the Mammal Chronicles

Random Thoughts While I Should Be Grading

2010-03-01T09:15:00.001-08:00

Service-learning makes the stakes higher. You have to be even more vested in the students succeeding because the end product goes to a community partner. Hopefully it makes the stakes higher for the students as well.
Having a grant to do said service-learning and create said end product for the community makes the stakes higher yet.
There is the sense that your own reputation rides on the success of the above if your students don't come through.
This weekend is the yard sale to end all yard sales. My rampant Target clearance-induced shopping binges will be purged.
I am still not purging enough of the bulk that has accumulated in my life. I wish I could convert all my books to Kindle.
I am getting rid of the candle-making supplies and the soapmaking supplies, but do I really need to keep hundreds of rubber stamps I haven't used in a decade? Can't I pare them down? Will I really use that sculpy again?
Research notes, transcripts and ephemera are way too bulky. But that ephemera is not available in most libraries, archives or online databases. What if I do pick up that research again?
Reading diaries from when you were 18 is painful and heartening at the same time. Some things never change, and yet some things do.
Yes, I can finally rid myself of childhood school projects and my jar of baby teeth.
I am still way too sentimental. Or just a packrat.
The end. I really must get to grading...

Random Notes from the Rockies, part two

2010-02-16T19:34:00.000-08:00

I think I've found my apartment. It's not my dream place, but it has enough of the right ingredients that I think I could be happy there: spacious, big closets, some wood floors, granite counter tops, big tub, covered parking, on a bus line, and right next door to:

a bagel place
a thai place (more on this in a bit)
a deli
a falafel place
a starbuck's
and all of them have vegetarian options, often plenty

We ate at the deli and the thai place. The thai place had nice atmosphere, really good food and black sesame dumplings in ginger sauce, which is my new favorite dessert.

The ginger sauce is more like a sweet ginger soup served piping hot. The dumplings, essentially mochi, are filled with a sesame paste that tastes like peanut butter. Heaven. And they deliver! I imagine all long, stressful days will end with dumplings in ginger soup.

Random notes from the Rockies

2010-02-15T08:30:00.000-08:00

People from my state university system like to find each other when we're in other places. Somehow even if we're not from the same campus, there's a sense of camaraderie. I feel it and I can't even explain to you exactly why it is. Perhaps it is that we are all from 4 year teaching institutions that are about (or are supposed to be about) access. Perhaps it is that we are all dealing with the same budget crunch. Or that despite campus to campus differences in size (from just a few thousand to tens of thousands of students) and internal politics, stuff more or less works the same. Or is supposed to. Whatever it is, we seek each other out as if we're all members of the same extended family.

So it wasn't surprising in a workshop the other day when during the break a gentleman from another campus made a point of finding me by my nametag (after seeing my name on a list) and introducing himself. He said, "Wherever I go, there's always someone from your campus. You must have a lot of money there!" To which I replied, "Oh no, not at all, haven't you heard our Provost is being called The Greyhound of Elimination?" I'm not sure what that moniker even means, but it's not good or complimentary, of that I'm sure. Later, looking at the list myself, I realized this guy was the Vice Provost of his campus. Oops. He probably knows my Provost.

Still later, during another break I'm chatting amiably with the man and as we walk back into our session I ask, "so what's your disciplinary background?" "Physics," says he. Oops yet again. Our provost is a physicist. These guys definitely know each other. Oh well. It's no secret on our campus that I'm leaving and that I'm not fond of the Provost.

In all, the conference has been great so far. I'm getting as invigorated about the subject as I'd hoped, and I've run into a number of people from the search committee for the job I may be taking, and they're all complimenting the heck out of me. I've been trying to attend workshops and sessions on assessment because I know it's something I need to know more about but what I've learned about assessment is the following:

Numbers, graphs and statistics still make no sense to me no matter how many workshops I go to
People who like numbers tend to be very dry presenters (Whereas the best, most entertaining presenters tend to be the professors who've been teaching for decades: they enjoy what they do, know how to do it from practice rather than analysis, and don't give a damn so they're pretty hilarious and inspiring at the same time).
Still, the powers that be tend to like numbers and graphs, so I'd better at least partner with someone who understands them when I do this
And I think that all these numbers people really need us truly qualitative people (not those qualitative folks who run supposedly qualitative data through a program -- that's *not* qualitative!). Sporksforall, I think our next AFS paper should be "Why Those Numbers People in Assessment Need Folklorists."

Weak End

2010-02-07T09:03:00.000-08:00

Weekends are rough on me these days. During the week, I have to be "on" and there is comfort there, even in the 10 to 12 hour days. I have to admit I love being in an office environment. As much as I told myself this year I'd spend more time in my faculty office, I find myself more and more in my administrative office because I love the bustle of people and conversation around me. This is a time of my life when I do not need to be alone with my thoughts. Granted, I brought all this monumental change in my life on myself, but it is still damn scary.

So during the week, I have no problem: I roll out of bed, drive-through the Starbuck's (unless I miss the exit, in which case I decide, do I get back on the freeway and turn around or do I go to the one on the other end of campus and try to balance all my bags and my latte??), get in before anyone else does, and start on my to do list. I juggle tasks, emails, staff crises (lately at least one per day, god love 'em), meetings, and finally get to class at 5 pm and head home at 7 pm exhausted. That's Tuesdays and Thursdays. On other days, it's the same without the class, and on occasion lately the Administrative Coordinator and I ditch a bit early to hit a thrift store (While I need to pare down my life for the move, I justify this flurry of consumerism by telling myself I need a more professional, non-hippy wardrobe for my new job and that I'm really spending so little by thrifting).

On the weekend, however, I find myself struggling to get out of bed in the morning. When I finally do, I find myself overwhelmed by the prospect of tasks like grading or packing up my life to move and end up sitting on the couch with my laptop or iphone most of the day instead. Yesterday I was in such a funk, I couldn't even get myself to Target to look for a garment bag or to socialize with the friends who had invited us over to hang out. That's when I know my depression has really hit: when I can't bear the thought of socializing even with people I love.

My psychiatrist urged me to take Ritalin on the weekends too. "I thought it was for energy and focus," I told him, "So I only took it when I was at work." "No," he said, "it's for your mood too. And right now in your life you need it." Thing is, I did take one yesterday and still managed to stay depressed. This morning I made sure to start the day with a latte and Ritalin -- thus the energy to write this blog entry, but we'll see if it leads to anything more solidly productive than that.

Luckily, next week there will be no weekend. I'm headed to the Rockies for a conference and more meetings with my potential new employers. Six full days of it starting Friday. In the brief bit of downtime, I will look at apartments. I already have two appointments: one 3 bedroom 1911 duplex with a Starbuck's on the corner and a new 2 bedroom apartment with covered parking and all the amenities newer places provide. I mapped out all my prospective apartments according to the following criteria:

Proximity to work/public transportation
School District
Proximity to Whole Foods
Proximity to Vegetarian restaurants

The two I'm looking at so far fit well in all those categories. It'd probably be a stretch to walk to work, but they're maybe a 30 minute bus ride. I'd like to look at some that are walking distance to work too, but they would not be in a decent school district.

I love conferences. I love learning new things, getting ignited by other people's passion for a subject. I'm taking three intensive workshops in addition to the normal round of watching conference presentations; I can hardly believe I'm excited to take a four hour workshop on assessment of all things.

At the end of the conference, I start my round of meetings with people on campus. While there is already an offer on the table, I'm nervous because things still aren't finalized: will they or won't they give me tenure? Will something unforseen fall through? In a way, it's like another full day interview, but as I've established previously, I get a rush from interviews. It is like being in the office times ten.

Inevitably though, there will be the crash afterward. I will return home exhausted and still have to finish out the week at work. On the weekend, I will hope that the latte and Ritalin will do their job as well as I have when I'm "on."

Riding the Whirlwind

2010-02-02T09:16:00.000-08:00

Here I am again, the day after a job interview, and I am drained. Job interviews are a drug, a performance high, maybe a runner's high (not that I've ever run, but I imagine it involves a similar pushing of your limits and releases the same sort of endorphins). I adore everything about the process: looking for the positions that don't know they are looking for me with my odd background, positions I have to narrate my way into in order to show them how perfect a fit I am for them even when they did not imagine me when they crafted the announcement. I love the rush I get when I'm notified that I made the cut. Phone interviews are more odd and awkward than anything -- a hurdle to jump. Once I've made it to the fly me out stage, that's where the real excitement begins. I love dressing for the interview (all thrift: suit $8, shirt $1.99, shoes $8, and three pairs of retail priced black tights to bear the cold of the East coast). I love the endless, whirlwind day without a break, sometimes preceded by the awkward, not yet an interview but really part of the interview dinner with the search committee the previous night. Time to be as much yourself as you can be, begin to let them see the real, quirky yet uber-qualified you. Then, the next day, interview after interview with individuals and whole conference rooms full of people who have a vested interest in bringing in a person they can work with. Worrying that the one guy on the search committee isn't too keen on your quirkiness, then having him ask you to repeat the story you thought he hated to another group. The open forums that often almost no one comes to, or the lunch with students where they have to drag in random folks wandering the halls who have no idea who you are or what your position is about. The woman who asks the hard questions, then tells you at the end of the day that she loved your spunk and how you gave it right back to her. Getting as happy inside as a toddler given a compliment when someone remarks on what a good question you asked, or when a previous answer you gave is quoted back to you as an answer. The woman who walks in late and jokingly asks what the question was because "that was such an interesting answer."

Still, despite the positive feedback, you never really know after it's all over if you will get the offer. Yet that doesn't really temper your enjoyment but for a moment when you are rejected. It is all practice for the next one, and when you do get an offer, you know who they want is really you -- you have flown your freak flag at full mast and shown them how you are unexpected but ideal.

I have two potential new jobs: the one I interviewed for yesterday in a small city on the East coast and another in a bigger city in the Rockies. Prior to going yesterday, I'd thought I'd like the job of this one better but the circumstances of the other more. After exploring the area and the position, I think I would indeed like the circumstances of the other more but the job about as much. And, if the one in the Rockies somehow falls through, I could be happy at the other. It's not a bad position to be in. Let's just hope that both don't fall through. If that happens, well... given the state of things personally and professionally, I don't know what will happen. I suppose though, it's on to the next challenge, freak flag flying high.

The Egg Woman...

2010-01-15T17:01:00.000-08:00

I love divination. Love it. I wrote a book on it. Over the course of my life, I've had friends do tarot readings for me, read them for myself, and yes, paid for the occasional tarot reader or psychic. The most accurate readings are generally my own, and usually I ignore what I see and do whatever the hell I want. I can't say I've ever been to a reader who gave me a reading about the future that, in retrospect, seemed particularly accurate. I do believe it's possible that some people have a gift for picking up on our unconscious emanations (which may be why I can sometimes successfully read -- and ignore -- my own). I just don't think I've ever met one. Nonetheless, I continue to hope.

So when my administrative coordinator mentioned that her mom did eerily accurate egg divination each New Year's Day, I was immediately intrigued. I'd never heard of reading an egg, for one (though every time I mentioned it to a friend, they immediately said something like "Oh sure, egg reading." I was baffled until I realized I was talking only to Latinas; must be a cultural thing. Still, I grew up in a heavily Latino area and live in a predominantly Latino area. On top of that I'm a folklorist for goshsakes. How did I miss this?). I was yet more intrigued when she began chronicling all her mother's predictions. They were so accurate that she now refused to let her mother read for her. She just didn't want to know.

But I did! "See if your mother has to do it on New Year's Day," I asked her, because clearly I'd missed that boat. So she called, and her mother not only could do it on another day, but would. Then she conveyed her mother's instructions: "At midnight the night before, fill a clear glass -- it shouldn't have any patterns on it -- with water, then crack an egg in it. Leave it there overnight and don't touch it." While my staffer didn't want to be there -- she wasn't sure she wanted to know that much about her boss' life -- she volunteered to drive her mother over to my house the next day because someone needed to translate for her.

And so it was that I had an egg, an employee, and her little Spanish-speaking mother sitting in my kitchen one Saturday evening. She had with her a deck of Mexican playing cards, which interestingly still had the same suits as Tarot cards: Cups, Wands, Swords and Coins. She held up the glass with the egg in it and said (in Spanish), "It looks bad." But, in the end, despite my staff member's furrowed brow, it turned out not to be so bad. Here, for posterity, were her insights and predictions:

Our home had low energy
I had low energy and I needed to fix that to be strong enough for the year ahead
We had money troubles but they would soon be over
I would, in fact, receive really good news 3 times this year
I would also have legal problems
And someone would die this year
But the divorce would not be contentious
I would travel and the results of that travel would be very good

Really, there were more details than that and it wasn't as vague or lame as it sounds. I asked how I could improve my energy. Her daughter said she didn't know how to do that, but she seemed to understand what I said and told her daughter she did too know how. She then proceeded to tell me to give her a small jar and the petals of the rose on the table. She'd do something to them, then return them to me so I could take a bath in it for two successive friday nights. After that was completed, I was to take nine lemons, cut a cross into them, soak them in water in a small bucket and leave it in the closet overnight. I should then put it all in a bag, take it to a crossroads and throw it over my shoulder without looking back.

The day after the reading, before we'd even signed with our realtor, another realtor slipped a note through our mail slot to let us know her client wanted to buy our house and only our house, citing a price that was $25,000 above our planned asking price and $50,000 over what we paid for it.

And, while we've had some tense, awful moments, when my husband and I went to the divorce and custody mediator for the first time a week later, she told us that compared to most couples we were incredibly calm and cooperative.

So far so good. I think I'll take that bath now.

A Quote

2010-01-10T09:09:00.000-08:00

From Still Life With Woodpecker, by Tom Robbins

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.

Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end.

Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm.

There is only one serious question. And that is:

Who knows how to make love stay?

Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself.

Answer me that and I will ease your mind about the beginning and the end of time.
Answer me that and I will reveal to your the purpose of the moon.

And that borrowed statement is all I have to share for today. Oh, someday I may write about the Egg Man (Or rather, more accurately, the Egg Woman. But not the Walrus. Sorry Walrus). I may not. Certainly I will write at length, at some point, about the complete absence of Trader Joe's in all of Colorado. But for now, ladies and gentlemen, that is all.

Goo-Goo G'joob.

A conversation in the car with my 4 year old daughter...

2010-01-05T11:29:00.000-08:00

Her: (observing my new watch) Mama, I thought you didn't like shiny watches
Me: I like them shiny, silver and simple.
Her: What's simple?
Me: It means "not fancy" -- it doesn't have a lot of decorations.
Her: I like watches that are pink and purple and brown.
Me: Like your shoes; they are pink and blue and brown.
Her: I don't like blue.
Me: Why not?
Her: Blue is a boy color.
Me: What about Green?
Her: Green is a boy color.
Me: What about Orange.
Her: Orange is a boy color.
Me: What about Black?
Her: White is a girl color, Black is a boy color.
Me: Why are they boy colors?
Her: Hmm.. Let me think... (tapping her cheek with her finger) Well (Way-yull), boy colors are awesome and girl colors are fablious.

Can't argue with that.

When a Family Falls Apart...

2009-12-29T16:01:00.000-08:00

Divorce looms on the horizon. It happens for a million little reasons that one day all add up.

My friend Donna sent me a novel in the mail; she often does this because I am the only person she knows who has the same odd fascination with time travel plots. Plus she's kind. There's that too. In any case, in the early pages of this novel (Replay by Ken Grimwood), a line caught my attention:

"Now it would merely continue as before: the dissatisfaction, the grinding loss of ambition and hope that had either caused or been caused by the failure of his marriage, he couldn't remember which anymore."

The passage doesn't quite capture my situation, but it has echoes of it. The unraveling of my marriage seemed to keep pace with the unraveling of my happiness at my institution, which reached a crisis point this summer when the new provost rejected me for a position I'd held as interim for over 2 years, when the end of my sabbatical loomed, when furloughs and resultant paycuts were announced, even when I was awarded tenure, which seemed in so many ways to be anticlimactic after all the work and stress that I'd invested in its achievement for so many years.

So for the past few days, in a house that has been largely empty but for me since late October, I've sat glued to this couch -- I've settled in here for the duration it seems, finally succumbing to retrieving my good pillow and a quilt because lately I've been sleeping and living (such as it is) in this spot. My 12 year old "puppy" sits curled on the quilt to my right and my husband's cat purrs on the armrest to my left.

The three of us comfort each other in the emptiness.

release

2009-03-21T11:57:00.000-07:00

Sadness hangs on me heavily today. I am mourning the loss of my family.

I've been harboring anger and resentment toward my sister, and nothing she does alleviates it. My feelings toward my mother are muddled with confusion and anger and love. Nothing she does changes that. The only thing I can change is myself:

I cannot harbor this ill will within myself any longer. It is hurting only my own happiness.

I have to release any expectation I have for my sister to act honorably, any expectation I have for my mother to do anything but what is easiest for her, any expectation I have that I will receive anything from them either emotional or tangible.

I don't know how to release those expectations, those false hopes.

Halloween Craziness

2008-11-02T17:35:00.000-08:00

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

2008-08-19T03:16:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-12T18:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-31T18:40:00.000-07:00

me too

you really can't go back

2008-05-27T15:15:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-05-27T15:10:00.000-07:00

: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

2008-04-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

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

2008-02-05T07:01:00.000-08:00

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.

