What Now?

Having a social life: February edition

I'm happy to report that, for a second month in a row, I met my oh-so-modest New Year's goal of having a social life. Indeed, I have once again doubled what I aimed to achieve, going out not once but twice. Go me! And there's still a week left in February, and I have actually been invited out for another social outing this week, but since that would involve switching duties with another teacher in order to be free on the appropriate night, I may decide it's not worth the personal energy cost.

The interesting thing about both February outings is that they were incredibly spontaneous, arranged only hours before they happened. Perhaps I'm sending out a different vibe, one that signals to friends that I'm interested in going out?

The first outing happened in the first couple days of the month (nothing like meeting the month's goal in the first week!) when a colleague asked me at lunchtime if I'd like to go to a play that night; at the last minute, his wife couldn't accompany him, and so he had an extra ticket. He asked a couple of other folks as well, and I was the first person to say "yes." (And it had been a comp ticket, so it cost me nothing, which certainly factored into my saying "sure!") I'll confess that I was regretting that decision by the time we left for the theater, realizing how late I was going to be out on a school night. Or, rather, NOT realizing how late I'd be; when the ticket-taker told us that the play was 3 1/2 hours long, my heart quailed within me. And the play was sort of interesting -- indeed, it was An Experience of the Adventure City Literati type -- but I couldn't really enjoy the experience because I was so exhausted for the entire second half and was fretting about how tired I would be at school the next day. I got home at midnight, and I was pretty much a wreck for the rest of the week.

Socializing Lesson #1: I just can't stay out late at night, especially on a school night but really any time. I'm simply not a late-night person, and I need to take that into account when making social plans.

Socializing Lesson #2: Honestly, I'm not a sophisticated culture sort of person, and I should keep that in mind when planning outings.

This relative lack of sophistication is something that used to cause me some distress as a grad student, worrying that I wasn't as cultured as I should be or as my colleagues were, but I've now mostly made my peace with my tastes. (I was about to refer to my tastes as middlebrow, since I don't listen to opera or classical music but also can't stand "reality" television and so am presumably in that middle region between high- and lowbrow, but on second thought I think I'm not really middlebrow either since my point here is that I don't actually keep up with what is considered "culture." I guess I'm no-brow.) I had read about this play when the new theatre season's offerings were announced, and I'd thought "eh -- sounds a little pretentious; it would be clever enough for half an hour or so, but tedious for more than that"; and in fact, that's exactly what my assessment was after the evening, so why didn't I say "Oh, no thanks" when my colleague invited me? Partly it was the exciting last-minute-ness of it all, so that it felt like an adventure. But in the future I think I need to feel okay with not being as up-to-date on a certain segment of contemporary culture as my colleagues are. The only time this really bothers me is when my fellow English teachers talk about readings and plays they're going to in town (and really, it's only a few of my colleagues), but the last time this happened, I just thought to myself, "Well, I probably know a lot more than they do about the development of the novel tradition in America, so don't sweat it." Yes, there are better ways of dealing with perceived inadequacy than silently putting down my colleagues' academic backgrounds, but hey, I go with what works.

Then, my second outing came about even more spontaneously. Yesterday I was playing music with some colleagues (and this will get a post of its own this week!), and a friend and colleague was showing off her very cool sneakers that she'd gotten at a local store, one that combines the eclectic nature and reduced prices of Overstock.com with a slight Goodwill grunge factor and a hefty dose of camp. I'd heard about but have never gone to this store (it's where my next-door neighbor buys many of the solar-powered ornaments that she displays in her backyard, which tells you something about the store), and right then and there this friend and I decided that she had to take me on an introductory shopping trip. And since she's a seize-the-moment kind of person, she said, "Okay, let's make a plan. What are you doing tonight? This weekend?" Having learned Socializing Lesson #1 and realizing just how tired I was at the end of the week, I declined to go out right then but suggested Saturday. She had another obligation in the afternoon, so we agreed to get together for breakfast at 8:00 in the morning and then head out to the store.

