Aristotle (and Liz) on Happiness

According to the professor whose class I am TAing this semester, Aristotle wrote that "Happiness is full activity aimed at virtue," if we think of virtue as meaning general "goodness" or "righteousness." As he explained to the students, what Aristotle meant is that we are not happiest when we are "having fun"-- we are happiest when we have found something that we willingly devote our whole selves to accomplishing.  This is why, he told them, you feel exhilarated after spending an entire night finishing a project with your classmates, even though it was hard and exhausting.  He said that for a lot of people, they find this place of potential in athletics, or in music.  It is not a "release" from life, like a fun night out drinking with friends-- if you are living your life well, it is life.

Happiness is full activity aimed at virtue.  This is the simple, straightforward phrasing of a concept I have been beating a bush around on this blog for years now.

This is why I did so well on my exam, even though the preparation was hard, and I hated the time it prevented me from spending with my family.  I wasn't nervous about the outcome because I knew I'd given it all I had.

This is why, when I finished the exam, my way of "relaxing" was to start making a quilt.

This is why I stay in grad school at all, frankly.

This is why I love (and miss) distance running.

This is one of the reasons why I was able to give birth to a posterior baby without asking for an epidural.

This is one of the reasons why I survived long days at home with a colicky newborn.

When I was teaching high school, I can remember one point at which I realized most of my freshmen thought it was uncool to "try."  I made each of them write an essay about the thing they worked the hardest towards and actually achieved.  Then they made license plate shaped signs about them, they had to share with the class the story that gave them "license" to operate in my class, and we used them to decorate the walls.  That was one of my best teaching ideas and moments.  Everyone came up with something, and it made a noticeable difference in my classes from that point onward.  It was like, with one activity, we successfully banished from that classroom the mentality that "cool kids don't try."  But I can also remember standing up there at the end and telling them, "What you may not know until you're older, is that it doesn't matter if anyone else thinks what you've accomplished is cool or impressive. Once you know it in your head, and you can feel it in your heart, nobody can take it away from you.  And the people who cheated to get where you got, or even farther?  They don't have what you have."  They were all like, "Awe, Ms. C, enough with the 'life lessons'."  But maybe a few of them carried it with them.

I wish I'd had this phrasing at my disposal then.  Full activity aimed at virtue.  I'm glad I have it now, for when those moments when I need to remind myself.  And for when we need to teach Nora.

Goodbye January// Go Ravens!

I have several blog posts in my mental queue that may never get written because we've had some very frequent but unwelcome visitors in our house during the month of January: germs.  Nothing knocks you completely out of the orbit of your regular routine like a sick baby or a sick mama, and it seemed like neither of us could really get well last month.  Nora recovered from a nasty cold just in time to travel to Oregon, where she caught the stomach virus that was in heavy rotation out there.  She handled it like a champ but passed it on to me just in time to miss our scheduled flight back home.  Billy came down with it literally minutes after arriving back home.  We were all feeling better in time for Nora to return to day care, where she promptly caught the stomach virus that has been going around our area, which featured the added bonus of a nasty fever!  Then she shared this one with me, as well.  As a result, it feels to me like the picture that best sums up our January is this one:

When you feel miserable and can't afford to venture more than 30 steps from your bathroom, it's easy to get caught up in negative thoughts.  I'm certainly guilty of feeling pretty sorry for myself this month, but in the midst of it all, I never lost sight of two things: 1) My dad felt like this for a good percentage of 5 years, and he got up every day and tried again, and 2) I am fortunate to have an excellent safety net that helps my family can recover quickly and fully.  So now that I can eat again, I'm feeling much more optimistic about the world, so I'd like to take a minute to focus on the positive and say how thankful I am for all of the following:
-a chubby baby whose health and attitude recover quickly
-a husband who does everything he can think of to step up, help out, and support us,
-a mom who happily took Nora off my hands for a whole day, took me to the hospital in the middle of the night, and helped get us on the plane,
-a sister, RN who responds to TMI texts with expert advice and offers of help at all hours of the day,
-the excellent health benefits we have through my husband's employer,
-IV fluids, anti-nausea medication, and kind ED staff members,
-in-laws who offer help and wish us speedy recoveries,
-an understanding professor and fellow-TA,
-day care teachers who helped Nora make a fairly smooth transition in the midst of all of it, and
-everyone else who sent me notes of various kinds to wish me well and see if there was anything they could do.

I can't say it enough: we are the luckiest.  As a small token of thanks, I wanted to share a few pictures I've been taking over the course of this week to catalogue Nora's pre-Super Bowl Ravens spirit.

Here's to a Ravens win tonight and a better February!

Goodybe, 20s. It's been great knowing you.

Today is the last day of my 20s.  I guess this begs some reflection, considering how much apprehension people generally have about turning 30.  I don't dislike getting older because my life gets better every year. These days, I think it's common to feel like you spend your 20s figuring things out and trying to get to where you want to be, and then you get to spend your 30s enjoying where you are.  I certainly feel that way.  I generally prefer to avoid boasting in favor of letting my actions speak for themselves.  But I'm really proud of everything I accomplished in my 20s, and before bringing them to a close, it feels appropriate to take a minute to acknowledge how hard I've worked and how far I've come.

Far and away, the best thing I did in my 20s was seek out and cultivate relationships with the very best people.  I met, fell in love with, and committed to a man who is smart, funny, hardworking, and supportive.  I've never had to question his love or loyalty, and I have never given him a reason to doubt mine.  We created a spirited, resilient, curious baby girl whose mere existence brings smiles to our faces and joy to our hearts.  I come from a good family, and though I decided to move across the country and made some mistakes along the way, I have worked hard at maintaining positive relationships with my family members.  I get along with and actively enjoy the company of all of them, especially my mom, sister, and brother.  My dad died knowing how much I loved and appreciated him.  I also married into a good family.  I've worked hard at learning how to be a member of a family who does things differently than I'm used to and how to learn from what they have to teach me.   I've appreciated being embraced by them, and I hope they feel, as I do, that we're all better off for having been brought together.  And every step of the way-- college, teaching, and graduate school-- I've managed to find and befriend women who are smart, insightful, honest, and supportive.  I've tried to return the favor of their friendship by displaying the same qualities in return.  I've loved all these people with my whole heart and I've tried to put their needs ahead of my own when circumstances called for it.  I've worked on fostering open, honest, and productive communication with them.  I've tried to encourage them all to tell me when I'm being unreasonable and use honesty to help me become better than I am.  These relationships are the crowning achievements of my 20s.

So while I'm about to list my other proudest accomplishments from this decade, please know that these people I've mentioned above are the ones who've made everything else I've done possible, and they're the ones who've made all of these things feel worthwhile instead of empty.

Academically:
-Graduated from Valparaiso Summa Cum Laude.
-Convinced my professors and classmates that I belonged in graduate school even before I convinced myself.
-Completed my Master's Degree at the University of Maryland.
-Earned the departmental prize for best MA level paper.
-Was admitted to the UMd PhD program, with full funding, in a year when approximately 5% of qualified applicants were accepted.
-Completed a Critical Theory Certificate from the UMd Graduate School despite beginning graduate school with no idea how to describe what critical theory actually is.

