I haven't been around here in a while. It's basically because I haven't been together enough to write a lot about what's been going on.

(Having posted this, I looked at the dates. A month‽ Wow. That's probably the longest I've ever gone without posting something since I started Livejournaling. My perception of time has been a bit off for a few reasons.)

The situation here in the Netherlands has been pretty rough for both Danae and me. For her part, she has an emotionally abusive PI (Primary Investigator) on her post-doc project who has driven numerous undergrads and grad students from the project and has had an ethics investigation opened into her in the past here at UvA.

Danae has been on sick leave for a few weeks due to significant stress-related health issues and is discussing options with the department. If she is, in the end, forced to work with that PI, she is going to resign and we will move in with her parents in Canada. I'm doing my best to support here, and it's rough seeing her going through this.

Meanwhile, Danae is doing her best to support me. I have a level of anxiety and depression here that I think needs therapy to address, and that also make it hard for me to navigate an unfamiliar health system that defaults to the Dutch language. Though I don't have any responsibilities outside the house right now, feelings of enervation frequently keep me from doing the housework I ought to or want to be doing. I am managing to more-or-less keep up with having the kitchen clean and preparing meals for us in the evenings.

My lack of ability to communicate in Dutch combines with my irrational feelings of anxiety and deep fear about taking up metaphorical 'space' socially to make going out really hard. Every time I go grocery shopping, I have significant anxiety about being a nuisance to anyone I might have to communicate with because I have to ask them to speak English. In the US, I happily went out of my way to accomodate people who communicated in a way I did not and loved to be in places where I heards or saw multiple languages. When it's *me* as the one who is outside the dominant group, and especially when I think of the reputation Americans have for expecting everyone to speak English, it bothers me a lot. I know that this is irrational. There are folks who live here for *years* without learning any Dutch and get along just fine. But that doesn't keep it from bothering me.

I had been working on Dutch for a while with Duolingo, but between general depression making it hard to concentrate or feel motivation, and not knowing if we're even going to be here for very much longer, I stopped.

It's been pretty hard being so socially and physically isolated. I've never really had a lot of in person friends anyway, but here I've spent the last few months in the apartment for 24 hours a day unless I have to go shopping. I haven't been able to get myself motivated enough for bike rides or walks when sometimes it's hard to just get out of bed.

That's changed in the last couple of weeks though. Through an ex-pat group, Danae found a nearby person who is happy to let me walk their puppy a few times a week. They get free dog walking, and I get a litle time with a cute 7-month old poodle named Poesjkin. Win-win. The first time I went over to meet them, I was terrified. Literally terrified. I spent a couple hours on the couch beforehand, feeling panicky and occasionally whimpering. But I went, and it was good. Very good.

Poesjkin likes me and there's a nifty park near his people's place to walk and look at birds. I don't make it there as often as I intended to due to depression/anxiety, but I've been going a couple times a week for two weeks now and I'm pretty sure it's good for me. I'm so grateful to Danae for connecting us. She felt awful at first when she saw how scared I was, fearing that she'd pushed me into something I didn't want. In truth, whether if it was something I didn't want to do, I probalby wouldn't have been able to fight down the anxiety long enough to do it.

I'm pretty unhappy about my the state of my body. I'm doing a lot of over-eating, my go-to self-medication response. That combined with little exercise has lead to being heavier and having ankle and knee pain. My left ankle has been a little arthritic or something since a minor bike accident years ago and it's acting up with more weight. My left knee, the one I injured in my fall in Amsterdam, is being tricky when I'm carrying twenty or thirty pounds of groceries plus my own self upstairs to our apartment. It still has a circular scar-like mark and a numb spot, but at least it's functioning mostly well! As my sweetie Lisa says, it's not the age, it's the mileage.

I'm still glad to be in the Netherlands instead of the US. I'm stressed about what's going on there. No, I'm horrified. Or rather, I alternate between horror and a sort of disconnected numbness. My dad teaches high school, and is a high-risk person for Covid for a few reasons and the schools where he is in Wisconsin are planning in-person instruction. My mother would love for him to retire a few years early, but they're not sure if that's doable financially.

Meanwhile, anonymous people in unmarked cars are grabbing people off the streets in Portland, OR. People are threatening, or even using, lethal force against other people over whether they have to wear a mask. I just don't have words. I hope Biden is elected in November so we can try to turn this around. I hope it isn't too late. I hope we don't have armed conflict in the wake of whatever outcome occurrs. I am registered to vote from here and will do my little part that way, for what it's worth.

That basically covers the state of the dog up to the last week or so. Most of it is unchanged, though I've requested help from Danae to find the mental health care I need and she's doing so.

