Because that's how we roll

For our 43rd anniversary, my husband gave me a massive book on the history of Maori art, a gorgeous compendium I've been wish-listing for ages. I gave him a tomahawk steak the size of his head at the Bears Den restaurant in Cambridge, Ohio, part of our annual holiday trek to visit with the taxidermy, view the courthouse light show, and eat the best beef on the planet--or at least our part of the planet.

The book weighs 8.9 pounds. The steak weighed significantly less. A good time was had by all, except maybe the elk that appeared to be looking for the rest rooms.

Not photoshopped. That bone is at least a foot long.

Fingers to show scale. The pages are thick and glossy and covered with beautiful things.

Doing my small part to make the world a better place

I staggered like a drunkard while walking into Wal-Mart would be a great line in a country song, but for me it's just another Wednesday. Plagued with vertigo connected to an inner-ear problem, I nevertheless headed out to do some holiday errands but found myself reeling through the parking lot and reaching out to strangers' cars to maintain balance. Kind of embarrassing, especially since the entire population of Washington County had apparently decided to shop at Wal-Mart yesterday. I saw a woman trying to push a shopping cart crammed full of all manner of stuff topped with a huge wide-screen TV box while eleventy-seven small children trailed behind not very calmly. She's the one who should have been staggering, but there I was holding on to the battery display so I wouldn't fall over. I needed to buy five small items--why did I have to wait behind a half-dozen people in the self-checkout lane while suffering from a vertigo attack? Sure, I could have stayed home, but where's the fun in that? 

Every day this week I've had to do some dumb errand on campus, and every day I've vowed that that's the last time I'm visiting campus until January. But stuff comes up. I needed to do some prep work for the workshop I'm leading on January 13, which seems a long time off but if we don't order lunch now, there won't be anyone on campus to take the order for weeks. And someone has to buy door prizes, so someone has to check out a college credit card, which can't be done after the business office closes for the holidays. And then someone else wanted to meet me on campus to give me a gift (very nice!) and I was on the way to deliver some freshly laid eggs after my annual glaucoma test (no change--all good!) and I knew the person I was meeting has been ill and can eat a very limited diet that happens to include eggs, so I let her take half of the very beautiful blue and green eggs and took the other half up the hill to my retired colleague, who had admired the eggs when I'd posted a pic online and wondered where she could get some green eggs (unaccompanied by ham). No wonder I'm dizzy! 

It's probably the weather change, which can set off a vertigo attack, or it might herald an impending migraine. In a masterpiece of poor timing, I've been reading Mary Roach's excellent book Packing for Mars and I happened yesterday to read the chapter on the problem of motion sickness among astronauts. Just reading about the Vomit Comet made me want to puke. It was interesting to learn, though, that I'm not the only person in the world who can suffer debilitating vertigo as a result of (takes a deep breath) sitting on a rocking chair, sitting on a swing, getting a glimpse of a rotating fan, spinning in anything resembling the Mad Teacup Ride, reading in the car, looking in the wrong direction while riding on a boat, turning my head to the side quickly when my head is stuffed up, or any number of other ordinary experiences.

Which is yet another reason why we're once again not going on a cruise for our anniversary. My husband used to lobby pretty heavily for going on a cruise, but he has seen me seasick enough times to have given it a rest. The closest I've ever come to suicide was on a three-hour whale-watching boat out of Monterey Bay. Even our little canoe can sometimes set me off if we're sitting still and bobbing. Yesterday, though, I didn't need a boat or a swing or a fan or any mad teacups: something shifted in my inner ear and boom, I was making a spectacle of myself in front of the entire county in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

Well if my antics made a few people laugh, if I lightened the load for just one overburdened shopper, if I provided an object lesson to a parent encouraging a teen not to drink and drive, then maybe my vertigo attack made the world just a teeny bit better for someone. It's literally the least I can do, short of actually puking.

