Cheesy with a chance of Sleestaks

I may have reached a new low yesterday when I showed my upper-level literature students a clip from the 1970s Saturday-morning children's show Land of the Lost. One moment we're engaging in deep philosophical discussion of solipsism and whether unmediated experience exists, and the next we're watching Will and Holly encountering Chaka for the first time. How many Saturday mornings did I spend slavering over those cheesy special effects and terrible actors? And I wasn't even a child at the time--the show debuted when I was 13. It was kind of embarrassing to admit to my students how much I loved Land of the Lost even after I was old enough to know better, but at least there were no Sleestaks involved. I draw the line at Sleestaks in the classroom.

My special topics class Between Fact and Fiction is nearing the end--finally!--of the book that never ends: Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. They found the book amusing and engaging at first but they've reached the point when the narrator is just annoying, which prompts the question: why would he portray himself as annoying when he could have assumed a more heroic persona? Or is his willingness to portray his own annoyingness somehow heroic in itself? 

Yesterday we tried to unravel the process Eggers experiences (or says he experiences) while his friend John (not his real name) is admitted to the hospital after a suicide attempt. John is in the next room getting his stomach pumped while Dave agonizes over how best to turn his close friend's pain into narrative:

So there is first the experience, the friend and the threatened suicide, then there are the echoes from these things having been done before, then the awareness of echoes, the anger at the presence of echoes, then the acceptance, embracing of presence of echoes--as enrichment--and above all the recognition of the value of the friend threatening suicide and having stomach pumped, as both life experience and also as fodder for experimental short story or passage in novel, not to mention more reason to feel experientially superior to others one's age, especially those who have not seen what I have seen, all the things I have seen....So I could be aware of the dangers of the self-consciousness, but at the same time, I'll be plowing through the fog of all these echoes, plowing through mixed metaphors, noise, and will try to show the core, which is still there, as a core, and is valid, despite the fog. The core is the core is the core. There is always the core, that can't be articulated.  

It's kind of a lot to unpack, as you would expect from a book trying to articulate what can't be articulate, narrate what most resists narrative, eff the ineffable. In the end we agree that the book (novel/memoir/experimental whatever-it-is) is a self-consuming black hole, a monument to solipsism consuming itself and everything it encounters--but not before we've had a chance to visit the Land of the Lost so my students can understand just one in a vast array of allusions to works outside their awareness. One of my students informed me that the TV show was made into a film starring Will Ferrell in the early 2000s, and all I can do is be thankful at having escaped that particular echo.

Baseball therapy

A beautiful day for baseball.

 

The big question at the baseball game on Saturday was Which team is the wind playing for? Sometimes the wind worked in my team's favor, pushing a fly ball over the fence for a three-run wind-assisted home run. Sometimes the wind worked against us, blowing the pitcher right off the mound for a wind-assisted wild pitch. High winds roared past the light poles, drowning out all chatter and making the poles sway menacingly; outfielders spent as much time chasing their own hats as they did catching balls--or trying to catch balls that often took wild detours, shoved by gusts of wind into unexpected places. 

Fans in the stands had to hold on to their hats--and everything else. Napkins, popcorn, loose bits of paper flew up and plastered themselves against the protective netting. Every time the guy in front of me stood up, his seat-cushion went skittering off on its own. The rain had stopped before the game started but the parking area remained a sopping mud-pit, so I drove home with soaking feet and a wind-burned face after my team lost--but I enjoyed every single minute of it. 

This was my third baseball game of the season. I missed one home game because of a meeting and a whole weekend of tournament play because I was sick, but aside from that, I've attended every home game, even though I don't even have any students on the team this year.

I generally try to support my students by attending their art shows, theatre performances, concerts, and poetry readings; I always find out what sports my students are playing and I attend a few home games. This semester I ought to be watching my students play softball, lacrosse, or soccer, but instead I'm going to as many baseball games as I can manage.

It's a mental health thing, I tell myself. Watching soccer or lacross feels like work, and the limited seating at softball games makes viewing difficult. But baseball makes me happy, whether I have to sit huddled in a blanket or sweating in the sun or holding onto my hat in the wind. Except I forgot to wear a hat Saturday so my hair was at the mercy of 50-mile-an-hour gusts, but I don't even care how ridiculous I looked because baseball makes me happy.

