Life has been moving at such a brisk pace, I’ve hardly had time to reflect lately. But I just couldn’t let April slip by without a nod to just how good I’m feeling these days. It hardly seems real to me that it was just two years ago that I had the injury that started with this, then developed into this, and then turned into six months of trauma that ended in surgery. I still have the shiny pink seam on my lower left leg as a reminder, but the muscle tissue has filled in nicely since then.
At the moment I don’t have anything terribly profound to say in addition to marking the time that’s passing. Except that I still don’t take it for granted. Everyday I’m grateful for my leg and for my healthy body that just keeps getting stronger and stronger.
These roses are blooming up a storm in my garden right now. Such beauty!
I encountered “The Raised Fist: A Cyborgian Tale” while attending the virtual HASTAC conference this morning. Embedded in the video were the words of Allison J. Harrington, speaking at the 1999 Berkeley Ethnic Studies Strike:
This poem written on my body will not stop.
You cannot arrest this poem without it growing bolder.
I wanted to give you a poem, but I offer my body instead.
Her words made me think about the poems written on my own body. I have no actual words on my body, but the scars of my life experience, the laughlines around my eyes, the dirt from my garden embedded under my fingernails, and the tanlines from my paddling jersey…these all are poems. Poems that speak themselves to everyone around me.
(photo by Jessica)
GameBoy is turning 16 years old today, which seems unbelievable. I know, parents always say that. But…wow!
As an example of the fine human being that he’s evolving into:
The other night we were having a dinner conversation about cheating at school. GB was saying how hard it is to ignore the rampant cheating on quizzes that happens in many of his classes. Occasionally, he explained, he will hear the “right” answer to a question inadvertently when his friends are sharing such info with each other. So then, when he gets to that particular question on the quiz and comes up with the same answer as he overheard, he will purposefully mark it wrong–just to prove that he didn’t cheat.
Can you see why he blows me away? Not only is he an amazingly compassionate taller-than-me teen, but he also works terrifically hard to do what’s right. His moral compass is true. It’s an honor to be his Mom.
And I love him so. Always have and always will.
Happy Birthday, buddy!
Recently I signed up for Foursquare, thinking that it would be groovy-cool to join in a real-life location-based game. However, I haven’t actually played along yet. It seems that I’m already more-than-visible to the world through my various internet presence(s), and I’m not sure that I want to add to that. At least not yet.
It anything, I’ve been feeling rather exposed by having so many online venues, clamoring for my attention. For example, I’m on Twitter under various aliases: @janaremy, @MHpodcast, @theexponent, @ATChapman, @PDP2010, @dhsocal. Granted, several of these logins I share with other group members….but it’s still a lot to manage! Blogwise, I can be found in numerous spaces, too: PilgrimSteps, MakingHistoryPodcast: Blog, HistoryCompass, DHSoCal, The Exponent, etc. Then there’s flickr and Facebook and LinkedIn and Posterous. Not to mention GoogleBuzz and GChat and Skype.
These online presences all complement my “in-real-life” busy-ness. I’m shuffling between two campuses, fulfilling parenting/household duties, and escaping to the ocean as often as is reasonable.
Of course, it would be uber-awesome to be mayor of the Pacific–or at least of Newport Harbor. But I’m not yet convinced that I need a web app to tell me I own those spaces.
CatGirl’s finished pysanky egg, plus two from previous retreats., originally uploaded by mind on fire.
Each Easter Catgirl creates beautifully detailed Pysanky egg art. I do think this year’s is especially lovely–but of course I think that every year.
My back is nearly always itchy–especially in that center spot between the shoulder blades. I think it has something to do my outrigger paddling and the stretching to the tendons and muscle fibers across my upper back.
But it’s so terrifically annoying to have itches that I can’t scratch (or at least, where it’s not so easy to scratch)! Today I can hardly get any work done because of the distraction, which I’m guessing is from the hard workout with my team last night…[note to self: buy backscratcher for office!]
As happens in academia, March and April are the season where you learn the results of all those grant applications you sent out in November and December. The last time I applied for funding I received nearly every grant that I applied for–a rare thing in History, for sure. But this past grant cycle has been nearly the opposite–the rejections far outweighing the acceptances. Of course it’s to be expected. Of course it doesn’t mean anything about my intrinsic worth as a scholar, but it is…wearying to keep finding all of those skinny envelopes.
So that’s just one reason that some news I received in Friday was extra-exciting, that I was selected as one of the twelve “barn-raisers” for the One Week | One Tool summer institute. I read and re-read that letter, just to make sure that it wasn’t another rejection. And then stomped my feet with glee!
Just shortly after I received that news, we left town for our annual Spring retreat with our Quaker Meeting. We gather in the mountains above Julian, CA, and spend three days strengthening our connections with each other and with our shared values. The setting couldn’t be more idyllic. We made blood-orange marmalade together, cheered the children’s Easter egg hunt, celebrated two friends’ engagement with some sweet champagne, played Eurogames, sipped tea, chased wild turkeys, took naps, wandered the forest dotted with wild daffodils, and ate apple pie. It’s quite different from the Easter celebrations when our kids were younger–there were no pastel dresses or baskets filled with plastic grass. No church choir. No talk of resurrection. After the egg hunt the children continued playing together while the adults sat in a silent circle.
I realized, while I was there, how much I needed time to simply be with my family, my friends, and my self. I needed the time to think and to imagine. I needed to watch the firelight dance. I needed to remember who I am and what I can be.
I just launched a re-design of The Exponent blog, which included moving the site off of wordpress.com and onto a hosted server. The blog is actually still just a wee bit buggy, but be patient with me–I’m learning a lot, making mistakes, and figuring things out as I go along. :)
As I wrote a few days ago, I’m continuing to enjoy my association with the fine Mormon-feminist women that I know from The Exponent & ExponentII. I feel so fortunate to count them each as friends and sisters.
As much as I embrace the modern, I’ll always be the kind of person who longs for aged wood, impossibly wrinkly lace pillowcases, the scratchy whisper of needle hitting a vinyl record, the crack of an old book binding, and the clothing styles of an era-gone-by.