Half Birthday Girl

Yesterday was Nora's half birthday, but I can hardly believe she's already a year and a half old!  We have entered full-blown toddlerhood around here.  She may be short, but with a full head of hair and a full mouth of teeth, she looks nothing like her baby self.  She is constantly on the move!  My attempts to capture some half birthday photos all left me with one conclusion: she's much too busy for my iPhone camera these days.

Nora has so many "skills" these days that it would take me all day to try to remember and list them, but I'll try to give the nutshell version.  She's talking all the time, acquiring 1-2 new words every day.  It's easy to understand her most of the time, but she does have a few "words" she says regularly that we don't understand.  She sings parts of her favorites songs, she loves to dance, and she is thrilled by every dog she sees.  Lately she has taken up running at full speed and has the skinned knees to prove it.  She's very friendly and outgoing around people she knows but shy in new situations until she gets comfortable.  She can properly identify and point to few body parts, Elmo, and several family members and classmates in pictures and/or on screens.  She makes us laugh constantly.  She's very affectionate, and spirited, and proud of herself, and silly, and curious.  She knows some multiple word phrases, and when I say "I'm Mama," she knows to point to herself and say "I'm Nora," so she's on her way to sentences.

The other very welcome development of this week is that she has finally warmed up to the BOB stroller!  She let me kick off her half birthday with a three mile run on my favorite nearby trail, and every time we passed someone walking or running with a dog, she would call out "doggie!"  The soreness in my arms confirms she is much heavier now than she was the last time we attempted this!

Her 18 month doctor's appointment today went off without a hitch.  She only got one shot, which she didn't really mind since it was over before she was really felt it.  When I picked her up, I said "I know that hurt, but it is much better than getting Hepatitis.  I promise," to which she responded "Okay" as if she actually understood.  : )  She weighs 23 lbs 13 oz, is 30 3/14" tall, and her head circumference is 19".  Our pediatrician says these are all good improvements, mostly on pace with her previous growth, though she did move up a bit in height percentile.  She's into 18 month clothes now, although she sometimes fits better into 24 month tops because of her little buddha belly.

But maybe you'd rather see for yourself what she's up to these days.  Here is a video we shot last week to wish her Uncle Nate a happy birthday!

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.

Father's Day 10K

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll remember that I used to be a member of a local running club.  If you have been reading from the start, you'll remember that this blog actually started in 2009 as a place where I described what it was like to train for the National Half Marathon in order to raise money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation in honor of my dad.  If you're new(ish) to the blog, you probably haven't read many posts about running because I haven't done much of it since I got pregnant.  In fact, I found out I was pregnant immediately before the first club race of 2011; I hadn't been feeling well and I wanted to make sure I wasn't pregnant before I went out in the cold and tried to push myself hard for 5k... but I was pregnant!  This means that after running a race about once a month starting in February 2009, I haven't run a race since my last 15k in December 2010.  


So when I started running again about two months ago, I decided I was going to aim for completing my club's Father's Day 10K.  I love this distance, and I was really bummed to have to miss the race last year because there are a lot of reasons I associate running with my dad.  Plus, the last time I ran this race, the weather was unusually hot and humid, I pushed myself harder than I meant to, I ran out of gas, and I got sick after crossing the finish line.  So I wanted a do-over.  When I casually began running again in late May, 6.2 miles sounded like way too many, but I found that I was able to run 2 miles without stopping to walk after only 2 or 3 runs.  Then I could run 4 miles without walking, and then I ran 5 just to make sure I could do 6.  I actually couldn't believe how easy it was to get back to running.  I thought I'd have to get my lungs and legs back into shape all over again, but I guess that after 2+ years of regular running and 9 months of lighter cardio, the body can go 7 months without doing anything and still maintain a fairly good level of fitness.  The weather on Sunday was perfect for race day, and Billy was kind enough to kick off his Father's Day watching Nora so I could head to the race.  (It ended right smack in the middle of her naptime, so we decided it would be better for them to stay home, even though I was bummed that this would be the first time Billy wouldn't be waiting for me at the finish line.  Hopefully they can come next time.)


I left all of my timing equipment at home because I was afraid I'd try to run too fast; my only goal was to finish.  I decided that if I was still feeling good around 4 miles I'd push myself to finish strong, and that's what I was able to do.  My average pace was about a minute and a half slower than my usual race pace, but all things considered, that was much better than I was expecting to do when I first set this goal for myself.  I loved getting out there again.  I learned that neon colors, running skirts, and those toe shoes have really taken over since I ran my last race.  There was even one guy running in what I'd describe as flip flops, which someone told me are actually called "invisible shoes."  They may be "invisible" but they are not "silent."  Thankfully he was way faster than me because the flip flop sound would've driven me crazy.  The one nuisance of running at this slower pace was getting caught amongst people who alternated between walking and running slightly faster than me.  I hate getting passed in these races, so it irritated me to keep getting passed by people who would then stop to walk, allowing me to pass them.  I guess this is just one more reason to keep working toward getting back to my normal pace!


It felt great spend the run thinking over all the running memories I've had with my dad.  It felt great run hard to the finish line and cross it.  It felt great to see young kids milling around with their parents and know that in a few years, Nora will be able to do the same.  It felt great to drive back home and talk about the race with Billy and Hernie, a friend of ours from college who visited us over the weekend.  I'm not very fast, and I don't intimidate anyone out there on the course, and really, I'm not "racing" anyone but myself and whoever happens to be ahead of me when the finish line comes in sight.  (I have to try to pass this person, always.  Dad taught me to do it, and now I can't really help it.)  But running these races is one of my "things" and it was really great to be able to do it again, this time as a mom.

Packing the Car

Sometimes I wonder if I am repeating myself when I bring up these images that figure in my thinking on the blog.  I guess if I don't remember whether or not I've written about it, people are unlikely to remember reading about it, so here goes.

