Giving thanks

What a weekend: 0kt0berfest on Friday, excursion with houseguests Saturday, cooking and consuming Thanksgiving dinner with my sister and her family on Sunday, Thanksgiving parade with them on Monday morning. Monday evening? Overnight flight to Denmark.

I'm in Denmark now, having joked that I had to go to Europe to get a good night's sleep--last week was a helluva week, you see--and I miss them terribly. How can it be that I'm so glad to be here--enjoying who I am when I am a traveller, something I've had a chance to experience quite a bit this year--and aching for home?

What I am thankful for, this year, then, are my commitments and my freedoms: my family, this family that Pynchon and I have built together, which we continue to build every day is the stabilizing force in my life; my work, with its selfish insistence that I follow my own intellectual interests and its requirements that I travel far and wide to learn and to teach, is my freedom.

It's balance, where I am usually complaining of being off-kilter.

Here's a little of our Thanksgiving, a little bit of a life that is, both bracingly and sadly, a whole continent away from me:



Here's Munchkin, playing in some leaves we raked up together: I couldn't find a kid-sized rake, so I got her a shrubbery rake, which has green tines and wooden handle, just like my rake. She loves it. What she loves more? Jumping in the pile and demanding to know where her feet have gone to. Grabbing piles of leaves by the armful and moving the whole shebang 7 feet north. Lying flat on her back and flayling like mad, yelling HOORAY!


Munchkin and my sister: we are all laughing because Munchkin has just soundly sneezed into the bowl. Twice. We didn't tell anyone, but we baked the hell out of that broccoli casserole, I tell you!


If your toddler wants to help prepare Thanksgiving dinner, get her (or him!) to shred bread for stuffing. Toddlers love destroying stuff, and they are in fact very good at it. Toddlers can be very methodical, and Munchkin at least loves 'cooking'. She only ate about half a (very stale) piece, and dutifully and cheerfully shredded the rest. No sneezing!


The cousins at the parade: I love that they look like siblings. It makes the age difference (13, 7, 2) seem less jarring, somehow. They adore each other and it just fills my heart. It does.

Well, if you've made it this far, thanks for indulging my long-distance sappiness.

You know, I was just looking at my recent posts before I started this and I noticed something odd. There are several posts right up there on the front page where my baby doesn't appear at all. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I'll give it a think.

Campus notes

Campus is really at its best this time of year. For the most part, the weather is crisp, bright, and cheerful. The leaves are Crayola-bright and swirl overhead and underfoot in a pleasing way. The crowds of the first couple of weeks have thinned, which is convenient for my rushed walks between the far-flung buildings in which I teach back-to-back classes--but I probably shouldn't be cheering what is essentially the onset of of widespread absenteeism. My own students are still showing up, although more frequently in their 'studying clothes' than in their colourful, new back-to-school outfits of the first weeks. Everything settles into its routine: I learn names, review notes, grade assignments, and reconsider ideas I'd begun to take for granted as I learn something new absolutely every day.

Campus is at its best this time of year.

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I'm such a dork. Today, taking a shortcut through an empty classroom to shave 10 seconds off my commute to the ladies room--it's almost as if I'm a medical doctor, rushing to the ER, so precious are my counted footsteps!--I walked into a door frame. You see, as I breezed through, something on the board from the morning class caught my eye, and I got a little more engrossed in reading than in, ahem, looking where I was going.

Bang.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you know you're in the right career ...

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I gave blood today. I was in the student centre anyway, dropping off my precious, precious MacBook Pro to have its topcase replaced (this is what you need to do when, out of the blue, the keyboard and mouse just don't work anymore). I was absolutely adrift: what the hell to do? I thought I might grade my undergrads' midterms, which are obviously on paper. But the answer key? On the laptop. Edit my recently-accepted article on You've Got Mail? On the laptop. Do the readings for my grad class? On the Internet, linked to from ... my laptop.

So I figured I'd kill the service time giving blood. I mean, I'd already pretty much had a limb amputated when I handed over my Mac. What's another 500ml of blood? Yeesh.

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I gave blood today, surrounded by bored nurses and nervous university students. I've done this a ton of times, except for a five year period where the timing of various piercings and a tattoo rendered me serially ineligible. I used to give blood a lot at York, where I did my undergrad. The clinic was always set up in the Bear Pit in Central Square. To be honest, I was easily induced at that time to participate in any activity that would result in me being fed. Once, as I lay there trying not to look at my arm (leads to fainting, every time), the nurse leaned over me and remarked:

"You look just like Uma Thurman! In that movie!"

She meant Pulp Fiction. You remember--naturally blonde Uma with a short, stark black bob, dark red lips and a white shirt? Check, check, check, and check. You remember of course that she was drug addled and nearly died in the film. So I answered, joking:

"Awww, you're just saying that because I've got a big needle sticking out of me."

