I keep writing and re-writing what I want to say in this post, and it still isn’t coming out right. But here’s an attempt…
Although I’ve been “very productive” in my life these past few years–working towards my PhD, advancing my career, pursuing my hobbies passionately, supporting my family, etc. Many things still fall through the cracks….
For most of my life I wrote letters to my extended family members weekly, and dutifully visited them. For the past five years, I have only intermittently remembered their birthdays and other gifty-holidays. I rarely call. Thank you notes are mostly unwritten. When my great-aunt died a few days ago, I was completely shamed by how lax I’ve been in supporting her the past couple of years.
I feel truly awful about this, and the more I realize how terrible I feel, the more it compounding all of the other ways in which I fail everyday. Whether its missing a deadline, or blurting out something asinine in an academic conversation, or forgetting to follow-up with a friend…I mess up constantly. Constantly.
Some days I just wish I weren’t so fallible, so busy, so careless, so self-absorbed, so tired, so focused, so weak.
Over the years I’ve written and spoken about buying a piano. I apologize for any who’ve already heard this one before (but maybe, like all good songs, it’s worth replaying occasionally)….
We bought this piano during a time that I was at the lowest low of depression, and needed some way out. I’d taken years of lessons as a young girl and had this inkling of a desire to play and sing again. So we bought an inexpensive yet serviceable digital piano from our favorite local music store. And I bought some music. Mostly showtunes and Enya and some Sting and a bit of Cat Stevens. Playable singable stuff.
It took my fingers awhile to remember how to play. And my voice was creaky and weak (I was also suffering from chronic bronchitis and had a physician who wasn’t helping me to get better), but my abilities grew as I kept playing. My kindergartener and toddler liked playing, too, and they could even recognize the Disney tunes and church melodies.
That piano was a catalyst to my finding my voice again. That, and I started taking classes at a community college with an eye towards graduate school. And soon after I started blogging–these words became my therapy to express the numbness happening inside my head…
Long story short: the kids played piano for a few years and then moved on to other instruments that they liked better. I rarely played much anymore because I had papers to write or to grade. The piano turned into a dust-gatherer that moved from room to room. It lived at a friend’s house for awhile and got some good use there, but it wasn’t getting any attention at ours.
So on Sunday, we moved our piano to our Quaker Meetinghouse. The very best part of that move? Knowing that it will continue to bring light to those who hear the music. I especially love the intention to use the piano for inter-generational singing. Perfect.
Back in the days when I was dating, nearly every Halloween I started a new relationship. I didn’t actually realize that pattern until years later, when I was connecting the dots in my photo album. I’d see me in a costume and then realize that was the night that I met “so-and-so.” Was it just the costumes that did that, or was it those not-to-be-missed Newport Beach Halloween dances emceed by Richard Blade (note: beware clicking on that link–it’s loud!)? Perhaps it was because every October after I’d settled into the school year I was looking for something new and it was convenient to let that emerge on a night where I might be emboldened by a costume?
Since being married to John, we’ve dressed up nearly every year (except maybe that year that I was hugely pregnant with Catgirl–I don’t think I wore a costume). For a long time, we kept with our pirate theme, capitalizing on that look from the first time I ever danced with John (to Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” of course), but we’ve also worn black and worn girlie things or manly things (ok, that latter link is just a figment of my imagination, but it’s worth a click anyways), dressed as fictional characters, and even changed our minds at the last minute about our costumes.
So this post isn’t about me starting a new relationship this Halloween, even thought that’s how it began. And it’s not about what costume I’m going to wear, even though I’m looking forward to dressing up. What it’s really about is the need to be something else for a little while.
Although in recent years I’ve embraced risk-taking and facing my fears, I’m actually a fairly reserved and risk-adverse person (I’m a historian, for crying out loud!). I wear fairly conservative clothes, I listen to my music at a respectable volume, I match my socks and fold them into tidy rolls in my drawer. For the most part, I find routine and structure quite satisfying. I don’t wear loud makeup or attention-grabbing clothing or anything that will draw a second glance. I like plain and simple.
But then there’s this one day of the year where I try something totally different. Like a kimono. Or a tutu. Or a wig. It feels good to experiment with that alternate identity for awhile and to see how it feels. On a day when no one will much notice how far I’ve stepped outside of my normal boundaries.
Tonite’s post finds me snuggled in on the couch. I’m sneezy right now, and my glands are swollen. That’s probably far more than you wanted to know about me, but this post is going to have a bit more TMI than my usual, so I thought I’d just get warmed-up from the get-go….
