Category:

deep thoughts

My Comfort Zone

There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.
Jane Austen

While I know that getting “outside of my comfort zone” is a fine way to challenge myself into trying something new, so much of this past year I’ve spent finding and curating my “comfort zone” through making our house into a space that I’m eager to come home to every evening (and hate to leave every morning). It’s certainly no coincidence that my most-used hashtag on social media is #theresnoplacelikehome, because it’s really true for me, at this stage of my life.

A few things that have made our home even more cosy and hard-to-resist:

Music playing, usually our favorite radio station, KJaZZ, but also a good amount of vinyl or European pop music as well.
Kitties who race to the door to meet me whenever I cross the hearth.
Two fireplaces that we use every night in winter–it is so hard to top the coziness of a glowing hearth on a winter night.
My office, for “getting things done.” This space helps me to be perfectly productive because it has everything I need (and want) at hand and I am rarely interrupted when I’m working there.
Houseplants that make my heart sing, each one carefully selected for shape/color/texture. I not only talk to my plants all of the time, but I also give them a weekly leaf massage.
The cosiest-imaginable bed, with the plushest flannel winter sheets (I first experienced these sheets in an AirBnb and had to go right out and get my own set). We also recently upgraded to a Casper mattress and pillows, which are pure comfort and make my back and neck so happy.

What is on your happy-comfort zone list?

December 22, 2018

books deep thoughts

was happiness…

Was happiness so bound up with the knowledge that it was also ephemeral? And was it therefore always to be accompanied by the stubborn fear of its loss? Something wasn’t right. And yet she believed that she had developed an unusual capacity to ruin her own good fortune with this anxiety, this expectation of something going wrong.
~Richard Bausch, Hello to the Cannibals

This was one moment in the book that resonated with me on a fairly deep level. I was raised on the notion that one could not know happiness without also knowing a corresponding sadness, and it seems to me that every happy moment in my life has held the shadow of the days where things have been equally awful.

I love how Bausch is able to capture that so well in this quotation. It happens in a moment where the protagonist has no idea that there is a huge amount of sadness in her future, it’s a foreshadowing of what’s to come. But of course life is not as tidily constructed as a novel and I wonder if it isn’t possible just to be happy for awhile, without it inevitably leading to a time of despair?

December 18, 2017

deep thoughts digital humanities

My love affair with letters (and the end of the semester…)

I am more than a little bit obsessed with letters. Ever since I was a young girl I have been a prolific writer of letters, often spending hours every Sunday writing to friends and family members, loving the practice of telling the stories of my life and sending little thoughts out through the post. In fact, I used to keep a large stash of little things that I collected from magazines and newspapers, just to have fun little things to include in the letters that I was writing. One of my greatest treasures is the address book that I kept for years, where I would record all of the places where my correspondents lived. Even though I no longer add to that book, I still keep it because of the waves of memories that it holds as I look at where each of my friends moved over the years.

And my love of letters even overlaps with my love of books. Three of my all-time favorites are Angle of Repose (which includes letters as part of the narrative), Pamela (an entirely epistolary novel) and Letters from Africa (the real-life letters of Karen Blixen to her beloved Denys Finch-Hatton). This is also why I am so very delighted by the current novel that I’m reading, Hello to the Cannibals, which also has letter writing at the core of the narrative.

I also use letters in my teaching, not just as source material for my students to examine, but for themselves to use the act of letter-writing as the basis for a reflective practice. One of my favorite assignments is at the end of the term, when I have my Digital Humanities students write letters to future students in the class, telling them what they can expect of the course. Here are some fun excerpts from those letters:

This class will take all types. Those who are tech-savvy, and those who still carry around those bricks people affectionately refer to as “Nokias.” Those who know how to code, and those who can barely form a proper sentence. And that’s okay. The hope is by the end of the class, you’ll find something, no matter how small, you can attach to and find what interests you in this honestly intimidating field. Once you find that thing, run with it and run far. You’ll have the freedom to really make this class work for you, if you want it to…I also thought I wouldn’t be using any of these tools after the semester ended. After all, they looked really cool, but how could I integrate them into my own studies? In this case, desperation is both the mother and father of invention. As work in my other classes became more involving and complicated, I realized I could unravel some of that complexity with some of the practices I learned from this class. Even if there isn’t a specific tool that you find particularly helpful, the concepts of critical thought, deconstruction, and distant reading will be universally helpful to you.

