Mountains Made Low

Well I would be, if I hadn’t learned, when I got home from work today, that I didn’t have any clean socks to pack for my trip. So now I’m waiting for socks. Hopefully, I’ll be on the road in a half hour or so. And off to Wytheville, VA tonight. Then the rest of the way to NC, do a little work at the house, load up the last few things, meet with my real estate agent, stop at a bank (saved me the trip to Michigan this week), and back to Wytheville tomorrow night. Then to Mom and Dad’s (to drop off a chair) on Saturday, and back here, probably late Saturday night.

Sleeping all day Sunday will probably be in the cards by that point, though I can’t say for sure.

Another reason why that 500th post “party” hasn’t happened yet, despite the fact that the post numbers in the permalinks are nearing 600: apparently, every time I accidentally click on the “Write” tab on my blog dashboard, a post number gets used up. Seriously. (And for those keeping score, this is actually the 462nd post—we’re getting there!)

I joked in a post about language that “Singular, Plural, Collective” would be a funny title for a post about relationships, though that post was not one. For the past couple of days, that very small joke has stuck with me, and I’ve been thinking about singularity, plurality, and collectiveness in terms of romantic relationships. It’s not quite the same as it is with language (except that it kinda is), but it’s an interesting way to look at the issues involved, I think.

The singular of relationships, I think we all understand. We’ve all been single in our lives, and sometimes we’re happily so and at other times we reflect on how much singleness sucks. Sometimes, that is, it’s great to live life as an I—not being beholden or responsible to anyone else in or for the day-to-day reality of life and the mundane tasks that accompany that reality. Other times, it would be great to cook for two, to argue (not seriously) over what movie to watch on Saturday night, and to share some warmth in the night against, say, October’s promise of impending winter.

Yeah, that, we all get.

But plural and collective are probably a little different, and more difficult to understand and differentiate from each other.

From my own experience, I’ve been single for most of the past two years. But there have been times within that span—and a while before the start of that span, too, I think—in which I’ve been “in a relationship” where I was part of something plural. I’m talking about the beginning (and, I think, ending) parts of relationships where I is replaced in our minds by you & I. In those times and places, we are not “two, alone” but “two, together.” In those times and places, I am still an I, and you are still your own I, but you and I make time and space, and expend energy and effort, to bring those Is together. But you and I also have times and spaces in which we are still separate; in this stage (or type) of relationship, it seems to me, you and I keep the good parts of singleness, while banishing the parts that suck to a dark corner. I can still be me, you can still be you, as each of us is as an individual, but you and I are also together—neither faces the world, or the cold of winter’s nights, alone.

Collective, though, is the point in a relationship where you & I becomes we. The point at which we each choose to give up some of our I-ness because we’re pretty sure we like who we are together better than we like I alone, or even I with you. This move, I think, is the unspoken impulse behind the relationship question “Where is this going?”

It’s also, I think, among the scariest decisions we can make. It’s a hard plunge to take, especially in the grown-up world of the once-bitten (or multiply-bitten). And yet, many times, we’re all too eager take that plunge. Or we think our respective yous (of our you & I relationships) are more eager than they really are, or maybe, just maybe, those yous do apply pressure.

I’m of the mind, lately, though, that there’s nothing wrong with a you & I relationship, a relationship in which you are you and I am me, and you and I are letting a level of we-ness happen naturally, unfold as it will, become what it wants to become when it wants to become it.

I think that the problem in many (especially new) relationships is that we’re uncomfortable being plural. Two together, after all, have two lives to manage—two of everything, really—and that’s difficult. And, for any number of reasons, we think we have to rush to the we—maybe because we want our happily ever after, and maybe just because it’s what we do, in our culture. We don’t give our plurality time to grow and evolve into a collective; we jump to that collective point, instead.

And, historically speaking, I’m as guilty as anyone of this. I have, at times in the past, wanted to jump ahead. But not recently. Of late, I’m happy with the idea of being in a relationship that is best defined as “you & I, together.” And giving that relationship time to grow and change and evolve—to transform from plural to collective, if it’s going to. And I’ve been more concerned with “Where is the relationship?” as a question than “Where is the relationship going?”

Of course, I’m in no way speaking from present (like at this very moment, today) experience, here. Yesterday, I stayed two hours longer at work than I had planned, and I’m making a trip to North Carolina this weekend at pretty much the spur of the moment—with no one but myself to answer to on either score. But last night, I cooked dinner for one and put an extra blanket on the bed to ward off the cold. I’m experiencing both the benefits and suckitude of singularity, right now.

