When I was a kid (around the time that I was reading The Mixed of Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler), it was my dream to someday hide out in a library after hours, perhaps snoozing among the stacks and reading reading reading to my heart’s content.
I happen to be, at this very moment, nearly alone in a closed library. And musing about all of the possibilities…(so if you don’t hear from me for awhile, you’ll know why)
The past few weeks I’ve been fairly contemplative about where I am in my life. I passed a milestone birthday and I marked the anniversary of my cancer diagnosis (or rather, I didn’t mark it at all this year, which felt alright). Also, I visited with a few old friends recently where we discussed all that’s happened in the past few decades.
And after all that, I suspect that I just might jinx myself if I say that things are pretty positive right now. But it also seems worth noting that while there are still some hard days and some things that I hope to change about my circumstances, for the most part it’s just really good: my days are filled with interesting activities that are mostly of my own choosing, I enjoy my work colleagues very much, there is little friction in my family life, I have few health complaints, my home/garden are well-worth returning to each evening, and I average about 7.5 hours of sleep at night (and every once in awhile, I even take a nap).
(photo taken in my garden this weekend)
Am I the only one who misses that era of about 2008ish where everyone had a blog and part of the day’s ritual was to read all of your friends’ recent posts? Every once in awhile I peruse the lists of sites from my now-defunct RSS Reader and I can recall the thrill of having so many writerly friends that I heard from nearly every day. But mostly I miss the thrill and energy of regularly writing for an audience–my writing muscles have become pretty flaccid these past few years.
This quotation, from one of my most favorite articles about blogs, sums up the magic of the phenomenon so well:
Finally, I think I get the superhero fixation. It’s the flying. It’s the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it’s like, “Dude, the ball.”
Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that. ?
(Note: the peonies have nothing to do with blogging, but they seemed worth including anyways…)
The language, mores, and workflows of IT aren’t all that different from what occurs in other areas of the campus, but it felt important to me that while I was in IT this year that I become adept at IT-speak and processes (just as if I were living in a foreign country and adopting the customs and colloquialisms of that region).
One of the ways that I’ve accomplished the task of learning The Ways of IT, is to seek an ITIL Certification. In fact, by next month I ought to have two of them under my belt.
I don’t know that getting certified makes me a better IT manager or employee, but it does make me feel like less of an impostor among my colleagues.
A post in the series My Year in IT
For me, working in IT has required a healthy sense of humor.
There is the easy, obvious humor that comes from working in an environment that is straight out of an Office episode. That leads to silly shared memes, bad photoshopping of each other’s headshots, and the occasional inflatable monkey at my desk. But what it really comes from is that in IT we are working in teams and not solo.
From my years doing historical research in the solitude of an archive, I’d become used to working through problems myself, and developed workflows for my personal productivity that rarely hinged on others. My first few days at an IT cubicle were a completely different experience. Paper planes whizzed over walls and news would spread across an entire hall of offices simply by having an audible conversation. I soon learned how valuable that ‘spread’ of overheard conversations would be, as others in nearby cubes who heard me speak of a problem on the phone might soon pop in and add their two cents to the issue. And among team members, it became apparent that humor is necessary to diffuse stress and to create strong working bonds with each other (or just to revel in the fact that it is Friday and almost the weekend!)
Humor also comes in handy when one realizes that a problem cannot be fixed. There is a mantra in IT that “anything is possible with enough resources” and this is usually said in a preface to an explanation of why that desired thing is not possible. It may be an unplanned system outage, the inability to modify out-of-the-box software, or the impossibility of churning out an immediate web programming change. Grappling with finite resource limits is maddening, especially when one is aware of the frustration that users feel when something is not working as expected. Enter, humor. These moments are not the laugh-out-loud silliness of youtube mishaps, but are times when one has to smile and forge ahead to provide a workaround, or reach out and communicate as clearly as possible what the impact of the problem/outage/malfunction will be.
Perhaps most importantly, I’ve needed to keep a sense of humor about myself. Despite knowing all that I know about technology there are days that my printer isn’t working, times when I need a password reset, and moments when it feels like every click yields an error message. It is then that I get most exhausted by the tangle of spaghetti powercords in my bag that seem to include every single one except the one that I need and it’s high time to start laughing instead of cursing. Technology is frustrating even for those of us who spend all day mired in it (or perhaps even more so).
This is the first post in a series about My Year in IT.