Their desperation, my gain

2008-01-24T07:13:00.000-08:00

Here's what the scoop was:
When I became interim director, it was because the university had done a national search for the position, asking for a tenured faculty member who would serve a 12-month, non-teaching appointment. They didn't get any applicants they wanted, so when I, a non-tenured junior professor with really limited experience in this field, raised my hand, they said "Sure" and let me have a nine-month 50 percent administrative/50 percent teaching appointment (to be technically accurate, it's a .533 administrative/.466 teaching-service appointment). I didn't get any extra money for doing it because they argued that it was the same workload, just divided differently.

Here's what the scoop is:
My interim contract was for two years. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like while I had convinced them it was important for a director to teach, they were going to list the permanent position as 12 month and conduct a national search. If it were 12 month, I'd decided I wouldn't apply, but even if I did, while at this point I'd be competitive for the position, there was no guarantee I'd get it. Then came the budget cuts. Searches cost money. Twelve month appointments cost money. Really academically sexy candidates from afar cost money. So my search was canceled and they asked me to be interim for another year. In addition, they offered me a stipend on top of my regular salary to do it. It's small -- I dont' know how much just yet, but they said it'd be something like what department chairs get, probably a couple hundred dollars a month. Still, I'm happy, because it's at least acknowledgment that doing this job requires more than a standard teaching contract. And, there's hints that when they do the search for the permanent director next year, it will be an internal search, which means I'm much likelier to get it.

Then and now: Their desperation, my gain.

mid-morning thoughts after working...

2008-01-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

Sure enough, get me here before 7 a.m. and I rock. I knocked off things on my to do list, prepared for class and meetings, even planned for the presentation I have to give this weekend.

I work in what was once the administration building back before they built what everyone merely calls "the pointy building." There's some architectural story behind the whole thing -- each corner points to something significant in the university's past -- but in the end it's just big and pointy, appended by a massive concrete square that looks like a parking structure. Appropriate, actually, since they just built a parking structure in front of the whole complex that effectively blocks your view of anything that could be called architecturally interesting.

In any case, in the old administration building, the bathrooms are a long corridor away from my office. Walking in that direction I often pass by class in session just across the hall. The classroom is huge -- it must fit at least a hundred students -- and as a result, the folks who tend to teach in there usually PROJECT their voices. It's compelling -- makes me peer inside to see if it might at all be interesting. Today it wasn't (powerpoint charts make me glaze over), but I did reflect upon how lucky I was that none of my classes are ever that large. At most I have 30 students per section. I can't imagine what the load must be like if you have to teach three classes per quarter that size. Of course, I'm guessing that large classes probably aren't writing intensive like my freshman intro courses, so maybe they have lower grading loads overall, but even so it's so much less intimate. How can you get to know your students with enrollments that large?

So, if I do have to return to three classes a quarter next year (right now with my administrative gig I only teach one per quarter), I still think I'm luckier than most. Yes, I read loads of bad writing, but I get to know each of the writers enough to care that they do better.

mid-morning thoughts when I should be working

2008-01-21T08:20:00.000-08:00

The problem with my work at home days is that it's a bit harder for me to get in gear. It would probably be different if I set up one room as a dedicated office. As it is, my husband's computer is in the middle of what the realtor would call the dining room (the chandelier above lending credence to that theory), my computer is in the guest bedroom, and the laptop generally sits on the coffee table in front of the t.v. It's also somehow harder to get motivated to hop in the shower and get myself at a desk without the compelling allure of the "holy grail parking lot" -- which explains why when I get to work later in the day instead of before 7 a.m. like I usually do, I likewise find it hard to get in gear. Half the day seems gone and I've lost the parking battle, my punishment looming ahead of me as a lengthy walk at day's end.

Then there's the fact that I tend to schedule doctor's (and homeopathist's and therapist's) appointments on work at home days. When I know I have to hop in the car and go someplace mid-day, I can't seem to mobilize to finish tasks before my departure (which, today, will be at 9 am to make it to the homeopathist in Pasadena).

Of course, all of this is merely my attempt to explain why I am blogging this morning instead of doing course prep or attacking my to do list...

You buy any of that?

Achy body, achy mind

2008-01-19T09:13:00.000-08:00

The new yoga teacher is *hard*. I went to yoga only twice this week but my whole body hurts. I've been sitting on the couch hugging a heated flaxseed pillow and taking tylenol for days but I still hurt all over.

The question is though, how much is stress-related? Remember the staffer who announced her same-day departure on thursday? Well, when I called my boss to strategize next steps, she said, "I hate to break more bad news to you, but you have to cut next year's budget by 20%." Had to know this was coming I guess, but our budget was already cut significantly this past year. Among the programs we cut were 20 grand in mini-grants to faculty. Next year I have to probably cut staff: do I re-fill the staffer's position or cut student workers? Each decision will decimate programs.

Of course, I don't know why I let myself get so invested -- someone who accidentally got on the email loop for the search committee for my position says they are still leaning toward having the job be a 12 month contract. Oh well. It's been a good run -- I'll miss this job. I'll miss all the community members I get to interact with, I'll miss my staff, I'll miss the camaraderie between statewide directors, and I'll miss most of all the sense that we're all in this together to facilitate change for the greater good. But you have to have a balance: time to teach, time to rest, time to be with family, time to pursue a diversity of projects. I can still connect with people and make a difference on another path.

In the meantime, I'm taking some time to renew my body. I complained my way to a free massage certificate at the club and I'm cashing it in. And speaking of connecting with other people, my two lone readers out there (you know who you are) are we getting together this weekend or not? Call me. I shall be refreshed and ready for you.

Back in Crisis Mode

2008-01-17T10:42:00.000-08:00

As it turns out, there's a reason why administrative types are usually in crisis mode: crises happen!

We've had persistent staffing problems in the office where I am interim director, and the tricky part is, whenever these jobs are in flux, someone, often me, has to pick up the slack.

one staffer is on maternity leave (which isn't a problem per se, but see above about slack picking)
we had a grant-funded position a couple months ago that was really difficult to fill. Then, the first candidate who we hired called in an hour before she was supposed to start to tell us she wouldn't be coming. Eventually I filled it with someone I knew through other circumstances and the crisis was averted.
Then, there was a new staff position which we listed as permanent, full-time which midway through the search they changed due to budget cuts to temporary, part-time. We hired a *great* person who started about a week and a half ago but this morning she told me that she was offered another job that starts next week (the offer is permanent, at a higher rank than this one, and offers full tuition reimbursement for her ph.d. program -- I really can't fault her for taking it). So now I'm scrambling to fill it again.
I also have a part-time faculty position to fill. By the day of the application deadline, we only had one applicant but she looked fabulous on paper. Unfortunately, when we called her for an interview, she said she'd changed her mind. We extended the deadline and now I have what looks like might be an equally good candidate who I will interview friday. I'm crossing my fingers.

There's something about this office...Even with my own position, I became interim because they had such a hard time with the national search they did for this two years ago. Maybe it's bad university mojo: currently we have no permanent provost and five of nine colleges don't have a permanent dean. If I'm in crisis mode, the president is probably more so.

As for my job, there's still no firm word on when they will re-announce the search for the permanent director or what form it will take. There's rumblings that it will be a 12 month position, in which case I definitely won't apply. But there's also a hint that it might be 10 month and then I'll have to decide whether or not I'm willing to go from a 9 month contract to 10 month.

Heck, it may depend on how many fires I have to put out between now and then.

How to Annoy Colleagues 101

2008-01-15T21:02:00.000-08:00

First, tell your colleagues they need to go on a business trip.
Second, tell them they can't bring their families because they will be

Working long hours
Housed at a retreat center so far from the nearest hotel that there will be no point in having their family stay nearby

Third, don't tell your colleagues until they arrive that

Cell reception is limited to Analog Roaming
The closest place to get internet connectivity is a rainy walk a mile or so away via dirt paths
They will stay in a cabin all to themselves with four beds, and thus would have had more than enough room for their families if they had come along

Yep -- that's how I spent Wednesday through Thursday night. It was supposed to be through Friday but by Thursday I couldn't take it anymore and caught an early flight home (the retreat center was so remote the shuttle company charged $80 for the ride to the airport).

Still, the trip, such as it was, was productive. I actually came up with some good ideas that I'm excited about implementing. Per their intent, they successfully redirected us from focusing "solely on the urgent while forgetting the important." You know how you get in that constant putting out the fires crisis mode of day to day management that you forget the larger vision? Nevermind the larger vision -- where you forget about the fun? So I'm back to the fun -- at least in between crises.

And after work? It has nothing to do with the "retreat," but I can now bend over without bending my knees and put my palms flat on the ground. Cool.

commencing toward commencement...

2008-01-07T12:32:00.000-08:00

Today is the first day of the rest of your quarter!

I'm feeling a bit more optimistic after getting some work done on Sunday: xeroxing syllabi, scanning readings, and doing a surface clearing of my office space so that it at least has the pretense of organization. My husband and daughter came with me, playing in the quiet of the office reception area while I worked. Just having them there helped me to focus a bit, though you'd think it would distract me.

This morning I arrived before 7 am, grabbed prime parking in what I call the "holy grail parking lot" behind our building, and started things on the right foot. My new staff member starts today, and the other position I've been having trouble filling received an applicant today -- one who is actually qualified. Things are looking up. I've also had two cups of coffee, which never hurts.

Still, I'm counting the days toward summer, marked in celebratory fashion by commencement. Not sure why they call it commencement -- it's the end of the year, the end of their education. Perhaps what is commencing is the rest of their lives -- and my summer of course, bastion of leisure (as long as I don't over-commit myself, something I admittedly have the tendency to do). Summer will be followed by one quarter of work, and, hopefully if my application is approved, two quarters and one summer of sabbatical. Hallelujah!

The need to be...: Jobdentity

2008-01-06T09:20:00.000-08:00

I suffer from a massive need to be something other than just myself. I see it as one of my key shortcomings -- an obstacle to everything from contentment to spiritual enlightenment. Some examples:

This morning while reading hipmama, I found myself not just reading but consulting the submission guidelines. I find myself not able to simply enjoy reading but instead feeling guilt that I no longer actively submit work for publication.

In college and a bit thereafter, I worked in the crafting industry: first for a company as a demonstrator, then as a freelance instructor, finally writing a small book published by an academic press. I haven't done those crafts professionally or for pleasure in years. If I wander through the craft aisle at Target, or pass by a craft store, I find myself more than a bit nervous at all the advancements in crafting that I've not kept up on.

If I go to an academic conference in my field, I find myself fascinated by presentations on other people's research while I simultaneously plague myself with regret over not doing more research myself.

When I ponder the thought of leaving my position at the university I teach at, my first worry is about losing money, insurance, etc. My second worry is that I will be nothing without my identity as "professor" (worse yet, that I leave before I can call myself "professor" without the modifier of "assistant" or "associate" -- far better to flee with the honorable and permanent modifier "emeritus" to salve my feeble sense of self).

Even when I pursue spiritual practices, I find myself investigating ways to publish in that arena or get certified, initiated, stamped with external validation of internal growth.

Some might observe that I have a remarkable ability to transform personal interests into professional activities -- something people often dream of: making work your passion. Instead, I manage to transform passion into work.

My identity is a piece of paper (more like 5ish pages of curriculum vitae). There is nothing behind it.

Random Thoughts on Low Health

2008-01-05T22:21:00.000-08:00

My husband recently pointed out that we have never managed to come home from a Christmas trip to Alabama without coming down with colds. With nine siblings (his, not mine) and their offspring, and their offspring's offspring, you can't help but find yourself in a veritable stewpot of germs. Now here we are back at home making our own little nuclear stew. This gets problematic because I've put off work I need to get done for the new quarter until the last minute and so, health permitting or not, will probably be going into the office tomorrow (Sunday). Not fun.

On Wednesday I have to travel for work and am not looking forward to it. I'm just tired, sick and want to rest and stay at home with my family, not go to a retreat center with work people.

Only January, and I'm longing for summer.

Random Sleepless Thoughts on Low Meds

2008-01-04T05:46:00.000-08:00

What is with these sleepless nights? I awoke at 3 am thinking about work. What really bites is that I often have insomnia when I really have to motivate myself to work the next day and thus need to be well rested most of all.

I am having a bit more anxiety lately since reducing my meds from 75 mg to 50 mg. I am hoping I am just in an adjustment phase, but if it persists, I will return to the higher dosage. My therapist gave me a cd yesterday to listen to, and I suppose I should be doing that now instead of blogging and shopping (The Body Shop online is at 75% off -- hurry, hurry! And there are rumors that Target B&M will go to 90% today).

Still no takers on the Coral Reef Rotating Nightlight -- c'mon, dontcha want it?

My calendar, by the way, says that today is the day my husband and I met in person for the first time eleven years ago (we had been corresponding online for about six months). Somehow I have the 3rd in my head as the date, but I guess it was the 4th? Either way, happy anniversary honey -- I love you.

White Elephants: Come & Get 'Em

2007-12-25T20:48:00.000-08:00

Teresa (a dear friend who came as sort of a "gift with purchase" when I made friends with her partner Sporks) recently came up with the fabulous idea of having an online White Elephant exchange: post your unwanted holiday gifts, send 'em out to whoever wants them, and make the world a better place. How could I resist?

Here are my first offerings (there may be more -- stay tuned):

Coral Reef Rotating Nightlight
I won this in a game of "Evil Santa" last year. I'd hoped that perhaps the seascape would fill the room, projecting outward on all the walls, but all it does is glow a bit as it spins.

Wacky Wheels Magnets
I actually like these -- they feature art cars from my favorite folklore film, Wild Wheels by Harrod Blank. So why am I giving them away? They weren't actually a gift to me -- I'd stumbled on them at Big Lots years and years ago (so long ago that Big Lots was called Pic N Save) and stocked up. I gave a bunch away, and all these years later, still have four packages in stock. At this point I think I've gifted them to anyone I know who might like the film too, and still have four packages left, so one's been earmarked just for you.

How do you claim these and other fabulous prizes? Teresa explains it better than I could, so I'll just quote her no doubt flawlessly copy-edited prose here:

• To claim it, just be the first to say “I’ll take it!” in comments (and, of course, privately e-mail your address to me [note from treecup: if you don't know my email address, be sure to include your email in the comment form so I can email you -- don't worry, it won't show up in the comment itself] ). I’ll cheerfully send my offering to you, even picking up the shipping cost! All that is requested in return is that you offer a white elephant gift of your own on your blog. (Don’t feel left out if you don’t have a blog—I’d be happy to host your offering.)

• To offer an item of your own, just post a pic and description and maybe even a funny story about receiving said item. Don’t limit yourself to this holiday season, either; go crazy and post the weirdest, whitest elephant you’ve ever been gifted in your whole life. Heck, list more than one if you’d like. You’re only limited by the number of “interesting” gifts you’ve received—and whatever you’re willing to pay to ship them out of your life. If you want to post an item before claiming one for yourself, go for it! And feel free to announce your participation in comments here to begin driving shoppers to your site.

• Catch all the white elephant sightings! Rumor has it they may be popping up here, here, here, here, here, here, and other fine blog locations to be announced. And, of course, you’ll want to start haunting the site of whichever lucky soul claims my soon to be posted gift—just click the link from their winning comment and follow that blog!

Teresa herself, by the way, though a gift with purchase, is not the sort I'd ever fob off as a white elephant. Indeed, she is the sort of gift with purchase that you might even buy something you didn't want just so you could get (not that I didn't want Sporks -- aieeee, this metaphor is getting way too convoluted).

lonely evening

2007-12-19T03:34:00.000-08:00

It's 3:35 am and I am feeling a profound sense of loneliness. I can't pinpoint where it is coming from. Maybe it is just being alone in the dark on a sleepless night. Maybe it is the general feeling of dread I get knowing that there is work I need to do that I have been putting off. Maybe it is the homeopathy working its mojo.

The tricky thing about how the homeopathy works is that it doesn't just make you better: it gives you challenges, bringing up obstacles and issues that you've been pushing down with meds, making you deal with them and push through them to the other side to make you stronger. I think that's how my homeopath explained it when I saw her this monday.

I am in a life transition I think. It's more than just moving beyond the tenure process, which is what I was attributing it to before. Everything in me and around me feels like it is churning and changing -- and it's not just an internal process, but random things working in tandem. Let's take work: I applied for a sabbatical and chose to do an artistic rather than research-oriented proposal mostly because I thought it would give me more of a mental break. But then I started having more and more conflicts (technical and ideological) with the campus Institutional Review Board and it made me think that I need to move away from "human-subjects" based research altogether so I could stop butting heads with them (it just drains all the remaining joy out of field research). So doing an artistic sabbatical now makes sense other reasons.

Or maybe I am just constitutionally unable to deal with happiness: I have tenure, a house, a family. I have no more excuses to attribute to my unhappiness.

I remember this was part of the realization I came to when I initially got on antidepressants: that I had always been trying to find reasons for my depression and anger and that there really wasn't a reason beyond my essential chemical imbalance. So ten years later I've come full circle again. But if I embrace the homeopathic/therapeutic process, it means that there is something I've been ignoring/not seeing that needs to be dealt with. My homeopath thinks that at the crux of things is a self-esteem issue. Self-esteem has always been a problem, so she's probably not far off. "Why don't you like yourself?" My husband asks me.

