Love Needed

Quiet Friend (for whom Politica recently organized the room renovation) is in hospital tonight, having been medevaced home from Mississippi last night. He and Mississippi Friend had gone back to their hometown for Christmas, and what had appeared to be some discomfort from a pre-bone-marrow-transplant-spinal-tap blossomed into increasingly painful and complex symptoms. So they ended up on a private plane back to the university hospital here.

Things don't look good--although QF has had some moments of lucidity, and may somehow find the strength to fight back whatever is going wrong, whatever that may be, as doctors have not yet figured out what might actually be causing the current crop of problems. But still, they don't look good, and Mississipi Friend is awash in hopes and feelings. Quiet Friend has been through a lot, medically, in the past seven years, and between the cancers he seems to be prone to, and the cumulative effects of chemo over time, he may simply be worn out. For all he's gone through, this is the first I've seen him looking truly sick. Tired before, fiercely scarred after the brain tumor, but never sick. He looks far away sick, like he's just withdrawn into his body which is busy trying to do what it can.

Politica spent the night at the hospital with him, so that Mississippi Friend could get some sleep. Friends took Curious Girl to a New Year's Eve party so I could slip down to the hospital and sit with them a while. Mississippi Friend is a wonderful friend, and there were a small group of us at the hospital, and more people are coming in from out of town tomorrow. Politica is planning to go a-sabbaticalling on Friday, to somewhere far away for a while. She's wrung out, not sure how she can leave someone who's close as family to us, knowing she has to be doing things with other people in a faraway place next Monday. Mississippi Friend is tired, full of emotions, fears, hopes, grief. She still gets indignant about the fact that the universe just isn't fair. It should be fair, she thinks. It's supposed to be. But it's so clearly not.

We could use some more love in the universe. So could you toss some out for us? I'll collect it for my friends, and share it with all of you.

Season's Greetings

We've arrived at part one of our trip, and had an amazing dinner with Graduate School Friends (one of whom grew up in South Texas, hence the menu), and opened a bottle of wine Politica and I had brought back from South Australia six years ago. It aged well, and GSFs were the perfect people to share it with. Politica's dad joined us for dinner (although he ate swedish meatballs rather than tamales), and CG collected clothing from GSFs' daughter, including a fancy blue dressup dress. I love the comfort of old friendships, and I love watching our kids play together. When CG was falling asleep, she rolled over and said, "I wasn't even shy at the beginning tonight. Because, I thought, I remember this place." I'm so glad we have good friends living near here--it makes our visits to Politica's dad feel much more homey than they might otherwise.

So life is good. (Although Politica, who just returned from her father's, where she was wrapping gifts, observes that Christmas is easier when you're a kid.) I finished CG's stocking, and it's by the fireplace in our hotel room in all its pink, purple, yellow, and rose glory. What's in it? A Miss Piggy journal, some glittery kid makeup, some lotion from my last hotel stay in a really cool shaped bottle, a clementine. I hope she likes it.

Merry Christmas to those of you celebrating tomorrow.

Get Your Nerd On

Thank you, thank you, thank you for all the comments on the previous post--I went to bed last night feeling validated, with a better understanding of just why this was all so hard to shake off. Nice phrase, Arwen, about conversations "loaded with history."

We fly out today and will have a wonderful time with Graduate School Friends and Politica's father. The assisted living facility is nice--institutional nice, but nice--and visits with Dad and GSF just revolve around everyone having a good time. And once we're at my sister's, we'll have a good time, too. The cousin excitement will be soothing for all the adults, I'm sure.

Since the tone around here is not usually so gloomy as those last few posts, I thought I'd leave you with some nerdy pleasures for the end of 2008:

• Free Rice, where you can play with words and help fund UN hunger relief efforts
• Kingmaker, where you can make predictions about the US presidential elections (primary/caucus results, campaign strategies, and even join pools if you're so inclined). Brought to you by the makers of Fantasy Congress. Woman of Many Talents and I had a great time going through some of Kingmaker the other day.

So even in the midst of all the family drama yesterday, I had some nerdy fun, and I certainly woke up in a more positive frame of mind thanks to your comments here, and to Politica's and WOMT's talk in real time. Wrapping up the year in the company of such friends, in and out of the computer, is a real gift.

Thank you all. And happy end-of-December to all of you.

Holidays for the Inner Child

So I've been back in touch with my inner child lately, which is to say I'm spending too much time feeling too sensitive about things that really shouldn't be that big a deal. I realize that there are far bigger actual problems in the world, and I have the emotional wherewithal to rise about all this. But still. It's not always so easy.

I wrote a bit about our Thanksgiving. I realized, later, that part of my problem that weekend was that I was doing some very particular things that I wanted my parents' approval and endorsement for, and they weren't giving it. Last winter, when my parents were moving out of their New York apartment, I took a box of old family photos and offered to put them into an album, telling my mother it would be a kind of album like I made from our adoption travels (a scrapbook format, with things pasted to the page, all archival-quality materials). I never got around to making the album, and last spring when we went to Florida, I took the photos, and my mom and I organized them by topics and family groups, and she identified people for me. I still didn't have time to do the album, but I thought over Thanksgiving, we'd have time to sit together and put the pages together, and I planned to give Mom some journalling boxes so she could write captions for the photos. It wouldn't be fancy, but it would get everything in a book.

