Stuff We Saw and Didn't See

Some things we saw:

Other things we saw but didn't photograph:

-- Segway tours (tourists in a group on Segways)
-- A hearse with the top cut out of the roof, and then a bar coming up out of the roof with bar stools seated around it. Tourists drank while being driven around on a ghost tour.
-- A bicycle powered bar. 8 or 10 seats all facing inward around a rectangular bar. Each seat was attached to pedals, and everybody pedaled to make the giant mobile bar move.

We didn't see:

-- Turn signals. Nobody uses them around here. It's treacherous!

Savannah

Last night we went to dinner at a place called the Pink House, which is an old mansion build in the 1700s that just went on and on and on. There were 11 of us and we ate in what used to be the ballroom, and we only occupied a small part of the room. Later we enjoyed the view from a nearby balcony. A woman in a floor-length ball gown walked around to each table to welcome us to the restaurant. She then sang for everybody in the room. You don't see that kind of thing in our town.

Me and My Girl

Different Shopping Attitudes

I no longer have any confidence to buy clothes for the kids that they don't pick out themselves, because they're so picky. Meanwhile, Nora wears about 3 different shirts and 2 different pairs of shorts, and then gets cranky when I haven't done laundry quickly enough so that she can continue wearing the exact same clothes every time. So today we headed out to the store to get a few summer clothes for the kids.

It's funny to observe how Milo is an acquirer and Nora is a minimalist. Milo: Oh, a Spiderman shirt! My very favorite! Can I have this Spiderman shirt? And oh Mommy! Look at this Star Wars shirt! And this sleeveless shirt! Can I have these shirts Mommy? Can I?

Pretty much anything I suggested for Milo, he was game. I wanted to pick out a nice collared button-down shirt for a wedding, and he was even fine with that. He kept seeing more and more clothes that he wanted.

On the other hand, with Nora, I'd say, Nora, do you like these shorts? Or these? Or how about these? Nora: No thank you. Milo: Nora, look!  A Dora shirt! Do you want a Dora shirt? Nora: No, I already have a Dora thing at home. Me: How about these blue shorts, Nora? You need some shorts. Nora: I already picked out a pair of shorts Mommy! That's all I need! Basically, Nora only wanted one pair of shorts, and one t-shirt (Thomas). I had to wheedle her into accepting a couple more pairs of shorts while fending off Milo who wanted to buy every item of clothing in the place.

Milo also wanted a Spiderman action figure, a Spiderman float board, some sort of weird plastic axe / hammer thing, some baseballs, and a set of kids' golf balls and a golf club. (Spiderman is currently his favorite, basically because it is his best friend's favorite.) I said, "Maybe for your birthday." Nora didn't want anything. (I do intend to get them a few summer toys next month, but that'll be a surprise.) It was funny to me to see how Milo wanted everything under the sun and Nora just wasn't all that interested in anything. Fortunately, they both seem perfectly fine with delaying gratification and pointing out something they like that I should keep in mind for their birthday - neither kid ever whines to get a toy right away or anything like that. (Then they forget about the whole thing the next day). I wonder how long that'll last...

The Subtle Effects of Tenure

I've been slowly resolving a two-day series of disagreements with Mentor. They're polite disagreements, but fairly forceful, and it is uncomfortable for me to argue. It's hard to let go of old habits (never argue, just agree, don't rock the boat, make everybody like you so that they'll support your tenure bid).

I have a longer story about this change in me that I'll tell another day, but here is a short excerpt from tonight.

Me: You know it is difficult for me to disagree with you but I think I am getting better at it.

Mentor: Tenure does wonders for one's voice!

So, so true. It changes how I interact with tenured people, and it changes how I interact with untenured people. It just changes things.

Lunch at the student union terrace

Ice cream is an important part of the terrace experience! Almost as important as beer.

Nora, you want me to, like, give you a wipe for your mouth or something? Or maybe brush your hair and adjust that headband? No? Okay.

They recently added some blue chairs to the terrace. For years (decades?) it's only been green, orange, and yellow. The blue chairs have caused quite a stir, believe it or not.

