What Now?

Off to Bard!

I'm heading out today to the Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT) at Bard College. I've heard fabulous things about IWT (Jackie, I know you had a great time there), and I'm really looking forward to my week there!

This IWT week was basically my consolation prize for not getting into the NEH seminar that I applied to; I was incredibly disappointed, and so I decided I needed something else to look forward to for this summer. And that strategy has worked well; I'm now excited about the week to come, and I do think it will have greater bearing on my teaching and my own writing and ongoing intellectual development than the NEH seminar would have. Maybe that's just sour grapes, but I think it's actually true. One of the strong appeals of the NEH seminar was that it was going to be like a grad seminar but without the major seminar paper, which sounded heavenly, but after I got over my disappointment at being rejected for it, I wondered if maybe the whole thing would have been too close to crawling back into the womb; instead of trying to do something that feels wonderfully comfortable and familiar, maybe I should be taking on a new challenge instead. Hence, the IWT workshop.

I maybe should have signed up for one of the two basic workshops, "Writing and Thinking" or "Writing to Learn," which is what IWT itself recommends for new workshop participants, but I decided that I was already a pretty reflective teacher of writing and that I'd rather take something that was going to be a fun challenge for me personally as well as for me as a teacher. After all, this is a consolation prize as well as professional development!

So I signed up for the "Creative Nonfiction" workshop instead. Having gradually moved away from traditional academic writing, with little motivation to return to it, I've thought that perhaps creative nonfiction is a good fit for me, genre-wise, building on many of the same skills as academic writing but with more emphasis on narrative and a wider sense of audience. This FGS book feels like a halfway point toward that genre; it's not really going to be creative nonfiction itself, I'm pretty sure, but it's on that path. Anyway, I'm kind of nervous but also very excited about this workshop ... such that I woke up at 5:00 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep for thinking about the week ahead. So now I'm up and blogging, after which I need to finish my packing.

Participants got an email this week telling us that essayist and novelist Jo Ann Beard will give a reading and discussion on Tuesday night. I hadn't ever heard of her, I'll confess, so I read her most famous essay, "The Fourth State of Matter" (published in the New Yorker in 1996), about the murder of several physics professors by a grad student at the University of Iowa in 1991; Beard was managing editor of a physics journal there and was particularly close friends with one of the victims. It's a really good but devastating essay -- not surprising, given the topic. If I'd had more notice, I would have read her entire book of essays, but I've decided not to worry about that.

What I have been doing for self-imposed homework is finally reading some Peter Elbow, who in 1981 directed the workshop that would become the genesis of IWT the following year. Elbow's ideas are still clearly a major influence in IWT, so I thought I would finally get around to reading him. Elbow is one of those writers and thinkers whom I felt like I knew even though I hadn't read anything of his; I'd heard his ideas distilled so often (mostly when I was teaching comp at Grad School and at St. Martyr's) that I'd never actually bothered to read him. But I happened to have a copy of his Writing with Power; I know that I didn't buy it, so I must have picked up a used copy that was lying around some school or another. Now that I think about it, it was perhaps lying about in my FGS classroom, since he was my department chair's dissertation director at U Mass Amherst.

Anyway, last weekend I pulled it off the bookshelf and decided to read it as a way of preparing myself for this upcoming week (and maybe to make up for the fact that I was skipping over the introductory workshops at IWT). And it's seriously good! In fact, I learned the hard way that I shouldn't read it at bedtime, because then I can't turn off my brain, which is whirling around with ways to use his ideas in my classes next year. I highly recommend it for anyone who teaches writing or uses writing in courses.

