Halloween Craziness

This was our daughter's first real halloween. Oh sure, year one we dressed her up as Maggie Simpson, but I can't say she was really into the experience. Year two, I got her fairy wings and a flower petal tutu, but she wouldn't wear it. This year however, she has been talking about dressing up as Lisa Simpson for weeks: "We go Halloween?" "We say Trick or Treat?" "I be Lisa Simpson?" Yes, yes, all in due time.

And finally it was. We decided to leave a note on our door for any early trick or treaters and take her out for a block or two together. I'd long heard of the crowds two blocks away on Jefferson, but had never seen it. Not many kids come by our quiet block. It's easy to see why they flock to Jefferson: It was like Disneyland. Lawns were decked out in orange twinkly lights, fog machines, headless horsemen, and tombstones. At one house, the entire front porch had been transformed into a fortune-teller's puppet stage; each time a kid walked up a puppet appeared and threw candy in the air as if from a Mardi Gras float.

Unfortunately I only lasted halfway down the block at which point I was so dazed by the display I walked right into my own dog's fresh pile of poop. I was feeling guilty anyway that we'd left our house unmanned, so I walked home. I had no reason to worry. It was quite a while before what few kids were venturing out our way came by. Still, the event had my brain working overtime:

I was torn between identities: should I give in to my folklorist's instinct to document this annual event/competition on Jefferson? Should I listen to my mother's instinct to want to hold my daughter's hand for as many years as possible, tagging along with her as she went trick or treating? Should I heed my own competitive/artistic desire to outdo them all? I had plenty of time to think.

In the end, I think I'll mostly hold my daughter's hand; childhood is more fleeting and precious than even the transience of festive events, and I'm too busy to really outdo anyone. Nonetheless, I did go to Target the next day and stock up on a few things at 50% off. Gotta keep up with the Boneses.

why

So it seems I have these sleepless nights every time I have to go to work the next day. I fall asleep fine, then come 2 or 3 or 4 I wake up with my mind racing with to-do lists and can't forget lists and what if lists and I can't go back to sleep.

I'd originally thought it was because we were co-sleeping with the youngun and she still wakes periodically through the night, wants to nurse (yes, she's 3, I still nurse and no I don't think that's weird. ok, maybe I'm a little defensive about it. time to go to a holistic moms meeting again and feel normal) then I can't go back to sleep because I start thinking of all this stuff, but we transitioned her to the other room, husband soothes her when she wakes, and still I'm waking up in the wee hours pondering.

The worst part is that when I start to lose hope of returning to sleep on a school night I start to fret about not having had enough sleep and that contributes to the inability to sleep -- a vicious circle.

So now I'm wondering maybe I'm not cut out for this administrative gig I've been doing as interim for 2 years -- there are just too many things to keep on top of. Maybe I need to go back to teaching. But I find it pretty rewarding, and what if I give it up only to find that I'm still waking up but thinking about grading or something else. Sigh.

A new tagline

In the comments on my previous post, Slangred pointed out that my tagline is officially no longer true:

Mother, with tenure.
Professor, without.

Too bad in a way. I liked the tagline even if I didn't like the status of untenured *junior* professor. As I've often said, in what other profession do you plod through upwards of 10 years of higher education only to end up a junior or assistant anything? So now, after 11 years of college (5 undergrad, 6 grad) and 6 years of assistant professor status, I've clawed my way to "associate." Yup, that's right, I won't be a "full" professor for another 6 years.

So that tagline, what should it be?

Full mother, associate professor? Nah. Not very catchy.

I also toyed with "Treecup is about to go on sabbatical, or die trying." Nixed that one too. Especially since I keep thinking of more projects I want to tackle on my sabbatical. Sheez, I can't even relax right.

I finally settled on "Treecup has 9 more cycles 'til retirement." That one should last me a while.

And give me hope. After all, I have 9 more cycles to learn to relax.

Woo Deux

me too

you really can't go back

Some time ago, I wrote about visiting my graduate alma mater and finding things so different that they were almost unrecognizable. I returned again last week for the retirement party of my dissertation director and found that all I remember is now utterly and completely gone. There is no home there.

I was cleaning out my garage this weekend, and oddly enough I stumbled on a file folder filled with all my papers from that first year of graduate school -- and I mean all of them: from blue books to research papers -- the whole kit and caboodle down to my handwritten notes from every class, complete with doodles of teacups in the margins.

There is one professor (he was at the party, though he retired more than 10 years ago) who still puts the fear of god into me. No wonder. In a blue book from that first year, I saw that he gave me a 90 out of 100, which he then translated as a "B." A "B"! Who calls 90 a "B"???

I also found the journal I was required to keep as part of my very first graduate class. The first sentence I ever wrote in graduate school read, "It seems there is no consensus on the definition of folklore."

In any case, the graduate experience I remember is dead. Dead, dead, dead. I think this summer I may pull out all those notes and read them thoroughly. I've not thought that much about folklore in a long time and I think it will be nice to have a conversation with my 27 year old self. Lord knows I don't get to talk about folklore much with anyone else.

Hic!

:An entry from January 31 that somehow never got posted:

My new favorite book is Hiccupotamus, the Hippo who hiccups quite a lot-a-mus. The problem is I get so into it that every time I "hic!" I send myself into a coughing fit. Yes, I'm sick. Again. But duty calls, and when a Hippo hics, you gotta put your all into it.

