On Sheltering and Shelf Space

Today, we have gone on what is variously being called a “lockdown” or “shutdown” or a “shelter in place order.” These terms have been flying around for a bit now, and there is no clear agreement what they mean. In general terms, all “non-essential” businesses need to shut down. So grocery stores, pharmacies, and laundromats: still open. Bars and exercise places: closed. Restaurants: takeout only. This prompts questions about coffee shops & roasters: do they get to keep running if you take your coffee to go?

Pathetic.

Sorry: got sidetracked there. Anyway, one thing that seems clear is that we individual humans are not supposed to go anywhere we don’t absolutely need to (again, open to interpretation — my thought is that if you’re out and there isn’t a dog on a leash in front of you, you should be prepared to say why you’re out, and make a case that it’s essential). So last night, when this was announced, I hopped on my bike — in the rain — and tore up for campus. Filled the saddlebag with the remaining books I thought I’d need, and headed home.

My old blogfriend Squadratomagico remarked, when she visited me in my newish abode, that I had hardly any bookshelves. “My books live at my office” I said. Well, Squadrato, I should have taken your comment as an omen and invested in more shelves.

Something New to Make Me Nuts

I've lived in Grit City Beach for 15 years. And I may -- MAY, mind you -- now have the financial resources to purchase a small home.

The question remains as to whether I have the emotional resources. I'll be doing this on my own, and that's both good and bad, in terms of organizing the whole process. Not to mention paying for it. But I thought that it might perhaps be amusing to view from the outside: "Book-smart person confronts the housing-industrial complex! Hilarity ensues!"

Here is my observation for the day: Why do so many condo-stagers paint the interior walls gray? Nothing says, "I want my condo to present all the warmth and charm of a high-priced chain hotel" quite like gray walls.

Settling In at FPU

Greetings from Fancy-Pants University!

Yeah, okay, it's been over a month since I've posted. But to be fair, in that month, here's what I've done:

• Finished up a last frantic week of research in Blerg City
• Gotten a cut that got infected four days before leaving (shivering in 75-degree rooms? check!)
• Traveled back to Grit City, and moved in with friend for 10 days
• Visited doctor for antibiotics for infection, then got sick with some new upper-respiratory thing
• Spent ten days finishing final good-byes in Grit City; dealt with address changes; mailed 7 boxes across the country
• Moved self (with two suitcases) across country
• Settled into new apartment and new office and new... well, new everything. 

So: busy.  But now, finally, I feel like I'm approaching a rhythm. I observed to someone yesterday that you cna power through 90% of settling into a new home in just a few days, but that final 10% can take weeks. Monday, for example, I had to buy a set of stick-on wall hooks that let me have a place to put away my winter hats and umbrellas. Yesterday, it was the process of getting the detritus of former tenants picked up by a local charity service (I have a severe problem with clutter, and no 1-bedroom apartment needs three tables [not including the desk] and six chairs, not to mention two microwaves) as well as getting automatic deposit set up for my travel reimbursements. Today, I applied for a car-sharing service. Tomorrow, perhaps it will be getting the new phone service set up.

My new office is pretty fancy-pants in its own right.

And, of course, there's the work of organizing the actual work. I was at that yesterday and today, trying to figure out what I had (more than I thought), what I still need to transcribe (again, more than I thought -- depressingly so), and where I'm at with the chapter drafts (not as far as I'd like to be, but a good respectable third of the MS in draft form). I'm hoping to really dive in and start writing on September 1. Every time I try to think beyond that, about how much writing I need to do, or what my daily/weekly pace needs to be to get there, or (gods help me) what the real "so what" of my book is, I start to freak out a little. So I've decided for now to stop doing that. Just put in the work every day, rain or shine. And enjoy the hell out of FPU, which truly is a wonderful, wonderful place.

A Month in Moving pt. 5: In Which I Abandon Everything

A while ago, in part 4, I wrote about lightening the load. I'm proud to say it was a success. Other than clothes and shoes (packed for shipping to FPU City), books (stored or shipped), and a bed and couch that my friend with the garage agreed to keep indoors, I've narrowed my worldly possessions to this:

Now, I just hope the garage doesn't flood, or I'm gonna lose all that nice furniture from Target.