I've always been good at packing.  I have good "spatial awareness"or good "spatial-temporal reasoning" or whatever you want to call it.  I'm really good with directions because I can almost always orient myself inside a city, a transit system, an unfamiliar building, etc.  It also means I can look at an assortment of items, look at the space they need to fit into, and play the mental game of tetris required to get them in.  I just see it; I've always been this way.  I've been thinking about this a lot since becoming a mother.  It feels like there are now way too many packages to fit in the car of my life.  Since Nora was born, I feel like I've been shuffling them around, taking them in and out, trying to figure out which ones need to go on which trip and which ones can be left at home.  (I also feel like I forget, trip over, and lose plenty of them, but that's perhaps better left to a different post.)  I've come to accept that I'm never going to fit all the metaphorical packages into my metaphorical car all at once, and that's okay.  This is a sign of good fortune, isn't it?  To have more than enough metaphorical packages than one life can hold?

Even so, it's nice to be able to fit more of "me" into the car these days.  I've finally been able to start running again.  A few nights a week after Nora goes to sleep, Billy stays in so I can go for a run.  (I've tried pushing her in the BOB, but that package doesn't fit yet.  She gets cranky around one mile in, so she's in training to try to increase her distance, too.)  I've been running the short loop around my house of about 2.25 miles, and then last night I got in my head that I was going to go 4 miles.  I was surprised that I didn't have to stop to walk.  It has been so long since I achieved a runner's high that I hardly recognized it when it struck, but it was such a welcome sensation.  Having an iPhone also means I could reactivate my Nike+ account, which has been dormant since my iPod nano broke in early 2010.  I've even managed to get my nails back in shape and to paint them a few times recently!  This might seem exceptionally trivial to anyone else, but polished nails had become something of a trademark for me over the past few years, and it keeps me from biting them down to nubs, so it is nice to have them back.

It seems to be popular for a lot of moms to complain online about how they never get any time to themselves.  They're "so busy taking care of their children that they don't even have a chance to shower!", etc.  I'm pretty sure this is what kids today would call a #humblebrag.  It's not difficult to come across postings which reveal a competition between moms trying to prove how little time they devote to themselves; I guess the implication is that the best moms only think of their children and never think of themselves.  I don't subscribe to this martyr's mentality, though-- I belong to the "make sure I get a shower every day" school of motherhood.  It's my opinion that if I'm not at my best, I can't give Nora my best, and I can't be at my best if I completely neglect my own well-being.  First Lady Michelle Obama caused a minor stir around the holidays for suggesting something similar in this video clip (which also shows adorable Bo-themed decorations in the White House), but I agree with her wholeheartedly.  I also agree that prioritizing your own needs is especially important behavior to model if you are a mother of a daughter, unless you want her to believe that she doesn't deserve to spend some time doing things for herself once she has children.

So I'm thankful that as Nora gets older, it continues to be easier for me to find time to devote to things that benefit her indirectly by improving my own mood.  I think I'll always be shifting the packages in and out of the car, and her packages will always be important, but I insist that we both benefit when I can find a way to fit some of my own packages inside, too.

Now that summer's here, I hope I'll be able to figure out how to devote some serious time to my academic work.  The blog is called Diaper Changes AND Doctoral Studies, after all.

Baby Steps

I keep wondering if giving birth is going to turn out to be a lot like running a marathon.  I have a lot of time to wonder about this because I can no longer make it through the hours between 2am and 6am without being awake for at least three of them.  This overnight wakefulness is not a new feature of my pregnancy, and waking up during this period plagued me even before I became pregnant... but the length of time I'm awake and the discomfort I feel during this period have gotten much worse in the past few weeks.  I wake up needing to go to the bathroom.  Then I'm nauseous and hungry, even if I've risked heartburn by eating a snack before bed.  Then I'm still nauseous.  Then I cannot get comfortable, no matter how I sit or lie.  It's as though I am mentally strong enough to put my discomfort out of my mind during the day, but after I put my brain to rest for several hours, my body insists on calling attention to the fact that it has a full sized infant body inside it and that this state of being is not particularly pleasant for either of us.

So sometimes, when I'm not sleeping, I worry about how bad labor is going to be.  Then I get to thinking, even if it is miserable, it means the end is in sight.  Even if I have a whole slew of sleepless nights ahead of me, they will be of a different kind.  So maybe pregnancy will turn out to be a lot like marathon training.

When I was training for a marathon back in 2003, I spent the entire time unsure whether I would actually be able to finish the race or not.  As a result, I didn't miss a single one of the miles prescribed by my four month training program.  Even then, I was worried about the longest training run being over six miles shorter than the race.  What I didn't realize was that the daily rigors of preparing for the race would turn out to be much harder to endure than the race itself, at least for me.  If you can run 20 miles on your own through the empty streets of Valparaiso, you can most definitely run 26.2 miles alongside thousands of other people through the cheering crowds of Chicago.  The race itself, while much harder on my body than any single training run, was fueled by the adrenaline of finally making it to race day, the encouragement of the people I knew, and the excitement of knowing the finish line was finally in sight.

People think of a marathon as a long race because it's 26.2 miles long.  I thought of it this way, too, before I trained for one.  The marathon turned out to be a really long race, though, because on the first day I laced up my shoes, I had over 350 miles left to run before I reached that finish line.  Looking back, its no wonder I made it through the last 6.2 miles of the race that carried me beyond my longest training distance.  I'd already survived the difficulty of the 350+ that preceded them.

Pregnancy and marathon training are not exactly the same because pregnancy doesn't take the same kind of determination.  You can't wake up and think "No thanks, I will pass on being pregnant today because I feel miserable" before rolling back over.   You could, theoretically, wake up and decide "It's 5am, I will pass on getting up to run these eight miles before class" before rolling back over.  For me, though, the determination was never the problem.  I am so determined that it takes more effort for me to quit on something than to stick with it.  The thing that is hard for me is enduring the strain that possessing this kind of determination puts on me and my body.  And enduring my pregnancy has been at least as hard as enduring marathon training.

