How I Learned Not to Drive 8/23/2010

The H4 bus passes me just as I have started to walk to the Cleveland Park Metro. Shoot, twenty minutes later to work. Part of why I drive is to save time. My world is a juggling of demands. In the more intensive world of UCSC teaching, I expect to disappoint someone every day, my family, my students, my collegues, book editors, The Public who occasionally calls on me to be an “expert.” I tend to fail one of these people – or People -- every day. In my current DC job, life is a bit easier. First, my kids are older (in fact, one is in college). My daughter is herself using public transport to get back and forth to school (or this week, just soccer tryouts before school starts). My job responsibilities (don’t tell anyone) are not as stressful, since I just don’t understand the politics behind the weekly meetings or the committee assignments. And, most importantly, I’m teaching dozens as opposed to hundred of students. But I still need time to do these things and not driving is time-consuming.

So, learning how not to drive includes learning to lose time. Now, of course, it might be interesting to see exactly how much time I’m really losing by not driving, especially not driving to Dupont Circle during rush hour and then finding a parking space or paying to park (the time vs. money question that I’ll deal with later). Maybe I’ll time it at some point. As anyone who tries to park at UCSC knows, public transport has the problem of scarce and expensive parking spaces on its side. I’ll talk more about time later. Today I want to talk about technology.

The DC Metro system does not have the benefit of the awesome technology I have, literally, at my own fingertips. This I learned during my not driving this morning.

The DC Metro has a (I thought) great system, a website where you put your starting point and your end point into the system and they tell you the best way to get there. I live in a place where, there are at least 4 different transport options to getting to my office and, from one 15-minute time period to the next, which of those options is the fastest changes. It could be the H4 bus to Cleveland Park Metro Station, or heading up to the Tenleytown Station, in the other direction, on one of the 30s, or one of the 30s in the other direction, and then a few blocks walk to my office, or the H4 all the way to Adams-Morgan and then a bus to my office from there. It all depends on the time.

So, every time I take the bus to my office (or anywhere, actually), I check the website. In fact, I check it on my phone, since I have an iPhone and I can get the website as a kind of web-based app (although not really an actual app, just the website translated to my phone, which is a bit clunky but works).

So, yesterday, I checked my phone and went out to the bus stop. Then I looked down at my legs. Stubble, and those shorter pants that tend to be cooler but you have to keep your legs shaved. Later, I’ll talk about how learning not to drive also involves learning how to dress, or the struggles over dressing and not driving. Or just the struggles over dressing because I am a slob, whether I drive or not. I decided to take the next bus and go put on a pair of jeans.

I got to the bus stop again just in time for the next bus, I thought, although a bit tight, timewise. But it didn’t show up. I thought I’d missed it and started to walk to the Cleveland Station. Luckily, it was one of those extremely rare cooler DC summer days, since walking in jeans can be a very sweaty process otherwise (hence my original choice of lighter, shorter pants). Just as I had made it halfway down the block, the bus I was waiting for went by, later than the app had told me. I wasn’t late; it was. What happened? I had assumed that the technology on the bus was as sophisticated as the technology on my iPhone. Simply, I assumed that since I had GPS on my iPhone, that could determine my location at any time, that the Metro system had installed GPS on the busses, and that, when I used my app to locate a bus, I was locating the actual bus.

In fact, as I now realize, the Metro app is just a bus schedule, translated into a website. It looks fancy, but it really isn’t. And busses are late, so the schedule is not that accurate. I was basing my transport decisions on absolute accuracy, not on the reality of a under-financed transport system that couldn’t afford the kind of technology I had in my phone.

This is what I learned by not driving today.

How I Learned Not to Drive

I will be doing a series of posts blogging my experiences in learning not to drive. These posts are part of developing an assignment for my Sustainable Design and Social Change course. I am asking students to change one behavior so as to live, for one week, a more sustainable lifestyle. They will be journaling on their experiences living with this change in a week of daily blogs. To figure out how to make the assignment work as well as possible, I am doing the same thing, but for a longer time period. As I carry out this assignment, I'll figure out what exactly I should ask of my students.

What If I Had a Facebook Party?

