another spring semester

so far, this corner of the world has felt abnormally like spring for the past eight weeks, save for two days of snow-dust several weeks ago. everyone is dreading how dry and fire-prone the whole area is going to be through the summer. let us hope we have a few good monsoons in store at some point. please?

eight weeks since classes started means that half the semester is over by now. but I can still blog about a new semester even when it's halfway over, right? why not?

there isn't much to say. this semester is basically a repeat of two years' ago's with only minor updates. one section of Technical Report Writing (this time with extra usability and UX flavoring), one section of The Art and History of Podcasts (quite a bit improved since my first semester teaching it), and plenty of other academic work on top of the usual teaching: meetings galore, emails that should not be so draining to read and write and manage, various professional development adventures, research and writing of my own in small snippets.

I enjoy this teaching career, such as it has become for me, because it involves so much learning. or at least I always used to think so and say so. am I still learning anything? am I still enchanted by the process of stretching my brain in new directions, of finding little corners of wonder amongst all the mundanity of things, like it seems I always used to be? well yes. mostly yes. students and colleagues say things all the time that make me think new thoughts and appreciate new things. their questions and my questions often join forces in pretty excellent ways. it's fun.

novelty seems rarer, these days, though. there is a lot of sameness, and it feels far too easy to let the sameness subsume everything else. do older brains prefer more sameness, I wonder? or does accumulation of experience just mean that any novelty we find is easier to handwave away as not-really-that-interesting-after-all-actually-kind-of-just-like-that-other-thing-I-already-know-about? or maybe our comprehensive eyesight starts to fade somehow, rendering us less able to appreciate shining novelty even when it's just as plentiful as ever?

I'm not sure. 

what is new and notable for me lately?

with enough time and energy, and given a wide ranging definition of "notable," I could list so many things. an onslaught of information from news and social media and instant messages. knee-jerk reactions and opinions and maybes in response to all of it. the absurd loveliness of a few calm, rich summery days in February. bundles of anticipation accompanying sprouts and buds and new greenery underneath dried leaves. earlier sunrises and later sunsets. a recent trip for work to Albuquerque, including a not-for-work visit to this cute new fiber arts shop. (I bought 300g of a wool/viscose blend called "crumpet tweed." awesome name, eh?)

also, 'tis the season for (a perhaps ridiculous amount of) excitement about the tournament of books. it starts next week!

I've read only four of this year's contestants (which is four more than I usually manage to read before the opening rounds): 

The Book of Love, by Kelly Link

James, by Percival Everett

The Wedding People, by Alison Espach

and Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino

I read them in that order, because that is the order in which the library served them to me--three in nice new hardcovers and one (The Wedding People) as a short and sweet audiobook. now that I've finished Beautyland, I really need to relisten to the So Many Damn Books episode about it. 

do I have a favourite? do I hope one of these four wins? it's hard to say. James and Beautyland have the most depth, I think; I read them both quickly and could see myself reading them again someday. the other two were excellently enchanting to me though, and both The Wedding People and The Book of Love delighted me with their neat and just-twisty-enough plots. 

but I don't like to make predictions. if I fill out a tournament bracket in the next six days it will be as random as anything might be, and I will not be attached at all to the idea of my random picks matching up with the true official judgements.

let's just see what happens next.

moments and years

I missed the chance to commemorate the true birthday of this little blog, last Monday. but today, January 19, 2025, marks exactly 20 years since the first actual, fully-fledged post: a response to our first key reading assignment about webdesign and such.

what a different world. such a different place it was. or maybe twenty years ago wasn't so very different, and it only seems so because I and my perspective have changed so much since then. 

what happens if I stitch together a few snippets from all the blogged Januaries of each year since 2005? what new montage will spill into this digital page in between them all?

I tried my best to pull from sections nearest to the 13th and 19th of the month (a thing much easier to do from the posts before 2014ish, when the apex of graduate school + its aftermath slowed down my writing here so much).

what I notice amongst these snippets and what you notice will be different, I imagine. I notice the unending pulse of learning and academia. books and thoughts chasing each other in circles. comments about the weather seem to sit neatly in the background with questions of identity and all its tangly unspooling. these words always have been for me more than anything. does all this pontificating from past amelia still sound like useful advice? mostly yes, I think. but I would say that, wouldn't I?

2006

the fact that energy is behind it all is somehow unifying. simple

...

linguistic structures will be a low-key class. it is full of people i don't see in my other classes. the other english majors. non tech writing people: the lit majors, the teaching majors. it's weird.

