Food for the Journey

Here's today's homily.   I went with the alternate reading of 1 Kings 19:4-8 because I didn't have the courage to tackle "Absalom, Absalom!"  The Gospel is John 6:35, 41-51.

*

Most of you know that I’m an English professor.  At least once a semester, usually around midterms or finals, a student comes to my office in panic and pours out a tale of woe.  Everything is due right now in every class, and the student also has a job and family crises and had the flu last week and just can’t keep juggling everything and doesn’t know what to do –

By now, the student’s usually sobbing on my tiny couch.  “I don’t know why I’m crying,” he or she will say, sniffling, as I hand over a box of tissues.  “I’m not usually such a mess.”

I give these students academic guidance, and I’ve been known to walk them over to UNR’s free Counseling Center.  But that’s not the first thing I do.  The first thing I do – something I’ve learned over many years of dealing with these situations – is to ask the student, “When’s the last time you ate something?”

And the student, who’s usually sitting on my tiny couch at about three or four in the afternoon, inevitably sniffles and says, “Yesterday, I think. Why?”

At that point, I reach into my desk and hand the student a power bar, a box of which I keep handy for just such occasions.  “You need to eat,” I say.  “You can’t think straight on an empty stomach.  This will all seem much more manageable when you have fuel in your system.”

As far as I know, none of my students have been prophets, and I’m certainly no angel.  Nonetheless, Elijah would recognize this scenario.  “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”   Elijah, fleeing Ahab and Jezebel’s death threats, was having an even worse day than my students usually are.   After hours of wandering in the wilderness, he was so exhausted and discouraged that he asked God to let him die.   Bone-tired, frightened and depleted, he couldn’t imagine how to continue.

Elijah’s despair certainly wasn’t caused by a lack of faith.  Two chapters before this reading, he called on God to restore a widow’s dead son, and lo, the child lived.  Note that in our lesson this morning, he again calls on God, shaping his desire to die as a prayer.  “O Lord, take away my life.”  The Lord doesn’t do that.  The Lord gives him bread and water instead.  This famous prophet has already seen and performed miracles, and will go on to see and perform many more.  He’s going to hear the still small voice of God a mere six verses from now, and he’ll conclude his career by ascending to heaven in a chariot of fire.  Right now, though, he has a serious case of low blood sugar.  He can’t think straight on an empty stomach.

Elijah reminds us that the physical and the spiritual can’t be separated.  Ours is an incarnational and sacramental faith: God has given us marvelous, intricate bodies, and has placed us in a marvelous, intricate creation that nurtures and sustains us.  If having a body is hard – we suffer from hunger and thirst, illness and injury – it is also a source of wonder.   Miracles needn’t take the form of angels or chariots of fire.  Miracles are within us and all around us: stars and stones, trees and grass, birds and beasts.  The seemingly ordinary is also always divine.  This is why Jesus came to us in a human body, and why the eucharistic feast is simple bread and wine.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus’ neighbors haven’t figured this out yet.  They don’t understand how this kid they watched grow up – the boy whose parents they know, whose games and pranks and skinned knees they witnessed throughout his childhood – can also be the bread of life that came down from heaven.   They labor under the misconception, still common in our own day, that holy things have to be rarified, otherworldly, set apart:  that miracles have to take the form of angels and chariots of fire, 3D special effects straight out of some CGI blockbuster.

And, in truth, Jesus does sound a little otherworldly in this passage from John.  “This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.  I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  That all sounds more than a bit mystical and off-putting, and I think the neighbors can be forgiven for being confused.

Jesus’ life on earth, though, very much depends on ordinary, prosaic bread.  Throughout the Gospels, he’s obsessed with food.  After he raises Jairus’ daughter from the dead, he commands her parents to give her something to eat.  He scandalizes the Pharisees by sharing meals with people who haven’t washed their hands.  One of his last acts on earth is to feed his disciples:  even Judas, the one he knows is about to betray him.   In one post-resurrection story, he asks what’s for breakfast; in another, he fries up some fish for the disciples on the beach.   He feeds us, now, whenever we take communion.  Jesus wants us to work to heal the world, but first, he wants us to have food for the journey.  He knows we can’t think straight on empty stomachs.

But he never force feeds us.  The feast depends on our consent and participation.  Elijah has to reach out to take the food the angel brings him, just as my weeping students need to agree to eat their power bars (and not all of them do).   The elements of the Eucharist represent not only God’s good creation, the grain and grapes that nourish us, but human stewardship in tending them and human skill in turning them into bread and wine.   God gives us what we need to live, but like any good parent, he knows that we must ultimately learn to feed both ourselves and others.  We have to learn to cook our own food, to share it, and to clean up the kitchen afterwards.

Even when we have done this, most of us will hit low points, moments when we feel too discouraged to continue.  Sometimes our despair literally takes the form of praying to die.  At such times, it’s crucial to remember that bread and water almost always help; low blood sugar and dehydration only make things worse.   But it’s also important to look elsewhere in the creation for sustenance, to remember that simple physical things can offer spiritual nourishment.

Years ago, during one of my volunteer-chaplain shifts in the ER, an ambulance brought in a suicidal patient.  He lay in a fetal position, unmoving and unspeaking, as the paramedics rolled him into a room.  Later I learned that he’d had no food or water for three days before, finally, summoning the strength and courage to call 911, to ask for help.

The ER staff started a saline drip to rehydrate him, and gave him a meal.  When I went in to talk to him, he was slowly munching a sandwich which, blessedly, had simply appeared without his having to prepare it.  In severe depression, even making a sandwich can seem overwhelmingly difficult, and a hospital food tray can be a miracle.

He poured out a long tale of woe: mental illness, job difficulties, abandonment by family and friends.  This had all been going on for many years.  “So what’s kept you going through all that?” I asked him.  “What makes you happy?”

“Nature,” he said.   He told me about camping at a lake in the mountains.  He told me about a waterbird he liked to watch there, about its antics and feeding patterns.  His descriptions were very precise, and as he told me about the bird, his face brightened.  He sat up on the edge of his bed, put down his sandwich, and whistled the bird’s courting call while he used his hands to imitate its mating dance.  And then the man who had wanted to die laughed for pure joy.