I'm mentally treating this upcoming week as another round of English Geek Camp -- I'm anticipating that it will be as much fun as my first English Geek Camp, an AP Summer Institute I did two summers ago, although I imagine that the food won't be as amazing (because, really, what could be that amazing?) and that the wine won't flow as freely. But everyone gets a single dorm room, which is a darned good thing -- I'm too old for roommates I don't know -- and we are encouraged to bring hiking shoes, swimsuits, and, for local folks, even bicycles. I've never been to Bard, but I hear that it's a lovely campus, with wooded trails thither and yon. So I'm anticipating that this will be one of the best weeks of the summer, and I'm determined to enjoy every moment of it. On rereading my post from the 2010 English Geek Camp, I'm suddenly reminded that I felt some social anxiety there at mealtimes; I'm always better in a formal classroom setting than in the free-form arena of socializing outside of class. Hmm. Well, I shan't borrow trouble and fret about that ahead of time. And perhaps it will be socially an experience more like the one I had in 2009 at an NEH seminar, in which I made a friend whom I still keep in touch with. I'm also realizing that I don't consider that NEH seminar English Geek Camp, I think because we were staying in a hotel and it really felt more like a conference -- a totally fabulous conference -- than like "camp."

In re-reading my old blog posts about those two previous experiences, I'm realizing that in both cases I was completely brain-exhausted afterward and wanted to do nothing but lie around the house recovering. So it will be interesting this time around that I'm not actually going straight home afterward but am rather spending the weekend with two old friends who live close to the Bard campus. I haven't seen them in probably a year and a half, so it will be great to visit with them, although I'm suddenly a little worried that I won't be well-equipped for socializing after a week at English Geek Camp. Ah well -- again, no point in borrowing trouble, so instead I'm just going to look forward to the whole thing as one big adventure!

And with that, I'm off to finish packing!

Trying to figure out how to have a perfect summer day

Last summer I thought I had perfected the summer experience and really learned to relax -- it was heaven!

This year, not so much. Partly the difference is that last summer we had vacation at the very beginning and had our nieces to visit at the end, and this summer we've reversed things. Certainly there's something to be said for both schedules, but I have noticed that I'm just not as relaxed as I was at this time last year ... although it's also true that I was not at all relaxed after the girls left last year and then had to start school the next week, whereas this year I'll start school right after a week of lakeside vacation. Also, of course, I didn't have minor surgery last summer, and I also didn't have a week of a professional development workshop such as the one I'm heading off to next week, and I also didn't have a writing project going. So I'm certainly giving myself a break on the relaxation front. But still, I'm hoping to work a little more R&R into the summer than I've had thus far.

Here was today:

• didn't wake up until 8:30, which was heavenly since I'd slept terribly the night before.
• leisurely breakfast of fresh peaches and cherries
• did a little bit of thinking about my teaching for next year -- nothing too strenuous, just some mild trying out of ideas
• mowed the lawn and exercised, followed by a shower
• a groggy couple of hours next, during which I ate lunch (hummus and tortillas, which strikes me as an unbalanced meal but tasted good) but didn't do much else
• went off to FGS and pulled together all of the handouts, etc. that I need for the first day of summer school, which isn't for a week and a half, but I need to be ready before I go out of town to this conference next week. This hour or so was not especially rewarding in and of itself, and the faculty room at school was hot and uncomfortable, but I think I will feel much more relaxed for the next week and a half now that I have it done.
• then I spent 2 1/2 hours in the (air conditioned!) archives at school, working on research for the first chapter of the book. It was slightly weird but mostly nice to realize that I was completely alone in the building (the librarian gave me the key for the summer); the aloneness meant that I could talk my way through the files I was working on, which was nice since there were a lot of little bits of info that I was trying to piece together into a big picture. I often think better when I can talk out loud about something, but that behavior is normally frowned on in a library!
• came home and ate tomatoes and a piece of swiss cheese for dinner, followed by another peach for dessert, and watched a short documentary about the Bordentown School while knitting
• now I'm heading to bed to read a little bit before zonking out

Now, this is not a bad day at all, and I drove home from school this evening feeling quite good -- not only that I'd been productive, but that I'd actually enjoyed the time in the archive. But my point is that I didn't realize until 7:00 p.m. that it had been a good day, and I'd spent much of the day feeling kind of fretful about what I was or wasn't getting done and being keenly aware that I wasn't relaxing. So that feels like kind of a waste of a summer day, even though it was pretty productive in terms of work.