Professionally:
-Earned the respect of my fellow teachers and administrators in the four years I spent as a high school teacher.
-Succeeded in convincing my students to give extra effort to their English studies, which I know because they made comments like "I think my brain will explode if I think any harder," they greeted me in the hallways with a smile, they came to me to talk about their lives, and they improved their test scores despite my refusal to "teach to the test."
-Gave countless extra hours of my time as Student Government advisor to enhance for my students the aspects of the high school experience that were the most meaningful to me.
-Was offered and accepted a graduate assistantship at UMd that paid me a stipend on top of complete tuition remission for my master's degree; brought a positive attitude to that job and did my best to be good at it, even though desk work was outside my comfort zone.
-Made the dedicated effort to serve my students as an instructor at UMd despite the vigorous demands of my own academic curriculum.

Personally:
-Lived within my financial means.
-Dedicated myself to giving back to my community through teaching and other charitable acts.
-Lived in Oregon, Indiana, and Maryland.
-Traveled to Ireland, Mexico, California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.
-Attended and participated in the weddings of many friends, all of whom remain married.
-Took care of the things that needed taking care of following Dad's death.

Physically:
-Ran a marathon, a half marathon, several ten milers, and countless shorter races of various lengths; earned third place in my running club's yearlong championship series.
-Conceived, carried, delivered, and nursed a healthy baby girl.

Emotionally:
Learned a decade's worth of lessons, the most important among them including:
-Being right is less important than doing the right thing.
-As an educator, the most you can do is give your students the very best of yourself and your talents.  You have a responsibility to try to engage all of them, but once you've done that, you have to focus on the ones who want to learn from what you have to offer instead of dwelling on the ones who don't.
-The true value of a good education is not in the facts it teaches you, but in the way it teaches you how to learn, how to evaluate different pieces of information, and how to use the new knowledge you've acquired to improve your life and the lives of others.
-The only way to maintain a meaningful long-term relationship of any kind is through open and honest communication.
-Loving someone doesn't mean giving them what you want to give; it means doing the work to find out what they really need and figuring out how you can give it to them.
-If I dig deeper, I am always capable of a little bit more than I think.
-Through preparing and persisting, I can endure misfortune and be ready to capitalize on any good fortune that comes my way.
-I am at my best when I know when to ask for help.
-When you lose someone you love, one way to move on is to keep the best parts of the past close to your heart as you continue to look forward to the future.
-Some aches may never go away.  And you may not want them to.
-What's right for me is not necessarily right for everyone else, and I have no right to try to dictate how other people choose to live their lives.
-If you can't or don't acknowledge the position of privilege in which you sit, it's difficult to give anything meaningful back to your community.
-You should only compare what you have to what someone else has if you're looking to make sure the other person has enough.
-If you treat others with fairness and respect, most of them will give it back to you, and the ones who don't will not have the power to get you down.
-It is wise to be emotionally, intellectually, professionally, and financially generous. It makes you feel good to give with no strings attached, and people remember the things you do for them.
-If you don't like the way things are going, it's up to you to make some changes.
-There is always so much more to learn.

With all that said and done, I'm excited to start another decade.  It might seem hard to imagine that my 30s could top my 20s, but when I look at the people I have around me these days, it's hard to imagine they won't.

The Lathe of Heaven

My teaching semester is wrapping up.  Friday was my last day of teaching, today was the last regular lecture, my students turn in their final papers this week, and they sit for the final exam next week.  This means that while all of my preparatory work for the semester is completed, I still have quite a bit of grading to finish before I can call the semester complete and move onto more focused preparations for my comprehensive exam.

The last novel we covered in the class is the only one I hadn't read before: Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven.  This novel seemed like a strange choice to me, but I have now come to believe it should be required reading for all perfectionists with control issues, like myself.  (Added bonus if you're from Portland, because that's where it's set.)  The main conflict of the novel is between two male characters: one of them is capable of altering reality through his dreams, and when his psychologist finds this out, he attempts to manipulate the patient's dreams in order to "improve" the world.  What the psychologist finds out, of course, is that he is rarely able to initiate the changes he'd like to see, and even when he succeeds, the changes he envisions don't turn out to have the results he intended.

Le Guin uses the characters to present two completely opposite worldviews: the psychologist who thinks every man's "purpose on earth" is "to do things, change things, run things, make a better world"  and the Daoist dreamer who says things like "I do know that it's wrong to force the pattern of things.  It won't do. It's been our mistake for a hundred years" (82).  In using these two men as exemplars of two oppositional ideologies, Le Guin is not particularly subtle.  The psychologist says things like "it's not how you get there, but where you get to that counts," while the dreamer disagrees, suggesting "We're in the world, not against it.  It doesn't work to try to stand outside things and run them that way.  It just doesn't work, it goes against life.  There is a way but you have to follow it.  The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be.  You have to be with it.  You have to let it be" (139, 140).  I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to reveal that in the end, the psychologist is responsible for his own demise after trying to take on too much and the dreamer is left to with the opportunity to continue following "the way."

So anyway, I've been giving this a lot of thought.  The other insights the book emphasizes are likewise thought provoking.  It suggests that you can't really know what is best for anyone else, and if you think you know how someone else should behave, it indicates your desire to exert control over them even if you think you have good intentions.  Likewise, the novel argues that even when you do a thing that you think is undoubtedly "good," you can't know for sure that it will only have positive outcomes.  I would argue that the book advocates trying to find your place in the world without indulging in the fantasy that you can exert ultimate control over anything that happens to you or to anyone else.  In a moment that was particularly resonant for me, the narrator suggests the dreamer "took it as it came.  He was living almost like a young child, among actualities only.  He was surprised by nothing, and by everything" (126).

I guess what the book has allowed me to do is achieve some critical distance from my own attitude about life, which has given me the opportunity to consider what some of its negative side effects might be.  I align with the psychologist, not the dreamer.  I don't often try to tell other people what to do, but I absolutely attempt to exert complete control over my own life.  I don't follow any path; I try to blaze my own.  On some level, becoming a mother has helped me to realize that this is an ultimately unsustainable way of being.  It has also made me fear that, because Nora feels like an extension of myself, I may someday find myself trying to govern her choices and their outcomes while ignoring the fact that doing so would be a glorified attempt to control her life in the same way I try to control my own.  I've written before about how spending time with Nora has helped me appreciate the benefits of slowing down, focusing on the moment I'm in, and worrying less about strict schedules and milestones.  Perhaps this is another way of saying she has helped me to recognize some of the benefits of living "among actualities only."  I already know some of life's greatest moments come from setting a goal, working toward it doggedly, and ultimately achieving it.  I think I'm only now beginning to learn that some completely unplanned and unforeseen moments can be equally gratifying.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to achieve a more harmonious balance between attempting to steer my own ship and learning to take things as they come.  I have the sense that this is likely to be something I'll continue trying to balance for the rest of my life.  I'm thankful to my professor for including this novel I never would have read otherwise on his syllabus.  This speaks to one of the reasons why literature is great: it gives us the chance to look at ourselves and our surroundings through different eyes.  It allows us, through the crafting of and the immersion within fictional worlds, to take a fresh look at the one we're living in.  Reading novels is one way of putting us in touch with what it means to be human.

Maybe you're more of a musical person than a literature person.  In that case, I've got something for you, too, off the Jason Mraz CD I just downloaded.  The general message is the same.




And I have one more, by Zac Brown Band:

Through the Eyes of a Child

At some point in the past few weeks, Billy noticed that Nora really likes looking outside.  He opens the front door so she can watch the flag wave from her jumper and holds her in front of the back screen door so she can watch his anemometer spinning in the wind.  In a continued attempt to increase her level of comfort on her belly, I've been putting her next to Oscar on the couch to look out the front window.  At first glance, it's hard to understand why she would find this scene even more mesmerizing than the TV.  Nothing's happening, in my opinion.  But as I've been sitting there watching her, I notice that she sees the wind blowing the branches of the trees, she watches the robin jump from its nest down to the ground and back, she watches people and cars pass by, and she watches Oscar's reaction to all of these same stimuli.

