¶ About I
This is a personal website that has at times in the past aspired to be something more. Those aspirations are all gone now: it’s just another personal website.
By me. I am Jeffrey Windsor. I am a Mormon father in his late 30s. I have seven children. I am a PhD student in English Renaissance literature at The Ohio State University. I am a Macintosh user. I am a Volkswagen driver, though I would prefer to ride my (1986 Specialized Allez SE, steel-frame) bike. I am a public transit user. I am a teacher, and have taught composition, Shakespeare, poetry, and English literature. I am a concerned American who doesn’t like categorizing himself and is uncomfortable with the fact that it is so difficult to be optimistic about the political process. I read every day from the Bible and the Book of Mormon. I use Emacs as my primary method of text creation on the computer. I collect pencils; I am a participant in the Pencil of the Month Club. I wear bow ties. I dislike tattoos. I do not watch television, though I do sometimes watch television shows online. I have allergies to, among many other things, pollen, and therefore I hate mowing my lawn. I live in a suburb outside Columbus, Ohio and have a substantial lawn.
Before returning to study in 2004, I worked for a number of years in high tech, and I was on the receiving end of the internet boom of the late 1990s.1 I studied at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts and later also took the courses to become a master gardener. I wrote a novel. While a teenager, I hiked large portions of the John Muir trail and to the top of Mt. Whitney. I did not vote for George W. Bush in 2004 though I did in 2000. I share the same middle initial as George W. Bush, though my middle name is not Walker. When I lived in Massachusetts, I was a registered Libertarian.
I find John McCain creepy and untrustworthy; I am prepared to be very annoyed with President Obama by mid-2009. I never liked Romney, though I was concerned that many voters rejected him because of his church membership, which church I also am a member. When I taught at BYU, I always encouraged my students to vote Democrat even if they were Republicans so that Utah might gain some balance and get some attention and respect by the federal government. I am not a Republican. I am not a Democrat. I now live in a swing state, and I vote.
I have no problem splitting an infinitive; ending a sentence with a preposition is something I’m also OK with. Sometimes I write things I think are funny, even when the joke is way too strained. I do not edit things on my blog even though I think I should because someday it will be seen by members of a hiring committee. I still want to have a blog that’s read widely.
I have no sense of smell. I can smell nothing. I sometimes tell my friends that I deserve handicapped parking because smell is just as much one of my senses as sight or hearing is. I do not know if blind or deaf people get handicapped parking. I do not really believe that I should be allowed to use handicapped parking. I used to really enjoy fine food but did not consider myself a food snob. I don’t think much about food anymore.
I like to read but am concerned that I am not a very good reader. I enjoy young adult fiction even though I know that it won’t help me in my career and might make me a worse writer. I feel like I’m a pretty good casual writer, but have no confidence about my skills as an academic writer. I take to heart criticism from a former advisor who expressed doubt in my ability to write with sufficient density. I secretly hate dense academic prose and have a series of justifications for my hatred. I know that all my justifications are really only attempts to assuage my fear that I am not good enough.
I like to talk about sex in literature but I do not actually like sex in literature. I like the attitudes about sex and marriage and gender and families that shape literature. I like formalism. I like to read against the grain. I like illustrative historical anecdotes. I like textual criticism. I like book history. I aspire to have sufficient energy to publish widely and to be well-regarded in my department. I don’t care if I am part of a movement. I think literature and the liberal arts are more important than professional education. I think studying business is a waste of time.
I procrastinate. I speak easily with strangers. If we use my latest teaching evaluations, I am an amazing teacher. I rock, or so I was told my one of my students in said class in said evaluations. I am amazing. I am enthusiastic. I am the best teacher she has ever had. I am chronically slow in returning student papers because I hate grading student papers. I like to lecture. I like to debate. I like the shock of discovery when a student asks a question that I didn’t think I knew the answer to, but apparently do. I like to have students laugh and fight and epiphanize. I like chalk and dislike whiteboards. I throw chalk at students, but only at the good students who I know will appreciate a chalk-throwing teacher. I am constantly surprised at how young my students are. I am constantly humbled by how much better and smarter my students are than I.
I like baseball. I like American things. I think of my California as something that existed long before I was born and is more about orange groves and clay and dogs than it is about entertainment or technology or education. I grew up in California and have no desire to live there. I want to live in the West where I can have a picnic in the mountains on any particular afternoon and where I can escape to the mountains for a weekend camping. I am an enthusiastic armchair ultralight backpacker; I love my Hennessy Hammock. I like apple pie more than any other kind of pie.