The giant orange chair is still our favorite.

Losing Battles?

These words bug me:

1) Veggies. Why can't we say vegetables? Do we have to give this a cutesy word like veggies? This one is so common that it's less annoying than the next three, somehow...

2) Cardi. Really? Cardi? You can't say cardigan, which is a perfectly good already existing word? Again, too cutesy.

3) Lil. Or lil'. Come on. Do we really need to talk like we're a member of the Little Rascals? It is not that hard to type out little.

4) Prolly. Ugh. This is the worst one of all. If you're typing "prolly", you either don't know how to spell probably, or you've decided to acquire an affectation that makes you sound like a 6-year old girl. With a maturity level to match.

I'd be hard pressed to think of a full grown man who would use these words. Maybe veggies is starting to sneak its way into the common vernacular, but I doubt most men would say "cardi".

I have noticed that I have a lot of writing pet peeves. It's kind of a losing battle, too. Every year I make the same speeches about them to my grad students (we don't write "people that...", it's "people who...") but it doesn't make much of a difference. They do it anyway, and some of them even do it on purpose occasionally just to bug me (ahem, "impact"). It's funny that I care about these things since I break so many writing and grammatical rules myself. So I guess I'm being pretty hypocritical. I've probably acquired these peeves because I have to read so many flipping drafts of theses, prelims, proposals, and dissertations, oh my. Reading student drafts is much, much more exhausting than reading published work. Amen.

But at least none of my students ever use the words veggies, cardi, lil, or prolly in their drafts. So it could be worse!

Summer Plans

I'm excited about a bunch of neat stuff we have planned for summer!

a) This month I'm going to a little conference in Savannah, which is a town I've always wanted to visit. There is a just-graduated colleague who wants to collaborate on a potential grant with me and my post doc, so we'll spend some time at that conference brainstorming grant ideas. Also, one of my intellectual heroes will be at the conference too. He's the guy who offered me a job last year that I turned down, and it was all awkward, and I think he was really bummed but he was nice about it. Then I wrote a paper for a monograph and he wrote a commentary on it. Recently he told me he's eager to discuss the paper at this conference, which will be great, I hope, and probably very helpful as I revise the paper for a journal. (Still kind of scary, though. He's so smart and his ideas are so much more sophisticated than mine that I am intimidated.)

Also, Jake is coming down to join me for the latter half and we're staying a couple of days after the conference ends to be tourists and have a little vacation! I am really looking forward to that.

b) Then like a week after that, in June, I'm going to DC for another conference. There I'll be on a panel discussing this particular methodology that I'm just starting to dip my toes into, but everybody else on the panel is super super advanced in this methodology, having done it for years and years. So that's a little nerve wracking, but I think I'll learn a lot and it'll be good for me.

c) Then in July a friend of mine in my field is coming to our town for about a week! She's going to do some work while she's here, and I'll show her around, and then we got this bright idea - what if we invite some other women in our field to town for a mini writing workshop, where we work together on our writing? So we invited 4 other women, and they're all going to come! Two will come in the middle of the week and the other two will come at the end of the week. So fun! I'm really psyched that I get to have visitors and talk and share with people, especially my friend who will be here for a week.

d) Then in early August, I'm going to go to the bay area for my teacher-friends reunion! It will have been almost 2 years since we've all been together, and even more exciting, one of them will have a new baby (due in a few weeks)! So I get to see all of my friends and also meet one of their new babies!

e) Then in late August, we're all going to go to my mom's house for about a week! And my sister and her family will be there too! Super fun. Oh, and supposedly I'm supposed to spend 2 days while I'm there being on an advisory panel, but the idiot budget people at that university haven't been able to pay me for the work I did on that panel over a year ago, so I'm not going to do it if I don't get paid by then. I mean, I'll still help out here and there for free, but I'm not going to take 2 days away from my vacation to sit in advisory panel meetings for free.

