Pilgrim/Heretic

Grading hangout

2011-10-29T17:10:00.000-05:00

Got the grading blues? Want a warm, cozy hangout where everyone understands what you're going through? Maybe some magic popcorn and roasted peeps? Come on in!

Customs

2011-07-15T18:44:00.004-05:00

I ought to be more upset about the sausage than about the names.

The sausage was taken away from me in the airport, you see, by the ever-vigilant Customs and Border Control folks, along with a lovely little can of morcilla paté. Husband and I had purchased both in Europe during our last weeks there, planning to eat them for one of the frequent dinners we call “Bread and Things,” meaning a crusty baguette and an assortment of whatever goodies we fish out of the fridge and cabinets: cheese, olives, mussels, serrano ham. But the last few days got away from us, and we decided to try to take the unopened sausage and paté home with us instead. I did a quick check online and found no apparent opposition to such things, and since the sausage was cured and vacuum-packed and the paté was canned, I thought we might have a fighting chance.

Looking over the pale blue customs form, though, I found a checkbox for “I am (we are) bringing fruits, vegetables, food, meats, animal products.” Dammit. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do these things; just that one has to declare them. The odds were that no one would have known about the sausage if I’d kept my mouth shut and checked “no” on the form, but I’ve gotten myself through any number of bureaucratic hassles by smiling brightly and following the rules, so I decided to fall back on the tried and true remedy of being obedient. I checked “yes,” and the first CBC agent said there probably wouldn’t be any problem with the sausage and paté as she waved me on towards the second checkpoint. The guard at the second checkpoint wasn’t so sure, and sent us to a separate area to have the products examined. (Here, not for the last time, I kicked myself for being obedient.)

The CBC agent in charge of determining the fate of our treats looked pinched and sullen and decidedly as though she had never enjoyed a dinner of Bread and Things and didn’t think anyone else should either. She read the paté label. “Asturias. That’s France, right?” “No, ma’am, it’s northern Spain.” She made a half-hearted show of flipping through a folder, deciding whether or not our food was worthy of entry into the U.S., and then she double-checked our passports and turned back to my husband and me with a sudden accusatory interest. “Why did you only fill out one form?” I was puzzled; I knew I’d done at least that part right. “Because they always tell us to fill out only one form per family.” She glared at us, nose wrinkled in distaste, holding up our passports. “But you have different last names.” She then proceeded to have another agent pull everything out of all four of our checked suitcases, even though we had already presented the offending food items.

Seriously? You’re going to mess up my stuff and throw away my tasty paté and sausage because you’re upset that I don’t follow outdated patriarchal American naming conventions? We’re still a family, lady. I bit back several unsavory comments, and reminded myself to be obedient. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I thought those were the instructions. We always fill out one form, since we’re married. Should we fill out two next time, because of the names?” She grumbled an unintelligible answer about how the previous agents should never have let us through with just the one form.

I brushed it off at the time, because it seemed like such a petty and small thing. But it continued to bother me, precisely because it was petty and small – of all things, why get upset about the fact that our names are different? We’ve been married for twelve years, and in all honesty, this is the first time anyone’s cared. But she seemed awfully insulted by the fact that we dared to impersonate a normal married couple when we were clearly some sort of subversive communists, unworthy of enjoying tasty dinners.

To be sure, I’m cranky about the sausage too, and not least because the agent made a big display of dropping it into a container marked “Foreign Trash.” (I made a mental note to use this against my husband the next time we get into an insulting match.) But next time, I’m still only filling out one form, and I’m going to hide a whole bunch of extra sausage in my bag and not declare a damn thing.

Almost home

2011-07-06T07:42:00.007-05:00

As many of you know, Husband and I - did I ever come up with a pseudonum for Husband? I do not remember, which is a sad indication of how long I’ve neglected this whole blogging business – anyway, we generally spend two months each summer in Husband’s Home Country. This is absolutely wonderful in that it’s a place that I love, with excellent food and museums and culture and friends, and also the archives where I get all my research done.

But it is also trying in that its culture relies on a much higher degree of mutual interaction and obligation than I’m accustomed to. The most relevant element of this is that we are expected to stay the entire time with my in-laws in their 700-square-foot apartment, which is uncomfortable for us and inconvenient for them, but anything else would be a Public Insult on our part and a Grave Failure of Generosity on theirs. I’m not well prepared for this – as a little kid I rattled around alone in a big house with my parents, since my older siblings were mostly out on their own by the time I was old enough to notice, and I lived alone for most of the 13 years between when I left home and when I got married. So all of this Living with Other People business isn’t a bad thing in itself, but it’s something I don’t have a lot of practice at. My sister said over email that this was a situation best managed by engaging in plenty of long walks and heavy drinking, which I think she meant as a joke, except that unbeknownst to her it’s been pretty much my MO for the past several weeks.

Don’t worry, I do smack myself every time I get too whiny about having a free place to stay in a gorgeous European city. I steadily lose little slices of my sanity over the weeks we’re here, but they grow back. It’s more than worth it, and for as much as I dream of getting back and lounging around in my big quiet peaceful house, by the time we get back, it seems awfully dull and empty without the sports news on at full volume and my father-in-law snoring in his armchair and my sister-in-law gleefully repeating everything she just read on Twitter.

Besides, here are things we have seen and done over the past couple of months, the things I will miss the most when I’m back to my quiet lonely peaceful house: striking landscapes, very very old churches, tasty food, and curious creatures of all sorts.

Random bullets of Hey, I'm back!

2011-07-05T04:18:00.003-05:00

I know, I've tried this before with not a lot of luck. But I also keep seeing all this advice about how the best way to get back into a writing habit is to, well, have a writing habit, and I definitely need to get the writing parts of my brain back into shape.

And I haven't set anything on fire here for a while. And I miss all the cool people who used to come hang around this odd place.

I don't know how many of you are still wandering out there in the blogosphere (though I'm delighted with those of you who are still writing!), and I'm not making any promises to be particularly entertaining, but I'm going to at least try to string some words together every now and then, and you're all welcome to pour yourselves a drink or light up a peep and join in.

I feel like there used to be a lot more words in my head than there are now. Maybe they've all wandered off to more promising territory. Mostly what I want to do is to create a friendly place for words here, and see if I can lure some of them back.

Happy New Year's Eve

2010-12-31T18:11:00.002-06:00

Okay, I can't imagine anyone will actually come across this tonight. But I found myself sort of wishing I could keep the bar open tonight and have a big flaming queimada, or just some quiet drinks, just in case anyone wanted to stop over. I'm heading out to a friend's house for dinner, and I am a firm believer in not texting or tweeting while in the company of Real Live people, so I won't be on the internets for the evening. But I'll leave the door open here, and the wine barrels at the ready, and there's plenty of clean glasses and duct tape and peeps to set on fire. You're all welcome to come in and hang out and get 2011 off to a good start!

Oh, wait...

2010-02-07T15:41:00.002-06:00

...you mean I was supposed to do this more than once a year?

I like the idea of blogging, and I'm glad to stick with those of you who are still writing, but it's harder for me to write these days. I think I'm more in research mode these days than writing mode, and I'm also spending much more time in close quarters with other people than I usually do, which takes the edge off any need for communication. But I love it when you guys hang out here, and I need to come by and sweep out the cobwebs every once in a while, so if nothing else I'll toss out a few random bullets of crap.

This sabbatical semester, in terms of the living-in-close-quarters-with-others issue, is going so much better than I had feared. I like a lot of privacy and alone time, and I'm pretty much guaranteed not to get much of either for the next several months. I was seriously worried about going batty from that, but we're a month in already and it hasn't been half bad - partly because I'm constantly learning to adjust more successfully, and partly because my in-laws have been unusually gracious in creating more space for us and tolerating my odd little quirks (like enjoying going for a walk by myself once in a while, which is deeply mystifying to people in this hyper-social culture.)
We have a giant leg of ham in the kitchen. I love this because I'm just Spanish enough to appreciate good ham, and just touristy enough to find it highly amusing that we have a very recognizable animal leg in a wooden stand on the kitchen counter, that we gnaw on every now and then. I promised seabright I'd post pictures, and will as soon as I get the camera and the netbook in the same room.
The clear fashion trend for women 25-50 here is to wear long tunic-sweaters over leggings with boots. Or very narrow pants. All my nice floppy-leg pants are not going to fit in so well. Good thing I gave up on fitting in several years ago.
The day after tomorrow, I get to start digging into the Inquisition archives. Harder to read, but so much fun.
The students who are housesitting for us back at home keep telling us everything is going fine. I mostly believe them, but once in a while I worry that the house burned down two weeks ago and they're not going to tell us until we get back.
I've been very entertained lately to watch the slow evolution of the social networks... I met most of you via the blogosphere, and then for a while we were all running around on Facebook, and then a bunch of folks headed over to Twitter, and now there's a group over in Fallen London. It's not all precisely the same group, of course, and I'm sure there are a bunch of people hanging out in some cool spot I haven't found yet, but it's interesting to see the trends and to wonder where I'll see you all next year.
Oh, hey, the Superbowl's starting! People here are largely mystified... they know it's a big deal, but they were doing man-on-the-street interviews this afternoon, and the most common response was "Yeah, I know it's today, but I've never been a fan of baseball." Still, I'm pulling for the Saints.
Enough random bullets for tonight. If I quit trying to come up with Thoughtful Entertaining Posts I'd probably write a lot more. In the meantime, it's time for bed. 'Night all!

New Year's Eve... the bar is open!

2009-12-31T18:27:00.002-06:00

Hello friends!

I'm not sure if anyone ever comes by here anymore, but I'm going to come over and sweep out the cobwebs and patch stuff with duct tape and try to freshen the place up again. You're all welcome to come over and have a New Year's drink!

I never really meant to quit blogging; it's just that fewer ideas reached out and grabbed me, and I didn't like feeling pressured to write. I really did miss the good friends and fun conversations that happened here, but those had their own magic, and can't be made to happen at my beck and call. (Or maybe they can. Hey! Everybody! Get over here and be clever.)

But I can try to create a space for that again, and perhaps a good creative space for myself. I've felt a little spiritually dry this past year, and am ready to look for new inspiration wherever it may turn up. So, it's time to light some candles here, and open the wine, and welcome any wandering guests. Come on in!

The elephant story

2008-12-19T10:08:00.003-06:00

Many many years ago, back when I was young and foolish, I was dating a slightly less young and more foolish young man who invited me to run away with him to Thailand. Just for the summer, of course; we would backpack and travel throughout the country and be Adventurous Travelers. I turned him down at first; I was a Responsible Young Woman more than an adventurous traveler, and I had a job, and a rented house, and a cat. But then I remembered my brother’s sage advice: when faced with such a choice, imagine yourself being ninety years old, looking back at your life. Which would you rather say, that you had a summer job and kept your lawn mowed and fed your cat, or that you were an Adventurous Traveler in Thailand?

Duh. I quit my job, sublet the house to someone who would feed the cat, and bought a plane ticket.

After a few days in the heat and noise and chaos of Bangkok, we escaped for a couple of weeks to the quieter, jungly north, near the border with Burma and Cambodia. We met some other Adventurous Travelers there, including a charming Scot named Daihi and his friends. A guide offered to take the group of us on a hill trek, several days of travel by foot and canoe and elephant into the villages of the northern hills which have never seen roads or electricity.

I should have known what was in store when we all piled into the back of a small covered truck to take us on the first stage of the journey, the only part that was accessible by road. We realized that the top of the truck had a sort of platform, and we asked the guide if we could ride on top rather than inside. He grinned and shrugged, and we all clambered up, wondering who would be so dull as to stay in the covered part. Riding on top let us see the little villages we passed with their huts and curious children and indifferent water buffalo by the sides of the road. It was infinitely better than riding inside, until we hit a length of road where the truck stirred up an enormous dense cloud of red dust, which stuck to our sweaty bodies and instantly transformed us into a mass of unrecognizable muddy creatures. Daihi howled with laughter as he looked at my caked face and matted hair, and shouted “Ach, if your people could see you now!” (I flushed with pride rather than embarrassment, thinking that at least they would see me being adventurous!) The guide just smiled.

The next stage of the trip was by elephant, as we ventured into areas where motorized vehicles had never penetrated. Elephants don’t plod heavily around like they do in zoos; in the jungle they are astonishingly nimble, and they can climb steep jungly hillsides more quickly than I could have on my own. On the second day of the trip, we started off early for a day-long journey, two elephants bearing three people each and one lead elephant with the guide.

The elephants snacked along the way, seizing clumps of tall grasses with their trunks and munching them as we ambled along. Several small streams crossed our path, and the elephants took advantage of those as well, slurping up the cool water. Ours drank his fill, and then filling his trunk again, suddenly swung it up in the air and sprayed himself – and us – with a shower of stream water. We howled with surprise and then pleasure, as the cool water felt wonderful in the sticky heat. We hadn’t showered for days anyway, and were still streaked with red mud from the truck experience, and it fit into our National Geographic sense of adventure to be sprayed clean by elephants. We crossed several more streams, and began to cheer every time we saw the elephant’s trunk swing up to give us a good dousing.

As we climbed higher, there were fewer and fewer streams to cross, and fewer trees to give us shade. The tropical afternoon sun beat down on our heads. The elephants lowered their heads as they trudged up the hillsides, and they probably missed the streams more than we did. We did pass a sort of ditch by the path, where stagnant water had gathered and a rich profusion of plants grew up out of the damp ground. I experienced a moment of horror, thinking surely the elephant won’t find that nasty stuff appealing? A cool mountain stream is one thing, but I don’t really want to be sprayed with swamp water. He didn’t, fortunately, but he did help himself to a few good-sized mouthfuls of the tender plants, and we were relieved that he was only interested in the snack. We climbed on, as he munched contentedly.

Then the trunk went to the mouth, and filled, and the trunk swung up in the air. We had just enough time to realize what was happening, but not quite enough time to duck, as we were drenched with an enormous trunkful of juicy green elephant spit. It was cool, and wet, but not exactly refreshing, though the elephant seemed to enjoy it a great deal. The rest of the day was filled with our howls of despair every time we saw that trunk reach out for another fat mouthful of squishy plants. The guide just smiled. Ach, if my people could see me now.

Some travelers complain that these northern hill treks are patronizing to indigenous cultures, because they take wealthy white people around to gape at the uncivilized tribes. I can assure you that it was more the other way around. Every evening as the elephants arrived at whatever village we were stopping at for the night, all the children came running out to stare and laugh at the stinky, mud-streaked, green-crusted foreigners who had come to visit. We experienced many of the wonders of Thailand that summer: temples, jewels, islands filled with coconut trees, luxurious fruits. But I will always associate it most with the smiling guide, and the sensation of being covered in elephant spit.

Done/not done

2008-12-07T17:11:00.005-06:00

Sorry I haven't been around the bar much; I've been hanging more around Twitter lately. Oh, and trying to survive the end of the semester. But memes are easy and fun, so here's one making the rounds lately. Things in bold are things I've done. You can play too!

1. Started my own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band (if singing counts)
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than I can afford to charity ("more than I can afford" for me sounds like bankruptcy, so no, I have not managed to be that charitable)
7. Been to Disneyland/world
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sung a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched lightning at sea
14. Taught myself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child (no, that one's just not likely to happen.)
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty (is it still possible to do this?)
18. Grown my own vegetables (used to have a gazpacho garden, with onions, garlic, tomatoes, cucumbers. Man, I miss that.)
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France and was completely awed.
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitchhiked (on a bulldozer, no less!)
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill (I am just beginning to learn how to do this. Too much of a rule-follower, I am.)
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset (are there people who haven't done this?)
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of my ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught myself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied (that doesn't take much for me, fortunately.)
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt (oh, I've wanted to do this ever since I learned about it as a little kid. I remember reading that it was very gradually erupting less often, and I cried to think that it might not exist by the time I was old enough to go. Hang on, old thing, I'm still working on getting there...)
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had my portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris (was at the bottom, but didn't want to spend the hours in line to go up)
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain (that was the best first date ever, with Bruce-Springsteen-look-alike guy)
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie (does a promotional university video count?)
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business (kind of unintentionally; I need to close it down by the end of the year)
58. Taken a martial arts class (years of tae kwon do; a little karate)
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies (would much rather buy them. oooo, Thin Mints!)
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma (all three, and some bone marrow to boot)
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check (I could live without doing this, or the ambulance trip, thanks)
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job (I was about to once, but I think I managed to quit first.)
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London (and Madrid!)
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book (hee! this still astonishes me sometimes)
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had my picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating (if fish count)
88. Had chickenpox (somehow I skipped all the childhood illnesses.)
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby (no, thanks)
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a lawsuit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee (just once. Thanks, Rocket Boy.)
100. Ridden an elephant (and for real travel, not just a photo op)

Halfway there

2008-11-05T17:10:00.002-06:00

Yes, yes, yes, we can.

I wish this weren't such a bittersweet victory... I am tearful with hope and joy and pride, and yet deeply disturbed by the victory of prejudice and hatred with Prop. 8 in California and an affirmative action ban in Nebraska. We've come such a long way with civil rights related to race... the next big frontier will be civil rights related to sex and gender. There's more to be done.

The bar is open

2008-11-04T07:33:00.002-06:00

I'm not sure how well Twitter will hold up under the onslaught of nervous commentary that is sure to develop this afternoon/evening, so I figured it was time to clean out some of the cobwebs, set out the bar stools, and welcome y'all over. It seems like a good day to start drinking early.

I'm not ready to be completely hopeful just yet - no jinxing! - but maybe, just maybe, if there happens to be something to celebrate, there's a bunch of champagne in the back too. Just in case.

I'm all twitchy and it's only 7:30 am. This is going to be a long day.

Recipe for a really great day

2008-10-18T15:34:00.002-05:00

1) Sleep in a good two hours later than usual.

2) Wake up and spend an extra half-hour reading in bed.

3) Make blueberry pancakes and eat them while reading the New York Times. (Bonus points to your husband, who has been indifferent to pancakes all his life but has suddenly decided that they are the world's greatest weekend breakfast.)

4) Head into the study to grade, and take twenty minutes to grade an assignment you were sure was going to take over an hour. Get caught up on a bunch of pesky tasks that have been irritating you.

5) Take a break to head to the park down the street and play an hour of tennis and enjoy the spectacularly beautiful fall day.

6) Come back, grill steaks for lunch. (More bonus points for getting really good steaks half-price on sale at the store yesterday.)

7) Write about the really great day now, because the rest of it's all going to be grading. Even so, take substantial pleasure in the fact that if you stay on schedule, you'll be caught up by tomorrow and might actually be able to enjoy the rest of October at a more sane pace.

8) Get through the afternoon by looking forward to repeating at least steps 1, 2, and 5 tomorrow.

poof

2008-10-08T19:20:00.003-05:00

I don't think there was anything incriminating in that last post, but I found myself getting uncomfortable with the thought of discussing such a crucial point in someone else's career, so I made it go away. I do appreciate the suggestions and feedback!

