Monthly Archives: December 2022

Cold

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When I returned home to Kansas City at the beginning of December, I was pleased to be able to go outside without a scarf or a hat. For at least those first two days it was pleasant here, with temperatures in the 40s and 50s Fahrenheit. I got pretty lucky with my own long drive west being during such a warm spell. The only snow I saw was in Michigan along I-94. Even in Chicago, a city famous for winter snow, I found only rain. So, when I first read that we were expecting a surge of Arctic winds to descend south down the Great Plains into the United States from Canada around Christmas, I, like everyone else, braced for the impact. 

The worst of the cold began to arrive here on Wednesday, 21 December, with temperatures that night reaching below 0ºF and wind chills well into the negative double digits with the cold bottoming out around -35ºF (-37ºC). Things didn’t really improve for a while just yesterday we started to see regular temperatures above freezing again. At first, I thought this storm was going to miss the Northeast, that it was something we’d have here in the Midwest, but as the week went by I watched as the storm moved across the continental radar first in a southeasterly direction across the Midwest giving what turned out to be a mere glancing blow to Kansas City, before turning northeast with the influence of Gulf and Atlantic winds and heading straight up the East Coast. 

Now, as I write this the City of Buffalo and its suburbs remain buried under feet of snow with nearly 30 dead. Air travel remains broken down across the Midwest and East, and journalists & meteorologists alike are calling this one “the storm of the century.” It proves that for all our technology and innovations, we remain subject to the whims of the weather. On a normal day someone with enough income could conceivably commute by air from one region of this country to another for work, perhaps not on a daily basis but certainly on a weekly one. Yet when extreme cold and blinding snow such as this barrel across North America we’re at its mercy.The funny thing about the last week is that looking ahead to the next few days things are supposed to greatly improve. Not only are we in Kansas City forecasted to rise out of our current frozen state but our temperatures are apparently supposed to climb back up into the high 50s Fahrenheit, warm enough for a nice walk in the park without a scarf, warm enough for some rain to wash away at least some of the snow and salt that’s making our streets and sidewalks dangerous to pass. Maybe that’s a good sign for 2023, that the new year will arrive to better weather than 2022 is leaving behind.

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Thirty

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Yesterday, December 20th, I celebrated my 30th birthday. It seems strange to me to be thinking about my thirties as here and now, rather than something in the perhaps not so distant future, yet here they are. One story that comes to mind about the thirtieth birthday is the time when Julius Caesar found himself standing in front of a statue of Alexander the Great when the Roman general was himself 30. He found himself weeping at the thought of how little he had accomplished at that point compared what to the Macedonian king and conqueror of much of the known world had done by the age of 30.

I for one don’t care as much for conquest or war, I’d rather avoid both and live peacefully, yet I still had my own moment of reflection just a few days ago at the tomb of the man who I have on some occasions referred to as my “patron saint” in the American civic religion.

Last week, on my move back to Kansas City, I stopped in Springfield, Illinois to pay a visit at the Lincoln Tomb. It’s one such monument that I’ve visited a handful of times before, but never before this time have I been alone with the Lincolns in the building. We are at a moment in our history when things seem to rhyme with Lincoln’s day, when we Americans are divided against one another to such an extreme not seen in these last 160 years. Lincoln has always been a sort of patron saint for me in our American civic religion, someone who I looked up to as a boy in the Chicago suburbs over twenty years ago, and so in this visit I found myself asking him to guide our leaders today, to offer them wisdom to “bind up the nation’s wounds” as he endeavored to do.

In a day as now when the loudest voices nearly drown out all the rest in our public discourse we need more quiet people, like Lincoln, to step up and speak out. I have tried in my own way both in public and in the Wednesday Blog to do this but have felt inadequate to the task and unheard by society at large. I worry today that we have lost sight of the need for balance in our lives, a drive for excess, loud colors, and garish noise contributing to the cacophony which makes maintaining our great society more difficult with each passing day. We ought to remember the common humanity that binds us together and “confidently hope that all will yet be well.”I hope these next years of my fourth decade will be good ones, that all the dreams of personal and professional accomplishments will be realized, and that we may again have a time of unity, and perhaps peace, in this country and around the globe.