Other things: I signed the kids up for swimming lessons again. I also feel like I should get Milo into baseball, since baseball is his preferred sport if he has to pick. But they still all happen during his nap time, so I'm not doing it. I am starting to feel a little bit like the lame parent who doesn't sign her kids up for activities, but, I mean, going to school 4 days a week should count, right? Plus, he still needs his nap. Nora could give hers up, but Milo still sleeps a solid 3 hours in the afternoon, even though he's 4. Who am I to argue with that? He's always been a big sleeper.

Jake's mom is already bugging us about when we'll go up north. I'm prepared to sacrifice one weekend this summer to that, but any more and Jake can take them on his own. Thankfully, they're old enough now for that! It's nice up there, but it is really tough on me not sleeping for a whole weekend, which is what happens every. single. time. There is only one person out of the 4 of us who actually gets any sleep, and it's Jake.

Writing plans:
1) Conference monograph into journal article, goal: out the door this summer
2) Collaborative with post-doc paper, goal: out the door this summer
3) Second collaborative with post-doc paper (her 1st author), goal: help her out on it and follow her timeline (probably it'll go out this summer)
4) New-to-me methodology paper, goal: drafted by the end of the summer
5) New co-authored book with Mentor, goal: Outline by Sept. 30

Another book? I've been saying to myself, no more books for a while! But then this book opportunity came up, and I thought, oh, that one sounds kind of interesting...so I said yes.

Anyway, I'm hoping that these concrete writing plans will get me past the classic post-tenure slump, which I do think has plagued me a bit over the past 6 months or so. Either way, it's going to be an exciting summer!

Shyness

I've always found it interesting to track the kids' waxing and waning shyness over the years. I used to think that being shy or not being shy was an issue of temperament, sort of constant throughout, but with M&N it has shifted back and forth a lot. Also, when one child is in a shy phase, the other one will switch to an outgoing phase. They seem to take turns.

So I remember when the kids were babies, Milo did not feel so great about other people. This first became apparent when he was just a few months old and our friends came over and he was on the floor under his baby gym thing. One of them touched his toe and said hello to him and he just totally freaked out. I mean, screaming like he was terrorized. I had to take him into another room to calm him down. Meanwhile, Nora was totally fine with anybody and everybody. I remember we went to a Mother's Day picnic sort of thing when the babies were 5 months old and I frequently had to walk away from the group with Milo to help him feel more comfortable. He didn't even like being around all of those people, even when I was holding him. Meanwhile, Nora was getting passed around from person to person and didn't care who the heck was holding her.

Fast forward to when they were twoish, and they had totally traded places. Nora was so shy and concerned about strangers that if we were on the sidewalk and somebody came walking toward us, she'd get upset and need me to hold her. Never mind talking to people. She'd bury her head in my shoulder and wouldn't talk to anybody. Milo, however, was mr. friendly, going around to anybody and everybody saying, "Hi! Hi! Hi!" This was still what they were like when they started school at almost 3, so Nora sort of got the reputation as being a little withdrawn and Milo got the reputation of being outgoing. Nora didn't really have much interest in playing with the other children, except Milo, and wanted to mostly hang around her teachers. Milo would play with anybody.

Now they're 4 and they have switched places again. Milo isn't shy, per se, but he definitely clams up when new people are around, or when he's in a large group. He gets very quiet and isn't really into talking to strangers. He'll talk to other kids, though. It's really interesting to watch Milo deliberately lower his voice when he's playing with other boys, trying to appear older, like a tough guy.

Nora, on the other hand, will currently talk to anybody. About anything. Like, we're at the pharmacy picking up an ear drops prescription for Milo. I tell the pharmacist, he just had tubes put in. And then Nora pipes up, "AND I'M CONSTIPATED!" Or we'll be walking along the sidewalk and pass some random stranger and Nora will say, "I'M FOUR AND A THIRD!" Doesn't matter who it is, she'll strike up a conversation (about herself).