What I am taking away from this class more than anything is a new way of looking at , and questioning, our digital world. Why do our screens have to be rectangular? What does that do to our thinking? Why do our presentations needs to be composed of slides? What does that do to our thinking? Why do we only watch one video at a time? What does that do our thinking? Are these the only ways? These are questions I wasn’t asking before, but I am now.

And finally, there’s this letter that a student wrote using animated GIFs and is well worth clicking through and seeing on her wordpress site: http://wordpress.chapman.edu/juliaross/2017/12/09/good-luck-to-you-boo/

December 16, 2017

deep thoughts Stories writing

a new look for janaremy

Perhaps some of you have already noticed that I’ve been doing a bit of rearranging around here. As of a month ago, my site looked like the image above.

I loved this look for my site that I’ve had for the past seven years. The colors and simplicity of the design were so me. However under the hood the site was a pretty big mess–the design wasn’t responsive, the subpage links kept breaking, and the content was really hard to update due to the customization of WordPress necessary to support the visual layout. So I realized that it was time for it to go and to adopt a new look.

So I fussed around about it for awhile and came up with something super-simple, that resembles some of the former look of the “pilgrimsteps” blog from way back when.

Today:

Way Back When:

And from Way Way Back When:

And From the Stone Ages of Blogland:

Some things never change, such as my love for light backgrounds, san-serif fonts, and images. But some things have changed so very very much in the past fifteen years. More than I can even begin to document. Fortunately I have a blog archive stretching back over all that time that I can peruse and marvel at all the roads I’ve traveled since then.

December 9, 2017

deep thoughts things I like women writing

A Room of My Own

Virginia was right.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write…

After a few years of Stijn and I trying to co-habit in a shared office space, I realized a few weeks ago that it wasn’t working for me, that I needed my own space to write, one that had my own books, office supplies, piles of papers, houseplants, etcetera.

I was nervous to tell him that I wanted to keep a separate space. I felt like, somehow, it was a signal that there was something amiss with our relationship. I waffled for a while about broaching the subject. And when I finally did, I was nervous that he would resist or feel betrayed. He didn’t. He was nonchalant, asked a few clarifying questions about shared resources, and wished me well.

For many years I have worked and written from wherever I could plug-in my laptop, and I have done just fine. I wrote papers, authored blogposts, crafted technical documentation, and replied to emails all from wherever and whenever. It has worked and I have made do. But now it feels like such a luxury to be able to claim a room and to make it my own. And already I can feel the difference. Writing is easier than it has been in a very long time.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. that is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.

December 4, 2017

deep thoughts women

we haven’t time

Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time – like to have a friend takes time.
~Georgia O’Keefe

Nearly every year I resolve to be a better friend. However, nearly every year I look back and feel that I’ve failed at doing that.

One recent “small” success in that area was when I was traveling last month and managed to visit many friends in many places that I hadn’t seen in awhile, such as Susan, Melinda, Melanie, Sarah, Alison, Vickie, and Courtney. We hugged, laughed, ate, schemed and talked. It felt so good and indulgent. It was so worth taking the time.

November 29, 2017

deep thoughts

room for randomness

Lately I’ve had multiple days where I have had back-to-back meetings for 5 or 6 hours, sometimes even more. Moreover my schedule this semester includes a 4.5-hour teaching block on Thursday evenings, which can be both the most draining and the most enlivening hours of my week.

So it’s Monday now and I am looking over my calendar and ensuring that I have a few “holes” of time where I can put my head down and work, rather than be leading a committee or teaching a class or a workshop. Because I fear that if I am simply running from meeting to meeting to class to training, then I’m likely missing the time I need to have a conversation with a colleague or to solve large problems. I am likely to simply be in list-making mode rather than in a space of productivity.

Thus, this quote from Jim Barnes (via Creative Mornings) resonated with me. Because it’s actually work to ensure that I have the free spot in my calendar, but I know that it’s an investment that is well worth the effort.

November 27, 2017

deep thoughts making history

what I really want…

From my handwritten journal (written in green ink, no less) on July 17, 2000

***

I’ve been thinking about what I really want (Though, as I’ve said to John, I am destined to follow on his coattails rather than forging my own destiny):

live in the Isle of Man for a period of time; a season, a year, a few years
write sometime important
study yoga, nutrition and natural healing
grow a huge, beautiful flower garden
return to school and study literature, women’s studies, and literary history (made that last one up, but surely it exists somewhere)
take more trips (holidays) and just wander and meditate in beautiful places
try to do things in old fashioned ways i.e. spin wool, weave, quilt, sew, do needlepoint etc
get a housekeeper
have a “library:” a room in the home totally devoted to the love of and perusal of books

***

How strange it is to think that I’ve tried my hand at all of those now–except for the Isle of Man part, but I suspect that living in Belgium is close enough :)

November 18, 2017

deep thoughts John love

A quarter of a century ago

Twenty-five years is a such long time, over half of my lifetime.