It might be really naive to think giving birth will be comparable to running the race.  Maybe labor will be so hard that I'll look back on things and think compared to childbirth, pregnancy was a breeze.  But I choose to ignore this possibility for now because worrying about it will do nothing to help me get through the obstacles that still stand before me.  What will help me get through the discomfort of these sleepless nights, and through labor, will be thinking of the birth as the last few painful steps in a long, difficult battle of endurance-- the only remaining steps I will have to take before someone hands me a baby.  Because while there is a lot of uncertainty at play here, I do feel confident that, as great as it was to be handed a finisher's medal and a foil blanket, being handed a baby will be much better.

(I don't know anything about this book, Baby Steps, but that felt like it had to be the title of this post.  And I don't care what this book is about, frankly, because it's nearly 5am and I'm finally feeling like I might be able to fall back asleep.  Goodnight!)

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.)

The Walking Woman

I have been reading Mama, PhD,  the book whose title I borrowed for my pregnancy announcement post.  In the book, many women write about various struggles they have encountered in trying to balance the desire to be a mother with the desire to be an academic.  The problem that keeps showing up from different women, in different disciplines, is that academia expects its members to behave as if they are disembodied minds which focus solely on their work.  I have also found that the expectations of academia suggest the “best” academics are wholly absorbed in their intellectual work, unhindered by the presence of their bodies, and not distracted by the influences of everyday life.  Every graduate student, I imagine, has heard some variation of the phrase "You're in graduate school; you're not allowed to have a life" from a professor at some point.  It seems pretty obvious to me that this results from the discipline’s predominantly male past, and Cather’s The Professor’s House demonstrates one example of what this looks like. The professor has an isolated study in his home where he performs his work, while his wife cares for his growing daughters in the house below.  He engages with them during prescribed times every week, but for the most part, his wife is responsible for keeping the family and the home running.  He ignores hunger and cold because venturing out of his study to eat or get warm leaves him susceptible to familial distractions.  He even remembers fondly that his favorite daughter sat outside his office when she was 8, waiting for him to finish his work before she told him she had been stung by a bee.

Since I began graduate school, I have been pressing up against the limits of the unreasonable expectation that academics should prioritize their work even at the expense of other aspects of their lives.  My work has been a top priority for me these past three years, but it has not been my only priority.  I am happily married, my husband and I are currently unwilling to move away from the house we own, and though I have good friends in my program, I insist on trying to maintain relationships outside my academic life.  With one exception, I managed to schedule my classes each term so that I’d never have to be away from my husband more than two nights a week.  I have carefully selected as mentors those professors who care about me as a whole person, and I often disregard the opinions of those who suggest I should devote even more of my time or energy to my academics.  I know myself, and I know that if all I did was school, I’d burn extra bright for a short period of time before burning out.  Attempting to maintain a balanced life helps me to keep enough fuel in my various fires for them to burn at a more sustainable rate.

So far, I have been largely successful in managing the work/home balance, if only because those in my domestic life are so supportive of my academic priorities. I love Billy more today than I did when I began graduate school. The patience and support he has shown for my dedication to my work has better revealed to me what an excellent man and husband he is. I almost always feel like a good academic, and I usually feel like a good wife. But I realize, and I worry, that choosing to have the baby could upset this balance and leave me feeling like I am not a good wife, mother, or academic.  The traditional expectations for these three roles are mutually exclusive in a variety of ways.  The women who’ve written in the Mama, PhD anthology suggest this fear is not an unreasonable or unusual one.

This anxiety makes me reflect on the story that allowed me to give myself permission to have the baby as a graduate student.  That story is Mary Austin’s “The Walking Woman,” in which the title character shares her tales of living, loving, and mothering in the desert with the short story’s narrator.  After talking with the Walking Woman, the narrator concludes that there are three things a woman needs, and if she has them, she can live without anything else.  These three things are “work—as I had believed; love—as the Walking Woman had proved it; a child—as you subscribe to it” (261).  For the Walking Woman, these three things are tied together and each is enriched by the others. I already know that work and love are richer when they inform one another; I have undoubtedly been a better thinker, writer, worker and teacher since Billy and I have been together.  Thus, when the story suggests the inclusion of a baby can strengthen this dual bond into a triangular one, it caught my attention.  After drawing this conclusion about work, love, and a child, the narrator elaborates carefully, “a child; any way you get it, a child is good to have, say nature and the Walking Woman; to have it and not wait upon a proper concurrence of so many decorations that the event may not come at all” (262).  I knew before I read this story that having the baby would enhance my life—that is why I wanted the baby to begin with.  But nothing had yet suggested to me that having the baby could enhance my work.  This story did this, and at the same time, it warned me against waiting for the absolutely perfect circumstances to introduce the baby because those circumstances might never occur.  I know it might seem strange to people who don’t have the relationship with books that I do, but this story gave me the confidence to make the decision that I had been wanting to make about having a baby and to trust that I’d be able to work out the remaining details as I went.

Now that I’ve conceived the baby, and I’m trying to imagine how I can simultaneously occupy the roles of wife, mother, and academic, the story strikes a different chord with me.  For the first time, it stands out to me that the Walking Woman walks.  I’ve often written here about how my running habit informs and influences my academic pursuits.  I absolutely believe that I have been a better graduate student because I have been a distance runner.  This past semester was difficult for me for quite a few reasons, but being unable to run has made it even more so.  This may seem trivial in comparison to the other obstacles I was facing, but for me, being unable to run has forced me to figure out how to continue moving forward without the sense of personal satisfaction I get from running.  The irony here, of course, is that pregnancy has turned me from a runner into a walking woman.  For a few months I was doing what I’ve been calling wogging—alternating between walking and jogging—but in recent weeks I have been walking almost exclusively.  And I don’t hate it anymore. It doesn’t feel like enough exercise, so I’ve joined a gym to supplement the walking with anaerobic exercise, but I’m beginning to learn to appreciate the slower pace of all these activities and the different view of things they give me.