I know the saline drip and sandwich were food for his journey, but I believe his memory of the birds was, too.  I pray that after he left the hospital, he went back to the lake to see those birds again, and I pray that as he listened to their calls, he also heard the still small voice of God.

Amen.

O. M. G.

Facebook: The Non-Essential Information Superhighway.

On the one hand, I now get what this is about. As I said on Facebook itself, it's the internet version of crack cocaine. In less than twenty-four hours, I've accumulated more friends than I have followers here on the blog, and I've reconnected with three old friends I haven't spoken to in decades. I also found someone (whom I haven't friended yet) whose friend list includes basically my entire high school class, including the guy who used to molest girls in band class by trying to stick his drumstick between their legs. That's a completely literal description, and it happened multiple times each class period. We later heard he was doing prison time for rape. I guess he's out now. I hope he's acquired some new hobbies.

Also, I've had some interesting mini-conversations with people. Facebook is fun. New items from friends pop up almost literally every second; you could spend all day there.

That's also the problem.

As I also said on Facebook itself, being there is a bit like standing on a skateboard in the middle of a freeway during rush hour. Everything's moving so quickly that you can't possibly keep up. Whoosh friend #17 has posted a link to a political article and whoosh friend #32 has posted a link to a funny YouTube video, and by the time you watch the YouTube video and come back, seventeen more people have posted and someone's sent you a message and someone you've never heard of wants to be your friend and whoosh friend #47's agonizing over which shoes to wear today and whoosh look at this gorgeous photo friend #4 just took and by the time you're done "liking" that and posting a comment about it, twenty-three more people have posted and . . . .

There's no downtime in this medium. There's no space for reflection. And status updates are limited to 400-ish characters, so you couldn't indulge in narrative complexity even if you wanted to.

No wonder so many of my students have the attention spans of ritalin-deprived fruitflies.

I spent entirely too much time on Facebook yesterday, and need to be much more self-disciplined today. I keep telling myself that I've gotten along just fine, for years, without minute-by-minute updates of who just bought orange juice and who's about to leave for a trip to Yosemite and whose kid just hit a homer in a Little League game.

But I'm also feeling more connected to a lot of people, including my old SF community in New York, than I have in a long time. So there really is an upside.

My Very Own Zoo

Because our weather's been so nice, I've been spending hours every day sitting in the shade on our deck, writing and weaving and knitting. This is more deck time than I've done before, and it's made me very attuned to the wildlife in our yard.

We have finches and quail, of course, as always, and this time of year, we have quail chicks, who are very cute. We have doves. At one point we had quite a lot of pretty yellow butterflies, although I haven't seen any for a few days. We have rabbits: evidently there's a warren in one corner of our large and messy backyard, and last week I saw either three bunnies or one bunny three times. My gardener friends would consider this a catastrophe, but I don't garden and I love rabbits, and I'm happy that they love our messy yard.

On Sunday, a friend and former student -- a student from my very first semester at UNR, in fact -- stopped by with her little boy, who's fourteen months old and very cute. They were down for the weekend from Portland, where she and her husband live now, so I hadn't met the baby before. While the rest of us ate Gary's homemade scones and fruit salad, Will conducted experiments with gravity and grapes, and had a fine time.

At one point, his mother glanced up at the ugly power lines running along our yard and said, "Hey, look, a hawk." Sure enough, a red-tailed hawk was perched on the power pole, being harassed by a much smaller bird who did pendulum passes past the hawk.

"The hawk has a bunch of feathers in its mouth," said Pam, who has much better eyes than I do.

"I bet it ate a baby bird and the mother's trying to drive the hawk away from the nest," I said.

"Who knew that our backyard was a nature special?" said Gary.

Our yard is notably unlovely, dirt and weeds, although there are a few clumps of pretty flowering peavine. We're on a third of an acre, and a fair amount of that is a Sierra Pacific easement -- remember the power lines? -- so between the prohibitive cost of landscaping and the fact that the power company has the right to come in and tear up anything we put in, we've left it alone. The patches of weeds spread out every year, and I'm enjoying the process of watching the yard turn into a meadow. I suspect this is also why critters like our yard.

Before too long, though, most of the weeds will be gone. We're getting into fire season -- there have already been wildfires near here -- and every year when the weeds start to dry out, Gary tears them up to reduce the amount of flammable material and create a defensible zone around the house. (To our relief and pleasure, the current weeds don't seem to be cheatgrass, an invasive species that's extremely flammable, and that we battled for quite a few years.)

I'm grateful for Gary's hard work tearing up the weeds, but I'll miss our meadow, and I hope the bunnies will still like it here when the cover's gone.

Well, Nertz

Tonight I took a cute video of Bali playing with a toy; I was going to post it, but the "add video" button doesn't seem to exist on the post editor anymore. I did a bit of research and discovered that I'd have to switch back to the old editor to post videos, but I'm not sure how to do that, so at the moment, you'll just have to imagine a fluffy black cat romping around chasing a small green pom-pom. It's adorable, honest.

Our Fourth was very quiet, which is how we like it. I'm not a big fan of explosions or Festivals of Drunken Driving (yeah, I know, some people are just no fun), so we stayed home and watched a few episodes of True Blood. I loved the first two seasons of this show, but two-thirds of the way through the third, I'm seriously annoyed with it.

For one thing, it's turned into one of those shows where hardly anyone isn't some sort of supernatural beastie. As I often tell my writing students, just sticking a label of "vampire," "werewolf" or "fairy" on someone doesn't automatically make that character interesting. One of my classroom mantras is, "If you can't write an interesting story about a mailman, you won't be able to write an interesting story about an elf, either." Having Sookie turn out to be a fairy who flits around in a white dress through a sparkling meadow with other fairies waving flowers -- talk about kitsch! -- makes her character less interesting, not more, at least for me. (I haven't read the novels on which the series is based, but I believe this is Charlaine Harris' doing, not Alan Ball's.)

