Category: deep thoughts

  • Bridges

    Cross posted at History Compass

    Lido bridge at low tide
    Since I started paddling an outrigger canoe through the Newport harbor, I’ve gone under a lot of bridges. I learned, very quickly, that the current around bridges can be unpredictable–even dangerously so. In my small boat if I hit a bridge it means that I’ll likely end up going for an unintentional swim and the blow from hitting a cement pylon can easily cause irreparable damage to my fragile canoe.

    As I paddled under a low-lying bridge last week and heard the uncanny echo of water and wind through that space, I realized why trolls always live under bridges in folktales. Bridges are important places–necessary crossroads. But they are also liminal places where danger lurks. It might be in the form of a malintentioned someone hiding in the shadows, or it might be a whirl of current that pulls the boat toward a cement piling encrusted with mussel shells. Whatever the possibilities, bridge-crossings demand heightened attention.

    Like the dangers of the bridges that I face as I paddle around segments of the harbor, there seem to be trolls lurking around the bridges of academia, too.

    Right now the trolls that I’m facing are the distractions that pull me away from finishing my dissertation–the largest being the specter of the awful job market, but others include my inner perfectionist that needles me with reminders that the dissertation will never be as good as I wanted it to be.

    Every morning as I plan my day and make my “To Do” list, I realize that some choices I make keep me on a straight and safe course, while others bring me dangerously close to wrecking my boat as I let the current pull me this way and that. And some days I don’t get anywhere–eschewing the list of daily tasks and paddling around in circles rather than making measurable progress toward my end goal.

  • You will survive

    When I was 13, I was struggling to survive, too, so the message of this video resonates with me even though I have no experience with human trafficking. And…I am so pleased to be part of it–you can see me, along with others from Orange County Friends Meeting at 2:12.

  • time & management

    I used to manage my time with a Franklin Planner. I carried that thing everywhere and kept all of my assignments, receipts, postage, etc in its pockets. I loved the daily to-do lists as well as the monthly calendar pages where I could see my whole schedule at a glance.

    Nowadays I use a similar system to manage my time: a combination of Hiveminder for task management and GCal for my calendar. But I don’t find that either work particularly well on my iPhone. I also really miss the visceral feeling of those handwritten to-do lists and checkboxes.

    Do you have any advice for me on what tools might work better for my time management? What tools do you use?

  • time & management

    I used to manage my time with a Franklin Planner. I carried that thing everywhere and kept all of my assignments, receipts, postage, etc in its pockets. I loved the daily to-do lists as well as the monthly calendar pages where I could see my whole schedule at a glance.

    Nowadays I use a similar system to manage my time: a combination of Hiveminder for task management and GCal for my calendar. But I don’t find that either work particularly well on my iPhone. I also really miss the visceral feeling of those handwritten to-do lists and checkboxes.

    Do you have any advice for me on what tools might work better for my time management? What tools do you use?

  • first morning


    Happy New Year everyone! Our family just chased the sunrise, shivering together and eyes watering as we shared this first morning of 2010 with each other.

    The picture isn’t much–my camera battery ran out before we were positioned to take any decent photos. :)

  • what an amazing year it’s been! (a meme for you)

    My garden, in the morningI’m following Bleeding Espresso’s year-end meme. Drop a comment if you play along–I’d really love to read your analysis of 2009!

    1. What did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before?
    So many things: spoke at the AHA (the biggest baddest annual history conference), worked in the D.C. National Archives, paddled in my first outrigger canoe season culminating with my Catalina Crossing, testified at my husband’s LDS church trial for Apostasy, swam under the moon in Albuquerque, wandered the flats of Cape Cod, perused my own medical records in Denver, turned 38 years old & raised funds for Huang Meihua’s prosthetic legs, leaped into Walden Pond, dyed my hair purple…

    2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
    The only one I made was to get limber enough to do the splits. I’m still working in that one…

    3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
    My youngest sibling. Her wee one is adorable!

    4. Did anyone close to you die?
    My dear blogfriend Sara and my GrandmaB. I miss both of them dearly.

    5. What countries did you visit?
    Just the U.S. this year.

    6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
    My Ph.D. dissertation.

    7. What dates from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
    9.9.09, the date of John’s ex-ing.

    8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
    Being present to the experiences that came my way.

    9. What was your biggest failure?
    Being short-tempered or impatient with my loved ones.

    10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
    A nasty cough in August that kept me away from Sunstone. A torn bicep that almost kept me from competing in the Catalina race (oh and all that black-and-blueness for a week afterwards). Near-daily achiness from my paddling & cross-training.

    11. What was the best thing you bought?
    My black tutu

    12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
    My kids. They rock the world.