I’m not, though, in a huge hurry to get to that collective stage, either. Don’t get me wrong, I want it to happen, but I want it to happen, not to be forced.

But, of course, one has to be plural first.

Last week, I discussed the idea that telling everyone that I felt like I had things basically “under control,” in terms of my life, felt like tempting fate. Like if I said out loud that I thought I had a handle on things, the proverbial “other shoe” would precipitously drop, and my life would literally become the maelstrom that it seemed to be on the verge of becoming from about the time I accepted my new job in June, until sometime in the past couple of weeks. For that span of about four months, I pretty much felt like I was hanging on by sheer force of will. Yes, I was liking my new job, my new place, my “new life,” but it felt like it might more than decide to go toes-up on me at any moment—it seemed as though I was, by main force, holding a lid on a pressure-cooker that was preparing to explode.

Well, a week has passed. And nothing has jumped out and grabbed me. No explosions. No storms. No nuthin’. (Though I’ll admit that saying that “out loud” also feels like tempting fate somehow.)

Not even the date on the calendar that I’m surprisingly superstitious about (October 23, and, yes, there’s a much longer story), did anything but lay me low with an stomach/intestinal thing—a happenstance which the superstitious side of me is half inclined to believe was contrived to keep me safely locked up and asleep in the house that day.

But I digress.

Nothing has exploded. Hooray! But the next few weeks, I’m pretty sure I’ll be feeling like that proverbial one-armed paper-hanger.

There’s the normal stuff, of course. I’ve got a fresh batch of papers to be graded (you can check out the teaching blog for details on the adventures getting those papers turned in and to me entailed), and I’m teaching, reading, writing, working out—in other words, keeping up.

Additionally, though, in the coming weeks, I’ve got a lot of travel on the agenda.

This weekend, I’ll be headed to North Carolina to (finally!) get the house there officially “on the market”; I’ve got an appointment with a highly-recommended listing agent on Friday at noon. I’ve got a thing or two that I need to do around that house, too, but it’s mostly just the meeting to get it listed, make sure the heat is working (and on very low), and get the last of my stuff, including my winter coats, which I certainly had not planned on leaving there this long, when last I was there in August (and who thinks about needing a winter coat in August?).

Next weekend, then, I’ll be out all weekend, too, attending a professional conference, and presenting a paper there. I’m traveling and presenting with a good, old friend, and it should be a good time, all around. But by the time I get back from that one, it will be almost Thanksgiving!

Thankfully (ha ha!), Thanksgiving is at Mom and Dad’s this year, so there won’t be much travel involved in that; the long trip for the holidays in 2008 will be the trip to my sister’s house in Tennessee for Christmas—when I’ll have the time to make a longer trip!

But it’s really feeling like the next couple of weeks here are going to be really, really busy.

Maybe I was “tempting fate” after all.

Nope, not a relationships or dating post—be a funny title for one of those, though, wouldn’t it?

So Dad called me yesterday. Nothing uncommon there, really, Dad calls me all the time. I thought it was probably just to lick a few wounds resulting from OSU’s heartbreaker of a loss on Saturaday at the hands of Penn State. (Dad was already up way past his bedtime when the game ended at 11:15 or so.) Anyway, making this assumption, I immediately dove into the Buckeye talk.

But that wasn’t what Dad wanted. Another of the reasons he often calls me is so that I can confirm his position on some new linguistic pet peeve or another. After all, he seems to reason, Mike has a PhD in this stuff, and he’ll know. Which, of course, I often do (or I’m at least able to offer an informed opinion, when—as is so often the case with language and particularly usage—facts or “real answers” are thin on the ground).

The thing that’s been annoying Dad lately is the use of plural verbs with the word media as their subject. Particularly, he asked about the phrase: the media are.

And here’s were we take of into the esoteric realms of grammar. If you ask most people about the concept of number in English grammar, they’ll say there are two options: singular and plural. (Some historically-minded individuals may know that there used to be a “dual” stuck in between there.) But there is, actually, in contemporary usage, a third option: collective.

Usually, the collective takes the form of a singular noun which, when its meaning is considered, implies plurality. One of the best examples here is committee. There is only one committee, so it’s clearly singular in form, but, let’s face it, any committee is made up of a group of members. So, in a way, one committee is already plural, too. Hence, collective.

Now, this is one of those places, like the (extra?) u in words like colo(u)r and humo(u)r where US English and UK English differ in the their “standard” approach. US English tends to treat collective nouns of this sort as singular: the committee is; UK English, by contrast, tends to treat them as plural: the committee are.