After the stressful year we've had, with all those long, tense meetings bubbling with bad news, I decided this spring that I would do what I could to maximize my happiness. Is this selfish? Maybe so, but at the moment I don't care. I sit in the stands behind home plate so I can see the pitches, and I end every game with a smile, even when my team loses. I carry that smile home, where I grade papers or prep classes or work on my taxes or do household chores, none of which seem onerous in the afterglow of a baseball game.   

If spending a couple of hours sitting in the wind watching my team play baseball can blow the cobwebs out of my brain and release the stress of a three-hour meeting, that's better than therapy. Cheaper, too, even after I pay for a bag of popcorn and a bottle of water--which I'd better hold on to even after it's empty lest the wind carry it away.     

Who's in the time-out box now?

I arrived on campus this morning to find this poor guy facing the wall, as if he'd been sent to the time-out box to think about his transgressions. What did Mr. Statue do to deserve such treatment? All he ever does is stand in his big glass box near the back entrance to my building, but now he's been facing a blank wall for hours and hours and hours. Cruel and unusual punishment!

It's a maintenance issue, of course. Loose tiles near the back entrance need replacement and Mr. Statue was standing in the way of progress. Still, the maintenance dudes didn't have to place him facing the wall. That wall doesn't require guarding--but then again, neither does the place where he usually stands guard. Against what? That door is almost always locked, and the area isn't generally subject to hordes of marauders--and even if it were, Mr. Statue is hardly a threat. All he does is stand there looking constipated.

Maybe that's why he's in the time-out box: You want something to frown about? I'll give you something to frown about!  I want to see some gratitude for everything we've done for you! You'll stand there until I see a big happy smile on your face--or else!

If that's the case, he'll be standing there a very long time.  

How to deal with the Glaring Student

Lately I've been tempted to distribute dark glasses in my American Lit Survey class so I'll be oblivious whenever the Glaring Student beams Hostility Rays in my direction.

I have this student every spring--the names and genders change but the behavior remains constant. The Glaring Student will discuss Walt Whitman or T.S. Eliot or William Faulkner without a problem, but the moment we focus on an author who's not some dead white guy, the student's behavior changes: they cross their arms and glare at me as if I'm forcing them to murder their grandmothers. Later they'll write hostile comments on my course evaluations, angry at being made to read Toni Morrison or Zora Neale Hurston or Maxine Hong Kingston or Langston Hughes--only some of the greatest authors of the twentieth century! What, you'd rather read more Hemingway?

Even though the Hostility Rays appear predictably, I never know how to react in the moment. I could challenge the student (Why are you glaring at me?) but that would lead to either flat denial or distracting defensiveness. I don't want to spend valuable class time defending my syllabus for the benefit of one openly hostile student.

I've had some outside-of-class conferences with previous Glaring Students, but they don't resolve anything. I try to gently suss out the source of the student's hostility, but the response is denial or deflection. Maybe I'm imagining things? But no: I can see the body language, feel the Hostility Rays, and read the comments on course evaluations. Some students just resent reading non-white authors and don't want to talk about why.

So maybe sunglasses are the answer. Dark glasses could deflect the Hostility Rays or at least make them less obvious. But then I'd also need a way to mask the body language--the leaning back in the chair with arms folded like an impregnable shield preventing all unwanted ideas from entering. Tempting though it might be, I can't make the Glaring Student sit under a blanket.

So instead I'll stand at the front of the class doing my best to ignore the Hostility Rays in hopes that exposure to a wide range of authors will somehow pierce the shield, melt the resentment, and help the Glaring Students open their arms to a world outside themselves. That is, after all, what I'm here for. 

When numbers and feelings don't mix

Last week when I spent Spring Break with the grandkids, my grandson kept opening up a music box that played "Feelings," a song that hasn't gotten any less sappy since it debuted in 1974. Every time I heard those tinkly opening notes, I wanted to grab the box, snap it shut, and toss it out the window--but I didn't, because I'm not that kind of grandma. I have years of experience in biting my tongue and I'm not going to forget those skills now.

This week, though, I have felt an awful lot like that music box: every time I open my mouth, I want to talk about feelings. Everyone's talking about numbers and money and percentages and interest rates, and all I want to say is it feels like a pay cut!

