self-disclosure
Coming out
Yesterday, I gave a talk at the University of Maryland’s Institute for Technology & the Humanities (aka MITH) about changing the way humanities PhDs are educated. It was titled “Stop Being Polite and Start Getting Real: Professional Education for Professional Humanists.” The really wonderful (and super-speedy) folks at MITH just posted the audio of the talk on their website; it’s about an hour long, but if you’re interested in things like how PhD programs should be built more like AK-47s, please check the link above and give it a whirl.
A lot of the talk is based on my own experience having gotten a humanities PhD and not being able to find a tenure-track job or full-time employment doing other kinds of university work, and how I eventually wound up becoming a technology journalist. So at the end of the lecture, I talk about a lot of personal stuff, including my son being diagnosed with autism, the accident where I broke my arm & leg, waiting a year to go on the job market and getting walloped by the 2008 economic meltdown — all stuff I’ve talked about here before.
One thing, though, I haven’t — the principal reason I cautioned the folks in the room who were live-tweeting the event to tweet this carefully. So I wanted to lay it on the table before some of you downloaded the podcast and were like, “what the what?”
I am a birth dad. I have an older son who was born and placed for adoption in 2003, during the spring of my first year in graduate school. He’s going to be eight years old in just a few weeks, and I love him more than anything.
We have an open adoption, which means that he knows that he’s adopted, that I’m his birth father (as it happens, his only father, because he was adopted by two women), and we see each other and exchange information and phone calls pretty regularly. We (he, me, Sylvia, Noah, his family) have a great, casual, very loving relationship. He’s just like me. I mean, just. Maybe better adjusted. And yes, he has red hair.
When I was 21, I was so terrified of both being a father and what the news of the adoption might mean that I told no one — including friends, family, and especially the people in my graduate program and at school. (This included my upstairs neighbor, which was tricky.) I’d just moved to Philadelphia. I felt completely intimidated and totally alone.
The only thing I did well was study and write and perform in my graduate seminars. So I threw myself into them and pretended it wasn’t happening. I even walked from the hospital downtown to attended classes just a day or so after he was born.
Over the years, as my relationship with my son has changed, grown more open and more clear that we were always going to be a significant part of each other’s lives, I opened up to more and more people — friends, family, sympathetic acquaintances and strangers. (For instance, Robin knew before today, but Matt didn’t. At least, I don’t think he did. After all, he is a reporter.)
Before I told my parents and brothers and sister, my son’s adoptive moms compared it to coming out. You’re not ashamed. You know you have to affirm who you are. That doesn’t mean you have to fork it over to people when you first meet them or hand them your business card. It’s driving you crazy when you don’t tell the people close to you. At a certain point, the most crazy-making issue is addressing why you haven’t said something before now. But ultimately, it’s because you can’t ever be certain how people will react.
For those reasons, I’ve still been reluctant to say too much, especially on the open web. There are plenty of privacy issues that go way beyond myself — I’ve really never wanted anybody in my family to be Googleable. Still, I gave a talk about it at the MLA a few years ago. If you were really determined to find out, it’s been findable. That’s a different thing, however, from stating it for everyone to see.
But since so much of my life now, so many of my friendships, happen online, and since I’m determined to not let fear or anxiety about what I do or don’t say control how I feel about the world, this seems like as good a time as any to tell a whole lot more people all at once.
As Jeff Mangum put it in Neutral Milk Hotel’s song “Ghost,” I’m resolved to “never be afraid / to watch the morning paper blow / into a hole / where no one can escape.” Or as xkcd put it in the comic “dreams” (This is actually the very last part of my talk), Fuck. That. Shit.
It’s an experience — one that’s always ongoing — that broke my heart and changed my life, irrevocably, for the better. Orders of magnitude better. It taught me who I was and is teaching me who I am. I can’t explain it any better than that.
The New Dead Media Expert at Wired
In the last year, the other two Snarkmasters switched jobs, with Robin joining Twitter and Matt moving to NPR. Well, friends, scratch off number three. Starting Wednesday, I’ll be a full-time contributor for Wired.com, writing about e-readers and emerging technology and all things awesome for Gadget Lab, plus maybe occasional pieces elsewhere in the Wired.com ecosystem. That’s right — me and Jonah Lehrer are going to get this whole fourth culture thing started.
Now, you may have heard that Wired editors Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff declared that “The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet,” in a magazine cover story that was also featured prominently at Wired.com. Let me tell you, friends, I was delighted to hear the news. You see, writing about the web has always made me feel a little uncomfortable. Not the actual writing — just the explaining it to other people part.
You see, I worked so hard to become an expert on dead media, like the book and the newspaper and cinema and poetry, that writing about something living, even using something living, always felt like the grave robbing the cradle.
