What Now?

Health update

Thanks for your well-wishes after my medical misadventure last Saturday night. I limped along all week, feeling slightly heroic that I was going to school each day like a trooper, although I was feeling more and more myself and thus less and less heroic as the week went on. The only things I missed all week were a department meeting on Tuesday so that I could go home and sleep after school (because that first day back, with four classes and a few student meetings, really did wipe me out), and one class today so that I could go see my doctor, plus a student event this evening I really should have gone to but was just too tired ater the doctor's appointment and the cumulative stress of the last week. I feel a little bad about this last omission, but I keep reminding myself to give myself a break because, seriously, it was perfectly reasonable to duck out of it under the circumstances.

So, here's the update from the doctor today. Fortunately, having staples taken OUT of one's scalp, while no picnic, doesn't hurt nearly as much as having them put INTO one's scalp. The doctor said that the wound was healing nicely, so no worries there.

They drew blood and are going to run anemia and other tests; when the results come back in next week, I'm probably going to wind up on iron supplements, which I'm not really looking forward to since iron tends to upset my stomach, but I'll learn to deal with that. The anemia levels that I had last week in the ER aren't enough on their own to cause the fainting, but I also tend to have low blood pressure, which means that I'm more than usually susceptible to feeling fainting (which has been true of me for years), so that means it's extra important for me to stay well-hydrated and have enough sodium and continue my usual practice of eating every few hours. So last Saturday, the combination of slight anemia and slightly low blood pressure could have combined with not quite enough food and water that day to make me feel light-headed.

Plus, she suggested that I go on birth control pills or a hormone IUD to reduce my periods, which have gotten extremely heavy in the last couple of years, such that they are probably a major contributor to my anemia. But first she wants to do an ultrasound to make sure that I don't have uterine fibroids, which are benign but do cause heavy periods and could be treated or even removed surgically. So I have that ultrasound scheduled for late March. The word "surgery" scared me a little, but then I looked up fibroids online and saw that it can be done as an outpatient procedure, so not such a big deal.

I've also been having weird shortness of breath from climbing stairs over the last couple of months, even though I exercise and think of myself as in reasonably good shape for a non-athletic middle-aged person. And that, too, can be a symptom of anemia, so I'm hoping that the iron supplements that I'll probably start taking next week will take care of that shortness of breath problem in reasonably short order; apparently anemia, especially when it's pretty mild, can be treated pretty quickly.

As far as last Saturday goes, the doctor said that if I had just thrown social convention to the wind and gotten down on the floor right away at Costco as soon as I felt faint instead of trying to soldier through it, I probably wouldn't have fainted, and thus obviously wouldn't have hit my head. (Well, actually she didn't say any of the stuff about social convention -- that's me -- but she did say I should have just lain down.) Certainly my experience of feeling faint in the past has been that if I can at least sit down and getting something to eat and drink and some cool air or a cool cloth, I'm fine. I still can't quite picture how that would have worked out in Costco that day, but of course it's not like I was more socially acceptable by fainting dead away than I would have been if I had just abandoned my cart and sat down on the floor somewhere! And quite frankly, I think that's what I would have done if I hadn't already been in line to check out when I started feeling cold and clammy.

So the good news is that (a) nothing serious is wrong with me, and everything that is slightly amiss can be treated easily, and (b) none of this in any way interferes with my South Africa trip, which starts two weeks from today! Yay! I am going to make sure that I have snacks and water with me at all times on the trip, since my experience of traveling is that one can't necessarily control when and under what circumstances one is eating and resting, and I assume that will be especially true when traveling with such a big group that is being run by an educational tour company. I want to make sure that I enjoy the trip thoroughly, so that will mean I need to take some initiative to maintain my own health and comfort -- no problem.

And on that note of self-care, I'm going to publish this and go to bed. One of the good things to come out of last week's medical misadventure is that I've been making sure to get plenty of sleep this week and have really scaled back on the amount of work I'm bringing home in the evenings. That does mean I have a shit-load of grading to do this weekend, but that probably would have been the case anyway since it's the end of term and also since, quite frankly, I'm not very efficient in the evenings even when I do bring work home. So in the spring term, I'm going to seriously commit to only doing reading and class prep in the evenings (since that's the fun stuff), and keeping the grading to my free periods and right after school and a few hours on the weekend, when I work much more quickly and efficiently. In fact, since Ash Wednesday was this week, I decided to make this my Lenten discipline -- not a traditional discipline, of course, but there will be no fasting for me, lest I faint away again!

