Reunion

Lisa V. recently (or not so recently) had a post about imagining where you want to be in 5/10/15 years. [I can't find the post now, either because I'm too tired or it's one of the ones she took down.]

I’m not ready to do that quite yet, but as I am heading off to my 20th college reunion, I can look back.

I did not attend the 15th reunion, because between a wedding planned shortly afterwards and my husband’s recent job loss, we didn’t have the time or money. 2003: We got married. My husband got his diagnosis. I stopped being vegetarian.

At the 10th reunion, I had recently defended my dissertation, but had not yet landed my tenure track job. After I got the tt job the next year, I attended my 11th reunion before driving cross country, since it would be the last time I’d be within driving distance of the college. What? Your college doesn’t have a reunion for every class every year? Your reunion probably hasn’t been on the cover of Psychology Today either. Anyway, I really only stopped by for part of a day, and mainly spent the weekend with a friend nearby.

At the 5th reunion, I had recently been discharged from the “behavioral sciences unit” of a hospital. I was about to take a year off from graduate school for full-time language study in Taipei.

20 years ago, I was finishing up my last semester of college. My senior thesis had been handed in in April, but I had comprehensive exams and term papers to write. I didn’t get the offer of the internship in Old Colony until sometime in May, so I was deciding between that and a position in the Peace Corps.

I only go to the reunions when I am sure a couple of my closest remaining college friends will be there, because I tend to get flashbacks to feeling like a complete social misfit freshman year. The people I know best tend to have a love/hate relationship with our college. When we arrived on campus for the 5th reunion, as we were parking the car, both the people with me said they got stomach aches every time they came back, yet one of them had been back every year since graduation and the other had been to a couple of reunions already. In my case, I think I got an excellent education, but I was also very unhappy a lot of the time. It is where I first ended up in therapy, though I didn’t get the big Major Depression diagnosis till graduate school.

Random Bullets of Back to School

• It’s hard to believe I have been at my university for almost nine years. Since I haven’t taught in a while between the sabbatical and the not-quite-maternity-leave, the time snuck by me.
• In those nine years, this is the first time I’ve started the semester on a Monday. Usually the fall semester starts on a Wednesday and the spring semester on a Tuesday.
• Language class: It is the fourth time I have taught this particular class. And the fourth different textbook. I have taught a different class in the sequence more often, and had plenty of opportunity to get familiar with its textbooks over the years.
• Literature class: So far, I do not see significant improvements in the new edition of the anthology I use for the survey. At least they waited ten years to put out a second edition, unlike some of the language textbook publishers. Out of 21 students on my roster, 20 attended the first day of class, and there were no students who had added after the list was printed. I don’t think I have ever had a roster that accurate before. The language classes had a more typical pattern of missing and extra students.
• It’s hard to write syllabi after the baby goes to bed when the baby decides that he was really just down for a late nap and is now ready to play from 10:00pm to midnight.
• If you decide that one day per week should be free of classes so that professors can work on their research, does it really make sense to hold meetings on that day, just because nobody has class conflicts?

Conference Travel

By the end of yesterday evening, I had memorized the 16 digits of my credit card, plus the three digit code on the back.

Five of the six times I typed it out were to pay for various aspects of a conference in the spring, so I haven’t become some kind of online supershopper (besides, those people wouldn’t be typing in their card number every time).

Rumor has it that our department suddenly has a lot of travel funds this year, so that we will be reimbursed for all of our conference travel, not just part of one conference, which has been the norm in the past. They won’t reimburse my husband’s travel, of course.

I don’t normally register for the conference, book a flight, rent a car, and reserve a room immediately after getting notice that my proposal’s been excepted, but we had problems with the hotel reservation for this conference last year because I waited until the last minute. I think I felt that arranging anything ahead of time would be jinxing the pregnancy (that was my trip at 34 weeks). The registration and hotel booking were also more complicated last year because of the location. (I don’t normally rent a car for a conference either, but there are some special circumstances.)

Mr. Luo needs a hotel with a fitness room to do his physical therapy. In the U.S., this isn’t such a problem, because you can get down to the level of someplace like the Comfort Inn and they’ll have a little room with an exercycle in it. For foreign conferences though, it means we need a fancy, modern hotel. No quaint converted monasteries. Twice we’ve stayed in places overseas without any fitness facilities and it did not work well for Mr. Luo.