And anyway -- as I'm also constantly reminding my students -- having too many vampires in town just doesn't work. Vampires are major predators. They need food. If their prey don't outnumber them by a fairly substantial order of magnitude, a lot of them are going to have to move on. In fact, I'm slightly suspect of highly organized vampire societies: seems to me much more likely, given the population biology of the situation, that they'd hunt on their own and spread themselves out very widely.

Then we have the infamous vampire-versus-werewolf feud, which has become such an old story that I yawn every time I see it. Then we have the really excessive amounts of gore, which has lost whatever shock value or interest it once had. Then we have the fact that every supernatural beastie on the planet seems to have settled in Bon Temps, and don't local law agencies suspect anything? Buffy at least explained this with the Hellmouth trope, and even had characters fantasizing about moving to non-Hellmouth locations (and, in some cases, actually doing it, as when Buffy moves away from Sunnydale at the end of Season Two).

To be fair, Being Human has a lot of these same problems too, but I think that series acknowledges them more honestly (and I find the characters more interesting). Right now, the True Blood characters I'm most interested in are Tara and Lafayette, who are still human (as far as I know) and dealing with interesting conflicts. The Tara/Franklin subplot this season was worth the price of admission, even if it was just a tiny bit reminiscent of Spike and the Buffybot. The most appealing supernatural at the moment is Jessica, who's trying to figure out how to get along with a human, fang-phobic coworker, instead of getting caught up in succession struggles and internecine bickering and Ye Old Nazi Werewolf Conspiracy Plots.

Nazi werewolves? Please! Has anyone else noticed that writers who don't know what else to do invoke the Third Reich? This really bothers me. For one thing, it's lazy writing. For another, it ultimately trivializes the subject, which I -- for one -- find problematic.

Okay, I'm done venting now. I still think Alan Ball is a genius, but at this point, I'm basing that on American Beauty and Six Feet Under, not on True Blood.

Missing

Today my uncle in northern New Jersey -- my mother's brother, Ken's father -- had a family reunion at his house, with his kids and their kids and my sister and her husband and son. The occasion for this was that one of my cousins, who currently lives in Singapore, is back on this side of the pond with his family for a couple of weeks. Gary and I were invited, but couldn't be there, obviously.

I was sad. I missed everybody.

Tomorrow, of course, is Father's Day. Since neither Gary nor I have our fathers anymore, I've found the nonstop reminders of this occasion even more irritating than usual. When Dad was alive, Father's Day was often a bit of a challenge, since it was difficult to find cards that accurately reflected our relationship. I finally started writing my own notes in blank cards. Now that he's dead, the holiday just makes me wish I were still having trouble with cards. (Some people are never happy.)

Today I taught three Tolkien classes for the annual conference of a local foundation that offers services to gifted-and-talented kids. It was fun, but also very tiring. The last class I taught was to a group of over twenty extremely bright, energetic and distractible five-to-nine year olds: charming children individually, but more than a little daunting in a group, especially since elementary ed isn't my field. Let's just say that it wasn't one of my more stellar moments in the classroom.

The kids come from all over the country, and of course their parents are here with them (although parents don't attend classes), so I saw and overheard a lot of parent-child interactions. I was especially aware of the fathers. The ones I saw were loving and concerned and listened attentively as their children happily told them about gene-splicing or forensic science or whatever the topic of the most recent presentation had been. I hope those kids will one day look back on this weekend and treasure these conversations.

Plan Z

As previously reported, I've now revised and rewritten portions of my three-hundred-page manuscript several times. Last night, settling down to the latest onslaught, I entered a bunch of revisions and then descended into a funk. The book had too many characters, and their stories were too complicated -- not to mention preposterous -- and the whole thing was emotionally inauthentic, and I hated it. Too much happened. Not enough of it mattered.

This sounds exactly like feedback I've given various of my writing students, so I gave myself the same advice I give them: Simplify. Focus less on plot mechanics and more on emotion. Figure out why this story should matter to the reader.

That's never easy advice to hear, of course. I gnashed my teeth, cried for a while, fumed, paced, and sat down to try to find the emotional core of the book.

When I was in college, I wrote a long paper on one of my favorite poems, William Butler Yeats' The Circus Animals' Desertion. It begins, "I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,/I sought it daily for six weeks or so" -- a sentiment to which any writer can relate -- and ends with the lines, "I must lie down where all the ladders start/In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart." Last night, I tried to descend into the rag and bone shop.

Well, I got someplace, and it's a destination I couldn't have reached without the latest round of revisions (which is some comfort, since it means all that work wasn't wasted). Near the end of the current draft, a newly introduced character has one scene lasting a page or two. Turns out she's a main character. Turns out she's essential to the core of the book. Turns out the story's largely about her and her relationship with somebody who's been a main character since Day One.

Most writers can relate to that, too. Minor characters, once you start paying attention to them, have a way of saying, "Hey, this story's about me." We ignore our minor characters to our peril.

So this is good news, more or less (especially since the book is now unambiguously mainstream, which is what Tor asked for in the first place; I've finally weeded out the remaining spec-fic elements). The problem is that it means I have to rewrite the book from scratch, and that at least eighty-five percent of the three hundred pages will wind up in the trash. I'm still hoping to be done by WorldCon, but that's very ambitious, at this point.

I called my agent and said, "Well, I finally figured out what the book's about."

When she stopped laughing -- I started this project two years ago this month -- she said, "That's good, Susan." She told me I'll be fine: my publisher won't fire me, and she'd talk to my editor to explain the situation. Shortly thereafter, she e-mailed to say that she'd reached him and he's fine with it, too. (Thank God!) Meanwhile, I'd e-mailed him to ask him to call me so I can talk about the new shape and focus of the book. That hasn't happened yet; I'll feel better when it has.

Today I started the new first chapter. So far, it's using a lot of preexisting material, but tomorrow, I have to start in on the new stuff.

This is why I'm not more prolific. Too many of my projects follow very circuitous years-long paths like this. It's bad enough with short stories; novels are sheer torture.

