Family Activities I am Looking Forward To...

...when the kids get old enough.

1) Friday movie nights. How fun would it be to all watch a movie together as a family? Maybe even while eating dinner? That'd be such a great thing to do a couple times a month. So far I don't think there are many movies that are suitable for the kids (they're kind of media unsophisticated compared to their peers), but I think in a couple of years there will be plenty of movies we can watch.

2) Roller coasters. I can't wait until the kids are big enough to go on roller coasters. I love roller coasters!

3) Getting into the good books. It'll be so great when they're old enough to read the Narnia series, and The Secret Garden, A Wrinkle in Time, Winnie the Pooh, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Little Prince, etc. We're already getting into some good books that I enjoyed as a kid, like Babar and Paddington. It's so much more fun to read those books than to read Knuffle Bunny over and over again.

4) Family cooking nights. Well, we do actually do this one already, where Jake will make pizza dough and then each kid builds his or her own pizza. I'm looking forward to weekly family cooking where each person contributes to the meal.

5) Family hikes. How great will it be to go on weekend hikes together? I bet this summer the kids will be ready for some of the shorter ones. Also, family camping. Can't wait to do family camping!

Lessons Learned

Lesson #1: When 3 male senior citizens are in charge of lunch during the faculty meeting, make sure to bring my own lunch. Because when "lunch" consists of a cold cuts tray and an 8-inch vegetable tray shared across 35 people, eating 3 broccoli florets and 5 carrots isn't going to cut it.

Lesson #2: Nobody is going to listen to me. This includes people who are generally nice to me (like Mentor) as well as people who barely know me. Nobody is going to give a shit about my opinion so by far the path of least resistance is to disengage, disengage, disengage. Don't bother speaking in faculty meetings (mission accomplished) and more importantly, don't waste my own time participating in faculty searches. Because it is truly a waste of time, even when I happen to know more about the candidate's research area than any other single individual in the entire department. They still won't listen to me.

(Maybe when I'm 50? Or full? Or 50 and full? I'm not sure how old enough or senior enough I would have to be for people to start actually listening to me. Fuck this bullshit department.)

Lesson #3: Do I care about fitting in? I need to make a choice. I can either not care, and settle in to my life here sort of disengaged from stuff that's not my own personal research and teaching, or go to a place where I fit better. It'd be best to just make a decision about that.

Lesson #4: If you're going to ask a couple of 4-year olds what they want the dinner conversation to be about, be prepared to talk about bananas eating eyeballs, going to bed, and then throwing up in their beds.

Funding

I am in what is a fairly large department; or, it used to be large (about 50 faculty members), and now is smaller due to budget cuts (about 30). But in terms of graduate students, we are very large. We have a couple hundred grad students.

The international students in our department asked me to come to a meeting and share with them the things we are doing in our sub-area for our students. Our department doesn't function like a coherent group so much as a larger structure that houses many sub areas. Each sub area may have its own unique rules, traditions, and practices. So my sub area is actually quite different from most of the others in the department. We make up our own rules about things like prelim / comprehensive exams, requirements towards graduation, etc.

This is nice because it allows us a ton of autonomy. We are just a group of 4 full-time faculty when it comes to making decisions about our graduate program. Mentor is the head of this group and these days he defers to me as often as not, so we pretty much do what we want.

In my area we have the luxury of mostly being able to fully fund all of our grad students. I say mostly because there might be an occasional situation in which something goes wrong, and much of our funding ability is precarious because it is grant-based, but we always keep funding in mind when we accept students. Typically we do not accept anybody we cannot fund. This isn't to say that a grad student's salary is decent or easy to live on. It's too low, and I wish we individual professors had some control over that (but we don't). But at least having a funded position means that a student's tuition is fully covered, and the student gets health insurance.

In our area we've recently instituted research practica and teaching practica to help students gain experience in areas they lack. This wasn't developed with funding issues in mind, since our students are funded, but it was developed with the idea of helping students gain experience in areas in which they may be weak because their funding comes from somewhere else. So a student who TAs for funding can do a research practicum to get experience on a research project. A student who is funded only through research projects can gain experience with helping to teach an undergraduate course, and so forth.

The international students were interested in this model because they see it as a way to get experience that is in itself valuable, but also experience that they could maybe leverage into a paid position down the road. The meeting was a real eye opener for me in terms of the plight of many of the graduate students in areas not my own within our department. I mean, I know there are a lot of unfunded students in our department. Most other areas are not grant-getting areas, so they have far fewer resources for funding students. They must rely on departmental money for TA lines and that money has shrunk year after year.

