Just stepped outside today with my new twin front-facing ocular sensors linked up to my multi-lobe organic processing unit. Environmental stimuli appear in HD clarity with an immersive 3D experience. Positive: functionality, low learning curve, great value. Negative: sensors temporarily malfunction around onions and at the end of Marley and Me.

I have been following Bryson's writing closely since 2000 after I gobbled up his non-fiction writing to date. This is his latest book. Following on the success of A Short History of Nearly Everything, I guess he decided another social history of a subject would attract readers. (His other books are a mix of travel narrative and memoir.) At Home is a social history of the house. The title is an overstatement and an understatement. The overstatement is, it's really just about Northern European and American homes in the past 300 years. The understatement is, the topic of "houses" –rooms, gardens, building materials– is really just a way to organize a book about nearly everything else. At Home is not so much a tour of homes as it is a provocation to write about whatever and whoever can be connected through archival citation to parts of the home. It makes for a wonderful ride and I come away from each chapter astonished with how Mr. Bryson charges otherwise dry historical minutiae with illuminating prose and top-notch story telling.

Interesting side note: this is the first full-length book I've read entirely on my Kindle.

I love the travel section in bookstores. Each thick, photo-filled guide promises a brief escape from the Midwest. I open the binding up wide and imagine it is a Boeing 747 departing CMH for a place far away. California! Mexico City! Morocco! This is what the travel section has taught us: travel takes place somewhere else. Not only that – travel demands expensive plane tickets, hotels, and lots of time off. 

I reject this notion of travel. Which is not easy to do when you’re living in the Midwest.

What I have adopted instead is a sense of being a stranger in one’s own land, of mystifying one’s own culture in a way that makes it new all over again. Take corn fields, for instance. There is nothing more boring that driving for hours through the great cornfields of the Midwest. But did you realize the unique, contingent nature of the Midwest farming economy? At no time in history has such fertile fields been systematically exploited to produce an excess of basic food, which is now exported around the world and used to make everything from soda pop to socks. These industrialization of farm technology in the midwest made possible the US’ own industrial revolution, freeing farm laborers to work in automobile manufacturing, finance, and higher education. I submit this to you: you can travel around the world and never see such a culturally and historically significant monument as the sprawling Midwest cornfields. Yet it is as mundane to us who grew up here as the crumbling Great Wall of China must be to those street vendors who sell vegetables in its waning shadow.

This is equally true of cities in the Midwest. In the past few years, Miranda and I have also adventured in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. 

We have also had the occasion of visiting Portland (Oregon) twice; Milwaukee; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C. (twice); Raleigh, North Carolina; and Wilmington, Ohio (countless times for family). 

I used to be fascinated with people’s responses when I told them I lived in Puerto Rico. “You live where? That’s amazing!” They would follow this by some remarks about how nice it must be to live near a beach or have year-round warm weather. This was all true, of course. But since I lived there, none of this struck me as particularly exotic. In fact, I often felt the reverse for my friends who lived in Columbus, Ohio. “You have sidewalks, you say? What’s that like?”

When I moved back to Columbus in 2004, I was determined to move beyond the nothing-to-do-here attitude and find creative ways to travel in my own flat, corn-bred part of the world. That’s when I started taking nearcations. 

Here are three great reasons to nearcation instead of taking a cruise.

You’ll save money

Lodging – You can get a 4-star hotel in Detroit for the price of a New York City hostel. No, seriously. Miranda and I scored the Omni Hotel on the river in Detroit for $60 a night on Priceline. We paid the same for Jazz on the Park hostel in New York City three years ago. 

Transportation – You can drive round trip to a nearby city for a fraction of the cost of flying to a more spectacular destination. 

