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Posts from the ‘Personal’ Category

Mar 29

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Buying a House: Debt

I’m in the process of buying a house for the first time.  This is exciting and strange.  I first started looking for a house the same week that I was teaching John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government.  I realized even more forcefully this time around how much social contract theory’s claims to belonging are tied up in relations to private property.  Witness the ongoing opposition between owners and renters documented in San Francisco in the wake of the tech boom.  Then last week, as we were signing the purchase agreement, I was explaining Marx’s analysis of capitalism to students, that wealth is produced by labor.  Fine, work harder.  But in the capitalist mode of production based as it is on private property, the worker never sees the fruit of her labor.  Private property gives the owner license to recoup the surplus value of labor, while the worker only has the right to the compensation that is socially determined is sufficient to return her to work again.  I realized I was living smack dab in the center of the contradiction between ideology and economic mode of production that Marx maintains will be the end of capital.  So being a good member of the typing left (per Jodi Dean), I decided the best mode of resistance is surely to blog about it.   This will then be the first in a series of blogs about house buying, private property, home-owning, home repair and remodeling, and town vs. country.

So, debt.

I have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, even though I had tuition remission and a stipend from my graduate program.  I definitely made decisions in college based on money rather than on what I wanted to do because I was paying for college by myself and I couldn’t afford not to work during summers and winter breaks (like I didn’t think I could afford study abroad, and was never told otherwise, and I just didn’t know that I could take my loans to off-campus housing which could have been cheaper and things like that).  I thought Occupy’s efforts to take on debt and organize for debt forgiveness were a good idea, but not at the top of list of efforts to join.  So yeah, I read David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years and I know debt is a burden and a historical rather than an intrinsic social relation, but I don’t think I ever realized how much a racket the debt industry is until this morning when I had to read through the 70-something pages related to my mortgage agreement.  Even though intellectually I know better, I thought debt was just the price you have to pay to be in the middle class.  By the end of the life of my loan, 69% of what I will have paid back will be interest on the principle.  69%!  What I realized in reading my mortgage agreement is that this situation is not just an economic necessity, borrowing with an interest rate that has 69% of what you pay back going to interest (i.e., to the bank, and I have a great rate!) could not happen without the institutional support of the government which makes the penalty for failing to pay, not just financially costly, but dire for families who are foreclosed on.  Government officials–sheriffs!–do the bank’s work of putting people who cannot pay on the street.

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Jan 30

Day 30: Two or Three Things I Don’t Know for Sure, but Think are Right

There is an ideology conference going on at Yale this weekend.  Someone mentioned that ideology might be settled belief which has got me thinking about my settled beliefs.  I have always worried about having settled beliefs, because I take seriously Socrates’ concern that our greatest danger would be to assume we know what we do not.  For Socrates, the pursuit of knowledge requires a way of being related to oneself and one’s own knowledge, to know whether one knows or does not know.    Read more

Jan 20

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Day 20: On Running and Being a Runner, Pt. 1

I have yet to blog about running.  Once I talked about what I saw and thought on a run, but it wasn’t blogging about running.  The next couple days I’m going to make up for that because it turns out I have a lot to say about running.  I am a runner.  In this post, I’m going to tell you my personal running story.

I wasn’t always an athlete.  I remember one day sitting on the bleachers at my older sister’s indoor soccer game and my friend’s mom asked me if I played any sports.  My friend, a guy who was a little older than my sister, said, “She doesn’t play sports.  She flirts.”  I think I was 12.  Maybe 13.  I think I’m still probably running out of rage about that comment. Read more

Jan 19

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Day 19: Tenure for Life

I was recently tenured.

A friend of mine told me a story about when he was interviewing and one of the people who interviewed him asked him what he would do differently when he got tenure.  He couldn’t think of an answer.  She said, that’s the right answer.  You shouldn’t do anything differently.

I tried to be a pre-tenure faculty member for whom that could be true not because I was living out of fear of who I was upsetting, but because I was doing what I thought was right in teaching, research and service situations regardless of what people thought.  I think my friend’s interviewer’s comment can sometimes imply that faculty are so beaten down, well-disciplined in the  Foucaultian sense, that they will continue to feel sheepish as they did before they were tenured.

Soon after I learned of my tenure decision, I was back home in Philadelphia visiting my family, and it struck me how freeing it would be if you could address your personal life as if you had tenure–tenure for life, I like to call it.   Read more

Jan 6

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Day 6: That Time I Worked for Rick Santorum: A Political Conversion

The summer after my junior year at the College of William and Mary, I interned for Rick Santorum in his Washington, D.C. legislative offices. I got the internship because my family had been very involved in anti-abortion activism, like Operation Rescue involved. In high school in Philadelphia, I had worked for a local anti-abortion activist organization and the director, William Devlin, knew Santorum’s Chief of Staff, Mark Rodgers. So he hooked me up. I think I interned for 10 weeks, but maybe it was 8. When I graduated from college, I went to work for Brabender Cox, Santorum’s political consultants who continue to advise Santorum in his presidential campaign. Read more

Jan 1

31 Days of Blogging: January Resolution

I don’t have the resolve for a year long’s resolution, and everyone seems to be poo-pooing resolutions this year anyway, so forget it.  I’ve decided to resolve just for a month I’m going to blog every day.  I was inspired by Jill Stauffer, who did it every day in December.  I am feeling a certain trepidation about this resolution, perhaps that is a sign that it is a good one.  I often think about something Jill said at the public philosophy panel at SPEP in 2014 about how things need time to percolate in private before bringing them to the world, and I think this notion influences my public philosophizing.  I spend a lot of time ruminating before sending things into the world.  I think that is useful, but I think it is also useful to develop habits of daily engagement and thoughtfulness.  So that’s what this is.  As you can expect, I’m also going to reflect along the way about what’s hard about keeping this resolution, which I expect will have something to do with being a woman in philosophy on the Internet.  Stay tuned.

calvin-hobbes-new-years-resolutions

Thanks to Fit is a Feminist Issue for the Calvin and Hobbes find.

