And for my next trick....

For the better part of 20 years, I have worked to write like a historian.  For the last 7 or so, I've worked to write like a historian who wants academics in allied fields to read their work.  My interdisciplinary writing group has helped with this -- pushing me to reconsider some conventions in my field, to explain things that I wouldn't need to explain to an audience of historians, to adopt some new practices in presenting my research.  I think I've been somewhat successful in this.  I've published more interdisciplinary and multi-discipline journals than in traditional history journals since getting tenure.  But now I'm wondering if I have over-stepped my abilities.

Last year I started working on using one of my history projects (on gender-based harassment in public spaces) to connect to current policy and practice on public transit.  I submitted an abstract to the "Women's Issues in Transportation" conference and got encouraging responses from reviewers.  The questions they raised helped me draft a full paper, which my writing group then helped me work into something I could submit.  Now I am faced with three more sets of comments from conference reviewers, asking for revisions before the final round of papers is picked for the conference.

I've never been through this intense a process for being accepted to present at a conference.  I've never even had a full paper draft reviewed, let alone multiple reviews calling for revised drafts.  The reviewers' comments have been rolling around in my mind for weeks, but today is the day when I intend to roll up my sleeves and start the revision.  But I'm feeling a bit stuck, still finding myself feeling defensive in response to some of the comments.  The requests for a clearer definition of harassment is fine, a desire for more description of methodology is annoying but familiar (how do you write "I read everything can find, think about it, make lots of lists, and write until I think I have some insights to offer"?).  The one comment that gets me, though, is this: "It needs to be framed more like a scholarly paper."

Hackles up.

The implication that textual evidence is some how not real data, not scholarly, seeps through this reviewers' comments, even though they are trying to be supportive (they did say the background of the project is "interesting").  The reviewer then goes on to tell me what a "traditional" paper should look like (intro, theory and method, findings and interpretation, discussion...).  I've read my fair share of these kinds of papers.  I even written one, but they don't work well for qualitative research.  I've got an 8,000 word limit; I'm going to use the bulk of them to explore the evidence, not describing the process.  I'm going to show you what I found.  If you want to know how I found it, read the footnotes!  Gah.

I guess part of my frustration is that I was conscious that this conference is full of quant people and I intentionally "scientificized" my early drafts, but apparently not enough for some.  It is not currently a paper many history people would recognize as standard history writing (or topic).  For example, I actually make suggestions for new policy.  Gasp!  Historians never tell you what to do.  That is your job (after we've told you how we got to this place and what other people have done).  But, apparently, it is still not a fully social science paper.

I could follow the scientific paper structure, but I feel like a fraud.  This is not how I was trained to write or think.  More than that, this structure works against what history can bring to the table (the whole point of my paper!).  I'm trying to write about how we got here, bring lessons from earlier generations of activists to current issues, to fill in around and contextualize the numbers.  X women may report being groped on a subway car.  But what might those experiences mean to women, transit officials, or society?

So... here I go to try give them just enough that they will see me as "scholarly" while selling them on the idea that narrative-based arguments add value to their numbers.

Bridging the Gap

I just returned from a hilarious and strange meeting.  An old guard feminist, one of the founders of one of the earliest local chapters, called all the county NOW members and commanded us to appear at her house to discuss the fate of the chapter.  She was a blast of energy on the phone -- saying "my goal is to choose a president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer" (in social change organizing 101, one never tells people that if they show up they are going to be elected to formal position!) -- and she was basically an airhorn-in-a-library when I met her in person at the meeting.  It was fascinating to watch the other attendees (only a handful) maneuver around her as she pressed her own agenda and dismissed ideas/topics she didn't like.  In general, I found her amusing, but then her real agenda came through: sign people up for leadership roles but figure out how the inner circle can vett the new people first.  The message was, "young people need to step up and lead this organization -- but only if they do it precisely the way we want them to."  As a scholar who studies movements for social change, particularly women's leadership in such movements, I feel pretty confident in saying this is a sure-fire recipe for disaster!