This summer, because of diagnoses, accurate and inaccurate, of a body gone bad, I ended up couch-bound for several months. I didn't really want to see people; mostly, I didn't want to people to see me. So even though my friends have a great couchside manner, I didn't tell too many people what I was going through. My family was busy getting the things done I could not do, like moving us out of our house and across the country. So, I had plenty of alone time.

Except for Facebook. I was only an occasional Facebook user before this happened. It was fun, in an unnecessary way. But my change of circumstance made sitting on a couch, looking at a screen, the best possible way to spend my time. Certainly, it would be great if a book beat a screen when it came to distractions from considerable and disturbing pain, but it doesn't. Facebook worked better.

I'm OK now, after much scary, ugly stuff. So I feel about Facebook the way Jack Nicholson felt about sex in The Departed: "I don't really need it any more, but I still like it." Why do I still go to my Wall almost every day? Because of the people I find there, people I mostly wouldn't know otherwise.

Many people, I know, use Facebook to keep in touch with their close friends and family. I don't really have any close family left that doesn't live with me, except my son, who I already probably call and text too much. Any he's mostly a Myspace person anyway. Most of my close friends think that Facebook is a conspiracy and wouldn't deign go near it, or they ask me, "why would I want to have more social contact?" My friends are kinda ornery loners, as -- kinda -- am I. And these are people I can talk to. I call them my "in the flesh" friends. They're good, interesting, funny people, much like my Facebook people but they are, in fact, my friends and that is just a different category. While I do have a few friends on Facebook, mostly people who lurk to see what's up with me, what I have on Facebook is a group of people I really don't know very well. They really aren't friends -- I wouldn't call them if I were dying. I didn't tell them I was sick. I didn't want sympathy, or warm lovingkindness. I wanted something else from my Facebook people, a particular kind of gift: pure, undiluted distraction from what was going on around, and in, me.

Some people are just good at that. Or, they are good at giving me the kinds of distractions that do the trick. Many of these are in the "used to know you slightly, looked you up" category. (And while some might expect many of these people to be old boyfriends, in fact, the few old boyfriends I have "friended" don't provide much distraction.) I have people who have friended me for other purposes, like to sell their books, but I find the "hide" button very useful for these folks. To stay on my page, you have to either be funny, post good music or art, or indulge me with political conversation (disagreement preferred). Lurkers I ignore, and some day I may just unfriend anyone who does not comment or post. I expect a certain amount of civility from my people, but some amount of tolerance for me, since my comments sometimes are teasingly obnoxious (I usually delete and often call to apologize when I go over the top.)

Good Facebook people aren't easy to find. They understand their posts on Facebooks as gifts, and they understand their gifts as acts of agression, much like Marcel Mauss described in his classic The Gift, many years ago. Mauss said that good gifts were aggressive because they called for a gift in return. A good Facebook post brings you in and makes you give something of yourself as well, either as a comment or as a new post in response. Facebook has recently created an app which some call "stalkers lists": you can get Facebook to figure out who has commented most on your wall, which you then publish, to the embarrassment of those who find themselves at the top. This is counterproductive -- people who comment a lot should be encouraged, not embarrassed. They have given you something for the gift you have given them.

My Facebook people also tend to be personalities in their own right, with strong opinions, not always my own. I live most of my life in what's called "The Leftmost City" where every conversation is preaching to the interminable -- and sometimes lovingly insufferable -- Left choir. My page provides me with smart people who don't always hold this point of view. It's sometimes rocky at first, but if we keep it up over several posts and comments, we sometimes come to a kind of understanding about what we agree, and disagree, about. For example, I am married to an articulate advocate of government regulation, and I tend to agree with his views. Yet, many people on my page find government to be a real problem. They tell me why, and I can respect them for what they say, but that respect happened only after we got into it on Facebook.

Yet, the variety on my page can be frightening. Today, I imagined what would happen if I invited all my Facebook people to a party and they all came. What would the tattoo artist say to the corporate attorney? What would the person who hailed the opening of the Northeast Passage say to the environmental activist? Would the 2nd wave feminists be willing to hang out with the third wavers who post risque stuff on my wall? What if the subject of anti-gang activist on trial for gang activity Alex Sanchez came up? Would some automatically assume he was innocent and others automatically assume he was guilty, or could they talk about it in some other way?

