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Acknowledgments are one of those occluded genres in our writing. It's rare for us to have the opportunity to issue public expressions of gratitude, although if the general session at CCCC were more like the Oscars, maybe that would change. Not that I'm suggesting, mind you.

Anyhow, a couple of months ago, I contacted my press to see if they would mind if I changed my acknowledgments. The original was a fairly standard set of thank yous to friends, family, colleagues. With my dad's passing, I felt like I needed to spend a little more time thinking and writing about his influence on my life. My intention, once they agreed (which they did), was to spend that weekend drafting a new couple of pages to sub for the ones they currently had.

Well, that was two months ago. I've intended to work on those two pages every weekend since then, and every weekend, I put it off. And off. And off. Here's the thing: I don't really write from pain. I talk it through. It's partly why this space has been as silent as it has for the past six months. I want to write something, but nothing that I can imagine writing is really enough for what I want to say. I talked about this problem with a couple of different friends today--talking about it is easy. Writing? Not so much.

And the fact of the matter is that, if I hadn't written a draft the other night, I would have continued to not write about it some more. It's been an odd experience that way. I have things I want to write--there's a couple of articles in me itching to get out--but I haven't really wanted to write. The connection is obvious, of course, but there's a little more to it, because while I know my dad was proud of me and what I was doing, there wasn't that much of a direct connection between the me who was his son and the me who writes articles, chapters, or books for the discipline. Not blogging makes more sense, because I know that he read this site.

Ah well. Like I said. I have a draft, and an idea or two about revising it. My guess is that getting this done will make it more likely that I'll come round here a little more. And maybe I'll finally get around to giving myself permission to write again. Here's hoping.

That's all.

As folks round these parts know, I spent last weekend in Brooklyn, at the 2008 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the 31st of its kind, and the first within an easy shot by train from where I live. So a solving did I go.

And to be honest, I thought I'd do better than I did, so it was a little humbling for me, but it also just about guaranteed that I'll be heading back down there next year in an effort to improve upon my showing. First, let's talk results: after 3 rounds, I was ranked #365, and I climbed a couple of spots to #363 after the second set of 3 on Saturday. Sunday's puzzle dropped me a few spots to #370, though, which is where I ended the tournament. I was a little perplexed, because I thought I'd done better on 7 than I apparently did. But oh well. I've thought a lot about my performance over the last day or so, but before I talk about where I went wrong, charts!

Here's a table featuring my puzzle by puzzle breakdown alongside that of the folks who placed 1st, 100th, 200th, and 300th:

Perhaps I say this just to comfort myself, but really, all that separated me from #300 was my performance on 2 of the easier puzzles. #1 was extremely easy, and #7 was a fairly typical Sunday-style NYT puzzle. Why did I do so poorly on them in particular? I'll get to that, but here's one more chart, featuring my scores lined up again a specific version of ideal scores. The way that scoring works is that you receive 10 pts for each correct word, 25 pts for each full minute you finish under the limit, and 150 pts for a perfect grid. Errors or blanks cost you 25 pts, plus of course you lose the 20 pts from the words crossing the rogue square.

Put another way, every 2 errors cost you a little more than 3 minutes of time bonus, and a perfect puzzle is worth 6 minutes of bonus. So here are my scores lined up with the score for each puzzle done perfectly, but with no time bonuses. In other words, had I gotten each puzzle perfect, and taken the full time to get them that way, my scores would have been those of the second row below:

By this measure, I didn't do too badly. A score of 8290 would only have been good enough to place 357th, and one person got that exact score. But I don't think I got any of them perfectly. I did keep track of my times, but it's hard to calculate from there how many mistakes I made without seeing the grids. The first error costs 25 + 20 points for the 2 words that are wrong, but the second error can cost 45 or 35, depending on whether or not it's in one of the words I'd lost with the first error. Ditto for the third error, but the fourth, if it overlapped with two other mistakes, could cost 25, 35, or 45. On top of that, you can't lose more bonus in error than you gain in time. So if I finish 10 minutes early, and earn 250 pts that way, but make 12 mistakes, only 10 of them cost me the 25 points--the other two just affect my word count. So I can't really reconstruct my scores with any accuracy.