To micromanage or not to micromanage?

2008-09-19T18:51:00.004-05:00

Here's an academic-y question for y'all to kick around. Our administrative assistant and I were going over the department's proposed spring schedule (why she was doing this with me, instead of the chair or the person actually in charge of scheduling, is a whole different story, sigh), and she was telling me about how one of our regular adjuncts is picking up 4 courses in the spring. We have four for him to do, and he's willing to do them, so everybody's happy on that score.

But this guy lives a ways out of town, and (like most of us) he'd rather schedule all of his courses on the same days. At least a couple of the courses we need taught are on a Tuesday/Thursday schedule, so he wants to put all four on TR. As the current schedule stands, we have him teaching four back-to-back hour-and-a-half classes, from 8 am straight through to 3:30 pm. He claims to be perfectly happy with this.

But it strikes me as not a great idea. I'm not capable of teaching more than two TR classes together without starting to lose my voice; four would utterly wipe me out mentally and physically. Our adjunct is a bit older than I am, and not in the best of health. I'm a little worried about him, and about the students in that fourth section who will end up with the dregs of a professor at the end of the day (to say nothing about the end of the semester).

Since I'm not the chair, and I'm not in charge of scheduling, this is not my call. But do you think this is something that falls under the purview of a department chair? If the adjunct thinks he's perfectly capable of taking this on, is it none of our business? I really don't know what I would do if I were chair, so I'm curious as to what y'all think.

can I buy an indulgence?

2008-09-15T18:38:00.002-05:00

I think it says something about my state of mind at this point (how in the world did I manage to get so far behind, so early in the semester?) that I saw an e-mail promoting Classroom Performance Systems, and misread it as Classroom Penance Systems.

Reasons

2008-09-05T17:41:00.004-05:00

I've been struggling this year to cut back on my service load , or at least not to add any more to it... people always want me to be on a committee somewhere, even the people who occasionally tut-tut because I'm not publishing enough because I'm spending all my damn time on their committees.

So is it very wrong that I accepted a request to be on a search committee, entirely because that committee will hold interviews at a conference in New York City, and I really want them to pay my way for a long weekend in NYC? Heh.

P.S. jo(e), I'm lookin' your way.

Another scene

2008-09-03T17:43:00.003-05:00

We're working in the shared study, where the LWI is putzing around online while the radio plays Semisonic and Matchbox 20 in the background.

LWI: We're going back to the 90's!

Me: I noticed! That's excellent.

LWI (after a puzzled pause): It's good for music. It's not so good for temperature.

So that's where they all went

2008-08-25T18:44:00.002-05:00

Scene: The Left-Wing Intellectual and I are watching the closing ceremonies of the Olympics, just before they extinguish the torch. True to my pyromaniac nature (and my curiosity about the practical nature of things), I am pondering what kind of fuel they use to maintain such a bright and substantial flame without much smoke.

Me: I wonder what they burn in that thing?

The LWI: Dissidents!

Road Trip

2008-08-06T18:11:00.008-05:00

We're getting ready to take a road trip, back to State Where I Grew Up. I know, I know, it's a dumb time to drive a thousand miles, but for all I know this is the last summer that gas will ever be below $10 a gallon, so we're going to do it while we can. We've driven substantially less over the last fifteen years than most people, so this shouldn't throw off our karmic balance too much. And besides, it's going to be an awesome road trip.

Here are just some of the reasons why I am all twitchy with glee:

1) It's our first road trip in the new car! With an mp3 jack and freezingly efficient air conditioning and comfortable seats and room for all our junk and more cupholders than any rational adult could ever need!

2) We're going to see my Piano Niece and her new husband, Tank. We missed their wedding while we were in Spain this summer, so this is our chance to see them as they cross the country towards their new home. (They're crossing the country horizontally, and we're going vertically, to meet up just in the middle. It's the Isosceles Triangle Road Trip.) They're great people and a perfect match, so I'm excited to welcome him into the family.

3) Piano Niece is my Studly Brother's kid, so this means we get to stay with Studly Brother! That alone will make this just about the Most Fun Thing We've Done All Year.

4) Ooo, and it only gets better. We have the magic ingredients to make a queimada, so one night will see us outside in the glowing green of a summer evening, surrounded by trees and fireflies, grouped around a bowl of flames flickering blue in the dusk. I don't think Piano and Tank will have too many demons to scare off just yet, but it seems like a good way to wish them off to a good start.

5) On the way, we get to visit Art Sister, who is always an inspiration to me. She's the one person in the world I can call pretty much anytime, with nothing to say, and we'll end up coming up with some Deep Philosophical Insights into ourselves and the universe. I always feel reassured and invigorated after I've spent time with her. (Hmm, that makes her sound too much like bath gel. New Extra-Foamy Art Sister: Soothing and Invigorating!)

6) Here's what I love about the State Where I Grew Up. There's a bed and breakfast on the way to Sibling Town where we've stayed the last couple of times we've driven that way. I emailed the owners to see if they had a room available for the night we're coming through. They wrote back immediately: "sorry, we're out of town then, but if you'd like to stay anyway, we'll hide a key for you; we just can't give you the breakfast part of the bed and breakfast." Keep in mind that they know us from all of two previous trips. But they're leaving us their house for the night. I love these people.

7) And then we're taking the long way home, to explore some new territory. I chose the route because the scenery should be substantially cooler and greener and hillier than where we live, which is basically furnace-blasted flat clay. It's going to be a good trip.

Vocabulary bleg

2008-07-31T13:36:00.004-05:00

I'm working on a translation project, and I'm getting deeper and deeper into that zone where I understand perfectly well what the original means, but I'm having a hard time remembering what the appropriate words are in English. (Somehow the more languages I get into my head, the less I can correctly use any of them.)

So I turn to the blogosphere. First, an easy-ish one: in English, is a female marquis most appropriately called a "marquise" or a "marchioness"?

Second, there's a Portuguese word recolhimento, which describes a place that would take in women and give them a basic education and a place to live, usually until they were old enough to marry. Its name comes from the verb meaning "to gather," so it's a place that gathers people in. I can't for the life of me think of a corresponding term in English: it's not a poor-house, because the women weren't necessarily poor; it's not an orphanage, because they often had parents; it wasn't exactly a finishing school, because (at least to me) that suggests building on a previous education as well as preparation for entry into an elite world, which wasn't necessarily the case here. It was really a mix of all of these things, with a religious element (but it wasn't a convent, becasue they didn't take vows). Is there any word that would suggest this, or am I stuck writing a long awkward footnote to explain this term?

Thanks for any suggestions!

The power of positive thinking

2008-07-29T18:52:00.005-05:00

I went to donate blood this afternoon, and as always, they do the little test first to make sure you have enough iron. Unfortunately the minimum requirement for blood donors is 12, and my blood only registered a 10.3. I was disappointed, because of course they do the iron test *after* half an hour of other questions like Have you recently played with typhoid-ridden rats? and Do you regularly inject yourself with other people's bodily fluids?, and besides, it frustrates me to not be able to give blood when I'm a perfectly healthy human being.

So the nice blood guy said "Well, we can try again on the other hand if you want... there's not much of a chance it will be different, but sometimes if your hands are cold it can register a bit low." So I said sure, what the heck, I have plenty more fingers. Besides, the second test was on my right arm, which is my tennis arm, so of course all the strong blood's going to be on that side. So we both started joking about focusing my iron and the power of positive thinking and so forth... until the little machine beeped, and the guy's eyes got huge, and he said "Um, I don't know what you did, but now you're at 13.7."

Cool, so now I can give blood. And just to be on the safe side I spent the rest of the day thinking World peace! World peace! World peace! just in case I have magical powers I was not previously aware of.

Anyway, all of that reminded me of a habit I used to have of making a wish at 11:11. If you're not familiar with this, it's sort of like wishing on stars, for the digital age - if you happen (and it must be by chance) to see a digital clock just when it shows the time 11:11, you can make a wish.

I don't know if this is part of the official 11:11 lore, but the habit I developed if I happened to catch that magic moment was to stare at the clock, not averting my gaze until it turned to 11:12, and focusing the entire time on my wish. For a long time I made a regular practice of this, and the best thing about it was that it taught me to always have a wish at the ready, so that I didn't waste big chunks of that precious minute trying to decide what to wish for.

And, interestingly enough, if you are frequently nudged to evaluate what things in your life you most want to wish for, that does wonders for helping you clarify what it is you really want.

A couple of years ago, What Now wrote a really lovely post along these lines (I'm so happy that I actually saved this reference); she wasn't talking about the 11:11 phenomenon, but she has a wonderful description (from her partner D.) of what she calls the background work of the brain: "Our brains are always engaged in background tasks; if we ask ourselves a particular question at least once every day, the brain starts to gather information on that question automatically throughout each day."

I think there's an awful lot that we do to train ourselves to think in particular ways. Squadratomagico just wrote about a couple she knows who have the habit of constantly denigrating everything around them, and I thought boy, do I know those people. They live in the same world I do, but they've trained themselves to pick out all the things they don't like about it. Others train themselves to look for any possible slight to themselves, any sign that they're not measuring up to the expectations of others; still others get in the habit of looking for opportunities. It's all in what you teach your brain to do. (Either What Now or PPB - unfortunately I didn't save this link, but I'll be happy to give credit if anyone remembers - once used the example of setting your computer password to be something you want to focus on, so that you're reminded of it every day. I loved that.)

I used to be in the habit of thinking about what I most wanted, which kept me attentive to the kind of person I wanted to be and the kind of direction I wanted to head in. I've slipped on that lately, to the extent that when our dean recently asked me what my longer-term career plans were, I didn't have a very clear answer at the ready. I know what I want to do today, and this week, but with my life? Haven't had time to think about that lately.

But heck, if I can boost my blood iron, maybe I can be a little more conscious about steering my life too. I don't feel like I'm off track, particularly; I just don't know what my track is at the moment, and if I saw a clock turning 11:11, I'd waste a good part of that minute trying to figure out what to wish for. Time to get back in the habit.

What would you wish for?

This Post Is A Clue

2008-07-27T16:45:00.002-05:00

I met a charming, super-smart academic the other day, and participated in a workshop he was running on our campus. It turns out he's a blogger, and I was so excited to find out that Someone I Know in Real Life actually blogs (blogging appears to be a rare hobby around my campus) that I immediately shared my blogger existence with him as well. Or, to be more precise, I half-shared, confessing that I did have a pseudonymous blog but neglecting to mention where it was. I did tell him he was free to try to figure it out, since there's a little bit of overlap in our bloggy circles.

On the one hand, this was me being coy and vicariously enjoying the process of trying to suss out someone's secret identity; on the other hand, it was me being embarrassed that this blog hasn't been worth showing off, for quite a while now. (Ah, for the days of the wild parties and water slides and flaming peeps and tripping over sleeping bodies curled up in the corner of the bar at 3 am...) Little did y'all know that I once intended this to be an academic blog, and over the past few years I may have actually posed on academic-y topics two or three times. But then it turned into a bar blog, and who could resist hosting parties in the world's goofiest online bar? And then a couple of my blogging friends got into trouble for appearing less than perfectly professional to their colleagues (and not even for the drunken bar antics, go figure), and I got wary of writing too much about my professional life - the really juicy stuff was too far over the danger line.

So the content here has become overly watered down over the past many months, and I'm a little shy about exposing my inadequacies to my New Cool Friend (though I'm perfectly comfortable exposing them regularly to all of you). But hey, he's still a New Cool Friend, and he's more than welcome here, and maybe that will nudge me a little towards writing something of Greater Significance.

Or maybe I'll just post more pictures of food. One step at a time, you know.

Either way, New Cool Friend, if any of this sounds at all familiar, voila - you found me!

Dancing

2008-07-17T10:46:00.002-05:00

I saw this link at bsgirl, and it just made me all kinds of happy. Go look.

Where the hell is Matt? (2008 edition)

RBOC

2008-07-07T05:27:00.003-05:00

I have a million posts I've written in my head, but haven't been at the computer long enough to write any... research is going full speed, interrupted by weekends out of town and away from the internets. So a quick set of RBOC to keep this blog from disappearing altogether.

* Uno de enero, dos de febrero... happy San Fermines! I've been out of the US on July 4 for several years, so I hardly even remember it anymore. But San Fermines are a blast. (this is what most of you are more likely to know as "the running of the bulls.") It, like pretty much everything else in Spain, has its own little catchy song, which will be stuck in my head for weeks.

* Spaniards are just beside themselves these days: the national team won the EuroCup, Pau Gasol made it to the NBA finals with the Lakers, Contador won the Giro de Italia and Valverde's leading in the Tour de France, and now Nadal at Wimbledon. Score!

* My sister-in-law is unfailingly awesome. My two brothers-in-law are both kind of jerks. We've just gotten back from a weekend trip together, and the LWI keeps saying "The one thing I know is that I am never, ever going to travel anywhere with my brothers again."

* As part of the weekend trip, we went to the city where my father-in-law went on his honeymoon 53 years ago. He remembered the neighborhood where they stayed, and we went past the hotel... which was still there, completely unchanged. We were afraid this would be a little too much for him (since my MIL died last summer) but he was really sweetly happy.

* I have a million photos to post, if I ever get around to it. They include pictures of my growing collection of T-Shirts That Say Completely Absurd Things in Mangled English.

* I'm ready to go home. I love being here, and there are a million things I know I'll miss as soon as we're back. But I've decided that I have a certain capacity for living with my in-laws, a reserve of flexibility and patience and the ability to be constantly around lots of people and to sleep about an hour a night less than I'm used to and to speak in another language, and that reserve lasts about seven weeks. It's not Spain itself that drains me; if the LWI and I take a few days off on our own, the reserve fills back up a bit. But by the eighth week I'm pretty frazzled, and I start acting like a four-year-old.

* Fortunately we're heading home on Thursday. I plan to sleep for about three days straight, and then you can expect to see me start whining about how I wish we were still here.

Nicer images

2008-06-03T02:05:00.008-05:00

Okay, time to get that previous post out of my head and off the top of the blog. Songbird requested pictures of things in flower, and that's a much nicer image to focus on. I'm not a great photographer of flowers at all, but it's been a wet spring here and things are wildly in bloom everywhere, so here are a few humble examples.

Bougainvillea in somebody's driveway:

Charming Town has a little fruit and flower market in the main plaza on Thursday mornings. (Is that cheating, to take pictures of captive flowers rather than wild ones? Anyway, I love seeing so many colors piled together.)

And, nothing is more symbolic of springtime in Spain than the poppies in bloom; they're everywhere, along roadsides, in people's back yards, all the fields are full of them.

A little freaked out

2008-06-01T16:21:00.008-05:00

Warning: this one's a bit disturbing. It feels weird even to write about, but it's occupying a little too much of my brain for the moment, so perhaps this will help get it out.

In honor of our ninth anniversary, the LWI and I took a few days to head out of the city and visit a lovely town a few hours from here, full of medieval churches and amazing landscapes. It was one of the best trips we've ever taken together, and I'll write about it soon (with pictures for Dale and Phantom and Songbird!) but at the moment all the good stuff has been rudely shoved out of my brain by the events of the last day.

The morning we left Charming Town, we'd arrived rather early at the train station, and were sitting on the deserted platform waiting for the next train to arrive. Finally we noticed that it was approaching, but it seemed to have stopped about 200 feet away from the station, and we could sort of see something on the tracks. We saw the conductor step down; he looked at the tracks, went back into the train, and then behind us we heard the station manager's phone ring. Definitely something odd going on. We thought, surely it's not a person who's fallen on the tracks or something? or an animal? Not an animal; the bit I could see looked like fabric or plastic. And certainly not a person; no one was screaming or running around as they would have done if a person had been hit by a train. Besides, since the train was just coming into the station, it wasn't going more than a few miles an hour, and there was no reason for anyone to try to cross the tracks at that particular point, only a wall on the other side.

We waited for a bit and then I decided to wander down the platform for a better look; more than anything it looked as though there was some construction material from the nearby highway, or a chunk of old tire, or something of that sort that maybe some prankster had thrown on the tracks.

And really, I wish I hadn't done that, because as I got closer the vague sort of lump came into clearer view, and then it waved its arm, and goddamnit it was a person halfway under the train. He was... well, you really don't want to know how he was, but suffice it to say that it took the emergency crews an hour to separate him from the train. (There never was any screaming or running around; the station authorities and emergency guys were brisk but silent, except for the wail of the ambulance when it pulled up to the station. I guess that's logical, and my own reaction was to be quiet and stunned, but the whole scene was very eerie and surreal.)

Astonishingly, they got him out alive, though I saw on the news later that he died shortly after arriving at the hospital. And now there are images in my head that I really really really wish were not there. Questions, too... he turned out to be an ordinary middle-aged bookstore owner, and no one has any idea why he stepped directly in front of a slow-moving train at 10 am on a sunny Saturday morning. For his sake, and mine, and everyone else's in Charming Town, I really wish that he hadn't.

For Phantom

2008-05-20T08:48:00.004-05:00

Food, always an excellent blogging topic! And one of the things I love most about where we are. Fortunately, another thing I love about where we are is that it involves lots of walking, which helps balance out all the food.

Here's what we had for dinner last night, and in fact what we have for dinner most nights: a loaf of crusty French bread, fresh from the bakery around the corner, accompanied by various things "para picar." In the back, a rosca, or toasty bread with serrano ham and cheese melted inside. Then we have bowls of olives, mussels, good old potato chips, and prawns. In front, a plate of lomo (cured pork loin) and spicy chorizo sausage (my favorite), and a bowl of berberechos (cockles - didn't know you could eat those, did you?). There's plenty for everyone - dig in!

Taking requests

2008-05-18T06:11:00.002-05:00

So the semester's over, we've flown across the ocean for our annual visit to the LWI's family, and I find myself in the position of not having any real stories to tell but being in a Place Very Different From The Place Where We Live.

So I'll take blogging requests. What would you like to see, in pictures or in words, about where I'm at now?

Howler of the week

2008-05-09T20:20:00.003-05:00

Around here we're all in the last exhausted stages of grading final exams, a process enlightened only by the occasional bizarre goofs or inexplicable misstatements that show up in the essays. So far today the LWI has had Mussolini as a Russian czar, and the Fabians as a bunch of party hounds (something about how they regularly had feasts and celebrations). Last semester's favorite was from a student who somehow conflated the Bourbons and the Huguenots into the Bourbonauts.

For my part, I offer this: "The Scientific Revolution brought about a major change. Researchers were beginning to notice the fact that the sun and all the planets did not revolve around the moon as previously thought."

The LWI, after a moment of stunned silence: "You win."

Music meme

2008-04-29T18:11:00.007-05:00

I've loved seeing these on other people's blogs, though I confess I haven't tried to guess many - it's more fun just to read the lines by themselves, kind of like the haiku meme. So here are mine.

