Rejection

After a couple of weeks of reading applications and conducting 27 interviews, I've made my picks for who will join the WILL (Women in Learning and Leadership) program in the fall. Sending out acceptance letters was easy -- congratulations, get registered, look for first meeting in Sept, contact me if you have questions, etc. etc.

The time-consuming and rather annoying task, however, has become writing the rejection letters for those who will not be joining us. I am only the incoming director, you see. I don't officially take over until Sept (or July... no one is quite sure) and I need to stay in the good graces of the outgoing director (who is stepping up to be Associate Dean of my college and someone I will need to work closely with on some things) so I have to follow her wishes on a few matters dealing with the administration of WILL at this moment. And she has made it very clear -- as has the director of the WGST program -- that I need to tailor rejection letters to the individual student. I'm supposed to be encouraging and positive.

But see, I'm not so good at that and I really don't see the point. The great bulk of people that I'm rejecting are people who don't make the GPA cut off. Honestly, they never should have applied and they should have known this since the 3.0 requirement is clearly stated on the application. "I'm sorry, we are unable to accept you because you do not meet the clearly stated and long established criteria of the program. If you are able to pull your grades up, we'll be happy to consider your application next year." Is that encouraging?

The other people are folks who had nothing to offer and little to say... people who could not say why they wanted to be in the program, what issues they are interested in, etc. etc. So how do I explain this while being encouraging? "I'm sorry we are unable to offer you a place in the program and we wish you the best of luck in finding something that excites you enough that you can say more than three words about it."

I'm trying very hard to not think that I am jumping through these hoops just because this is part of a Women and Gender Studies program. I reject tea party feminism where being nice to women takes precedence over doing good work and producing meaningful results. Rejection happens and we all need to learn to deal with it and not expect to be coddled through it. There is good reason why the program has a GPA requirement -- it can be intense and it is not for struggling students who need to put academics first. And if you are not invested in the program, the students who are will come to resent you for not doing your part and that will distract us all from doing what we need to do. So..."Thank you for applying, but we are unable to offer you a space in the program." Now, go study.

What to do with the camper...

Well, I won't have a van soon... maybe I'll need to go to something like this to meet my hauling needs :)

Traditional Arts Weekend

E blowing dandelions in the setting sun.

My sixth Memorial Day Weekend at Wheatland. It was just me and the kids this year -- doing some art, doing some dancing, watching others do these things, and enjoying music, music, music. As a dancer first, TAW is such an amazing treat for me as all classes have live musicians and those folks are very much a part of the class. I even did a couple of partner classes: swing with E, contra with E, and intermediate Cajun with someone I just met (I totally lucked out here... he actually knew how to partner dance already, so we breezed through the two-step waltz, and Cajun jive pretty easily!).

The kids played like crazy, as usual. O found a little gang and they built a wood fort and a stone fort along the paths at the edge of the woods. E was a loner this year...happily in her own head for most of the time. She is so different at 10: she went back to the camper to read and then tidied it all up and made the beds, she didn't want to come to clogging with me but then appeared at my side 20 minutes in and stayed the rest of the time, she ate food she did not particularly care for when it was served for her and didn't complain... Wow.

O was a different story. He was all about the peer group and it was interesting to see who he choose. He made plenty of mistakes, but he was so desperate to stay with his new buddies that it only took the tiniest look from me for him to rush to correct his error... except when it came to eating. He had a hard time disengaging from the play long enough to eat. A fitting end, perhaps, he finally wolfed down some food when he was past tired on Sunday and then woke up in the middle of the night barfing (on his sleeping bag, then on me as I tried to save my bed...)

Really, you haven't done extreme camping until you've handled a 6 year with a stomach issues. Go ahead, you try to explain through the closed door of a port-o-john -- in a bank of port-o-johns with other people waiting -- why viruses make his poop come out like pee.

Seriously, sorry to see the boy ill, he laid around in bed and then on a blanket while I packed up. He was all done with Kid Hill for this year.

Barfing aside, it was a lovely, relaxed weekend where the three of us all got along reasonably well and where we all got to indulge a bit in the things that engaged us as individuals. And yes, I will go back next year. And the year after. And you should come with me.