I guess I hadn't had enough up close and personal experiences with what these students are enduring, though. It is very difficult. One student broke down into tears as she explained the dozen and dozens of applications she's sent out across the university and her bewilderment at what is wrong with her background / experience that she is not getting hired. (The sad answer - nothing is wrong. The numbers are what's wrong. When I have an available position and post it, I now get hundreds of applications from grad students across the university. I get applications from law students. From business school students. All of the students are suffering because all of the departments have had budget cuts. Eight years ago, I would have gotten maybe 20 applications. So it's just a bad, bad time.)

One student explained a situation that is actually pretty common. Her parents mortgaged their house and spent their life savings for ONE year of tuition here. In her home country, that's what her parents' entire life savings and house amounted to: one year of tuition. One can only imagine the pressure she was under to find funding before her first year was up.

We're between a rock and a hard place because we keep receiving funding cuts from the state year after year. This past year we took a greater than 20% funding cut from the state, but we are simultaneously being required to educate more students every year and reduce time to graduation. The faculty have only had one cost of living raise in the past 8 years, and in the past 3 years we've had pay cuts. In our department, the money we get to fund TAs shrinks every year, so this means fewer paid positions, fewer TAs, and fewer sections with larger enrollments in each section. It means waiting lists for every course and students who can't finish their requirements in a timely manner because they keep getting shut out of needed courses. It's basically a mess and it's not getting any better.

How ethical is it to accept doctoral students you can't fund?

I'm not sure it's so ethical. I think most professors in my department would argue that it should be left up to the potential student to decide to come, even if they're not funded. But I think this obscures the fact that we aren't always being brutally honest about the funding situation. Attending this meeting with me was another extremely senior professor. (He has been a professor here since the year I was born.) He sat there, in the meeting, and said look, you might have to be willing to come here and eat salad for your 1st semester. But then you'll get funding after that if you beat the bushes, knock on people's doors, and make yourself known to professors by chatting with them in the elevator.

What the students' stories revealed is that this is total bullshit. These students have been beating every bush from here to Canada and they've been doing it for 2, 3 years in a row, with no funding to show for it. They're volunteering. They're attending meetings and talks and lectures and participating in research groups. Professor Senior's advice used to be true 10 years ago, but it just isn't now. (Not to mention, I don't think "eating salad" really conveys the gravity of this situation. Tuition has gone up, especially for out-of-state students. What we may think of as one year of tuition and living costs could mean an entire life savings for students from some countries.)

Tomorrow I'm proposing a change to our admission letters in the case of unfunded students so that we communicate the funding situation clearly, along with perhaps some facts about funding likelihood. I know that this will anger a lot of faculty, but that's what tenure is for.

Houses

This morning we looked at 4 houses in the neighborhood that we've kind of been interested in. The first one was vertically huge (4 bedrooms on the 2nd floor, 2 more on the 3rd floor, tons of closets etc.) but such a mess that it'd take about 150K, we were guessing, to get it into the kind of shape we'd want. Then it'd still have the problem of not having a garage or driveway. So meh.

The 2nd house was almost perfect. Great price, gorgeous, huge front porch, a garage that actually has a door that leads into the house so you'd never have to go outside in the winter to get into your car. (I know this is common in suburban houses but in our urban neighborhood with houses built anywhere from 1890 to 1930, it is unheard of.) Perfect main level; gorgeous, big kitchen with nothing we'd want to change about it, a fabulous entry / mudroom from the garage, living room, dining room, extra bonus library/parlor room, and a bathroom!

OMG, this back entry. This is a dream in a snowy state where entering the house means a 5-minute ordeal involving shedding boots, hats, mittens, coats, and scarves:


So much charm! So beautiful!


This is only half the kitchen!


Seriously, it is a really gorgeous house. Upstairs, 3 decent bedrooms and one pristine bathroom. So there is that. The basement was the nicest unfinished basement I'd ever seen, and it was huge, so it probably wouldn't be too tough to put a bedroom into the basement and call it a day.

The problem? The location. It's a block from the stadium and all of the houses across the street are rentals. Rentals in general isn't a problem, but in this location rentals means undergrads. And in our town, at our university, undergrads means drinking, partying, and overall mayhem. We'd probably be kicking ourselves after a year if we moved there. I am not exaggerating when I say we'd probably have to hose vomit off our sidewalk every week. The location pretty much made it a non-option, but we're going to check it out for a few Saturday nights to see if it really is as loud and obnoxious as we think it'd be.

