what is in a name?

as promised, I have written up and organized many, many, many photos for a full stand-alone page chronicling my adventures (so far) with this lovely old spinning wheel, now posted neatly alongside my about page and a draft/test page for an audio workshop I hosted once upon a time.

{ before all the learning about and cleaning of }

{ after all the cleaning and fiddling and reassembling } 

she needs one more replacement part and much more practice before she produces any yarn at all. so in the meantime, I do wish to solicit your opinions on her name. I'm weighing these three options at the moment...

Lydia, (after my father's maternal great-great grandmother Lydia Ann Taylor, 1852-1888),
Charlotte (after another of my father's maternal great-great grandmothers, Charlotte Amelia Van Orden, 1828-1895),
or Phoebe (after my mother's maternal great-grandmother Phoebe Rebecca Reynolds, 1863-1922)

...but at any point I could decide that Selina (after my mother's paternal great-great-grandmother Selina Tibbs, 1817-1891) or Florence (after my father's paternal great-grandmother Florence Charlesworth, 1879-1931) are worth considering. those two remind me a bit too much of a town in Kansas + the famous British nurse, respectively, but who knows if some quirk of my spinning wheel's personality will nudge them into the running.

east carolina and back

last month I got to attend the 2022 Computers & Writing conference, hosted on the charming East Carolina University campus. this year, it was a hybrid virtual/in-person event, which means that on top of the eight in-person sessions I inhaled one after the other while I was there, I also still have at least 12 tabs open from the online program, just waiting for me to spend proper time with some of the virtual presentations. one of them is this one about academic twitter and such, which features none other than friend Patti!

friend Patti is, as I write, gallivanting gloriously around in Portugal or somewhere similarly awesome thereabouts. from her instagram missives, it all looks terribly fun.

traveling for this conference was fun, but stressful. I used to love airports and the shock of new places. maybe I'm getting old and tired, or maybe the pandemic times have just cast shadows over it all. or maybe some of both. all the airports-- Phoenix, Charlotte, Raleigh/Durham, Detroit-- they were all crowded, hectic arenas. were they just as crowded, before? I can't remember.

here are some photos of the little creek I walked by on my way to-and-from the conference events that week.

and one of the lovely pathway itself, through the tall green trees.

while I was in North Carolina for conference reasons, I took some time to explore downtown Raleigh before I had to come home. it was pretty cool. 

I don't know what this tall reflectively blue building is, but it surprised me as I wandered. I felt ambushed by it in somewhat the same way I did by the Eiffel tower. only this was bright daylight. 

through the gaps between trees and buildings there, you can see the white tents of an arts festival. I had just enough time that afternoon to browse four or five booths, let the live music wash disjointedly over my ears, and wish for more time to souvenir-shop.

I did manage to acquire a nice belt from these recyclers-of-bicycle-tubes, for Jeremiah, before hurrying to return a rental car and resubmit to the circus of the airport. little did I know just how much of a merry-go-round the Raleigh/Durham airport would become for me that fateful Sunday. 

but that's a whole other story, and perhaps too complainingly for here, anyway.

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 }

wintery mix

yesterday it snowed for hours.

so we opened the blinds and pulled aside our gauzy curtain to watch the flurry of sparkly white magic blow around in the chaotic winds. every texture of snow was represented-- icy shards of sleet, tiny flakes of snow-dust, and cottony pea-sized puffballs. it was mesmerizing.

on our after-dinner walk last night, we admired the pink sunset light glinting off the corners of windows in houses across the gully. all the cleanly snow-covered rooftops gave the suburban landscape a seasonal uniformity, and the smooth swathes of rosy, opalescent clouds glowing above it all made for a highly dramatic, majestic backdrop. everyone we saw on that walk was taking a photo of the sky: the neighbor with his two larger dogs paused at the end of the parking lot to document the loveliness; a woman on a third-floor balcony in the next building leaned out with her phone to capture the perfect light.

after months and months with a mere handful of days with any precipitation at all, this afternoon of winter was wholeheartedly welcome. despite all the blustering wind, I wanted to walk around in it all evening. only the older pug's protestations prevented this. Wesley hates these cold, cold days.

thankfully, our little layer of snow is still around (though as the Tuesday morning grey fades into the brightness of afternoon, I'm sure it will all melt away before long). thismorning the clouds to the north lengthened themselves into perfect ridges, like the tips of a heavenly mountain range. to the east the sky seemed to be auditioning for a role in a Bob Ross painting-- everything blended back into soft smoothness. 

