We often speak of being on another planet when we don’t quite understand where we are, when we don’t quite understand what is happening to us. That is often how I have felt over 6 years teaching in Texas. The world is to be decoded but we seem not to have the key, not to understand the merits of systems that hold us. Systems like education, disciplines like law, monsters like Wal-Mart and professions like architecture or dentistry. We imagine help to be available. We imagine agents to come and meet us and tell us how to behave. We imagine guides to entertain us, take us through the difficult first steps. “Modern, all to modern,” the guide will announce and leave us at the airport to find our own shuttle.