Walt's 200th Birthday Bash

31 May 2019: Our little celebration went off without a hitch. What a wonderful day!

Conversations with my little nephew...

30 May 2019: "I have an ant! Or a grasshopper. No. An ant." --excerpts from a fascinating conversation with my nephew Evan.

His mother later confirmed: it's an ant he brought home from pre-school. He's keeping it in a jar. She told him he should probably free it but he said he's "just not ready to let it go yet."

Fleabag

29 May 2019: Finished the second season of Fleabag yesterday and, like I said after the first season, believe every good thing you've heard. It is perfection. Hilarious, beautiful, genius, heart-breaking. This piece sums up one particular angle that thrilled me. Watch it. Watch it. Watch it.

Technical difficulties

28 May 2019: Major technical difficulties for the first few rounds of trivia tonight.. Long story short, the projector wasn't working so we couldn't show the questions. The actual cause and whole story is too complicated (and boring) to explain, but for a while, it was so freaking stressful. Oh, and my cellphone battery was dying as I tried to get tech support from the guy who writes the game/runs the trivia company. And the AC was out in the restaurant, too, so you know that really helped with the overall vibe.

But at some point I was just like, "Okay. We'll just read the questions out loud and do our best." And we did and it was okay. It felt good to just decide not to freak out about it and just do our best. It was enough. Sometimes it's worth remembering that. And our teams were kind, understanding, and gracious. They got it. So it was okay.

(By Round 4, tech support showed up in person and fixed things, which was great.)

Memorial Day...

27 May 2019: Saw this image being shared a couple of times today. Love it.

Cute packaging...

26 May 2019: Had a fun time running errands with Amy after we saw Book Smart today. (Very good movie, by the way.) One of our stops was PetSmart so she could get some more kitten food for her crew. I was delighted by this packaging, which charmed me with its French language and its reference to the mother as a "queen." The bag knows.

Game day...

25 May 2019: Spent most of the day with some of my favorite people playing games at Tim and Kevin's house. Wonderful.

"You Were On My Mind"

24 May 2019: Heard this track on my way to drop off the rental car I've had since Tuesday (getting my car fixed after a minor fender bender). Turned it up, sang along, and thought it felt pretty darn appropriate.

Sure is tiring...

23 May 2019:

Sure is tiring being a well-cared for kitten. (One of the five Amy is fostering. She'll be up for adoption soon-ish...)

Fringe benefits...

22 May 2019: It's only the second official day of the summer session, but students are already hard at work in my class. One fringe benefit? By making them talk about funny things, they are introducing me to funny things. Here's an example that made me laugh a lot.

Here's hoping they keep 'em coming!

Perfect score!

21 May 2019: One of our trivia teams had a perfect score tonight. In the whole time I've been hosting or playing trivia, I can't remember this happening. This is especially sweet since the team is all middle-school teachers--and all women (tonight--most of the time their team is a little bit bigger and includes a man). What fun!

Why Not Me?

20 May 2019: "And these days, I find I'm caring less and less about what people think of me. Maybe it's my age, maybe it's my security in my career, maybe it's because I'm skrilla flush with that dollah-dollah-bill-y'all, but if I had to identify my overall feeling these days, it's much more 'Eh, screw it. Here's how I really feel'" (4).

Just digging into Mindy Kaling's Why Not Me?, trying to pick excerpts for the summer class. The bit quoted above really speaks to my mindset these days. It is strange and kind of liberating. (And sometimes still abandons me in an instant I am right back to living the complete opposite way.)

Work Cited

Kaling, Mindy. Why Not Me? Three Rivers Press, 2015.

Already posting...

19 May 2019: My summer class includes a blog component. We don't officially start until Tuesday, but I gave them the first set of assignments a few days ago and some are always posting. Good stuff so far!

Garth Brooks Concert

18 May 2019:

[Catch-up post]

Had a great time on Saturday heading to Pittsburgh with Allison, Beth, and Jane to see Garth Brooks. Great show but even better company with three of my best friends.