And what fun we had! We were going to eat breakfast and grade for a little before going to the store, but we ended up just talking the whole time (having clarified that both of us were fine with its not being a productive morning) and then spending a couple hours strolling around, first in the funky store that was our destination and then in an office supply store and a used instrument store, both perfect for browsing. (I've now decided that it would be fun to take up the xylophone at some point.) It was totally casual and relaxing, we both were clearly enjoying ourselves, the entire outing cost me very little (because I didn't actually find anything I wanted at the funky store, other than some fancy tea bags for the low, low price of $.99), and I was home shortly after noon and had the rest of the day to myself. (In part because -- let me toot my own horn -- I got up and went for a brisk walk/jog before we got together for breakfast so had already earned my exercise sticker. Yay me!)

Socializing Lesson #3: Socializing during daylight hours works really well for me! I have a lot more energy earlier in the day and apparently can relax if I'm not fretting about being out too late. So maybe Saturday brunch rather than Friday or Saturday dinner needs to become my standard social outing meal? Sure, most people won't be up for get-togethers quite as early as we had today, but I'd still rather do 9:00 a.m. than 9:00 p.m.

So, although February is very much the month of doldrums for me (as for many people, of course), I am pleased at the direction things seem to be heading. None of my social experiences this year have been about the kind of deeply committed friendships in which one can reveal one's innermost self -- and that's really the long-term goal here -- but they are about my stepping out of my shell, and that's all to the good.

2010 resolutions -- one month in

So here we are, one month into 2010, so I thought I'd report on my goal of "reaching out in 2010."

The first way I meant this goal was about reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. And the specific benchmark I decided on was going out or getting together with folks socially once a month. And this January I actually went out twice! The first time was a colleague's birthday party, and then last weekend I had a blind date of sorts, getting together with a friend of a mutual friend, who sent us both an email earlier this month saying "hey, it just occurred to me that the two of you both live in Adventure City and might like each other!" I have to say that, in both cases, the social experience was just meh, but I'm not going to let me put that off of socializing in general. But I will say that it's increasingly clear to me that I get most of my day-to-day social needs taken care of at school, so I'm really only socially restless during the summers. No, the bigger issue is the need to maintain and care for deeper friendships, those few people whom one can tell one's gravest worries and call when everything is crashing around one. Not that things are crashing around me at the moment, I hasten to add, but if they did I would really be largely bereft, and that worries me. So the reaching out goal certainly continues.

The second way I meant this goal was about sharing my relative largesse, both because it's the right thing to do and because it will help me remember that what I have is indeed largesse. This goal is in many ways much easier to accomplish, and in January the disaster in Haiti made giving priorities clear, plus I had promised my alma mater a little dosh. It's still not an orderly and consistent set of charitable values, but it's a step in the right direction.

Now, back to goal #1, the reaching out to friends: I figured that two reasons I had been becoming less and less social in recent years were basic lack of energy and my embarrassing housekeeping, so I decided to keep myself honest on both of these points in hopes that improvement in these areas would lead to improvement in reaching out in general. And since you know I love a gold star, I have gone the stickers-in-a-calendar route, and it's working beautifully so far! I found a retro Barbie pocket calendar that tickled my fancy, and I get a shiny star sticker whenever I exercise for half an hour (trying to build energy), a little dog sticker whenever I spend at least 15 minutes on housework (washing dishes and doing laundry don't count, since those are the two things I was already doing anyway), and a smiley face sticker whenever I do financial housekeeping (paying bills, etc. -- the goal here is basic lessening of the underlying anxiety that I carry around all the time). Here's January. Not too bad, eh? It's interesting to see patterns emerge; the blank days are almost all Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, which make sense given my school schedule. It helps to be aware of such schedules since, for example, it pushes me to exercise on Wednesday, knowing that I probably won't take the time to do so again until Saturday. And, although the living room is currently a mess, I actually have been doing more straightening and cleaning around the house, knowing that I'll get a little puppy dog sticker if I do so. There's a part of me that feels like a little kid getting a reward for not wetting the bed, but hey, apparently what's sauce for the 6-year-old is sauce for the 42-year-old!

February begins in three hours, and I guess I turn over a new page then and start fresh. This is motivating me to call a friend who, like me, is apt to crawl into a hole and not stay connected with friends; given that we share this characteristic, we have a really hard time getting together, but darn it, I need a February date to keep my resolution, so I'll let that commitment fuel my social outreach.
 