Leaving it all behind also refers to the neighborhood I've called home, and the apartment in which I have hosted fellow bloggers Squadratomagico (come back and blog with us again, Squadrato!!!) and Historiann, where I finished one book and started another, and where I lived next door to Voice of Reason from our first months as first-year proffies up to the time she got married. I guess her husband thought the two of them should live together. Whatever. Anyway, it's been a good home, but today I locked the door behind me and dropped off the key. On to new things.

Finally, I'm temporarily abandoning Grit City altogether.  In a few weeks, I'll be on a flight for a year-long adventure at Fancy-Pants U.  At the moment, however, I'm sitting in the international terminal, waiting to board a flight to Blargistan. A month of research, friends, and excellent food. I'm also bringing my Fancy Camera, which I have named Vera, in the hopes that if I name her, I won't neglect her. Expect dispatches, lavishly illustrated.

Good bye, everything! Hello, everything new!

A Month of Moving, pt. 4: Lightening the Load

I talked in a previous post about how a long stay in a single address allows one to gradually accumulate great piles of stuff without even realizing it. But the pain/joy of moving is that one is forced to confront such things and decide what to do. Usually, the choice comes down to: box it up and move it, or get rid of it.

This month, I have been making the choice to lighten my load. A week ago, I took out a bunch of good clothing I never wear: a leather jacket, two suits, a faux-leopard coat that I used to wear a lot, that sort of thing. "Still good! You like this!" warred with "You haven't worn this in 3 years/5 years/10 years/ever. Donate it." I've approached neighbors, friends, and random acquaintances and asked them whether they want some object or other, many of them quite nice. Yesterday, I saw a neighbor going by, and I dashed out of my door and asked "Do you need a blender or a drip coffee maker?"

The result? I've been slowly getting rid of everything that I don't use regularly. Every thing I give away is one more thing I don't have to pack.

Today, I explained this, in excited tones, to a friend of mine. He pointed out that I could have sold them online and gotten lots of money for them. Undoubtedly true. But right now, "lightening my load" also means not spending time doing things that I don't want to or have to do. Getting an account online, photographing and listing items, corresponding with buyers, taking shit to the post office -- NOT something I want to be doing right now.

I've also been attacking those stacks and stacks of articles with my marginal notes and syllabi and reading lists that I've saved. I wish I could tell you that I'd just ditched them all, but the fact is that about 20% of them are still with me, waiting to be scanned. But none of it will be done now, and none of it is getting moved with me. I've gone through the drawer in my office full of publishers' catalogs and just tossed it all in the recycling. Likewise for old notepads full of things that I figured that I might one day want to transcribe. The general philosophy here is the same: If I haven't needed it for this many years, I don't need it now. Or ever, probably.

None of this makes moving a pleasant experience, but I feel like I'm getting something good out of it: a lighter, more portable life.

A Month of Moving, pt. 3: Stupid Shit I Shouldn't Be Wasting my Time On

• Entering bibliography from old notes and publishers' catalogues that I have stacked up.
• And I shouldn't have kept those anyway.
• ... from 2009?!? What the hell? Why didn't I thrown these away years ago?
• I'm just gonna take this whole folder and... Ooh! There's a bib I got from my Revered Mentor in grad school on the subject he's a world expert in. Let's enter that now.
• No. It's 18 pages long. Okay, back in the folder it goes. 
• Along with this.
• And this.
• I'll enter them all online soon.

A Month of Moving, pt. 2: In Which my Apartment Becomes a Clown Car

"Oh, I don't have that much stuff. The move should be a snap."

HAH.

When I was in grad school, I moved six times in eight years. Or was it seven times? I forget. But roughly once every year and change.  When you do that, you don't ever get a chance to accumulate that much stuff. And everything you have is disposable, more or less.

By contrast: I have been in my current apartment for twelve years.

Granted, there was the year I spent at Fellowship U. back in 2007/08. But I had a subletter then, so all I had to do was move my personal stuff into the back storage closet and box up the few things I was taking with me. So, twelve years since a move. This by far the longest I have lived in any single address since I... well, I was going to say "since I lived with my parents," but it occurs to me that my family moved across town when I was seven, and I moved out when I was eighteen. So: the longest I have lived anywhere, ever.