When we sat down to do the album, though, my Dad walked over and said, "but what if you wnat to take the pictures out? Or give some to Other Daughter?" So they decided no, they didn't want the album. Which is fine, but it also means they weren't listening when I had offered to make the album, and it also means I had acquired a bunch of album supplies I didn't need. And my inner child heard all this as "You don't matter." Which I realize is all the product of my inner child's insecurity schtick which my inner child has processed in therapy and I thought had gotten over. But apparently not.

So I went to a photo store and got drop-in archival photo sleeves and a binder to put them in, and we put the photos in pages, with some paper for writing captions, and Mom was happy. Then she wanted to pay me for the materials. Which my inner child also perceived as a huge slight, because I had wanted the picture-organizing to be a gift for them. I tried to say, no, no, it's a gift, but they insisted.

In the meantime, my mother was trying to tell me six ways from Sunday how much she enjoyed all the food I had cooked over the weekend--which is really a pretty big deal as my parents are not vegetarians, and are pretty suspicious of vegetarian cooking. All those compliments didn't really make a big impression, because my inner child was moaning so much about the failure of the photo project.

So really, my mother and I were talking at cross purposes: I am sure that she meant her food compliments to convey her appreciation for all we did to organize the Thanksgiving weekend. I am also sure she has no idea what the photo-organizing project meant to me. And I don't know why I can't, having come to this analysis, just take in the compliments for what she intended and leave the photos behind.

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I have been on the phone with my sister several times today. We're going to her house the day after Christmas, for the Granola family Christmas celebration. Curious Girl, who in years past has been pretty darn terrified of Santa, has this year started to explore a little bit of Santa enthusiasm (she is scared of real Santas dressed up but has been having hysterical conversations with rooftop Santas we've seen around the neighborhood). We've always been rather reserved about the Santa mythology (a topic Dani has had some interesting thoughts about lately), in part because neither Politica nor I are really comfortable with actively building up a story I know to be false (most of our pretend games are driven by CG's imagination, but the Santa story is one we would need to feed to her), in part because we're not celebrating Christmas as a religious holiday even though we do love our Norsk Jul with Politica's father and my family-of-origin celebrates Christmas religiously; in part because we are always on the road. We are the People who Travel to the rest of the family.

But, Santa brings presents for my nieces , and last year, when we were there on Christmas morning, we had a Santa present for CG, too. (I think the year before, I hadn't thought about this at all, and my sister had a spare Santa present for CG. So last year, we organized for Santa, and this year, we had planned to ship a present to my sister's for CG). All fine. Except that UPS isn't cooperating. Our gifts for Politica's dad have arrived, but not our package to my sister's.

So why not just have Santa arrive at Politica's father's, you may be wondering? Well, because CG, in her Santa narratives this year, has been saying to anyone and everyone, "Santa is coming to my cousin's house." And we've just been nodding in agreement. It was a lovely narrative--we got to hitch onto my sister's family's rather extensive Santa mythology without having to do much ourselves to support it. But UPS isn't going to arrive until 12/27, we discovered today. So I suggested that Santa could leave a note saying he'd swing back around on the 27th for CG (we can reallocate some gifts and have a present that was going to be from Politica's dad come from Santa instead, so we'll have it with us when we arrive.) No, my sister says, that won't fit with where her kids think Santa will be on the 27th (at the North Pole). Just have Santa come at Politica's dad's, she says.

Politica and I confer. We like sticking to the CG-generated narrative about Santa coming to the cousins. So I call back. We'll have Santa deliver the present at my parents' house, which is where we'll actually be staying. No, that won't do, because my sister and her kids will be over at my parents' before we arrive, and they will know there is no Santa gift there. So that won't do. Just have Santa come at Politica's dad's, she says again.

My sister also says, "you sound upset at me," and I lie and say I'm not. She presses me, and I continue to lie. This is my deal with my family--I do not like to show my emotions in front of them because I am afraid that they will ignore them. And my sister's continuous suggestions about how we can manage Santa anywhere but near her house are certainly feeding that fear. I had called her a few weeks ago, actually, to talk about Christmas stockings. I'm knitting one for CG now. She's never had one, although my nieces, sister, and brother-in-law all have stockings I knit for them. Last year, CG was in tears on Christmas day because her cousins had a couple of little matching items--hairbows, I think--that had come in their stockings, and she wanted one, too. She didn't really care about the stockings, she just wanted to match her cousins. So I asked my sister if she could pick up three of anything she was getting two of for her girls. I wasn't asking her to fill the stocking, just enable a little matching, I told her. She was surprised. "I thought you'd do the stockings at Politica's dad's," she said. Politica points out now that this was a big hint that she didn't really want our Christmas stuff at her house. We had an awkward conversation that night, and I called her the next day to say not to worry, we'd do the stocking on our own time.