This example will serve as a good representation of being in a meeting with this woman:  she read a quotation and asked people who it was from.  I happened to know, but she told people not to answer if they knew and instead made the others guess (ugh!).  When no one came up with it, I was then called upon.  I said, "Obama" (it was from his speech on the 50th anniversary of the MOW).  Her response? "Excuse me? That is President Barack Obama, the first half-black president of this country!"  Um, yep, that is the Obama to whom I was referring.  Yikes!

Anyway, of the 9 people at the meeting, we had an amazingly good representation of NOW's history -- all white, most in their 60s, small minority of working class women feeling somewhat out of place, all formally educated.  Even in this homogeneous group, though, we had many of the movement types -- the shy workhorse, the I-knew-Gloria-Steinem, the structure and policy person, the I'm-just-here-to-watch one, the action focused one, etc. etc.

My students and I have been doing a bunch of interviews with NOW members since April.  I went to this evening's 'entertainment' in part to gather more ideas for the research project and in part because I worry about a world where NOW can't manage to hold it together in a place like Ann Arbor.  I heard some important things:

1)The older generation (women in their 60s who have been doing active feminism for decades) are tired but they don't think there are any younger feminists who want to take on the work. (They are wrong, but we'll get to that another time.)

2)This group is pretty evenly split between those who trust young women to keep on fighting the good fight, but expect that they might want to do it through different tactics and organizations and those who think young women spend too much time on the computer to do any real organizing and dress like hookers.  (Yikes!)

3)The younger generations (and even my own sandwich generation) need to get it together and figure out a way to have real conversations with their elders -- despite the stuff I mentioned above -- or they/we will lose the opportunity to take over an organization that carries pretty substantial brand recognition.

4)There are many, many issues that reach easily across generations (reproductive justice -- don't doubt it for a minute, those post-menopausal women are FIERCE on this!, equal pay, sex trafficking, rape culture, political representation, etc.).  Once the formal meeting was ended by our host ("meetings must be exactly one hour!") and we could have real conversations about the issues and ideas that motivated us as individual activists, these connecting threads were so obvious.  It was heartening to see.

5)We need to listen to each other more and we need to assume that each group is going to say something stupid about the other.  We need to find a way to get past it and focus on the shared issues.

And that is the report from the "front lines" of feminism in Washtenaw county in the late summer of 2013!

Unfamiliar Feeling

It is only a little after 6pm on a Thursday and I am home, sitting on the couch with a cup of tea and nothing in particular to do. Oh, I have plenty I could do (grade papers, sign kids up for summer camp, get my finances in order, read many things, laundry, etc), but nothing scheduled to do.

I can't remember the last time this happened. Truth be told I'm a tad sick (mystery sore throat) and that is a large part of why I am without commitments. I purposefully did not schedule the usual meeting, dog walk, or beer with a friend that I usually would. It feels weird and certainly makes me realize how packed my days generally are. My calendar going forward is jam-packed with end-of-the-academic-year activities for the kids and me, so I know I should appreciate this quiet evening of nothing in particular. Since it is so unfamiliar, however, I wonder if I'll make it through. There is a better than even chance that I will be asleep before 9:00pm. I guess this is something I should work on...

Momentum

So, quite unintentionally, I've been reading two books back-to-back that both deal with the angst of women who married, had two kids, and found themselves in lives that were not what they thought they would be.

I started with Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, but put it aside for a while and read Stephanie Staal's Reading Women. Now I'm back to finishing up RR. They are very different books: one fiction, one a memoir; one published in 1961, one in 2011. The struggles of the women, however, are strikingly similar to each other and to feelings I recognize in myself. Most of it is a sense of loss of personal identity and one that the men connected to the women do not experience. One would hope that Reading Women, especially with the (overly) ambitious subtitle of "how the great books of feminism changed my life," would have some pithy solutions -- or even observations -- but it really doesn't. The message of both books seems to be "it is complicated, there is no right answer, and since you won't really figure it out, the best you can do is to muddle through and try not to be so hard on yourself" (especially in April's case) I suspect there is also supposed to be some message about the role of society in all this, but it is present but surprisingly not active in the stories.

I don't, of course, really need anyone to tell me that life as a 30-something mother is tough. What I have been thinking about is the role of momentum in shaping this experience. Motherhood interrupts the momentum one has developed as an adult and creates its own forces that, once rolling, are hard to check.

