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"Quotidianness"
Two announcements:
- My dear friend Jenni (who I have known from a distance for several years and am delighted to be rooming with at The Glen in a week or so) has been working very hard on the Art House America site – and it’s finished, as of last night. So go read, gawk at the loveliness, and enjoy.
- I’m delighted to be the faculty advisor for the newest women’s house at King’s, named for Corrie ten Boom. (You can read the announcement here from last spring.) I know several of the girls from my class last year, and I am very excited to be joining them as they embark on their first year, and to be able to engage in student life at King’s in my first year.
Things I am pondering:
- The perennial question: M.F.A. or Ph.D., or both, and in which order? Do I need to study craft or history? Where, how, when? Do I need prerequisites? And how can I avoid paying for it? These things roll around in my head a lot, and they’ve come back lately in a kind of aggravated existential crisis. (What do you think?)
- I asked this question of a number of teacher/writer friends in an email, but I’ll ask here, too: if you do both, how do you manage both? Do you schedule time for writing into your office time? Or is it haphazard?
- Similarly, blogging friends: do you find that blogging takes away from or enhances your writing time? I used to say that blogging was exercising the writing muscle. Then I stopped blogging. And I think maybe I was right, but it’s hard to start again.
- Jim Belcher’s book Deep Church, which, besides being incredibly engaging, compassionate, and reasoned, is also challenging, expanding, and clarifying my thinking in ways that few books have done of late (Jamie Smith‘s Desiring the Kingdom being one of those few). If you care about church and have been scurrying around the periphery of both relatively traditional evangelicalism and vaguely emergent churches for a while, like me, you can’t afford to skip this one. I promise: you haven’t read it before. And you’ll also enjoy it.
- Speaking of Desiring the Kingdom, I’m struggling with how to develop thick practices in my students through teaching. I’m already committed to not setting deadlines for big assignments for Sunday night or Monday morning, because I know students, and many will not make Sunday into a day of rest if they know a project is due. I don’t want to teach them that behavior – it will burn them out. I’ve been there. I know. And I also plan to focus on Sabbath the week we also focus on poetry and description in my first-semester writing class this fall. But what else? I’m thinking about, for instance, Andi’s article on shelter and my own new (even if shared) office.
You know, just an average Friday morning.
On Wednesday, June 16, I was waiting for my plane at LaGuardia, en route to a work trip to Hamilton, Ontario (which also, by extension, is filled with a lot of fun), when Apple called and said that no, my dead computer wasn’t covered under warranty because it was showing liquid damage to the logic board and I could either pay $750 to fix it or just cut my losses.
It’s two years old, so I chose the latter option, which of course means I’ve been computerless, since I immediately hopped on a plane (with my husband’s laptop), came home two days later for twenty-four hours or so, then boarded another plane at another airport bound for Dublin. (After much deliberation, I ended up ordering a netbook from Asus. I hate Windows – a feeling that has not abated but grown since I started using it again – but the iPad lacks a lot of functionality I need from a portable computer, and I lack the funds to buy another MacBook.)
Dublin, though, was great. We immediately rented a car and headed out of the city for a few days to Cashel and other places, spent the night in Kilkenny, then climbed a very tall hill in Glendalough before returning to Dublin:
Not nearly a good-enough photo. It looks quite low and uninteresting here. More pictures to come.
Back in the city, we visited galleries, museums, old buildings, new sights, and more, winding up at the end at the Guinness Storehouse (as one does in Dublin). We spent evenings in pubs, watching the football, and had a great time.
A week later we moved on to Glasgow, where we stayed with very kind friends, and spent a few days tooling around Glasgow and Edinburgh – two very different but very interesting cities. We saw the Queen’s Scottish home and some underground streets and the fabulous cathedral in Glasgow, above which towers, perhaps ironically, a statue of John Knox:
John Knox atop the necropolis behind the cathedral in Glasgow, the only one to survive the Reformation in the country. Irony?