For quite some time now I’ve been meaning to follow up on my #genderd experiment. At the close of that day, one of the things I realized was that I never tweeted about using the bathroom. And I should have. It’s one of the most explicitly gendered choices I make several times per day at the office. I work on the floor of a building that has two restrooms. They are both single stalls with locked doors. One has signage for men, and one for woman. Or at least, they did back on September 1st when I did my #genderd experiment. But shortly after that day, I received an email from Chapman University’s SafeSpace Committee saying that they were working to locate all single-stall bathrooms on campus and change them from an assigned-sex bathroom to a gender-neutral bathroom. So I replied to them about the ones on my floor and suggested that the change would be particularly welcome because the floor primarily has women’s offices, so there can often be a line for the women’s bathroom, but I’ve never seen any men waiting in line for their designated stall. And honestly I thought many times about just using the men’s stall myself–given that it had a locking door, what would be the harm in doing so? But because I still felt so new at my job and I felt too uncomfortable to push the social boundary of using the opposite-sex bathroom stall in front of my colleagues. So I didn’t.
When I returned from my trip last week I discovered new signage on the men’s stall. It now has a men/women/wheelchair sign, while the women’s bathroom stall signage stayed the same. I think that’s peculiar, but I haven’t yet written to the the campus sign-maker to see why both stalls weren’t given the same signs. But perhaps what’s more interesting, are the surprised looks on the faces I’ve seen when I use the now-gender-neutral stall. After I exit that door I’ve seen colleagues walk up very close to the sign as if to see if it’s “real.” I’ve only seen one other woman ever use it, and she wasn’t a regular on our floor.
While I think having one neutral stall on the floor is certainly progress, I still think it would be far better to have two neutral stalls. Because it seems that as long as there is a women’s stall, the other stall will be “not women’s.” However, it could be that the reason they kept one as women’s is that it includes the wastebin at the side of the toilet for “hygiene” products (what a janitor friend of mine affectionately called the “cigar box”), and the formerly-men’s bathroom doesn’t have that feature. I’ve also noticed each time I use the not-women’s restroom that the toilet seat has been left up. I’m going to guess that that’s a leftover from when it was a “men’s” stall only.
And…speaking of men…
Last week I had the strangest concurrence of experiences. By the third time it happened I was so rattled, I could hardly make my way back to the place where I was staying for the night…
Three times in three days I had men call me out in public space, yelling sex-laden obscenities. What is probably most bizarre about this experience is that I’ve never had a man even so much as whistle my direction before (unless, perhaps, it was my partner being playful). Catcalls from strangers seemed like something that happened to streetwalkers and not to women that look like me. I suppose I’ve never experienced this because I don’t often walk in urban spaces–I’ve tended to live in middle-class suburban areas. But I also suspect that women who are disabled are far less likely to garner attention from male strangers.
The third time this happened I was alone and in a fairly deserted area of a city where I knew I probably shouldn’t be walking at night. But I was hungry and there was a corner store a few blocks away. I was sure I’d be just fine. And I was. But having a group of men following behind me and hurtling obscenities my way as I walked down the block? I was so scared. What was I scared of? Scared, knowing that I couldn’t run if they came after me. Scared, because I didn’t think I could dial anything coherent on my cellphone of they neared. Scared, because there was no one else nearby to hear if I should scream. Looking back on it now, it’s possible that these men might’ve even thought that they were flattering me with their opinions about my body. Perhaps they thought that I would respond back playfully or provocatively. But I think they knew that what they were doing was cruel and that I was scared shitless, despite my attempt to walk even more tall and confidently down the block as the vulgarity continued.
There was nothing in my clothing or in my behavior that indicated that I would be a target for men’s attention. I have a “boy” haircut, I’m nearly 40 years old. I was not wearing makeup and I was wearing “Mom” jeans (read: not sexy). But I was identifiably female, still, which is why I suppose I was a target.
I deliberately choose to raise my kids in an upper-middle-class neighborhood where just about anyone can safely walk at night. Though there are occasionally some college rowdy college students around, there is little to fear in my environment. There are, of course, costs to living in such a homogeneous suburban community, and lately I’ve wondered if we haven’t veered towards being too “safe” in choosing a place to live. For example, I relish the vibrancy of the urban neighborhoods that I found on recent travels through Oakland, San Francisco, and in San Diego, and felt the contrast to our “vanilla” community quite keenly. And while I usually don’t feel that I fit in my neighborhood (I am not really a vanilla gal, myself), it would be hard for me to change now if it meant facing the kind of jeering that I experienced last week on a regular basis. I suppose I would get used to it–perhaps even expect it. But it’s hard for me to imagine that now, I suspect I might just always be afraid.
