Writing Maternity

I seem

to have lost my attention span. 

If you see it wandering about, send it home, would you?

stay put, little girl

I've written before about the heart-wrenching few years my sister, W2, has had. It seems they aren't over yet: at 22 weeks pregnant, she's been put on 100% bedrest because her cervix is shortening (which precedes actual dilation). 

We know that this is happening because Bumblebee was born at 26.5 weeks about eighteen months ago.  There's no clear medical reason for his premature arrival (the technical diagnosis was "spontaneous cervical dilation"), but as a result this pregnancy has been monitored closely.  And that has turned out to be a deeply good thing, since her doctor thinks that this little girl is trying to follow her big brother's path into the world.  And right now, we're all hoping really hard that she won't.

I'm off across the country the day after tomorrow to try to help out.  I think of it as buying them the time to find a nanny they're fully comfortable with.  My mother will arrive a few days after I leave, while Top Gun goes to New State to close on their house. (They move in June -- and, yes, we're all trying to figure out how that one' s going to work.)

In short term, what I need most for W2 are book recommendations: all-absorbing, take-your-mind-off-it pleasure reads.  Any ideas?  She's partial to young adult fantasy, but, really, it's all about sending her to another world every night after Bumblebee goes to bed.

Update, 11:30 AM Friday: In the round-robin that is familial communication at such times, I just heard from my mother, who heard from Top Gun, that W2 is currently in the hospital having a cerclage done.  The ultrasound showed that she'd responded quickly and well to the two days of complete bed rest, so there's reason to be hopeful. 

time

Unclutterer talks about time, quoting H. Jackson Brown:

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.

Sigh.

I say versions of this all the time -- and this is not to suggest that I think that I don't waste a perfectly respectable amount of time -- but I don't see any people on that list who were responsible for domestic labor.  No one, in other words, who was also cooking, cleaning, and raising children.

Let's be careful about the standards we set for ourselves.  Otherwise we set ourselves up for failure, and teach our children to be unforgiving of their own imperfections.

make your sacrifices

So, earlier today meg and I decided that we needed to figure out which Greek deity was in charge of things technological, because clearly it was time to start sacrificing incredibly huge herdbeasts of various kinds.  G and discussed the matter briefly over dinner, before referring it to the in-house expert.

Squiss considered the question carefully.  She then immediately pointed out that, when she thinks of Hera and Persephone, she thinks of them as *queens* of things, not *gods.*  (Of the gods of Olympus and the Underworld, respectively.)  So her first instinct was to think that one of them should be the god(dess) of computers and technology.  Reasoning further, she decided that Hera should be goddess of fairy princesses: because they have powers, and Hera likes power.  (That's what she offers to Paris, after all.)

That left Persephone as the goddess of computers and technology, and queen of the underworld.  She then went over to the fireplace ("where we sing Christmas carols") to say her prayer to Persephone to please keep all the family computers safe and working.  She reported that Persephone heard her, since gods and goddesses can hear you, even if you whisper, and even if you're very far away from Greece or Olympus.

G and I had been more inclined toward Hermes than Persephone, in our own meditations on the subject.  The trickster god, the god of thieves and travelers -- a crosser of boundaries, writ large -- strikes me as a good fit in this day and age.  But I'm more than happy to make my obeisances to both.  Persephone is a more generous and merciful personality than Hermes, and so I like having her there to temper his sense of humor.

(On that note, I'm currently writing this from my fully functioning laptop, connected to the home wifi.  The highlight of the entire 6 hours I've spent with various tech support people at Apple and Verizon in the last two days was, without question, the moment when today's second Apple tech started to direct me to find System Preferences.  Then he interrupted himself: "but I bet you know where that is, don't you?")

(Thank you, oh generous and merciful ones.)

geekery

One thing about having your primary (work) computer stolen is that it potentially inspires a complete revision of how your organize your computing life.*  Rather than have my institution replace my stolen laptop with another one, I opted to have them buy me an iMac and bought myself a Macbook.  I figured that I'd migrate everything from the iMac to the Macbook, use .Mac to sync iCal and the like (because when you use iCal and your computer is stolen, you lose every appointment and deadlines, too**), and then, in addition to routine back-ups to the school server and a whole variety of other things and places, I'd have two -- two! -- almost identical repositories.

That was the plan.  I still like this plan.  But it's still merely a plan.

The iMac arrived a couple of weeks ago, and I'm quite loving it.  The big screen is great, the keyboard is great, etc.  The Macbook arrived on Monday, and this is where my problems have arisen.  Feeling all clever, I hooked the two up with my FireWire cable and started migrating.  The migration seemed to go smoothly, and I thought that life was great.  Then, when I took the Macbook home at the end of the day and went to start it up and get going, I discovered a wrinkle: it seems incapable of logging me in if it isn't using the iMac as a target hard drive.

(Can I point out that this renders the two computer project, not to mention the laptop project, utterly useful?  I don't need two computers sitting on my desk at the office; I need one computer there and one at home and at conferences and so on.  Rrr.)

It's now three days later.  I've re-installed Leopard twice, thinking that I'd just wipe everything out and start over.  No deal: we always come back to the same problem.  At 9:00 this morning, I finally called Apple.  After two hours on the phone and multiple approaches to the problem, the product specialist (I've forgotten his name) walked me through the migration and seemed to think that I was peachy.  Foolishly, I let him off the phone at that point, because once I restarted I had precisely -- precisely -- the same problem.  I'm now back on the phone with them, and we seem to be trying a new set of approaches, eerily similar to the first.