I'll be so glad when this book's done!

DIY Art Therapy

At the end of my last lesson with Charlene, she said, "Thank you for all your hard work." The statement caught me a little off guard. I've been very, very conscious of how bad my playing is; although I do have some abilities -- as Charlene said, "You have a good ear; if I play a tune for you, you can play it back to me" -- I don't speak the language of music and would never consider myself a musician. I'm somebody who enjoys scratching out very rough tunes on the viola.

But what Charlene said made me think, "Huh. Yeah, I have worked hard at this, haven't I?" And, more to the point, when I've been able to let go of my deeply ingrained perfectionist streak, I've enjoyed it.

The perfectionist thing goes way back. I'll spare you the history; suffice it to say that for many years, I was one of those unhappy people who measured my worth by my external accomplishments, especially grades. This tends, or tended in my case anyway, to turn into a glass-half-empty mindset: I measured myself according to what I hadn't done, and if you think that way, you'll always consider yourself a failure, because there's always someone who's done more.

I've been struggling with this issue lately at work. For one thing, academics are increasingly being evaluated as much by what they haven't done as by what they have, which is why I won't be going up for full professor. I have to keep reminding myself that even if I don't have the "national profile" required for promotion, I have published four books (with more on the way, I hope), and also perform community service I wouldn't have time for were I serving on MLA committees. The non-promotion situation, though, has re-sensitized me to how stressful glass-half-empty thinking is on colleagues and other people around me.

It's a tricky issue. Several of my students this semester have been very upset that I graded them on the results of their work, rather than on their effort. My response, and that of most professors I know, is that I have no way to measure relative effort, and that other arenas of human experience (most jobs, for instance) evaluate on results, too. Learning to come to terms with that is an important part of a college education.

At the same time, though, I always try to tell my students that their grades are not the measure of their personal worth. I know many of them don't believe me; if they did, the grades wouldn't upset them so much in the first place, and at that age, I sure didn't believe anybody who told me the same thing. I'm always heartened by students who maybe didn't get perfect grades, but who say that they enjoyed the class, or learned something, or acquired a new skill. In other words, the students who are looking at what they have, and not at what they don't: glass-half-full folk. They're so much healthier than I was in college.

Another way of defining this is process thinking versus product thinking. Both are important, but in different ways and for different purposes, and if you enjoy a process, you've gained something even if no one else appreciates the product. (One of the problems with academic promotion procedures right now is that the range of acceptable products has tightened considerably.)

It needs to be said that some of this stuff is a function of consumer culture, which encourages to focus on what we don't have so we'll go buy it. As an inveterate shopper, I'm very familiar with that pattern.

So, anyway. Today, as previously advertised, I sat down to start revising the latest novel. I did fine; I'm about ten pages in. But the next two sections, the ones scheduled for tomorrow, will require a lot of changes and some major plot rethinking, and I felt my stomach clenching up about it even today. Gotta get it right gotta get it right gotta get it right.

That mantra serves a purpose, but at this stage it's counter-productive. It's classic glass-half-empty thinking, because I'm looking at what's wrong, what isn't there: at lack, rather than possibility.

I played the viola for a while, since that always gets me to loosen up. Playing the viola means giving myself permission to do something badly, just because it's fun.

Then I decided to go shopping for a Magic Revision Pencil (inveterate shopper!). I like soft, dark pencils, and the number two I used this morning wasn't cutting it. Staples didn't have anything softer. After a few other unproductive stops, I wound up buying a drawing pencil at an art-supply store.

And that reminded me how much I like drawing. As a kid, I had a modest amount of artistic talent and drew and painted up a storm, to the lavish praise of the adults around me. I loved it. But as I got older and fell further into glass-half-empty, I became shyer about the visual stuff. I wasn't good enough. I wasn't skilled enough. I wasn't a Real Artist. This is of course either completely true or utter hogwash, depending on your point of view. I'll never be in MOMA or be paid for my artwork, but I have as much right to draw, paint and doodle as anybody else.

Back in 2006, inspired in part by a course I'd taken on art as spiritual practice, I briefly kept a drawing journal. Every day I'd produce a little doodle. Some are quite pretty; some are hideous; all of them were absorbing and fun. But after a while, I became too self-conscious about that project, too, and put the sketchbook away.

Today I took it out again. I sharpened up my colored pencils and doodled for an hour or so. The product will never be in MOMA, but the process made me very happy. As kids know, and as adults too often forget, coloring's a blast! (I can't remember who said, "All five year olds know they can draw. All fifteen year olds know they can't," but it's spot on.)

I hope to do one of these a day. I think the drawing journal -- along with the viola and knitting -- will help me stay relaxed on the writing front. And anything that creates joy should be maximized.

Joanna Russ

I was sad to learn -- somewhat after the fact -- that renowned science-fiction author and critic Joanna Russ died at the end of April. She was a wonderful and vastly important writer, and it's a huge loss to the field and to her many friends.

I've taught various of Joanna's work over the years, and it never fails to inspire heated class discussion and unusually good work from students. In fact, two of the best papers I've ever read were responses to her novel The Female Man. My somewhat conservative Nevada students, even or especially the women, argued passionately with the book, but it resulted in some terrific writing. (We get a lot of "I'm not a feminist" disclaimers around here from young women who don't quite realize that they owe their voting rights and access to higher education, among other things, to the very hard work of many of their foremothers.)

That was many years ago. I should teach the book again, since I'm constantly looking for ways to slice through student apathy and disengagement. Anything that inspires discussion is a blessing.

I never met Joanna personally, but I absolutely treasure a note she sent me praising my story "Ever After." I was incredibly moved that anything I wrote had meant so much to someone I so admired.

Rest in peace, Joanna. You'll be missed.

Ready for a Break

I've been very bad about posting, largely because, while there's a lot going on -- notably family medical concerns and an annoying situation with an alarming student -- most of it's stuff I can't discuss in any detail here. Let's just say that, while I'm glad classes are over, I've had better weeks.

