I Got Nothin'

One of the general tricks to get traffic to your blog (aside from writing well, and putting your blog URL in the signature of your e-mails, and making a jillion comments to other people's websites with a link to your own) is to have a posting schedule and to stick to it.  You want to post often, to post regularly, and to build a readership who looks forward to your daily or every-other-day news.

The last thing that's been up here is four days old now, a rant about Comcast customer service.  Four days... that's like a century in Internet years.  That was so long ago, people still knew who Rebecca Black was.

I'd love to be witty and productive, but there are some days when I just got nothin'.  I spent all day today in front of a database and a spreadsheet, pulling out the grades for every single course at our school for Fall 2010 and Spring 2011 so that we can look for patterns of success and difficulty.  I've gotten to be really good at extracting data from our student-record system, checking it for duplicate records, and then doing rapid data crunching to build comparison tables.  I know about 15% of what Excel can do, which means I know more about Excel than anybody else in the building.

And I was working my way down the list of courses, examining the average grade and number of fails for each course.  It's pretty manual work, since there are a different number of students for each course, and most of the courses are three credits but some of them are 1.5 which means you have to divide by the appropriate number of credits.  And I'm powering through this, getting my results and putting them into the Word document I'll use for reporting.  I'm feeling good about my capabilities.  And I suddenly had a feeling of my friend Pete looking over my shoulder...

Some of you know Pete.  I wrote a book about him, about the ways in which he was incapable of imagining an adult life for himself.  A lot of the book was his own commentary on the perceived futility of adulthood, and on the decidedly mixed pleasures of being 22.  And I felt Pete watching me pull grade data together, and I could hear him saying something like, "That sucks.  I'd rather deliver pizzas.  Why would anybody want to be good at that?"

Why indeed. 

I'm supposed to teach tomorrow night, a lecture on the nature of cities and the ways in which we can understand Boston as a series of independent problems or as a completely interwoven system in which every solution to one problem causes dozens of others.  And I got nothin' there either.  I know more about Boston and about urbanism and about systems thinking than a room full of 19-year-olds... but that and four dollars would get me into line at Starbucks.

I was reading one of the local papers a couple of days ago, with a lifelong Bostonian comparing Boston to Disneyland.  He ended with a parody of Disney's old tag line, declaring Boston "The Surliest Place on Earth."  And as a Southie native, he was proud of that.

He's right, of course.  Boston is a city of naked power.  That power gets exercised through finance or through "knowing somebody" or with a couple of feet of pipe.   The Bulger brothers exercised it in related ways, one becoming a gang leader accused of 19 murders and the other becoming the President of the Massachusetts Senate and then President of the University of Massachusetts.  Ray Flynn was mayor of Boston for ten years until 1993 when he was made Ambassador to the Vatican, and there's the nature of Boston in one sentence.

The Burrage House, a remarkable mansion a block from our school, was built in 1899 on the backs of the immigrant miners of upper Michigan copper. Albert Burrage was the owner of Amalgamated Copper, and on the board of Standard Oil, and in a move 120 years before its time, worked endlessly to prevent public-service employees from being members of political organizations (Boston's Burrage Ordinance of 1892).

I just don't like Boston.  Why should I teach it?  Maybe I should teach all that other stuff tomorrow night.  I can just play a Ben Affleck movie.  "I need your help.  I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later.  And we're gonna hurt some people."  "Whose car we gonna take?"

And before class tomorrow, more data.  More grades of Spring 2011 courses, downloaded and compiled with remarkable speed and accuracy.  ("Why would anybody want to be good at that?") 

Today was a day of trying to look forward into the fog, and seeing nothing take shape.  And tonight isn't much better.  But at least there's a blog post out of it...