"Miss Committee"

This is what a friend (from both work and church) has taken to calling me, and he's quite right, and it must stop. I'm on four five [remembered another one] different school committees, which tend not to meet that often and are mostly not too burdensome, with the exception of the admissions committee, for which I wound up reading almost 100 applications for new students. Exhausting! All the more so, I'm afraid, because I underestimated how long it would take and thus wound up reading most of them in just a few days this week -- I haven't been this wiped out in a long time. Plus, as director of a program on campus, I have an hour-long evening service obligation every Thursday night -- not a committee, strictly speaking, but another regular item on my school calendar. But this schedule is do-able ...

... until I put the school committees together with the church committees -- I'm on the adult education committee and the steering committee for the Open and Affirming (ONA) process in the congregation (i.e., making explicit that we're gay-friendly) -- at which point things go from "busy" to "what the hell was I thinking?"

I got myself over-committed because (1) I'm still a sucker for the "honor" of being nominated and elected for things; and some of this IS an honor, but an onorous honor (say that three times fast), and I just need to let the gold stars go; and (2) some (although not all) of these committees are things I care about and think are important and want done well, which is just one short step from thinking that I therefore need to be on them; and (3) I agreed to these committees over time, without always knowing what was going to be involved or how it would fit into my schedule. For example, I cheerfully said "yes" to being on the ONA steering committee, knowing that it was an important process, pleased to have been asked so soon in my time at the congregation, and figuring that, as an ad hoc committee, it would meet a few times and then be done. So imagine my dismay when it turns out that the damn thing is meeting every other week for two hours each time and with no clear end point in sight! That's just crazy.

All of this came to a head this month, when in one two-week period of freakishly bad timing almost every single committee met, such that I had an evening obligation three nights in a row on top of afternoon meetings, all as the trimester was coming to an end. I finally just bailed on the ONA committee meeting (letting them know the day before, of course); I simply could not attend all of those committee meetings and still stay on top of my job.

So my new resolution is to make my friend's teasing moniker for me no longer appropriate. That can't happen right away, but the school committees are all just for this school year (and in fact the admissions committee work will be over as of Tuesday, I think), and next year I'm going to limit my involvement to the curriculum committee (which only meets 4 times a year, is actually fairly interesting, and lets me get my departmental service out of the way pretty easily and with minimal effort). On the church front, I was just elected to the adult ed. committee, which has a three-year term (!), but it meets only monthly and only during the academic year, and it's a pretty fun group of people that does its work fairly efficiently, so I'm happy to stay involved in it.

But the ONA committee, which is too big and fractious and unfocused and generally nightmarish? I'm getting off of that one as soon as seems possible! I feel obligated to stay on it until we have the congregational vote to become ONA, which should happen either at the end of the spring or the beginning of fall, and the committee will be on hiaitus during the summer, so it's not too dreadful, although the thought of those biweekly meetings is wearing me out. But here's where I must draw the line: after the church goes ONA (which is essentially a foregone conclusion -- one of the reasons I was willing to go ahead and join the church last fall), then there's supposed to be an implementation committee to guide how we live that welcome out as a congregation, and the expectation is that those of us on the steering committee will form the core of the implementation committee. And this is important work, and I'm the only gay person with gumption on the steering committee, so I worry about what will happen if I'm not on the implementation committee ... but I have to learn to say "no" and recognize that things will be fine even if I'm not there. Or maybe they won't actually be fine, but that doesn't mean I should have done something different. Plus, I had enough of being a "professional lesbian" at St. Martyr's, and I vowed not to take on that role again; I have to remind myself of this when I find myself starting to feel guilty about the thought of saying "no" to this new committee. (So please remind me of all of this next fall when the new committee forms!)

Fortunately, one of the things that has stayed with me this week from last weekend's writing retreat is the conviction that, if I'm going to be serious as a writer and commit to writing this biography, then I need to protect time for writing. It was really frustrating this week to have no time for writing (or for much of anything else) because the admissions committee work was so burdensome, and I want to remember that frustration the next time someone asks me to do something.

I hope that, if I frame the question primarily as saying "yes" to writing rather than saying "no" to committees and other committments, I will have an easier time sticking to my guns and eliminating the guilt I inevitably feel for not contributing when I might have.

As I wrote last weekend, the part of the writing retreat that was clearly good for other folks but that I felt I didn't need was the stuff about gender, about being convinced that one's voice was important, that one had the right to write instead of cleaning the house, etc. Yep, got it, all over that. But this week it occurred to me that perhaps this tendency to volunteer for things, to join committees and take on tasks, is a gendered phenomenon, another way of being a "good girl," not by being quiet and docile and those other things that I'm not, but by being helpful and useful and thus well-loved.

