Bilbo's Car

Finally, five months into the Abu Dhabi experience, I have a rental car. Technically, I suppose, I could have rented one earlier, but I was waiting until I had all forms filled out. So, once I squared away my Emirati ID card (more on that epic adventure later) and my driver's license, I finally felt empowered to go rent a car from Hertz at the airport (which is only around ten minutes away). While several of my friends here have cars, I grew tired of mooching rides off them and wanted more freedom. So, I popped over and rented a Toyoto Yaris, which is a little hobbit car. However, they are pretty peppy and pretty popular. I've had to memorize the license plate because so many people own or rent a white Yaris. I pleased with the nice woman at the counter for a blue or red one, but they are very rare. So, here it is. I suppose it's not that big of a deal, but if you factor in the fact that I haven't really owned a car in over two and a half years I'm oddly happy to have my little Yaris. Now I only have to avoid getting creamed. The UAE, besides being number one in the world in per capita carbon footprint, is also number one in crashes per capita. The Emiratis, bless their souls, are just really crazy drivers. I heard this morning, and I find this to be completely believeable, that last year when they had a big rain there were 6500 wrecks in one morning in Abu Dhabi. Yikes. Now, I don't really think the numbers make any sense, but the Emiratis do drive like bats out of hell so anything is possible. There was a story in the paper recently wherein the government came to realize that their yearly amnesty of traffic tickets was actually a bad idea because the drivers knew that there was going to be an amnesty so they just drove all the faster. You rarely see police cars here, although heaven help you if you get pulled over, especially if you've been drinking. The Emirati authorities are not amused by drinking and driving and you will end up in jail immediately, which I actually support. Every infraction here is captured electronically and you don't find out about your tickets until you come in to renew your tags, and there are all sorts of stories about drivers who come in and discover that they owe thousands of dollars in fines. So, the adventure begins. The UAE will be the fourth foreign country where I've driven, following Canada, Oman and South Africa, and the first where I've acquired a new driver's license.

Rain, Sort Of

Last night, 20 January, it sprinkled. I suppose that's not that big a deal, but it's the first rain, even a timid, unsure one, since I arrived in Abu Dhabi on 1 September. It's truly silly how happy I was to see it. It's no wonder the students will sometimes go outside and play in the rain. The UAE is one of the driest places on earth, and they champion, for the most part quite rightly, their efforts at water conservation and increasing efforts at ecological conservation. As most Emiratis, with a pained expression, can tell you, the UAE is the only country in the world that that is ahead of the US in regards to their per capita carbon footprint. They are starting to work on carbon neutral buildings and cities. That said, they also have several lush golf courses, including the Abu Dhabi course where Tiger Woods will be playing next week, which seem like a really bad idea considering that we are in the desert. I tweaked my students about it last week, and they responded that the golf courses will designed and built for westerners so it's not their fault, which is probably a good point. However, if you're turning yourself into a vacation destination then I guess you're stuck with providing what the vacationers want.

Lucky Dogs

Recently I was sitting around watching college football with my great friend Mike Lange. Actually, we were sitting around wasting an entire New Year's Eve watching around ten hours of college football. I've never been a big New Year's Eve person so I was happy to do so. Plus, it was during the brief golden age of my college football pool dominance, before it all ended in tears. Anyway, being guys, we were generally talking nonsense. At one point Mike asked me where I would like to spend my time in the Witness Protection Program doing and where would I like to spend it. What a great question, and one that made me hold my questioning manhood cheap (to paraphrase Shakespeare). I'm normally the one who prides himself on asking questions like that, so I was shocked that I didn't think of it. My answer was easy and obvious (at least to anyone who knows me): selling Lucky Dogs in the French Quarter in New Orleans. This has been my retirement goal for some time now. Now, in the end we decided that this was not a good answer to this particular question because too many organized crime types pass through the French Quarter so I would be too easily discovered, and I had to move on to working at a video store in the Dakotas. Still, it didn't change my desire to spend my declining years (which actually began when I was around 27) selling Lucky Dogs. The obvious question is: why? First off, I love New Orleans and the French Quarter. Secondly, I love Lucky Dogs. Thirdly, I am more than a little bit like Ignatius O'Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces. Finally, however, maybe I'm just tired (or it might be better to say, exhausted nye on to death) of making decisions. A life devoid of administrative, faculty and student tomfoolery - and where my biggest challenge in the course of a day related to breaking a $100 bill - sounds better and better. Here's a picture of a Luck Dogs salesman, snapped during the epic journey to Nawlins over last summer with Andy Burkhardt and Steve Wehmeyer. I have seen my future and it is one of bliss.

Hagia Sophia

Like most men, I suppose, I rank things, which is different than making lists. Women make lists - men construct Top 10 lists. It probably relates to our fascination with sports, especially baseball, which are driven by standings. Following this logic, then, as participatory sports became more popular among young girls then women should have started constructing top 10 lists as well (but maybe this is actually all genetic). So ask any man a question like "What are you top five cars?" they would not hesitate for a moment, and could give you the list, and, more importantly, in order. It could be top five or ten cars in the world or that they had personally owned, but they would have a numerical list. It doesn't matter whether it is favorite professional athletes or teams or classes or best kisses, but they would have a list ready. Now, why am I starting a posting about Hagia Sophia with this odd preamble? As I walked into the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul I had one of those moments when you find yourself sitting there like a dope with your mouth hanging open - and this must have lasted around five minutes. I came back to the real world as if from a dream, and I also was delighted/horrified to discover that I was fighting back tears. The experience was that overwhelming. Now, it relates to the initial point because I had one of those realizations that I've been so remarkably fortunate to have seen so much of the world and to have had other moment like that. Then, of course, being a guy, I ruined it by thinking that I should really construct a list of the Top 10 most amazing, jaw-dropping, tears-inducing places I had ever visited.