Fortunately, I make heavy use of filters; very few people can see my wall the way I do. I mostly do that to protect my grad students, who have been kind enough to let me into their world and who I want to be free to say what they want without worrying about what future employers might think. And I keep my mostly professional folks away from the personal stuff. The folks whom I let into all my filters don't know how lucky they are. And, very few people look at other people's walls, anyway. But I love my wall -- it is crazy, contradictory, resplendent with human folly: these people I don't know very well but whom I am in touch with every day.

Saving Us One Snack at a Time

It’s ironic that lawmakers in Washington are negotiating both health care and food safety bills this week, while new evidence shows that treating diet-related diseases like diabetes and heart disease is costing the country more than $140 billion a year in health costs. While legislators try to give us health coverage with one hand, they are threatening our health in The Food Safety Enhancement Act (H.R. 2749). A number of nonprofits who defend the ability of small farms to stay in business have put out an all-points bulletin this week that the food safety bill, in its current form, would make it impossible for small-scale and local food systems to survive. Many consumers depend on these alternatives as their way to insure the health of their families. The new food safety regulations, in terms of fees, inspections and traceability requirements, would simply make small-scale direct marketing too expensive. Anyone who has seen Food, Inc. would know the result: the monopoly that large scale agribusiness has over our stomachs would get even stronger, giving consumers little choice but to buy from the big guys who are part of the problem.

In my book, Nature’s Perfect Food, I showed that the industrialization of our dairy production system and the imposition of certain food safety regulations in the 1920s went hand-in-hand. And it led to the kind of industrial dairy foods we have today – Velveeta and pizza cheese. But it didn’t have to be that way: regulations could have been different and could have created a more diverse dairy system while still protecting consumers. Many of the nonprofit supporters of small farm systems are taking a “no government” attitude towards the new food safety bill. Alternative food system activists tend to be suspicious of government in general, like libertarian the organic farmer Joel Salatin, featured in Michael Pollan’s Ominvore’s Dilemma, who talks about his wish for “government-free” relationships between him and the people who buy from him. Some food politics observers, like myself, are more like the “goo-goos” (good government advocates) of the 1900s: we believe government can get it right, if they work on it. Legislators, however, aren’t doing it right when it comes to HR 2749. They are trying to pass this bill “under a suspension of the rules” that is, without allowing negotiation over amendments such as the Farr-Kaptur Amendment, which provides some regulatory relief for smaller food producers.

Yet, in the Senate, legislators are intensively negotiating the health care bill, trying to balance interests and get the best bill possible. They may fail, giving us yet another indication that government is not longer capable of governing. But if Congress is trying so hard on health care, why not the same kind of in-depth conversation on food safety as well? Isn’t getting food safety regulation right as important as making sure our health care regulations actually give us better health at a reasonable cost? This is an important question, since, if we hand our entire food system to large-scale industrial processors, we may, in fact, cancel out whatever benefits health care coverage will give us. As Food, Inc, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser and other food activists have shown, large scale industrial food businesses have an economic incentive to convince us that food created from various forms of corn actually comprise a balanced diet, a diet as balanced as the one the New York Times reported as on the table at the health care negotiations: chocolate-covered chips, beef jerky, and other salty snacks. Which is more risky for our nation’s health, the Senate Room Snack Diet or spinach salads?

The fact is that “interests,” in terms of food safety, have their undemocratic factors, the powerful lobbies, as much as we’ve seen in the health debate. The Organic Trade Association, a captured lobby group that claims to represent the whole industry but is mostly funded by large organic processors, has not come out in favor of the Farr-Kaptur Amendment. In fact, there is no mention of the amendment on their website at all. More grassroots groups are asking their members to call their representatives in favor of Farr-Kaptur. The amendment can provide the beginning of a larger conversation about getting government regulation right in terms of food safety.

Does “free information” make the university irrelevant?

I was sitting on my university loop bus, which is where I get to “test the temperature” of this current crop of students. A group of three sat across from me, looking very much like they fit into the category of first generation college students. They were accessing a cellphone app that gave them various pieces of trivia, on which they were all avidly focused.

“Did you know that a moth has no stomach?” the student holding the cellphone exclaimed

“No!” the others answered.

