When you write, write what you know. Or feel. Or think. It's what I tell all my students, and it's an adage that I too live by religiously. If you've been reading this blog long enough, you'll know it's true. No matter how badly I try to create a theme ("life in the south!", "life as an academic!", "the life of a triathlete"), there's always that awkward moment when I simply have to write about something completely different (say, our misbehaving puppies, trips overseas, and the importance of bathrooms), for no other reason than that it's been on my mind.
This is also the reason I have not blogged in two weeks. And why blogging prior to my last post was sporadic to say the least. It's not because I don't have anything to say, because heavens knows that moment won't come until I'm six feet under the ground, but because what is on my heart and mind is not something I feel comfortable sharing. It's not my story. It's someone else's. And although I don't mind talking about other people ad nauseum, albeit under a fake name, it has always been under the guise of their lives being part of my story. And this story isn't just part of my life, it's part of lots of other people's lives too.
And the story that's been on my mind, heart, and soul is about Ozzie and Jimmie. Who, of course, aren't really called Ozzie and Jimmie at all. But that's part of my blogging deal. I know there are bloggers who have no qualms about sharing their children's names, pictures, funny, sad, and happy stories, but I'm not one of them. Maybe it's because they're a little bigger and older than the average, oh, toddler or pre-teen, or maybe it's because they're never really mine. I don't know. But apart from some minor tales about Jimmie's bullying problems and Ozzie's likeness to Sheldon Cooper, I've written very little about them on this blog. And as they are possibly the easiest stepchildren any stepmom could wish for, that hasn't been difficult at all.
Lately, however, their stories have become more complicated. More rife with questions, worries, and strife. Although fundamentally, most of their issues are no harder or worse than what any mother with teenagers would face, in my case, they feel very different. There's more people in the picture, such as their biological dad (you know, the long-suffering, always patient man known as husband-dear), but also people who have begun to play a much more important role in the recent years; their biological mother, their relatively new stepdad and stepbrother. And it's exactly this presence of multiple people, roles, and influences that has rendered every situation more complex, more fraught with questions and doubt, and harder to write about. I want to write about Ozzie's struggles and Jimmie's quest to grow up as quickly as possible (or maybe not), but I can't. Because then I would have to write about their mother too. And their stepdad. And my very own husband-dear, of course. And they never asked to be on this blog, let alone be an object of analysis. As I said, as much as this is part of my life story, my future, my dreams, it's also not my story alone.
In addition, having problems such as these in the first place, makes me feel broken. Incomplete. Even failed. I always joke about how I don't like the term "broken family" and prefer "blended" or "julienne", but in reality, that is what we are, a broken family. Our kids have two homes, four parents, and different expectations everywhere they go. Making our family work in all of its complicated dimensions takes a lot of effort, patience, and good will. And sometimes it seems that we all just run out of everything at the same time, leaving nothing but a feeling of falling short. Of guilt for not trying harder, being better, showing more grace.
It doesn't help that everyone whose blog I seem to read lately has the seemingly perfect family. And I know that that's just a facade, that everyone has problems, just like I hide our fights behind funny stories about dirty kitchen floors and cleaning ladies. But everyone I know is on their first marriage, with kids that only belong to them and their spouse. Many of them are pregnant, dealing with questions such as whether or not to paint the nursery, reveal the gender, and feeling the pressure to defend the preference for a home birth. Important matters? Yes. Definitely. Matters I would love to have be my problems? Oh, yes. No one I know seems to deal with complicated pick up and drop off schedules, phonecalls about whether someone's band shoes got left at the other house, and why one house seems to hog all the new jeans, and more problematic issues such as the definition of acceptable grades. Not to mention the worry about whether or not you're doing a good job, if maybe the other parent is handling things smarter or not, how that will affect your children, and whether or not you should/could/must address this. It's both scary and lonely.