On September 2, 1992 the temperature was somewhere in the 80s, a nice sunny California fall day. It was warm enough that I was glad that my simple white dress was made of cotton lawn fabric and had short sleeves as we snapped a few photos after our wedding ceremony in the midday sun.

There were so many things I didn’t know that day as I knelt at an altar and agreed to the LDS vows of a forever marriage. For example I would have been devastated to know that three close family members who were present at the ceremony would die too soon. My father would only live two more years because of pancreatic cancer, I would lose my brother-in-law to lymphoma five years later, and my grandmother a decade after that. I couldn’t foresee that I would move more than 15 times in those 25 years or that the wedding gift that I received that day, of a sewing machine from my mother, would become one of the very few possessions that would travel with me for each of those moves. And of course it was completely beyond my imagination that the eternal wedding vows I agreed to that day would, seventeen years later, be erased by the action of a stake president when he excommunicated my spouse from the LDS Church, or that a year after that I would file for a civil divorce.

Perhaps above all, I could not have imagined that 25 years later I would find myself sitting in a sleeveless polka-dotted sundress in a hipster cafe in Los Angeles sipping a latte, once again a newlywed, as Stijn and I discussed which light fixture would look best in our living room.

September 2, 2017

deep thoughts family

Sunday thoughts

in the courtyard of the Mutter Museum

It’s the quiet before the storm here, a few days alone before the family arrive for the holidays. I am still not used to the rhythm of the holidays sans children. I put the ornaments on the tree myself, reveling in the memories of each one.

I still only use the same small batch of ornaments that we’ve collected over the years. I wonder sometimes if the secret santa who gave us a set of cheap tin angels in 1992 ever thought that they would still be on our tree 25 years later, not to mention every ornament that I made in grade school, on our tree alongside the ones that my children made. Though it would be so easy to buy new stylish decor, I never feel the impetus to do so.

Which reminds me of a conversation that I had at a holiday party last weekend. I met someone new and mentioned that I’d moved to Orange just as soon as my kids finished school in Irvine.

“Weren’t they sad about your selling the family home?,” she asked.

It was a stranger, one I wasn’t ready to fill in on the backstory of my patchwork life. I am not sure how she would have made sense of our moving eight times in those last three years while the kids were finishing high school. While I can so easily tell the stories of the rat house, the whale house, and that time that seven sailors were sleeping in the living room, I didn’t this time. I simply said that we were all ready for a fresh start…

I had a similar feeling a month ago when a colleague asked how I was spending Thanksgiving. I told them I was skipping the holiday and traveling to Philadelphia to visit my daughter. I could see that they don’t really understand why I would opt out of the TDay to wander a strange city on my own and pop in to visit Em on her campus.

But it was a lovely trip. The weather so cold and so bright. When she wasn’t busy studying we went to the Mutter and the Barnes and the map room of the downtown library. She showed me her favorite study spot in the campus library and her favorite trees. We had coffee at Hobbs and water ice at her pizza place and noodles at her noodle place. We found a swingset by the Friends’ Meetinghouse and swang and swang. I felt the pull in my stomach as I pumped my legs up into the air I swung back and forth and felt so young and so old all at the same time. Remembering myself as a young girl who wanted to swing so high, always reaching out my toes into the big blue. And remembering the hours (upon hours) that I pushed Em in the playground swings, relishing her squeals as she flew higher and higher and further away from me.

When I wasn’t with Em I walked and wandered Philly. I stood in line for Independence Hall and went on the tour along with the schoolchildren and families, all of us rubbing our hands together and stomping our feet to keep warm while the wind whipped at us as we queued.

It was all worth the wait when we finally got inside and the tourguide told us about the signing of the declaration, reciting those famous words in a practiced voice:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…

I looked out the tall windows into the courtyard where we had just waited, to see dozens still in line. The wind was outside was gusting, and yellow leaves were swirling and dancing in the golden light of the winter afternoon.

December 18, 2016

body deep thoughts LDS

Sunday evening

Yesterday I went to the farmer’s market, my mouth watering for the heirloom tomatoes sold by my favorite vendor. I bought two last week and they are the tastiest tomatoes that I’ve had that I haven’t grown myself. She had just three left and I bought them all. I had the first on a salad of spicy lettuce for my lunch and it was just as good as I had hoped it would be.

