Swans 2
Remember “The Ugly Duckling” story? Do people still read that story to their children? I loved that book as a kid, the idea that the poor ugly duck who everyone teased would turn out to be a swan, the most beatiful of them all. It spoke to the ways I felt awkward as a kid, like I didn’t fit in. Watching this swan last weekend, I was remembering the story. Look forward to reading it to my own kids, seeing what it means to me now, 25 years later.
A Different Angle 2
Taking the camera with me a lot lately, finding that looking through the lens, framing light and color, is a break from the ups and downs. (Here, from the back of a convertible on the Bay Bridge–which I’ve crossed innumerable times, and never taken pictures of.) Writing and walking a lot too, finding pause and rest from mood swings in putting words to page, walking up and down hills.
Listening to new music, The Boxer Rebellion, loving how their beats and voice resonate with my moods.
Thinking about a series where I post pieces of writing I’ve been working on here, once a week. I like the free flow of blogging, that captures where we are, today, in photos and words; but I also love reading blogs where people post more crafted writing, less often, and have imagined doing that here. I think of it as a way of developing and sharing something from the pages and pages of writing I do every day and never show anyone.
A Dose of Fall Color 2
Went two states north for fall color this year, a last-minute trip to Seattle to spend time with an old friend. Someday I hope to live where there is more of this; San Francisco definitely leaves something to be desired in the fall color department….
Tackling “Perpetual Uncertainty” 1
“One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.” (Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, p.xii).
This is true of research too, when the research is about life and meaning and our social world, as mine is. It’s the wonderful thing about my work, what makes me come back and keep working on my dissertation and imagining that I can dedicate myself to this work. While I was doing fieldwork last year in Barcelona, there were days where the writing and ideas and deeper meaning of what I was seeing were all coming together and flowing like swollen rivers in spring.
Yet it’s also true that writing in academia can be as uncertainty-provoking as any other kind of writing. You obsess and try to start and worry over whether your ideas are worth anything. You write ten different versions of the same first paragraph. You try and fail to institute a morning writing routine, and then you try again. You do other kinds of writing, hoping it will spark new ideas and ways to connect the academic work to questions and struggles people have in their real lives.
I’m in the midst of fall fellowship applications for my dissertation year, trying to get started on yet another iteration of a personal statement, selling who I am and what I do for far-away committees of people to evaluate. Maybe because of all the uncertainty of this process, this poem Anne Lamott quotes in Bird by Bird also resonated with me and made me laugh at the obsessions of the writing process (just substitute advisers for friends and approval for affection!):
We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is in on it
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.
(by Phillip Lopate,
Quoted in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, pp.11-12.)
Grateful 1
I’m stressed out about writing dissertation fellowship applications, frustrated about whether another month will go by with no baby hopes, and worried about the holidays with my family. And yet, I am feeling incredibly grateful for the family of two I have with this guy. I feel like I got struck by a bolt of luck when he came into my life. He has this uncanny ability to pick up on things when I’m having a rough day (week, month). He makes me laugh all the time. He pushes me to go to yoga when I’m stressed (like last night). He gets tickets to concerts and brings me coffee before I run out.
I’m so grateful to be married to him!
Curls and Drops 1
On Tuesday, dinner with friends who live nearby for the first time since high school. Before dinner, I played outside with their daughter in their new backyard. We buried our bare feet in the sand and caused earthquakes, slowly shaking our toes to the surface. We poked and tickled beneath the sand, wiggling toes and watching the dog chase a squirrel. Then we hunted for baby lemons under the lemon tree, and washed them in a dripping faucet, again and again, filling the small terra cotta pot, feeling the water dribble away, and filling it again. When the sun went down and the night air came in, J came out and changed j’s wet flowered dress, and we went inside for dinner.
Fall Clouds 1
This week, sunny afternoons, moments out on the patio, feeling the sun warm my legs, listening to birds twitter in the redwoods. Seeing the first clouds in months, high in the sky. Thinking how until you live in a place where there’s fog, and you watch it burn off (or not) day after day, you don’t know the difference between fog and clouds.
Today, a lazy morning outside before driving south to see friends (me) and play soccer (JJ). Hearing sea gulls in the distance, the grinding gears of a bus in the valley headed up the hill, the clank of tools in the construction next door. Smelling fresh air, and relishing in the feeling of bare feet and sun on my hair, outside my own house on a Saturday morning.
Bridge, Bay, City 0
*Joint credit to JJ for these favorite shots from a while back; when we go out together we sometimes lose track of who took what picture.*
Balancing anxieties 1
Talking with my husband’s 90 year-old grandmother in Spain the other day, I was asked, again, “¿bueno, algunas noticias?” (“so, any news?”). She then began worrying at me, saying “and at your age you shouldn’t be wasting time”, and “you should look and see if somethings wrong, if one of you “no vale” (literally, “doesn’t work”). All I wanted to say was “mind your own business”, but at the same time, I want people to feel like they can ask how things are going, because it’s a big part of our life right now. This is a hard balance to strike, because I’m both wanting to share how it’s going, and not wanting other peoples’ anxieties to make my own even more pronounced.
Every other week or so my mom tells me about some naturopathic doctor she ran into at a farm market while selling her dolls, or an old midwife friend she saw who had some advice for getting pregnant. (The latest, told with a good laugh, was to eat goat balls. Yes, goat balls. According to this 40-year veteran midwife, it works every time.). It makes me realize my mom is bringing me up a lot, and it also makes me think how when you know someone who’s trying to start a family, they’re the first people you think of every time you see something related to fertility.
It kind of makes me wish we hadn’t said anything to anyone. But too late for that. On Halloween, grandma’s 91st birthday, it will be a year since we started, a year since we whispered in her ear on her 90th birthday that we were trying for that great-grandaughter she’d been asking us for. And in some ways that’s a long time, and I get anxious about it. And in other ways, given that this last year was very stressful and unsettled for us, it’s really not that long at all. So for now I’m trying to be relaxed about it, tell people how I’m doing when they ask, but avoid letting them get inside my head with their own worries.
Not an easy balance to strike, but it feels good to try. And I’m glad to be talking about it with people–it seems somehow better to be open about it than secretive, the way people used to be.
Windy Self Portrait Series 1
After three days of still heat, a once-or-twice-a-year heat spell in SF, the wind rushes over the hills this evening, tearing into treetops and bringing cool ocean air to my nostrils. I sit outside reading a colleague’s paper for class, trying to concentrate on organizational theory and school district reform. Instead, the wind whips my hair and I am inspired to take pictures. It’s strange how self conscious I feel doing self portraits.Do I really look like that when I’m alone? But like blogging, I find creativity in it, possibility in seeing these angles of myself, unfiltered, risky.
Earlier, I did the last of the laundry from the weekend, turning socks inside out and looking wistfully at the Grand Canyon dirt still crushed in their threads, already missing the trails, the sudden views of the canyon, the happiness I feel in nature. I hope they stain, that spots of red dirt remain ground in their fibers, a reminder to go outside, hike more often.
Now the sun has fallen behind the peaks and the night air sets in. I come inside, cold now, my skin tingling and alive from the wind and cool fall air.