Last week, I was trying to explain to a friend that I was thinking it was time to get more engaged with my career. As someone who has recently left corporate world to seek greater validation in other parts of her life, she stared at me with a certain disbelief? surprise? disdain? I think what she heard me saying was that I was going to work more, which is most decidedly not my goal. I just want to use my time differently. I feel like I spend and enormous amount of energy trying to restart work that I have let grow cold, especially research. Deadlines and trips that provide research opportunities force me to frantically try to pull my shit together and while that frenzy results in a decent (though not outstanding) quality and quantity of 'deliverables' I have found myself thinking that if I could just keep plodding along and stay engaged, it would be so much easier and rewarding. To do this, I will have to counter the frantic-ness of academic life during crunch times at the beginning and end of every term and bring some more discipline into my summer work.

From there, it occurred to me that there are some other big and important areas of my life that need a similar treatment. They need better shape and structure. They need to be moving forward and that movement needs to be established well enough that the inevitable forces that crop up and get in the way can't derail the whole project.

How intimates fight...

Something about this passage rang (a little too) true for me:

"Then the fight went out of control. It quivered their arms and legs and wrenched their faces into shapes of hatred, it urged them harder and deeper into each other's weakest points, showing them cunning ways around each other's strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint, and strike again. In the space of a gasp for breath it sent their memories racing back over the years for old weapons to rip the scabs off old wounds; it went on and on."

-Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

Why aren't there alternatives to skipping?

So... maybe the girl could skip ANOTHER grade. I'm stewing about this today. In her typical, unflappable way, her response is "cool, when do I take their tests?" My response is much more complicated (witness my last post). Today, however, I'm finding myself pissed -- pissed at a system that is so inflexible, that fetishizes grade levels, that is so lacking in creativity. (I am not alone in this, just read this post/comment thread from Edutopia.)

When I contacted a teacher about curriculum in her classes and where my daughter and kids like her (those who are highly motivated in this subject), she accused me of advocating tracking. I'm having a hard time not seeing that as a direct attempt to shut me down. The challenge is, and this is what I've been asking for all along, is how to provide just some -- one or two -- opportunities for my kids to work with a motivated peer group and have the full attention of a teacher, while staying in the 'regular' school. E likes band and art. She has a pretty diverse group of friends. She is at ease in this school. I do value these things but there is no getting around the fact that she is bored and stuck in classrooms that just lump kids together without any regard to ability, motivation, or experience. In these situations, my kid gets A's because she manages to turn in all her work and is quiet. And she knows this. She wants those A's to mean more.

When I was in 5-7th grades, we lived in Virginia in a huge school district that had a much wider range of students than the sheltered world of Midland public schools from which I had come. I was identified as "Gifted and Talented" somehow and experienced three different programs during my time there. One year, there were a handful of days where we were taken out of regular classes to attend a district-wide day of activities. This was lame because I knew no one (I was in elementary school and didn't even know the other kids from my school) and it wasn't a sustained program, just a series of one-offs. The next year, there was a short time in the afternoon once every other week where we were pulled out of class to go work on projects with other kids from around the (large) school. I learned about flow-charts and rudimentary computer programming, we built electrical circuits, and stuff that was cool, but again, there was not rapport with the other students or the revolving adults who lead the projects.

The third model, however, had a significant impact on me. In 7th grade at a gigantic, overflowing school, I spent 4th period in a "special" class with less than 20 other kids. I can still recite poetry I learned in that class. I designed and adminstered my first survey. I learned the mathmatical explanation for "magic" tricks... Projects aside, it was neat, it was special, and I got to know a diverse range of students who made me a better student because they were better students -- and that compensated for the shortcomings of my other classes. There were four teachers for the class, so each quarter we had someone new who was excited to be there because they got to try out kooky projects or teach about their passions to a small, motivated group. I certainly hope it was as rewarding for them as it was for me.

Okay, that was many years, er, decades, ago, but surely there must be some models out there for creating that kind of experience for kids -- even if it is just for 50 minutes a day. And I don't just mean the kids who test well. Why can't we borrow a page from the "free schooling" movement and get kids to pick something that interests them and then get them a peer group and teacher that will encourage them in this?

