Twenty Trip Treats

We're back from Washington D.C., where we had a good visit despite the fact that Kim needed to periodically attend meetings. I found the trip particularly delightful, both because I finally feel reconciled with my former home and because I got to do almost everything I wanted. I've made a list of high points:

• watching swirly 60s-era abstract films with my wife and daughter in the roomy coolness that is the the Hirshorn
• acknowledging that even the wheat-free version of my mother's cherry pie is sublime
• seeing a red fox darting across the road last night in Rock Creek Park
• realizing that one of my dearest friends smells exactly the same as a mother of three as she did as a Barrington Hall boho
• drinking draft Pilsener Urquell out of plastic cups while eating spicy $1.50 collard greens
• following my daughter through my father's garden as he led her to the first two ears of corn ready for harvesting and then watching her do the honors
• hearing how happy my former housemate is with his job, his home, and his life as I remembered how hard he worked to put himself in position to welcome good luck when it came his way
• feeling the damp, concrete-scented air of various Metro stations and remembering how much that odor moved me as a teenager
• observing my daughter's fascination with the various bones, prehistoric and contemporary, at the Museum of Natural History
• seeing how much fun my wife had using the iPod Shuffle I'd originally purchased for her birthday but then feared she wouldn't want
• checking out an impromptu breakdancing competition in Dupont Circle
• conversing with one of my favorite former students about the variety of present-day feminisms and the difficulty of turning theory into practice
• driving to the Target in the shopping plaza near my parent's house and not seeing another white person from the parking lot to the checkout line and back
• learning what it's like to be a reporter for The Wall Street Journal
• directing my daughter to her first fireflies
• seeing my favorite George Bellows and John Sloan paintings, however briefly, at the National Gallery of Art
• frolicking in a hotel pool for the first time in ages
• recounting two new iterations of the "Zeus story" as part of my daughter's bedtime ritual
• soaking in the extreme greenness of my surroundings
• not letting the fear of terrorism prevent me from having fun

For years I talked about how dreadful it was to live through summertime in the D.C.-area, yet I invariably enjoy the experience of walking through air so viscous that showering feels like an hourly necessity. As we rode the cab to the airport this morning, I looked out at all the joggers on the paths in Rock Creek Park and thought, "I could live here easily." I wish we could have stayed longer.

Overly Reductive Analogy

The question of whether academics should be punished for having personal blogs is on the same plane -- though further from its edge, I'd warrant -- as the question of whether spiritual leaders should be punished for indulging in pleasures of the flesh. To the extent that scholars constitute a secular priesthood, the desire to regulate their intellectual production overlaps with the desire to regulate the sexual reproduction of priests. What matters, in other words, is whom academics have intercourse with and whether they use the proper protection while doing it.

Reminder

Remember when I wrote that I was going to try to free myself from the fetters of caution so that I could pursue metaphors down dark and potentially dead-end alleys? I'm in a mood to do precisely that.