​US Cellphones and traveling overseas

How can you use your USA cellphone overseas? The answer is both easy and difficult, and depends on your length of stay, budget, convenience, and patience. Here is what I have learned while traveling in Spain.

The first issue is the length of visit to another country. Your main choice is buying data through your own domestic carrier, or access to the foreign country's carrier. With Verizon and other US companies, it's $20 a day to keep your current number but have it activated and roaming in another country, without very much data. If you are traveling for less than 5 days or so, or your work requires you have access to your number, then this is a decent choice. It is easy and convenient. Your domestic phone number will ring your phone, and you have access from the moment you step off the plane and into customs.

If you opt to not use your domestic carrier for overseas access, then you will save a significant amount of money but you will sacrifice convenience. You will need to purchase a SIM card somewhere, and this isn't always as easy as it sounds (there were no such shops in the Madrid airport, for example). The SIM card in your phone is what allows you to access other countries and their networks. SIMs are universal, but not all phones can use all SIMs and networks. Smartphones within the last few years all have the capability of using the major cellular network bands, but double-check your device just in case. The other issue is whether the SIM is locked, with hardware or software, through your provider. This could be because you have a contract on your phone and you have not fulfilled that contract completely, or for other reasons. Check with your carrier to see if your phone is unlocked. Most phones and plans in recent years have been unlocked. Otherwise, your phone won't accept the foreign SIM.

Buying and installing a foreign SIM card gives you a local phone number and cheap data plans. My first data plan with Movistar was €20 for 3 GB of data. Through taking a lot of photos that I uploaded and shared, I burned through this is ONE WEEK! These pre-paid SIM cards do not allow you to easily or cheaply top-up your data plan; you have to wait the whole month to renew it (it is really a month-to-month contract, in that regard). Orange had a summer promotional of 9 GB for the same price, so I bought a new SIM card through them (with a new Spanish number), and I turned off all data backup functions through cellular data.

One issue is that in many European countries, incoming texts and calls are always free, if you have a SIM for their country. So people can call and text you for free, but you may not be able to call or text them back. In the USA we pay for both incoming and outgoing calls and texts (well played, cell phone carriers). But the issue has become fairly moot in the USA because most current plans include unlimited domestic calls and texts; our carriers want you to buy data plans, and then they give you the rest. This is not true in Europe, at least for pre-paid SIM cards, where you put money on your account for outgoing texts and calls. This pre-paid amount is separate from your data plan. I currently have no money for calls and texts, which almost works. You may want to call a place about their opening hours, for example, and I cannot do that. WiFi calls through Google Voice want you to have phone access. Texts through Apple Messages (iOS device to iOS device) on an iPhone seems to assume a cell phone number and access for final delivery, but not on an iPad that is not sharing that number. For fear of being charged international rates somehow, I disconnected my iPhone with Spanish SIM from my iPad.

If you want to save money, don't need access to that number specifically, or are traveling for more than a week or so, then buying a foreign SIM is the way to go. It does mean some aggravation, though. The SIM card and company will assume you understand the language, and will text you offers and information that you may not always understand. My two visits to store providers were difficult because my Spanish is fairly basic, as was the employees' English. Cell phone access and terms are difficult in native languages, so consider how tricky it is in translation for non-fluent speakers!

Another strategy is to just use your home cell service once a week or so. Pay the $20 so you can access your messages and voicemail for one day, then turn off cellular data and depend on WiFi for the rest of the week. Apps like Skype, Google Voice, and Facebook Messenger allow you to call and text to some degree without a SIM card. But some apps (Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp) use a cell phone number to identify and find you, and need an active SIM card to make the last mile delivery. This caused some irritation for me, because I signed up for Signal in the USA to use over here, but it doesn't have a way to migrate to a new SIM card; you have to create a new Signal account with a new SIM card. Since I purchased two SIM cards I had to do this twice. It is an easy process, but your contacts don't have your new information so you have to establish the connection again. This is an issue for WhatsApp as well, which uses your phone's contact information to find friends. If you change your SIM and number but people don't have that information, you can't see each other. It's very strange that such high tech telephony can fail in such simple ways. In this way, Facebook Messenger is the most superior, because it doesn't require a phone number to find you, and it has mobile, iPad, and computer sync.