I guess shyness isn't a constant thing, at least with these kids at this point. That's true of me, too, I suppose. I've mostly thought of myself as shy all my life, but I'm not really like that anymore. Or rather, I have learned the skills to interact with new people despite the fact that I don't really like new people. Recently at a conference I was searching around for this friend I wanted to have lunch with. I finally found him and a couple of his friends and as we all started walking to lunch, I ran into this random person, and then that person who wanted to say hello, and more and more people started joining us and my friend said, "You're such a gregarious person that pretty soon we'll have 30 people coming to lunch with us." And I was like, what? You mean shy, not gregarious, right? Also, he's the really outgoing one. It turns out that each of us perceives the other as gregarious, while we both perceive ourselves as shy. So I guess there is a difference between how you feel, and how you're able to act, which, thank goodness. Otherwise, I'd probably spend my life as the little troll scowling in the corner.

Weekend Stuff

1. It was really hot today, like 88 degrees. Awesome! Still cool enough in the morning for a nice 4-mile run, barefoot, no pain!

2. Jake's parents have returned from FL and are here this weekend on their way back to their home up north. I spent the whole afternoon cooking. I forgot how they drink cocktails every evening at 5. It is definitely a fun tradition! But not one I could indulge in regularly.

3. Milo is getting a weird sort of attitude and makes these come backs now. Like, say he's racing somewhere and trips, and we'll say, "Whoa, slow down dude." And he'll say, "YOU slow down." Um, aren't you a little young for that kind of thing? And also, that doesn't make any sense. You're doing it wrong.

4. Nora is totally starting to read stuff on her own now. Today she was looking at a book title and sounded out "Babar". She's pretty psyched about this whole thing and regularly asks me, "Am I starting to learn how to read? Am I figuring out how to read words?"

5. A long time ago Mentor and I applied for a grant. I was pretty hopeless about our chances of getting it for two reasons. One, there were 900 letters of intent and they are going to fund about 30. I think in the end the real number of applications was a little over 500, but still, the odds are lousy. Two, Mentor applied for 3 grants, and I know he's going to get one of them because it's one that NSF asked him to submit because they want to fund a continuation of a project he's currently doing. (That's not the one I'm involved in). So would they really want to fund 2 out of 30 to the same PI? I highly doubt it.

But, when I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine asked if I'd heard back yet on the grant. I said no. He said, "Well, we didn't get ours. And so-and-so from xyz heard back too that they didn't get it, and so did so-and-so from abc, and..." As I chatted with people I found out that a number of people have heard back already. The fact that we haven't probably means it made it through the 1st round of review, so now I have the tiniest modicum of hope. We keep thinking we'll hear soon, and then each day passes and we hear nothing, and my hope grows a little. This is hard because I don't want to get my hopes too high. I really want this grant but need to stay realistic.

6. Nora wants to be Superman when she grows up. Then she corrects herself and says, "I want to be Supergirl."

This is Why I Don't Visit

So, there is an uber-conservative group, an offshoot of ALEC, full of business people and tea party members and people who run private, for-profit schools like Kipp, and they have a sham "research" organization that is aimed at "grading" teacher education programs. Their intention is to give all of the teacher ed programs failing grades, and highly publicize these "results", which they do, to convince everybody that teacher ed programs should be eliminated. They don't actually have any scientists or researchers on their organization, but what they do is conduct fake studies based on things like class syllabi and then create sham reports that they release grading various schools of education. They look reasonable at first glance, but then you realize that the reports are actually based on no data, they don't publicize their analysis criteria, or their methods, and every report comes out with a failing grade or a near failing grade. (Suffice it to say, this sort of thing would never make it past peer review. It's a biiiiig red flag when a group doesn't release its methods.)

Their goal is to a) eliminate teacher ed programs, and b) privatize education.

They have an enormous budget and an enormous PR campaign. And lots of people listen to them. In fact, they're going to start publishing their reports in U.S. News and World Report (who is trying to survive in this time of terrible sales).

They do things like hire students to solicit syllabi from professors, pretending they're interested in a course, and then turning the syllabi over to this organization.