What I can say is that I thought I did better on puzzles 1 and 7 than I actually did, I did pretty well on 3 (a 30 minute puzzle I finished in 8), and 2 & 5 (the 2 hardest by all accounts) kicked my tail. And I think that second chart bears this out. By my calculations (I did keep track of my solving times), If I'd gotten #1 perfect, I would have had 1180, 1240 for #4, and 2000 or so on #7. Another 800-odd points or so moves me up into the mid-200s. But I'm relying here on perfect grids, and I knew that a couple weren't, because I neither knew the name of an old San Francisco mayor nor that olid was a word for a disagreeable smell (that was puzzle 7). Take out those 150 point bonuses (and drop another 45 points for at least 1 mistake), and my scores on those puzzles become 985 (guess I only missed one on #1), 1045, and 1805, which are not too far off from how I actually scored.

No, the really big difference between me and the top honchos was the fact that I really struggled with 2 and 5. I finished 2 with only 30 seconds to go, and 5 I didn't finish at all. And here's the thing: they were the most clever puzzles. But I was so focused on speed and moving clue to clue that I didn't really sit back, take a breath, and figure out the clever ahead of time. #2 was a word ladder, with 9 clues corresponding to rungs on the ladder (first word VENUE, second word VENUS, third word MENUS, etc.). I figured it out fairly easily after the round, but during the round, I didn't think I had time. And #5 was a little more diabolical, with long answers starting with notes from the do-re-mi scale, but transposed. For example, the second long answer was MINTSTRIKE, a relatively meaningless phrase (Labor problems in Denver and Philadelphia?) until you realize that the phrase is actually "RENTSTRIKE" with RE transposed one step up the scale to MI. And so on through the puzzle. But in neither case did I really bother thinking about the theme, figuring that it would just come to me as I frantically scrabbled for individual words. When I came up for breath after each round, the trick was obvious. While the clock was running? Not so much. Instead, I obsessed over the crossing words, and got 4 or 5 of the long words that way, never understanding (a) how they fit together, nor (b) using that information to help me solve them. Inexplicably, I didn't even read the title of the puzzle ("Up-Scale" might have been--how you say?--a CLUE?!?!).

Ah well. I think that the key to my improvement, both in nearing perfection on the easier ones and completion on the harder ones, will involve not taking the clock quite as seriously as I seemed to on Saturday. I need to be a little more careful, yes, but mainly, I think that I need to realize that a minute or two sacrificed to the big picture would have netted me hundreds more points on the harder puzzles.

I did get to wish Will Shortz good morning, and everyone at the tournament was extremely friendly. It reminded me of a mix of other nerdy pastimes. It was something like the debate tournaments of my youth, but without the head-to-head competition (except at the top of the ladder, I guess). The sessions themselves were not unlike the SATs or GREs, and there was a little bit of costumery and localized celebrity, which put me in mind of a fairly mild con, I guess. There was a broad range of ages, and certainly more boys than girls, but all in all, it wasn't scary or anything.

I could have done better, but I guess I feel like #370 (out of about 700) is not a bad place to start. I'm planning on returning next year and improving my score, and now that I know what it's like, I think I'll be able to do so. As I told people around the office today, if there was another tournament this weekend, I'd go to it. I'm a little compulsive that way.

And I'm only a little ashamed to see that it took me this long to get to the fact that Friday night, I had dinner with Douglas and hung out with him for the first time in a few years. So yeah, good times.

Gotta run. I've only got 360 days to practice before next year's tournament, so better get to it!

Yes, that was a joke. Sort of. That's all.

It is not the best week to be (slowly) recovering from back spasms. In a couple of days, we have our annual recruitment visit from prospective students (posts from years past on this process). The good news is that I'm heading into this event with more sleep than I've apparently gotten in years past. The bad news is that I've been getting lots of sleep because there's not much more to do than nap when you're lying on your stomach in bed with a heating pad on your lower back.