As I continue to adjust to a different exercise regimen, I wonder if I can learn to adjust my expectations for myself as an academic in a similar way.  In grad school and in distance running, I’ve pushed myself to the limit with single-minded devotion, exhausted myself, and gained satisfaction from proving that I am capable of achieving success.  So I wonder what walking in my work might look like, and whether I will find that covering the same ground at a slower pace reveals my surroundings to me in a different way.  I hope the baby can help me redefine what it means to be successful in my work and in my life as a whole rather than making me feel like I'm failing to live up to my earlier expectations.  “The Walking Woman” suggests this is possible.  The narrator also says of the Walking Woman, “she had walked off all sense of society-made values, and, knowing the best when the best came to her, was able to take it” (261).  I don’t know what “success” looks like when one is simultaneously attempting to be a wife, mother, and academic.  I know it will not look like the disembodied, focused mind that academia expects of its thinkers—but if I’d wanted that life for myself, I never would have gotten married or pregnant in the first place. I hope that, as I move forward in this balancing act, I can learn to walk off academia’s unreasonable expectations and values and walk into a better understanding of which measurements of success work for me.  

I realize that the balancing act is always going to be a struggle, but I feel obligated to attempt it for myself and for my baby.  It’s a little girl in there, after all.  If I want to bring her up to believe that she’s capable of balancing her various interests, it will be important for me to learn to do the same.  I hope I can remind myself that how I feel about what I’m doing is much more important than how anyone at school feels about it.  In this way, I hope, I can know “the best” when it comes to me and be able to “take it” as it is, rather than getting discouraged when I fail to live up to academia’s expectations. Whether academia is willing to make room for me, with my own priorities, remains to be seen—but that is outside my own control.  I want my daughter to believe she is successful when she has met her own standards of success, and I don’t want her to feel inadequate just because she may fail to live up to outdated, discriminatory, and unhealthy expectations of accomplishment. I hope that as I go, I can teach myself to do the same.

(I'm citing the version of Mary Austin's "The Walking Woman" that appears in this collection, but you can read the entire story online here.  And you should.  It's so good.)

Long May You Run

Today starts my Thanksgiving "break."  My professor re-arranged our schedule to cancel class on Tuesday, so to save myself a trip to campus, I cancelled the class I teach and gave them an additional assignment instead.  This means I have 11 days at home to work on grading, final lesson planning, and most importantly, on my end-of-semester papers.  I hope there will be at least a little time for relaxing, but we'll see.

I told my friend Katie that the professor who cancelled class is like a marathon trainer.  Her class was really intense at the start and pretty rigorous throughout, but the way she arranged the end of the syllabus indicates that she knows about "the taper."  In order to produce our best work at the end of the semester, we need a little break to gear up for that assignment, she seems to know.  I could hug her.

Speaking of running, I went for a 9 mile run on Sunday, thus confirming that if you can run 5 miles comfortably you can run 9.  After the results came in from my most recent race, I realized that if I don't run in the December 15k race that ends the Championship Series, I will likely lose my 3rd place spot to the girl behind me.  She doesn't seem to run very fast, so if I can run a fairly decent time, I can beat her... but if I don't run at all, she'll move up enough in the points to surpass me, I think.  I won't really have time to train my way up from 5 miles to 9 miles, so I figured I'd see if I could get through 9 miles without training.  I ran about a minute slower than my regular pace but didn't have any trouble finishing the distance, so I think I'll just keep my regular workout schedule between now and then and hope for the best when that race day comes.  It always makes me laugh a little when it's my legs that get tired before my lungs do-- when I first started running in 2003, and when I first started running again last year, the burning I experienced in my lungs made it seem like running until my legs hurt would never be possible.

Anyhow, after "sleeping in" until almost 8 and then wasting some time online, I must get started on today's grading.  I'll leave you with the photos of the last race that the club photographer shared last week.  It was chilly!

(Long May You Run is actually a book I'd never heard of until I searched Amazon for "run," but I like the Neil Young song and I don't have any better ideas for a title, so we'll go with it.)

At the Bay

Yesterday I ran the Down's Park 5 Miler, which I also ran and wrote about last year.  It was actually my first race since August, and I really enjoyed it.  I haven't been feeling too great, and I certainly can't afford to get sick at this point in the semester, so I tried to put my competitive urges on the back burner and run it just for fun.  It was, indeed, quite fun.  It was chilly, but the course runs through the fall foliage at the park and along the Chesapeake Bay, so along with my own heavy breathing I got to hear the sounds of the water lapping on the rocks and the leaves crunching under peoples' feet.  I ran it three minutes slower than last year, but I think I still finished with a good enough time to secure 3rd place in my running club's year long "Championship Series" for my group, so I was pleased with that.  They still haven't posted results online, so I can't be sure, but I'll update with that info and the pictures from the photographer when they're available.  Billy, as always, came to cheer me on, to meet me halfway so I could hand off my gloves.  Somewhere in the midst of all of that he took the photos of the bay above and watched an 11 year old girl beat every other woman in the race.  (Because of the way the course loops around, I could hear the crowd cheering for the winners when I was just past halfway, which was really funny.)

It has been quite a hectic past few weeks, which helped to increase the satisfaction of spending some time outdoors breathing the fresh air and watching the sun come up.  I'm beginning to check things off the endless list of responsibilities, though.  While the end of this semester is not yet in sight, I'm managing to prioritize my work appropriately and feel pretty good about where I am right now.  In the past, the last 6 weeks or so of the semester have always seemed so terribly overwhelming, but I'm trying to adopt a different approach this semester, which is also kind of inspired by the running.  Thinking about having 2 miles left to go is much less daunting when you focus on the fact that three miles are already behind you.  So rather than focusing on all that I have left to do, I've been trying to think retrospectively, as well, at all I've managed to accomplish in the past few weeks.  This helps to give me confidence that I'll be able to tackle the goals ahead, as well.

One of the things I'm glad to have in the rear-view mirror now is my presentation at the Reading Comparatively conference, about which I last wrote.  After spending several weeks condensing, reshaping, and practicing my paper, I felt pretty good about delivering it at the conference, and I was legitimately excited to share my research findings with more people than just my professor.  We had a pretty good turnout for the talk-- I think there were over 20 people in the audience, including quite a few of my own professors.  Vickie also came to see what the conference was like and to provide moral support. It was fun for me to have her get a glimpse into what I do, even if that glimpse just revealed to her in more detail just how nerdy I am.

