Spring finery

One of the best things about living in the land of ice and snow is how exuberantly and magnificently everyone revels in spring.   The color green has nothing to do with jealousy here and everything to do with joy and hope and not-being-freaking-freezing-all-the-time.

The instant the bike paths clear and the sun comes out and the thermometer registers above 40 degrees, the people come out.  They come out running.  They come out biking.  They come out walking the dog. They come out pushing a stroller.  They come out with bags to fill at the grocery store, they come out in tee shirts and shorts and sandals with socks.

I open the house windows as soon as the temps hit 50 degrees.  I have learned not to plant anything before Mothers Day, since, as was proven last night, we can still get frost well into May.

And I start monitoring the garden growth.

I love my neighborhood’s gardening aesthetic and commitment.  We are not of the neatly trimmed lawns and tidily organized pathways and bed edgings here on the near-east side of Madison – AKA Hippie Central.  No, we are of the wild abandon, the “toss all the bulbs in together” and let come what may.

Increasingly, folks around me are building raised garden beds on any patch of flat ground they can (yards tend more toward the postage-stamp size than the expansive, need an actual lawn mower variety):  on the median, in their front yards, in side yards, on top of former driveways.

My garden resides mostly in old kitty litter and construction buckets.  Not the most attractive arrangement but what is produced is gorgeous.

So, spring.  It’s like Christmas times the 4th of July plus Easter.

second-hand guilt

There was a thought-provoking, frustrating Op-Ed in today’s NYT, tracing the garment industry’s woeful record of mass disasters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/opinion/bangladeshs-are-only-the-latest-in-textile-factory-disasters.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

As long as there have been factories producing cloth and clothing, there have been people dying in swaths, the result of greed and incompetence and a never-ending supply of human beings desperate enough to take terrible jobs.

In order to keep the price of a pair of pants down, poor, ill-educated people – mostly women, often children – toil in abysmal conditions for pennies.

I largely avoid feeling any guilt over my complicity in this system by buying most of my clothes second-hand.  I’m not giving money directly to the companies that condone, either overtly, or through averted eyes, the abuses that take place in the making and distributing of the clothes.  In addition, I am usually spending my wardrobe dollars in places that do good things with the proceeds.

But ultimately, for me to have items to buy second-hand, somebody had to pay something to purchase them new.

The only way out is for me to start saving the fur shed by all the beasts, carding it into wool and knitting my own clothing.

 

alternate reality sucks

Use of stone hammer tools and anvils by bearded capuchin monkeys over time and space: Construction of an archeological record of tool use

This ↑ caused me a significant physical and emotional pang.  This article could very well have been from my planned dissertation, or at least from my research.  The authors (women, notably!) are the same scientists whose work I studied in graduate school.

Once upon a time, I was in graduate school, working on my masters thesis on primate cognitive evolution and scoping out what my PhD work might entail.  I was fairly happy amongst smart, funny, focused people with no connection to reality or the injustices of the world.  Cocooned, you might say.

Then my innate, and enduring, reactive response to people expressing authority they have not earned nor deserve kicked in, and I bailed out.  Into a chaotic, raging sea of no life raft, no plan b, no notion of what else one might do with one’s life other than attend graduate school.

A couple of weeks ago, approximately 21 years later, a galaxy away, I started following a Tumblr account called The Olduvai Gorge, a running listing of interesting/provocative articles and information about the field of human evolution, paleoanthropology and related topics, as a way of seeing what has happened since I fled, and dipping a toe or two back into an area of study that still fascinates me.  Today, the article above was posted, a virtual slap upside the face by an alternate reality where I might be a co-author.

I am not a PhD holder.  I do not spend my years in the field studying new world primate behavior, teaching undergraduates about primate evolution, attending scientific conferences to present the results of my research.  My reality is a hopscotch of jobs held for a handful of years, lateral moves through a series of underpaid jobs at non-profit organizations, and an underwhelming amount of intellectual stimulation.

I think I would have been a good scientist, an awesome professor and a provocative colleague.

the kid is funny

Egon has an acute and deadly sense of humor.

Example Numero Uno:

I’ve been sick with some hideous upper respiratory infection which in the current phase renders my voice somewhat below Lauren Bacall’s throaty basso or entirely absent.

Juan, one of the flock that appears in our house every day after school, asked Egon if they could order pizza.  Egon passed on the request to me, and I croaked out a negative reply.  Given my vocal limitations, Juan could not hear my response.

