Happy new year everybody! I'm just heading out to make a queimada with local friends, but wanted to duck in the bar and greet everybody first. You all have been one of my favorite parts of 2005, hands down.

What have been your favorite moments of the past year, and what are you most looking forward to in the year to come?

Well, my scary-smart sexy-thighed Frenched-up bar dears, I'm off (tomorrow morning) on a cross-country drive to visit family. I'll leave the cookie jar open and the liquor cabinets unlocked, so please keep partying on without me; I'll drop in every once in a while to make sure everybody's having a good time.

Happy winter solstice, and much love and holiday cheer and gratitude to you for making this bar such a great place to hang out. Big virtual hugs to you all.

Grades are in!

Christmas shopping is done!

LWI and I went on a giant shopping spree today to reward ourselves for having survived a nasty awful semester! (Outlet stores were involved, and leather... ah, it was lovely.)

And I am now utterly broken. Is it okay to go to bed at 9:30 pm? Because really, the only reason I am up right now is because I'm too embarrassed to go to bed this early.

Ooo, wait - another question! A request for your bloggy wisdom: what would you recommend for good Christmas-break fiction reading?

My offerings: Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Shadow of the Wind, and Patrick Suskind's Perfume.

What are your favorites for a good afternoon of curling up on the couch and losing yourself in another world?

Hi, everyone - I just came in to wipe down the counters, bring fresh cookies and refresh everyone's drinks. Mostly I've been working on my non-wireless-adapted notebook so I can sit by the fireplace while I grade and not succumb to the temptation to check blogs every three and a half minutes. (The grading goes a heck of a lot faster that way, but I miss you guys!)

A question: what's the thing you're most looking forward to doing as soon as you finish grading?

What could be better? Here I am, wearing my favorite old college sweatshirt and flannel pajamas, stretched out on the comfiest couch, working on my laptop, with OneCat snoring in my lap and TwoCat (who never snuggles with humans!) draped across my ankles, Steely Dan on the stereo, and a blazing fire just next to me in the fireplace. It almost makes grading bearable.

Yesterday I spent part of the afternoon in a meeting (oh joy!) This committee happens to be one of the higher-level university committees, the kind that deals with material that's already been approved by departments and colleges. It's also an unusually efficient and well-run committee, at least judging by my experience in the previous two meetings of the semester.

But yesterday's meeting made me wonder a little bit about just where the bar of professionalism is set. We had a set of proposals to approve, and one of them was a new course proposal that (as new course proposals should) included a syllabus and some other supporting material. One other colleague (only one, mind you) and I pointed out a minor flaw that we'd noticed in the supporting material. We were roundly praised by the rest of the committee, without the slightest hint of irony, for our sharp eyes and attention to detail. What, you ask, did we notice that garnered such praise? ...That the supporting material, originally two-sided, had only had one side copied, so that we were missing half the proposal. No wonder I keep getting merit raises. I'm brilliant!

New Kid’s recent post on a person who inspired dislike has been poking at the back of my thoughts all afternoon, in ways I’m not sure what to do with. (which would be a warning that this post may not make much sense; I’m not sure I have a coherent theme here, but there are a couple of things I want to try to string together. Bear with me. ETA: And now I'm not wildly happy with it; this may not stay up long.)

One phrase particularly stung, as she described this woman who did not in any way fit the mold of the usual coffee-house denizens: “She just looks wrong here.” (I mean no criticism of NK; that’s something we’ve all thought or said at one moment or another, which is why the honesty of her post is so valuable). It’s what we think when we find someone doesn’t fit our expectations, when we sense they don’t belong.

I love to travel, and one of my obsessions with traveling is to blend in well enough that no one will immediately guess I’m a tourist. I know I can’t avoid giving myself away at some point, but I feel a powerful obligation to master at least a smattering of the language and the customs. I want to delay as long as possible the moment when it happens: the reaction that is never spoken aloud, but easy to see in someone’s eyes, “You don’t belong here.”