After reading several of these facts, one of the students exclaimed, “Why can’t school be like this, teaching us stuff we can really use?”

As a professor at this university, I was crestfallen. How can I compete with a cellphone app?

Getting off the bus, I met one of my own students. “I think the University as a system of knowledge is in trouble.” I said, and related the story of the cellphone trivia app to him.

“And you think that’s a problem?” he asked.

I don’t know. I teach classical sociology, citing Weber’s ideas about the legitimacy of authority. If students see a cellphone app as a more legitimate information authority than The University, doesn’t this traditional educational institution have a problem? I might not be so sensitive if it were not for the fact that the state is now proposing to cut my wage by 8 percent, making my full professor salary somewhat less than the pay of a large city trash collector. I might also be less sensitive if 40 percent of my students, in their evaluation of my Web 2.0 based class, had not seen me as largely irrelevant to their learning. When I taught Introduction to Sociology two decades ago, Professor was very close to the top of the list in terms of honorable status. I see – of course my research comes from the web -- that this position of honor is slipping. Certainly, we need our trash moved away from our living spaces. And no amount of Web 2.0 apps will move our trash for us. However, given Web 2.0, do we truly need professors?

I am a big fan of Web 2.0. I teach a course on collaborative sustainable design that uses Web 2.0 tools to allow students to collaborate for intersubjective learning. And I greatly cherish the new kinds of knowledge they get from working with each other rather than getting their heads filled with my lectures. My large lecture courses are interactive, but that’s different from this small lab class, in which cohorts of equals work together to accomplish a goal. It’s great to watch students learning from each other, and Web 2.0 tools like Google Docs and various collaborative wiki tools (such as Wikispaces and PBworks) are very useful in that process (or very frustrating, as my students have told me in my last set of evaluations for this course).

The university costs money. Web 2.0 is “free.” Does that free information compete with me and my role in society, making me less essential, less useful, less paid? Should I hang it up and let the web teach my students?

Interestingly, in their evaluation of this course, many of my students believed that a TA could meet most of their needs, and that my role was largely irrelevant. However, a majority of students also believed that I provided useful input to their projects. Useful, I am, but not essential.

I should say, however, that students’ evaluations were equally mixed about the benefits of Web 2.0 tools. They are frustrating, they (and I) all agreed, never quite meeting the ideals we expected of them. But, of course, professors never quite meet the expectations of students as well. As a person, and therefore not a program, I am probably better at managing student expectations than Web 2.0 tools, but I’m not always sure. There’s something about Google Docs that creates an infrastructure of promise, of hope, that I, as an individual, will never live up to. How do I manage the expectations when I’m in competition with Google Docs, when I’m in fact dependent upon Google Docs to get things done myself? Does Google Docs become, in 1980s lingo, the “locus of authority”?

The University, as an institution, is going to have to face these issues head on. How do we make these tools work for us rather than compete with us? How do we appreciate how “group projects” become so much better with these tools, while not letting the tools become the center of the educational process?

My students, the focus of my anxiety, have also been the most assuring. In their evaluation of my class, when I expected them to write about the technologies, the “active learning” classroom I managed to cob together out of nothing, what they really wanted to talk about was what they learned about from learning to deal with each other. They learned how to do something, even if it was failing to do something, with other people in an active, engaged, and often painful, way. And they appreciated that more than any course design I could provide, although, I like to think that the course design had something to do with it. I’m hoping that, maybe five years down the road, they stop being annoyed at the ways in which I failed to provide the best organized of courses and realize that what they got done with each other had something to do with me, too.

Walking to Work

I live within walking distance to work, about a 35 minute walk uphill, through the university arboretum (with its signs, "Reunite Gondwana"), through the greenspace meadow, across a few parking lots and up to College 8, which houses my office and my department. I seldom walk, mostly bus but sometimes drive, the 1.5 miles up to campus.

This would not be as much of a problem if I weren't part of a group of professors establishing a "sustainability curriculum" on campus. In lecture after lecture, I am reminded about the fact that walking is good for me, that driving is bad for the environment, and that by taking the time to walk instead of driving, I would make a contribution to sustainability, fighting global warming, and lessening the huge traffic problem on campus. When the Campus Sustainability Coordinator speaks in our introduction to sustainability design class, she hammers the point home: our university carbon footprint comes from all the driving and flying professors do. If we could just convince professors to stay put, or to walk or bus or bike, we could make real progress in carbon reduction.

