bullets

• I have a deadline that I am currently not meeting.
• I would like to meet it, but I just don't quite know enough yet.
• Blogging will not, at this point, help that.
• The ice on the cherry tree limbs this morning, in the fog, glowed almost pinky-white--a harbinger of the blossoms that will be there soon.
• I have to believe in that "soon."
• I am really tired of winter, and it's not even February yet.
• I'm not sure Twitter is helping me become more concise.
• I'm not sure I'm giving it a chance.
• I forgot to mention yesterday that I blogged at Inside Higher Ed, as I usually do on Tuesdays.
• Here it is.
• I participated today in a panel on "balancing teaching and scholarship."
• I have rarely felt like such a fraud in public.
• I take comfort in knowing that my co-panelists did, too.
• Though I of course am sure they are not frauds.
  

The Week that Was

It's been a busy week. As June comes to an end camps kick into gear, plans for our summer trip take on more urgency, and there are various finishing-up things to do after the end of the academic year. Here are a few highlights:

• I turned in my annual report. Early!
• I met with Claudia for coffee and discovered that she grew up in my neighborhood. I knew Richmond was a small town, but I hadn't quite realized how small.
• I re-knit something I'd knit in March. It is oddly satisfying to rip out an entire garment (OK, just a stole, but still) and re-knit it so that it actually works. I did some more ripping out (of something as yet unfinished) yesterday, and that was satisfying, too. I realize I like the process of knitting enough that ripping and re-knitting is not so bad.
• There's a lesson here, I think.
  
• I finished a long article on fantasy literature and education that's been percolating for a while, and got friends to read it on a ridiculously tight deadline. Good friends. One more pass through the revision mill and I can send it out.
• Friday night I got to go to a free "art-tasting" at the Visual Arts Center and made a fabulous glass pendant. Now I want to buy a soldering iron so I can make more!
• The four of us went to see Wall*E yesterday--what a sweet movie!
  
• Went to a "Unite for Change" Obama party last night and was blown away by the engaged, thoughtful, articulate group of recent high school grads there. They, almost as much as the candidate, give me hope about this election.
• Heard the rough cut of some of the music we recorded earlier this month; now I can't wait for the rest of it!
  

teaching and tae kwon do

At first I didn’t mention it at work. I think I felt a little silly about it: a middle-aged woman — an English professor! — taking tae kwon do. But then one day a colleague asked about a small bruise on my arm and, unthinking, I told him I’d blocked a kick with my forearm. It hadn’t been a smart move in tae kwon do, but as I told him about it, I could see the respect in his eyes. I began to think I should bring in my broken boards, leave them in the office, maybe mention how easily my palm had just gone through the wood. It couldn’t hurt.

Read the rest here..

(cross posted at Lessons from the Tortoise)

the news of the day...

...is that I just sent back my contract for my contribution to Mama, Ph.D.: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life. Go check out the list of fabulous contributors, the table of contents, and the editors' blog about the book. I'm really excited to be in this essay collection--not least because one of the editors is my sister Caroline. So cool!

Things I've Learned Lately

• When I began the 48-Hour Book Challenge I piled up the recent library books on the stairs and just pulled volumes off as they appealed. One that I had also picked up, not for the challenge, was Elizabeth Zimmerman's Knitting without Tears. It's one of those books that you hear about all the time. It's not one of the pretty new knitting books with lots of pictures; it's all just practical advice. And I learned that not only did I learn to knit wrong, I purled wrong as well. This sort of makes sense, as she explains it. Somehow my "German" needle-holding technique led to the wrong-way purl, which makes the wrong-way knit almost necessary. So now I know how to purl the right way, it makes knitting the right way easier. Sometimes the secondary technique is actually the one that matters.
• I'm not good at following the rules right now. So while I did indeed start the notebook described here, I have not yet used it in the way she describes.
  
• I think the not-following-rules thing is a function of age. It began just as I entered my forties. I remember one morning standing up to Nick's preschool teacher, who didn't like how long it took us to say good-bye in the mornings ("Y'all linger," she said disapprovingly). I ignored her, figuring I could take as long to say good-bye to my baby as I --and he-- wanted. That didn't bother him, but he did get upset with me when I didn't cross the street at the crosswalk and backtalked the security guard who gave me a hard time about it. I was ok with Nick wanting to follow the rules--that's appropriate for a four-year-old, after all. But I sure wasn't going to let a guy in a uniform tell me I didn't know how to cross an empty street, holding my son's hand.
  
• The thing is, I was like Nick long into my adulthood. Rules matter. I like rules: they tell you what's expected, they simplify decision-making, they provide order and continuity in what can be a disordered world.
  
• But maybe what I really like--and certainly what Nick liked at that age, and still does--is ritual. The calming certainty that things will be done the same way as before. Nick's good-bye ritual at age three was a fascinating thing to behold (and worth its own essay, another time); one of my favorite things about it was that it seemed such a child-sized reflection of my own need for order and consistency.
  
• I've become one of those people who says "when I was your age" or "when I was younger" even "at my age." This, too, is obviously a function of age (middle).
  