Juan – “What did she say?”

Egon – “She said that she hates you.”

Example Numero Dos:

For years we’ve been getting coupons for free pints of Ben & Jerry’s sent to us very regularly from Credo Mobile.  This started a long while back when they double charged us for something and provided a coupon as part of their recompense.  Since then, we get about a coupon a month.  It is rare that we pay for ice cream.

For several days, Egon has been exhorting Daniel to take our current crop of coupons to the store to redeem, and Daniel has been forgetting.  This afternoon, when he was preparing to leave to pick up Shara from work and grocery shop for dinner, Egon carefully and clearly reminded him about the coupons.

A few minutes ago, Egon appeared in the living room, holding a spoon, spoon-end up, hopeful expression on his face.

“I forgot,”  said Daniel.

Egon’s spoon slipped to a spoon-end down configuration.

“Oh, Egon’s spoon is in a sad position,” I said.

“Egon’s spoon is in a murderous position,” said he.

Beloit: putting the “eh” back in education

The stream of mailed invitations to apply to one college or another that Shara has been getting is nothing like the flood that overwhelmed me, largely because most of hers come electronically.  But it’s been fun to see the different approaches taken by these institutions in courting a student like her.

Among them, though, the one from my alma mater totally stands out:

Is Beloit College right for you?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Come find out.

Has there ever been a more self-effacing marketing strategy?  “Maybe.  Maybe not.  Nah, probably not, but come have some cookies and see our cool new science building just for kicks.”

Shara & I both very much appreciated the grunge factor of Skidmore, comparing it favorably to Belwah’s peeling cinderblock walls and cracked cement staircases.  Nothing flash about Beloit.  You might like it.  You might not.

 

1/2 of it all

I turned 45 in December.  My one remaining grandparent is 99 years old.  So I think it is totally okay that I am having a midlife crisis.

The only part of my current life situation that has any overlap with where I thought I would be at this age, back when I was graduating from college, is that I am working at an institution of higher learning.  Not as a professor, however, as I had intended oh so long ago.

On the bus this morning, two current graduate students at the UW were earnestly discussing what type of professorial job would be preferable, what to do if they were facing tenure at a college they didn’t like, how their status will change once they “publish my first book.”  I really wanted to lean over and say:  Chances are, reality will be nothing like what you are plotting for yourselves.

When I was 21, I had a game plan.  It involved graduate school, a PhD, lots of international research in exotic locales, a professorship at a liberal arts college and fame of an academic nature.  I also knew that Daniel would be a part of it.

What I have at 45 is no game plan whatsoever.  I have two amazing, inspirational, jaw-droppingly talented kids, the most supportive, adorable and oddly geeky husband, the best house in Madison, lots of animal companions, and a track record of work that looks like a dot-to-dot picture filled in by someone who did not know how to count sequentially.

To cope with a lack of long-term vision, I’ve started setting short-term goals.  These are of the “I have an idea and must execute it immediately” type of action.  Most of the time, I am able to talk myself down from doing drastic and ill-conceived things, but some of these ideas drill down into my marrow and must be accomplished lest I burst into flames from repressed need.

So.  We are going to adopt a dog.  This weekend we meet 4 likely candidates and figure out which is the best fit for our existing menagerie.  We’ve got a dog bed and a leash, and the cats have all gotten their vaccinations updated.  (They have no idea what is about to descend upon their feline-centric lives.)

And I – finally – had the Firefly tattoo I’ve been craving, and Shara has been designing, inked onto my arm.  It is beautiful.

 

sick day

Today’s accomplishments:

• folded laundry
• made dinner (this is big – I have largely stopped cooking in the past couple of years)
• worked out at the gym
• got the old picture frames from the basement to the 1st floor
• did the crossword puzzle
• bought new comic books
• made an appointment with Travis the tattoo artist

Shara & I had a mental health day today.  With depression, sometimes you need to cut yourself some slack so you can stop beating up on yourself.  So we slept in an extra hour, went out to breakfast, did some shopping, went to the Y, played with the cats, watched some Freaks & Geeks.  It was necessary therapy to augment the drugs.

There are days when doing a load of dishes feels like climbing Mount Everest.  I need to remember to acknowledge what I do accomplish instead of chiding myself for not accomplishing more.