Monday, December 31, 2007

Onechan Plays with Time (Imoto: "Me, Too!")

Sometime over the past two weeks, onechan and her 3-to-4-year-old friends have begun playing with time--or perhaps they have been for awhile, and I've only just noticed it. What I mean is, they'll put time in their role-playing games in fast forward, so they can extend their game over many play "days," with many nap times, sleep times, and going to school times in a single play session. So let's say we're playing PowerPuff Girls, and I'm the Professor, Imoto's Buttercup, Onechan's Bubbles, and one of their friends is Blossom, and it's night time, so we all have to go to sleep on the toy box, the little table, and the piano stool, but then her friend announces it's morning--time to go to school--and soon later, onechan chimes in that it's nap time, and pretty soon it's time to go to sleep again. The idea that they don't have to play in real time is an exciting one to them.

Imoto plays right along. When it's time to lie down, she lies down; when it's time to get up, she gets up. She seems to be entering a new phase in her relation with onechan, where she's much more aware of what her sister is doing and wants to do it herself. This extends, as well, to what onechan has. So if onechan gets seconds at dinner, imoto wants more food, too, even if she hasn't finished what's on her plate. And of course she wants whatever onechan is drinking. She's very observant: just the other day, onechan was having a big stuffed animal hang onto the handle of her toy stroller so that it was "helping" her push it, so within 10 minutes (after onechan had gone on to another toy/activity), there was imoto, doing the same thing with a smaller stuffed animal.

The changes should be coming fast and furious in 2008; it's been fun documenting some of them here and at Mostly Harmless over the past year.

Saturday, December 29, 2007

On Funding Public Higher Education, Part I: Webquest

It's no secret that I work at a public regional university in New York state, so I've seen up close and personal what the chronic underfunding of SUNY means to students, faculty, and western NY. Over the course of 2008, I plan to do an ongoing series on funding public higher education, a particularly relevant topic now that Governor Eliot Spitzer's NY State Commission on Higher Education has released its preliminary report. This post sets the scene for my series, webquest style.

For representative arguments that public higher education should be free, check out Marc Bousquet (How the University Works) and Adolph Reed and Preston Smith (Labor Party). For a representative faculty union campaign, check out the American Federation of Teachers' Faculty and College Excellence campaign. For an attempt to get a discussion of endowment disparities started, see Bill Benzon (The Valve). For my spring 2006 debate with a privatization advocate, go to Objectivist v. Constructivist v. Theist. For further background and resources, check out Workplace, the Workplace blog, and The Rouge Forum.

For initial reactions to the NYSCHE's preliminary report, check out the statement by the Professional Staff Caucus (CUNY), the press release from United University Professions (SUNY), Craig Smith and Barbara McKenna at FACE Talk, CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, and Stanley Fish in The New York Times.

More coming!

[Update 1/10/08: Here's the relevant summary of Gov. Spitzer's State of the State address.]

Thursday, December 27, 2007

On Toddler Performance Art

I'm in the home stress stretch of my first fall back from Japan--less than 24 hours to turn in my grades! And I do mean home--I've done the vast majority of my grading from home this week, mostly by choice but also thanks to bad weather, illness, and a low-level migraine that hit the Full Metal Archivist yesterday. So in between papers I've gotten the chance to witness a wide range of performance art from onechan (who just turned 4) and imoto (who's 20 months old today). Here are some highlights:

Onechan: Branching out into drama, particularly stage direction and set design. At her girls' birthday party this past Sunday (7 girls under 5, 2 dads, and 1 mom for almost 3 hours!) and at the impromptu Christmas get-together at a friend's place, she enjoyed assigning roles to her friends, from the fantastic ("I'll be the princess, you be the prince, you be the good witch, and you be the bad witch!") to the everyday ("I'll be the mom, you be the dad, and you be the baby!"), and then setting up various kinds of improvs (from fighting a dragon to having a baby to being sick and having to stay home from work or school or see a doctor). At home with imoto, she's enjoyed rearranging the desks, chairs, and toy boxes in the play room to form little rooms, houses, or tents in one or another area of it. She's also enjoyed naming the various baby dolls strewn about the house after the various characters in our fictional pantheon and play-acting her favorite scenarios.