Reaching out in 2010

After a heretofore lovely winter break, I've been in kind of a funk the last two days, which has kept me from writing a year-in-review sort of post. Since I tend to be a globalizing person, I knew that any summation of the year written when I was sunk in the blues would lead to such dire statements as "20009 was terrible, terrible, and everything sucks. And 2010 will be the same, I'm sure, because everything sucks." Knowing my tendencies in this direction, I have wisely been avoiding making any pronouncements at all about the past year. I do know that in a more cheerful mood I'd think that it had been a pretty good year all told, but clearly any assessment I make is largely dependent on my feelings of the moment.

But I have been thinking about a theme for the new year: "Reach out." I've built some walls around myself in the last several years -- in some cases, for some good self-protective reasons, but in doing so I've shut myself off from friends and the world around me. In 2010, I'd like to dismantle some of those walls and reach out to other people. I see two main paths this could take this year:

• First, I need to reconnect with friends and be willing to make new ones. I am friendly with lots of folks at school, but when I'm on a school break it sinks in just how much those friendships stay on campus at FGS and how bereft of friends I am in my non-school life. This should change. I think it's not good for D and me to depend so largely on each other for social outlet and support, and I think I'd have more fun in life if I were open to more experiences with more people. I'm going to start slowly here and build up: My specific goal is to do something social with friends once a month. (Fortunately, I've been invited to a friend's birthday open house next Saturday, so January is already in the bag!)

• The other is that I want to be more intentional about sharing with others the ample resources with which I have been blessed, both because this is the right thing to do and because I think it will help keep me mindful that those resources are in fact ample rather than frighteningly limited, which is my usual attitude. Giving money and time to church used to be the natural venue through which I did this, but in the last few years of not being a consistent member of a parish much of my charitable giving of time, treasure, and talent has fallen by the wayside. So instead of carrying on with my ongoing (and increasingly boring) spiritual crisis, I'm instead going to try to live the way I think I should regardless of my faith life. I haven't yet worked out a specific goal in this regard, and I want to think more about how and where to direct my resources; there are so many good causes out there, and of course the goal is to do all of this intentionally.

As I was thinking about this theme for the new year, I went back and reread some blog posts from last year, especially from last January 1, when I stumbled into the resolution "Let it go." This was an excellent theme, really, and wound up taking on different forms over the year, from "suck less" to "don't get my knickers in a twist" (for which I can't find a link but which I actually included in my official FGS goals for the year, much to the amusement of the dean). And certainly I didn't live up to (or down to?) this goal consistently all year long, but I do think that I managed to let go of a number of artificial or arbitrary rules or goals that I had set for myself. I'll never be all zen and tranquil, but I do think I regularly managed to be more relaxed and less anxious than I have been for much of my life (and yes, I do realize that this isn't such a high standard). I'm better at not getting my knickers in a twist than I probably was a year ago, but I expect that this will be a lifelong challenge for me.

So this year, I've decided to adopt my new goal of "reach out" without letting go of "let it go" (heh heh); surely a good goal is worth repeating.

That's the scoop for 2010 thus far. A happy New Year to you all!

FB as a source of personal healing

Back in March, Peggy Orenstein wrote an interesting column in the New York Times about "Growing Up on Facebook," in which she wonders whether Facebook might hinder people's opportunities to reinvent themselves, to change themselves, in Orenstein's case, from "the goofy girl I left behind in Minneapolis" into "a journalist/wife/mother in Berkeley." She asks whether FB, in keeping people in touch with their friends from all stages of their lives, keeps people from reinventing themselves, perhaps keeps those stages from being so distinct.

Maybe. I'm not saying that Orenstein doesn't have a point. But as one of the folks who, like Orenstein,  reinvented herself more than once (although maybe not to the extent that she apparently did) and went through all of those reinventions before Facebook was around much, I have to say that I'm finding FB wonderful proof that I am consistently the same person through time, that those reinventions haven't changed everything.

Okay, admittedly I don't have many deep, personal conversations on FB, and I know that some folks criticize FB for the water-cooler level of chit-chat, but I still find it incredibly meaningful to have such light chit-chat with folks from all of those different stages of my life, all interacting in the same place. To write an update and then get comments from a high school friend, a grad school friend, and a current colleague is evidence that I am in fact the same person, that there is some essential me-ness that has remained. I'm not sure I've always believed that to be the case.