I was the first to present in my panel, and then there were presentations given by another grad student and two professors.  One of them is a pre-eminent scholar in the field.  One of them is currently on a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, working on her second book.  The other one is currently on his second yearlong dissertation fellowship.  So, to say the least, I was expecting to get zero questions/comments about my own paper unless someone thought my conclusions were absolutely wrong.  However, I got all the questions/comments.  I don't know whether I should consider this a sign that my paper was the least well articulated, or that the audience found it interesting, so I've decided it is probably a combination of the two factors.

First, the professor for whom I wrote the paper (and who organized the conference) suggested he had learned a lot from my paper, which was especially exciting news considering that edited the book I wrote about and he edits the Norton Anthology of American Literature.  He also made a suggestion about connecting my argument to Uncle Tom's Cabin, after which one of my co-panelists suggested another text that I might want to look into.  Then another one of my professors asked a series of questions that basically boiled down to "Okay, interesting discoveries, but why should anyone care?"  I gave what I felt like was an honest answer to that question (which I do think I had addressed in the paper itself, if more briefly than I would have liked to have done).  Then a friend of mine who introduced the panel asked the other grad student to talk about his paper in relationship to mine, and his answer gave me some really interesting things to think about in regards to my own argument.  The professor who organized the conference also suggested that he'd like to hold a longer symposium on the topic of "law and literature," which was the theme of our panel, so I might get a chance to give an expanded version of the talk in the spring.  This would be helpful for me, as well, since he thinks I should continue working with my argument in order to get it published.

It's nice to come away from anything feeling like the work you put into it had paid off, so getting to experience that with my race this weekend and my presentation on Friday made for a good couple of days.  I feel ready to take on the rest of the term, which is exactly what I wrote about after the Down's Park 5 Miler last year.  And that semester turned out pretty well for me, didn't it?

("At the Bay" is Katherine Mansfield short story, from her The Garden Party collection.  I wish she was American so I could call her my own.)

A Grain of Wheat

This morning, I went for my first outdoor run after several weeks of trips to the gym for workouts on mechanized equipment.  The weather was just too great to pass up, and one of my classes did not meet last week, so that has allowed me the chance to make some headway on getting ahead instead of feeling like I am constantly behind.  As soon as I got onto the trail, I noticed that I was in the middle of an official race.  And because of where I'd started, I was just behind the leaders.  This was made me laugh to myself until I got a cramp.  I got to see firsthand just how fast the winners of these events run as they sailed past me, one after the other.  I did get a few cheers at one point, though, from some people who I assume mistook me for the female leader.  Fortunately, after I'd finished my first mile or so, their route took them off the trail, so I got to enjoy my last four miles in (relative) peace.  I don't know how fast I ran, but I pushed myself pretty hard at the end, and it felt great to be out in the fresh air again.  It reminded me of a quote from A Grain of Wheat, by Ngugi wa Thiong'o which I read for class last week. One of the characters is running in a race during his village's celebration of Kenyan independence, and we're told "he used to run in all long-distance races.  He had even developed a theory about such races.  'They test how long you can endure hardship,' he used to say.  'You say to yourself.  I will not give up: I will see this to the end.'"  Indeed.  If I've already unlocked a Kenyan "theory" of long distance running on my own, I'm destined for a faster race pace, right? : )

Since my schedule's not quite as tight this weekend, I thought I'd take a minute to share with you all what I'm up to this semester.  It's a lot of work, but so far I'm enjoying all of it, so that keeps it manageable.

I'm teaching English 101, which is officially called "Introduction to Academic Writing."  I only have one section with 21 students, so I really can't complain.  It's not a literature based course at all-- it's the class the incoming students are required to take to prepare them for the writing assignments they'll have to complete thereafter in their academic careers.  The teaching model is based in rhetoric, so I get to teach some of the things we discuss in our department, but mostly I'm responsible for helping them learn how to become better writers.  All PhD students start out by teaching this course, and a lot of them complain about it because they'd rather be teaching literature and there's a lot of grading.  I like teaching writing, though, and since I'm only teaching one section, the grading responsibilities will not be as overwhelming as if I'd been required to teach two.

I'm also taking three classes.  On Tuesdays I'm taking a class about 18th Century Experimentalism and Natural Philosophy.  Or, as I might title it, "How science as we know it came to be."  I'm technically taking it because I slid through our MA program without taking enough classes in pre-1800 subjects (one of my professors changed the scope of his class at the last minute), so it's a requirement, but I've been wanting to take a class with this professor, anyway, so I'm enjoying it.  She tried to kill us with the reading assignments in the first two weeks, but now that I've accomplished those, I'm hoping it will be slightly smoother sailing for the rest of the semester.  Plus, we've finally gotten started on the literature written about experimentalism, so I'm starting to feel more "in my own element."

On Wednesdays I'm re-taking a class on American Modernism/Modernity that is similar to the one I took in Spring 09, which I might title "Whatever Liz wants to read."  Since we took the class with this professor last time he taught it, my friend Katie and I are taking it as a pseudo independent study.  We're attending class on days that address new texts and working with our professor outside of class that relate more specifically to our research interests.  It's really an ideal scenario for me, because it's precisely the type of literature that I want to be reading, and his flexibility with the syllabus will allow me to get an early start on working on the reading list that will ultimately serve as the basis for my comprehensive exams next year.  (Yes, I am always looking forward.  No use in standing still.)

On Thursdays I have a class in Postcolonial Literature and Theory survey course, which I could otherwise call "Books written by people whose names I can't pronounce."  I feel completely clueless in this class, because after we left Conrad and Achebe behind in week one, I've never even read any of the authors we're covering, not to mention the texts we're assigned.  It's supposed to be a survey, which means an "intro" to the field, but since it's the only postcolonial class offered this semester, a lot of people who specialize in this area are enrolled in it, as well.  The one saving grace for me is that I've read a lot of the critical theory that serves as the foundation for the field, so even though the texts are new, the ideas are ones I'm used to working with.

