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On losing a pet

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There’s a short story we were set to read during my Creative Writing MA. More a vignette really. It was about the happiest moment in someone’s life. A guy is on a train, his family are around him, his daughter rests her head on his shoulder. At the time he doesn’t realise it’s his happiest moment of his entire life, but bit by bit things fall apart. The story had a huge emotional impact on me, and when I chatted to the others in my tutorial group, it had the same effect on them. It’s about a happy moment, but the inevitability of that happiness is the rest of your life will always live in the shadow of that moment. As someone pointed out, if you are a parent, there will be a point in your life when you put your child down and, unless you’re a weight-lifter, or they remain much smaller than you, never pick them up again.

This morning the second of my two cats, Pash, was put to sleep. She had a severe heart episode on Sunday, which left liquid on her lungs. We hoped it would have been possible to manage her medication so that we could remove the liquid, but without dehydrating her too much. But there was no way to balance the two demands on her body. This morning her breathing was laboured from the water pressure on her lungs, and she still wasn’t hydrated enough. So with the vet we decided it was the right thing. It was quick overall. From having the episode to five days of care, to the end. She was 17. I’d had her since Easter 2008.

My elder cat, Sinta, had kidney disease. She was being treated and was on special food, and lasted seven months from initial diagnosis to a moment when she degenerated rapidly. That was Feb 4 2023. She was 16. I’d had her since 2006.

I initially had Sinta because my ex-girlfriend suggested it. We’d had an on-again, off-again relationship for 6 years. We’d row, split up, one or both would get lonely, and we’d get together again. The last split was amicable, but her suggestion I get a cat was (fairly transparently) that with something to prevent one of us from feeling lonely, we’d break that cycle.

It worked. It sounds cheesy, but it really felt like I’d found a soulmate. She’d climb onto my shoulder and happily sit there. Be content to just sit on me and we’d stare at each other. Come when I called her. The relationship felt more like one of Pullman’s daemons than a pet.

Then I got a full-time in person job and I thought she’d need a companion, so I got Pash. Which after an initial bit of conflict, also worked. There’s a painting of the two of them my father did, of them sitting next to each other on the windowsill looking out of the window. He’s caught their postures perfectly, their tails curling in mirror reflections of each other, Pash still not fully grown.

One of the things about autism: people are tiring. The constant extra effort in determining what’s going on, the wealth of information about emotions, expressions, tones, you’re expected to parse. The constant self-management of masking. Being away from them is a relief. They don’t make effective constant companions. Even if you find the perfect match in a partner, they’ll be autistic too probably, so they’ll need to withdraw for long periods of time. Which I understand, but also that can feel lonely.

Cats (and dogs – I suspect) don’t judge. You don’t need to mask in front of them. Yet they still come to you for comfort, they still need us, and are still comforting. Physically they have perfect fur, they purr (one up on dogs there), they’re warm, their weight is comforting as they lie on you. They vocalise enough but not too much. Both of mine had a wide range of sounds that could almost be a conversation. They’d play. But most importantly, they would always be there. When I went through a major depression after getting my PhD (no job, all my social contacts had withered, the one thing I’d focused five years on had ended, and there was nothing to take its place) the cats were there. During covid, they were there. They were my bedrock. For a lot of people, pets become part of the family, but for long periods of my life, those two were my family.

After Sinta died, Pash came into her own. Suddenly there was no competition for my affection. I’d get headbutts, she’d stretch her paws out and claw me in sheer happiness at being near me. Undisguised, unfeigned.

I knew my time with Sinta was limited, which meant much more focus on my time with them. There was one moment I remember, lying in bed, one each lying contented on a shoulder, purring in absolute bliss, and I felt utter contentment. And I know that is the moment that the rest of my life will exist in the shadow of.

I miss them, obviously, and that’s where a lot of the grief comes from. Knowing that they won’t be around to come up to me when I get home, or jump on the bed to be allowed in to sleep next to me, or sit on me and let me talk to them or sing to them (I’m sure Sinta loved my rendition of Klokleda partha menin klatch). But much of the grief comes from knowing that feeling of contentment, of just sheer happiness of having those balls of fur lying on me, trusting me, sharing their contentment with me, is gone forever.