So in lieu of writing, I've been baking. A lot. It helps me whenever I'm stressed, or just blah, and have already ran/biked/swam that day. This past weekend, just to give you an idea, I baked three fresh pear cakes, twelve honey-blueberry muffins, one pear-apple pie, and one loaf of bread. I would have kept going, had I not run out of counter space and containers. The kids loved it, the neighbors loved it, and so will my co-workers once I start sharing. It may not be the story that it's in my head, but it's sharing something of me. And that's better than nothing at all.
I wanted to end with a flippant final sentence here, drawing a parallel between baking and life. Perhaps something like "when the ingredients are in the bowl, they don't look like much, but when the final product is amazing", or "just like baking, life requires patience and a vision of how things will turn out". But instead I will end with what husband-dear wrote after proofreading my blog (as this is, after all, his story too): "Someone, somewhere else may read it and know they are not the only ones baking with an ever changing recipe".
Monday, January 28, 2013
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
4, 3, 6, 5: On the importance of research assistants
I'm not dead, haven't sunk into a depression, and I haven't given up on blogging either. I promise. I've just been a little overwhelmed. Oh, and busy giving myself road rash while running. But anyway, whenever I get overwhelmed, I do what has worked so well in the past decade of academia, I man the hatches, hunker down, get 'r done, and pretty much fall off the face of the earth. Ask husband-dear, he's barely seen me in the past ten days. And if he hasn't seen me, you know it's bad.
In case you're expecting the standard "classes started and life got busy" spiel I give you guys twice a year, I can triumphantly tell you that that is not the case. Nope. Well, sure, having 70% of my advisees realize that, oh, hey, classes have started, and I'm not registered yet! didn't help, but it wasn't the crux of my absence. Nope. That can be blamed on the baby-drama, my new project, and Steve*.
First of all, everyone around me is pregnant. Honestly. If you're reading this, and you're not pregnant, you better be sure, because everyone else is. In fact, if you want to become pregnant, just make friends with me, and I guarantee you a pregnancy within six months to a year. Promise. Although after three-plus years after no-baby-gate, I'm really sort of OK with the no-baby thing most of the time, being surrounded by nothing but glowing, pregnant women has not been easy. So over Christmas break, when my period was on a three-month hiatus, and I was sick, sicker, and sickest, I couldn't help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, maybe-maybe-maybe, a miracle had occurred. Well, obviously (as otherwise I would have probably been so excited I would have called each and everyone of you in person), there was no miracle. And although one would think one would get used to this sort of disappointment, this particular time was rough. It didn't help that even though husband-dear and I had not said a word about this to each other at all, when I asked him to add tampons to the grocery list because my period had started, he started to cry. In spite of knowing better, he had been hoping for the miracle too.
So to say that put me in a bad mood would be an understatement. Add to that the fact that my entire reader seemed to be overflowing with pregnancy/baby tales, and the fact that I believe in writing what you know while not wanting to write about this again, and you might see why my brief blogging break turned into a somewhat lengthy hiatus.
Then there is the new project. I mentioned this before Christmas break, and people, it's awesome. I'm only teaching two classes, and have been able to spend the rest of my time working on this new health communication initiative, designing outcomes, trying to understand NIH requirements, and talking to as many experts and interested parties as possible. As your classic type-A, overachiever personality, you can see how I can make this really big, really quick, and I did. The thing has got so much momentum, there are times when I'm not sure where to begin. People love the initiative, want to help, give feedback, collaborate, and OMG this could be huge if I just get everything done right now.
Right.
So lots of hours poring over ideas, spreadsheets, schedules, and research proposals, and a head filled with things to do, people to talk to, concepts to consider.
And finally, there's Steve. Or more accurately, there's a project Steve and I have been working on. We started it last semester, and because I apparently had a brainwave of awesome proportions before the summer, I commissioned a few research assistants. While Steve and I played with the questionnaire design, concept mapping, and data analysis, they collected and entered all the data for hundreds of respondents. It was awesome. Then the semester ended, the research assistants graduated, and Steve send me much-dreaded email, "The results are not clear enough. We need more data."
Steve, you see, works for a research institution. A place where people teach two classes per semester, if that. A place where there's an army of graduate assistants dying to help you with your projects. But the data collection is taking place at my institution, where everyone teaches at least four classes, and graduate assistants are hard to come by.