I tried some of these ideas out on the principal of the middle school and got nowhere (E calls her "weak-minded") so now I'm laying this challenge in front of the school board and the district adminstration today. We'll see. In the meantime, I still need to figure out if I should cut my losses with this school and jump through the hoops to move E straight to 9th grade (at the ripe old age of 12 1/2)...

Losing (some of) the Noise

My experiment this term is "no-email Thursdays." I'm not telling my colleagues (yet) and I'm only cutting myself off from work email. Of the four Thursdays I've encountered so far, I managed to stay true for three of them. The week before last, I forgot. Habit kicked in and I checked and somewhere in the back and forth of History scheduling minutiae with a colleague it clicked...this was exactly the kind of time suck I was trying to avoid. The other three Thursdays were beautiful, productive things and no one died when I did not answer or initiate email for one day.

Here is what I've learned:

1. a day in the middle of the week is probably the BEST day to stay off email. Most of my colleagues teach on Thursdays and are therefore quite busy. They seem to assume that if I don't answer it is because I am similarly busy (I think) -- only I don't teach on Thursday (delicious, delicious Thursdays!). Friday or Monday we have the (fiction of the) weekend and people are twitchy about getting answers before people "go away" for the weekend (altho many don't go away...see point number 3 below). I can always mop up whatever crisis has exploded on Friday morning and not leave anyone hanging as we head into the weekend.

2. I have to prepare. I have to go into my email on Wed night and pull out whatever I need for the work I have planned for Thursday. This means I have a chance to answer late-in-the-day emails and I HAVE to plan my Thursday. Guilt and control freak tendencies go down and productivity goes up.

3. I want more. I want no email weekends. What I am learning, however is that my colleagues have pretty much lost all sense of boundaries. One of them sent an email asking for a discipline vote on something at 8pm on Friday and then was back on line early Saturday afternoon complaining that only one person had weighed in. (I saw all of these on Saturday evening but was so annoyed by it I waited to answer until Sunday night -- should have waited 'til Monday!))
This job is already severely lacking in boundaries as anyone who has ever gone anywhere with me and knows that I carry a book (or three) with me pretty much constantly knows. Why can't we have weekends? I'm not going to pretend that I don't work on weekends. I do. But at least let me stick to doing the reading and grading that is necessary and keep the piddly requests and political crap for a weekday? And then there are the students... I'm thinking email allows us just way too much access to each other and that we all need to retreat to our separate corners. Email, for example, allowed me to learn that a student in my methods class only today found the instructions for the paper that is due tomorrow. Really, do I need to know that my students take my assignments so seriously that they only start them the night before? No, I don't. I'm sure they do this. I'm just sayin' that I don't want to know!

Anyway, the upshot is that no-email Thursdays are pretty damn awesome and I intend to keep them up and look for ways to further limit the noise and improve my focus.

How Was Hawaii?

So...I went to Hawaii. Upon return, people politely ask, "How was Hawaii?" and I stumble over an answer. After some contemplation, I've decided that this is for two (related) reasons:

1. Hawaii is a spectacularly beautiful place, but it is a place with which I am quite familiar. I lived there for a short while in '92-'93 and I've been back to visit a few times. I can't recapture the wonder of seeing how blue the ocean is, how black and huge the lava fields, how lush and green the valley's of wet side are. I know they are fantastic sights, but they are too familiar to move me to any aggressive use of adjectives...

2. This visit meant that I spent two weeks visiting my former life. I lived in Hawaii 18 years ago. Hard to believe 18 years has passed, but I don't regret that time. Being in that place again and sharing space with the person I shared space with then... well, it put me just a touch off balance, but not much. I'm not particularly sentimental and this trip reminded me of that. I could ponder where the time went, but it didn't send me into waves of nostalgia. It just seemed (again) very familiar.

"How was your trip?"

"Nice."

liminality and the royal we

Hunh. Today is my 13th wedding anniversary. I'm not really sure what to do with that since I am not really married anymore, except in the eyes of the state. I'm not uncomfortable where I am in this liminal state of commitment, but there is a certain awkwardness. I have trouble this time of year, when there are so many surface-y social chit chat sessions at holiday gatherings and such... how do I tell my stories? Is it "me" and "I" or if they are the older stories, are they "we" and "us" even though there is no current we. And then today. What do I do with myself today?

