20th Anniversary Countdown: Guest Post #20

In celebration of my blog's 20th anniversary, I've been having guest posters every week leading up to the big day. You may remember that a while back I asked all of you to submit questions you might have for my husband. I anonymized the questions, reordered them, and today you'll be getting answers to those very questions. Thanks to everyone who asked questions!

About a week ago, I spent approximately five minutes writing what I thought his answers might be, so those answers are in brackets after his responses. 

Without further ado, here is Dr. BB!

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Marriage 

1. What did you first notice about Engie? 

I could point to a lot of things that I love about Engie that would make me look really sweet and charming – her unassuming brilliance, the fact that she is the only person I’ve ever met who literally dances like no one is watching, etc. – but it took me a while to discover all of that. The honest answer? She was wearing a tight-ish t-shirt and some hip-hugging flared jeans and I didn’t stand a chance.  

[My response: That I was not Black. I think everyone thought I was going to be a Black woman until I showed up.]

[Note from NGS: Fourth of July, 2005 - We went to the fireworks downtown. One of the earliest photos of us together. You can read a very vague recounting of this outing on this very blog.]

2. What are your best and worst qualities as a husband? 

I’m midwestern, so “best” is tricky. Engie would say that I am funny, but this is not a universally agreed upon assessment! I think my best husband quality is that I am just really into Engie in a bunch of different ways. Those ways have changed and deepened throughout our relationship. I make a point of both paying attention to that dynamic and, hopefully, letting her know about it! 

[My response: Conscientious, supportive, funny.]

There is some competition for worst. I can be moody and sullen. I sometimes have conversations with myself in my head and assume that Engie has been involved in that process. The big one, though, is probably my extremely neurotic relationship with food. I can (and do!) rationalize this based on medical issues I have dealt with, but at the end of the day I am weird about food, and this causes a lot of inconvenience and missed opportunities for both of us.  

[My response: The food thing.]

3. What is one thing that you do better than Engie and one thing she does better than you? 

I think I am more intuitive than Engie, but this comes with the downside that if I do not grasp something reasonably quickly, I have a tendency to get frustrated and move on. This might be a partial explanation for why I am terrible at painting rooms. I start with the best intentions, but if I don’t nail it on the first go my instinct is to say, eh, fuck it. Engie, for her part, has a deep curiosity about things that translates into a lot more perseverance than I can usually muster. She will dig and sift and winnow until she has her head around something. This is probably also why she outperformed me on every standardized test that we have both taken. She’s not a perfectionist, per se, but she has a lot more patience with imperfection than I do. She is a hell of a room painter.  

[My response: He does better: Tetrising the dishwasher. I often just pile the dishes next to it and ask him to deal with it. I do better: Remember the things.]

[Note from NGS: Engagement photos in 2007. This isn't the best technical photo, but I love everything about it. If you want to see a few more, here are some links. Our photographer is still in business and if anyone in the Twin Cities wants a recommendation, he's got ours.]

4. What is your favorite thing about your wife? 

She is caring in a really genuine way. I know a lot of people who put on a good show about giving a damn, but at the end of the day it is just that – a show. For my part I tend to care quite a lot but keep it to myself, and I’m adept at hiding my not-caring. When Engie professes to care about something, she follows through on it. A great, if simple, example that she may have written about: Engie keeps in touch. She writes letters and notes, sends cards, makes time to text or call. She cares about the people in her life and she acts on that. On the flip side, she generally will not pretend to care when she does not. This can make her come off as brusque to some people, but those people should get to know her better. 

[My response:  I have no idea how to predict this answer.]

5. How do you feel about having a wife who blogs about her life? 

I love it! That said, I don’t read it. I think of it as a space that she has where she can reflect at length about what’s on her mind and connect with a community that means a lot to her. I made a conscious decision to absent myself from that space. Engie has mentioned the book club to me, and I think that is a great encapsulation of how I see the blog as a whole. It would be kinda weird for me to randomly drop in on an in-person book club. That’s how I feel about the blog. 

[My response: It’s really weird, but she likes it, so that’s okay.]

Work 

6. What kind of doctor are you? 

I have a Ph.D. in political science, specializing in political theory. What does that mean? Read on! 

[My response: Ph.D. – not the medical kind.]

