Dean at Home: The Pandemic Blog

Clean Your Room Tonight's soundtrack: Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5, Bernstein, Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1974 My parents visited this afternoon. For the first time in over a year I saw them in person and we were able to embrace. It is a wonder of modern medicine and logistics that they are now vaccinated. They brought homemade kimchi, pickled vegetables, mandu filling and wraps (homemade Korean dumplings), and some chives to plant.  We milled around mostly outside and said hello to the chickens. I helped load two five gallon buckets of chicken droppings and compost into their car (hopefully they don't tip over). They then came in and got to see our work-from-home spaces, and then in just a few moments they were leaving and backing out of the driveway.  I'm afraid I didn't have a chance to clean house and our pandemic household is something like my teenage room. Maybe a little better than that, but on this particular day, I had taken out the trash and not replaced the tr...

Minari Today's soundtrack: Stanley Clarke & Marcus Miller & Victor Wooten, Jazz Festival Vitoria-Gastetz, 2009 This weekend I finally got to see the film, Minari . It is a wonderful film about a Korean American family forging a home on an Arkansas farm. I'll refrain from any spoilers, but it was wonderful to be steeped in that world for a little bit. June bug snuck under the plastic protecting our bed. After watching the movie, I thought someone should do a study on Korean grandparents who follow their children and come to America. It is such a fascinating cultural phenomenon and there must be so many stories to share. I tried to imagine one of my kids moving to a completely different country and in my seventies picking up, leaving everything, and moving to Portugal. What a sense of adventure my progenitors had! My own grandfather arrived in the early 1980s and he stayed in my room, while I moved in with my brother. He was an active septuagenarian and while he ostensibl...

Put on Your Glasses Tonight's soundtrack: The Ray Brown Trio, Jazzfestival Bern, Switzerland, 2002 The season changes and suddenly, at six thirty in the evening, the sun catches the corner of the window and is right in my line of sight. It is blinding.  When I was little boy, I used to stare at the sun out my bedroom window. It was my act of defiance while my friends played football other games down in the field at the bottom of the driveway. My mom had a campaign to improve my handwriting and before going out to play, I had to do handwriting worksheets where I followed along the dotted lines with cursive letters neatly positioned between the guidelines. Then I had to do the math worksheets. Then I had to do my homework. And because I was resistant and because I was spending too much time staring at the sun, all my studies took too long and all my worksheets were smeared with corona-like shapes of light. By the time I was done all the other kids had gone home for the evening. Satur...

In My Dreams I Am an Old Man My son warned us that he had a foreboding premonition, and asked us to be careful. On a Zoom Townhall on Anti Asian Racism, one of the first questions, even before the facilitators had finished giving instructions about how to use the translation options and the question and answer feature, was about how to intervene in an attack against an Asian without becoming an victim yourself. I am not ready to answer questions like that... to imagine rushing to the aid of our grandmothers and grandfathers, our mothers and fathers. I remember the confrontation my father told me about when he tried to find a parking space near a popular fishing spot, where the White man looked at him with such hatred and anger.  How do we know when we are safe and when we are in danger? How do we know if it is safe to wait in line for an ice cream cone? How do we know if it is safe to wait for a person to vacate a parking space? I once walked to school with a greasy bicycle chain c...

 Rejuvenation Tonight's soundtrack: The  Headhunters, 1976  and Return to Forever and The Headhunters, 1974 I was in a meeting today and was surprised by a colleague asking me, What new thing am I going to incorporate in my routine? We were trying to model integrating new tactics into our toolbox to reach a goal, but I had not prepared and I froze for a moment like an opossum caught in headlights.  Franklin smells something in the air. My mind raced through my day. When could I possibly find time to do something new? I feel like every hour is already fitted as snuggly as a nicely tailored shirt around the activities I have on any given day. Some days, I manage to eat lunch in a matter of minutes and by the time I am done with my activities, I am ready to call it a night. I don't understand how I managed to also drive to work in the before pandemic times.  It is, of course, not just work that takes up my day. We prioritize what is important, and whether that is r...

Bow Riding Tonight's Soundtrack: Zakir Hussain and Dave Holland: Crosscurrents, 2018 There is something marvelous about a bow riding across a bass string. The resistance of the rosin and horsehair over the string sets off a resonance that feels wholly human. It feel like a thing that you can feel in your soul, that awakens centuries of accumulated history, generations of tragedies, entire lineages of love making. It is all transmitted and received through the arm, across the chest, where the body presses seductively against your waist, and even into your head when you lean close to the tuning machines. Just a simple drone is is like rock forming, like the surface of a mountain top lake. It is like a clear blue sky in the height of summer.  A single note wavers in anticipation. A singe note wavers in anticipation. How can such an instrument exist, that feels it was made for human intimacy?  All one needs to do is listen. A memory reconfigured. To stand one with the bass and fee...

Losing Track of Time Tonight's soundtrack: The Claypool Lennon Delirium, 2016   Spring has arrived. Last night, I didn't make a fire in the wood stove. I skipped my thermal undershirt this morning, and today while taking Franklin for his afternoon walk, I wore my light leather jacket for the first time of the season. It feels like a chrysalis opening. The fortunes in our Chinese food takeout  have been getting more creative. I once stumbled onto a fortune cookie factory  in Queens near a aqueduct that smelled acrid and shimmered like gasoline.  I wanted to knock at the door of what looked like it had once been an auto repair shop and demand to see who was responsible for typing out my little after dinner aphorisms. Years ago, I was at a conference in Kansas City and late one night,  found myself standing outside the headquarters of Hallmark. Up on the sixth or seventh floor in a completely dark building was one office with the light on. I wanted to know who was ...

Atlanta Tonight's soundtrack (because I didn't get to finish it last night): Colonel Claypool's Bucket of Bernie Brains, New Orleans, LA, 2003 It has been raining all day and it is chilly again. It is hard to not feel like the world is cold and tired.  Drawing on work of my colleagues, I helped craft a message for an organization I work with to respond to the Atlanta murders. I managed to stay relatively positive and hopeful. Dear Community, The Coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the rise of violence against Asian and Asian American people across our country. The horrific violence in Atlanta Tuesday highlights the impacts of this violence against Asian American women in particular. We stand in solidarity against hate crimes that impact all people across the ALANA/BIPOC communities.    We urge all our campuses to redouble our efforts to support our students, faculty, staff, and community members who are marginalized and face challenges due to sexism, racism, homophobia, ...