At the moment, Politica and I are both livid. I guess we'll have Santa's gift arrive on Christmas morning, which has the advantage of giving us one more thing to do with Politica's dad in the assisted living facility that morning. There's not going to be a lot of hoopla--our traditional Norsk Jul isn't really possible given that we don't have a kitchen. We're going for Christmas Eve dinner to Graduate School Friends' house, which will be wonderful, joining them for their tradition, which is tamales. Christmas Day we'll be eating at the assisted living facility, and we won't really be able to make the traditional rice pudding (which Politica doesn't like, anyway). So having a stocking and a morning gift will make a little more hoopla, and that will be nice with Politica's dad.

But still, I'm livid. Yes, my sister says, if we had ordered the gift a week earlier it would have been there. Yes, if we had called my sister a week earlier she would have picked something up for us (although my efforts at early coordination didn't really pay off on the stocking). But when you are the People Who Travel, it is hard to craft holiday traditions, and I would think that the People Who Don't Travel would cut us a little slack and help manipulate the narratives to make our lives a little easier. Instead, my sister has all kinds of ideas about how we can change the story we've been telling Curious Girl so that she doesn't have to change a darn thing in her own narrative.

And this bugs me. I know I should be able to let it go. But it's not fading easily. And I wish my inner child weren't so up in arms about this. I've had enough therapy to see the patterns, to understand why all this happens. I don't understand why it's suddenly so hard to react in a more healthy fashion.

Bah, humbug.

But hugs to anyone who's reading my rant: my inner child is happy for supportive readers!

Looking for the happy

It has been a loooooonnnnnngggggg week in my office at the end of a reasonably long-feeling semester. Yesterday, for the first time since being department chair, and I hope it will be the last, I came home from work feeling like I wanted to burst into tears. (So perhaps the fact that Curious Girl has been bursting into tears at the drop of a hat lately is simply a reflection of my vibe? maybe a contributing factor.)

So I went blog surfing today looking for the happy. And I found some in posts like those, posts that made me smile.

I also found a pay-it-forward project, at Rhymes with Javelin (and Niobe's), a meme that involves bloggers sending happy (in this case, hand-made) gifts out into the world. If you participate as a receiver, you have to make the same offer on your blog, too. Here's the scoop:

I will send a handmade gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment on my blog requesting to join this Pay It Forward exchange. I don’t know what that gift will be and you may not receive it tomorrow or next week, but you will receive it within 365 days, that is my promise! The only thing you have to do in return is pay it forward by making the same promise on your blog.

What do you have to do?
1. Respond here and give your email address so that I can contact you for your address.
2. Place this on your own blog and also send the first 3 people that respond something.

So sign up, and perhaps on a day when you're looking for the happy, the happy will arrive in your mailbox. Well, not the happy, but a happy, anyway.

And if you're looking for other ways to spread the happy, Magpie has a wonderful post today about 13 ways to use charitable giving (or involvement) to make a difference, and the Clutter Museum has had two posts this week about good causes. To Magpie's list, some other interesting charities I've heard of in presentations lately are Agape International (a Christian organization working with orphanages for HIV+ children and children orphaned due to AIDS in India); this wonderful school in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria and another organization helping children in that same area; and a school for children affected by HIV/AIDS in Uganda. I didn't post for World AIDS day, but it's getting on that time of year when the anniversary of my uncle's death rolls around. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria, and he died of AIDS-related complications four years ago. In between, he had a big impact on me--the first relative to really treat me like a grown-up. I miss him.

So it's a good time of year to spread the happy. I could use it, and I bet you could, too.

Professor Ms. Manners

A friend wrote to me today, wondering what to say to a friend and colleague who's been denied tenure. Any suggestions from out there in reader land?

My own experiences with a friend denied tenure were wrapped up in some awful personal and campus politics, so much of our conversations around that involved venting and analyzing the rather idiosyncratic and personal factors that led to the situation. My friend was so angry that the anger steered a lot of the conversations.

In the friend-of-friend's case, I don't know anything about the background. But I can imagine that this general scenario is the kind in which many people don't know what to say, so they don't say anything, and they avoid the person, which could well make the person feel even worse. So what to do?

When New Kid on the Hallway didn't have her contract renewed last spring (click back to the April 2007 archives to see a set of posts about that, and here's the first long discussion of it), there was an impressive array of comments supporting her in all kinds of ways. Her most recent post, in fact, discusses what she's thinking about her future career options; it's clear that her response to the non-renewal has been to stop and consider what she wants to do with her talents and interests (not to mention moving, necessitating a new pseudonym for Long Distance Husband). That's the attitude at a moment like this, I think, to try to remember that life goes on--in or out of academia--and there are options to consider.

But still, what to say, in the moment? In the face of any kind of loss or sudden bad news, it's wise to let the friend take a bit of a lead: does s/he want to discuss it? avoid it? dwell on the sadness? anger? At the same time, the friend probably doesn't know what s/he needs, either. So bringing over dinner, or movie tickets, or inviting the friend over for lunch or out for a walk or whatever seems good. Dropping a note to say, "I'm thinking of you," or bringing by flowers. Gestures that let the person know you notice them, that they've not gone invisible, that you're trying to make their day a little brighter.