Honestly, I think what I need to do is adopt a siesta lifestyle for the rest of the week. What's killing my summer buzz is those two hours in the middle of the day when I'm fighting to stay awake and am feeling hot and grumpy. So then the rest of the afternoon feels like I'm trying to make up for those lost hours. Why not just give into the sleepiness and take a nap instead? And it stays light so late that it's no big deal to stay up later than I would during the rest of the year, especially since I can sleep in the next morning anyway; last night I was out in the yard weeding until 9:00 without even realizing it had gotten that late. Of course, I can only sleep in until this Sunday and then I'm going to have to start getting up every weekday morning, but I could still think about a siesta sort of pattern even when I'm teaching summer school, since I'll be done teaching by 1:15 each day. Maybe a short nap when I get home and then a more refreshed evening?

The other thing I need to do to keep a hold of summer R&R is to be much more realistic about how much research/writing I'm going to do. Honestly, there is no reason at all to spend more than two hours in any given day on this project, and it's totally fine if I blow it off entirely for a day. The whole point about not telling anyone (except in the blogosphere) about my goal of writing the first chapter by the end of summer is so that I don't actually have to accomplish that if it turned out to be kind of unrealistic, so I need not to chain myself to that expectation. And after all, I'm not actually being paid right now (even though I will be later), so why feel guilty about what I am or am not getting done?

In a way, it's kind of silly to be working on trying to create a pattern for a perfect summer day when I won't actually have that much time to follow that pattern, but I do want to enjoy the rest of this week more than I did the start of the week, and I also kind of have my eye on the week in early August after I finish teaching summer school and before we go on vacation. I'd love to spend that week getting deep-down relaxed ... and drinking plenty of iced tea.

In hot water again

Literally, not figuratively!

Last night I took a lukewarm shower, not by choice. So afterward D. and I went down to the basement, where we discovered the water heater leaking water on the floor. Uh oh. We managed to figure out how to turn off the water going into the heater -- we are not a very handy couple, so yay for us on that front! And good to have some victory to cling to, since we then had to tackle the task of forking over big bucks to get a new hot water heater. Such tasks also aren't our strength and can bring with them significant anxiety, which I think is probably pretty usual.

But I'm glad to report that we handled the whole thing with reasonable aplomb, thanks in large part to having a plumber whom we trust, and by mid-day we were a thousand dollars poorer but had hot water in the house again. And we got a water heater with a 12-year warranty; if we pro-rate theexpense over a dozen years, I'm certainly willing to pay that much for the privilege of taking warm showers, but of course one has to pay for these things in one fell swoop. Ah well -- such are the joys of home-ownership.

Besides facing the loss of those big bucks, the real challenge was facing the mess in the basement. Over the past school year, D. and I got worse and worse about treating the basement as a dumping ground, and one of my intended summer projects was to do some major sorting and cleaning and organizing down there. I had made exactly zero progress on that project, finding it too overwhelming to face ... but suddenly we were faced with a very immediate deadline, because the plumber would have to wheel the old heater out and the new heater in through the bulkhead, all of which would require actually having clear floor space enough to do said wheeling.

So I had two hours of really hard labor this morning -- or at least much harder labor than I usually do, which is perhaps not the same thing! -- and by the time the plumber showed up I had made a significant start on the basement project.

Then this afternoon I spent a while sorting through a couple of boxes that I'd brought up from the basement -- boxes that I had packed up from my St. Martyr's office when I left that job and hadn't looked at since! That sounds like sorting through them should have been an emotional sort of project, but it really wasn't, and I threw away or recycled most of it. It gives me confidence enough to contemplate actually continuing to make progress on the basement project ... as well as on the other household projects I have lined up for the summer. All easier to think about tackling since there's once again the option of having a hot shower after the hard work!