It's not a pay cut. It's not a pay raise either, but that's no surprise--we haven't had raises in a number of years I'm too depressed to add up. What we're experiencing is a reduction in a small but significant stipend teaching faculty receive from earnings on an endowment fund directed toward recognizing the value of teaching. To explain more clearly: some years ago, a bunch of people donated money to a fund to benefit teaching faculty, but the annual amount we'll receive from it has been reduced from a small but significant amount to an even smaller but still significant amount. So, yes: it's not a pay cut but it feels like a pay cut, particularly on top of all the other cuts we've been experiencing for the past couple of years.

But there's more. The reason the stipend needs to be cut is--and believe me, I have feelings about this--that we've evidently been overpaid for the past five years. I've seen the numbers and they are convincing, so intellectually I can agree that it was not wise to habitually pay out more in stipends than that specific fund could produce in earnings, but you could poll every single faculty member on this campus and ask whether they've felt overpaid for the past five years--or, really, ever--and not a single one would say yes. Everyone feels overworked and undervalued, but the numbers suggest that we have actually been overpaid from a fund designed to reward the value of teaching, and now we will have to endure a correction to bring that reward back in sync with what the endowment is producing, so, according to the numbers, there's really nothing to see here. We have been overvalued and now we will be rewarded more in line with what the numbers say we're worth, sorry as that valuation might be. End of story.

But it still feels like a pay cut, and I still feel like spilling out a sappy story every time I open my mouth, but I fear that someone might just snap me shut and toss me out the window, so I'll just sit over here and bite my tongue.

Colorful, quaint, and positively geriatric

I thought I had come to terms with the passage of time a few years ago when I taught a class on 9/11 literature to a group of students who had no memory of 2001, but this week my students reminded me just how much the gap between our ages is growing: They wanted me to explain what a character means when he says "I'm a spring."

We're reading Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which is set in that distant decade the 1990s, when Getting Your Colors Done was a thing. I explained the whole seasonal color palette concept to my students. "I'm a winter," I said, a fact anyone who was sentient in the 90s could have discerned simply by looking at my outfit. My students seemed both puzzled and moderately amused.

I'm accustomed to explaining the 90s to my students, but it's usually the 1890s. When I assign readings by Paul Laurence Dunbar or Charles Chesnutt, for instance, I talk about lynching and the backlash against Reconstruction and the Old Plantation School of literature and the Atlanta Exposition Address, topics that feel much more weighty than whether a person looks better in pastels or primary colors.

What other 1990s phenomena will I have to explain to the class? The whole decade is a bit of a blur, possibly because I was busy working on my PhD while serving as editor of a community newspaper and raising two small children. I immediately think of the Challenger disaster, but that happened in 1986. In the 1990s, Princess Diana died. Apartheid finally fell apart. The Cleveland Indians went to the World Series but lost--twice.  Operation Desert Storm, the bombing of the World Trade Center, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, Dolly the sheep...interesting times. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and is now positively geriatric.

Which is how I feel when my students treat the 1990s as if it's just as distant as the 1890s, or when they talk about the Vietnam War as if it were roughly contemporary with the Civil War. To them, anything that happened before they were born is all part of the dim and distant past, interesting to learn about but full of primitive people doing quaint but incomprehensible things, like dialing a telephone or watching Matlock or getting their colors done. 

Next thing you know I'll be chasing young folks off my lawn while reminiscing about the joys of cursive writing and analog clocks--but at least I'll be wearing the right colors to suit my season.

Not the zombie apocalypse

This morning my campus appears to have been struck by the zombie apocalypse: people are dragging themselves around like the undead in search of fresh brains, but all the brains in evidence seem clouded and confused. 

Or maybe it's just me. The combined impact of spring break, the time change, and a head full of congestion have left me feeling as if I'm in the middle of a silent film running in slow motion. I spent yesterday sitting around surrounded by a great cloud of kleenexes and the congestion kept waking me up in the night, but today I feel almost human. 

Almost. It's going to take a lot more than antihistamines and caffeine to bring my brain back into clear focus. Good thing I have only one class today, followed by what should be a short and simple meeting, then home to an early bedtime, which probably won't prevent the all-day headache that generally hits precisely 48 hours after each time change. (Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?)

But here I am back in the office ready to tackle whatever I can manage considering the circumstances. If you stumble upon any fresh brains, please send them my way.

So much drama just over our heads

Here's how you can tell I'm on Spring Break: when my daughter asks whether I want to visit a blue heron rookery on a weekday, I say "okay." 