Anyway, this organization is going after the program I work in. This was expected, because they're going after all the top-rated schools of education (and our dept. is rated #1 in the country). They solicited some syllabi in general, and made a couple of very specific syllabus requests: they requested the release of my syllabus for an undergrad class I teach, and they requested Mentor's syllabus for an undergrad class he teaches. Our university refused the request under intellectual property arguments. The organization has now filed a lawsuit to get our syllabi. In the past year our state government made a new law that says you can file a lawsuit like this in any county in the state. So the organization filed the lawsuit in the most conservative county in our state, with the most conservative appellate court. The current expectation is that the university is going to ultimately settle with this organization, because the lawsuit would probably prevail, and settling avoids setting a legal precedent. At that time, my syllabus will be subpoenaed. If I don't comply, I'd be in contempt of court.

One might ask, why bother resisting this? I am not ashamed of my syllabus or the course I created. It is an excellent course and I am proud of it. (And, when colleagues ask for my syllabus so that they can use or adapt it, I freely give it out.) In addition, they're going to create their report regardless, and it will be negative regardless. The actual content of our syllabi will be irrelevant to this outcome. For me, it's more a desire to not comply, indeed to protest, this unethical set of actions. I don't want to condone it, I don't want to be a part of it, I don't want to be under attack programmatically or personally, even though that is what is going to happen.

All of this is to explain what I am about to write below; it's to set the stage, to explain that this current lawsuit is just the latest in attack after attack after attack on my profession, my values, my research, and my way of life. I live with this every day.

***************************

Several weeks ago I got dragged into a conversation with a lot of neo-liberal bullshit about education, and it is still bothering me.

Why do these conversations enact such a high mental and emotional cost? Why is it hard for me to let it go?

It's because I am embattled. It's because I have to live it both professionally and personally. I am steeped in attacks against education and against public workers on multiple levels: local, state, and national. I must address this in my professional life, I write about it, I respond to discussions about it, I read about it. I am confronted with it in my personal life with every other news story that comes across my desk. I have to deal with it with my grad students, facing a job market in which budget crises, loss of tenure-track faculty lines, and conversion to for-profit practices are going to be a part of their new reality as they struggle to actually carve out lives as educators in the face of the CEO corporate model eagerly and gleefully taking over education at the expense of the poor. I have to deal with it with my undergrads, struggling with them to think through why it even makes sense for them to go into teaching at this point given the systematic and ongoing attack on their autonomy, their ability to make a decent living, and their self respect as actual professionals. I have to deal with it personally, as I come off of three years of pay cuts from furloughs, six years of no merit raises and no cost-of-living raises, and a significant pay cut this year thanks to the tea party politics of my governor and state legislators bent on destroying public institutions.

In that conversation I shared some news with this conservative Bush-voting millionaire -- who pretends to care about teachers' lives -- about what our governor had just done. Not only has our governor capped pay increases for teachers and systematically attacked teachers' workplace protections, wages, and benefits, 3 weeks ago he went even farther. He has crafted an executive order that allows for the redefinition of the pay schedule for experienced teachers, which enables districts to eliminate add ons, like advanced degrees, that increase teachers' salaries. So, for instance, that master's degree your kid's chemistry teacher got 15 years ago is no longer going to count towards her salary. For some teachers, this can result in a pay cut of up to 30%. Think about that. THIRTY PERCENT. Think about it some more. Imagine you're a 50-year old teacher who has been in the system for 28 years. You've got two kids in college. You plan to retire in 14 years. And now your salary is getting cut by 30%, and there is nothing you can do about it. When I shared this story with the Bush-voting conservative, he said, "and is that a bad thing?"

Are you fucking kidding me? Are you so out of touch that you don't understand that this is a bad thing?

Here's the thing. I am embattled both professionally and personally, and I cannot escape it. The wealthy white men who made their fortunes in business and now want to talk about this shit with me? Who want to argue their points aggressively in some sort of education debate? For them, it's a fucking hobby. It's a political point of interest, it's a hobby horse. It doesn't affect their lives as they pay for their daughters' lavish weddings or trips to Italy. It doesn't touch every part of their personal and professional lives. They can end that conversation and go back to their fucking golf game. I end that conversation and return to about twelve other conversations of the same ilk. This is why I struggle to let these things go.