Bonus points for anyone who knows #21! (And extra bongo bonus points for anyone who knows the bonus lyric at the end.) The hardest ones will be #10 and #15, though, because they're from CDs put out by local bands, one from the cool town where I lived way back before the days of Google, and the other from the cool town where my Studly Brother lives. (So he'll probably know that one, come to think of it.) And a fifty-point deduction for anyone who CANNOT guess #17 or #19. Ready, set, play!

Step 1: Put your MP3 player or whatever on random.
Step 2: Post the first line from the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song and artist the lines come from.
Step 4: Bold when someone gets them right
Step 5: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING.

1. Qué horas son, mi corazón
2. Thanks for the boogie ride, I'm more than gratified
3. En cambio constante, todo se mueve y deja de ser lo que era antes
4. And the hail falls hard and the wind whips in my face
5. Help me breathe, help me believe
6. There were people living in a green valley, found a way to make a lot of money
7. Pa' el cementerio se va, la vaca de mala leche
8. Poor old Johnny Ray sounded sad upon the radio
9. I do believe in you and I know you believe in me, oh yeah
10. Woke up this morning and what did I see, all of the bigots had gone to sleep
11. Lone Star, where are you out tonight
12. We can't play this game anymore, but can't we still be friends?
13. Here we go again, another round of blues
14. Don't bother me, I ain't got time for your misery
15. Wake up y'all 'cause I'm a crazy fool
16. Late nights in rustic motel rooms, stale lives left by someone else
17. Here she comes now sayin' Mony Mony
18. Tok tok, quién es?
19. Istanbul was Constantinople, now it's Istanbul not Constantinople
20. Tengo que confesar que a veces, no me gusta tu forma de ser
21. He held a job at the Buckeye Creamery
22. And when I see the sign that points one way, the light we used to pass by every day
23. Hazme un lugar en tu almohada, junto a tu pecho me calmaré
24. The song came and went, like the times that we spent
25. Full, full moon and that same sad nature

Bonus (I cut this one from the list because it's from a recording of a live performance that varies quite a bit from the original, but it's fun anyway): Bring on the bongo, bring on the bongo bong!

Chicken Little

2008-04-26T15:54:00.003-05:00

No, really, the sky is falling! Or at least our house seems to be falling apart around us. A week or so ago, a storm took down part of the silver maple in front of our house. The next day, our microwave made a loud POP and promptly stopped microwaving. Somewhere around there our phone quit working, and yesterday we came home to a pool of water on the kitchen floor and a refrigerator full of distinctly unrefrigerated food. (I'm a little bit scared to be using the computer right now, lest I wreak some similar destruction upon it.)

Some of these have a bright side. The maple only lost one substantial branch, and it fell in the only part of the yard where it could possibly have fallen without doing any damage to anything. The microwave is still dead, but we actually still had our old microwave in a box in the garage from the last time we moved (the house came with a built-in one), so that at least has a temporary solution. It took AT&T a full four days to fix the damn phone, and the "fix" involves a large black cable strung over our neighbor's fence and through the yard, so I'm hoping that story's not quite over yet, but at least the phone works, which is good because we need it to call all the other repair people.

The fridge is being more obstreperous, and more puzzling. The motor works, and it blows air, but the air is not particularly cold. Naturally, we discovered this on a Friday evening, so we spent the evening buying ice, rounding up the coolers, and trying to decide whether the previously frozen stuff was at all salvageable. Then I discovered that the manufacturer had a website where you could make a service request, and, wonder of wonders! one local service place had an appointment available on Saturday. We jumped on it.

Except that Saturday morning, we get up to find... a perfectly working fridge. The freezer is frozen again, and the fridge is warmish but clearly on its way to cooling. WTF? We debate about whether to keep the service appointment, because something clearly *had* gone wrong even if it fixed itself. But then we decided that a) a Saturday service call was going to cost us an arm and a leg, and b) if the thing was running perfectly, the service guy probably wouldn't be able to tell what was wrong with it.

So I cancelled, and we loaded all the stuff from the cooler back to the freezer, and went about our business.

Until, later this afternoon, I went to put some leftover lunch things away, and... again the damned thing is blowing lukewarm. I try kicking it a few times, which doesn't seem to have much effect besides scaring the cats. I call the service guys back, and they say sorry, not only did you lose your place today, but we don't have any openings again till Wednesday.

This week of course is the last week of class, which means there are countless meetings piled on top of the usual schedule, so I have no idea when we're going to find a way to be home during the precious rare minutes that the service people are willing to come out. I think we're pretty much doomed. Anyone wanna come over for a big meat/cheese/egg/yogurt feast before it all goes bad? Come quick, before the stove breaks down.

Meme of the mundane

2008-04-13T15:23:00.002-05:00

The lovely and talented Billie tagged me for the Mundane Meme! which is just the kind of thing my poor worn-out brain can handle at the moment.

Favorite laundry detergent:

I am committed to a variety of particular household and personal products, but I must confess I have no real emotional investment in my laundry detergent. I like the whole line of Mrs. Meyers Clean Day products (especially the dishwasher detergent), but our grocery store quit carrying those, so I need to figure out some other way to get them.

Favorite item used for an unintended purpose:

The Oracle Sock. The LWI used to own a pair of ratty funny-looking argyle socks that we tied together to make into a cat toy, many years ago when OneCat was tiny and wildly hyperactive. Since then, we have never seen either cat actually touch the sock or even acknowledge its existence. Nevertheless, it travels around the house on a regular basis, usually seeming to comment on the general situation of cats - lurking outside the bedroom door on mornings when we sleep too late, or perching on Places Cats Are Not Allowed (such as the dining room table) when we're too many long days out of the house.

Favorite way to buy music:

Um, people still buy music? I've never actually purchased music online, but for the last couple of years I've subscribed to an internet radio (formerly MusicMatch, now Rhapsody) that lets me play or download as much music as my little heart desires. So I buy access to music, but not music itself. Ironically, I still possess the first CD player I ever bought, long enough ago (1987?) that I wasn't entirely convinced that CDs were really going to be the Next Big Thing.

How clean is your car?

Spotlessly clean, because it's only two weeks old! I meant to blog about this at some point, but we have ourselves a brand new car, and every day we are absolutely delighted with it. One of the things I appreciate the most about the LWI is that we work in remarkable harmony in coming to such decisions; we started out liking the same make/model, both spent a few weeks carefully researching (and briefly favoring) other options, both came back to the same original choice, and ended up agreeing on it down to the color and accessories. (I am a little baffled as to why he thought a roof rack was essential, but hey, you never know, I might get a kayak someday.) And all of this gets away from the question of how clean it is, but we both drive around every day chortling with glee about how lovely our car is.

How clean is your apartment/house/room?

Okay, that's another story, because we haven't bought a new house lately, and there's an awful lot of accumulated grunge in the old one. Today it's reasonably clean, because I tackled it yesterday after a few weeks of neglect. I fear that's the last good cleaning anything is going to get before the end of the semester.

How clean is your office?

Oh, yeah, like you don't know the answer to THAT question. In April? Are you kidding me? I'm lucky I can find my desk.

Favorite weekly free time:

Probably Friday night, to the extent that I have any free time at all. Fridays we teach in the morning, go to the gym, do the weekly shopping, and grab a late lunch on the way home, and by that time I'm usually pretty well wiped out, in a happy Friday sort of way. So Friday evenings are spent flopped out on the couch with a book or the previous weekend's New York Times.

Is there a word, phrase, or gesture that is identifiably yours?

Oh, that's greatness.

Most effective medicine for one (or more) of your ailments:

Red wine; one glass every evening cures the woes of the day. I hardly ever take standard medications of any kind; I fortunately don't suffer from any substantial ailments, and I tend to think of occasional aches and pains and sneezes as my body's way of warning me or correcting itself, meant to be responded to, not silenced.

A favorite thing you try to sell/push/encourage your friends to try:

Mmm, I'm not a big fan of pushing things on other people, even if I really love them (the things or the people). If I were to recommend anything, it would probably be yoga, which is a wonderful remedy for most of the things my friends and colleagues complain about. Stress, stiffness, low energy, back pain? Get a little down-dog in your life!

Favorite new (or new-to-you) thing:

Besides the above-mentioned lovely new car? Boy, I haven't done much new lately. One new-to-me thing (in a slightly more abstract sense) was the conference experience I described earlier; I've finally gotten to the point where I know probably more than half of the people in this organization, and it was new and pleasant to feel that greater sense of connection. I tend to be a loner in terms of my research and academic identity, and I'm not all that great at networking, so this was a positive new experience.

Tag! You're it.

Conferencing

2008-04-12T20:04:00.005-05:00

One of my big tasks this spring was organizing the annual conference of the principal academic society to which I belong. Some of the most useful conversations I've seen in the blogosphere lately revolve around things like the process of getting tenure, planning new courses, working with colleagues, or various pedagogical issues, but I haven't yet seen much discussion of conferences besides reporting on the quality of individual panels or social events.

Here, then, for your enlightenment and instruction, is my Participant's Guide to the Academic Conference, from the (somewhat jaded) point of view of the organizer.

1. It will be much appreciated if you register by the registration deadline, rather than waiting to register on-site. Organizers need to have a reasonable idea of how many people to expect. Presumably you know fairly well in advance that you're going, especially if you've needed to purchase plane tickets, so why not share that information with the organizers?

2. If you have received a request (or, indeed, several) to confirm whether or not you will be attending the conference dinner, please respond to this request; it is very simple to email a Yes or a No. This is far preferable to casually mentioning to the organizer on the day of the banquet that you don't plan to attend, or that you've suddenly decided to attend and bring three guests.

3. It is not recommended for you to call the organizer at her home on Friday night to ask for a digital projector to be provided for your panel on Saturday morning. The organizer has many talents, but she is not able to make equipment materialize out of thin air; that is why she asked you to indicate any audio-visual needs with your proposal three months ago.

4. It is not appropriate to refuse to pay the registration fee for a conference on the grounds that you will only be attending for one day.

5. It is equally frowned upon to ignore several suggestions to update your long-unpaid membership in the organization hosting the conference, especially when you are participating on two different panels in that conference. If you are benefiting from your connection to the organization, the least you can do is pay the (quite paltry) membership dues.

6. It moves into the realm of the genuinely heinous for a single person to commit every one of the above-listed sins.*

7. Most of you, of course, are not guilty of these acts. If you register on time, show up for your panel, take part in discussion, head out for some social outings with your fellow conference-goers, and generally enjoy the collegial interaction that is the main point of all these things, then you are entirely responsible for the conference's success, and the organizer loves you. Thanks!

*Yes, that really happened, and of course this person is a well-respected, well-paid full professor at a large R1 university. Nevertheless, he is now blacklisted from all future meetings of this organization, and God knows I'll never do him any favors.

Haikus

2008-04-12T19:45:00.002-05:00

As seen in several places... a haiku generator based on your blog. Mine seem to reveal a certain degree of anxiety, but it looks like everything turns out OK in the end, which is pretty much how things have gone around here lately. Get your own here.

i will be done yet
eight things i can't use those
connections as much

wanted to change times
or something god knows what but
it matters a lot

perhaps that is all
the titians and grecos and
van goghs and hoppers

again did the third
and the fourth and all manner
of things shall be well

Six words

2008-03-21T18:26:00.004-05:00

Woo hoo - New Kid tagged me for a meme! I've seen several folks do this (PPB's is lovely, as are the ones in the comments). I have the feeling this will stick in my head and I'll come up with more over the next few weeks; it's a fun idea.

Anyway, here's how it goes:

1. Write your own six-word memoir
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere (I've lost track of the original post!)
4. Tag five more blogs with links.

Mine:

Observing in amused silence since 1968.

Many of the folks I'd tag have already been tagged, and I'm not even sure who's reading around here anymore. But I'd love to see jo(e), timna, Songbird, Lisa V, and Zhoen give this one a try.

A little nice goes a long way

2008-03-07T18:37:00.003-06:00

So I'm making the local arrangements for a conference that will be held here this spring, and although I'm trying hard to not let my ego get wrapped up in it too much, you know how it is with these things - if it goes well and people have a great time, I'll look good, and whatever goes wrong, I'll feel guilty, even if most of the things that can go well or badly are entirely beyond my control.

I sent out a batch of form emails a couple of months ago, informing the participants that their papers had been accepted and letting them know their place in the program. The next morning, I opened my inbox, and there were probably twenty emails in response. I felt my heart seize up, assuming I'd made some mistake in the program, or everybody had complaints and wanted to change times, or something, God knows what, but it looked like a mess.

Trembling, I opened the first email, and instead of blistering criticism, it turned out to be a bright and cheery "Thanks! This looks great!" The second one said the same thing, with an added "Looking forward to meeting you." So did the third, and the fourth, and all twenty of the damn things were just perfectly nice messages of thanks. It made my week.

Now the registration forms are coming in, and it's the same thing. Probably half of the forms have nice little notes added to them, and I can't tell you how gratifying this is to see. (I often add little notes like this myself, assuming they never really got noticed, but now I know that they do.)

It's hard to shake the worries, though. One of the registration forms came from my adviser, who is a singularly intimidating person, even though we get along very well. The first part of the form lists the registration fee and the events it includes, and in the margin she'd penciled in a little "Wow!" Of course I had to panic over that for a few minutes - what did she mean, wow? One would like to think it meant wow, this is great. But what if it meant wow, that's really pricey? Or wow, I can't believe you think you're going to put together that many events on this skimpy registration fee. Did I miscalculate the budget? Is this whole thing doomed?

Okay, then I got hold of myself. Once I calmed down, I saw the bottom half of the form, where she'd written an additional note - "You do us proud." Well, damn, that about made me cry. It really is dangerous to get too much of myself wrapped up in this conference, because it's not any kind of Supreme Judgment of Me, but I have to confess that the little bits of encouragement are deeply, deeply appreciated.

(Until I realized, of course, that her phrase could be read as an imperative - "Do us proud, girl, if you embarrass us we'll disown you altogether!") Sigh...

Another good day

2008-03-06T16:51:00.004-06:00

So we're getting some Messy Weather in the region, enough to close campus for the day. (Not sure about tomorrow, but keep your fingers crossed.) Most places would send out an announcement of the closure and leave it at that. But our provost, who is a prince among men, sent out an email following the closure notice that read in part "Faculty and staff: go home.
Enjoy a warm fire, a good book and a pleasing beverage tonight."

I am nothing if not an obedient employee, so here I am with a glass of wine, some nice cheese, a fire crackling in the fireplace and a fun novel. Boss's orders!

Good day

2008-03-01T16:54:00.003-06:00

You know what's awesome?

Spending your whole Saturday planning to do a big task, and budgeting about three hours for that task, and having to kind of work yourself up to it because it will need a lot of concentration and you're not all that excited about it...

and then opening the file and realizing that you did it a week ago.

(Should I be worried that I didn't remember this? I don't think so... it's one in a line of several tasks of its kind; I just forgot how far along I'd gotten.)

And now the LWI's playing Duran Duran for our work music. It's going to be a good day.

Regrets, or not

2008-02-27T17:53:00.004-06:00

*poof*

Favorite quote of the day...

2008-02-25T17:04:00.005-06:00

...brought to you by the need to do laundry, coupled with the dangers of teaching too much modern European history:

the LWI's fierce declaration "I will be the Bismarck of my socks!"

Charmed, I'm Sure

2008-02-09T11:52:00.000-06:00

So the LWI and I went to a Big Shindig last night. Well, the shindig itself wasn't all that big, but it was attended by lots of Important People. I am not, myself, anywhere near to being an Important Person, but I have a connection to this particular group, just enough to put us in the general circles of Important People milling about before and after the shindig.

At the pre-shindig reception, the LWI noticed an unusually distinguished-looking gentleman strolling through the group, and pointed him out to me. "Look at that guy; have you ever seen anything more aristocratic? He has to be Spanish nobility." And it was true - if it's possible for aristocracy to be etched in a face, this guy had it. In fact, he looked just like a twenty-first century version of this guy.

I went off for a moment to talk to an Important Person who's working with me on the conference I'm organizing later this spring, and when I came back, I was astonished to find the LWI engaged in a delightful conversation with the Spanish Nobleman. He introduced me to His Excellency, who greeted me warmly, gave a gracious little bow, and kissed my hand. I about peed my pants.

Generally I'm a fan of the proletariat; I identify with the common people. But being kissed on the hand by an old-fashioned gentleman? Priceless.

Conclusive evidence

2008-02-07T08:11:00.000-06:00

So one of my students turned in an assignment where his job was to analyze a primary source, in this case a letter from a woman in Renaissance Florence to her son. My student concluded from the letter that the woman's son was gay.

What evidence did he use to support this? That the mother at one point in the letter expressed disappointment to her son for “having caused her grief” in the past.

Boy, I think there may be a lot more going on there than I know what to do with.

This Is It

2008-02-05T18:19:00.001-06:00

A most encouraging coincidence:

The LWI and I are in the study, each plodding away on our own projects, the radio playing in the background. Suddenly the LWI speaks up with the news that Obama has won decisively in Georgia. In the pause that follows this statement, as we are savoring the news, we hear Kenny Loggins sing out: "This is it, for once in your life, here's your miracle, stand up and fight!"

As a fan of portents and omens, I find that profoundly heartening.

On the Eights

2008-02-01T18:57:00.000-06:00

So yeah, I procrastinate a little, but eventually things get done. An embarrassingly long time ago, the captivating Wayfarer Scientista tagged me for a meme; I've been thinking about it ever since, but hadn't written anything down. (You know, my grandmother was in the hospital, and my boyfriend broke up with me, and I've been having problems with my computer... no, wait, that's my students. Sorry.) Anyway, here are my thoughts on the Meme of Eights:

Eight passions in my life

I had to think about this one a little, simply because I wouldn't describe myself as being passionate. Thoughtful, yes; appreciative, definitely; grateful, enthusiastic, occasionally obsessive, sure. But I'm a little too quiet and introspective and distant to think of my interests as passions. But that's taking the wording a little too seriously.

1. Walking. See? That's not something you'd ordinarily describe as the object of passion. But I love to walk, both as exercise and as a way of maintaining contact with the world - when you move yourself through a space, you're much more in tune with that space and yourself than if you are moved by car or bus or even bicycle. I like to look at the sky, and at my surroundings, and to feel the rhythm of the movement of my body and the contact of my feet on the ground. I did a 300-mile pilgrimage walk a few years ago, and the physical act of walking across fields and up hills and along ancient paths pleased me as much as the cultural experience of the trip.

2. Ideas. Yeah, that's vague. But there's nothing more fun than coming up with a new question or new perspective on something, talking it over with a friend, seeing new angles, and feeling my brain muscles stretch to try to handle it. That hasn't happened nearly enough lately; I'm enough in a comfortable rut with most of my friends that I already know what they think about most topics, and we exchange anecdotes more than we wrestle with entirely new ideas. I need someone to shake my brain up a little.

3. Things I can see. Maybe this works more in reverse; I can't really be passionate about things I can't visualize. My brain works in a very visual way, so I tend to think of concepts and words and people in terms of color and shape. That's not exactly a passion in itself, but anything I'm passionate about takes on some sort of visual presence in my head.