I've also been one who has felt shaky enough about friendships that I have sometimes assumed that people are glad to be rid of me when I move on, or that they take my absence as the opportunity to say all of the bad things about me that they felt constrained from saying before. Paranoid, I know, and greatly overestimating my importance to most people, who clearly have better things to do than talk about me, but that self-important paranoia has eased considerably as I've realized that some folks from my past are happy to be back in touch. I tend to be pretty passive about FB, being friended rather than friending, because I find it hard to believe that people actually want to be in touch with me. And again, the "being in touch with" is fairly superficial in some (but not all) cases, but still, it's nice to realize that folks would talk with me if we were all to show up to a big party. For instance, for years I've had this notion that I was a big disappointment to my grad program and that people wouldn't want to be in contact with me, and I've been really touched that my FB friends number several former fellow students (although mostly from folks who haven't stayed in academia -- hmm, interesting).

Anyway, all of this brings me to St. Martyr's, clearly the stage of my life from which I've needed the most healing. A lot of faculty there were furious with me when I left, feeling betrayed by my "ingratitude" because I didn't stay to be persecuted so that they could feel progressive (okay, clearly my words rather than theirs!), and so I have a rule that I will not friend anyone from St. Martyr's, because I don't want to presume friendship where there is in fact hostility. I am, however, happy to accept a friendship request from folks there, and I have been really pleased to be back in touch with several St. Martyr's faculty, as well as with former St. Martyr's students, always a reminder that I actually did good work there. It's an interesting experience to comment on a St. Martyr's faculty member's post and then have other St. Martyr's folks comment on that same post, and yet not be friends with those other people -- the online version of studiously avoiding eye contact so that we don't have to say "hello." But I don't let this bother me, since those folks are not people I've been pining for anyway, and I mostly just enjoy the realization that my dramatic life change in Summer 2006 did not necessitate breaking off all contact with people from that period of my life.

So here's the interesting experience from Friday, one that is actually another example of FB healing even though it won't seem like it: I heard from one of those folks who'd been studiously avoiding catching my eye in FB comments,  someone whom I'd actually cared about at St. Martyr's but whose last words to me were "I'm so angry I can't even talk to you." So, three years later, after we both post little comments on a St. Martyr's person's FB update, he sends me an email -- not accompanied by a friend request, mind you, but a message nonetheless.

The first email read only "Hi WN." Period. So I sent him back a cheerful three-sentence reply and waited to see what would happen next. An hour later, I get another email that begins,

Hi.

Okay, when you left St. Martyr's I was too angry to talk to you. I felt like, if you left, "those people" would win and we would be sold down the river. I'm over it.

But first, this: those people won. Pay has gone up dramatically (particularly at my [full professor] rank), but so has the weirdness. I am attempting to just focus on my students (most of whom I like) and the colleagues that I like. For everything else, I say "la la la la la."

The email then went on to ask about my current job and to update me on his kids -- friendly, but again not accompanied by a friend request.

Now, anyone who sends a message about people being sold down the river is not, in my opinion, really "over it," but I have to say that it was such a relief to have someone from St. Martyr's actually say that to my face (as it were) rather than behind my back. During that whole strange summer and fall in 2006, friends would call up and unhelpfully want to tell me all about the nasty things that people were saying about me now that I was gone, but this email was the first time that someone actually said something to my face.

I took this email as a prompt to go back and read my blog from July 2006 -- an interesting experience in and of itself -- and then to spend two hours crafting an email response that, in three overly long but eloquent paragraphs, explained my decision and put the onus back on the tenured faculty for allowing this "weirdness" to continue and grow. (A point I wish I'd made but didn't think about later: it's telling that the tenured faculty experience as "weirdness" what I was experiencing as soul-crushing persecution. What I did think about but didn't say was that I resent his implication that the other faculty were the helpless slaves while I was ... what? the slave-seller? the ungrateful slave who ran away? How does this metaphor work?) I got to make several points and do so thoughtfully and hopefully not too defensively, among them that "those people" also would have won if I stayed and was persecuted with the president's explicit blessing, that "those people" were going to continue winning unless the tenured faculty decided to organize and work consistently to re-create St. Martyr's into the school they wanted it to be, something they had shown themselves unwilling to do while I stayed (and I provided a brief, specific example of this that hadn't involved him but had involved several senior faculty). I then explained my St. Martyr's FB policy, that I wouldn't initiate a friendship request but would be happy to respond to one of his. I finished by telling him about my fabulous FGS job ... and I'll admit that this part was perhaps a tiny bit cruel, given that he and everyone else is miserable at St. Martyr's, while I do things like sing on the way to work. Hey, living well is the best revenge!