Imoto: Pushing the boundaries of bodily fluid expulsion. Moved from snot to diarrhea to vomit this week. Specializes in coughing so violently in the middle of the night she almost spits up the breast milk she's just extorted from the Full Metal Archivist. For the first time in her long and changing illness(es), she's running a fever, so adding sweat to her repertoire.

Onechan: Continues to explore musical performance. She treated us to a concert after dinner yesterday, complete with stage (one of her little chairs on top of her wood toy box), a playlist (her new Dora checkers board), original songs (one in her version of Spanish, even!) and old classics (the alphabet song, among them, which features "ello mello pee" and "double you, ess, why, and zee"!), and of course instrumentals. We're not just talking the mean air guitar she already plays, but violin (consisting of a little coat hanger from one of the presents her grandmother got her and a plastic golf club) and flute (consisting of the same plastic golf club with the head unscrewed), as well.

Imoto: Also into music. Likes to cradle one of her musical dolls and sway to the beat (kind of) or jump around to Buzz Buzz or The PowerPuff Girls CD with her big sister. Often tries to sing along with onechan, say on the Japanese version of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," but due to her limited vocabulary mostly just substitutes her sister's name in the opening "Kila, kila, hikaru" line.

Onechan: Beginning to tell stories, some from real life (a little anecdote from her hoikuen that something that's just happened reminds her of), some from her drawings (telling me what's happening), and some from our pantheon of imaginary characters. I'm having fun at bed time asking her what happens next in the stories I'm making up for her, or having her edit them when I go off track ("no, no, daddy, tell it this way!"), but I can't yet get her to tell me a bedtime story.

Imoto: Into cosplay, particularly when it comes to footwear and, less often, hats. Still mostly other people's shoes and slippers but lately has enjoyed slipping her feet into the fuzzy boots her grandma just got her and stomping around the house on the hardwood floors. That, and slamming upstairs doors. And running away, giggling, when it's time to change her diaper or throw her in the tub. And rolling around on the big bed after her bath to avoid getting her pajamas on. And kicking me with both feet when I've finally pinned her. And laughing uproariously when I pretend the kicks have knocked me backwards or off the bed--just like her sister did when I played that game with her a few years ago!

Yup, we've been lucky that the girls have mostly kept their energy and good spirits, despite being sick most of the past month. Now it's time to make that final grading push!

Monday, December 24, 2007

Who Wants to Be a Tenure-Track Professor? Part II: The MLA Interview

'Tis the academic career advice season, it seems, as the most-read post in the brief history of CitizenSE has been the first installment in this series. So, going against The Little Professor's advice, I'm going to offer some more today, this time on the MLA interview. (Hey, she did it first!) Having been on the interviewed side more than a dozen times and on the interviewing side around a half dozen, I certainly have some experience, if not yet wisdom, to share. But since Tenured Radical has handled the "to do" part so well (along with Eric Rauchway and Eric Hayot), what I'm mostly going to do here is offer my own little "to don't" list. Not as funny as Robert Farley's, but hopefully mildly useful and/or entertaining to someone on the eve of MLA! If anyone wants to follow up on anything I've written or hinted at here (in the process of revising this, I've systematically removed all the juicy bits), drop me an email and I'll give you a call.

Don't forget that you're going to be interviewed in that tiny uncomfortable little hotel room or weird picnic table among dozens like it because that institution's personnel committee (some of whom you may even in that room with you at MLA) thinks very highly of you and your work and wants to find out more about both. The overall job search engenders such self-doubt, anxiety, and paranoia that this point can be difficult to remember. If you're in the top 8-12 of a particular search, you should keep in mind that a good number of people in the department are already interested in your work, already think you will be a good fit at their institution, and already believe you could become a wonderful colleague. So pat yourself on the back for putting together fantastic application materials and go into the interview with some well-deserved confidence.

Don't be intimidated by the realization that the other 7-11 people being interviewed for that position are likely to be about as well-qualified and -prepared for the job as you are, but only 2-4 of you will be invited for a campus visit.. You could be the personnel committee's consensus #1 heading into the interviews. But the actual interviewers might have their own ideas before you even set foot in the interview room. But even if you're the consensus #12, you can only move up, right? The point is, you can't know where you stand heading in and, anyway, no matter how anyone looks on paper, what matters now is what happens during the interview itself. You don't have to be perfect, you just have to be good enough to get into the top 3 or 4 in your pool.