This "good girl" behavior is also, of course, a way to get immediate feedback to my words, rather than that longer, slower, more solitary work of writing. Because I'm actually quite good at the committee work I volunteer for, I get all of the satisfaction of making good points and making them well and seeing people nod and agree, and then I get to feel smart and powerful. So I think I need to wean myself off of needing excessive response (especially since teachers already get such responses in the classroom, and then there are the departmental and faculty meetings that I have to go to anyway; how much more immediate response do I really need?) so that I can settle into expressing myself without an immediate audience.

(And yes, I did just write all of this on my blog so that I can have an immediate audience and get a response -- clearly I'm a work in progress!)

Rockin' the mahjongg!

Remember how D. and I were taking a mahjongg class at our local library? Well, the class finished up in early December, by which point we were hooked and determined to keep going. And fortunately, the teachers, who belong to the same regular Sunday night game, wanted to facilitate the students' having regular weekly games as well, so they passed around sign-up sheets for various times that people might want to meet. Clearly they're trying to create a mahjongg culture here in our neighborhood of Adventure City, and I'm all for it! D. and I put our names down for almost all of the times, since we both have pretty flexible schedules and were eager to get a weekly game started.

And here was a fabulous gold-star moment (and you know how I love those!): At the end of the third lesson, when we'd been doing all of this signing up, the lead teacher pulled me aside at the end of the class and whispered to me that she hoped D. and I had signed up for Sunday nights as one of our available time, because she and the other teacher wanted us to be part of their regular game! Hurrah -- we got an A in mahjongg class! And it is true that D. and I picked things up far more quickly than many of the folks did; we're both used to learning something reasonably fast, which clearly not everyone is. I do have to chuckle about the teachers: clearly one of their motivations in teaching the class (which they did for free through the local Friends of the Library branch, although we did all pitch in and buy them each a gift certificate to say "thank you") was to find new players for their own weekly game.

So now we've had three weeks of the Sunday night game, and we're really enjoying it. It's not quite as social as I'd imagined, in part because we're still new enough that it takes concentration to play, so we only chat between hands (and when people do try to chat during hands, the head teacher, who's clearly just a bossy person even when she's not teaching, tells them to be quiet!), but last night when there were only four of us, and D. and I were the only newbies, things were more relaxed and chatty. It's funny to be engaged in an activity with people I otherwise wouldn't know and probably wouldn't really hang out with under other circumstances, and I don't have the sense that these folks are going to become our bosom buddies, but it is fun playing with them, and I love having a regular Sunday night outing. It's going to be especially good for me as a way not to get caught up in that Sunday night anxiety about preparing for the week ahead. Nope, at 6:25 the work is done, because the game starts at 6:30. (And yes, it takes only five minutes to get there; hurrah for a neighborhood activity!)

The one disappointment I had was that the person I liked most in the class didn't sign up for Sunday night because that's when she tends to go visit her uncle in his nursing home; she likes to go during the we ekly bingo game because it gives them something to do together. She is clearly a good person, and she also seems to be funny and smart. I wasn't surprised when I discovered that she was a reference librarian at the local prestigious university! So I was bummed to not get to see her each week, but on the last class day, when we were playing in a game together and sitting next to each other, I decided to make a move. Really, making friends is like dating, isn't it? I gathered up my courage enough to say casually, "I'm sorry that we won't be part of the same weekly mahjongg game, since I've enjoyed getting to know you this month." And she said, "Well, just because we're not part of the same weekly game doesn't mean we can't get together. We could play a game on our own, or we could just get together for some other reason." Yay!

Of course, I have to admit that I haven't then followed up with her, nor she with me, but writing this blog post has reminded me of her, so as soon as I finish this, I'm going to send her an email. Fortunately, I have a nice excuse to write to her, since she had recommended something that I finally just watched this morning. And indeed I'll recommend it to you all as well: The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York is currently running a mahjongg exhibit that looks fabulous, although alas I have no plans to be in New York before it closes. But there's a great podcast/slideshow about the history of the game (an introduction to the exhibit) that's well worth watching. So now I can email her and thank her for the recommendation and suggest that we get together for coffee one day in the next couple of weeks.

Oh, and here's another fun thing: One of the women in the Sunday night game is into steampunk, and it turns out there's an emerging Adventure City steampunk scene. She had spent the afternoon right before yesterday's game at their first event and had photos to share. I don't know that I'm going to follow her into the steampunk world, but it is an inspiration to me to see people doing cool things and finding like-minded folks in Adventure City.

And speaking of like-minded folks: it turns out that mahjongg, at least as played in our corner of Adventure City, is a predominantly lesbian game. I totally did not see that coming! But it does make sense, given that it's a female-dominated game, and I'm sure that many couples made the same decision that D. and I did, that learning the game would give us something fun to do together. Isn't that an interesting twist on the tradition of the game?