the snow-dust and puffballs, for now, are plastered evenly around the west-facing sides of the tree trunks, draped over eaves and ledges and windowsills like thick frosting, and clumped in the leaves and needles of all the shrubbery. my inner child imagines all this fallen snow as lost and scattered fairy-pearls, broken free from their settings and necklace strings, blown frivolously into our world from some other enchanted dimension. while they're here-- before they melt back into magic-- we can shake them out of the trees, into the cold grey sky, onto our hatted heads. we can dent the clumps and layers of them with our footprints and fingerprints. most of all, we can inhale all the serene beauty that the whiteness has added to these days at end of the year.

maybe it will snow again this week. the weather channel gives it a 5% chance.

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.

telling the future

I haven't done this before, ever, in all my years of following the Tournament of Books. but after listening to this episode of So Many Damn Books last week, I thought I'd sit down and force myself to guess.

the left-hand side of the bracket seemed easier, somehow. I've read fewer of the books on that half. but most of them have rather striking reputations. 

Cloud Atlas was sure to win (and it did, as I predicted).

I hoped The Road would lose, mostly out of spite (though I am no fan of the Diaz novel either). Carolyn Kellogg's judgement review yesterday was most refreshing to read. the trickiness of separating art from artist and the ethos and value of each... it will always be tricky, I imagine.   

I am still only halfway through Toni Morrison's A Mercy, and I simply cannot seem to find my way into enjoying Wolf Hall, at least not in ebook form. there is so much beauty in the former. my reading brain keeps getting lost in it. I hope to finish it this weekend, and I suppose I could always amend my predictions once I do... but... given the undeniable popularity of Mantel's historical fiction, sustained even further by the third book's recent release, I expect Wolf Hall to make it at least to the second round. but I could be very wrong! 

as for the right-hand side... I've read all but one of these books by now. I have five more days to devour The Good Lord Bird before it faces The Orphan Master's Son. we'll see if I make it. if all else fails, there is a television series of it now. would it be cheating to watch an episode of that and call it good?

anyway, on this side of the bracket I went with the books I liked the most of each match. it's been a while since I read Station Eleven, but it was so lovely and possibly even more relevant and necessary to the world we have here in 2020 than the world we had in 2014. I think that will give it a good chance.

I left the center championship match slots empty. there is so little chance that my earlier bracket choices are accurate, it seemed far too wild a commitment to guess the final winners.

A Visit from the Goon Squad I've read too recently. the zombie system of this particular tournament is so unlike the usual system. I haven't read Freedom (though I remember enjoying Franzen in small doses, way back). All the Light We Cannot See was lovely also, but I don't think it has quite enough depth to overcome its old rival.

what is the outcome I'm hoping for?

do I want Station Eleven to win? 

yes.  

.

postscript
it feels like I ought to update my notes from my last Tournament of Books post, so here I go:

The Accidental, by Ali Smith
the climax here was somehow given the perfect shape and balance-- not too dramatic, not underwhelming, strange and unexpected, but not unbelievable. the ending itself felt a little stretched and more ambiguous than it needed to be, I thought. (my goodreads review here)

A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
I loved how this starts out. and then the third section came out of nowhere, shaking down everything I thought I'd be getting from the story. it unwinds from there like... like... I can't even figure out a good metaphor. the main 2011 tournament judge described it as scaffolding. in some ways, the structure echoes Cloud Atlas, but not.

The Sellout, Paul Beatty
I am still not sure that I am a person who is supposed to understand everything in this book. it's a lot. it's impressive in just how dense and rich all the writing is. but it's a lot. (my goodreads review here)

A Mercy, by Toni Morrison
I mentioned the beauty in this book already. it's a beauty that feels half-hidden. blurry, somehow. I must admit, my reading attention is currently split (quite unevenly) between this book and the audio version of Hank Green's new book, so that may be one reason I don't feel like I'm fully appreciating the former.

The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
the world of this book is painted so gorgeously vivid. the journey the main character takes is so long, so fraught, but somehow steady and full of optimism.

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
so many people like this book so much. I thought I'd like it too, at least as much as I like reading most books, but the sudden drastic time jump away from Thomas Cromwell's youth kinda lost me. hopefully I'll get back to it someday and give it another chance, when I don't have to read it on my phone.  