One of the best things motherhood has done for me is force me to slow down.  I'm still not very comfortable living at this different pace because I sometimes start to feel like I'm not "accomplishing" anything from one day to the next.  As Nora approaches her half birthday, however, realizing how much she has learned and developed by watching the world around her and feeling it out-- simply by being, really-- has helped me to see that oftentimes the things we "accomplish" somehow manage to build up invisibly until moments of significant, remarkable breakthrough.  Tracking movements with her eyes, reaching for a toy, and rolling over have all seemed like things she just woke up one day with the ability to do, but clearly she has been spending all the "unremarkable" days between slowly accumulating the necessary information.

The Other Side of Tired

Here's the Cliffs Notes version of the blog post I want to write today:

Remember how I briefly mentioned the Australian Open final yesterday?  Did you watch it?  What can anyone say about it, except that it was literally unbelievable?  That it made me proud to be a tennis fan?  That it made me marvel, yet again, at what the human mind and human body are capable of accomplishing?  Here's what Andy Roddick said about it:

Last week, I mentioned that one of the mantras I repeat in my head is That's where you are going to know yourself.  On the other side of tired.  As I wrote a couple years ago, it comes from Andre Agassi's autobiography, Open.  He told his trainer, Gil Reyes, that chasing dreams is so tiring, and that was Gil's response.  Yesterday, we got a new tennis image of what that kind of self-knowing tiredness looks like:

image via

I was cheering for Djokovic to win.  I used to like him because he was the underdog compared to Nadal and Federer, and I'm amazed by how he has managed to completely usurp them in the past year+.  I was also cheering for him to win because he had to serve second in the fifth set, which is a huge disadvantage.  If Nadal had broken Djokovic, the match would have been over.  When Djokovic broke Nadal, he still had to win his service game to win the match, which meant Nadal had a chance to even the score.  You might recall that when Federer beat Roddick in the 2009 Wimbledon final, Federer got to serve first, which meant that when he broke Roddick for the first time in the entire match, it was game-set-match-championship to Federer.  No chance for Roddick to break back.

Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked, and Nora is going to wake up soon.  And if she doesn't, I should spend the next 30 minutes reading.  So what I really want to say is this: when Rafa and Nole were standing there during the trophy presentation, you couldn't tell who had won and who had lost.  All you could tell was that both players had given everything they had.  Even though they had just been executing unbelievable athleticism a few minutes ago, and someone was about to hand them each a huge check and a trophy or a dish, they were so exhausted that they could not even stand.  I watched that whole trophy presentation, waiting for Djokovic to raise the trophy above his head, as is customary.  He couldn't do it.  In other sports, they talk about "leaving it all out on the field."  I've never seen a better demonstration of that cliche.  Djokovic used to have a bad reputation on the tour for being unfit, for calling the trainer to give himself a break, and for retiring from matches when he should have played them out.  I think he found himself on the other side of tired.

So I'm going to try to imagine this image every time I start to feel tired or exhausted over the next few weeks.  We'll see how that works out.

Back in the Saddle

My first week back to work went better than I could have imagined.

On Monday, Nora and I tried our best to savor our last day at home together before things began to change.  She just seems to get more curious all the time, and it is unbelievable to me to see how much comprehension she seems to develop in just a single day.  I have to be careful with her in her Bumbo seat because her head control is still developing, but here she is sitting in it and inspecting her toys from a new angle.

On Tuesday, I had to attend an orientation for new teaching assistants, so I took Nora to campus with me to meet my colleagues.  She took a nice long nap in the morning, so she was in rather pleasant spirits all day.  It was nice to have a reason to get properly dressed and leave the house.  We were met with so much enthusiasm when I showed up with Nora, and it was a delight to introduce her to many of the people I've been working with for the past several years.  

Billy began working from home on Wednesdays this week so he can watch Nora while I'm on campus.  I enjoy his work from home days because he gets to be there for Nora's golden hour.  In the first hour after Nora wakes up, she is often at her most curious, inquisitive, and happy.  I always put her in her play gym during that time, and each day we can see that she is getting closer and closer to rolling over.  She was getting such good rotation on Wednesday morning that we joked she is already much smarter after one day at college!

I had a really hard time leaving Nora that morning, and the car ride to College Park has never seemed so long.  Nora seemed un-phased, though, and she behaved well for Billy.  Once I got to campus, I was distracted enough that being apart from Nora for the longest period yet did not feel so bad.  In lecture on Wednesday, I realized that in all my anxiety about being separated from Nora, I managed to overlook how fortunate I am to have this teaching assignment.  Twice a week, my "job" is to attend an interesting lecture about my own subject area taught by a professor I like and respect.  Once a week, my "job" is to meet with undergrads to talk about books.  Aside from all the grading this entails, it is a job I would gladly do for free.  I felt better after making this realization, and Nora smiled and giggled for me when I got home, so that first day of the semester felt like a success.

Since the class had not yet begun in earnest, my professor cancelled the Friday discussion sections, giving me an extra week to prepare to teach.  On Thursday, I savored the chance to be home again with Nora for a "normal" day.  Evidently, she did too; she took a three hour nap!  She normally naps for around 30 minutes, she sometimes naps for an hour, and on a few rare occasions she has napped for up to two hours.  So a three hour nap is unprecedented... but it was also reassuring.  I think Nora must have been worn out after Tuesday and Wednesday, so it was nice to see that she is finally able to sleep longer when she is tired.

The cancellation of Friday's discussion sections also allowed me a chance to do a "practice run" of having Patti watch Nora for the full day.  Being away from Nora is hard enough; I can't imagine what it would be like if I was also worried about the type of care she receives in my absence. On Friday, the thing that comforted me enough to get some work done was knowing that Patti was taking great care of Nora.  Chuck and Brian were home when I went to pick her up, and it was fun to see how excited they were that they got to see her that day.  I was also relieved to find that Nora hadn't given Patti trouble with eating or napping, and that the two of them had fun playing during Nora's waking periods.

After all that, it was great to be home with Billy and Nora yesterday.  There were several signs that things are finally falling into place, which meant it was the first day I really felt like we are doing a good job as parents.  Nora has started reaching for and holding her toys, she is beginning to tolerate tummy time, she holds her head up much higher these days, and she is getting closer to rolling over.  She is learning so much now that it's easy to see how getting enough sleep is fueling her brain.  She's getting better at self-soothing and she's continuing to nap for longer periods.  Now that she barely puts up a fight before relaxing and falling asleep, it's hard to believe that only a few weeks ago she was screaming and writhing every time we started the nap routine, or that a month ago, it was literally impossible to get her to sleep without holding her for the entire nap.

An added bonus from yesterday was getting a visit from Aunt Vickie and Tres, who leave for their Bahamian cruise today.  After bringing us lunch and patiently waiting for the little sleepy head to wake up, they were treated to a fairly pleasant mood and a few hours of playing.  A while back, I finally found a onesie that said "aunt," which I had to buy immediately because Vickie does not want to be called "auntie."  Nora was also decked out in her little Gap skinny jeans, so naturally I had to take a photo of my two favorite girls.

Tres was last here right before Thanksgiving, before Nora got sick with RSV. For us, that time has really flown by, but having him visit again really drew attention to how much Nora has grown and how much she has developed in the past couple of months. It was great to see him and hear about their plans for the cruise... even before we opened the gift he brought, which could not have been more adorable.  These Tiny TOMS are still a little big for Nora, but that's perfect, since she isn't really wearing shoes yet.