I just don't know.

Jazz and Fondue

2007-12-15T07:21:00.000-08:00

Last night we got together with two of my colleagues for jazz and fondue at a new place that opened up nearby. One of the colleagues brought her partner and the other brought tales of her recent "speed-dating" adventure.

The restaurant had a sort of 60s/70s kitsch theme: black velvet paintings were the dominant motif. The waitress asked us if we were celebrating anything and one of my colleagues said, "yes." "We are?" I asked. Turned out it was the other colleague's birthday and we were also apparently celebrating getting tenure, even though that's far from official -- It's only gone through one committee so far and has three other approval processes to go through. I'll celebrate that when it is official, thank you very much, but the birthday I would sign on for.

Fondue, especially with one prong per person, can be a time consuming meal and we ended up staying through four courses and three hours. It was kind of pricey, but leisurely and lovely. Then we parted company, wandering off into the night and promising that we would host the next fondue gathering at our place, given our fondue pots have been gathering dust for a few years now.

Pure Light Within You

2007-12-12T21:39:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure I love kundalini yoga -- I have to admit I'm not terribly fond of "fire breath" -- but I do like the icy buzzing sensation that I feel coursing through my body and brain by the end of class. What I like most though is the singing:

"May the long time sun
Shine upon you,
All love
surround you,
And the pure light within you
guide your way on."

I feel joyful and centered when I leave. It's a hard thing to explain to my husband, even though he's sometimes in class with me. "Centered" is one of those words I use often that he always asks me about. "What does that mean?" I usually respond by saying something about how I feel grounded and he looks quizzically at me, effectively communicating to me that this word means as little to him as the last. It's funny to me because I'm guessing he's pretty much centered and grounded most of the time. Maybe that's it -- it's such a normal state to him that he can't conceive of or differentiate a state that isn't either of those things.

We don't always communicate with the same language, he and I, but we've been at it now for almost 11 years, trying to understand each other even when we are talking about things the other one wouldn't otherwise be interested in, because there's love there. Sometimes that means I watch the Venture Brothers with him until I "get it." Sometimes that means that he takes a yoga class with me and sings the song even if he never does.

And the pure light within us
guides our way on.

bLOG

2007-12-08T18:39:00.000-08:00

I saw my psychiatrist yesterday. For all of about five minutes, I managed to skirt telling him that it was due to homeopathy that I wanted to lower my daily dosage. His brow was furrowed for a good part of our session, but to his credit he didn't tell me "No" outright. Instead, he asked me lots of questions about my mood and behavior and told me to come back in two weeks. In the meantime, I also have to keep a log that tracks my sleep patterns, my mood (from depression through mania, the worst stage of which the booklet classifies as "Family and friends want me in the hospital"), my medications, life events, etc. etc.

Asking me to do this and come back in two weeks is perfectly reasonable I think, but annoying because my psychiatrist is all the way in Beverly Hills. He used to be in Glendale, which was far enough, then moved. He's also "out of network" which means we don't get reimbursed for much. My husband wonders why I keep going to him -- I'd initially searched him out because I was pregnant and he'd been involved in some studies on pregnant women on antidepressants. Now that I haven't been pregnant for two years, my husband thinks I should find someone closer in network, but I figure this guy knows my history and was also the first doctor who managed to lower my multi-drug cocktail to a single low dose of zoloft. So, furrowed brows and all, I like him. Besides, I usually have to see him once, maybe twice a year. I'm hoping that part won't change but it may be determined by what I write in this little mood log I have tucked in my purse.

In the meantime, while I wouldn't categorize my "mania" as "family and friends want me in the hospital" I was a grading madwoman today and am exercising regularly (which, as I've pointed out, for me exercising at all surely falls under "mania").

So here's to Mania: may she always be productive and fit.

bi-polar? obsessive-compulsive? manic?

2007-12-03T07:27:00.002-08:00

The girl has been sick this week: feverish, holding her hand up to her ear and saying "ouch." It's been sad to watch. My husband loads her up with tylenol or ibuprofen while I load her up with store-bought homeopathic tablets. Neither seems to work much, so today we're taking her to the doctor.

The amazing thing about all this (knock on woodgrain .jpg) is that through it all, with both husband and daughter sick, I haven't caught it. If you recall, I tend to catch colds if someone sick even glances at me from a distance. I do think the homeopathic treatments I've been undergoing are making a difference in my overall health, boosting my immune system.

But despite my health, my daughter and husband's illness have meant that we hadn't made it to the club in about 4 days. I was surprised to find myself getting antsy. We'd been going almost daily and I was starting to need to go. Finally, yesterday, though I felt guilty for abandoning ouchy girl for a few hours, I went by myself. I was disappointed to find the Yoga schedule had changed, but I did some cardio and then retreated to the sauna, steam room and spa.

It's a little bizarre to be honest: I've never wanted to exercise. It may be the lure of the steamroom in part, but it's actually the exercise I'm craving too. I'm apt to attribute this to the homeopathic treatment as well -- one of the first reactions to it I had when I first started was a need to get on the stationary cycle at home daily. Then we dialed back the treatment a bit and it stopped. Now that I'm progressing with the treatment at a slower pace, the need to exercise has returned. My husband, on the other hand, attributes it to my somewhat obsessive-compulsive personality ("You always want to do things a lot when you first start") but never in my life have I gotten obsessive or compulsive about exercise. My new therapist thinks I may be mildly bi-polar, though no other psychiatrist has ever diagnosed me as that. My homeopath thinks that my normal level of depression puts me at such a low energy that the homeopathic treatment is pushing me past the level of my antidepressants into a mild mania and, as the homeopathic treatment takes effect treating and curing my bodily imbalances (whether they are to do with blood-sugar or brain chemicals, in the homeopathic view it's all pieces of a puzzle that influence each other), I will need to dial down my antidepressants. So, later this week I will go to my psychiatrist and see what he says (and try to figure out a way to ask him to lower my meds without telling him it's a homeopath who suggested it). It's weird to suddenly like exercise but hopefully, as I get stronger through the homeopathic treatments, the need to exercise will simply become a part of my being.

Speaking of exercise, I'm also exercising internally with this. There are fifteen levels of resistance and I'm only up to 3. Hey, I pushed a baby out of there -- Give me time.

the Club

2007-11-18T13:55:00.000-08:00

My husband and I are not known for our athleticism. Years ago we decided that we would correct our sendentary ways by taking a daily walk. Not long after, we found ourselves ending our walks at 7-11. The sad thing is we didn't even notice for a while that it had become a habit, effectively negating any good we were doing.

Periodically, I get it in my head to try exercising. Once I took up Karate at an all women's studio. My favorite part was the sweeping before and after. During my pregnancy, under midwife's orders, I began walking or biking daily, but this too did not last.

More recently I began to think perhaps Yoga would be the answer: spiritual, aesthetically pleasing, not a lot of jumping up and down. I researched a few local options, and after a site visit, decided that the Club might be the place for us. Not a yoga studio per se, but something somewhere between a gym and a country club. It cost not much more than a yoga studio alone, but included in the price was membership for the entire family including, and this is the amazing part, 3 hours of childcare a day 7 days a week.

The girl, however, has not been as excited about childcare as we have been. Today was the fourth time we've dropped her off and she started panicking the moment we got to the gate. We could hear her screams from across the courtyard. She seems to have a good enough time once she's settled in, but the initial process is painful for all involved. We keep hoping it will get better.

More appealing to the girl is what she calls the "beach" -- she doesn't differentiate between the ocean and a swimming pool. To her, they are both enormous bodies of water and that girl just loves to "s'im".

Mama is enjoying yoga thus far (and hoping that will last), but especially enjoys the steamroom and jacuzzi thereafter. Maybe that will get me to the club when nothing else will...

Some notes on taking a toddler to work...

2007-10-30T19:53:00.000-07:00

My husband is out of town -- he, his four brothers, and a couple friends are in New York to see the Police at Madison Square Garden. It is his first trip away from the girl. Like a dutiful stay at home dad, before leaving he set me up with bags packed with snacks, diapers and instructions to take to the sitter. We arranged for the teen next door to watch her while I was teaching but after class I had to come by, pick her up and take her to work with me.

Our university is undergoing a process called "prioritization and recovery" -- yes, a euphemism for "who's getting cut?" Today was a big townhall meeting for support programs, mine among them, and so there I was with the girl on her trike (she doesn't pedal; it has a push handle) in the back row. It did not, let's say, go well.

So here's what I've learned about taking toddlers to meetings:

a plate full of grapes will get you quietly through a few minutes
a plate full of grapes will not stay on the plate for long once the toddler decides she wants to hold said plate on her own
it is hard to stop a toddler from eating grapes off the floor and keep her quiet at the same time
if you are going to take a toddler across campus to a meeting, remember to bring a fresh diaper
don't take toddlers to meetings wearing shoes that squeak with each step
don't take toddlers to meetings

venturing into the village

2007-10-27T14:20:00.000-07:00

I am chronically early. If you're having a party, plan on having me show up inconveniently and unfashionably 30 minutes before it is scheduled to start. I can't seem to help it. My dad was in the Navy, so he was always pushing us to be on time. I responded by being early, my sister responded by being late. I guess I'm not a rebel (in some ways at least).

So the Holistic Moms said they'd start setting up our booth at the village fair at 8 am, and I was there before 7:30. I wandered around, probably annoying merchants who weren't yet ready for looky-loos, and making others wonder who the transient in the "Homebirth Mama" t-shirt was.

Looking at all the craft booths being set up took me back in time to college when I worked for a novelty rubber stamp company. I'd worked many of these fairs, and recalled those long days of constructing booths, demonstrating stamping all day, until when I finally went to sleep all I could see in the darkness were stamped images of bunnies skipping under clouds holding multi-colored balloons. I remember my body aching from head to toe and collapsing in hotel rooms, only to repeat the cycle the next day then drive or fly back home to get to class on monday. It was often days before I could fully wash all the glitter out of my hair.

So today there I was, prepared, with my stamp carving tools in hand ready to set up for the fair. When the volunteer who brought the potatoes arrived, I was dismayed to find that carving potatoes was not nearly as easy as carving erasers. I'm used to being able to carve stamps with significant detail and the potatoes (Holistic Moms wanted a nature-based craft) refused to cooperate. Finally I had to let go of my expectations and just go with roughly hewn hearts, moons and leaves.

Mostly though I was there to get to know the other Holistic Moms. We talked about local school districts and homeschooling, nursing, and other holistic stuff. At noon my shift was over and I wandered the village where I perused the various crafts arrayed in booths and thought about how I could make this one or that one but how I never would. At least not for a long time. So now I buy handcrafted items more than I make them. Today's haul: three bars of goatsmilk soap (lavender/lemongrass, spice, and green tea/lemongrass/ginger) and three tins of shea butter (patchouli, grapefruit and lavender). Mmmm...grapefruit.

Pumpkin Fest 07

2007-10-20T19:05:00.000-07:00

We didn't expect it to be so big.

Each year my university, historically an Ag college, holds a Pumpkin Festival. I'd never bothered to go, but my daughter is 2 now and it seemed the thing to do. Our friends with kids had been going every year. When I mentioned my astonishment at the size of the event, which seemed to go on for acres, one of the friends declared, "You're a virgin."

I assume she meant to the pumpkin festival, but it'd be equally applicable to parenthood. It's funny that even though I was the type to like this sort of event before becoming a parent, I had never bothered to go. Besides, I'd always thought the pumpkin festival was a small patch outside the farm store, but the pumpkins, lying in fields surrounded by sunflowers, went on and on and on. They were complemented by a petting zoo, pony rides, kettle corn, funnel cakes and other fair fare. Other folks were clearly more familiar with the event and came prepared: as we drove up, the walkways were filled with people carting off literally dozens of pumpkins in wheelbarrows, wagons, and strollers (in which the child had been displaced by, yes, pumpkins).

We ate hot roasted and buttered ears of corn, picked out two good-sized pumpkins, and ate pumpkin ice cream. I was sorely tempted to purchase one of two Ag school t-shirts: One said "Plant Geek" and the other said "Eat, Sleep, Garden" over our school name. I've never been much for school pride, but loved these.

The day was dusty and hot, and by 2:30 or so we were ready to head home. We were tired enough that we didn't make it to the Insect Festival on another part of campus. Maybe another day.

The Dancing Elephant

2007-10-19T21:06:00.000-07:00

It was a work night, and by that I mean that someone had to ride the second bus with students to LACMA and that someone was me. Yet despite it being a work night and a work trip, somehow it ended up costing me $42, which if I had lied and said I couldn't go, I would have saved and my salary wouldn't have changed one bit.

Here's the tally, some of which I could probably write off as a business expense but probably won't:

Ticket to see the Dali exhibit, which the university paid only for the honors students and the professor teaching the honors section: $12
Assorted salads: $7
Sparkling water: $3
Funky little doll for my daughter: $5
Bathtub stopper with chain and floating lily pad attached: $15

Sure, I didn't have to buy the lily pad bath stopper, but how could I not? And then how could I spend $15 on myself and come home with nothing for my daughter? Clearly I had no choice in either situation. I suppose that I could write off the lily pad or the doll if I argued they were educational tools.

The Dali exhibit was good, though I would have liked to take it in chunks instead of trying to pack it all into one visit. I have a hard time at museums because I'd like to just spend quality time with a few pieces but always feel like I have to see it all. In this exhibit, the Disney/Dali collaboration, Destino, was particularly beautiful and haunting, but then I'm not as big on ants crawling out of a hole in your hand, which seemed to be a motif in the rest of his work.

On the way home the students were bored and wanted to play telephone. I was assigned to come up with the phrase. "She'll make it good and weird," I heard someone say from the back of the bus. "No pressure!" I shouted, "I'm thinking!" Eventually I came up with "The Dancing Elephant looked for his keys in his long, long trunk." By the end of the line, it became "Anna lost her keys in the back room."

That was the theme of the night I guess -- Not losing your keys, which is certainly the theme of many of my days, but the mundane becoming weird and the weird becoming mundane.

Story of my life.

Finding My Tribe

2007-10-18T06:59:00.001-07:00

It was the noisiest meeting I'd ever been to (small children raced across the circle as women tried to talk over the din) but then in two years of being a mother this was one of the very first times I'd attended a mommy group. I probably would have done so sooner if not for two reasons:

I work full-time and sometimes through the weekend while most mom groups meet on weekdays.
I'd never really connected to other moms. I don't always feel like the same species.

I had my suspicions though, that this group promised to be different, worth making time for even though I'm often dead tired after work. There's the name, Holistic Moms Network, that made me think maybe I'd find "my people" here. They have chapters all over the country, but until recently the closest one was in Pasadena. I'd tried it once when my daughter was only a few months old, and liked both the people and the talk on nutrition that the guest speaker gave, but the drive was just too much on a weekday evening. When someone posted on an Attachment Parenting list I'm on that a chapter would be forming in my area, I was thrilled.

Upon entering the meeting place at a local new age shop in the same center that held the first natural foods market in the area (which had opened only a month or so before), I saw pillows on the floor, crystals in glass cases, and mommies with babies in slings. I knew I was home. We went around and introduced ourselves: there was a mom named "Summer" and babies named "Tara" and "Paisley." Women talked about how out of place they felt in other mommy groups, how long they breastfed their children (the winner: still nursing at 4 1/2 years), how good it was finally to be in a group where homebirths were the norm rather than a freakish anomaly (I remember 2 years ago one mom asking me upon finding out I gave birth at home, "On purpose???"). Here, in this group, I felt almost conservative because I vaccinated my daughter and am only vegetarian, not vegan.

I am home, I am home, I am home.

Can you go back?

2007-10-15T10:20:00.001-07:00

I have been overcome in the past week with a fit of nostalgia. It happens now and again: the urge to google my past. These days, enough people are online in one form or another that a lot of former friends and lovers come up in searches. I'm saddest when I can't even remember full names: only a shared experience perhaps or an alias. There was a woman in college I only ever knew as "Madeleine" -- I never knew her real name, or her real hair color. She had short bleached hair and had chosen Madeleine because she felt it represented her better than her birth name, which she never told me. She lived in a rambling house with half a dozen other people where there were whole five foot eucalyptus branches in the living room to repel the fleas the cats brought in. Or Lianne -- I can't remember her last name -- I only remember taking mushrooms with her at Will Rogers park, hiking to the top of the hill, and hearing her sing a song to the sky that she composed on the spur of the moment. She had a way of holding your face with her hands on both your cheeks and looking at you with an intensity I've never seen since.

I'll never find those people, but I do find others. I don't feel compelled to email or call all of them, but a few I do. Some don't write back. Whatever happened in our past to pull us apart still sits in the long road between us, causing us to only see the obstacle and not each other.

In one instance, in this case an ex-boyfriend, we had the loveliest chat on the phone. Lovely, really. All the detritus of our failed relationship seemed to have disappeared and all that was left was fondness. It felt as if enough time had passed and enough happiness had transpired in our respective lives that we could finally move forward. But then it happened: in a week of email, suddenly it was there again -- the criticism I remembered, the judgment, the "unlike the past when I bent over backwards for you..." (which in this case seemed to mean that if he wanted to criticize me for what he didn't understand, he wasn't going to hold back). Sigh. Old patterns, old blame. What he didn't get was that I didn't expect him to bend over backwards for me, which maybe I did do in the past, just that I wanted a friend who would try to understand the choices I made in my life rather than making quick assumptions about them. It's a loss, definitely, and I feel it all over again. He was quirky, talented, affectionate and fun. He probably still is.