One final piece of news: In last night's game, we played three hands. One was a draw (no one won mahjongg), I won one hand, and D. won the other hand. How's that for rockin' the mahjongg? We're not yet playing for money, but if we had been, we'd have come out $2 ahead for the evening. (Yes, the stakes are just that high!)

Okay, that's probably enough of my fun mahjongg adventures for now. Besides, I have a new friend to email!

Wanting something bigger

School's going well -- the end of term is hectic, but what else is new? -- but I've been feeling a little intellectually restless for the last few weeks. I somehow need some project or another that's outside of school, something bigger for my brain to work on so that I remember that the world is larger than my classroom and the grading I have to do.

But the question is, what? There is no bigger thing that seems to be calling me.

This is both the liberating and the frustrating thing about my career now. No publishing pressure, no need to stay in a particular field, no need to study or write anything particularly academic at all. I could do anything I want, if only I could figure out what that was.

As NaNoWriMo was rolling around, I found myself in a genuine panic in late October, feeling that this was the perfect opportunity to embark on something bigger, but I didn't have any ideas for novels and besides, I knew that November was going to be absolutely exhausting in terms of work. Then I came up with a potential idea and thought that maybe I'd spend November just thinking about this novel and then maybe in December, a much saner month for me, I'd actually start working on it. But I think that all of this intention of launching into a novel was entirely a function of NaNowriMo fever, because once we were a few days into November, I lost interest in the project, which of course I'd never really started anyway.

I did apply for that writers' conference, but if I get in, what on earth am I going to work on? What writing project do I have to talk about?

I've done a mental inventory of old academic projects that are in various states of completion or lack thereof, but none of them excites me, at least not enough to imagine picking them up again.

Some of this dissatisfaction with my lack of a project is no doubt due to the fact that next year's sabbaticals were announced last week, and I discovered that a colleague has for years had a burning passion for a particular topic in his field and has been doing all sorts of preparatory work for this interesting and cool project he's now going to devote himself to next spring and summer. I'm so impressed! And then I had to ask myself, What sabbatical project do I have on the back burner, simmering away? Answer: none! Not that sabbaticals are the be-all and end-all; I actually am not at my best with unstructured time. But having a break from one's day-to-day job, as fabulous as that job is, and using one's brain in a completely different way are good things indeed. But these days I'm not actually using my brain for things other than teaching, and I've got no possibilities waiting in the wings.

Of course, it may be my years of academic training that have me so focused on a project, an end result. Given the lack of publishing pressure, why not embark on studying something that I'm interested in for its own sake, without worrying about producing anything afterward to show for my efforts? I've thought about doing something along these lines in light of my new UCC identity; I could study Luther and Calvin and the Protestant Reformation and the history of congregationalism in the US, and this would be extremely interesting and would have something to do with my current life. But I haven't quite made the leap from academic study to autodidactic study; I think it's a good leap to make, but it's one that brings with it some baggage from my old academic life. (At first I thought that was a ridiculous mixed metaphor, but now I like it -- it is indeed harder to make a big leap if one is carrying heavy luggage.)

And hey, maybe I need to not limit myself to the world of books and writing. For example, the other day I thought about starting a new quilt. I really enjoyed doing that last quilt, and it was of ongoing, engaging interest -- not intellectual interest, certainly, but problem-solving, and there was the joy of playing with color and of creating something tangible (which doesn't usually happen for me!).

Along these same lines, obviously there's the ukulele ... but I've realized that for me the fun of the uke is playing with the faculty folk band rather than any intrinsic sense of fun. So I'll practice enough to not embarrass myself in front of my colleagues, but when I'm sitting around at loose ends, the thought of playing  doesn't really turn me on. I do sometimes have a fantasy about picking up the piano again (not literally -- har har), but I think it would probably fall into the same category as the ukulele.

I know that some people find various sports or exercise of enduring interest -- training for a marathon or the like -- but that's just not me. And I'm not going to take up cooking adventures; I like reading cookbooks, but I don't like actual cooking all that much.

My mother finds enduring interest in home projects, which mostly leaves me cold, but there are several short-term, smaller house projects that would be good to do and that would be something other than grading to give a shape and purpose to weekends. Unfortunately, the biggest household project I should embark on is cleaning and organizing, which does not thrill me at all, although certainly the end result would be pleasant. But also, such household projects aren't really a reminder that the world is bigger than my classroom; it sort of feels like another chore much like the chores I do at work, and my goal here is to have something completely different.