Which is why, whatever method I'm using to get to campus, I generally spend that time thinking about how to make it more possible to get there a better way. I keep thinking that, rather than providing disincentives by making it expensive to park on campus and hard to find a parking space when I do drive, perhaps the university should try to eliminate the obstacles to my walking, busing and biking to campus. Disincentives are annoying by definition and so as I drive to campus and notice how hard they make it to do otherwise, I take to a constant internal grumbling of "if only they would..."

A few years ago, the university actually responded to my internal grumbling (which I would occasionally express outwardly in various university transportation surveys). They put in a campus bus that passed close to my house every 15 minutes or so. When I get it together to step on the bus, a sense of peace falls upon me, I breathe more deeply, and maybe even smile as I thank the busdriver for picking me up. It seems almost perfect. Thank you! But this bus only works when classes are in session, 30 weeks a year. I work many more weeks than that.

But on those days when I walk, rushing because 35 minutes out of my day is a lot of time, I grumble. Why do they make it so hard to walk, with all the fences surrounding the university? Why can't I just walk straight up or down between my home and my office? Why did they take out the ladder fence that used to be there when I first arrived on campus, enabling me to walk a much more direct route? Why do I have to go out of my way and take extra time to walk around to the entrance to the arboretum? Why is it so unclear whether or not it's legal to bike through the arboretum to the bike path (much easier for my 51-year-old body than the alternate bike-path entrance)? Why is the greenspace so lacking in people and therefore so isolated that I feel the need to put up my female-at-risk antenna, the ones I grew when, in the early 80s, the Trailside Killer was my Glen Park, SF neighbor who stalked exactly this landscape? Why does the Trailside Killer have to have anything to do with the question of sustainability?

These are the sort of things I have thought about during my walks, although a kind of positive "unintended consequence" has recently saved me from growing my risk antennae quite so vigorously: the arboretum folks are taking over the meadows and "managing" them for specific landscape restoration goals. As a result, the path I take through the meadow is now lined with 12 foot deer fences, to keep deer from eating the new plants they have planted in the meadow. Because I have heard (from victims) the stories of how attacks have happened in places a lot like this (the person in the bushes waiting to step out and grab the unsuspecting off a trail) the presence of these fences is remarkably soothing to me. They make me feel, at least, that it would be tough for anyone to step out and grab me off the trail. Fortunately, rapists are not built like deer, who are not at all deterred by this new, tall obstacle. I always see them grazing inside the fence, eating those young plants.

The real reason I drive, investing in a day permit, at least once a week is the fact that I'm not just a driver, I'm a trucker. I "truck" in the traditional sense that my jobs (as professor and mother) require that I move things around, like computers and books for work and children for that other work of motherhood. If my leftie city had a schoolbus system the way many more conservative cities do, I would almost never need to drive to work. The university used to provide a bus system for my books as well, delivering them to my department mailbox. Despite their new dedication to lowering the school's carbon footprint, this policy will only force me to drive more.

Then there's the institutions involved at the other end of my kid pickup. If I felt confident that my daughter could safely walk from her school to my husband's office downtown, he and I wouldn't have to join the traffic jam that is constant at the intersection between downtown and the industrial park where her school is located. I realize that we are squandering carbon for what may be an overly middle-class mom concern for our daughter's safety, but I don't see too many other 13-year-old girls walking alone around this industrial park. I've asked the school to help me form a walking partner group, but school administrators have lots of other things on their minds. Their green committee has created a carpool list, but my daughter's schedule changes all the time; we haven't had the consistency to use it. Walking would be the flexible solution.

In the thin European vs. fat American discussions, it turns out that the amount of walking Europeans do is as important or more than differences in diet. When I get the chance to walk somewhere, it would be great not to have to think the whole time I'm walking, "Why can't I do this more?"

Angry Men, Angry Mothers

There are usually only a few men in my Sociology of Food class. In their answers to questions in class and in homework, most are indistinguishable from the women: concerns over diet and body image, some hints of anorexia, love of cooking, wishing there were more time, and money, to cook well and to eat well with others.