Apr 24

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What Other People Accomplished By My Age

It’s my birthday.  Here’s some things people accomplished by the time they were my age.  I won’t be coy, I’m 39.

  • By 39, Thomas Jefferson, who studied at my alma mater, had written and signed the Declaration of Independence and become the Governor of Virginia.
  • By 39, G.W.F. Hegel had published his seminal text Phenomenology of Spirit.
  • By 39, Sojourner Truth escaped from slavery, moved to New York and became the first black woman to win a case in court against a white man in the United States.
  • By 39, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had organized and held the Seneca Falls Convention where she, Lucretia Mott and several other women drafted the Declaration of Sentiments proclaiming equality between men and women.
  • By 39, Albert Einstein had published his discoveries of the special and general theories of relativity, which revolutionized modern physics.
  • By 39, Barack Obama had been a community organizer for 12 years and an Illinois Senator for 3.
  • By 39, Hillary Rodham Clinton had served as an advisor on the presidential impeachment inquiry for the Judicial Committee of the House of Representatives during Watergate, had taught at the University of Arkansas School of Law and was the First Lady of Arkansas while working as a partner at the Rose Law Firm.
  •  By 39, Judith Butler had published Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter revolutionizing the way that we speak about gender and sexuality.
  • By 39, Annie Dillard had published five books including one of my favorites, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
  • By 39, my mother had five children.

I leave you these facts without comment.

The painting is “Women VI” by Willem de Kooning whose birthday is today.

Jan 1

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Janus-Faced Part 2: Stuff I’d like to do in 2015

According to Ovid, Janus was the son of Apollo and was born a mortal in Thessaly but then fled to Italy.  He was a Roman god with Greek roots, like many of the Roman gods, which makes the roots of Janus themselves Janus-faced.  I’ve been thinking about Janus a bit this week as I have been writing about and reflecting on what I’m doing when I do the history of philosophy – lots of looking back to look ahead.  Sounds like a country song.

Yesterday, I looked back at 2014 to list the things I was proud of last year.  I know most look backs cover the year in literature, in politics (Cuba is open for further colonization, the GOP is taking over the Senate, and yeah we did torture all those people and how), in public life (Ebola, police finally getting called on killing black men with impunity), in the academy (Steven Salaita), and philosophy, but I went the personal route.  So this Top Five list is the personal follow-up to look ahead and consider what I’d like to do in 2015.

5.  Keep blogging regularly.  My goal is to continue blogging once a week.

4.  Run outside through the winter.

3.  I’d like to take advantage of the proximity to Chicago to attend philosophy conferences there — there are two conferences this spring at DePaul, the History of Philosophy Society and the graduate student conference on affectivity that Jason Read is speaking at, that I’d like to attend.

2.  I’m heading to the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Città di Castello, Italy, in July and I’d like to visit Crete and some of the other Greek islands while we are in Europe.  Last year I went to Greece for the first time, which was amazing.

1. I was going to make number one thinking about pedagogy, but while I really do want to do more of that and I probably will, it sounds pretty boring.  So as I was telling some friends last night at the New Year’s Eve party / bonfire I went to, I think this year I’m going to pay some more attention to music.  I am going to buy an album a month from a musician that I’ve never listened to before (recommendations welcome).  I’ll blog about that too.

Here’s to a good year.

Dec 31

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Janus-Faced, Part 1: Stuff I’m Proud of from 2014

Janus is the Greek god of doors and gateways, beginnings and endings, looking back and looking ahead.  To be Janus-faced is to recognize that the ending is a beginning, and the beginning an ending, to hold together what has come with what will come.

So much for the lofty start.  Here we are: year end reviews.  Everyone’s doing it.  I don’t like to be a cliché, but I do like to look back in order to look ahead and to do so in a way that addresses what was significant to me rather than the kind of thing I would put on a salary review.  I realize that what I don’t like about these kinds of things is how much they are about individuals–what I did this year–when what seems important is what we collectively have done, or more, how what we’ve done has been collectively accomplished.  So I’m trying to think about how the things that I did were also collective efforts. Read more

Aug 3

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Trip to Yellowstone National Park

We just  got back from a week in Yellowstone.  We stayed in cabins in the Cinnabar Basin right outside of Gardiner, Montana along the Yellowstone River with my husband’s parents, sister and brother-in-law, their three kids, his aunt and uncle, their two kids and their families and one of his cousin’s husband’s parents.  For twenty-one separate wills vying for satisfaction and recognition, it was a remarkably pleasant week.   Read more

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