic scales.)

I know I’m sounding like a guilty, liberal, self-criticizing curmudgeon, but for some reason, the fact that our congregation is overwhelmingly white struck me yesterday.

I always feel as though I should attend one of the official commemorations of the life of this great man–and I always blow it off and treat the day like just another free day on which I don’t have to work. And then I’m always sorry about it.

Categories: politics, religion

I’ve been in Chapel Hill, NC now for about 29 hours, having come here to attend PodcasterCon2006. My brother Howard, one of the other Word Nerds, was here as well.

Howard and I were undergraduates here in the 1970s. I graduated over 30 years ago, and Howard 28 years ago. Chapel Hill is where I met my wife, and we got married while we were graduate students in Dramatic Art here.

Chapel Hill is one of those college towns you never, ever forget once you have been a student (or even a resident). It is the essence of youth and intellectual ferment. Even now, in the dead of winter with no classes in session, there’s a buzz in the atmosphere. It feels like a cool, happening, important place.

And when you’re 52 years old and in town on your own for the first time in about 25 years, it also feels like a very young place.

Last night I had checked into my hotel about halfway between Chapel Hill and Durham, and I decided to drive back into town and stroll around on Franklin Street, the main drag. This was an activity I did countless times in my late adolescence and early adulthood. I learned to be an independent person in this town, learned to spend and save my own money, drink beer, browse for books in a bookshop–in short, to define my adult personality.

This time, however, for the first time in my life, I felt out of place on Franklin Street. A few of the same businesses are still here as were here 30 years ago, and the restaurants and snackbars are the same kinds of places we freqented as young people. But last night I looked at my reflection in the store windows, and I saw an old guy. Not even a mature professor-type, but an old guy.

My undergraduate and masters-degree years faded into history long ago, but I’ve also passed the age at which I could dream of bringing my Ph.D. in German to this school to be a faculty member. That is, I’m now too old to re-enter this community in any legitimate way–except maybe, in 13-15 years, as a retiree.

At dinner tonight, Howard pointed out that our (baby-boomer) generation tends to view ourselves as stuck in age somewhere between 18 and 25 years old. I think he’s right. We somehow assume we can stay in that young-adult mode forever. But we need to let it go and allow ourselves to become “mature adults.”

I love it here in Chapel Hill, it brings back great memories. But it sure is a stark reminder of the inexorable passage of time. And at the same time, I think my pensive regret at being an older person in Chapel Hill is precisely a reflection of that baby-boomer sense of entitlement to our years of youth.

Categories: midlife, podcastercon2006, university

I am writing this from the Hampton Inn in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, after the first (annual, I hope) PodcasterCon meeting, PodcasterCon2006.

This was the first podcaster meeting of any sort I have ever attended. I was unable to fly across the country to go to the Portable Media Expo in Ontario, and I missed last month’s Washington, DC, podcasters meet-up because of an ice storm. (Will B., my hat’s off to you for attending! Glad I met you in Chapel Hill!)

I attended three sessions, in one of which I was a nominal discussion leader. In the morning I was at the session by Rob Walch and Stephen Eley on the 411 of Podcasting–an introductory session for people interested in getting into podcasting. This was simpler than I needed to do, but I thought I might be able to contribute to the discussion, and I ended up being the quasi-official audio recorder of the session. It was very good to meet Rob and Stephen, both of whom I had admired for some time on the podosphere (and, in the case of Stephen, on the Yahoo Prius group).

Lunch was an interesting, somewhat crowded experience in Murphey Hall of UNC, but I did meet a couple of other people whom I knew only by their voices–in particular Chad Barnard and his wife Amanda, of Me and the Bean. I also saw, but did not meet, Mur Lafferty of Geek Fu Action Grip, and Swoopy and Derek of Skepticality. (Derek looked very strong and in good shape, considering his recent health problems.) I also did a video interview with Joseph of the Mac Pro Podcast, and was interviewed, along with my brother, by Beau and Kevin of the Attack of the Nerds podcast.

After lunch I attended a very interesting session on copyright and intellectual property issues, led by Derrick Oien.

My last session of the day was an “open session” on the use of music in podcasting, with several great and thoughtful participants and led by Chad Barnard and Tom Shad. I was at least nominally a discussion leader of this one; I held my mike and recorded it (and said a couple of possibly worthwhile things as well).

After delivering Howard, the North Carolina Nerd, back to his car so he could drive west, I re-joined the group at Fuse, a bar directly across Rosemary Street from a house where my brother Howard and I lived for a semester as undergraduates. (That slum-dwelling house has been razed and replaced with a new condo building.)

Enormous thanks are due to Brian Russell for single-handedly organizing this event. It was fantastic. It cost us nothing, and Brian fed us lunch and gave us coffee in the morning.

More thoughts on this conference later, I hope. Further information and links to audio recordings of sessions will eventually appear at the PodcasterCon website.

Categories: podcast, podcastercon2006

Tomorrow, Monday the 2nd of January, is my last day off from teaching before returning from winter break.

I am oh-so-very ready to return. Not because I look forward to rising at 5:15 AM, or even to having responsibilities to students and administrators in three different schools. Rather, I am looking forward to having some structure to my day.

The last ten days of Christmas break have been days of sloth for me. True, I completely produced two half-hour podcasts and recorded five others. But I’ve also spent the whole time sitting on my bottom, causing the discs in my lower back to compress further. I should have exercised–instead, I took too many naps. My wife and daughter and I all have acid indigestion this evening from all the junk food we’ve eaten the last several days. And above all, my motivation level has dropped to zero or below.

There are plenty of things I should have done during the break. I have checkbook registers to balance, bills to pay, midterm exams to write, tax records to prepare, and general cleaning, filing and straightening to do. Yet I’ve watched old movies on TV and slept very late every day.

Ah well. I should let it go. I think the worst thing about the break, really, is the guilt I feel now for not being “productive.”