In fact, I loved them so much I had to buy myself the matching pair!  So you can be sure that photo will be forthcoming. : )

Besides a considerable amount of peace of mind, the main lesson I took away from all this is what a difference a week can make.  When you're in your 20s, the weeks all blur together, and it's easy to turn around and realize a whole month has passed unnoticed.  But when you're approaching 4 months old, one week is long enough for an amazing amount of growth and development.  In addition to trying to take things day by day, I hope that next time I start to feel frustrated or clueless, I can say to myself: Give it a week and things will be different.  Surely we will have some weeks ahead where things are as bad as they were good this week, but now that I know just how quickly Nora can change, I hope I have an easier time getting through them.

Today, after we watched the last two hours of the Australian Open final, we took Nora to the mall to make some returns.  She was a little skeptical about having her photo taken. : )

Posts are likely to be shorter and more sporadic from here on out, since I really need to be doing academic work, but I'll try to share pictures and a few thoughts once in a while. : )

The Baby-Sitter's Club #37

Today I've reached the 37 week mark, which is a milestone because it means my pregnancy is full term!  As I understand it, the baby's lungs are the last thing to finish developing, and from this point onward she would be able to breathe unassisted if she were born.  Since she could survive on her own outside the womb, there's no longer any need to worry about pre-term labor!

In celebration of reaching full term, I spent the morning reading through the pregnancy notebook I have been keeping along the way.  While reading old entries did nothing to alleviate the feeling that I've been pregnant forever, it did help me reflect on how far the baby and I have come since conception.  Pregnancy doesn't feel quite so unnecessarily long when I think about the fact that Baby D started out as a single cell and has grown into a fully formed infant that currently weighs somewhere around six pounds.  Bringing the baby to full term also makes me really appreciate my body's ability to endure so many difficulties in the process of getting her ready to be born.  Healthy babies might be born all the time, but I have several healthy friends who have lost babies at various stages in pregnancy, so I feel especially fortunate that all signs continue to indicate that our little one will be healthy when she joins us fairly soon.

I also thought posting some pictures of our recently completed nursery for everyone to see was another appropriate way to celebrate reaching full term.  I know I have been promising a video, and I tried shooting one, but it turns out that I'm not capable of showing the various features of the room without inducing motion sickness.  I think the pictures capture the look of the room pretty well, and if you want to see the baby's room in real time, you'll just have to come visit!

I always thought it was a bit strange to devote a lot of time and energy to decorating a baby's room because the baby doesn't know the difference.  What I realized after I'd repainted the room and began choosing wall decals, however, was that I was decorating the room for myself and not for the baby.  When we first purchased our house, I decorated the whole thing one room at a time.  I really enjoyed the process, which made our house feel like home, and I've enjoyed living in a space that felt right for our personalities ever since.  Once all the rooms were done, though, and I returned to graduate school, I guess I forgot how much I enjoyed decorating.  Since I had plenty of time this summer, making decisions about the room and executing them also gave me a productive way to channel my excitement about the baby into a task that has measurable results.

This first photo is the view from the hallway.  We decided we wanted to be able to see inside the crib from the doorway, so that made space planning for the room a little complicated.  Thankfully, we have enough clearance to put the crib here without blocking the entrance to the bedroom.  From this angle, you can also catch glimpses of the window valance and crib skirt my mom sewed for the room.  I think they look great!  She custom made both of them with the measurements I sent her, and I am really excited to have a crib skirt which goes all the way to the floor because it means I can store things under there while also keeping them out of view.

Right now the crib is holding the various baby toys we have to keep out of Oscar's reach, but we'll need to find a new home for them when the baby is ready to sleep there.  This angle does a pretty good job of showing off the purple and green butterfly mobile I found, and here you can also see the child-size rocking chair Billy's Aunt Nancy repainted and reupholstered for the little one using our color scheme.

Here is another view of the left side of the room, which also shows the bookshelf we put in the corner.  This gives us a place to store the baby's books and a counter on which to put the owl lamp Patti found.  We put some baskets on the bottom shelf for some extra miscellaneous storage.  I didn't want anything above the crib that could fall off the wall, so I put up some purple and lavender butterfly decals to compliment the mobile.  It looks a little strange in this photo, but in real life the mobile creates shadows on the wall, and I like how this gives the decoration a little bit of a multi-dimensional effect.  We have something else to put on the wall above the bookshelf, but that can't go up until we announce the baby's name. : )

Here you can see the other corner of the room-- the one that is off to the right when you walk in.  This corner is dominated by the glider Jacelyn and Allen very generously handed down to us.  You wouldn't know it, though, because it looks brand new!  We just got it from them over the weekend and I love it already.  I imagine our admiration for this chair and our appreciation for the gift will grow exponentially once we have a baby to rock in it!  The Jimmy Buffett quote painted on the wall above the chair is the only remnant from the original room decor.  I measured off a rectangle around it to leave alone when I repainted the room, and when I ordered the vinyl decals I had them send me a few strips of purple so I could frame out the quote.  I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the green paint I used to write the words even matches the green vinyl decal perfectly!

This last picture shows the corner of the room opposite the bookshelf, which is next to the closet that is immediately adjacent to the doorway.  I posted a picture of the tree decal when I first applied it, but now you can get an idea of how it really looks.  We had a different Ikea dresser in this spot that we were planning to keep, but we decided that we wanted something a bit sturdier that had more storage, so we replaced it.  The baby's great grandparents helped out a lot with the furnishings for the room because Mimi and Papa as well as Nana and Mr. Dick gave us monetary gifts so we could buy the things we really needed for the baby.  Their generosity made it easy to get pieces that fit the space and our storage needs.  This dresser is also a little bit taller than the last one, which made it the ideal place to mount the changing pad, negating any need for a separate changing table.

Now that the baby could theoretically arrive any day, and I no longer have the excuse of working on the nursery, I guess it is time to direct my nesting instinct toward cleaning the house.  I'd like her to arrive a little early (even though I know she'll probably come late), so I keep saying that I hope the baby inherited my aversion for procrastination.  I have told her several times that I take due dates very seriously and have never once asked for an extension on anything in hopes that she will take this advice to heart.  : )  Meanwhile, I keep putting off cleaning up, even though I know that if I don't want to do it now, I certainly will not want to do it after she arrives. : )

(I loved The Baby-Sitter's Club when I was growing up.  I think Ann M. Martin kept publishing them after I grew out of them, but up to that point, I had read them all.  My favorites were the Super Specials because I got to read about the same events told from the various perspectives of the different girls.  I guess my appreciation for these focalization shifts this should have foreshadowed my somewhat sophisticated interest in books. : )  The 37th book is "Dawn and the Older Boy," but I will not go into detail about what I remember from this issue because it is too early to be scaring Billy with the possibility that our daughter could fall under the spell of older boys.  Don't worry, Billy-- her friends are looking out for her.)

Breaking Back

In tennis, it is such a big advantage to serve that you are expected to win every game in which you're serving.  When you win your own service game, it's called a "hold."  When you lose your service game, they call it being "broken."  I don't know the origins of these terms unless the "service break" refers to a break in the expected pattern of the server winning each game.  Since the players alternate service games, and a two game lead is needed to win a set, the set is usually won when a player breaks his opponent's serve at least once.  If no one breaks, the set goes to a special game called a tiebreaker, unless it is the final set of the match, when some tournaments require the play to continue until one player gets the two game advantage.

