October Weekends

As usual, October is whizzing by far too fast.  I want to spend my time lingering over tea and going out for long walks in crisp air and then coming home to curl up in the living room in front of fires or movies with my family and cooking and knitting up a storm...

That's my ideal October. My actual October is filled with blue books and meetings and classes and commuting and hassles.  It includes Saturday morning cleaning and grocery shopping and kid anxiety over assignments and ripping out a knitted gift project in order to start over. Again. 

But somehow, on the weekends, I do manage to squeeze a little bit of that October magic into my life.  Even if I do have to fit it around grading blue books.

Fall in New England just might be an argument for heaven.

This is what happens...

...when Anya sits in the kitchen doodling while NPR is on.

Facing the Tidal Wave

Today at work was nonstop: a meeting about a new grant, followed by my 100-level class, followed by an office hour trying to find answers for a student planning to study abroad next semester, followed by an upper-division colloquium, followed by a department meeting, followed by work on the train. All "free" moments were spent checking on, answering, and organizing emails. Somewhere in there I ate soup.

Until 6:30, when I moved my laptop off the dining room table and put on Julia Nunes while throwing together my part of "leftovers for dinner" and waited for my son to get back from karate.  We settled down to a candle-lit, un-fussy meal and I heard about the kids' days. At one point, I leaned on my husband and soaked in the goodness of life--this family that I come home to at the end of a long day, meeting together around the table my brother made with his own hands.

I am fortunate to have (mostly) interesting and meaningful work. But in October--that most beautiful of months in New England--that work gets really busy, really fast.  It's this crazy little family that keeps me from losing it altogether. They sustain me.

And so tonight I will relax with them. Tomorrow, again, I will put forth my best effort to make our little corner of public higher ed meaningful for both students and faculty alike. 

There are worse ways I could spend my time at 50. 

Then and Now

Anya, at about 10 months and then at 10 years...both times in Dad-inspired AC/DC t-shirts. (Her dad just went to the concert in August. She wore her the t-shirt to her first day of school.)

They just get better all the time. 

In the News

The only thing more important than teaching my daughter to keep herself safe in a world like this...

...is teaching my son how important it is not to tolerate actions and attitudes like this, let alone participate in them. 

There is a great blog post here dissecting these kinds of messages and how they treat women as merely a means of exchange between (or among) men.

Unexpected Change

Honestly, I was happy with how my dining room looked.  Ever since we changed it a few years ago, it felt like it all went together well.  I had no plans to do any painting or redecorating in the house this summer.

Until...my brother Tim called me at my mother's house on July 4 to see if we were interested in buying a table he just made. Like, with his own hands, from re-purposed wood.  Ummmm....yeah. Ever since I saw the stuff Tim makes, I've wanted him to make us a dining table.

But then, of course, the dining table didn't work with the rest of the room.  And so--as I had, in fairness, warned my husband might happen if we bought this table--I had to change almost everything else. Wall color. Shelving. Artwork. Curtains. We even replaced the drawer pulls on the secretary (though I didn't think to take a specific picture of that). Only the chairs remain from the room's previous incarnation, and thank heavens that worked (chairs are expensive, even at Ikea). The resulting room looks like this:

It's hard to tell in the pictures, but I went with grey again (gull wing grey, which seemed appropriate for a table from Rockport, MA). The sideboard, shelf, and curtains are from Ikea, and the rest...is mostly stuff I had around, some of it used in new ways. 

I love the table, and I think I am pretty good with the rest of the room.  I'll have to see how it makes it through winter. I never used to like the dining room in winter until its last incarnation.  At any rate, this is it for me with dining tables. I now have one that is sustainable and has character, a story, and a personal connection.  It's not quite as big as the old one (which could seat up to 12 if I put in all the leaves), but I can still fit 8 comfortably, and that's good enough for me.  The room now feels less polished, but the dialed down, less fancy look does a better job of reflecting my casual nature.

Thanks, Tim! 

(And, um, thank you Howard--for putting up with my need to change everything right away.  I am working on that patience thing, but don't quite have it figured out yet.)

Let's All Be a Little More Curious, Shall We?

Today, a lengthy, food-for-thought quote from a favorite gender scholar.  I want to work toward making curiosity more central in my life and actions:

"The moment when one becomes newly curious about something is also a good time to think about what created one's previous lack of curiosity. So many power structures--inside households, within institutions, in societies, in international affairs--are dependent on our continuing lack of curiosity. 'Natural,' 'tradition,' 'always': each has served as a cultural pillar to prop up familial, community, national, and international power structures, imbuing them with legitimacy, with timelessness, with inevitability. Any power arrangement that is imagined to be legitimate, timeless, and inevitable is pretty well fortified. Thus we need to stop and scrutinize our lack of curiosity. We also need to be genuinely curious about others' lack of curiosity--not for the sake of feeling self-satisfied, but for the sake of meaningfully engaging with those who take any power structure as unproblematic.

Why is a state of uncuriosity about what it takes to produce a pair of fashionable sneakers so comfortable? What is there about being uncurious about how the military base affects the civilians living in base towns that seems so reasonable? I've come to think that making and keeping us uncurious must serve somebody's political purpose. I also have become convinced that I am deeply complicit in my own lack of curiosity."

Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 2-3.