    13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
    The local LDS leaders (you might remember that I wrote a post about that, but later deleted it)..

    14. Where did most of your money go?
    Supporting our family.

    15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
    I think I get really, really, really excited about almost everything, but particularly travel.

    16. What song will always remind you of 2009?
    See #38, below…

    17. Compared to this time last year, are you: (a) happier or sadder? (b) thinner or fatter? (c) richer or poorer?
    a) just as happy
    b) just as fat (tho with a bit more muscle tone)
    c) just as rich

    18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
    Skinny-dipping (just kidding–I’ve never actually done that)
    Gardening

    19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
    Stressing about things beyond my control, especially about the depressing job market for historians

    20. How did you spend Christmas?
    Relaxing at home with my family

    21. Did you fall in love in 2009?
    I think I fall in love nearly every day.

    22. What was your favorite TV program?
    I watched a few episodes of Mad Men and it looks promising, but not worth getting caught up in right now.

    23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
    No.

    24. What was the best book you read?
    No idea. It was probably something about diphtheria (my current dissertation-related obsession)

    25. What was your greatest musical discovery?
    Emily Wells, live & in person. That girl is a musical hypnotist!

    26. What did you want and get?
    Nearly everything (and more)…

    27. What did you want and not get?
    Such a complicated question, which doesn’t seem worth answering right now.

    28. What was your favorite film of this year?
    Ugh, I hate favorite questions. Harry Potter 6?

    29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
    Turned 38 and celebrated the 25th anniversary of my cancer diagnosis in a spectacular way.

    30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
    To get more work done on my dissertation.

    31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?
    Cheap, comfortable and eclectic. With an occasional corset.

    32. What kept you sane?
    Paddling. Home.

    33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
    AFP

    34. What political issue stirred you the most?
    Healthcare, for everyone.

    35. Who did you miss?
    Sara. The world just wasn’t as exciting without her around to share things with.

    36. Who was the best new person you met?
    Every new person that I met was the best. Seriously. And my old friends, they were the best, too.

    37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009.
    Still learning this one, and doing a wee bit better at it this year!

    38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
    There’s just something about this song by Muse that grabs right around my ribcage and squeezes, making my heart beat that much harder, reminding me how very alive I am…

    They will not force us,
    They will stop degrading us,
    They will not control us,
    We will be victorious

    Let me know if you do the year end meme!

  • I call it my "office"


    Last Wednesday our Internet connection went down. Within a few days we learned that this was an outage affecting most of our neighbors, perhaps even thousands of on-campus apartments. This happened during the budget-mandated furlough at UCI, which means that all the IT people are on mandatory leave. There’s one measly helpline open, and they have no jurisdiction over the Ethernet systems in on-campus residences.

    Then today we received an email letting us know that we’d likely not have Internet until Jan 4th. Sigh. But we also learned that one laundry room in our neighborhood has wireless (why a laundry room? Oh, wouldn’t I like to know!). So for now, this is my office–where I’ll be doing all the writing & research that I’d planned for the Winter break. It’s horribly inconvenient–I’ve been standing at the side of a washer typing away for the past 45 minutes. Talk about unergonomic! But, at least I’m connected and I can now get some small portion of my work done.

  • I call it my “office”


    Last Wednesday our Internet connection went down. Within a few days we learned that this was an outage affecting most of our neighbors, perhaps even thousands of on-campus apartments. This happened during the budget-mandated furlough at UCI, which means that all the IT people are on mandatory leave. There’s one measly helpline open, and they have no jurisdiction over the Ethernet systems in on-campus residences.

    Then today we received an email letting us know that we’d likely not have Internet until Jan 4th. Sigh. But we also learned that one laundry room in our neighborhood has wireless (why a laundry room? Oh, wouldn’t I like to know!). So for now, this is my office–where I’ll be doing all the writing & research that I’d planned for the Winter break. It’s horribly inconvenient–I’ve been standing at the side of a washer typing away for the past 45 minutes. Talk about unergonomic! But, at least I’m connected and I can now get some small portion of my work done.

  • Mary Monday: lessons, shells, and solitude


    Cape Cod-tide on its way out, originally uploaded by pilgrimgirl.

    My visit to Cape Cod was two months ago, but I feel like I’m just now actually processing the lessons that I learned while I was there. I was so raw, still, from John’s excommunication. For a very long time I’d been feeling this urgency to have some time just for me, and I had those few days to sort out some of the concerns that weighed rather heavily. I needed the time to be on my own, to wander, and to face the sea wind.