The Good Lord Bird, James McBride
still waiting to get past page 3 of this one, so far. I think I was feeling overloaded on narratives with slavery in them after The Sellout and Underground Railroad, so I had to set it down.

blend in

the last several days seem to have slowed down. August is only ten days old but those ten days have stretched themselves out so far, so languorous.

one week ago, we jaunted up to see this famously vast hole in the ground.

it was a nice little trip. not too far. definitely worth it.

what else?

some sewing (sloppy and frustrating), some reading (poetry and textbooks), plenty of games and naps and long walks with the puppy.

around Willow Lake the other day, we almost stepped on this little snake. it was so still and so camouflaged.

little snake (probably a glossy snake or maybe a gophersnake, according to my bits of googling), what can I learn from your sun-basking stillness?

hopefully when the semester starts I will continue making time to be outside in the sun. hopefully some of that time will be given to a little bit of sweet stillness, too.

both, and, oscilatio

halfway through the year.

and such a strange year, so far.

on Independence Day this weekend, we're gonna stay home. I don't think I'll make a cake but you never know when or if a cake-baking mood will strike. (the cake pictured is from two or three years back, I think.)

what we are planning on doing is watching the on-demand film release of Hamilton at least once. very excited for that.

it's the middle of the year. halfway. for another six weeks, I'm inbetween official full-time tenure-track jobs. I'm biding my time to see what this pandemic is really going to do to the university's plans for fall semester.

from the middle of Arizona, these precious summer days are ticking along, all of them similarly sunny and breezy and grand.

Richard Lanham (one-time academic idol of mine) writes in Economics of Attention about the concept of oscilatio. it's the way we can look at something and through that thing in turns. like the screen of your phone or laptop or television. if there are cracks and smudges on the glass, you can look at them--consider the glass and its material conditions on their own. or you can train your eyes to ignore the cracks as much as possible and look through them to whatever the light behind the screen is showing.

it's been a little too long since I read Lanham's book, so I remember the concept itself much more than I remember why it's so rhetorically important. the concept itself is so interesting though.

oscilatio reminds me of something I read even longer ago from C. S. Lewis, about what it's like to look at a beam of light vs. looking along it to see the things it touches. in his metaphor, standing in the light and seeing through that light is more valuable than standing outside the light and watching dustmites dance within the beam.

that depends, I imagine. there is beauty in both vantage points. dustmites are a simpler beauty than a garden landscape, and the cracked screen itself doesn't tell you as much as all the news and social media you can read through the screen. maybe all it tells you is that it's time to save up for a new phone.

it might be impossible to look at and through something at the same time. but that still doesn't mean you have to choose only one or the other forever.

oscilatio means the skill of shifting positions. recognizing the difference. having it both ways depending on what you're after.

right now it's halfway through the year. and sometimes it's good to take out your calendar and look at this set of moments from above. June gone, July unfurling in similar languor. six weeks left til I go back to work. other times, it's better to look through it or along it. let it engulf us like all this steady sunshine. what can the days and their cycles show me? time with myself, my love, my two silly pugs. time with books and crafts and food and creativity.

one of my flaws is a tendency to look at everything--time especially--as a scarcity. there's only so much of anything, and the everything I want to cram into my life is a glacier of potential that completely dwarfs the handful of moments I can hold in my brain at once. but that's only one way of looking at it. in another sense, time is a constant. even if I can't cram the everything into it, I still have plenty. life is a brilliant candy store of possibility. I want and need to stop focusing so much on the what ifs and might have beens.

this is the gorgeous, uncertain middle of the year. there is light and dark. screens and shadows and stories to look at and to look through. so it goes.

and here are a few other things that I am in the middle of right now--

- replaying Horizon Zero Dawn. it's one of the first videogames I've ever touched that feels like more than a game somehow--it's easier in this shiny, open-world design to get lost in exploration, combat, questing, and so on. I like it. the sequel looks very neat, too.

- reading the old science fiction novel Dune. I'm not sure what made me want to read it after having heard vague praise of it for so long. it's good though. very engaging and well-constructed.

- editing various projects on the side. some computer graphics analytics, some organizational leadership stuff, some orthodontics, some social work. editing is almost always fun.