Another option would be to forego cell phone service at all. It's possible. Your phone's GPS will still work and show you where you are on the map, but you can't use the routing services. If you had decent WiFi and used Skype, you could get by without cell service, but it would be weird in today's age to not be able to call or text while out and about. You couldn’t use Google Maps or other apps for directions.

We live in an age of marvels, but also strange irritations.

Hardbound Books

 On a visit to New Orleans, the bookshop Faulkner House Books reminded what a pleasure it is to have a collection of nice hardback editions. Somehow I had forgotten, and I had gotten so used to cheap paperbacks that age poorly. Faulkner House was especially impressive because it was such an eclectic mix of books; the only unifying trait was that they were nice editions of good books – no junk either way.

Bookshelves should be inviting places, with books that please the eye, hand, and mind. There shouldn’t be guilt over what you hate to get rid of, or what you meant to read. They should inspire and delight, not create psychic baggage. I had always thought you should never get rid of books, but I don’t think this is true anymore. If a book is damaged or falling apart, and doesn’t hold a special memory for you, then get rid of it. Marie Kondo applies even here: keep only the books that give you joy. Otherwise, it’s just another thing.

Inspired, I went home and purged many of the aging brittle books on my shelves. I rarely read a book again, so anything that was in bad shape got purged. If I should want to re-read a book, I’ll buy a nicer version or use the library. E-books are wonderfully handy for travel and odd moments, but a physical book collection is something fun, beautiful, and personal. Like a garden, it has to be pruned and cultivated, but quality annuals and perennials will bring you great joy. So I’ve started buying these.

​Citation Managers like Bookends

The manuscript for Christ the Tragedy of God is finally done. It took longer than I expected, which is pretty typical. Challenging for me was being away from research and writing for several years. In that time I had made various notes and drafts, so my task was corralling and stitching these notes together into a cohesive whole. Having all those notes and bits sounded advantageous, but it was maddening to constantly move, rewrite, cut, and shift things around as I tried to find the larger argument. Perhaps it’s just me and my synapses, the curse of technology, or having so many notes, but writing for me is a lot of working and re-working. It’s like sanding a table by hand, going over and over it with various sandpapers.

I realized just yesterday that I had done the bibliography incorrectly. Somewhere I had the idea that Routledge wanted a separate file for just the bibliography. I realized my error yesterday in going through the author’s guidelines. But it wasn’t a problem at all because I had used Bookends. A citation manager allows you to have a reference and resource library (I have 832 items, personally), and to format your citations at the end. Using the one-two-three punch of Scrivener, Microsoft Word, and Bookends, I was able to export the chapters and temporary citations from Scrivener into Word (like most academic publishers, Routledge prefers the manuscript in Word), and then scan the chapters with Bookends to convert the temporary citations into endnotes, and place a bibliography at the end of each chapter. It took 15 minutes, tops.

The Problem with Studies

Everything is a study these days. They are endlessly cited on the news, on social media, by leaders and medical professionals. Data promises a kind of certainty, a shortcut to decisions and ideas. If we can study the issue then we can all agree, it will be like 2+2=4. It’s alluring, given how diverse people are and how complex our world is.

Data does help, on a personal level, especially considering how self-deceptive we can all be. We tell ourselves and others that we go to the gym “about 3 times a week,” and the key word there is about. That’s where the aspirational sneaks in, where there’s the wiggle room between the person we are and the person we want to be. If we check the computer at the YMCA, it actually says we check-in 1.7 times a week. A food journal points out the truth, even if we desperately say “I don’t eat anything all day.” A sleep app on a smartphone points out we sleep 6.3 hours a night on average, not the 7 hours we claim. The data keeps us honest considering how aspirational we can be. Our words often say more about the person we want to be, than the person we are.

But we also know that the larger societal studies are often wrong, contradictory, or biased. We were told for decades that eggs raise human cholesterol, but no one bothered to study it and see that it’s not true. Pharmaceutical studies conducted by drug companies always advocate for the drug; contradictory studies are buried. Estrogen was all the rage for women and osteoporosis, until they decided it was a bad idea. The same thing happened with tobacco research decades ago. Studies favor the expensive, the patented and the new, because there’s no money to research simpler solutions. Doctors are influenced to prescribe new drugs that have only modest benefits over older, generic drugs, or fall into some weird anti-science positionthat resembles anti-vaccination.

