Don't Forget to Hang Up Your Sock

This has been a good year, despite and/or because of some changes it's brought. We bought a townhouse-style condo in August and live there now, about a town away from where we were. The kids' school district changed; our church didn't. 

Since our previous pastor (who had led the church for eighteen years) took a college faculty position down south, we are a fair amount of the way through a pastoral search, but our interim is a pastor whom our church has known for a long time (he was kind of our main guest-sermon-giver over the years). He is more than qualified as our interim, so it’s been a smooth transition so far. 

I've also recently become temporary co-leader of the church worship team, in an unexpected-ish development. Our former worship leader, a military guy, is off doing a military internship and then probably retiring. Another vocalist and I are jointly spearheading the worship team's once-a-month leads until...well, no one has said, but I suspect it's at least until the new pastor comes in, or maybe until someone else wants to run the team. Interim Pastor is arranging other worship leaders for the other weeks, since even under our previous worship leader, we'd only been singing twice a month anyway. So far it's...fine? I haven't done a lot of it yet.

Work felt mostly normal this year, and I’m okay with that.

This being our first Christmas at home, today we made Christmas finger Jell-O a la Pioneer Woman (my verdict: the recipe made waaaayyy too much, and it tastes fine, but not good enough to justify that amount) and went to the Christmas Eve service at church (which we don't often get to do). Then we waited for basically an hour to pick up our Chinese food from a place fairly near our condo, but the girls were very good while waiting (their getting to watch some kind of baking show on the restaurant's TV helped). The food was all right, reasonably worth the wait, even if not the Chinese of my dreams. I tried a crab rangoon from one of the girls and decided that it actually benefited from not having a very perceptible amount of crab in it. Their scallion pancakes are one thumb up (tasted good; nice and crispy; really could use more scallion). Their beef fried rice was a pleasant surprise, in that we figured it would probably be fine, but instead it was quite good. Their sesame chicken, alas, I won't get again: too sweet.

Making tomorrow: cranberry-glazed ham, Aunt Peggy's potatoes, rolls of some type, green beans. Eric's mom is bringing an apple pie for dessert. Yes to all of that.

The girls are good. They are the merriest part of Christmas, and it's time for me to see if I should help Eric wrap their presents.

Merry Christmas. Love to all.

Well, Away Down South Where the Air Gets Warm...

I'll let you, the reader, decide what should rhyme with that.

We're in Florida this year for Christmas. My parents are well, we're well, and the girls are seven and five years old, which is basically peak Wonder of Christmas time, so I imagine they're pretty happy. Either way, they're very cute, albeit hopped up on holiday excitement and sugar and too little sleep. They made and decorated gingerbread cookies with Grandma today. We had Chinese food for supper, per A.'s family's tradition. We went to a local service - missing our own back home, I think, but its technical difficulties and other minor blips made for some brief discussion with the girls about how unexpected parts of the first Christmas must have been.

I got an emailed Christmas letter from Dr. Strong, which included - he said as a present to all of those reading, but especially his wife - Wendell Berry's "VII" at the end. I sent back Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent," one of my favorites from my grad school readings for Dr. Strehle. 

This year, I left the job I'd had for another at a different college. I work at two of its multiple campuses; one of them is right in my own community, if technically two towns over. The job didn't have the smoothest start, but now I'm in a groove and it's pretty good. I have applied for an advising job at that same community campus, but even if I don't get it, I'll be all right staying where I am for the present.

Not every Christmas to come will be as good as this, I know. I wish it could be. But this is so good, and I'm so grateful.

Quietly, on Christmas Eve

Here's a lovely story I just read for the first time this year. I'm glad Plough recommended that in one of their emails (I like their mailing list enough to stay on it, which certainly isn't something I can say about a lot of them).

We're a little tired this December - not bleakly, but simply. We didn't even really attempt the Advent activity bag from church. We didn't attempt Christmas cookies or any rough equivalent. Most of our decorations didn't go up until yesterday. I didn't even consider giving gifts to anyone from work.

Not all of those were traditions we normally uphold - considering how much I love all things food-related, I am surprisingly bad about baking cookies, whether by myself or with the kids, and Christmas has so far seldom been an exception - but you probably see what I mean.

2024 is shaping up to be a big year for family things - my dad's 70th birthday, A.'s 40th birthday, my brother's wedding, Pearl starting kindergarten. I hope, one way or another, this can be a bigger year for me to be with people, and for my family to get a larger, better share of my time and effort. 

Merry Christmas.

I Love You, I Miss You, I'm Trying to Leave

Most names have been changed.

I spent two hours this morning bagging sweet potatoes, a roughly-estimated three pounds' worth at a time. The big food-bank truck from Boston must have come early, and Alena must have started setup early (or maybe even the day before) - I think I remember wooden pallets already placed. We were out in one of the big canopied parking lots. By the time we started, long tables at the back held coffee, pastries, cookies, a sign-in clipboard, a large container of Germs Be Gone hand sanitizer (yes, that was its actual cartoon-label-worthy brand name), and - just about all-importantly - disposable plastic gloves, clear and almost like sandwich baggies with finger slots. There were also disposable white cotton gloves, an item I'd never seen before: these were to put under the clear gloves if we wanted to, to keep our hands warm. Alena knows how to run a volunteer-powered food distribution.

I did start out with the cotton gloves, but soon discarded them in favor of the clear gloves only. I'd volunteered to be on the team working with sweet potatoes, and a big element of the job was separating and opening plastic grocery bags. That was hard enough without gloves restricting my fingers; the others on the team seemed to reach the same conclusion. The weather was probably in the forties; I was in a winter coat and sneakers, my black work pants and silver flower earrings looking a bit incongruously formal.

By turns I bent, squatted, stood, and even kneeled on a pallet, doing almost nothing but bagging bundle after bundle, with Caspar Babypants songs stuck in my head from this morning's drive to drop Pearl off at preschool. Not that it was silent: there was chitchat with the others, and a lot of listening to theirs among themselves. Annette, from the registrar's office. Carolie, Ashley, and Kaci, from the student-advising team. When we lagged behind at one point, Devin, from the Veterans Center.

Others I recognized, too - Michele, from TRIO, of course. Michael, from the science faculty. Somebody from the testing center, good-humored about her colleagues making jokes about her shortness. Student-services staff of various kinds. And at least one student - a slightly cleft-lipped guy whom I've felt elsewhere to be honestly a bit difficult - a bit prone to too much self-centeredness and too little self-awareness. Today, he didn't draw attention to himself; he took away emptied boxes and flattened them. 

The work I did reminded me of other moments - pits crew at Basileia, when I made up verses about each of us to the tune of M*A*S*H's "I Don't Want No More of Army Life," and in the one for myself I made fun of how I kept holding us up from starting every shift, to layer my gloves before handling scorching-hot dishes from out of the drying machine. Appraising sweet potatoes at the supermarket, trying to guess their weight and not necessarily proving very accurate. My first time volunteering at a soup kitchen in high school.