2007

get used to the fear and the doubt. get used to being faced with new facets of your own ignorance. get used to the pain. embrace humility. you can't always feel in control.

but really, how comforting is that?

I don't know. I'd take humility over false confidence anyday. but then the humble rarely get much respect.

2008-2009 (a pause.)

2010

the world is big.

there's a lot going on in it. even in this mostly empty house, there's me sitting at the table, typing, stretching a bit of CSS out over a half-built website skeleton, scribbling a few what-ifs, listening to Radiohead. and I made banana nut muffins this morning.

2011

in the beginning, this blog was just a place for all my first impressions--all my doubts and worries about the usefulness or meaningfulness of all the stuff I was learning. after that semester, I decided to keep blogging--mainly about writing (Starcustard and random short stories), school (rhetoric, more webdesign, and Isotope), and life (philosophical thoughts about my job, vague complaints about boys, and so forth). and so it continued. I'm still here. I still blog.

...

what do those stories say about me?

I'm thinking about all the texture of my life. all the patterned and patternless history I've collected so far. telling stories is one way to remember it. and on the other hand... telling and retelling and re-remembering these stories is one way to completely revise the past. after a few months or years, it becomes easy to bend the details. to emphasize the funny parts. to leave out the things that make you look like a bit of an idiot.

how I envision myself is pretty complicated, I guess. perspective is weirdly limited like that.

2012

 

which we am I talking about, anyway? and when? and where? 

2013

it may not make any huge difference in the long run, but even so, the ultimate pointlessness of things should not be dragged up as an excuse for us to stay in bed all day. at least not more than once or twice a year, anyway, right?

2014

this seemingly misnamed semester will inch along to spring in due course. and when that happens, finals and stress will no doubt prevent me from enjoying it as thoroughly as I could, but for now... well for now, the semester is glowing with warm, cozy pillows full of insight and excitement. this might be the best January ever.

2015

I have spent much (but not enough) of this long, mostly-pleasant weekend sitting by the window, trying to focus on readings for classes. 

.... 2015 is here, still all new-feeling. gradually we'll get to see both how it changes my life and how it doesn't.

2016

today it is raining in spurts, like a chilly and unkempt spring. Tuesday's snow is long since melted. it'll be back this weekend. the universe is giving us yo-yo-ing seasons, somewhat drab all the way through, with occasional bright sunset smudges.

the trees are bare. my apartment windows open onto more distant views than they did in summer and fall. at night, more and more streetlights perpetually leak into my bedroom under the edges of the blinds. I notice the faces of buildings I have never seen from such an angle before.

2017

it's empowering to reflect on the background structure of your whole life. to actively participate and acknowledge your role in either accepting/reinforcing or resisting/revising the culture you swim in. and that seems important. that's what it takes to make all of that power and structure more open-book, more readable, more transparent and less like a vice.

2018

if I had the brainpower on this Friday evening to make some additional academicalish comments on how these beautifully-commentated marble races and our fascination with them could link up interestingly with some of the tenets of object-oriented ontology, I would. but I don't know all that much about object-oriented ontology myself, and should probably not let it distract me much more than the Marblelympics already have from writing up nicely finished dissertation chapters about digital ethnography and distributed commons-based peer-production and what that all may mean for technical communication and human culture and such.

2019

and then the speaker said something about facebook hopefully having a major role in someday establishing some kind of global online government. after that, according to my notes, I typed out this:

"eeeeek."

does the world want and need to be connected by a central online platform, really? is the capitalist interest that facebook has in being the medium by which everyone is connected anything we can trust?

2020

all this potent potential meaning curled up in to hold. and then there are all these phrasal verbs, too: hold back, hold up, hold out, hold off, hold against, beholden to...

to be held as a parent holds a young baby is to be safe. comfortable. cared for. right?

to be held is also to be restrained. controlled. and to be restrained isn't usually considered comfortable, though... right?

or is it?

2021

and when I listened to this recent episode of So Many Damn Books with George Saunders I felt more affinity for Saunders's love of teaching writing than perhaps I might once have felt. his advice is to remember that you're never just teaching 20-somethings who barely know what to do with their adulthood when you meet them-- you're also teaching the 40-something-year-olds that they'll become. I like that. (not all college students are 20-somethings, but the concept holds. we are all humans-in-progress.)

2022

why does this small saga of knitting woe and triumph deserve documentation in this little blog of mine? I don't know if there's an answer, other than my typical interest in capturing bits of experience and emotion in as vivid and accurate description as I can. I like to write these vignettes of where and when and how, with all the metaphor and adjectives they need to vibrate satisfyingly from my imagination to yours.