Brian Nosek has found that many scientific studies, when repeated, yield different results. Scientists have expectations during their research, and are quick to seize on positive results, as are the journals that publish the studies. The experiments that fail get put away in a drawer. Science promises impartiality and certainty, but some are questioning the way science is done since some of the same studies yield different results.

Big data is here, but it’s a more cynical reality. Politically the data is about motivating us, micro-targeting one’s supporters to insure their vocal participation over others. Economically it’s about influencing us to buy something through various levers, showing us products and services in a certain light, or through repetition. At least the scientific studies tried to create solutions to problems. Big data is just about manipulating us.

It’s no wonder that people are confused and frustrated. But despite the contradictions and frustration, we keep going back to the studies, citing ones we like and ignoring ones we don’t. It’s a bit of a curse, and a shortcut for good thinking. It’s clear that data doesn’t help everything: would we have developed democracy and human rights based on experiments and studies? Ideas and reasoning are more vital than ever, to be able to think clearly and critically about an argument, its points, and its assumptions.

I think it’s especially worrying when decisions and leadership are solely based on studies. Here the promise of data serves the interests of power. It’s sheer ideology to oppress someone while denying responsibility: hey, it’s not my fault, the study told me to do it. If a company claims high satisfaction scores then maybe they can lay off some customer service representatives, as long as the scores don’t go down too much. Everybody and everything wants a survey, and I’m at the point where I just refuse. Why should I help you do your job? If you don’t know why I should want your product or service, or don’t know what to discuss at a leadership session, I don’t see why I should help, especially for free. It’s a weird kind of buy-in that occurs, that if we take the survey then we can’t complain because our ideas were part of the process. But that doesn’t follow at all. There’s no guarantee that my ideas were used, or that they weren’t greatly transformed in the process. If you want my ideas, I might as well lead it, after all.

We need visionaries, people who will hold the line without needing marketing data or political polling. It’s a cold world where politicians make decisions on what is palatable, instead of what is right. Reinhold Niebuhr warned us about this in 1952 in The Irony of American History, where he worried that the rise of social scientists would lead us to confidently trust social programming, to grasp the shortcuts over the hard realities of lived history that is slow and ironic,, “the temptation to become impatient and defiant of the slow and sometimes contradictory processes of history” (p. 134).

In Praise of Movies Over Binging Netflix

Binging TV shows and Netflix is fun, you just sort of disappear into something for a while. It’s especially great when you’re sick and need a distraction.

What is frustrating is how shallow it can be. The plot twists and surprises come fast to keep you watching, but little of it sticks in the long run. I really enjoyed The Punisher and Mindhunter on Netflix, but I don’t remember much about it. It’s like a casino floor-plan, it’s designed to keep you in and hard to get out. But what do you have left when you finally find the exit?

TV shows are great, and some really stick with me. (The Wire, Black Mirror and The Simpsons are shows that I can vividly remember, for example). But movies have a much more powerful effect. They are more condensed, with less false climaxes and less surprises. They aren’t trying to hold your attention for 10+ hours, but sustain something over 1 sitting.

I’m haunted by Ladybird and the enigmatic mother, who is kind to others but cruel to her daughter. When Ladybird asks her mom if she likes her, the mother never answers – it sticks in a permanent way. How does one become that kind of parent? The Post is so terrific in its honest portrayal of the first female publisher of a major newspaper. Meryl Streep is anxious and afraid in this all-male world – who wouldn’t be, as a woman who has been belittled and marginalized her whole life, who inherited the newspaper with no prior experience? But she finds a strength to step out and trust her moral compass. You know how it’s going to end, but the movie still creates an incredible suspense as you agonize with the characters. I want to watch things that will stay with me, not things that disappear quickly like a bag of Doritos. 

The trick is the time it takes to discern. If you’re willing to follow the lead of others, then you can take recommendations from newspapers, magazines, and friends. If you want to trailblaze, then you simply have to devote a lot of time to watching a lot of things, knowing that 80% of it is forgettable. The effort is for that magical 20%, the minority of things that are worth the time and attention, and there’s nothing like finding an unknown gem.

Thoughts on a Sabbatical

A sabbatical is a pretty great thing. The email is turned off, and there are no meetings or training sessions. It’s like being a student all over again, with blocks of time to read and write. Instead of scurrying around, I can focus. Let’s face it, email sucks.

