Display and Connectivity

An aside:
Due to the lack of connectivity in my apartment, and in the spirit of trying to make sense of Flagstaff, I expect that I will be posting more regularly via the Tumblr account than through Blogger. For those who notice these once in a while on the Facebook feed--as all posts are routed to the Facebook via the Tumblr--nothing besides slightly more frequent posts will be noticed. For those who follow the blog itself, you may want to check more regularly at the Tumblr (http://bakingphilosophy.tumblr.com). The Tumblr will continue to be where articles, videos, images, and links will be posted more regularly.

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For many people, this will be nothing new. I have had many conversations with women that have included this sort of consideration, but I felt it rather potently today, just a few scant hours ago.

The undergraduate students are returning to NAU. Many, many of them appear extraordinarily young. I suppose that is in part due to the playful activity of first-years in the early stages of orientation. They have some sort of treasure hunt afoot in order to get a lay of the land around here. I suppose I have done something similar in my few trips to campus--when I visited in early summer, last Tuesday, the Monday before--and have biked through and adjacent to it while in Flagstaff. Suddenly there is the grand transition about the campus, a metamorphosis or awakening into itself. Very soon, it will be an academy again where classes are commonplace, professors instruct, and students are everywhere.

I spent most of my morning amidst the SLUGG garden, a student-run garden near my department's offices, where I read and thought and wrote and generally enjoyed the clear air, bright but shaded light, and near absence of fellow students, my age or younger. I moved to North campus for lunch and after lunch, read for a spell outside the library while ominous clouds scuttled in overhead. I realized my posture and demeanor, and at one point my tone, were just so, sculpted as it were to make clear certain personal affectations.

Somewhere along the way, I had put myself on display for people to see. It has occurred to me that I make more of an effort to dress this way or that over the past year, but this had all the more to do with composure, eye contact, stature were intended to inform everyone of my status, my persona, my image of myself as a graduate student, intellectual, and informed--let's use the term...--resident. I can't say why, exactly, but there I was strutting my feathers just as any other peacock might.

Anyway, I have since moved inside to use the internet, power, the facilities, and to avoid the rain. I feel more myself inside, less strained to make myself into a particular manifestation. Instead, here I am working on my computer, taking advantage of wireless that I do not have in the apartment. I want to feel like the showmanship was a sort of game rather than a mask, that it is something I can play that doesn't play me. All the same, I know that the line between them is thin and that worries me.