Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

I arrived in Oxford yesterday morning, was shown to my room in Merton College, spent the remainder of yesterday and last night alternating between dozing and sleeping, and now feel much refreshed. I’m in a room above the T. S. Eliot Room; on one side of the room I can look out over the Fellows’ Quad, on the other side I can look at crocuses blooming beneath the large tree behind the library.

At the moment, it’s nice and sunny outside, so I’m planning to venture into town shortly and see if I remember my way about. According to the weather forecast, there’s supposed to be heavy rain for the rest of my stay here. Perhaps that will encourage me to get some work done before my interview.

Sydney

After an unexpected drive to Syracuse this morning (our flight in Ithaca was canceled due to weather), Katherine and I arrived safely in Iowa.  She is tired and somewhat cranky after such a long day, but she’s already starting to leave her mark on the house: no “stuff” on low surfaces and lots of fingerprints on the glass table and fireplace front.  I have no doubt that a fearful housecat will be next on her list.

She also took her first run at stairs!  When I went upstairs to get something, leaving her with Mom and Dad in the livingroom, it was clear that Katherine had no intentions of being left behind.  So she started climbing after me, and it is now her new favorite activity.  We are now always on the watch for a climbing Katherine!

Erin

This week turned into a very interesting one.  Stressful, yes, but just all-out interesting.

To begin with, Katherine and I are leaving for my parents’ place tomorrow.  It’s a work vacation for me, but Katherine will get to crawl all over a much larger home than ours (and learn about stairs!), and Mom and Dad will get to think about something other than how much snow they’re getting.

Sydney is preparing for his interview at Oxford, which has him suddenly shifting from the early-modern papers he was working on recently to the medieval material that’s at the heart of his dissertation.  My husband, mentally leaping several centuries in a single bound!

In the last two days I was notified that the publication I had underway would no longer be needed for the collection.  Gah!  Arg!  On the other hand, I’ve had papers accepted to two different conference in June.  We’ll have to see how much traveling and conferencing we’re up for.  Right now the summer seems very far off; we’re focused on all that the next two weeks will bring!

Erin

Ever.

Sydney

. . . Sydney just learned that he has an interview for a postdoc.  So he’ll be flying to England next week!

Erin

In a certain sort of way.  We feel very thrown off in part because Katherine’s returning to her October ways: she has stopped sleeping for more than a couple of hours at a stretch at night–and does not want to sleep by herself even when she does go back down.  In part because Sydney and I both have taken up a number of teaching duties that have kept us running; this past week, for example, I had nine hours of student conferences.  And, as usual, despite our best efforts, we’re having a hard time getting dissertation work done, simple as our switching-off schedule sounds (Is there a big black hole where dissertation time is supposed to be?  does it get swallowed up by Katherine feeding sessions?  cups of tea?  dish-washing?  I’m thinking about putting signs around town: “Lost: Dissertation time.  If you see it, please call.  I would describe it, but I haven’t seen it myself!”).

In all of that talking with my students, I noticed that at a number of points I would ask them to explain their paper’s argument, and they would wave their hand and offer a phrase like “social structures” or “justifications.”  That’s an argument?  The older I get the less likely I am to assume I know what chain of thoughts is supposed to follow from such a catch-word.  At the graduate-student level, you see the same thing when  someone waves a hand and says, “Like [insert theorist or philosopher] says.”  Yup.  Uh-hunh.  Maybe I’ve been married to Sydney for too long, or maybe I’m realizing that people rarely know how to fill in that hand-waving part, but I’m less comfortable now than I once was with assuming I know what on earth someone means by such a wink-nod way of talking.  And as I got older and bolder I am more likely to ask, flat-out, for more explanation.  And then I finally learn something.

Erin

As Sydney reminded me today, cooking is what we do while looking after Katherine (since work and Katherine don’t mix).  She likes her parents to be up and moving, entertaining her with their motions and stopping frequently to play with her (which she makes happen by going after some forbidden object).  That means that we still cook a fair amount, though nothing that’s terribly fussy.  In recent weeks we’ve made sweet potato crescent rolls, blue-potato soup, chili, pumpkin-rice pudding, citrus salad, marinated tempeh, and squash and lentil soup.  Katherine has helped either by playing happily within eyesight or by riding along in the backpack when she wanted a bit more contact with us, and by eating pureed extras from most of the dishes.

Erin

I’m enjoying the sweet feeling of vindication: new research shows that multitaskers are worse at everything. They can’t focus as well (even when they want to), they can’t think as well, they get less done, … not only that, they’re worse at multitasking than the non-multitaskers.They do think that they’re better at multitasking and at getting things done, though, so we can add suffering from delusion to their list of woes.

Read all about it here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/interviews/nass.html

Sydney

Sometimes I get embarrassed for my students.  Not when they make grammatical mistakes or mangle sentences, but when they overreach.  What do they hope to achieve by name-dropping Freud, Hegel, and the flashiest terms of recent literary theory?  What do they know about any of these things?  And, frankly, why should they?  Think what other things they could be doing with those brain cells . . .

Erin

UPDATE: Today in class I had a student ask if what the author was doing was a kind of “deconstruction.”  Gah!  After prodding a bit to be sure that that was, in fact, the extent of his knowledge about the subject, I made pretty clear that throwing out literary terms willy-nilly will not earn them bonus points.

In the course of this past week we’ve welcomed several new babies to the fold.  On Monday we took food to two families with new ones.  K and I got to spend time cooing over Jared’s and Laura’s new little girl, Lily, and David’s and Ann’s Ruth.  In recent times Katherine’s been the only little girl in the nursery, but that is going to change!  Ruth was adopted from China and is just a couple of months older than Katherine, so Katherine can enjoy time with one playmate her size while she waits for Lily to get a bit more mobile.

We also attended a shower for Laura and Jenny, whose baby will make his or her appearance in June.  When the same group of friends gathered last year about this time, there were a lot of pregnant bellies but only one child on the scene.  This time around things were definitely different, with one toddler, three babies, one newborn, and only one pregnant belly.  It was a much noisier shower!

These recent activities only reinforced the feeling I’ve had recently: I no longer have a baby.  Katherine’s just shy of ten months old, but her activity level and mobility make me think of her as a small toddler, rather than a baby.  Although I have small moments of “Awww” when I see newborns, I’m very happy watching Katherine grow up.  After all, we have books to read together!

Erin