2017
self-sufficience please
maura @ 9:47 pm
Grumpy. I am grumpy. Grumpy, grumpy, grumpy. Grumpy when I wake up in the morning, grumpy when I go to sleep at night.
I’m grumpy about all the usual things, things that are probably making lots of other folks grumpy too. Time, capitalism, bodies; too little, too much, too fragile. Plus the disturbing political situation. Plus the rolling waves of sexual assault news.* Plus climate change (so hot). Like a slice of toast spread thickly with gray sludge. Grumpy.
* Among the many well-written and heartwrenching pieces, this one by archivist Eira Tansey really resonated with me.
I’ve been trying to talk myself out of it and write myself out of it and think myself out of it, but this grumpy is nothing if not persistent.
—
Last week I went to a symposium for librarians about higher education, focusing on what might be on the horizon. The speakers were mostly not librarians, they were administrators or folks in library-adjacent fields like scholarly publishing. There was, as is so often the case (cf. Eira’s post linked above), not gender parity among the speakers (though perhaps among attendees), and nowhere even in the remote vicinity of racial/ethnic parity among both. I am grumpy about disparities. I am grumpy when I hear about things happening at better-resourced institutions. I know that my colleagues and I do the best we can with the resources we have available, a great job, in all and genuine honesty, but it’s hard not to be grumpy thinking of what we might be able to do were the resources available.
—
The symposium was held at a hotel in Manhattan. As I walked into the lobby I experienced the most incredible nostalgia, though it took me a few minutes to place it. A long time ago, when my kid was little, the two of us came to that very hotel to meet his grandmother — my spouse’s mom — for lunch. She was at that time the president of a scholarly association that had its meeting at the hotel. My memory is that she was only in town for a short time and couldn’t make it out to Brooklyn, and my spouse was also busy that day, so we decided that the kid and I would come in and meet her for lunch. I believe we ate at a diner, I have a memory of us sitting on counter stools and spinning around? I could dig a little to figure out the exact date (but I haven’t), it could have been when the kid was 3-ish, though maybe as old as 5-ish. I think the lunch was a bit hectic — it’s a busy part of the city for schlepping a kid, she was busy with her meeting. But he is the only child of her only child so of course we made the trip.
—
It’s 3 years last month since a good friend of ours died suddenly, 3 years this month since my spouse’s mom died. The sadness and missing them has changed and keeps changing, complicated by external factors: other people, the world, life. Reservations are made and tickets are bought for us to go a Chinese restaurant for lunch and to see the latest Star Wars movie on Christmas as we have for the past 2 years, our now-not-so-new tradition. I am and will be thinking of them both.
—
And I’m looking forward to a few days off at the end of the month to catch up on sleep and read and play some games and get myself out of the house a bit more. It’s so boring to be this grumpy all the time.