What to avoid, I think, is pushing to solutions when the person isn't ready for that. In any kind of crisis, we need to be sensitive to when someone wants a listening ear, when they want some help with strategy, when they want additional ways to look at things, when they want validation for their analysis or reactions. If the friend really wants someone to say "Ah! those b@st@rds! " and instead gets detailed advice about how to work the grievance procedure, frustration will ensue.

I remember a Tenured Radical comment at New Kid's last spring that brought me up short: as I recall, there were a number of comments about NK's non-reappointment that were focused on could she appeal, how awful it was, what should she do next, and TR said, "whoa! let's think outside the box: what do you want to do now?" (I can't find the post and comments to link to, so perhaps my memories playing tricks on me. But this seems like a TR kind of comment to me, and I can't imagine she'd be distressed to find it attributed to her.) So in the long run, I think the friend, and friend-of-friend, need to find ways to use the tenure denial as an opportunity to figure out what is the right next step. There are plenty of prominent academics who didn't get tenure and whose careers have flourished. And there are ways to take skills from academia and use them elswhere. (As college class newsletter, I'm amazed at the jobs people have that I never new existed.)

So those are some of my thoughts. Yours?

The Lost Glove is Happy. Poetry Friday is early this week.

By Nuala Archer, from The Hour of Pan/Ama (Salmon Poetry, 1992). This wonderful poem arrived in my mailbox thanks to their poem of the week program. Special good wishes for anyone reading who's losing gloves, and who shares my fondness for Lubbock

Is it in the terminal I left
the brown, rabbit-fur-lined gloves
made in Taiwan? Gloves
I've worn in Ireland.
Gloves that kept my fingers
warm walking the bitter cold
coastline of Bull Island
with Howth and her necklace
of lights in the background.
Gloves lost now between Stillwater,

Oklahoma and Lubbock,Texas
on the way to see my mother
Come, she said, I'm in
the midst of desolation. Come.
Take Southwest Airlines, past
Love Field. I'll be waiting
for you. I'll be waiting.
And in the mall, when I got
to Lubbock, arrived to embrace
my mother in desolation, she had
me strip, try on outfit
after outfit-sweaters, trousers,
skirts, shirts, shorts, slips
and blouses-to see like
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
how does your garden, my garden,
grow? She in her mid-fifties
and I at the cliff-edge of
twenty-nine. My mother had me
fly to Lubbock and on the way

I lost my rabbit-fur-

lined gloves. When I got
there, when I arrived, when
I reached desolation, my mother
alone, in the middle of crazy

cottonfields, my mother in

desolation, I reached her,
I travelled to her,
to desolation, and in desolation
we were as lost as any
two mismatched gloves and

for a few moments we relaxed, lost
and strangely happy,
in the Lubbock Mall, without

labels stripped to our bones.

Sometimes, You Get What You Need

Recently overheard chez Granola:

Curious Girl: "I don't want to go to school tomorrow because I'm sick, and New Classmate Who Doesn't Speak a Lot of English Yet will want to kiss me becuase she always kisses me, and I don't want to make her sick. Teacher will say "no, no" but New Classmate won't understand."

Politica: "Well, if you're sick, don't breathe on me because I don't want to get sick."

Curious Girl: "But Mama will take care of us!"

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Curious Girl, walking down the hall, singing: "You can't always get what you want. You can't always get what you need. But if you try sometime you can't always get what you want. This is so catchy! It's catchy!"

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It's the end of the semester and the middle of Hanukkah. May all the latkes be yummy and the celebrations happy, for those who are celebrating. For all us academics, may the distance between now and final grades somehow be covered quickly.

Barn Raising

Politica spent the day at Mississippi Friend's house, working with a group of contractors and friends clearing out two of the bedrooms in the Victorian house Mississippi Friend and Quiet Friend bought, intending to restore it so they could grow old together in the city. Shortly afterwards, Quiet Friend got diagnosed with an incredibly rare cancer, and time that might have been spent on the house got redirected to doctors, hospitals, and sickbeds. Quiet Friend is now incredibly-rare-cancer free, but has recently been diagnosed with another cancer, one which isn't responding to treatment. So he needs a bone marrow transplant. MF wants to ask her parents and in-laws to come help take care of her/the house/their child/QF during the transplant and recovery, but there's no place in the house for them to sleep, those other bedrooms never having been restored. So Politica is organizing a group of people willing to donate time and/or money to get at least one other bedroom habitable. It's a good thing, and it is at least a thing we can do in the face of the medical problems plaguing them.

We have another friend with a different and rare cancer who'll be having another kind of surgery next week. This surgery should set him up well for a multiple organ transplant sometime next year. I've blogged before about Annika and Moreena's experiences and the importance of talking about organ donation. Now I have two other friends waiting for transplants. I missed the work party today because I was taking care of Curious Girl. The least I can do is remind anyone reading this that organ donation saves lives. Shareyourlife.org has links to organ donation information in the United States, and you can get more information about organ donation at http://www.organdonor.gov/myths_and_facts.htm. The National Marrow Donor Program has information about bone marrow donation in the US. I hope more people I know never need the services here--but too many people I know are already waiting.