I'm probably feeling particularly restless because I'm at loose ends this weekend. Classes ended yesterday, but the English exam isn't until Tuesday, so for the moment, there really isn't much work for me to be doing. I've slept 9+ hours the last two nights and have clearly been exhausted, and I know myself well enough to know that I'm often kind of fretful when I'm tired (it's the toddler in me). That fretfulness in combination with unusual free time is no doubt leading to this litany of possible projects.

For now, though, I'm going to use up some of this free time by taking advantage of the sunshine by going for a bike ride with D, and then going to school to practice with the faculty folk band. And then I'll come back home and finish reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, which I started the other night. And maybe all of that is enough of a project for the day.

Mahjong!

D and I are having an adventure: We've started taking mahjong lessons!

Four-plus years ago, when we first moved to Adventure City, we had the idea that it would be fun to learn mahjong; D found a set for sale in eBay and bought it, and we set about to teach ourselves. But damn, it's a complicated game! Our notion was that we would make another couple friend and that we'd all learn together.

Two problems emerged: (1) We didn't actually make any friends who were interested in learning to play; and (2) the game requires four people, and we found it difficult to learn to play with only the two of us. So the mahjong adventure ended almost before it began.

But now, four years later, the adventure is back on. Hurrah!

A couple of weeks ago I saw a flyer in our local library that the Friends of the Local Library organization was hosting a four-week course in mahjong for beginners. I signed up right away ... and a good thing too, it turns out, since the class filled, and there's actually a waiting list. It's a class in the American rather than Chinese version of the game, and fortunately the set we bought is for the former (which is to say that it has additional tiles that aren't called for in the latter).

This morning the adventure began. We headed to the library, mahjong set in tow. (Our set is a very nice one and comes in its own silver suitcase, on the heavy side but easy to carry around -- "have mahjong set, will travel.") On the way, I started fretting a little: Would we make any friends? Would we be able to learn the game? Was I properly prepared for the first day of school, or should I have studied beforehand?

Not a surprise: All of the students were women. D and I were the youngest people in the room.

When I told a colleague yesterday about the class, she laughed and asked, "Could you be more of an old Jewish woman?" (She also told me that she enjoyed living vicariously through my adventures ... which we agreed goes to show the lack of adventure in her life rather than anything especially fabulous in mine.) And indeed, quite a few of the students were indeed elderly Jewish women, and many of the others were younger Jewish women (but still older than we are) who fondly recalled the clink of tiles from their mothers' games.

It is indeed a complicated game, and one of the first things that one of the two teachers said was "Please be patient with yourself. You will be confused for the entire course, and it takes more than four weeks to learn to play mahjong, but it's absolutely worth it to learn." I found this reassuring and threw myself into what we were learning, but it was interesting to see some of the folks at the table get frustrated pretty quickly. My hunch is that some folks won't return next week, and indeed the teachers said as we were leaving, "If you're not coming back, please let us know so that we can let new people into the course."

A side note to add that it's always interesting, as a teacher, to be a student in a class, and I was particularly amused by the lead teacher. She had said at the beginning that a ground rule was that we keep side conversations to a minimum and pay attention to her at all times -- and admittedly, it's a small room with lots of people, so the noise level can get pretty high if many people are talking -- but she had little patience with what I think of as the inevitable rustlings of people who are trying to learn something new. She was quite the disciplinarian and kept saying things like "We're all waiting for this table to be quiet before we can continue" or, when a woman was whispering to another woman, "I'm sure the entire group would benefit from your question." It was very funny to me to hear grown women addressed this way, and I forthwith resolved not to use those same phrases with my own students! At the same time, I had more patience with her than did D., who found her very annoying; after all, I do experience daily what it's like to try to get the attention of a room full of people who insist on not listening.

D. and I picked up on things pretty quickly, I think, and both wound up helping other folks at the table who seemed extremely confused. (And perhaps one reason that D. liked the teacher less is that she more than once glared at D., who was in the difficult position of sitting next to an elderly woman who was hard of hearing and kept asking D. to explain things just at the moment that the head teacher was calling for quiet; but that elderly woman was actually the mother of the other teacher, so I do think that D. should get a break on this point!)

After one lesson, I believe the teachers that it takes quite a while to really learn the game, and clearly the thing to do is to join a group that has a regular game so that one can keep practicing. I'm hoping that will be one of the things that comes out of this class, although we weren't so thrilled with any of the women at our table that we'd want to hang out with them regularly; in fact, we found the other four folks quite dim. But the women at the next table over seemed fun, and perhaps we'll move around the room over the next three lessons and meet different folks, and maybe a mahjong-playing group of beginners will form -- that's the hope, anyway!