But you know what? I'm not letting any of those projects interfere with drinking more iced tea and remembering that summer is a time of R&R!

Iced tea, and the living is easy

So far, this has been the best summer I've had in I can't remember how long. It's been lovely!

Now, admittedly, one week of the summer has been spent on a lakeside vacation, and I don't start teaching summer school for another week, so I've had the easiest part of the summer thus far. This coming week is the last of the easy-peasy summer laziness, which I'm fine with -- I think I'll actually enjoy one of the three-week summer classes I'm teaching (a middle school class on "Percy Jackson and Greek Mythology," which I expect will be populated entirely by geeky kids -- my people!) and will find the other one okay if not fabulous (a high school writing class, which I've taught a couple of times before -- the kids really aren't into it, and who can blame them in the summer, but it's only three weeks long). And after those classes end, I have a few days off and then our nieces are flying up to spend a week with us -- the first time we've tried this as a family, and we're slightly nervous but really looking forward to having fun in Adventure City with a 10- and 7 1/2-year old. And then, once they fly back home, I've basically got a long weekend free before the faculty meetings at FGS begin.

Put like that, it seems like the summer is already mostly over, but that's not the way it actually feels to me. I can't think when I've had such a feeling of time spreading luxuriously out before me, of not feeling any pressure to accomplish anything in particular. It doesn't mean that I haven't done anything; I just haven't HAD to do anything, which is a very big difference.

I think that this may be what relaxation feels like! That's not a state I'm familiar with, but if this is what it feels like, I'll take it!

This relaxation, by the way, is apparently how most of my FGS colleagues spend their summers. None of that academic "this isn't time off; it's time to do my work" business; no, they actually really do take the summer off. Well, lots of them do professional development weeks here and there or teach summer school or do professionally related reading, but when they're not doing those, they're actually kicking back and unwinding. No wonder everyone else always looks so refreshed when we come back in late August! And this year, I'm hoping to keep this summer feeling going so that I can join them in that happy, relaxed state.

And my symbol for this delicious feeling of summer unwinding has become iced tea. I've been making at least one pitcher of it every single day, after having not made iced tea in literally years. Pouring myself a glass of tea has become a moment in which I consciously say to myself, "Ah, this is summer, and the living is easy." It's a nice moment of mindfulness and appreciation that comes several times a day.

I'm not sure when and why I stopped making iced tea years ago. Then again, I also stopped really relaxing years ago. It feels good to have both back in my life.

Delicious.

I have no landscaping vision!

I find mowing the lawn incredibly tedious -- hot, noisy, requiring timing around rainshowers, tiresome -- and the fact that our lawn never looks very good even when newly trimmed (it's all dandelions and clover and other weeds) doesn't help my motivation. Really, it's only the fact that I don't want to be that neighbor who lets down the block that keeps me mowing it every week.

So this spring I decided that I either had to devote some energy to creating a beautiful lawn or I had to get rid of the grass altogether. I opted for the latter.

First observation: Pulling up grass is a lot harder than it seems like it should be!

Second observation: Once the grass is pulled up, one is left with a big dirt plot, which doesn't particularly help that whole "let's not let down the neighborhood" project. One needs to put something in place of what one has removed.

Which brings me to my problem: I have all kinds of ideas for what our yard could look like -- big rocks & beautiful wild grasses; mosaics & colorful plants; a stone path that cuts across the yard, or maybe not; flowering plants or otherwise; whimsical gewgaws or objets d'art (although not the glow-in-the-dark solar bibelots that our neighbor loves); plants in tall pots surrounded by other plants in the ground, for height contrasts -- but I can't commit to anything! Which means I'm not planting anything at all. Which means that I've missed the beneficial spring planting season and am now heading into the hot part of the summer, when normal people don't plant new things but rather concentrate on keeping alive the things they planted earlier and that have already taken root.