Well and good, right? We all know they’re wrong (whichever we we happen to be part of), and the worst that happens is that Brits and Yanks sound odd to each other from time to time.

But this question of media is, it seems to me, a different question. It’s not, after all, a noun, singular in form, that is taken as a collective and (on one side of the pond) ascribed a plural verb. The word media is plural in form (comes to English from Latin: medium, media). Even when we’re talking about the communications media, it’s plural in function: print is one medium, radio is one medium, tv is one medium, and the Internet is yet another medium. All of these (and others) taken together are the media. So it’s plural, right?

Maybe not so much.

And this is where Dad comes into the story. He has been annoyed of late by the talking heads (ironically, in “the media”) using the phrase, “the media are,” and he wanted me and my language-oriented PhD to tell him that “the media is” would be the correct usage.

I had to disappoint him. Kinda.

Because here’s the deal: Media is clearly a plural form; based on that alone, “media are” is correct. But, of course, it sounds wrong—and it really does (as does the analogous data are). Maybe that’s because it’s a collective noun, and on this side of the Atlantic, we like our collective nouns with singular verbs, thank you very much.

That’s what I was thinking yesterday. Today I’m not so sure. Because, other than data and media (though any other -um/-a Latin words where we more commonly use the plural than the singular in English would not be any different, I think), I cannot think of a collective noun that is plural in form for which US English demands a singular verb. Collective nouns are singular in form, and take singular verbs in the US, plural verbs in the UK.

The bottom line is that yesterday I convinced myself of the interpretation that says that the word media is collective. Today, though, I’m left with only the other answer I gave alongside the possibility of collectivity, yesterday; the answer about usage questions that Dad hates, and that he can’t understand how I, an English professor, would give.

Usage is slippery. It’s open to change. And both “media is” and “media are” are correct. One is more common (just as more common is commoner than commoner), and one is more historically correct (when you look at its Latin roots). But neither, I would say, in contemporary US usage, can be said to be non-standard.

Which is not the sort of thing Dad likes to hear when he asks these questions.

Earlier in the week, I upgraded the blog software. Upgrading WordPress itself (from 2.5 to 2.6.2, then 2.6.3, which was released the day after I upgraded) went smoothly for me, and—I hope!—seamlessly for you.

One of the new features in WordPress 2.6.x, though, is a nifty little deal that indicates when a new version of a WordPress plugin is available. It promptly told me that there was a new version of StatPress (my blog stats plugin), and I promptly installed said new version.

Big mistake!

For one, the new version seems to be beyond buggy. Way beyond. It wasn’t logging all my visitors (I’m pretty sure), it was not allowing Feedburner to catch (and divert) feed traffic, and its algorithm for identifying traffic generated by search engines was basically fubar (it was listing search engines as referrers, but not figuring out that Google and Yahoo! are search engines and not sites that link to my blog).

Again, Big Mistake!

So, today, I decided that I’d had enough, and rolled back to the old version that I still had on my computer. But the old version I had saved was not my customized old version. Over the eleven months or so I’ve been using StatPress, I’ve slowly and surely edited the PHP code so that it does more of what I want it to do within its original design parameters. When I reinstalled, today, I was back to its basic functionality, which is good enough, but not good.

Thus, I spent some time this afternoon tweaking the code, trying to recreate the functionality I had come to know and love for looking at who’s looking at the blog (at least from where people are looking at the blog—it’s not like it gives me a list of names). And I think I’ve mostly got it.

The moral of this story is that just upgrading because there’s an upgrade available is a bad idea, or maybe a Big Mistake! And doing so without saving the current version of customized software is even worse.

Sorry, I just couldn’t let this go without a minor rant.

The photo posted earlier was taken before, of course, OPEC announced their intentions to actively manipulate the oil market.

It irks me that we’re expected to play—pay?—by the rules of market economics, when agencies of foreign governments act in concert—cartel is the nice way to describe what they are, monopoly is probaby more accurate—to manipulate market forces. I’m a firm believer in Market Captalism, but I’m also a firm believer that it only works when: a) there is personal and corporate responsibility and accountability in play (the major problem with the US economy at the moment), and b) supply and demand are allowed free reign. When a group—cartel, monopoly—is allowed to, at a whim, set supply levels to maximize prices regardless of demand, the market in that commodity is in no way free! And when the market in a commodity is held captive by a coalition of national governments, well, let’s be honest, that doesn’t bear any resemblance to market capitalism at all!