On our recent trip, we stayed with his parents when we visited them, and in a fancy hotel when we went to see the other relatives. I don’t think about it much when I stay in a conference hotel, but I felt a bit guilty staying at an expensive hotel for personal travel (and no conference discount). We were in town for a very short time and had an early flight out, so I decided we should just stay by the airport. Due to a scary night in a Howard Johnson at Newark once when Continental stranded me, I decided that I would stay at nicer places for any future airport hotel sojourns. And I figured at some point, we’d be tired and have a tired baby and want to be able to eat in the hotel. So, I had my reasons, and my husband agreed, but it still seemed wasteful. I don’t think any of our parents would have stayed in at this hotel, even with an early flight and a baby. And shouldn’t buying a house make us more frugal?

At this point I am wondering if it would be less boring to write about my hair. And yet, I publish…

Random Bullets of Three A.M.

• Counting on nap time or nighttime to get work done is a bit like counting on office hours to get work done.
• Or perhaps worse. My students are more consistent about avoiding office hours unless we schedule a conference than Zebediah is about sleeping.
• That said, it was a glorious day when he started napping in bed instead of on my lap or while being carried, so I’m not really complaining if the naps last anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours.
• By the way, isn’t the whole point of office hours to be available for unscheduled time with students?
• Part of the problem seems to be professors at our university who tell students not to bother them during office hours.
• But maybe I’m just not interesting enough anymore. When I was younger and teaching in Old Colony, students came by just to chat in English and ask me about song lyrics. And we didn’t even have scheduled office hours.
• The relationship between students and teachers is quite different over there though. Both more formal and more familial.
• I just submitted an paper proposal online. The online form insisted that I was over the word limit in my title, abstract, and bio, although Word’s word count tool told me I was under the limit on all three.
• Even counting a hyphenated surname as two words, my own word count of the title comes up under the limit.
• My very first conference paper, in graduate school, included the word “fertility” in the title. Was it a sign?
• I tried to write this proposal before traveling, so as to avoid the whole last-minute thing, but it didn’t happen.
• If I found enough time to find and buy a house, I should be able to find the time to write. It’s harder to do the latter with the baby, however. Meredith Small may have been able to write with her baby in a sling (I read that in an interview once, somewhere), but Zebediah doesn’t approve of sedentary sling-wearing anymore.
• About that house: walk through tomorrow, closing on Wednesday. Yikes.
• About that trip: mutual love fest between Zebediah and his paternal relatives, especially his great grandmother.
• I think he may have a thing for southern accents, or it may just be the great-grandmother charisma.
• It seems a little sad to me that Zebediah has no relatives except his parents nearby, but I suppose to him it will be normal. As a child, I didn’t even know anyone from my father’s side of the family, and I don’t remember worrying about it at all.
• My husband doesn’t seem too warped from having lived far from his extended family for his first twelve years.
• I think Zebediah has already been on more planes by six months than I was on by 14 years.

So Lazy I Forgot the Title the First Time Around

39w0d. Still pregnant, no baby in sight.

Some links.

Dooce on Ikea. We also have a newish Ikea, but I haven’t been there, because it is 45 minutes to an hour away from me, depending on traffic (well, if I timed it particularly poorly, I could easily spend a couple of hours to get there on the Death-trap Interstate) and I am afraid of spending too much money. Also, this way I can continue to tell people that I have only been to two Ikea stores in my life, one in Hong Kong and one in Edinburgh. The Container Store is closer, but not too close. Having just spent $230 there last Saturday, I think I’m glad it is not on my side of the city.

Dean Dad and Dr. Crazy on blogging ethics, developing a blogging voice, writing about students, and the apparently eternal desire to police other people’s blogs. I’m just doing links, because I am too tired to write coherently just now about my thoughts on this. I will say that I think Dr. Crazy’s post and her comments at Dean Dad’s blog add important thoughts to the discussion. I do think there is a difference between complaining over the copier and complaining on a blog, because audience of a blog is more likely to include students (which doesn’t mean we should never write about students, but as Dr. Crazy says, we need to remember that blogs are public).