I was really happy. Not just because it was satisfying to feed hungry people, although it was. It was that it was the college being the college, and this was only the beginning of a day full of that. Food packing and distribution in the morning; workshops about assessment practices in the afternoon. Breakfast, lunch, and snacks: decent wrap sandwiches and salads and pastries and cookies; dull and liquidy soup. I was on a student panel in the last part of the day, probably about eighty people in the audience. I knew who most of them were, and they mostly knew or recognized me.

It really is a lot like a small town unto itself. Even with staff turnover, I still recognize so many faces and names. I've stood on so many parts of the campus for so many reasons. 

Trying to leave there feels maybe like trying to leave Binghamton did: I know why I'm doing it, and I have some sense of where I might go - but it's been so much a part of me that it's almost unprocessable that it might come to an end sometime soon, that I might go somewhere else. 

Or, unlike Binghamton, I might not. It certainly feels possible that I'm called to that place, though how that would square with my family's belonging to a church some fortyish minutes away from it is a question I don't know how to answer. When we talk in church about serving our community, being committed to our community, which one should I mean? They're in two separate states, and to some extent two separate cultures; I can feel the difference.

I am trying to see it as a hidden surprise, the ways everything will work together for good.

I'm Told that Grief is Love with its Recipient Missing

What does visiting the sick look like when the sick are immunocompromised and you're at regular risk of Covid or other illnesses? Does it mean more videochat? Does it mean email and letters? Does it mean something else? What does feeding the hungry or visiting a prison look like when you work full-time in another industry, then have children to take care of until nightfall; when your house is a mildew-speckled, filthy mess and the dishes are dirty and all your family is miles away; when you're nearing forty and neither have energy past nightfall nor can fall asleep? Does it mean throwing money at things? Is that of equal value to doing things directly, yourself? Should I feel grateful to have a job, even if it's a tiring one that I suspect is a lot less important than everyone likes to believe? Would I be a better person if I left my job to maintain my household and care for my children? But aren't my children better off being cared for outside the house, given what I'm like inside it, and what I think the dynamic would be (or already know it is) when my children's constant stubborn defiance and constant thankless demands me(e)t with my inner and outer exhaustion? What do I make of the endless conflicting claims about the correct way to interact with, and the correct attitude to take towards, the non-Christian world - especially as a person who works in the non-Christian world? Is there any proof of God's existence or claims that my heart would consistently accept without doubt? Is there any way he could speak to me that I would not distrust? If not, where does that leave me? How do I build a life, and what kind of life would it be? It may be true, as Brad East says, that people don't die for a question; but what if that's the only choice I have?

We're Here Tonight, and That's Enough

Very glad we beat the Northeastern flight cancellations (not to mention my own fears of a plane crash) and made it to my parents' earlier this week. Glad to be seeing more family tomorrow. Glad for this Matt Labash piece from the past, though maybe I should note that even my weird relatives may not be as weird as his. 

After the girls went to bed tonight, Mom and Eric and I looked at baby pictures and video clips of both of them, and Dad, Mom, and I also watched video of them being part of the group of kids doing hand motions to "Joy to the World" last week in church. They (the girls) were very cute on all counts, of course.

It's been a weird and tiring year in some ways, but not a bad one overall. Even with what I wish had happened or will in 2023, I'm still grateful for how it's turned out. I'm looking forward to tomorrow, and also, a little cautiously, to the upcoming new year.

We'll See

Today, daycare sent an excited message that next week we parents will be allowed in past the lobby again and can drop off our kids outside their classrooms - a prepandemic privilege whose revocation probably never crossed anyone's mind, back when I had to slip blue covers over my work shoes before entering the infant room, a similar blue to the now-ubiquitous surgical mask. M. was in the infant room, and L. in the big preschool room through the adjoining door within the room, and when either girl got too fussy or sad, the other would get to go give a quick comfort visit.

I feel like I've heard this story before: we were almost back to this point last summer, right before Delta hit. There'd been an art show sort of thing inside the center one evening, and L. and I had gone, admiring her and M. 's and other kids' pictures, L. playing for a little while on the playground, other playmates and parents around. A classmate's mom had clearly lost weight; I figured it was probably noticeable that I had gained it. The sun hadn't set yet, at probably seven-something.

Every return to normalcy gets scuppered or seemingly punished. Digital magazines call 2021 "hot vax summer" ; then, Delta. We return to family Thanksgiving; the world discovers Omicron. I get a haircut; my kids sick out of daycare for something like the next week with a standard kid virus. We buy a couch; M. picks up Covid at daycare and brings it home. The couch gets delivered; M. breaks out in hives for a week, and then we all start catching colds again. I plan a birthday party; snow probably cancels my mother's plane into town [later update: yes, it did, or at least some element of the inclement weather did]. No under-5s' vaccines: October 2021 turns into November turns into February or March turns into who knows when. Almost no in-person church since October. Nothing in public to do with our wild, cooped-up kids. Gynecology appointment rescheduled every single month since November; I'm twice-vaxed and have a recent negative PCR, but they still won't take me with Covid symptoms, even knowing they're not Covid.

So I'm glad to be entering the building again, and dumb enough to think this time it might keep going, that there won't be another variant, that the case counts will more or less crater soon, that my kids can go to school with colds even after our we-got-Covid-too-recently-for-a-repeat expires.

We'll see. It should be nice for a while to get to go in and see the classrooms. 

Findings

Don oíche úd i mBeithil,

beidh tagairt ar ghrian go brách
Don oíche úd i mBeithil,
go dtáinig an Briathar slán
Tá gríosghrua ar spéartha,
's an talamh 'na chlúdach bán
Féach íosagán sa chléibhín,
's an Mhaighdean in aoibhneas grá

Ar leacain lom an tsléibhe,
go nglacann na haoirí scáth
Nuair in oscailt gheal na spéire,
tá teachtaire Dé ar fáil

Céad glóir anois don Athair,
i bhFlaitheasa thuas go hard
Is feasta fós ar talamh,
d'fheara, dea-mhéin síocháin.

English translation (if you're willing to trust Wikipedia, but in this case, I am):

I sing of a night in Bethlehem

A night as bright as dawn

I sing of that night in Bethlehem

The night the Word was born

The skies are glowing gaily

The earth in white is dressed

See Jesus in the cradle

Drink deep in His mother's breast

And there on a lonely hillside

The shepherds bow down in fear

When the heavens open brightly

And God's message rings out so clear

Glory now to the Father

In all the heavens high

And peace to His friends on earth below

Is all the angels cry

This month I, fulfilling a wish I've held since probably fairly early in the pandemic, created a Spotify playlist with coworkers - in this case, the theme was "lesser-known holiday songs." I allowed two interpretations of "lesser-known": one was infrequently-played covers or other recordings of familiar songs (for example, one of my coworkers submitted Tracy Chapman's cover of "O Holy Night," which to me fit the bill, as it doesn't seem like any of the versions most likely to be played over a department-store PA system in November or December), and another was songs that themselves are lesser-known, such that anyone's recording would be fairly uncommon (I gave "Ríu Ríu Chíu" as an example when I explained the playlist theme).

