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....

Starting Over

It's the first day of school! Which means it's time to announce a new programming schedule here at CitizenSE, now that the blog is on American time (even if I'm not yet).

Teaching Tuesday: I still won't blog about current students, but I will offer some reflections on the way I approach and handle teaching now that I'm back in the U.S. again.

Service Wednesday: After a service-free year in Japan, I should have one or two interesting thoughts on what it's like to ease myself back into the kinds of institution-building activities I devoted a good deal of my pre-tenure time to.

Free-form Thursday: Combines and replaces the old Unexpected Hawthorne Wednesday, CitizenSE Hawthorniana Link-o-rama Friday, and What Would Hawthorne Say.

Family Friday: Onechan will be having a yochien-like experience every Saturday in Buffalo, so combined with her American hoikuen and imoto's beginning onechan's old day-care arrangement on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Fredonia, I'll have plenty of stories to tell.

Research Weekend: A less quirky but more inclusive name than the old CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea, but basically fulfills the same function and allows me to make my old Close Reading Tuesday and Intertextual Thursday posts a little more substantive.

Yes, I'm turning CitizenSE into a less research-centric blog than it has been in the past. The leave is most definitely over, but it's not just that. I figure I ought to try to better represent the full range of things I'm doing as a tenured professor. They're new enough and strange enough again to me after gaining some distance on them over the past year, literally and figuratively, that I should be able to do something interesting with them. And since my core audience seems to consist of fantastically-talented and incredibly-prolific graduate students, giving some perspective on (professional) life off the Research I track may be of interest to them.

Looking back over my summer output here, it's clear that the travel, talks, and teaching took a toll on my Hawthorne blogging. Putting myself back on a schedule may help CitizenSE get back on track--and help me regain my momentum on my primary research projects. We'll see!

Programming Note

Sorry to report that blogging here will get sparser and lazier for the rest of the month and into August. Although my last class meets in a few minutes, I'll be busy grading and meeting with personal and family friends for farewells during our last two weeks here in Fukuoka. We're cramming a trip to Kagoshima into the second half of this week, as well (here's hoping the forecasts for another early typhoon in southern Kyushu turn out to be wrong this time). And let's not forget boxing, shipping, packing, and giving away our stuff. Fortunately we can leave some things with the tsuma's family in Chiba, where we'll be from July 31 through August 14th, but while there I'll be hanging with onechan and imoto's cousins for the first week and then grading the last set of papers during the second week. So I guess what I'm saying is that Citizen of Somewhere Else will be a bit of a lower priority than it's been even in the past two months. I'll try to make up for the lack of quantity here with quality when I do post. But my five regular readers know how rare that is even when the law of averages is working in my favor! But it's entirely possible the next time you "hear" from me here, this blog will be back on Eastern Standard Time. Or is that Daylight Savings?

Taking Off the Training Wheels

What a crazy week! From a feverish day and night before I started teaching to almost losing my voice while teaching, I am sad to report that my health has been at its worst since January. The measles epidemic sweeping Japan has reached Fukuoka, which shouldn't affect my family, since we've all been vaccinated (even imoto, although hers may not kick in fully until next week), but since the strain here may be different than what onechan and I have been inoculated against, and since it is rampaging among the college-age population in Japan (most of whom never got vaccinated as children), I'm not going to be taking any chances. So that means more sleep and fewer late nights/early mornings. On top of that, I have four lectures to give in June and July, which is a lot for me, and I'm getting drawn deeper into the rhythm of the book manuscript's revision and addition process. Plus, the second week of June I'll be spending almost a week in the Tokyo/Chiba area with limited internet access and the week after that I'll be taking off a couple of days to meet up with friends visiting Japan in the Kyoto area. After that, I can foresee lots of meetings with students as they work on their final projects, grading, preparing my American classes, and getting ready to return to the States.

The upshot for CitizenSE is not that I'll be going on a leave or anything as drastic as that. But, from June through August, I will be ending the programming schedule that's sustained and structured my blogging here since December 2006. (Look for a new one in September, once I've figured out the rhythm of my semester back home.) For the next three months I won't be putting pressure on myself to maintain the 7 days/week schedule I've done a pretty decent job of sticking to, all things considered. And I won't be visiting my blogroll nearly as often as I've done this spring. I'll still be labelling posts that fit the old programming schedule's categories as appropriate, disregarding what day they happen to fall on. And I may be trying out some new labels/categories. But I'll be following a more organic flow from post to post, developing some ongoing series, and weaving the many loose ends I've left hanging for a while back into the mix.

Hope you like it!

CitizenSE Metablogs

Still not well enough to get back to serious Hawthorne blogging. But why should I refrain from all Hawthorne blogging when I don't have time or energy to continue my episodic reading of "The Custom-House" that itself is a stepping-stone toward explaining what this blog is and why it exists? There's no good reason!

So, without further ado, here's a programming schedule I'm going to try to stick to way more closely than my "Hawthorne a day" pledge. [Note: the following has been updated to reflect my latest thinking.]

Mondays: Why CitizenSE? (blog ontology, metaphysics, and epistemology--and maybe someday a turn to the personal)

Tuesdays: Close Reading Tuesday (something for or from the Kyushu University Postcolonial Hawthorne class that's wrapping up soon this semester, which, by the way, I will likely get to revise for both Seinan Gakuin University undergraduates and Fukuoka University graduate students next semester)

Wednesdays: Unexpected Hawthorne Wednesday (Hawthorne lists, quotes, trivia, and other things that may surprise you--cheap, yes, but this is my busiest teaching day, where I commute to three different campuses. I hope to replace it with Historicizing Hawthorne after the fall semester ends or when I run out of material)

Thursdays: Intertextual Thursday

Fridays: Weirdest Hawthorne Link CitizenSE Can Find in 15 Minutes [Update: name changed (see categories) due to shortage of weird Hawthorne posts findable in 15 minutes.]

Saturdays: CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea (sneak previews of Ideas from the Manuscript)

Sundays: What Would Hawthorne Say? (jeremiads, allegories, current events, bloggy intertextuality, etc.) or Daddy Blogging (kawaii-itude) or Reader "Mailbag" (should anyone ever read this blog)

This schedule is subject to change without notice. The fall semester (and academic year) ends in late January 2007 in this part of Japan. So this schedule will change with notice in February 2007.

As today is Friday, but I posted a Weird Hawthorne Link on Wednesday, this schedule has already begun, prematurely (or even proleptically). Look for my Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea tomorrow. I promise it's a doozy.