a little bit puny

maura @ 10:52 pm

Yeah, it’s a phoning it in kind of evening. But hey, I wrote a (so very short) blag post over on the CUNY Games Network blag about the article that I wrote that just came out yesterday, so that counts, right? Right?

same time this year

maura @ 8:02 pm

So this year I finally realized why it is that the month for all of those writing stuff in a month events is November. It’s because by November everyone is just too far gone down the rabbit hole of crazy overcommittedness to say no to anything. So when the internet says, “hey, you, why don’t you write a novel/blog/write an academic book/etc. every day for a month!” you’re all “well, why the heck not?!” Because what’s one more straw when the camel can’t even feel its back?

Seriously though, I can still feel my back. Sometimes it aches a bit when I’ve done the standing desk thing all day, which I haven’t this week because I had a weird one-day cold + fever over the weekend and I’m trying to make sure that I’m really recovered by being lazy and sitting all day.

I am insanely busy. The confluence of work stuff plus family stuff (including middle school tours, aiieee!) that’s all sitting on my plate right now is unbelievable, even to me. I’m so busy that I haven’t been doing any of the things I try to do to keep sane + healthy, like get enough sleep, walk to work, and … write. Every day. Just a little bit, maybe 201 words or so? (Maybe 205.)

So here I am, giving it a go again this year. We’ll see how far I can make it. 200 words/day has always been my goal, how hard can that be?

maybe

maura @ 11:54 pm

I am not doing NaBloPoMo this year. I just have too much to do. And there isn’t even time to post this before midnight, anyway.

(Or is there?)

twenty years

maura @ 11:04 pm

This fall is a big anniversary of many events. We’ve been in NYC for 20 years now, which means we were here on 9/11. I don’t really know what to feel about the 10th anniversary. I’ve been thinking that I should have something to write about it, but even the things that I start writing in my head don’t get anywhere. Then I feel guilty that I don’t have more to say. But we were here and we were lucky and I am still grateful for that: I was 6 months pregnant, everyone we know was safe + sound (if scared). I was proud to be a resident of NYC* and to experience how well the city pulled together.

* I still am: thank you, Occupy Wall Street.

On a much much much lighter note, this fall is also the 20th anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album. I know it’s reductive to pin all of the changes in music since then to one record, but it’s always seemed like that to me. Before that record it was “college rock” — played on college radio, mostly on independent labels, small venues + shows. And after, after it was “alternative” — on all of the radio stations, big shows, etc.

For us it coincided with leaving college and coming to grad school (version 1.0), which I’m sure is at least part of the reason it feels like lots of big changes. I had a show on my college radio station with a pal; when we got to grad school, the station was much more professional and didn’t have time for us. I know it’s trite to complain about bands getting big — “I liked their first record,” said in self-mocking tones, was something we said often. But there’s a practical side to a smallish music scene, too. Big shows are more expensive for tickets + drinks. Big shows are harder for shorties like me to navigate; I’ve spent innumerable shows jumping up and down, not because I love to pogo but because otherwise I couldn’t *see* anything.

Of course music is completely different now in our internet world, some things better, and some things worse. It seems almost quaint to think back to a time when radio mattered that much, and when the freaky kids suddenly got popular.

actually from last monday

maura @ 3:45 pm

This morning I woke up feeling crabby and crappy thanks to various small entities interrupting my sleep last night: a child, cats, unsettling dreams. File under damned if you do, because I actually went to bed early last night fell asleep reading the New Yorker, which of course makes me feel even more crabby and crappy.

As I started my walk to work my internal soundtrack was a weird mashup of Nirvana’s songs “Negative Creep” and “Breed” where the beginning of the first song morphs into the chorus of the second song. (This fall is the 20th anniversary of the release of Nevermind, but that’s a post for another day). It’s a mashup that’s a common earworm for me, but this morning it just felt too gritty and mean to start my tired day like that.

So I spent the walk to work trying to dislodge that and cram another earworm into my brain. All of my c’mon-get-happy usuals weren’t working, not Spice Girls nor Gaga. After cycling through Public Enemy and Joy Division (for real, brain?), I finally got to Janelle Monae: “Sincerely, Jane” from the Metropolis EP. Phew.

I haven’t been walking to work much recently. It’s been hot and rainy and I’ve been tired and tired. But this morning’s walk reminded me why I should push past the whinybrain and get moving. Because I may be too tired to ride my bike or scooter, but once you start walking it just gets easier, and by the time I get to work my head is clearer even if I am still tired. And it’s downhill all the way, too.

on teaching and learning and worthwhile work

maura @ 10:49 pm

It’s been quiet around here, I know. But it seems like the semester’s finally settling in so I hope to be more present here, to write more in general, really.