I had thought that one of my three contributions (that being the per-person limit I imposed) would be Sufjan Stevens's cover of "O Come O Come Emmanuel," which is quirky in ways I really like and evokes memories for me of recent Decembers (it was excellent background music in 2019, the year I think I found it, when I spent many unexpected hours working on TRIO's APR and feeling very pensive and like I needed God's presence). But instead, I forget how, I stumbled across "Don Oíche Úd i mBeithil" and quickly realized that I liked it enough that it was going to be one of my new things that I listen to every Christmas season. "Merry Christmas Everyone," by Rend Collective, and Guster's excellent cover of the itself-rather-obscure "Mamacita, ¿Dónde Está Santa Claus?" joined "Don Oíche" on the playlist. Sufjan Stevens was unexpectedly out. 

Back in college and grad school, of course, I used to take Christmas Eve posts here to greet the year's new friends. This year, what with the job change, I would have quite a bit of greeting to do. 

I still wonder if this job is where my heart lies, professionally speaking; I miss student services and advising very much. I can see, off in the distance, a possible future where I learn to love this job, too. But it still feels like a fifty-fifty, and a question of how successful I can be at creating some sort of synthesis of the work I did and the work I now do. 

But I have good coworkers, some very good indeed. One unexpected, slightly poignant, but overall welcome surprise came one night when I was exercising, which I do in the basement because we have no real space elsewhere and I usually want to do it alone. But not necessarily permanently alone: I kind of felt like a few specific work colleagues, especially two women I've hung out with the most over lunch, might think the Jenny Ford workouts I was loading on YouTube were fun and easy, like I did. What if we started some kind of Zoom thing every some-certain-night of the week? Would that work, to exercise together while apart, with a video screen-shared? Would we do that, or would it be awkward to exercise with your coworkers? 

Hard to say; I don't know that I'd actually want to do it. But as I played it out in my head, some minutes later I noticed: my "real-life-imaginary" work friends in this scenario weren't the English department. When I've had a crackpot theory, a funny idea, a rant, something that in college I would have presented to friends, since not long into my Bristol career I've mentally pictured those conversations happening during the end-of-semester English-department gatherings that Mike used to organize. Eventually I knew that the mental conversations were my way of getting more time with people I wished I could be friends with in a truer way. I loved our English department, and to some extent still do. They're fun, smart, caring, praiseworthy people, whose praise I valued, whose friendship I awkwardly wished for but didn't quite know how to try to get. 

But more and more these days, those moments in my head happen with people in my new department as the audience instead. And whatever that turns out to mean or not mean long-term, right now it is something that I'm thankful for. 

Merry Christmas. 

Love

It was a long time ago now, about fifteen years, when I burned out of Alpha Phi Omega and went on whatever we called a leave of absence from it (was it "becoming an associate member"?), ultimately to quit altogether, to some extent probably to my own surprise as well as that of not a few others. I had been so into the fraternity, sophomore year, that my parents paid dues for lifetime-member status for me (not crazily expensive, don't worry) at some point as a Christmas gift, though I don't remember whether it was in that year or the part of my junior year where I hadn't quit yet. I'd leapt from pledge to secretary to Vice President of Service, gone through most of LEADS training, lived and breathed APO to a pretty large extent.

But the problems had begun when I became an officer. I came to realize that being a member of an organization and helping to lead that same organization are two very different experiences. Membership is fun and meaningful. Leadership is work, and much less fun. It's much easier to burn out of leadership than membership, or at minimum to become disillusioned. And that's what happened with me as far as APO, for reasons you could probably read about in this blog's archives (if you wanted to, and I'm not saying you should).

I remembered that "leadership is a different experience" lesson to some extent in InterVarsity and beyond, but I will say that the experience of leadership in a Christian organization usually felt different from that. I was on Good Shepherd's vestry for a few years, but though there was certainly small-scale drama, and though I put plenty of time into serving the church, it had the vast advantages of a commonly-shared, commonly-lived set of values and (I believe) the work of the Holy Spirit, and the whole thing just went better.

So I wasn't thinking about any of that when I took a job at work that's basically a leadership position. I was thinking about wanting to stay at Bristol. I was thinking about what it and its faculty and fellow staff and students stand for in my imagination and, well, my heart. I built a lot of warm colleagueships (is that a word?) over eight years, and I met a lot of students I liked. I like a lot of the differences between our community college and most four-year institutions. I knew we needed a good tutoring program, and I hoped I could help make sure the college had one. I didn't think it would be easy, per se, but it was a challenge I cared about and felt more or less up to.

Now I'm in a job where, instead of bringing happy tidings of grant funding and equal-footing faculty/staff collaboration, I have to make up rules and guidelines and say no to students, tutors, and faculty alike, maybe more often than I get to say yes. I have discovered just how different it is to tell a faculty member no about something they really care about - and let's face it: a lot of times, TRIO wasn't in the position to give a meaningful no to anything faculty wanted to do with their own courses, and/or wasn't something they really cared about, so I didn't have that problem very often before. I am the one now who's pulled into every awkward situation - every student who complains to administration that we didn't support them, every student who thinks they get to take their frustration out on a tutor or desk staffperson, every faculty member who doesn't submit a support request and then wants an embedded tutor the exact minute their Flex Start course begins, every tutor-faculty pairing who are convinced that they know their subject and are an expert team and all I can do is come in like a wrecking ball and destroy everything they've fought so hard to achieve; plus a good half of the awkward situations that my associate dean gets saddled with that are even remotely related, if she feels there are any ripple effects out to tutoring, which she typically does.

I've been in the job for three-and-a-half months, done a zillion things but accomplished what feels like fairly little progress, and can't even estimate the true feelings of my supervisor, who's unfailingly supportive and skilled in management and carefully very kind - but also, it must be said, an odd mix of gentle-and-understanding and candid-yet-hard-to-read and easily-disappointed.

There isn't really a mechanism here for going on associate-member status, and I don't really have anywhere else to go, even assuming I would dare and wouldn't melt into a guilty puddle.

I think I really do love the college as a whole, and the people who work there, and the people it serves. I stayed because of love; I think I chose a harder job out of not just necessity, but love. But like all love becomes, love is hard. I'm a little disoriented, and trying really hard to love, but love is hard.