Leave it to my grandmother to point the way. She stayed over this weekend and at one point yesterday she casually said, "well, I'm not sending you an anniversary card this year." I told her that seemed quite appropriate, considering. Later, as I drove her home, she said, "I think it's good that you've found a way that works for you and you shouldn't have to bother with anyone fussing about how it is 'supposed' to be." Thanks, Grandma, that is a way better sentiment than I could get from any card.

Pant Wars

And now for something completely different...

I'm having a small war with my pants. Or maybe it is with pants makers. It all started a few weeks ago when I braved the mall on a mission to find talls for a tall friend. While there, the attentive sales people in Eddie Bauer spotted my cord lust and convinced me to try the "curvy" cut. While they are soft and lovely, curvy cuts apparently end at the top of my hip bones -- about a mile from waist. They also, well, curve around where I curve, so I'm feeling sort of extra out there. Where I am really struggling is in the lowness of the cut in the back. They are still a bit too big in the "waist" (for lack of a better term, since this top part of the pant is really no where near my waist!) and they are low, so when I bend or sit, unless I am careful: coin slot. Noooooooo. How do people live like this? I think the pants are kind of cute when I'm feeling cute (I notice I like them best right after I've been to the gym) and when I'm standing or walking, but sitting is strange and I find my self hiking them up a lot even though they are in no way too big for me.

Okay, so this is totally inane, but its been a long week and the drugs in my system are leaving me a bit hazy and the papers are still not graded... and so I'm thinking about my pants.

radio silence

It has been a long time since I've had anything to say on here, it seems. I think that is mainly because all I have wanted to say to internet-land for the last couple of weeks is, "OUCH!" What began with a strange pain/weakness in my right hip the morning I hopped out of bed to fly to California in mid-October has become a constant, painful companion of late. I recognize the patterns from chronic pain of the past... I'm struggling to focus, to do what I need to do, to get out of the house. I'm terrified that if I stop moving now, I'll stop moving for good.

Some progress with the doctors reveals that it is some damage happening to my L5 nerve root happening in my lower back that is sending the shooting pain and painful numbness down my right leg. My lower leg burns. Even my toes tingle painfully with numbness. Not surprisingly, I've maxed out on ibuprofen so that I can function a bit but by the time evening rolls around, I'm more often than not crawling off to bed whimpering. But then at some ugly hour (usually beginning with a 4 - or 5 if I am really lucky) I'm up, howling in pain. Really, I've found myself howling. I was actually screaming in my car the other day while stuck at a light on a 5 minute drive: the pain had flared up, I had to get out of the car, but I was stuck.

I've got some better drugs, but I'm not taking them now (4:40am) because it is my morning to drive the carpool for middle school. And then there are meetings. And a sizable stack of term papers that must be graded. I will, however, take the prednisone I started yesterday. Yesterday was a better day than I've had in a while, so maybe there is some hope but then the system is doing a crappy job of finding me a specialist to see and a place for physical therapy. There is much more waiting ahead of me. I call the doctor and wait. The nurse calls me back, but only half my questions are answered. So she goes back to the doctor and I wait. Then the referral is not clear, so the clerk has to find the doctor and I will wait some more.

In the meantime, I'm feeling somewhat paralyzed by my partial diagnosis (we now the nerve group but won't know how it is being impinged until I get the MRI next week). In the meantime, should I go to the gym? It feels okay when I am there, crappy after, then (after a nap) I generally feel better for the rest of the day. I have felt myself getting weaker, especially in the last two weeks, sometimes I'm shuffling when walking.... This terrifies me. Maybe the gym makes me feel better because I let myself think I am fighting the decline and confirms that I can still move. But what if I'm making it worse?