The good news is that, now that it's mid-summer, perennials are all on sale. And it is true that every perennial I've planted in the three years we've lived in this house has been purchased mid-summer on sale, and they do keep coming back each year. So maybe this is just my way, especially given a school schedule that is busiest just as one should be putting new plants in the ground.

Okay, so I've worked through my anxiety about timing, but the challenge still remains: What shall I plant in the pile o' dirt I'm creating?! How does one who is not a gardener know what to plant? Very difficult. I should say that our front yard gets full sun all day, which of course affects what one can and can't plant.

I went to the garden store today and walked around, looking for motivation, but in the end I was pulled in so many different directions that I just bought mulch and left. I could just go with a hodgepodge aesthetic; as I rip out new grass and expose more dirt, I could just plant whatever strikes my fancy at the moment. That approach could result either in wonderful, unstructured beauty or in a royal mess; I fear the latter.

At least I can comfort myself that the planting I've done this year that is not aesthetically motivated -- my vegetable garden! -- is doing quite well, although it needs serious weeding now that I've come back from vacation. But it's way too hot right now (see "middle of summer," above), so instead I'm going to lounge on the couch and read and do my outdoor labors once it's cooled off a bit.

Summer writing accountability: End of week 2

Since I didn't finish the school year until yesterday, today was my first real live "summer writing day." And dang, writing is so hard! This is why I wish that more HS teachers -- at least those in English and social studies -- considered themselves writers; I think it's far too easy to forget what our students are going through with their own papers when we're not writing papers of our own, which I'm afraid is the case for most HS teachers. (Last week, Bardiac and Mean Something and I decided that HS teachers should have to include writing samples with their job applications, although we recognized that none of us had the power to make it so.) But that's neither here nor there, since my goal this summer is not to revamp the profession but rather to make serious progress on my own writing.

So I'll confess that I didn't get all that much done, what with the grading and the comment-writing and the wrap-up meetings and all the rest. But here's what I did do:

Yesterday took my first trip of the summer to the local college library to stock up on a few books (and I did get my "visiting scholar" status renewed at another local school, which will as of July 1 give me access to the chiefest of research libraries in Adventure City).

This morning I drew up a rough outline of the chapter I'm writing this summer and went through all of my notes for the chapter, slotting text and notes into the right part of the outline. It's all a big ol' mess, but at least I have things set up now that I can on any day work on a particular section. My goal from now on is to tackle a section each day until I have a complete draft; there are 10 sections, so in two weeks, I should have a complete draft -- one that needs to be added to and revised, of course, but a draft nonetheless. Oh wait, let's add some time to that estimate, since we're going on vacation. Yay! So we'll say three weeks for the complete draft.

I also started jotting down notes for the book proposal -- not a whole lot done there, but I'll keep chipping away at it.

Another goal I have to chip away at is actually making the study a usable space for work so that my books and papers aren't strewn about the living room, which I'm afraid is where they are now. Fortunately, I have a friend coming over for the evening next week, which provides a built-in deadline to have both rooms cleaned up.

In a way it's silly that I'm calling this the end of week 2, since school just ended yesterday, but I'm following the schedule for ADM and Notorious's writing group -- wonderful motivation! -- and, truth be told, I've been in a summer frame of mind for a couple of weeks anyway.

Summer writing accountability: End of week 1

I've decided that this summer I will finally write the proposal for the danged biography I've been working on and off again (often off) for the last five years. Not that I've finished writing the biography; by no means. But I'm pitching this as "serious nonfiction" rather than "academic biography," and apparently one often sells the former to agents/publishers with the proposal, before one has actually written all (or even much) of the book. And, honestly, if I can't get a publisher to take the book, I'm not going to finish writing it; labors of love and romantic pursuits are one thing, but I'm interested in sharing the research I've done about this interesting subject with people who are interested, and if it looks like that's unlikely to happen, I'll move on to greener pastures.