I Am Not At All Sure of When I Will Do Any of the Following

• Make muffins with the blueberries that E.'s mom sent us over a week ago (still good, though; I checked)
• Put the blueberries in the freezer because I've finally accepted that I'm not going to make the muffins until some random weekend or at 8:15 PM some random night
• Get the haircut I have been trying to get for about the past month
• Get L. the haircut we ought to get her, not least because it is starting to get dangerously in the way during some of her bathroom breaks, and do you know what I don't feel like cleaning out of her hair if I can help it?
• Actually get my tutor-training curriculum (due earlyish next month) finished drafted out of the early outline stage
• Start getting caught up on the student-advising database records for my previous program that I left undone, saying I would do them sometime (assuming what's left of the program is actually submitting an annual report this year, which I am hoping they totally won't if they're not getting funded again until 2025 or later, but it would be like that byzantine grant to expect us to waste a gazillion hours on it anyway) 
• Start an exercise regimen (alone, thank you, or at least alone among others if I decide that part of the point of having been vaccinated against Covid months ago is to be able to go waste about 15% of my monthly discretionary funding on a seldom-used subscription to a public gym)
• Find the cloth mask given me by my college
• Borrow Ember's End from the library system connected to my college, because the odds don't look good for its soon being acquired by the library system in my state of residence
• Reread the first several books in the Queen's Thief series so that I can have more than a vague recollection of their contents when I eventually go on and read the other ones
• Read the pile of books connected to my job, because somehow I got hired with practically no knowledge of one of the forms of tutoring I'm supposed to be overseeing, yea, even training people in
• Start figuring out when we are moving out of here, in greater detail than "ideally before M. [so, I haven't previously mentioned here that we had a second daughter in 2019, but we totally did] turns three"
• Resume any meaningful semblance of a social life, even via Zoom (remember when I lived in Binghamton and blogged about doing CyberCafe trivia most Mondays? So: Cyber Trivia came back over Zoom late last year [on Thursdays this time], even though Cyber Cafe West had closed a couple of years ago. I started playing again early this year [not every week, but probably the majority of them], and it was genuinely great. I had a fun threeish months there with Charles, Suzi, and other friends of theirs. Then Jeff, Cyber Trivia's creator and only-ever question-writer and host, developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and died within something like a couple of weeks of diagnosis. The trivia league, bereft of its central figure, hasn't met since, at least that I know of)
• Clean the rest of the fridge shelves

Thank you.

Overmastered

If the above title is true, the thing that overmastered me was wanting to stay at the college where I've been working. I didn't end up in either a faculty or an advising position, but in a tutoring-coordination one. In a world where my previous program didn't go insane and then go belly-up, would I have even interviewed for it? Maybe, since I've long found this particular position interesting, and since my frustration with our grant-regulation noncompliance might have boiled over if I'd still discovered how extensive it was. And so far - after exactly one day fully on the job - I'm glad I did.

In any case, even as I interviewed for two separate grant positions last fall at another college, even as I did the finalist interview for one of those positions and felt like it had gone well, I think part of me still hoped that somehow I could stay where I was, with students I like, with colleagues I really like. I don't remember being very disappointed when that college failed its search.

After spending almost eight years very seldom friending any current coworkers on Facebook as a matter of personal policy (for retired ones I was more open to it), it may have been the pandemic that finally got to me: this April or May I set myself a deadline. No matter how this most recent position interview turns out, I thought, whether I'm cutting my final positional ties with the English department or not, I am finally giving up and friending the English department, and anyone else I want to besides. 

And I got the position, and I did lots of friending, and I have not yet been utterly disappointed by anyone's publicly-online persona, though I'd hardly dare take any bets on some of their perceptions of my own.

My former director probably was annoyed about my leaving, despite putting a good face on it. At any rate, after some congratulations during the meeting when I told him I was taking the new position (and some genuine thanks to him from me, since all the intraprogram complications since 2018 meant that I'd had little choice but to ask him to be my managerial reference for the new job, and he had agreed to do it, thereby helping to seal his own staffing-problem fate), I don't know if we ever saw each other in any program-related meeting after that. Past that day, even on my last day, I got no goodbye, no token expression of thanks, no involvement from him in the sendoff organized for my retiring colleague and me, no offboarding from the program to speak of (he gave me one item to make sure I did once I told him what my last day would be, but that was it). I doubt my colleague did, either (she announced her impending retirement probably a couple of months before it happened, and her last day came two weeks before mine). Given his personality as a manager, the extent to which he's been disengaged lately, and how essentially dead in the water the program is, I wasn't expecting much, and I don't think I'm bitter. But I will say that it was even less from him than I had anticipated, and I do wish there'd been something.

But though it's early days, the new assistant dean seems like she may become my best supervisor yet. She's smart, straightforward, and kind of intriguing. She seems fair-minded, and (though this is more of a neutral quality, I find it interesting) has a sort of calm outward manner overlaying more intense depths, a combination that reminds me of an English-department colleague who also happens, like her, to have spent a lot of her childhood on a farm. 

And though I'm sad to lose most of my reasons to professionally hang out with the English department, I'm happy about the prospect of the library-and-tutoring team, whose members seem likeable; and it's also a definite plus to still be semi-collaborating on Writing Center matters with one of the English faculty members I like most (at least until he rotates off at the end of next year). As for the advising staff, despite the mild reservations I expressed in the previous post, overall I did like them, and can at least hope that I wasn't too insufferable a presence on their Teams channel; it'll still be nice to see them in collegewide contexts, and it wouldn't be an awful idea for me to request an occasional few minutes to talk tutoring and learning-community matters at their staff meetings.

So, altogether, this seems about as good a resolution as I could have asked for. I'm grateful, and interested to see where it all goes next.

I Try Not to Even Think Much about Work on Sundays. But.

With the grant not renewed for the 2020-25 cycle (we've got a year of preapproved banked funding to tap into, so I'm glad to say that I do still have a job past tomorrow), I may finally have to make the decision I've been mulling over for some years now, between advising and English. 

For much of my time in my position, it's been no real contest - I would say the advising I do in my job is my favorite of all my responsibilities. I can pretty much advise all day if I need to, whereas it's been a long time since I've had to do English teaching and related responsibilities all day, and those memories aren't very happy ones. 

But I was also twenty-six and younger then. A decade later, I've been involved in English tutoring, curriculum, and assessment from the perspective of someone really embedded in a full-time department, and that's a somewhat different experience. If all my semesters on Portfolio Assessment have taught me anything, it's that I certainly could teach competently if I decided to, and would be very much less isolated in it than I was as a young adjunct. Over the past almost-eight years, I've learned a lot - and have also felt, I think justifiably, that I have a better grasp of what effective composition teaching looks like than a number of our current part-timers. Some semesters it was hard not to feel like maybe I'd better get involved with teaching again, simply because the teaching of developmental and introductory composition will happen at my college, every semester, no matter what quality it is, but that quality has real implications for the future academic paths (and professional lives?) of students. 