We felt a little like voyeurs as we watched dozens of great blue herons engaging in mating behavior. At a pull-off beside a busy road in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, we watched at least 30 herons in one tree and another 20 or more nearby. A male heron would fetch a stick and present it to a female to add to the nest. Occasionally a pair would do a little flirty fight-dance and then get down to the business of making sure the world has more baby herons. 

Backlighting transformed the herons into silhouettes, like massive paper puppets pasted onto the sky. The scene before us looked positively primeval, even when traffic whizzed past behind our backs and I struggled to keep the power lines out of the pictures. 

I wondered how so many people could drive right past all this drama taking place in plain sight, but the herons and the traffic seem happy to coexist. Near my son's workplace there's a heron rookery tucked in between a warehouse and a factory, alongside a railroad track and a busy highway. I'm sure many commuters drive past the rookery every day oblivious to the heron hi-jinks, and in a month or so the herons will feed and tend their nestlings without much concern for the bustling world across the railroad tracks.

The photos suggest a world far removed from everyday life, a place so exotic that we ought to have to trek for miles just to catch a glimpse. But no: all you have to do is pull off the road and look up. Given the wonders taking place in plain sight, it's a wonder the entire world doesn't come screeching to a halt.

Hard to see, but these two herons are mating

So many nests on one tree!

At another park, we saw a bald eagle.

 

Three stories of problematic storytelling

This big ol' pile o' books is threatening to topple onto my workspace if I don't deal with it, but I tell myself that I ought to write about what I've been reading before I put it all away. Writing about books makes me happy, usually, but this particular pile is a bit mixed. I'll highlight the three I found most interesting:

Let's get the bad news out of the way first: George Saunders's new collection of short stories, Liberation Day, is kind of meh. I love George Saunders and I always look forward to introducing my students to the weird but oddly familiar world of "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline," but this collection feels like a rehash of things he's written before, as if he's transported old characters to new settings to say the same old things--things worth saying, yes, but when a writer known for originality starts recycling his own material and becomes predictable, I lose patience. He's best when he's moving into new territory, as in "The Mom of Bold Action," in which he channels the inner voice of a mother who's constantly attempting to transform ordinary life into compelling fiction, casting her can opener, for instance, as a character in an imagined story called "The Trusty Little Opener." Everything she encounters becomes fodder for the fiction she isn't writing:

"The Tree Who Longed to Come Inside." Once there was a tree who longed to come inside and sit by the woodstove. He knew this was weird. He knew that his fellow trees were being cruelly burned in there. But, gosh, the kitchen looked so inviting. Because of all the hard work the mother had done. Painting, and whatnot. When she should have been writing.

These false starts always end before the mom can write anything down, but when she finally manages to fill pages with angry words, her words surprisingly create real-life consequences for her family and community. This obsession with the power of words appears in several other stories as well, mostly in dystopian settings where an oppressive power controls language in order to control people, but the idea comes across most tenderly in "Love Letter," in which a grandparent tries to give his grandson advice without arousing the suspicions of certain Thought Police who seem to have sprung from today's news. 

Control of language also plays a part in The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, a novel that beautifully recreates the awkwardness of female adolescent friendship while also raising interesting questions about ownership of stories. Two girls in post-World-War-II France entertain themselves by fabricating fictional worlds, only to find that their stories can cause real harm in their own lives and those of others:

A long time ago, when the game of writing was only an idea, like the idea of growing happiness, Fabienne said that we should write books together so people would know how it felt to be us. That, I now know, was the only mistake she made. What we wrote was about many things, but not about us. When the books were read by others, we were nowhere to be found.

The girls found in this beautifully written novel feel real and the consequences of their fabulation are utterly believable, even if some of the minor characters seem to have stepped out of the pages of a Dickens novel.

Maria Dahvana Headley takes a different route toward breathing new life into old stories. Her translation of Beowulf, published in 2020, feels fresh and powerful and poetic, primarily because she imagines the poem being told by a bunch of guys sitting around a mead-hall drinking. The problematic first word of the poem, "Hwaet," has been previously translated as "Lo!" or "Behold!" or "So," but Headley starts with "Bro," which feels just right. Headley's translation sometimes echoes the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse without sounding stuffy or artificial, as in this snippet from Beowulf's boast to Hrothgar:

I heard tell of Grendel from sailors--seriously,
the whole world knows the stories, swapped and sworn,
of Heorot Hall's early curfew, how every night
you surrender to silence when the sun sprints
out of heaven, leaving the celestial dome dark.
Every elder knew I was the man for you, and blessed
my quest, King Hrothgar, because where I'm from?
I'm the strongest and the boldest, and the bravest and the best.
Yes: I mean--I may have bathed in the blood of beasts,
netted five foul ogres at once, smashed my way into a troll den
and come out swinging, gone skinny-dipping in a sleeping sea
and made sashimi of some sea monsters.