- working thoughtfully through this workbook, slowly. it's not easy, and not enough, but it is important stuff. it feels important for me and for the world. it also led me to the author's podcast: Good Ancestor, which is quite lovely stuff.

generosity and gratitude

basically we have one week left in this quaint little Louisiana town.

no, we haven't managed to sit ourselves down to watch Steel Magnolias yet. should we still try? (part of me does want to.)

one week!

and there is so much to do. food to use up from the fridge. piles of things-we-don't-need-anymore to organize and donate somehow. fragile dishes and art and knickknacks to wrap and stuff into boxes.

if times were even a tiny bit more normal than they are now, we'd have a goodbye party. we'd schedule in plenty of time to visit one last time all the friends we've made here. we'd go out to that Mexican place one last time. have another end-of-semester karaoke thing. 

but times are not very normal. so instead of all that... what will we do?

I'll distantly and carefully turn in my office keys next Monday morning, distantly contrive to drop off  a few spare houseplants and some spare yarn at a few dear colleague's doorsteps, and perhaps write short goodbye notes to leave in everyone's mailboxes on campus. I'll assume, for now, that campus will return to something like normal eventually.

right now, there are thirteen days until grades are due for Spring 2020. not long after that, my contract with NSULA will officially end. the summer will start to uncurl and stretch its scaly paws, and I'll have three months to play and write and daydream before my next job starts in August. will those three months go by as slowly and weirdly as the last eight weeks have gone by?

right now, I am lucky. my contract with the new institution was signed a few weeks before all of this happened. we've been able to find a new apartment and afford all the headachey moving expenses, so far. I can do my job remotely, for as long as I have to, without too much trouble.

we are lucky, so far. 

my students? most of them are hanging in there, keeping up with things despite everything. this semester has been the opposite of ideal in about a thousand ways. it's been seven weeks since normal classes in normal classrooms. some learning opportunities have worked out okay and many others have not worked out very okay at all. but by now we've adjusted our earlier definitions of "okay."

through all this uncertain weirdness, I've tried to be as generous and patient and responsive with all the students as possible, even moreso than usual. I don't know yet how that generosity is going to finally and concretely translate into course grades next week. I hope to still see evidence that learning about professional writing has been attempted by all the students, whatever else is happening. I hope to read some thoughtful and thorough reflection from everyone before the end. learning is more important than grades.

despite all the important considerations reflected in this recent post and this less-recent post, I'm not sure if all my students will pass or not. I'm not sure how far my responsibility to be generous right now extends in relationship to students' responsibilities both pre- and post-pandemic. maybe all of these things need their definitions adjusted, too.

I haven't read Kathleen Fitzpatrick's (who keeps a very nice blog) new book Generous Thinking yet, but I want to. the whole idea-- generosity, open collaborations, re-imagining our institutions so that they serve more people more equitably-- feels so lovely.

despite the loveliness, I can't help but ask questions. who can afford to be generous and in what ways? what are the little hidden costs of personal generosity? it seems so cynical to ask such things.

in terms of my students, I can definitely afford to be outrageously generous about their grades. I hope the students and their brains can afford it too.

in terms of everything else, I can probably afford more than I think I can.

right now, there's just enough time to ponder everything I'll be leaving behind next week. there's time to feel a few puddles of regret and a whole mountain range of gratitude. we haven't been here long, but friends and colleagues and students and neighbors have been very generous to us. lucky. grateful. and hopefully, in my own ways, just as generous.

shiny emerald wisps of inspiration

sometimes, though not so much lately, I feel like I am fighting inspiration off with a stick--making great efforts to do one thing at a time and actually finish a project before yet another wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-I-also... comes along to take me in some new direction.

inspiration, for me at least, isn't always the most useful thing. it can be distracting. or infuriating, the way it tantalizes me. I tend to be plagued with flighty, wispy kinds of inspiration. the kinds that hover just out of reach, just beyond practical-possible priority.

an hour or so ago I read this piece about teaching abroad. about the prospect of "relocating to a continent renowned for civil unrest, poverty, and disease-- but also for untarnished landscapes, wildlife, many cultures, and a complex history." high daydream potential, this sort of thing.

and yes, some of the descriptions in this piece are on the sweeping, sensationalish side. but you can at least see what I mean about the distance stretched out between me and such prospects. this inspiring stuff always seems to float just six inches or so higher than my hands seem to reach-- things to daydream about but not things I could actually do-- not yet anyway. and perhaps that's the way daydreaming is supposed to work. before you can reach a thing with your hands, you can settle for reaching it with your brain. imagining it. a first step, of sorts.