There'd also be the undeniable pull of really belonging, with full-timer status instead of just warm affiliation, to the English department, colleagues to my very favorite people on campus. They have spent a lot of time being oh-so-generous to me and really treating me as one of their own. Not without precedent, to be sure: historically my position has often been a feeder for the full-time faculty, which I didn't really know when I interviewed for and accepted it, so it was in their interest to welcome and prepare me. But it's really been more than pro forma. And one of the nice things about working in a department where you're the youngest (or at least were until recently - probably the newest hire is younger than I) is when people try to remember what it was like to be twenty-seven and just starting. I remember being checked in on early on when my academic division re-orged (the one that was just a re-org, not the later dissolution of that division), some of the conversations that happened when I was on a search committee, the time the department chair told me (I'd only been at the college a couple of years) that he was glad I'd been hired. Dozens of tiny encouragements from people kind enough to care. 

But the truth remains, and I know it, that I probably wouldn't join an English faculty for anyone else but them, anywhere else but where I work. And even then, I'd blanch at a five-course teaching load; my dream is to get offered the Writing Center Coordinator position (which is not a completely crazy dream, as the current holder of the position is tired of it, but there's been no successor forthcoming), which carries only a two-course load (which becomes essentially a one-course load if you're able to take a corequisite course).

As far as being a full-time advisor - I could certainly do it, and for all I know I might well like it a lot. But I've been surprised by how much less excited I've been about it than I would have been even a couple of years ago. Advising, as it turns out, might be more fun when your caseload is smaller, but these days to be a professional advisor is to have a minimum of 250 students (though how many of them show up is another question). Also, not to be that person, but my interaction with NACADA leaves me feeling like advising is just a more openly politically-progressive field right now than I am ever going to have that much patience with. 

And I also would miss the academic side of things. Curriculum Committee wouldn't be the same if I weren't interacting with tutees and their assignments, because that's my best window into how things look on the ground. In academic discussions with faculty, I'd lose the credibility that tutoring students and teaching College Success Seminar has given me. No convention in my own field has ever been as interesting as Four C's was back in grad school (though some of that is probably about the quality of presentations you can get on a national scale versus a regional one). And I do care deeply about composition curriculum, but what, I'm going to keep reading portfolios as an advisor? (Assuming the project even survives into this new academic year, but that's another story.) 

But again, I think of how, even teaching CSS, I often didn't love the actual act of teaching (although sometimes I liked it - it depended on the lesson). I still, even for a one-credit course, dreaded grading. A wonderful department is truly wonderful...but they wouldn't be there with me in class. They wouldn't be grading my papers. 

I wonder how much I'd want to teach if it weren't for the simple fact that I have more natural sympathy with my college's faculty - often the kind of delightfully geeky people I most adore - than with its advisors, who though nice also seem noticeably less geeky, and the women of whom are often (it must be said) very much more stereotypically feminine than I am. And if some of EFC's plethora of southern military moms (not all of whom are stereotypable, I know) have unknowingly taught me one thing, it's that I do not really know how to act around women who aren't of an implicitly or explicitly academic turn of mind. I haven't really had to very much. (Practically all my closest female friends, before, during, and after college, have been. And my mom is more so than she probably thinks she is.) 

Anyway, what I ought to also be doing, besides thinking, is praying. After all, my current position has been such a glovelike fit - and it's so unusual for its type, and only by a slightly odd coincidence did it come open in the way it did in first place and stay open long enough for me to apply - that I can hardly do anything other than chalk it up to the power of the prayers of church ladies, per the Biblical book of James. (Don't scoff, non-Christian readers, assuming I still have any. Any Christian without a healthy respect for the praying church ladies is, as Chesterton would say, a very shallow critic.) 

And I'm mulling over an interesting exchange I stumbled back across in Gaudy Night - 

[Harriet] "...I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel." 

[Miss de Vine] "I don't think that matters, provided one doesn't try to persuade oneself into appropriate feelings." 

... 

 "But one has to make some sort of choice," said Harriet. "And between one desire and another, how is one to know which things are of overmastering importance?" 

"We can only know that," said Miss de Vine, "when they have overmastered us."

A Christmas Word from Our Sponsor

With all the Chesterton I've posted over the years, you'd think I'd have paid more attention to this poem sooner:

Christmas Poem
There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.

Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost--how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wife's tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall all men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

Well. It's 2018.

Today we had the kind of blizzard that might (might) have led to a school cancellation even in Rochester. We were all off. A. teleworked. L. slept a lot. I watched her and moodled around the internet and read a little and tried to make a meal plan and a grocery list.

L. is ten months old now, and some of having a ten-month-old is easier than having a younger baby (probably most of it is, really). A few things are harder, mainly the ongoing transition to solid food after enjoying a hard-won nursing groove for a while, as well as the having to be so vigilant and intervening when she plays because she won't. stay. still, but we also don't have any baby gates (no objection to them - just a small apartment and a weird-but-sadly-kind-of-unsurprising lack of follow-through on getting them). She's fun, and adorable, and great, and tiring, and I am excited and also scared to be one of her parents.

As much as I love A., I miss having other nerdy, well-read friends. I think I'm more social-media-dependent lately, even as I often hate it as much as ever, because it's the only way I can get any of what those kinds of friends used to give. I check the Twitter channels (and blog posts, as applicable) of Alan Jacobs and Jamie Gladly and Simcha Fisher nearly every day, but because I've always loved reading blogs, I'm only just realizing that right now it's probably mostly because I can't get to the likes of Carrie and Leah and Joe. You would think that I would just, you know, contact them. But that's kind of complicated sometimes, and more awkward than I would have expected.

I've tried to play the game here. I did Thrive for a long time, and it's been quite good sometimes. I'm trying MOPS, and it's too girly and its Christianity is too superficial, but the meetings have their advantages and their value. I go to any English-department thing I reasonably can, and talk too much, and later second-guess things I said. But it's not the same.

But old friends and places aren't the same, either. I can picture moving back to Binghamton or Alfred (but with us doing what jobs?), and in some ways those are happy pictures. But there are some question marks there, too. Alfred feels like it might be getting more ideologically polarized, and some of the people there that A. and I like most are aging rapidly. And Binghamton - I think going back to Good Shepherd (I mean, realistically, that's what we would do, if there) would involve a lot of reverse culture shock. As for Rochester, that might be my real preference, of the three. But I think of my brother running into high school buddies who "never got out" of there - I don't know. (Plus, ugh, after getting used to winter here actually not starting until December, and then actually ending in March...)

I hope 2018 doesn't burn me out as much as 2016 and 2017. I need God. And I want smart, kind friends.