In fact, it reminded me of recent posts at Life and Times of a Labor Nurse. She had written about a patient who was rather pushy and also inconsiderate of other patients. Brooklyn Girl commented on her own experience at her first birth, and even though the Labor Nurse pointed out that the situation was different, in that Brooklyn Girl had had good reason to be assertive, BG wondered if somewhere a labor triage nurse had blogged about her. Life and Times seems to have gone private or been taken down, which may have something to do with another post in which she received threatening email about the ethics of writing about patients at all (she pointed out that she disguised identities in the same way that doctors do when they present case studies at conferences).

The pushy patient post brought up a lot of issues for me about medical care and self-advocacy that I have not been able to blog about. Maybe I’ll give it another try soon.

Journals, Magazines, Books

Nesting, purging, de-cluttering continues. (Although I am still a little skeptical of the term nesting. After all, Dr. Crazy is cleaning too these days.)

1.

If anyone would like a bunch of old issues of the PMLA, in good condition, let me know.

Or, if you’d prefer a bunch of old issues of Wired (”from back when it was worth reading”), plus a few newer ones, in beat-up condition, we’ve got those too.

2. After four and a half years of cohabitation, the need to make room for baby has motivated me to combine the some parts of my fiction collection (the parts that have nothing to do with my research) with my husband’s.

Our duplicates are:

The Lord of the Rings

Frankenstein

The Handmaid’s Tale

Dubliners

Prince Caspian

The Magician’s Nephew

Doonesbury: The Original Yale Cartoons, Downtown Doonesbury, In Search of Reagan’s Brain, Guilty, Guilty, Guilty, A Tad Overweight but Violet Eyes to Die For, An Especially Tricky People, As the Kid Goes for Broke, And That’s My Final Offer, Call Me When You Find America, Speaking of Inalienable Rights, Amy

There would be more duplicates if most of the books I owned before college had not gone missing over the years (Doonesbury collection and LOTR being salient exceptions, because I must have taken them with me to college). All the duplicates (except LOTR, to which we are too attached, and all of which are too beat up to donate anyway) are going to the local literacy group’s book sale. The magazines will most likely be recycled. I will send a note to my department’s listserv about the PMLA, but who will want a ton of paper when they can print out whatever articles they need from  J-Stor?

Third Trimester Travel

The trip went better than I expected, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend travelling at 34-35w.

My doctor’s standard recommendation is that travel is fine up to 36w, barring complications. I was almost hoping that he would tell me not to travel at my appointment two days before we left, except that I didn’t want to actually have complications.

Aside from worrying about my paper, I was afraid I just wouldn’t be able to enjoy the trip. I tire too easily now for the kind of energetic sightseeing I usually do. Anyway, I had already been to the two cities on our itinerary, and though I liked them both, this wasn’t the time I would have chosen to revisit them.

The part of me that worries too much and reads too many blogs feared that pre-eclamsia would strike suddenly while I was gone, or that the birth would simply happen prematurely without any convenient warning signs to keep me at home. The part of me that wasn’t worried about actually going into labor didn’t want to deal with having contractions and wondering if they were the start of labor or not, and doubting myself, and trying to communicate with my doctor at home and so on. (For the record, I am not so impressed with t-mobile’s World service plan, given that nobody who called me from the US got through. Missed calls were logged without the phone ringing, and without caller id. I was half convinced that one of our cats had died and our neighbor was calling to tell us, but all or most of the missed calls turned out to be my mother trying to say happy birthday.)

In all, I did enjoy the trip. At the conference, aside from my own session, I went to some other good panels. I did nap in lieu of going some sessions I would otherwise have attended. The plenary session that my husband accompanied me to was interdisciplinary in a way that allowed both of us to notice the weak parts (ah, marital snark bonding).

Megalopolis was fun too. I had had images of myself spending all my time napping in the hotel while Mr. Luo explored the sights and (historical) sites, but instead I napped while he used the hotel fitness center and then we went out together. His long workouts helped wear him out a bit and bring him closer to my energy level. We took a lot more taxis than we normally would and took a tour to get to one place out of town instead of doing the independent traveller thing and using public transportation. We even ate at one of the hotel restaurants a number of times, when we were too exhausted to go elsewhere. Fortunately, the food there was good.