But I'll admit that I've made this same claim before, just last summer -- "This is the summer that I write the book proposal!" -- so clearly my wishing it does not make it so. Having learned my lesson, I'm creating some public accountability for myself:

1. A colleague and I are going to get together regularly this summer to share our writing. Now, he's never actually published anything -- not unusual in a HS history teacher -- but he's going to attempt his first journal article this summer and is looking to me for help. So I think this partnership will be valuable, because I will appreciate his feedback on my writing, and there's nothing like being a mentor to help one articulate one's own process. And there's the social embarrassment factor of not having something to give him every couple of weeks, so that's a very good thing.
2. I've also joined the writing group that ADM and Notorious, Ph.D. have organized for the summer. Hurrah for them and for another layer of accountability!
3. The check-in day for that online writing group is Friday, so I also thought I'd blog each Friday about my writing progress for the previous week -- a fuller account than I'll make in my comments to the writing group.

I think three layers of accountability should be enough, shouldn't it? Plus I have the extra motivation that I'm going to apply this fall for a sabbatical for the following year; I probably won't get it -- local wisdom says that one never gets a sabbatical at FGS on the first application -- but I think it would help my case to say that I was currently shopping around the book proposal. (And it's possible that my being a published author, which isn't the case for the vast majority of my colleagues, might make a difference. It might not -- such accomplishments are not consistently seen as inherently valuable at FGS, at least no more so than any other hobby would be -- but it's a real enough possibility that it adds fuel to my fire for this summer.)

So here is my first week's accountability check-in (although, in point of fact, I'm still grading final exams, and my official summer doesn't technically begin until next Thursday ... but that's neither here nor there):

• I did some reading about the genre of book proposals, including beginning to read Susan Rabiner's Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction -- and Get It Published. I also found the successful book proposal of a friend of a friend that I got a copy of a few years ago; I've read it before, but it was helpful to review it. I set up the general outline for my own book proposal ... which, um, mostly just meant opening a new document and typing in the standard category headings -- but at least now it's ready for taking notes about how I'm going to fill in those categories, which is one of my goals for next Friday.

• Part of a book proposal is a couple of sample chapters, and I took a serious look at my table of contents and chose the two chapters I'll include. Unfortunately, the introductory chapter that I'll include is only partially written, and the other one is not written at all, although I have pages and pages of notes. So I have my work cut out for me.

• My thought for the summer work is to go back and forth between the book proposal itself and the as-yet-unwritten sample chapter, so that I can spell myself when I've worked too long on one of them. And the book proposal is in many ways big-picture, whereas the sample chapter is more focused, so that's probably a good pairing.

• So, as far as work on the chapter goes, I've now read and taken notes on the first third of a secondary source associated with the topic of this chapter; I should be able to finish the rest of the book next week.

No actual writing, I realize, but I'm still going to call this "not bad" for exam week in which I'm still in school and surrounded by blue books and attending many required end-of-year events. Let the summer of work begin (any day now)!

A foretaste of summer

What a great weekend -- really wonderful! The weather was decidedly summery, and so was my mood.

I haven't previously had this sense of giddiness around Memorial Day weekend and imminent summer; at St. Martyr's, graduation was usually over by then and real summer had begun, which made a three-day weekend not particularly noteworthy, and at FGS, some years we've been heading into the final week of classes at this point. But this year the calendar has cooperated (for the faculty, at least), and classes ended on Friday, which means all grading had to be done and returned by then, and my final exam had to be photocopied and in the administrative office by earlier last week. So no real work to do! This week is exam week, and my exam isn't until tomorrow afternoon, which adds to the summery sense of things; here it is, 8:45 a.m., and I'm lounging on the couch in shorts rather than in the midst of my first-period class. Lovely!