England was last: first Bristol, where we stayed with the marvelously longsuffering and generous Beldmans, and visited both beautiful Bristol and the best place in the world – Bath – where we went to the contemporary hot baths and soaked in a warm pool on the roof overlooking the Georgian town, and visited Jamie’s Italian twice in one day; then London for two nights, where we went on the London Eye, ate Indian food, and spent a day in the Tower of London, which is enormous and fascinating.
We got home Saturday and have been running around madly since – Tom to D.C. to see his grandpa, me unpacking and cleaning and sneaking in the World Cup finals yesterday in a Hell’s Kitchen bar full of yelling Americans, who, after all, were a bit more enthusiastic than any pub crowd we ran into in the British Isles – go figure.
So here we are – back home. Three weeks and I head to the Glen in Santa Fe. Tom’s working on an action flick in Manhattan beginning today. I’m finishing out my tenure at IAM this month and getting my syllabi put together for my three classes this fall at King’s. We’re attending a dear friend’s wedding at the Botanical Gardens on Sunday. And hopefully squeezing in the Philharmonic’s performances in the parks this week.
Traveling, we find, always reminds us why we’re happy to live in New York, a place where people are friendly when they need to be, where they walk quickly on the sidewalks, where it’s easy to carve out a small corner in a big city if you want it enough, where you can get food or really anything you want past 6pm, and where the subways are VERY cheap (1/4 the price of the Tube!). We’re grateful that we have such a wonderful town to come back to, filled with wonderful people.
Be it ever so humble – or maybe not so humble! – there’s really no place like home.
Last weekend I was at Jubilee, conducting two workshops, meeting with people, and generally having an awesome time. We flew in Friday morning quite early because I had an editorial meeting for Comment, which, as it turns out, was a great time to meet – for me, at least. We solved all our problems and then proceeded to solve a bunch of others throughout the weekend.
After the meeting, Tom and I slipped out of the hotel to drop by the Andy Warhol Museum. It feels a bit weird to be reading all about Warhol – who defined a large part of New York’s culture scene in his time, and continues to do so – while not actually in New York, but the museum was quite interesting. It’s not laid out strictly by chronology or by medium, leaving you to draw some conclusions about the work as you work your way from the seventh floor down.
The conference itself started Friday night. The speakers were fabulous, as always – Don Opitz, the inconceivably awesome Bob Goff, John Perkins! and I won’t even try to name the rest. My workshops were fairly successful, and Tom’s was a smash bang-up success – so full that you couldn’t get your head in the door.
But the best part of these weekends is always the connections you make with others, and Jubilee is starting to feel like one giant reunion party with a lot of college students attending on the side. Besides giving workshops, I spent most of the weekend with my colleagues from Cardus (and thereby, most of them, from Comment), who drove down from Ontario, and are some of my favorite people in the world that I never get to see (though I did spent five hours on the “phone” aka Skype in a meeting with them yesterday, which, given the generally dismal state of five-hour conference calls, was pretty pleasant). We spent a lot of time laughing and drinking a variety of substances and talking with various interesting people about the future of the world at large. It was, quite frankly, splendid.
All good things come to an end, of course, and we got back Sunday night. This week has been, well, bumpy. Early mornings and too much work, and some really nasty weather. I feel like the avalanche is accelerating, since the IAM Encounter starts a week from today (good, but oy). I’m having a trickier time staying on top of grading this semester, which I attribute to the fact that while last semester I had one essay to grade each week, this semester they’re all kinds of different essays, spread gratuitously all over the semester. It’s okay. By the time I get the hang of it, the semester will be over.
It could just be February slump, though. I’m a New England girl through and through. I like winter, I really do. I like sweaters and scarves and boots, and bundling up, and I like how pretty snow is, especially since I don’t have to drive in it. I like hot drinks. Hockey is far and away my favorite sport.
But by late February, I always am feeling the SAD a bit. It always takes me by surprise, because I don’t consciously feel like I’m tired of it. I’m not even watching the Olympics (and in fact, the entirety of my Olympic watching this year was restricted to some background ice shuffleboard curling while hanging out with with crazy people Canadians). But I guess I could be ready to go running outside without being so bundled up. And I do get excited for toe ring season.