As part of organizing my new office at Chapman University, I’m moving most of my academic books from the shelves in my living room over to campus. Every time I pull a history book off the shelf it brings back memories of the specific graduate school seminar where we studied that work. So in packing the bags of books I’m also re-living much of my graduate school experience. There are so many memories held in those pages! Most of all, it is sitting around the seminar table in the basement of Murray Krieger Hall and grappling with the ways we imagine the past and the best practices for doing our own writing about it. I remember failures. And moments where I really “got” an idea as brilliantly as a lightbulb turning on inside my head.
My journey through graduate school has not been easy–balancing my family’s needs with my own need to write and study has meant major sleep derivation, and sometimes half-baked scholarship. In those seven years since I started graduate school I’ve battled a life-threatening illness, I’ve left my Mormon community behind, and I’ve become a person that would be hardly-imaginable to my 32 year-old self. When I signed up to get a PhD I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but it certainly wasn’t all that!
So many of those thoughts where swirling around in my mind when I came across a dusty copy of The History of Tooele County. It was a gift from Mike Davis, the historian-writer who strongly urged me to attend graduate school and was an ardent supporter of my creative nonfiction writing. I’d written about my Utah family and their problematic relationship to the land that’s poisoned by the Kennecott mines that loom so close nearby. Mike talked with me about the Iosepa cemetery, which is one of my all-favorite burial grounds (a close second to the Pleasant Green cemetery). He understood the tensions I felt between my bone-deep allegiance to the place of my family and to the utopian promise of the “West,” while also validating why I felt so betrayed by the Mormon naivete that “all is well” in Zion. One day we walked along the beach in San Diego as we talked about all of this, and he asked me how I could continue to believe in the Mormon church, knowing all I did about its failings. I looked at my kids who were running in the waves alongside us and thought of Davis’ own wife who was about ready to give birth to twins.
“I love them so much,” I said, pointing to my kids. “How could I ever live with the constant overwhelming fear of losing them if I didn’t believe in eternal families? I can’t not believe that they will always be with me.”
He replied to me on an equally deep level, expressing his love for his children, and his fears for their futures.
There was something about walking along the rocks and sand and waves that cemented that interaction in my mind long after it was over, and all of that returned as I held the old book in my hands yesterday. It’s been a few years since I chatted with Mike and since then I’ve faced down a lot of fear. I no longer feel the same sense of needing to believe in Mormon cosmology to assuage my concerns about losing my children, even though I do constantly worry about their safety.
It brings to mind some favorite lines from a Mary Oliver poem, “Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith”:
And therefore, let the immeasurable come.
Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine,
Let the wind turn in the trees,
and the mystery hidden in dirt
swing through the air.
How could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?
What should I fear?
One morning
in the leafy green ocean
the honeycomb of the corn’s beautiful body
is sure to be there.
About four hours in to each of my long outrigger races, the shakes begin. I’m cold, but bundling up for warmth does almost nothing to reduce the jitters. It’s that point where my body says ‘no more.’ It wants me to stop. And it takes everything to keep going…
When I was traveling around Boston and visiting with friends that I hadn’t seen for a year, a few mentioned that I’d changed. Getting a full-time job seems to have altered me at a metabolic level–I am not only thinking about work most of the time (and rather tied at the hip to my computer just in case something goes terribly awry), but I’m also far less to prone to just relaxing. My major realization from the Exponent retreat was that I need to make sure to keep space in my life for the things that calm me. Like friends and nephews and picture books and long walks and wading. One symbol of the way I “let go” over the weekend was that when my Prezi for my talk didn’t materialize (due to being saved on the Internet and I didn’t have any ‘net access at the camp), I let it go and I didn’t beat myself up about it…
But let me back up a bit, back to the shakes… I don’t think I mentioned here that I accomplished the Catalina crossing once again. We had a wicked south-pulling current and it was a longer-than-long race–my GPS marked 37.7miles, and 6.5 hours of paddling. I steered two long pieces, and afterwards my forearms were so sore from trying to hold the paddle in place against the waves, that they kept rapidly cramping and contracting–resulting in my fingers twisting into strange claw-like shapes. When I got off the boat after the finish line, John was snapping photos. Later, he said he wasn’t going to show me the pics because they were so unflattering—I can only imagine how tired I must have looked. It’s one of those accomplishments that doesn’t feel good until a few days later, when the body has had time for some repair work…
So as I’ve finished the team outrigger season and now have some more space in my life, I’m considering where I’ll look next for my exercise and my fun. I feel as though I need a bit less of the long-haul endurance work–both at work and at play. I want to continue to develop my strength, but I also want to just “be.” I need to remember what that feels like. Again.