43 years ago today

Our chickens are little artists

Angelic voices, eclectic spaces

Two holiday concerts one week apart:

Last week I enjoyed Handel's Messiah sung by a heavenly host of singers, including my husband, accompanied by orchestra and harpsichord in the historic Basilica of St. Mary of the Assumption, an ornately decorated worship space where hundreds of listeners sat on rows of pews surrounded by statuary, stained glass, imported marble, and angels, lots of angels, including cherubs hovering around the ascending Mary up front and, above our heads, a phalanx of carved angels holding torches on their heads.

Yesterday we watched five women (including our daughter) singing Christmas music in close harmony, without accompaniment, in Cuyahoga Falls at the historic Jenks Building, in a converted garage where a spattering of observers who had braved the horrible weather sat on mismatched chairs surrounded by decor I can only describe as eclectic: an industrial-size coffee roaster on one side of the performance space and a canoe hanging from the ceiling on the other, plus piles of used books and vinyl records, unusual light fixtures and barking dogs sculpted from scrap metal and fish trophies and framed covers of Time magazine featuring Kennedys and a drill bit the size of my oldest grandkid and an anvil and a small statue of a man playing saxophone and, above our heads, a bust of a man wearing on his head not torches but what looked like a small satellite dish.

During the final leg of our two-hour drive to yesterday's concert, the weather was awful enough to prompt me to ask out loud, "Is it worth killing ourselves in a snowstorm just to get to this concert?"

Reader: it was. Spending a couple of hours surrounded by music so lovely it makes me smile clear down to the soles of my feet is worth any effort, whether it's Handel in the basilica or "The Holly and the Ivy" in the garage.

I rarely carry much cash but, thanks to an unusual series of events, last week I ended up with a fifty-dollar bill and a twenty in my wallet, and after the Messiah performance I decided I would put my hand in my purse and pull out a bill blindly to put it into the plate, and then yesterday the other bill went into the tip jar. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. You can't buy holiday cheer, but those experiences were worth every penny.

Voices of angels.

Coffee roaster the size of a locomotive

The singers in the family

Not a clue. Seriously, I've got nothing.

Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel?

Sn

Junkyard dogs

Deck the halls with bogus sources

So I'm sitting in the waiting room while my car undergoes routine maintenance and I'm feeling rather virtuous. Why? Because instead of watching the television tuned to the Sky Is Falling Channel, and instead of doomscrolling on my phone, and instead of playing the vintage PacMan game in the corner, I'm writing Christmas cards. So much to do in the holiday season and here I am providing a shining example of efficiency! But really it's just another way to put off grading research papers.

How do I procrastinate? Let me count the ways: I grade all the little things that don't take much thought, respond to a million not-so-urgent emails, bake cookies, write cards, shop for gifts, attend concerts, visit the holiday tree display at the park, mail packages--but I still haven't started grading research papers.

On Tuesday in our Center for Teaching Excellence I spent five hours hanging out with colleagues while eating cookies and laughing my head off (at this link, among other things), which was very therapeutic--but I really needed to be grading research papers.

I could have postponed mailing packages until the weather cleared up but instead I drove to the horrible downtown post office, made a futile circuit of the overstuffed parking lot, drove around the block in the pouring rain, and finally parked at the only available spot down the street--but that was just the first half of my Adventures in Package-Mailing. Then I had to toddle up the hill in the rain while juggling an umbrella and two bulky packages that blocked my view, and I didn't have enough hands free to manage the umbrella and the packages AND open the door so I got thoroughly wet in the struggle while an older guy in a gentleman's cap stood nearby laughing at me. Not the highlight of my holiday season--but it was better than grading research papers.

To be clear, these are not traditional research papers at all. My Nature Writing students wrote a persuasive essay that required a minimum of five sources, but some of those sources could be interviews with experts. Only nine papers--maybe I can finish them today (if I ever stop blogging and start grading).