The 3rd house is pretty nice and may be worth buying. An older university couple has lived there for about 40 years, so there are cosmetic upgrades it would need, but they're not that bad. This is a really old house (like 110 years old) but it is cute, with an awesome little yard. And the driveway? Is a heated driveway:


The kitchen is big (eat in), and there's a wood-paneled library off the living room, and a weird little 3/4 bath on the main level which, combined with the library, could function as a place for guests. And the upstairs has 3 very nice sized bedrooms, plenty of closet space (again unusual in our neighborhood), and a little office/library off the master. So a little money going towards taking up the carpet, refinishing the floors, and doing some work on the kitchen would result in a very nice house, I think.

(However Jake just said, "I'm not feeling it", so maybe not...)

The 4th house was a remodel / flip up from the studs and weirdly you could just tell and even though the bones of the house are old, the house felt like some weird soulless thing that you would find in the suburbs. Like everything about it was more or less nice, but we didn't like it at all somehow.

No house is perfect, I guess; when you combine location and charm and space and bedrooms / bathrooms and garage and yard and porch and so on and so forth, the kind of house that has everything we want is never what we can actually afford. When we came home we felt a renewed appreciation for our house; its location, how bright and sunny it is, and how nice it is to have a guest room and bathroom in the basement. So, food for thought I guess...

P.S.

I wish I had a shirt that said, "Fuck you, you fucking fuck." But I'm not sure where I could wear it.

Awesome Sauce

This morning I was reading a book to the kids and on one of the pages there was a picture of a sign that read, "Bus Stop". Nora pointed to it and said, "Bu...Bu...Bus. Bus Stop!" She rocks!

Weirdness!

Nora: Where is my penguin's nose? Where did the nose go? The nose is gone. What happened to my penguin's nose?
Milo: Hmm.
Nora: Maybe I ate it.
Milo: Yeah, I saw you do that.

*****

This morning out of the blue Nora asked me who built our town back before any of us lived here. Somehow that question led to a series of more questions that culminated in asking how babies get into their Mommy's tummies. Blindsided!

*****

Tonight I made a vegan version of scalloped potatoes with mushrooms and shallots, using almond milk instead of cream. It was good. Small steps away from dairy.

One Year Ago

I can't help but remember that it was 1 year ago today that the political protests began with a smallish group of students delivering valentines to the governor's office. And then it grew, and grew, and grew, and grew.

Last week we visited the fire station for a school field trip and they had a sign up in their office that said, "IAFF FIRE FIGHTERS RECALL WALKER". I still remember what it felt like to stand in a crowd in the capitol as the fire fighters marched through to the sound of bagpipes, their hats in their hands, marching to protest a bill that exempted them. I can still feel that crushing feeling in my chest as the entire crowd started chanting, "THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU" and the noise echoed up to the ceiling and back again, deafening our ears.

Recently a friend sent me a photograph taken of me and her marching and holding signs in a crowd and talking to each other. It's not a flattering photo. My mouth is open and we both looked pissed off. I remember that we were talking about tenure, and it was such an incredibly anxious time for us both. The anxiety over politics and what was going to happen to our paychecks and our healthcare and our schools on top of the tenure anxiety was just too much.

Things are so different now. Tonight I did 2 pull ups. My goal is to do 5 by the end of the year. I got stuck halfway through the 3rd and could not make it, and my trainer said, "You've got to get angry!"

But that's the thing. I'm not so angry anymore.

(We still better recall that fucker, though).

The Future is Now

I am so happy because:

1) When I left to go to work late this morning, after my pancake cooking extravaganza and my run and my shower, I got to watch the kids on the ice rink and see Milo skating around with a grown up's hockey stick, one at least 6 feet long.

2) One thing I got to do at work today was read three very good papers. All three of them actually come to me by way of Google+, one as a recommendation, and two because I contacted a scholar and asked him to send me some of his work. Google+ is a great way to talk about interesting work-related ideas with people.

3) When I came home, Jake had a great dinner ready: spiced lentils with tomatoes and carmelized onions and coconut rice. The rice had jalapenos in it. It sounds weird, but it was actually really delicious.