It's not April, right?

If it were April 1, I'd be wondering whether this is an April Fool's story. But I checked: it's November, and according to Inside Higher Education, a Florida community college is now providing pet insurance, after declining to add benefits for domestic partners for faculty and staff. Really, you couldn't make this stuff up.

I Wore My Wedding Dress

We had the traditional lesbian vegetarian thanksgiving: mushroom-tofu-leek phyllo pastries, maple pumpkin pie, roasted vegetables, cranberry sauce with a raspberry/orange twist, and a wonderful salad made by Husband of Pseudonymless Friend. The children ran around the house and everyone was happy except for the shy cats. My parents (who are not vegetarians) are here, and Mom asked Politica "Where's the bird?" (we did cook a turkey two years ago for Thanksgiving, but it was a lot of work, I didn't eat it, and the house smelled of turkey for a whole day afterwards. Why do that when the phyllo pastries are so tasty?) But even the meat-loving grandparents were happy with the meal. It was good, and the table was beautiful.

At one point, my mother said to me, "That's a nice outfit you have on." I paused. "It was my wedding dress, " I told her. She doesn't know that because she didn't come to our wedding. She paused. "Cute outfit," she said, and turned away.

I have mostly let that go, that she didn't come to our wedding. Mostly.

I shouldn't dwell on that, when there are happier moments to savor:

• Curious Girl falling asleep on my shoulder, exhausted after a day of playing, giggling, and shrieking
• CG talking to the balloons in the Macy's T-Day Parade. I'm going to miss it when she finally figures out the line between reality and fantasy
• Working in the kitchen with Politica. We were in and out of the kitchen all day, and the food was good.
• Eating bread fresh out of the oven: I made sandwich bread for my parents, and when I offered to cut some for my mother her eyes just opened wide. "Don't you want to save it for the company?" You are the company!
• Watching Politica gradually relax over the course of the day.

Here's hoping all Thanksgiving-celebrating-readers had a good day.

Bad at the Buzz

When I updated my previous post, I said that I thought it was OK that Mother Talk, on its summary of what the MT bloggers are saying about the Daring book, had quoted a single sentence from my previous post. The more I thought about this, especially in light of Jody's post about the book and Mother Talk today, the more that troubles me. I don't know that this is a fair reaction--after all, as Politica reminded me tonight, when publicists ask you to read and talk about a book, they're asking you to blurb it, not review it. And I don't think I fully understood this aspect of Mother Talk. I had envisioned it as a little more of a conversation-based site. And I'm a little irritated that the single sentence they pulled out of my review fundamentally misrepresents my post (even if what they say in the summary is literally true. I did say that.)

So I'm bad at the buzz. But it would't be a bad thing for more of us were talking about gender and parenting. How do we raise kids to move beyond oversimplified notions of gender? I loved Jody's story about Gemma and the shoes "from the boys side" of the store. Head over there and check out her post and the comments (unless, that is, you've arrived here from there: statcounter shows a lot of people are stopping by from Jody's today. Welcome!)

Wouldn't it be more daring to be queer?

This post is a Mother Talk review: they provided me a copy of the book and an Amazon gift certificate. You can see the other bloggers Mother Talk enlisted for this book.

Edited to add a short update at bottom--see comments, too, for another take on the ground cover issue from a commenter.

There's a lot to like about The Daring Book for Girls--not least its sparkly turquoise color which Curious Girl got very excited about--but I find myself troubled by the book even as I flipped through it feeling quite excited at finding sections that remind me how to do things I once knew (like play four square or tetherball) or things I'd never quite figured out (like how to make a cool, round, paper airplane). I like its copiousness, the way it flits from fourteen ways to play tag to how to whistle with two fingers to women scientists to bird watching to math, darts, and yoga. I like the readers this book imagines, readers who might sometimes be in the mood to write a letter, or sit on the couch and think about Cleopatra or Zenobia, or go hiking and flower collecting, or build a tetherball court or play softball. Most of the other bloggers who've commented on the book have loved the myriad ideas covered. Daring does describe a lot of different things to do, and older girls, or families (or Scout or Guide troops) organizing activities might well find this a handy reference. I like the old-fashioned look of the book. It looks good. (And it sparkles!)

But......I'm troubled. Miriam Peskowitz and Andrea Buchanan wrote this book in response to The Dangerous Book for Boys. With the permission of the original authors, they've copied the concept and design, changing colors and a key adjective in the title. Some of the page headings are the same (like the opening list of essential gear, and a paper airplane), although the particulars are a bit different. I've not read Dangerous (but I've looked at its TOC), but I'd say that anyone who owns the pair of books would have two books with plenty of good ideas in them. But they'd also have two books that play up socialized differences between girls and boys, even if they do so capaciously, and that troubles me.