Now my portfolio is much tidier. Radio and TV hosts can introduce my credentials in one line: “Tim Carmody, renowned expert on dead media and its future.” It’s probably why they hired me in the first place.
[Actually, they advertised the job, I applied, they gave me a one-day tryout (One,Two,Three), and then gave me the nod at the end of the past week, while I was writing for Kottke. It’s been a heady month.]
Anyways, I hope you’ll stop by and bring the Snarkmatrix love to the comments over there. Tell your friends. Link to what I write, all the time, even or especially when you think I’m wrong. (I’ll be able to explain why I’m not.)
And of course, I’ll still be right here, writing about culture, really old technology, and everything else. The paisley just wouldn’t be right without the blue, orange, and green.
An exercise in empathy
Mostly I want to point to Rob Greco’s wide-ranging post on empathy here. Empathy might actually be the master virtue—the one that makes any of the rest worth having—and Rob serves up a great collage of ideas and further reading including, of course, this all-time Snarkmarket favorite.
BUT I am also going to use this as an opportunity to describe a little thing that I do—a thing I have done since 7th or 8th grade, at least, and still do all the time today.
It goes like this:
Sitting in any space with other people—a classroom, a city bus, even a big wide-open park—I’ll sometimes let my mind wander and imagine the space from someone else’s vantage point. It’s as simple as that. No deep emotional imagination involved; it’s really just visual.
But the important thing is that I am included in the transformed scene. Doodling on a legal pad, hunched into a laptop, reading a book, whatever. The core of the exercise, I think, is that you see yourself as just another person in the space—an opaque bag of bones—instead of as, you know, the movie camera. The privileged POV.
Does that make any sense? It’s stuck with me as a habit, I suppose, because it’s so simple. This isn’t level 12 meditation. It’s just a little flip, a little dose of visual imagination. But I always find it entirely transporting. And it tends to put me in my place.
Anybody else ever do this?
The playing field of public policy
I was just reading a blog post about Afghanistan policy and man, I just could not get interested in it. Then it occurred to me that this is really quite a change from, say, five years ago, when I definitely still self-identified as a wonk-in-training. Or a wannabe wonk, at least.
So I was ruminating on that and without really intending to, I tweeted this little sequence, which I will now assemble here Carmody-style:
- Once, long ago, I really REALLY wanted to be a policy wonk. No longer. Public policy once seemed very LARGE to me. Now it seems… small?
- Initially I was convinced that policy (esp economic policy) defined the playing field—the space-time continuum! What a thing to master!
- But in fact, there are bigger fields on which policy itself is played. Longer games. Supersets. This is @longnow-inflected thinking, obvs.
- And for me, it’s an open question whether digging into (ephemeral?) policy right now helps you understand (and play!) the longer game.
Nothing to add; I just wanted to reproduce it here. I know a lot of Snarkmarket readers (and at least two Snarkmarket bloggers) are a bit wonkish. I wonder: Do you find your interest and engagement in public policy waxing or waning lately? What’s your own trajectory been?
And I realize “public policy” is ridiculously broad. I’m thinking a bit more of macroeconomic and foreign policy than domestic policy—but my observation above applies across the board. My utter lack of interest in health care reform perfectly balances Matt’s deep knowledge.
The kid with the wooden crossbar
Forgive the all-in-the-family post, but this is a fun story. My uncle John Sloan writes:
As the youngest–by several years–of three kids, I was used to hand-me-downs. Usually, it worked out pretty well. My brother’s toys and sports equipment were generally pretty cool and broken in–but not broken–by the time I got them. But the timing was all wrong when it was time for me to move up to a bike big enough to ride to school. My brother was still using his current bicycle, so the one that came down to me was my older sister’s baby-blue, balloon-tired, 24-inch Schwinn.
It, of course, had no crossbar. It was a girls’ bike.
My big brother didn’t generally make it his business to solve my problems, but he could see the angst that this was causing me […] as the big kids taunted me with shouted remarks about my gender identity.
“Hey, look at the shrimp on the girls’ bike!”
So I was grateful, indeed, when he pulled me and the bike into the garage with the equipment needed to solve my dilemma.
The rest of the story really does go, as he puts it, “like an episode of Leave It To Beaver.”
This is from one of his columns for the Star-Courier in Kewanee, Illinois. I always enjoy reading them, because they’re a reminder that a different media galaxy—a different public sphere—still exists, far from the buzz and flow of Google Reader, Twitter, and Snarkmarket threaded comments. (Sorry, just had to get that in there again.)
Fun fact: My great-grandfather Simpson Sloan was, circa 1896–1898, a designer of bicycles. And remember, bikes were basically the internet of the 1890s! Exciting, accessible, full of promise. He even built one called “the Sloan Special.”