This morning I spent my extra hour in the garden, talking to our winter tomato plants that are just beginning to blossom. They are thriving in this not-winter weather and I expect to have fruit soon. I suppose we’ve gone a bit overboard, as we always seem to do, and I am looking forward to having the problem of too many tomatoes.

This afternoon I went to an intensive yoga workshop, “on the ropes.” I hung upside down and did forward bends and backbends while suspended in loops of heavy rope hanging from the walls in my teacher’s studio. While I suspect that I will be moving a bit slowly tomorrow as a result of my time hanging around this afternoon, it is such a delicious feeling to stretch and bend and twist and breathe into my body. To push it harder than I think it can go. As I walked home from the workshop I marveled that this is the thing that is middle age. To have the freedom and the flexibility to choose to exercise for an afternoon just because it’s what I want to do.

And then afterwards I puttered around the house doing laundry and cooking dinner and watching a bit of Netflix. A pair of missionaries knocked on my door as I was puttering. When I answered the bell they greeted me by name, saying that they’d just received my contact information and that they were excited to meet me.

I was still wearing my yoga clothes, my bare shoulders revealing more than my tan lines. I knew I couldn’t invite them inside, because I am an adult woman at home alone and that would not be appropriate. They smiled and they told me they were from Utah and Texas and asked if they could come again soon. I was tempted to tell them to google me when they got home, but instead I thanked them for their kindness and explained that I would not be interested in future visits.

I looked in their eyes and saw my brothers and so many other young mormons I have loved. I wondered which one of them had shared my address with the Church and wondered if they knew how sad I was to have my location known to the local congregation.

They asked how long I had been a member and I told them it has been for all of my life.

In that moment I remembered being wrapped in white linen, when holy oil was swabbed on my forehead and scalp and clavicles and spine, when I sat on a throne and was anointed to become both a priestess and a queen. The details are still vivid, despite it being an eternity ago.

I wished the missionaries goodnight and turned off the porch light after they exited the front gate.

November 6, 2016

deep thoughts food garden

morning thoughts

our daily bread #chefstijn #tastevenbetterthanitlooks #sourdoughshmourdough #theresnoplacelikehome

A photo posted by @janaremy on Oct 1, 2016 at 4:42pm PDT

Last night I dreamed about my cat who was dying. It was my cat, but not my cat (in the ways that dreams work). She was Toby, but not Toby. She was curled into a ball on my chest and was shaking and heaving. And as much as I tried, I could not remember her name.

I woke to the sinus ache of dry hot air, another night of the “Santa Anas,” yesterday’s temps peaking at 104 according to my car’s thermometer. I immediately stepped outside to check the progress of the garden. The peas that I planted a few weeks ago are surviving the dryness, thanks to a regular dousing. The Siberian winter tomato varieties that we planted a few weeks ago are thriving. We’ve never planted winter tomatoes before, but it seemed worth a try and the horticulturist at our local nursery was insistent that they would set fruit. I wonder if they are as acclimated to dry desert winds as they are to the shortened days of the season. They already have several blossoms apiece.

I am barefoot in the garden though I probably should not be. We’re rebuilding our back house and the ground around the garden is covered in splinters of wood and screws and small sharp things. But I take my chances anyways, today.

I sit on the pavers in the sun, near the plants, and marvel that it’s fall and yet it’s hotter than the summer. Though this happens every year, it always feels strange and new when the dry winds blow.

My son moved home this week, for awhile. It’s a strange thing to have my kids around–it is so easy to share with them, everything. Yet I struggle with parenting them, as adults, never knowing how much to guide, how much to let them do for themselves. We went grocery shopping together yesterday afternoon and as he put the shopping cart away he deftly lifted the entire thing over the parking lot median, as if it was as light as a gallon of milk. I am jealous of his easy strength, and am reminded of my middle age. The time when I carried him on my hip feeling more than two dozen lifetimes ago.

For lunch he and I have a salad of spicy mesclun lettuce from the garden, picked at midday. The leaves are wilted and limp, but have so much flavor that they overpower the small grape tomatoes that I’ve added into the mix.

The house is full of the smells of fresh bread, as Stijn is baking his next round of sourdough. We watched Michael Pollan’s “Air” documentary a few days ago and ever since I have craved bread, remembering all of the dark and rich loaves of Scandinavia. Little else is as interesting to me right now, as that.

October 22, 2016