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Cosmos

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Cosmos comes to English from Ancient Greek, where it referred to a sort of order in nature, the opposite of Chaos. This meaning stuck into the medieval period in works like the twelfth-century philosopher Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia. In the Renaissance, the period I study, a science called cosmography developed in Europe as a way of making sense of all the worlds the explorers setting out from Portugal, Spain, France, and England were encountering. Still later, in the early nineteenth century the German scientific polymath Alexander von Humboldt named his greatest work, the five volume book Kosmos, which sought to describe the totality of nature as he and his colleagues had observed throughout his long lifetime. Today, Cosmos speaks to something far exceeding the Earth in scale, it’s the observable Universe with a potential for even more that we presently don’t know to be included under that cosmic umbrella.

A term like Cosmos is important because it helps us understand how we make sense of everything around us. I feel like I can imagine the entirety of the Universe but I’m sure if I saw an artistic rendering of the visible Universe, I’d feel like I was seeing a new face. This weekend as I was on my way west back to Kansas City through Chicago, the two cities I’ve called home over these past thirty years, I found my perspective shifting away from that of the stranger in the Northeast to one of familiarity and comfort back in my own native Midwest again. Arriving in Chicago I was delighted to realize I didn’t need the GPS in my car anymore, I knew exactly where I was in a place so vividly familiar to me. The same can be said for the rest of my drive west of Chicago, everything was familiar and wonderful to see.

My own Cosmos then, the order that keeps my life together, is built with Midwestern sentiments and expectations. Something that made life in New York difficult for me was how the customs there are at least somewhat different from what I’m used to. Even in these last few weeks there I still had to remind myself it wasn’t intentional rudeness when people I knew wouldn’t acknowledge me, let alone smile and say “hi” when we’d walk past one another, it’s just the impersonality of life in a place that has never really become familiar to me.

In these last three years I’ve now stretched my world out further, filling in many of the gaps of my own experience here in North America with trips to nearly all of the major cities on the East Coast and to Montréal and Toronto. I now know so many of the highways that link the Midwest & Great Lakes with the east. I found myself thinking about how as a child living in the Chicago suburbs that my family never took road trips east out of Chicago to Michigan, Indiana, or Ohio, nor north to Wisconsin. Instead, whenever we traveled it was west to St. Louis, Kansas City, and Denver further afield. Thus, the ways heading east were new to me as I drove along them this weekend, the easy drive on I-94 from Detroit to Chicago being one such example.

I’ve known many people who define themselves by where they’re from, for good or ill. There have been plenty who are loud and proud supporters of their hometown baseball team, and others who use their origins as an excuse to be unkind to the people around them. Over these last three years I had moved into a state of mind where my own origins were somewhat more dormant, sure I had all sorts of art up on the walls in my apartment celebrating both Chicago and Kansas City, and I’ve interchangeably worn my Cubs and Royals hats, but I’d begun to think of myself more as a person who can shift between places and communities, a skill that I needed to develop in Binghamton. Yet upon my return first on Saturday to Chicago and then on Monday to Kansas City I found all those old emotions and memories flooding back. 

One of the parts of the Christmas story that I always remember is that St. Joseph had to go to Bethlehem from Nazareth to participate in the census because that’s where he was born. I am who I am just as much because of the places I’ve grown up in and the people I’ve lived among as the experiences I’ve had as an individual trying to make things work over these last three years alone in a lonely valley far from home. Home is a word of tremendous significance for me, it’s the place where I feel the most comfortable, the safest, and the most appreciated. For much of my life I’ve seen both Chicago and Kansas City as my home. It’s a sentiment I’ve reinforced this weekend on my first visit to the city of my birth since the pandemic began. Were I to say I have a “homeland,” Lake Michigan would remain its eastern boundary, the Great Plains beyond Kansas City its western. That is the heart of my Cosmos.