I received the sabbatical because of a book contract. This is the hard part of being a student again: now I have to write a really big paper (80,000 good words, as I tell people). All the things that I have told students to do, now I have to do them, like hitting word counts with clear and concise prose. I have this deadline hanging over me, and with it comes anxiety and dread. Teachers have deadlines too, and there is a near constant, low-level stress with the deadlines of midterm grades, many papers to grade, classes to prepare for, reports to file, final grades to submit. Teachers, like students, always have something to do, are always bringing work home during the semester. But I have to admit that the faculty deadlines are smaller than the student ones. Faculty with large teaching loads don’t have the demanding weight of learning and writing under deadlines, the forced creativity of the student, journalist, and preacher. Deadlines are tough – ask Damocles, or the protagonist in “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

I do miss the camaraderie of graduate school. The burden was shared when we could commiserate and share ideas. There was a fecundity with the students, papers, seminars, libraries, and faculty, the atmosphere that stimulated ideas and arguments. My process is more lonely, working on my own and hoping for the best, interrogating an article or author but it’s a bit more one-sided than a live interaction. This is not to say that graduate school was smooth sailing, because there was a horrible guilt and competition. How do you share your pleasure at an effective day of writing with your friends, who may have been stuck or ineffective that day? Jealousy is rampant in academia, with high achieving people and agendas, and it all begins with graduate school and the oddness of writing a dissertation, which is something you’ve never done before and never quite do again. (Books are very different from dissertations. Books are written to sell to scholars and libraries, and to influence research and ideas; dissertations are written to please small committees, with copious footnotes, surveys of literature, and an air of defensiveness. The dissertations are often shelved and forgotten, especially given that the transition from dissertation to book is rare and rough.)

If someone asks how my classes and semester are going, I’ve learned to tell them about the book contract first, before mentioning the sabbatical. If I lead with the sabbatical, it results in suspicion and confusion; the eyes narrow judgmentally as they imagine a 5 month vacation. If I tell them about the book first, then there is sufficient respect to permit the sabbatical as potentially useful. People are funny like that.

I have a lot of notes on this project because I’ve been working on it for 5 years or so – ideas, paragraphs, research notes, and outlines that scraps of time here and there have created. I tell people it’s like the Pentagon Papers, that scene in the movie The Post where the reporters have thousands of photocopied pages from the Pentagon Papers, but out of order and without page numbers. They have stitch to the pages together and figure out the proper order. That’s a large part of what I have to do with all my notes. But then it becomes more than just stitching together, as new connections get made, new emphases, bits get moved, so it morphs in new ways. The parts don’t connect themselves, but form new connections that form new connections. It’s less of a paranoid bulletin board and more of being a lion tamer. But there is a thrill at the performing lion. Stephen King in The Green Mile writes how “the combination of pencil and memory creates a kind of practical magic, and magic is dangerous”; for Nabokov, “the pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.”

A sabbatical creates a different relationship to time. Blocks of time fly by as I try to absorb a book or article, or churn out my 930 words for the day. A whole day seemed like a luxury, but it quickly flies by. It is surprising just how much time is required to write, how quickly a few edits and expansions turn into 3 hours. Part of me is impatient and wants to get it all done, while the rational side urges “eye on the prize,” and “slow and steady wins the race.” I struggle between wanting it to be epic, and knowing it’s just a book, just a glimpse of an area that continues to evolve. I cannot master all the material, the endless books on tragedy and tragic theory. Just yesterday I bought another book, this one on Simone Weil and tragedy, but when and where do I draw the line? “Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body” (Ecclesiastes 12:2). I imagine most books are a result of exhaustion, a mental shoving of the material off the table – here it is, I’m done.

Writing requires an obsession with a topic. Even when I’m not working on this manuscript, I’m thinking about it. It may be with a sense of annoyance because I’m not sure what my next point is, or guilt because I didn’t get as far as I expected to, or with frustration that I want to get back to it and I can’t due to time constraints. A thought hits me that I want to expand on, but I’m sitting in the choir loft at choir practice, or driving somewhere, or swimming laps at the pool. It would be more convenient if it could do its job at the right time. The mind is funny, it works through things even when it is doing something else or engaged in monotony. So I try to commit it to memory, but Plato was right about literacy and writing, and my memory is crap thanks to all the keyboards around me.

I’m fortunate to have received a sabbatical from my institution, and I’m most grateful. But I will be glad to have this manuscript submitted in all its 7 Microsoft-Word-document-chapters glory.

Email still sucks, though.