So I cussed Steve out, told him to get creative, but it was to no avail. He was right. We needed more data. With my research assistants out in the real world, and no new candidates, you can guess who has spent the better part of last week visiting lectures, administering surveys and entering lots and lots of numbers. Exactly. Me. The deadline we're trying to make is in two weeks, so we have some time, but still, the pressure is on.
So there you have it, three reasons why I've been somewhat absent. I will be back, I promise. But right now, I need to go print out my latest and greatest project outcomes for a meeting I have in ten minutes, after which I need to haul butt to administer surveys to three back to back classes.
*Steve, for new readers, is a former colleague who decided to head for greener pastures and get his PhD at a Big Midwestern University. After three years of talking to each other through our paper thin office walls, we continue our conversation through gmail chat and Facebook, and continue to produce mind-boggling important research. Sort of.
In case you're expecting the standard "classes started and life got busy" spiel I give you guys twice a year, I can triumphantly tell you that that is not the case. Nope. Well, sure, having 70% of my advisees realize that, oh, hey, classes have started, and I'm not registered yet! didn't help, but it wasn't the crux of my absence. Nope. That can be blamed on the baby-drama, my new project, and Steve*.
First of all, everyone around me is pregnant. Honestly. If you're reading this, and you're not pregnant, you better be sure, because everyone else is. In fact, if you want to become pregnant, just make friends with me, and I guarantee you a pregnancy within six months to a year. Promise. Although after three-plus years after no-baby-gate, I'm really sort of OK with the no-baby thing most of the time, being surrounded by nothing but glowing, pregnant women has not been easy. So over Christmas break, when my period was on a three-month hiatus, and I was sick, sicker, and sickest, I couldn't help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, maybe-maybe-maybe, a miracle had occurred. Well, obviously (as otherwise I would have probably been so excited I would have called each and everyone of you in person), there was no miracle. And although one would think one would get used to this sort of disappointment, this particular time was rough. It didn't help that even though husband-dear and I had not said a word about this to each other at all, when I asked him to add tampons to the grocery list because my period had started, he started to cry. In spite of knowing better, he had been hoping for the miracle too.
So to say that put me in a bad mood would be an understatement. Add to that the fact that my entire reader seemed to be overflowing with pregnancy/baby tales, and the fact that I believe in writing what you know while not wanting to write about this again, and you might see why my brief blogging break turned into a somewhat lengthy hiatus.
Then there is the new project. I mentioned this before Christmas break, and people, it's awesome. I'm only teaching two classes, and have been able to spend the rest of my time working on this new health communication initiative, designing outcomes, trying to understand NIH requirements, and talking to as many experts and interested parties as possible. As your classic type-A, overachiever personality, you can see how I can make this really big, really quick, and I did. The thing has got so much momentum, there are times when I'm not sure where to begin. People love the initiative, want to help, give feedback, collaborate, and OMG this could be huge if I just get everything done right now.
Right.
So lots of hours poring over ideas, spreadsheets, schedules, and research proposals, and a head filled with things to do, people to talk to, concepts to consider.
And finally, there's Steve. Or more accurately, there's a project Steve and I have been working on. We started it last semester, and because I apparently had a brainwave of awesome proportions before the summer, I commissioned a few research assistants. While Steve and I played with the questionnaire design, concept mapping, and data analysis, they collected and entered all the data for hundreds of respondents. It was awesome. Then the semester ended, the research assistants graduated, and Steve send me much-dreaded email, "The results are not clear enough. We need more data."
Steve, you see, works for a research institution. A place where people teach two classes per semester, if that. A place where there's an army of graduate assistants dying to help you with your projects. But the data collection is taking place at my institution, where everyone teaches at least four classes, and graduate assistants are hard to come by.
So I cussed Steve out, told him to get creative, but it was to no avail. He was right. We needed more data. With my research assistants out in the real world, and no new candidates, you can guess who has spent the better part of last week visiting lectures, administering surveys and entering lots and lots of numbers. Exactly. Me. The deadline we're trying to make is in two weeks, so we have some time, but still, the pressure is on.