Seriously, if I were in a position to teach Beowulf to young people, this is the version I'd choose: totally un-stuffy and full of fresh fun. (But watch out--the alliteration is contagious.)

And we're fresh out of magic beans

It may not have been the most depressing meeting in the history of academic department meetings, but it has to be right up toward the top of the list. My department sat in our regular meeting space alongside our colleagues who last week were informed that their positions are being discontinued, and what can we say to them? Sorry is hardly adequate. The wounds are still raw and there isn't a band-aid big enough to help.

We had two essential pieces of business to perform. First, we had to revamp next year's course schedules to take into account the impending absence of key colleagues, a discussion that raised questions such as these: Will promised budget cuts prevent us from hiring adjuncts to cover some sections of first-year composition? Will we be pressured to raise the seat numbers in composition classes? Will we be able to offer enough upper-level writing classes to enable students pursuing writing minors to complete those programs? Will we have to cut down on the number of core General Education classes we offer? Who will take over the administrative tasks performed by the colleagues whose positions have been cut? Few answers were forthcoming.

The second order of business required us to respond to a survey that will be submitted to the committee charged with making recommendations about cutting majors and programs, and this activity raised a whole different set of questions, some of them more cheerful, like How have we managed to get so many of our majors into so many great graduate programs? We talked about our former students who are teaching and writing and doing good work and we want to know how we can keep on doing the things that are equipping students for interesting careers, but the more time we have to spend defending our right to exist, the less time we can devote to doing our actual jobs.

We look at our record of service to the College and community, at the great work our graduates are doing and the impact they'll keep having long into the future, and we know we've managed over the years to do a whole lot of academic magic despite limited resources. We're committed to continuing to do this good work, but deep inside we wonder: how can we keep making the magic happen when so many wands have been snapped in two?

  

Forthcoming, finally

Just a little bit excited about seeing this listed among the Forthcoming Titles on the MLA website:

Available for preorder by clicking here. 

Weird winter weather, indoors and out

I'm wearing my snowflake sweater today in hopes of encouraging the weather to do something more seasonable--like, for instance, send us some freakin' snow. I mean, why should Minnesota have all the fun? But instead I'm photographing tiny iris blossoms while the forecast calls for a high in the 70s tomorrow. In the middle of February. It's true that Spring is my favorite season, but can we have a little winter first?

The wintry mood inside campus buildings is also warming. True, it's still Axe Week: a small but significant group of faculty members will be told by Friday that their positions are being cut, and some departments are already scrambling to revise fall course schedules. But Monday's faculty meeting was much shorter than expected and bubbled with a giddy air of hope. The controversial motion for a vote of no confidence was withdrawn without a single murmur after news came out that a certain top administrator will be leaving the college by June. To pursue other opportunities, he says, for which I can only say pursue away. 

It would be unseemly to rejoice while others are struggling, especially when this decision leaves us with lame ducks or interim administrators in a number of important positions while several other essential positions remain either unfilled or in flux.  Our Faculty Chair reminded us on Monday that we'll all have to work together to help move the College forward, but we've never been afraid of hard work as long as it looked like it could get us somewhere. Times are tough but we can shoulder the burden as long as we see signs of hope, and now we do.

And I'm not just talking about a few early iris blossoms. Send us some snow--or send us some warmth--or send us a little bit of everything all at once--and somehow we'll figure out how to carry on.

 

 

Seeking a foolproof excuse

What I need right now is a foolproof excuse specific enough to extricate me from an awkward meeting but vague enough to sound truthful regardless of the facts.

Last week, for instance, I excused myself from a meeting by saying I have a family thing, which was true enough as long as no one asked for more details about the family thing: an opportunity to eat dinner with my husband, who, like me, has a lot of evening meetings, so some weeks we see each other only at breakfast and bedtime. It's true that I could have stayed at the meeting and let him wait at the restaurant a little longer, but my meeting had already dragged on for an hour without showing any signs of coming to a conclusion and if I'd sat there any longer my head might have exploded, and who would clean up the mess?