So will I write or call folks the next time the urge hits me? I don't know. All these people I cared about for one reason or another and that doesn't always go away with the passage of time. It's hard not to hope that you might one day be able to build on that.

Renewal

2007-10-13T23:01:00.000-07:00

I was at a street painting festival today, manning a booth for the organization I volunteer for. People walked up, told me their stories. I watched children in the distance drawing on the ground with chalk and blowing bubbles. I played matchmaker a bit, chatting with another volunteer about someone I'd introduced her to at the last board meeting. She wasn't sure, but thought his passion for community service was "hot."

A week ago I turned in my tenure file. I won't find out for many months whether or not tenure will be granted, but already I feel a weight has been lifted off of me. The days feel lighter. There will be more blowing of bubbles and the asphalt will be brightly colored. Suddenly my life is less about jumping through arbitrary hoops and more about the work I do, and the play in work.

It rained last night, but the morning was clear. I can see the mountains again.

Now you tell me?

2007-10-05T11:30:00.001-07:00

My tenure and promotion file is due on Monday. On tuesday, the chair of my department relayed to us that the dean had a number of "tips" she requested we follow in preparing these documents. Yes, that's less than a week before it is due. Among these requests are that our narrative be no longer than 10 pages (mine is 30 pages single-spaced), that we do not state how we have "fulfilled the criteria" because that is not for us to decide, and that we do not list publications that are accepted but not yet in print because it is "double-dipping" or because some anthologies may never actually come out.

FUCK YOU.

I didn't want to write a 30 page document, but that is what five years of these reviews have wrung forcibly out of me: each year the letters from various committees have urged me for more and more detail.
I have fulfilled your fucking criteria. You haven't let me think of anything else for the last five years and I am nothing if not thorough. But fine: I'll change my wording to say "I have worked toward addressing the criteria by..." rather than saying "I have fulfilled the criteria by..."
I worked hard on those publications that are still in press, and sometimes the process for them to actually end up on physical paper is long. But I did the work.

Besides, the dean is not the end of the line: the University committee and Provost evaluate it after she does. People with other deans are putting in this stuff and my file will be side by side with theirs. So I told my chair that I would still be turning in those thirty pages. She responded by saying, "as long as you feel what you are turning in is authentic, you should be fine." I responded, "Oh, it's not authentic, but it's what this university has groomed me to turn in until its sudden u-turn less than a week before the deadline."

So here's my 30 pages. Read it or not. I'd like to see you try to deny me tenure because my file was too long.

Hallelujah

2007-09-30T13:58:00.001-07:00

click to play

Hallelujah, praise be to Jeebus, my students can write. I just received the first batch of 29 reading response papers from my entering freshfolk, and much to my surprise, most of them were not painful. Instead, I'd say that a majority of the papers were exceedingly well-written. I was able to focus my comments on substantive content-related suggestions instead of simply breaking down run-on sentences or correcting spelling errors. This is a marked improvement from what I've received in previous courses, including honors sections (which this is not).

What can the difference be attributed to? Is this year's crop of college freshfolk more prepared than in previous years? I'm guessing they're not. Instead, I'd guess that we've succeeded in our effort to stamp out the tendency of previous students to promote us by telling their peers there are "no tests." The "no tests" label has drawn the wrong students to us for the wrong reason, and word seems to be getting out that we're about hard, but interesting work that will truly engage them. In fact, on the first day when I asked why they had signed up, not a single student said (or at least admitted) that it was because there would be no tests.

This is going to be a good quarter.

Click that sound file again, will ya?

Let's talk about the 800 lb. gorilla in the room...

2007-09-21T19:59:00.000-07:00

Or rather the very dead cow in the middle of my living room.

Since we moved into this house in 2003, we have been patiently enduring the lack of comfort inherent in the $300 sofa we bought, literally, in the impulse aisle at Ikea (we almost left without a couch when we saw them stacked five high not far from the cash registers). Our friends, notably Sporks and Teresa, have not been so patient, and in fact have been fairly vocal about the lack of comfort, despite the 42" plasma that made the room an otherwise enticing space. The couch in question had also suffered from sun damage and the night attacks of our cat Emma. I'd patched the frayed surfaces fairly creatively with appliqued leaves, but let's face it, the couch was tired from day one.

The dilemma, once we had the money to spend on a decent couch, was what sort of upholstery would stand up to Emma (and our occasionally food-flinging toddler). It was one thing to have your cat destroy a cheap piece of Ikea furniture that you never really expected to last, but it was another when you invested a fair amount of money in it. What we kept coming back to was leather -- Emma never paid the slightest bit of interest in the leather chair from my mother's house that we had in the back room.

But here's the catch: I'm vegetarian. I have been for about 20 years now. It's an ethical choice, not a health-motivated choice. I do wear leather shoes because when I've spent money on shoes certified by the vegan society or some such (they were embossed with a cute little flower logo to prove it), they fell apart almost immediately, so I found myself wavering on the sofa decision for the same reasons. Except a sofa is HUGE -- at least one full cow. I've been rationalizing that the decision makes sense: that unlike a fabric couch that will do the environment more harm because it won't last as long and will end up in a landfill, I'll have this sofa for another 20 years (my optional warranty says so). Heck, even my little shoes (ok, size 8 1/2, but little in the grand scheme of things -- probably less than a cow leg in terms of hide consumed) won't last that long. But I know that it's really a rationalization:
when it comes down to it, I'm kinda cheap. If I'm going to spend money, I want good stuff that lasts.

Catch number 2: Emma attacked the couch on almost the very first night. We've since decided that we will close the doors to the living room when we go to bed, but does make you wonder if the universe is conspiring with your cat to confront you on your tendency to waffle on your own ethics.

On letting go...

2007-09-16T08:42:00.000-07:00

I have been searching for it, on and off, since we moved into this place. It was what I considered my best drawing: I'd done it years ago during a colored pencil workshop. It depicted a bird of paradise in which the petals were made up of colored pencils jutting up from the stem. It had once been framed, but during one move or another the frame shattered and I couldn't remember what I had done with it. Fast forward to last week when, as I was rummaging through the garage cleaning out drawers, I found it rolled in a protective paper tube. The only problem was that the mice in the garage hadn't realized the tube was meant to be protective and had eaten right through it, effectively decimating the drawing.

What do you do in circumstances like this? You let your shoulders slump for a moment and a sigh escape your mouth, then you let it go.

My husband says it wasn't my best drawing; that it looked like what it was, something done in an art class. I suppose it was that it was technically good: when you don't believe in your own prowess as an artist, examples of technical proficiency bolster your belief that perhaps you are capable, given the time and patience, to create something that doesn't look like "outsider" art. But I think I have to let go of that conceit as well -- my art is what it is.

Lately I've been painting teacups on 4x4" canvases. The subject matter is a return to doodles I used to do constantly during graduate school seminars. I'm not sure why I draw them -- then or now. Sure, I like coffee, in all its forms and all the rituals, mundane and fantastic, that it is a part of. I like the mystique of coffee and tea. But mostly I think it is that teacups are easy to draw, and the small canvases give me something I can complete in a short amount of time in the breaks I give myself amidst an increasingly busy work schedule. Looking at the finished paintings is a window into slower moments, holding a coffee cup between my hands as I start the morning in the quiet hours before anyone else is awake.

For a moment, as I sip my morning coffee, I hold on. Hold on to tranquility, quiet, stillness, and peace. Then I let it go.

Yesterday

2007-09-06T22:15:00.000-07:00

Some friends thought my husband and I needed a weekend away, so they gave us a coupon for a weekend in Laughlin that they won in a raffle. Laughlin is known as a low-rent Vegas, but I was still surprised that the hotel didn't offer room service. So it was that early one morning I found myself sitting at a table in "Carnegie's Dining Car" -- the 24 hour coffee shop of this vaguely train-themed casino hotel -- waiting for my to-go breakfast order while staring at the refrigerated dessert case as it spun hypnotically round: Carrot cake, layer cake, coconut cream pie. Eclair, cream puff, repeat.

Service was fairly slow, and after a while the spinning sweets put my pre-diabetic consciousness into a sort of coma. There were oldies piped in over the clang of slot machines and Stevie Wonder sang:

What happened to the world we knew
When we would dream and scheme
And while the time away
Yesterme, yesteryou, yesterday...

The scenario that popped into my head was somehow in the future and the past at the same time. What would I say, I wondered, if my daughter ever asked me "Do you have any regrets?" I'm not sure... do I?

I talk a lot about paths not taken: ie, what if I had followed this career path instead of that one? But when I thought about it, I didn't really regret the path I'd taken only because one path would not have mattered any more than another. In the end, careers don't really matter. At least they don't to me. Eventually they are all just ways to pay the bills.

There is, for example, a criterion I am required to fulfill for tenure: "The candidate will have identified her strengths and passions in teaching." Strengths, sure, I have those, but passions? I don't think you can require someone to have passions, but they did, so on paper at least I have them. But making them a criterion? A requirement? That's the surest way to deaden passion. And that's really what most jobs do -- they may start out as passions but when they become requirements that goes out the window. That's why I stopped being all sorts of jobs that sound fabulous and fun.

So I don't have passions when it comes to work. I cycle through them, I try new things now and again, I leave them and come back again when I can run far enough away from their association with responsibilities and expectations. And I've really tried just about everything I thought was fun, so I can't regret not trying, and if there are things I haven't, there is still time.

Do I have regrets in life? Not really, except, I realized, in one area: I regret when I have not treated people well. Jobs come and go and don't matter. Opportunities not taken can be taken up later. But when you don't treat people well, as I have on so many occasions, you can't ever take it back. Not really. You can apologize (if you are wise you will), they can forgive you or not, but what's done is done. There are times when I have not been a good friend, sometimes simply through neglect, and I wish I could say otherwise.

I can, however, try to do differently in the future: I can treat myself well. I can treat my friends and family (and my friends that are family) better. I can not forget. Eclair, cream puff, repeat.

--

Addendum: after one night we abandoned the vaguely train-themed hotel in Laughlin for a vaguely egyptian-themed one in Vegas. It has room service and a spa.

On living life now: a mid-life reflection

2007-07-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

I turn 41 this month. Lately I've been pondering how I can manage to retire by 50. Why 50? Because that's the magic age when the state says I can retire, taking with me medical benefits and a very, very small monthly check. The monthly check would get bigger the longer I stayed, but the medical benefits are what's key: we can find somewhere in the country cheaper to live, but medical insurance for someone like me is nearly impossible to acquire.

The question is: how can I make the next nine years endurable? I keep telling myself: that's only nine more cycles. But something about that is inherently wrong: how can I just tell myself to grit my teeth and endure almost ten years of my life? How can I afford to waste that precious time being stressed and unhappy? The answer is that I can't. Retiring by 50 isn't inherently a bad plan, but in the interim, I need to make life joyful now. Here's how I am going to do that:

I'll have tenure (knock on wood) very soon. It's time to jump off the hamster wheel. I will focus on teaching, which I genuinely enjoy even if the load is a bit much, and trust that the other things I do just out of interest will be enough to get me my next promotion. Enough to get promotion at a teaching institution anyway.
I'll give up the idea that there's some sort of scholar I'm supposed to be -- that I should be doing a certain amount of research or kind of publishing. I may give up doing research altogether unless something really compels me.
I'll take sabbaticals when I can, and difference-in-pay leaves every few years. I'll make sure what I do on those leaves is something that I will enjoy.
I'll take summers off -- truly off.
When it's time to call off work for the day or the week, I'll leave it truly behind me. I'll kiss my daughter and read her a book. I'll count the fledglings in the aviary in the backyard. I'll take my husband out to the local diner for french toast.

That's the plan. I'll follow it to the letter. Especially that part about french toast.

what do I want?

2007-07-15T10:21:00.000-07:00

This Fall I apply for tenure, so this summer is pretty full. Add to that a new class prep for Winter, various duties for my interim administrative position and the application for my first sabbatical due in Fall (which wouldn't actually happen until the following Fall), and I'm pretty much overwhelmed with work. Sometime next year they will also begin the search for the permanent person to fill the administrative gig, so I really have to decide if I want it.

I had pretty much decided that I would want it if it took my base pay up a notch -- that this would make it worth giving up my summers at least for a while, but man, do I need a break. If I didn't take the position, not only would I be able to take next summer off (no more tenure to file for) but I may even be able to take Fall and Winter of 08-09 off on a sabbatical (well, you do have to work on a sabbatical, but I may be able to figure out something fun).

Can I keep it all up without that break? Do I want to? I dunno. I'm about to crack under the pressure at the moment. I'm so depressed on a daily basis this summer.

Last night I went to a concert in the park for two hours and ran around selling raffle tickets to help raise funds to repair a statue in another park. I had a blast, running up and down the grass tiers saying "1 for a dollar, 8 for 5!" and swigging on ice coffee. A little activity, community spirit, simple service, and my mind was temporarily off all the looming, tedious tasks.

But it was only two hours.

work

2007-07-10T17:52:00.000-07:00

I don't know that I'm a scholar anymore. There's just so little joy in it. Maybe I'm just in a slump now, but as I pore over articles and books for research, it is so tedious. And there isn't a new subject I'm fascinated enough by that makes doing research fun.

Becoming your Mother

2007-05-23T13:21:00.000-07:00

I've long feared the folk wisdom that says you are destined, for better or worse, to become your mother. I've also recognized that it is often true, but lately I'm finding that it's not only true with your literal mother but with your professional "mother" as well:

I've often snickered about fellow professors who have the professorial ailment that compells them to talk endlessly and often obliviously. I'm simultaneously disdainful, and in rare cases where they are eloquent or insightful, envious of the tendency

Yesterday I went to a meeting to conduct a focus group about a proposed new academic program -- not, mind you, a program even remotely in my area of expertise

As I listen to the recording of this meeting today, I note uneasily that I'm talking as much as members of the group who are supposed to be providing feedback

While I'm distressed that I'm speaking so much (granted it's generally in answers to direct questions, but still, I should be redirecting and listening more), I'm also simultaneously impressed with myself that I'm speaking so confidently and expertly about something I knew nothing about merely months before

Then it occurs to me that I've also acquired the additional yet related professorial disease of being impressed with myself.

Sigh.

sickly

2007-05-06T17:42:00.000-07:00

I am sick. Burning, seething nasal passages and throat raw and scratchy sick. Yesterday I thought I was suffering from spring allergies, but I thought wrong. By nighttime I could feel my head melting.

This is the fifth or sixth cold I've had since December, when I had three or four of them in quick succession. My immune system is clearly not up to par and that's nothing new, though six colds in six months is surely a new record. In the past I'd be apt to blame it on unhealthy living, but despite the fact that I don't really exercise, I take better care of myself now than I ever have, so instead I think I will blame it on my mother who never breastfed me. A nice convenient excuse by which I can neatly absolve myself of responsibility. Maybe I should start exercising instead of blaming. Maybe. Right now though, I'm going to bed.

Nostalgia

2007-04-22T16:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday as we were driving home from the conference, we decided to take a detour to drive through our old neighborhood. Our former next door neighbor had mentioned that our old building had been torn down and replaced with snazzy condos and we wanted to see what other changes had happened in the area. What'd we find? Not much. Oh sure, that old building had been replaced, but all the other dingbat-style apartments were still there in force.

While the first apartment we lived in was no longer, the second apartment was still there, though it did not look like the landlord (Miller and Desatnik, which seems to lord over the area of Los Angeles known as Palms) had painted it in the many years since we'd been there. I was sorry to see that the "Dollar Majal" next door had been replaced with a less brilliantly named dollar store. "Dollar Majal" is an issue of debate between my husband and I to this day: I contend that it is hilarious and a stroke of pure genius. He contends that it makes no sense. Exactly!

Also gone was the Thai/Pizza joint we often ordered from but in its place was, oh my dear god, a vegan delivery place! Clearly, we had moved too soon. Still around were our old veterinary hospital (still purple, yet more so) and our favorite breakfast place, which no longer had its outdoor dining area due to road-widening.

Since moving to Pomona, our walk-to and delivery meal options have significantly lessened, yet everything else is worlds better: we live in an adorable house in an even cuter tree-lined neighborhood that is perfect for walking the dog or strolling with our little one in a wagon to the park. No longer do we live in overpriced dingbats, no longer do we struggle financially to make ends meet, and I'd even say our relationship is better -- not to mention the addition of our uber-perfect little girl. Still, isn't it funny how nostalgia will hit you?

As we drove through our old neighborhood I couldn't help but long for those earlier days, the lack of vegan delivery in the envisioned past notwithstanding. This is what it will be like, I told my husband, as we get older: there will be more and more past to reminisce and feel nostalgic about. Youth is all about the future, age is more about the past. "You've always been old," he replied. Maybe so. As long as I am always old with you.