Don't forget that interviewing teams will express their interest in you/your work and approach the task of making the MLA cuts in varying and fairly unpredictable ways. The key is to suss out the situation as early as possible in the interview itself and react accordingly. Maybe you're interviewing with an R1 place that believes in "trial by fire." They see their job as zeroing in on the shortcomings of your research and limitations of your theoretical approaches in order to see how well you handle the kind of intellectual streetfighting at which they excel. They want to convey to the candidates that the job is stressful and the department ethos is competitive. Best 2-4 candidates at parrying the attacks and keeping their heads make it to the next round.... Or maybe you're interviewing for a position at a teaching institution and the chief goal of their interviewing team is to figure out how ready you are to do the job (in terms of teaching and service, particularly) and how their students are likely to react to you. They want to know how seriously you've imagined what living and working there would be like and how intensely you're interested in the position. Or maybe.... Well, the situations vary. If an R1 place has a pool of candidates who similarly distinguished themselves (or failed to) during the research portion of the interview, then the teaching part rises in importance. By the same token, a teaching institution may want to convey that they would be good colleagues to you and so go out of their way to engage you on your research. And really good interviewing teams will have an original opening question that sets the tone and terms of the interview to come--something inherently difficult to prepare for. The only rules of thumb I can propose given this variability are:

1) prepare for a variety of kinds of interviews, from worst-case (where the interviewing team is clearly looking for reasons not to invite you to campus) to best case (where they're clearly recruiting you during the interview);
2) do your homework on the institution, department, and interviewing team and try to anticipate what kind of interview it's most likely to be;
3) remember that you're interviewing them, too--you're picking up all kinds of information about the position, place, and people from something as simple as the kinds and order of questions you're asked, not to mention the body language, facial expressions, and interactions among the interviewers--so use it to help you decide what questions you want to ask them (unless they're the kind of interviewing team who's decided that opening rather than closing with, "What questions do you have for us?" is the best way to go).

Don't assume that everyone on the interviewing team was equally involved in the evaluation of initial applications or is equally familiar with the materials you sent them. One of the reasons the "tell us why your dissertation matters"-type question is so popular as an opening gambit in MLA interviews is that some people on an interviewing team may have seen only your letter and c.v., and then maybe only the night before--or the ten minutes before--your interview. So you should think of the interview as an opportunity to introduce yourself to potential future colleagues--another chance to frame your work and shape their image of you--particularly those whose engagement in the process is beginning at MLA. What do you think are the most distinctive features of your teaching and writing? What do you think you can contribute to their department that few others can? What doubts or qualms might an interviewing team have about your fit for their position/institution and how can you productively respond to them? You may be going over familiar ground for some of the people on the interviewing team, but they'll be looking for new twists on what you've already written or perspectives on what they already thought they knew about you--and everyone else will appreciate your starting from scratch for them.

Don't try to fit yourself into your image of their ideal candidate. "Be yourself" is the stupidest piece of advice anyone can give, except that it's probably the best. It's no coincidence that my grand total of 3 on-campus visits came out of the MLA interviews where I was most myself, or perhaps myself at my best. So think for a bit about what kind of professor you want to be, how you want your students and colleagues to see you, what you want them to say about you, and so on. If you're doing every day what it takes to reach that ideal, then doing your best approximation in your interviews is all you can ask of yourself. That way, you can take from even the most traumatic interviews lessons you can apply to the next.

Don't talk the interviewing team out of their interest in you, unless it's a job you decide during the interview you don't want. The first part sounds like a no-brainer, right? Well, I've done it! It's amazing what comes out of your mouth when you're under pressure. (Not an exact quote: "It's hard for me to imagine how I can contribute something new to your department, given how my work overlaps with Professors X, Y, and Z's. But, uh... wait a second, I had a 'But' ready.... Uh, bear with me....") And the second part sounds impossible, right? But it's happened to me, too. And not because I had a plethora of prospects, either.