The best thing you can do when you've been broken is to win your opponent's next service game, which is called "breaking back."  This nullifies the advantage your opponent achieved by breaking you and puts the set back "on serve."  It also stops the momentum shift that is likely to occur when your opponent wins three straight games.  When you break back, you essentially even the score, though you may still be down by a game if your opponent served first.  You'll have to break again if you want to win the set before the tiebreak, but at least you are no longer playing from behind.

I am explaining all of this because I turn 29 today, and the best way I can think to describe the past year is that while 28, I was broken.  Sometimes in tennis you're broken when you play a loose game, or you let the other player get in your head, or you make too many unforced errors.  This was not the case for me.  Figuratively speaking, I came into 28 with a careful game plan, a good support team, proper training, and excellent conditioning.  I played the best tennis I could play while I was 28.  I pulled off shots that would have been clean winners at any other point in my life, but the balls kept coming back until I couldn't return them.  I maintained my mental focus.  I even hit a few serves that would have been aces in different games, but this time they were converted into returns that were shoved down my throat.  I was broken despite my best intentions and my best execution of those intentions.  And I was broken badly.

For the past few years I thought I would have some anxiety about turning 29.  I am not really worried about turning 30, because I'm looking forward to what my 30s have in store for me.  But I thought my 29th birthday might trigger the feeling that I was running out of time to accomplish all the things I'd expected to do in my 20s.  But this is not the case.  I am so ready to say good riddance to 28 that I welcome 29 with open arms.  I am glad this service game is over.  I do not like getting broken any more than I thought I would.  And 29 means a chance to break back.

Losing my dad was the most profoundly difficult of the several difficult experiences I endured while I was 28.  I hope that in the years to come, when I look back on 28, the pride I feel in how I played will grow stronger than the sting I've suffered from being broken so badly.  But despite any success I might have in recovering some positive sentiment for 28, it will always be the year in which I lost my dad.  It will always be the year in which I was broken.

This makes me extra thankful for my birthday this year. I can already see that 29 will be include important opportunities for me to break back.  One of the things I love about tennis and about life is that they both afford chances to stop, reset, and start over.  Everything else aside, if the baby and I make it through her birth happy and healthy, 29 will always be the age at which Billy and I had our first child.  If you read my Dad's blog, you know that he often relied on sporting metaphors to explain his experiences and his attitude about them.  In our family, this is why we love sports.  Sports give us a way of understanding our experiences and sharing them with others.  The tennis analogy feels perfect because breaking back is a hugely significant accomplishment, and at the same time, it is only the first step of many towards coming from behind to win the match.  Now that I've been broken, there is nothing else to do but just keep playing until I get the chance to break back.

(I can't claim to have drawn this parallel between life and "breaking back" myself; I first discovered it when I read James Blake's autobiography, which he titled Breaking Back.  In the book, Blake describes how fracturing his neck gave him the unexpected opportunity to spend plenty of time with his father as his father died of cancer, and how he subsequently had to overcome a debilitating case of shingles before returning to the ATP tour.)

Lifting Belly

Life is speeding along quickly in our house, which it always does when we are busy... and since we're always busy, life always seems to speed along quickly.  Between working two days a week at my old office job on campus, getting ready for the baby's arrival, taking care of neglected projects around the house, watching tennis, and catching up with friends, the few weeks since I returned from California have slipped by without me feeling like I have anything to report.  So rather than rehashing my daily activities, which seem rather unremarkable, I thought I'd spend some time discussing the question I find myself being asked with increasing frequency:
Do you enjoy being pregnant?

This is my stock short answer for this question: I sure enjoy it now more than I did a few months ago!  I am trying to enjoy this middle stage after the nausea is mostly behind me and before I get so big that I'm uncomfortable.

The long answer is more involved.  I am beginning to suspect that the people who "enjoy" being pregnant most are ones who enjoy being the center of attention, who otherwise feel neglected or in need of more attention in their everyday lives, and/or who enjoy having an excuse to eat excessively.  I am not any of these women.  I do not like having people dote on me or pay me special attention, my husband is good to me all the time (not just because I am pregnant), and pregnancy has actually made it harder, rather than easier, for me to eat. 

There are certainly some things I enjoy about being pregnant.  Most of all, I enjoy that it means there is a baby at the end, and though preparing for her arrival feels like a never-ending checklist of things to accomplish, I like that every passing day brings us closer to her arrival.  I love to see how excited Billy is about the baby and how interested he is in her development.  I also appreciate that he is encouraging and supportive about the changes my body is undergoing, especially since I struggle to recognize myself in the mirror these days.  I like getting a chance to see how excited everyone else is for Baby D's arrival, too, so even though I feel overwhelmed by all the attention I am paid as the "pregnant person" when I arrive somewhere, I try to think of it as attention people are paying to her rather than to me.  I like being told that I am going to be a good mother and/or that Billy is going to be a good father.  I don't know how people come up with these assessments, since how well a person knows us seems to have no correlation to whether they say this or not.  But whenever someone says we will be good parents, it feels like an acknowledgment that we do our best to be good people who do good in the world, and can thus be trusted to teach another little person to do the same, and that's not an acknowledgment you get to hear others make very often.

It is tempting to dwell on the things I miss about not being pregnant.  They're easy to rank right off the top of my head, even though I am well past the miserable nausea that plagued my first trimester.
1) Sleeping through the night, on my stomach
2) Running
3) Sandwiches with deli meat
4) Coffee
5) My regular clothes
6) Alcoholic beverages
I try not to get too hung up on these things, though.  It's worth giving them all up to have a healthy baby come October.  None of them are things I can't have back after our little girl arrives.  Most of them are even things I can work around.  I can eat an occasional tuna sandwich.  I allow myself a frappuccinno once in a while because they only have about half my daily allowance of caffeine.  I like my maternity clothes, too, even though there are some days in which I must try them all on before I can settle on something that looks or feels good enough to wear out of the house.

The best workaround of all, though, has been lifting weights instead of running.  I have gone through periods of weightlifing in my life before, but I can never remember actively enjoying it like I do now.  My new routine consists of 25 minutes of light cardio on the elliptical machine, about 20 minutes of arm lifts, and about 20 minutes of leg lifts.  I try to get to the gym 4 days a week, though when it's nice I sometimes walk the trail instead. 

I have decided that I want to have the baby naturally, without an epidural or other pain medications, and one of the worst things about pregnancy is knowing that this is what I want to do without feeling absolutely sure that I will be able to do it.  So I think the main reason I enjoy lifting these days is because I have convinced myself that it is good preparation for childbirth.    When I lift weights, I do three sets of every exercise with a short break between sets.  Each set gets increasingly difficult, and sometimes the last few lifts are quite painful... but then you get to take a break to recover and mentally prepare for the next set.  I like to think labor will be a lot like this, since the heightened pain of the contractions is broken up by less painful intervals in which you can try to let your body relax.  Women I know who have succeeded at delivering naturally tell me the key is to tell yourself, each time, that you can make it through one more contraction.  I think that's a lot like weight training, where it's always easier to get through the exercise if you focus on finishing one set at a time.  The main difference, obviously, is that you can choose to slow down as the reps get harder, and you get to decide how much time to take off between sets, and neither of those is the case in labor.  This type of exercise is certainly more similar to labor than distance running, though, for which I have had to teach myself to endure a long period of increasingly difficult but never unmanageable discomfort.  To be perfectly honest, the reason I am still an exceptionally slow distance runner is because I have never succeeded at forcing myself to enjoy or even endure interval training. 

