Looking forward to the day when...

I'm looking forward to the day when the most notable aspect -- and most consistent identifying feature -- of a candidate for an academic job in any field outside of Women's Studies will not be her gender. Referring to a candidate as "the female" while using actual names of the male candidates is not acceptable. Assuming that a female candidate should go to lunch with the women in the department merely because they share a gender is insulting to all of us involved. Watching the good old boys pat themselves on the back for offering a job to a woman when they had men in the pool is nauseating. Pointing out to them that this is unacceptable and having them respond, "but we like redheads!" is... well, you see where I'm headed.

Cool as a cucumber, E set off to take the ACT this morning. I don't remember freaking out about these big standardized tests, but I do remember feeling like I should manifest some serious anxiety and that was a form of anxiety in and of itself. Apparently my demons have not been transmitted to the girl. Her attitude? "Eh, I've done these before." Such an awesome kid.

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.

Santa Trap

In a fit of an 8 year old's doubt, O decided to set a "Santa trap" (see pic at left) on Christmas eve. Unlike the kids who resist the people who tell them there is not a Santa Claus, the boy -- the product of a household that has never perpetuated the Santa myth -- was determined to prove that Santa didn't exist. He decided that he would rig the little fake tree in the living room so that it would rattle if someone tried to put presents under it. His assumption was that it would not rattle and therefore all the deluded believers (that would be the kids at school, I'm guessing) would be proved wrong and would stop talking about this Santa crap. But then his desire for presents kicked in. What if the Santa trap kept anyone from putting out more presents for him? Conflicted, the boy finally when to bed, announcing that what ever happened, happened and he would not be sleeping in the hallway trying to catch anyone. And he woke up happy to find treats in his stocking and a number of delightful and thoughtfully chosen presents for him from... me :)





Kids trying out new dress up duds from Value World (left) and Emma passing our presents at my brother and sister-in-law's house (right).

Tis the Season...for tromping

O and Boone playing in an icy creek bed.

In a new nature preserve, there is evidence of the land's earlier use as a dumping spot.

The pond was frozen. Next time? Ice skates!

O makes ice balls for Boone to chase.

The early season snow has hung around and now that the kids are on break, I've been taking them out to explore. We found woods and a frozen pond on Christmas eve and then played on the icy banks of the Huron River in Frog Island and Riverside parks on Christmas afternoon. Both adventures were lessons in the awesomeness of winter, kids in nature, dogs with kids, and ice (and a very good counterpoint to overabundance of plastic stuff this time of year...):

Better now...

Finished the grading for one class. Whew. Two more over the next few days and then I'll be done. While I spent large chunks of the weekend grading, I also managed a grown-up dinner out with people, a lazy morning, a party, and even the HoliGAYs Extravaganza at the Blind Pig. I didn't, however, see my kids other than for a brief moment on Friday. I can't seem to put all the parts together these days and having the kids at W's meant that I didn't have to for this brief moment.

Coming Up Empty...

My reserves of tact and patience seem to be spent. I realized this this afternoon while sitting in a faculty senate meeting, trying to explain to the provost how her "process" is less than transparent. I kept a lid on my rant (barely), but that was only because some good colleagues helped carry the issue forward (in a much more civil manner than I would have been able to muster) and my frustration was temporarily overriden by bouts of resignation or maybe it was apathy...

I'm not sure why I've ended up here. The term has been tough, but there wasn't anything particularly novel about it. My sense is that students needing special tending (extensions, alternate arrangements, hand holding) has risen, but I'm not sure if it is really worse or if it just seems that way because I am so worn out. I do know that as students flail and flounder in front of me about why their papers are late, etc., etc. I can barely force myself to actually listen. I just don't seem to care, because behind them is a line of students who also need something...

In my personal life, I seem to have only two settings: fury and apathy. I can't even seem to muster the energy to be actively disappointed in one moment -- or I'm having a flash of anger. Fortunately (perhaps) one seems to cancel out the other.

I feel like I've hardly been out in the world in the last few months, hardly seen anyone beyond the most immediate circle. I did spend last weekend in Buffalo with friends, but even there, it felt like my social skills had atrophied. Certainly my ability to be a cheerleader has evaporated. And now my ability to tolerate the regular old bullshit of academe has headed south. Tomorrow's meeting of the economic history search committee ought to be a blast. An overeager chair who apparently has nothing else to do is nipping at the heels of the rest of the committee and I'm about ready to... See? That's what I'm worried about. My tolerance is gone. And I'm really at a loss as to how to recover it.