on Monday I attended a very nice talk by a former professor of mine: Dr. Cheryl Ball. she taught my professional writing capstone course ten whole years ago. since that far-away semester, she has worked at three other institutions and done many more boundary-pushing academic things. she taught and researched in Norway on a Fulbright scholarship. she is developing this fancy-looking revolutionary publishing system.

sometimes inspiration starts out as envy.

or maybe they are secretly long-lost twins, envy and inspiration. yeah.

anyway. the talk on Monday was about digital humanities + digital publishing and the paths Dr. Ball has wandered in getting to where she is now. now she is scholaring in an emerging field she calls publishing studies, a place full of multimodal and digital work, editing, technology, infrastructure, and lots of other finicky processes that have to do with making things public.

she began the talk with childhood tales featuring inspirational words like vision and initiative. and she ended with this slide, of which I took a crooked and slightly fuzzy photograph:

there are, I saw on facebook earlier, several much better photos of Dr. Ball's visit to Indiana in an album here.

her concluding list of lessons learned isn't earth-shatteringly inspirational in general, but in this specific sub-section of academia it counts. for me, swimming in semi-aimless circles in the middle of my PhD, it very much counts. so I have typed these points out again for ease-of-reading and for the thought-provoking reminders they might be to my current and future overly-inspired but somewhat lost, less-motivated self.

publishing studies has taught me [Dr. Cheryl Ball]...
- editing praxis for media-based texts
- the arbitrariness of style guides
- the ethics of access/ibility and preservation
- the importance of building communities and infrastructure
- the importance of global communication practices
- the necessity of teaching writing in use-contexts
- the necessity of teaching multimodal communication
- that vocational training isn't a dirty word for liberal arts.

there were examples and stories referenced at each of these points, but stories and examples are not as easy to transcribe into a neat list. I will have to trust my memory to weave the stories from her life into and alongside stories from my own.

the paths I'm wandering aren't the same. ten whole years is a long time and lots of things are different in the world. the wouldn't-it-be-nice-ifs that I follow around (or don't) will be unique to my brain and my habits.

at the moment, one of the wouldn't-it-be-nice-ifs that I have wrapped my fingers around is reading audiobook snippets for LibriVox. I have an official page in their catalogue as a reader, even. I've only just started. the project is wide and ambitious. it's not the exact same kind of digital publishing Dr. Ball presented, but it is a digital publishing project nonetheless, and a fascinating one. we'll see what it teaches me.

spring semester, 2016

this, if all goes according to the sketchy plans I have sketched in collaboration with the English department and my advisor, will be my last semester of coursework. the last time I sit in a classroom as a graduate student.

it feels like a very different semester already. an edge. a transition.

the season and the weather seem to echo this. or at least that is the way I am going to write about it all.

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. expanses of roads and curb and green up the hill peek out between branches. it's the same neighborhood. but different. a few days ago it was all white and grey, snow and shadow. today it's still grey, but more slick and shine, a little warmer, and soggy.

this semester feels different too, barer than others have been and yo-yo-ing in its own way. class on Mondays, teaching on Tuesdays, alternate thusly for the rest of the week. research meetings and office hours, writing time, scraps of reading, planning, list-making.

English 631 World Englishes, with Dr. Margie Berns
this is my linguistics requirement. it's been a long time since I took a class that met more than once or twice a week. World Englishes is a one-hour thrice-weekly seminar. short, but interesting. and full of students from other programs, too. it should be pretty chill and relatively basic, for my last bit of coursework ever. I am already pondering project ideas. various Englishes as used in online volunteer communities... or various Englishes as they are negotiated/tolerated in social media somehow.

English 699 Research Hours, with Dr. Patricia Sullivan
not a class, really, but a placeholder to make the registrar's office happy. the credits I earn here are up to me to direct. this is time to plan the rest of my graduate career and start writing a prospectus. what will it all be about? to help me figure that out, I'm revisiting some of my previous projects and pondering the feedback professors have given me. I feel like I'm off to a slow start, but maybe that's okay. everyone says not to compare yourself to your colleagues. so I won't. some of them have their dissertation projects outlined and their committees chosen already. I do not. but I will, eventually.