Anyway, back in late August (which it feels like right now because it’s about 75 humid degrees), I wrote something about school and homework and struggling. But things got busy and I never finished or posted it. It’s weird to reread it now — seems practically like another lifetime ago. But it also seems a shame to waste the words, since writing, even the most self-indulgent bloggy kinds of writing, is hard work. So let’s see what I can make of it. And the bonus, since it’s a month later, is that I can share the end of the story (so far), too!

—

As summer draws to a close I’m thinking about working and teaching and starting the new school year. Gus’s new year is starting soon, too, which means that I’m racking my brain to think of strategies we can use to get through this year’s homework.

Last year featured some epic homework battles, occasional storms that besmirched an otherwise pretty excellent 4th grade experience. Sometimes the battles were over work that he finds difficult. Other times there were no battles – the homework was just challenging enough, interesting, and, dare I say, even enjoyable.

The biggest battles (and most frustrating, at least for me) were over homework that was a straightforward review of stuff he’d already mastered, esp. if that review came in the form of a worksheet. It wasn’t engaging for him, and that stuck in his craw, hard. We had the same conversation repeatedly, trying to convince him to just sit down and do the homework and get it over with quickly so he could move on to something more fun, rather than raging against it and drawing out the entire process. Some nights we were all miserable.

As much as I find all of the homework theatrics annoying (and angering), I feel for the kid, too. No disrespect at all to the teachers, who perform heroic feats in crowded classrooms (30 kids last year, 1 teacher) over long hours every day. But some of the homework *is* boring. It’s unengaging. It’s busy-work. And I can sympathize with Gus’s inability to see that as worthwhile work (while occasionally feeling like maybe there’s value in learning to just do it and move on).

This knowledge doesn’t bring us any closer to a solution for the upcoming year, though we still have a few weeks to discuss strategies as a family. However, it does make me think about the students I work with in the library. Too many of them seem to treat their research assignments the same way, as boring busy work. Even worse, some seem to have given up on wanting to take advantage of creativity and choice in their assignments. I am admittedly a spazzy nerd, and I hope that my (genuine!) enjoyment of the research process helps make the inevitable boring one-shot library instruction sessions a little bit less dull.

—

And now I’m not sure how to end this, at least not the library part. I’m not teaching our 3-credit course this semester, in which we have the whole semester to work with students to draw them out and engage them over lots of interesting topics in information and research and libraries. I’m too busy to miss it, but I do.

On the bright side, so far things are okay with homework and Gus. Some is situational — a bus switch has him home a bit earlier each day. But we are also trying to convince him to set an amount of time in which he’ll do his homework, then not hover too much over it. Middle school is coming, so in some ways this is probably our homework for the year. (Poor kid, don’t tell him that homework never ends.)

methods of dance by japan

maura @ 11:05 pm

It struck me tonight, as I listened to the album “Gentlemen Take Polaroids” by Japan while doing the dishes, that Air is very similar to Japan in many ways, despite being many decades apart in time. Both are synthy, ethereal, sort of quiet (except when they’re not). I listen to a lot of Air while I’m working, both in-my-office-at-the-library sorts of work as well as writing work at home or in the library. I’d listen to more Japan than I do, but their other records are caught in the amber of old media, some on cassette and the rest on vinyl.

I’ve complained many times about the labor of digitizing old music. Even with the USB turntable the process is, frankly, a pain in the ass and takes forever, so I haven’t digitized much. Really that task has over the past couple of years transformed from “something I’ll chip away at on the weekends and in my spare time” into “something to do if I’m ever on bed rest for some reason.”* What I really need is a clever monkey or gnome to do it for me. It has crossed my mind to pay Gus to do it, too.

*(Along with putting the actual photos in actual albums with little adhesive corners. When I told a friend that I’d bought those photo albums with adhesive corners–about 8 years ago now–he was like “just get rid of them now, you will never use them, it’s too much work!” And he was so, so right.)

But it’s a shame, because I miss their other records. I’ve got a pile of stuff to do tomorrow on the holiday, but maybe I should take some time out for digitizing. Just to prove those naysayers (including myself) wrong.

give a little whistle

maura @ 11:44 am

I don’t know how we made it this far without Gus seeing Pinocchio, but last night when the video went on he was rapt. It’s been ages since I’ve seen that movie and I’d forgotten how weird it is. IMDB tells me that the movie came out in 1940 which seems about right. The blue fairy has that old-fashioned animated look the way the earlier Disney movies all do.