I have a metaphor for grief. It’s the sort of thing Langdon Jones once described as antipoetry because it’s so banal. Grief is like a hydrofoil. While I’m busy skimming along, I’m above it all. I can work, write a blog post, watch TV, read a book, and it’s pushed away. But as soon as I stop, I sink into it. Waves of it come at me and every seventh one, or so, is so big it swamps me. Even after two years, I’d be physically hit by a wall of grief that Sinta was gone. Now both have. All you can do is let it drive you down, and hold on until you come up for air.

This time is, I think, easier. I’m not sure why. I think because with one cat there was still something emotional going on inside. This time, with none, I don’t think that connection with the emotions is working so well. I’m just on autopilot now. Maybe I’ll be wrong. It’s still early days. I didn’t save any of Pash’s fur from the last time I groomed her, so hunted around my room for traces of it. I gathered up a small handful of it, and yes, it’s soft and white, but there’s no emotional connection to or tactile memory of her in it. It’s just fur. I wanted to feel something from it though. It’s good to have the scrappy bits of fur though because if I didn’t I’d regret not having some so that I could have that connection. This is evidence that wouldn’t work. I haven’t been able to look at any photos or videos. Still can’t for Sinta. They might have a better connection to them, but that might be overwhelming. Like it would trigger this big ball that’s just inside that I can’t let out, but I want to let it out in manageable amounts. Maybe it’s there to stay.

A friend has talked about a ceremony for emotional closure. I’m not sure I want that. I’m not sure what would be left if I got closure. Today’s card on my tarot app says “Keep going, knowing that the journey does not end.” So — good advice. We’ll see.

<edit> I’ve come back in to change the names of my cats – I don’t remember if I’ve ever used them as passwords but it’s possible at some point over the past 19 years that I have.

I’m realising that the effort (on day 1) of getting through is added to by a sort of muscle memory of them. Lying on the bed anticipating one jumping up onto it, to an extent that I think it’s happened. Like a phantom limb. Opening the curtains and looking down expecting one of them to be looking through the window and to look up and give an acknowledging meow at me.

All those moments were small little lifts that brightened each hour. Now they’re not there. I keep leaning on something that’s absent, and keep falling. And much as that habit painful, the worry is that it’ll wear off and I’ll forget what that felt like. Just sharing my life that closely with another for so long that your behaviours are intertwined, not just your lives.

Also, why I’m writing this post. Main aim is – there’s probably someone out there feeling the same thing. It might help to see someone else understands it.

Letting the GenAI out of the bottle

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I’ve had a couple of interesting conversations at work recently about the use of AI in education – prompted largely by sharing this poem

https://poets.org/poem/student-who-used-ai-write-paper

which asks the question “I know your days are precious on this earth. But what are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of it?”

It’s a good question and I think is a good one to raise with students, because it reframes the whole relationship between teacher, student, assessment and study. We’re not (or we shouldn’t be) trying to persuade students not to use AI because we don’t want them cheating, or because there’s a standard we want them to attain under some artificial constraints, just to make assessment more challenging (which we shouldn’t) but because there are skills we think they should acquire because they are skills that will develop them, their interaction with the world, and to feel the pleasure of enacting their abilities well.

AI has its place – in the words of someone I was talking to at a conference recently, it’s good for doing the boring stuff we already know how to do. There’s also the possibility you could get by through getting AI to do the work, but to progress past a certain level, you need to have the skills that (if you’ve used AI) you’ve bypassed the acquisition of, for example, you could get AI to write an essay that synthesises different writers, but to create something novel, you need to make associations that aren’t really obvious. To do that you have to have the ability to summarise papers, follows citations, pull out key thoughts and abstract them.

Also, to stick with it, you’ve got to find where the fun is in it. In the degree I’m doing at the moment, I’m enjoying doing the assignments, because I’m finding my own take. For example, my essay on Leibniz I developed by relating each of the aspects of his philosophy to different cake metaphors. Because I like cake but I can’t eat it, basically.