• When I was younger order mattered to me more. I need to think about this for a while, but I'm seeing the signs everywhere--not just in petty defiance of preschool functionaries, or the refusal to follow directions in a writing book. In unpaid bills and missed deadlines (not so good); in messy creative re-thinkings of previous projects (maybe ok).
• At a party the other evening I found myself saying "at my age" and being called on it. Turns out no one there believed I was over forty (or at least they were really really flattering me, for no particular reason). I think I might start telling people I'm fifty just to hear the flattery. (Yes, I'm aware of how this one might backfire. So probably not.)
  

MotherTalk Blog Book Tour: Writing Motherhood

I began reading Writing Motherhood on Monday evening, and Tuesday morning I went out and bought the notebook I'd been eying for months. I had a little notebook in my purse already, but it's littered with to-do-lists, dimensions of the refrigerator we replaced last fall, lists of books to read, knitting patterns, the model numbers for the bionicles Nick most wanted for Christmas—well, you get the idea. It is, in fact, a mother's notebook par excellence. But it's—mostly—missing what I most want to have in it: my writing, daily reflections, ideas for further exploration. Inspired by my reading of Lisa Garrigues' new book, then, I got a bigger one, one that can hold all I'm already carrying around and my own words as well.

The Mother's Notebook is only one of the helpful ideas in Garrigues' new book, but it's probably the central one, the one on which everything else depends. Once you get the Mother's Notebook going, you've got invitations to write, inspirations from other writers, reminders that you're not alone, and suggestions for ways to share your writing. It's almost a parent-writing class in volume form: just add students and stir. That's not surprising, as it comes out of Garrigues' experience as a teacher and workshop leader. It gives the book a useful structure: one really could just work through it, preferably with a group, and jumpstart a writing practice that had gone stale, or get one off the ground for the first time. But it can also be a useful reference tool, a resource like other writing books, to dip into for inspiration and useful reminders. The writing prompts Garrigues crafts—she calls them "invitations," which makes them sound, well, more inviting than "prompts"—are mostly linked to motherhood, but little in the book would be foreign to any writer, especially any writer who does something else, whether paid or unpaid work. (And, really, how many writers don't do "something else"?) What motherhood adds to the writing process, then, in addition to great material, is a sense of balance: other writing books may assume all you do, or all you want to do, is write, but Garrigues knows you've already got a lot on your plate. Fifteen minutes a day is all she asks, for starters; then she adds play-dates and time-outs as well as regular writing group meetings, making it all seem manageable and even fun for a time-pressed parent.

Here's what I wrote in my notebook:

Tuesday morning, conversation w/Nick, ruling out causes for his stomach ache. I ask if he's pooped lately. Yes—so no constipation, I say. "If you got constipated, would you throw up, or would you just explode?" he asks. Much hilarity.

Ah, potty humor. It never loses its appeal. Maybe that's not the most interesting conversation we've ever had—indeed, I know it isn't. But it is representative of our conversations lately—equal parts true curiosity and nine-year-old gross-out. And I know I wouldn't remember it if I didn't write it down.

Will it ever make it out of the Mother Notebook? Well, it just did, didn't it? But no, I doubt I'll use it in a story or essay. Garrigues reminds us, though, that writing begets writing, and that paying attention is one of the skills both writers and parents need to cultivate. I may not need to remember our conversation about constipation, but I do need to listen, and writing things down helps me do that.

Now that I've finished reading the book I want to go back and reflect on it as well, pay attention to the parts I read through quickly, make a plan for how best to use it. This book came to me at a great time: as summer begins I'm thinking already of how to jumpstart my writing, and I have several projects I plan to work on through the next academic year. Inspired by Garrigues, I'm thinking of trying to get a small local writing group going (leave me a comment if you're in central VA and think that might be fun), and I'm making a resolution to write in my notebook every day.

Check out the conversation with Lisa Garrigues here, and the other posts in the blog book tour here.

on the X-chromosome...

I think Natalie Angier had a lot of fun with this article. Just check out this one paragraph:

Yet the X chromosome does much more than help specify an animal’s reproductive plumbing. As scientists who study the chromosome lately have learned, the X is a rich repository of genes vital to brain development and could hold the key to the evolution of our particularly corrugated cortex. Moreover, the X chromosome behaves unlike any of the other chromosomes of the body — unlike little big-man Y, certainly, but also unlike our 22 other pairs of chromosomes, the self-satisfied autosomes that constitute the rest of our genome, of the complete DNA kit packed into every cell that we carry. It is a supple, switchbacking, multitasking gumby doll patch of the genome; and the closer you look, the more Cirque du Soleil it appears.

Little big-man? Gumby doll? Cirque du Soleil? What's going on inside me, anyway?

A lot, it would appear. Fun piece.

MotherTalk: Fearless Friday

Today is MotherTalk's Fearless Friday, a blog bonanza in recognition of Arianna Huffington's book, Becoming Fearless. I've been thinking all week about fearlessness, trying to come up with a good story of when I stepped out of my comfort zone, took a risk, challenged my usual fears.