Half

When my children are with me, I am half full. To be connected with them, I feel very disconnected from the world of grown ups. I have little individual existence/identity. I often find myself not doing things I want/need to do (such as reading) and instead waiting for the next thing I need to do for them. And engaging with them involves a fair amount of negotiation, persuasion, cajoling... even for things they want to do. But we do connect, especially when they are with me for longer stretches. We had an interesting discussion about puberty in the car yesterday. Today we put the yard to bed for the season. But then they drop into legoland, a book, or a friend and I'm just waiting for the next thing I need to do and I feel the gulf between their world as kids and my adult status. I'm the one in charge. The one who makes money, buys food, makes plans, arranges transportation. makes the big decisions...

And when my children are gone and the world is a bit more about me, I am more like half empty. In those times, I am independent and the enormity of that is almost overwhelming. I feel like I waste large chunks of it. I should be riding my bike, writing my book, getting drunk, and kissing people. But I never seem to get that much out of it.

I'm feeling the frustration of neither situation feeling right. Both leave me so very tired. And I'm feeling at a loss as to how to fix it and find some sort of middle ground where the pieces of me fit together.

Cooking

Not eggs, but work. The last few days I've been on my game and made some real progress. I finished the anti-porn/Minneapolis article and sent it off, I nailed down the community partners and research projects for URS 450, I negotiated my way through a stack of readings on neighborhood activism -- putting some in the article and picking others to go on the 450 syllabus, I did a bunch of organizing for the WILL program, and now I'm working on the public toilets piece again.

It feels good. When school gets out in the Spring, I revel in the freedom to let my mind and work wander, range, and roam. Somewhere in the middle of the summer, that gets a little painful, though. It starts to feel useless rather than freeing. And that is is the headspace from which I have emerged this week... which means the 'gearing up for the start of term' activities and the need to produce finished research projects actually feels like a kind of a relief.

A Year

A year ago, I had my hip surgery.

People ask me if I'm better... well, yes, I'm better, but not fixed. I did look back at the assessment I had done of my pain right before the surgery:

"Over the course of the four+ years, I have seen the flexibility and strength on my right side decrease markedly, I have become increasingly unable to walk or stand for long periods of time (esp. on concrete), I cannot sit on overly soft couches or overly hard chairs for more than a few minutes, I cannot sleep on my side (often being on the left with my right hip in the air hurts too), I cannot sleep for more than a few hours, I cannot step up more than about a foot on the right, I cannot drive for more than about two hours without suffering for days after."

Considering what I wrote a year ago, yep, I'm better... still weaker on that side, still suffering from some pain at the back of my hip often (not always), but I do not take handfuls of ibuprofen, I can walk on concrete (made it through the Shadow Art Fair yesterday just fine!), and the pain does not wake me up, generally. Overall, I'm glad I had the surgery -- it did not create a profound change in my life (this hip may always challenge me) but for the first time in 5 years, I've felt better rather than worse.

Bye-Bye Summer

Here it is. The last evening of summer.

This was not the bloggiest of seasons for me. Like many of the friendly blogs in my world, YesterdayLooksGood got very little attention. Her sister blog, Breaking the Code, got even less.

I meant to record more of my happenings -- they are fun to look back at, a way to solidify memories, etc. -- but many posts were never started and of those that were, I abandoned more posts than I actually published.

Using my calendar and a scroll through the drafts-never-published here are the highlights of Summer 2008:

In May, we went to Traditional Arts Weekend at Wheatland. Just like always, and nicely so.

In June I went to Minneapolis/St. Paul for a conference and research (probably the highlight of my summer in terms of work).

In June, E finished 4th grade (which she loved) and O finished Kindergarten (which he tolerated). They understood that they were supposed to be happy about summer, but they didn't quite know what to do with themselves with day after day of unstructured time. Apparently, they didn't feel the chores I assigned them was the kind of structure they were looking for, however. They did a week of low-quality day camp that convinced us they were better off rattling around the house bored and beating on each other than in that environment.

In late June/early July, we went to my folks' cottage. This is a trip I have done for years, but this particular trip came with some twists. I went without my dog, for one. It was her favorite place in the world. She was dune colored and loved to romp there. [sniff]

In July, I became a stay-at-home mom. I struggled with this for awhile. I finally had to accept that my sabbatical was over and stop trying to parent and write at the same time. Things got much easier after that. I scheduled playdates so I could launch a new article and get ready for classes, but I also took other people's kids on adventures with us, rode bikes with my pups, went blueberry picking, hit the pool and the waterpark, danced to the bands at Crossroads, became a regular at the Tuesday farmers' market, and visited many area parks. The kids and I even rode our bikes in the Heritage Festival parade (which I think we all found pretty boring).

