b l o g o s

time warps

Today I called Comcast to see how much we would save if we dropped tv cable from our package. The person on the phone volunteered that we have been getting overcharged by $10. a month since we moved in: "and since that was in June 2009," she said, "we need to refund that money for one year."

Later, JM and I were at "the mall"* with the Bean, who was running ahead of her stroller in Macy's. A Macy's employee smiled sweetly and asked, "how old?" When I replied "15 months," she nodded knowingly and said "Yep. I was going to say a little over two," as if my answer completely affirmed her guess.

I will leave it to you people to guess which of these women I corrected. 

 

*honestly, there should be regulations against calling that place a mall.

inauspicious pre-beginnings

Around these parts, this week is the week before the semester starts, which means it's a week of trying to get my head around the new schedule. The ever-changing schedules used to be something I loved about academia, and now that we've added an extra family member, it's become way more complicated. This semester is particularly complicated, with childcare swappage, meetings that happen every second Wednesday and every fourth Monday, and a class that meets Tuesday-Thursday-Friday. Add in a couple of regular class sessions of the bodily kind (yoga and pilates), and if my online calendar could sag momentarily and then explode, it would.

This is why when I successfully scheduled my pilates reformer sessions for Thursday afternoons, coordinating my co-sufferer's schedule with my insanity and our instructor's kid's bus schedule, I had to consider everything from my new office hour schedule to the route I would take to get there after my class to make sure that time would work. When it appeared to work, I rejoiced!

Until I realized--two days later--that the appointed time is also the designated time for my other course, which meets once a week. Blam.

"80s day"

Today JM and I had a rare non-daycare day where we had commitments on campus that were only 10 minutes apart, and so we called in our reinforcement, M, who lives down the street.  M is a high school senior, and we love M. She is both mature and veeery laid back, and she is great with the Bean. M arranged her school schedule to get out every day at 12:30 because, as she put it to us this summer, "school can be tedious."

Today M informed me that it was spirit week at her school and that today was 80s day. I half glanced at what she was wearing--a big dark green hooded sweatshirt, black leggings, and flip flops--thinking that either a) she had already changed, or b) she's one of those cool kids who doesn't abide the spirit week. But then I realized that there was a connection: the leggings. So I wondered out loud whether the leggings were her tribute to the 80s, and a sly grin spread across her face. She explained to me that they're not otherwise allowed to wear leggings as pants in her school, but during spirit week, the rules relax.

The whole exchange was about as charming as it could be. It brought to mind my own high school days--in the 80s.

summer worky plans

If I've learned anything about myself in the past decade or so, it's that I tend toward overly ambitious plans, each summer, each semester, each week, even each day. But they are only slightly overly ambitious. Just enough to keep things from seeming paralyzingly impossible, but more than I can accomplish so that I can always conjure up a wee bit of self loathing, the fail-proof spur to a quasi-productive day or week.

The problem now is that I know my own tricks. And the other problem is that my daily life has changed so radically that I have lost my sense of what is too much and what is too little. Some days the victories reside in answered, typo-free emails. So I'm trying to be even more reasonable than ever.

I'm working on a book chapter for a historiography collection, and I'm lucky to have an excellent co-author on that piece, someone who plans a little like I do. We've both been augmenting and grooming this piece by turns for a few months, and it's starting to take shape. That piece will get done. (Do you hear that, co-author? Yay.)

Then there is the contribution to the companion to propaganda that I agreed to write. I probably should have said no to this request, but it had just the right mix of elements--a finite task, a challenge to stretch myself beyond where I normally work, a terrific pair of editors, the chance to bring rhetoric to a larger table--that I said yes. I hope I don't regret that.

There is a book review I asked to write on a sport and rhetoric collection, mostly because I'm curious about the collection itself, and also because I just plain like to write reviews. 

And finally, there is a short--very short--piece on animals that will be part of a forum in Philosophy and Rhetoric. I have lots of ideas for that one.

Of these four (seemingly) tidy tasks, the last one is the only one related to the research that I really want to be working on this summer. And once the other three are finished, I have vowed not to commit to any writing- or research-related task unless it funnels directly (or nearly directly) into the animals book. 

The summer stretches before us, but two months will move with unsettling speed. Rereading this list, I see that some of this work will probably spill into the fall semester, but I'm going to try my damnedest to prevent that from happening. Which means I need to get going.

lady goo goo

I've got other, more private spaces where I'm posting pictures and videos of the new (now not so new!) baby, but sometimes there might well be baby-related spillage of the discursive variety onto blogos. And of course there is the whippet-baby combo in the upper left. Given that both JM and I are in the business of language, and that I have written about imitation as a means of learning, blogos seems the appropriate place to document what happened today.

What happened is this: the baby imitated us both when we said "goo goo" to her. Now, she is only nine weeks and some change, so we were both in turn rather startled when she did this. She did it with JM first while he was changing her diaper. Thinking it was a fluke, he repeated the experiment again and again. Then he brought her down to me and told me that I might think he was crazy, but that she just imitated him saying goo goo. So I tried it, and she did it with me too. We would of course go crazy praising her when she did it, which made her smile and giggle as if our words were tickling her. Beyond the praise, we went back and forth goo-gooing like eight or nine more times until she got tired and started to squeawk (that's my new word for one stripe of noises she makes). But pre-squeawk she was very definitely saying "goo goo."