Alma Mater

2007-04-22T08:54:00.000-07:00

I went to the regional meeting of my professional society this weekend. It was held at my alma mater. I hadn't been there in many years -- things have changed quite a lot: no longer is the program I graduated from housed in a dank basement but in what can only be called splendor. Ridiculously splendid splendor. Except, you see, for all intents and purposes, the program I graduated from is no longer. The faculty are there, a few straggling students are there, but it got swallowed up and digested by another department until it was all but unrecognizable. Then again, if it hadn't been swallowed up, it might have disappeared altogether.

Still, it was nice to be amongst people from my discipline again and hear presentations about their research. I miss talking about my field with people in my field. It made me realize though, how little actual research I have done in recent years. How do these people do it? I try to tell myself that after I have finished jumping through all the hoops to get tenure things will be different and I can focus on things I actually care about, but that may be wishful and deluded thinking. After all, isn't before you get tenure supposed to be the time when you are most rather than least productive?

My other fear is that disciplinary thinking is like a language: if you don't speak it you lose it. Lost on a campus with no disciplinary colleagues and teaching everything but my actual discipline, will I be able to fruitfully go back to it if I do have time to do so after I get tenure?

I know all this sounds like I had a horrible time, but it is really not true. Being at the event made me realize how much I really do love my discipline. What I do, both in the department I teach in and the department I administrate in, I enjoy and am good at, but this I love. Eventually I think, especially with regard to the administrative gig, I will have to decide if it is enough to enjoy and be good at something to the exclusion of the thing that will probably always own my heart. Being in the administrative position would likely take up any time I might have for research. The answer seems simple but it is not: there's a lot to be said for enjoying and being good at something, especially if they end up paying me more to do it.

The other good thing I came away with this weekend was that I had the first truly pleasant interaction with my ex that I have had in the last dozen or so years. That's pretty cool and nothing to be sneezed at since it is clear I will run into this man over and over again for the rest of my life. It was nice to feel that maybe we can finally salvage what we enjoy out of each other from the mess that was us being in a relationship together.

More course woes...

2007-03-16T13:35:00.000-07:00

It seems it wasn't enough that the anthropologists were against me, now the art historians have something to say:

Here are the comments about your proposed "Folklore, Folklife and Folk Art" course that I promised you I would forward. While they come from the Art Department, other College Curriculum Committee members agreed with and supported the Department's concern.

Consultation Comments :
We are asking that the course please not claim (especially in the title, course description, or syllabus) to cover a specifically visual-art domain in the course, since art history covers this area already, and the analysis and interpretation of visual art legitimately falls under the expertise of the art historians on campus. Of course, we might expect that she use visual-art or artifactual examples in the organic course of intellectual inquiry. Naturally, all of us think beyond our fields as narrowly defined, and all of us reach to a variety of examples in the process of thinking and teaching. We would never want to restrict another instructor's right to point to all kinds of material, nor would we want our intellectual inquiry to be suppressed in turn. Our recommendation is really just this: we would like to see the course not CLAIM, in title, course description, and syllabus,that it covers "art" as a subject domain. There are a variety of reasons for this, including that doing so has future implications for our own course proposals. Instead, we suggested the use of the term 'Folk Culture' -- a broader term that would not specify "Art."

So it seems that even though my specific area of specialization is folk art, I don't have any right to teach it. My husband thinks I'm silly to say this, but more than wanting the class approved I want people's respect. He says that's less likely than getting the course approved. Sigh. So here was my response, which I hope was respectful enough while still getting across my point:

Thanks for forwarding this. I think I can respond to the concerns of the committee:

- The comments below state that "visual art legitimately falls under the expertise of art historians," and while I certainly understand this assertion, I think that as a folklorist who specialized specifically in folk art and aesthetics, I have a legitimate claim to expertise in this area (I'm including a list of relevant publications below and am happy to provide copies for review) so while the course is a synthesis course and thus necessarily synthesizes material from multiple areas, folk art is actually my area of expertise more than any other area in the ECO
- I am certainly open to the idea that the course could be cross-listed with ENV if there are other people with expertise in this area who would like to teach it.
- I am also happy to meet with anyone who would like to discuss this further.

art and lists

2007-03-13T14:42:00.000-07:00

It's been a while, hasn't it? My life is dominated by minutiae: lists of things to do that never get done. I don't spend time with friends often -- on weekends I either work through it or quiet my mind with sci fi on the couch (quieting the mind is important: I lay awake on work nights thinking about those lists). Still, it's not so bad: I feel like I am finally getting a bit of a handle on this job, and I love teaching only one class. I did a cool project with a local arts community center this quarter that I will replicate with a bigger class next quarter. I also bought some art:

It's only a screenprint -- I can't afford actual paintings -- and it will probably cost me more to frame than the print itself but I like it.

Next year I'll get to teach not only this class but another class about art as well, and that's a lot closer to my specialty than the courses I normally teach. I'm also in preliminary talks with another local gallery to do a project with both classes: the first class will mentor high school students collecting oral histories of local artists and the second class will create lesson plans based on them. It's all so exciting it makes me less depressed about that other class that I'm still battling to get approved.

My friend Sporks also clued me in to a potential job at her institution that is actually in my area of specialization (sort of). There are a lot of ifs, ands, and buts to that opportunity (would I beat out the million other people that would apply for it -- many of whom I went to school with, and if I did would they hire me at tenure, or at salary that would make it make sense to move to what is a more expensive area, and on and on...) but it is intriguing: graduate students, colleagues in my discipline, a campus that doesn't consider my discipline a "flawed, thinly camouflaged, truncated" version of another discipline, and well, Sporks!

But even applying for that is a long way off. In the meantime, I need to tackle those lists...

The Saga Continues

2007-01-29T20:45:00.000-08:00

I'm depressed.

It was bad enough when it was one grumpy, old anthropologist who was hellbent to stop my class from being offered, but it is the entire college of humanities and social sciences. There's only a day left for consultations to come in, and so far not only did that one faculty member (speaking on behalf of the anthropology faculty: all two of them) post, but then the college curriculum committee and now the geo/anthro department curriculum committee. The sad thing is that I know someone on the college curriculum committee who teaches folklore in english who always said her class was too different from mine for there to be a conflict, but the new committee letters say my class encroaches on that one and I don't think she'll say what she said before on record. And, I had a nice lunch with someone from the geo/anthro dept the other day and thought she was on my side, or at least helpfully neutral, but I doubt she'll break rank to say anything on record either. I can't really blame them -- they have to work with those people everyday.

It's all a territory battle for dollars and students during a time of reprioritization, and not really what they say it is about at all -- sort of like a stupid fight you have with a boyfriend or girlfriend -- but, like that, it is hard not to take personally.

I just want to crawl in bed, eat candy and sleep, but I am too busy and diabetic to boot.

You don't have to feel sorry for me -- clearly, I'm having no trouble in the self-pity department.

old, grumpy anthropologist part two

2007-01-23T06:50:00.000-08:00

Apparently the last letter, which was both emailed to various chairs, deans and senate committee chairs AND printed on paper and addressed to all faculty in my department was not enough. OGA had to post another, slightly different but no less insulting letter online on the official course consultation website. Here 'tis:

I Disagree that Interdisciplinary 321 Folklore, Folklife & Folk Art should be adopted as part of the University Curricullum.

Feedback:
This course is essentially a truncated version of ANT 102, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology; as such it infringes on an already existing offering of long standing. Its components are imbedded in the ANT 102 where the material can be given a holistic, comparative, and contextual perspective of the discipline To the extent that this is literally a lower division course proposal, it could not begin to qualify as a synthesis course regardless of its other flaws. In this period of Prioritization and Recovery it is a particularly insupportable submission.

The rationale for proposing the course actually includes, in fact, the completely invalid appeal to need for faculty development through its implementation. Courses are not proposed for the dubious benefit of individual faculty: such proposals do not enhance overall University curricula.

It is also a groundless argument that the course would be interdisciplinary merely because it comes from the Interdisciplinary Department -we teach students
this is a tautology- and certainly in this instance fallacious on the face of it. The fact that Interdisciplinary Department faculty would be diverted from their
approved offerings raises serious questions about the integrity of team teaching-the basis for styling itself interdisciplinary in the first place-not to mention the viability of the basic program.

Old, grumpy anthropologist

2007-01-15T19:27:00.000-08:00

There's a soon to retire anthro professor with a lot of pull who hates my department. You may think this is not a problem because of the "soon to retire" part, but apparently he actually postponed his retirement to fight this battle. When he couldn't dismantle our departmental status (acquired only a year or so ago -- before that we were a program) or challenge our right to propose upper division classes, he changed tactics and decided to challenge our course proposals individually. Mine is the second course on the list (321):

The anthropology faculty emphatically, strenuously, and unalterably opposed to the proposals put forward by Interdisciplinary Department faculty for Interdisciplinary 321 and 323 on the grounds of curricular infringement. They oppose all three proposals on the grounds that emanations from Interdisciplinary Department -whether identified with Department or Program-are not authorized by their charter nor by precedent in any other curriculum proposals.

Interdisciplinary 323 is the most egregious proposal of the three in terms of overlapping existing course offerings. Even a cursory comparison of the proposal with Anthropology 360-Magic, Shamanism, and Religion-shows a blatant, if faulty, knock-off. The attempt to mask the overlap/intrusion is transparent: "Domestic Religion" is nothing less than 'folk religion' or 'Little Tradition,' that has been researched, analyzed, published, and taught by generations of anthropologists. The entire content of the proposal is, in fact, subsumed in Anthropology 360, which unlike "Interdisciplinary 323,"provides the thorough contextual basis for studying a huge array of belief systems. Cosmetic labeling cannot disguise the redundancy at hand, and on the face of it this course, of itself, short changes the subject area

Interdisciplinary 321 is a close second to Interdisciplinary 323 in replicating already exisiting course offerings. This proposal is a narrowly defined course in cultural anthropology, with the term "folklife" being a synonym for "Culture." "Folklore," was the term first used for anthropology when the discipline was being founded in the 1870s by students of cultural systems [the term, broadly translated, meant 'the knowledge, or learning, of the people' (folk, from the German volk=people; lore, also from German, lernen=to learn)]. Therefore, the proposal for "Folklore, Folklife, and Folk Art " is "the learning of the people" (aka Culture), Culture, and The People's Art. Art, as a constituent of this proposal is, not incidentally, being pulled from the cultural matrix where it actually appears in the real world of integrated, interrelated, and interdependent sociocultural elements. In sum, it is a flawed, thinly camouflaged, truncated cultural anthropology introduction.

Finally, Interdisciplinary 340 "Encounters Between East and West" does violence to academic conceptions of what "East" and "West" might mean in contemporary usage. With overuse, and abuse, of East (Orient? Middle East? Far East?) it is equivocal whether this term has any worth in defining an academic offering. Likewise, "West" (Occident? Western Hemisphere? New World?) is equally vague. A cursory examination of the course outline shows, in fact, that the proposed offering is actually Islam v. Christianity. The equation of "civilization" with "Dar al-Islam " and/or "Christendom" is appallingly simplistic and misleading. As with the two other proposals, the redundancy of this flawed conception should not be further indulged.

I hate the notion of "little tradition" as much as I despise the notion of "high" and "low" art -- it is insulting, as is his overall tone, both to the people we study and to the scholars who study them. Where he really shoots himself in the foot though is where he says "Folklore was the term first used for anthropology when the discipline was being founded in the 1870s" -- he admits folklorists came first, but assumes we became anthropology. How can that be when there are still folklore PhD granting institutions? But apparently I can't rant back at him. My chair advises us to just be even-tempered and calmly note how are classes are similar or dissimilar to others.

It's awfully hard to be even-tempered when you're being insulted!

A decade of love and intermittent illness

2007-01-10T13:15:00.000-08:00

On January 4th, husband and I celebrated our tenth anniversary. Not our tenth anniversary of being husband and wife, but of meeting in person (yes, we were an early adopter of online courtship). That first weekend, I came down with stomach flu and husband-to-be spent a good deal of time holding my hair back as I vomited. He should have seen it as a sign of things to come: in the years since he has nursed me through a broken collarbone, an extended bout with gallstones, adult onset diabetes, and innumerable other ailments. Appropriately enough, on the day of our tenth (that's tin/aluminum for you traditional folks), I was battling the onset of my third cold in three weeks, so we didn't do much to celebrate. Inside though, I smiled alot. He's a patient man, my husband, and I love him.

Oh Come All Ye Momentarily Faithful

2006-12-12T07:08:00.000-08:00

Despite the fact that I'm not really Christian, I love nativities and the Christmas story. I say "not really" because when I'm looking at a nativity, I find myself momentarily Christian. I can believe anything, wholeheartedly, for about five minutes. I also, disturbingly I'm sure to those who are actually Christian, assign the story more pagan symbolism in my head (return of the sun and such).

In any case, as a result, I've been keeping my eyes open for some time for a nativity set. Some I've liked include handpainted tin ones from mexico, but I've nixed those because of cost (since I usually spy them in pricey gift shops rather than in the country of origin) and sharp edges -- the latter not the best choice with a toddler in the house. Another I like, that I also ruled out because of cost, and besides resist because it is so wildly popular with people whose taste I normally question (folks that also like precious moments figurines and never got over their love for hello kitty), is the Willow Tree set:

Someone gave me a statuette from this line (of a mother with child, though not THE mother with child) and I really like it, and can wave away my concerns about its popularity, and the fact that I suspect years from now it will look like a pet rock on my shelf, because it was a gift.

Another nativity that tickles me no end and is cheap to boot, but that I do not want because it does not give me the warm fuzzies that my momentary religiosity demands, is the S'mores Nativity (yes, you heard correctly, a nativity made of faux marshmallows, chocolate and graham crackers):

I suppose my momentary flashes of faith speaks to a real longing: even before motherhood but especially after, I've longed to belong to a community of faith. I think in terms of religious symbolism, I relate best to paganism, but there are downfalls to that: it's hard finding a tight community that isn't a considerable drive and, an even bigger concern, so many pagans are, well, flakes. It's a beautiful faith, but it can attract a pretty unstable bunch. And, while length of commute shouldn't really factor into choice of religious practice, part of the very longing is the desire to be a part of a real community centered around where I live. I've been tempted to check out the churches locally, but I don't think I could give up my essentially inclusive beliefs and I haven't heard of many Christian churches that welcome that. I think a Unitarian church might be the ideal solution, but there isn't one of those in my neighborhood either.

So I continue to look for the right nativity, hope that my inclusiveness won't confuse my daughter, and hope that as she grows we will find community and ways to speak to speak to any inner longings each of us may have.

A sleepless morning

2006-12-10T07:00:00.000-08:00

For some reason, I only seem to find the time to post or even read blogs when I can't sleep. This time it's morning. Granted, it's not that I lack sleep: I went to bed last night at 7:30. But somehow waking up at 5:30 (wow, ten hours of sleep!) seems too early. It does, however, seem like a good excuse for why my blog entries aren't as fluid or entertaining as those of my friends. Mine are bad hair and a bathrobe entries, both literally and figuratively.

So here's the general update, with news both good and bad:

I didn't get the NEH grant I applied for. Bleh. And while they encourage rejected applicants (I like to call them rejecticants) to apply again, they didn't indicate why I didn't rank sufficiently high, so I have no idea how to revise my application.
But on the upside, the day before I found out about not getting the NEH grant, I found out that my equity increase petition had been approved. What does this mean? It means I no longer make less than the people in my department hired three years after me! In fact, I make just a smidgen more! This news effectively tempered the blehness of the NEH news.

There's other stuff, but those are the major updates. The rest is just generally being distracted and busy with a million little things. And now, back to bed. Yes, I got ten hours of sleep, but it is Sunday and I'm allowed to get a little more.

Another sleepless post...

2006-11-02T00:48:00.000-08:00

It has been quite a while since I posted. You may have guessed it has something to do with that job I got that I promptly panicked about. It does indeed, though worry not, I'm not so panicked anymore. In fact, I like the job quite a lot. I'm not entirely confident that I'm quite up to being competitive if I were to be considered for non-Interim yet, but what I am doing I enjoy. Correct that: what I am doing has saved me. If I weren't doing this job, I'd be stuck entirely in my other department and that would mire me in bitterness ever-growing. Now the bitterness is just a mild funny taste in my mouth. Doesn't sound like a huge improvement, I know, but I'll take funny taste over bitter any day. Besides, in the new job I'm in charge of being all enthusiastic and optimistic about community service. It's a hard sell, lemme tell ya. For example, I offered a workshop at a student leadership conference the other day and had a whole 5 people show up. The workshop scheduled immediately after me in the same room, which had to do with the completely non-optimistic topic of stereotypes and racism, drew at least 30-40 people, so it wasn't as if students weren't going to workshops at all -- just not mine. Still, as hard a sell as it is, being in charge of being enthusiastic and optimistic is a heckuva job.

Panic

2006-09-10T12:36:00.000-07:00

I should begin by announcing that I got the job. A cause for celebration, no? Well yes, it was, for an exceedingly brief moment in time that was almost immediately followed by a descent into panic. What if I'm horrible? What if I can't handle it? I have to give a 7-8 minute presentation to new faculty tomorrow (something that has been scheduled for weeks that I would have given whether or not I got the job) and all of a sudden it has taken on the weight of the entire world.

Also, I just got an email from my new boss saying "we should plan an on-campus retreat for the Center as soon as possible. Could you try to find a day and time that I can attend?" An on-campus retreat? Does she mean 2 hours, 2 days, what? What will this retreat cover? Who will attend? Am I in charge???? ACK!!!