Wow.

You all know what that means: even though I've only got a little over 500 square feet, and even though I like to keep a lot of empty floor space in that space so I don't feel crowded, in twelve years, you accumulate a lot of stuff without even realizing it.

And when you finally move, even the tiniest space turns into a clown car: you keep pulling stuff out and putting it in boxes, and yet there always seems to be more -- way more than the space and the laws of physics would seem to allow. How is this possible?!?

2996/1088

That is, unfortunately, what my e-mail inbox looked like on Wednesday.

2996 messages.

1088 unread.

Yeah. If you haven't gotten a reply from me, it's not that I'm ignoring you. Apparently I'm ignoring everybody.

Part of this has to do with the fact that I've been writing. Focusing on other things. I've been going on these 10-week "write-every-day-even-two-sentences" binges, and while it's been really productive, it's also been keeping me hopping.

Part of it is that I don't have home internet anymore. But let's not kid ourselves -- I was bad about this long before. 

What it really is is that "keeping up with correspondence," never among my top talents, has become more difficult as the e-mail proliferates. And as the junk e-mail proliferates, the real stuff gets buried. And I think "I'll get to it later." And then I get busy again.

So, this holiday weekend has been a process of digging out. Wednesday I resolved to myself that, for every day this week, I'd shrink each of those numbers by 50%. Yes, I know -- those of you who do math, or even those who know the story of Achilles and the Tortoise -- will tell me that, at this rate, I'll never get there. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. But this morning, I'm at 600/50, and falling fast.

I really think that "keeping up with my correspondence" needs to be my major resolution in the upcoming semester.

The OTHER Summer Projects

When we last left our heroine, she was embarking on a summer without travel, the purpose of which was to enable her to complete an article, a book chapter (based on the article), and drafts of grant proposals in a ten-week period.

How am I doing at slightly past the halfway point? Well, thanks to a couple of writing support groups (one online, two in person), I've managed to get a mostly-done draft of the article, and I'm two thirds of the way through the first pass at the chapter draft. No work on the grant proposal yet, but that will come. I also realized that I neglected to factor in a couple of book reviews (one embarrassingly overdue) and a syllabus for a new course, but I'm chugging forward on those, too.

But I've not mentioned the other summer project: get my house in order. Literally. There are those thousands of multi-hour projects that you can't really take on during a semester workweek, and that you're too wiped out (or buried in grading) on the weekend to even contemplate. For me, a tidy house contributes to my peace of mind and productivity, but most often, my home, while not a complete disaster, looks a bit like this:

 

It puts me on edge. But it's also too overwhelming to think about most times. Yet last night, faced with the impending arrival of my young nephew who will be sleeping in that front room for four days, I decided that now was the time.

"I'll just tidy up a little," I thought. HAH! Five hours later, I had pulled and sorted stacks of papers, reshelved some books, taken others to be sent to the office. I had filled two bags full of recycling. Lo, I even dusted.

And now, Behold!

I am mighty! I am unstoppable! I am... What's that you say? My office?  Well.. um... Omigod is that a mountain lion behind you?!?

::poof!::

Procrastivity

Sometimes you just can't face the Thing that Must Get Finished. Usually, that Thing is grading. Today, some unseasonably hot and windy weather has sapped my will to do... well, anything. But certainly not grading.

This is the time for "procrastivity." I figure it's okay if I procrastinate, as long as I'm doing something, even if it's not the thing I'm supposed to be doing. So for the next 45 minutes, I will work on making a dent on the mess on my desk.  I think that will be sufficient.

In Which I Adopt a Contrary Position (updated with a Very Special Link)

[UPDATE: Anticipating the reactions coming from Comrade PhysioProf and others who may occasionally find my turn into the hippy-dippy a bit gag-inducing, I promise you that I have many sides to my personality and, as proof, invite you to click here while I put on "Free to Be You and Me" for those who wish to continue reading.]


You know what I love? The end of daylight savings time.