4. Learning. My god, I get bored if I'm not on some sort of learning curve. Unfortunately that means I like beginning projects more than following through on them.

5. The BBC. Really, I didn't realize how hooked I was on BBC news until our local public radio station moved it an hour later at night, and that's the hour I usually listen. For most of the past fifteen years I've listened to the BBC while I'm getting ready to go to bed, and besides the basic quality of the news, it gives me that sensation that no matter how crazy the world gets, there will be sensible calm people to help figure it out.

6. Environmental responsibility. I certainly don't do everything I could to conserve resources, but it matters a lot to me to understand my impact on the world and moderate it as much as possible. All I have to do is imagine any individual action - throwing away a battery, letting the sink drip, not recycling plastic bags - and multiply it in my head by the three million people in the metropolitan area where I live, and that's horrifying enough.

7. Getting into other people's heads. The main reasons I study history and literature are because they give me a way of understanding other people's culture and beliefs and behavior, and I find that endlessly fascinating.

8. Sleep! I am so not one of those people who can party or study or play all night; never have been. I'll sacrifice fun time or shopping or housecleaning or eating time if I really fall behind on something, but never sleep time. I need seven hours a night to be a human being, and since I used to suffer regularly from insomnia, sleep is a precious treasure. The last few years, I've slept better than I ever have in my life, and oh what a difference it makes.

Eight things to do before I die:

I vividly remember one point in graduate school when I realized that I was at the age when most people had a job, a car, a spouse, maybe even a kid, decent furniture, a retirement plan, leisure time... and I wasn't even close to getting any of those things. Being the incurable optimist that I am (I can hear New Kid laughing at me now) I decided that the best part was that I still had all of those things to look forward to. The truth is that I enjoy looking forward to things almost more than I enjoy doing or having them, so I'm almost hesitant to make a list like this; ironically the only way I would die happy is to still have things to look forward to. I guess the solution is to make sure that as I do these things, I add new things to the list. No final bucket list for me!

1. Live within walking distance of campus. I've been associated with university campuses of one sort or another since I was a kid, and until my current job, I've always lived within walking distance. It feels very odd to me now not to, and I'm always torn between wanting to go to evening events and activities and really really not wanting to drive back in to campus. There's a good chance this move will happen in the next three or four years, fortunately.

2. Decorate and furnish our house (the one closer to campus) in a way that reflects a reasonably consistent and attractive style. We still have the sort of odds-and-ends collection that we cobbled together when we got married, and the pieces we like best don't really fit with the house, so our style is sort of Lower-Income Hodgepodge. We've been keeping a savings account dedicated to buying stuff that will coordinate with itself and the new house, whenever that comes about. That is going to be the world's most satisfying shopping spree.

3. Learn to play the piano, again. (Did the usual lessons as a kid; hated them; have finally recovered enough to actually want to play.)

4. Walk somewhere. (see "passions," above.) I don't have any concrete goals for this, but another pilgrimage, or walking across a country, or the Appalachian Trail, or something.

5. Discover some new talent I didn't know I had. Wouldn't that be fun? I'm always taken by these stories of people who started playing the guitar, or writing, or woodworking, in their thirties (or older) and discovering a real ability when they never had any idea that was something they'd be good at.

6. Find some sort of community service project I can really get into. I've done odd bits of volunteer work here and there, but as I get more comfortable in my career, I'd like to spend more time finding ways to contribute to the world outside of it.

7. Travel more. This one's pretty much a given, and we've gotten good at taking little adventure trips to new places every summer. But I want to plan that in to the rest of my life, too.

8. Figure out a way to get through the next 30 years of my career without feeling stagnant or burned out. I'm almost ten years in, and there have been enough challenges and enough of a learning curve to keep it exciting. But that's not likely to last, and I want to make sure I find ways to keep it satisfying and rewarding. Not sure how that will be done, yet.

Eight things I often say

1. "Awesome!" (I am so trapped in the eighties.)

2. "Run-run-run to the kitchen!" (high-pitched and with great excitement.) This is part of our nighttime ritual of feeding the cats. We're on a regular enough schedule that the cats start pacing around about ten minutes before their dinnertime, watching to see if we shut down the computers. But they wait for that final cue to bolt downstairs.

3. "You're such a cat." Another feline ritual. OneCat curls up in my lap every evening while I work, and looks up at me with that contented sleepy face of his, and I always feel irrationally compelled to inform him fondly that he is a cat.

4. "Husband!" For some reason the LWI and I almost never call each other by our real names, but simply refer to each other as Husband and Wife.

5. "Thank you." A habit we got into when we first moved in together, that I think has had a healthier impact than almost anything else we've done - whenever either of us cleans the cat box, empties the dishwasher, gets the mail, clears the table, all those things that happen every single day, the other says Thank you. It really helps to acknowledge what each person does every day to keep the household running, and to have those things be appreciated.

6. "Don't eat that." A frequent admonition to TwoCat, who has an unhealthy interest in chewing on envelopes, photographs, and plastic bags.

7. "It's in the syllabus."

8. "Really. The answers to all those questions? They're in the syllabus."

Eight books I've read recently

I'm listing only fiction, since I don't "read" history books in the traditional sense; I dip into them and grab a few pages at a time.

1. Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes. About the relationships and events leading up to a school shooting. What I liked best was that you know at the outset what happens, but not who did it, and the story engages several high school students in such a way that they're all perfectly normal kids, but there are moments when you can imagine any of them getting to that point. It's remarkably sympathetic without downplaying for a moment the hideousness of the crime.

2. Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs. By the guy who wrote Empire Falls, which I haven't read yet but loooved the movie. He does a beautifully convincing job of telling a story from the perspective of a single narrator, but at different moments in his life. Plus it's a fascinating comparison of the advantages and downfalls of naive optimism vs. calculated skepticism.

3. José Luis Sampedro, Real Sitio. A historical novel about Spain (and about the writing of history itself) that hops back and forth between the Napoleonic era and the years just before the Civil War, set in the palace of Aranjuez.

4. Garrison Keillor, Pontoon. My favorite kind of weekend reading, just charming and sweet.

5. Fannie Flagg, Can't Wait to Get to Heaven. Same as the above (in fact they're remarkably similar plots.)

Okay, this is embarrassing, but I probably read eight books over Christmas break alone, and I couldn't for the life of you tell me what they are. I get completely caught up in the world of a book when I'm reading it, but then when I move on, I don't remember that much. I can remember individual scenes from several of them, but not authors or titles. So I'll have to abandon this at five.

Eight songs that mean something to me

My commentary is getting absurdly long, so I'll just list these, and leave the stories for another post. :) Most of these are pretty recent; I'm sure I could come up with an entirely different list if I thought back to high school/college.

1. Lyle Lovett, "South Texas Girl"
2. Manu Chao, "Merry Blues"
3. Jorge Drexler, "Milonga del Moro Judío"
4. Everly Brothers, "Dream"
5. Paul Simon, "African Skies"
6. Julieta Venegas, "Me Voy"
7. The 9s, "Can't Stop the Groove"
8. Bela Fleck, "Sinister Minister"

Eight qualities I look for in a friend

Kindness; responsibility; willingness to see humor in things; tolerance; talent; independence; ideally they'll have the same general values I do but a perspective different enough that we can learn things from each other.

Apologies to Wayfarer for taking so long with this; I tag everybody who'd like to play!

2008: so far, so good

2008-01-10T18:53:00.000-06:00

The main event of the year so far was the Big Conference in Our Nation's Capital. I had two particular commitments to this conference (one panel I organized, another I presented on) which is more involved than I usually am, but at the same time I came more determined to disconnect from the academic side a little and play tourist in what has become one of my favorite cities. (In this I had the full support of the LWI, who goes to conferences only as an excuse to goof off in interesting places.)

The academic side worked out to my overall satisfaction. The panel I organized went exceptionally well: the room was packed, all the presenters and the commentator performed beautifully, there were interesting questions, and several folks stayed around afterwards to chat. This bodes very well for the edited volume to which all the panelists will be contributing (of which I am one of the editors, thus my reason for organizing the panel). The panel I was on was a little half-assed to start with, and got sort of half-assed attendance, but I ended up feeling more confident about my presentation than I'd expected, and got a nice response.

The social side worked out to my immense satisfaction. Friday night we met up with ADM and had the greatest evening - easy warm conversation, excellent food, perfect atmosphere. Couldn't have asked for a better evening; ADM's somebody I really wish I got to see more often. Saturday the LWI and I headed to the Library of Congress in the morning, did conference-y stuff all the rest of the day, and gave up on being social in the evening - just got takeout and sacked out in the hotel room for some much-needed rest. Sunday morning we hit the Smithsonian (Air & Space), one of my favorite collections ever, which always makes me wish I'd gone into aeronautical engineering. Bit too late to switch, I guess. After that, one of the highlights of the weekend: I got to meet the fabulous Rana for the first time! She and D. joined us for lunch with an old grad school friend of mine and his wife... a good time was had by all, but it was far too short. I had a million things I wanted to talk about with all of them, but didn't have a chance to do more than scratch the surface. Given the alternative, though, that's the kind of get-together I like best, one that leaves you looking forward to the next. That evening we got to see another old grad school friend who lives in the vicinity, and had an excellent Indian dinner with her, enjoying a few hours of catching up. I hadn't been in touch with her for years, and it was wonderfully easy to be with her again.

Monday (we stayed a couple of extra days for fun) we hit the National Gallery and soaked up all the Titians and Grecos and Van Goghs and Hoppers our little brains could stand. That evening we rejoined the first old grad school friend (who hereafter I believe I shall call the Gentleman; the LWI refers to his wife as the Viper, which if you know him is particularly funny, because he's only the teensiest bit mean to people about once every two years. I think I'm just going to dub her Control Freak, because she's really not all that bad, just Very Decisive about Everything.) The Gentleman and Control Freak joined us for dinner at a wonderfully charming Spanish place that made the LWI the happiest I've seen him in weeks... he delights in food, and this place had all his favorites, well prepared and beautifully presented. It's a shame about the CF, because we both love the Gentleman to pieces and would have been delighted to have more time in his company, but she wears us out a little.

So that all felt like a whirlwind of culture and social events, especially for us slow-paced folks who usually delight in evenings at home. I loved it all, and it was a great way to kick off the new year, with my resolution to be a little more gregarious. I've recovered from feeling totally overwhelmed by last semester, and am feeling fairly positive about tackling the new one starting Monday. Here goes.

Happy Festivus!

2007-12-24T18:47:00.000-06:00

Happy holidays, all. I've been an absolute ten-toed couch sloth over the last few days, and have loved every minute of it. Wednesday I'll kick into high gear with a bunch of work that needs getting caught up on, but for now I'm in full relaxation mode. Neither the LWI nor I is particularly Christian, so we're not doing anything churchy or caroly, but he's roasting a leg of lamb, I've built a nice fire in the fireplace, we've opened a lovely bottle of wine and are now snuggled up with the cats writing holiday cards. (Yeah, I know I'm a little late with the cards, but those of you who get cards from me in the next few days, know that I'm having a lovely evening thinking about you right now.)

Julian of Norwich says it best: All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

I hope all's well with all of you. It's been a pleasure having gotten to know you, virtually or otherwise, and I'm grateful for your presence. I wish you many good things in the new year.

Year in review

2007-12-22T17:12:00.000-06:00

Things that were particularly nice about this last year:

Being active. Around this time last year I was so wiped out from the semester that I just crashed and went into a mild version of hibernation; it felt good for a few days but ended up making me feel terribly sluggish, which took weeks to shake off. (As did the ten pounds that came with it.) For the rest of the year I managed to exercise more regularly and in ways I really enjoy. The LWI and I play tennis every time the weather permits, and I managed to go the gym at least three times a week even during the busiest weeks in the semester. I could still stand to lose some weight, but at least I'm in good shape, which I enjoy.
Finances. We're not wealthy by any means, but after years of half-starving my way through graduate school, it feels wonderful finally to have a little savings socked away. (Yes, I've been out of grad school for eight years. It took a while to get caught up.) This last year has been particularly good in that regard. (knock on wood! Please, universe, I am *not* asking for trouble here. Just because we can afford to get a new roof doesn't mean I want any more shingles to blow off.)
Family. I've grown closer to both ArtSister and Awesome Sister-in-Law over the past year, and in some ways the death of Belle-Mere this summer made me more clearly part of the LWI's family, which I really value. I haven't kept up with StudlyBrother as much as I'd like, though; we used to have excellent end-of-year philosophical discussions, and I miss that.
Liverpool. The academic highlight of the year was the conference/workshop I went to in Liverpool; it was without question the most productive, friendly, and engaging academic discussion I've ever been part of. Unfortunately the topic was something I've published on but do not plan on continuing to develop, so I can't use those connections as much as I'd like. But it was just nice to have been part of something so exciting, and to see the best side of academia. There were no cliques; there were no jerks; nobody was overly obsessed with his or her own ego. One of the most telling signs of the workshop's success, I think, was that on the nights where we were all free to head out on our own for dinner, the entire group (20-25 people) chose to find somewhere to go together to continue the discussions we'd been having for the previous eight hours!

Things I'm looking forward to in 2008:

Friendship. I haven't done much to cultivate friendships over the past few years, and it's starting to wear on me. I enjoy time with my husband, but just as Maggie said in her end-of-the-year meme, "being married has made me rather lazy about maintaining my friendships." Yep. I also got a fortune cookie the other day that said "Seek friendship and you will find it," which is a nice reminder that I do have to do a little active seeking; people aren't likely to just show up and knock on my door. There are a couple of people around here I'd like to get to know better, and that seems like a good place to start.
Spirituality. I used to be a very spiritual person, and this is something else I've let slide lately. Several folks have written beautiful posts about the solstice, and I'm wishing I'd done more to celebrate it. I'm usually too exhausted by this time of the year to really plan anything, but perhaps that's all the more reason. Some kind of spiritual fulfillment is something else I need to seek out.
Conference. I'm in charge of organizing the annual conference for the (fiarly small) main professional organization in my field this spring, and I'm starting to feel pretty good about it. It works in my favor that last year's conference was a little messy; I think I will look good in comparison. (knocking on wood again)
Confidence. I have a lot of big projects in line for this year, and although I do regularly suffer moments of panic about each of them, overall I think I'm capable of handling them and that they're all going to go well. Let's hope.

What about you? What's going to be good about next year?

Space for the gods to find me

2007-12-21T19:51:00.000-06:00

Billie wrote the other day about meeting a woman in Starbucks who came across at first as vaguely pesky, distracting her from her writing, but then unexpectedly gave her some excellent advice about her dissertation.

My brother used to describe those people as “spirit guides,” the ones that just show up out of nowhere and tell you things you need to hear. It’s not all up to them, of course; you have to be paying attention. Spirit guides never announce themselves or wear handy name tags, so it’s easy to brush them off. I fear I’ve probably missed several, when I was more committed to talking than listening, or when I assumed a person had nothing interesting to offer. But if you’re smart enough to notice, they can make a big difference indeed.

I haven’t heard from any in a while, or perhaps I just haven’t been listening; I’ve had my head bent down a lot lately, trudging along to get things done. But for the new year I’m going to try to take a few more risks, open myself up to a little modest adventure, and see if any of the spirit guides come around to let me know how I’m doing.

A belated list of seven

2007-12-19T19:47:00.000-06:00

Kermit and Squadratomagico tagged me ages ago for the Seven Meme, which calls me to list seven random and/or weird things about myself. Here goes:

1. Something that should help explain my absence from the internets for the last few days: I am just the right combination of hermitish and lazy that if I have the chance to stay home and in my pajamas for several days straight, I embrace it with deep pleasure. I think this is okay for now, but I worry a little bit that it will work against me when I'm old and have no actual obligations that get me out of the house. I'm going to end up one of those people who dies of old age at home, and nobody will find me for months because they won't notice I'm gone.

2. I had serious reservations about getting married, because I value my independence and my alone time so much. To my great astonishment, my husband and I now work together (in the same department, and at home we share an office), we shop together, we go to the gym together, and I enjoy every minute of it. I never would have believed this would be possible.

3. Several years ago I developed an interest in recording my dreams. I had read that if you write your dreams down just when you wake up, in that brief few minutes when they're still in your head, you can train yourself to remember them more clearly. The problem is that it worked entirely too well. You know how there are sometimes moments in your day that will make you recall a dream? That started happening to me all the time; it was like having a little TV channel of dream-remembering going on in my head that I couldn't turn off. For a few days I was worried that I'd seriously shorted out something in my brain, until they finally faded away again. I've never messed with my dreams since.

4. Speaking of dreams, I once had a remarkably vivid dream - more akin to a hallucination - that Death, personified as a woman in a black cloak, was in my living room. She hadn't come to take me or anything; she was just sort of dropping by to say hello. I should write about that one sometime; it's worth a post to itself.

5. I am developing the possibly annoying habit of exclaiming YES!, in a Brain (of Pinky and the Brain) voice, when I find solutions or come up with good ideas.

6. I have almost no memories of my childhood. There are a few photograph-like images in my head of particular moments, and two memories from somewhere around kindergarten, but other than that, there's almost nothing I can recall in any detail until about the age of twelve.

7. The entertainments of my youth (junior high and high school) largely involved setting things on fire. My best friend RocketBoy and I spent endless hours putting together bombs, rockets, and flares, cleverly designed and patched together with ordinary household items and ingredients stolen from his father's lab (his dad was a college chemistry professor). No one seemed particularly alarmed by this, if they even noticed. One afternoon when school was out we were out in RocketBoy's driveway setting ourselves on fire (there's a trick with isopropyl alcohol that lets you set your whole hand on fire for a few seconds without suffering any damage), and one of the neighbors stepped out onto his back porch, saw us cackling gleefully and waving our flaming hands around, and just sighed "Summer's here."

The rules for this meme, of course, involve tagging other people. This one's been going around for a while, so I suspect everyone's had a chance at it; if not, I tag you!

Spanish spicy

2007-12-03T15:26:00.000-06:00

This has an odd set of questions, but I'm quite charmed by the results (mine & those I've seen elsewhere).

Your Score: Saffron

You scored 75% intoxication, 25% hotness, 100% complexity, and 50% craziness!

You are Saffron! Those other spices have nothing on you! You're warm, smart, and you make people feel really good (and with no side-effects!). You can be difficult to get to know and require a lot of those who try, but you're so totally worth it. *Sigh*

Link: The Which Spice Are You Test written by jodiesattva

This is just blogfill for the moment - I'll be back soon with memes handed along from kermit, Squadrato and Wayfarer!

Banishing demons

2007-11-17T16:27:00.001-06:00

Dear friends, the time is upon us for fun and festivity!

A blogging friend reminded me of a post I wrote two years ago, one I was particularly proud of but had almost entirely forgotten. It's about the queimada, a tradition we've borrowed and adapted from Galicia in northwest Spain. A queimada in its original context is a midsummer activity, meant to happen late at night out on a quiet beach, invoking the many spells and spirits that inhabit Galician culture.