Whether lifting is really good mental and physical preparation for labor, however, is not really the point.  The important thing is that I have convinced myself it is.  I've written before about how my distance running helps me in my academics because it gives me the chance to exercise my determination.  I equate these things with one another because both require persistence and keeping the end goal in sight while focusing on achieving the markers of progress along the way.  Both give me that same deep feeling of satisfaction that I can only get from accomplishing something that's really difficult.  So each time I lift, I continue to build up the parallels between lifting and labor in my head, because I know it will help me mentally even if stronger legs and arms don't actually make labor any easier.  The parallels continue, really.  When I get done running, I'm tired, but my body rarely physically hurts the way it does when I finish lifting.  Sometimes my body hurts for days afterwards, which I certainly expect to be the case after giving birth.  But it's that good hurt-- that "I just accomplished something difficult and good for me" hurt-- which gives me the satisfaction necessary to convince me to get back to the gym.  Plus, there is one thing I know for sure: now that I've graduated from 5 lb curls to 7.5 lb curls to 10 lb curls, I'm much more prepared for lugging around a baby and all of her stuff!

So perhaps a better answer to the question, "Do you enjoy being pregnant?" would be: I enjoy my regular life so much that I do not automatically find pregnancy to be additionally enjoyable.  But I am so excited about having the baby that I am working on learning how to enjoy pregnancy, to appreciate the changes it has brought into my life, to recognize what new things it can teach me about myself and those I love, and to be thankful for the ways it is preparing me to be a mother and to handle the changes that are ahead of me.

P.S. My belly is quickly obscuring my view of my Asics.  And I've only made it through 30 of the 688 pages of Digital SLR Photography All-In-One for Dummies, so I don't know if it would have been possible to get my belly and my feet in focus in the same shot.  Hopefully I can figure this camera out before I have to share blurry baby photos, too.

("Lifting Belly" is an erotic lesbian poem by Gertrude Stein.  As such, its content has very little in common with a blog a post about a heteronormative pregnant woman lifting weights during her pregnancy.  But I have to be careful, when I lift, to avoid doing anything that could strain my belly or my changing abdominal muscles, so the title of this poem frequently pops into my head and makes me smile at the irony when I'm lifting.  And then the brain starts going, and it thinks things like "Maybe it's not so different.  The poem and what I'm doing are both about one female demonstrating her love for another in a very bodily way.  I have to lift, rather than run, because my daughter is literally physically attached to me and dependent on me in ways Stein describes being joined with her lover.  So the only real difference is the erotics..." and further down the rabbit hole.  But these are thoughts only a handful of academically-minded people who've read Stein's poem might care about, and I haven't really begun to sort them out... so I'll save that line of thought for a conference presentation someday or something.)

Old Mortality

I used to pride myself on being someone who rarely gets stressed out.  I've been thinking in recent days, though, that there's a difference between managing stress well and finding ways to minimize the stressors of everyday life.

I'm excellent at minimizing stressors.  I'm married to a man who stabilizes me, provides me with a firm foundation, and gives me a soft place to land.  We live within our means, we work to save money, and we pay all of our bills on time.  In my work, I plan ahead, schedule my time, and refuse to procrastinate.  I'm fortunate to work in a field where the work is always rewarding, even though it is always demanding.  I surround myself with people I can depend on-- people who help me carry my burdens rather than adding to them.  Whenever I can, I do favors for other people.  I really don't "sweat the small stuff."  I keep a friendly, cheerful dog in my home who reminds me of life's simple pleasures.  I have an exercise routine that generally keeps me healthy in mind and body.

I was thinking about how, in high school physics, one of the projects is the egg drop.  It's as though I've crafted an excellent egg carrier around myself.  My egg doesn't crack from life's drops.  My classmates frequently say things to me like I don't know how you do it all, which kind of reminds me of the reaction I had when someone in my physics class designed an egg drop carrier that protected his egg.  He said "I just built it in a way that made sense to me."  I really can't imagine going about my life in any other way.

Dealing with Dad's death, though, has been too high of a drop for my egg carrier.  I feel like my egg is cracked.  I no longer feel like someone who manages stress well.  I am sometimes amazed at my lack of productivity on my work-from-home days.  All I did today was read one article and fifty pages of fiction? How is that possible?  I feel like I've been working all day, I think.  Then I remember that on every work from home day, there are also emails to send, phone calls to make, and questions to look into regarding Dad's affairs.  There are also moments when I find myself staring off or mindlessly surfing the internet, unaware of how sidetracked I've let myself get.

So I was thinking about how I might carry the analogy all the way through.  My egg is cracked, but it's not crushed.  I still manage to get something accomplished every day.  Then I started to think, Well, what good is an uncracked egg, anyway?  You can't actually use it for anything.  It's not fertilized, so if you never crack it, it will just spoil.  A crushed egg is pretty useless, too.  You can't sort out egg from shell, and it's all mashed into the carrier.  Maybe a cracked egg is the best, actually, because you can turn it into an omelette or scrambled eggs or something.  (Dad loved to make both.)  Maybe this means I'll have to spend some more time in this frying pan before I'm transformed into something positive.

Today's a work-from-home day, so there are phone calls to be made, emails to send, and questions to be looked into.  Thankfully, though, there's also a lot of Katherine Anne Porter to read-- "Old Mortality," in fact.  Three classes this semester means three research projects/papers, and I've decided that two of them will be on Porter.  I'm trusting that KAP, along with the other usual features of my egg carrier, will carry me through.

The Night Before Christmas

Merry Christmas from our house to yours!

Last night, Vickie picked up Billy and me from the airport after an eventful trip back to Oregon for the holidays.  While we were home, I submitted my final paper of the semester, which felt like a huge weight off my shoulders.  It was a very rigorous term, so it feels great to have most of the work behind me.  I began working on my winter break project, which I'll need to submit before the semester is officially finished, but I am looking forward to undertaking that reading list over the next few weeks.  I also checked my grades for the two classes I've completed, and overall I was quite pleased with how they turned out.  I may have finally learned that perfection on my transcript is unimportant as long as I feel like I gave the classes my best effort.  I know I could have done better in one of the classes if I hadn't also been taking two other ones and teaching, but as a whole, I feel very satisfied with what I was able to accomplish this term.  I also feel relieved to have it behind me and to know there'll never be another one like it.

It was really nice to be in Oregon.  I finally got to introduce Billy to Jordan, Krista's husband and my old friend, and we both got to meet their girls for the first time.  I was so glad to have time to catch up with Krista and Jordan, and Clara and Evie were even more adorable in person, which I didn't think was possible.  When we were saying our final goodbye and Clara waved and said "Bye Liz!" my heart grew three sizes that day.  We also hosted a get together of old high school friends, and my friend Tina arrived early so we could meet her new baby, Sophia.  Sophia was happy and smiley, and it was fun for me to see Tina as a new mom and talk to her about how she has begun to figure things out.  (It was NOT fun to hear that she'd been in labor for over 24 hours.  Yikes!)  It was also great to see my friend Kelsey and several other girls we grew up with.  We are all doing such different things, and we're in different phases in our personal and professional lives, but everyone is doing so well.  It made me thankful that I grew up in a time and place where it was cool for girls to be smart and kind.

I was also glad to have a chance to spend time with family.  I'm spoiled now that Vickie lives with us, but especially after such a difficult semester, I was really looking forward to going home to see my mom and dad.  Mom continues to work really hard in her job downtown, and she told us that she recently realized she has worked 22 Saturdays this year.  She has had to put in a lot of overtime, and her job sounds like a lot of work, so I was really thankful that she was able to take some time off to spend with us.  My dad's parents, Mimi and Papa, finally got to town after several flight delays, and it was great to be able to see them for the holidays again this year.  I was also glad to see my dad, and we finally got to hear more details about his trip to Chile.  He also shared his photos of the trip with us, and it was nice to hear how much he enjoyed seeing the country with Nate and Judy and how nice his visit was with his exchange student host family.