Though, having fun with something is really possible only when you’re not overly concerned with the mark that you’re going to get and that as I said in a meeting last week “is only possible when you’ve reached an age where … err … you’re confident enough that you don’t feel the need to prove yourself further” to which my colleague responded “you mean run out of fucks to give” which is exactly what I was going to say before I self-censored myself. 😀

The issue is that students are just scared, scared by the amount of assessment they have to do, scared by the amount of competition (some people still do normative grading – which is inexcusable) and scared of screwing up. Sitting back and smelling the roses is – or the pleasure in just learning – is rarely possible.

What we can do is make their engagement with AI authentic at least. People who insist on written testing simply so that they can be sure it’s the student’s own work need to think again. If AI can do the thing we’re testing them on and will do that better then – and I’m going to put this in capitals so that this stands out – because it’s key

WHY THE HELL ARE WE STILL TEACHING THEM TO DO IT?

If this is a skill AI can acquit perfectly, then it’s not something that’s worthy of a human doing. So, maybe this will rule out a huge chunk of a maths syllabus, for example, or coding. Well fair enough. Rethink your syllabus from the ground up. Maybe it’ll make it easier, well deal with it, you’re now teaching an easy subject and all the people who can’t do the tricky things will take yours as the easy option. But putting in artificial barriers, simply to make the assessment harder (like in person testing), is missing the point of what education is for (the subject of my next post). Find a way of assessing which actually challenges the student on something that has some value, like groupwork, or have an assessment that checks in on them frequently so you can observe their process.

Avoiding coming up with authentic assessments, which test the non-AI skills is simply failing the students, yourselves, and the education system. In fact, that’s where the cheating is, not in the students using the AI.

Reflecting on reflection

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As part of a project I’ve just started working on I spent two days last week at a castle in Yorkshire.

The project is fascinating – and fun – it’s about integrating playfulness within the curriculum and measuring its impact. You can read more about the project at https://research.northumbria.ac.uk/replay/One of the things that came out of the workshop was being given the task with three other participants of coming up with the structure for one of the final steps, which is where we all reflect on the project. We decided that we’d actually plan the reflection for the whole project all the way through, as one is so dependent on the other. As the learning designers on the project (across six universities) have to do research diaries, it makes sense that these should all be integrated.

As part of this “working group” one of the people in the team shared this: https://eprints.staffs.ac.uk/9080/1/Lesley%20Raven_Thesis_2025.pdf It’s really focused on reflection in design education / studio learning – that general domain – but there’s a lot that’s transferable to other disciplines. The key thing that was fed into our process on the day was the key phrase “Reflection is not admin”. If we have to do repeated reflection throughout the project, it shouldn’t feel like a chore, but actually be playful practice too.

I started skimming through it, but there’s such a lot of good stuff in there, i’m reading the whole thing from beginning to end.

What I particularly liked about the bit of it I’ve read so far (p. 34 – ) is the break down of reflection into these five themes. The design ed focus shows through but most disciplines will have something that aligns to these.

1) Technical rationality – This is really the basic “did it achieve what it set out to do?” – most tasks will actually have some learning to acquire, even if it’s not a technique or skill. Bottom line is – did it work?

2) Artistry – again this is obvious for design ed (and art) not so much for other things. Though this book shows how artistry is a principle that can be applied anywhere. Chapter twelve is especially worth a read.

3) Constructivist assumptions – constructivism is the principle that we develop knowledge by building on what we already know – and so this reflection would address the extent to which these assumptions have been met. Did we build on any knowledge?

4) Tacit knowledge – tacit knowledge is the hidden bits of knowledge we have, but we’re not aware we have. This part of the reflection aims to unpack that aspect. So the question here might be “has any knowledge or understanding emerged through the process of reflection?”

5) Mind and body dualism. This is a bit trickier to apply generally. The thesis isn’t really suggesting we adopt mind body dualism but be aware of it. We often ask ourselves how have our minds developed, but of course design ed is also about physical skills. The two are intertwined so much the idea of dualism is outdated. Embodied learning. Post-humanist post-dualism etc etc. Lots of post. It’s a bit difficult to say what your body has learnt from … say a maths lecture … except lecture seats do not provide adequate lumbar support for 62 year olds. For me this makes sense in terms of Gibbs’s “feelings” stage of reflection. How did it make you feel? When you reflect do you cringe or smile? There’s a quote by Polanyi (1974) which helped me get my head round this – “practical wisdom is more truly embodied in action than expressed in rules of action”. So basically, don’t overlook the embodied aspect. It’s the ontic before the ontologic (to get all Heideggery again).