The plot is just, well, bizarre to today’s kids. I’ve not read the fairy tale in ages so not sure how much of the movie is artistic license. But Pleasure Island? So random! All were aghast at the kids smoking cigars. But Gus wondered what was bad, exactly, about playing pool? He’s been to a few birthday parties at a videogames + billiards place in our neighborhood. And the peals, absolute peals of laughter when the boys get turned into jackasses, and on hearing the word jackass repeated several times. Hilarity for the 9 year old set, for sure (though the 3 1/2 yr old was a bit confused).

Gus was adamant that he would never go to Pleasure Island, no matter how much free root beer was promised. But I wonder whether the moral of the story is even understandable to kids today under all of last century’s trappings. If you skip school you’ll have to sing and dance at the theater and then sleep in a cage? If you get on the boat with the creepy old men and go to the island where you can act naughty all day you’ll turn into a donkey and go work in the salt mines? “Don’t they get salt from the ocean?” asks Gus.

But I guess it *is* handy to know that you can light a fire to escape from a whale’s belly.

up the hill backwards by david bowie

maura @ 8:07 am

On the drive down to our annual beach trip we left early to avoid the traffic and ended up hitting the worst snarl we’ve ever experienced on that route. We stopped at a McDonald’s to meet my mom for lunch because it was too early to check in and everyone was starving. Afterward Jonathan and I went to the grocery store to get started on the shopping while my mom took Gus to get the key and open the house. I tried to drive through as many strip mall parking lots as I could to get to the food store, but eventually I had to go back out to the main road and inch along like everyone else.

At some point while we inched we realized that music could make things better, so I started pawing through the more easily-accessible cassettes and picked my very old (20 years?) yet still perfectly functional Aladdin Sane/Scary Monsters tape. Despite all of the hullaballoo about the impermanence of tapes I still have a pile from as far back as high school that work perfectly well, thankyouverymuch.

The tracklisting was written in my long-ago handwriting, so very legible compared to the scrawls of today. Aladdin Sane in red marker, Scary Monsters in blue. Jonathan had just been telling me a few days ago about an article he’d read about Scary Monsters so that was the logical choice. It is a weird record, partly because of the time (which was what the article was about) – 1980 was in-between for so much music, and for Bowie especially given what he’d done before then. I’d written the dates on the tracklisting, too, because I’m a nerd and like to know those things (Aladdin Sane came out in 1973).

I do like the record, despite its weirdness, and especially the A side. Halfway through I realized that I must have listened to the A side much more than the B, because I was far less familiar with the B side songs. The occasional static and pop from the vinyl (which I still own) is well-preserved on the tape. Now that I’m an old lady I’m instantly nostalgic when I hear those imperfections, despite my own clear preference for digital media: when’s the last time I broke out the turntable? And it was such a pain to have to flip the record over. I’m sure that’s why the A side songs are so much easier for me to remember.

kelly watch the stars by air

maura @ 11:29 pm

A long time ago in a borough far away (well, maybe just across the bridge), before we were parents, we used to have gaming nights with friends. There was a period of time when we played Magic the Gathering with a couple of pals who would come to our house one night a week. We’d all order food + have a few beers + play a little Magic. We’d listen to music, too, and it was right after the Air album “Moon Safari” came out, the first record I bought of theirs. Good times.

This morning we drove to sleepaway camp to pick up Gus. He spent the first few hours at home obsessively dividing up Jonathan’s old Magic cards into their respective colors, reading each one individually and telling us about all that he learned playing Magic at camp. We didn’t know we were sending him to geek camp! It took 2 hrs to get lunch into him, one bite at a time between the organizing.

He was away at camp for a week, first time ever. It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster for us all, I think. We were away the week before last with only 2 days at home before camp. And one of the cats, who’s been sick off and on for a while, kicked it up a notch last weekend. It seemed touch and go for a while–can’t really think of a worse pet scenario than the cat dying the first time the kid goes to camp–but luckily the kitty has perked up since he’s been on the meds we got at the vet.

Since Gus has been home it’s been an alternating love + loss fest. He loves us so much! and missed us so much! he’s told us over and over again, but he loved camp so much! too, and misses it terribly! So difficult, this growing up business.

Today I spent most of my time doing ALL the laundry, because kids bring lots of real dirt (TM) back with them to the city from sleepaway camp. When we got there this morning they made a big announcement that they’d found lice on some campers + counselors (which I’d totally planned to check him for anyway), which was just another reason for me to enact LaundryFest2011. Actually it was really sweet: the camp seemed so apologetic about the lice, as if we don’t get a note from school about lice in Gus’s class pretty much every year. And we have that crazy German lice comb so we’re ready to pick the nits.

So far so good: no one seems to have lice, everything’s clean, and the cats and child are sleeping happily. I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep, too.