Among other things, I've been entirely too conscious of non-stop Mother's Day advertising, which makes me miss Mom. My new church runs a very busy food pantry, and they solicited donations in honor of mothers, so I made one in memory of my mother and in thanksgiving for Gary's mom (who'll get a nice card from the church). That helped a little bit, but I'll be glad when the holiday's over for another year.

On the bright side:

Classes are over, except for the final I'm giving next week.

I've been chipping away at the book manuscript, mostly managing to write 1,000 words a day. I'm not happy with the results, but at least I have something to revise.

I've been exercising a lot, and have managed to lose a few pounds. I'm no longer officially-according-to-my-BMI overweight, although I'd like to lose a lot more (if only to give my back and knee a break: both have been complaining mightily lately).

I'm reading a wonderful book: Chris Adrian's new novel The Great Night.

Gary and I attended an astonishingly accomplished graduate viola recital last night.

Speaking of violas, I've started practicing mine again, and I'm having fun with it, even if the results aren't even remotely accomplished.

Gary and I just finished watching the first season of David Simon's new series Treme, which we loved (and I don't even like jazz!). I found the post-Katrina New Orleans setting especially poignant because my father still lived on the Gulf Coast when all of that was happening.

Last week I covered a class for a colleague who was dealing with a family emergency. This wasn't a big deal, especially since it was a really fun class. It's the kind of thing all of us do for each other whenever it's necessary. Colleagues covered for me when my parents died, for instance. Everybody hopes it won't be necessary, because you don't want your co-workers to be dealing with crises, but I don't think anyone expects any acknowledgment except a simple "thanks so much" (and depending on circumstances, even that's optional).

The colleague for whom I covered has a really impressive jewelry collection -- and this is coming from me, so that's saying something -- and we've periodically admired each other's pieces. I don't remember talking to her about turtles, but at some point she must have picked up on how much I like them, because earlier this week I discovered in my mailbox a thank-you card taped to a box containing this stunning item.

I was very nearly speechless (and coming from me, that's saying something!).

I've worn the pendant several times already and have gotten lots of compliments on it. Right now, the turtle's an especially timely reminder of things I need to remember:

* Hiding under your shell is fine, but you need to stick your neck out to get anywhere.
* It's okay to go slowly as long as you keep moving.
* Only carry as much as you need.

So that was my week, o gentle readers. How are all of you?

Whatta Week (and it's only Tuesday!)

Yesterday UNR announced a new list of possible budget cuts, including the elimination of the Philosophy Department. The mood at work is not good. My personal mood isn't stellar right now either. Monday will be a year since Mom died, so I've been very aware of the events that led up to that.

Maybe it wasn't too surprising, then, that today I woke up with a migraine. I haven't had one of those for years. I did what I usually do: have a bland breakfast, take Tylenol, drink some coffee, and hope it doesn't all come back up.

It came back up. It kept coming back up. The tiny sips of water I took to try to rehydrate came up too. All in all, we had four very unpleasant episodes of Coming Back Up, between which I lay in bed, literally moaning in pain. This was very unusual. Usually stuff comes back up once, I take a nap, and when I wake up I feel all better. Not today.

So I made other arrangements for the class I was supposed to teach today, covering for a colleague who's on bereavement leave after a very tragic loss (have I mentioned that the mood at work isn't good?), and -- after a phone call to a nurse hotline, which advised me to be seen within four hours, and to my primary-care doc, who couldn't get me in today -- arranged for a friend to drive me to a local Urgent Care. The Urgent Care I usually go to is moderately far away, so I was pleased to discover that my medical group has one much closer, right across the street from the assisted-living place where Dad used to live. (It's a measure of how whacked-out I was by the migraine that at first I didn't even recognize the name of the street.)

I'm not sure I'll be going back there, though.

Here's the procedure I'm used to: you walk in, you're checked in right away, you're seen by a triage nurse within a few minutes, and then you're sent out to wait more minutes or hours, depending on what else is going on. At this place, I didn't even get checked in for half an hour. There appeared to be no triage nurse. Half an hour after I was checked in, I felt cruddy enough to actually lie down across two seats in the waiting room, at which point my friend Linda went up to the desk and said, "My friend really feels awful. When will she be seen?"

Well, after that they took me immediately back to a room, let me lie down, gave me a blanket, cooed over me, and dimmed the lights. A medical assistant took my vitals, which were fine, and then a Nurse Practitioner came in, asked me what was going on, and gave me the most thorough physical I've had in years. She actually touched my body! My primary-care doc never does that anymore. She decided that I could use some IV rehydration, which was exactly why I'd gone in.

Then the fun started. The medical assistant tried to start an IV in my right arm and blew the vein. This was a slow, bizarre process: she had to go in and out of the room about fifty times to collect the supplies even to start the thing, and then she kept anxiously peering at various bits of paraphernalia, and I kept anxiously peering at her long, painted fingernails, which, for hygiene reasons, would never be allowed in the hospital where I volunteer. After she'd placed the IV, she had another staff member come in and inspect her work. The two of them peered, poked, prodded, bit their lips while staring up at the IV bag, which wasn't dripping properly, ascertained from me that the IV site was indeed burning, and decided to pull the IV and start again.

Medical assistant #2 decided to start the new IV in my right hand. (Both of them had assured me cheerfully that I had nice fat veins.) This was an inordinately painful process that didn't work out any better than the first one had, so they pulled that, too.

Then the Nurse Practitioner showed up. All three of them examined my left arm, making helpful comments like, "These are nasty veins." I commented that the downside of Urgent Care is that they probably don't have to start many IVs and therefore aren't adept at it. The Nurse Practitioner told me that they start lots of IVs! Two or three a day! (I thought, but didn't say, lady, where I usually hang out, that would be two or three a minute.) The NP decided that she was going to attempt the IV in the left arm; she'd been an ICU nurse before she became an NP, she told me, and was very good at IVs.

She got the needle in fine, but then she couldn't get the IV tube attached to it. "This is a new kind," she said. "I don't know how this works." Oh, terrific. She finally, with a lot of painful twisting of the needle, got the tube connected. Everyone recommenced staring anxiously at the IV bag, which once again refused to drip properly, and I complained about burning at this IV site too, so IV #3 was a bust. (I now have very colorful bruises on both arms, especially the left one.)