These seem like a strange hodge podge on paper (or online), but as always, they begin to grow together more than I had originally anticipated.  One of the articles I had to read for my PoCo class last week mentioned one of the texts I'd read for my Experimentalism class the week before.  And so it goes.

The final thing I want to mention is that I've decided to stop making this blog "searchable" via google and the like.  This means you'll no longer be able to type "Literature is where I go" into google and pull up the blog (I hope), so if that's how you're used to finding your way to me, please add the URL as a bookmark or put me in your blog reader instead.  I'm careful about what I write here, since I know I'm sending it out into the public world, but the blog is not really meant for consumption by those who don't know me personally, so I don't see any reason why people need to be able to find it in their search engines.

Hope you've all enjoyed a restful weekend, and that your week ahead is productive.  Vickie is set to return to MD tomorrow, and the new season of Glee premieres the night after that, so things are looking good for us this week.  No races coming up anytime soon, and a whole month before the next Navy football game, but maybe that means I can get even farther ahead in my studies!

And just for good measure, here are a couple pictures of Clara and Cash enjoying the brand new additions to their families:

Thanks for sharing the pictures, guys!

Old Friends and New

At the end of July, my childhood friend Kelsey paid us a visit for around 10 days.  She's currently enrolled in an Occupational Therapy graduate program at the University of Washington, and she applied for a weeklong internship at Johns Hopkins so she could come pay us a visit while also completing one of her program's requirements.  Kelsey was on my new soccer team when I moved to Oregon before fifth grade, and we've been friends ever since.  She, Krista, and I grew up together and logged more hours in one another's company than many people who actually live together, I think.  For eight years we participated in the same activities and took the same classes, but for the past ten years we've lived in different states and, at times, different countries, so it was interesting for me to think about the ways we've changed.

It was great to have Kelsey here to see what my life is like now and to have a chance to share some of my favorite experiences with her.  We had been hoping to go hiking in Harpers Ferry the first weekend she was here, but with temperatures over 100 degrees, that wasn't possible.  She was working pretty long hours at the hospital, but we still managed to squeeze in several fun activities during her visit.

On her first day in town, we all headed down to Annapolis.  She needed some new running shoes, so I took her to the running shop that sponsors our Annapolis Striders races and the owner helped her find the perfect shoe.  In addition to walking around downtown in the heat and grabbing lunch, Billy took this photo of us in front of Ego Alley.

Midweek, we took a break from schizophrenia case studies and German homework to head down to Fells Point in Baltimore for their summertime outdoor movie.  Kelsey thought Fells was a cool neighborhood, and we enjoyed dinner and gelato and sat down to watch the movie.  Then we decided we were too tired to sit outside to watch a movie we could barely see or hear, so we headed home.  Just in case we needed a reminder that we're not 16 anymore.  : )  Here we are on the Fells pier in front of the Harbor.

On Kelsey's second weekend here, Billy's family got crabs, so she got to see why they're called "Blue Crabs" and why Old Bay is sold in a 2 gallon container.   I think she ate two, which is two more than I ate.  I'm glad Kelsey got to experience this quintessential Maryland tradition and spend a little bit of time with Billy's family.

Kelsey was also here for the most recent Annapolis Striders race, so she ran the 8k with me.  Or, I should say, she ran the 8k far ahead of me-- she's fast!  She has participated in several large races, including the Seattle Rock and Roll Half Marathon and whole bunch of shorter races, but this was the first time she'd run in a race hosted by a running club.  She couldn't believe how cheap it was!  It sounds like she has caught the running bug, and she just started training for a marathon, so I was glad to help her experience what I see as the advantages of participating in smaller local races.  For the first time in a while, I really enjoyed the race.  The weather has been so hot that I have hardly run outside in the past month, so I wasn't sure how I'd do, but the temps cooled down for the race and I was able to post a time that was one minute faster than last year's time for the same race.  I felt great throughout the race and the course is sort of cross-country style through trails, so it was definitely a fun change from the past two races where I've felt pretty miserable.  I don't know why Kelsey felt compelled to capture this moment on film, but since she did, here's the photo. : )

Later that day, we took Kelsey to the opening weekend of the Legg Mason Tennis Classic (more on that in an upcoming post), and though she doesn't follow tennis, I think she enjoyed being out in the sun (while it lasted) and seeing some high quality play up close.  She didn't know who any of the players were, but she dutifully took pictures of them as if she thought they were as big a deal as I do.  : )  She also got to join me and Billy for our first ever rain delay at the tournament which was, unfortunately, not the last.  You can tell from the photo that everything is damp.

While she was here, we also went to see Inception (which I now want to see a second time), she got to experience Sunday morning breakfast at Panera with Danielle, and I think she did more shopping than she has probably done all year.  Having Kelsey and Vickie stay with us has made me realize how much shopping I do without actually buying anything, because those two go with me to be nice and then they end up buying while I walk out empty handed.  I finally made my first purchase in quite a while when I took Kelsey shopping in Georgetown, and since I did not follow the directions I'd written down on the way into or out of DC, she got to see plenty of the city!  After opting out of waiting in line for a Georgetown Cupcake, she discovered a s'mores/krispy treat hybrid at Dean & Deluca which I promptly plan to replicate.  She also spent a morning in McKeldin while I went to German class, and she marveled at our beautiful mall.  She claims that it could also be called a quad, in which she is obviously mistaken, because look how un-quadish it is! : )

In general, I think the time Kelsey and I have spent apart has made more evident the differences in our personalities that I completely overlooked when we were young.  It was interesting to talk to Kelsey about the priorities we have in our lives right now and realize how differently we think through the issues we face in our lives.  I realized that these days the people I seek out as friends share worldviews nearly identical to my own, but spending time with Kelsey reminded how helpful it can be to participate in friendships with people who look at the world differently.  I always try to look at issues from every angle I can think of, but there are always angles I can't think of, and speaking to those people who see them naturally can certainly help me to see the whole picture.