When we got back home, D. said heatedly, "I want local friends, dammit!," and I'd been having the same thought. Many of the women had signed up for the course with friends, and I had felt quite wistful as folks went around introducing themselves and telling stories about the friends they were going to play with. It's not that D. and I don't have friends, but we don't have very many Adventure City friends, and those few friends that we do have are folks we don't really socialize with all that much. We'd like to change all of that.

The whole reason for getting that mahjong set in the first place was to facilitate socializing with the new folks we were sure we were going to meet in Adventure City, and I'm ready for that to happen now. Let's hope we took the first step this morning!

What I did on my (one-day) vacation

Having taught one day last week and two days this week, I was clearly due for a vacation. My school got today as a holiday for Rosh Hashanah, which gave me a day of leisure to recover from the first few days of the school year.

So I slept until 8:00 a.m.

Then, I dinked around on the computer and did a smidge of work before realizing that I was in grave danger of wasting this one-day holiday.

So I showered and got myself out of the house and had a wee bit of an Adventure City adventure. I was feeling a little blue today (a combination of overcast skies and general tiredness and hormones), so I went for a walk around an Adventure City pond that I'd driven past many times but never walked around. I was definitely in a strolling rather than serious walking mood, and the path around the pond was perfect for a leisurely meander. All in all, I walked about 50 minutes, ultimately circumnavigating not one but two smallish bodies of water.

Then I took myself out for a burrito for lunch and read with pleasure the book I'd brought along, a book on teaching revision that definitely deserves its own blog post.

Sated and having had my fill of fresh air, I went home and took a nap, then woke up and read some more.

I satisfied my craving for green beans with a dinner consisting of nothing but, and I watched my first-ever Campion mystery film while knitting.

All in all, a fine one-day holiday, one that managed to banish the blues I'd been fighting for 24 hours. And now I'm ready to go back to work for one whole day before the weekend commences. I'm hoping to get in a little kayaking and a little waterfront-ing this weekend, and Sunday is my big joining-the-church day, so it may be a busy weekend ahead. Good thing I got a little R&R preview today!

... and trying to suck more

So, as I said yesterday, I'm trying to suck less on the home front (not with total success, I'll confess, but the struggle's the thing, and of course the goal is not to suck, just to suck less).

But, as Gretchen Rubin likes to say in her Happiness Project blog, sometimes "The opposite of a great truth is also true." And as much as I want to aim for sucking less in most parts of my life, there are also ways in which I would do well to learn to suck more.

Which brings me to a report on one of my summer projects: ukulele lessons!

Perhaps a word of background is in order: One of the many fabulous things about FGS is that it has a faculty folk band! I mean, really, how fun is that? It was started three years ago by a teacher who's a talented pianist and has a taste for the quirky, and a few other faculty joined, and that spring they gave a concert during the morning meeting. (So we're talking about a 15-minute concert.)

Jump forward a year, and I've gotten hooked on the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain's rendition of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" and am thinking more and more about what it could mean for me to be a high school teacher in terms of having outside interests and a more balanced life. And the long and short of it is that I got the crazy idea that I would learn to play ukulele! And D. got me a really nice one as a gift, on the theory that it's better to learn on a really good instrument so that one doesn't get frustrated at how crappy it all sounds.

The ukulele is a pretty darned easy instrument to learn, and I was excited to play music again after the less-than-successful years of piano lessons back in elementary and middle school. And the faculty folk band guru found out I'd gotten a uke and invited me to join the band, even though I carefully explained that I didn't know how to play it. "No worries," he said, "you've got all summer before we start rehearsing again."

So that was last summer. And it turns out that I really sucked, and I was so devastated at sucking that I avoided playing at all costs! And when last fall rolled around, I told the folk band guru that I couldn't join the band after all because it turned out I really wasn't musical and I hadn't been able to learn to play. He said, "I have two words for you, WN: 'air ukulele.'" And he insisted that I come to the first rehearsal. When the day came, I was almost sick; I'd been crying off and on for 24 hours at the mere thought of displaying my incompetence in front of colleagues who had heretofore respected me.

And you know what? It was seriously fun! I had never actually played music with other people, which is completely different from playing by oneself. And the folks in the band are definitely some of the most fun colleagues I have ... and that's saying a lot at FGS. And the guru told me (and has repeated it more than once since), "There are no tears in the folk band."