2023

I trust that learning is happening, little by little, in all of our spongey-curious brains.

2024

January, perhaps fittingly, seems so very long. all the transitions it spans-- all the shifting, deepening of the dark season, the post-holiday recoveries, the shiny new beginnings of a calendar year and of an academic semester-- all of that is a lot for 31 average winter days.

I don't know if it really did feel longer for me this year, or if I'm only saying that because it seems like an appropriate thing to sigh into this semi-bleak and impermanent world.

- - -

and now what? do I still blog? 

time will tell. if you'll indulge me, I have one more excerpt, this time from May of 2014, when so much of me was so unsettled and rearranging itself and I clung to my love of writing as if nothing else mattered:

from time to time I wonder what it is I'm trying to do here. does it matter what I'm trying to do here? I write. our reasons for enjoying things are seemingly inarticulable. is there irony in that? I claim that words can make everything better. is that true even when the words crumble into meaninglessness as they fail at encompassing feelings? do I mean that even crumbled words are worth something?

yes. crumbled and halfhearted attempts at capturing it all still beats blank silence. I know only so much stuff fits into one life. there are only so many live possibilities. this is the way it needs to be, I guess. but the way everything is carved up now isn't how it'll always need to be carved. our crumbled communications don't stand still; they change.

.... and even if I can't really say I know exactly what writing means, I can try to explain what I like about my practice of it.

I like the pausing and sifting through potential descriptions and the shuffling of parts of speech. I like the dancing of clauses and punctuation and space. I like the starts and stops and backtracking, the meandering fragments that stretch so subtly for their finish. I like the way these little symbols can twist and mold intangible thoughts into a dozen differently shaded shapes. I like unknotting a tangly draft, picking out the pieces that don't belong and pulling away each piece that does, tidying it all into a hopefully-clean curl of interesting prose. sometimes I save the scraps for later. sometimes I can't. .... I write for the writing's sake. I sketch and wonder and experience plenty of other things for the same reason. they don't have to be means to some other end, these creative processes. maybe all the best things are their own ends, or at least neatly wrapped around something like one.

after twenty years, does this blog count as art? as an end in itself?

doesn't matter. it's here. I'm here. for now.

sidewalk-henge

at a certain time of day, the shadows that fall from the southeasterly sunrise across the somewhat-elevated sidewalk behind our house line up just exactly right with the angles of wide concrete pavement and granite-pebble landscaping and the gully on one side. and for however long the sun and earth match up that way, we get to watch a shadowy parade of me with the pugs, walking with perfect balance on the top of the shadow of the earth against itself. 

I suppose the conditions for this must happen at least twice in a day, whatever times those may be depending on the time of year and the slant of the earth's axis. in the mornings, lately somewhere near 8:00 a.m. or so, the shadows slant northwest. we don't often walk that path during the other half of the day, but I imagine in the early evenings the shadows must slant more to the northeast.   

so what? 

 

it is a thing to notice. a small event-thing among many other variously-shaped event-things. 

I haven't bothered photographing our shadows. it's nice enough to just notice it when we happen to be out walking at the right set of moments. 

the morning pug walks require more layers this month. hats, gloves, fluffier scarves. I crocheted a new puppy pug coat in red and beige for the skinny little Faramir. his old grey pug coat still barely-kindof fits, but it didn't look as warm all stretched out of his lanky body.

these photographed trees and their shadows are not trees near us (we are quite starved for trees in this neighborhood). but they are very autumnal, aren't they. I took these photographs some years ago, mostly in Chicagoland and perhaps a few in a town near the Wisconsin–Illinois border, October 2022. 

fall semester, 2024

the word semester shows up in at least 130 of my past blogposts, which is a little more than 10% of all the posts I've thus far posted. considering that this little blog has always been roughly half focused on various academic and intellectual pursuits, this makes plenty of sense. semesters are like seasons.

the word itself is not even 200 years old, the etymology dictionary tells me: "...semenstris 'of six months, lasting six months, half-yearly, semi-annual,' from assimilated form of sex 'six' (see six) + mensis "month" (see moon (n.)). The word, and the idea, were picked up in the U.S., where the German higher education system served as a model."

apparently the Latin-y adjective forms semestral and semestrial are a few centuries older. interesting. 

anyway, I'm glad our semesters are not a full six months long these days. four months is plenty. 

and for these upcoming four months, I'm teaching three batches of students, including a few repeats from past semesters. the longer I hang out at this institution, the more that will keep happening I suppose.

