The Dancing Sausage Web Journal

At the beginning of this semester I had a conversation with Kellan in which I tweaked his nose about how transient his life is. “How do you ever intend to effect sustainable social change if you keep moving around?” I asked him, cheekily. “Who said I did?” he responded. When I pushed him a little more, he allowed that he wasn’t sure he believed in change.

This revelation troubled me rather deeply, for reasons I’m still straightening out. I saved the communication on my desktop for later reference, hoping to come back to it.

I’ve had ample time to meditate on the process of change and what role I want to take in it this semester. In a class called Technology and School Change, we’re reading a truly amazing book titled Diffusion of Innovations which discusses how new ideas, technologies, and practices get spread. I don’t have a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point around, but I imagine it relied heavily on this book, a 518-page compendium of research on change across about eight different academic fields over a period of just about exactly a hundred years. Sixty of those pages are references. It’s written by a pioneer in the field who has been updating the book regularly since its first publication in 1962. With that kind of heft it’s amazing that the book is readable, but the ideas in it are well-illustrated and rigorously organized, and all in all it’s quite engaging.

Meanwhile, the class I’m taking on the history of communications also focuses on how change happens. In it we investigate the much broader topic of communications systems and the transformations of society they accompany and contribute to.

The net effect of the two courses has been a split in my take on change. I feel I’ve gotten a very clear sense of how change is made in on a small scale, and like what I know might prove effective at some point. By contrast, I’m increasingly overwhelmed by the impossibility of effecting change on a large scale, compounding the hopelessness I first started to feel on September 11th.

I was going back to graduate school, I figured this summer, to think about how I really wanted to work for equality. I hadn’t thought too hard about it; in fact, going to a school of education for a degree in communications was a sneaky way out of deciding what I wanted to do, since it encompassed so many disciplines. Now I feel like I should drop out for a semester and reconsider what I’m aiming for and what skills I need to pick up along the way.

…

I started to write something here about the disconnect I see between the literature on change (and its history) and the strategies of the activist groups I’ve been involved with, how their strategies are limited to a rather small toolkit, and many of the tools don’t take into account how people adopt changes or the historical complexities of societal change. This was spurred in part by Evan’s recent outlining of a book chapter he’s apparently writing about Indymedia. I see a lot of anarchist posturing there, and not a lot of attempt to spread Indymedia to more people by understanding how it would fit in with their culture, whether its aims would be viewed as an advantage by them, who might get involved first in a given community and how to leverage that to get more people involved, etc. Then again maybe that’s someone else’s chapter.

Anyway the writing proved to be a huge endeavor. I’m really out of touch with Indymedia, I only feel able to comment on it within the context of the United States, and I kept wondering why I felt so compelled to rehash and analyze it that I might want to write so much about it. I guess Indymedia’s meaning in my life isn’t as settled as Hampshire’s is right now. (In the context of grad school and continuing the study of education, having gone to Hampshire suddenly makes a shitload more sense than it did during my Div III or in successive years.) I also think it’s deeply deeply flawed! ahem. but yeah, besides, everyone in my research group is sick and I think I’m coming down with it. Sarah said “viral meningitis” today. I sd shut up dont jinx us.

Speaking of sick, tomorrow the cat goes to the vet to be dewormed! Will this never end?!!!

Hey ma, how’s this for making you feel old: Your eldest daughter just found her first grey hair. I mean on my own head; of course I always used to find yours fixed to the mirror by the sebum of their own follicles when we shared a bedroom and bathroom in junior high. I never figured out why you did that. I guessed it was a sense of idle horror at their progress, an absentminded reflex to sober you up against some other impulse I never could fathom either.

I was running my fingers through Jacob’s grey hairs again last night, the thin silver veins running through the long dark stuff at his temples, and telling him again that they make him look “distinguished.” He was telling me he’s afraid of getting old. He’s afraid of losing his ability to do things, and of losing his mind. He has a grandfather who has lost his, and it’s hard to watch.

I’m not so scared of that; parts of my family have histories of staying sharp until unusually ripe old ages, and the ones who have lost their minds either seemed to enjoy it to some extent or to compensate by filling in gaps with what remained of their logic. And I trust my mind; it’s my favorite toy, and it hasn’t lost its novelty despite 26 years of play. I even expect to be more open to new ideas for longer than most of the professors I’m dealing with right now.

I am scared of being single for long enough that I’m not attractive to anyone anymore, though, an echo set up in my head by the muffled howling of one or two of my older female relatives. I haven’t even had a chance to think of myself as having a broad aesthetic appeal for more than a few years; to lose it after so little time seems unfair.

But these hairs — I do think there’s actually two, one is no more than an inch long at this point but both have the wiry quality of real grey hairs — aren’t really wigging me out yet, so to speak. There’s just two. For the moment I can view them as freak accidents having nothing to do with the rest of my body. I’m more flexible than I’ve been in years, and I feel pretty good.

But jesus, grey hairs. I haven’t even had kids yet. I’m not even thirty.