So there you have it, three reasons why I've been somewhat absent. I will be back, I promise. But right now, I need to go print out my latest and greatest project outcomes for a meeting I have in ten minutes, after which I need to haul butt to administer surveys to three back to back classes.
*Steve, for new readers, is a former colleague who decided to head for greener pastures and get his PhD at a Big Midwestern University. After three years of talking to each other through our paper thin office walls, we continue our conversation through gmail chat and Facebook, and continue to produce mind-boggling important research. Sort of.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
In Bruges...
"And I realized, f**, maybe that's what hell is, the entire rest of eternity spent in f*** Bruges. And I really really hoped I wouldn't die"
Ray ~ In Bruges
Although "In Bruges" is Belgium's answer to Quentin Tarantino and the Cohen Brothers combined, and definitely worth watching, assuming you're OK with 126 f-bombs dropped in a little over an hour and a half, a plot centered around three hitmen, a neo nazi, a dwarf, and a prostitute, and lots of useless violence, although the movie is awesome in spite of, or because of, all of that, I can firmly claim that Bruges is not hell. It is, in fact, the closest to the most perfectly historical, preserved, pretty, quaint, and quintessential European city there is. And I know this because when traveling to Holland for Christmas this year, husband-dear and I selected Bruges from a large selection of European cities (Paris, Brussels, Aachen. Venice, Trier, among others) as the destination of our four-day pre-Christmas getaway.
When planning this year's Christmas vacation, we knew from the start that we wanted to incorporate some DixieChick-Husband-dear alone time. We try to do this every year, and since the last time we had some husband-wife time that did not involve a marathon, a triathlon, or a mountainbike race, was in the spring of 2011, when we went on the cruise of a lifetime, we figured we were long overdue. We had several, fairly random criteria: It had to be cute and quaint (obviously. I mean, we live in a town made up of stripmalls, we need to be reminded that not the entire world is this ugly every once in a while); it had to not be in Germany (since husband-dear vowed he could not handle yet another German Christmas market after years of seeing nothing else in the month of December), and we had to be able to get there by train (husband-dear, who does not have the Dutch-student-life-public-transportation trauma I do, loves traveling by train).
After some fairly random internet searches ("I think Lara once told me Aachen is really cute. Let's look at Aachen..oh no, that looks way too German. No, we can't do that.") and equally random decision processes ("I'd like Paris, but you know we have been there before, and then if we were to go, I'd feel all this pressure to see all the right things and eat at all the right places. I mean, what if there's this awesome bistro everyone knows about, and we miss it? That would be horrible"), we decided on Bruges. Neither one of us had ever been there before, and our knowledge about the town was restricted to what I was able to recall from reading a single children's book about the middle ages, whose first chapter takes place in Bruges (yes, Dutch readers, that would be this book). After glancing at a few pictures of a beautiful town square decorated for Christmas with hundreds of lights and a real ice skating rink in the middle, our decision was made. We were going to Bruges.
For the next few weeks, TripAdvisor became my best friend, and after weighing the pros and cons of various hotels ("this one looks pretty from the outside, but the rooms look horrible", and "I am not staying in anything that's a chain. I don't care of it's a Belgian chain. I refuse to do anything chain-ish outside of here"), as well as the sanity of some of the reviewers ("Well, they claim the rooms are not up to par, but they also claim that the front desk clerk was 'merely formal' and 'seemed automated', so I'm not too sure about them"), we decided to spend all the kids' college money (OK I lie, all of Jimmie's college money) on a fairly nice hotel a few minutes away from the main square. Once that was done, we booked traintickets on the much-disparaged Fyra, and started to count down the days.
And Bruges delivered. Our four days there were absolutely magical. We had absolutely wonderful meals, sampled lots and lots of wine, spent days meandering through the gorgeous "egg" (the medieval town center), randomly stopping at the various churches liberally sprinkled throughout the town, climbed the belfry, went to a brewery, climbed one of the old city gates, got lost and used the many church spires to find our way back, saw Michaelangelo's sculpture of Mary and baby Jesus, walked all the way around the old city walls, ate far too much chocolate, drank more really good cappuccinos than I can count, and took lots of baths in the hot tub in our room. If you are ever in the position that you can only go to one city in Europe, I say forget Paris and go to Bruges. It has it all, but more, and all within walking distance.