Also reading the thesis I realise how much scope there is to reflection – it’s not a boring chore if you do it properly – it can be a creative act in itself. Maybe the most creative part of the cycle if done in a fun and playful way, which is what we’re here for.

Obviously I blog, I do podcasting and I have a constant internal self-critical monologue so reflection is something I do a LOT of, but finding alternative mechanisms to reflect that are creative and invite people to want to reflect is, I’ve realised, going to be a fascinating parallel part of the project.

Polanyi, M. 1974. Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

On creativity

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This is another blog post following up on one Grainne Conole has written (at http://e4innovation.com/?p=661) which is ironic, I suppose, given the nature of the topic. I wanted to chip in on the conversation too, because I wanted to offer a slightly different perspective on what creativity is, and what constitutes a particularly creative person. I think our culture is obsessed by the lonely, creative genius who works away creating rare works of art, and I think this is both limiting and offputting for those of us who aren’t actually geniuses. So I’ll offer some examples of what also comprises creativity, using as an e the person I’d consider to be one of the most creative people, if not the most creative person, whose work I follow, Gregg Taylor.

You might not have heard of Gregg Taylor because he’s not someone held up as one of the great creative geniuses of our time, because what he does doesn’t fit in with that image. Gregg is the force behind Decoder Ring Theatre, which produces podcasts in the style of 40s’ and 50s’ radio serials. He’s been doing that for eight years. and I first came across them about seven years ago.

These podcasts come out twice a month. So 24 a year, of which he writes 18. That’s 18 a year, for 8 years. Without fail. We underestimate that as an aspect of creativity. Quantity. Sure it’s important to have the novelist spending his entire lifetime creating one world altering novel. But to be able to sit down and come up with something new, every fortnight. That’s an incredible achievement. I think more of us should look at the amount someone produces as a mark of a creative person.

That’s not to say the quality isn’t there. Sure there are better writers. I’m reading Midnight’s Children at the moment, by Salman Rushdie, and there’s a great writer. But the content of the podcasts are entertaining, there’s character development, nearly always a plot (as much as you can get into 25 mins), there’s some fun lines, poignancy. They have the lot. And Gregg is a better writer than most. And he comes up with that every two weeks. For eight years. Very few creative outputs have those attributes of quality and consistency.

But I think what also makes the truly creative people stand out, isn’t just the ability to succeed in one area. There’s a good team of actors in these podcasts, of whom Gregg Taylor is one. He acts, directs, does post-production and markets them. He’s also written novels based on the characters and now has launched the first comic book, to great reviews. Specialism is over-rated, adaptability is a mark of a very creative person.

I think, though, the most unhelpful of the characteristics we associate with creativity is the idea of the emotional erratic soul suffering for his art. We all know people who are jerks, who people let get away with being a jerk, simply because they are creative and innovative. This probably happens more in the academic world than the art world. Happens a lot in movie making too. They’re perfectionists, or they’re obsessed, or any one of a number of excuses we give for their bad behaviour. But really, if it’s such an effort for them to create, then really they’re not that good at being creative. Sure everyone needs to put their work first occasionally. I get ratty if I get interrupted in the middle of thinking about something. But actually … that is because if I lose my train of thought it takes me ages to get it back, sometimes I never do. So that’s a case in point, I’m actually not that creative, otherwise I could recall it whenever I want. In contrast, the DRT troupe engage with their audiences, through twitter, facebook and there’s an approachability there that you wouldn’t get, say, with other writers, actors etc. Not sure what I’d call this as a quality, but maybe not being really up yourself … humour or humility would cover it.

