Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

–not that I’m counting 🙂

If all goes well (and good weather is expected both here and in Detroit), Sydney will be home by 11:30 tomorrow night.  I thought I was playing it pretty cool these last few days, but he drew my attention to the fact that there was a smiley face after nearly every sentence of my email to him today.

Since I’ve had a lot of time to think about this, I’ve had visions of greeting Sydney in various different ways.  Don’t ask me why I don’t have better things to do–I do!!  I may wear a very ladylike skirt just to keep me from knocking him down like an overly affectionate St. Bernard.  I’ve also thought about holding a little sign spelling out “Sidney Pener” and looking anxiously at all of the female fliers who emerged from the gate. 🙂 Why do I think about these things?  Because this is Ithaca, and Ithaca is a very small town.  It’s occurred to me that I may see one of my professors or one of my students waiting for someone on the same flight, in which case I’ll need to be sure I can greet my husband appropriately with such observers nearby.  School and life are on intimate terms here, and normally that’s okay, but I think I’m just going to hope that I can get away with expressing some unalloyed joy tomorrow night and hope that everyone else is doing the same thing.  Late-night flights into small towns make for some interesting people-watching about which poems wait to be written.

Erin

Ithaca’s been having one heck of an ice storm. It blew in on Friday and then kept everybody close to home on Saturday. Of course, I decided the weather necessitated a nice, long walk on Saturday morning–and it felt great! Beautiful trees and a quiet that you don’t often get, even in rural places.

But last night the wind picked up and our power went out around 5:30 . . . and it didn’t come back on ’til 6:30 this morning. Thankfully, this was the one day ever when I didn’t seriously need to use the computer. So I wrote letters and read by candlelight, and then when it got too cold I crawled in bed with my travel alarm, my down comforter, and my cat. It was quite lovely, actually. I had lots of candles, a good flashlight, and my housemate has a wired phone, so I felt perfectly safe. She also has a wood stove, in case we were really stuck without heat for longer than a few hours.

But then around 11:00pm I heard cursing in my driveway and sneaked into the living room to watch some young guy unhook what I later realized was a sizable tree from the front of his gigantic truck. He’d driven right into it farther up the road and then dragged it all the way down. I wasn’t thrilled about a large, swearing man in my yard, but after about five minutes of watching I suddenly thought things would be just fine, so I pulled on some warm outerwear and went outside. This is why in Ithaca you sleep in yoga pants and layered sweatshirts! 🙂

For whatever reason, he was in a great mood. In fact, he reminded me of my brother: shiny toys (this was a nice truck), looking for a bit of trouble, but personable as all get-out. So he and I joked about the weather, about whether or not the cops would be able to get up my road, etc. And he hauled the tree off the road (man, I felt like such a girl in my polka-dotted rain boots and wool coat!). So by about midnight I had a tree chainsaw-ed into pieces on the side of my road and an amusing story that made me laugh even as I was going to sleep.

Erin

I came across some ranting today about how Americans are so embarrassingly stupid compared to the rest of the world. I hear this sort of stuff all the time, whenever I’m outside of the U.S. Actually, not just outside the U.S. Certain segments, e.g., academics, of the American population enjoy deriding their fellow citizens.

I can go along with some of the sentiments involved here to a certain point. I rather resent that the rest of the world is overflowing with American products, for example. I also intend to spell it ‘colour’ until my dying day. More seriously, I do meet a significant number of Americans who seem to have let the fact that they are citizens of the most powerful country in the world get to their heads. Not most Americans. But there are definitely some who fall into this sort of obnoxiousness.

But when the critics become strident, i.e., when they start becoming very serious and pontificating about how Americans are so stupid that they don’t even know what country London is in and can’t tell Obama apart from Osama and don’t know who won the Vietnam War and so on and so forth … well, then I find it embarrassing how the critics are parading their own bigotry and ignorance just while they are criticizing others’ ignorance. In case there’s somebody who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, search Google with ‘stupid Americans’. You should easily be able to find plenty of video clips of people going around asking Americans simple questions and receiving really stupid answers from the Americans.

Now anybody with a shred of intelligence should know that such videos constitute exactly no evidence whatsoever for the claim that Americans are more stupid than other people. Given that people producing these videos often go on to explicitly present them as evidence for that claim, I suppose the videos do at least provide evidence that their producers are stupid. Not evidence that they are more stupid than the Americans, but just stupid in an absolute sense.

Anyway, there is, of course, no lack of evidence that Americans are abominably ignorant of many things. But … so are people everywhere else. So, to balance the tables a little bit, here are the results of two polls:

1)  Nearly half of Britons are unaware of Auschwitz.

2) Nearly half of Germans under 24 do not know that the Holocaust involved the killing of millions of Jews.

So, yeah, when people get tired of stupid Americans, perhaps they might want to consider going and hanging out with those oh-so-knowledgeable Britons and Germans.