Last year I moved from my central campus office-with-a-window to a cubicle in our IT building. In preparation for the move my academic books went into storage and I bought a fancy new pair of noise-canceling headphones (which were deemed a necessity for my new digs). The move was a willing change for me, as I had just accepted a one-year position managing the computing service team for our university.
My motivation for this move was driven by the disconnect that I see between academics and operations in HigherEd. We are a house divided, with few people who navigate the gap. Nowhere is this more obvious to me than in IT, whose technical functions undergird teaching, faculty productivity, and campus communication. Yet there is near-invisibility of the technicians who sit at their screens all day ensuring that when a professor walks into the classroom they can access the classroom projector, open Blackboard, and log into their storage drive to retrieve their powerpoint slides.
Given that our campuses incorporate cutting-edge digital tools and methods, the impact of IT on HigherEd is ever-expanding. Our libraries house digital repositories, our faculty each have an online presence, and even the campus gym is expected to have wireless. Added to that are the data needs of campus support services, which are critical for hiring, enrolling, advising, coaching, and so forth.
Serving on the front lines of the campus IT department has given me a window into how all of the campus systems function and interact with each other (and also a view onto how difficult it can be when services don’t function). I have a growing respect for my highly-skilled colleagues who offer technical support, fix AV, install routers, write programming scripts, manage projects, and implement technology policies.
From where I was sitting a few months ago, to where I sit now, the view could not be more different. Yet it is also very much the same–in both seats I am surrounded by people who work hard and who are passionate about their jobs. On the academic side my colleagues focus on teaching students and excelling in research. And in IT, they focus on providing timely and helpful service for clients. Both are necessary. Both keep the university humming along everyday.
And I might add that those noise-canceling headphones are now dusty from lack of use. Instead of tuning out, I’ve been listening and learning constantly, which has reminded me why I got into academia in the first place–to better understand what’s happening around me. And that is definitely not noise.
Feeling pensive today as I reflect on the past year and consider my intentions for the future. So as part of that I spent some time looking through my blogposts from the past year and weighing how they reflected my memories of 2015.
Some of the larger happenings of the past year include:
And I’m writing this list as I’m snuggled up on the living room sofa of our Brussels home (photo below). Life continues to be interesting as I straddle the cultures of continental Europe and Southern California, and as Stijn and I consider our future together. It’s hard to predict how that will evolve as we make professional and personal choices, but what is obvious is that it’s wonderful to have many possibilities for the future. In past years I’ve found my greatest longing was for home, and now I have two of them. :)
My resolutions for 2016 are pretty simple, so far:
I’m tempted to also set some writing goals for 2016–I’ve totally slacked in that department in the past few years and I just haven’t felt inspired to write. So, I’ll give that some more thought and see if I feel ready to formalize a plan for writing this year (or not).
The laryngitis hit a few days ago and doesn’t seem eager to leave. So now I must be silent and let my voicebox rest and heal.
In the meantime, I am missing calling Ellycat in from the back porch, giggling with the kiddos on skype, and rehearsing my day with Stijn over dinner. Not to mention the difficulty that I found in teaching my three-hour seminar and the work meetings that I’ve had to put on hold until I can vocalize.
Of course it’s a temporary thing and I expect to wake up in a day or two and be able to talk comfortably again. But in the meantime it feels awfully lively with all these thoughts knocking around in my head that I can’t share with anyone around me. But that does seem to be the gift of getting older, that there are so many thoughts and associations and memories and wonderings. I can easily fill an hour by sitting in the garden enjoying the scent of the basil plants, and rehearsing in my mind my favorite basil recipes and basil foods, as well as the most humble and the most exquisite caprese salads that I’ve ever tasted. And the pretty soon the sun is setting and the hour is past and now I’ve moved on to the rosemary…
For a long time I’ve been thinking how helpful it would be to have some of the expertise of my colleagues in IS&T, in my Digital Humanities course. At a conference I’d heard about the benefits of embedding librarians within research courses, and it seemed to me that embedding technicians within a DH course would accomplish a similar aim, and would also reinforce the nature of DH as a collaborative discipline.
So today was my first foray in that vein, as Ryan (a member of our server team) attended my class and gave a demo of the inner guts of a PC and a server machine.
It was successful enough that I will try it again in future classes, and may also call on other technical expertise from our IT department throughout the semester. Because while I don’t think the students need to know all of the details of how a computer works, it is important for them to consider the limitations of various devices and platforms as they imagine the possibilities for their future research projects.