I am unable to handle success, clearly. Or happiness. Something is wrong with me.

Killing Time

2006-09-05T09:16:00.000-07:00

Today is the big day when I interview for the interim director position. I've learned not to overprep for interviews. Last time I went on a job interview, I had various people ask me hypothetical questions and it made me even more nervous than I already was. They asked questions I didn't have good answers for -- questions, perhaps, I should have been asked in the interview -- but when I got to the interview itself the questions they actually asked me were right off my resume. I didn't get the job, but I don't think it was because I answered questions wrong per se, simply that I wasn't the type of person they were looking for. Lesson learned: Be yourself. I should have learned that already anyway -- the last job I got (the one I'm in now) I was totally myself, all wacky credentials and wacky me (I gave a job talk on the history of the Ouija board for goshsakes) and they hired me.

So it's now 9:16 am (Scout, my copyeditor friend, must I always put a period after the a and after the m?)and my interview is at 11. I pondered going in to the office early to get some much needed tasks done but decided it would make me scattered. So, instead, I'm killing time writing this blog entry, hoping it will help me stay focused but not too focused, if that makes any sense.

I'm not entirely sure I'll be good at this job -- I'm not sure how well I'll handle an administrative post. I do know I like meetings, and I'm passionate about the community-oriented thrust of the position, but I'm not sure how good I'll be at selling the topic to faculty and students. I don't know if I have enough good ideas for initiatives to make it all happen. I suppose that's why it's good it is an interim position -- they can see if I'm up to the task and so can I. Still, I do hate to fail at anything.

- Baby crying -

Back. Nothing like nursing to give you a little perspective. At least I did one thing really right.

Total Take: 94.65

2006-09-02T15:28:00.000-07:00

Pomona has four yard sale dates a year. It's a great system. Everyone knows what the days are, so you don't have to advertise. People just drive around looking to see who has stuff out.

Last time we had a "free sale" wherein everything was, yes, free. It was a kick. Not only did we get rid of everything, including a dog-chewed hammock and a broken exercise machine, but it was fun to watch people's reactions to a yard full of free stuff.

This time though, I was feeling a bit poor, so we had a small free area (someone even took the broken plaster virgin of guadalupe) but put everything else up for sale. Here's some of what did get taken:

old working stereo components, $25
working 27" sony tv (old-style crt; I'm spoiled by the aesthetics of plasma), $25
three plaster columns, $6
old-school diaper pail, $1
cds that we've already transferred to mp3, 25 cents
emmy screener videos that ebay won't let you sell anymore, 25 cents
mouse-chewed linoleum block carving tools, free

Here's some of what didn't get taken:

mostly working washing machine, $10
various 35mm slide carousels and viewers, $1
diaper genie, $1
infant car seat, $5
various music cassettes, free
christmas decorations (including an awful red plush stocking with my sister's very unusual name on it in glitter), free

Of our total $94.65 take, we spent the following at our neighbors' sales:

Solid wood mid-century modern nightstand, $5
3 Chocolate chip cookies, 25 cents each
2 Cups of pink lemonade, 25 cents each

All in all it was a good day. Our neighbor Scott pulled out a boom box and we played some of the 25 cent cds that no one had taken. I sat in their tree swing with my daughter in my lap, gently swaying and spinning while 10,000 Maniacs Our Time in Eden played. Our neighborhood is alot like the Long Beach neighborhood I lived in while I was in college -- lots of leafy trees and craftsman houses -- and that's probably the last time I listened to 10,000 Maniacs with any regularity. I felt a bit of deja vu. But it's different with kids running around, including one of my own. I felt old. But in a good way, in a very good way.

Waiting

2006-08-30T18:42:00.000-07:00

So I've sent in my "letter of interest" and cv for the job on campus and waiting, waiting, waiting for a call to go in and talk to them. I'm holding off on sending the letter of interest to the position in a far-off land just in case I can say in it that I am currently "Interim Director of Related Field." I was also surfing the job listings in the Chronicle of Higher Education today, and pondering how much my job prospects would widen if I did get leadership experience in this area. At the moment, I'm mostly confined to looking at folklore jobs, and those are few and far between and hotly competitive to boot (the advantage being, of course, that if I had a folklore job I might get to actually teach folklore). I get a little too excited about job searches I think. It's all about the potential for leading a suddenly different life perhaps. Slangred talks about it in this post, and it is an inclination to daydream that I share -- though as I pointed out in a comment to her post, for me it mostly has to do with other careers.

Would I still look around and apply for other positions if I hadn't gotten so screwed on salary issues at my current post? Or if I felt as if other folks in my supposedly collaborative department were at all interested in what I had to contribute? I might here and there, but I doubt I would with quite the fervor I do now. When your university tells you straight up that the only way you'll ever make as much as faculty hired after you is to get an offer in writing from another university, they don't leave you much option but to apply elsewhere. From what I understand, even if I get the interim director position here it won't mean I'll make any more money than I am now (though apparently I would get a raise if I got the permanent directorship a couple years hence).

The other reason I want the job, however, is that I'm worn down by the grind of teaching three classes per quarter. It's hard to really give your students the attention they deserve at that pace. This job might mean I'm physically on campus more days of the week, but I'd only be teaching one class per quarter. I need a bit of variety and the ability to make that one class something spectacular.

As unsupported as I've felt here, I was surprised by how supportive my chair decided to be after initially telling me applying for this would be bad for me and bad for the department. I never know what to expect from her. But hell, I'm sure she never knows what to expect from me either.

and now, at 40

2006-08-19T14:04:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I turned 40. I just chatted briefly with Sporks on the phone and it occurred to me that I sound much more depressed about my life than I actually am. Perhaps I am that depressed and I just downed too much coffee to wash down the spicy Indian food and the resulting caffeine rush makes me feel that no, I'm not down on myself at all really. But I don't think I am (down on myself). I just complain alot. About (and here I go again):

that I have acne and age spots simultaneously (SUCH a significant symbol, no?)
that I never fulfilled my childhood ambitions to write the great American children's book
that my job doth suck

But, caffeinated truth be told, I'm in a pretty good place. I have:

As Sporks rightly pointed out, the perfect child. Perfect. Really. You oughtta see her.
The perfect husband. Also really.
Pretty fake nails. I got them for my birthday. And I think I can still be a hippy earth mama even though I have them.
A darned cute blue and pink tudor house in a historic district with brand new curtains I just made.

And I'm proud of myself:

I earned that house with job that doth suck. And I didn't, like my sister, clear out my mother's life savings and a nice chunk of my in-laws cash to do so.
Three generations have lived pretty successfully in aforementioned house. How unsual and cool is that?
Job that doth suck is still one that I never thought I would be chosen for (and to be perfectly honest, there are parts of it that doth not suck at all)
I didn't publish the children's book, but I did publish two funky little books on subjects you'd never think a publisher would be interested in

Besides which, as I craft yet another letter applying for a job that hopefully doth not suck, I'm starting to believe my own press: I'm pretty cool. I do really interesting, meaningful stuff. People should hire me.

Let's hope they do. And if they don't, I will focus more on parts of the job that doth not suck and keep doing interesting, meaningful stuff. Once in a while, I will write a letter about it and believe my own press.

Welcome to the Dumpy, Middle-Aged Woman Demographic...

2006-08-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

In but 9 days, I will be forty. Say it with me, FOUR-TEEEE. I am practicing. I need practice. It is hard to say something when you can scarcely believe it.

It shouldn't be so hard to believe. Today, for example, I went for the first time to Curves. I purchased a one month gift certificate at a silent auction in february in hopes of motivating myself to exercise and it has taken this long for the motivation to kick in. Curves, it should be said, is clearly for the dumpy, middle-aged woman demographic. Your average Curves goer is someone intimidated by those muscular, lithe forms in Bally's ads (Note the name: not Hardbodies, but Curves). Your average Curves goer, like me, was probably the last person picked for the team in grade school.

Here's how Curves works: in 30 minutes you complete a circuit of machines twice. There's no thinking involved. We dumpy, middle-aged women like this. You do each machine for about two minutes, not long enough to really hate it, until a soothing voice over a loudspeaker tells you to "Change stations now," at which point you move one station over going clockwise (unless, like today, it's "Wacky Wednesday," in which case you go counter-clockwise. Wacky!). When you've gone through twice, you're done.

Prior to starting the circuit for the first time, I was weighed, measured, and had my body fat ratio determined. I was asked what size dress I wore and what size dress I'd like to wear. I was also asked what I weighed when I was first married. I don't imagine these are the sorts of questions I'd be asked if I went to Gold's Gym. Nope, clearly they know their market, and it is I: the dumpy, middle-aged woman on the verge of FOUR-TEEE.

The truth is though, I've always been a dumpy, middle-aged woman, even when I was in my twenties and weighed 125 pounds (in my early twenties this was attributable to metabolism, in my late twenties to diet pills. Never was it attributable to actual healthy living). Yet I've always been intimidated by the muscled, lithe bodies in Bally's ads (or whatever they were called 15 years ago). That's the mentality you stay in when you're picked last for the team in grade school. Besides, I had dumpy middle-aged woman tastes:

I had the small dog before Paris Hilton made them a fashion accessory and the only people that had them were little old ladies.

I've always had a predilection for what my friend Sporks calls "woman folklorist of a certain age" attire (also known as "storyteller of a certain age" attire). If I wasn't wearing said garb, it was either because handwoven fabric and batiks were expensive or because I was changing who I was to get a man.

My fantasies have always included a Recreational Vehicle.

So now I'm merely actualizing what I've always been within. Self-actualization: isn't that what a fortieth birthday should be about?

The Biggest Difference

2006-08-01T19:32:00.000-07:00

If you know me IRL, you know that I didn't decide to have a child until very shortly before I became pregnant. For years it just wasn't a priority -- I wasn't even sure if I wanted one. Often, when I came across children, they seemed, well, noisy. I was never all that great at interacting with them either. Besides which, my mother and sister always emphasized how difficult it was, so whenever I saw peers with children I would look at them in awe, wondering how they possibly could juggle it all. Once, I asked a fellow professor how she managed a busy academic life with raising kids and I was stunned when she replied, "the children are the easy part." I didn't know what to think of that.

The funny thing is, she was right. Oh, sure, I've only been at this a year, but our life hasn't changed much. My husband and I never went out all that much anyways; we're pretty much homebodies. At most we get together with a few close friends for quiet dinner, and that we can still do with a little one (though now we notice if restaurants are well-stocked with high chairs). The biggest difference in our life that I notice?

I smile more.

Really. That's it -- but in a way it is huge. I still get stressed about work, but in between I find myself smiling. Not bad for someone chronically depressed since she was a child.

So here's the thing: if you're like me and aren't quite sure if having kids is for you but just the littlest part of you think it might be, don't wait. If I'd known it was this good I would have had her much sooner.

Of course, if I'd had her sooner, she wouldn't be her. And she is perfect.

6 am

2006-07-27T06:12:00.000-07:00

I've been up all night, and while it is not the reason why I haven't been able to sleep, this song has been running incessantly through my head:

My husband showed it to me a couple days ago. It's strangely catchy, but mostly it's hilarious: the narrative thread is that our hero is obsessed with a bot in a chatroom named Anna. "She gets rid of all the spammers" and "she can ban you, ban you so hard." He obsesses over her while riding a dune buggy (notably, not on a dune), while pedaling a boat (note that in Europe apparently you drive dune buggies American-style, while sitting on the left, but pedal boats European-style, while sitting on the right), and, of course, while deejaying at a nightclub. Eventually, in an eighties-esque twist (and in eighties-esque clothes), Anna turns out not to be a bot at all. Of course.

ninety inches

2006-07-22T10:51:00.000-07:00

You'd think after my last post I would hesitate to write about my mom again, and I do, believe me. But this explains so much about how I turned out the way I did:

Yesterday mom commented again how she had gained a lot of weight. Bear in mind that, at barely 5 feet tall, at her last doctor's appointment she was about 90 pounds.

"Mom," I told her, "you are as small now as you have ever been in your life."

"No, I'm as large as I've ever been," she protested.

She asked that I measure her waist. Thinking perhaps that actual numbers will knock some sense into her, I went to get a measuring tape. As I do, she mentions that on tv she heard them say that if your waist is bigger than 90" you should go to the doctor.

I measure her waist. It comes to 31".

She pauses. "Meaure my belly then." I comply. It is 32".

I then measure my own waist to give her some basis for comparison: 33". "Mom, my waist is bigger than your belly."

"That can't be," she says, "It doesn't look like your waist is bigger than my belly. Maybe because you are so tall." (I'm 5'7")

She's pretty silent after this. Somehow, she can't reconcile the image of the woman in her head with the actual numbers. But I'm sure by tomorrow she will find an explanation that will support her unshakable belief that she is overweight.

The Spa - Chair Report

2006-07-07T10:19:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit happier today because my department chair rearranged my schedule. It's still not my absolute top pick of classes, but it is much closer. I'm still a bit overwhelmed at the amount of work I have to do before school starts. Here's a summary:

Plan my fall classes, one of which I have not taught in two years so it will take some doing.
Plan a new class I will be teaching in Winter. If I don't do it now, I'll never have time in the fall. This will be a lot of work because it requires learning state standards and working with a new community partner for the service learning portion of the class. It also may require learning everything I can about Oaxacan art (which I know nothing about).
Reformulate another class for winter with another new community partner.
Rewrite an article.
Edit several other people's articles.
Co-write a conference paper.
Publicize one of my service learning projects in order to recruit participants in time for fall.
Organize materials previously collected for a community partner for distribution to same.
Compile and write my annual report for the tenure police.

All this by September 15! Eek!

So you can see why I needed a vacation. Now, by popular demand, the spa report:

Red Rock: Spa facilities are mostly wood and in keeping with the clean, modern lines of the rest of the resort. It's fairly small, but what it has that the rest don't are the sort of classes you might find at a destination spa rather than a casino spa (Yoga, meditation, hiking, etc. Some of the excursions are extra, but most of the classes are included). Another nice feature is the private outdoor pool area (not clothing optional) for spa patrons. Both in the hotel room and in the spa itself, Red Rock had the best soaps and lotions (Essentiel Elements, scented with real essential oils).
Signature/MGM Grand: Didn't partake of the spa here, which was the same for both hotels. Signature, however, had the best in-room bathtubs, which were enormous and had jets. The in-room bath products were by June Jacobs, and I loved the grapefruit shower gel (grapefruit is probably my favorite scent in the whole world). If I had opted to try the spa, this is the treatment I would have gotten:

TURKISH HAMAMM TRADITION
(100 Minutes - $280)
The treatment originates from the Turkish Hammam, which is a spa tradition dating back thousands of years, popular throughout the Mediterranean region. The ritual begins with a scrub made with Turkish coffee grinds and Brown Sugar blended with crushed Walnut Husks and fragrant Cinnamon and Cardamom. The body wrap that follows contains coffee extract, which will stimulate the tissues for cellulite reduction. Milk proteins, Aloe and Seaweed help nourish the skin. Enjoy a scalp massage during the body wrap before beginning a vigorous, deep pressure massage, performed with Orange or Lavender body butter.
THE hotel at Mandalay Bay: I'll give a more complete description on this one since I didn't cover this hotel in my last post. We had a two room suite at THE hotel, with a full bath and a washroom. The tub was enormous, though it didn't have jets. There was a 42" Plasma in the living room, a regular crt television (about 30"?) in the bedroom, and a small plasma in the bathroom (which was at an odd angle for in tub viewing). The living room also had a wet bar and the decor was really nice, but showing the first signs of wear. Their use of THE whatever could get tiresome. For example, the restaurant was called THE cafe, the shop was THE store, and the toilet paper had a sticker on it that said THE tp. In-room bath products were Bathe by Gilchrist Soames and smelled like Japanese Ramune candy(1). There were two spas I tried here, Bathhouse at THE hotel and the Spa at Mandalay. The Bathhouse spa was small and dark. Decorated mostly in slate, it was so dark and severe I felt like I was in a dystopian sci-fi fantasy (which, given my predilection for sci-fi, you'd think I'd like, but for spa atmosphere it didn't really do it for me). It was also showing definite signs of wear with white hardwater stains on the slate and grimy upholstery. They did, however, have the most comfy robes, which were knit like a sweater rather than the usual terrycloth. The Spa at Mandalay in contrast was a world apart: The spa was spacious to the point of being cavernous and the surroundings were regal. I felt like I was ancient Roman nobility (mind you, I've never been to Rome and I know next to nothing about Roman antiquity -- this is my Sci Fi channel fantasy of what it would be like if I were on the Stargate planet that emulated the Roman era). It also had the best free snacks: nuts, mini-muffins, fruit and juice.

So, to recap, the best overall resort experience was Red Rock, but the Spa at Mandalay Bay is worth a day trip on its own.

(1)Ramune is actually a soda, like 7-up. I think the name is just a phoneticization of "Lemonade" -- remember that in Japanese, "R" is pronounced like "L" (contrary to popular notion that it is the opposite). It comes in a really cool bottle where you pop a glass marble from the top down into the drink and have to avoid having the marble block the opening again while you drink it. The bath products, however, smelled not like the soda but the candy that is made to look and taste like the soda, if that makes any sense.