To Remember

L. has been doing this thing for a few days where, when she's just asleep and I put her in the Rock'n'Play (which, a hundred alases, we're going to have to give up soon because she's getting both too old and too big for it), she wakes up a bit and gives me a mad-sad face and starts crying. But when I pick her up and cuddle her, her head sinks onto my shoulder and she falls asleep for real.

It's a little like the very early days, when she was something like three or four weeks old: often when she cried (but didn't concretely need anything) I could hold her against my chest and she'd nestle herself in and go to sleep. She stopped doing that after a while, I think about either the six-week or two-month mark. But this new variation, so to speak, is a sweet one.

Cranky Question (Alternate Title: First-World Problems)

So if chocolate is basically produced via modern-day slave labor a large percentage of the time, as I heard back in grad school, isn't there some U.S. governmental body that looks into supply-chain issues? There are regulations about so many other things. Do we not set standards for how things get sourced? Can we really not do anything on our own end, even if we can't change other countries' regulations?

Because I'm going on, like, my seventh year of having to feel guilty every time I eat something chocolate-based that isn't expressively Fair Trade, but I can't help wondering why it's my job to not buy things because I don't know how they might have been made, as opposed to some governmental body, something with actual background knowledge and actual clout, being in charge of keeping them off the shelves if they truly are a moral outrage. I understand that people gave up sugar back in Wilberforce's time, and I'm not saying there's something wrong with that. But I am saying that that shouldn't have to be the default strategy. The default strategy, if the stakes are as high as slavery, should be for government bodies to do their jobs, not for us to call on semi-informed citizens to engage in a boycott if they aren't made of money and can't buy Fair Trade everything. Like, didn't C.S. Lewis write something about this somewhere, about how to some extent, you can't be expected to background-research every charitable cause before you give to it? It's kind of a similar thing, isn't it?

Summer Leave '17 - Week One of Six

There's no way for a mere human to "cherish every moment," but I don't know when I'll ever have so much time again to spend with my baby - whether it be this one or, if God wills, any future one(s). Well, unless I take some of my FMLA time unpaid next time around, I guess, since it took me four years to earn enough sick time to cover most of this leave. But I suppose it's possible that a governmental push for a standardized paid parental leave could succeed by the time we end up doing all this again.

Anyway, in some ways the time has seemed short, but in other it's seemed kindly long. The early-March near-panic of trying to figure out L.'s car seat feels far in the past, succeeded by a fairly low-stress ability now to just strap her in and go, not crazily far from the have-baby-will-travel attitude I'd been dreaming of when I originally contemplated this time of year. (Here's hoping that eventually putting her in the Baby K'tan will feel the same way, though at least there's now the Ergobaby to bail me out in a few months if not.)

But for the grace of God (I am still very thankful for all the prayers for my job situation those years ago), I would probably be now in the place of some other moms in the nursing-mothers group I attend weekly: searching for daycare while wondering if it really makes sense for me to go back to work at all. My mom cycled through all three classic configurations of work-motherhood balance over about the first dozen years of my life - full-time work, stay-at-home-momhood, part-time work - which contributes to my being able to picture myself in any of them. Nerd though I am, I think I could be very happy staying home: I love my daughter (and my husband, who would presumably share in the benefits of my having a domestic-engineering job), I like to cook and run errands, I can tolerate cleaning house, and I could do more for church. But even if our health insurance and some of my future retirement funding weren't running through the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I don't think, in the end, that I'd stay away from school. I have the kind of job I wanted most in high school, although I didn't know then what form it would take: I think I am "doing something that means something." While no worker is irreplaceable, and education is not quite the shining and salvific thing that college employees are often tempted to conclude that it is, my students do tend to need the day-to-day things I provide, and for a wide range of reasons, I think I'm able to provide contributions to the program I serve that, at least for right now, are unique.

So I'm praying that we pick a good place for L. to go during the day, and I'm hoping to make something good out of these next six weeks. Some days it still feels weird that L. is here with us for good (though certainly that's what I want). But she is, and I hope to remember more of her babyhood (and, for that matter, my marriage) than I remember of most other things. Hopefully returning to this blog will aid that.

Also from the Hidden Archives

This is another past draft (here with minor revisions) that I initially decided not to publish, but rereading it now, I like well enough after all.

The original timestamp reads "9/5/12, 12:23 AM" - obviously I had no idea of it, but I was three years out from my wedding day. I was also within six weeks of moving out of Binghamton.


Not That This Written Thing Really Rereads Right, Either

I had thought, at the time I decided not to send the first card, that it was the exclamation point that had ruined things (it had looked wrong without it, but much worse with it), or the probably-too-inarticulate thing I'd tried writing about God's love to people whose spiritual status I didn't really know. It didn't sound right. And it probably wasn't straightforward enough. I had to try again, even though I'd spent quite a while drafting the message the first time.

Tonight I tore open the sealed envelope (still there, on a dresser), made myself reread it. It probably wouldn't have been either of those things. It probably would have been the last sentence: "If there's anything at all I can do for you two from here, please let me know."

You two - for something that would have arrived on the day she died, had I sent it on the day I'd intended, that probably would have been the problem.

Of all the people in Syracuse's folk-dance group, her husband, C., is my favorite. A middle-aged college professor, teaching chemistry, owning at least one t-shirt off of ThinkGeek. Quirky and gentle, classy as he guided me (my headlight-freeze very badly, or not at all, concealed) through English country dances (at which, like so many dance genres, I do not excel). My sympathies lie with the geeks of this world; I would have liked to have known what to get him talking about (that I could have followed, that is - probably not chemistry), since I'm sure it would have been fun or good to hear. Somehow I'd missed how close he and his wife were, but later I could tell when I looked at their Facebook pages, at his webspace - he'd written dances in her honor more than once.

Their marriage had been somewhat late, and now, I had recently learned, he would have to watch her die; it reminded me of C.S. Lewis losing Joy. I reread most of A Grief Observed by cell-phone light in the dark, trying to guess how it'd feel, what to say. I ended up unsure there'd be anything helpful I could really say.

I went to the local gift shop back on Saturday before I picked up Leah for the movie we went to see; I bought the card for the second attempt. This card was better, being handmade, like the ones she'd made when well. I'd try again to get it right.

I meant to write the message today or tonight, but a busy day at work, dinner-making, prayer group, grocery-shopping got in the way. I scrawled myself a reminder on my whiteboard. But as my last thing tonight before going to bed, I also went back to Facebook, went to C.'s page to see if anyone else had said anything - any piece of information that would help me know what to say.

...How did I - ? Well...it's true that I wasn't on Facebook as much last week as I might have been. Either way, somehow the program couldn't tell what news I would have thought was important. I saw other people's sympathy there on his page before I saw the official announcement with the date - August 30th. The first card would have gotten to them that day. I read through the obit, checked the funeral day and time. I'll be at work - and I don't know that I really know them well enough, anyway, especially her. She must have been at folk dancing sometimes - but I don't have any memories that are definitely of her, only possibly.