But just yesterday did the biggest reason for my summery sense of leisure finally sink in: This is the first year I'm not teaching the regular junior class (having taught AP Comp instead), which means this is the first year that I'm not grading the year-end portfolios that juniors do in place of their final English exam. Those portfolios are great assignments -- students set writing goals for themselves earlier in the year, and then they have to revise some pieces and write some new pieces for the portfolio, in addition to writing an introduction, and putting it all together professionally into a folder -- and absolutely valuable pedagogically; students are often struck by just how much their writing has matured, and most of them take real pride in their final work. But wow, it sucks to grade. I used to plan on an hour per portfolio to read it (sans pencil in hand -- I made no marks at all on the portfolio itself) and then write a letter to the student responding to her portfolio and commenting on her writing improvement over the year -- and I could only do so many a day before running entirely out of steam. The students submit them during the last week of classes, which means that I always had those stacks of portfolios haunting me as classes ended and exams ran. And I taught 2 or 3 sections of the course, so I'd have 30-45 of them to do over about a week and a half so that I was ready to give them back, with their accompanying letters, at the end of exam week. Kind of brutal.

But now, ha ha, no more! These portfolios are not at all the reason I switched from regular junior English to AP Comp, but clearly the foretaste of summer that comes from not having those portfolios to grade is a lovely thing inded. And in fact the AP Comp students don't take a final, having already sat through the official AP exam, so I've already written and posted those students' final grades and comments. Summer just got one step closer. Oh sure, there's still a week plus a couple of days of school-related work to do, including the 45 freshman exams I'll get tomorrow, but I'm already in a summer mood.

A relaxing family visit (Is that an oxymoron?)

D picked me up from the airport yesterday morning after my short flight back from the land of my youth.

Well, my mom actually lives more than an hour away from the specific land of my youth, so there is no revisiting of my haunts of yore when I visit my family. My 25th high school reunion is next weekend, which would have involved such revisiting, but this past weekend worked better for everyone for my visit, and I didn't actually enjoy either my 10th or my 20th reunions, so I didn't feel particularly motivated to attend this upcoming reunion. But I digress.

The interesting thing is that it was actually a good visit with my mother! As I was unpacking last night, D commented that I seemed much less anxiety-ridden and emotionally overwrought than is my usual state upon returning from a family visit, and it's also true that I didn't once call her over the weekend to cry or complain or just get a reality check. (I sent her some emails, but they were of the "I love you -- hope you're having a good weekend" variety.)

Here's why I think it was a good trip (and I'm writing these out so that I can replicate them on future trips):

• I've lost weight, which my mother approves of because for her that represents self-deprivation, which she's in favor of. (Have I ever mentioned the strong Calvinist streak in my family?) Now, this weight loss has not actually meant self-deprivation for me, which is the one reason I've stuck with it, but she approved nonetheless. Also, she wants to lose weight but hasn't done so, so she couldn't hold this over me. The moral high ground is very, very important in my family dynamic, and I usually am occupying the low ground!

• We had a project in which she was instructing me. I learned this lesson a couple of years ago, and it's made a huge difference in our visits. This time, she was teaching me the basics of crochet, which she learned in the last year. Now, I don't actually care for most crochet, but all I wanted to be able to do was to add trim to knitting projects, and I think I successfully learned to do so. This meant that my mom and I spent time sitting side-by-side on the couch, her showing me what to do and my mimicking her, and in the end her teaching and my learning were successful. She felt needed, and we had spent time focusing on something external to us and our relationship: a recipe for a less fraught visit.

• My mom and I had a day and a half together before my brother and his family descended on the house, and we had a little time afterward with only my nieces around. In many ways, having the whole family there makes the time go faster, but I think it helps my relationship with my mom when we have some mother-daughter time as well as grandmother-aunt time.

• As part of that mother-daughter time, we went to the outlet mall, where I bought clothes for the new school year. This was fun (see the weight loss above!), and I think it helped her feel involved in my "real life." Plus, she bought me some pairs of chinos, which was nice. My mother tends to be so very critical that I keep her at arm's length and don't tell her a lot of what is going on in my life -- an understandable defense mechanism, I think, but one that naturally keeps us apart, which then causes her anxiety and unhappiness. Oh, families!