I'm conflicted: I went to a girls' high school, I am loving watching Curious Girl's current all-girl preschool class, and I have just returned, quite refreshed, from a gathering of (virtually all) women discussing women in higher education. I'm a life member of the Girl Scouts of the USA. I value women's and girls' spaces, and I think it's important to take time to think about the way gender works--and that sometimes means talking to/about boys, or girls.

Yet books marketed like this set up gender binaries, and don't offer a lot of ways to think about what makes girls and boys. Daring pushes at some boundaries, to be sure: it includes a great section on how to negotiate a salary, and I wish someone had ever laid all that out for me earlier in my career. While it does include a section on making daisy chains, it also includes sections on hardware stores and toolboxes. But in some respects Daring also enforces gender binaries (one of the dangerous activites it recommends is wearing high heels. Not a good idea.)

I'd love these books if they were published together (although neither would sell nearly so well: it wouldn't attract much media attention to simply have an encyclopedia collection of activities for children). Politica says that it's important, though, to talk to girls to make sure they are encouraged to take up a wide range of activities, and maybe she's right: Daring certainly would encourage girls to play sports, to use tools, to read, to look at nature. (It would also teach them how to fold T-shirts the Japanese way--I'm not sure what's daring about that.)

It would be considerably more dangerous and daring to think about what the Dangerous and Daring Book for Queer Kids would look like. And here I most emphatically don't mean a book only for gay and lesbian kids, but rather a book for kids that would open up possibilities for what it means to be a boy or a girl today. What kinds of encouragement would it take to encourage children to see that there are lots of different ways to be a boy or a girl? Or to think that while being a girl or boy is important, it's not the only important characteristic we have? And that for some of us, being a girl or boy might not be the most important characteristic?

So I'm conflicted, and I'm honestly not sure I'd buy the book. But I will keep it on my bookshelf, and I'll probably be peeking at it for activities for quite some time.

I'll close with some quibbly reviewer comments: I'm hoping that some of the reviews will look at some of the historical content and comment on its quality. The section on camping suggests that campers might want to use a ground cover, and anyone with good Girl Scout training will tell you that ground covers are essential! They'll keep the ground moisture out of the tent. The text mentions taking a cooler camping, but doesn't explicitly say to keep the cooler out of your tent. No food in a tent--it will only attract animals. Keep the food outside. The craft sections mostly seem to work well as written; the sports sections explain the rules, seemingly in faith that knowing the rules translates into being able to play. I wanted a little more on the etiquette of breaking into a basketball game at the park.

****************************

Update: so this is my first Mother Talk review. If you click over to their site, you'll see my review gets the shortest shrift in the summary and they quote simply this:

Crunchy Granola says “There’s a lot to like about The Daring Book for Girls–not least its sparkly turquoise color which Curious Girl got very excited about.”

I guess that's OK--after all, this book is a Mother Talk project, and they organized a cheering section. I'll bring the lavender pom poms next time.

Airport Blogging, Once More with Content

I'm returning from a very interesting symposium on women in higher education held at Fancy Pants University in a reasonably crunchy granola town (so I felt quite at home with my crunchy granola blog persona). Some observations, some more serious than others:

• There are really only about 20 people in the country who work in health food stores, and they magically circulate among the stores. They all look the same--the guy with the long pony tail and the tie-dyed shirt, the guy in lederhosen that somehow looks cool, the gal with long hair and an Indian print dress....I walk into any such store and recognize everyone, even if I've never been before.
• It is no fun to have a cold sore on the weekend you are seeing many former classmates.
  
• There are, according to the speaker I heard on Title IX, about 3 million girls playing high school sports and less than 200,000 playing NCAA sports. Don't let anyone tell you that college women have no interest in sports.
• While there were a considerable number of "follow your dreams, all it takes is passion and perseverance to get where you want to go" sorts of presentations (which were somewhat inspirational even though a sociological voice in my brain was quibbling along the way), there was also ample evidence that gender matters these days. Some of the anecdotes the sports lawyer who spoke on Title IX told were quite shocking (like the fact that a campus administrator at a reasonably well-known western state institution was sponsoring an "ugly female athlete day" well into the 1990s.
• I heard some remarks by a biology professor which included the story about how when she was pregnant with her second child, around 1990, an anonymous idjit put a book on birth control in her departmental mailbox.
  
• Despite the fact that I really never liked playing team sports--in part because I am slow and don't have the greatest hand/eye coordination, in part because no one ever really taught me how to play various team sports and I don't like trying new things in groups--I found myself wishing that I had played a sport in college. The value of connecting with a good coach and teammates really came out in a lot of the conversation at the athletic sessions. I think it's great for girls and young women to participate in organized activities that help them connect with mentors in different ways, and I have a renewed appreciation for sports.
• I am amazed by the number of women I met who have parlayed fascinating careers on meandering paths. I took a very direct route to what I do: college, a year off working on campus, grad school, 3 years of non-tenure track faculty work, then tenure-track work. I've moved into an area of English studies that most of my undergraduate faculty still haven't heard of, but still, it's been a pretty direct path. I do love what I do, but I am a bit envious of the people who have worked various international and public policy advocacy work into their careers. I want Curious Girl to somehow have the freedom and imagination to discover jobs and dreams that she doesn't already know exist. (One of the panelists on women and business pointed out that the jobs our daughters will have one day will include many jobs that don't even exist yet, because things are changing so quickly.)
• I am also amazed by the qualities of students at today's FPU. They are smart, savvy, and amazingly overscheduled. While that's a problem in many respects, it's also very impressive.

