Football coach quits, pandemonium reigns... wait, what?

Mob Action on campus, 01/12/10, originally uploaded by Wyoming_Jackrabbit.

Not to give too much away about my location, but this was the scene at my campus last night a couple of hours after the announcement that my college's football coach was high-tailing it out of the South to take a cushy job at his old college and he was taking his entire staff (and probably most of their recruits) with him. Wait, what?

The bad news is that several hundred undergraduates took to the streets to burn their football T-shirts, some dorm furniture and a really smelly mattress. All told, I think a couple thousand students were involved at some point or another. And one girl got whacked upside the head with a thrown traffic cone-- one of the really big, heavy ones, so I'm pretty sure she has a concussion.

The good news is that apparently the kids on my campus don't really have the meanness in them (or the liquor, not sure which) to foment a full-fledged riot; mostly they just meandered around campus in flash-rave style, knocking down traffic cones and yelling football slogans. The only actual damage I saw on campus this morning was a cockeyed bus kiosk, and that's pretty fixable.

But, seriously-- I take loyalty and dedication as seriously as the next person, but what the hell are people doing initiating a full-fledged police emergency response over a guy quitting his job early and weaseling out of his contract? He sure as heck doesn't care about our college enough to stick around, so I'm pretty sure that all this didn't bother him any.

Maybe it's because I came from a state that, until recently, had one of the worst NCAA football teams in the nation so I don't understand getting that riled up about sports. But these are my students, for crying out loud-- and seeing them do something like this firsthand is just a wee bit disturbing, to be honest. I recognized a few faces in this crowd as students I have worked with as freshmen.

Yeeowch. Would somebody please give me a shot of common sense and reason? Or is that asking too much of American football fans?

Down the Rabbit-Hole: It's my memory, darn it!

So, I've been looking back on the first four parts of my personal memory this past week, ruminating on the way I've told this memory.  A few weeks ago, before the Christmas break, I checked that memory against some kind of official record (newspaper articles and my student papers) and teased out a few inaccuracies in my personal memory.  I also gave a few suggestions as to why some of those inaccuracies probably crept into my memory.  I suggested that the kind of story I'm telling (in this case, largely a coming-of-age story) was dictating to a certain extent what details I recalled and the order I told them in.

When I looked back at my personal memory a second time, I think I may have found a second narrative framework (called a schema in psychology) that may be unconsciously dictating the form of my memory, and it's not a very surprising one: The Laramie Project.  And for some reason, this annoys the heck out of me.  Let me give you a run-through and see what you think...

Walking in My Own Footsteps and Finding they Don't Fit

So, after three and a half weeks back home in Wyoming with family, I boarded a plane in Casper, Wyoming to fly back to my home in Appalachia last Friday night.   The weather, unfortunately, prevented me from making the five-hour trek to Laramie through the Shirley Basin, so I never got to visit the campus again like I hoped.  That was the same cold weather snap (one night plunged to -25 degrees Farenheit) which wreaked havoc on our airplane the day of our departure, and between the cold in Casper and the storms in Atlanta, I spent about nine extra hours sitting on uncomfortable vinyl chairs in various airport terminals trying to think.  For some reason, this visit was a lot harder than on previous years; certainly the lack of my grandmother's presence was a huge factor, but something else about this visit was on my mind as well.

When our plane finally departed from DIA and rocketed its way into the sunset, I snapped a picture of the view on our way out.  This was my last sight of the American West for a long time to come: an endless patchwork swath of snow-dusted farmland, fields, and prairie stretching off into the distance, Laramie and Cheyenne somewhere north of our plane's wingtip.  As I looked out the window and craned my neck backwards for a last glimpse of the Rockies, it suddenly occurred to me what the problem was: I didn't really feel like my life fit here anymore.  In a sense, I was getting utterly homesick for a place that, in a real sense, wasn't even my home anymore.  I've lived in the South for eight and a half years now, which is six months longer than I had ever lived in Wyoming.  I've been in college now for eleven years, in an intellectual environment that has almost nothing to do with my family's lived experience.  How on earth do I reconcile these two halves of my life-- my Western self, my internal wilderness and land-centeredness, and my Humanities self, the one that lives in a middle-class land of intellection and abstraction?  How can I retrace my own footsteps every year back to the land I call home and make that journey make sense?