Food – New York City has its Italian Village and San Francisco has its China Town. But have you ever tried authentic bratwurst in German Village in Columbus, Ohio? Or Hungarian cuisine in Toledo? Puerto Rican specialties in Cleveland? Middle Eastern recipes in Detroit? Not only can you find delicious, underrated bites all over the Midwest, you’ll pay a fraction of the price of a fancy coastal bistro. To top it all off, you’ll get down-home Midwestern customer service.

You’ll become a better traveler

The relative dearth of landmarks in Cleveland, Indianapolis or Akron can be to your benefit. To be sure, if the Midwest had a long-standing tourist tradition like Greece or Paris, you can bet we would find a valid way to make every street corner a monument to some obscure moment in history. (The first traffic light (Cleveland), the shortest road (Bellfountaine), and so on.) Instead, Midwest cities have scores of hidden treasures that you, the traveler, must work a little harder to find. I’m thinking of sunken gardens in Windsor, Junctionview Studios in Columbus, or the Andy Warhol museum in Detroit. Yes, you’ll have to do more poking around in the mud to find the gems, but you’ll become a much better traveler when you do make it to a major city. After honing my travel skills locally, I find myself much more capable of enjoying a trip to Frankfurt or Washington, D.C. For one, you learn the difference between tourist traps and everyday life. Secondly, you learn to enjoy the mundane experiences and feel less pressure to see it all. Lastly, you learn to appreciate that the spectacles which appear exotic to you, from the Eiffel Tower to the National Mall, are just part of somebody else’s daily routine. In other words, it makes you rethink what it means to be exotic.

You’ll become a more frequent traveller

Once you get over the psychological barrier that “there nothing to do in Columbus”, the nearby world becomes open to you as a potential travel destination. And since it takes significantly less planning and vacation time, any long weekend (or regular weekend for that matter) opens up the possibility of another adventure. Family vacations don’t have to wait until a single 10 day stretch in the summer; you can also take several trips a year. You’ll also benefit hugely from fewer administrative hassles. Being gone from your home for a two weeks is completely different than being gone for a night or two. You don’t have to put your snail mail on hold, you don’t have to set up an email response telling people you are away for the moment, you don’t have to get a house-sitter/pet-sitter/child-sitter, you can be confident your cell phone will work as expected, and you’re never far from friends and family in the case of a travel emergency.

The freezing temperatures and grey clouds have broken here in Columbus. Which means I'm running outside again.

My favorite days of the year are those first glimpses of spring when I can hit the street for a good run. I ran twice on Sunday and every day this week. I am a better person when I run.

Running is a great way to see a city. I often use this argument about cycling, but it's equally true about running. I like taking back roads, paths, and alleys where I can see the parts of the city that are hidden behind the facades of front elevations and street-level advertisement. I am never disappointed.

I reminisce when I run. I remember when I started running – I mean really running – in San Diego with my friend, Paul Bowman. Paul had 12 years on me. Which means that I am his age now. We used to run to Ocean Beach the long way around through a housing development on the point, and then back a more direct rout over three hills. The first hill was huge, straight up. And we sprinted it every time. I remember getting to the top and looking over the bay and all the way to downtown. 

Running was harder in Puerto Rico, where sidewalks are in the road and the road is a racetrack. It was like running the Indy 500. I remember one time someone drove by and hit me hard in the ass with a half-full plastic soda bottle. It didn't take me down, but I found another road to run on after that. One lady I knew through friends ran marathons and trained on the same part of the island that I did. She ran 75-100 miles a week. With a 3 1/2 foot long walking stick. If it's not jealous competitors trying to break your leg, it's stray dogs that wouldn't mind some half-baked runners flesh to dine on. I thought she was pretty smart.

The longest I ever ran: I came back from running to Ocean Beach one night, an 8 mile run, and I was still bounding with energy. So I ran to downtown San Diego, around the business district and back. That made it about 13 miles with hills. I only stopped because I had to get up early the next morning.

The 5K. I ran a 5K in San Diego and got second place at 19:30min. I always thought it would be nice at 30 to best my 18-year-old time. We'll see.