The first-year seminar papers are more challenging. I'm down to sixteen students (from a high of 19 at the start) and I believe one of them never turned in a paper, so there's one down and 15 to go. They had to write something I call a researched persuasive memo, trying to persuade a specific person or group to take a specific action in order to improve education (however the students want to interpret that). They were required to use at least three sources, which ideally would all be academic sources drawn from our research databases but I'm not holding my breath. I had a dickens of a time trying to get students to understand that quoting from the online abstract is not the same as citing the article itself, but even those abstract-dependent essays are easier to grade than the ones that provide only vague references without actual citations. 

Because I'm going to have to check sources. Maybe not all of them, but at least one per paper and more if things don't add up. Some students won't provide sufficient bibliographic info so I'll have to try to find the sources myself. Some students will misunderstand or misrepresent sources, through either sloppiness or intent (though it's hard to tell at this stage). And some sources will be entirely imaginary, invented by an anonymous AI. 

Here I am enjoying the heck out of the holiday season; I'm wearing a holiday sweater and festive socks and I'm fully equipped to spread holiday cheer at a moment's notice, but instead I have to force myself to read a whole bunch of research papers.

So I'm giving myself a stern talking-to: no more holiday cheer until the papers are graded. No more cookies or cards or packages or errands. It's time to turn aside from fa-la-la-la-la and pick up the research papers. 

If you don't hear from me by this time next week, send in the Saint Bernards. (Extra credit if they're carrying eggnog and cookies.)

 

 

 

TMI alert! (Seriously, go read something less icky)

I'd been sitting half-naked on an examination table for about 20 minutes with nothing but a flimsy paper blanket to cover my nether parts when a bright young thing in surgical scrubs poked her head through the door and asked, "Are you ready to get your IUD inserted?" Which would be a neat trick considering I haven't had a uterus since 2009. I don't know where you'd insert an IUD in someone lacking a uterus--or, for that matter, why.

My experience at the gynecologist's office this morning may look like a comedy of errors in retrospect, but it didn't feel particularly funny at the time. I've been suffering from a serious case of IPNBLRSTTBS Syndrome (It's Probably Nothing But Let's Run Some Tests To Be Sure), and this is where you'll want to close your eyes and cover your ears if you're allergic to ick. 

There's a bit of scar tissue, see, where my most private regions had endured massive amounts of radiation 16 years ago, and my new gynecologist wanted to do a biopsy on a polyp located there, which looked like a cervical polyp, but no insurance company is going to approve a biopsy on a cervical polyp for a person who lacks a cervix. So when I arrived today I signed a release form allowing removal of an endometrial polyp, but then someone in the chain of command noted that a person lacking a uterus probably doesn't have endometrial tissue either. In the end they had to tear up the signed release form and get me to sign a new one allowing removal of a vaginal polyp, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be two vaginal polyps, which were eventually removed. 

But first I had to spend a full 30 minutes waiting (and sweating and breathing deeply to try to keep my blood pressure under control), wondering what kind of wild party was taking place out at the nurses' station and why all the new medical staffers look like they just got out of the seventh grade and why I always carefully fold my clothes at the gynecologist's office so that the person poking around in my most intimate regions won't be exposed to my ratty old granny panties. What else was there to do but think, and fret, and sweat? 

I'm not proud of it, but eventually I got tired of waiting (and sweating, and fretting) so I used my cell phone to call the front desk and ask whether I'd been forgotten. What did they want me to do, walk out there in front of everyone and demand satisfaction while wrapped in a flimsy paper blanket? I had sweated so much that the paper was starting to disintegrate anyway, so I made the call.

"Don't worry, she's on the way," they said, and indeed she was, and within moments I was on my back enduring a procedure that was less painful than I'd expected but also more bloody. My longtime gynecologist--the one who did my hysterectomy and found the cancer and got me through all the horrors of treatment--was a dapper gentleman with the kindly gravitas of a modern Marcus Welby, and the new one who replaced him is on maternity leave, so I was dealing with someone I'd only just met who seemed caring and competent despite looking about twelve years old. She spoke like an intimacy coordinator, asking repeatedly, "All right if I touch you here?" Not sure what would have happened if I'd said no. I suspect it would be difficult to remove a vaginal polyp without touching some sensitive parts--er, tissues. Why does the word tissues make everything ickier?