So I played with the folk band for six months (which is the entirety of our "season"), hanging out in practice sessions after classes ended on Fridays and then performing at the employee holiday party and at the now-annual morning meeting concert in spring. I was a nervous wreck before both of the concerts -- and remember that, in both cases, these are 15-minute "concerts"! -- with all of the symptoms that folks complain about when they're dreading public speaking. But I made it through, butchering songs right and left but not so that anyone could really tell, since the uke doesn't make much noise compared to the other instruments. The concerts were not nearly as much fun as rehearsal, but they were the goal that made us rehearse, so it was all worthwhile.

And I did really get better over the year. My fingering (left hand) significantly improved, but I was still having oodles of trouble figuring out how to strum well. So when we wrapped up the year's "season" at our spring concert, I promised my bandmates that I was going to take ukulele lessons over the summer and was going to really be able to strum when we returned and took up band practice again in the fall.

So I dutifully -- nay, excitedly -- made arrangements with a ukulele teacher and started taking lessons. I like him, although I don't think he's the greatest teacher (but then again, what do I know? I haven't had music lessons since I was in 9th grade). But I have learned a good bit from him about ways of strumming as well as about music theory, the role of a uke in a band, the history of the instrument, the uke in popular music, etc. So that's all good.

... except that I'm miserable and anxious before lessons and avoid practicing in between said lessons. Even as D. says it's clear that I'm getting better, I'm so very, very aware of how bad I am, and I don't like doing things I'm bad at, and so I avoid the uke altogether until it's time for my lesson again, at which point I get weepy and distressed. Seriously, I woke up in a bad mood on Monday morning, knowing the moment of doom was nigh, and then I cried that afternoon as I drove to my lesson. When I got home, D and I had a serious conversation about whether it was worth the distress for me to keep playing or whether I could somehow change my attitude enough to accept that it's natural to suck when one is new at something.

The question is: Do I really enjoy playing uke and just need to accept the learning process, OR is this something I've forced myself to adopt in some sort of desperate attempt to be cooler or more balanced, and my dislike is now coming to the fore to show me how I really feel?

And is it possible for any academic or former academic to ever have an actual gut reaction without overthinking everything?

In a case of fortuitous timing, I've just finished reading Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, a summer faculty reading book option that I wound up (unexpectedly) liking so much that I've started reading one of the books that he recommends, Carol Dweck's Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. (This was actually a faculty summer book option last year, but it's not the one I chose. Dweck's book is thus far not especially well written, but I presume her research is sound.) She distinguishes between the "fixed mindset" of folks who believe that their talents and gifts are predetermined and, well, fixed, and the "growth mindset" of folks who believe that these talents can grow and be developed. So the latter are happy to suck at something when they're learning it on the theory that of course they'll get better if they keep working at it.

And wow, I'm totally in the former, not the latter, category! The kind of folks who take the safe option that guarantees success, that don't take risks or tackle anything new that they might not be good at. True story: According to my mother, when I was a wee tot, I didn't play any of those little baby toys in which one is supposed to stack things or push shapes into matching holes or any of the rest of it. Then along came my brother, two years younger, an adventurous sort who tackled all of these toys much earlier than expected. And apparently I watched him carefully as he figured out all of these toys, and then I'd pick the toys up and do them perfectly the very first time. I've carefully crafted a life in which I do the things I'm good at and never go near the things I'm bad at. And so I rarely try new things.

Until the ukulele, that is. D. pointed out to me that I'm willing to do physical activities I'm not good at -- jogging and kayaking -- but of course those aren't exactly public; I mean, yes, there are other people around on the street and river, but none of them is paying any attention to me. And I took a quilting class and made a beautiful quilt for a friend's baby ... but I cried more than once in the class, and when I went to a meeting of the quilting group at my church this spring,  they were all so much better than I am that I completely froze and sneaked out early and plan never to go back. No, I've pretty carefully crafted my life so that people I know never see me being incompetent.

So, even though it really may be that my gut is trying to tell me that I'm not really a musician and don't enjoy the uke for its own sake, I've decided this week that it's good for me to suck at something, just on general principle. And of course I know that people don't get good at something unless they practice, so I'm committing to daily uke practice, even though I suck at it and am not at all convinced that I will ever get to the point of not sucking. But if my folk band colleagues are happy to put up with me and my sucky uke skills, why not just hang out with them and have fun and not worry so much about whether I'm good or bad at playing?

And thus, in the midst of my mostly trying to suck less, there's a part of me that's committed to trying hard to embrace my suckiness in this one realm.

First day of summer vacation

My big goal this summer is not to be so goal-oriented.

I have all kinds of little projects planned (see the sidebar) but no big project at all. Not that I got so much done last summer, but I kept feeling like I should be getting stuff done. This summer, it's all about trying not to feel that way. I want to give myself time to lie fallow, to embrace the easy life, to unwind all the way.