"We're not going to poke you again," the NP said soothingly, as MA #1 brought me a warm blanket. (I'd told her that they needed blanket warmers like the ER has; she put my blanket in a microwave to warm it up for me, which was very sweet.) "We're just going to give you a GI cocktail and a lot of water to drink and see if you keep it down."

I kept it down. My head still hurt like nobody's business -- probably, at this point, because I'd had nothing to eat all day and it was almost dinnertime -- so the NP decided to give me a shot of Toradol. She was very patient with the questions I fired at her after researching the drug on my BlackBerry. About half an hour after the injection -- three and a half hours after getting to the Urgent Care place -- I was finally feeling a bit better, and they let me leave.

I don't believe there was a doctor in the building. I only saw four staff members: NP, the two MAs, and a young woman whose role I never determined, but who looked about twelve. They were all very sweet; they all apologized copiously for the blown veins, praised me for my sense of humor through the ordeal, and told me repeatedly that they hope I feel better.

I still don't think I'll be going back there.

I'm now, as per NP's orders, pushing diluted Gatorade. If I can't get a certain amount of that down by 9 PM, or if I start vomiting again, I'm to go to an Emergency Room, where the staff will presumably be better at starting IVs. I don't think I'll need to go to the ER, although I'm not sure I'll be going to work tomorrow.

I'm going to bed early, that's for sure.

On the bright side:

My friend Inez can come to WorldCon after all!

An acquaintance from college called last night, and we had a long and pleasant chat.

I've actually started knitting my first sweater! It's for a baby, but it's still a sweater!

Gary's Better, Thanks

I figured I should post to this effect, since a friend e-mailed to ask me. He's fever-free and fine, for which I'm very grateful.

The weather's getting warmer, finally.

Summer's coming.

Work's grim right now: ongoing budget issues, a colleague in the midst of a personal tragedy, widespread exhaustion and plummeting morale.

But summer's coming.

Good Day

This morning I met with my rector; we had a very pleasant chat, and he invited me to preach on Maundy Thursday and on May 29 (Memorial Day Weekend). I'm really looking forward to writing homilies again, and I'm honored to be preaching during Holy Week.

I ate my brown-bag lunch at church, raced to the gym and swam for thirty minutes, and then drove to the family shelter to teach my poetry class. I absolutely loved it. You can read about it on the UNR Poetry Project blog. The eight weeks of classes will culminate with a gallery show, probably at the university, and one of today's students has already given permission for her poem to be displayed (which makes me very happy, because it's a gorgeous piece of work).

It was incredibly moving to hear people in such tough circumstances express so much love for their families. As a side note, I was also very impressed with the physical plant; I'd been to the medical clinic downstairs to donate my father's meds after he died, but I'd never been inside the family shelter. It's clean and spacious, and seems very comfortable. Each family has its own room, and I loved looking at the kids' artwork posted on the doors.

When I got home, Gary and I decided to dash out to a store in Sparks that sells sports optics; we were hoping to get prescription snorkel masks. The store sells them, but they cost about $200 each, which is way too much money for an activity we indulge in once a year if we're lucky. So we're going to look for less expensive options. The cruise line supplies equipment, but we don't know if they'll have optical masks.

The store was fairly close to the fancy mall with the big sports store where I bought my wetsuit, so while we were in the neighborhood, we decided to go look at ellipticals. And, mirabile dictu, we found one! We hope to very soon be the proud owners of a Horizon Ex-59, which -- at its sale price of $599 -- was the second-least-expensive machine in the store. It seems really solid and smooth, though, and the online reviews we've seen have been good. We could have ordered a slightly older model, the Ex-57, from Amazon: less money, no tax. But after reading about people spending two or three hours assembling their machines, and winding up covered in grease, we've decided to spring for the tax, since if we buy from the store we'll get free delivery and installation, and they'll handle any necessary repairs. Right now the store only has the floor model in stock, but the sales guy is going to call me tomorrow about when they expect more in.

Of course, this is an even larger investment than the masks (and yes, I was conscious of the irony of embarking on this project right after a visit with homeless families), but we'll use it a lot more often. I hope to use it for at least a little while most mornings; I'll be able to work out in my PJs, which means I can give myself a serotonin boost on those mornings when crawling into clothing to crawl into the car to crawl to the gym is just too much effort. Gary dislikes most gym equipment but was very impressed with this, and he can use it when weather keeps him from hiking. So, yeah: big outlay, but I think the price is reasonable for what we'll be getting, and I think it will help with my health goals. My ultimate goal is to work up to using the elliptical half an hour in the morning and then swimming half an hour in the afternoon. That way, I'll get both weight-bearing exercise and the swimming I love, and I'll be able to rest between them. This may be too ambitious, of course, but if I could manage that even a few times a week, I'd be happy.

It was dark when we left the mall. I don't know Sparks very well, and I got lost. We wound up on a long highway without traffic lights. I couldn't see familiar city lights. I couldn't even tell which way we were driving. Finally I pulled up to a supermarket and told a lady there that we were lost. She laughed -- she's gotten lost there too, it turns out -- and offered to lead us back to town.

Talk about angels in disguise. I never would have found my way on my own; we weren't even close to my best foggy guess of our location. Thank you, lady in the silver Cadillac!

After that adventure, we'd have gotten home later than Gary likes to start cooking, so we went out for pizza, to the place that has gluten-free crust and soy cheese. It was very yummy. I'm very grateful to be able to eat pizza again.

They Can't All Be Winners

As I've noted here before, February 20 is the anniversary of the day I was offered the job at UNR (in 1997), the day of my very unexpected and grace-filled first communion (some months before I was baptized, in 2000), and the day when we learned that my mother's lung-cancer surgery had been so successful that she needed neither chemo nor radiation (in 2004). I believe it was also the day (in 2006?), when Rita Charon spoke at UNR, sparking my interest in narrative medicine. In any case, it's a day when many nice things have happened to me, a day I tend to expect to go well.