Can't Sleep

2006-07-04T00:46:00.000-07:00

I just got email from my boss telling me what my class choices are for fall. After much haggling in the past couple of weeks, she had promised to give me several options. The options she came up with? Two identical schedules with identical classes. The only difference is that for one of the time slots I have the choice between a (possibly) team taught section (if enrollment is high enough) or an honors section of the same class. Either way I'm teaching two sections of a class I didn't want to teach at all. It's no secret that I'm unhappy in my job. The tenure process is stressful, I'm often overworked, I'm paid less than people who were just hired, and the environment is oppressive. So I'm awake and unable to sleep stressing about stupid things like not getting the classes I want to teach, even though I'm on vacation in a lovely hotel.

A quick review:

Red Rock Station was just fabulous. The rooms are stylishly and lushly decorated (very modern with lots of clean lines and dark wood) with a 42" plasma in the main room and a smaller plasma above the tub in the bathroom. The pool area is amazing. You have to rent the cabanas and "cabeds" (which are cabanas in which the entire space is taken up by a huge bed) but the large, round beds with half moon shades over them are free. Cushy lounge chairs are half submerged in the pool so you can sun with your legs in the water. For a few photos of us enjoying the poolside splendor (and those round poolside beds), head to my daughter's site.

Signature at the MGM Grand is nice, but not as splendiferous as Red Rock. While everything is brand spanking new and tastefully decorated, something about the room says "hotel" while the rooms at the Red Rock felt like someone's hip apartment. There's a high definition plasma tv in the main room (though it appears to be about 20 or 25" compared to the massive one at Red Rock) and a small one in the bathroom (smaller than the bathroom tv at Red Rock). You can either go to the pool of the main hotel (which is crowded but has a lazy river) or one exclusive to Signature, but that one is really bland. Neither pool area compares remotely to RR. The plusses: A kitchenette in the room complete with fridge, stove, microwave, blender, toaster and coffeemaker. The bathtub is gigantic and has jets. For eats, the sandwiches at 'wichcraft are really good.

Tomorrow we head to THE Hotel at Mandalay Bay (Yes, they actually capitalize all the letters in "the"), report to follow.

But despite my luxe surroundings, I'm awake, looking at the coming year: the loads of work I have to complete this summer, the class load come fall, and already counting the weeks to next summer before this one is even out. It's easy for me to get caught up in resentment and bitterness toward my oppressors -- um, employers. I can't let the bitterness keep its hold on me. I have to learn to let go. Wish me luck.

Just in Case...

2006-06-28T12:18:00.000-07:00

I was helping mom pack and found a black turban. "Do you want this?" I asked skeptically. Her reply? "I want to keep it just in case I get cancer." I started laughing uncontrollably, to which she countered, "It would be a lot of trouble to go out and buy a hat." Can't argue with that!

No Tote

2006-06-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

The family and I are in San Diego at a conference. It's the "Civic Learning Institute" sponsored by the state university system I work for. The hotel is surprisingly nice for something sponsored by a state university, though they didn't provide a tote at registration, only a binder. A truly good conference provides one with a complimentary tote. My boss says at one conference she even got a mug. Oooh.

I like conferences and workshops. I'm a workshop whore, if truth be told. Taking workshops makes me feel productive and I'm very susceptible to getting charged up about whatever the topic is.

Today, during "team time," we talked about how to incorporate service-learning into our department. Service-learning, if you're unfamiliar with the term, involves doing a service project in the community that is specifically tied to course content. The two other people who are here from my department were set on what I consider a pretty tepid approach: one that was not only optional but conducted primarily through the student club rather than through the classes themselves. They also didn't see doing s-l in the first year of our course sequence, even though this whole conference is geared toward enriching a college student's "first-year experience." Some of their concerns were understandable:

* It is difficult to coordinate a service project during a ten week quarter and still maintain other course content
* The courses in our second year sequence are more directly tied to contemporary civic issues than our first year sequence, which deals primarily with ancient texts

But I think it's a great opportunity to help students tie themes from the ancient texts to contemporary experience, and studies show that s-l can be very powerful in a college student's first year -- and I knew how to make it work. I am, by the way, the only one in my department who has actually implemented a service learning project in any of our classes, so I do think I have some basis for being able to speak with a little bit of authority. I was a little nervous though, because I never, NEVER manage to convince anyone else of my ideas in my department -- never mind, for example, that I am the only one with professional training in the arts, they never listen to my ideas about the arts component of our program.

Still, this time, I think I almost managed. They started to shut me down and I nudged them back toward my idea, tried to explain how it could work. I think they may even be considering it, though I am afraid to hope. I've been shut down and disappointed too many times.

Stay tuned.

Mom

2006-06-11T21:08:00.000-07:00

My mother has been living with us for about five years now. It was supposed to be a year, until my sister was ready to take her, but a year became five and here we are. By the time my sister, who's never helped with her care and rarely does what she says she will, finally said she was ready to take her and my mother agreed, I cried.

Of course, given how much my mother regularly drives me crazy, it didn't take long for sadness to turn to relief. For example, there was the day my husband noticed my infant daughter smelled strongly of maple. "Did you give her pancakes?" he asked my mother. "Why?" she asked, "Did she throw up?" As if that was the only reason why giving my daughter pancakes soaked in aspartame-sweetened syrup would be a bad idea. Or there are the many times my mom, despite my repeated pleas not to, dangles a piece of jewelry or something else with small, removable parts in front of my daughter and I have to leap in to snatch it away before my daughter puts it in her mouth.

We squabble a lot. Sometimes it is about my daughter, but often it is about her diabetes and what she shouldn't eat. She thinks I am controlling and that I delight in making an old woman suffer (she doesn't remember all the days she's passed out, fallen to the ground, or been incoherent because she's sent her blood sugar out of whack). I think she is stubborn and selfish and doesn't love me.

Then she does something like this: I was napping on the couch today and woke up to find her gently putting a baby blanket over me. And I remember all the times she has done that over the years.

It's enough to get me through another five years. But I don't have five years; she leaves for Florida this fall.

My child will be safe from syrup and small parts, but my heart will be a little broken.

Happy New Year

2006-06-10T21:18:00.000-07:00

Today was graduation day and my fondest desire was that the academic year be reformed to coincide with the calendrical year. Don't get me wrong: I like the pomp of commencement, I just don't care for the circumstance. The circumstance being Pomona in June.

As I've mentioned before, it's hot here in Pomona, and if you've ever worn traditional graduation gear, you know what a miserable day it can be. In years past I've carried blue ice underneath the generous folds of my gown. One particularly vain year (the occasion of my own doctoral hooding) I even put antiperspirant on my face. This year, given it was unseasonably overcast and breezy in the morning, I did neither. I was sorry. By 4 o'clock as we processed across the university quad, the sun came merrily out of hiding. To make matters worse, while every other professor's seat had a bottle of chilled water beneath it, somehow I ended up in the row just behind the ones they'd allocated for us.

I never actually graduated from high school. In the middle of the eleventh grade I tested out and got an equivalency certificate. So my undergraduate graduation was the first actual commencement I participated in. I remember the first time I saw all the professors parading forth in their doctoral gowns and hoods and funny hats. My only thought was that I wanted to wear one of those outfits. Believe it or not, it was that thought that kept me going through six years of graduate school during moments when all other value the Ph.D. had for me had dissipated to nothing. I'd waited to wear it for that many years -- do you blame me for being vain enough on that day that I covered my face in antiperspirant? But be careful what you wish for: I'm now doomed to wear that ensemble annually during the hottest days of the year.

Still, you'd think that given my affection for the outfit that by now I'd have purchased the official blue velvet robes and plush, puffy hat of my alma mater instead of making do with the generic, wrinkled black polyester set the university of my employ rents for me each year. In actuality, I've never worn them. Even on the big day of my hooding I wore rented duds. There's the cost for one thing -- well over $500 even if I buy a knock-off and getting higher every year I wait. I'm also paranoid: what if I buy it and I don't get tenure? I'm too superstitious to risk jinxing it.

Of course, the way things are going, there's every chance that by the time I do get tenure I'll be so disgusted with the academic system I'll leave the profession and won't need them. Besides, now my daughter is in the picture: why spend upwards of $500 on an outfit for me when it could buy her a really amazing swing set or her own carnival bouncy?

But if my employer ever stops paying for the rental, I might make the jump. Until then, it's once a year in a wrinkled gown. And next time I won't forget the blue ice.

Snaza-2!

2006-05-29T22:14:00.000-07:00

School, thankfully, is almost over. One more week of classes, a week of intense grading, graduation, then summer. Ssssssssssummmmmmerrrrrrr.

Not that there's not a lot of work to do even during the summer, but it's not the same kind of grind. And, until then, more facepainting (or arm painting, as is the case most often) helps me keep my spirits up:

Snazaroooooooooooooo!

2006-05-22T18:05:00.000-07:00

We've established sufficiently I think, via previous posts, that life can be depressing. We've also established that I've had some of that "can be" of late. Actually, there's been even more of that "can be" than I've posted about herein. I won't bore you with the details. Instead, it is time to establish that life can also be Snazarooo!

Snazaroo, as far as I know, is not an adjective or a state of being, but it may as well be, for you see, I have a new hobby: Recall several posts ago that I volunteered for Literacy Day at our university Downtown Center. Recall how amazed I was that there was such a thing as professional face paints. I don't think I mentioned it, but that day I had more of a blast facepainting than I did storytelling. Something about the way it made the kids light up.

So, being that life "can be," I decided I needed a bit more of that "can also be," and I ordered myself Snazaroo's "Walk-Around Palette" of professional face paints:

Since they arrived a few days ago, every evening when I'm ready to call it a day after grading papers or doing class prep, I break out the palette and start painting my arm or my legs -- any body part within sufficient reach (which, on occasion, is my husband's):

It makes me surprisingly happy, and now I have something I can offer up when I volunteer at events or just pull out when kids are around.

Those that know me from years back will remember that there's one image that I used to doodle incessantly. Life can get you down, but down deep I'm still the same girl:

Imprisoned in my Ivory Tower

2006-05-09T22:33:00.000-07:00

I'm tired. There's a throbbing behind my eyes from crying. I don't feel like ranting about all the specifics, but suffice to say that academic life sometimes squeezes all the dignity out of you.

I think it is built into the system. Graduate school was sometimes rewarding but often wrenching. A friend who just finished her MSW thought that her graduate program's oppressive atmosphere was attributable to her program specifically and that if she went on to get a ph.d. elsewhere it might be different. I had to tell her that it was pretty much the same everywhere, that the nature of an academic career was having your soul crushed.

Oh, I talk big. If I actually told you the details of what happened yesterday, you'd roll your eyes and tell me it was a minor slight at worst, but these things accumulate like lead weights. Worst of all, the blow was dealt by one of the few people on campus I thought I could count on. It makes me feel very lonely.

I work on a beautiful campus. I have wonderful students. I have the coveted "tenure-track" job. I wish I could just put blinders on and not let this other stuff get to me.

I've never been very good at not letting things get to me.

doing a 180

2006-05-04T09:13:00.000-07:00

One of the committees I serve on here at my IHE is the academic senate general education subcommittee. I'm not on the actual senate, just a subcommittee of it. I ran for senate on kind of a whim, and lost, which was probably a good thing. I had eight votes to my competitor's twelve: voter turnout is clearly overwhelming among us highly educated types. Actually, it may have been nine to twelve or eight to thirteen, except that one voter apparently did not fill out their ballot correctly. Smart as whips, aren't we? But that's all beside the point (if, indeed, there is one).

This is the first year I've served on this committee. Each year, the University Tenure Police has requested that I perform university-level service, by which they mean not any university-level service, of which I had scads, but specifically joining the senate or a senate subcommittee. Serving the students of the university through organizing cross-cultural events apparently didn't count. So, each year I've complied by dutifully filling out the senate subcommittee volunteer form but had never actually been appointed to serve. It was sort of circular and senseless in the way that these things tend to be. Finally, this year however, I was CALLED TO SERVE and, actually, the General Education subcommittee suits me nicely. I enjoy the people and the discussions, and, from what one senate member on the subcommittee tells me, we've got a good thing going because being at some of the other subcommittee meetings is "like watching paint dry." It may all change to paint drying next year for all I know, because each academic year the composition of these committees can change drastically.

As a newbie, I'm still sussing out what exactly our role is. Here's how it works: faculty members come up with extended outlines for courses they would like to be approved to count for general education credit in a specific category. A subcommittee within our subcommittee agrees to look it over (about now is when my blog post starts to read like paint drying). They make suggestions that address issues ranging from minor typos in the outline to ways the assessment of the course could be clearer. After going back and forth with the writer of the proposal, they report back to the larger subcommitee. If there are no further problems, the larger subcommittee votes to send it onto the Academic Senate itself. If there are more significant problems, challenges regarding whether or not this is truly suitable as general education for example, the larger subcommittee discusses it some more and probably votes not to send it onto the Academic Senate. We're essentially one of several minor but unavoidable cogs the course and its author must muddle their way through before going onto the real decision makers.

A side note: Most people who don't work in academia think that the job of a professor is to teach. They think that we show up a couple days a week for a few hours at a time and blather on to students, hand their assignments off to teaching assistants to grade, and go home. They think we have it easy and rail against the evils of tenure. My students think this, even my mother thinks this. The truth is we are overworked. A colleague joked that she once figured out what her salary would be if she factored in all the hours she actually works and it came to 39 cents an hour. It's not far from the truth. In order to finally get the blessed status of tenure, junior faculty (after over a decade of college we are still considered "assistant" or "junior" somethings) are required to file a massive annual report which documents their accomplishments in three areas: teaching, research, and service. The requirements for each are far from clear, and so most of us end up working way too hard scrambling to make sure we have enough of each. And that thing about handing off assignments? In a state system we have no teaching assistants and a larger class load to boot.

So one of the issues that often makes us subcommittee of the subcommittee cogs rankle is when a proposed course tries to double count -- ie, it is a class that is clearly for majors only but is being proposed under their general education column (this is legal in some instances, which I have issue with as well, but I won't get into that). When challenged about this, a frequent response is that our Chancellor, that administrator from on high, has decreed that all departments must strive to have their degree programs completed in 180 units or less. As a result, one of the only ways to meet this mandate is to have courses moved to the general education column. It seems to me anyway that this is not a valid argument, but then I don't happen to think the Chancellor's mandate is a good one either.

There's a big push to get students in and out of college in less time. For example, students are offered the opportunity to make a "four year pledge." If they do so, they get perks like early registration appointments. The four year pledge strikes me as a bad idea. I have one very smart student who has even made a three year pledge. Sure, she'll probably graduate in three years, but what will she lose? Students at a Polytechnic are already more driven by career goals than learning goals. Where's the room to explore areas of knowledge that might inspire them to forge off into heretofore unpredicted directions? Where's the time to listen to the promptings of their soul?

I understand that these aren't privileged students at private liberal arts colleges who have the time and money to learn for learning's sake alone, but I speak as one of them: I was a working class student paying her own way through a state university, but if I hadn't taken five years to complete my b.a. I would have been all the poorer for it. Neither would I have ended up where I am now. Working class students with limited funds and exposure to ideas are exactly the population that need to take a little more time, as hard as it is, and bathe in a world of ideas, not do a 180 away from true education.

Still waters run shallow

2006-05-02T18:54:00.000-07:00

I aspire to great things. Well, decent things at least. I do hope to make a small difference in the world, to contribute to society, to inspire my students, and to instill worthy community-based values in my offspring. In the end, however, I find that I am also shallow.

Oh, I'm 39, soon to be 40, and I've become used to the fact that my dog gets more attention from passersby than I do. I like to think that I am adjusting well to age, that I embrace both the crone and willendorf goddess within (and inevitably, without).

Today, however, they were holding Associated Students elections on campus and some overworked poll monitor asked me to vote. Ah, it was probably that I was walking fast and their eyes were tired, but it pleased me, and ironically it simultaneously saddened me that it pleased me. How's that for conflicted?

So, I have some inner work to do, don't I?

it's a MISTAKE!

2006-05-02T13:19:00.000-07:00

You'll recall a couple of posts ago I reported that the University Tenure Police had requested that I "increase the scholarly level of activity." I spent the better part of a week worrying, complaining to peers, getting advice from my chair, from the union rep, and crafting my official two-page reply to that single phrase (it was originally four). Overkill, perhaps, but there are big things at stake. In the end, my mind was completely confused by the barrage of competing and sometimes conflicting advice until I didn't know what to do. After three or four wildly different drafts, in flew my chair like a superhero and rewrote the letter for me. That was fine with me -- I sent it off.

Today she pulled me aside and told me, unofficially, that she's heard from a member of the UTP committee that it was all a mistake. A MISTAKE. They will apparently revise the statement.

Of course, I shouldn't count my UTP statements before they hatch (like bug eggs, probably, rather than like chickens), but still I'm breathing a sigh of relief. And victory. A small, cheap, petty victory perhaps, but I'll take them where I can get them.

postscript: Upon reading this, my husband informed me that "In flew my chair" sounds like I threw an actual piece of furniture rather than what I meant, which was "the nice lady who serves as our department chairperson intervened." I'll leave it in there, however, because I like the image of a flying chair and liken it to an ottoman emperor as a ruling footstool...

the grind

2006-04-26T20:43:00.000-07:00

It saddens me a bit that I am so caught up in the bureaucratic grind of academic life. After all, here I am teaching at a university! How fabulous is that? Or at least it should be -- if I want to change the world (or at least a few hearts), where better to do it from? It should be a huge opportunity. But instead I slave over my reappointment and tenure file, grumble over the inequities of "market compression" on professor salaries, listen to my friend's horror stories about the University auditor accusing her of trying to make a profit off her students by sending them to an off campus copy shop to buy their course readers, slog through various meetings, and labor over other mundanities that take up much time and emotional energy.