But I can't claim to have a family thing every week, and I no longer have small children at home to justify all those great kids-and-their-busy-lives excuses. A pet might help. Frequent vet visits would lose their plausibility fairly quickly, but I can imagine standing up at a meeting and saying Sorry, but someone's got to walk the dog. A true statement, especially if I don't specify who that someone might be.

I need to go sounds urgent enough, but at some point someone is bound to ask why and then things can get dicey. I can't say Sitting in that meeting was making me want to stab out my eyeballs with a dull pencil--even if it's true! Nobody appreciates that kind of honesty, and besides, we all have to bear our share of the burdens of adulthood, including sitting through an uncertain quota of awful meetings. What makes me think I'm so special?

So I try to hoard my excuses for when they're really necessary. I sit through meeting after meeting dutifully doing my part in keeping the wheels of academe spinning, even when I wish someone would just pull the brake lever and let me off. But one of these days I'll need to miss a meeting for no good reason, and when that time comes, I need to be prepared with something more compelling than I need to go.

Last dance before the apocalypse

A friend sent me photos of spoonbills he's encountered and they plunged me into memories of spoonbills I've visited in Florida and Georgia, lovely pink birds with big awkward bills that sweep side-to-side in the water. I had to go back and search for my own spoonbill photos, which took me on a journey through file after file full of colorful birds and butterflies and beaches and blossoms and dragonflies and grandkids and snow and sleds and everything wonderful. I really needed that this morning--my own private smile file.

Yesterday I enjoyed attending a very pleasant event where I could cheer for my colleagues earning awards, but it felt a little like the last dance before the apocalypse. Next week is Axe Week, when a certain number of colleagues will be told that their positions are being cut. Do I know that final number? No I do not, but Faculty Council has been consulted as part of this process so I know some names, and I find that knowledge very uncomfortable. I want to comfort some colleagues and avoid others and I find myself working with my office door shut just because I fear that I'll spill something I'm not supposed to share.

Consultation sounds abstract but what it comes down to is weighing how certain cuts would affect the curriculum and whether one type of cut would be less painful than another, but we know all those abstract positions as people who work alongside us and share our passion for the mission of the College. Some cuts may be less painful than others in the long term, but none of them will be painless. I've been walking around feeling some of that pain in anticipation even though the axe hasn't even fallen yet. I don't know how any of us will get through the next two weeks.

It was just one year ago that we learned about the massive budget crisis that precipitated all these cuts, and a year later we're still struggling. Last year I tried to cope with the crisis by getting out of town for Spring Break to spend time with the grandkids and look at birds. Now I'm waiting for the axe to fall and I'm coping by looking at spoonbills. They're lovely and soothing and they calm my soul, but nevertheless I have never felt so powerless in the face of impending pain. All I want to do is fly away.

More letters I won't be sending, or why it's important to look alive

Dear turkey vultures circling above campus this morning,
Move on--nothing to see here. Despite rumors of death and decay, our college is still among the living. I'm more concerned about you: what are you doing back in Ohio this early in the season? You ought to be languishing in Florida or perhaps just starting out on your long trip north, but here you are two weeks early circling above campus on a winter day when the temperature is expected to soar to 70. What do you know that we don't know?

Dear sick student,
I get it--you're too sick to come to class, but do you really have to give me the play-by-play? I don't need to know how many times you've vomited this morning or how badly you're suffering from diarrhea (but kudos on spelling it correctly!), and in fact if I never again receive a message reporting in detail about the state of your bowels, I'll be happy. We're all adults here: if you're too sick to come to class, just say so, and if you're so sick that you need to miss a week or more and want to join on Zoom, ask the appropriate office to send me a medical excuse. But please don't email to tell me that you've been vomiting all morning but you'll force yourself to come to class anyway if I think the class is "important." I mean, I think all my classes are important, but that doesn't mean I want a vomiting person in the room. Please: stay home and get well--and if you have to vomit, I really don't want to know.

Dear everyone who voted to put me on Faculty Council two years ago:
As I near the end of my two-year term--probably my final term on Council before I retire--I'm spending a lot of time in meetings dreaming up ways to seek vengeance on anyone who ever voted for me. If I knew who you were, I'd come to your office and stuff piles of student papers under the door or leave my leftover Indian food containers in your office trash can that never gets emptied. I'd like to sentence you to seventeen solid hours of listening to jargon-laced statements from higher-ups adept at weaving words without actually saying anything, people who say "I have adjacency to that issue" and expect the world to nod in agreement. I'll tell you what issue I have adjacency to: the issue of persuading my appreciative colleagues to never, ever, ever vote for me again. If you can manage that, perhaps we'll all be able to find repose in our situation.