Don't bring your last interview--or your history of interviews--with you into the next one. Yup, stay in the present, don't fight the last battle, take it one shot at a time, etc. Easier to say than do--I still get flashbacks from my worst MLA interviews. (Really. They were that bad.) But even if you've just had the best interview of your life, that's irrelevant for the next one. If you have only a short time between interviews, focus on calming yourself down and getting your mind focused on the next one. If you have a lot of time, venting with close friends, analysis, reflection, and note-taking (to prepare for the [knock wood] on-campus visit) is in order, but let it go well before the next interview. Draw on any kind of academic and non-academic experience that helps you do this, even if it's something as apparently irrelevant as online poker or golf.

Good luck to everyone at MLA this year! And be on the lookout for further installments in this CitizenSE series, including a companion to Bardiac's advice on the campus visit and a response to Marc Bousquet on attrition, contingent academic work, and the academic job system.

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Just Checking: Is Everyone Sick?

The cough that doesn't go away for a month. The snot faucet. We've been passing that one along between ourselves here in the Constructivist household since before Thanksgiving break. Now imoto has the diarrhea thing. And both she and onechan have coughed so hard in the past week they made themselves throw up--imoto just a few minutes ago. Which reminds me that just about 11 months ago, we were worried about the norovirus hitting Fukuoka. Now we're wondering if it's hitting Dunkirk....

'Tis the season, I guess. Forget dust in the wind--we're all just vectors for microorganisms....

So how y'all doing in Blogoramaville? Everyone sick?

Friday, December 21, 2007

Off Trail, with Nashi and Kurari

Given how illness and overwork have decimated Citizen of Somewhere Else for the past month, it's time once again to consign another programming schedule to the recycle folder of history. I have a bunch of posts in various stages of ye olde writing process that are worth putting out there whenever I get them done, not on a day of the week that no longer even corresponds to my teaching schedule. My grades are due on the 27th, so don't expect too much going on here before then.

In honor of this being the last Family Friday post for awhile, however, let me note that onechan is like Tiger Woods in having a birthday come during the holiday season. Hers, though, is ten days before his, and, unlike his folks, we don't get her one shoe for Christmas (not least b/c we don't celebrate it) and one for her birthday, although we are almost as cheap. But when you have an imagination as rich as hers and a little sister as cool as hers, you don't need much stuff.

Case in point: onechan has been adding to our pantheon of imaginary characters. Unlike the mythical Saja and Suweet, however, her imaginary friends Nashi and Kurari are pretty much normal little girls. They're both Spanish, and they may be 6-year-old twins, although I have to check on that, because sometimes it seems like Kurari is Nashi's friend and sometimes her little sister. And sometimes it sounds like Kurari's parents are dead. My uncertainty stems from the fact that onechan rarely gives me updates on their lives, preferring instead to tell stories to herself about them and play with them. It was a really funny moment to me last night in my parents' hotel room (they made it for her actual birthday and will stay through her girls' party on Sunday, weather permitting--yeah!) when, in the midst of playing with her gift from them (a wood block stamp/colored pencils kit), she started telling them about her new friends. I don't know how much they caught, because she was kind of distracted and sounded like she was talking to herself, and they were very distracted for other reasons that I shall not be getting into here, but it was striking to me how casually she was speaking of characters she invented (and knows full well are "pretend"). It's amazing to watch onechan become a story-teller and to see how play and storytelling are so intertwined in her head and in her actions....

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Welcome Valveteers; or, One Thing You Might Not Have Known About Bill Benzon

Bill Benzon just passed along my little plug for Marc Bousquet's How the University Works, so I'll let all you Valveteers (as in Rocketeers, Musketeers...) in on a little open secret: quiet as it's kept, Bill writes fantastic (in all senses of the word) children's literature.

For what it's worth, this post is rated PG (for procrastinatory gratitude).

Monday, December 10, 2007

How the University Works

Do yourself a favor and get Marc Bousquet's How the University Works--and of course visit his book's blog regularly. The journal he founded and I edited for awhile is doing just fine without us--check out the latest issue and back issues over at Workplace.

This academic labor moment has been brought to you by the letter W.