And because it would be remiss to not mention it, I MUST add that Krista had her new baby girl last week!!  Evie Kate was born healthy on August 4!  Krista said that she looks like Clara but with Jordan's coloring instead of her own, and I definitely agree.  It's funny that it worked out this way because I have been saying for months I want her to look just like Clara but with dark curly hair, and Kelsey said something similar when she visited... and now here the little one is, satisfying our expectations!  Visit the Hoffmanns' blog to read more about Evie's arrival.

(Old Friends and New is a short story collection by Sarah Orne Jewett.  I am actually surprised to realize that I've never read any of the stories collected in this volume, so I looked at Willa Cather's collection titled The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, and it appears that Willa didn't consider Old Friends and New to be Ms. OJ's finest work.  Mystery solved.)

The Perfect Mile

I've been super busy, and I realize I've been neglecting the blog.  I mean to tell you what I've been up to, but the days have been slipping away even more quickly than usual!  This week is the Legg Mason Tennis Classic, so I'm actually sitting at my new desk on campus, waiting for my friend Anne-Marie to get here so we can head over to Rock Creek Park to catch today's action.  In the meantime, though, this year the Annapolis Striders have a photographer on the course snapping pictures, and he just recently uploaded hundreds from the most recent races (thanks, Rob Smith!).  I thought I'd post them here to share with you until I have more time to write--

June: Father's Day 10K Photos

That's me in the middle!

I snuck right into the corner of this next one, but I'm including it because you can see Patti, Chuck, and Billy cheering for me as I near the finish:

And in case you were wondering what I look like immediately before I throw up, here's this one:

July: One Mile Track Run 

I can't tell if that's a look of determination or desperation, but please note that I was properly attired in my Livestrong gear to celebrate the final weekend of the Tour de France.

August: 8K Cross Country Run

I'm wearing a white top and black shorts in these.  If that doesn't help you identify me, I'm the one in the middle who looks like she's walking in both photos.  I don't know why it looks like that-- it was only the start of the race!

And it might be even harder to find me in this one, but that's me running up the hill right past the mile marker, trying to pass the guy in all black.

I promise I'll be back to give you the recap on the cross country race and everything else I've been doing once I get a break from all the excitement of out-of-town visitors, an intensive German class, and an exciting tennis tournament!

(The Perfect Mile is a book by Neal Bascomb that documents the competition between Bannister, Santee, and Landy to be the first man to run a mile under 4 minutes in the 1950s.  I haven't read it but I'm sure I'd be fascinated by it!)

The Summons

I've survived week 1 of a my super-busy three week span!  Though most of the campus is quiet during the summer, this is actually the busiest time of year for my job.  I'm in charge of processing the paperwork and computer data for all of our adjunct lecturers and graduate assistants by July 31, which, not coincidentally, is the final day of my own appointment in the office.  We have about 80 graduate assistants and 80 adjunct lecturers in our department, so you can imagine that this process is pretty time consuming.  For the past year, I've been filling in for my old full-time officemate, who accepted a job in another department.  Several months after she left, they replaced her by promoting another one of my officemates, and then they finally hired someone to replace that officemate, so after I go they will have a full-time person to occupy this job again.  I've been trying to do a 40 hour job in 20 hours per week, and though I'm glad I've been able to help the department, I'm thankful to be moving back to teaching in August.

These three weeks are extra busy because in addition to my office job, I've taken on a 6 week Intermediate German class which meets four days a week.  I'm taking it to try to reacquire my German proficiency, and after I complete the course, I hope to be able to pass the foreign language exam that's required for my PhD degree.  Ultimately, I'd love to get a firm enough command on my German to be able to read German-American immigrant texts from before, during, and after WW1 (though the language was officially outlawed for a while, the stuff is still out there).  For now, though, I'm taking one hurdle at a time.

I am really enjoying the German class.  I was hoping to audit it, but the German department is forcing me to take it for credit and the grade will show up on my transcript, so I feel some extra pressure to do well.  I took four years of German in high school and one semester in college, and though I never reached the level of fluency that I might have attained if I'd traveled to Germany, I was a fairly capable German speaker back then.  When I arrived to class on Monday and was handed a "placement quiz," I realized just how much of the language I had lost.  I couldn't remember how to conjugate any verbs and I couldn't even think of how to write the plural form of "you."  It's really fun to see how quickly it is coming back, though.  It's fascinating to me that I can pull words I had all-but-forgotten out of the cobwebs of my brain.  Shortly after I answered a yes or no question with "si," I correctly used the word "Schauspieleren," which is German for "actress."

There is a "culture" portion of the curriculum that is essentially unrelated to my reasons for taking the course, but I find it really interesting nonetheless.  Some of the more surprising things I've learned in the first week of class include:
-My instructor, who is my age and is working on her PhD in Germanic Studies, was born in East Germany (DDR) and got choked up talking about the fall of the Berlin Wall.  She told us that before the wall came down she had never seen a grape or a banana, that her father waited 20 years to be given permission to buy a car, and that she was almost expelled from her school at age 7 for asking what all the blank spaces on the map were.  (She says only Communist countries were labelled.)
-She did say she misses the camaraderie her old neighborhood had before the fall of the DDR.  She said "we had no money and so everyone was kind."
-My instructor also claims that nobody in Germany flies the German flag or demonstrates German patriotism except during the World Cup, when German flags hang from every window and people paint their faces on match days.  She says that if you hung a German flag at any other time, people would think you were a Nazi.
-On a related note, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin was seriously damaged during WWII, but the Germans did not repair it, and it stands as a war memorial.  My instructor said they left it alone "so we can never forget what we did."
-She also told us that the US planned to drop an atomic bomb on Dresden but changed their minds.  Google hasn't helped me verify the validity of this statement, but when I asked her why we targeted Dresden and not Berlin, she said "because the Germans love Dresden most."  This rationale seems to stand up, at least-- my web surfing reveals that the fire bombing of Dresden is believed to have achieved so little military advantage that it is considered a war crime by many and an act of terrorism by others.
-If you are a young American man who would like to date my beautiful German instructor, and you take her to see "Inglorious Basterds," that will be your last date with her.
-The German word for diarrhea translates roughly as "it falls out."
-UMd undergraduates in 2010 make the same jokes about drinking alcohol in Germany that WLHS underclassmen made in 1998.  If I had a dollar for every time I'd heard someone say "Bier ist gut!" I could finance a trip to Germany.
Another thing I'm noticing about myself and the German class is how fun it is to work on something completely different than literary studies while still working on my degree.  It feels like I'm taking a "break," but at the same time, I still feel productive because I'm being proactive about my degree requirements.  I hope it continues to be interesting and fun.