Dad says he felt well during his trip, but unfortunately the tumors in his liver seem to have spread since his return.  Shortly after we arrived in town, his doctors determined that he has some kind of blockage in his liver, so he underwent a procedure to try to alleviate the obstruction.  The procedure was not as successful as the doctor had hoped it might be, so they are continuing to try to figure out what the next step will be.  My dad has kept such a positive attitude and a determined spirit throughout his battle with cancer that it just feels so fundamentally unfair that the cancer does not recognize how badly he wants it out of his body.  My dad and I are both such do-ers that I know it's hard for both of us when there doesn't seem to be anything that we can do.  I was really thankful that we were home to try to help out and keep him company since he wasn't feeling well.  Given Dad's health, we've decided to forgo the trip to Australia we had planned for January and will instead return to Oregon to spend some more time as a family.  I had been looking forward to this winter break all semester, and now I am more appreciative than ever that I don't have to "report for duty" at school until late January.  Billy has never been to Seattle, so I am also hoping we will be able to get up there with Mom during this next trip out.  It will also be fun to have the chance to see Jordan, Krista, Tina, and their girls again.  We're all hoping that Dad will be feeling better then, but if he is not, I am glad that I will be able to be home to help out with whatever he needs me to do.  Plus, now that he has a DVR, we can catch as much Australian Open tennis as my heart desires!  : )

It was hard for me to leave Portland, but it is always nice to come home to our own house, and Oscar is definitely happy we're back.  After sleeping in this morning, we went up to Patti and Chuck's to exchange gifts before heading to Nana and Mr. Dick's to spend Christmas Eve with Chuck's side of the family.  Billy's cousin Gina is newly engaged, and his cousin Chuckie recently finished his nursing program, so there was plenty of Christmas cheer with that side of the family this year.  It was fun for me to have Vickie there, too.  Billy's family has made me feel like one of their own for several years now, but having them adopt Vickie into the swing of things makes me realize anew how kind and welcoming they are.  Now she's off to work at her church's Christmas Eve service before we all head up to Billy's Aunt Mary and Uncle Gary's house to celebrate with Patti's side of the family tomorrow.

I'm sorry that I won't get to see Nate or my Gramma Kingston this holiday season, but I feel more thankful than ever that I've gotten to spend the holidays with all of the other people who are most important to me.  I hope all of you out there are enjoying plenty of good food, fun, and laughter with your loved ones this holiday season.  My tendency to get caught up in my academics makes me appreciative that I have so many people in my life who remind me that the most important things in life are not printed between the covers of a book.  I feel like I must have overused the words "thankful," "glad," and "appreciative" in this post, but I can't help feeling like my heart is full this Christmas.  Cancer infuriates me, but it also reminds me that life doesn't promise us anything, and in just one day everything can change.  I feel so fortunate that I got to hug and laugh with so many people I love this month, and I hope you'll all take a few extra minutes this season to do the same.

Growing up, my dad read us The Night Before Christmas by Clement C Moore every Christmas Eve before bed.  In the spirit of that book, I'll close with:

Happy Christmas to all, and to all, a good night!

(I almost like this picture better than the proper one at top.  The camera has fallen over, Oscar has jumped out of his spot, and Vickie and I are laughing, but Billy is still trying to play it straight to get the shot.  Such is life in our house these days.)

The Little Engine That Could

Hi everybody!  Yesterday I submitted a 32 page seminar paper on Eliza Haywood's Fantomina and the 17th century scientific revolution.  I have been busting my brain on this project for several weeks.  At the end of the day, I have no idea whether my professor will find it adequate or not.  I took on some very complex theoretical frameworks, though, so I'm really proud of where the project ended up.  I think that's supposed to be the point of a seminar class, anyway, so I'll consider it a success no matter what grade my effort garners.  It's funny how sometimes the class you thought you'd be least interested in is the one that motivates you to push yourself to produce your best work.

I also taught my last undergrad class of the semester, so it finally feels like some of the pressure I've been under is lessening.  There's still a lot of work to be done; I collect final papers from my students tomorrow, so I have to grade those and finalize their grades for the semester by the 17th.  Yesterday, when I collected their final participation self-evaluations, one of the most quiet girls had written a short note about how much she had enjoyed the class.  It reminded me that one of the things I learned while teaching high school was that you have to consciously make the effort to avoid doubting yourself just because some of your students frustrate you.  They're the most vocal ones, but they tend to obscure the fact that for most of the class, things might be moving along quite well.  I always want to feel like my courses are ones in which students get out of them what they put in, so I need to re-learn to stop getting so frustrated by the students who don't put in much effort, and re-learn that the students who sit there quietly and periodically compliment my shoes before class might be learning as much as I hope they are. I also had three students schedule appointments during office hours to go over last minute questions about their papers, and all three of those conferences went really well.  I quite enjoyed talking to those students and could tell that they had been putting a lot of work into their research projects.  I hope I'll be able to take those moments away with me and leave the grade complaints behind.

I also have to research and write a 10 page paper for my postcolonial class, due December 20.   Though I think I know where I'm headed for that paper, I don't feel like I have a great idea.  I think I may have run out of great ideas and/or the energy to conceive great ideas for this semester, and I think that's okay.  Just do the best you can is the mantra that has been on repeat through my head this semester, so I'll give that paper as good a shot as I can muster.  Everyone likes to tell me things like "Nobody loves every paper they submit" and "Sometimes a course just doesn't strike a chord with me," but I've never actually submitted a paper I wasn't quite proud of, so we'll see how it goes.  At least I can direct my focus on that paper once my grading is done rather than trying to work on it while doing 18 other things simultaneously.

Then I have the entire holiday break to work on a research project for my American modernism seminar.  I am actually quite excited about that because it feels like I will finally be getting the chance to focus specifically on my area of interest.  It will also give me some increased motivation to read some of the books/articles I've been meaning to read but haven't been able to find time to get through.  I hope working on that will keep my momentum going through the break while still allowing me to feel like I've had a break from the intensity of the semester.  After this week, I don't have to be on campus again until the end of January, and I realized recently that this is the first time I've had over a week off since I began graduate school.  Even this past summer, when I had a month off of work, I still had to go to class four days a week for my intensive German class.

I'm also looking forward to going back to Oregon for the first time in two years.  It will be fun to see my parents and several friends, and I'll finally get to meet Krista's little ones.  My dad recently told me that my grandparents are going to be in town for part of our visit, so that was just like icing on the cake.  While we're home we're also supposed to finalize plans for our Australia trip!

I hope that in the long run, I'll be thankful that I put in these few hard, high pressure months to get a little bit ahead of schedule on my funding package.  It's comforting to know that I'll never have to teach students and take classes in the same term.  And I hope that next term will feel a lot more manageable by comparison. I still have a lot going on, but I'm not teaching, so I hope I'll be able to avoid the feeling of being completely and totally overwhelmed.  The comments of my classmates and professors suggest that they don't feel like my work has suffered too much as a result of my over-commitment, but I know that Billy and Vickie and a few friends have seen just how close to the edge this semester has pushed me.  I hope for all of our sakes I'll be able to continue getting better at finding a healthy balance between school and home life.