In July, E went off for a week at sleep-away camp. I loved camp as a kid and went for multiple weeks (regular, horseback riding, competitive swimming, and, my favorite, sailing) so I was rather excited for her. She did great there but was incredibly tired when I retrieved her. The promised "vegetarian option at every meal" also turned out to be salad and peanut butter sandwiches, so she was mighty happy to have a plate of pasta plopped down in front of her. I had hoped that a week apart would get the kids out of the negative patterns of taunting they had developed. It didn't. Almost as soon as I had fetched her I heard from the backseat, "mom, he's looking at meeeeeeee!"

July also meant beerfest and I had a lovely time with my dad, brother, and many buddies. I didn't pick a "best beer" this year, but I enjoyed several ryes... and I really enjoyed that there were several ryes to enjoy. Worst beer: Jolly Pumpkin's Perseguido. It almost doesn't seem fair, since I don't like their beers/sour beers in general, but EVERYONE in my universe that day agreed that this one particularly sucked.

In August, we went to Dunegrass, the music festival in Empire, MI. Year #2 for us and it held up well, which is not surprising because the kids are now old enough to be fairly sturdy on such outings, we took the camper and therefore had cushy digs, and there is a beautiful beach with great dunes just down the way. moe. wins for best band, I think. Particle was the same as always, only I was too tired to get into the groove this year.

Also in August, S finally got me to play water polo. Okay, yes, it is fun. Water polo easily slid into the hole left by us quitting clogging (E lost her interest and I wasn't going to force it). The kids could swim in the shallows while mommy dunked the college boys... then we would all go home mellow and tired. E wormed her way into one game and played well. I'll coach a tweener team next year if the pool folks will let me! Most of my other exercise came from the bike. I think my fitness level peaked somewhere in late August. If I had to pick a day, I'd say it was when I rode (read: held on for) the local shop ride: 32 miles in about an hour and half. Otherwise I rode with Bike Ypsi many Sundays and took to early morning roll outs so that I could do 20-30 miles and be back in time for W to leave for work. (Tom's right: it's a great time because there is no wind!) My favorite ride became the Saline-Milan route (40 miles), though it was hard to squeeze in on weekday mornings.

The last bit of August contained my birthday weekend. I celebrated Bike Ypsi's first birthday, helped break in Andre and Stephanie's new house at their first party there, closed the pool for the season, and celebrated my many revolutions around the sun with my extended family.

September saw me not only enter my forties but also take on my first big administrative job: department chair. The kids went back to school. We celebrated surviving that momentous week with a bonfire at the party barn, including a birthday king and queen, and chocolate cake with a milk fountain built in.

But the signs of fall have started to arrive. E started soccer, the rain pushed the last Crossroads act (Black Jake and the Carnies) inside, and it was time to make pesto. I rode 50 miles last Saturday to help make 35 pounds of pesto at Jeff's house out in Chelsea. It poured for much of the ride, but it was warm and I loved it except for my fogging glasses. On Sunday, I rolled out in the ran again to ride Tom's Taco Tour. Five taco stops over 19 miles and we ended -- very wet -- at the Corner.

What this summary, focused on specific events and dominant trends, glosses over is the emotional terrain of my summer. It is hard to characterize, but I think I have spent much of the last three months trying to get my head in the game -- whatever the game may be. I've been sad, I've been unfocused, I've raised indecision to a near art form, and somehow I became a procrastinator. I've decided I'm angrier (in general, or maybe it is that I am easier to anger) than I realized. This is not to say that I was not happy this summer. I was, at times, but these other things had me pulled off in too many directions to focus on the things that made me happy. So this is the problem I am tackling this fall: how to be in the right place... or at least how to be in the place I am. How old-school hippie-ish, eh? Yeah, well, I seem to need to go back to that school. To frame it positively (and find a way out of this post!), my goal for the fall is to be good with where I am and what I am doing in that moment and not overthink where else I might be. I'll be in that other place soon enough.