Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: life and living

Not so much the daily grind, as the things that fall outside the scope of academics.

expectations

Academics, life and living

I’m very tired. All humour aside, I only got about two hours of sleep last night, and right now it doesn’t look like I’m going to get any tonight. I’m trying to push through the tired, but one of the problems of this deep tired is that my brain gets stuck. Right now I’m stuck on the idea of expectations, and specifically how badly I react when people say something like “I’ve heard so many good things about you!” or “so’n’so’s really been talking about you a lot, you’re apparently awesome” and so forth.

Believe me, if you ever want to see me react badly, that’s a good way to go. I just… I get very flustered, but also uncomfortable and awkward. And my brain apparently decided to stick here, tonight.

I think, however, there’s a very reasonable rationale behind the discomfort. The more people praise you to others, the more chance you have to fall flat on your face, fail, be a disappointment. I think I’m simply afraid that people are going to talk me up so much, there’s no way I’ll be able to live up to the expectations.

I don’t like failing. I had a marriage dissolve because of mismatched expectations, and I don’t want the same thing to happen professionally.

Radio Silence

...and everything else, Academics, Bioethics, Duct Tape and Prayers, life and living

Although I have been posting here nearly once a day, if you actually look at the content of the posts, I haven’t said anything of personal substance for a week, and a week is a long time when cancer is an unwelcome guest at your table. So why the radio silence?

I suppose I’ve just felt a bit mute since returning to Albany. It’s not just this blog, or the other blogs I write for (where I’ve also been silent); I’ve ceased responding to most email, creating a large backlog, I’ve largely stopped writing for fun or classes, and have even been quite a bit quieter on the various instant messaging services. I’m just at a bit of a loss for what to say.

Writing, a certain kind of writing anyhow (the narrative kind?), requires, for me, a connection to how I’m feeling. Not a knowing of how I’m feeling, but an actual experiencing of that feeling. And for better or worse (alright, definitely worse), I’ve been kind of numb lately. I know what’s going on, but I just don’t have a way to access it, to feel it. It’s like all those emotions are inside a snowglobe, and I can turn it upside down and shake it and watch the glitter swirl, but I can’t get inside it.

My heart as a snowglobe – it’s an evocative image, one that I should feel something towards, and I simply don’t. I just don’t feel.

I know some of it is simply exhaustion. I hit the ground running when I returned from Albany, rather literally; I ran into a colleague at the airport, picking up a job candidate who was on the same flight from O’Hare. We all ended up talking for over an hour, while we waited for confirmation that our bags were off traveling without us. The next day, interviews, Tuesday – I literally slept all day, jet lag traveling a bit slow. Then class, more interviews, working on an indexing project, more interviews (we’re hiring three new faculty, which means an insane interview schedule for the next couple of weeks). I’m not getting a lot of sleep, and not having much real downtime that isn’t me trying to sleep, or falling asleep at inopportune times.

On top of that, I guess it’s been the month for commentary on the blog. I’ve probably received more feedback in these first few days of 2007 than I have in the last few years. And of course it’s been all over the place. Some friends love that they can follow all aspects of my life here, from school to personal to family and so on. Colleagues have written in to tell me they enjoy reading about themselves, or seeing how I’m doing, or just the breadth and depth of what I opt to write about (thank you, and I will write back). Some friends have stopped talking to me over the content – guess not so much with the friends. And then there are the people who question what I write about, if I’m too open, or writing about things best left private, or if I’m using the blog as a form of therapy, and all the suggestions of how I could improve it if I just changed this one thing (that thing varying, of course, from person to person), and then the folks who’re astonished anyone would suggest I change a thing.

So instead of being paralyzed by the knowledge of People Who Matter reading (even if just occasionally), I now seem to have some sort of paralysis-based-on-rampant-public-opinion. Not that I’m going to change how I do things – I don’t want to be like other blogs, or change a thing; I write what and how I want to write. But of course, now I’m aware of the various lenses people are viewing this through, and what their critique is, and I have their voices in the back of my head when I sit down to write anything. (Frankly, I’d rather put you all in a room and have you duke it out, rather than have you doing it in my head. Unfortunately, I sort of suspect that putting everyone into some sort of American Gladiator deathmatch would be bloody, and deprive the world of some academics that it probably needs.)

And I guess the last bit of it is just – what am I supposed to say? I feel horribly guilty that I’m enjoying my time back in Albany, that I am having fun spending so much time with like-minded people, and I’m enjoying seeing people realize that I actually am smart and I know my subject area much, much better than most people here have given me credit for. I should be in Oregon, not here, not enjoying myself, not having fun, not being cut off from the day to day life and process with Mom. I should have been there Thursday to swallow my fear of needles and learn how to give her shots that will boost her production of white blood cells, instead of sitting in a classroom taking on 20 people who don’t think we have any single, agreed upon comprehensive moral doctrine, tilting at windmills just to tilt at them. I shouldn’t have had to have my father call me with the results of the CT scan, or describe the found tumor over the phone, or hear about the restaging in 6 weeks, and my parents not wanting to know what stage she’s at. I should have been there, asking my own questions to the oncologist, bringing my own concerns and fears and support to the table. I should have been there to argue when the nurses kicked my family out of the room Mom was receiving chemo, limiting them to 15 minute visits once an hour.