Every so often I will scan through the over 450 posts that make up this silly little blog, and it's funny how many times I will write "if you ever visit ________, and every one should visit ________, then you should . . ." OK, if you ever visit Istanbul, and every one should visit Istanbul, you have to make a pilgrimmage to Hagia Sophia. Or, more appropriately, if you ever go to see the Hagia Sophia, and every one should see the Hagia Sophia, then you should see the rest of Istanbul. It is staggering to think that the building itself dates back to the 300s, and it reached the form we recognize around fifteen centuries ago during the time of Justinian, the greatest Byzantine emperor. For over a thousand years the dome, which ascends more than 180 feet in the air, was the largest dome in the world. It was a church for a thousand years, and then a mosque for around five hundred years (after the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453), and it has been a museum since 1935 (as part of the secular modernization that was so much a part of Ataturk's dream). I one time opined that you recognize true genius when two seemingly contradictory things happen at the same time - you become both bigger and smaller. You become bigger in that you share some profound truth that connects you to a larger intellectual or spiritual or creative universe - but you also become smaller in that you are dwarfed by the enormity of that vision/truth. Hagia Sophia was that - it lived up to its Greek name, "holy wisdom."

Self-Portrait

My favorite class to teach at Champlain is our Aesthetic Expression class that is in the second year. Like all Champlain classes it is interdisciplinary, and is a great fit for me because it focuses on art and literature and music, and is thus pretty clearly in my wheel house (or at least my perceived wheel house) - at the very least I really enjoy teaching it. The students are supposed to learn about the Western aesthetic, but also their own aesthetic. It is also designed to teach them how to interpret art. As Epictetus reminds us, "Making a statue requires skill, and viewing a statue aright requires skill also." A key component in the class is the creation of a student self-portrait. Some of my colleagues don't seem to like the project and complain that they get lousy results. I have been more fortunate, but that might relate to the fact that I really focus on it and encourage/prod/pound my students into giving me a quality product. My basic rule, which every one of my students can repeat (usually with a shutter) is "no collages" - well, actually, it is a little more graphic than that. The reason why I don't allow collages is that they're stupid, at least at any point past the 7th grade. More importantly, it is very difficult for them to convey any sense of uniqueness. OK, it is series of photo-shopped (or, old school, cut and pasted, and not computer cut and pasted) pictures of your mom and friends and hobbies. Well, I have a mom and friends (even me) and hobbies, so this tells me nothing. To simplify things I press them to think of the one thing that sets them apart from everyone who has ever existed, and it can be a painful process. Last summer a quarter of my students broke down in tears when presenting, which means they dug down a little more deeply than I was intending, but rather that than the alternative. Having said all this, the thing that I hope to do someday is take part in the experiment and create my own self-portrait. We look at a lot of famous and obscure self-portraits and take them apart, and I talk about what I would put in my own self-portrait, but I have never actually created my own. For some time I've been thinking about taking a drawing or painting class, not only for my own enjoyment/enrichment, but also so that I would know more to share with the students. Maybe this is a first step. Here's a picture I took of myself in a sultan's mausoleum next to the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. You can just make me out. I was merrily snapping away at the beautiful tiles when I realized that I could see an outline of myself, and thus the experiment began. Maybe I like it because I am "lost" in the history, which probably speaks a lot about me. There is the old belief that psychologists go into their field to try and figure out why they're so crazy. In a similar way my friend Eric Usatch told me that people go into communication to figure out why they can't communicate. I've often thought that the reason why I like history so much is that it allows me to replace my own history with someone else's: a history more interesting or meaningful or important. So, I'm still there, you just have to work to find me. I've always been much more comfortable listening to other folks talk about themselves than talking about myself. Many people consider me to be a very good listener, and that may relate to the fact that I find other people's stories more interesting than my own - or it could just be a defense mechanism. Reveal more of your own history to me, while I hide my own.

Istanbul

I've just returned to Abu Dhabi after an exhausting 34 hour flight from Vermont. I love living there, but it is so out of the way it is always a challenge to get there in any graceful fashion. Typically, I left at 11:30 on Thursday 5 January, and then endured a five hour layover in JFK, then a ten hour flight to Istanbul, then an eleven hour layover at the Istanbul airport (and I was just too tired to venture out so I just curled up in the quietest corner I could find and slept), and then a five hour flight down to Abu Dhabi - arriving at 4:00 a.m. on Saturday 7 January. The last two days have been devoted to trying to beat down the jet lag, which I think I've managed to do. The other reason why I didn't take the opportunity to leave the airport is that I carved off three days for myself in Istanbul on the way to Burlington. My travel agent, the long-suffering Rochelle, found a relatively inexpensive flight on Turkish Air with the requisite layover in Istanbul, and since I had never been there - and always dreamed of going there - I had her arrange for a three day stay. I loved it, and will have a lot more to say about it. I'll start off with an odd sign that I saw in the palace.

Red Wolves

I am hesitant to include this post because it just calls down divine judgment, but if there has ever been a poster child for hubris it's me. In the face of all logic, if the Arkansas State Red Wolves (my all-time favorite college football team) wins the GoDaddy.com Bowl (my all-time favorite college bowl) then I will win the college football bowl pool. This illogical position has mainly been fueled by an inexplicable run of fifteen straight correct picks. The folks in the pool who actually know more about college football than me - and that is everyone but me - are stunned (as they should be). Go Red Wolves!!