The other highlight of my week was my trip to traffic court.  Did I really just write that?  Yes, I thought it was BS when I got pulled over just off campus for "running a stop sign."  I believe I stopped.  Both officers who approached my car peered into my vehicle while they were speaking to me, so I assumed they were looking for someone/something else and would let me go with a warning... but a $90 ticket and 1 point on my license later, I found out they were serious.  This marks my first traffic violation since 1998.  I decided to go to court, and figured I'd plead guilty in hopes of getting the point taken off my license.  After watching a few people go ahead of me, I decided to "explain" that I thought I had stopped but I may have failed to come to a complete stop.  The judge issued me "probation before judgment," my fine was reduced to $9.50 plus $25.50 in court costs, and the point was suspended.  If you don't care what happened in traffic court, feel free to stop reading, but I find these kinds of interactions very intriguing, so I thought I'd share a few things I learned in court.
1) If you're ticketed by a UMd officer, expect him to show up in court.  They seem to have more spare time than other police officers in PG County.  Mine entered the courtroom and fist-bumped two bailiffs, the court reporter, and the Spanish translator.  At this point pleading guilty felt like an even better idea.
2) When the judge begins his directions with "Make sure your shirttails are tucked in and your pants are around your waist before you approach my bench," he means it.  The first guy walked up with an untucked polo shirt and khakis and was promptly instructed to "exit the courtroom, tuck in your shirttails, and return to your seat.  Your case will be called again after we've gone through the rest of the docket."
3) When the judge explains how the proceedings will go, listen.  He didn't say "If your officer is not present, don't plead guilty," but he said everything short of this to get the idea across.  My benchmate was called up after Mr. Shirttails was excused, told by the judge that his officer was not present, and asked how he would plead.  His answer?  "Um, guilty."  Poor kid.  The judge told him to sit back down.  I said "Did you just plead guilty when your officer is not here?" to which he responded "Oh, God."  The officer sitting in front of us turned around, gave him a "What is wrong with you?" look, and gave him some suggestions about asking to change his plea.  Everyone else who plead guilty was asked for an explanation and then issued a reduced fine, so I think the judge told him to sit down so he could call him up again at the end after giving him a chance to realize his mistake.  I felt bad for him.  It's awful going first.
4) If you get a ticket for "operating a bicycle with earphones in both ears," do not: a) claim you did not know it was against the law, b) explain that you're a musical theater student and were listening to classical music very low, c) suggest that you were listening to the music to study for a test that you were going to take when you arrived at your destination, d) claim that the University is responsible for not offering a bicycle safety course, e) answer "the volume was turned down" when the judge asks you "even if you didn't know it was illegal, does it seem safe to ride with headphones on?"  Certainly do NOT do all of these things while also adopting an "I'm better than this garbage" attitude.  If you do, the bailiff will moan, groan, roll his eyes back in his head, shift his weight, etc.  The judge will tell you that ignorance of the law is not an excuse and reduce your fine by only $10 (which will mean your fine has actually gone up due to the court costs).  Then, if you snatch the form out of the annoyed bailiff's hand, he will follow you down the aisle and whisper loudly "If you do that again, I will knock you out."  (When I went to pay the cashier, this student was registering a complaint about the bailiff.  I wish I could have stayed to see how it was resolved.)
5) Beyonce might be in her late 20s, but her "booty is popping like a teenager's" and therefore "Jay-Z knows what he's doing."  At least according to the gentlemen discussing it behind me.

I also had my one mile track race Saturday morning.  I was hoping to run it in under 7:45 so I could beat my PR as a 13 year old track star (ha!), but it didn't go according to plan.  I ran a 7:51 last weekend on the track, and two separate miles in the 7:40s on the treadmill this week, but I finished the race yesterday in 8:01.  Like last time, it was about 80 degrees with humidity above 90%, and I could feel the extra heat emanating from the fieldturf surface inside the track.  Awful.  I've decided that yes, it's hard cardiovascularly to perform well in these conditions, but they ruin my mental approach, too.  Normally, I hate getting beaten, and I love chasing people down at the finish.  This time it was like I could feel the heat sapping away my will to compete and I just didn't care.  I'm not horribly disappointed with 8:01, especially given the conditions, but obviously I feel like I could have done better.  After seeing the standings in the Championship series this morning, yesterday's race can be classified as "mission accomplished."  I only went because I didn't want to fall behind in the standings, and since most of my "competitors" didn't participate, I actually moved up from 3rd place into 2nd.  The girl in first place consistently runs much better times than me, so I don't think I can catch her, but my paces are pretty competitive with everyone else below her, so this was a good boost.

I have another 8k race in about two weeks, and I am crossing all my fingers and toes that the weather cooperates.  My good friend Kelsey from back home is visiting, though, and her visit coincides with the run, so it will be fun to have run it with me even if she beats me by several minutes.  It would be nice to have cooler weather for her visit in general.  I love the heat more than most people, but I'm getting tired of being trapped inside when it looks beautiful out but is so hot that the NWS advises you to avoid being outdoors.

(The Summons is a 2002 novel by John Grisham.  In 1994, when I was 12, I got ahold of someone's copy of The Client and then promptly moved on to A Time to Kill, The Firm, and The Pelican Brief.  Thereafter I read The Chamber, The Rainmaker, and The Runaway Jury, and The Partner before I lost interest.  I don't remember much about them, outside A Time to Kill, which was always my favorite, but this evidently amounts to over 3,600 John Grisham pages read before I was 15.  I think this classifies as one of a long line of events which indicated that my reading habits have always been fairly unusual.)