(Am I too old for toe rings? Every year I wonder if my inner hippie will sneak up on my outer chic New Yorker facade and I’ll be suddenly clad in toe rings and flared jeans or broomstick skirts.)
I fail at blogging. But at least I’ve been thinking about blogging. That means that I’m remembering I have a blog, which is a positive development.
Every year, for the past few years, I have a number of strange things happen to me in the early months. Last year it was bedbugs, which I dearly hope never to repeat, followed by getting hired at King’s for the fall semester, which has been utterly delightful.
This week turned out to be my week of surprises. First, I got to be on The John and Kathy Show (on WORD-FM in Pittsburgh) on Tuesday, talking about the concept of being a Christian in the scholarly community. Several people asked me why I didn’t alert them to this sooner so they could have listened; I was on at 4:15pm, and I found out I’d be on around 2pm, so hopefully that explains it. But it was good fun and I’m hoping to meet John and Kathy in person at Jubilee next weekend.
Then there was a blizzard, kind of, on Wednesday. This is notable mostly because it doesn’t happen too often in New York City. It was a rather cowardly blizzard, as blizzards go. And I work from home on Wednesdays, so it wasn’t really a snow day. But it was fun to watch it fall and remember that I used to spend all winter dodging blizzards like this when I lived upstate. I don’t miss that one bit.
Thursday requires some explanation. King’s has a “Distinguished Visitor” series, in which famous, intelligent, or otherwise worthwhile people visit at noon for a lecture or a Q&A about their work. I require my students to attend some of the lectures but I’ve never been able to attend one myself.
Until Thursday. It worked out that Tony Hale (aka Buster Bluth) was the visitor, and as my students are studying film, I told them not to miss that one. Then I decided to go as well. Tony, while being hilarious, also managed to reinforce several things I had talked about in my class lecture that day (which I thanked him for). He also lived in New York years ago and therefore knows half of my friends, including my coworkers, so afterward we trekked up to the IAM Space and all chatted a bit whilst eating lunch. I’m used to running into people famous enough to have their own Facebook fan pages, but rarely do I have a great conversation with them. So, thanks, Tony.
So now it’s Friday, and I’m at work, of course. We’re showing Yi Yi tonight at IAM, and tomorrow we’re seeing people all day, and Sunday is Valentine’s Day (though we have no huge plans that I know of).
And I will try to blog before next weekend, especially because we leave on Friday morning for Jubilee. By the way, Ash Wednesday is this week. Isn’t that crazy?
A gorgeous, clear morning here in Brooklyn. It rained heavily and gustily on Monday, was warm (meaning, around forty degrees) and beautiful on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then yesterday morning I was putting on my running shoes around 7:30 and looked out the window, and it was snowing mightily. I still went out – it snowed ever more mightily as the time wore on – but running in the snow is lovely when it’s not too deep. And the ground was warm, so the snow melted by the time I’d emerged from the subway in midtown.
But I think it’s pretty cold today.
I still sound like I’m hacking up a lung, and people tend to inch away on the subway, but I’m really quite a lot better. I have enough energy to to walk around and do things, and after two weeks of misery, I’ll take that. I even went running twice this week and will do so again tomorrow.
I’ll be heading toward the IAM office around noon to work and then help coordinate our evening event, a concert/poetry reading by Brooke Campbell and L.L. Barkat. (You should come! But if you’re not in New York, you can still watch it streamed live online at 7pm EST. You probably won’t get a glimpse of me, but you’ll see where I work a couple days a week.)
Before he left this morning, Tom said to me, “Can you believe it’s almost February?” And no, I cannot. Until yesterday I thought it was mid-January. February is an exciting but exhausting time in our world; we’ll head to Jubilee in mid-February, where we’re both presenting workshops, and then two weeks later – this year, it’s the first weekend in March – is the IAM conference. Conferences like this are wonderful, now that we are on the speaker side of things, because we get to meet new friends or see far-flung friends again. But they’re undeniably tiring. I’ll be packing the Airborne when we go to Pittsburgh.