Okay, so everybody loves that "free hour" of sleep we get once a year (though we're also acutely conscious that it's gonna get taken back in another six months). But after that, it's all bitching and moaning about how it gets dark so early.

Except for me. Because, as I've mentioned, I am a lapsed but aspiring morning person. The big problem is that my body is more and more light-sensitive when it comes to waking up early. The body only wants to wake up once the sun is coming up. And since my bedroom windows face west, this makes things difficult.

Not so this morning.  Up at 6:15, and... well, I won't say I got right to work, but it's a start.

Oooh!  You know what's also cool? I got a tiny cash windfall and bought myself something that I've been wanting a long time: a zen chimes alarm clock:

Seriously, I've been longing for this ever since my friend Dr. S. got one. Can I tell you how nice it is to wake up to? The tone is wonderful, and I can use it as a meditation timer as well. Plus, it's small enough to travel with.

Mornings just got better for me.

Dear Internet (a request) [Updated: the internets reply!]

Dear Internet,

Do you take requests? Because I would very much like you to make a photo-based website called: "What the hell is wrong with my houseplant?" Because seriously: I go to the nursery and say, "Show me your indoor plants that cannot be killed." Then I take it home and give it fresh potting soil, water (once a week), sunlight, misting the ones that seem to call for it, even plant food. And still, in a matter of weeks, my plants look like this:

No, that's not flash glare.  The middle of the leaf is corpse-white.

Or this:

Note the curled, dry leaf edges, as if I'd been holding this plant near an open flame.
The rest of the leaves mostly aren't doing this, but they are rolling themselves up like 
little hedgehogs, which worries me.

I like living things! I'm a yoga-practicing vegetarian daughter to a woman who had a house full of thriving plants and a vegetable garden! I even went out and bought a water meter... but the damn thing insists, two hours after I've watered a plant, that they are bone dry, so I have little faith in it.

Seriously, internet.  Please send me a website (or, failing that, one of those reality show makeovers where a host and a film crew comes in, makes snide comments, makes me cry, then shows me how to make everything better and I cry again at the end but this time happy tears) and I promise to be extra-good for the rest of the year.

Yours truly,

Notoriously Phytocidal Dame.


UPDATE:

Dear NPhD,

Thank you for your inquiry. Yes, we do do requests, but as we are currently swamped with requests for pictures of cute baby animals, and politicians or celebrities doing horrific things, it may be a while before we get to your request. In the interim, we have forwarded your request to the publishing industry, which points out that people never appreciate it any more, and this is why it's going out of business, and even supposed "scholars" just want a quick fix... well, you see why we don't contact them much. But after they got finished kvetching, they mentioned (with a deep sigh and an eye-roll) that this book has existed for three years now.  It seems to be more about outdoor plants than indoor ones, but you should look at it. And you might tell them thank-you for making the book... though I'd recommend you send them a note, rather than call. 

Best wishes,

The internet.

Still not dead.

But still not posting. Unless you're interested in my to-do list.* And face it: no one really is, except me.

The hiatus is not permanent. But I need to focus on getting my feet under myself for the next several days, so blogging will be nonexistent for a few more days.

In the meantime, here's a random recent photo. No story here except the truly beautiful light.




*And if you are interested in such things, look at the many, many tags to this post for a hint as to what my life's like these days.

Declutter (an optimistic post)

First off: I'm home from Puddletown. Christmas went off with very few hitches (and we are a family who loves our hitches).

But now is the time to look forward. I have good reason to believe that the next six months will bring a great deal of scurrying and exploding head syndrome at work, from the get-go, with no chance to pause and catch my breath. There are also some Very Good Things in the offing, though. And to prepare for both of these, I need to declutter.

Clutter, whether physical, digital, or mental, tends to make it impossible for me to work. I have a zillion and one three- to five-day tasks to get done in too little time. When that happens, my natural response is to practice denial about all of them. But, after many attempts, I've determined that this does not produce the desired result.* Furthermore, doing the Next Indicated Thing actually does produce results: The Thing in Question gets done, and I feel lighter.