Physically, I was not as uncomfortable as I had feared I might be, back when I was contemplating the conference. I am not too huge to get around. However, the occasional contractions or other abdominal and pelvic pains make walking a little harder than it would be otherwise. I have had to become accustomed to walking slower than my husband, which is not the normal state of affairs. Plus, I get more nervous when I’m not just walking around my neighborhood, where I know exactly where I am and how long it will take to get home.

I also discoved that even after two months of natural childbirth classes, my first reaction to a pain is still to clench something (usually my hands). Oops.

Also, even though Mr. L. helped with my luggage, he couldn’t carry all of our bags all of the time. Turns out my normal backpack / carryon was too heavy for me to carry without getting pains in the stomach muscles (though not the back at least), even on the trip home, when I put as much of the conference stuff as I could in my checked bag. Did I mention I hate asking for help?

Finally, I didn’t sleep well, which made the daytime fatigue worse. On a good night, I got up every three hours; more commonly, I woke up about every hour.

Quick Update

The last time I went away for nine days, I wrote up posts and dated them to publish while I was gone. This time, I not only didn’t do that, I didn’t write even though I had internet access part of the time I was away, as I got too obsessed with catching up to the hundreds of new posts in my Bloglines feeds. Please excuse the general laziness. (Not that I feel obliged to post while at a conference or on vacation, but I always get nervous when I don’t hear from third-trimester real life friends or bloggers.)

Since the last post, I:

delivered my paper in The Country Next Door

spent time with two grad school friends at the conference

revisted some tourist sites with my husband, who hadn’t been to either Conference City or Country Next Door’s Megalopolis

acquired a bunch of baby clothes from one of my friends

caught a cold

missed three prenatal yoga classes, and one more this morning, because it occurred to me that the other pregnant ladies might not want me around right now

got too big for my regular pants, finally (for those keeping track, at 34w, I could still get them on, but they were uncomfortable enough that I only took skirts and dresses on the trip)

turned 41

33w5d

I have a deadline this week, so posting will be light.

The nesting instinct may have kicked in. Whatever it was, it came with a burst of energy that led me to overdo the cleaning, cooking, rearranging of furniture, etc., which led to a sore back, which means I should try to limit my computer time to working rather than blogs. (Procrastination from the paper is responsible for last week’s return to regular posting.)

Otherwise, pregnancy continues. I feel like my belly is growing rapidly, though I still fit in my clothes. (I half expect to outgrow everything in the middle of my upcoming conference trip.) Sometimes I can sleep well, but mostly I don’t. Still, the only time I’ve felt really physically uncomfortable recently was on the hospital tour yesterday, but that was probably due to the morning’s overexertions.

I have a checkup tomorrow. I am feeling ambivalent about my upcoming conference, so I half hope that the doctor will tell me I can’t fly, but he’ll only say that if something is wrong, and of course I don’t want that. A month ago, I was ready to cancel the conference trip, but since I’d lose the same amount of money whether I canceled weeks ahead of time or at the last minute, I decided to wait and see.

At this point, I have so little confidence in my work’s contribution that I’m not feeling guilty about potentially depriving my fellow panelists and conference attendees of my insights. Besides, if I cancel, everyone on the panel will be happy because then they can talk for longer. (Then enough people will overcompensate and speak for way too long that the panel will run out of time despite having one less paper, but that’s not my fault.)

Welcome Home. Get to Work.

We finally went on our long-delayed trip to my home state, which is also Mr. Luo’s grad school state. Because I am at least as paranoid as Johnny, and because our cats would be even less effective than Jo(e)’s at scaring off intruders (one would hide in the closet, and the other only scratches people she knows and loves), I didn’t mention our imminent departure on the blog.

Since I didn’t take my laptop, all vacation-related blog posts were in my head, and right now I can’t even spit out random bullets of nostalgia from visiting my childhood hometown, but I’ll try to post something about it soon.

I have just under three months to complete my sabbatical project before my Estimated Date of Delivery. Time to clean off my desk and reattach the arm to my superergonomic graduate school physical therapist-recommended desk chair.