Bananas. 

while waiting

This blog has been collecting spam comments like dust bunnies, and so I figure I better get in here and add to the mix. I've been busy wrapping up reviews, getting ahead on editing,  matching teeny little socks, and yucking it up on facebook, and so haven't been paying as much attention to this space--I've been too busy waiting.

The longer I've been in this profession, the better I have gotten at Waiting for Something to Happen. I blogged about this phenomenon around the time of my tenure decision here, and since then I've gotten even better at this waiting business. Part of it is that our jobs provide lots of other work to fill the waiting maws--little piddly stuff as well as big, chewy stuff--and I am ever grateful for both kinds of work at the moment, as JM and I endure a Big Wait. 

I was thinking this morning about how this wait resembles the wait for tenure, (only) insofar as there is an imagined reality shift that happens after the moment arrives. I say imagined  because that shift can only be imagined before it actually transpires, at which point it becomes real in ways previously both imagined and unimagined. For example, tenure, for me, brought interpellative changes (how I was hailed by colleagues and institutions), as well as responsibility changes--more like a heaping-on of new responsibilities. No longer is there the singular goal that governs pretty much all professional activities up to that point. There was, for me, a shift from being primarily a "taker" (of time, reviews, tenure letters, etc.) to becoming primarily "giver" of these same things (though to pretend like we give nothing pre-tenure would be dumb--there's just a more noticeable ratcheting up of the requests to give, if not the giving itself). I rather like that about post-tenure; pre-tenure was a bit all-absorbing to me professionally. 

And there is also the crucial point that these Big Changes are not the same for everyone. In different departments, or fields, or institutions, or for people with completely different constitutions or attitudes toward their jobs, tenure can bring both more and less change.

Similarly, everyone with a kid or more tells me that having one will change my life, and I know that. Some changes can be generalizable--less sleep at the beginning, a reorientation of daily schedules (or, schedules, what schedules?) and priorities. But the specific contours of what will change are still not the same as they are for parents everywhere, much as the realities of tenure or any other professional milestone vary widely. This seems to me an important lesson as we consider the ways we talk about such changes.

Such are the matters I contemplate while I wait.

Pat Summitt's Definite (half) Dozen, selected and redescribed for those of us in academia

One of the pleasures of being an alumna of Tennessee women's basketball is that each year I receive in the mail a copy of their media guide, a glossy, heavy-duty preview of this year's team, with a good dose of reflection about teams past. Debby Jennings and the media relations crew at UT do an amazing job on this publication, as evidenced by the many awards they have received in years past for their efforts.

This year, the page following a two-page spread chronicling Coach Summitt's road to her 1,005th win (since win number 1 in 1975), lists "Coach Summitt's Definite Dozen," a sort of twelve-commandments or set of be-attitudes for members of her team. I remember these vaguely from my years there, and I believe the pointers were evolving at that point. But as I was browsing through the list while gnoshing on my turkey salad sandwich, it occurred to me that Pat's definite dozen also includes advice that I wish were followed by more people in my current occupation. I have therefore pruned down Pat's list to a half dozen maxims that could help make English departments (and academia in general) a better, even healthier place, were more folks to abide by--or at least try to abide by--them. I am also fully aware that some of these (e.g., the first one) aren't unique to Coach Summitt and may as easily be learned in Sunday school. Even so, they're worth thinking about in terms of our jobs, our relations to our work, to ourselves, and to each other:

1. Respect yourself and others. This one makes me think particularly of all the self denigration that goes on in academia, especially--though not exclusively--among women. The other-denigration happens with even more regularity, and the two are no doubt related, though the self-denigration might well be more damaging. I have learned the lesson about respecting others from lots of people--an anonymous reader who pointed out that a footnote in an early draft was unnecessarily harsh on a particular scholar; a colleague who teaches grads to be very strategic about criticizing, and never to be seen as "going after" someone; others who model this sort of respect while also earning it themselves. I try when possible to call attention when people go the self-denigration route, or I refuse to engage it even by disputing the claims to (stupidity, incompetence, etc.) There are times and places when it's harmless, or even charming, but guess what? It can also be convincing and is best avoided or at least countered by a hefty dose of self-praise (even if that is practiced in private, for which, see number 6).

2. Take full responsibility. Oh lord, don't get me started on this one. I have precious little time for people and their excuses. Taking responsibility doesn't even have to be all that big of a deal. Pat teaches her players a short-hand code for when they screw up. We would say "rebound." Sounds gimmicky, but it was a good way to acknowledge and recover. Taking responsibility was something the seniors on the team did quite well, so I think we all developed it over time. No excuses! And also, we all screw up! Acknowledge your mistakes and get over it.