Swearing in my head (which I actually rarely do), I reached up to my whiteboard, swiping my thumb across the green letters. Too blunt a gesture now, but I was frustrated and sad. Write to C[--], it says now, with only a smudge where I'd had and G[--]. A blank card, still bagged, still out in the backseat of my car.

Posted After All

Writer's Note: I started this post back in late July; I don't know whether I ran out of time and saved it, or saved it because I wasn't sure anymore where I was going with it, or what. But, upon today's reread, it seems worth it to post it even in its unfinished state.


I've been reading, from time to time, a blog by the daughter of a former Sunday-school teacher of mine (or one of them - two ran the class). When I was in his class, back in what I think was the eighth grade, his eldest daughter, K., was something like six years old. Now she's just graduated from college.

Thanks to her dad having linked it, I've been reading her blog, too. Where my former teacher's is funny - witty, punny, wry - hers, though not without humor, is heartfelt, raw, vivid, inspiring, and heartbreaking. What she writes about most is what it's like to be recovering from depression, self-harm, an eating disorder, and the sexual assault she suffered in the eighth grade, when five boys violated her in a school bathroom because she wouldn't go out with one of them.

I don't know what it is about the past year-ish, but I've been hearing a notably elevated number of sexual-assault/-abuse accounts. Most of them happened in the past, when the now-women were younger (sometimes quite young), although at least one of them was more recent. To say that it's tragic is so obvious as to be meaningless.

What it makes me wonder, often, is how many of my students it's happened to. Somewhere at school once was a poster with a statistic about how many girls have been sexually abused (or maybe assaulted, which seems like it would cast a wider net because we often use it to mean a broader thing?) by the time they reach adulthood, and it was some horrifyingly-high percentage, something like 1 in 7, or maybe 1 in 5 - in any case, something that, God forgive me, I had thought on first glance couldn't possibly be accurate. By now, my mind has changed on that.

I myself haven't suffered any form of abuse or assault, by the way, sexual or otherwise. My experience has been so different, in fact, that I wonder how much of my present self-confidence I can chalk up partly to having been spared that horror. But I learn well through first-person accounts, and I've scrolled through a lot of K.'s:


The most common question I get is, "What you were wearing?" As if that makes a difference...I was wearing jeans and an extra-large hoodie if you must know.

The second most common question I am asked is, "what did you do to provoke him?" Nothing. Unless you count him asking me out and me saying, "no," because he was a jerk who slammed my locker shut every day, who used to pull my hair because he liked the way it curled.

*

The people who know me best ask me, "On a scale from 1-10, how much does it hurt today?" I live my life at a 7...[but] the weight of the number changes...Imagine this: 7 bowling balls are heavier than 7 eggs. 7 microwaves are heavier than 7 bowling balls. 7 elephants are heavier than 7 microwaves. Some days I’m 7 elephants. Some days I’m 7 eggs.

*

Depression has this way of making you see the world differently. People with depression see the cruelty, the joy, the pain, the compassion, all at once. I look at a person, and I see their capacity to hurt and help, and I’m always wondering which one they’ll choose. I see the world as it is, how it was, how it could be. I see my life the same way. Nothing is black and white. Sometimes, the weight of all this seeing is overwhelming, which is the cause of the pep talks in the morning, the faith trusting the floor will hold firm beneath my feet.

A Rerun, Because I'm That Kind of Disappointing

Here, have a quotelist from grad school. I really do intend to go back to writing on this blog sometime. But considering the amount of wedding(!!!) prep the fiance and I have been doing on top of everything else, I couldn't really tell you when that's likely to be.

Another Word from Our Sponsor(s?)

Instead of reading anything I've written lately, go and listen to this and/or read the G.K. Chesterton essay (not directly related to the sermon to which I just linked, but still one of my favorites) below.

The Methuselahite
(from Chesterton's book All Things Considered, which, I remind you, is [gloriously] in the public domain)

I [s]aw in a newspaper paragraph the other day the following entertaining and deeply philosophical incident. A man was enlisting as a soldier at Portsmouth, and some form was put before him to be filled up, common, I suppose, to all such cases, in which was, among other things, an inquiry about what was his religion. With an equal and ceremonial gravity the man wrote down the word "Methuselahite." Whoever looks over such papers must, I should imagine, have seen some rum religions in his time; unless the Army is going to the dogs. But with all his specialist knowledge he could not "place" Methuselahism among what Bossuet called the variations of Protestantism. He felt a fervid curiosity about the tenets and tendencies of the sect; and he asked the soldier what it meant. The soldier replied that it was his religion "to live as long as he could."

Now, considered as an incident in the religious history of Europe, that answer of that soldier was worth more than a hundred cartloads of quarterly and monthly and weekly and daily papers discussing religious problems and religious books. Every day the daily paper reviews some new philosopher who has some new religion; and there is not in the whole two thousand words of the whole two columns one word as witty as or wise as that word "Methuselahite." The whole meaning of literature is simply to cut a long story short; that is why our modern books of philosophy are never literature. That soldier had in him the very soul of literature; he was one of the great phrase-makers of modern thought, like Victor Hugo or Disraeli. He found one word that defines the paganism of to-day.

Henceforward, when the modern philosophers come to me with their new religions (and there is always a kind of queue of them waiting all the way down the street) I shall anticipate their circumlocutions and be able to cut them short with a single inspired word. One of them will begin, "The New Religion, which is based upon that Primordial Energy in Nature...." "Methuselahite," I shall say sharply; "good morning." "Human Life," another will say, "Human Life, the only ultimate sanctity, freed from creed and dogma...." "Methuselahite!" I shall yell. "Out you go!" "My religion is the Religion of Joy," a third will explain (a bald old man with a cough and tinted glasses), "the Religion of Physical Pride and Rapture, and my...." "Methuselahite!" I shall cry again, and I shall slap him boisterously on the back, and he will fall down. Then a pale young poet with serpentine hair will come and say to me (as one did only the other day): "Moods and impressions are the only realities, and these are constantly and wholly changing. I could hardly therefore define my religion...." "I can," I should say, somewhat sternly. "Your religion is to live a long time; and if you stop here a moment longer you won't fulfil it."