But our version here belongs to the late fall, with its lengthening nights and chill in the air. I'm going to repost part of that earlier piece here, and invite you all to join in the celebration:

Start with a big shallow bowl and a couple of bottles of orujo. Orujo (pronounced oh-ROO-ho) is a drink unique to Galicia, made from fermented grape skins, a cousin to Italian grappa. Take a careful sniff from the bottle; it’ll make your head snap back and your eyes water. As you pour it into the bowl, the fumes will rise and whisper to the whole neighborhood that you’re up to no good.
Stir in a substantial amount of sugar, the rind of an orange, and a handful of coffee beans.
Now comes the good part. This is best done in the summer, on the beach late at night under a watchful moon, but we can do it here in the bar where it’s dark and cozy. Take a shallow ladle, dip up a bit of the brew, and light a match. It won’t flare up immediately; you need to be patient, hold the match under the ladle to warm it up and coax it into flame. When the flickering blue spreads across the liquid, gently lower the ladle to touch the orujo in the bowl. Watch the licks of fire skitter across the surface, hesitant at first, then more bold.
Fire is a powerful element, but it still needs your help. If you stand back and watch, the flames will burn the alcohol off the surface and disappear. Stir it gently, and they will revive. Lift the ladle, and you can pour delicate streams of fire back into the bowl. Pass the spoon around, and let everyone stir the flames. The constantly shifting patterns of blue tipped with gold are hypnotic; there’s always a period of silence while everyone loses themselves in the mosaic of flame.
But we shouldn’t forget the purpose. The traditions of Galicia say that a queimada is to summon witches, demons, and evil spirits, so that with the proper incantations they may be destroyed in the flames. In our queimadas, we let everyone summon their own demons: too much grading. family squabbles. difficult colleagues. stupid politics. frustrating research projects. looming deadlines. too much grading.
Bring them all in the room, name them, lift them up in the ladle, and dissolve them in the fire. You can see them flame up and disappear; they don’t even leave any smoke.
Now, look back into the bowl. The flames have slowly caramelized the sugar, toasted the coffee beans, and drawn the zing out of the orange rinds. The alcohol has lost its punch-you-in-the-face potency and is now mellow and smooth. Pour a short squat shot-glass full; it will be warm in your hand. Sip, and it is sweet and potent and caffeinated; as we pass the glasses around, the atmosphere will change from quiet, intent focus to cheery babble. The demons are banished; only the friends remain.

Let's do another one this year. I've filled the bowl and lit the match; everyone is welcome to bring their demons as well as the things they're most thankful for this year. (We won't burn the latter!) Who wants to take up the ladle?

Design and function at low prices

2007-11-13T13:40:00.001-06:00

Okay, I'm supposed to be working instead of blogging, but I couldn't resist sharing this: looking over the headlines, I saw a news item stating that Iran had given up its nuclear warhead blueprints to the IAEA, the UN nuclear agency. Except that I misread the headline as "Iran Hands IKEA Nuclear Blueprints," and I thought, wow! Affordable, easily assembled nuclear devices, in a variety of fashionable colors for your home, and just in time for the holidays!

Oh, and speaking of holidays and blowing things up, I have an idea for the Monster Bar for maybe this weekend, a little pre-Thanksgiving get-together. Stay tuned.

White flag

2007-11-05T19:26:00.000-06:00

I briefly toyed with the idea of committing myself to NaBloPoMo, or at least trying it out for the first few days to get back into the bloggy groove, but clearly that ship has sailed. So I'm going to throw in the towel instead, and acknowledge that this semester is just kicking my ass all over campus.

Here, as Exhibit A, are some random bullets of Things That Demand My Attention:

a volume of collected essays I'm editing with a colleague, for which I really really need to start pulling my weight
the conference I'm organizing for the spring, for which proposals (good!) and stupid questions (bad!) are beginning to roll in
my field's student honor society, for which I am the faculty adviser, and responsible for organizing the fall initiation ceremony this week (I came so close to forgetting to make arrangements with the caterers...)
a conference paper, for a Really Big Deal conference, that needs to get finished in the next three weeks
work for a major departmental committee I'm on, that's tackling some Important Issues for the department
participation in a campus-wide discussion of some even more Important Issues that are finally getting attention from the administration (yay administration!)
meeting with our new dean, who is making the rounds and spending half an hour with each faculty member in his college (yay new dean!)
the last three points are things I'm really excited about, but to get the most out of them requires a little more thought and energy than I have left at this point, and why do they all have to be happening at the same time?? but if I don't get fully involved, I'll become one of those people who whines about nothing ever changing and then sits back and does nothing when the actual opportunity comes for change. These chances really deserve to be pounced on, but all I can manage is a sort of exhausted collapse in their direction.
and then all the usual grading and letters of recommendation and meetings that wear me out by this time anyway.

So I'm going to give up on blogging for the time being (though, gift-pyramid people, fear not! I will be contacting you for addresses one of these days, and sending out nifty gifts). As many of you know, I'm still alive and well on Facebook, so pop in over there if you miss the bar and want some free drinks and a game of Scrabulous. :)

ReadySetGo

2007-10-14T12:33:00.001-05:00

Seen at MaggieMay's, and elsewhere, a fun gift pyramid:

By the end of the calendar year, I will send a tangible, physical gift to each of the first five people to comment here. The catch? Each person must make the same offer on her/his blog.

It's like a chain letter, but better! Everybody wins. (I should warn you, the way this semester is going, it's likely to be the very very end of the calendar year before I can send stuff out. But I'll have fun planning!)

Connections

2007-10-12T17:14:00.001-05:00

FINALLY, it's happened! All these years I've read about pseudonymous bloggers finding connections with each other, being "discovered" (in good ways and bad) by others who know them in real life. I'm fairly careful with my pseudonymity, but I always thought it would be fun to serendipitously meet other people at my institution who blog. Sadly, it seemed that no one did... whenever I read a particularly good piece at Dean Dad's or Maggie's New Kid's or any of the places where I find little gems of commentary on the academic world, I'd face awkward moments of wondering how to work them into conversations with my friends here. "I read this great discussion the other day... do you read academic blogs? No? Well, anyway, it brought up these interesting arguments about tenure..." No one seems entirely confused by references to the blogosphere, but they don't light up in recognition either.

But today I was friended by a colleague on Facebook, a very cool person I've known for several years, and when I went to her profile, I saw a suspicious number of familiar faces, folks I know by different names on their blogs. I thought... could it be? And, in fact, I'd come across a fellow blogger, somebody right here on my campus, and this just tickles me to pieces. She's more identifiable than I am, so I won't name her here, but - hi, friend! :)

Figlet

2007-10-05T18:32:00.001-05:00

Oooooh, we love fig trees. The LWI loves the fruit, which reminds him of his faraway homeland; I love the dusty cool scent of the leaves. We figured out a year or so ago that this was a climate that could support figs, and when we found out that our friend Sparky had thriving trees, we were just beside ourselves with glee.

She came over for lunch earlier this week, and glorious creature that she is, she brought us a cutting from one of her fig trees, which we planted this morning. We have a big gaping sun-baked space in the back yard where a dense Bradford pear used to stand; when this little guy gets bigger, he should provide some welcome shade.

I'm anthropomorphizing a little much, but he's so darned cute. I'm seriously tempted to make little pencil marks on the fence to mark how fast he grows.

In the longstanding tradition of blogger self-portraits, here we are, the fig and I:

Grf

2007-09-28T19:52:00.001-05:00

So here's a dumb thing I did with one of my classes this semester. I've assigned presentations to the class, in which each student makes one brief presentation and turns in a 1-2 page paper on his/her topic. To incorporate that material more thoroughly into the course, I'm including those topics as ID questions on the exam, and have posted them on the online course page (the idea being that students not only have to learn the basics of the topics presented, but explain how they serve as examples for larger themes in the course).

I did this with a previous class, and it worked quite well. What I didn't think of, though, is what to do if the papers are lousy. The in-class presentations have all been fine, so what the students have seen is good, but several of the written papers don't use proper footnotes, have poorly chosen bibliographies, use Internet sources when they were instructed not to, and other such problems.

Had I caught this early enough, I suppose I could have required the students to rewrite the papers before posting them. But there's nothing about that in the syllabus or assignment description, and I posted the first few before realizing that there were enough problems in them to be sticky. (The content is reasonably good for all of them, but I just don't want the other students using them as models for their own work.)

So for now I'm just putting minimal editorial comments when necessary [Prof's note: this isn't the proper format for footnotes], and I think I'll address this to the class as a whole in our next session. I needed to go ahead and post them, since the first exam is coming up fairly soon, but I'm not particularly happy with the situation overall. Usually I'm pretty good at imagining all the things that could go wrong with an assignment before I implement it, but I really missed the ball on this one.

Serious athletes

2007-09-16T12:55:00.000-05:00

We've been playing a bunch of tennis lately, the LWI and I, every day through the end of the summer and weekends now that we're into the school year. We're not all that great, and we do it more to run around outside and have fun than to keep score. The neighborhood park has a tennis court ringed by part of a long walking path, so we're often accompanied by a variety of folks out strolling or skating or walking their dogs, for a nice festive weekend atmosphere.

We don't buy new balls all that often, and at the moment our sack of balls includes a bunch of fairly worn-out Wilsons plus a few slightly newer balls we've picked up around the court. (We've lost our share of new balls, so the ones we collect usually balance out the ones we lose.) One of the foundlings is more thickly felted than the rest, and slightly heavier, and we've found that it handles with noticeably greater speed and accuracy - when we play with the Fuzzy Ball, we get some viciously fast rallies going.

As I said, we're not all that good, but we do take pleasure in a great deal of bluster and mock-toughness. So when we've played for a while and one of us starts feeling cocky, we'll pull out the Fuzzy Ball for a serious attack. It's also fair to warn your opponent about the change in balls, since Fuzzy Ball handles differently than, for example, Old Grey Ball.

We feel pretty intimidating breaking out the serious-game ball, but it wasn't until we noticed the strollers in the park chuckling to themselves as they walked by the tennis court that we realized a bloodcurdling yell of "Fuzzy Ball!" probably does not sound quite as fierce as we thought.

Reminders

2007-09-08T19:16:00.001-05:00

We were engaging in the LWI's favorite pastime of channel-flipping the other day, when we came across a wonderful movie from the 1960s, one that he knew but I haven't yet seen. It had already begun, so we decided to track it down on TCM and see if it would be shown again anytime soon. Fortunately, a showing turned up later in September, and TCM has a cool function that sends a reminder to your Yahoo! calendar. So the LWI asked for the reminder, and we both forgot about the movie.

Imagine LWI's astonishment when he opened up the calendar for this week, and the first reminder that popped up was "Thursday, September 13: The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!"

Guess we'd better get ready.

Gem of the day

2007-09-04T17:40:00.000-05:00

I don't often get howler emails from students, but the LWI got one today that beats them all. We're in the third week of classes, and he sends weekly emails to his class with discussion assignments. Today, in reply to the third of these emails (the third, mind you!), he received a message from a student who had never been to class.

The excuse? "i had the wrong class on my schedule and have been attending the wrong [same department] class for the past 3 weeks and i have no idea how this happend."

The best part? This is an upper-level course, and there is nothing else being taught in the LWI's department that is remotely close to its content. If it were English, this would be like signing up for a Faulker course, going to a Chaucer course instead, and not noticing the difference until you were three weeks in.

I am baffled and amazed.

A perfect day

2007-09-02T16:29:00.000-05:00

Sunday morning (and the Sunday before Labor Day, so that my first thought upon waking up is "Mmmm, this is like getting another Saturday!"): Alarm goes off at 7 am. This is an hour later than the usual 6 am, so it feels luxurious already. I have just enough work to do that goofing off takes on the tinge of guilty pleasure, but not enough to really feel pressured to do any of it just yet.

7:45 am: the LWI and I get on our bikes to go to the nearby park and play tennis. It's the first reasonably cool morning we've had in weeks, and we play probably the best tennis we've ever played, punctuated by chest-thumping threats of war and gleeful cheers for the good shots.

9:30 am: back home for a well-earned shower.

10:00-11:30 am: take a bowl of organic granola, a glass of orange juice, and the Sunday New York Times out to the back yard. Enjoy all three while flopped in the hammock under the flowering crepe myrtle.

11:30 am -12:00 pm: flip through the manuscript I received the other day from Kick-Ass Historian; decide it's going to be a truly enjoyable read.

12:00 pm: inspired by the smell of charcoal smoke wafting through the neighborhood, we decide to grill steaks for lunch. There's just enough time to soak them in a garlic/red wine marinade first.

2:30 pm: with lunch over and the paper read, I start feeling the tugs of responsibility - should go finish grading those papers I received online last week. Just as we finish clearing the table, though, a small thunderstorm blows in - not big enough to be worrisome, but just enough lightning to make us postpone turning on the computers for a while. Darn.

2:30-3:30 pm: back to the hammock (sheltered by a roof overhang) to watch the storm go by; toes get covered with fuchsia crepe myrtle petals blown loose by the wind.

3:30 pm: back inside to futz around with email and blog posts. Wonder if I can do all this again tomorrow morning.

(Don't let this keep you away from the party in the previous post; no reason that can't continue all weekend!)

Party

2007-09-01T18:01:00.000-05:00

Hey all you riffraff,

Do you have some free time this weekend between the barbecues and frisbee-playing? Do you miss the bar and all its craziness? Well, swing by if you have a chance, because we have a new blue house to play in.

Squadratomagico went to India and brought me back the most gorgeous blue house! I think it will be perfect in the back yard behind the bar. The old place is still a little cobwebby, so while I clean that out I think we should baptize the new place. Mango lassi and margaritas on the balcony, anyone? Come one, come all; I hope to see the old crowd around, and new folks, please don't hesitate to introduce yourselves. It's been too quiet around here for too long.

Who's with me?

Attitude

2007-08-29T16:53:00.000-05:00

I'm a big fan of the idea that success is largely about attitude - if you're cranky about something, change it, and if you can't change it, figure out a way to deal with it, hopefully with some cheer and good grace. Students' attitudes have a lot to do with how much leeway I give them; if they're selfish and demanding, they don't get much, but if they're sincere and hardworking, I'll do anything I can for them. (Same goes for the rest of the world, now that I think of it.)

There's a student who graduated from here a couple of years ago who had the most irritating attitude. He was a work-study student in a nearby office for a while, but he made it clear to everyone that that sort of work was really beneath him (and thereby alienated everyone in the building). At one point he asked me for a recommendation for a post-graduation job that wasn't his first choice of occupation; his entire conversation made it clear that he wasn't terribly interested in the position, but that he'd do it if he had to. I gently suggested to him that that attitude made it hard for me to write the recommendation, since I couldn't truthfully write about his energy or commitment or willingness to work.

When he decided to apply to graduate school, we had some of the same conversations about his approach. He didn't get into his top choice school (which admittedly was way beyond his reach), and grudgingly applied to some other schools as backups. His reluctance hovers around him like a cloud. It's nice that he's confident in his abilities, but he constantly conveys the idea that he'd really rather be somewhere else, somewhere better. I've tried to suggest that successful students are the ones who dedicate themselves to where they are and what they can do rather than saving all their energy up for thinking about where they'd rather be, but his responses have only been defensive, insisting that he really is doing a good job at where he is, even if he hates it.

Our last correspondence was nearly a year ago, when I wrote him a recommendation for graduate school. Today he emailed me to let me know he'd begun his studies at a regional university, not one of his top choices, and his only two comments about that experience were to describe it as "a step down" and to say that although he was pleased to have a job on campus, he'd rather have a different kind of job.

Comments like this just grate on my nerves, and I always wonder how I should respond. Should I brush them off and wish him well? Or should I try to suggest that his attitude might really be getting in his way? He's truly a capable kid; he just doesn't realize that a little humility can go a long way, and that no one likes working with someone who thinks his job is beneath him. If he'd just bite the bullet and dig in to what he has to do, he could work his way up to where he wants to be, but he seems to think if he waits around long enough with an air of resigned suffering that someone will recognize his talent and reward him appropriately. I'm thinking that's not likely.

Judge

2007-08-25T18:14:00.000-05:00

I got an email request yesterday to review a manuscript for a publisher. Cool - this is this first time that has happened to me! Not only that, but they pay real money for the review! Who knew the extra parts of this job actually paid money? I wish all my committee work paid money.

The catch (or the best part, I can't quite decide which) is that it's a manuscript by a Very Well Known Person in My Field. I'm actually working indirectly with this person on a different project, and have corresponded with him for several months, and met him in person at a conference several months back, and he's just as charming as can be. Plus he's a kick-ass historian.

So I'm completely tickled to be asked to review this manuscript, but at the same time it feels to me like a museum calling me up to say "Hey, we found this Titian in our attic, do you think it's good enough to hang in the museum collection?" Well, um, yeah. I think it probably is.

Immobile fun

2007-08-23T17:01:00.001-05:00

Internets, I need your advice! (Plus this is a good way to slip back into blogging... I can't ever decide whether to go ahead and take a hiatus or not, so I keep popping back in here every couple of weeks just to clear the cobwebs out. Thanks to y'all who have stuck around!)

My nephew, Fixit, smashed his foot a couple of weeks ago and will need to spend a rather horrifying amount of time on crutches while it heals. It's his right foot, so he can't even drive; he'll be doing a lot of lounging around for the next couple of months, and he's not very good at lounging.

I'm trying to think of something fun to send him to keep him occupied and entertained. He's in his mid-20s, likes to tinker with things, isn't much into reading. If it were me, I'd be pretty happy to have three months of forced lounging with a pile of books, but poor Fixit is going to go stir-crazy after about five minutes. Anybody have any suggestions?

He done stole my heart

2007-08-06T12:50:00.000-05:00

I call him Charlie.

We found him in the park this morning, or more precisely, he found us. The LWI and I go out every morning to play tennis, and today I was startled to see that I had a fan: a little black-and-white kitten watching intently from just outside the fence.

When he realized that I'd seen him, he let out one of those little squeeky little-kitten mews that are biologically designed to bring out all one's protective instincts. (I've never had any sort of inclination towards motherhood, but kittens flip all those switches that I imagine children are supposed to.)

But he wasn't mine, and we have enough cats already thankyouverymuch, and surely he'd just wandered out of someone's yard and they'd come find him any minute now. So I tried to ignore him.

I'm up two sets to one, a killer serve, a baseline rally, an attack at the net, and...

mew!

Dammit. We try another couple of sets, but come on, you try focusing on the ball when there's a little tiny helpless creature behind you (mew!) who finally works his way under the fence and trots over to rub up against your ankles. I carried him back outside the court a couple of times, and each time he'd sit and watch us play for a while, and then (mew!) he'd come back on to the court and want to play too. He was hardly bigger than my shoe. This picture isn't him (I was afraid if I actually took his picture I'd never be able to give him up) but it's pretty close to what he looks like, except that he has this absurd little Charlie Chaplin mustache.