I pace. I frequently walk a couple of miles in a fixed pattern downstairs, after Kate goes to sleep. When I pace, I work through lesson plans and lectures. When I worked in business, when I got going on an idea in a meeting, I’d get up and start to pace in the conference room. I liked that people thought this was the eccentric behavior of a wunderkind. I tried to foster the image that I was a wunderkind because I didn’t have a college degree and yet was sometimes the guy in charge. I like to pace in the dark so I don’t get distracted by what I see; I only want enough light that I don’t bump my hip against the countertop. When I pace at night, I don’t like to stop until my legs ache and I am ready to fall asleep immediately. I hate laying in bed awake.
I pray every day, a couple of times a day, on my knees. I am pretty chatty and conversational when I talk to God. I listen. I attend the temple just enough so that I feel only a little guilty. I like telling people that I am a Mormon partly just to see their reaction because I don’t talk the way many people expect Mormons to talk. I have studied extensively both (early modern) Catholic and (early modern) Protestant doctrine and feel that I can speak about them with some expertise. I am happy to explain the differences. I like that I know more about Protestant history and doctrine than most Protestants. I am not a Protestant. I like to tell people that no, I do not think that they are going to hell just because they’re not Mormons because we Mormons don’t believe that non-Mormons will go to hell.2 I question the motivation of mega-church, brand-name preachers, but I don’t think they’re going to hell either. I love that Mormon doctrine teaches that reason, logic, liberty, and agency to be unimpeachable principles. I speak Portuguese because I was a missionary in Brazil. I visited Portugal and discovered that the accent there makes their Portuguese virtually incomprehensible for a North American who learned Brazilian Portuguese. I get nervous around Portuguese speakers because I don’t speak it very well anymore. I am convinced that someone who really follows what it says in the Bible would be a friend to everyone, by which I mean everyone regardless of their choices or opinions. I want to be like that. I try.
I read Shakespeare and John Donne and Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson and John Milton for fun. I used to aspire to be a poet, and then a short storyist, and then an essayist, and then a novelist. Now I aspire to write a good-enough dissertation very efficiently. I aspire to a tenure-track job at a mid-level university that’s big enough that I’m not expected to teach freshman comp ever again. I want the freedom to someday research and publish about American transcendentalism or about films that are not Shakespeare adaptations. I collect Shakespeare adaptations on DVD by telling my wife I’m going to use them in classes I teach. Except for Room with a View, I would rather read the book or play or poem than watch the adaptation. I sometimes read Renaissance poetry aloud to my children whether they like it or not. I recite the opening 14 lines to Canterbury Tales to my children at high volume during mealtimes at least four times a year. I have encouraged my children to memorize short poems by William Carlos Williams when they are in preschool because I love them. I intentionally used an ambiguous pronoun to finish off that last sentence because I wanted it to mean both that I force my children to learn the poems because I love the poems and because I love my children. Because I do.
I spank my children playfully every time we walk up the stairs together. I sometimes put one of the toddlers on my head and tell him that he is a hat. I tickle my children often. I fear that they have inherited my weaknesses when I see them do things in the same crummy ways I do. I yell at my children when I see them do things in the same crummy ways I do, and I feel terrible at my hypocrisy. I want my children to love America and love the mountains and love the west, but I also want them to question America and to push back against political promises. I took my three oldest children backpacking last year. I have taught my children to love the Red Sox. I have taught my children to growl and mumble disparaging remarks about the intelligence of the driver when they see a Hummer on the road. I love that my children love to read and that they blow their allowance buying books. I am afraid that I push Teddy too hard and Jack not hard enough. I get scared that they’ll grow up and not recognize how smart and useful and valuable and worthwhile and clever and important they are. I am constantly humbled by how much better and smarter my children are than I. I am afraid that sometimes my students get more of my best self than my children do. I am pleased that my children seem to be excelling even in spite of my shortcomings.
I am not afraid to write lengthy pieces, at least by internet standards. I recognize that I might not be successful in achieving the effect I’m going for here. I am going to post it anyway.
NOTES
1 Which is why I can afford to have seven children while still finishing a PhD.
2 This bears a longer explanation, but the short version is that you can’t go to hell unless you’re a Mormon. You’re not qualified for hell until you’ve a) understood the full extent of your behavior and b) actually chosen to go to hell. Thus Mormons don’t preach hell-and-damnation, fire-and-brimstone because we don’t believe it. And I get depressed when people think we do.
19 September 2008