But now it's all over but the waiting. Three to five days for biopsy results, 72 hours with no sex. (During my birthday week! Ah, the humanity!) I wondered about the propriety of writing about all this ick, but the advantage of having entered my Crone Era is that I'm allowed to write about whatever I want, and what I want right now is to wonder what happened to the woman who was expecting to get an IUD. Did some bright young thing poke her head in the door and ask, "Are you ready to get your polyps biopsied?" 

 

Errant u's, invisible emus, and other news

I have reached the point in the semester when little annoyances evoke outsize responses; for instance, yesterday I may have publicly threatened to employ a flamethrower against students who spell my name incorrectly. (Fourteen weeks into the semester and they can't figure out how many u's are in my last name?) 

PowerPoint slides with very small white text on a black background! Students who insist that they've "fixed" everything I marked on their drafts when they've corrected small errors but ignored the big stuff! A classroom thermostat that hisses, loudly, throughout a two-hour event! A new light fixture in the library that makes me want to distribute green visors to everyone forced to work under those harsh conditions! All these things have earned my ire in the past couple of days.

But probably my time would be better spent on a wild-emu chase. Actually I don't know whether the emus in question are wild or domesticated, and in fact I'm not entirely sure that emus respond to domestication, but I do know that people I know and trust, people who inherited a big chunk of my DNA, claim to have spotted emus in a fenced enclosure along a particular stretch of my daily commute. Every day since Thanksgiving I have looked for emus along that stretch of highway but I have not seen so much as a feather.

Well, I have seen some feathers, but they weren't on any emus. Yesterday a Carolina wren got into my house--who knows how?--and kept fluttering from room to room trying to find its way out. At one point it flew into our bedroom and hid behind a framed photograph of a ruby-crowned kinglet. Nice choice, but hiding in my bedroom is not a viable lifestyle for a wren.

So despite the cold weather we opened the back door wide, but the bird wouldn't come close while we were nearby. My husband left for an early meeting so I sat quietly, as far from the cold as I could get while still maintaining a clear view of the door, because otherwise I'd never know whether the bird got out of the house. (Once, years ago, we found a dead bird in a large plant pot downstairs. Who knows how long it had been in the house without our knowledge?) In the dead quiet I could hear the bird flittering here and there until finally it flew right out the back door, which made me happy because I'd had enough of letting the winter freeze invade my space. 

Meanwhile, deer hunting season has started, prompting one of my students to comment on what a great sacrifice he was making just to be in class on Monday. Others didn't bother trying. I hope they'll bag their deer, but local bag limits were severely reduced after a disease ravaged the local deer population this fall. I told a colleague that some of my students seem to have deer flu and she asked, "What are the symptoms?" Look for massive outbreaks of camouflage and hunter orange.

Finally, my adorable daughter, who shares my interest in holiday music and punctuation, sent me a link to a charming YouTube video attempting to answer a burning question: Where does the comma go in "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"? Who can maintain an air of annoyance with such silliness about? Forget about the spelling errors, errant students, and emus; let's play with punctuation!

When Wordsworth visits Wendy's

I'm tempted to begin it was a dark and stormy night, but the icy rain has stopped and the road is clear and the wind is growing less gusty. The last night of November of a cold, dark year, and I'm the only customer sitting in Wendy's just off the interstate in Nowheresville, Ohio, eating chicken tenders and fries and wishing I could go back in time just one hour and sit instead in an acoustically perfect performance space that had seemed apparelled in celestial light, where my daughter's choir, accompanied by a small orchestra, sang a lovely arrangement of Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" with the glory and the freshness of a dream. 

By the time I've driven an hour down the road, though, the music has faded and my eyes are tired and I need to get off the highway, so here I sit eating my solitary supper to the accompaniment of random clangs and the murmurs of kitchen workers and the continuous shooshing of passing traffic, and with Wordsworth I concur that there hath past away a glory from the earth.