• Speaking of her criticism: Both before and after my brother and his family arrived, my mom kept telling critical stories about my sister-in-law; my SIL is actually a great person, and my mother usually holds her up as a model to me, but this weekend she could do no right. At one point, my mom even caught herself being particularly critical and said, "Of course, I love SIL!" My SIL is also someone I didn't grow up with and don't have a long, complicated history with, which means that I have a pretty clear-eyed view of her strengths and weaknesses, so I could put my mom's criticisms in clear context and see that what my mother found so lamentable are things that are not weaknesses at all or that are so minor that it is silly to even point them out. I found this very eye-opening, since I tend to internalize and/or resent my mother's criticisms of me and D.; but clearly her critical eye is always roving and finding new things to pick on, and clearly those things usually don't amount to anything at all. Also, I've been interested over the past few years to observe how both my brother and SIL try to let my mom's criticisms just roll off of them like water off a duck's back, and how they even make her comments a source of inside jokes between them -- so maybe in this respect, my mother is right that my SIL is a good model for me!

• I also borrowed my mom's car a couple of times and had lunch with my dad and his wife and had breakfast with Another Damned Medievalist (who lives in the area), and SIL and I also took my nieces to the neighbor's pool one afternoon, so I didn't feel as trapped in my mom's house as I sometimes do.

All of which is to say that it was actually an enjoyable trip, and I was kind of sad when my mom took me to the airport, mostly because I wish I lived closer to my nieces (but they're coming up next summer for a whole week with their aunties!). But it's really a short and often fairly cheap flight, and if visits weren't so fraught, maybe I could run down for an easy weekend more often. Food for thought.

Trying to suck less

August hasn't been all adventures, of course. I've also been trying to be a responsible adult and get projects done around the house -- much less fun than the adventures!

A year and a half ago, a colleague and I came up with a very helpful mantra: "Suck less." It arose from a serious case of January sluggishness in which we were having trouble motivating ourselves to do anything at all. So we decided to set the bar really low: We didn't have to stop sucking; we just had to suck a little less. It's been a great mantra, one that we still remind ourselves of pretty frequently and that always lights a wee bit of a fire under me to take care of pesky tasks that I'd rather avoid. And since I tend to spiral pretty quickly into the realm in which I'm convinced that I am the suckiest person ever, this is an especially good mantra for me.

I've mostly used this mantra for professional rather than personal stuff. But last week, as I was languishing on the couch in a fit of "how much do I suck? let me count the ways," I decided I needed to resurrect the "suck less" mantra, haul myself off of the couch, and start getting something done. For the last week, I've mostly been alternating between having fun adventures and trying to suck less. (I initially wrote "try to be a less sucky person," but I'm trying to make this about my actions rather than my identity.)

I haven't yet managed to finish anything, I'm afraid, but I have at last tackled several projects that had been stuck on the "to do" list with no progress being made. I've unpacked several boxes from the basement that had been stacked up since we ran out of energy during our move two years ago; I've done some hard manual labor in the back yard and have more to do tomorrow; I've emptied out the two-drawer filing cabinet in which we had simply piled rather than filed papers, and started sorting through the papers and creating organized files; I took the car into the automechanic for some needed work. All of these projects are at the half-way point and won't be finished before I head out of town Thursday morning for a quick end-of-summer visit to my family; even taking the car into the shop turned out to be more complicated, as seems to be the way of all projects I tackle. But my goal is to have everything far enough along that I'll be able to finish them before the faculty week o' meetings begins two weeks from today.

I'd like to start the new school year on a less sucky note, feeling -- at least temporarily -- like a competent adult who's taken care of real-life projects. And then what a relief it will be to tackle school projects, which are so much more in my realm of competence!