What do you do with that? The little guy wasn't more than a couple of months old; he was clearly accustomed to people, but we had no idea where he belonged and no one seemed to be looking for him. The park is bordered by a couple of fairly high-traffic streets and there's a number of loose dogs in the neighborhood, so I really didn't want to leave him on his own. And ohmygod he was so helpless and adorable. (NOT taking him home. NOT taking him home. NOT taking him home.)

I figured if someone did go out to look for him, they'd have a better chance checking the local animal shelter than they would just randomly looking around the neighborhood. So I took him to our vet first, hoping against hope he'd have one of those identity chips even though he was so little, or that someone would have reported him lost there. (When I took OneCat and TwoCat to their vet last week, someone had brought in a stray they'd found, who turned out to have an identity chip, and while I was there he was reunited with his people, to many tears and much rejoicing all around. I couldn't help but hope for something similar for Charlie.)

Charlie was chipless, unfortunately, and the vet said the best thing I could do was to take him to the shelter. Even if his people didn't find him, he was so cute and well-behaved that she said he'd have an excellent chance of adoption. (And neither one of us could bring ourselves to say this, but even if he does meet the fate of most unclaimed animals in shelters, I think it's better for him go that way than to be hit by a car or mauled by a dog.)

I took a cardboard box to put him in for the car ride to the vet, but he only lasted about 30 seconds in the box - much more fun to ride up front like a person! I was worried about him scooting around the car, but he sprawled comfortably on the seat and stayed put. On the 20-minute ride downtown to the shelter, he wormed his way onto my lap, sighed in contentment, and promptly fell asleep. The shelter people were completely taken in by him (as was everyone I passed on the way in), and it's a good shelter, so I trust he'll do well there... I'll check the neighborhood every day for signs, and hope that he's found by his old people or adopted by good new ones.

But I still can't help wishing he were my Charlie. We had a thing, there, for a little while.

We now return to fairly normal blogging

2007-08-04T19:07:00.001-05:00

I was a little abashed to read Dr. Virago's post the other day about deciding what nifty things to add to an empty day in her fall course schedule. She, faced with the rich possibility of adding a new topic to the course, asked for recommendations for material to support a discussion of the future of literary studies.

I, faced with the same small empty block in my syllabus, thought "Woo hoo! A day off!"

Nearly every semester, I need to miss one day of class for a conference or professional obligation of some kind. This fall, for the first time in ages, I'm teaching a set of classes I've taught before without making any substantive changes, so all I needed to do was to shift the daily topics over to the fall calendar. And, lo and behold, since I'd needed to plan for missing a day in the previous semesters I'd taught the class, two out of my three classes ended up with one empty day each.

Yeah, I considered adding an extra day on some topic that had gotten a little too squeezed in previous semesters, but I'll confess I didn't consider it very long. The tantalizing jewel of an idea that dangled before my imagination was to simply build in a day off, ideally during October, more commonly known in the academic world as Exploding Head Month.

The fun part was trying to decide where to put it. Should I tack it on to fall break or maybe save it for Thanksgiving, to stretch those precious vacations out a little? Should I put it before the big midterm exam, to give both me and the students a little bit of a breather? Or maybe it would fit well on the Friday before my birthday, which often gets lost in the midsemester crunch? The possibilities are delicious.

I know that that magical day is going to disappear in a flash, probably consumed in grading or meetings or housework or whatever else I'm most behind on at that point, but right now it's worth it just to imagine the joy of a day off during the hardest part of the semester.

Readjusting

2007-07-28T16:10:00.000-05:00

We're back home at last, and although it's a tremendous relief, it's surprising after two months away how long it takes to slip back into our old familiar routines. We pause in the kitchen to remember where the bowls are; I've lost the knack of getting the mower to start on the first try.

Even the cats are struggling to adjust. OneCat used to have an ironclad bedtime routine; on his way to the bedroom he'd jump up on the hallway bathroom sink to lap a quick drink from the faucet, and then head to the dresser for Evening Brush. The last couple of nights he's spent a few minutes sitting in the hallway, just between the bathroom sink and the dresser, looking from one to the other in perplexity... he knows something used to happen here, but he's not sure quite what it was. This morning he saw the dresser and suddenly his eyes lit up... he leaped up onto the dresser and nudged the brush, chirping in delight - That's what it was!

LWI is happy to be back, though the loss of his mother is still sinking in. In the eight years we've lived away, he's spoken to her on the phone nearly every day, just for a few minutes. The last few days, since we've been home, his father has tried to keep up the tradition, but they're not quite sure what to say to each other. OneCat has his routine back, but the rest of us will have to readjust to a world that's a slightly different shape than it was.

Belle-Mere 1923-2007

2007-07-18T03:17:00.001-05:00

She died yesterday morning, peacefully, surrounded by her family. Under the circumstances that's about the best you can hope for. I'm glad I knew her.

away

2007-07-13T02:29:00.000-05:00

It's not like I've posted enough lately to need to tell you that I won't be posting for a while, but I'm headed off to a conference in Another Nearby Country for a while. The hotel has no wireless and there's very limited access at the university that's hosting the conference, so I'm going to experiment with being unplugged for five days. (half terrifying and half incredibly liberating, that thought.)

Things are still struggling along here - belle-mere is back in the hospital and probably won't make it out; the goal now is just to keep her as comfortable as possible until her liver or heart fail. Rest of the summer course went well, but I'm too worn out to come up with good stories. Lots of half-hearted blog ideas floating around in my head, but no time or concentration to do them justice. Hopefully later this summer.

Thanks for all the encouragement; it's meant a lot to me. Hope to see you back here soon! In the meantime, as always, the door's unlocked and the liquor's free; feel free to hang around in my absence. Cheers!

Still here

2007-06-28T16:49:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the radio silence, all; I hadn't realized how long I'd neglected the blog. (I'm also still reading everyone, but only finding a few minutes a day to connect, so very little commentingon my part. I'm still lurking in all the usual places, though!)

Everything's OK here, all things considered... Belle-Mere is home and recovering, but terribly frail and needy, and we're exploring various at-home-nursing-care options for her; the combination is sucking up enormous amounts of time and energy. We're into my half of the study-abroad course, which is fun and going well but sucking up enormous amounts of time and energy. You get the idea. We're all struggling our merry way along, grateful that things aren't worse, but a little frazzled on the edges.

Hope all's well by y'all. Will try to be back soon with more stories of Fun With Study Abroad. Just need to survive the next few days.

Awesome blogger meetup

2007-06-12T13:27:00.001-05:00

Seeing Maggie's pictures reminded me - I almost forgot to blog about my first overseas blogger meetup!

Short version: Maggie rocks (but duh, you knew that already). She's clever, savvy, and fun, and would have been a blast to be out on the town with. Unfortunately with all the belle-mere-in-the-hospital business before I left Spain, I couldn't stay out with her as long as I'd planned... initially I had vast and elaborate plans for tapas and drinking and gabbing the night away, but in the end was only able to walk around for a bit and show her some of my favorite bits of Madrid before I had to head back. (Maggie, did you go back for chocolate?) Once I met her I was even more sure the night on the town would have been memorably awesome, but it'll have to wait - M, I owe you one.

Speaking of belle-mere and hospitals, unfortunately the saga continues... after her good solid recovery, she was fine at home for two days, but she just had another bad dizzy/delirious spell and right now they're ambulancing her back to the emergency room. Uff-da. Keep those good thoughts coming.

Mama update

2007-06-11T15:47:00.000-05:00

I really need a better pseudonym for my MIL, because "mother-in-law" carries all those negative connotations, and there's just nobody in the world sweeter than my MIL. I found out a while ago that the French for "sister-in-law" is "belle-soeur," literally "lovely sister," and so I've been calling my sister-in-law that for fun. I think the same will work for my MIL, so she will now be Belle-Mère, lovely mother.

Anyway - the good news is that BM was released from the hospital today! They had expected her to go home later in the week, but she was doing so well that they turned her loose this afternoon. It won't be hard to care for her as long as the LWI is around to help (belle-soeur lives at home but works during the day, the other brothers live elsewhere, and father-in-law often needs to run errands in the mornings) but there will be some tough questions about what to do after we leave. The obvious thing would be to put her in some sort of assisted-living facility where she would get both good medical care and the company of other people. But to my FIL, that is the ultimate of insults... partly because they had one family friend years ago who was placed into such a facility, and it turned out to be not terribly appealing (and on the verge of being a little scary), and every time they went to visit her she was in tears begging them to take her out. So that's his image (and of course he resists any suggestion that that's not the norm). That must be combined with the fact that he is of a culture and a generation that requires its children to care for their parents; anything else is a profound betrayal. They have another family friend who's now in a nice facility, and she's perfectly happy and well cared for, but every time he talks about her he says with profound disapproval - "she's in a residencia... and she has four children!" meaning of course that the children are ungrateful brutes who have abandoned the mother who raised them. The rest of us see this as the children being wise and caring people with families and careers of their own who have placed their mother where she will be much better cared for than they could do themselves, but there is absolutely no way that FIL is going to accept that idea, this side of hell freezing over.

But all that is to be worried about later. For now she's home, and eating well, and comfortable, and in far better shape than I dared hope for. Vive la belle-mere!

Ménage a trois

2007-06-11T14:54:00.001-05:00

So now I have to confess a little nagging childish issue I've had about this summer program. This is the one I wrote about a while ago, an interdisciplinary trip to Apple City and Orange City, that nearly derailed because Sparky (the apple professor) needed surgery and wasn't able to do the trip. (She's recovering well, though, fortunately.) We found a replacement apple professor, and the plans continued - well, as planned.

What I've had in the back of my head all along, though, is that there are three of us faculty, and people always interact oddly in groups of threes. Not oddly, really, but there's a strong tendency for most people to pair up and leave one person out. There are all sorts of possibilities for this: Apple and I are both teaching the history part of the course (she the history of apples and I the history of oranges), so we have that in common. But Apple is really trained as a literature person, and Orange is doing the literature of apples and oranges, so they have that in common, and they have known each other longer than I've known either one. Orange and I have been working on this course together from the beginning, so there's that; all sorts of possibilities for alliances and odd men out.

So I've been torn between my natural inclination to do more stuff on my own, and my desire to not be left out. Today was the first day we were all together (students arrived this morning), and I had very good "bonding" moments with both. To clarify the first sentence of this post, I see my concern as childish because I find myself not concentrating on how to avoid the two vs one pattern, but more on how to make sure I'm one of the two. Really, if we worked this right, we could find ways in which each person could be a sort of link between the other two - I'm picturing this rather like those little plastic balls and sticks that people use to demonstrate molecule combinations. So far that's the sense I have of how this is working, but I still have to confess a little moment of glee when Orange shared with me at several points over the evening her minor complaints about Apple (she walks too fast with the group! she's terrible at calculating how long it will take us to get somewhere!) ... I know that it is the worst of karmic curses for me to be happy about this, because it guarantees that they'll be complaining to each other about me next, but still - hee.

Random paragraphs of Paris

2007-06-09T15:13:00.001-05:00

Staying in an apartment by myself after having spent three weeks in Too Little Space with Too Many People = great relief paired with a sudden onslaught of loneliness and therefore, I suspect, much more frequent blog posting. Mark your calendars accordingly.

It's such a weird mix of feelings - it is so very cool to be here, and so hard to be away from LWI and his family. I have a whole bedroom to myself! and a whole bathroom to myself! and a whole kitchen to myself, apartment gods be praised! but then again, I'm alone. Bleah. But this apartment is so unbelievably cool; it's little teensy tiny, but it's an attic of a 17th century building, with big old wooden beams and slanty ceilings and skylights everywhere. If I stretch a little I can see the cathedral of Notre Dame out the living room window.

My two favorite moments of the past three weeks:

the first time I visited MIL in the hospital, after she'd been in the ICU for a week - she saw me come in and her face just lit up. That look on her face is going to make me happy for weeks.

yesterday the LWI was updating his calendar, and he asked what date we were flying back to the City Where We Live But For Which I Have Not Yet Chosen An Appropriate Nickname. I told him the date, and he entered the phrase "Flight back home." Normal enough, but keep in mind, he grew up and lived in the same house in Madrid until he was in his 30s, and then I came along and lured him away to the U.S. where we've been now for eight years, only the last five of them in Our City (not that I wouldn't have loved to live in Spain, but academic jobs are easier to get in the U.S., if you can believe it.) So I looked at him and said "Do you mean that? Is Our City really home for you now?" and he replied that of course it was. That just means the world to me... I've always felt bad that he's so far from his family and the place where he grew up, but he really does feel at home with me. Awww.

numb3rs

2007-06-08T11:30:00.000-05:00

Hours until I leave for Paris (whee!): 17
Clues I have about getting around in Paris: 0
Students I'll have in class over the next four weeks: 17
Miles I have fallen behind on course prep for said class: many
Hours (approximate) each member of the LWI's family has spent in making trips back and forth to the too-far-away hospital to visit my MIL in the past week: 23
Times we've been certain she wouldn't make it to the next day: several
Times we've been certain she was making a spectacular recovery and would be home within days: several
Awesome blogger meetup-dinners I'm going to miss because of trips to the hospital: 1 (sorry, Maggie! On the very off chance that you read this before I get there, stick around, I'll come meet you anyway but can't stay long.)
Hours I have spent preparing for a conference I'm going to right after this ridiculous summer course ends: 0
Times I've been grateful that at least we're here to help out and spend time with MIL: countless

Bonus amusing anecdote: I was home alone the other morning when suddenly I heard an odd buzzing noise coming from... where? next door? The neighbors have been doing some remodeling; maybe it's a saw. No, it sounds like it's coming from the hallway. WTF? It's coming from our own bathroom. Plumbing doesn't buzz, does it? Oh dear. I went into the bathroom with great trepidation, and there on the edge of the sink sat the LWI's rechargeable shaver, shaving away at nothing in particular.

Okay... the LWI had been gone for hours, and nobody had recently been in the bathroom; the thing had just started up by itself. I pushed the little button that turns it off, and... it kept buzzing away. I bonked it on the counter, and it kept buzzing, trying its little heart out to shave something. I tried to take it apart without doing unnecessary damage to myself (really didn't want to suffer any kind of unpleasant shaving accident), but no go. There just aren't that many ways to push a button, but I kept trying just in case, and nothing. So I figured - the only thing to do is let it run the battery out. I went back every half hour or so to see if anything had changed, and once I actually managed to turn it off... until four seconds later it gave a little cough and started up again. AARGH!

So the shaver and I spent a less-than-agreeable morning together; it shaved air for about three hours straight, and then started to fade, and the buzz finally died out in an anguishing half-hour of desperate little hiccups. I really felt sorry for the little guy, but I would've had to smash it if it had lasted any longer.

Sigh

2007-06-01T12:34:00.000-05:00

So far in this summer's adventures, the bad is outweighing the good. One of the principal concerns has been the failing health of my mother-in-law; she's in her mid-eighties, terribly frail, and has suffered from liver problems for the last several years. Two nights ago she had a rough night and all of us stayed half-awake most of the night worried about her; then yesterday she had a dizzy spell and ended up very weak and faint, so that we ended up taking her to the emergency room. They in turn diagnosed a serious arrhythmia and possibly a mild heart attack, and are currently keeping her in the ICU. (That whole process involved 10 hours of getting her from place to place and waiting to talk to doctors, during which time we had neither lunch nor dinner, followed by a drive home at 1 am during which we encountered, of all things, a half-hour traffic jam in a tunnel. Good times.)

This is complicated in so many ways. Her whole family is utterly devoted to her, which in itself is wonderful, except that it means most of them are also refusing to accept how serious this is likely to be. (Maybe I'm too much of a pessimist, and I'm certainly not sharing my opinion with them, but I honestly don't think she's going to make it home from the hospital.) The initial hospital where we took her didn't have enough beds to admit her, so they took her to another, which is nearly an hour away. My father-in-law is 81 and insists on driving there, even though he really really really should not be behind the wheel, and his children cannot persuade him not to drive. This wouldn't be as much of an issue if the eldest son (who runs his own business and is filthy rich, so in theory could take a day or two off) were willing to drive, but he has "lots of other things to do." My husband and I can't legally drive here without an international license, so we're not much help.

Antiwhine: at least we're here. My husband's two older brothers are usually the leaders of the family, but they and their father completely fall apart when it comes to seeing their mother in discomfort, so my husband's the one who went with her in the ambulance, who stays with her when they only allow one person in the ICU, and who will probably stay overnight with her once she's stable enough to transfer to a regular room. Meanwhile - except for the first long hospital experience - I'm staying behind at the house, fielding phone calls, doing laundry, and helping my sister-in-law have meals ready for the rest when they return. It's not much, and it doesn't feel like nearly enough, but there's not much else I can do.

Here we go again

2007-05-25T15:27:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow morning we get on a plane (and then stop and sit in an airport for a ridiculously long time, and then get on another plane) for this summer's European Adventure.

The good: two weeks in Paris, a week in England, several weeks in Spain, the accompanying good food, friends, and adventures, and an excellent blogger meetup. (Said blogger will remain unidenfitied unless she chooses to reveal herself, but I am totally psyched to meet her.)

The bad: shepherding students through four of these weeks, a treasured mother-in-law with failing health, too many family members in too little space.

The good definitely outweighs the bad; I'll try to chronicle the most interesting of both. And hey, if anybody wants a postcard, email me your snail mail address!

weird advertising

2007-05-18T17:14:00.000-05:00

I've been talking with sales folks from several hotels lately, working on plans for an upcoming conference we'll be hosting here. One hotel gave me a nice folder full of advertising goodies that I just now had time to look through. It included the usual information about the hotel itself, local activities, and their proposal for me. There was also a small, slightly thick white envelope with a little gold ribbon around it, some mysterious little gift. Perplexed, I opened it up, and found a cream-colored... thing... about 3 inches by 4, with a little seal, and a paragraph description of an Important Historical Event (though not a very happy one) that happened in the hotel many years ago. Well, as an important event, I can see how they'd want to include information about it, but what the heck was this thing? A slim note pad? No, there were no pages... A coaster? Then I noticed it had a long crack, and in fact it was a little bit soft. It couldn't be... I sniffed, and nibbled a corner of it, and in fact it was white chocolate.

Now, I'm all for chocolate in all its forms, but a little chocolate slab (that otherwise doesn't look remotely like anything edible) to advertise an unhappy but significant event that took place at your hotel? It just struck me as odd.

(Although now that I'm writing about it, it strikes me as tempting. I think I'll go eat it, and meditate on the vagaries of history and the wonderful meeting areas and banquet facilities of the hotel in question.)