E runs the tires on Kid Hill.

Self portrait by O.

O's pic of our camp and his hippie momma.

E chilling in early morning.

This (gardening), That (computers and bikes), and the Other (walking)

1. I did get help cleaning out the side bed back in March. Today the kids and I put in some seedlings from Growing Hope. Later in the evening, I found myself worrying a spot on my wrist. I thought it was a bug bite, but no, sigh, was six or so alarming (well, alarming to those of us who are poison ivy sensitive) red bumps. I went in straight away to wash with the special soap and cursed my stupidity at planting without gloves (I didn't want to hurt the baby plants!). Grrrr...

2. I'm having cord issues. The power cord to my laptop is fritzing out. By standing my head, hooting like an owl and realigning the feng shui of my living room, I finally got it to work so that I can recharge my barely-holds-a-charge battery. And then I sent an urgent message to the tech people on campus and asked them to hurry up on the ol' warranty check they were doing. NEED NEW CORD VERY SOON! But then I am also having cord issues, it seems, with the computer on my dirty bike. In the process of moving my shifters and brake levers around to accommodate my new grips, the dead-all-season computer suddenly came to life... so I jiggled and realigned and tried what I had for my laptop, but to no avail. A couple of glimmers and one reading of 4.5 mph when the bike was dead still, but I couldn't get it work properly. Another day.

3. I've been sucked into the walking (and biking) vortex. My kids' school, with the help of the Ypsilanti Health Coalition is finally getting it together to apply for a Safe Routes to School grant. I brought the idea to the principle over a year ago, but, as he does whenever I mention the wholly inadequate placement and style of the schools' bike racks, he just sort of shrugged at me. But now... now the media teacher is on board, a couple of parents, the school janitor, and the YHC are helping out. We did a walking audit of the neighborhood two weeks ago. There has been a survey about walking and biking that went home to all families. And we just got word today that our request for a concrete pad in front of the school for bolting down bike racks has been approved! (Yes, we still have to find money for the bike racks, but there will be a place for them!!!!) The sheriff and the township planner came to our meeting today and had great suggestions for how we might get some of our wishes met (moving parking away from the school, lighting and adding crosswalks and a shared-use path to Service Dr., etc., etc.). We are staffing a table at the ice cream social next week and putting together a helmet giveaway before the end of school. It is exciting to see things happen -- and happen fast.

Going on Tour

Heavy Metal Tour.

An alleycat of sorts, the idea is to ride around town for a set amount of time, collect all the metal you can that you find on the streets (things that would hurt a wheel or slash a tire) and haul it back to end point. We had a dozen or so riders and collected 281.5 pounds of junk.

Pride

Ypsi Pride. Recreation Park. Three kids, four Bike Ypsi folks, three neighborhood people, three EMU students, a gaggle of EMU football players and their handlers. Two dozen donuts. Two misplaced shovels.

We cleared the gutters of glass, condoms, and assorted trash; weeded the playground areas and re-mulched them; trimmed around trees; and generally tidied up.

Thomas is broom-wrangler supreme.

The football players brought flowers, so FOUR of them went to plant them under the sign. I finally pulled two of them (I was 'Site Captain' doncha know) and a few others to help mulch around the fence at the pool. A few other scraped and painted benches at the Senior Center.

Jeff spent quality time with Trey's weedwhacker. So did Andy. The quarterback wanted it too, but the team handlers said no (he didn't want to explain to "Coach" how the star had cut off a toe). O had a go at it too, fortunately a 6 year old can't manage the choke and pull cord very well and he never got it started.

At the end of the morning there was picnic in the park. It was not the lavish spread of previous years -- no doubt a reflection of the poor state of the economy -- and my kids ate the last pieces of pizza.

O says, "Thanks for organizing it. We had a good time. Are you willing to do it next year?" I am.

Mother's Day or why my grandma rocks

For this Mother's Day, four generations gathered at my grandma's in Chelsea for lunch. I brought my grandma a bleeding heart for her shady yard. While I went to change out of my dress and slides into something more gardening friendly, she decided to forge ahead and plant it herself. That, in a nutshell, is my 89 year old grandma. She's game for pretty much anything, pretty much anytime... corsage and all.