I should have been there, and I’m not, and I can’t be, and I don’t know how many times or ways to say it.

And so I retreat. I retreat and I stop talking, because the last thing I want to do when people are already commenting left and right on the style and tone and quality of this blog is to be monotonous and repetitive. Silence on my part is a good way to insure silence on the part of others.

Food

...and everything else, life and living

A couple of years back, while I was attending an undergrad conference at Penn, Art Caplan stated to a group of students (for reasons I totally don’t remember) “I like all kinds of food ”” immobile, slow, accelerating and fast”, and it cracked me up, and stayed with me. It’s one of those quotable quotes he’s known for, and I’ve done more than my fair share of quoting it. But, it’s true – I like all kinds of food, too, and I especially like reading about food. Just as an example, I’m currently at my parents house, 3000 miles from my home, and yet within arms reach I have three books on food (Mark Kurlansky, known for the brilliant Salt, collected a bunch of food writing from, oh, the second century BC to now, into a volume known as Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World, a book on the history of vanilla, and the reason I’m writing this, The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation). It’s a rare week my desk doesn’t see a book on some type of food, be it Steingarten collecting his latest batch of Vogue writings into a book, or analyzing a recipe and accompanying facts in an Alton Brown cookbook (both of which are also here, although not within arms reach – they’re in the kitchen, covered in flour from a failed scone attempt).

Over the summer I read Michael Pollan’s amazing Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I keep saying that I’ll write about some time and never get around to. But basically, Pollan follows four “types” of meal from farm to table, and the sometimes circuitous route the food takes to get there. A hunter/gatherer meal, fast food, organic, and so forth – and he explains a lot about the history of how Americans eat in the process. He also, and perhaps more significantly for at least me, put the fear of God, or at least famine, in me. I had no idea, before reading this book, just how heavily our food supply relies on corn, and just what it would do to us to lose it. I also had never really stopped to look at just how much high fructose corn syrup is in just about everything we eat. More than anything I’ve read in the last couple of years, (or seen, if we want to include Morgan Spurlock’s great documentary, Supersize Me), this book impacted how I eat.

David Kamp’s The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation is almost the flip side of Pollan’s book. Instead of looking at how our food is grown, manufactured, and made into tablefare, Kamp looks at just how we moved from pressed jello molds to baby green and chevre salad. And for those of you who, for reasons that I cannot begin to fathom, want to ditch nouvelle anything and go back to the days of canned salads and potted meat, you now have a pre-Julia Child scapegoat: the French themselves, and their export of Escoffier and the impact this had on the American culinary institution.

Kamp’s book is a rollicking and entertaining romp through American, specifically New York and LA, food history, starting with the seemingly omnipresent media chefs like Lagasse, Flay, Batali and others in the Food Network stable (as well as those who just occasionally stop by for a visit, like Bayless), and then backs up to the world wars, the French exodus, American GI’s in Paris, and the cannot-talk-about-American-chefs-without-mentioning James Beard. He weaves the story well, rarely dipping into sensationalism or lingering too long over tabloid-style gossip, but instead looking at how the influence, passion, drive and growing star-power of the folks behind some of the biggest restaurants changed our individual eating habits – and hopefully, you’ll agree, for the better.

The United States of Arugula is similar to Pollan’s book, in that it gets you thinking about what we eat and why we eat it – why French cooking is so revered, how revolutionary the idea of sun-dried tomatoes were, why we have Williams-Sonoma and just how radical radicchio is. The way of life Kamp takes on is one Pollan skipped – the one of the celebrity chef, with their audience of fans flocking to the nearest Dean and Deluca the day after their favourite chef used this great new gadget, be it a new way to measure or a certain twine to tie pork, and who demand the exact product being shown. It’s not full of any shocking revelations, not the way Pollan’s might be, or Old MacDonald’s Factory Farm is, but it is certainly full of quiet realizations of the power a small group of determined people can have, and the impact they can have on us all.

Out with the Old,…

...and everything else, Academics, Bioethics, Duct Tape and Prayers, life and living

It’s 2007. My instinctive response is “good fucking riddance to 2006, and here’s hoping the next one is better” (but I know better than to taunt the universe by making it any sort of challenge). But Discardian had an interesting tip up a day or two ago that suggested we – and I assume she meant social we, and not just you and me we – have a bit of a binary, black/white, good/bad way of looking at life. We see the highs and lows, and not miss the rest.