There is one last piece of major news. I may be burying the lede here, but I'm still pretty scared about telling anyone since my last school experience was pretty awful and I have a lot of stuff to get past from it still, and I'm feeling a lot of fear about telling people I'm doing anything new for fear that I'll fail and embarass myself...

But I've been accepted to my first-choice MLIS program. It is an entirely online program with Simmons University in Boston, MA. They are a highly-rated program, and I'm taking their concentration in cultural heritage management which I think is a perfect fit for my background and interests. They're giving me a small merit-based scholarship, and it looks like federal loans will cover the rest of it.

The day I got the news, I had to spend the next few hours in bed, being excited, terrified, hopeful, ashamed, determined, and bunches of other things all at once. I'm still working through a lot of those feelings too, but this has also given me some optimism for the future that I haven't felt in a long time.

I finished reading the architecture book and grabbed another one on the way out the door from the stack of interesting stuff that I took home during weeding. I read the introduction of Thomas Gieryn's "Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line" on the train and concluded that I can't read it right now.

This is the kind of book that was deeply important to me in my academic path. Why do people think about science the way they do? What makes it credible, or incredible, to people? How do the socially constructed elements of science affect/effect belief and, at least as importantly, policy?

But I think reading this right now is just going to make me angry and sad. I'm not up to dealing with that yet. I'm glad that I'm reading again, but maybe I should stay around the shallows for a while before jumping into the deep end of epistemology and trying to understand how people form beliefs about things that are important to me and that so many people are just wrong about.

Reading things like this hurts for numerous reasons.

So next is going to be Mario Salvadori's "Why Buildings Stand Up: the Strength of Architecture" (As well as Matthys Levy's "Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail"). I think that will be a good next step from Edward Allen on my way toward getting back to Condit's book. I'm gonna order them today!

Random thoughts that a Calvin and Hobbes comic on Facebook (the one here inspired today:

The more I've thought about this kind of joke in the context of my own experiences with academia, the more I've wanted to analyze why this is funny despite its apparent trivialization of areas of the humanities that are important to me.

Academic journals are intended to be a conversation between specialists about complicated topics with arrays of nuance that require the construction of terms and phrases to refer to them. Those concepts do not exist in common understanding outside the field, so to discuss them readily, people familiar with them have to create their own 'code' if you will, to refer to them.

This is true in any specialized discipline. If I look at high-level physics, for instance, I have far less of a clue what is being expressed than I do in something like the title of Calvin's paper there. Just like published articles in humanities journals, hard-science journals are not written for a lay audience; they are written for other experts. Being understandable to the public is not a significant concern. (That is, indeed, a problem in itself, and science needs to be more accessible in many ways to many more people. But that's its own topic.)

So I have to wonder why incomprehensible humanities jargon gets made fun of so much more often than incomprehensible hard science jargon. Maybe it's because people have a sense that they already know about the topics being investigated by the humanities researchers? That these things are simple enough that people who are making them so hard to understand must be either engaging in intentional elitist posturing, or are disconnected from the underlying, far more simple, reality?

It's a strange double-standard. Hard-science research gains credence when it's so complex as to be incomprehensible to the layperson. Humanities research *loses* credence when it's so complex as to be incomprehensible to the layperson.

A couple paragraphs I wrote elsewhere in response to a discussion of politics (and a lengthy expansion of those thoughts):

"I'm frustrated with myself that it's so hard for me to try to rationally engage with people who are right-leaning politically. Understanding and respecting alternate systems of understanding, recognizing their internal validity and engaging them in ways that make sense not to 'me' but to 'them' is the very core of my undergraduate degree.

Hurtful language and petty attacks are counter-productive, but oftentimes these days, it's all I'm capable of. So I stay largely out of the discussion. I feel like I'm failing at politics."

My therapist asked what it was that kicked my legs out from under me in Syracuse. There were a few things that reinforced each other. One is that I have lost the belief that I have a chance of having an effect on society; of making it better. Because of that, so many things I was fascinated by because they were important to me as part of understanding how to do that are just depressing. Rather than being motivated to thoroughly understand systemic inequalities in urban geography, they just make me want to cry. Geographers and anthropologists and others have been talking about ways to make things better for decades, but the ears of the dominant paradigm are deaf to them.

The ruined buildings and blighted urban landscapes that, as objects of fascination for me, led me to photography and school and art and anthropology and geography, are also symptoms of that dominant paradigm's disregard. They are still history and the passage of time made manifest; that was what I hoped to convey in my photography. But their meaning as the chewed-up and spat-out leavings of a seemingly inescapable and deeply discriminatory system overshadows their other meanings.

Artistically, I'm still fascinated with the thought of how a space is made and unmade. When does a space become a place? When does it unbecome? When is a room no longer a room, as its doors and windows and ceilings and walls slowly rot away? I'm drawn to that kind of liminality in ways I can't explain. But that making and unmaking does not occur in a vacuum; it is part of the making and unmaking of communities, and livelihoods.