Not that this is so easy for me. I certainly don't accomplish so much on a daily basis, but I always feel like I should be accomplishing more than I am. So this summer I'm going to try to work against type and try accomplishing less. We shall see how it works out.

A case in point: This spring, I learned that the original headmistress of FGS wrote children's novels before she took over leadership of the school. How cool is that?! As someone who has done a bit of work on 19th-century children's literature, I was immediately seized with the desire to read her novels. And then I thought, "Ooh, that's my summer project. I'll read all of her novels and write an article about them!" At which point I reined myself in and thought, "Hey, who says that this has to be a big project with a clear product at the end? Why not read one novel just for the fun of it and then decide if you want to read another? Stop forcing things; just let them unfold!" So that unfolding is now the goal. I'm having to move forward in faith that my relaxing won't mean that I don't get a damn thing done this summer; my fear is that, if I have no big goals, I'll spend all of my days watching TV and getting fat and lazy. But what my HS teacher friends tell me about sabbaticals is that they are really lazy at the beginning, get bored, and then start getting things done just because it's interesting; so I'm working on faith that I won't really succumb to permanent sloth if I just let myself be, even if there's a little sloth along the way.

So here's what I did today on my first day of summer vacation: I wrote up a lengthy list of small goals for the sidebar; I spent a couple of hours lying on the couch and reading part of a fun novel; I made a few phone calls to businesses about getting the roof repaired and the poison ivy removed (two of the items on the summer list); I decided I wasn't up to reading anything with intellectual content, but I did review my underlined notes in a previous chapter to prep my brain for reading for real tomorrow; I talked with my mom on the phone; I weeded in the garden for 40 minutes or so; I cleaned out the toaster; I did one load of laundry; and I went to a fun party this evening. Really, it was a lovely day -- very easy, very laid-back.

D. knows very well, of course, how hard it is for me to relax fully, and so she suggested to me that I could give myself a gold star on my calendar for every day that I really did kick back and only do stuff that I wanted to do. I think I started off the summer with a gold star day today!

Two glorious weeks

I'm now well and truly on winter break and, inspired by Mean Something, have decided to set some goals for the next two weeks. I am being far less ambitious than she, but I do want to take advantage of my first winter break in a couple of years that involves no travel at all and thus two glorious weeks at home. The goals:

• relax, kick back, and have fun, but in an active sort of way. I have books to read, a new knitting project to start, an abandoned quilt project that I may take another stab at, and things to see and do in Adventure City. What I don't want to do is descend into sloth, which is sometimes my wont and which makes me feel icky pretty quickly.
• write those last two letters of recommendation. I wish I'd gotten these done before school ended, but I didn't, and there's no point berating myself for this. But they do need to get done in the next week and a half.
• paint the tiny foyer, which somehow we neglected to do when we were painting the other rooms in the house.
• do some clearing out and straightening up in the basement.
• draft a short pedagogy article that I started over Thanksgiving break.
• plan for the rest of the winter trimester for both course preps.
• decide on my New Year's resolutions.

I think that should keep me pleasantly busy for the next fortnight. I'm hoping to return to school on January 4 relaxed, rejuvenated, and ready to dive into teaching with renewed vigor, and this is best achieved by a careful balance of work and play.

Cats and quilts

Philosophy Factory alerts us to a phenomenon I hadn't heard of, that some websites called for 09/09/09 as a day without cats on the internet. Outrageous, she cries! Outrageous, I agree!

And since I was already planning on posting photos of the quilt that I finished this week -- at long last! this is a baby quilt for a child now four months old -- and since the cats felt the need to insert themselves into the photos I was taking of the quilt, I will kill two birds with one stone, showing off my shaky stitching skills and showcasing our lovely felines at the same time.

Here's the quilt itself, in an attempted "artistic shot" in the backyard (and with the Muse barely visible in the window):

 

(That shot also lets you admire the plants I planted last month. I seem to have done more gardening and quilting than writing this summer ... and I'm cool with that.)

Here's the Contemplative standing on one side of the quilt:

(You'll see that my stitching skills are indeed so shaky that I wound up tying rather than quilting the quilt, but I think it wound up looking pretty nice.)

Here's the Muse standing on the other:

(The theory behind this side of the quilt is that, apparently, newly born infants see black and white better than colors. Of course, this brilliant idea would have made more sense if I'd gotten the quilt finished on my original schedule, rather than after the baby was four months old. Oh well, I still think it looks cool, especially with our black-and-white cat.)

And here are a couple bonus shots of the two girls, just 'cause they're so darned adorable and both tried to get mailed with the quilt:

 

 

And THAT is my response to the internet day without cats!