William Wordsworth probably wasn't thinking about the mundane squalor of modern fast-food dining when he wrote the poem that's made me so pensive. Its full title, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," immediately reveals that it's not a young person's poem, but I'm surprised to find that Wordsworth was just thirtysomething when he wrote it, significantly younger than I was when I studied it during my second stab at grad school. I don't remember being particularly impressed with the poem at that time, but perhaps I wasn't yet ready for the kind of nostalgia the poem evokes--or maybe the poem is improved by the presence of ethereal sopranos and a French horn.

Double vision: what I experience when I've been driving too long without a break, and what Wordsworth experienced when he visualized the world through the eyes of his childhood self while viewing his childhood self through his jaded adult perceptions. My heart is at your festival, he tells the youth, and The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.

Or maybe he just wishes he could feel it all again, feel the child's innocent joy in nature unmediated by the knowledge endowed by experience. He reaches for the joy (while I reach for another French fry, dip it in ketchup, try to savor the crunch and saltiness as if I haven't tasted it a thousand times before)--he reaches for the joy, I say, but gets distracted by a Tree, of many, one, / a single field which I have looked upon, / Both of them speak of something that is gone, and he's not talking about French fries: Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

The door opens. A gust of wind blows in a tiny old man accompanied by an even tinier older woman. They step up to the counter to squint at the small print on menu board, so the minimum-wage worker behind the counter patiently recites a litany of sauces--honey mustard, sweet chili, barbecue, ghost pepper ranch--but the old folks don't strike me as the ghost pepper type. They settle for ordinary ranch. I chose the sweet chili sauce myself. Why not take a walk on the wild side for once?

Trailing clouds of glory do we come, insists Wordsworth, but I don't see any glory following behind the little old couple, or behind me either. Where did it go? If we come into this world with bits of star-stuff stuck to our ankles, it seems to rub off awfully quickly. Sure, Heaven lies about us in our infancy, but in the very next line Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy. I wish I could remember the tune the choir sang, the rhythm and the harmonies that made these words lodge in memory so that I couldn't shake them through miles of busy city traffic or the roar of passing trucks. The music trailed clouds of glory, but At length the Man perceives it die away, / And fade into the light of common day.

The light in Wendy's is common enough but harsh and garish, illuminating exhausted faces of customers and workers. We should be at home but the road stretches ahead of us as we act out our daily rota of obligations. Wordsworth sees the child eagerly assuming roles of responsibility with costumes and customs that stultify his creative soul. Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight / And custom lie upon these with a weight, he warns the child, so why so quickly constrain freedom behind a mask of conformity?

Outside, a semi-truck makes a sharp right into the truck stop next door, trailing clouds of diesel exhaust. Does the truck-driver cherish within his soul the fugitive embers Wordsworth wrote about? Is it possible that, Though inland far we be, / Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea / Which brought us hither? I'd like to hear the mighty waters rolling evermore, but all I hear is traffic, and more traffic, and more.

The French fries are gone, finally, and so ought I to be. I've had a long and lovely visit with the family and I have to teach first thing in the morning, so now it's time to pick up my tray, trudge toward the trash can, and head out the door for another hour of driving. I wish I could remember the music, feel again the joy and peace I felt as I sat in the pew surrounded by people as my beautiful daughter lent her voice to Wordsworth's words. By the time I've fought my way through the dark, cold night traffic, I will have forgotten everything.

What though the radiance which was once so bright / Be now for ever taken from my sight, and who really cares if this Wendy's melds in my mind with every other fast-food joint I'll ever visit, Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower, of music and light and beauty, good fellowship and friendly smiles and fierce hugs from my youngest granddaughter, We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind--and here I'm certain Wordsworth wasn't talking about Wendy's. I walk out the door to my car, echoing the litany of the poem's closing lines:

    Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Goodnight, Wordsworth. Goodnight, Wendy's. Goodnight, kitchen workers and little old couple and truck drivers. Perhaps there has past away a glory from the earth, but despite the dark we still can find strength in what remains behind.