7. Could you please tell me what political theory is in twenty words or less? 

Probably not, but I’m no quitter! Here goes: the study of political ideas and ideologies, how they have evolved over time, and how they influence politics today (19 – boom).  In a few more words, political theory differs from political philosophy be being marginally more practical. Political philosophers ask questions like, what is justice? Political theorists are more likely to ask, what are the features of a just political system? How have our answers to that question changed over time? How do our current institutions measure up to that ideal? 

[My response: Ha ha ha. I cannot.]

8. What is your area of research/ study/ teaching? 

My research is in the philosophy of social science. I’m interested in how we establish truth in the social sciences (political science, sociology, psychology, etc.) and how our paths to truth differ from those taken in the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, etc.). It is arcane and uninteresting to most people! 

My teaching is more interesting, and much more broad. I’m the only political theorist at my university, so I teach the entire historical sequence in political thought, everything from ancient and medieval political thought through contemporary thinkers. Plato, Machiavelli, Locke, Nietzsche, Camus, Rawls – I do it all! I also offer occasional one-off courses on topics of contemporary interest, so things like democracy in dark times. 

[My response: He studies Big Ideas. (Look, I’ve never, NOT ONCE, taken a political theory class. Maybe I should audit one of his classes.)]

9. How did you become a political scientist? Were there any big moments of formation or clarity? 

I took a lot of detours in college. I started as a biomedical engineering major (!), hated it, and went searching. Eventually, after a number of false starts (including a brief period when I thought I was destined to be an underappreciated poet) I found my way to philosophy and theory classes. My clever idea was that I could tell my parents (who were understandably concerned about my prospects – I was writing poetry for god’s sake!) that I was studying political science with an eye toward law school, while actually indulging my interest in these more abstract pursuits. Along the way I had several amazing professors who steered my thinking more in the political theory direction rather than philosophy.  

[My response: He wanted to study international relations, but his celiac diagnosis made that seem a bit too challenging, so he began to study theory instead.]

10. I have a sense of your political stances via Engie (oriented towards social and environmental justice). What would you say is a litmus-test question that could be used to gauge a political scientist's politics? 

The question would be different if I were talking to a political scientist versus the average politically interested person, in part because most political scientists I know are pretty savvy about dodging such questions. That said, I think a revealing question is to ask about the balance between liberty and equality in society. Most people who think a lot about politics acknowledge that liberty and equality are sometimes in tension. Their views on how the two are best balanced can be illuminating.  

[My response: He doesn’t think your politics should matter to a person in front of the classroom!]

[Note from NGS: Dr. BB is OVER taking photos by this time on our wedding day and I love how he's glaring. I just really really love this photo, even though my dress is bustled incorrectly and my makeup is a mess. Look at how hot my husband is!]

Hobbies 

11. What do you like to do when you are NOT researching/ teaching? 

I read a fair amount, though nowhere near as much as Engie. We do a lot of “parallel play” where we are with each other, each doing our own thing. Outside of that I am a pretty solitary creature, so I enjoy doing things that allow me to be alone for stretches of time: bike rides, solo golf rounds, listening to or playing music, that sort of thing. It’s how I regain my bearings after spending chunks of my work life in classrooms or meetings full of people –experiences I enjoy but find draining and a bit disorienting.  

[My response: Playing guitar, playing tennis/golf, watching The West Wing.]

12. What's your favorite movie, and why? 

Like Engie I don’t watch a ton of movies. I have a soft spot for ‘80s horror movies, oddly enough, and the best example in my book is Halloween. For the nerds out there – my people, in other words – I know that Halloween actually came out in 1978 and is technically not an ‘80s movie.  It feels like one, though, doesn’t it? Maybe because it does all of the things that ‘80s slasher movies do, but better. Tension, some humor, an eerie as hell soundtrack, a few well-placed jump scares…. I watch it every year and love it every time.  

[My response: I don’t know the answer to this. I should feel bad about that.]

A fairly representative example of a page from one of my editions of Truth and Method. It’s not clear form this picture, but there are three different ink colors here - black, blue, and violet - a different color for each time through the text. The damn book is almost 600 pages and every one of them looks like this. 

13. What is your favorite book? 

This is a tricky question since I both work with books and read them for pleasure. My favorite “work book” is called Truth and Method by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. It has been hugely influential in how I think about a lot of things. My favorite book of poetry is Hart Crane’s White Buildings. My favorite novel I’ve read for pleasure is a moving target. Today I’ll say This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I first read it when I was 18, and it was a major case of “the right book at the right time.”  