COM 221: Technical Report Writing
counting the two sections I have this semester, I've taught practically a million versions of this course (okay, 15 total sections. that is still a lot). it's becoming a bit of a struggle to not get completely burnt out and bored of it, but I'm doing my best to keep it interesting for me. we're only in week 3, so I'm still getting to know the vibe of the students. we'll have some fun together I hope though.

HU 356: Audio Production & Podcasting
this one is going to be interesting no matter what-- it's a brand new class, only recently outlined and designed and proposed by me for our catch-all Humanities & Communication department. I am pretty excited to see how this goes. so far I'm having students practice various little audio recording tasks, then we'll level up to remixing all those clips into some fun story-arc, before finally moving on to pitching and workshoping individual podcast projects. the students all have great ideas so far. (wish me luck persuading the one who simply wants to copy Mr. Rogan's insufferably long-winded (at least it is to me) format into doing something at least slightly more inventive.)

what else? I signed up for a weaving class next month. some family is visiting next week. we have some more camping planned for during fall break. we're having a brand new screen door installed sometime soon. and our Monday evening D&D group is on the brink of moving up to level 8. in November, our crazy puppy will turn 1 year old.

at some point we should work on the mish-mash garden projects and other household tasks that need doing. and eventually figure out our holiday plans. 

or maybe we let go of shoulds for a while and enjoy the almost-autum while it's here.

and spring semester 2024

eleven years ago, back at the very beginning of my academic career, I trekked 6 hours west from Lubbock, Texas, in my very old leper of a car (the paint was all but totally peeled way from its poor hood), to attend my first ever academic conference in Albuquerque.

this week I'm gonna trek 6 hours east and attend the same conference, this time in a rental car, with way more academic experience, an institutional credit card for travel-related purchases, and a significantly different research agenda. I'll be presenting this Saturday all about how I designed and get to teach a fun little class on podcasts. 

 {the title slide, so far anway}

 

and I'll get to see some of my old professors from USU. very excited for that bit. 

it'll be fun, hopefully. I hope I'll meet some other cool new interesting fellow scholars along the way, too. we shall see, given how sunny and warm it looks to be in Albuquerque this weekend, how much of the conference I actually sit through.

in the more normal weeks of this semester, I'm teaching a couple sections of technical writing. the same old basic tech writing course, only slightly different every time by virtue of new students and a new me and a new world.

besides teaching, I'm also working on a book chapter about podcast transcripts and leading various faculty from various other programs through a series of mushy but important assessment adventures. friend Caroline and I are still working on soliciting content for a new issue of the campus literary arts magazine (the second since we took charge of it last year). maybe we'll have an official reading event at the library with the creative writing class-- fingers crossed. 

it's all nearly haflway over, this set of 16 work weeks called spring semester. at the moment the halfway point feels encouraging. time ticks onward. work gets accomplished. knowledge is made and shared and reinforced. skills are modeled, practiced, learned, forgotten, re-learned.

in other news, I'm also finally getting to see some work from the past year come out in official publication! perhaps the coolest online academic journal of all, Kairos, made space for my multimedia oral history-ish interview piece all about two colleagues who recently retired.

and then colleagues and I have a co-authored piece in the most recent issue of Programmatic Perspectives (the differently cool but still very awesome journal from the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication). some awesome Purdue colleagues have an article in the same issue, which is quite cool to see. 

time ticks onward. I've been here 4 years. 2 more until hopefully they give me tenure. 

in the meantime, age and experience accumulate. some days I feel older and other days not at all. 

next January, in the auspicious year of 2025, it'll be 20 years since I started this blog for a class. how will we celebrate that, I wonder?

introducing the summer 'tournament of TTRPG books'

last year, just for fun during my summer break, I watched almost 30 Matthew McConaughey movies (even more of them than I initially planned). I never did post a full account of that whole journey and my resultant novice-movie-reviewer verdicts, but maybe I still will someday. for now I will say that the key results of that project were: 

1. I now have a pretty detailed range of opinions about most of Mr. McConaughey's movies and
2. I can confidently spell the actor's surname.