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Whoops, Missed CitizenSE's Blogiversary

Don't be fooled by the date on the first CitizenSE post. This blog began on December 1st in Fukuoka, Japan, out of my dissatisfaction with having only 40 minutes to survey the various transformations of my Hawthorne project and reflect upon what they reveal about changes in my fields in an address to the Kyushu American Literature Society I would be giving the following day. So while I missed the blogiversary, I at least got a post in on the anniversary of the talk that inspired it. Which is better than I expect to do the rest of the month here. We'll see!

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Racialization Matters: Notes toward a Global History of Race

Later today I'll be part of a panel discussion on race on my campus--one of those "sum up the history of the race concept in 10 minutes" deals. Given how much I overprepared for my Big Read talk--and totally stepped on my co-panelist's time (sorry, Dustin!)--and given how many student conferences I have over the next week, starting in a few hours (it's final project time!), I'm pretty much only going to try to do two things in this talk:

1. Summarize the consensus view on the history of race in North America (Fredrickson, Gossett, Horsman, Jacobson, Morgan, Omi and Winant, Smedley), the Atlantic world (Allen, Berlin, Forbes, Gilroy, Hall, Linebaugh and Rediker) and the West (Balibar, Fredrickson, Hannaford, Malik, Snowden, Stepan, Zizek);
2. Introduce a few new angles on this consensus that a global perspective (Bender, Dikotter, Dower, Mamdani, Marger, Prashad) can offer.

Too bad it's too late to check out recent studies by Ramán Grosfoguel and Denise Ferreira da Silva, as well as Racialization and Racism: A Global Reader, but that would just lead to the overpreparing problem again, right?

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Do Not Taunt Super Wacky Fun Ball Mostly Harmless Jinx

OK, so I've had a lot of fun with the notion of a Mostly Harmless Jinx this past year, but things are getting out of hand. I mean, wouldn't it be ironic if the penultimate post here was on death and we happened not to make it to Syracuse for Thanksgiving Dinner later today thanks to the season's first real winter storm? For you all, that is. Or maybe not. Who know what irony means these days?

A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 4 AM TO 4 PM EST THURSDAY.

OCCASIONAL RAIN WILL GRADUALLY MIX WITH...THEN CHANGE TO SLEET AND SNOW DURING THE WEE HOURS OF THE MORNING. THE CHANGE OVER WILL TAKE PLACE FROM NORTH TO SOUTH WITH NIAGARA AND ORLEANS COUNTIES THE FIRST TO EXPERIENCE ANY WINTRY PRECIPITATION. IT IS NOT OUT OF THE QUESTION THAT THERE COULD BE A PERIOD OF FREEZING RAIN AS WELL OVER THE HIGHER TERRAIN SOUTH OF BUFFALO AND ROCHESTER TOWARDS DAYBREAK.

THE PRECIPITATION WILL COMPLETE ITS CHANGE OVER TO SNOW THURSDAY MORNING. THE SNOW SHOULD THEN TAPER OFF TO SNOW SHOWERS BY MIDDAY THURSDAY AND ACCUMULATE JUST AN INCH OR TWO...BUT THE COMBINATION OF MIXED PRECIPITATION AND TEMPERATURES FALLING TO NEAR FREEZING WILL RESULT IN VERY SLIPPERY ROAD CONDITIONS FOR THE THANKSGIVING DAY HOLIDAY. THIS WILL BE THE FIRST BOUT OF WINTER DRIVING CONDITIONS OF THE SEASON FOR MOST OF THE REGION...SO EXERCISE CAUTION IN YOUR HOLIDAY TRAVELS.

A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY IS NORMALLY ISSUED FOR A VARIETY OF WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS SUCH AS LIGHT SNOW... BLOWING SNOW... SLEET... FREEZING RAIN AND WIND CHILLS. WHILE THE WEATHER WILL BE SIGNIFICANT... THE WORD ADVISORY IMPLIES THAT SEVERE WINTER WEATHER IS NOT ANTICIPATED.


A laugh a minute that Weather.com is, is what I say.

What with imoto learning how to walk down stairs by herself and repeat whatever everyone around her is saying, letting a little winter storm stop us would be a real let-down. So in honor of our upcoming drive, a little dialogue from a trip to Buffalo the other weekend.