[My response: The Idiot. I feel like I need to defend this answer - he has absolutely said The Idiot was his favorite book to me before!]

A ~25 year-old picture of me with a statue of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Three things that should be evident from this: 1.My appreciation for Fitzgerald is long-standing. 2. I’m not lying about the hairline thing (below). 3. There are good reasons why I rarely wear shorts. 

14. What is your favorite thing about Hannah? 

We sometimes joke that Hannah is me in dog form. She’s generally quiet, has weird food issues, is suspicious of strangers, fiercely protective of Engie, etc. She also has an undeniable goofy streak. The thing that I love the most about Hannah is how that side of her personality pops out unexpectedly and unreservedly. I will never know the uninhibited joy that Hannah expresses when she is tearing ass across an open field chasing something that only she can see.  

[My response: When she “woop woops” in her sleep.]

Hannah being a little nutter. I had to freeze-frame and zoom in on a video to get this - these outbursts are both fleeting and hilarious. 

15. What is your favorite quote? 

I’ll go with the opening stanza of Hart Crane’s “Repose of Rivers” from the aforementioned White Buildings: 

The willows carried a slow sound, 
A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead. 
I could never remember 
That seething, steady leveling of the marshes 
Till age had brought me to the sea. 

[My response: I don’t know how to answer this for myself, let alone him!]

16. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live? 

G.K. Chesterton tells a great little parable in Orthodoxy (a book I probably would not recommend unless you are very Catholic or Catholic-curious) about an Englishman who gets a yacht and sets out to discover the world. He is a poor sailor, though, and, losing his way, ends up discovering… England. The thing is, he is enchanted by his discovery. He views his home country with fresh eyes and loves it. That’s how I feel about my home. If I could live anywhere in the world, it would be in the home I return to after travelling anywhere in the world. 

[My response: Huh. I’m interested in his answer to this.]

17. What is your favorite kind of hat? Do you wear hats? 

Do I wear hats? I’m a 40-something man who started losing his hair as a teenager. I wear hats. Lately I’m big on bucket hats. I used to think they looked a bit dorky, but I’m leaning into that these days. Baseball hats are a bit…sporty for me. Fedoras and the like are too extremely online. We live in northern climes, so stocking caps are a given 4-5 months out of the year. Bucket hats have a bit of personality, they’re functional in the sun, and they aren’t a default choice for dudebros – my mortal enemies.  

[My response: He wears hats a lot because he’s a balding man. Right now he’s on a bucket hat kick.]

A new addition to my bucket hat collection (to deal with the aforementioned hairline issue). Engie likes the puzzle pieces side; I favor the tropical birds.

18. What kind of music do you like or dislike? 

I really love music. Engie goes in for podcasts, I prefer music. I listen to jazz, soul, rock, R&B, country, pop, rap… pretty much any pop music recorded between the late 1930s and the turn of the century, or contemporary music in that vein. My home base is probably jangly power pop. I honestly cannot get into contemporary hip hop. I like the music that inspired hip hop, but to me the whole is less than the sum of its parts. 

[My response: Not the same music I do, that’s for sure!]

19. If you had three wishes, what would they be? 

It’s a trap! I would use only one wish, and it would be for my remaining wishes to be transferred to someone who needs the wishes more and who would choose more wisely than me.  

[My response: My wishes for him are health, peace, and joy. I suspect those are not his own.]

20. If you had to pick a book for Engie’s book club, what book would you choose? 

Infinite Jest. Just kidding. Engie and I have very different tastes in books, so I would be tempted to pick one of the few books that I have recommended to her and that she professes to have enjoyed. I’ll mention two: A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.  

[My response: Great question. I can’t wait to see what he says!]

A Canticle for Leibowitz. Marginalia include my rough Latin translations for Engie’s benefit. The post-its include things she wanted to ask me about. This probably says a lot about us, but I’m not sure what.

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And that's a wrap on guest posts, friends. I hope you enjoyed them. I'll have our CBBC wrap-up for I Capture the Castle tomorrow and then I'll write some Top Twenty lists until the actual 20th anniversary. In the meantime, I hope you're having a great long weekend, American friends, and everyone else is enjoying just a regular old weekend.

Who else wants their partner to answer twenty questions on their blog?

What's something fun you've done this weekend?