Death in the Afternoon

When I was teaching high school, we talked about how Hemingway coined the term "grace under pressure,"  and I showed them his episode of A&E's "Biography," which explains Hemingway's relationship to bullfighting, about which he wrote Death in the Afternoon.  In short, Hemingway had a deep respect for bullfighting because he considered matadors to be the individuals who best demonstrated grace under pressure.

One of the reasons I love sports so much is because they afford athletes opportunities to demonstrate grace under pressure.  This week we got two great examples.

Pitching a perfect game in baseball is a demonstration of grace under pressure-- history shows that maintaining your mental composure enough to keep making outs until the very end is an almost impossible feat.  We all know that Jim Joyce botched the call at first base and ruined Armando Galarraga's chance to have a perfect game recorded in the books, but what impressed me most was Galarraga's immediate response to the call.  If you watch the video, you notice that for one split second when he knew he had made the out, he started to celebrate-- but when the call was made, he just smiled, stared at Jim Joyce, and then walked back to the mound.  HE SMILED!   And then he recorded the next out!  There was a lot of hype after the game, and all the analylists practically started singing kumbaya because Joyce apologized and Galarraga said "nobody's perfect" (even though he had been)... but what I'll remember is that smile.  My brother Nate was impressed by this moment, too, and wrote on my facebook wall, "Someday I'll tell kids about the grace with which Armando Galarraga handled himself in that situation."

Maybe that smile grows out of ten years spent in the minors before being called up to the majors.  Maybe it comes from the maturity of being able to recognize the strength of one's accomplishment even without official recognition of that accomplishment.  In the Women's final at the French Open, we also saw an experienced player earn the chance to make good on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.  Before the French Open, Francesca Schiavone had never advanced beyond the quarterfinals in a Grand Slam tournament.  She'd only won three tournaments in her whole 12 year career.  She was the heavy, heavy underdog.

I'll admit that when I started watching the match, I wanted Sam Stosur to win.  I'd been impressed by her giant-killing journey to the final: she'd already upset Serena Williams and Justine Henin, the two favorites to win the tournament, and had destroyed former world #1 Jelena Jankovic in the semis.  I was already imagining how exciting it would be to experience in person the Aussie hype that would have been around Stosur at the Australian Open in January had she won her first slam on Saturday.  But even though no one gave Schiavone a chance, she came out with a game plan that handcuffed Stosur, and it became impossible to cheer against her.  With the chance to win the match in the second set tiebreaker, when most players participating in their first slam final against a heavy favorite would have tightened up and choked, Schiavone took risky shots, executed them perfectly, and began jumping for joy after each winner.  Aside from Serena and maybe Kim Clijsters, the women in today's game seem afraid to rise to the challenge in this way.  I generally find the WTA tour uninspiring precisely because it so sorely lacks these kind of grab-the-bull-by-the-horns moments.

But Schiavone is evidently not our average WTA player.  Afterward, Schiavone said "I took it, and I didn't lose the chance. I didn't care about nothing. I want to take that [ball] and play my tennis. It was the moment."  Peter Bodo also reports that when she was asked how she accomplished something so much greater than anyone had ever expected of her, she responded, "Every morning that you wake up, you work to do something like this. So maybe it was far away in reality, but here [she pointed to her heart] it was never that far."

Thanks, Armando Galarraga and Francesca Schiavone, for reminding me this week how much the human mind is capable of achieving.  For reminding me that the moments when we are placed under the most pressure are also the moments when are given the opportunity to surpass everyone's expectations.  For demonstrating, as Schiavone said, that "This is mean that everybody have the chance to be who really you want to be, and to do everything in your life. This is what's happen to me."

The Graduate

Vickie is officially a Valpo graduate!  Welcome to the club!

Nate, Vickie, Me, and Billy after the ceremony

Billy and I were happy to have the opportunity to return to Valpo this past weekend to meet up with the west coast family in order to celebrate Vickie's graduation.  Having her attend our own alma mater has been a lot of fun for me these past four years; I watched her enjoy many of the same experiences I did while also taking on many more responsibilities.  In the past year alone she has served as the President of the Student Nurses Association, Group Coordinator for Valpo Overnight Visits, Tour Manager for the Admissions Office, a consultant in the Writing Center, a member of the Dance Ensemble, a DJ on the campus radio station, and a member of the medical team that traveled to Central America on a spring break service trip.  Her intramural team has also done something mine was never able to do-- beat out the sorority teams to win the yearlong points award-- and they've done it three years in a row!  

Vickie with Mom, the VU Class of 2010, Vickie has had enough photos, Vickie with Dad and Judy, 

Vickie amongst her nursing classmates

In addition to all of those extra-curricular activities, Vickie also completed her nursing coursework, so she was awarded her Bachelor's of Science in Nursing!  Being six years ahead of Vickie in school meant I had left home before she started racking up accomplishments in high school, so as an older sibling, it was a lot of fun for me to be able to go back to Valpo to celebrate such a major accomplishment in her life.  Spending time with her on campus made me realize that while we both attended the same university, she made her own space and her own impact there in ways that make me really proud.  While I spent more of my time searching for the perfect beer pong partner, writing lesson plans, and chasing sorority girls off the elliptical machine, I think it is a testament to the environment and opportunities Valpo provides that we both came away from there feeling so positively about our experiences.  When I first visited Valpo back in 2000, it was the friendliness of the people that made me want to go there, and despite all the beautiful new buildings they've built between my tenure there and Vickie's, that friendly attitude remains the thing that makes Valpo a place I'd recommend to anyone who asked.

I got up early on Saturday morning so I could go for a run along my old marathon training route.  Valpo's campus feels so different now that it doesn't make me too nostalgic, but that run certainly did.  It brought back the feeling of accomplishment I enjoyed while training for the marathon, but it also served as "Liz's underage drinking tour," and I made it through five miles easily because I was busy thinking about all the fun I had with my friends in the various houses and apartments on the outskirts of campus.  Though I look back now and wonder how I bonged beers with such ease, I have really fond memories of all the goofy things my friends and I did on the Valpo party circuit.  I know a lot of college kids get themselves into serious trouble because of their drinking habits, and I've often tried to figure out how it was possible that I never did anything I seriously regretted, never found myself in a dangerous situation, and never got arrested (or even written up!) despite all my shenanigans.  This weekend I got to thinking, though, that despite making some questionable decisions about how much to drink, I always made good decisions about with whom to drink.  My friends at Valpo were all good-hearted, kind people, and we always looked out for one another.  When I watched Vickie begin to think about life after Valpo, I couldn't help but remember being in that position six years ago.  I have never been one who wanted to go back to college, but it made me miss all my old friends and the fun we had together.  It also helped me to remember what a special time those four years were in my life, so I'm thankful for that.

It seems self-indulgent to say that the best thing I can wish for my sister is that, after enjoying college as much as I did, she is able to find as much personal and intellectual gratification as I've found in my post-college years, but that is what I wish her all the same.  I know she's had a positive impact on that university, and I hope that going forward, the experiences she had at that university prove to have made an equally positive impact on her.  (And if anyone ever asks me what I "gave back" to Valpo in return for everything I took away, I can just say "I gave you Vickie!")

Want to see her collect her diploma?  Want to see the fierce red heels she wore with her cap and gown, which the people who took the photos above clearly did not properly appreciate?  Want feel seasick as a result of my extremely poor camera work?  Want to lose your hearing from hearing me cheer for her?  Then watch the video below! 

(The Graduate is the novel by Charles Webb upon which the movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft is based.  I'll summarize simply by stating: Benjamin Braddock did not attend Valparaiso University.)