I’ve had a few zucchini piled up on the counter that I haven’t been sure what to do with. They aren’t the young tender ones that taste great in zucchini carpaccio (which, btw, I make sans goat cheese and it is still super-yum) and I’m not in the mood for baking zucchini bread or zucchini cake.
So, this recipe from the gals at 3191 was just what I needed. I adapted it by using soymilk instead of coconut milk and I put a dollop of rich plain yogurt in the center and swirled it around into the soup. Also, I wanted to note that I made this with some BIG zucchini (you know, those ones that are lurking under the leaves that you don’t find until they are as big as your arm). I feared that the big zukes would turn out woody or flavorless, but that was not the case at all. And I didn’t even clean out the seeds–I just blended it all together in my Vitamix
Curried Zucchini Soup with Coconut Milk
adapted from Great Food Fast
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 teaspoons curry powder
1 1/2 pounds zucchini (I used 3 medium-sized), sliced thick
1 baking potato, peeled and cut into 1-inch chunks
4 cups stock (the original recipe just calls for water)
2/3 cup coconut soy milk
1. Heat oil in large pot over medium heat. Add onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until soft, 4-5 minutes. Add garlic and curry powder and continue to cook, stirring constantly until fragrant (another minute).
2. Add the zucchini, potato and stock. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer until vegetables are tender (15-20 minutes).
3. Add coconut milk. Puree with immersion blender or in batches in blender until very smooth and velvety. Taste and season with salt and pepper. Seasoning depends on stock and potency and freshness of curry powder (my soup needed very little seasoning).
“I need some ocean air” I texted to him, as I was packing up to leave work. So I drove towards Newport Beach, picked him up from the office and we pulled a parking spot just as the sun was hovering close on the horizon. Then we hopped out of the car and headed across the street to the bench where we’ve sat so many times before to watch the setting sun.
I noticed that when I stepped off of the curb my knee felt a bit stiff, but I ignored that feeling. I was focused on the sunset and not on my gait. But then when we were about a foot from our bench, I dropped to the pavement. My knee had completely given way and had buckled underneath me.
The jogging couple walking behind us stopped abruptly.
“Is she okay?” they asked.
Meanwhile, I was gauging how bad it was. I’d fallen just as I should. No obvious scrapes or sore places, although I suspected that I’d torn a hole in my skirt. And I didn’t want to stand back up immediately, knowing that if I did I would probably fall right back down.
As the couple from behind us hovered in concern I almost said to them, “It’s a known issue.” But checked myself and said cheerily “No problem, I’m fine!” And they passed, confused as to why I was still on the ground.
It happened yesterday, too, this falling–on the blistering hot asphalt of a cafe parking lot, which was really not a very fun place to try to troubleshoot the malfunction. Because of that I almost headed into the repair shop first thing this morning, knowing that a failing knee wouldn’t be a plus as I navigated my workday. But the knee acted normally as I tested around the house and in the garden before heading to work. I figured that the fall yesterday was an odd blip and the quick reboot of the microprocessor that I’d done in the parking lot had resolved the problem.
But now that it’s happened twice, I’d say that it’s gone from a one-time blip to being a “known issue” that’s got to be escalated to a professional. Because falling can be risky (and painful) and particularly inopportune if I’m carrying food or my laptop.
So I’ll get a loaner knee ASAP and send mine back to the factory for service. And as I do so I will marvel at the fact that I can swap out my knee almost just as easily as I upgraded my iPhone last week, with all of the settings and customizations are preserved “as is” so I can get back to my everyday routine just as soon as possible.
Recently my office moved and I acquired a new set of colleagues, as well as gaining a new set of IT-related responsibilities. Such changes bring challenges–not the least of which is the necessity of solving problems with new-to-me team members.
As a result of these changes, I found myself at my desk later than I’d expected tonite, trying to understand some messy data and longing for a crystal ball to appear to give some clarity to a process that was feeling really murky.
And then a colleague came around the corner and offered me a cookie. It was a small gesture and a generous one given that he, too, was staying late and staring at that similarly messy data on his screen. But that moment of solidarity meant a lot and was so-so much bigger than a few carb-calories. In a very good way it reminded me of this night and the stranger who offered me a cookie at a moment when I was hopeless.*
It reminded me that I want to be the kind of a colleague who is always there with a cookie when the going gets rough. Because even at the hardest of times (and after the longest of work days), there is always space for kindness.
*And because Proust and because I also had a cup of tea at the ready to enjoy with my cookie…