Six Posts

I have been in the Pit of Despair for the last ten days. Which is to say, I've been grading papers for the last week and a half. It makes me crabby and short-tempered, plus, I don't have time to do things I actually enjoy - like blog. So I've been thinking about blog posts for the last few days but have been unable to actually compose them. So, here are six short blog posts all in one. Enjoy.

Friendship


I've been thinking a lot about friendship lately. I just finished reading Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett. It's Patchett's memoir of her friendship with fellow writer, Lucy Grealy. It's beautifully written and so full of the love and forgiveness that we all crave from those we love. As I was reading it, Maryn and Avery were both having struggles with their friends at school. Is true friendship so hard to find because it's so important or is it so important because it's so hard to find? I've had the same best friend (besides Suzanne, of course) for twenty three years. We keep in touch and maintain our friendship partly because it's just too freaking hard to find new ones.

Rejection of the Week


I want to start a new feature on my blog: rejection of the week. As you know, my favorite phrase right now is, "I reject that." So I was thinking I'd pick one thing a week that I just outright freakin' reject. This week? Dishes that are hand-wash only and clothes that have to be hung rather than put in the dryer. Seriously. It's the twenty first century and you're telling me I can't put this green plastic cup in my dishwasher but that instead I have to lovingly soap it up like some ancient relic? I reject that.

Spring
Yesterday was the first day of spring. Here is my favorite springtime poem. It's by that old grammar and syntax rebel e.e. cummings:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

That about sums it up, eh?

Speaking of Spring


When I was nineteen years old, I attended the National Undergraduate Literature Conference at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. It was April and, while Idaho was still a gray bog, Utah was in bloom. I remember driving up to the campus which was, to me, huge and gorgeous, and seeing all the apple and cherry trees blooming. Forsythia was everywhere looking like Mother Nature's crazy daytime neon. I was dazed. It was practically narcotic and I loved it. To this day, blooming trees are still my favorite thing about spring. They look like frozen tidal waves of color and bolts of lightning. What's not to love?

Justified
The season is more than half over and I'm still waiting for this season to work up half the momentum the last one had. Too many villains and subplots with not enough of Raylan Givens being his cool self. On the last episode, Raylan was being framed for a murder he did not commit. The bad guys had a bullet with his fingerprints on it because he had tossed it at one of them earlier in the season and said, "Watch out or the next one will be coming a lot faster." When he told the investigator about it, the interviewer chuckled and said something like, "That's the coolest thing I've ever heard." I think he was speaking for all of us.

Dancing With the Stars
I haven't felt the DWTS vibe in a couple of seasons but this one is firing up with a vengeance. An interesting bunch of has-beens and never-weres with some serious skills. It's not like there's an obvious ringer like there has been the last couple of years. Instead, there's some real competition. Plus, Gladys Knight. Need I say more?

Poem for the Day

I think writing intelligently and artfully about spiritual matters is really hard. Things either become so vague and metaphysical as to lose any connection to the real, or they become so trite and hackneyed that they lose any ability to move or inspire.

That's why I really liked this poem from today's Writer's Almanac by Marie Howe. She gets it right and does it well:

Prayer

Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention--the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage

I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here

among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.

The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?

My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.

Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.

A Recent Exchange

Me: "Parker, get off the counter."

Parker: "No."

Me: "Seriously, get off the counter."

Parker: "No."

Me: (Getting irritated.) "Get down, or you're going to be in trouble."

Parker: "No!"

Me: (Getting up in her face a little.) "Stop telling me 'no.' Get down now!"

Parker: (Nodding vigorously) "Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Yes, sir!"

Me: (Astounded that, apparently, I am being mocked by a two-year old.) "Holy crap."

Parker: "Holy crap! Holy crap! Holy crap!"

Me: (Sighs. Weary. Unable to win.)

To the D

So we're just back from a quick couple of days in the dirty mitten. (Michigan to all you uninitiated.) We went back so I could meet face-to-face with my new Prospectus Committee chair and a couple of new faculty members. My old committee chair got a job in New Zealand, her homeland, and so is leaving at the end of the semester. You may have heard me talk about this person. If you ever heard me refer to a professor who "scares the pee out of me," that's who I was talking about. So the fact that she's moving to the other side of the planet is actually okay with me.

With my committee already in flux, I thought I'd act boldly and ask the other member who I felt utterly incompatible with to step down so I could replace him with someone a little less...full of himself? Elitist? Snobby? Lame? Take your pick. So that's why I met with the new faculty members - to see which one would be more compatible with me and my project.

One thing that struck me on this trip is that, at least in my experience, the world of upper-tier, publish-or-perish academia is a really cold, self-involved, unhappy place. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with being an academic at that level, and there are some people in that world who are kind and good, but it does seem that English departments at least tend to either create or attract a lot of bitter, selfish, miserable people who love ideas and abstractions more than they love other human beings.



Part of me would love to be able to teach just three sections a semester to advanced students who are brilliant and motivated. But the idea of being in a publish-or-perish environment gives me shpilkes like no other. It would be like having to write my dissertation every day for the rest of my life. Ugh. No freaking thank you. I want the pay increase and mobility a Phd will give me, but I don't want it as a pass into the upper echelons of education. (Let's be clear here, I do want that mobility. The Illinois Valley is not where we intend to stay any longer than we have to.)

Anyway, on the bright side, my new chair doesn't scare me to death. On the contrary, he is pretty encouraging and positive. I left my meeting with him feeling, for the first time in a long time, like my dissertation is viable, like I'm not an idiot, like it can get done and maybe in a reasonable amount of time. After more than a year of feeling like I was pinned under heavy furniture after an earthquake, it's good to feel a little lighter, a little more hopeful.

Other Detroit highlights were:


The DIA. You know that feeling you're supposed to get at church? The uplifting, peaceful feeling that suggests there's a power greater than yourself in the universe and that it's a benevolent one? I get that at the DIA. (Of course, I only go there once or twice a year. Maybe that's what makes it special. If I went there for three hours every week, maybe I'd just get irritated at other patrons and think about eating lunch through the whole thing.) Anyway, I especially love the American landscape collection. Some of them are literally breathtaking. Walking around there for two hours with Maryn and Avery pointing out paintings and sculptures they like was just lovely in every way.



The food. Middle Eastern food is like the nursery rhyme - when it's good, it's very, very good, and when it's bad, it's horrid. Pine-Land is profoundly good Middle Eastern food. We just ordered a giant platter of everything and stuffed ourselves until we just couldn't do it any more. The girls and I ate at Los Gallanes in Mexican Village on our day in the city. The food was wonderful, and the restaurant has a lot of really happy memories for me from back in the day. For dinner the night before we left, we had Buddy's pizza, a Detroit area classic. It was cheesy, crispy-crusted, and perfect. Living in a desert of burgers and fried chicken like we do, we have to get the good stuff when we can. Next time, it will be all about Pad Thai, the place in Eastern Market with the best Thai food outside of Bangkok.

The Griswolds. Ben has been my pal since he joined the family, and it's always good to sit around with him and shoot the breeze about work, kids, marriage, politics, etc. If only we lived closer, Benny the Beard would be my movie compadre for all man movies that Suzy has no interest in seeing. (John Carter opens this Friday!) Erin, of course, is wonderful and always has been. She's always been a very kind, charming person, and it's no surprise that she's such an excellent mother. It's fun to watch her with her wild twosome. Braden and Cole, of course, are awesome. Few things make me happier than rubbing their bristly little heads and tickling them. They're great.

We loved our trip and really appreciate Paul and Linda letting us stay in their place. We promise to not almost lock ourselves out next time.