Back to Bossypants

17 May 2019: Re-reading Bossypants for my summer class and struck once again by how smart it is. Here's one passage that stood out to me today: "This is what I tell young women who ask me for career advice. People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel that you are in competition with one another. 'You're up for a promotion. If they go with a woman, it'll be between you and Barbara.' Don't be fooled. You're not in competition with other women. You're in competition with everyone."

Wine Country

16 May 2019: Got a lot of work done today and then spent a fun evening with Hannah, eating trashy food, talking, and watching Wine Country. Perfection!

"How to be alone"

15 May 2019: This episode of the This is Love podcast is one that will stick with me for some time, I think. It goes to so many quietly unexpected places and it's tone, message, etc. are hard to put into words. But so worth a listen...

Thinking about laughter...

14 May 2019: "...Dr. Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire...discusses gender differences in humor citing research showing that 71 percent of women laugh when men tell a joke (based on recorded conversations at parties) and 39 percent of men laugh when a woman tells a joke." --Rebeccca Krefting, All Joking Aside : American Humor and Its Discontents

Now that's a depressing sentence from a depressing chapter about the ridiculous yet complicated idea that women aren't funny. Reading it has me thinking about my own laughter...

(Still preparing for that summer class, in case that wasn't clear...)

Letter writing...

13 May 2019: Requests for letters of recommendation sometimes pile up. They aren't fun to do, even for the best students. And the ones I really care about--that are for something big for a student who I am really pulling for--they sometimes mean I need to wait until I have a big block of mental space to work on them. Given what I wrote about this year's graduating class (how many of them I will miss so much, how many are exceptional and unforgettable), you might anticipate that the requests have been plentiful and have been the kind that I really want to get right.

Finishing a decent draft for one of those students (like I did just a little while ago) feels great. Moreover, working on it made me go back and look at her work for me over her time at Shepherd. And it's so cool to see how these papers and projects really do reflect who she is and what makes her so amazing. And it made me so determined to help her get what she wants (in this case, to go to graduate school for a Master of Social Work).

So yeah...another example of how doing this job reminds you why you do it and why it matters.

Summer syllabizing...

12 May 2019: “But humor is different. The humorist is at odds with the publicly espoused values of the culture, overturning its sacred cows, pointing out the nakedness of not only the Emperor, but also the politician, the pious, and the pompous. For women to adopt this role means that they must break out of the passive, subordinate position mandated for them by centuries of patriarchal tradition and take on the power accruing to those who reveal the shams, hypocrisies, and incongruities of the dominant culture. To be a woman and a humorist is to confront and subvert the very power that keeps women powerless.” Nancy Walker, A Very Serious Thing:  Women’s Humor and American Culture

Yes, graduation was only yesterday, but no rest for the wicked. I've already actually been working a bit on this class--a fully online version of Advanced Composition--for a bit now, but got some serious work done this morning. This section will be about women and comedy, with a particular focus on the last 10 years or so. The Walker quotation above (from her 1988 book) is good food for thought.

Security detail...

11 May 2019: Graduation Day always brings about such complicated feelings--and this year's group of truly stellar graduates really stoked some emotions. I'll miss so many of them so much.

So...it helped to have some lighter moments like the one pictured below: Hannah and her grad student Maya  pretending to be my security detail. Thanks to Hannah for always being up for a joke--even when she's doing a super-important, ear-piece-requiring job at graduation.

Pile of cute...

10 May 2019: Amy has been indulgent enough to left me visit this crew every day. (Perhaps this conversation had something to do with it...)

Signs...

9 May 2019: So...some signage as you enter our campus has been updated.

Spring Writing Workshop

8 May 2019: While one of my colleagues was on sabbatical, I covered her job as WPA for our department. Today I carried out one of my last tasks in that role, putting on the spring workshop for our faculty. The entire day--and indeed the entire semester--just provided more evidence of how wonderful so many of these Shepherd folks are: dedicated, caring, talented. They make us all better.

Eye-opening...

7 May 2019:

[Catch-up post" my laptop's charger cable stopped working last night, so I am saving every little bit of juice it has left until the replacement cord arrives, thus, no post last night.]