Today, alas, was a little disappointing. I finally booked the ninety-minute massage my sister gave me for my birthday, and was looking forward to it tremendously. I'm glad I got it -- I certainly needed it -- but I think my massage therapist was having a bad day, because she seemed very terse and untalkative, and also worked on me so fiercely that I'm still sore. (To be fair, she told me I should let her know if she was applying too much pressure; it felt okay at the time, and I'm sure I'll be fine tomorrow.) I used to have long, warm conversations with my old massage therapist, who left to go to nursing school, and although I was fine not talking today, it felt odd that this therapist didn't even respond to my tentative openings. She wasn't exactly rude, but the interaction felt brisk and impersonal.

Also, halfway through the massage, I developed a stomachache that lasted a good four or five hours. It's gone now, thank heavens. I don't think the massage had anything to do with it. Still, this definitely wasn't one of my better February 20ths.

Better luck next year.

Got it, guys! Thanks!

Before anyone else feels the need to e-mail me, yes, I already know about the Mordor's POV midrash of LotR.

I've now been sent this by a former Tolkien student, a current colleague, and Gary, so I thought I'd save the rest of you some time!

I won't have time to read the actual book until this summer, but yes, I'm curious. And I'm glad someone's done this; Tolkien's villains, aside from Saruman, are very two-dimensional, and it's a weakness in the book. My students have started complaining about it; one woman wrote a paper about how much richer the book would have been if the bad guys had been fleshed out more. I'm constantly telling my writing students how important it is to characterize villains fully, and as much as I love Tolkien, he doesn't even come close on that score.

Craziness

I've always been one of the reasons the stereotype of "absent-minded professor" exists. Even at the best of times, I tend to be klutzy and forgetful (one of last semester's students noted on a teaching evaluation that I'm "accident prone," and that's true, if somewhat off-topic). But today I really outdid myself. I got to a job talk late because I went to two wrong rooms -- in two wrong buildings, interrupting two classes in the process -- spilled tea all over myself in my first class, and then told the students to have a good weekend.

Sigh.

Well, I do want them to have a good weekend, but saying that on Monday's just rubbing in the fact that the week's barely started, right?

Before I left my office for my first class, I downloaded Google Chrome and set it up with the same apps and extensions I have at home. When I returned to my office, the apps included two games that I swear, swear, I didn't download. (I promptly deleted them, since I hardly need more ways to fritter away time.) So either my computer's possessed or someone's sneaking into my office. Neither idea is reassuring.

Gah. Time to set up the computer so it won't come out of sleep without a password. Pain in the patootie, if you ask me. Not, of course, that it makes any sense that someone would break into my office to download games. There must be some other explanation. It's still mighty strange.

On happier notes:

I'm listening to an audio version of Kate Braestrup's Here If You Need Me and loving it. She's a chaplain for the Maine State Game Warden Service -- coolest! job! ever! -- and I highly recommend the book.

Weather permitting, which it looks like it actually might, we're going to San Francisco for the long President's Day weekend. I have a professional gig on Friday, visiting a class on "Philosophy and Science Fiction" at UCSF -- they'll have read two of my stories, which we'll be discussing -- and the rest of the weekend we'll see our friend Ellen and her family, and walk on the beach, and hike the Land's End trails, and eat good food. We have a hotel reservation and a cat-sitter. Now we just need good weather! This is a real extravagance, especially so soon before the Spring Break cruise, but it's the trip we didn't get to do over Christmas, and I think I need it. Maybe when I come back, I'll be less spacey.

Oh, and check out this cool photo. Behind the English building on campus there's a small manmade pond called Manzanita Lake. It's frequented by ducks and swans and geese that are fun to watch, especially when they have their babies in the spring (although the babies often get picked off by owls, which isn't fun, although necessary for the owls), and it contains concrete rings, mini-pools, whose function I don't quite understand. On my way home tonight, I looked at the lake and at the trees reflected in it, and I realized that the calmer water inside the concrete ring was reflecting the tree much more clearly. So I took a snapshot. Interesting image, isn't it?

Finally, have you all seen the happy news that dark chocolate is healthier than fruit? Of course, since the study was conducted by the Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition, there may have been some bias involved. But I had some dark chocolate after dinner anyway, just in case it's true.

Another Church Closure

I got to church today to find the doors locked; a sign said that today's 5 PM service is canceled, but didn't give a reason. Either somebody's sick -- I hope not! -- or everybody's staying home to watch the Superbowl. Football renders me comatose with boredom, but whomever dubbed it a secular religion was completely correct.

When I got home, Gary said, "It's you. Churches see you coming and close." When I let out a wail, he assured me he was only kidding. This closure's temporary, at least. Ironically, today's Gospel is the passage from Matthew about how a city on a hill can't be hidden. Well, it can if the gates are locked!

So I won't get communion this week, which always leaves me feeling out of sorts. On a happier note, however, today I walked for thirty minutes in the morning and swam for thirty minutes in the afternoon. This is my new strategy to try to get more exercise without wearing myself out completely, since two half-hour sessions are less tiring than a full hour at once. I don't know how often I'll be able to manage this schedule, but at least today demonstrated that it's possible.

Also, Google Docs has indeed kick-started my writing again. Yesterday I finished a draft of one new chapter; today I started another. They're not very good, but at least they're there.

Tolkien and Trauma

So I said (or implied) in my last post that I probably wouldn't be blogging for a bit, but something really neat happened today, and I wanted to write about it.

Background: I've been having some trouble with job satisfaction lately. Partly this is because I've been through a lot these last few years and am simply tired. (That sabbatical can't come soon enough!) Part of it comes with the territory: all teachers have spells when they can't see if anything they're doing is making any difference to a soul. And part of it -- a lot of it -- is because of the hideous state budget situation, especially in terms of education. Our "no new taxes" governor is talking about cutting higher education by twenty-four percent, after a series of cuts that's already been disastrous.