So, today, on my arrival home, I am devoting myself to doing the major decluttering my physical and mental environments. This means 1) putting away the stuff from the trip; 2) sorting through the many piles of papers accumulated throughout my teeny apartment; and 3) making a list (long) of the tasks I need to accomplish in the month of January, and actually prioritizing them. The invisible 3b is for me to get started on the first of these tasks tomorrow.

And fair warning: this may be part of a semi-ambitious project to Finally Get My Shit Together. Notebooks have been purchased, anyway. But I won't say more about that now, for fear of overwhelming myself. For now, I will simply do the next indicated thing. And the next indicated thing, today, is decluttering. For now, that will be enough.


*The desired result being that the elves swoop in and finish my projects while I sleep, leaving them done, proofread, and neatly printed and collated for my perusal. They also have yet to repair my shoes.

If you really loved me, you'd do it.

Today, I'm on campus until 9:30. I have no food in the fridge, and have not had time to shop for a week. There is also no food worth eating on this campus. And I will get home around 10 p.m., and I will be cold, and there will still not be any food in the fridge.

Would one of my readers like to come by and fix me dinner, to be waiting for me when I get home?

In which I get a bit woo-woo

Remember how I posted recently about my plant-killing abilities?

Well, a couple of days ago, I bought two big ol' bags of potting soil, two shade-tolerant and hardy-looking houseplants, and three itty-bitty pots of flowering plants for a hanging basket. And some plant food (which I may have already lost). And I potted the new plants and repotted the two plants that I already had, as sort of a prize for having survived years of my neglect. And I brought them inside, and set them about the house. Three floor plants and one hanging one in the front room, and one brand-new plant in the bedroom, where I'd been maintaining a pot of dried-out dirt (where a plant had once lived) for so many years that I no longer noticed it.

And I swear to god, the apartment feels different. I only added two plants, and replaced another that was looking scraggly. But it just feels like a warmer, happier place somehow. Good energy in the room. Plus, I had the added bonus of falling asleep to the scent of fresh soil and cedar shavings emanating from the newly potted plant a couple of feet from my bed.

Conclusion: living plants -- as opposed to scraggly, dying ones and pots full of dirt and dead roots -- make things better.

Cleaning House (NOT a New Year's Metaphor, I Promise)

As the parenthetical subtitle says: this is NOT a New Year's post about metaphorical housecleaning. This is a post about real housecleaning as a single person, a woman, and an ostensibly upper-middle-class person.

This post was inspired by an offhand comment overheard in the coffee shop I'm currently sitting in: one of the baristas, as she went out to clean the condiment counter, noted that she'd "called the maid about doing it." This was by way of a funny: we, the comment said, are the ones who do the cleaning-up. Household help is something so utterly foreign as to be silly. The foreign-ness comes partly from being a 20-something working in a coffee shop, but also, I suspect, from being a person living in this particular neighborhood in this particular city. Since this is the city and the neighborhood I grew up in, I felt myself included in the unspoken "we."

I thought most people in my peer group were like me. And here in Puddletown, they are. But do you know what? The four academic women I am closest to in my department all have someone clean their houses** once every one to two weeks. Granted, one of them only has a housecleaner because her husband had one, and when she moved in with him, the housekeeper was already installed. But honestly, I was shocked. Because all of a sudden, the thing I thought was a joke had become normal. I found myself an "us" on the "them" side of the line (or the other way around, depending on your point of view).

Now, "Why do people have housekeepers?" is a question with many answers. "Why do professional women have housekeepers?" is one I can answer myself: Because they'd rather be doing something else, and no one else is going to do it for them. And I can certainly appreciate that on an intellectual level, and don't begrudge any woman the choice of what to do with her own hard-earned money. If my friend is using her money to buy her way out of scrubbing the toilet, I can totally get behind that.