But not too much repose. Look alive--the vultures are still circling.

But is there a futon in that elevator?

 I want to write about the word repose, but I'm too tired right now. 

I've been attending too many long, exhausting, emotional meetings full of people on the verge of meltdown whose valid concerns keep being met by soothing buzzwords. I've just gotten accustomed to being told that it's not yet time to elevate our concerns to the next level, as if we could just punch the Up button and everything would be taken care of, and now comes a Person in a Position of Authority repeatedly telling a group of campus leaders that we need to find repose in the situation, which makes me wonder whether some major donor has come through with the funds to install futons in all our offices. I mean, I'm as big a fan of repose as the next guy, but if the building is on fire, the last thing you want the firefighters to tell you is Why don't you calm down and take a nice nap?

And speaking of the next guy, I've heard that it's problematic to address students as guys, which makes some sense if they're not all guys, but I've just used the word guy to refer to myself, which suggests that I don't really conceive as guys as gendered, which explains why I'm having a hard time not addressing groups as guys. Old dog/new tricks, blah blah blah. But I'm trying! I asked a class how they'd like to be addressed and someone suggested pupils, which makes me think of Mrs. Davis back in third grade, with her white hair piled high and gems on her glasses and a hanky tucked up her sleeve. I may be old, but I'm not ready to be Mrs. Davis. I'll never find repose until I elevate that concern to the next level--but wait, where's the Up button? 

 

Close encounters of the kestrel kind

For years a photo of a male American Kestrel has graced the home screen on my cell phone and served as my profile picture on Facebook. The photo was a fluke: I was out birding along a country road near The Wilds and I saw a flash of color in the grass on the other side of the road. I pulled over,  carefully grabbed the camera with the telephoto lens, and I crept slowly across the road to see two kestrels in the grass looking stunned. I suspected that they'd been struck by a car and I wondered whether they'd survive, but I managed to snap just a few shots before they flew off.

Something about this bird spoke to me. I love his vivid colors, stripes, and splotches, but mostly I love the look in his eye, observant and wary but also wise, as if he's about to open his mouth and share some insight about all he's seen. I don't see kestrels in this area often and in fact my prior encounters had mostly been with captive birds, like the ones I visited at the Audubon Center for Birds of Prey near my parents' house in Florida. In December I saw a kestrel perched high above a wetland in South Carolina, and even from a distance its bold colors caught my eye and made me wish I could get closer.

Then yesterday I got much closer to a kestrel, although I didn't know what it was at first. I was pulling into my driveway after the long drive back from a weekend with the grandkids when I saw a bird fly up to a tree beside the driveway. I thought at first it was a mourning dove, common as dirt but nice to have around, but when it flew down right over my windshield before disappearing into the woods I saw its size and vivid coloration--the first time I've ever seen a kestrel near our property.

Can this bird be looking for a home or is it just passing through? I had to look it up: kestrels like to hunt on open ground (like our lower meadow) with a few tall trees nearby (check) offering high perches for visibility plus lots of hollows for nesting (check again). They eat insects, small rodents, small songbirds, and the occasional frog, lizard, or snake, all of which we have in abundance. 

 Can they coexist with the red-tailed hawks that nest in the area? Will they attack small birds visiting our feeders? I don't know, but something about seeing this kestrel so close to home made me feel hopeful, reminding me that spring is coming with all its promise of change and growth. The kestrel in the photo always looks like it knows more than I can ever imagine, but maybe there's hope that some of that wisdom will eventually be revealed.

 

Foxtrotting among the kitties

Yesterday a colleague was telling me how soothing it was to go home after a stressful meeting and relax with her new kitten purring on her lap, and I had a brainstorm: We need therapy cats at campus meetings.

Think of all the things you can't do with a cat sleeping on your lap. You can't jump up and start shouting, for one thing, and even vigorous finger-pointing is bound to distract the nearby kitties.

Of course we might run into problems if colleagues are allergic cats, and we might see factions forming between cat people and dog people, not to mention those who find comfort in the presence of reptiles. We can divide up faculty meeting rooms into cat sections and dog sections, with a token nook for the odd tortoise lover, but that might lead to more division.