I have received no reply from him and am at this point not expecting one, nor a friend request. And I was quite agitated by the time I finished reading my old blog posts and reliving that particular episode of my life. So I know this doesn't sound like a healing FB experience on the face of it.

But first of all, knowing that someone else still has his knickers in a twist about this three years later makes me feel better about still being so deeply affected by it after all this time, so I feel more sane with the external validation that it was a real trauma. More importantly, it was such a relief to get to respond directly to one of the accusations that I'd previously heard only second-hand, and it felt really good to say, with only minor emotional heat, "Yeah, here's why I did what I did, and I stand by it three years later, and your accusations don't hold water. If you want to assign blame, look in the mirror first." A deeply satisfying experience, especially when combined with the fact that over the weekend I've commented upon and received comments from various other St. Martyr's folks. I'm not actually a pariah, and the me that I was then and the me that I am now have an awful lot in common.

So I'm feeling quite pleased with FB these days, and I'm enjoying seeing my life as a chain of linked experiences rather than a disconnected series of discrete stages.

Thursday Randomness

• The Hair Report: Yesterday I didn’t even shower until 5:30 (yeah, it was kind of a lazy day), so I didn’t bother doing anything with my hair at all when I got out of the shower. The good news is that my hair looks absolutely okay when I don’t do a damn thing with it. Today I actually put some effort into styling my hair; it wasn’t going very well, so I called in D. to help, and the two of us worked over it. I’m not getting it to flip/curl out quite as much as the hairdresser did, but I still thinks it looks pretty good; I’m no longer the cutest thing ever that I was on Tuesday (I should have taken a picture then!), but that would probably have been too much pressure in the long run! D. says she thinks it looked more natural today, more like me. I’ll try again tomorrow; it seems the trick is to muss it deliberately, which will take some getting used to.
• Something I’m excited about: Thanks to Sr. Steph, I’ve been turned on to the Read the Bible in 90 Days program. I’m with Steph in thinking that the programs to read the Bible in a year don’t take into account my limited attention span. And I’ve been looking for something that will jumpstart my spiritual life in the new year, especially now that my vestry term is ending and I can maybe stop thinking about church as annoying work. Here’s the best part about the program: There’s a checklist! Something to check off every day when I’ve read the day’s twelve pages. Ooh, I love me a checklist. I'm joining Steph in starting the program tomorrow, on Epiphany. Anyone want to join us?
• The Peanut Butter Battle is alive in our house. Last year I kept a jar of peanut butter and a box of wheat crackers in my desk so that I could have a protein-filled late afternoon snack to keep me going. But then D. and I realized how much sugar is in commercial peanut butter, so I didn’t want to keep eating it. D. got natural sugar-less peanut butter, but it was almost impossible to get it mixed up. So the long and short of it is that I haven’t had peanut butter in the last year, and my wonderful late-afternoon snack is gone. D. is now wondering if she could get a jar of natural peanut butter and empty it into the food processor to get it all mixed up for me. Or could she just grind up peanuts to make her own peanut butter? Any ideas out there?
• On finding out that Lifetime and Lifetime Movies are no longer included in our dish network package, D. and I were trying to remember the name of the TV show Any Day Now (the only thing that we ever, ever watched on those channels; it used to come on late at night, so we’d occasionally watch it in bed when we were trying to fall asleep), but it was entirely escaping us. Alternative titles that we came up with: “I’m a Crappy Lawyer, but I’m Black and Beautiful, so You Don’t Really Mind” (I mean honestly, she was supposed to be both a prosecutor and a defense attorney, both a civil and criminal attorney? Come on!) and “We’re Southern and Feisty; Don’t You Love Us?” I found it amusing. And now how will we keep up on which disease of the week is popular and romantic?
• I’m worried that I’m drinking too much. I’m certainly drinking more alcohol than I used to, but since I used to be practically a teetotaler that doesn’t seem problematic in and of itself. I don’t drink to tipsiness, but maybe that’s because my tolerance level is rising, and is that itself problematic? It all started a couple of years ago when I began pouring myself a glass of wine in the evening when I got home from school. And then I had a glass with dinner. And maybe on the weekends an after-dinner glass as well. Is that bad or not? I can’t tell. My parents and mother-in-law all regularly drink to the point of drunkenness, so I’m very conscious of alcohol and the effect it has on people’s lives, but I don’t want to monitor my own alcohol intake based on theirs, since they’re clearly beyond the pale of acceptable alcohol use. Hmm. I’m not quite sure how to measure an appropriate level here.
• I meant to go to school on Tuesday, but I just couldn’t quite bring myself to go. And then I meant to go on Wednesday but never quite got around to it. And then I thought I should go today. So finally, around 3:30, I pulled myself together and went in for a couple of hours. Hmm, maybe I’m not quite as ready to go back to school as I thought?! And I went in so very late today, that now I have to go back in tomorrow because the library and the office are both on limited hours during the intersession. Aargh. I've got one syllabus partly mapped out, and the second syllabus not even at that stage. Gosh, I should really get my act together.
• D. and I have quite the social weekend ahead of us: dinner with friends in Big City on Friday night, a party at another friend’s in Big City on Saturday night, and dinner with our closest friends here in Small City on Sunday evening. Fun and more fun! I hope my hair will be looking fabulous for these social events.