I’m sorry for these dull, quotidian entries. I’m not back into the swing of blogging yet, and I forget the blog exists until Fridays, when I sit down to write blog entries at the other three blogs to which I contribute. I’ll get better. I need to flex the personal essay muscle more, now that I spend a lot of time teaching it.
There is a reason I haven’t blogged in over a week, and that is that I have been rather ill in between being rather busy. I’m still sick, but I have to teach tomorrow, so whether or not I have a voice I’ll be there. (Thankfully, my students are slated to present on various film history topics tomorrow, so I won’t need to say much.)
If you, too, are under the weather, you ought to check out Katy’s list of strategic ways to combat what ails you. My blood pressure precludes the use of Sudafed, but I did run through my supply of Breathe Easy tea and have moved on to elderberry syrup, echinacea + propolis throat spray, and slippery elm lozenges, which I am trying not to use up too fast.
But it’s been a good week, if we don’t count the hacking cough. Last night, Tom led a bourbon tasting at an IAM event for young patrons, and all twenty or so participants, plus staff, enjoyed themselves greatly. There was good food and good music and good company – and that’s all you really need.
Pocket litter, as Gideon calls it:
• I’ve been a long-time user of Remember the Milk for to-do lists, by which I live and die, but I’d found over the past few months that certain things just weren’t conforming to the way I live my life. Enter Things, which I had heard about but was really convinced of by ProfHacker. I think I’m in love.
• By the way, the aforementioned ProfHacker is a fantastic site for those of us who teach at the college level.
• The truly brilliant Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, now about to be performed in NYC.
• William Zinsser’s insightful talk/essay on writing good English – essential reading, even if you, like me, harp on good writing for a living. (HT Rob)
I haven’t had a week like this in a long time. Fighting off illness was only the half of it – and I’m functional, but have a lingering chest cough. Lots of tea.
My later section of research writing was cancelled, but in its place I’m doing some work with the online education program at King’s. It’s exciting work that uses all the skills and education I’ve accumulated to this point (amazingly enough), but it’s also disorienting to suddenly pick up another set of responsibilities you hadn’t thought about until that moment. Added to getting lecture preparation finished on the right day (still trying to remember that class is on Monday and Thursday, not Tuesday and Friday), and piloting an online version of the class I taught last semester, and that’s just tiring. The other jobs (including a grand push to get the next print edition of Comment ready by Jubilee) have been an icing on the proverbial cake (which I, being barred from gluten for the time being, cannot even eat).
Yet I’m very thankful. I spent many years working in not just full- but part-time jobs (in college and high school) that I nearly unilaterally disliked or was at least bored by, and so I had come to expect that I could never really like work. I’m unspeakably grateful to have a to-do list a mile long with things I actually want to do (yes, even laundry).
Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m not a little stressed out, and since I do in fact have high blood pressure, I should probably be watching the stress level. I’ve taken up real running again (and the weather has been cooperating – thirty degrees is ideal for street running), and I have been very carefully watching my diet and laying off the coffee for the most part. I think what I probably really need is a yoga class and a vacation, but this will do for now.
It’s vaguely nervewracking to wake up with a sore throat and nagging cough on Friday when you have to start lecturing to college students on Monday morning. Hence, I am working from my cozy bed today, doing all the things I’d be doing in the office but not actually going out in the cold.
Because it is cold; not unbearably so, but chilly, and there is pretty snow coming down that I can see against the dark rooftops of the apartments and buildings from my window. The flakes are tiny, light, and floaty, which is the best kind of snow, because it sticks to the ground, but not to your eyelashes. And in New York, unlike most other places in the country that are getting snow today, an inch of the white stuff does not shut down schools and workplaces. It just means boots and a pretty, clean coating for a day.