I also read his recent-ish memoir, Greenlights, which was an interesting package of retrospective optimism. last summer was a very good summer.

and now summer break 2023 has barely even blinked itself into existence, and I have begun organizing a similarly arbitrary project:

it shall be a one-woman tournament of table-top roleplaying game systems. this was, in part, my dearest Jeremiah's idea, to creatively remix a thing he is very into and a thing I am very into. I latched onto it almost immediately and started listing out the role-playing books-- core rulebooks for unique game systems-- that we already owned, calculating how many more I'd need to add in for an even 16.

surprisingly, we had a whole 15 separate books already, not counting different editions or sequels or expansion books or any of that. 15!

for the sixteenth? by complete coincidence, a friend in our gaming group suggested a one-shot of Wrath & Glory practically the same time we were thinking up this tournament plan. so... even if Warhammer 40,000 may not be the genre or tone or universe that I would've picked all of my own accord to round out the existing 15... still, it was convenient timing. we played a short session last weekend.

here are the match-ups we've designed thus far, presented in a kinda-sorta rough chronological order of maybe how I'll proceed through my judgement process:

World of Darkness vs Wrath & Glory (yes, that's an edited-in jpg of the cover. all the others we own in physical form, but not that one).

Mage: the Awakening vs Pathfinder 2e.

Changeling: the Lost vs Star Wars: Force and Destiny.

The One Ring vs Scion: Hero.

Exalted vs. Vampire: the Masquerade 5e.

Cyberpunk RED vs. 7th Sea.

Dungeons & Dragons 5e vs. Werewolf: the Forsaken.

Shadowrun 5e vs A Song of Ice and Fire.

my approach to this series will mirror the wholehearted subjectivity of the annual Tournament of Books, with the main difference being I shall serve as the one and only judge. 

most (10) of these are games I have played at least one session of at one point or another. the other 6, either barely or not at all. D&D and Vampire I've played the most, with Star Wars, 7th Sea, and Shadowrun taking up third, fourth, and fifth places. our current long-running campaign is set in the base World of Darkness system (with added zombies). Mage, Changeling, and Pathfinder have been small 1- or 2-session experiments. 

so judging all of these against each other will be an interesting task. as set-up, I've fashioned a big fat spreadsheet of metadata and notes about each book. for some of them, I know a fair bit already, or at least have a wealth of relevant pop-cultural knowledge to apply. 

my plan, at the moment, is to follow a roughly similar process for each book, take detailed notes all along the way, and then write up reviews for each match accordingly.

the process:

1. read/skim each core book in full
2. create at least 1 new character (to add up to at least 2 total characters created) using each system
3. assess each game's mechanics, aesthetics, and general user-friendliness
4. summarize my past gameplay experience or, for the 6 I haven't fully played yet, arrange at least one session of play

I'll go through this for all 8 pairs before choosing which 8 advance to the next round. then we'll match those 8 and start again, more or less.

who knows what will happen. it'll be fun and interesting in any case.

moon wear

the clouded sky out west thismorning was solid, stoic blue-dark-grey, except for a very little patch low to the horizon where it looked like the moon had worn a hole straight through. the (almost unbelievably and excessively bright) golden glow shone clearly underneath a stretch of threadbare overcast just exactly like the ball of your foot would show through an old sock.

could we darn the clouds against the friction of the morning moonlight? it's great to imagine such a project. what would one use as mending threads and darning needles? would they need to be enchanted or celestial tools?

I haven't so much as darned a simple sock yet, so I do not know. 

for now, I know that winter is slowly fading into the past. it's finally a bit warmer in these pre-dawn hours for walking with Hamilton around the bend of our cul-de-sac without a heavy coat. 

we shall see what the sky looks like tomorrow. 

week eight

after blogging almost everyday for seven weeks, summer activities and naps and plans took over and left no time. 

but I have still been writing. journaling... work notes... DnD vignettes... mental rants about politics and society... and yes, various blogpost drafts. 

some of that writing will become conventionally useful in future lesson plans or tenure/promotion paperwork or letters to congress.

some of it will simply exist. 

other things I've been up to since last week:

reorganizing and tidying the china hutch, carefully

-spinning wheel practice, frustratedly

-making cheesecake, indulgently

-watering plants, generously 

-planning a weekend camping trip, hopefully

-taking Hamilton for short walks, lazily

-dealing with our fritzy air-conditioning, longsufferingly

-and, resignedly, failing at Wednesday's wordle. 

I fail at Worldle all the time (despite having won 2nd place in a geography bee once upon a time; someday I really need to sit down and try to master all the countries in Africa), but I don't think I've failed any of the daily Wordle puzzles before this. ever.

I still think the game should have a mechanism for signalling when a letter shows up more than once. but maybe that would make it too easy...

oh well. 

life is about way more than mere success, thankfully. 