The other day I stumbled on an ad in the latest issue of the Utne Reader -- a magazine I've loved since college (undergrad college, as a student, if it needs clarification, since it seems I've been in some sort of college my entire adult life) but for some reason haven't subscribed to in years. I'm not sure why. The magazine rarely disappoints and there are some issues so dear to me that I've held onto them since the late early 90s and still re-read when I need to be inspired or restored (All Shopped Out, Sept/Oct 1989 and Salons: Reviving Conversation, Mar/Apr 1991). Recently I got a cut-rate deal on it and started reading and subscribing anew. In the latest issue, there was an ad for a site called Zaadz. It was an intriguing ad: a bunch of photos of folks overlaid with the words "Zaadz: We're changing the world." Ever idealistic and hopeful, I bit.

Turns out it is kind of a MySpace clone but for the ever idealistic and hopeful crowd, the type of person who reads Utne I suppose. There's nothing extraordinary about the site itself: profiles, blogs, discussion boards -- that sort of thing. In fact, it could use quite a few other tools. Where are the chatrooms, for example? But people really pour their hearts out in their profiles. This isn't the teen-dense atmosphere of MySpace with its oppressively soundfile-laden profiles and adulatory altars to the cast of the O.C. These are people seeking nothing short of spiritual enlightenment or eco-revolution...or something. O.k., yes, there's your usual sprinkling of MLM-pushers and people who just want another person to add to their "friends" list, but overall the sincerity level seems pretty high. Misguided? Sure, some of them, sometimes, but aren't we all?

I need an injection of their idealism and hope, a reminder that I once wanted to change the world, and somewhere down deep still do.

There are still hints of it in my teaching -- my department at its idealistic heart is about changing students' lives and opening them up to a world of ideas beyond the career-track mentality of a Polytechnic. Service-learning, when I can get it to work and not fall down under the strain of the extra effort it requires, is an amazing pedagogy. The Downtown Arts Center I serve on the board of has great potential, even if I'm not fond of the fact that part of the effort requires organizing fundraisers for rich people.

I need to shake off the bureaucracy, reawaken the dream, give it a strong cuppa truckstop joe. And hashbowns. Every dream needs hashbrowns.

Tenure Schmenure

2006-04-25T18:23:00.000-07:00

So the University Tenure Police reviewed my yearly request for reappointment (I don't go up for actual tenure for another couple years) and in a succinct three sentence letter requested that in the next year I "increase the scholarly level of activity."

Why am I upset about this? Let's give you a little context:

During the year in question, I had a peer-reviewed article published, a book chapter, two encyclopedia entries forthcoming, another co-authored article under review, and a book translated into Polish (granted it's a small book and it wasn't academic in nature, but still, add that to the other stuff and it's not a bad little pile). At a research university, this might not be alot, but I teach nine courses a year.

A little more context: A colleague of mine only had a book review published. Her letter said nothing about increasing her "scholarly level of activity." Why? I asked someone "in the know" about that and their response was that while they couldn't give details about specific cases, they could speak about, ahem, hypothetical cases, and in this hypothetical case a book review was an improvement over the year before. Apparently, if an issue was raised the previous year and you improved, you couldn't raise it again. In my case, however, they hadn't raised it the previous year, so they could ask me to improve over an article, a chapter, two encyclopedia entries, and a book translated into Polish.

It all makes loads of sense.

Early Harvest

2006-04-22T20:10:00.000-07:00

My husband recently pointed out to me that I don't focus enough on what I have. A friend noted that I've been this way ever since she's known me -- always looking toward that next thing, whatever it may be. I suppose I already knew this about myself, but sometimes you just need gentle reminder.

I'm very goal-oriented. And goals, lauded though they may be, tend to undermine contentment. I thought perhaps I should set contentment itself as my next goal, but contentment, oddly enough, doesn't work too well that way. How would you know when you had gotten there? So instead of reaching longingly toward it, I'm going to focus instead on a few things that make me content and hope that I can just settle nicely into them like a comfy chair:

I work on a beautiful campus. It is surrounded by rolling green hills, farm land and horses. That's not quite right -- it is actually surrounded by fairly dense urban development, but because it is an Ag school and because the original land bequest to the state stipulated that the university must maintain the Arabian horse breeding program of the former landowner, even while urban sprawl has overtaken the surrounding area, the campus itself still seems rural. The heart of campus, where most of the offices and classrooms are, is thus surrounded by unspoiled orchards and grazing pastures. So I travel the freeway from my house over a hill into a little valley of loveliness. Near the dorms there is a duck pond and as I walk from my car to my office in springtime, I might come upon a family of ducklings off for a morning stroll with mom (yes, those are real photos of ducks on campus that I took just the other morning).

I have long weekends. Oh sure, I often have to work through them doing grading, class prep and the like, but it is work I get to do at home. I don't often have to go into campus on fridays or mondays, so after working a while in the morning I can take a break to go out into our backyard and pull weeds, plant vegetables and herbs, and feel our dog daisy lick the small of my back while I kneel down in the dirt wearing a silly garden hat and apron. There is something incomparably satisfying about rooting around in the dirt. In almost no other circumstance can I lose myself so completely, push out all my worries and preoccupations, and, afterward, feel both energized and tired at the same time.

I am a mammal. I lie in bed on my side like a contented sow with my little piglet nursing at my side as I stroke her soft wisps of hair. My husband curls up behind me. I sigh, and close my eyes.

Smells Like Storyteller Spirit

2006-04-09T14:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a good day. Long, but good.

In the morning I headed off for the university Downtown Arts Center at ten -- ten was when I was supposed to be there to check in but, well, I live half a mile from there and it seemed a bit of overkill that I needed to be there an hour before the event started at eleven. After all, all I needed to do was set up our table with bookmarks and rubberstamps in readiness for the rest of my group to arrive.

The event was a literacy fair for local families. I'm on the Arts Center board and I'm part of a local storytelling group, so I recruited the latter to attend the event, tell stories, do some facepainting and help kids make bookmarks. I'm part of a storytelling group, but really I don't tell many stories. Mostly I'm a booster. Storytellers are good people. I learned how much, again, yesterday.

I arrived at a couple minutes past ten -- that's how close I live -- and by the time I got there two of the storytellers had not only arrived but had already set up our area: The storyteller who said she'd bring facepainting supplies had set up a table draped with a colorful cloth and surrounded by half a dozen kid's stools. Laid out on the table were dozens of colors of what could only be described as professional-grade face paints (who knew there was such a thing?). Draped on the theater door was a banner she'd made that said "Once Upon A Time" in appliqued script. In the theater itself were an assortment of props: rainsticks, frame drums, dragons large and small, finger puppet princesses and life-size dancing snakes. The other storyeller had decorated our other table with a two and a half foot bookworm reading atop a stack of wooden books. On the floor, the frog prince was perched on a velvet pillow. As I arrived, the storyteller and her husband were rolling in a massive chest she'd created that was shaped like a book. It was big enough for an adult or a couple of children to comfortably lounge on. A bit later our other two storytellers arrived with yarn for bookmark tassels and a couple dozen tomato plants from their garden in little pots (each child would receive one upon saying the 'magic' word when he told a story about a farmer).

Storytelling draws a different sort of artist, and they're not always understood. In the morning as we set up, the local school district set up a table nearby. One of the storytellers, known for her over-the-top style and getting amped up for the event, waved both her hands at them and said "Hi-eeeeee!" in a high-pitched squeal. The teachers sort of gave her a blank stare. I laughed and told her, "Storytellers scare normal adults."

They all worked, hard, all day for not a penny in return. They even had to buy their own lunch (the center provided snacks, but face-paintin' and storytellin' can make folks pow'rful hungry).

Afterward, another one of the storytellers told me that during one of the performances she brought a couple of kids up to sit on that big book and tell their own stories. "I have a story," said one child, "but it's sad." "Well," the storyteller responded, "in life there are happy stories and sad stories." Thus encouraged, the child went on to tell about how his cousin had killed his other cousin and was now in prison. "I told him I was sorry he had to go through that," the storyteller told me, "I hope I handled that alright." I assured her she handled it fine, and told her that while it was disheartening to hear a child tell a story like that, it did tell us that the event was reaching the kind of audience we had hoped it would -- ie, not privileged suburban kids with lots of cultural resources already at their disposal.

I got home a little after 4pm and had a couple hours to rest and recharge before going out for the evening with my husband. We went to see Ladysmith Black Mambazo, one of the official arts events my department sends our students to each quarter. They were amazing. They kicked as high as Rockettes, but their dancing was pleasing in a way rote synchronization is not: they danced in unison, of a sort, but each varied the movements to greater and lesser degrees, adding flourishes that reflected their individual personalities. Something about the deep rhythmic resonance of their voices, I told Sly, made me feel like I was outside listening to the songs of frogs croaking and crickets chirping on a hot summer night, the hummmmm hummmm hummmmmm of insects in the air.

Greener Grass

2006-04-04T08:38:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning thinking about North Carolina -- not the state, the institution, though part of the appeal of the institution is certainly the state with its cultural riches, natural beauty, and oh, those real estate prices.

A side note: I'm mildly obsessed with real estate and always have been. For years, my number one goal, which always seemed impossible, was to own a house. Now I have one, and it's really quite lovely, but being in California you can't help but imagine how your standard of living could increase if you cashed out and bought a house in some other locale with the profits. Recently, one of my favorite houses in the neighborhood went up for sale:

It's hard to see in the photo, but it is a two story spanish style with balcony off the second floor bedroom in front and a deck off the second floor in the back. It has a pool, which I'd actually prefer it didn't because yard in back suits our purposes more with a dog, but it also has a lovely, large front yard (a corner lot) with a fountain, lavender bushes and hedges. How lovely to drink coffee in the morning on that balcony! It's also a good 150,000 more than our house and our house is all we can afford.

But I digress.

But the most appealling thing about North Carolina was that the job I didn't get there was in my (rarified) discipline in my (even more rarified) specialty. Currently I teach in a program where, as my earlier post notes, I often teach outside the bounds of my subject area, and I also usually only teach first and second year students. This would have been undergraduate and graduate students. Mine is a wonderful job in many respects, don't get me wrong. We do a lot of fairly innovative things, my students are often wonderful, and for someone with said rarified degree (read: largely unwanted by the bulk of academia), it is not only a job but the coveted tenure-track job. It is hard to get one of those even with a more standard degree. Sometimes I think I need to slap myself for not being more grateful.

Perhaps I'm thinking about that North Carolina job again because this quarter I am teaching a variable subject upper division seminar in a sister department -- in other words, I get to teach whatever I want in this class and no surprise here: I'm teaching what I love and what I was trained to do. It's exciting. Not only that, for reasons I'll not go into here (for it would require another digression) I have a course release this quarter which means I'm teaching two classes instead of my usual three. This is much more what the load would be like if I were at a research university. Two classes are perfect -- it's enough time to really focus on class prep and on my students without getting burned out and frazzled. I even have time, on occasion, to think of other things (note: blogging).

But it's not only folks at research universities I'm jealous of, it's folks in said sister department. The normal load for my friends in that department is two instead of three every quarter. Why? Because they supposedly have a major which requires a lot of advising so they are allowed a course release every quarter. In truth, while they have students at their door more often than I, they're not required to be in their office any more hours a week than I am and I would love to have more students at my door. The poor students who do come to me get so much attention they don't know what to do with themselves.

Sigh. So that's my lot. Not a bad one by all counts, and, this morning anyway, riddled with jealousy. But I do have my class to look forward today, so not all is bad.

Folklore rules.

What to do when you're in hell.

2006-04-03T15:58:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Dante's Inferno for the fourth time in as many years. That's how long I've been teaching at my IHE. It's far from my choice of instructional materials: In my department, the curriculum is 60% collaborative and I'm required to teach from the same major texts for certain courses and for this one, they're Inferno and Lear. I don't mind Lear so much even though Shakespeare's not really my thing: Lear has its roots in proto-Cinderella, so there's lots for a folklorist to play with. Yes, there's tons-o-myth in Inferno, but c'mon, hell -- lots and lots of hell.

My worst teaching comes when I'm just trying to fill the 110 minute class period. Our departmental modus operandi is discussion/activity-based teaching, so it means I have to find some activity that will fill that void rather than lecture. Sometimes, I'll admit, it's an activity that has filling time as its primary pedagogical underpinning rather than some cleverly worked lesson. Sometimes I'm better than that -- at least I try to be. It can be difficult though when the courses you teach aren't really in your area of expertise (or interest). I did a little better with Dante this time I think.

I have my students fill out little info cards at the beginning of each quarter: contact info, major, that sort of thing. For no reason I can really think of, this quarter I also had them put down (on an index card mind you) their "fondest hopes and dreams." It was a whim more than anything, but serendipitously it dovetailed nicely into Inferno. It occurred to me as I was re-reading Cantos 1 - 6 that each obstacle the Pilgrim faced or punishment he witnessed was something keeping him from his fondest hopes and dreams, namely, God and heaven. Accordingly, I gave the students the following questions to anwer:

A Personal Inferno:

Recall the hopes and dreams you put on your index card. These will be the destination you seek as a modern-day Dante the Pilgrim.

Canto One:

If the Leopard, the Lion and the Wolf are three sins keeping the Pilgrim from his goal, what weaknesses would your Leopard, Lion and Wolf represent?

If Virgil is Dante’s guide because he is also a poet that Dante looks up to, his role model, who would be your guide through the hell you must survive in order to reach your dream?

Canto Two:

Dante feels unworthy of taking on this journey. What makes you feel unworthy of achieving your dream? Why are you worthy?

Canto Three:

The sinners in Canto Three are damned because they failed to take action. What action that could take you closer to your dream have you failed to take? What punishment would be appropriate for this sin?

Canto Four:

The people in Limbo are those who were good, even extraordinary, people who had one downfall: they did not know the true God. What well-intentioned people would populate your limbo and what would be the characteristic that kept them from attaining the dream you hold?

Canto Five:

The sinners of this circle of hell were lustful in life. Uncontrolled passions of the flesh are seen as incompatible with spiritual growth. What passion is incompatible with your dream? What punishment would be appropriate for this sin in your version of Canto Five?

Canto Six:

The sinners in Canto Six are the gluttons. Appropriately, this section of hell is guarded by a dog with three heads (and thus three mouths). What sort of appetite would keep you from your goal? Who would guard those guilty of this appetite? What would the appropriate punishment be?

After they'd individually answered these questions, they got into small groups to share their answers. Each group then chose one version to dramatize. They'll come back next class to share their skits. We'll see how it goes.

The class after that I decided to show them L'Inferno: a 1911 Italian silent film version with new music by Tangerine Dream. I'm going to ask them to bring in blankets and pillows so we can disrupt the "classroomness" of the environment and really get into watching the film. I'll bring cupcakes and popcorn to complete the movie night feeling. My husband Sly thinks the movie stinks and can't believe I'm making them sit through it. I'll admit it started to veer dangerously close to the "filling time" un-pedagogy, but I think it will work. I'll start with the concept that art begets art: Just as Dante drew inspiration from classical mythology, the filmmakers began with Dante and the musicians began with the film. They'll be asked to evaluate the film and the music as two separate artistic visions of Inferno. I'll follow it up with a clip from the South Park movie wherein Kenny goes to hell. Then for the subsequent class I'll ask them to write a creative interpretation of Inferno and to bring in/create images and music that they would use to represent hell.

Frankly though, I think the pillows, blankets, popcorn and cupcakes are just as important and aren't just filling time: Sometimes I think an important part of what I teach them is that education is engaging and fun, and that it's part of my job to create an environment where they enjoy each other's company rather than sitting numbly in chairs with walls of life and responsibility separating them from each other.

Sometimes I do just fill time, but cupcakes? That's something else entirely.

Staying out of trouble.

2006-03-31T20:29:00.000-08:00

So here I am, journalling online again. Got me into trouble before -- we won't get into that. So why am I doing this? I suppose I miss the dialogue. Some friends started blogging recently, and it's nice to hear their thoughts. Sometimes I want to talk back.

Perhaps I'm also hoping it'll break my terminal writer's block, or at least loosen up the internal editor that silences me. I've been thinking about that today -- I'm working on a grant application that would allow me, if I got the grant, to start on a research project I've been thinking about for a while now. It's a neat research project, but it also makes me wonder why I want to start research afresh when there's another book I probably should have written by now. The research is all piled up, there's even lots of writing done (that my internal editor thinks is crap, btw), and I'm even probably one of the only ones, if not the only one, that has any significant research on this particular topic. Even the new topic has already been done by others, if in different ways. But the old topic, it is mostly just me I think, and it probably won't always be.

So I'm going to try with this journal (I'm so old school when it comes to online journalling that I still call it that) not to edit myself too much. I used to fuss with the old one alot. My internal editor tells me it will be less interesting, certainly less eloquent. I think I will fire her.