For your benefit, I have enclosed some of my hundred or so pictures below.
Ray ~ In Bruges
Although "In Bruges" is Belgium's answer to Quentin Tarantino and the Cohen Brothers combined, and definitely worth watching, assuming you're OK with 126 f-bombs dropped in a little over an hour and a half, a plot centered around three hitmen, a neo nazi, a dwarf, and a prostitute, and lots of useless violence, although the movie is awesome in spite of, or because of, all of that, I can firmly claim that Bruges is not hell. It is, in fact, the closest to the most perfectly historical, preserved, pretty, quaint, and quintessential European city there is. And I know this because when traveling to Holland for Christmas this year, husband-dear and I selected Bruges from a large selection of European cities (Paris, Brussels, Aachen. Venice, Trier, among others) as the destination of our four-day pre-Christmas getaway.
When planning this year's Christmas vacation, we knew from the start that we wanted to incorporate some DixieChick-Husband-dear alone time. We try to do this every year, and since the last time we had some husband-wife time that did not involve a marathon, a triathlon, or a mountainbike race, was in the spring of 2011, when we went on the cruise of a lifetime, we figured we were long overdue. We had several, fairly random criteria: It had to be cute and quaint (obviously. I mean, we live in a town made up of stripmalls, we need to be reminded that not the entire world is this ugly every once in a while); it had to not be in Germany (since husband-dear vowed he could not handle yet another German Christmas market after years of seeing nothing else in the month of December), and we had to be able to get there by train (husband-dear, who does not have the Dutch-student-life-public-transportation trauma I do, loves traveling by train).
After some fairly random internet searches ("I think Lara once told me Aachen is really cute. Let's look at Aachen..oh no, that looks way too German. No, we can't do that.") and equally random decision processes ("I'd like Paris, but you know we have been there before, and then if we were to go, I'd feel all this pressure to see all the right things and eat at all the right places. I mean, what if there's this awesome bistro everyone knows about, and we miss it? That would be horrible"), we decided on Bruges. Neither one of us had ever been there before, and our knowledge about the town was restricted to what I was able to recall from reading a single children's book about the middle ages, whose first chapter takes place in Bruges (yes, Dutch readers, that would be this book). After glancing at a few pictures of a beautiful town square decorated for Christmas with hundreds of lights and a real ice skating rink in the middle, our decision was made. We were going to Bruges.
For the next few weeks, TripAdvisor became my best friend, and after weighing the pros and cons of various hotels ("this one looks pretty from the outside, but the rooms look horrible", and "I am not staying in anything that's a chain. I don't care of it's a Belgian chain. I refuse to do anything chain-ish outside of here"), as well as the sanity of some of the reviewers ("Well, they claim the rooms are not up to par, but they also claim that the front desk clerk was 'merely formal' and 'seemed automated', so I'm not too sure about them"), we decided to spend all the kids' college money (OK I lie, all of Jimmie's college money) on a fairly nice hotel a few minutes away from the main square. Once that was done, we booked traintickets on the much-disparaged Fyra, and started to count down the days.
And Bruges delivered. Our four days there were absolutely magical. We had absolutely wonderful meals, sampled lots and lots of wine, spent days meandering through the gorgeous "egg" (the medieval town center), randomly stopping at the various churches liberally sprinkled throughout the town, climbed the belfry, went to a brewery, climbed one of the old city gates, got lost and used the many church spires to find our way back, saw Michaelangelo's sculpture of Mary and baby Jesus, walked all the way around the old city walls, ate far too much chocolate, drank more really good cappuccinos than I can count, and took lots of baths in the hot tub in our room. If you are ever in the position that you can only go to one city in Europe, I say forget Paris and go to Bruges. It has it all, but more, and all within walking distance.
For your benefit, I have enclosed some of my hundred or so pictures below.
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