Wordle 396 (20 July 2022) X/6

⬜⬜🟩⬜🟨
🟩⬜🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩

twill or something like it

the idea with this embroidery hoop weave is to evoke the seasons, one in each quadrant morphing from winter into spring into summer and into fall.

winter is first, mainly because I have the most white and grey and gold and fir-tree colored yarn and ribbons. 

so far it's pretty fun to mess about with. fiber improv. 

rain spots

 

finally a bit of a rain storm. the puddles won't last but they are here doing their thing for now. 

as are we all.  

in other news for this fine Tuesday: 

puzzle solving 

chocolate pudding

paper mache 

weaving scraps 

chicken salad 

watermelon 

and True Detective, season 1, episode 5

encircle

 

why not weaving?

is there such a thing as too many summer projects?

let's pretend there isn't. 

it's okay after all if I don't finish any or all of them. it's summer. 

plant babies

it's been a while since I last blogged about my plant collection. so here's a small update. 

above, there set that does best with partial sun. some of them might move out into sunnier parts of the patio once they acclimate a little more. we'll see how things go.

below, we have the set that needs all the sun it can get. when I have to bring them all inside for winter, these are the ones that struggle the most to get by on what they get from our south-facing windows.

I've added many new plant dudes (and many new pots, too) over the months, but that pair of zebra plants, the lanky gollum jade, and one seasonally depressed flapjack plant have been with me for at least six years or so by now. the flapjack and one of the zebras have had some babies, even! 

the roses have also followed me around for a while-- at least from Louisiana to here. I was convinced I'd eventually kill them, but not yet. mini roses from a bygone Valentine's day have proved particularly sturdy. now if only I could keep the aphids off them, that would be nice...

blossoms, seeds, and shadows

I think this is a small shrubby redbud tree. not sure though.

it has a neighbor along our walking trail. the two trees are more like bushes, really, reaching not too far above my waist, spindly branches bent toward the road.

some months ago this spring, both trees burst into blossom--crowded little pink frothy blossoms all over--even though so many dried out seed pods still clung to all the branches.

it seemed like such a metaphor. 

last year's efforts, thin and pointless, weighing down the future. new life and color pushing onwards anyway. old baggage, getting in the way of everything you might want to blossom into.

by the time I took this photo, the pink flowery frills had wilted and shriveled quite a bit. the desert sun has taken no vacations this season. but there are still rows of orange seed pods holding fast, refusing to be blown away.

a tree, its seeds, its blossoms, all live in cycles just like everything and everyone else. times for growing and times for resting. times for bare bark, times for buds and leaves and blossoms. but all the parts of that cycle have residue from the others. none of them gets to be a clean slate starting from scratch. dried out seed pods, failures, sadness, winter cold, autumn loss-- all of it gets wrapped into the things that happen next. 

maybe sometimes it feels like so much heaviness to keep hold of, to keep track of. 

maybe it's simple. flowers leave behind seeds, and not all of those seeds go off to grow into anything.

the metaphor is very flawed, of course. the seeds are not the opposite of progress and beauty. just because convention paints pink flowers as more lovely does not mean that's truth.

I'm reminded of the best song from Encanto. things don't need to be perfect; they just need to be. 

that's enough for the scrubby redbud trees, I guess. simply being. why do humans complicate it so?

a catalogue of small beauties

the wind and air currents in our neighborhood are conspiring to toss little snow pixies up against the window above the desk. I'm imagining them as tiny winged creatures frolicking their hearts out. 

it's a snow day. no classes. no going anywhere. just snow: sparkly and white, soggy and slushy underneath. 

I do hope this is the last big winter storm. for weeks it has seemed that spring is just minutes away... but the mornings are still often freezing, the wind biting and fierce, the sunsets rather early. 

I've been wanting to blog about small but satisfying contrasts from recent days. I don't know how long the list will be, but anything I find inordinately beautiful or strikingly lovely will get added to it. 

in no particular order: 

flecks of black pepper, scattered across the whites of a fried egg. 

sap frozen into drippy, globby icicles all around the scabby trunks of pine trees.

thick ribbons of sweetened condensed milk folding softly, meltingly against each other in a bowl.

perfect avocado slices fanned out across crumbly homemade toast.

cold, bare tree branches (or window sills, or fences, or mailboxes, or sidewalk railings) lined with defiantly high, narrow piles of snow.

walnuts chopped into uneven pieces-- craggy nubs, random slivers, and grains of walnut dust.

woven wicker baskets of varying colors, stacked up in the corner, waiting for me to organize yarn and crafts into them.

mismatched but mostly coordinating pillowcases squashed together with their pillows at the head of the bed.

clean blank notebook paper, but with crisp little doodles-that-turned-out-quite-nicely along the edges.