Do I sound angry? Because I am. I'm angry.

I also need to do what is necessary to protect myself. And that includes not spending time with people like this having these kinds of conversations. Sorry. It's nothing personal. But I spend enough of my time fighting these issues. I don't need to voluntarily do it any more than necessary. I don't want to spend every day pissed off about stuff. So that means surrounding myself with people whose values align with my own.

For You

Literacy

This morning on the way back from the children's museum the kids were asking me to spell various words for them. They then started asking about spelling just letters or sounds, like "B", or "D", etc. Nora asked, "Does every letter start with itself?" (For instance, "Dee" starts with "D", "Bee" starts with "B", etc.) Without thinking about it much, I said yes.

Then tonight at dinner, Nora said, "I thought of a letter that doesn't start with itself. 'C'. It sounds like 'see', so 'C' starts with 'S'. Not with 'C', which is a 'Cuh' sound."

Two things strike me here. One, how the heck do kids ever learn to read and spell (in English)? Because we have so many exceptions, so many idiosyncratic spellings, so many illogical ways to spell a word, it's a miracle kids ever learn to read at all. Two, Nora is a very logical kid!

Hmmmmm

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. ranks dead last on breastfeeding support policies. We're also the only developed country with no maternity leave policy.

So, let's see. We put out magazine covers with provocative breastfeeding images with captions asking us if we're mom enough. We create commercials terrorizing women into thinking that formula feeding is akin to riding a mechanical bull while pregnant. We have the slogan "breast is best", and we have La Leche League. And we also have no paid parental leave policy and no paid nursing breaks for new mothers.

So as far as I can figure, we're making it extremely difficult for most working mothers to breastfeed (and in many jobs, it's impossible) while simultaneously creating a culture in which you are definitely a second-class mother if you don't breastfeed. Now I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I just have to wonder about this cultural obsession with breastfeeding. It just happens to be the one thing you can't do easily while working many jobs. Seems to me that if policy makers really cared about breastfeeding, they'd enact policies to actually support mothers' abilities to do so. Instead we've got this strong pressure to breastfeed without the supports in place to help mothers do it...unless, of course, they quit their jobs. Then it becomes a lot easier.

It makes a person wonder.

When I was pregnant and trying to figure out how I'd ever manage to breastfeed twins, I discovered that there was a LLL multiples meeting. I was encouraged to attend before I delivered, so that I could make some connections, get some help and advice, etc. So I called up the leader to find out when and where the meetings were. Well, they met once a week. At 10:00 a.m. On a Tuesday.

I was like, "Uh, I teach then. Do you have any evening or weekend meetings that I could attend?" No. They did not. So who gets the benefit of these supports? Not working women.

I personally had it lucky. It's much easier to keep breastfeeding when you have a super flexible job, a private office for pumping, and enough saved sick leave to use the FMLA to at least stay home for a couple of months after delivery. But my job is not the norm. How exactly are women who work less flexible or hourly jobs supposed to do it? I don't think we really care, as a nation, about the health and well being of babies and kids. If we cared, we'd change our policies. I think we're more interested in profit margins and the economy.

Three I Guess

1. A while back I was in the shower and noticed a lump on my ribcage about an inch in diameter. Jake was worried about it, because he's a hypochondriac (especially on my behalf), but I wasn't worried. The ribcage doesn't seem like much of a worrisome place to find something like that. Nevertheless, I called the doctor and long story short got scheduled to see the surgeon today to check it out. Well, the surgeon said that it is just a harmless fibroma, so nothing to worry about. That's good news.

2. My new goal is to be in bed by 10:30 at night and turn out the light by 11. So that I can try to not feel so tired all the time. But wait. It's 10:55 now. Why am I so bad at going to bed? I just don't feel tired at the right times.

Also, night time is my only time to myself. It's hard to give that up. But maybe it'd be easier if I started having an easier time getting up when I hear Milo's door open.

3. Nora has started sleeping in. Some mornings, on school days, I end up waking her up a full hour after Milo's already up, and she is cranky. This seems pretty cruel, that I'm starting to get a sleeping-in kid but the other kid is decidedly a morning person. Who wants his breakfast pronto, thank you very much.