My husband's new favorite book to read is Going to School. I don't like the book itself much, but I love how participatory my daughter is with it. She counts the school children holding hands in a row (she gets it right sometimes, then the next time it will be "one, fwee, one, fwee, one, fwee, four, seven, eight, nine, fwee"), says "oh no!" when she realizes the two children split by the page seam aren't holding hands, putting her fingers between them to link them. When they get to the page where they are making cupcakes, she pretends to pick off sprinkles from the cupcake and feeds them to us.

Bedtime rocks.

playing catch-up

This will be one of those "I haven't written in forever so I'm going to vomit onscreen to catch-up" type posts, and in this case, vomit is an appropriate word because purging of various sorts dominated my existence for the past week. I came down with some sort of stomach bug last tuesday, making me nauseated and purgey for a full six days.

Sadly, prior to this I had been on a health kick: I'd decided I was going to knock out my pre-diabetes by adopting a mostly raw vegan diet and was blending and dehydrating my way into heaven on pure dietary virtue. Happily, I'd found that I wasn't allergic to agave nectar after all and had even found a way to make a decent raw vegan "cheese" "cake." Other than this indulgence, however, my diet consisted of green smoothies and dishes such as "fried" "rice" made out of chopped raw cauliflower or "bbq" "ribs" made mostly out of ground nuts. My husband says he doesn't believe in food in quotes, but I was chowing down pretty happily. Not all my recipe experiments were a success: can't say I loved the beet burgers, but I did feel energetic (I even ditched caffeine!) and relatively satisfied. If I ever felt deprived, I ate one meal a day of a regular cooked ovo-lacto vegetarian diet.

But then came the nausea. Chances are it had nothing to do with the raw food -- my 2 1/2 year old daugher had been vomiting the week before so there was a good chance it was just a virus -- but you know how when you come down with nausea anything you ate in that time frame becomes repellent for a while? Now I can't look at my raw foods, even the "cheese" "cake" -- I only hope this is a passing thing.

So now I'm back to the standard ovo-lacto vegetarian diet I've been on for the last 20 or so years. So far I've managed to stay off the caffeine, but we'll have to see how long I can hold onto that.

Teresa thinks that giving up caffeine means that I should forfeit the $25 Starbucks gift card I won at Sporks recent 40th surprise birthday party, but after all, I didn't say I gave up decaf. Besides, now if you register your Starbucks card you get free milk options, which means my soy milk is free! Besides, I wear my Starbucks card like a badge of honor: It signifies that I knew Sporks better than anyone at the table except Teresa. I can even say that I didn't have to guess what the title of her Bachelor's thesis was -- I recognized it right away out of all the options.

Besides, since I hadn't been drinking much coffee right before I got sick, the sight and smell of coffee doesn't nauseate me. Glory, glory hallelujah.

substance abuse

While I am not a substance abuser (generally I treat them quite nicely), I am abused by substances. I was born with an asian hereditary inability to tolerate alcohol. This means that if I do consume, I bypass drunk and go right to sick. My older sister, who instead inherited my naval father's inclination and ability to drink anyone under the table, used to insist that I merely needed to develop a tolerance. So at 18, with my sister's assistance I began my noble attempt to do just that. Each time, however, my face would flush at the first sip and by midway through a cocktail I would need to lie down, sometimes on the floor of a nightclub bathroom. Tequila was always the worst. With only one sip of a weak margarita, I slid off my seat at a mexican restaurant and flopped under the table until a waiter insisted I could stay there no longer (his insistence was, in reality, less compelling than my body's insistence that I stay put). Eventually I realized I was allergic to alcohol, perhaps tequila more than any other, and quit trying to drink.

Fast forward several decades when another of my mother's genetic traits reared its substance sensitive head: this time I was diagnosed as pre-diabetic. Since then, I've been trying to fend off genetics and hypoglycemic spells by exercising and radically changing my diet. In the process, I've been trying a variety of natural and unnatural sugar substitutes to appease my ferocious sweet tooth (o.k., maybe I *was* at one point a sugar abuser). I tend to gravitate toward natural substitutes because, well, they're natural and besides which I'm hoping I can cook for the whole family, including my toddler daughter. I've tried Stevia (Bleh. Bitter foretaste and aftertaste), sweetening baked goods with fruit juice (Tastes fabulous, but highly questionable in terms of whether or not it has a more favorable effect on blood glucose levels), sweetening baked goods with fruit (low impact on blood glucose, but not terribly sweet), sugar alcohols (which taste fabulous, but I'm not sure about their suitability for children) and more recently, agave nectar.

Agave nectar, a sweetener made from the Agave cactus, purportedly has a lower glycemic index. It tastes great too. But shortly after I had my soy milk hot cocoa sweetened with Agave nectar last night, I began experiencing stomach distress. It wasn't horrible, it wasn't painful, but it was very uncomfortable. I carefully reviewed everything I'd eaten that day, and no other ingredient was new. Then it occurred to me: if I'm sensitive to Tequila, maybe I'm also sensitive to what it's made of.

So here my genetic pre-dispositions came together, meeting like long-lost lovers in my gastro-intestinal tract. I, on the other hand, continue my search for my sweetener soul mate. I know you're out there somewhere.