Actually, this leads me to a question about conferences. Several of you have been through the spring conference routine, and to the extent that that's fresh on your mind, I'd like to ask what things you like best and what you would have changed. (My conference will be about 100 people, to give you a sense of scale.) Things like: if we have the reception & banquet & meetings all in the same hotel, is that good because it's convenient, or bad because it's claustrophobic? (The hotel at least is in a very attractive downtown area with lots of great restaurants and bars within walking distance, so people will be able to go out and have fun.) To fit in all the panels, would you rather have panels that run from 8:30 am to 6:30 pm all day Friday and Saturday with Sunday free, or panels that run more from 9-5 and then one session on Sunday morning? (This location is reasonably accessible, so people shouldn't have a hard time scheduling afternoon flights, though I don't know if they'll want to.)

Any other things you would recommend to do or avoid? I'd love your suggestions!

Wouldn't You Like To Be A Mickster Too?

2007-05-11T12:27:00.000-05:00

Woo hoo! My Awesome Studly Brother has finally started his own blog. I'm coming close to outing myself here, since he does not hide behind a pseudonym (though he certainly doesn't mind being referred to as Awesome Studly), but if you want to work that hard to figure out who I am, you probably already have. Awesome Studly, if anyone asks you who Pilgrim/Heretic really is, make up some sort of cool superhero identity for me.

Anyway - he's a fine singer/songwriter/musician dude, and he crafts a good story. Plus he has a real live bar! I was worried about the competition, but then I realized that people probably can't play around with duct tape and blow things up like they do here. Probably.

Check it out here: http://pickymick.blogspot.com/ Drop by and say hello!

Short term, long term

2007-05-02T17:48:00.000-05:00

The conference was excellent! (And yeah, I've been back for over a week, but have spent most of that time in Grading Jail, as Philosophy Factory would say. Even now I've only momentarily escaped, and they'll be dragging me back any minute now.) It was a huge ego trip, really. I'm accustomed to being fairly invisible and not knowing many people, but I've finally hit some sort of critical mass in terms of the number of folks I know (especially in this fairly narrow field) and now that my book is out, even more people came up to introduce themselves to me. A graduate student e-mailed me a few days before the conference and asked if we could meet, because she admired my work, and we had a lovely lunch together. Boy, do I wish I'd had the guts to do that more often; from the student perspective it's terribly intimidating, but from the other side, it's wonderful to know that someone enjoyed your work, and to talk with them about their own ideas (which in this student's case are far superior to anything I ever did with that particular topic - if anyone should have been intimidated, it was me).

My panel was well-attended, and all the papers fit together remarkably well. An Awesome Senior Historian attended, and gave me some very supportive comments afterwards. (In spite of my recent experience with the graduate student, I still couldn't get over feeling completely outclassed and tongue-tied with him.) A book review editor from a well-respected journal approached me to say that someone had just asked him to review my book, and if I'd arrange to send him a copy. I met several people from my Ph.D. institution, and had a lovely time chatting with them, feeling much more like a colleague instead of a former student.

So all in all, an excellent and encouraging experience! It's odd that I'm into my second year as a tenured professor, but I'm just now starting to feel like a grown-up in the academic world. (A junior-league grown-up, but a grown-up nonetheless.)

While I'm enjoying the sensation, however, I'm uncertain about the future. As several others have written recently, there's a moment after you get tenure when the future stretches out in front of you in this long flat featureless ribbon, and you realize that there are no more hoops to jump through. Everything during my academic career has been relatively short-term tasks and rewards: take exams and get a grade; complete an undergraduate program and get a degree; complete a thesis and get an M.A.; complete a dissertation and get a Ph.D.; go through the interview cycle and get a job; publish a book and get tenure. There's always an immediate, measureable goal, and a prize when you get there.

But now what? I am not without goals, but as of now they're entirely of my own devising. Which, when I put it that way, sounds like it ought to be more rewarding. But when you've been trained to jump through clearly defined hoops for twenty years, it's hard to adapt to setting up your own, especially when the prizes aren't as definite, and there's no punishment for failing. For as lovely as the academic life is, it really does rely on a great deal of self-motivation to keep productive. My pride and sense of basic decency will keep me going for a while yet, I imagine, but it's hard when there are other faculty in my department who make a practice of being so incompetent that no one will give them any jobs to do, and they coast along making a nice salary for virtually no work. Once you get tenure, there are no carrots and no sticks.

What got me thinking about this (again) is the ceremony I attended on campus the other day to recognize people who have been at this institution for recognizably important numbers of years. The five-year folks (including me) got little pins, as did the ten-year folks; the 20- and 30-year survivors got nicer gifts and little speeches about their accomplishments. This is what got me, because after a few dozen names the speeches started to sound more and more alike, except for the few individuals who had clearly made a recognizable impact; of the rest, all the men had a "can-do attitude," and all the women were "unfailingly cheerful." I thought it would be a little depressing to dedicate thirty years of your professional life to an institution, especially when that dedication comes mostly from your own internal motivation, only to be rewarded with your life described in three sentences about how cheerful you are.

So my question is: how do I want to be described when I've completed thirty years here (or wherever)? That's a very scary question, but I like it as a way to figure out what to aim for. The conference experience has me all warm and happy right now, but "she impressed a few people at a conference once" is not going to hold up for a description of my career. I have no answers yet, but I'll share the question: what do you want your three sentences to say?

On the road again

2007-04-19T07:46:00.000-05:00

All's well here; I've just been going through the Week of Insane Busyness and am now about to head to a conference in the City Where Don Johnson Played A TV Detective. (I don't know any bloggers in my particular field, so sadly I'm not expecting any blogger meetups, but if this sounds like someplace you might be headed, let me know!)

I'm not taking the computer, though - much as I'd love to live-blog the conference, I like to travel light, and I really need to disconnect for a few days.

So you'll hear back from me next week, once I'm back with lots of new ideas in my head and sand between my toes.

Hard of hearing

2007-04-06T18:50:00.000-05:00

The LWI and I misunderstand each other all the time - or at least I mishear him sometimes and I suspect he does it on purpose to get back at me. Either way, we are endlessly entertained with the results.

He has a routine of ironing each evening the shirt he's going to wear the next day, and the other day he was singing a little ironing song to himself in Spanish, "Plancho mi camisa, plancho mi camisa" (I'm ironing my shirt). I thought I heard "Anchovy camisa," and asked him what the heck he was singing about anchovies for. We've been referring to the ironing ritual as "Anchovy camisa!" ever since.

And a few minutes ago I said something about it being cold, and he responded in astonishment "You need a Pope?"

There ought to be just an infinite number of good responses to that, but I was laughing too hard to think of any.

Isolation

2007-03-31T19:45:00.000-05:00

One of the things people criticize about Modern Society is our lack of community. People move far away from their families; they live in suburbs where they never get to know their neighbors; they lose the tight interconnected circles that used to bind us all together. That loss can also be perceived as freedom, and I’ve never personally minded it much… except when people die.

It’s so hard to know how to grieve when you lose someone who lived far away.

A week or so ago, a friend of mine in Midwestern City was struck by a car as she crossed the street. Badly injured, she fell into a coma, and last night she was taken off life support and died within minutes.

Usually in human communities we gather together at the time of a death; we bring food and drink and tell stories. We comfort each other, and we chip in to do whatever tasks need to be done. But here I am a thousand miles away from the people who knew my friend. Nobody in this city ever met her; there’s no one here to share memories with. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen her (I’m startled to realize how many; it didn’t feel like long), so that even if I were there, I wouldn’t know most of the friends she has now; the circle of friends we shared several years ago has itself divided and moved on.

I’ll call her Dancing Woman, because my favorite memory of her is from a goofy little Irish bar in Midwestern City. My brother was performing that night, and I joined him on stage to sing a few duets. We loved to do unbearably cheesy Everly Brothers kinds of songs (I sing a mean Everly Brother) and that night when we sang “Dream” (I can make you mine, taste your lips of wine, anytime night or day), I saw her dancing, eyes closed, huge silly smile on her face, swaying her hips in happy abandon to the music. It made me so happy, to see her enjoyment and to have inspired it.

Dancing Woman was one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met; she could charm your socks off, but she was also tough as nails and took no shit from nobody. She was street smart more than book smart, though the streets weren’t always easy, and she struggled to make ends meet as a single mother. But she was always fierce and determined and strong, and she could always make you smile, and she was always ready to dance.

These are the kinds of things I wish I could share with her friends, in the kind of laughing-crying-drinking-singing wake she would have loved. But I’m here, and drinking and crying alone just isn’t as satisfying. All I could do last night was to walk out into the thunderstorm raging over our neighborhood, admire the turbulent sky, pour some wine into the rain as a libation, and silently wish her well.

Colorful language

2007-03-27T20:00:00.000-05:00

Squadratomagico asked about the synesthesia (#15 of the previous post) a while ago, and I thought that would be fun to write about, now that people seem to have heard of it enough to think I’m not totally psycho. For those of you who haven’t, it’s a neurological condition that makes some of your senses overlap; in my case, I have “grapheme-color synesthesia,” which means that letters and numbers have distinct colors. I think I suspected for a long time that not everybody saw the world this way; once in a while I’d mention how somebody’s name clashed or how nice it was that their address was the same color as their house, and I’d get weird looks. So I just quit saying things like that, and didn’t think about it much.

I’ve known what to call it since a couple of years ago when I read an article in Smithsonian about it, and thought – OH! – you mean not everybody sees words in color? Cool. I think it happens in about 2% of the population, and different people have it in different forms – for some people, sounds have a distinct color, or colors are associated with smells and even distances, or whatever other combination you can come up with. Those all sound pretty bizarre to me, except of course for my version - of course words have color! How could they not?

I didn’t really talk this out with anyone until a few months ago, when I mentioned it to my talented artistic (and very color-oriented) sister, who did indeed think I was nuts. She asked me a bunch of really interesting questions about it, though, which helped me be more aware of the “rules” of how it worked. For example, each letter and number has a particular color; the color of a word is determined most by the word’s first letter, though vowels tend to make it lighter or darker: an ‘a’ will add a reddish-orange glow; ‘i’ adds a reflective whitish/silver tint; an ‘e’ tends to thin the dominant color, like adding water to paint, and so on. It’s the letter itself and not the pronunciation that matters, so a ‘c’ is sand-colored whether it’s hard or soft.

Wow – I’ve just looked this up for the first time on wikipedia, and people seem to know a lot more about it now than they did a few years ago. (Must be the brain weirdness of choice these days.) One cool thing the entry says is that while individual grapheme-color synesthetes don’t always agree on the same colors, there are some common patterns, such as A being likely to be red. What’s surprising is when I read other people’s accounts and they differ – A is indeed red, but another person reports that S is red, C is yellow, and J is yellow-green. Is this person crazy? That to me is like insisting that the sun is blue. How can S be red? S is beige, and thinking of it as red is just… really disturbingly wrong.

One interesting thing ArtSister asked was whether I thought this would work with other alphabets. And that question was the first thing that really made me understand what this looks like to other people. If I imagine Greek or Russian or Japanese, why, they’re just lines and shapes on paper! How the heck could anybody associate color with that? …Oh. So I guess it’s just the Roman alphabet with me, though I wonder if I really learned another alphabet, whether it would carry over. And it works with the Roman alphabet across different languages, whether or not I understand the word.

Aren’t brains interesting things? I guess if I’m going to have wires crossed in mine, this is a good way to do it; it certainly doesn’t do any damage. The only thing is that I get confused with centuries… for me it’s weird to say that a certain event happened in the 1500s but also in the 16th century, because I remember dates by color, and “1500s” is orangey, while “16” is a dark matte blue. I’ll learn that the Battle of Lepanto happened in an orange time, but when I try to remember it later, that doesn’t tell me if it was the 1500s or the 15th century.

And none of this means I’m artistic or any good at all with color; I can listen to my sister talk about color wheels and values and saturation (and see all of these things in her work), and I don’t begin to comprehend any of it; that’s a whole different language. All I can tell you is what color the word “color” is.

Random bullets of mood improvement

2007-03-26T18:30:00.000-05:00

I've been in a ratty grumpy mood all week - mostly, I think, out of the realization that spring break is over, I didn't get half the things done that I wanted to do, and now all I can see in the side-view mirror is that I'm being pursued by a galloping herd of Big Project Deadlines, just over the little warning that says "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear." Gulp.

But not all is lost. In an effort to cheer myself up, here is a list of Things That Have Gone Right:

I made some awesome blueberry muffins yesterday that has the LWI waxing rhapsodic about teh glories of breakfast.
I found a way to do a really nice thing, in public, for someone who has been very generous and very unrecognized. Total time elapsed between the initial birth of the idea and its full execution: less than two hours.
I fixed the upstairs toilet (temporarily) with a foam earplug and a twistie.
One of my students told me she thinks I look like Lena Headey. This totally makes my day.

Memey goodness

2007-03-11T16:41:00.000-05:00

Swiped from (and dedicated to) Celandine:

1. Can you cook?
Pretty much. I have lots of basic things (lasagne, enchiladas in green sauce, Spanish tortilla) that I make pretty well, and LWI and I almost always prepare nice lunches to take to campus instead of eating out. But there's a lot of experienced-cook savvy I'm lacking... I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to deal with a whole chicken, and though I grill well, I don't really understand how best to cook different kinds of meats.

2. What was your dream growing up?
The first one I remember was to get a horse (the Walter Farley fantasy); the second was to chip in with my friend Wanda to buy her uncle's old enormous wood-paneled station wagon, wait until we were old enough to drive, and travel around the country together; and the third (heading towards college) was to be a UN ambassador.

3. What talent do you wish you had?
A really awesome singing voice.

4. Favorite place?
Outside, preferably in Minnesota or South Dakota in the summer.

5. Favorite vegetable?
Red bell peppers (spinach, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts are close runners-up.) But why does this question always show up in memes? Does anyone care in the slightest what my favorite vegetables are?

6. What was the last book you read?
Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red. Highly recommended... it's a slow read, but he keeps coming up with paragraphs that you just have to wallow in and read over and over.

7. What zodiac sign are you?
Scorpio.

8. Any tattoos and/or piercings?
Regular ear piercings, though I don't often wear earrings anymore. I've had an idea for a tattoo for several years, but probably won't do it. (not out of any principled objection, but simply because the best place for it would be on my back between the tops of my shoulder blades, and what's the point of a tattoo if I can't see it?)

9. Worst habit?
Being too critical of people who don't do things the way I do them.

10. Do we know each other outside of LiveJournal?
Yes!

11. What is your favorite sport?
To play, racquetball or tennis; to watch, basketball or soccer. (my pulse is still racing from watching the end of the Texas/Kansas game!)

12. Do you have a negative or optimistic attitude?
Ha! (I hear New Kid laughing at this one...) If you've read more than three sentences of this blog, I'm thinking you can guess.

13. What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me?
Tell stories.

14. Worst thing to ever happen to you?
Now that's a question I really don't want to dwell on. I've been remarkably fortunate overall, so there aren't that many bad things, but the ones there are aren't the kind I can compress into a meme answer.

15. Tell me one weird fact about you.
I have mild synesthesia; numbers and letters have distinct and immutable colors. I generally remember names and dates by their color, and it really bugs me when people's names don't match them colorwise. (My last name is sort of cream-colored, which I don't think suits me very well.)

16. Do you have any pets?
OneCat, TwoCat.

17. Do you know how to do the Macarena?
Dear God, no.

18. What time is it where you are now?
Now!

19. Do you think clowns are cute or scary?
Neither one, really; I think clowns and circuses are kind of depressing. I think it's because they try so insistently to be So Much Fun, and fun just doesn't need to be that hard.

20. If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be?
I don't think my face fits my personality very well; it's very soft and bland. Not that I want to look like a film star, but the person who comes closest to looking like my ideal vision of myself is Rachel Griffiths. (Her name is a great color, too!)

21. Would you be my partner in crime or my conscience?
With Cel, totally your partner.

22. What color eyes do you have?
Green.

23. Ever been arrested?
Read my Miranda rights, yes; formally arrested, no.

24. Bottle or draft?
Unequivocally bottle.

25. If you won £10,000 today [$20,000 for the Americans], what would you do with it?
Oh, I'm so conservative with personal finances. I'd stash it in a money market account for a couple of years and then use it for a down payment on a nicer house.

26. What kind of bubble gum do you prefer to chew?
Yuck. I've never liked bubble gum.

27. What's your favorite bar to hang at?
Mick's in Omaha, of course!

28. Do you believe in ghosts?
I don't think about them much, but I don't not believe in them. But it seems kind of limiting; once you've died and are freed from the constraints of your body, why would you still hang around humans poking around in human affairs? Wouldn't you have a million other possibilities for things you couldn't do when you were stuck in a body?

29. Favorite thing to do in your spare time?
Tennis, jigsaw puzzles, geocaching.

30. Do you swear a lot?
Some, but not very inventively. I've been grunting sonofabitch! at everything that irritates me lately.

31. Biggest pet peeve?
People who use (abuse) religion to be judgmental of others, and people who don't use their turn signals.

32. In one word, how would you describe yourself?
Content. (runners-up: thoughtful, lazy, curious.)

33. In one word, how would you describe me?
Inventive. (runners-up: clever, sensible, trustworthy.)

Who wants a meme? I tag you.

Random bullets of spring

2007-03-11T16:30:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was:

the first day I wore shorts instead of sweats at home, and flip-flops instead of cozy slippers
the first day we left the windows open all day
the first day we could go out to the park to play tennis (and oh, did we play some wicked tennis!)
the first day I mowed the lawn since sometime last fall (or at least I mowed the weeds; the best parts of the lawn got roasted by the insane heat and drought last summer)
and, coincidentally, the first full day of spring break.

And all that in spite of losing an hour to daylight savings!

Random paragraphs of crap

2007-03-07T18:51:00.000-06:00

Topic the first: I just got an email from my sister, with an update on the still-fascinating chicken question. She writes:

I brought up the chicken question to some friends for cheap conversation, and they immediately reminded me of the scene in Rocky 1 where Rocky was supposed to get in shape by chasing a chicken. When he could catch it, he was ready to go into the ring. So either the chicken thief was preparing to start a life as a lady boxer, or I need new friends.

I think we should definitely incorporate the boxing idea into our analysis. And there must be a good title in there somewhere as well: "Rocky XVIII: The Chicken Thief."

Topic the second: I've posted on this before, but it happens every semester, and it never ceases to amaze me. I'm the faculty adviser to an honors society, and every semester I look over the transcripts of interested students to see if they're eligible. And I have to ask you this: if you were a student in your second year of college, and you weren't doing very well (Ds in some fairly easy classes, and a rather grim GPA overall), and - most importantly - if you were taking your FIRST EVER basketweaving class, why, why, would you indicate your interest in an honors organization for which you are only eligible if you have twelve hours of basketweaving credit and a 3.1 GPA? Are you mad?

Topic the third: I had something else funny to share here, but I got so fussed up again over that previous one that I forgot what it was. Sheesh.