gently twinkling strand lights against the dark wood of the kitchen cabinets. 

pale scented wax (passion flower & citrus, in this case) cooling so flat and smooth and solid after the candle warmer is turned off.

almost winter break

the stars in the winter seem brighter, or shinier, or at least more, possibly because there is more night for them to shine in.

yesterday, it rained and rained and rained all afternoon and evening. it began around noon as the barest mist of precipitation in the grey, chill air. at some point while I was teaching my last three technical writing classes of the semester, it intensified until all the sidewalks were slicked and slippery. 

today was the first fully cold-cold day of the season. 

a dusting of snow on top of Granite Mountain made it look a little like a delightfully craggy, if lopsided, bundt cake. 

(did you know that "bundt" is technically a trademarked brand name? I was somewhat astonished to learn this when I doublechecked my spelling just now. I guess it's like kleenex and google and velcro and all the other trademarks that have crept into the zone of regular old vocabulary for what was once the latest amazing innovation but is now just everyday stuff. the company still enforces its trademark over Bundt cake pans-- but you can call the cake itself a bundt cake without issue. thank goodness.) 

way up to the north, the mountains around Flagstaff have much more than a dusting of snow-- they look like they've been repainted altogether in a major revision to the horizon. the distant trio of sharp peaks seem to be layered with at least seven perfectly fine, perfectly white veils of silk. 

when will it snow here in the valley? my guess is not until next month. but it's hard to say. the nights are officially freezing. the skies have been grey all week. the chill wind and the bright sun are battling over the temperature of the air.

now that classes are over, we'll see if I can sleep in past the late sunrises and hibernate a bit more, as nature's signals have been directing us all to do for at least a month. 

what else? my other winter break plans include... 

- visiting my family and homeland to the north
- getting a neat haircut, and maybe some highlights or color or something to go with it
- reading at least ten books for fun
- watching all the longest versions of all the Lord of the Rings films
- baking several pies + some other sort of holiday sweets for the neighbors 

I did want to join a Christmas choir this month, but I'm still a bit too worried about a certain viral pandemic situation. and singing in a facemask doesn't seem like it would be feasible or effective. hopefully next year...?

in less fun (but still pretty fun) arenas, I also have research to work on (more podcast transcript tracking, among other things) and LibriVox projects to edit and finish (just 4 more sections of this to get done). and that is plenty. in fact, I should take some of my expectations about all that down a few notches. two pies will probably be plenty. 

we'll see how industrious I actually want to be during the nineteen or so days of de facto freedom I have before spring semester drags me back to the office. if I can plan all my Business Communication syllabi next week, I won't have to think about that at all until probably... January 10 or so. 

 

{ these two images are very old scans of very old Christmas card sketches }

seasons, dark and light

sleeplessly wrapped myself in a fleece blanket and sat outside under the sunrise early today. I greeted this May Saturday in pajamas, without my glasses, before it was even fully day. 

the nights now are not quite cold. it is time for leaving the windows open while we sleep.

if we sleep. 

I might still need a few weeks more of semi-hibernation. early bedtimes to counterbalance the way the waking glow of dawn pulls on me at 5.45am. 

it feels like I'm getting old. 

summer means long days. sometimes that is glorious and sometimes it's exhausting. last night I opened my paper journal (this year's is pastel green, with a scripture about gratitude embossed in cheap, flaking faux-leather) and wrote the date, April 30, only to realize I had written the same date that morning, above a few lines scribbled about our indulgent and lovely anniversary datenight up in the mountains last Wednesday.  

and it's only barely mid-spring. the solstice is months away. 

longer days are coming. 

sleepless or not, I'm grateful for open windows and sunshine and time. may I use plenty of these days for rest and just enough of them for making things happen. 

deep solstice

it has been almost three years since I last joined a public yoga practice. that's kind of a long time. but also not that long.

I have gotten emails from that downtown yoga studio, Sunshine Yoga, in the meantime. pointless emails, but at least they were not overwhelmingly spam-esque.

there was a yoga studio called Spark in Natchitoches for a moment, but it closed its doors before I could participate. I was sad and a tiny bit angry when that happened. how unfair. what stupid timing.

there are at least fourteen yoga studios here in Prescott, but there is also a pandemic going on.

and so the time since I practiced any good yoga with anyone but my own household stretches longer and longer.

I do still have Yoga with Adriene, thankfully.

and now I also have a weekly yoga church thing, which I joined on strong recommendation from friend Patti.