3. Discipline yourself so no one else has to. I admit that this member of the definite dozen is what prompted me to think of their broader application to work in academia. I struggle a lot with grad students who need discipline, even as I've been blessed with some of the hardest-working advisees ever. This relates a little to number 2. If work doesn't get done, it's usually no one's fault but your own. Yes, life dishes out some crazy shit, but that's why it's so important to stay on top of things, to know your limitations and work with them. I dislike nothing more than to have to be the person to try to teach someone this stuff. I'm a much better mentor when I can help someone focus on other ways to improve than simply spending more time with their work. So, to all you burgeoning scholars: spare us! DIY!

4. Develop and demonstrate loyalty. In the context of Tennessee basketball, this one obviously means loyalty to the team. But I would urge academics to think about it this way: who is your team? It could be your institution or department or immediate cohort in your field. It could be a network of people outside your institution, even a national organization. I would think it's most important to remain loyal to the people with whom you work most closely. Of course, this is more difficult when the loyalty doesn't travel the other way. Goodness knows loyalty seems low on the list of qualities to value in academe. I don't think I've ever highlighted this quality in rec letters, for instance.

5. Don't just work hard, work smart. I like this one a lot. It reminds me of teammates who would throw their bodies in all directions in order to demonstrate their willingness to do so. But sometimes that's not the smart thing to do. It can take you out of position, for one. The analogy in academia is when someone "shows their work," or describes the number of articles they have read, the number of pages of notes they have taken--evidence, no doubt, of their effort. But to work smart is to convert that effort into what is supposed to be produced. Efficiency might be a good word here, though I would clarify that I give the term an elastic meaning, not just a factory-style pump-it-out approach. Working smart may well entail taking longer with things. It all depends. (Burke is good on this concept of efficiency.) Note too that this one also assumes hard work. Well, yeah.

6. Handle success like you handle failure. This one, I think, is meant to balance number 1 and attempts to keep in check the towering egos that are the occupational hazards of sports and academe. When something good happens, be humble and reflective (though maybe keep the reflective part to yourself), and, as Pat always used to say after a loss, "learn from it." Don't take either one--success or failure--as a grand commentary on you as a person or even your future. If this advice were followed on a large scale, we would all be more sane for it.

techie tech

Today has been what might be called a high-tech day. It started this morning when I installed a new router. This was a much-needed change, since our five-year-old router kept my laptop spiraling in buffering hell any time I tried to watch a video of any length. Audio isn't that great either. When KM was in town for thanksgiving, she suggested that we try a new router, and boy was she right. The new router makes everything faster on the four machines we have linked in to the wireless network, including our iphone and itouch.

Then I moved on to building my professional online site using the Penn State blogs platform. The platform leaves a lot to be desired, and ought to be more user friendly for as simple as the layout looks, but it will do. Even though right now I only have a front page, I have big plans for the whole site, including adding links to my published work and (more importantly) a resource page for the course I'm directing. 

Now it's time to make pizza dough for tonight. Yes, yes, this involves technology in that we always mix and knead the dough with our kitchenaid mixer, but just moments ago I was thinking about how my cooking moments here in State College have been missing something. When I lived in Urbana, I would do any mid-day meal prep (which=prep for the evening meal) while listening to C-U's awesome public radio station (WILL), a station that is all talk, all the time. I loves me some corn and bean report, and I miss it. Here, though, the public radio station plays classical music all day until the main NPR news programming begins at 4 pm. Snore.

A few months ago I tried putting my laptop in the kitchen to stream, but the sound quality wasn't great, our wireless buffering problem was annoying, and I ended up getting flour on my keyboard. So today I did what any thinking person would these days, and what I should have done long ago: I consulted my iphone. Voila, there is a free app called "public radio" that will stream hundreds of public radio stations from across the country. In the past twenty minutes since downloading it, I have listened to public radio stations in Austin, Lexington, and Chicago. So off I go to pop my iphone into my new speaker system (which incidentally reminds me of a boombox I had in the late 80s that I decorated with a rainbow sticker that said "Debbie" on it), so that I can listen to the afternoon magazine while mixing yeast, water, flour, and salt.

overheard at the PA state dept. of health

vaccine volunteer to the mother of the ten-year-old girl in front of me: so, has she had tetanus?

mother: yes, just this past summer.

ten-year-old: and I don't even have a boyfriend!!

nca, yay. chicago, double yay.

The dryer just shut off, so I really need to go finish packing and therefore need to make this short. I am giddy about heading to Chicago for NCA. It's the Chicago part, more than the NCA part, that has me giddy. But NCA is okay, I suppose. I like the people, no doubt, and look forward to running in to everybody.

As an extra bonus, I convinced JM to fly and meet me there after his teaching obligations for the week are done. Chicago is where we always used to go to shake off the end of the semester, to eat some good food, and to catch a film that we might not otherwise catch in a theater. Mornings will be early for me--chock full of meetings and panels--but Friday and Saturday evenings, back to our favorite spots we will go. I even managed to work in an appointment with my favorite hair stylist. So if you don't recognize me, it's either because I'm 6.5 months pregnant, or because my hair has been blown straight. Come to think of it, the combination might not work very well, but I don't even care.

I do know that we miss you, Chicago. We look forward to toting our kid there. But in the meantime, we are excited to have you all to ourselves, even in the midst of the crazy convention.