While on the subject of humility, I first heard someone describe themself as a Creative at a seminar day a couple of years back (at the University of Hull actually). Talk about lack of humility. To describe yourself as a Creative is, by default, implying that you’re somehow different from everyone else, that you’re creative and they’re not. No. You’re just lucky enough to be in a job that supports you to be creative, that doesn’t make you special. I get to spend a big chunk of my time writing. Sometimes I get paid for that. I am therefore a jammy bastard, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=jammy%20bastard and I never forget that. If you ever refer to yourself as A Creative, you’re pronouncing it wrong, it’s actually pronounced “wank-er”.

Finally, and maybe the most controversial of the pre-requisites for creativity, the DRT output is free. One of the mistakes a lot of people who create things make is that they think that because they are talented, the world owes them the opportunity to put those talents to use. No it doesn’t. Work for the vast majority of people, is doing stuff they hate that they get paid for. If you like doing it, it’s not work, and essentially there’s no reason to be paid for it. People need you to stack shelves, mend roads, grow food. They don’t need your book or your music in the same way. So yes, the majority will share your music, download your movie, pass on pdfs of your book chapter. That’s tough, but it’s a fact of life and you probably need to just face up to that rather than whinging about it and trying to come up with legislation to stop it. I’ve never actually taken anything like that for free, I pay for the music I listen to, and the TV shows I watch, and I donate to DRT and soma fm and any of the free content that’s out there, but I do so because I see it as a moral obligation, not a legal necessity. And from a selfish point of view, I want to see them continue. If enough people value your work, then they will pay for it and the work will continue. If they don’t then they won’t,  and it won’t. The truly creative will therefore make their stuff open source, they’ll share it for free and then see what happens. A freemium model, whereby you find ways to make money by selling extra content works too – monetizing the long tail as I almost managed to say at a recent transmedia conference, then had an attack of self-respect at the last minute.  (Other people ripping off your stuff and making money off it is another matter, that’s out and out theft).  It’s inappropriate to rail against creating music, or writing books or making movies under those conditions.because you knew that’s the way things are when you got into it. If you don’t like it, there’s always stacking shelves, mending roads, or teaching to fall back on. If you’re really creative, you’ll still feel driven to create anyway.

Oh and if you want to check out DRT, their website is at http://www.decoderringtheatre.com/

Flow and writing

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This is my own observations and response to Grainne’s latest post http://e4innovation.com/?p=658 mainly because I’ve just spent three days solid writing and doing nothing else in order to meet a deadline so it’s on my mind at the moment.

The subject of Grainne’s post is flow, and I’ve definitely been in the zone today. The book is on Making Sense of Space and is written with a long-standing friend and collaborator Iryna Kuksa – she got the publishing deal, we came up with a subject we could both write about, and then off we went. Or rather I didn’t. I did an introduction back in September, then left it until December, didn’t quite get the last chapter written in the time I had allocated and it’s taken me until now to get it written.

What helps? Well deadlines help. They are the best cure for writer’s block there is. We all know the stories about Douglas Adams and deadlines, so I don’t need to repeat them here … I’m not as bad as DNA, I nearly always meet them, but this one has been particularly difficult to get started on. The reason, mainly, was because I didn’t believe I could do it. Although I did my half of the intro with no problem this was mainly because Iryna had laid out what she wanted from me and how much, so no real thought required there. So really six months (I started thinking about it in July) of panicking before I got down to it. But then I remembered something I really wanted to write about, which was a proposal I’d started to put together for a Marie Curie fellowship, something I’d noted about descriptions of game spaces, ritual spaces, theatre and virtual worlds while doing the PhD and had emerged in conversations with colleagues and friends. That gave me something I wanted to say. I was no longer just doing this because I felt I ought to write somethign, this was something I cared about. So that’s lesson 1 for writing: Find something you care about. Even then though it was a while before I started. I was really waiting for an opportune time, I’d taken on a few projects, and needed to get those written, but had most of December and early January set aside for writing the book (well my half of it). Other writing commitments eroded that though, so bit by bit I was reduced to only about two weeks: a few days before Christmas and about two weeks of January. This was a good time though, I’m not a huge fan of Christmas, and luckily I had a huge back muscle cramp that meant I couldn’t walk for about two weeks anyway, so I could shut everyone away, turn off the email, turn down Facebook and focus on the book. Because really you need to think, and you need to immerse yourself totally to do that properly. Lesson 2: Shut yourself away from distractions. That worked this week, three days with no Facebook, no email and no visitors and I got it done. This morning I had the conclusion to write and the only way to do that is read it through, hold everything in your head at once, and try and look for the common themes. That needs protracted durations of quiet. I wanted to link experiences of space, experiences of technology, willingness to bond with technology and ultimately look at longterm effects on what that means to be human. A lot of disparate stuff, but I think i got there without sounding too mixed up.