* Combine this with having your daily computer BAG stolen and you have a recipe for a fairly radical work-life organization system overhaul.  The bag replacement process is almost happily complete.

** So, yeah, to address that problem I used some birthday money form my mother that I hadn't yet spent to buy an iPod Touch.  I'm liking it even more than I anticipated -- and I haven't had any setup problems there.

Update at 12:59: I just got off the phone with Jim -- another product supervisor -- and we seem to have fixed things!  (furious knocking-on-wood noises)  In my own defense, what I thought had happened had, in fact, happened, even though I didn't have the language to explain what it seemed to be.  So perhaps I'm not quite as much of an idiot as I was feeling all along.  Still isn't clear how it happened, though.

update/explanation

We returned from a really great and computer-free weekend skiing in Utah* to find our house burgled.  No visible damage apart from even greater untidyness than usual and the loss of some emotionally and otherwise significant item: most of my jewelry is gone; G's and my laptops are both gone; you get the picture.  They ignored the outdated (and quite bulky) desktop computers, TV, and stereo, and rifled through many drawers to relatively little avail.  (We just don't have all that much -- apart from the abovementioned laptops and jewelry -- that's of much value.  Unfortunately for us, it turns out that the items most valuable to the pawn shop are also the items that transcend monetary value for us.  Those two computers, man, ...)

So if blogging is light in the next couple of weeks, blame the burglars -- and understand that I am trying to reconstruct the last two-and-a-half years' of work.  Much of it was backed up, but some of that was on the thumb drive hiding sneakily in a pocket of my computer backpack, which they swiped (I assume to carry the loot in).  It got stuck when they dumped the rest of my things (library book, notebook, pens).

Back up your work.  And keep your jewelry in a strange place -- although given the number of drawers they rifled through, I can't for the life of me think of what a strange place might be.

* Two happy notes: Squiss was *amazing* and by the end of the trip had taken the chair to the top of the mountain and skied down some blue runs.  Tricksy has discovered her first rock star.  We went with the Transmogrification clan, and she screamed "Truck! Truck! Truck!" every time she saw him.  I think that I have to change his handle now.

rushing

Today was one of those days where there wasn't enough time to do anything, and what time there was had to spent doing things that are annoyingly necessary but not substantive.  Something was up, because I was running late and then nearly forgetting incredibly important meetings just about all day long.

I should open a deli . . .

with all the sandwiches I've had to serve this semester.

An only somewhat random example ...

Dear Writing Director,

You know that decision you made about something, the one you sent through all the appropriate bureaucratic channels last spring and was then approved by a vote of the full faculty?  Well, some of us weren't really paying attention, but we care a lot now and thought you might change your mind.

Sincerely,

Your Colleague

a moment of being not thankful

Squiss's school is having a potluck lunch tomorrow to celebrate Thanksgiving.  Families are invited and, Squiss explained, it will start with all of the children standing around a big table in the two-year-olds' classroom saying what they're thankful for.  Thanksgiving and Passover are my favorite holidays.  Perhaps not incidentally, they are the only holidays for which the meal itself is the point, the purpose and substance of the celebration rather than just an important expression of it.  Both also explicitly thematize gratitude: at Thanksgiving, we go around and say what we're thankful for; in my family at least, at Passover we go around and think about how we want to use our freedom.

I may well post later in the week on that very subject.  It's been a crazy-strange fall, and so the fact that I can feel thankful for anything above and beyond mere survival is something worth marking publicly.  Today, however, all I have are news items that make me quite angry:

• via Laura, yet more evidence that the staffing crisis in higher education isn't striking nearly enough people as a crisis
• from IHE, news that the assessment craze is gaining momentum (I have a post in me on assessment, but that will have to wait until January when I'll be preparing a talk on it)
• and, again from IHE, information about Drexel's new English Alive program -- which I find interesting, although I'm not completely sold on certain aspects -- that presents a "typical first-year writing assignment [as] ask[ing], 'What themes do you want to cover?'" (The contentless writing class is worth a rant on its own, but that, too, will have to wait.)

dantean thoughts

I haven't read Dante recently enough or close enough to be making this analogy, but it's occurred to me twice in 24 hours now, and so seems worth saying out loud.  There are many, many ways in which I'm in this profession for the chance to work with students.  There are many, many ways in which that work with students has been the saving grace of an otherwise intolerable semester.  (There have been other saving graces, as well.)  But there are certain assumptions that students make about faculty authority and time that send me up the wall, and I am coming to believe that there are special circles in Hell reserved for these particular sins. 

One sin can loosely be characterized as the assumption that faculty time is endlessly expandable and endlessly available.  This happened to me twice this week: once when a student gave me a piece of writing, without apology, that was much longer than I'd asked for; and the other when a student emailed me one evening to request a pre-9:00 am appointment the following day.  (The second student was both apologetic and grateful, for which she gets time off.)

The other sin can be loosely characterized as arrogance.  In other words, those who can't sure as hell imagine that they know whether or not others can.  I've seen versions of this for years when I distribute an outstanding FY student paper to other FY students: they spend the hour utterly trashing it, despite the fact that almost none of them (at that point in the semester) could write something half as good.  This week -- and this semester -- I was taken aback by students doing the same thing to scholarly work.  While at times I do think that you learn from this mode (after all, it's easier to identify flaws in good work than bad, paradoxically enough), at other times I'm fairly certain that this kind of arrogance actually blocks learning.  I'd seen this happen with several students multiple times at this semester: it's their mode as individuals and as a group, it seems, and it makes me impatient and tired.  It's hardly worth smacking them down about, but I do wonder where (and why) they picked it up.