4. Wait. I don't have four things.

Snapshots of Today

This morning we spent the whole morning planting flowers and herbs. Here are my herbs all nice in a row in our cedar planter. How will they do? Only time will tell.

After the kids went to nap I made a summer pasta salad with cherry tomatoes, avocados, basil, lemon, garlic, capers, and green onions, but I forgot the green onions! So I strolled down to the neighborhood market to pick up some green onions. The grocer said "Hey, green onions" and then started singing "green onions" by Booker T. and the MG's. On the walk home I looked at all of the recall signs. Pretty much every other house looks like this:

In the afternoon we went to a party downtown. Our friends have a condo right near the capitol and they have this awesome set up where they've got this huge terrace, bigger than our own patio, and then the terrace connects to this big grassy area and another set of gardens. It's like the best of both worlds, living right downtown in a modern condo and also having outdoor space right outside your back door. 

I'm So Tired

Tonight just as I was literally exiting through the door to go out to dinner (of course) Milo fell off his chair and gashed his eyelid, causing a lot of bleeding all over the place. It's a small (1 cm) but deep cut. That kid is going to have so many scars by the time he gets to college.

The kids' classroom has a sister school in Liberia. They've been sending packages back and forth, pictures, notes, etc. between the two schools. There is currently a book drive to send a bunch of books to the Liberian school. Milo and Nora chose some books to donate.

Meanwhile, Nora has been gathering random pennies throughout the house and she now has a cup full of pennies. She wants to go to the book store with me and use her money to buy a book for the kids in Liberia. She's been pretty insistent on it, so I'll take her this weekend if we can squeeze it in. This is the first time that Nora has demonstrated any sense that money is something you use to buy things. Pretty awesome.

That Time Magazine Cover Everybody's Talking About

Boy howdy am I glad that my kids are older and I now get to rely on my brain, rather than my stupid messed up body, to parent. THANK GOD.

The kids are so awesome and entertaining now. Tonight I tossed Milo's face cloth at him as he was goofing around, and it smacked him in the face and then fell through his arms. Instead of being annoyed, he said, "Good job, you made a basket!"

Nora explained to me that she has something she is going to bring home tomorrow for me for Mother's Day. It's a flower! Maria has been helping her make it! She has absolutely no concept of keeping something a secret. Nora also motioned towards her pants pocket. She was wearing purple and white checked capris, with two zippered pockets. One was zipped closed. She said, "I have something in my pocket for you for Mother's Day too. But I have to keep it in my pocket until then. Well...you can peek. (Opens the pocket about half a centimeter). Okay, that's enough of a peek." I hope whatever is in that pocket wasn't alive.

Lawn Mower Accident

One time, a long long long time ago, I was having dinner with a friend. We were out of town at the time, with a bunch of other friends as well, but this one night just this one friend and I were having dinner. Anyway, at that time, he had this big secret he wanted to tell me. And as he was hemming and hawing and delaying and giving little hints about this terrible secret, my mind started constructing these hypothetical scenarios about what the secret might be.

Meanwhile, tonight I was chatting with another friend and this friend asked if I ever hear from that other friend, the one with the secret. So I was sharing what I know (our lives pleasantly diverged long ago) and then I had this sudden memory. I suddenly remembered that this old friend had experienced a terrible accident, I think involving a lawn mower, in which a very delicate body part had been partially severed!

Isn't that awful? I thought to myself, "How could I have forgotten that?" I felt sad for a bit, remembering that terrible detail about this person.

But then I realized, oh wait a sec. Waaaait a sec. No. There was never any lawn mower accident. That was actually just one of the hypothetical scenarios I had constructed way back when, during the time when he was equivocating about telling me his terrible secret! I can remember where we were sitting in the restaurant at dinner, I remember him being very embarrassed about his secret, and I remember imagining what it could be, including that scenario. (Which is a really dumb thing to imagine. Who mows the lawn naked?) His actual secret was much more benign.