Last night John walked into our bedroom and found me with the bedcovers covering part of my face. It wasn’t until he said something that I realized my hands were pressing the layers of quilt and sheets over my mouth, in an act of self-comfort.
I think I’d told John before that when I was younger I slept with the covers over my head. Especially on nights that I was scared. Because the warm cocoon of blanket seemed so much safer than whatever loomed in the dark night.
My favorite travel bag is the one that I’m carrying in my right hand in this photo. I bought it in China the morning before I returned to the States. It was $6. I didn’t haggle. It says “ESPBIT” on the logo, which looks just like ESPRIT unless you take a moment to really think about it. It was hard to choose between a red one and the green one–I’m glad I settled on the red.
I needed an extra bag to bring home some trinkets: a wooden dragon for GameBoy, turquoise silk pajamas for Catgirl, a black cheongsam for me, as well as several pouches of jasmine tea. For John I brought a delicately carved “chop” engraved with his name in Chinese.
Now I carry my ESPBIT bag to my outrigger races, to conferences, and just about anywhere else I travel. It’s outlasted nearly every other suitcase that I’ve purchased.
I’m horribly afraid of heights. So much so that when I find myself in a high place, I’m tempted to just jump because I want the fear to end. Completely irrational, but that’s how it feels.
So given my fear, rock climbing is just crazy. But I kind of love it anyways. When I’m up on that wall and my heart is pounding so hard from fear, and every muscle is straining…it gives quite an adrenaline rush.
But I never look down and I never look too far ahead. I stay focused on the place where I am and the next step. I look for the nearby holds rather than looking back or down.
Though as a historian I tend to have an obsession with the past, in my own life I’m learning the importance of being present in the here and now. Rock climbing is a good reminder of that important lesson. When I concentrate on the very place where I am, the fear of what’s below or ahead just drops away.
Note: Catgirl is on one face of the wall and I’m on the other. :)
I’m posting this picture simply because I wanted to post something today that just makes me happy. And seeing this picture of Catgirl feeding the birds at Notre Dame cathedral, it’s pure happy. :)
A friend mentioned, in an email, conversation to me recently that she’s a ‘workaholic.’ I hadn’t heard that word in a long time, and it caused me to think for a bit. I suppose I’ve rarely heard that term applied to women–usually it’s a term used to denote a man who spends more time at the office than at work. But I began to wonder if maybe I’m a bit of a workaholic. Or, maybe, all of us in academia suffer a bit from the workaholism simply because our work is never done. It never gets left at the office. There are always journals to read, and articles to write, and studies to conduct, and conferences to attend. And all of that on top of our teaching and administrative activities.
I think about work nearly all of the time. I can sometimes turn it off if I’m paddling or with my family, but even then I tend to yammer on to my teammates or to John about “something that happened at work today.”
Surely some of this is the novelty of my new position at Chapman. I have had to learn SO MUCH in the past few months and my brain is constantly spinning on the various tasks associated with my job. And then there’s my dissertation, which is congealing much more these days, and as it does so it’s just hard to step away from–my subjects are living right alongside me all the time.
And I’m certainly happy with my job. So far it’s offered a healthy mix of deadlines and projects. That there is no space for complacency is actually a good thing for my personality. I like challenges.
But every once in awhile I remember that my current lifestyle is definitely…odd. That I don’t just hang out with friends anymore…makes me a bit wistful for the days that we had friends over for games nearly every weekend. That I’ve only read one poem in as long as I can remember seems….so unlike me and there is this part of me that craves words as juicy as oranges.. That I haven’t planted anything new in my garden since May….makes me wonder if some part of me is dying on the vine.
I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just a temporary thing. And next year when that dissertation is filed and my job becomes more routine, then there will be time for poetry and friends and flowers once again.
At Chapman I spend a lot of time coaching faculty on how they can use technology in the classroom. This past week–the first week of the semester–numerous times faculty have told me “I just don’t want to learn one more piece of software.” This usually happens after I’ve gushed about some type of tool that would help them solve a problem.
I gush far too much.
What the faculty need is not someone like me who loves to experiment with new software, who thinks a great weekend is one that involves a fresh install of WordPress, or who dreams about digital tools (yes, I’m embarrassed to admit that many of my dreams have involved magical plugins). They need someone who thinks they way they do.
Perhaps it will be all of the above!