377

Writing this kind of blog is a strange thing to do in a sense because it's mostly for me, partly for the kids in their hypothetical future, and partly for other people, for instance, family who like to see stuff about the kids. But it's not all for me, of course, because if it were, I would write different stuff. Or rather, I wouldn't leave out a lot of stuff that I do leave out. And it's not all for other people, because I have an indulgent habit of making posts like this one that will bore the pants off of people who are not me, in which I share a crapload of photos that the kids took. Maybe this will be interesting to the kids when they are older. I imagine sharing this with them when they're grown up, perhaps when one of them has a baby of his or her own.

So anyway, Nora and Milo somehow took 377 photographs when I wasn't paying attention. Here are a few of those. I don't share them because I'm under some delusion that they're great photographs. I just find them interesting in terms of what they tell me about what Nora and Milo are looking at, and what they find worth capturing. It's so odd to me what they choose to photograph!

What I didn't include was the 30 or so photos of our smoke detector. I don't know why Nora was so into photographing the smoke detector.

My keyboard:

Coming down the stairs:

Blocks in a stainless steel bowl with a lid on it:

Folded laundry in a hamper:

Me, when I was sick, juxtaposed with a distorted image of a model:

Nora's feet:

Me, reaching out to Milo saying, "Come here, let me roll your pants up."

Milo:

Nora:

Our kitchen wall:

Our linen closet. I thought it was so strange that Nora wanted to open up the closets and capture what was in them:

Milo's rody horse:

Our bathroom floor and my great shoe:

Winter light in our house:

Bar stool and heater vent:

Milo and our new bathroom door knob:

Installing that door knob has been a major hassle. Our door knob hole isn't cut in a standard location; actually, nothing about the door is standard. But the door stays shut now, which is something. The door knob is also very pretty.

Happy

My rock star friend got tenure yesterday. Hooray! Tonight we all drank tequila, and then more tequila, and listened to White House stories and discussed who is the George Clooney of math ed. Me. I'm the George Clooney of math ed, bitches.

Oh, Texas

Just another reason I'm glad we don't live in Texas. I can't even fathom many parts of this story. Spending tens of thousands of dollars to send children to see a movie in a theater? Sending only the boys?

I can only imagine how well it'd go over to try to explain that Milo gets to go on a field trip to see a movie but Nora needs to stay at school with all of the other girls.

Quote of the night

"Mommy, I'm going to love you for as long as I live."

Quote of the morning

"Well, when Dad was done smelling your slipper to see if it had pee on it, he didn't say anything!"

Grrrr!

I can't sleep tonight because right before bed I discovered something that has been bothering me all night. I'm on a research group and we've been writing up some results from some studies for two short papers for a conference submission. I took the lead on one paper and my post doc took the lead on the other. She finished her draft a few days ago, and I am still working on mine. So in the intervening time Mentor took a look at her draft and revised and shortened it. Then he sent out his revisions and when I opened it up I couldn't believe my eyes. He had rewritten her intro and lit review substantially, and his rewrite turned it into an exact replica of MY intro and lit review for my paper -- without ever having read my draft!

You know you've been writing together too much over the years when you independently write what is basically the exact same intro and lit review for two different papers. It is a better fit for my paper than for the other paper though!

Moral of the story, I think: Don't read emails right before bed!

SPD Picnic 1977

This morning Nora dug through her shirt drawer, which must contain about 30 or 40 different shirts, most of them gorgeous hand-me downs or gifts of really lovely quality. There is lovely stitching on these shirts, delightful patterns, nice sleeve detailing, etc. I got sort of depressed looking at all of those beautiful shirts and realizing that Nora will pretty much only wear three of them: her school t-shirt, a fishing t-shirt, and a bikemonkey t-shirt.

Sometimes I worry that people keep giving us more and more clothes because they might see how Nora and Milo are dressed and conclude that we can't afford to buy them enough clothes. Recently their teacher gave us a big bag of terrific hand me downs. So far I have convinced Nora to wear only one thing out of the whole bag. But the truth of the matter is, it's just not a battle I want to fight. If they're old enough to pick out clothes and have an opinion, I don't feel like I should enforce different clothes onto them against their wills.

This morning all three of the shirts Nora likes were dirty, so Nora was pretty much at a loss. Wearing any of the other 37 shirts is pretty much unthinkable. Then she spied, what's that? A t-shirt, on a different shelf, high up. "What's that, Mommy?" She asked. I pulled it down. It's on old t-shirt of mine that says "SPD Picnic 1977". Nora breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, another acceptable shirt to wear! So today she happily wore the t-shirt I had back when I was 6 years old.

Unanswerable Questions About Crabs

1) How can we not get pinched by a crab when we go swimming?