Watch out for them dogs

2007-03-04T19:28:00.000-06:00

In the category of "this must be shared with the blogosphere":

I'm doing some reading on the origins of physiognomy, the practice of interpreting people's faces to understand their character. (You know how it goes - a strong jaw indicates courage, little beady eyes mean you're greedy, and so forth.) Apparently there are physiognomical treatises in Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Chinese traditions going back thousands of years... but the oldest evidence comes from cuneiform tablets in ancient Mesopotamia, which include the following gem:

"If a man with a contorted face has a prominent right eye, far from his home dogs will eat him."

Dang, that's pretty specific.

Calling all chicken thieves

2007-03-02T19:34:00.000-06:00

Get ready, guys, here comes a serious academic post. (Can you believe I originally meant this to be an academic blog? I did, but then everybody started getting in trouble or fired for their blogs, and I chickened out.)

Ha! What a great segue! Speaking of chickens, that's my question. A student of mine (we'll call her Clever Shy Girl) is working on a great project related to gender and crime in the 18th century, and among other things she has a list of cases of people stealing animals (horses, sheep, pheasants, rabbits, you name it). Mostly just one animal is stolen, or a few easily herdable animals, like sheep. But in a few cases, a single person is accused of having stolen chickens - lots of chickens, in one case a few dozen chickens.

Initially CSG just plugged this information into the database with everything else and worked on figuring out the patterns of who was stealing what from whom... but then as we talked about people's reasons for stealing animals (to sell? to eat?) we started to do more imagining about how those thefts would actually have worked, and we began to wonder: how does one person steal a whole bunch of chickens? These were live chickens, and I can imagine one person carrying two chickens, or maybe four or five in a sack, but twenty or thirty chickens? How do you do that? You'd have to at least have crates, and then some sort of small cart, and even then it seems like a pretty messy and complicated endeavor.

CSG and I are both city girls, with little experience in the ways of chickens, so I called my sister. Art Sister doesn't have chickens, but she lives in a small town and works part-time for the county extension office, so I figured she must know somebody who knows about chickens. She confirmed that it's virtually impossible to carry more than one chicken at a time, but didn't know more than that. I asked her: "Surely you know someone who raises chickens?" and she said "Well, yes, I do, but I am NOT going to call them up and tell them that my sister wants to know how to steal chickens."

My sister does not have the proper adventurous spirit necessary for academic pursuits.

So I turn to you: some of you are historians, and some of you are rural, and all of you are good creative adventurous thinkers. Give me a brainstorm on this one: if you were suddenly taken with the desire to go out and steal say twenty or thirty chickens, given the ordinary tools and resources available to a relatively poor person in the 18th century, how would you go about it?

Incidents and accidents

2007-02-23T17:28:00.001-06:00

I haven't written a lot lately because my life has been coasting along on a nice even keel, no unnecessary drama, no events that demanded to be chronicled, nothing that's made me say "'That'll blog." Until the last two days, when all kinds of big things have broken loose.

Two of them are extremely good: a dear friend of ours has a tricky long-distance marriage, tricky because they've just had their first child, and they're living together while she's on maternity leave, but it wasn't entirely clear how they were going to manage after that. But she's just been offered a job here, which is a better job than her previous one, and it lets them be together! Yay for the friends.

And yay for me too: a colleague and I are working on an edited collection of essays, and we just got a contract from a great publisher! This happened super fast, too - it took us ages to write the proposal, but once we sent it off, we got an astonishingly fast and positive response. As in, a contract. A contract!! SCORE.

Both of those newses came yesterday, when I left my house at 7 am, ran around at top speed all day, and returned home a little after 11 pm, so it was a full and intense day. In the middle of that came a third bit of news, in the form of a message from my friend Sparky: "I need to talk to you soon, in person, about Big Summer Project." What with all the running around yesterday, I didn't have a chance to talk with her, but the tone of the message did not bode well. Sparky and I and a third colleague, Orange, were planning to team-teach a study abroad course this summer; it turns out that Sparky will need to undergo major surgery at the end of the semester, and won't be able to do the course. (Fortunately the surgery will completely fix the problem it addresses, and she won't have any long-term ill effects, but it's still surgery.) This means we lose a major component of the course: say Orange's job was to teach Fruit Appreciation, and to fully understand the role and significance of fruit, I was going to teach a unit on the history of oranges, as we spent two weeks in the city where oranges come from, and Sparky was going to do the history of apples, during two weeks in Apple City. Sparky is the only one of us who has been to Apple City, and the only one who speaks its principal language.

Everyone's first reaction was that I should be able to fill in and teach the history of apples, because after all, I'm the fruit historian, right? Well, I suppose I could, especially because Sparky could help me with the preparation before we go. I was really excited about this course, and I don't want to disappoint the students who have signed up for it.

But: I don't know squat about Apple City, and I really don't want to be in charge of fifteen students in a place where I don't speak the language. The course was set up around my familiarity with Orange City and Sparky's familiarity with Apple City. The history of apples and oranges isn't all that different, but as the analogy suggests, the course sets them up as a contrast, so I'd have to do a lot of extra preparation to take on the apple course. If this were a normal spring semester, I could probably swing that, but I've committed to a bunch of research projects (see the abovementioned contract, for example) that I need to work on, and I don't think I can handle another big course prep on top of that.

Unfortunately, it's pretty much up to me. Orange has said she can go either way, because her course on fruit appreciation won't be affected by Sparky's absence. I hate to be the person who kills this course, because there are some ways to make it possible: Sparky can do a lot of the prep work for me, and we're already working with an international organization that's helping us with housing and classroom space and such - they can also provide more local guided tours and such in Apple City so that the whole burden isn't on me.

But still. I hate to be the person who kills this course, but otherwise it may be the course that kills me.

Between the big long day yesterday and the emotional intensity of all of these discussions today (plus of course our real concern for Sparky, who has every chance of a perfect long-term recovery but who is in a fair amount of pain right now), I'm completely drained. I think I'm going to be limp on the couch for a few hours, and then go to bed and see how this all looks tomorrow.

Well hello there.

2007-02-19T08:46:00.000-06:00

I was just at Flavia's wishing her a happy birthday, and then I saw that Blogging the Renaissance is celebrating its first birthday, and something began to nag at the back of my memory... birthdays? blogging? Oh! Hey, today's my blogiversary!

Usually I love the symbolic import of anniversaries... a good chance to reflect on the past, and to imagine the future. Unfortunately I have ten thousand little tasks to perform today, so I'm too bogged down in the present to wax lyrical about anything else. And I've been too lazy about posting the last few weeks (months? year?) to be very excited about a retrospective. But every day I enjoy reading the blogs of the folks I've met here, and I'm warmed by the conversations that happen in comment boxes here and elsewhere, and I'm more than pleased to be part of this little bloggy community. Thanks for hanging out at the bar, y'all, I'm glad you're here.

So I'm not sure if I'll be able to get back here today to post something more substantive, but either way, I'll uncork the champagne and pass around the brownies and tortilla chips. Cheers!

I am Spartacus

2007-02-14T16:42:00.000-06:00

Regarding the recent resignation of Amanda Marcotte from the Edwards presidential campaign, Aunt B. at Tiny Cat Pants has (as usual) said it best:

...I take from this a different lesson, that, if we scare them this much, we must be doing something right, even if all we're doing is articulating what we think and having just one other person say, "Yeah, I get that" or "No, you've got it wrong and here's why."

The world, as it works now, works because folks who are not you and me control the messages that get disseminated into the larger culture. What we do scares the shit out of a lot of folks because they can't control what goes on out here and every day, more and more people get access to it.

Amanda is nobody, just one lone woman with a computer in Austin, Texas.

She didn't give anybody's husband a blowjob; she didn't molest any interns; she didn't lie about weapons of mass destruction; she didn't out a CIA agent.

And she almost derailed a presidential campaign. Ha, sorry, I guess that sucks for Edwards, but for the rest of us?

Shit, if I had a beer, I'd drink a toast to Marcotte right now.

And now that Shakespeare's Sister has resigned as well, driftglass has started a blogswarm of support. (Hat-tip to Rana for pointing me to this!)

I am Spartacus!

Valentine

2007-02-13T11:26:00.000-06:00

Aaaaaaaack! I just got forced over to the new Blogger. I knew it had to happen. But so far it looks like all the duct tape has held the bar together... all the wine barrels are intact... nothing seems to have exploded... so maybe we're okay for now.

To celebrate, send me a Valentine! I was going to resist this (my pretentious distaste for commercialized romanticism combined with flashbacks to third-grade fears of being the only one with an empty Valentine's bag) but Maggie and 1B* have done it, so what the heck.

Get your own valentinr

The alphabet meme

2007-02-09T18:32:00.000-06:00

Thanks to Scrivener, a meme!

A- Available or Single? The LWI satisfies all my romantic-partner wants and needs, thanks.
B- Best Friend? Hmm... I haven't really had one for a couple of years, in the sense of one person that stands out above all the rest. Same with bloggers. I love you all the same! :)
C- Cake or Pie? Cake, dark chocolate, moist. Buttercream frosting.
D- Drink of Choice? Diet Pepsi with lime, or short-cut sangria (the latter is my habitual evening drink, a glass of half-and-half red wine and orange juice).
E- Essential Item? A sense of humor. There aren't any physical objects I'm all that attached to; I just don't like carrying things around.
F- Favorite Color? Depends on for what, of course. Earth tones, and rich dark blues. I have a gypsy patchwork-cloth thing (not really a quilt, but I don't know how else to describe it) from southern Spain hung over the bed, and it's these crazy patches of deep rich blue and silver with occasional glimpses of ruby red, and it just makes me happy to stare at it for long stretches of time.
G- Gummi Bears or Worms? My first reaction was the same as Scrivener's - what's the difference? but actually I like the texture of the worms better. More fun for the mouth!
H- Hometown? Technically Kearney, Nebraska, but I've probably felt more at home in Minneapolis than anywhere else.
I- Indulgence? Sure! Most of my indulgences are food (see above-mentioned lack of interest in material objects) - good steak, sushi, Spanish cheese, lamb, roasted red peppers, that sort of thing. Yum.
J- January or February? Jeez, that's an ugly choice. Usually I'd pick January, because February just drags on in its endless grey. But this February has actually been remarkably satisfying and productive, so for now I'll pick that.
K- Kids and names? I'm not really in need of either, thanks. My father had big issues about wanting to give his kids names that had associated nicknames (like Ken for Kenneth or Liz for Elizabeth), but he invented a "formal" name for me, and gave me a nickname that usually stands as a name on its own. I like this in some ways, but it's kind of a pain for recordkeeping. I finally got my university to change how my name appears on e-mail, for example, because most people don't know my "formal" name.
L- Life is incomplete without...? Appreciation.
M- Marriage Date? June 26.
N- Number of Siblings? Five!
O- Oranges or Apples? Depends... I love blood oranges like crazy, but I like apples because they're less work. (Yes, I really am that lazy.)
P- Phobias/Fears? I'm with Scriv... none that I can think of. I have occasional semi-nightmares about incidents in elevators (having to jump out of the open doors of moving ones because they don't stop, that sort of thing) but that fear has never extended to real elevators.
Q- Favorite Quote? "I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything." - Steven Wright
R- Reasons to smile? ...You need a reason?
S- Season? I wish we had more of them here... I love fall, but it always makes me painfully nostalgic.
T- Tag 3 people? The usual suspects - you, and you, and you!
U- Unknown Fact About Me? I've had several MRI brain scans, for fun and profit.
V- Vegetable You Hate? Vegetables should not be hated. Vegetables are our friends! Okay, I'm not all that fond of cauliflower. But Scrivener, try slicing brussels sprouts in half and sauteing them in a little butter and garlic; there's nothing better.
W-Worst Habit? Being irritatingly certain that I know the Only Right Way to do things. Usually it's true, but not always.
X- Xrays You've Had? None. No broken bones, no major illnesses, nuthin'. I went to an emergency room once, but it was with an appointment to make a bone marrow donation. (why they make appointments for that in the emergency room, I have no idea.)
Y- Your Favorite Foods? Food rocks. (Okay, I meant that as noun-verb; when I went back to proofread, I read it as adjective-noun, as in rocks made of food.) Pasta always makes me happy.
Z- Zodiac? I'm a Scorpio... a fairly mild version; it takes a lot to piss me off, but if you do, I really will hold a grudge forever. (I tell my students that when I talk about plagiarism.)

Cats on a bus*

2007-02-03T15:37:00.000-06:00

I had a series of the weirdest dreams last night. All of them began with a setup perfect for the typical anxiety dream: explaining something to a roomful of students and having all the equipment backfire; needing to get to a meeting and not being able to find the room... but in each case, somehow the problem turned around into a situation that worked. They were like anti-anxiety dreams.

The weirdest by far was the dream in which LWI and I got on a New York City bus... with our two cats. What could be better for an anxiety dream than taking your high-strung cats on a city bus full of people? I remember all the possibilities flashing through my mind - people complaining about the cats, OneCat freaking out and biting someone, or bolting out the door at any given stop, or TwoCat wandering off to sleep inside someone's bag and getting unknowingly carted away. (Of course they weren't even in carriers; they were just walking along with us.) Not only that, but at some point the dream came to include a third cat (who fortunately bore a much closer resemblance to mellow TwoCat than hyper OneCat). This complicated things in that two people might have a chance at carrying around two cats, but not three; not only that, but for half the dream I couldn't quite remember ThreeCat's name, which introduced an odd element of guilt. (When I did remember, it was Laurel, which was just as odd.) At one point I had the clear idea that the bus went in a big loop and would come back home in about an hour, so all we had to do was try desperately to keep them under control for an hour and everything would be okay. (Famous last words, right? and besides, what the hell were we doing going on a one-hour circular joyride on a bus with cats?) Some part of my brain was conscious enough to foresee this becoming serious trouble.

But. All we had to do was to store TwoCat on the luggage rack over our heads, where he curled up in a comfortable ball and napped, and put OneCat in a window seat, where he happily watched the world go by. Magically, we found we'd remembered to bring food and water for them, so they snacked along the way. The bus took us to a cool little park outside the city, where we all got out and played for a while (both cats comporting themselves like well-behaved children, not wandering too far off), and then the dream ended when we decided to go back home before it got dark, knowing that the bus ride wouldn't be any problem.

Throughout the whole dream there was this little frisson of anxiety about all the things that could (and rightfully should have) gone wrong, but it all turned out beautifully well. WTF? Dreams don't usually work like that. What does it mean when instead of chaos, I dream that things are more under control than they could ever possibly be?

*(sort of my odd subconscious equivalent of Snakes on a Plane, I suppose...)

Random bits of my day

2007-01-29T16:52:00.000-06:00

I was chopping up mushrooms and peppers and garlic for a lasagne this afternoon, and one thing a dear friend of mine taught me is that the key to lasagne (or any other tomato-pasta combination, for that matter) is a little squish of anchovy paste. (Mmmmmmm... anchovies.) I'm sure we had an unopened tube of anchovy paste somewhere, because I kept running into it in the pantry when I was looking for other things. Let's see... not behind the black beans, not behind the miso soup... aha! There it is.

I wonder how long it's been there? We went through a phase of using the stuff all the time, but then we kind of forgot about it and it's been a while. Does anchovy paste expire? How would one know?

The box had no expiration date, and when I took out the tube inside, it didn't either. Hmm. Well, it can't have been there all that long; let's see how it smells. So I took off the cap and punctured the little foil seal across the mouth of the tube...

...and oh-so-very-expired foul brown anchovy paste sprayed several feet across the room. Fortunately none of it landed in the lasagne. So much for no expiration dates.

On the other hand. There's a conference coming up this spring that I'm excited about, and it's being held in a rather more posh hotel than this organization usually books, so I'd definitely like to share a room. Previously I've either stayed by myself or the LWI has come along, so I don't have a regular conference roommate among this particular group.

There's one person I was thinking of asking, because I know her husband hates these things and doesn't tag along, so she might be scouting for a roomie. But she's a Big Name Academic and probably has plenty of her own friends and would be merely amused by my pathetic offer, right?

Just a few minutes ago, she emailed me asking if I'd be interested in sharing a room. I am positively giddy in a Sally Field they-really-like-me! sort of way. I know, it's just a conference hotel, we're not going to be Best Friends Forever or exchange little woven bracelets or anything. But I'm still pleased to be hanging out with the cool kids. Beats cleaning anchovy paste off the cabinets.

Fat-cat freakout

2007-01-24T17:38:00.000-06:00

So the oddest thing happened last night. The LWI and I were downstairs, relaxing on the couch after dinner, when we heard some sort of noise from upstairs - afterwards we couldn't remember just what it was, but we knew we'd both registered hearing something, like a faint thump or other indeterminate noise. That was immediately followed by two top-volume blood-curdling yowls from TwoCat. We were startled, but assumed that he was just getting the worst end of a fight with OneCat - they play-fight often, and once in a while one of them yells that the other is taking the fight a little too seriously. But a half-second later we realized that OneCat was with us in the living room, looking just as startled as we were.

So I headed upstairs to see what TwoCat had gotten himself into, and found him at the top of the stairs, all puffed up and bug-eyed and spooked. TwoCat is the mildest of creatures, and even all puffed up he doesn't look very intimidating, more like a black furry basketball, but he was more worked up than I'd ever seen him. I took another step up the stairs to see what was the matter, and he flinched like he was ready to bolt, so for the next few minutes I eased my way up the stairs to soothe him and figure out what he'd done to himself. At this point I was thinking perhaps he'd jumped down off a chair or desk and landed funny, twisting a leg or a paw; he's ordinarily a stoic little guy, and doesn't make much of a fuss about anything, but that full-throated howl was still echoing in my ears. But after a while he calmed down and bounded downstairs to see if there was any dinner in his bowl, and showed no signs of physical damage at all. WTF? I canvassed the upstairs, and found no evidence of anything out of the ordinary - nothing tipped over, no giant rats to fight with, no bloodstains, nothing that looked at all like it was worth screaming about.

We remain perplexed.

Life in a suitcase

2007-01-22T08:43:00.000-06:00

1B*'s post today about the difficulties of packing lots of trips into her semester made me pause once more to consider the situation I've gotten myself in for this summer. Mind you, I'm very excited about this summer, because it holds lots of great opportunities: I'm teaching a study-abroad course in two European cities, doing some research, presenting at a conference, and going on at least one fun getaway.

But let's consider this in terms of clothes. All of these adventures are connected to the same two-month trans-Atlantic trip, so I have to prepare for them all in the same set of suitcases (ideally no more than two). Here's the deal: I will be teaching and being touristy in two different cities, one of which has an average summer high of 76 degrees and the other of which has an average summer high of 89. I will be attending a professional conference, and going on a four-day hike, in a third region that has an average summer high of 65 degrees. Last but not least: under normal circumstances, I really prefer to travel light and pack as little as possible.

How the fireplace am I supposed to make this work? I think I need to start packing now.

(ETA: now I have the old Police song "Man in a Suitcase" stuck in my head. This is not helping.)

(ETA2: it is important to remember that at least half of the overall trip will be spent in a very tiny apartment shared with four other people. Thus an additional limit on the stuff I can bring, because there's just not anywhere to put it.)