So, at this point, the question is: "Why don't I, when other people do?" Here's what I've come up with -- admittedly off the top of my head while on the second cup of coffee:

• I can't afford it.
• Okay, so maybe I could, but I'd have to give up something else that I value more than paid domestic labor.
• The Gender Thing: I have a hard time paying women in particular to do things that I've always successfully done for myself. This is why I only rarely get pedicures; the image of a woman more or less on her knees for me just to earn a lousy couple of bucks makes me want to scream with outrage.
• The Class Thing: I feel like I'd be exploiting the people I came from. Yes, I'd be providing employment, and any work is good work in these times. And I could pay a real living wage and tip generously. Yet somehow, it just feels wrong.
• The Race Thing: See both "class" and "gender" reasons, above. Since most "house help" in the Grit City area are immigrant women, all the above reasons apply here.
• I rent 500 square feet. Really, doesn't hiring someone to clean a teeny-tiny space that I don't even own seem like overkill?
• I'm the kind of person who takes perhaps unreasonable pride in doing for herself whenever possible. I can change my own bicycle tire; I can navigate my way solo around a foreign city's bus system; I can damn well sweep my own floors.
• I can't live in disorder, clutter, or filth, but do I really need floors I could eat off of at any given moment? If my bathtub or kitchen floors are only really thoroughly cleaned every two to three weeks, will something bad happen? Does anyone really look at the baseboards? The answer to all three, I've concluded, is: Probably not.

So, I guess that's kind of it. For me, personally, it's a list compelling enough to ensure that I will keep on doing my own half-assed housecleaning. So come on over to Casa Notorious, help yourself to what's in the kitchen... and keep your line of sight well above the level of the baseboards, okay?

Happy New Year, everyone.


**For what it's worth: 1 full-sized house, 2 two-bedroom condos, 1 two-bedroom apartment; all are women living with their spouses, no children, and no pets. If that makes a difference.

Balance (a quest)

It's been a while since I've written a real post (I'm not counting yesterday's rant), because working on two projects has diverted all my creative energies. But this morning I cracked the 80% mark on the conference paper [new material], and I've been able to get the introduction and first chapter of my copy-edits done, so I'm feeling a bit more relaxed, at least for the moment.

So, as I've said before, this is an ambitious semester, in terms of writing. A draft of an article, a polished conference paper (for November), a draft of another one (for May), and the copy-edits on the book. January will be Big Conference, packing up for sabbatical leave, and preparations for a three-month research trip. So, I'm busy. There are other things, too -- pesky things on the "teaching" and "service" front, but I'm just not looking at them. This is a marathon semester, rather than a sprint, so I keep my eyes on the next tree or telephone poll that I'm running to pass. Mini-meltdowns are going to all be part of the process, I figure.

I didn't plan it this way. It just kind of happened. But in case some of you were thinking of doing this on purpose, here's what I've given up so far, 7 weeks into the process:

• a clean apartment
• a stocked refrigerator
• getting home from the office before 8 p.m.
• sleeping past 6:30 a.m.
• clean hair
• cooking
• taking pictures
• long walks with neighbor C.
• phone conversations with friends (except those lasting less than 10 minutes)
• e-mail correspondence
• any social life whatsoever
• falling asleep before I'm utterly exhausted (otherwise the anxiety keeps me awake)

Oddly enough, I've managed not to get sick, despite all the colds and flus in the air, and despite hosting a sniffly six year-old for 48 hours last weekend. Honestly, I think it's the same phenomenon as the two weeks leading to the nearly simultaneous submission of my MS and my tenure file last year: the adrenaline seemed to act as a temporary immune system boost. But this isn't healthy in the long run, right?

In any case, my colleagues lately have been stopping by my office with helpful suggestions. Two think I should start dating (yeah, right -- with what time?); one thinks I should take up drinking (a world of no); another says I need sleep (this one strikes me as reasonable), but also deep-fried foods.

I'm tempted to go with the standing suggestion of my old friend the Wizard Chimp: "Mmmmm...chocolate..."

Greetings From Dustbunny Central

I want to assure you all that I'm not ignoring your comments or blogs. The last few days has been taken up with moving preparations, and in less than 24 hours, I'm off to the airport, headed home to Job City. This will be my last post for the next couple of days, but I'll be checking in as soon as possible. In the meantime, please enjoy this picture of the first of many herds of dustbunnies that I've rounded up. I have a feeling that I'll be at this a while.

Boxes

Yesterday, I took the day off, except for one little errand: I bought boxes.  

Today, I'm starting to deal with the mess in my living room.  But it's so darned hot. Ugh.