Back to Appalachia

Sunset at Lucerne, 2, originally uploaded by Wyoming_Jackrabbit.

Well, after over nine hours of delays and a disastrous re-route through Atlanta, Jackrabbit it is finally back in the South once again. As good as it feels to be back in my own home again, I miss my real home: the Rockies. I hope the picture above helps you understand why.

I took this picture from my father's car one evening after a long day-trip to the northern part of the Bighorn Basin.

How I spent my Winter Vacation... And this afternoon

Eagle Fishing, 2 of 6, originally uploaded by Wyoming_Jackrabbit.

Well, I'm stuck in the C terminal of Denver International Airport after my plane from Casper was four hours late and it's looking like I'll be stuck here overnight, all thanks to our wonderful Rocky Mountain weather. It was so cold in Casper (well below zero degrees Farenheit) that the plane fuel wouldn't pump. Go figure.

So, while I am sitting here in virtual stasis while United Airlines is working on keeping us out of Appalachia, I thought I'd share some of my photographs with you just out of boredom. This one represents what I would like to be doing right now and can't: flight.

My father is a wildlife enthusiast, so we spent a lot of time in Wyoming traveling all over the state taking pictures. This immature bald eagle is one we spotted in the Wind River Canyon (north central Wyoming) while he was fishing for carp. After a few unsuccessful tries, he landed on some rocks for a rest.

I hope you enjoy the picture-- and if I get stuck here much longer, you might get several more. If you get as bored as I am, you can visit my Flickr photostream if you like, which is under the name Wyoming_Jackrabbit. I have several other photos of this eagle's fishing expedition, among other things.

Linked NPR Broadcasts on TLP, the Matt Shepard killing, etc.

During the trial and its aftermath, I always felt that the NPR reporters did a decent and largely balanced job of covering the Shepard murder and its aftermath when so many of the television news networks were going unhinged.  Unfortunately, the NPR audio archive no longer has a good search feature, and finding what you want can be tough.  Nevertheless, with some thorough combing through, I managed to find most of the links I was looking for!

Looking at who was covering Laramie when, I think that really nice reporter who snagged me might have been Mark Roberts, who was a regional reporter for NPR stationed out of Denver then.  Just to give credit where it's due, thanks for being a good role model for media people, Mr. Roberts! 

Life in the confession booth

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With what fruit, then, O my Lord...  do I confess, not only in your presence but to men also by these writings, what I now am, not what I once was?

--Augustine, Confessions Book X, Ch. 3

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So, I've been thinking hard over the last few days about a weird change I've been noticing about myself this past semester: I'm telling everybody I can corral for ten minutes about what happened when Matt was murdered.   And, I'm starting to wonder: is this necessarily a healthy thing?  It really started with my minister friend back in August.  We were having a theology discussion at a local bar (yes, we do that sort of thing) and he was trying to come up with topics for a lecture series on campus. 

"What about a roundtable on theology and homosexuality?"  He asked innocently.   I leaned over the table and thumped my finger on his legal pad. 

"Absolutely not.  You might as well lob a grenade in the middle of our campus as do that," I answered.

 Later, I apologized and explained to him why I was a little sensitive to that issue, and he was really surprised.  Then, when the Laramie Project: 10 Years Later came to our town, I told "Joe" the entire story, and then the cast.  It's sort of snowballed from there.  Each time scared the utter heck out of me, but then I've felt so much more...  liberated, I guess.  And I keep doing it. 

Reactions have been mixed.  Some people just sort of edge slowly for the door, like I'm going to pounce on them.  One colleague suggested that I needed a vacation.  And then one of my classmates just opened up and shared with me the trauma in her own life she's been silently packing around for seven years, and I was stunned.  She and I have started talking a lot. 

So I find myself in the twenty-ninth year of my existence in the middle of an all-out confession fest.  Why?  I have never really felt impelled to air out my dirty laundry for the world.  In fact, one of the hardest things for me has been that  whole "Confess your sins to each other" business in the Book of James (there's a reason Protestants don't like that book.)  But I'm starting to wonder just a little bit about this little glut of storytelling: is all this some kind of exhibitionist tendency, or is it something more-- or something worse?