Divorced from that context, it is apt to call images of Detroit's burned out houses or Gary's empty church 'ruin porn.' It's an empty aesthetic that provides a thrill disconnected from the reality of the subject's life. "I love Brutalist architecture!" I excitedly commented in an online discussion. "You don't have to live and work in it," one person responded. In Detroit, a woman approached me to ask why I was photographing a crumbling stone house with a sagging roof. "It has a kind of beauty," I said, somewhat self-consciously. "Ain't nothin' beautiful here," was her sharp response.

The more I've thought about those exchanges, the more photography of ruins feels like a kind of exploitation; converting someone else's miserable day-to-day existence into some pretty pictures to show to other people to evoke some sense of authenticity and wonder. "I was there! I saw this myself and I am sharing it with you!" What does my brief passage through the place really teach me about its nature and its place in the lives of people for whom is is part of their everyday world? How much less does my self-conscious abstraction of that experience into a few photos show someone who looks at my photos? It's hard to think of a more inauthentic way to experience a place.

It's not documentary work with some redeeming intent to communicate what these places are like. That's been done, and claiming that's my intent without doing the very real and extensive work necessary to contextualize what I'm producing is a poor excuse. If anything, it has the opposite effect, abstracting real, living places into mysterious empty landscapes of decay and ruin that contribute to unfounded apprehension of cities, the very places I feel are the best way for vast numbers of people to live on Earth.

I...think I've lost my thread. I was writing about geography and ineffectiveness.

The study of urban geography makes clear that, just as these ruined landscapes are a result of the destruction part of the engine of creative destruction that powers the economic redistribution system of post-Fordist capitalism, their reconstruction is a result of the creative part of that same engine. When buildings are created or revitalized, when infrastructure like highways and rail transit are constructed, it doesn't matter who the metaphorical architects of such plans claim will benefit from them; the real winners are those who have the means to invest in their creation and the real losers are those who do not have the means to avoid the consequences of significant and irreversible change to their landscape. Everything I read in my urban social justice class (with the possible exception of that damned inscrutable book by Henri LeFebvre that I wanted to pitch into Onondaga Lake) pointed to that conclusion. Some of the best minds in geography and progressive academia can't figure this shit out; what can I do?

I don't want to feel so ineffective and helpless. But I do.

I also don't want to see random pictures of dying places anymore. I don't want to produce more of them myself. If I produce more urban photography, I want to make images of living systems. Working infrastructure that shows how deeply interconnected we all are. How many ways we all work with and for each other. How we all cooperate, consciously or unconsciously to create these beautiful, ridiculously complex, heart-achingly imperfect yet deeply optimistic engines of assault against entropy called cities. (Is that even what cities are anymore, or is it just a side-effect?)

But I don't know how to do that either.

In the meantime, right now, I'm conducting my own tiny fight against entropy as I work to repair my VTVM. For now, as I slowly work out where to go from here, that will do.

I have next-to-no time on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I have to be in class at 9:30 and my yoga and pilates class goes to 8 o' clock, and I haven't been able to do laundry since getting back home, but I have enough clothes for one more day.

Things are shaping up for my semester, work and project-wise.

I just got an acceptance from the Central States Anthropological Society for a poster submission. That means I have three presentations in April; one in Minneapolis, MN; one in Madison, WI; and one in Chicago, IL. That's going to be a busy month! These are all poster sessions and will focus on various parts of my work on Pike Creek. Which I need to get back to doing. I have hydrologic GIS data to hunt down, and more oral interviewing to plan out with my advisor.

My semester project for my GIS class will likely be geo-referencing of a set of ward maps, aerial photos, and perhaps some Sanborn fire insurance maps, of Kenosha. That will all contribute toward my poster presentation for AAG at the same time. Plus, because it will be digitizing material held by the Parkside archives, I can work on it during work hours there and get paid. Yay!

My history class will require reading two books on a particular historical topic and writing a formal analysis and comparison. I think my topic is going to be urban renewal in major cities in the '60s and '70s. This is convenient because I'm in an urban planning class wherein I need to do a book report, so I'm going to use one monograph for both of those. It will likely be Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" which I started reading today. It's been on my list for a while anyway. Not sure about the second one yet. Can anyone suggest any good historical monographs on urban renewal? I may have to do a little lit review.

I ate some really hot (temperature-wise) food on the way home from Oklahoma. It was hours after my dental work, but I may have still had some residual numbness, 'cause I burned the roof of my mouth quite badly. My mother checked with a flashlight and thinks that it blistered. I can't eat solid food yet, and am slightly worried. The internet does note that it can take up to a week for this kind of thing to heal, but I may ask the campus clinic to look at it tomorrow.