The reason why I wanted to bring together all those different things was because throughout the book — in fact a big part of the pitch to the publishers, was that this would be a book with a lot of contributors, but with the majority of the writing by Iryna and me. I’ve quoted friends, got them to add stuff through Facebook, interviewed them, quoted their dissertations. Of the 26k words I’ve written I’d say that about 5k were written by others (all credited obviously). I like having those viewpoints and voices, and I figure that it’s a platform for other people who have influenced me to also get into print. I’ve also let anyone read it who wants to, through posting it as FB notes, or emailing it to them. It’s made it a lot more fun, and hopefully readable. so lesson 3 Don’t do it alone.

The other thing that helped too, over Christmas particularly when I had 10 days over three weeks of concentrated work was to keep a spreadsheet of how much I was doing and set a target every day. This was around 1000 words, which doesn’t sound a lot, but some days I’d delete half that before starting anything else. The advantage of this is that you have to keep going, even when you want to stop. And also when you get to that point, you can stop. One of the mistakes with writing is to always think that you should do a bit more. The mistake with that though is, if you don’t stop, where’s the incentive in writing? If you keep going at it and get your 1000 words done by 4:00 the evening is yours, aiming towards that goal is then a point you can reward yourself, so you keep going. If you faff about and are still at it at 10:00, tough. The flow thing is all about feeding back how well you’re doing and thereby remaining motivated. so lesson 4: lots of small targets and stick to them, feed back regularly.

Although I was originally a bit peeved at the time taken off the chunk of time I’d set aside to write, when I got down to it I could see that this had been an advantage, because during that time a friend had given me a book called Virtual Literacies. In it there was a chapter on the schome project, which she’d contributed to. This ended up being the place where I started my chapter, because the discussions in the Gillen et al chapter in the book had stuff to say about how learners in Schome had related to those places. I could start by recapping that chapter and then branch out to talk about teh bigger picture. This then became the format for the other chapters too, start with a case study of one thing, to illustrate the argument, then talk about the chapter. Without finding a formula like that I’d’ve been prevaricating for a couple of days each time trying to get started. This applies really to each individual day too. If you finish one day with sort of an idea of what to do next, or even start by editing what you’ve already done, it makes it easier to start, because you know what you have to do. Some peopel I know even leave sentences half way through so they can start off the next day by finishing it off. I wouldn’t take the chance that I would be able to, but a few notes on what the next bit is, or a plan, really helps. lesson 5, if you only know one thing, know how you’re going to start.

That really applies to the conclusion too, I find it helps to start those of with one specific thing … maybe something new, or maybe something said in the chapter, that can kick off the discussion. The first bit doesn’t have to be profound. It can be only connected vaguely or occur to you because of something else completely. Just write that down and see what follows on from that. I was stuck on the conclusion for one chapter and couldn’t see what the lessons learned were, but then had a conversation about how we always try and fix things by making the technology better rather than the pedagogy. That seemed to be a lesson that also arose from the case studies I’d been writing about, so I put that down. After writing for a while, I realised that actually, it was true. lesson 6 if you’ve got too many things to say just start with one, pick it at random if you like. that’s still better than not picking one.

And finally, lesson 7, sometimes you just have to go with the flow and let yourself be distracted. The last post I wrote was when I was still trying to get down to the final chapter. I saw the Daily Post challenge and i spent a couple of hours writing a short story when I should have been working.  I can’t really argue that it helped me get the work done, but I really don’t think I’d have been able to focus until it was written. Same with this blog. I have 200 unread emails and about 250 unanswered ones, but I thought of this first so got it out the way.