Now while I have often told friends that the nice things about the lows is that you can’t see the highs without them, I am often guilty of overlooking that in the middle – the not extraordinary, the not horrible, but that which moves us forward in life. Or holds us back, if we let it.

2006 is always going to be a hard year to look at, even when memory takes the edge off the sharpness of Mom’s cancer, or the loneliness and difficulties my first semester of graduate school brought. And it will round the edges off those highs, too – my letters of acceptance, teaching my first class on my own, reading my first feedback reports that were just about me, writing something as big as my thesis (and finishing on time!), graduating, the fun things I’ve done in NYC and people I’ve met and so on.

But 2006, I think, will also be remembered as a year where I made a lot of forward movement in my life. I see a lot more clearly where I want to be, down the road, and the things I’ll need to do in order to get there, and I’m on my way doing most of them. Yes, life keeps throwing challenges in my path… but Phillip told me something, once – it must have been three years ago? My husband had left me, my best friend had died a horrible death, and I simply could not get my act together. I couldn’t juggle all the balls I had in the air, and I let them all drop. I was sitting in his office, telling him that just as soon as life calmed down I’d have it all together, I’d be better. And with his typical bemused expression, he glanced over the haphazard stacks of books between us and told me that life just keeps coming, it never calms down and never gets better. It’s always one thing after another, and we all juggle; what matters is how we do it.

I learned to juggle, and I did pretty well. But now it’s a new game; the ante has been upped, and the stakes are higher. My sneaking suspicion, though, is that I’ll learn the rules to this game soon enough, and then I’ll shine as brightly as a I did before.

2006 was a bitch of a year, dragging me all over the map, not just emotionally but literally. But if I was pressed to admit it, I would admit that I’ve probably grown more this last year than the past few combined – and that’s saying a lot. I might not look fondly back on the year, but I suspect I will eventually be very grateful for the contributions it has made to who I am.

And so I raise a glass to 2006, and to all of you. May 2007 be everything you wish for, and more.

it’s easier to sing the blues

...and everything else, Duct Tape and Prayers, life and living

Information wants to be free.

This was the refrain I taught with for a couple of years, whenever I was sidekicking Phillip in one of his technology classes. It’s a pretty common maxim, and it’s one I actually do believe, especially when it comes to the internet. Put it online, and whatever “it” is no longer belongs to you – it goes wild, and anyone can come across it.

Like your boss. Coworkers. Sister.

I would say woops, except it’s the deal I accepted with myself when I opted to keep a public blog, and when I opted to open it up to spiders and search engines, thanks to Sean being sneaky and finding me prior to that.

The thing is, and to my sister’s credit she understood this prior to talking with me this morning, blogs are often out of context. If you read my last post, and have never talked with me about my sister, you’d have a much different impression than if you’re one of the many people I’ve bragged to about her. And the thing is, she’s pretty cool, and part of the issues that come from being here are because of that – because she did do all the things my parents want, but more than that, because she’s a pretty amazing, and strong, woman. How many people do you know who voluntarily spent their spare time, as a teenager hanging out with young kids afflicted with horrible forms of cancer? Most folks acknowledge that it takes a special person to opt to deal with children in medicine, and the special of the special to do pediatric oncology.

And plain and simple, I envy her. I envy the fact that she lived here eight years I didn’t, and she has habits and routines with my parents that I never will. That she has a closeness with Mom, because of the way she looks and her choices on how to act, that I never will. That she’s seen as the amazing medical person in the family, and when she gets in to medical school there’s going to be an excitement that they didn’t have for me getting in to my PhD program.

There’s a lot of backstory to my relationship with my parents, that I’m not going to get in to right now. But being home, that backstory comes to the front, and it clashes horribly with my sister, not necessarily for anything she intentionally does, but simply because we’ve had different lives, and there are a lot of things in hers that I wish I could have, and I simply can’t.

But just because I want to throttle her half the time, and she can get under my skin like no other, doesn’t mean I don’t love her to pieces, and that I’m not immensely proud of the woman she’s become. In her 25 years, she has put more good out into this world, than most do in their lifetime. And that’s pretty damn cool.

That’s the limit of these things, though, these words in blogs. You get what I think to put down, be it the heat of the moment, the height of frustration, or the flush of a passionate response. And it goes for more than just my sister – reading over the last couple of months of this blog, you’re going to pick up a lot more of my frustration with, say, Glenn and his insane scheduling, than the intense admiration, respect and affection I have for him. You might not necessarily grasp just how much I actually love UAlbany and the people there, both professors and colleagues, or how exciting I find my life in general, or the potential I see in my future. For some reason, it’s simply harder to write about the things that are good. Some of it is self-consciousness; it’s easier to be vague and circumspect when you’re bitching than praising, and some of it, I think, is basic human nature. Besides, it’s far easier for me to write evocatively about the non-positive…which perhaps should be a challenge, instead of something to shy from.