She didn't laugh.

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Campus is at its best this time of year. Students begin to buckle down into the real intellectual work of it, as midterms loom, arrive, and then pass. The tone is a little more serious, but not desperate like before finals, not exhausted and snowy and dark like the new semester in January will be.

I'm writing this post in the Student Centre--my laptop has that 'new computer' smell again, and my arm is stained nicotine-yellow from the iodine swab. Students around me are variously discussing 'hot chicks', travel home for Thanksgiving, and what happened in class.

It's all pretty good.

Your moment of baby zen

Because there's nothing better for morale than babies dancing to 1980s vaguely obscene popular 'rap': what you can't hear in the background is Salt 'n' Pepa's seminal hit, "Push it". Please try to catch Munchkin's attempts at the lyrics.

This is her favorite song, and we're doing an after-dinner dance by request. I hope you enjoy this as much as I do.

Do you ever really grow up?

My parents came. Another lightning visit, but one that had promised to be a little longer than it actually turned out to be. Friday 3:30pm to Sunday 8:00am.

The highlights? My parents actually seem to like the 'new' house (and that's right, I've been here since May and this is their first visit, and they're an afternoon's drive away). Mom is particularly impressed that it's so old and has brick and oak and squeaky floors and such. My parents adore Pynchon. Mom came to daycare to surprise Munchking, and the looks on both their faces were priceless. Mom and Dad read the special nursery rhyme book to Munchkin; she, in turn, helped them to 'unpack' all their belongings in the guest room. My sister came and we got a sitter: Pynchon and I and Mom and Dad and my sister went out for dinner and drank too much wine; my sister and I went out to Starbucks after. The babysitter put Munchkin to bed.

The low points? My parents arrived with all their own food--they don't seem to trust me to be provisioned. They were rarely here and seemed to get out of the house as fast as possible when Munchkin was awake, and to mysteriously reappear to read the newspaper at naptime. They cut a whole day from their visit to take off with my sister back to her house, her kids. The guest bed needs my dad, apparently, to fix it. There is too much dog poop lurking on local sidewalks to ensnare my dad.

I'm keeping score: hours of a visit, compliments paid versus critiques made, time spent with the granddaughter, time spent with me. Time shopping rather than being with family. I'm snappish about it: I want so badly to see them, and yet, when they're here, I'm annoyed. It feels like nothing so much as being a teenager again. Come closer, go away.

I reread what I'm writing and think: it's not so bad? They came, right? I guess I have this idea in my head of parents too eager for more of me, of their granddaughter. Overinvested and overinvolved. I want to roll my eyes and mutter, "oh, my parents are coming AGAIN, I don't think Munchkin can handle all the attention and I'm perpetually busy drinking tea with my mom and looking at landscaping with my dad." But I guess not everyone gets those parents (I know that many of you have lost your parents entirely, and that's a sobering thought). I guess what gets me, actually, is that my sister has those parents. No, wait. That's not it. It's that her kids have those grandparents.

Ah, you see. It's multigenerational sibling rivalry.

I'm so mature.

Stripe towards me? Or stripe towards you?

Once more I stand at the checkout counter, indecisive. My bank card poised, aloft. The little black box on the countertop presents its inscrutable icon, my insurmountable interpretive obstacle: stripe facing in? or stripe facing out? I don't know. The little dimensionalized drawing of a bank card meant to guide me is completely incomprehensible. If I understand it correctly--and obviously I don't--it seems to me that the stripe should face up into the air, not making contact with the reading mechanism at all.

My card-bearing hand hovers somewhere near shoulder height and I stare hard at the little machine. I think. I reason. I tilt my head. I swipe.

I swipe, incorrectly as it turns out. Damn it! Wrong again! How many times is this damn box going to outwit me, I wonder?

Quickly, I flip the card around and swipe again: my aim is to do it so fast that no one notices I did it wrong the first time.

In a flash it hits me: it would actually be faster and less stressful--more efficient by any means of reckoning--if I just swiped randomly, every time. Faster because a mindless swipe has a fifty percent chance of being the correct orientation. Faster because a second reswipe would still happen more quickly than my first, overly deliberate, mentally laborious swipe of current brain-busting practice.

Sometimes it's easier just to make an attempt, fail, and then correct it. Sometimes it's more effective, even better, than trying to puzzle out a first move so that it will be my only move, and then disappointing myself by being wrong. If you expect to have a chance to be wrong, you're pleasantly surprised to be right; if you take all the buildup out of a decision, you don't get so invested in it.

So now, at the checkout, when I take my bank card out of my wallet, I ensure that the magnetic stripe is poised to contact some part of the card reading machine and I blindly, confidently, swipe at random. Sometimes it works--at least just as often as it did when I stared at the machine and tried to figure it out--only now I don't have to think about it at all. I just do.

There's got to be a life lesson in there somewhere, don't you think?