I've long argued that our society claims to care about kids and education, but clearly doesn't, based on spending priorities. The current leadership of Nevada couldn't say any more clearly that it doesn't care about education. If you're a teacher, that's bound to make you feel, well, a little . . . undervalued? I think my job is safe -- lots of students major in English, and we're responsible for several courses all students need to graduate, and we're so understaffed right now that we're actually being allowed to make some new hires -- but let's just say that university morale in general isn't terrific at the moment. My personal fatigue, against that community background of despair and paranoia, has been a fairly toxic brew.

Fortunately, I'm teaching my Tolkien course this semester, which is always one of my favorites. (Tolkien's a great antidote to despair and paranoia!) Today my students read, among other things, part of the Foreward of Tom Shippey's J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Shippey begins by claiming that the fantastic is the dominant literary mode of the twentieth century, and goes on to observe that many fantasists are survivors of combat or other traumas, a fact he calls "strange." Talking to the class, I said that I don't find it strange at all; I gave them a brief overview of my theories about fantasy and trauma (basically, that the "strangeness" of fantasy allows writers to represent the strangeness of trauma more realistically than realism can). I mentioned that there's well-established research about writing and trauma, which I could talk about more later were anyone interested.

I'd thought there wouldn't be time to talk about that material, but it was one of those days when discussion never took off. I wound up with about ten extra minutes at the end of the class. All teachers know that this happens, but it can also make you wonder what you're doing wrong. Today, a bit desperate, I said, "So, is anybody interested in hearing more about writing and trauma?" (All teachers also know that we tend to keep material in reserve for just such moments.) To my relief, a few people nodded.

So I gave them the condensed version of my speech about why writing is the opposite of trauma, even though it wasn't strictly on topic. Most of them looked interested. One student actually seemed teary-eyed, but I assumed that was allergies or a speck in the eye or something.

After class, though, that student came up to me -- openly weeping -- and thanked me for the trauma lecture. This is someone who plans to go into healthcare. "My friends have been asking why in the world I'm taking this Tolkien class, because it has nothing to do with my field, but now I can say, 'Hey, she has some really interesting ideas about trauma!' Now I know that I'm supposed to be here." The student has experienced personal trauma, which made the lecture especially applicable (to use a favorite phrase of Tolkien's!).

During my office hours, another student showed up and thanked me for the trauma lecture. "That was really moving." This student, too, has a personal history with trauma, and has dealt with it partly through writing.

So, hey. Just when you think you aren't getting through and have nothing to contribute, it turns out you're saying something other people need to hear. It's a good feeling, I have to say.

Digging

I'm now officially snowed under with grading, committee work and meetings (although the weather here's been warm and sunny!). As a result, I've canceled my fiddle lesson and hospital shift for Saturday. I can certainly use the extra five hours to dig myself out from under, and it seems wise not to repeat last week's pea-soup fiasco. I hate to skip my "electives," as it were, but I don't have time to get my work done in through here, let alone to do anything even remotely, by any definition, non-crucial.

Which includes blogging: yeah, I know. (And we're going to a concert tonight, since it's a friend's recital, but I'd already committed to that before the current crunch descended.) Two quick notes. One is that today's my mother's sobriety anniversary: she stopped drinking on January 25, 1964. Even my sister remembered that date, although she's not nearly as aware of anniversaries as I am. It was a huge turning point for our family, for obvious reasons; I've always found it ironic that it's also the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul.

Secondly, outside my chiropractor's office today I met a ten-week-old Great Pyrenees puppy who was about the cutest thing in the world (and who's going to be gigantic when he grows up). I should've taken a picture, but didn't. You'll just have to take my word for it!

Away We Go!

I taught my first two classes yesterday; I think they went well, and I'm looking forward to the semester.

On Tuesday, one of my grad students handed in her 193-page thesis and 19-page annotated bibliography, along with a portfolio that's forty pages or so. And yesterday, I received the sixty-plus essays resulting from the med-school class I taught last week (I graded twenty-two of those last night). So even though the students in my two undergrad classes haven't started handing in work yet, this weekend will actually be one of my heavier grading sprints; for various reasons, I'd like to have all this material read and evaluated by Monday, although that may well be overly optimistic. I'm kind of glad this is happening now, though, when I'm still in the flush of that beginning-of-the-semester burst of energy.

Today's open, so I'm trying to get a lot of work done. Tomorrow's so crammed with meetings that I can't even get to my lesson with Charlene; that's deferred until Saturday, when (with luck) I'll also get to the hospital.

I worked all morning doing class prep for Monday. After I finish this post, I'll go swimming. On the way home, I'm going to splurge and buy a new grade book, since I've been using my old one for nine years and it's gotten a bit grotty.

Heigh ho, heigh ho . . . .

Whew!

Today I worked a busy shift at the hospital -- I had a census of ninety-nine, including two patients who reminded me poignantly of my mother -- and then went to work to grab some course materials I needed, and then went for a chiropractic adjustment (I think maybe it's starting to work, although I'm still sore), and then came home and worked like mad on my syllabi, both of which are now done.

Yay.

Thank God for Gary, who always proofreads my syllabi for me and catches errors I can't see because I've been staring at the documents for so long.

Tomorrow I'll go to school and photocopy for hours, jostling around all the other people who'll need to photocopy for hours -- at least I don't teach until Wednesday -- and I have a meeting with an honors student whose thesis I'm supervising, and I need to work on revising my Tolkien essay, which should have gotten done last week but didn't, and I need to write two letters of recommendation and . . . I'll need to swim. And tomorrow night I'll need to prep my first classes for Wednesday. As often as I've done this, I still get nervous.

Welcome to the beginning of the semester.

Our trip down to Minden on Saturday was lovely; I adored the music, although Gary was less than thrilled with the sound system. I spent some money at the yarn store, of course. We both liked the restaurant where we had dinner, which was conveniently across the street from the concert hall. We sat behind some other students of Charlene's -- a mom and teenaged daughter who are both taking fiddle lessons, and who'd brought along dad and two brothers -- and chatted. The entire expedition was a nice little end-of-break break.

But now winter break's over. Time to start the countdown to the Mexico cruise!