Onechan [interrupting the tsuma and I]: Daddy, talk to me now!
Imoto: Dada!
Onechan: No, imoto!! It's my turn to talk to daddy!!
Imoto: Dada!
Onechan: No, imoto!!! It's my turn to talk to daddy!!!
Imoto: Dada!
[repeat, adding exclamation points as you go]

Hasta la vista, baby! Happy Thanksgiving, from the Constructivist and the Full Metal Archivist....

Friday, November 16, 2007

"I Don't Wanna Be Die"

That's what onechan told me a little over a week ago. She's been figuring out what death is and what it means over the past couple of months. It's hard to recall how it started. She knows that she is named after the tsuma's grandmother and has gone with us to visit her grave site every time we visit Baba and Gigi in Chiba. She likes to listen to the wind-up music on the photograph we have of her great-grandmother, especially on the anniversary of her death. But lately she's been putting two and two together and asking all sorts of questions. She knows both sets of my grandparents are dead and she knows you visit the graves of those you love, so now she wants to visit my dad's parents in Syracuse this Thanksgiving. She's aware that animals die, too. She was fascinated by the dead skunk that nobody would remove for weeks from the edge of the factory parking lot we drive by almost every day on the way to her hoikuen. When I was reading her a story about Thanksgiving last night, she got very upset that the Wampanoags and Pilgrims hunted wild turkey; when she saw the bows and arrows and processed my explanation of them, she exclaimed, "But the turkeys may get hurt!"

She's still trying to get her head around the notion that everybody dies and you never know when it might happen. For a while, she insisted that she didn't want to turn 10, because she thought she would die soon after. It's not that she doesn't know bigger numbers--we've gone up to 100 in English and over 10,000 in Japanese (thanks to our efforts to teach her about takai [expensive] and a dollar still being worth over a hundred yen)--but it took me a long time to convince her that 100 is old, not 10.

Here's what she knows about death as of right now (she's next to me and I'm translating her answers into complete sentences: if you hurt yourself bad, you can die; after you've been dead awhile, you lose your skin; when you die, you rest in cemetery (which she keeps calling a temple or a church). Gotta go--she wants to type ("on a big big page, ok?")....

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

The Dunkirk/Fredonia Big Read: Fahrenheit 451

My university is participating in the Chautauqua/Cattaraugus counties' version of The Big Read, with their focus on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. As the last person in the department to teach our Science Fiction course, I'll be contributing to a panel discussion on "Fahrenheit 451 as Novel" with my colleague Dustin Parsons early this afternoon. The goal is to get the audience thinking and talking, so I'm aiming for short and sweet.

Here's my talk's outline (with page numbers keyed to the 50th Anniversary Edition):

I. Where It Comes From

  • A. History: Fascism, McCarthyism, The Great Depression (132, 150-154), the Bomb (158-162)
  • B. Literature: Dystopias, American Pastoralism (140-145, 157), World Literature (150-153), The Martian Chronicles (Grand Master Edition 31, 108, 180)


II. How It Is Relevant Today

  • A. Postmodernism and New Media: Entertainment (81-82, 84, 87), Information (61), Knowledge (105-108), Wisdom (75, 82-86, 163-165)
  • B. Democracy and Capitalism: Mass Culture (54-55, 89, 108), Diversity (57-60), War (73-74, 87, 158-162)


Here are some suggestions for further reading. First, a few novels:

  • Samuel R. Delany, The Einstein Intersection (1967)
  • William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
  • Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
  • Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (1991)
  • Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)


Then, a few links:

Saturday, November 10, 2007

On Language Explosions

Imoto has been making incredible strides in communication over the past few weeks in particular. She gets mad now if you don't immediately understand her combination of looks, gestures, and made-up words (like "acamba") or otherwise show any hesitation in figuring out and doing what she wants. She can kind of say "mine," a key word for a year-and-a-half-year-old surrounded by older girls in day care and by onechan everywhere else (yes, onechan's just that fast). She tries to sing the "atsui, samui" song I made up (to the tune of Frere Jacques), loves to chime in on choruses like "ee aye ee aye oh" and "ai ai," can repeat about a quarter of the Japanese alphabet, and points out Dora wherever she can find her (and believe me that's just about everywhere) with a triumphant "Do-ah" (door in Japanese). I'm thinking by her second birthday in late April she'll be having some real conversations with onechan.