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1st Anniversary

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A year ago, I decided on a whim to turn my weekly blog into a podcast. I’m a bit late on the blogging game, and I always knew the podcast likely wouldn’t be one of the most popular out there, but despite all that I knew one thing for sure: it would be fun to make. I quickly found the audio editing enjoyable, and after the first couple weeks decided to keep things up, to add new elements into the recordings, and see where this would take me.

Now, one year in I’ve recorded 415 minutes of the podcast, according to Spotify, or 6 hours, 55 minutes. That’s enough to listen to for the last couple days of driving during my Longest Commute this August, or enough to get you west across Kansas on I-70 from Kansas City with an extra 50 minutes of podcasts to spare for those first flat miles in Colorado. It’s a big milestone for a project that survives depending on how much fun I’m having with it. Each week I know I could end this show, even end the Wednesday Blog all together, if I’m tired of it.

I think the reason why I keep this going is because I enjoy getting to write about something other than history every week. It could be as mundane a topic as highway signs or as personal a story as how I ended up working in Binghamton, NY. For the longest while I found it funny that the top rated episode by listener numbers was “Episode Untitled, or Humanity and What We Can Do About It,” which has had 34 plays to date. Currently, “Episode Untitled” ranks ninth in the standings, just above this summer’s excited reflections on the launch of Artemis I and below my episode on “Suspending Disbelief”, and the necessity for imagination to keep our lives fresh and exciting.

I was surprised to see “The Longest Commute” perform so poorly overall. While the first episode is ranked at seventh, “Part 3” sits at 28th and “Part 2” at 34th, well below my estimates. This trio of episodes, which I used to end the first season of the podcast, were inspired by the pair of blog posts I wrote in June 2021 about my trip with my Dad across Colorado and Utah, both of which performed extraordinarily well both with my usual readers and with members of the public who found them through WordPress and Twitter. So, the fact that “The Longest Commute, Part 2” ended up only getting 18 listeners is disappointing, but something I’ve learned from.

My two lowest played episodes, two that I really hoped would get more listeners are “Vote!“, the first Wednesday Blog Tuesday Special released a month ago on Election Day, and “How Space Exploration Can Unite Us,” which I released following the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) last December. Even my February 2022 episode “Patience” only got 10 plays, and sits at 51st in the rankings. I’ve learned to be patient with these listener numbers, whether it be with the disappointment with the longer episodes that I put a lot of work into, like “The Longest Commute” or the shorter ones like June 2022’s episode “Kitty,” which at 67 plays is currently ranked at the top of the most played episodes of the show. And, of the episodes with musical interludes and bonus songs, you’ve seemed to like “S’Wonderful” the most at 46 plays with my two baseball episodes “Bad Practices in Baseball Broadcasting” (21 plays) and “Baseball is Back” (20 plays) ranked 27th and 29th respectively.

I’ve begun to incorporate guest voices into the podcast, from the voice of dead presidents, the talented actor Michael Ashcraft, to my good friend Alex Brisson who joined me to talk about the 2011 silent movie The Artist this Spring. This is something I want to do more, in the long run I have an idea for an expanded Wednesday Blog format where this weekly editorial would remain at the center of the show, but there’d also be a weekly musical interlude and a conversation included for a 30 minute episode. We’ll see how or when that’ll happen.

I want to thank you, my audience, for listening in over this last year. While most of you (74%) have been here in the United States, there has been a steady and growing listenership elsewhere around the globe. I’ve had a fair number of listeners in Ireland (9%) and the United Kingdom (4%), with the odd listener here and there in France, India, Tanzania, Canada, and Saudi Arabia. Most of you seem to be finding the podcast through the Wednesday Blog website, though I’ve got a fair number of listeners tuning in elsewhere. Anchor tells me there are 23 people in my audience, two less than the average size of my classes here at Binghamton University.

I’ve been surprised and excited to hear passing mentions of The Wednesday Blog from friends who haven’t come up in any of the analytical data, people who’ve read or listened to this. There’s a small group of friends, and my parents, who I send this to each week, and who have given me good feedback each time, but then there’s those of you who I don’t know but deeply appreciate who listen to this podcast and read this blog. I hope I can keep this going for you guys for a while yet.

So, from me to you, thank you!

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