Sydney

Today I had the second occasion in recent weeks to step across a stream of urine running over a sidewalk, thanks to somebody thinking that a busy sidewalk was a good place to urinate. Today it was a sidewalk along one of the busiest roads in Oxford. Last time it was on one of the busiest walkways in Oxford, just over from the Bodleian. Today it happened at about 5pm, last time right at noon (with at least a hundred people within a fifty foot radius). So in neither case was it somebody staggering home from a pub or something after a late night of drinking. My question: is this sort of behaviour more acceptable in England than in the United States or Canada? At least I’ve never witnessed somebody urinating in the middle of the day in a busy, public place at home. This sort of behaviour strikes me as just the sort of thing for which a day or two in stocks in the town centre would be suitable punishment.

Sydney

Today I led a hearing for a student who plagiarized her work for my class.  I realized only later that I must have somehow seen the student’s actions as a threat to my person, as well as my work; when she mentioned that she was a wrestler, I found myself sizing her up as a reassessment of the sizing up I had apparently done earlier that week, when the case first developed.  Though initially I apparently found myself to be about equal to her, my second assessment let me know that I would be in trouble, which is the only reason I realized all of this was going on in the back of my brain.  Did I worry an academic hearing would turn into a brawl?  Did I think I needed to protect something (the classroom?  my other, hopefully non-plagiarizing students?  the faculty member who served as a witness to the proceedings?).  At any rate, I have not only one messed-up student, but also a messed-up head of my own.

Erin

If you’re from a Russian Mennonite background, this should have you rolling on the floor. If you’re Swiss Mennonite, you’ll likely still find it funny. If neither, well, I have no idea.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SggmDSJSYs]

Sydney

After a six-week slog through unhappiness, illness, and a whole lot of work, several wonderful events in my life:

– By this point, I have my head back on straight enough to realize that I have had a lot of wonderful help in keeping it together while Sydney’s gone.  Mom, Sarah and Lisa, Sydney’s mom, Christi, numerous friends from church, Kate, Heidi–you guys rock.  It’s taken me awhile to figure it out, but I’m feeling incredibly supported and encouraged because of your help.

– Sydney comes back in five days.  Even a wimp like me can handle that, right?  I am having to work hard to resist the temptation to drive out to Detroit to see him upon his first landing in the US, but, well, I’m my father’s daughter and common-sense is keeping me in check . . . so far, at least.

– Two of my advisors got together earlier this week to discuss my upcoming qualifying exams (May 14th).  They then sent me an email with all sorts of great ideas about how I might frame my project, avenues to explore, suggestions of books that might help me along the way, etc.  I loved knowing that they had taken the time to figure out how they could help me prepare!

– Today I learned that I won a fellowship from my department.  It will give me a) an extra semester of teaching-free funding so that I can work on my dissertation, and b) another semester in which I will teach a course that I have already designed and proposed to the committee.  The course theme is something that has come out of my dissertation work thus far.  I am excited about both halves of the project–no, excited really isn’t a strong enough word for it.  I love teaching, and I would really like to teach some of the things I’ve had spinning around in my head for awhile, but I’ll also be grateful for sustained time for dissertation work.  And man, that award came at a really good time.  Oh yes, and winning this fellowship will be a great boost when I walk in to take my exams later this spring!

Alright, time to go read some books so that I can take advantage of some of these wonderful things . . .

Erin

Too bad that this isn’t the door I get to use to go into the Bodleian:

On my oh-so-lengthy to-do list for February, I had “Do taxes.”  Ha!  I hardly even looked at them before the month ended.  But I settled in early this morning, started with Line 1, and finished state and federal off by late afternoon.  For those who are currently struggling through a more extensive tax season (I have my dad in mind in particular), remember that I have no house, I have no assets of any kind, I have no children, and I have no money.  That makes taxes a lot easier 🙂  All the same, I’m glad to have them out of the way.  After a month of fellowship applications, incessant grading, and now taxes, I’m feeling liberated.  March is going to be a good month!

Erin

Earlier this week I decided I needed a break from the libraries, so I walked around in Oxford’s botanic garden. Naturally, there would be more to see there later in the year, but there were some interesting things now as well. Here are a few pictures. I even promise a photo of myself.

First, some narcissus with what I assume must be some lovely Rubus sp. in the background:

There are lots of really cool euphorbias to be found around here, much cooler than that euphorbia that everyone knows, i.e., poinsettias:

Any place where you can grow cyclamen outside has something to be said for it, in my opinion:

Here’s some birch bark (Betula albosinensis, to be precise) for Erin:

And here’s a flower for me, since I have always liked green flowers and black flowers and this one is both green and black:

That was a widow iris, by the way. A widow rainbow? I think I could come up with a better name.

I really hope this plant sometimes does something to merit the name ‘mirabilis’:

This tillandsia needs to hear a few good Mennonite sermons on modesty …

And, finally, they had a whole greenhouse full of insectivorous plants, including these tiny sundews:

That’s me in the photos for size comparison. Now, I want to hear no more complaints that I never have any photos with me in them.

Sydney