I thought I blogged about this, but just about everyone I tell is surprised, so apparently I haven't mentioned it. This year, inspired in part by Wordplay, I'm an entrant in The 31st Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which is happening next weekend down in Brooklyn. So while our prospective students are flying back to their home bases, I'll be taking the train down to NYC to prove just how nerdy I can be.

And actually, I'm looking forward to it. If my practice has been accurate, I'm probably not going to finish much higher than middle of the pack. I'm a little sloppy when I'm under the gun, and I have the same bad habit that sometimes plagued me on multiple choice exams--"how can that be a good clue for this word?!" I've been stepping up my crossword solving to maybe an hour or so a day right now, but other than that, I'm not doing anything special. No stacks of notecards with obscure names of rivers on them for me. Just me and my brain and a bunch of pencils.

If I think of it, I'll try and do a little bit of blogging from the tournament, but it'll depend on how social I'm feeling and how much I feel like putting words outside of the grid...

That's all.

I have all sorts of junk saved in Google Reader, just awaiting my commentary, but this week, I threw my back out or something. As anyone who's seen me can attest, I am not especially happy at the moment. And I can't sit for much longer than a paragraph, although it's getting a little better.

I have managed to find a position that allows me to work on crosswords, and I can prop the laptop for DVD viewing, but other than that, it's been a pretty weak week work wise. Weally.

K. Enough whining. I'll try and get back here soon, back permitting.

The subtitle for this entry could easily be Holiday Loot, Part 3. One of the best gifts I got this holiday was a framed version of the picture above, which features me, resplendent in blue, sitting on my grandfather J.O.'s lap, being poked in the face by my dad, and looking at a photo of my great grandfather Collin, for whom I was named. J.O. passed away while I was still wearing onesies, so I don't really remember him at all. I'm not 100% sure when the picture was taken, although it would have to be either late 1969 or early 1970, which would put my dad at around 26 or 27 in the picture. And I consider this incontrovertible proof that short hair is actually genetic in my family. That, and baby-poking.

Anyhow, today would have been my dad's 65th birthday, so you'll forgive a little nostalgia on my part. That's all.

This is one of those posts that I've had brewing for a bit. In some ways, I feel like I've hit a milestone that's even more important than receiving tenure (!!) was for me last spring.

As of this month, I am no longer carrying any debt. No loans, no rotating balances on the credit cards. I am debt-free.

To provide a little context, let me repeat something I said the other night at dinner: I have been in debt for longer than I've been in academia. Yep. My entire adult life. And it's one of the things that grieves me mightily when I hear people talk about the cushy lives we lead. In preparation for a life in the professoriate, I spent 5+ years (and I was fast) earning less than 10,000 dollars a year. In Texas, the big perk I got for my TAship? In-state tuition. I made less than 10K, and had to pay for tuition out of that. Lucky me.

(A side-note: When I completed my dissertation, I had already taken my job at Old Dominion. I no longer had a TAship, and was living outside the state, and had to enroll for a mandatory 9 credits to complete my degree--I didn't need the credits, it was just a rule--and so I had to pay out-of-state tuition for them. I ended up having to pay something like $3500 to graduate. And as I told the representative from UTArlington who called me last night looking for donations, until I get a check for $3500 from UTA, UTA will not be seeing a check from me.)

Now, I'm not great with money. I overtip, I prefer to own the books I read and use in my research, and I generally subscribe to a philosophy of dinner karma, where the meals I buy for friends will roughly equal the number of meals they buy for me. I'd taken pretty solid control of my finances in the time I've been at Syracuse, gradually working my debt down (and correspondingly restoring my dismal credit rating) without feeling too put upon in terms of quality of life. I probably could have done it faster, if I'd really cracked down.