How lovely to be back home

MLA was interesting but exhausting. For the record, I didn’t attend a single panel, I didn’t even go into the book exhibit, and the half-hour I spent in the main conference hotel completely overwhelmed me with the noise and crowds. Thank goodness we stayed in the hotel across the street; it was still full of the MLA Type everywhere one looked, but the noise level, the stress level, and the poser level were all lower than at the main hotel.

I would just like to say that, although in many respects I too fit the MLA Type, I proudly wore my decidedly-not-MLA pink Doris-Day-meets-Jackie-Kennedy winter coat whenever I went out.

Not that I went out much, you understand. In fact, I didn’t experience the light of day for all of Wednesday and Thursday. So what did I spend my time doing, since I was ignoring all of the main parts of the conference? Sitting in my hotel room chatting with fascinating, smart, professional, fabulous people. This was the first time I had ever been on an interview committee, and it was quite an experience. I’m so impressed and amazed at how wonderful the candidates were that we interviewed; even the folks that the search committee immediately agreed weren’t going to get invitations for on-campus interviews were still really impressive.

But all of that fabulousness was rather wearying. It’s nothing like the strain of being the person interviewed, of course, but the hours and hours of sitting on very uncomfortable furniture and asking the same questions over and over and trying to listen hard and respectfully to what people were saying in response took its toll, not least of which is that my butt really hurts. Remember that bruising fall I took on the ice over two weeks ago? Well, my tushy is still aching, and by the end of the interviewing on Thursday I was in some real pain, so much so that as soon as I parted from my fellow interviewers, I lay down on my stomach and stayed that way for over an hour, just to give my butt a rest. (Note to folks being interviewed: If the interviewer’s face has a look of strain or pain, it isn’t necessarily about you at all. The interviewer may think that you’re absolutely wonderful, but her butt may be hurting.) I slept for ten hours on both Thursday and Friday nights, and I’m fully expecting to do so again tonight. (Needless to say, I am NOT planning on seeing in the New Year.)

I anticipate some arguments in the department as we choose the three folks to invite for fly-backs. We had more than three wonderful people who would clearly add so much to the department, so no matter whom we choose, we will all know that we’ll be missing other fabulous people. This is the heartache of the process; again, it’s nothing like the heartache of those looking for jobs (as I well know from my own painful years on the job market), but it is painful nonetheless.

Other lovely things from the MLA: Chatting with Sfrajett. Having dinner with Tiruncula. Having breakfast with a friend from grad school. Getting to spend most of the day Friday with another friend from Grad School City, a really important friendship that I think continues to nourish us all. Falling back in love with St. Martyr’s as I heard myself saying to candidates absolutely true things about the warm faculty community, the shared intellectual life we have, the charm of Small City, the bond between English professors and our majors. My two colleagues said the same thing; we all remarked that, much as we dislike the college president, it really helped us to remember that he’s going to move on (he’s made no secret of the fact that we’re just a step in his career path and that he’s already got an eye on the next job) and that the wonderful things that we love about St. Martyr’s still exist and will continue to exist, with or without him.