Amy is fostering a mama cat and five tiny kittens. One of them had an eye still closed, but we couldn't tell if it just hadn't opened yet. I took a good look yesterday (May 7) and thought I saw that it was a bit crusty. So we got a warm washcloth and I held the little one while Amy gently wiped the eye. Seeing it open? What an amazing moment...the kitten even changed the way she was behaving--she got antsy and excited.

(Apparently it was closed back up today, so she'll have to keep an eye on it (ha?), but it is good to have a better sense of what's going on.)

About "fixing that..."

6 May 2019: I spent some of today working on the "fixing that" I mentioned in my last post. After a restless night where it took forever to fall asleep, I slept in a bit and then felt guilty about that. Not  a great start.

Things got better once I got going...got some work done, attended the faculty awards ceremony on campus, hit the grocery store, mowed the lawn. Then Hannah texted me and asked if I was free for dinner. I loved having that balance of "fun" and "unscheduled" to all the other stuff. And we had a lovely time, sitting outside at the Blue Moon.

So I think today's vibe is definitely better than yesterday's. Here's hoping tomorrow is a good one, too.

Semester's-over vibes...

5 May 2019:

[Catch-up post...]

The fact that I went to sleep last night without doing my daily post indicates that I am in that weird intersession mental space. Some years, these few weeks before the summer session starts are like a breath of sweet freedom--just the right amount, too. Some years, I feel more unsettled and anxious. So far, I am feeling more of the latter than the former. Have to see about fixing that...

"Prompts (for High School Teachers Who Write Poetry)"

4 May 2019: Blown away by this one, from the poem-a-day email.

"Prompts (for High School Teachers Who Write Poetry)"
Dante Di Stefano

Write about walking into the building
as a new teacher. Write yourself hopeful.
Write a row of empty desks. Write the face
of a student you’ve almost forgotten;
he’s worn a Derek Jeter jersey all year.
Do not conjecture about the adults
he goes home to, or the place he calls home. 
Write about how he came to you for help
each October morning his sophomore year.
Write about teaching Othello to him;
write Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle, 
rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven. 
Write about reading his obituary
five years after he graduated. Write
a poem containing the words “common”
“core,” “differentiate,” and “overdose.”
Write the names of the ones you will never
forget: “Jenna,” “Tiberious,” “Heaven,”
“Megan,” “Tanya,” “Kingsley,” “Ashley,” “David.”
Write Mari with “Nobody’s Baby” tattooed
in cursive on her neck, spitting sixteen bars
in the backrow, as little white Mike beatboxed
“Candy Shop” and the whole class exploded.
Write about Zuly and Nely, sisters
from Guatemala, upon whom a thousand
strange new English words rained down on like hail
each period, and who wrote the story
of their long journey on la bestia
through Mexico, for you, in handwriting
made heavy by the aquís and ayers
ached in their knuckles, hidden by their smiles.
Write an ode to loose-leaf. Write elegies
on the nub nose of a pink eraser.
Carve your devotion from a no. 2
pencil. Write the uncounted hours you spent
fretting about the ones who cursed you out
for keeping order, who slammed classroom doors,
who screamed “you are not my father,” whose pain
unraveled and broke you, whose pain you knew.
Write how all this added up to a life. 

A simple answer...

3 May 2019:

Excerpt from a conversation with Amy (who is fostering a mama cat and five tiny kittens) earlier today:

Amy: …I don’t know if you wanted to come see the cats—

Me: I am going to stop you here. The answer to that is always “yes.”

My eventual goal? Re-create this image:

Spring 2019 Grading: DONE!

2 May 2019: Well, it sure is a lot easier to get grading done when you only have two classes. So here I am--done with the semester's grading before 3:00 p.m. on a Thursday. Sweet.

Commence chair dancing to this little ditty that just came on Pandora...

My (new) favorite coaster...

1 May 2019: This gift I received today from one of our graduating seniors features what I tell students I would be happy to have on my tombstone someday: my all-time favorite short-and-sweet evaluation comment.