But there are always a few men who are in the course but not of it. They sit uncomfortably in the back or the far sides of the classroom. The look on their faces during class discussion indicates that they think what we are doing is a waste of time. They come to me bewildered over the class assignments, or they write answers to the assignment questions that are mostly critiques of the questions.

I try to bring in all points of view in class, including the "why the hell does this class exist" point of view. But if I pay too much attention to the disengaged men, if I look at them too much during classtime, if I maintain what I consider a good measure of vulnerability to class dynamics during discussion and in my occasional lectures, I get nervous and start to teach badly. These men, I realize, are not just in my food class, there are always a few in the classroom whenever I teach, but the food class is particularly interactive and one of the smaller (at 86 students) that I teach, so I tend to notice them more there.

This quarter, I've created some new assignments, one of which was to interview three people about their "food-centered lives." As usual, these men made it clear that such an assignment is a waste of time, and that whatever I was asking them to do and whatever conceptual tools I was asking them to use to analyze these interviews were useless. But it was in the interviews themselves that I got a glimpse of where their disengagement comes from, where the anger that makes them refuse to listen to the ideas presented and, in particular, to the person presenting them. The anger comes from their mothers.

Nearly all the students interviewed family for this assignment. Many of them interviewed grandparents, but a number interviewed parents as well, particularly mothers. We had read Meredith Abarca's Voices in the Kitchen, which talks about how Latina women sometimes turn the kitchen, which can be a place of oppression for women, into as a space of creativity, power and independence. The kitchen is always both a place of subjugation and empowerment, but creative cooks play with this boundary, using their artistry to push into the realm of power over their lives. Several students interpreted this in their interviews as women learning to love their kitchen and their place in it, which isn't quite what Abarca was saying. They interpreted consent as creativity. However, the angry men had a very different take on the book: that it didn't tell them anything about their mother's food lives. Their mothers, they said, always wanted to be cooks in the home, but they had to work, and they spent their lives angry at their fathers because they wanted to stay home but couldn't, because their fathers didn't make enough money to be the sole breadwinner.

These were a separate set of moms from the other students in the class, the students who came from full-time mom households or from households where moms were happy with their paid work lives. These students told stories about their mom's happiness in the kitchen or about how their moms were constantly juggling their work and kitchen lives, or how their mom's and dads shared the cooking the way they shared bringing home the bacon. These stories weren't always about family contentment, but they were about how people coped with the lives they had, rather than wished for lives that were completely different.

The men with angry moms cared deeply about their mom's anger, and were angry for them. These, I realized, were also moms I didn't meet very often. As a professional mom, I live in a town and a neighborhood that requires an income that only high-earning men (high enough to also have stay-at-home wives) or two-professional families can make. The working class moms who have to work and are angry about it don't live where I live, don't go to school with my children. I only meet them in the presence of the angry men in my classroom.

Of course, that is another reason why these women and their sons are so angry. The feminist revolution that enabled me to have a life of professional juggling -- happy with both family and work even while it drove me crazy on a daily basis -- is the same one that took them away from the kitchen where they wanted to be. I benefited from this revolution by entering the workforce and competing with their husbands for education and the professional jobs available with that education. Standing in front of that classroom talking about kitchens, my brains chock full of the social capital that only comes from a huge social investment in a person's education, I stood for exactly what the angry mens' angry moms had lost: I was the professional woman describing the changing world in which fulfilling my dream came at their expense. These men grew up around this anger, which I suspect these women must have expressed not just as anger toward their low-earning husbands, but also anger toward women like me, who grew up with a mom who was happy to go into the workforce even if it was under the unfortunate circumstances of single momhood.

These angry men will never accept me as a professor, no matter what I say, or how I try to include their perspectives in class discussion. I can try to expand the concepts of the course to understand the frustrated kitchens they come from, part of a world in which single-earner families with happy moms spending hours in the kitchen only exist at the top of the heap. I can explain how academic women don't tend to tell the stories of the working class women who want to stay home. But the contradiction will remain apparent: I am what angry mens' angry moms are mad about. Simply by being who I am, I am an imperfect political contradiction that no amount of intellectual inclusivity can resolve.