I'm looking forward to sleeping in my own bed again tonight. Home will be good. I miss Politica and CG!

English Department Playlist

I got my colleagues' attention at the start of our department meeting by playing "Trollope," by Dave's True Story (click here and scroll down for the lyrics). It made people laugh, and it worked.

So I'm thinking of songs to open other meetings. At the risk of ruining the fun for the colleague or two who reads this blog, I'm thinking of these songs to get the attention at the start of our next few meetings:

• "My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors" (Moxy Fruvous)
• "Wuthering Heights" (Kate Bush (video link)
• "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" (from Kiss Me Kate)
• "Lets Call the Whole Thing Off" (from Shall We Dance, the "you say tomayto, I say tomah to....one )
  

So what other songs would you suggest for an English department? (or any other department, I suppose--we could suggest songs for different professions/disciplines, I guess.)

Not Quite NaBloPoMo: Jobs and Markets

I don't think I"m up for posting once a day this month, but I'm feeling inspired by the bloggers I read who are doing NaBloPoMo this month.

I have a lot of academic thoughts flying around this week, and I still have some work to do to prepare for the department's first meeting of the year. So I'm going to be lazy-ish and simply list a few things

• I'm wondering what other folks think about mentoring. I was browing posts at Rate Your Students and noticed a fair bit of kvetching/critique by junior faculty regarding unwanted mentoring by senior faculty (the complaint generally being "if we want your advice, we'll ask for it"). I've construed my role as department chair to be largely about advocating for my colleagues and department, so mentoring has been a huge concern of mine. We have officially assigned mentors, but I've made sure to have a series of meetings with new assistant professors (4-5 over the first year, covering general orientation, our review procedures, documenting and assessing teaching, preparing for promotion); I've coordinated workshops on promotion for nontenure track faculty (who are eligible for a promotion in rank, but not tenure); I've been working my way around the associate professors to talk a bit about planning for promotion to professor, sooner or later in various cases. Maybe mentoring isn't quite the right word for all that, but it seems to me that it's a good thing for administrators to actively promote their colleagues. Does that need to be patronizing or intrusive? I've thought about this a lot this year as we have hired several associate professors, who need different kinds of transition assistance than new assistant professors. But still, that's a kind of useful mentoring. I think.
• There have been some wonderful posts about the academic job market this year at Tenured Radical's, Dr. Crazy's, and Citizen of Somewhere Else's. I forwarded TR's post to a friedn on the job market, and she said, a few days later, "oh, that was really helpful. So I shouldn't use letterhead?" Turns out the comments on TR's post took up the issue of letterhead and whether or not to use it quite seriously. I thought this was all rather bizarre, since every search I've served on in English has always seen most applications come in on departmental letterhead, even from graduate students. (Not that this is required: I've also seen graduate students not use departmental letterhead, and I've never seen a search committee discuss this.) I'm on a search committee now for a campus-level administrative position, and none of the applicants--almost all of whom currently have some kind of academic affiliation--used institutional letterhead. So my new advice to job seekers: check out the customs in the field to which you're applying. (other things I have noticed, reading job applications in a field-not-my-own: inspirational quotations don't really add a lot to letterhead; mis-spelling the search committee chair's name is a good way to get a letter some negative attention; the best in-house applicants for a position will write as though they are from off-campus, so their materials have the same general style as an applicant from afar.)
  
• Dr. Crazy got dumped on quite a bit over at RYS, quite unfairly. I find it amazing that so many academics talk about loyalty to departments or campuses, framing issues of academic jobs and searches in the same terms we talk about personal relationships. Academia is about relationships, of course, and I'm a big believer in looking for jobs where there's a good fit between the campus/institution's goals and an individual's own goals. But life is long, and we shouldn't assume that our first job will be our only job. Can't we value a committment to institutional goals while realizing that it's OK for some people to move on to another job after 4 or 5 years? I've advised my newer colleagues to simultaneoulsy imagine that our department might well be their only job--so we can all make it a department to grow in--and that our department might nurture their career for some period of time--so we can all see the work we do in the department as contributing to the discipline, in which people circulate to some extent.
  
  Research, teaching, and service balance out very differently in our own interests and on different campuses. My department has lost some very talented junior faculty in the past few years, and there is likely to be another significant personnel change in senior faculty next year, besides some movement in retirements. I miss my colleagues who have left, but I think it's a healthy thing, actually, that the work done in our department helps move people along. I'm not quite sure how to balance encouraging ambition in my colleagues with encouraging a collective department vision, but somehow (and perhaps self-servingly), I think that good academic administration should help individual faculty to achieve while helping the department as a unit achieve. It's a tricky thing, as the department as a unit is not always tolerant of individuals who seem to be achieving way more than others do. Sometimes, departments are proud of their research stars or mega-award-winning teachers; other times, such colleagues can be criticized for putting their own needs ahead of the department's. I'm not quite sure what I think department chairs have to do with all this, but I am spending a lot of time pondering this individual/collective relationship. (apologies if this bullet doesn't make whole lot of sense--I'm working this set of ideas out here as I type!)
  