I'm a pretty timid person, it turns out.

That is, I'm physically pretty timid. I didn't learn to ride a bike 'til I was 12, never really got into sports, still feel awkward on a dance floor. I heard a colleague speak the other day about her love of extreme sports and I gaped open-mouthed at her as she spoke. Launch myself down a mountain with thin pieces of wood (fiberglass? plastic?) strapped to my feet? Jump off a mountain, or out of a plane? Forget it.

It's not really that I fear pain--though I do, I think, have a healthy instinct for self-preservation. It's more about looking foolish, about humiliation, about failure. One way or another I think the fear of failure has motivated me more often than I like to admit in my lifetime. One can achieve a certain measure of success by fearing failure--I do tend to do the things I do rather well. But the older I get the more I realize that without risk is no true success. I urge my students to try harder things; I ask for edgy thesis statements, even if they're wrong, rather than the safe ones they all (we all) aim for at first. I ask for experimentation rather than regurgitation, exploration rather than recapitulation. And I am trying, increasingly, to practice what I preach.

I think I talked about this earlier this year, when I got my green belt. But it really goes back much further. Being a parent, for me, is all about living with fear. There are the productive fears of birth defects and accidents that have us complying with our prenatal care routines and installing car seats. These don't, we know, guarantee "success," but they help us cope. Then there are the unproductive fears--of strangers, of random violence, of the unspeakable--that we simply can't allow to control us, though events occasionally bring them to the fore. We can, of course, convert those unproductive fears to something useful by taking on a cause, by urging change. I watch Elizabeth Edwards, who has faced one of my greatest fears--the loss of a child--and now can gracefully face her own mortality, seemingly fearlessly, at least in part because she has something to work for. And my own efforts at fearlessness seem timid and small in comparison, but they're what I've got.

Becoming a parent is teaching me fearlessness. I will fail, I do fail. We all do. But it's in our hard-earned failures, not our easy successes, that we grow.

what to say?

It's been a surreal few days. Sunday a neighbor reported on a mugging in the neighborhood--no one was hurt, but the mugger waved a gun and that's always scary. Monday I came in to the office and one of the women who works in my building told me a dreadful story of a pickup truck driver run amuk. Twice the guy nearly killed her, speeding and running red lights. Looks like he might have killed someone else instead. Then of course the news came from VA Tech. Because I live in a cave, I didn't hear until mid-afternoon, when a friend walked in to my office and said, "So, we're not ever sending our kids to college, right?" But here we are on a college campus, a campus not that far from Blacksburg, a campus --like Tech's-- noted for its safety, its security.

We are not safe. We mostly don't think about how not safe we are, because if we did we'd be paralyzed. So we do what we need to in order to protect ourselves --get out of the way of the speeding truck, choose the lighted streets and a couple of companions when we're walking home, park under a streetlight, lock the doors-- and then we try to forget why we're doing it. Every now and then we are reminded.

In Blacksburg everyone's been reminded, just as in Baghdad, Darfur, and Chad, everyone's been reminded. Just as we were reminded in 2001, and again on New Year's day 2006. It's not a safe world. But if we act on fear, if we allow it to take over, we allow ourselves to be diminished. The stories that I have most wanted to read from Iraq and Darfur have been about ordinary people living their lives --NPR did a lovely one by an Iraqi translator whose wife was pregnant, for example (sorry, can't find a link). They live their lives.

Jo(e)'s candles help. The student reporters at VA Tech help. Teaching, and talking, and writing, help.

Thinking Bloggers

(cross-posted at the other blog)

One of my favorite bloggers has awarded me a Thinking Blogger award--thanks, Caroline!

So now I get to pass it on. And there are lots of blogs that make me think, but many of them have already participated (some twice!). So here are some I haven't seen yet:

• Becca's posts at Not Quite Sure are about mothering, baking, reading, the Red Sox, music, and whatever else she feels like, but they all make me think.
• Tricia, of The Miss Rumphius Effect, focuses mostly on children's literature and teaching future teachers. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of books useful in classrooms, and always thinks about interesting things to do with them.
• Julius Lester's Commonplace Book is a wonderful blog, filled with his original photos, his thoughts about reading, writing, and living, and--right now--a lot of terrific guest posts about books changing lives. I am still working on my response to that one.
• I read the Yarn Harlot whenever she updates, and it's never often enough. Even if you don't knit, you'll love Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's way with words (and, occasionally, with Mr. Washie. Check it out.)
• Writing as Jo(e) has great pictures and wonderful stories about teaching and raising kids.
  

(And if I can add a nepotistic sixth, I'll suggest you check out Dad's blog, too! Beowulf, writing, gardening, libraries, words, he's got it all.)

So, now, here are the rules to keep this thing going:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn't fit your blog).

Hip Mamas

I'm afraid I'm too old to be a Hip Mama, but my little sister (!) isn't: check her out here, with her essay "The Cookie." (mmm, cookies!)

(Note: the Hip Mama site can be a little slow; be patient!)