English 421 Technical Writing
I get to teach a new professional writing class this semester. my students seem pretty cool so far. they have plenty of experience to share and our discussion yesterday went pretty well. texting vs email vs. facebook, and how you figure out the best way to communicate (or not) using all these options.

I look forward to figuring out the rhythms of the next sixteen weeks. so many kinds of work-- teaching, researching, scholaring. there will be grading and analyzing and writing and reading. I need to think about making a reading list for myself. put deadlines on calendars. two more years isn't that long.

lists and dreams

eight days and a bit until a new year.

I have dozens and dozens of things to blog about. I have photos all lined up from my Blue Apron adventures (Patti has begun blogging about that already and I am way behind on my side). I have reflections on my final fall semester of coursework, and in-progress thoughts on winter break projects, and daydreams about future things. I have books I could review and places I could muse about.

when I have too many things to blog about, but haven't blogged in too long, and cannot decide where to start, it seems the best thing to do is set the vague list aside and throw something random together. photos usually work pretty well.

so. let us take a whirlwind snapshot tour of this amelia girl's past few months. summer feels both like yesterday and an entirely different country. I saw some new places. Kentucky in the spring. Michigan in May. New Orleans in June. Wisconsin in August. New England for October. 

ponds and gardens. lakes and boats.

we waded in Walden Pond. I collected a few acorns.

I saw some old places too. Indiana trails and creeks. city blocks and tucked-away parks.


and I went home for a wedding in September. met some new nieces and nephews.

my crazy brother's wedding day was perhaps the most windy day I have ever lived to see.

and I'm home again now, reshuffling and unwinding after a crazy semester, breathing in and stretching out before the next one begins.

there is snow. and chocolate. music and family.

I'll blog more about all the other stuff later. 

twentyfour: numbers, calories, feelings

let it be known that I am having a giant, imaginary shouting match with Apple and all their employees right now.

also let it be known that there are one thousand posts sitting around behind the scenes of this blog. see there in that right-hand column? one thousand. eighteen of those are drafts (including this one). a lovely palendromical 303 of them are mere sunday-scribbles posts. 109 are tagged with the label 'random'.

so after this, I will have seventeen more posts (of which six will appear within the next week) to think up some fabulous celebratory thing to write here for the one thousandth actual published post. does my blog audience have any suggestions for me? should I hold some silly contest or scavenger hunt or game? hmm.

while I ponder, and while I mourn the death of this melodramatic semester and this fickle April and--most stressfully and traumatically of all--my dear old nameless macbook, I'm going to talk about food.

yesterday, I made chicken and rice. I think (not counting the recent occasion of Easter) this was the first time I've cooked chicken since Thanksgiving or something.

usually it's canned cream-of-mushroom soup you do this with. I didn't have any, so I made do with almond milk and actual mushrooms and random spices. turned out gorgeously, if I do say so myself.


a few weeks ago, inspired by Ms. MacKenzie Smith of the grilled cheese social blog, I made pear/gruyere grilled cheese.

these are awful photographs, with too much yellow light in them, but nevertheless, they are evidence of grilled-cheese-bliss on a plate.


I also baked my genius brother's famous savage chocolate-chip cookies the other night. I have eaten way too many of them today. so? aren't Fridays meant to be days that you eat hardly anything besides exceptionally awesome chocolate-chip cookies? good. I thought so.

other planned baking adventures for the near future include more fresh bread, cream cheese wontons, and pie crust. comfort food. yeah.

twelve: slip step

I have decisions to make about next fall. about the next phase. about where this academic funnel is really going to take me.

they feel like crushingly heavy decisions. (I wrote 'are' first. and then revised. 'feel like' is more true. ...unless there really isn't a difference? hm.)

somehow they will get made though. and they might be wrong decisions or they might be unwise decisions and I will most likely end up missing out on something or other...

no matter what gets decided, whether I choose this or that or try to juggle both somehow, or whether I flip a coin or throw a dart or take your advice, there will be some other thing that could have been. inaccessible alternate realities and all their teasing, rose-tinted fanciness.

but that's how everything seems to work. in pieces, in slices, where you can't see the other side and there is no way to rewind or restart.

eight: greenifying

there are puddles everywhere. as I got ready for the day thismorning, thunder was thunking and crashing around above everything, like boxes falling over in some celestial attic. it is the first real sky-rending lightning-and-thunder storm we've had this season, I think. before now it's only been drizzly and gentle. but today is thoroughly wet. only a little pale light from a gap along the western sky made it through the downpour.