Because We Really Are That Powerful

and because I love a Broadway-ish tune

Random

• We woke up this morning at 7:04, and we somehow managed to all three of us make a plane that departed from the airport (which is a 20 minute drive from our house) at 8:00. Somehow, the extra sleep we got doesn't seem to have refreshed us. We're all zonked.
• Yesterday I read Moreena's amazing post about, among other things, religion, Annika, and organ donation. But it must have also inspired me to play a guess-the-number game with Curious Girl. Today, I kid you not, she did just what Annika did with Moreena: she told me she was guessing a number between 1 and 2. I guessed 1. I guessed 2. I guessed one-and-a-half. She kept saying "no." Turns out, her number was 3. Go figure.
• We're visiting Politica's father for the weekend. At lunch he said, "You don't know how much it means to me, that you all come and see me." It's nice to be loved.
• I am now on Facebook, which I joined to be able to look at photos of some student activities in my department. I am feeling simultaneously hipper than I used to be and more middle aged than I used to be. It certainly is interesting to see how some folks I know from blogging are using the space, as well as how some folks I know from my profession are using it.

Slow Cooking

This is my week to get things off my to-do list that I've been feeling guilty about not doing. In August, Magpie tagged me in a recipe meme: 4 simple recipes. Here goes:

1. Enchiladas Calabaza, inspired by a recipe from a restaurant in Graduate School City. Take a butternut squash and bake it (sliced in half the long way, seeds scooped out, cut side down on a greased baking sheet) at 350 degrees F until soft (maybe 20-30 minutes? depends on big is the squash. You could also peel and boil, but peeling is a pain). Let it cool, and then scoop into a bowl. Add cream cheese (half to a whole package, depending on how big is the squash) and some onions sauteed with garlic, cumin, and cinnamon, to taste. Mash all together. Scoop into tortillas,and shape into enchildas. Put into a greased baking dish, and cover with chopped tomatoes (canned or fresh) and/or salsa, and grated cheese. Bake until cheese is melted and everything is warmed through. You can make the filling ahead of time, and then just bake a little longer to heat it all through.

2. Ianqui's V8 soup. OK, I'm cheating, since it's not my own recipe. But I've made it, and I love it. It's amazing, it's easy, and it is the cure for whatever ails you.

3. Low(er) Fat Guacamole: mash an avocado with a can of kidney beans and a jar of salsa. Yum!

4. Matzoh brie: whisk some eggs and a little milk, and crumble matzah (egg & onion is my favorite here) into the egg mixture. Let the matzoh soak up the egg mixture, for the most part, and then saute in a pan with a little oil and/or butter, stirring, kind of likc you are cooking scrambled eggs. New Recipes from Moosewood uses cream cheese with their matzoh brie, which is not bad, but not necessary. Eat quickly, as it cools.

and a bonus recipe, a recipe from Linda, which we make every Thanksgiving: Green Beans. Slice 6 cloves garlic, and saute in 3-4 T olive oil over low heat, with some oregano. Add green beans, the juice of 2 lemons, some lemon zest, kosher salt, and about 1/2 cup of water. Turn to boil, and then simmer, covered for 30 minutes or until the water evaporates. The beans get yummy and soft.

Four off-the-top-of-my-head recipes: enjoy! I am not going to tag anyone. I'm always happy to be tagged, but my bloggy neurosis acts up when I have the opportunity to tag readers (what if you're not reading? what if you don't want to be tagged? what if the sky falls...). So I'll leave it up to anyone reading who might want to share some recipes to do so. Happy cooking.

I feel one coming on soon.... a la Niobe

IMG_1233
Originally uploaded by crunchy granola

Niobe invited her readers to leave comments in her own style. I haven't gotten around to commenting there, but it did inspire this post, which is written about a photo from summer 2006. Curious Girl had a Niobe-like touch with the camera that day.

A summer day, humidity wrapping itself around us like a blanket, although Curious Girl didn't care how sweaty she got in the sling. Cars drove by noisily, running between the gentrified harbor and an edgier older neighborhood, crossing an industrial area on the way. Some friends were held up at gunpoint just a few blocks from here, heading back to the hotel around midnight.

In the morning, people are sleeping. It's a weekend summer day, and few are stirring. We walk, and we see it: the Blue Moon Cafe. The sign seems magical, a symbol of whimsical cheer flowing out onto the rather sad sidewalk.

I can't stop thinking about our friends. They're all fine, although scared, and taking taxis more than usual to get around today. They lost their wallets and their cash, and their jewelry. One saved her wedding ring, quickly stepping on it when the muggers asked them all to toss their jewelry on the sidewalk. She covered it with her foot, and no one noticed.

What about you? What streets have you walked between sadness and charm? What jewelry would you seek to hide? Or would you?