I’ve spent most of this week working from home, my last like that for a while. The Curator‘s web host and I had a run-in after a WordPress upgrade went awry, and I spent most of Wednesday trying to fix it and finally just migrating to another host in utter despair. If you poke around the site, you’ll see that a few things broke, a little, but nothing so terrible that it obscures actual articles. By Wednesday night, I’d lost the will to fix things anymore. It hasn’t come back yet.
Tom has been shooting lengthy hours this week (lengthy, but not as lengthy as I thought they’d be – in the film industry, a thirteen-hour day is “short”) on a set in Bed-Stuy. He’s been leaving before six o’clock (and in some cases, before five o’clock), but coming home cheerful considering the circumstances. It’s hard work. I couldn’t do his job.
I haven’t finished my first book for Fifty Two Fifty Two yet, but you should pop on over there and see what the others have been reading. I’m delighted with the reviews that have popped up so far. (I, too, am reading Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, and if it looks like everyone in the world is, that’s mostly but not entirely because several participants are in the same book club with me.)
We celebrated the New Year sumptuously: games, pizza, and champagne with friends on Thursday night; a long, languid day of delicious food and old friends on Friday; a day spent at the Kandinsky exhibit at the Guggenheim, Cafe Sabarsky, and The Princess and the Frog with friends on Saturday; and church plus our favorite brunch spot on Sunday.
Tom went back to work very early yesterday morning. I worked too, but from home, and only kind of feel like I’m at work this week, since I have only two days in the office. But next week the semester starts, and so I am busily prepping materials for my two classes (one college writing class online, and two sections of the same research writing class in the actual classroom). The spring is a busy time, with several conferences and a lot of projects popping up, and so it’s important to be as organized as possible.
But all that organizing needs a respite, and so I have started recording the movies I watch along with starting the Fifty Two Fifty Two project. I haven’t finished a book yet this year, but I’ve gotten into Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, the 2009 Pulitzer winner, which our book club is discussing next Tuesday, and I’ve read the first two interviews (Dorothy Day and Truman Capote) in the Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1 – which is completely delightful. I tend to read a whole bunch of books at once and finish them all on the same day.
Last: my doctor put me on a fairly restrictive diet because, as it turns out, I have Stage 1 hypertension – nothing to get too worried about, but also something I shouldn’t have at my age. And so I’m off dairy and gluten for a while, and eating a very specific amount of certain things. I found myself re-reading Jenni’s article from Comment a while back.
I’ve become quite in love with cooking and good food in the last year or two, enjoying the cheese counter at the local gourmet market and baking homemade bread, but I can receive these things again when I am well. It is good discipline for me to experience some “fasting” along with my feasting, and I suppose, in that sense, that Father Capon would approve.
I was thinking, at first, that 2009 was relatively uneventful; then I thought harder, and knew I was wrong.
There were quite a few firsts this year. I got my first teaching job – and, incidentally, found the first thing I’ve ever loved doing unreservedly and would be happy doing for a very long time.
Tom and I took our first long vacation together off the East Coast, in places neither of us had visited before: a week in the Caribbean (where, for the first time, we snorkeled and kayaked on the ocean), and a week in Santa Fe.
We started our mostly-monthly brunch series and crammed 20+ people into our apartment.
In January, we battled our first bedbug. (I say bedbug, singular, because we never managed to find it or see it, and it was most certainly not an infestation. But it was awful. There may have been two or three, but they tortured us for a month until we beat them with elbow grease, a mattress cover, and Mr. Clean.)
Tom got a Wii for his birthday, and has been enjoying it since. I never once played video games growing up, so I’m learning to like it, but that’s a big first for me.
I also, of course, finished my graduate degree, which I’d been working on since January 2008 – not a dreadfully long time, but long enough that it felt monumental.
I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting, but at the end of the year, I am mostly grateful for what happened, and ready to move into a new year and decade. The noughties were good to me, on the whole, and I’m curious to see what the teens will bring.
This year is full of resolve – resolutions mostly given to me for health or career reasons, and very few I’ve made myself. But I hope mostly to slow down and remember it all more thoroughly.