And now we’ve come home and are spending a luxuriously lazy day, doing nothing much at all but enjoying being home. I’m lying on the couch, with an afghan and a cat spread over my legs, and D. is reclining in a comfy chair reading a book; the Christmas tree is lit up, and we each have a cold Diet Coke at hand. Heaven! And tomorrow we’ll go to church and then spend the afternoon with one friend and then in the evening go over to another friend’s house. And I’ll make a pot of black-eyed peas for luck in the new year, and I’ll make everyone eat at least one bite, whether they like the beans or not. (D. points out to me that the black-eyed peas that I forced her to eat last year did not do much for 2005; I point out in response that the year could have been even worse!)

Happy New Year to you all!

Thanks!

Thank you all so much for the wonderful, supportive, congratulatory comments on my tenure post! You guys are great, and it feels really, really good to know how many folks were out there hoping, praying, crossing fingers, sending good wishes, and in a couple of cases saying rosaries and lighting candles. (This last is definitely one of the advantages of working at a Catholic school!)

I just submitted my grades to the registrar computer program St. Martyr's has, so all I have to do tomorrow is call the secretary and have her write in the grades by hand on the paper version. (Because honestly, why submit grades in only one way if you could double the work? But that is the St. Martyr's way.)

And then D. and I are heading out for a couple of days! She has a business trip to take, so I'm coming along for the ride and for the fun of having a couple of play days in Much Bigger City. My oldest friend (that is, my friend of longest duration) is taking us out for a celebratory dinner on Monday night, and then we're going out with other friends on Tuesday night, and I'm going to bop around town and amuse myself while D. is in her meetings, and then we'll head back home on Wednesday afternoon. My mother, in her typical fashion, scolded me for "the insanity" of going out of town for three days the week before Christmas; she doesn't see how I'll possibly "get everything done." But I'm actually fairly together about Christmas this year, and I really, truly need a few days out of town.

I'm not bringing my computer with me -- yes, it's a REAL break! -- so I will catch up with you all when we get back on Wednesday. In the meantime, thanks again so much for this vivid reminder of how much friendship and good will are out there in the blogosphere.

Good deed for the day

This morning at 10:45, the phone rang. I’m embarrassed to admit I was still in bed; I was awake by that point, and D. had gotten up, but the two of us had slept hard for over ten hours.

St. Martyr’s doesn’t have classes on Wednesday before Thanksgiving (yay!), and D. and I had made plans to have a lazy and relaxing day today, but even we weren’t expecting to spend so much of the morning sleeping in.

Anyway, back to the phone call. It was from a friend and colleague of mine, wanting to know if she could stop by to talk with us for a few minutes. I heard D. saying on the phone, “Of course you’re welcome any time. Just be warned that the place is a mess, although of course you’re used to that with us.” D. got off the phone and told me that it sounded as though this friend was almost in tears on the phone, so that it was kinder to invite her into our messy house than to not invite her in or tell her to come back when it was cleaner. Of course she’s right, and I would have done the same thing, but how humiliating to have anyone see what a disaster area our house is.

We sprang into action and flew around the living room, tidying and straightening as best we could. Mostly this meant taking out the pile of papers to the recycling, piling on the stairs everything that belonged upstairs in our bedroom or study, and pushing everything else into tolerably neat piles. By the time our friend arrived ten minutes later, things didn’t look too hideous, although of course my faint hope is that she had no idea we’d been flying around and that the current state of things is what D. meant by “the place is a mess.”

And sure enough, once our friend sat down, she promptly started crying. She also is up for tenure and has had an equally rough time as I have, although for very different – and equally unwarranted – reasons. Her department is incredibly dysfunctional, which has been at the root of her tenure troubles, so in a way it’s been harder for her to try to put tenure craziness out of her head than it has for me; she’s faced with it every day when she goes into school, whereas I only have to think about it when a new outrage occurs. So she’s been incredibly stressed about that. Plus she’s bipolar, which makes everything more difficult. Plus she’s had a significant crisis in her extended family this term. Plus she and her boyfriend haven’t figured out how to support one another particularly well, even though they’ve been going out for 1½ years now. Plus the change in seasons affects her very negatively; late fall and early winter are always the most difficult time for her in the year. All of which adds up to one very stressed out and unhappy friend.