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice. We have had the sophist who defends cruelty, and calls it masculinity. We have had the sophist who defends profligacy, and calls it the liberty of the emotions. We have had the sophist who defends idleness, and calls it art. It will almost certainly happen—it can almost certainly be prophesied—that in this saturnalia of sophistry there will at some time or other arise a sophist who desires to idealise cowardice. And when we are once in this unhealthy world of mere wild words, what a vast deal there would be to say for cowardice! "Is not life a lovely thing and worth saving?" the soldier would say as he ran away. "Should I not prolong the exquisite miracle of consciousness?" the householder would say as he hid under the table. "As long as there are roses and lilies on the earth shall I not remain here?" would come the voice of the citizen from under the bed. It would be quite as easy to defend the coward as a kind of poet and mystic as it has been, in many recent books, to defend the emotionalist as a kind of poet and mystic, or the tyrant as a kind of poet and mystic. When that last grand sophistry and morbidity is preached in a book or on a platform, you may depend upon it there will be a great stir in its favour, that is, a great stir among the little people who live among books and platforms. There will be a new great Religion, the Religion of Methuselahism: with pomps and priests and altars. Its devout crusaders will vow themselves in thousands with a great vow to live long. But there is one comfort: they won't.

For, indeed, the weakness of this worship of mere natural life (which is a common enough creed to-day) is that it ignores the paradox of courage and fails in its own aim. As a matter of fact, no men would be killed quicker than the Methuselahites. The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it. And in the very case I have quoted we may see an example of how little the theory of Methuselahism really inspires our best life. For there is one riddle in that case which cannot easily be cleared up. If it was the man's religion to live as long as he could, why on earth was he enlisting as a soldier?

Diary Day, the First

Today was fast-paced and rather difficult, but worthwhile. Found out that one of the professors I work with seems to have pretty unrealistic standards for her ESL students' grammatical skills. No wonder the ESL students have been grumbling for some weeks now about her; I thought it was just because said instructor isn't clear on assignment directions (that's what I can mainly tell from lab stuff, and of course I have my own personal experience) - but today I saw, for the first time, a graded product. Red pen over every visible error--of which there were many, but of quite varying degrees of seriousness--and comments that weren't meant to be tactless but sometimes read that way. A barely-passing grade at the bottom. An attempt at consolation (after three negative adjectives describing her sentences, something like "but you are IMPROVING"). And all this to a student who's only been writing in English (maybe even speaking English - I don't remember now) for two years and spends more hours in the lab than any other student I can think of. And this isn't even the instructor whose class was designed so poorly (and so far below college-level) that I actually reported it to her dean - this was someone else.

Yikes.

Writing centers usually don't comment on instructors' policies, especially negatively, to students. But after some thought, I deliberately broke that rule. I explained to the student the difference between the standard she was meeting in class and the standard she would actually be held to during portfolio assessment. And I told her that the standard in class was higher than I would set, and that for the amount of time that she had spent working with English, she should be proud of the work she had done.

I did also tell her what the instructor was right about. The student does have a lot of errors that impede meaning, and we did talk about that.

I left her doing an extra-credit assignment that will raise her grade on the red-penned one...if she gets at least a C. When she left the lab today, I didn't feel as though, according to her instructor's usual standard, her odds were very good.

She's going to come back tomorrow. God, please help her - we can't just edit. But at this point, that's about what she'd need.

*

One thing I prayed for, I did receive - and it was a big victory. I had a very productive conversation with a new advisee, who had been flirting with educational choices, for the fall semester, that I considered unwise. By the time she got to me, most of the hard work inside her had been done already - by God, I think, through His use of several things, including her sometimes-difficult creative-writing class. The whole thing, start to finish - talking about aspirations and such, talking about classes, choosing classes, et cetera - took about ninety minutes, but it didn't feel like it. I left the meeting hungry and tired - but excited and grateful. I walked over to another building and (after a bathroom break) bought a hamburger, squeezed on ketchup/a little mustard/a dab of mayo, and spread the condiments together with a plastic knife. I ate it with, of all things, cinnamon-sugar Pringles (brought from home - I think I'd bought them at Job Lot) - a late lunch after a pretty busy day.

A Pentina

Curled up on the couch in the cold,
I press keyboarding fingers listlessly to lettered squares,
thinking of friends on couches, in meetings,
on planes, at work,
everywhere but here.

"Don't abandon the here
and now," people say, cheerfully cold,
diagnosing me: I'm unwilling to work
to turn circles to squares,
to ask God to bring heartfulness out of watery meetings.

Surely true. But I'm tired of new meetings,
of crestfalls after hoping that here
at last are the boring squares,
of the inevitable moment of cold
wet feeling that every fresh beginning is yet more work.

I don't know if I'd even want it to work
to "be intentional," plan earnest meetings,
march down the salt-filmed street like it isn't even cold.
I'm too chest-weighted. I want them here,
All sitting knee-huggingly in Sunday knots and weeknight squares.

The happy girl squares
Her shoulders, then bends to work
In the seedbed lovingly dug for her. But I carve a cavern here.
Stalagmite words and echoing eyes have blue-black meetings,
Watering pin-sprouting pods that curl in the cold.

In cold town squares, we huddle up for meetings.
Everything's more work out here, but we can't talk inside.

Venite Adoremus Dominum

And thus that manger poor became a throne;
For he whom Mary bore was God the Son.
O come, then, let us join the heavenly host;
To praise the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Traditions are well and good, but once in a while it makes sense to do something different. Thus, rather than try to make a long list of this year's new friends (between Thrive and my new job), I just want to say a few words.

Driving to my parents' for this Christmas, I made a point to listen (for the first time in a while - a couple of months at least, I'd say) to a new (to me) Tim Keller sermon from off the iTunes feed. It was about covenant, and the significance of the one God made with Abraham, and it was a sermon of a kind I love - bringing cultural context to bear in a way that illuminated what God has done rather than try to explain it away. I love when that kind of thing makes it obvious how amazing God is and how brilliantly Scripture tells stories. Keller is par excellence a credit to English majors everywhere, but my very favorite sermons of his are the ones where, instead of admiring his rhetorical skill, I end up mainly looking past him, along his pointing arm, straight to Christ.

It was what I needed; it's been a good year, but it's had its difficult moments. I have had a hard time doing anything besides going through the motions this Advent - as these days I often also do, honestly, at church.

But the way that God broke in through that sermon...it didn't last as long as I'd have liked, but it reminded me of what He's like.

He never leaves His children. He always comes to rescue us. I am so glad, worlds glad, for that.

Full Circle

[I know I've already posted something similar to parts of this on Facebook, but whatever.]

If I'm correct (and for a couple of reasons I think I am), a year ago today was when I interviewed for the job that I have right now.

Today, that year later, I spent most of my day sitting on an interview panel.

On the panel, you understand, not in the interview seat. My position wasn't the one up for interview. I'm still possibly the newest member of the full-time English-department staff (depending on how you look at it - I don't mean this with any animosity, but it's probably simpler not to ask).

But this week, I get to help decide who gets to have that honor next.

Fittingly, and thinking of that interview (although not realizing yet that it'd been exactly a year before), I decided to wear the same dress shirt today that I did back then.

I praise God for a year full of blessings.