it's stopped raining now, though the clouds are still piled up in layers. we'll have plenty of sun once summer arrives. for now, these spring drizzles can continue as long as they like. I love them.

microscopic ice palaces

last Tuesday, my local world was made of tundra. the photo here isn't as striking as all that delicate golden foliage was in real life last week. you'll have to imagine the way it managed to shine and glint even in the grey, flat light of wintertime noon.

six days later, a change of the clocks, a turn of the page in my calendar-book, and a good two-thirds of all that tundra has disappeared. the sound and the sparkle of wet, melted ice remind me a little bit of this April day five years ago.

but April has not arrived for us. there are not diamonds dripping from the trees--not yet. the semi-cruel dreariness of wintertime is only barely beginning to thin.

and I have been thinking about slush.

a not-solid, not-liquid, half-melted stuff, slush. sometimes cohesive enough to walk upon, other times not. sometimes accepting of your footprints, other times not.

the indeterminate, transitional nature of slush. of course this is a thought my brain would enjoy swirling around with. I'll blame Postmodernism class (not that I need anyone or anything to blame).

sometimes my brain gets gently hooked by the tiniest, strangest, half-invisible ideas. the word you used there--'engaged'--does it imply more purposefulness than makes sense to imply in this situation?

or that word we always tend to use here--'about'--what kind of connection does it really invoke, and is that connection always the same in all the alwayses where we use it? what if it isn't? what if this preposition isn't all the things we secretly want it to be?

or this word--'melt'--that I want to use as a verb in seventeen different ways right now.

melt. I am thinking about slush, melting. but the slush is not only melting--it has been melting, it was in the middle of melting, and it is unfinished with melting.

yeah. melting. a process. a thing happening to the slush. but this doesn't seem good enough. it's like there is too much between-ness to fit in-between the two extremes of unmelted snow and pure water. 'melting' is too easy a word for this. I want more words. I want words for all the gradual states of change: the warming, softening, glittering, thawing, re-crystalizing, crumbling, smushing, cracking, re-freezing, dripping, hollowing, breaking, re-thawing, slurping, sloughing, hollowing, sluicing, slipping, and slushing of slush. do the eskimos have nouns for all those moments? hm?

the world we are creating

if there are things you love on the internet, save copies of them. this is advice that Dr. Sullivan is alway giving us with respect to our wandering research. if you even sort of think you might want to use it someday for an object lesson, class project, seminar paper, conference illustration, or article-fodder, download the thing. as endless and un-erasable as the internet seems most days, the stuff of it doesn't always stay there. you cannot trust the cloud.

(whether you can trust the integrity and/or longevity of your harddrive to any significantly greater extent is a separate though not unrelated question. all is temporary, and the scales of temporariness are complicated.)

if there are people you love on the internet, I don't know what to tell you. so far, there's no way to download people. that's probably a good thing.

early thismorning I saw people linking to a new post by Kathy Sierra. it is a long post, personal, a tad meandering, but it seems everso soul-questioningly, heart-wrenchingly important.

read it. go on. I've linked to it twice now, redundantly, asking you to read this long meandering story even if you have not been a Kathy Sierra fangirl since at least 2005, and even if you have no clue who this Andrew Auernheimer fellow (hm... he blogs on livejournal. how old-fashioned...) might think he is, and even if you, like me, find life much more effective without worrying very much about the hopeless-seeming, headache-inducing state of the universe.

Sierra's post might not be there very long. I have made a copy of it, in case the original disappears. it's also on Wired, for the moment. (if Wired and Dropbox disappear, who knows what we shall do).

two-thirds in, Sierra shifts into saying we. "This is the world we have created."

not only does that make us sound so implicated, so conspiratorially close to culpable... it also makes us sound so finished. so final. we've hit send. we've checked enough boxes. the world has been published. editing is over and this is the product we're stuck with.

not so. please, not so. I'd rather say "this is the world we are creating."

the we is still there. I don't see any ways of getting around that we, though parts of me are tempted to pick we apart and subdivide it into some sort of graph with axes like experience, influence, responsibility, investment, and such.

all the other words could stand to be picked at too. which exact this? creating how?

in one of those neat serendipitous internet moments, the following video was posted today. Mr. Rugnetta says a few things on cultural (re)production that answer that last question. the how is discourse. pens, not swords. writing and media, not sticks or stones or construction equipment. it's actions too, of course, but what we say about how we act, and how we storify things that happen = way incredibly powerful. Sierra's story similarly notes that stories with enough inertia and spin can permanently warp one's perspective. even the most disturbingly inaccurate stories, like the kind you might hear about scaly, murderous llamas, can stick in your head and tint everything you see. all the Pratchett you've ever read will say the same thing--narrativium is not to be trifled with.