Old running partners. I haven't had a running partner since Luke Cassada. First Paul, then Luke. (Sounds biblical, doesn't it?) Luke and I were in SEAL training together. I dropped and I was quite happy with the decision. He was not satisfied with a med-drop, so he went back and became a Navy SEAL. Last I heard he was messing around in Afghanistan and all bulked up and stuff. I remember how he was so shocked that my short legs would easily outpace him on our 6 mile runs. I'm pretty sure that's not the case any more.

New running partners. I think I've found some good folks around the University to run with. This gives me hope.

Here's to a great year of running in 2011. 

I want to take the opportunity to offer a broad view of my academic interests. Yes, that sounds tremendously boring. But I haven't done it anywhere else, and if you're a fellow grad student you may actually find this interesting.

Primary Research Interest (How do I spend the majority of my research efforts?)
I am interested in how immigration enforcement functions in non-border spaces. It's that simple and that complicated. It's a broad topic that draws on social and political theory, legal history, and site-specific field research. This is the substance of my MA thesis, and likely the focus of my future PhD dissertation, as well. I will be the most vague here, since it is the topic of ongoing research.

Secondary Research Interests (What other research am I willing to selectively spend time on?)
Geography & Deaf Studies: There are relatively few geographers who have the experience and language proficiency to connect deaf studies and geography. I am fascinated by the potential connections and contributions that have gone unnoticed due to the relatively little research overlap between these two fields. You'll notice that I'm organizing two sessions at the AAG on this topic. I find this a rewarding way to balance my interest in this topic and more pressing demand of the primary research.

Mobility and Cycling: Like the deaf studies, this is an intersection of personal and professional interest. Through my own experience of cycling for transportation, I have become interested in how mobility is invested with political, cultural, and personal meaning. This actually shows up in my research on immigration, but only a piece of the larger puzzle. I also help to keep Bike OSU going. (See http://bikeosu.weebly.com)

Tertiary Interests (These are the threads in my sweater that I just pick at from time to time.)
Project Management in Academia: After interpreting an excellent two-day seminar on project management, I realized that project management skills were just what I had been trying to develop over the past few years of organizing Bike to Work Week and other programs. I have since tried to apply bits and pieces of project management to my own studies in order to get (and stay) on track with my research. I am now kicking around the idea of how project management (P.M.) might contribute to improved research experience and outcomes, and whether P.M. is not an absolutely crucial but heretofore untaught skill for graduate students and career academics. 

Productivity and Performance in Academia: This is related to my first tertiary interest. I hesitate to mention these together, because it may seem like I'm trying to simply import business concepts. Not the case. I'm genuinely interested in how goals are set, measured, and achieved in a variety of settings: personal life, career life, and social life. I take the position that people generally accomplish what they set out to do. And most of the time, we set out to fail in some way – we just don't realize it because we aren't used to thinking clearly or communicating specifically. This brings up tertiary topic 2.1: writing and communication. I want to have an efficient writing process and produce clear writing products. Like P.M. above, I can't help but see writing as a core skill for academics. And like P.M., the writing process is almost completely untaught; it's expected that students will pick it up as they go along. Some of you may think that's fine. But think of where we've come with research methods. No one used to take research methods classes, and now they are seen as core skills (and required courses) for graduate students.

Relevant Pedagogy in Higher Education: Let's face it. If you are going to work at a university, you will have to teach. And unless you're at a liberal arts college, teaching will always be second to research. So, why bother being a good teacher? Primarily because initial investment in being a good teacher means lots of time saved down the road. Hence more time available for research. But it's more than that. Higher education can be anywhere between enlightening and life-changing, to irrelevant and mis-managed. It's just my opinion, but as a social scientist, I'm supposed to know something about how society functions, no? Even better if I can make a contribution to society, developing much-needed perspective in our undergraduate future leaders. What does all that mean, and how do we do that? I don't know. But I'm watching. And taking notes.