If not therapy animals, then how about ballroom dance? I read today in a student paper that "Every minuet is a blessing," so how about conducting campus business while engaged in a quadrille? The need to pay close attention to the steps would eliminate frivolous rabbit trails, and following the figures would enhance cooperation, unless issues arise over, for instance, who will take the lead in the foxtrot.

Maybe that's the time to bring the therapy animals into the ballroom. Chaos would ensue, but at least it would be more amusing than the chaos we're currently experiencing.

Random bullets of Monday morning; or, my life as Whack-A-Mole

I miss my teaching-free Thursdays! With no free day during the week, I always hope for some free time over the weekend, but it just isn't happening right now. The harmonic convergence of a whole mess of deadlines led to my working all weekend, with just a few idle hours last night to read the paper and play silly card games. Hence I'm starting the week already feeling like I can't get caught up, and it's not going to get better any time soon because I have both a doctor's appointment and two special meetings this afternoon--and by special I mean long and angry. So I've got nothing of any value to contribute to the universe this morning except some random thoughts:

• Years ago when I was the most junior member of my department, a senior colleague asked me to cover a class for her on a day when she expected to be absent. Why? Because she expected that attending a controversial faculty meeting on a particular topic would upset her so much that she'd be in no condition to teach the next day. I agreed to cover the class, but what if we all did this? I'm attending a meeting that's bound to upset me so I need you to cover my classes. What, you're attending the same meeting? But surely you won't be as upset as I will!
• Overheard from a prospective student: "I'm looking forward to taking liberal arts courses because it's nice to have an easy class that lets you shut down your brain for a while." He's in for a rude awakening. 
• Prospective students who participated in a scholarship competition on Saturday morning impressed me with their ability to engage in academic conversation, but I was really impressed by their attire. High school guys in suits and ties! I can't remember the last time I saw so much professional attire assembled in any of my classrooms; dressed in my usual casual teaching gear, I felt a little outclassed. Will they look any different when they show up next fall? If they show up next fall?
• All that hard work over the weekend allowed me to finally check two major items off my to-do list: I finished proofreading the page proofs for the comedy book, and I revised and resubmitted a journal article. It feels great to get these projects off my plate (for now), and just in time, too: I'm collecting drafts and papers in all my classes over the next 10 days. 

My life right now is like a giant game of Whack-A-Mole: smash one time-consuming project into smithereens and another two pop up demanding attention. 

 

Journeying in a nightmare world

Lately I've been struggling with logistical nightmares--literally. Instead of waking up screaming from dreams about invasions of nasty critters, I'm alert at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat after a nightmare about the problems inherent in getting certain people from point A to point B. In one dream I'm frantically trying to pack for an immediate departure but my very young daughter keeps taking things out of the suitcase as quickly as I put them in there, and in another I'm trying to transport my small children across a post-apocalyptic landscape but I can't find adequate food so I have to stop them from eating random stuff they pick up off the ground, and in the worst nightmare I suddenly realize, in the middle of a complicated journey, that I've accidentally misplaced a child. Terrifying.

I could understand having these dreams back when I was responsible for planning one of our many camping trips when my kids were little, like the time we drove to the Grand Canyon camping all the way or the weeks we spent camping in the Great Smoky Mountains. Making reservations, stocking up on supplies, and packing all the camping gear for a family of four was enough to give anyone nightmares, while planning a workable route in the pre-GPS era presented its own special challenges. 

But I don't do that any more. Our trips these days are much simpler and more focused: the two of us pack for ourselves, drive someplace interesting, and stay in a motel or rental or with relatives. No nightmares need apply.

And yet here I am, waking up frantically night after night from dreams of thwarted journeys presenting logistical challenges incapable of resolution. I sense a theme, but I don't know what it means. I'm reminded, though, of my father's nightmares about running from floods, recurrent frightening dreams that stopped only after our family weathered the floods following Hurricane Agnes in Pennsylvania in 1972. We lived through danger and terror and rampant destruction but came out unharmed, and after that Dad's flood dreams dissipated.

So maybe what I need is to start living dangerously: plan a logistical nightmare of a trip in hopes of banishing the logistical nightmares haunting my dreams. But where should I go, and how can I heighten the risk level to make the journey less comfortable, predictable, and safe? 

Maybe I'll just plan a comforting staycation. After all those nightmares, I could really use a nap.