2) What if we go swimming in the ocean, and a crab is there in the ocean, and wants to pinch us?

3) Do crabs have eyes?

4) So crabs can see everywhere, and if we step over them, they can see our legs and bottom. How can the crab not see our legs and bottom?

4) Why do crabs walk on the sand in the ocean?

5) What if a bee stung a crab?

6) What if the crab was out of its shell and a bee stung it?

Next up: Unanswerable questions about bees.

Cupcake Moments

I'm going to go ahead and blow whatever flimsy pretense I had at not discussing the name of my town or university by linking to an article that has meant a lot to me over the years.

A friend of mine had a cupcake moment tonight. Her son's birthday party at school is tomorrow, and she ruined the cupcakes she was making for it. Of course this happened not at the reasonable hour of 7 p.m. or something, but at 10:30. She'll probably get up at 5 tomorrow. My colleague's cupcake moment reminded me of two things. First, of my own cupcake moment a year ago, when I ruined the cupcakes I was making, late at night of course, for my own kids' birthday treat the next day to share with their class. Fortunately I had the ingredients to start all over and make a second batch. Second, it reminded me of this essay written by one of my departmental colleagues.

Before my colleague published that essay in the Chronicle, she read it at a panel forum on campus about balancing work and life. Characteristically, she did not just show up to the forum to share a few rambling thoughts about her experiences, as the other panel members did. Instead, she carefully prepared and shared with us a couple of insightful vignettes that so well encapsulated some of the impossible and competing pressures she faced as a working mother. These stories were infused with my colleague's contagious humor and sincerity.

She told them so well, and the second one, the one about her daughter getting sick in the elevator, moved me so much because I could so easily see myself in that position. I didn't even have kids yet, but at that time, dealing with the tenure track alone seemed impossible. What I wanted to do, have a family on top of it, seemed impossible. The pressure was so overwhelming, in the moment of that discussion, that I struggled not to start sobbing right there in the audience.

My colleague, who I adore, was untenured at the time, and what she said at the end of her talk has stayed with me forever. She said, "If the university grants me tenure, then they are so lucky to get to keep me. And if they don't, then fuck 'em!"

And I wanted to jump out of my chair and cheer for her.

She got tenure.

Why is Slate Such a Crappy Rag?

A lot of thinking people sometimes stumble upon a terrible Slate article and then go on a rant about how wrong it is. And then their thinking friends say, "Well, what did you expect? It's Slate, after all." Home of the pseudo-science bullshit "evolutionary psychology" articles (OMG it's totally natural for men to be cheating sex addicts because that's the way it was on the veldt!). Home of articles with headlines like, "How to Hit a Woman". If it's sexist, anti-intellectual, or stupid, you're apt to find it on Slate.

So why, oh why, did I click on a Slate link about Dooce's separation from her husband? Probably because I've been reading Dooce for 8 years, and oddly, the news of their separation really saddened me. They seem like a fabulous couple, which is a naive thing to say when your only sense of somebody's life is through what they choose to share on a (very public) blog. But anyway. A lot of people in our real lives have been getting separated and divorced lately too, and in almost every instance it ends up surprising me. They seemed so great together! It goes to show that you can never know what is going on somebody's marriage.

So I clicked on the link to read the headline: "If Dooce Can't Make an Egalitarian Marriage Work, Who Can?" Seriously...that's the angle? Oh, Slate. Of course that's the angle. Find some way to suggest that traditional marriage is the only way! Egalitarian marriages are just unnatural and, really, impossible, am I right? I'm sure the separation had nothing to do with the very serious mental health problems Dooce has written about (including severe depression); it happened only because they had an egalitarian marriage. (Dooce has, to my memory, never actually described her marriage in that way, by the way). But they separated, therefore, egalitarian marriage is a sham! That's right ladies, get back in the kitchen pronto, because if you don't, you'll get divorced!

I know. It's my own damn fault for clicking on a Slate link.

Hearing Loss

Nora is currently having a massive tantrum in her room. I wonder if she is going to break a door. When she is good, she is very very good, and when she is bad, she is horrid.

Today we went to audiology, and Milo has significant fluid in his ears (no surprise there) and a moderate hearing loss. Significant enough that we need to do something to fix it so that he doesn't miss out on too much at school and at home. The idea is that if the fluid goes away, his hearing should improve. He also had an x-ray this morning that showed enlarged tonsils and adenoids. I don't know what any of this means, other than a follow up with an ENT doctor to learn more.