“Maybe after our meetings this afternoon we could do a bit of our grocery shopping.”
“Sydney, this is where I try not to strangle you for mentioning this just after we leave the house, with my grocery list still on the fridge!!”
“I have the grocery list right here, in my pocket. Now don’t you feel bad for giving me a hard time?”
“My hero!”
My cold is clearing up. I sat through a meeting this afternoon with nary a cough nor sniffle. Yes! I have a bit of trouble getting the voice going, though, and I think Sydney is enjoying a slightly quieter Erin, though I make up for it in moans and sneezes and such. I also have got a whopping cold sore, so I’m ugly but getting pretty healthy. 🙂
Sydney has housing for the majority of his stay in Oxford. We can’t move in when we get there, though, so we’re still working on housing for us, but I’m glad to know that by the time I leave I’ll see him safely ensconced in his home. What with him living almost two miles from the library in Oxford and me picking up his shoveling while he’s away, we might be slightly more fit by the end of this gig! Of course, I’ll be the one with a deep freeze full of food and no one to look askance when I crave sugar, so I will have the harder time keeping up my end of the bargain. But he’ll have the famous British clotted cream to contend with!
Erin
In the last couple of days I’ve developed a nasty cold. Most other times, this would just be a pain for a few days, nothing more. But after battling stomach ailments and migraines for the last couple of months (particularly this past month), I’m a bit worn out, and watching my cold build up made my heart sink. When I think that we’re going to England in just three weeks, I begin to worry, so I’m now fighting a multi-fronted battle: stomach, migraine, cold (with the possibility of a sinus infection, always fun), and morale.
Thankfully, the semester is over and I don’t have deadlines for any of my work (yes, academics generally work through holidays). But not having to haul myself up to teach my freshmen or to meet with my advisors or whatnot makes it hard to motivate myself to get up to do anything. After a certain point, it’s just hard to motivate yourself when you know you’re the one making the reason to get up in the first place. I think I’m about out of self-motivation, and I don’t want to lean too hard on Sydney (who is himself rather busy and preparing to leave the country). Maybe I’ll turn to cooking . . . 🙂 I can’t taste anything, but I know what good food looks like, at least!
Erin
[They] are not usually withdrawn around others; they approach others, even if awkwardly, for example by engaging in a one-sided, long-winded speech about an unusual topic while being oblivious to the listener’s feelings or reactions, such as signs of boredom or wanting to leave. This social awkwardness has been called “active, but odd”. This failure to react appropriately to social interaction may appear as disregard for other people’s feelings, and may come across as insensitive…. [They] may analyze and distill their observation of social interaction into rigid behavioral guidelines and apply these rules in awkward ways—such as forced eye contact—resulting in demeanor that appears rigid or socially naive. Childhood desires for companionship can be numbed through a history of failed social encounters….
[They] display behavior, interests, and activities that are restricted and repetitive and are sometimes abnormally intense or focused. They may stick to inflexible routines or rituals …
Pursuit of specific and narrow areas of interest is one of the most striking features … [they] may collect volumes of detailed information on a relatively narrow topic … without necessarily having genuine understanding of the broader topic.
I thought this sounded like a great description of academics. And then I realized it was a description of people with Asperger syndrome.
Sydney
I discovered a new benefit of the Christmas season: happier driving. Never mind that this is a hazardous time of year, particularly as all the new students learn to drive in winter conditions right now, in Ithaca, during a snowstorm. Never mind that this is a crazy town to drive in, with idiots and jerks littering the road and hugging your bumper for ten straight miles, despite the snow gathering at the rate of an inch an hour. This is the time of year when I sing Christmas songs in the car to myself (nice and loud). When preparing to climb up to the highest notes of “O Holy Night,” you can’t choke off to exclaim something about the guy who just cut you off and moved across three lanes in the space of a block. Oh no, you need to sing, and sing with full breath support. So you sing and by the time you’re done you’ve forgotten all about that idiot and the next three or four that have come along since him. It’s wonderful! I need to apply this technique all year long. Only one caution: when driving on campus, where students swarm all around the cars, assuming that they are protected from harm by their constant cell-phone use, they may actually look up if they hear you singing in your car (yes, I’m loud), so perhaps it’s best to sing to “Silent Night” right about then. But don’t stop singing!
Erin
We got a beautiful snowfall this morning . . . which meant I almost didn’t get back up the hill after my morning errand-run. Thankfully, Sydney came when I beeped the horn and we nudged the car the last ten feet up the hill and into our driveway. Gotta love living in Ithaca! But we enjoyed watching it continue to fall for the rest of the day as we worked inside.
Christmas is taking shape a bit more slowly this year than some. After spending a lot of my summer break visiting family, both mine and Sydney’s, I decided I’d like to stay here for Christmas. Originally, the idea was to stay and do some major work. That will still happen, but the break will now also include a good chunk of time preparing for and being in Oxford, which I didn’t expect. A great treat, but I think it might change my plans for a quiet, relaxing holiday! I might have less of the wanderlust in me after such a whirlwind trip, though, and be able to focus on my work!
This will be my first Christmas away from my parents, and I have been trying to figure out how to make it still seem like Christmas. Sydney isn’t really into holidays, but I am–big time 🙂 All that I’ve figured out so far is that Christmas for me should involve time at church, lots of music (I’ve had the Messiah playing incessantly), and good food and fun in the snow. Helping with the food part will be Nelson, Sydney’s brother, who’s coming to visit next week and who will be here over Christmas. Sydney says he’s coming here to cook. Cool! Maybe, just maybe, I can convince him to do some Christmas cooking with me, whatever that means. Nelson, do you make Christmas cookies? 🙂 I’m not sure I need to be eating Christmas cookies, but making them would give me a real holiday boost.