I met Summer Cushman, the beautiful soul who hosts this event, just once I think-- during a dinner at Black Sparrow at some point during this visit to Indiana. her partner Jeremy Cushman orchestrated my introduction to the graduate program + environs at Purdue that March. 

so for the last three Sunday mornings, I have set aside 90 minutes for a little yoga, a lot of journaling, and a much-needed dose of connection and fellowship. it's over Zoom, which will never quite be the very same thing as an everyone-in-the-same-room-breathing-and-moving-together yoga class, but it is very lovely in its own way. 

{ one of my favorite hand-drawn cards from Christmas 2018 }

yesterday, we turned our journaling and our meditating to the depths of this season. midwinter. cold. darkness. accepting the rhythms of putting down what is ready to die and making room for the new things that might grow when the spring sun comes back. 

we were encouraged the day before to collect and arrange a simple little solstice altar for the occasion. 

mine is still on the coffee table in our cozy front room. I laid out a hand-woven scarf from my mentor Kelli Cargile Cook, a small wrinkly white handkerchief, three candles (one Christmas-scented), two little paper snowflakes, one red jingle bell, a pine cone and various other plant-bits from the walking trails near our apartment.

while I gathered all these things, I kept thinking about silver and gold. I untangled the bell from a long golden ribbon it had been tied to. the twig I picked up is pale, easily imagined like slightly-tarnished silver. the curled leaves look much more obviously golden in real life. and the brilliant embroidery thread of the handkerchief shines a little bit like precious metal. 

I don't remember the rest of the lyrics to the song, other than the basic title: Silver and Gold.

but I like the idea of using whatever we can to brighten some of the darkness this time of year. candles. sparkles. carols. 

during yoga church we came back a few times to a quote from Glennie Kindred. I don't want to merely regurgitate everything from yesterday into a blogpost here, so I'm posting just two snippets:

"...it is important to realize that this festival is not the beginning, in a linear way of looking at things, but a rebirth within a cycle in which the starting point chosen here is part of a vibrant whole. Therefore it is necessary to make a connection to what has gone before." 

"Something old must die in order for something new to be reborn. This period of rest and darkness is a vital link in the cycle of life."

linearity vs. non-linearity is a (fittingly) constant source of pondering for me. it seems that the connotation of linear = straight, one-dimensional, confining, constricting. but I know that lines can be curvy and wild, too. a circle is also made of points on a line, sort of. 

it is easy to forget that, though. to make our stories about ourselves into stair-steps that only go one direction. 

yesterday, taking time to remember the bending arcs of things, the out and in, the back and forth-- that was very nice. our starting points and our ending points can be chosen. there can be palpable connections-- whether we make them ourselves or find them waiting for us-- to an infinite, cyclical, beautiful whole in each seemingly-insignificant little moment.

nothing momentous

can these miscellaneous photos become something else if I throw them together in a blogpost today? can they tell a real story or scaffold the lines of a poem?

for me there are wispy old memories inside each one. the past curls up, loose and wriggling, in little mental pockets marked with "autumn 2015" or "July 2016" or "that one conference in Rochester, NY."

but what are they for you? 

evidence? or art? or both? it probably depends on who you are.

plants in a garden. plants on a windowsill.
all in the middle of growing, dying.

or both. 

all of it part of some cycle. up. down.
rainfall, rainbows,
showered on or sheltered from.

or both.

 

writing or drawing, or both. seeing or listening, or both

being or breathing. 

but not or-- and.

always trying for and.
or failing. 

or both. 

along with the wispy memories, there are deep and unpredictable tides of emotion, too. a longing for the pieces of these pasts that have faded too far. a fear of losing all the people and connections that once felt so close and certain. amusement and nostalgia drizzling from clouds of wonder about why everything feels so impossible.

gollum and mantis

this isn't the best photograph, but you might be able to see the praying mantis chilling there on my gollum jade plant. it's hanging upside down like it's Spider-Man or something.

this older photograph is a better one, but it's at such a different angle you can't really use it to compare how much my gollum jade plant has grown.

let me assure you, my funny little gollum jade plant is at least twice as tall now as it was when I first acquired it in Indiana. the heat of Arizona shocked it a bit when we first got here, but it's ultimately adjusted pretty well.

as have all my succulents. they are all thriving here a billion times more obviously than they ever did in our shaded humid home in Louisiana.

I should take photos of all the plants I have left, to show off how well they're doing. the zebra plants especially have bounced back from a state of terribly stressed, wrinkly-brown sadness into one of beautiful, fat green vibrancy. I'm so happy for them both.