Anyhow, cushy lives. I guess I want to challenge the idea that our earning power offsets the financial hardships we have to endure to get to where we are, as is often the case for other professionals (lawyers, doctors, e.g.). It does eventually, but not nearly as quickly. Many of my friends still struggle with massive amounts of debt that for graduate students in the humanities is all but inevitable. We have the same taboos about talking about it that we do for all matters financial, but most of us still go through it, I suspect. And if their lives are anything like mine has been, graduate school debt is a dark cloud that hangs over each of us for a lot longer than it probably should. It's been a source of some personal shame for me, when in fact, it should be a source of shame for our institutions, who are more than content to exploit graduate student labor without even the mitigating factor of a living wage.

I don't have any grand solution to go with my personal celebration, although I wish I did. I can say that I spent part of this afternoon helping someone figure out some funding strategies for next year that don't involve loans, and I felt pretty good about that. I wish that I were in a position to be able to effect more change than I can right now--when I think of all the anxiety and stress that I experienced over my finances, I can't help but wonder how much more I could have done in their absence.

Guess I'm ready to start finding out. That is all.

So I stopped up at school this weekend, and when I came outside, what did I see? A brand new car!!

Who says you can't get a new car for Christmas??

(Okay, so I actually picked it up at the dealer the day before, and photoshopped a bow on it from this lovely site.)

My new car and I are slowly making our way westward, so expect little to go on here...

That's all.

As I observed 362 days ago, I'd like to wish everyone a happy St. Pullman's Eve. As I thumbed back through my entry from 365 days ago, I had cause to recall a little birthday hope. Not so much for this year with the hope, I'm afraid. It's been an understandably difficult year, for some reasons that I've shared here previously and others I haven't.

And yet, I'm on the front edge of what I hope will be a long-term uptick in terms of my quality of life--I'll talk about it more when I get there, but I'll just say that one of the things I wasn't ready for (and didn't fully understand) was the black cloud of debt that a career in the humanities entailed. To be fair, much of it was my own stupidity, but given that I've had to be triple smart for years now to make up for it, I feel as though I've paid my dues (and at outrageous interest rates).

So while I entered last year with a sense of hope and expectations for change that didn't really pan out, I enter the last year of my thirties with the means to effect some change, and some choices in front of me about how best to do it. That's not such a bad trade, I suppose.

That is all.

...has descended with unwavering accuracy upon the city of Syracuse.

I don't have much more to say than that. My methods class met for the final time last night, so it's all over but the grading. And the practice job talks. And the practice phone interviews. And the practice f2f interviews.

I do hope it stops snowing one of these days.

That is, to my chagrin, all.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by roman numerals. I was also quite intrigued by the notion that our own number system was arbitrary in the sense that you could have other bases besides 10. (Yes, I know, what with ten fingers and ten toes, it's not exactly arbitrary.) Silly as it may sound, I would figure out what random numbers would be in base-8 or base-12 number systems. This may be one major reason why web design, with its hexadecimal numbering for the colors, appeals to me so much.

But this is an entry about roman numerals, prompted by two things, one which makes sense, and another which doesn't. The one that makes sense is that in class last Monday, someone stumbled a bit relating the roman numeralled page number to which she wanted to make reference. Later in the class, in making reference to a normally numbered page, I converted it to romans just for fun. For whatever reason, it happened to stick in my head. And when things get stuck there, I tend to just roll them around. So instead of remembering straight page numbers, for the books I'm in the middle of, I'll convert them to romans. (I'm on page LXXVI of the book sitting next to me, btw)

I'm also fascinated by the subtractive numerals--IV, IX, XL--the ones where the normally additive numeral system is reversed like we do with time when we say quarter til two instead of 1:45. The number 944 (CMXLIV) is obviously greatly appealing, the number 144 (CXLIV) only slightly less so.

I should note too that 144 is 100 in base-12, which makes it a big round C.

That's how my brain worked when I was a kid.

The mood for this post was inspired by a hilarious LJ entry by webcomicker John Campbell, titled "50 Answers," which of course my brain converted to LAnswers. Campbell invited commenters to ask him questions, to which he draws answers. Fifty of em. Here's one:

That is all.