Erin
to that question, “Okay, so you’re going to school forever. What good is it going to do?”
A New York Times article on cognitive decline in the elderly: “Several studies of normal aging have found that higher levels of educational attainment were associated with slower cognitive and functional decline.” Apparently how much you then go on to use that stuff you learned and continue to exercise your brain in new and challenging ways is a big part of the benefit, but the education starts the process. Stimulating social interaction (playing challenging games with friends, gardening with others) also helps, as does physical exercise.
I ‘m just thrilled that I now have a response to that question. I’ll use it, too!
Erin
As I was walking out of the campus bookstore this afternoon the display of diplomas caught my eye. Of course, it wasn’t the piece of paper inside that caught my eye (however expensive the education it represents), but the matting. Go figure. But it was a pretty cherry red!
I was reminded that I wanted to ask what you guys do with your diplomas. If you have a professional degree, I think people are used to seeing it on your office or study wall–we want to make sure you are well trained before you poke and prod! I don’t think anybody wants or expects to see any degree validation from me, though. So where do the diplomas go? I’m worried I’m being derelict. Where do yours end up?
Erin
I always say that I am built more like a furniture-mover than a marathoner, and the idea of running without someone chasing you and trying to hurt you has always been inconceivable to me. But recently, my walks at the gym haven’t tired me out quite the way I’m used to, and so I’ve thrown in a bit of running just to make sure I really do come home completely exhausted and ready to settle down with a book (otherwise, I’m apt to spend my entire day popping up and doing small chores all around the house out of sheer energy). When trying to run I sort of feel like I want to throw up, but I’ve been told “you get used to that.” Riiiiiiight. On the way home from the gym the other morning I passed a runner on the road and I found myself thinking “Way to go! Keep it up!” instead of my usual “Hmm, you know, if I swerve a bit to the right I could take a whole lot of crazy out of the gene pool.” Apparently some thing are changing . . . though I was still thoroughly disgusted by the petite blonde who was racing away on my left in the gym this morning. I’m more understanding of running, but I’m not nuts!
Erin
“You hate when you come home from a trip with a lot of luggage and have to drag it up the stairs, or you’re in a huge hurry to leave and you have to run back up to the third or fourth floor dressed up in high-heeled shoes because you’ve forgotten something,” said Barbara Fox, president of Fox Residential Group, who lived for two decades with her husband, James Freund, in a 7,000-square-foot town house on West 73rd Street near Central Park. “And you hate when you have to have repairs because there’s always got to be somebody there to answer the door.”
This is from, you guessed it, the NYTimes, in an article about townhouse-owners in the city, and the drawbacks of owning a home that lacks “a doorman, concierge, superintendent or managing agent.” Part of me wants to make a snide remark about having a 7,000-square-foot house that you find too big to manage. But another part of me is simply intrigued that you could begin thinking of doormen as necessities for your living space. The more I’ve lived on the east coast, the more I’ve gotten interested in what people do with their money when they have it to burn. I don’t want to make unhelpful generalizations, but one thing that I’ve noticed is that the dominant view at home is that money is for stuff: houses, cars, and insurance policies on them. But here, money is for services or for experiences; as the lady in the article sums up, “I just got tired of not having the services that made life simpler for me.” Where I’m from, turning sixteen meant a car, preferably one with gadgets, if you had money to spend on it. But for much of the NYTimes readership, turning sixteen means a trip to Europe.
So, of course, with thoughts like these, I’ve been wondering about the pros and cons of each situation; more than that, however, I wonder at the way in which each camp seems to be quite sure that its way of doing things is much, much better than the way the other camp spends its money. And hey, I’m not immune. From all my National Geographic reading as a kid, the one piece that really struck me was an article about Hollywood. A hairdresser there remembers moving to California and, with no money for a shop or anything else, buying a pink Cadillac. I remember reeling from that, even when I read that the hairdresser said it was the best investment he could have made: with such a flashy car other people bought into the idea of him as successful, and actually made it happen. I’m glad he didn’t starve to death, but what a way to go about it!
I see this kind of split, too, with my college students and their choices about careers. Most of them are in engineering, animal science, or other fairly steady-employment-geared occupations. My dad would be proud of them. Sharing an office with several creative writing staff, I hear them encourage their students to continue writing, and the students replying (with greater and lesser degrees of sheepishness), “Well, I would go into creative writing, but I want to get a job that makes money.” Things you can only say when you’re 18 without some embarrassment. When I was in college many of my pre-med friends hated their schoolwork, and some even hated the idea of practicing medicine, but they were quite confident that what they were doing was superior to the work I was doing. Anybody, it seems, can read a book, but not everyone can a) make money b) suffer through things they hate to do the job that makes money. I’ve never been particularly tolerant of faux-martyrs, so I often let them have it, I’ll admit. But what surprises me is that, given their view of my work, they didn’t express more astonishment at the fact that I could really struggle with my work and make it take up so time. If it’s just reading books, why was I always working? I’m hoping they didn’t just think I was really slow! To be fair, these people may have had some run-ins with the artistic-martyr types who languish over each word and expect the public (the cool public, not the real public) to thank them for it. An amazingly slippery situation all around.
Not to digress, this need to defend one’s choice about the dream job/money job problem made for some real tensions among many people I observed, particularly when it came time to graduate and some had to fess up to “selling out” to business while others took great pleasure in announcing they were doing public service work. And I worry for both sides, because it’s clear that what you were “proud” to do was whatever had currency in the public mind, whether it was money or public service or the medical or law professions (which some might see as having the assets of both the money job and the dream job). Is it not possible to enjoy what you do, feel comfortable in it, without having to denigrate the choices of others who chose differently?
Erin
Alan Schmierer