What is really creepy about this (aside from the fact that I had ever imagined such a bizarre scenario to begin with) is that I just barely caught myself in the false memory. Something about the illogic of it made me catch myself and remember what truly happened. But I'm sure there are other times when I don't catch myself. It's truly creepy to me, how our memories are constructed. We construct our memories, totally unreliably, and therefore we construct our past. And our reality. What is real? What is not? There is no way to know. Our sense that what we remember is what happened is totally an illusion.

I have another experience like this. It involves the last time a huge conference I attended was in San Francisco. This was in 2006. I have two memories of staying in a hotel in SF. In the first memory, I am staying in a very large, dark room. There is a table between the bed and the window. The bathroom is between the bedroom and the door. I sat at the table when I talked to my cousin on the phone, telling her a story about a horrible session I'd had in which the discussant had been a jackass.

Then there is a different hotel room I stayed in. It is extremely bright and white, and it is small. There was an armchair next to the bed. The bathroom was behind the bed. The layout of this room was completely different. The chair is where I sat when a friend visited me. My friend sat on the bed and showed me a sculpture he had made.

The problem is, there was only one trip, and only one hotel. And I know I stayed in that big, dark room, and I know I stayed in that small, white room. But I do know for a fact that I only stayed in one hotel on that trip. Which room is the real room? They are totally different rooms in my memory. I mean, nothing even close to the same. If my life depended on it, I could not tell you which room was the real room.

I am pretty sure that these incidents don't mean I'm crazy. I think they just mean I'm able to sometimes, very rarely, catch some grave errors in my mental images and my memories. What I suspect is that these errors are constant occurrences, but I have no way of noticing, or knowing.

Our intuition that we perceive and remember the world in any direct way is an illusion.

Three Petty Things and One Not

Petty Thing #1: Last night Nora asked me how much I weigh. Huh? I said I wasn't sure, since I haven't stepped on a scale in a very long time, and then I gave her an estimate. She said, "Well maybe you could try getting on the scale and then you can let me know." Uh...no? I'm pretty sure Nora has no idea what she weighs, so her sudden interest in what I weigh was pretty surprising.

Petty Thing #2: We have to go to this wedding. I don't want to go, but Jake wants to take the whole family so we're going. It's on a Friday afternoon, at like 3, in a town about 2 hours away. So that means taking the day off work. And having the kids miss their nap. So anyway, it's his cousin who is getting married and I've never met the bride. I've met the groom twice, I think. But recently I got an envelope in the mail (of course addressed to me with Jake's last name) inviting me to this woman's bridal shower. Just me, not Jake.

Okay, wait a sec. I have literally never met her. And she's like 35 and getting married for the second time. And I have never met her. And I'm supposed to go to a bridal shower for her? Are you freaking kidding me?

(Also, the wedding invitation itself included their registry info. Sorry, but...no. I'm no Emily Post, but come on.)

Petty Thing #3: Due to not-worth-getting-into details I am paying $160 to feed my department members lunch. In return for all of those other months when they feed me lunch, and by feed me lunch I mean bring in a tray of limp deli meats and call it a day. Um, can we abolish the communal lunch thing already? I'd rather keep my $160 and take care of my own lunch each month.

Non-Petty Thing: Last night Nora had reflux. And here I had thought, once again, that she had outgrown it. We've been cutting back on her meds. Anyway, I figured she needed to sit upright for a while so I said she could sit with me and watch Deep Space 9 with me and Jake. (It was a quirky episode. The episodes are either stressful or quirky, and this one was quirky, so I knew it wouldn't be scary.) She sat there on my lap for the whole time, and occasionally Nora would look at me with this huge, sweet smile on her face, because it was such a treat to stay up with Mom & Dad and look at the grown-up video they were watching. It totally reminded me of this one time that I took Nora to meet a friend at a coffee shop when she was about 6 months old. And the whole time, sitting on my lap, Nora would look up at me with these giant smiles. My friend said, "Boy does she love you!" And things haven't changed at all. Nora seems so grown up to me most of the time but sometimes I still see the baby in her.