I wonder sometimes if the stories we tell about the stories we tell carve ruts as deep or as damaging. those are thoughts for future blogposts, I think.

as long as I'm being redundant today, I'm going to include another video--yes, more of this silly Rugnetta fellow and his ponderings. it's relevant, I promise. and the followup comments/responses over here are also enlightening and chewy. (my brain has been particularly hung up over the 8:40 mark. it's a part of me that's been trained to meekly accept and swallow all things as somehow divinely-permitted-side-effects-of-this-fallen-mortal-experience-which-will-ultimately-all-work-together-for-my-everlasting-good that wants to say, "yeah, shrug off those death threats, everything will be fine." what does that mean? who does that make me? am I supposed to squash this attitude? or unravel it away? maybe all I can do is wait to see how I actual feel when or if death threats are ever made in my direction, and keep my mouth shut about the concept until then.)

anyway. this whole situation--trolls, women, internet, life--is more than a story. we can uses stories and conversations and videos and blogs to reach out for little parts of it, and build what we see into some sensible structure, with sections and headings and terms lined up for convenient deconstruction. but labels make me squirm, generally. what we mean by troll and or victim obviously isn't easy. it's not even always useful. the definitional blurriness between criticism/harassment is another thing that might deserve plenty of more discussion. my own experiences of such things aren't the same as anyone else's. that's why we need to tell the stories, after all. that's why we invented ways of sharing all the crazy insides of our heads.

maybe all this talking and thinking will help. somehow.

lunch date with Dublin

on Tuesday last, I landed in Ireland at something like half eight in the morning (also known as half three in the wee hours of what could almost still count as Monday five timezones back). I'd only slept a little on the plane, but since my flight from Dublin to Paris did not leave until six o'clock that evening, I had nine hours for adventuring. plenty of time.

friendly Irish airport staff pointed me toward the city, handed me maps and bus routes, and made recommendations. I sat sleepily on the top level of the bus, relishing so much green, wondering what I would find exploring Dublin.

first I walked around Trinity College.

there were beautiful, chained off grassy spaces and whimsically fat trees. I wanted to climb them, but: fences.

I saw this sign propped up against a wall, and big green ribbons tied around the columns of buildings. I guess it was green week, though I don't know what that means here. green as in College Green? green as in sustainable and eco-friendly? green as in Irish and St. Patrick and luck? not sure.

doesn't that look like the most glorious tree for climbing? in a few months, when (or is it more like if at this point?) summer returns to Indiana I will designate a 'tree climbing week' for myself.

I felt both like a student (like any other student) and not like a student. I am, of course, endlessly a student. an endless student. but I am not a student at Trinity College. that makes perhaps more difference than it seems to.

then I got hungry and made my way to the Temple Bar district for food. I peered at menus outside cafe after cafe until this one on Essex Street caught my imagination. Brick Alley Cafe in dark shabby slab serifs over the door, window-menus boasting dozens and dozens of hot chocolate varieties, a long narrow bar above which stood a really neat clock, tables covered with local indie-looking zines and cards and such--I should've stayed there all day reading the Aristotle I'm supposed to be reading.

this is the lovely white chocolate with marshmallow the shy-seeming barista served me. not pictured: an even-more-delicious-cuz-I-was-so-hungry-by-then tomato and cheese ciabatta sandwich.

I did not sit all day in the cafe reading Aristotle. I walked across and along and around the River Liffey, people watching and looking into shops every once in a while. I bought a few postcards.

I took lots of photographs.

I browsed a few awesome bookshops, considered buying a magnet with Oscar Wilde's quote "Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong" on it, decided against that idea, and then had a berry scone with butter on it while I wandered back to the bus stop on Dame Street.

I was no less sleepy on the top of this double decker bus. the sun was setting out there behind the reflected bus-innards. it kept setting as I skipped through short security lines to wait by the windows for our gate to open, and it kept setting as I found my window seat, and it kept setting as we took off for Paris.

I'll have to write about Paris some other time.