And I’m really glad that she felt she could turn to us for comfort. She ended up staying for over two hours (with me in my pajamas the whole time, since all of that flying around the house didn’t include my actually getting dressed). D. and I wound up doing a lot of listening, of course. And then, after she’d talked about the difficulties she and her boyfriend had been having, D. and I did a fair bit of talking about our own relationship history, about the challenges we’ve faced and still face as a couple, and about how helpful we found it to spend six weeks or so in “premarital counseling” pretty early in our relationship. (“Premarital” is in quotation marks there because we weren’t yet planning on having a ceremony, and in fact didn’t get married for a couple of years after that, but the counseling was immensely valuable to us in figuring out how to be a couple, in talking about our values, and in working through our initial challenges.) I think that our friend has very unrealistic ideas about what “normal” relationships are like, so it was important for her to hear that her snapping at her boyfriend when she has PMS doesn’t mean that she’s too unstable to be in a relationship. In fact, I worry – and I shared this with her – that she takes her bipolar status as a reason to assume that all of her emotions and reactions are unstable, overblown, and abnormal; I think that she’s been told so often that she’s crazy that she has internalized this diagnosis, and I think that now her boyfriend is also working on that assumption. Since she thinks that I’m a stable, emotionally healthy person (ha ha, maybe she is crazy!), I told her all about my hysteria of Saturday morning as proof that even stable people have emotional outbursts and that this isn’t abnormal. And when she said that school was stressing her out too badly and she just didn’t think she could handle it anymore, I shared with her the advice that many of you gave me earlier this term when I was saying the same thing: That this semester of going up for tenure is the most stressful term we’ll probably ever have, and that all of the semesters leading up to it have also carried with them the stress of leading up to this point, and that this spring we’ll probably have some postpartum emotion, so that it’s probably best for both of us not to make any decisions about our future in academia until we get through and recover from this particular episode. And it’s not as though the entire conversation was this heavy; for example, she and D. and I decided that the three of us were definitely Persecution Central these days and that we should form a little club, and it felt good to have friends to laugh with about this.

D. in particular is very good at affirming people’s feelings without trying to “fix” the situation they’re in (which is harder for me), and our friend comes to us in these moments so that she and I can talk about school stuff and she and D. can talk about everything else. And by the time she left, she was feeling much calmer about life. We told her to stop by any time, that she’s always welcome.

Afterward, D. and I agreed that our conversation with this friend definitely counted as our good deed for the day. But then I double-checked with D. that this did not count as doing “to the least of these” as we would do to Jesus (from Matthew 25), which I’ve been thinking a lot about for the last week, since it was this past Sunday’s lectionary reading. And D. confirmed my own sense that Jesus there is talking about being the difference between life and death for the most marginalized. So we were good friends today, which is certainly worthwhile, but we didn’t feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or visit the prisoner. I’m worrying about the extent to which I don’t do this; yes, I give some money to Episcopal Relief and Development, and certainly my stewardship checks to church help to support important ministries that do some of this work, but I think that Jesus isn’t going to be so thrilled with me when I have to tell him, “No, I didn’t actually feed or clothe anyone, and in fact I had essentially nothing to do with the most marginalized at all, but hey, I gave a little bit of money.”

Hmm, I seem to have digressed a little bit here at the end of this blogpost, but I think actually I have a point here: I want to reprioritize my life so that I’m living up to my values, which means having the time to be a good friend (and not just on holidays from school), doing what I can to help people who don’t have as much as I do, and living a more balanced life that doesn’t involve thinking about school all the time. Maybe this will be my post-tenure resolution, assuming there’s a post-tenure time in which to resolve things.

More flowers!

Some of you who read my blog on my old site may remember that some dear friends sent me flowers in the first week when everything started going sour with my tenure case. Well, dadgumit if a colleague didn't send me flowers today out of the blue! Her card with the flowers said only "in support," and when I called her she said that she just wanted me to know that she was thinking of me in this time of duress. And she and I aren't even particularly close; we serve on a committee together and are certainly friendly, but nothing more than that. I love these beautiful and aromatic tangible reminders that I'm part of a supportive community of friends and colleagues here at St. Martyr's and in Small City.