Speaking of whom, onechan is going through a language explosion of her own. If you put her on the spot, she'll claim she can't do it, but she's been making up stories a lot lately (often telling them to her toys)--and answering questions about them. When I told a friend about Suweet and Saja, it occurred to me to ask her how they make the earth spin. "They jump up and down," she said. "And they tickle it. And dance." My friend asked her if they blow on it, too. She thought for a while and politely said yes, but when I asked her about that in the car a few days later, she nixed it. And she's been quick to pick up on how they're relevant to her usual time travel scenarios. This time she went from saying she wanted to be little again to saying she wanted to skip right ahead to her 6th birthday to complaining that she didn't want night to come. "You can't stop time," I told her. "To keep it from getting dark, you'd need to make the earth stop spinning." When her eyes lit up I knew I was in for a long story about the Super Prius and her visit to Suweet and Saja at the North Pole.

Come to think of it, I never finished that story. Maybe something for the car ride to Buffalo later today!

Friday, November 02, 2007

Onechan: Poet, Scientist, Myth-Maker

The day before Halloween, onechan was running down the stairs in tights and socks and slipped when she transitioned from the carpeting on them to the hardwood floor and tried to change direction too quickly. "I slid like an ice cube!" she exclaimed with a smile. It sounded to me like her first really poetic simile.

This came in the midst of a period that's started even before our return to the States in which she's been trying to get her head around the difference between U.S. time and Japan time. In the morning, she'll seek out confirmation that "It's getting dark in Japan" or "It's bedtime in Japan." At night, before she goes to sleep, she'll tell/ask me, "People are eating breakfast in Japan now?" This has lead to questions about why day and night alternate, which she's been asking often enough that we've moved from "the sun goes up and the sun goes down"-type answers to trying to get across the notion that the Earth rotates and revolves around the sun (though the latter is more relevant to discussions of her birthday, which is coming in less than two months, and why she has to wait for it to come and can't just turn four tomorrow). We've explained it and showed her shadows on various balls using lights and flashlights. But now she wants to know why the Earth spins. Partly b/c I can't really explain it (b/c I don't really know), partly b/c I'm swamped and stressed, and partly to see how she reacts, I haven't gone online with her to look it up or asked the storytime librarian at the local library for a good book on the subject for an almost-four-year-old, but I have encouraged her to come up with an explanation herself and played devil's advocate on all her attempts. She's really into it b/c she's moving from the definite "that's why" to "probably..." (her new favorite word) as her favorite way of attributing a cause to something. So she likes searching out alternate hypotheses, so to speak.

She started with the wind. "Probably the wind makes the earth spin, daddy," she told me in the car on the way back from her Fredonia hoikuen a couple of weeks ago (she seems to like to have these kinds of conversations then and there). When I tried to explain that the wind was probably an effect of the Earth spinning and get across the idea of a vacuum in space (hah!), she grew tired of that hypothesis or my questions and comments or all of the above. So she hadn't said anything about it for awhile. But last evening in the car ride home she informed me she had figured the whole thing out. "There's this big giant, a nice one. She makes the Earth spin. She's pretend." So of course I had to ask her a few questions. Name? "Suweet." What does she do? "She does homework and takes care of her little sister. She goes to school." Wait, what's imoto's name? "Saja. She's three and a half." Oh, how old is Suweet? "Three and a half, too." So they're twins? "Yeah. Saja was born in April. And Suweet was born on the same day."

Not a bad start for onechan's first myth. Suweet and Saja have joined the Powerpuff Girls, Pretty Cure, Sparkychan and Gojochan, Iki and Ika, Jayla, Kake, Trak, and Zavis, the Super-Prius, and various friends and animals in our storytelling pantheon. Which, I freely admit, doesn't inspire as much hysterical laughter as my dad's stories about adults who can't do things right (eat, stand up, walk, etc.) and alternate worlds (say, where things fall up) did from onechan and her oldest cousin, the only other girl among all 7 of them, last weekend in Hershey, PA. Or my mom's playing the TV Teacher for them. But onechan's stuck with me and the tsuma (whose stories are more about everyday life in Japan, from what I can gather, and who tends to gravitate more toward Socratic dialogues with onechan to get her to think through a moral or interpersonal issue than straight storytelling). So tell me, what questions should I ask her about Suweet and Saja?