I can do this in a few parts of the world for a reasonable amount of time before the disguise fails, but one of the most memorable elements of my long-ago trip to Thailand was the realization that I was unavoidably trapped in my skin. I knew that during my brief weeks there I had no hope of mastering more than a few phrases of the language or getting a very sophisticated understanding of the culture, but I thought I could do enough to not stand out as a painfully obvious farang. It didn’t take long to realize that even if I spent the rest of my life in this lovely country, even if I made friends and got a job and settled into a community, if I spoke Thai and dressed Thai and lived Thai, the first reaction of any stranger upon observing my Anglo-Saxon features would be “you don’t belong here.” It doesn’t even have to be malicious, it’s just the observation that I’m different, but not to be able to escape it is maddening. I’m embarrassed to confess that that was my first real understanding of what most African-Americans and Hispanics and cerebral-palsy patients and folks in wheelchairs live every day in this country, the extent to which the majority of the population bases their first reaction and set of assumptions on appearance. (I was nineteen and naïve; these things took a while to sink in.)

It’s easy, if you listen, to hear that phrase going through people’s heads every day on my own campus, that momentary double-take of dissonance: when they encounter the distastefully overweight, awkwardly dressed student I see lumbering across campus every day; when they see black students in graduate courses; when they see female faculty in the science departments; when they see the kid with blue hair and a nose ring; when they cross paths with the janitorial staff before 5 pm. I know that at least one of my colleagues thinks it of me.

One of the comments to New Kid’s post was from marcelle_proust, who said simply that “Compassion is a learned response.” That’s so true. Compassion is not automatic; it needs to be practiced and cultivated, and never more than when we are least inclined to it. We can’t help our initial reactions and judgments when we see someone we perceive to be out of place. We can help how we express them or respond to them. We may hear that phrase flash through our own heads – you just look wrong here – but we can challenge it, and look twice at the person, and say: Do you want to be here? Welcome.

Song lyrics for today:

It's coming down...
On a lucky Monday, Mrs. Braintree
All your lanes are waxen silver
And the stores are loot for vagabonds
It's coming down
Go home! Go home and take a snow day, Mrs. Braintree!

-- "Snow Days," Trip Shakespeare

First it starts to snow and the children dream of igloos
Then there's five inches of snow and the city's slowing down...
Sixteen inches of snow and the bartenders start drinking
Three feet of snow and the telephone lines are down...

Sixteen feet of snow and the cell phones are finally failing
Thirty-six feet of snow but there's no one left to count
Ninety-six feet of snow and there's one guy in a highrise, in an office, who doesn't even know.

-- "Five Feet Nine and Rising," Steeplejack

Last day of class, end of the semester, and a SNOW DAY! Half a snow day, really, since they closed campus at noon - I had the chance to do everything I needed to get done, and then, just at the best moment, got the perfect excuse to go home.

What's even better is that I live below the 40th parallel, which means that this is a snow day with very little real threat of snow. It's really more of a freezing rain day, and to be entirely honest, it's a great-fear-of-the-faint-threat-of-freezing-rain day. Not that I wouldn't like some real snow - it's been years since I've had snow enough to play in (ah, for the days when I built enormous snow gargoyles on my balcony in Minnesota!) but give me an order to go home and not even any real nasty weather to contend with, and I'll take that deal. The forecast was grim (perhaps a whole terrifying inch of snow!) but I'm looking out my window now at a calm, dry day, and chortling to myself that this is what they call a Snow Day.

I'm not complainin'.

I just found a link to this at Overread, and there are just not words to describe my enthusiasm. This combines my geeky-computer-toy urges with my blowing-things-up sensibilities with end-of-semester-grading frustration... I must have one of these in my office. Pointed at the door.

It's time to revive a long-neglected tradition of this blog: the giving of prizes! Scrivener laments that "it's a sad, sad day when a picture of a grown man, a college professor even, dressed in slippers, boxers, and a necktie while popping a wheelie on his three-year-old's tricycle, reading Foucault's This is Not a Pipe, and blowing on a bubble pipe does not win any kind of award." I couldn't agree more. This world is in sad enough shape without neglecting the exquisite combination of creativity, sheer nerdiness, snazzy facial hair and postmodern genius that led to the famous photograph. It's no pipe dream: that's a prizewinner in my book.

Found at Celandine's, the best grading-procrastination toy EVER!

Do your own snowflake here.



ETA: can't... stop... making... snowflakes...