    It’s not often that we get a chance to be apart from the world for awhile, in such a beautiful place. Cape Cod will always be dear to me now, as the landscape that held me when I was aching, that taught me to feel strong in the midst of fear and change.

    Today’s passage isn’t from Mary Oliver, but from another woman who knew the gifts from the sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Her insights gained during her time on the “island” are resonating with me today as I think back to my time on Cape Cod.

    She writes:

    “Moon shell, who named you? Some intuitive woman I like to think. I shall give you another name–Island shell. I cannot live forever on my island. But I can take you back to my desk in Connecticut [or in Irvine]. You will sit there and fasten your single eye upon me. You will make me think, with your smooth circles winding inward to the tiny core, of the island I lived on for a few weeks. You will say to me “solitude.” You will remind me that I must try to be alone for part of each year, even a week or a few days, and for part of each day, even for an hour or a few minutes in order to keep my core, my center, my island-quality. You will remind me that unless I keep the island-quality intact somewhere within me, I will have little to give my husband, my children, my friends, or the world at large. You will remind me that woman must be still as the axis of a wheel in the midst of her activities, that she must be the pioneer in achieving this stillness, not only for her own salvation, but for the salvation of family life, of society, perhaps even of our civilization.”

    The need for solitude and stillness is not just essential for women and mothers, but for everyone so they can find center. Where do you go when you need to be alone for awhile?

  • pilgrim classic: What love?

    Originally published on 11/24/08:


    cluster of heliotrope, originally uploaded by pilgrimgirl.

    Where there is greed,
    What love can there be?
    ~Sikh wisdom

  • the deeper the sense of mystery…


    I don’t subscribe to many magazines. I mean, they are certainly fun to read (and who doesn’t love thumbing through National Geographic or Yoga Journal), but it’s hard to find time for them and I dislike the paper waste that they generate. But one magazine that has continued to hold my attention for the past few years is Seed (tagline: “Science is Culture”). I find myself gasping over the artwork and riveted by the articles. The writing is almost-always top-notch, too.

    I just wanted to share a few paragraphs from a recent article, “The Future of Science” (Nov/Dec 2007) because I find them so thought-provoking. [ok, confession #1: 2007 seems recent to me–I read and re-read these mags and just can’t get enough of them. And confession #2: I think molecular models are hot, don’t you? And, yes, I am a complete and total dork]:

    In the early 1920s, Niels Bohr was struggling to reimagine the structure of matter [note: I do this all the time, don’t you???]. Previous generations of physicists had thought the inner space of an atom looked like a miniature solar system with the atomic nuclues as the sun and the whirrig electrons as planets in orbit. This was the classical model.

    But Bohr had spent time analyzing the radiation emitted by electrons, and he realized that science needed a new metaphor. The behavior of electrons seemed to defy every conventional explanation. As Bohr said, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.” Ordinary words couldn’t capture the data [gee, do you think my dissertation adviser would accept this as an excuse??]

    Bohr had long been fascinated by cubist paintings. As the intellectual historian Arthur Miller notes, he later filled his study with abstract still lifes and enjoyed explaining his interpretation of the art to visitors. For Bohr, the allure of cubism was that it shattered the certainty of the object. The art revealed the fissures in everything, turning the solidity of matter into a surreal blur.

    Bohr’s discerning conviction was that the invisible world of the electron was essentially a cubist world. By 1923, de Broglie had already determined that electrons could exist as either particles or waves. What Bohr maintained was that the form they took depended on how you looked at them. Their very nature was a consequence of our observation. This meant that electrons weren’t like little planets at all. Instead, they were like one of Picasso’s deconstructed guitars, a blur of brushstrokes that only made sense once you stared at it. The art that looked so strange was actually telling the truth.

    It’s hard to believe that a work of abstract art might have actually affected the history of science. Cubism seems to have nothing in common with modern physics. When we think about the scientific process, a specific vocabulary comes to mind: objectivity, experiement, facts. In the passive tense of the scientific paper, we imagine a perect reflection of the real world. Paintings can be profound, but they are always pretend…

    But the trajectory of science has proven to be a little more complicated. The more we know about reality–about its quantum mechanics and neural origins–the more palpable its paradoxes become. As Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist and lepidopterist, once put it, “The greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of mystery.” [yes, indeed…]

  • flash poetry: flower haiku


    farmers market flower seller, originally uploaded by pilgrimgirl.

    It’s been awhile since I attempted some flash poetry. Because I need to get my creative juices flowing today, I decided to try my hand at a 10 minute haiku. (For those new to flash poetry, the point isn’t to be good, it’s just to have some fun by setting a timer for 5 or 10minutes and seeing what flows…):

    Indecisive, I
    take pictures, without buying
    from the flower stand.