i watch the snow make slow time

maura @ 10:29 pm

Over xmas break we went to Disneyworld. It was my first time and before we left I thought it would also be my last, but now I’m not so sure.

Let’s back up. If you were alive in America after the 1950s or so it’s impossible not to have some sort of history with Uncle Walt’s Corporation. I wasn’t a particularly Disney-crazed kid, but I do have lots of fond memories of the old movies.* I think Cinderella was my first movie in the theater ever, Alice in Wonderland (which I actually remember) my second. I still have the soundtracks to several of them — with a storybook built in to the sleeve! — that I vividly remember playing on my Fisher-Price record player.** I brought Dressy Bessy with me to see Snow White, because that evil queen was intense. But I was never really into Mickey et al.

* And why don’t they release the movies theatrically anymore, like when I was a kid? They could make boatloads of $ I’m sure, you’d think they’d be all over it.

** Would that I still had the record player, it was so cool!

We didn’t go to Disneyworld when I was little — it was too far away + expensive, so we went to Colonial Williamsburg + Busch Gardens instead (which was really fun and actually historical, so don’t feel bad for us!). When I was in college my mom + stepfather + sibs + stepsibs all went and I admit to a smidge of envy. Not quite as much as the jealous queens of old, but a tiny bit. As a college graduation gift my mom got us Disneyworld and Epcot passes, but we didn’t use them for a long time.

When I took a year off from archaeology grad school to work in the crazy internets trenches during those mid-1990s boom days, I spent some time working for Disney Online. The job was kind of wacky (in that Herman Miller chairs + unlimited espresso + late night redesigns kind of way), but I worked with some smashing folks. One of the perks was four 1-day passes to any of the parks every year (Happy Holidays!). My brother went to college in LA, so once when my mom + J + I were visiting we trooped out to Disneyland (with Tex, too).

Driving in CA is awful but the park was a blast. It was so cool to see the care + attention to detail — wherever you were it was almost impossible to see the other parts of the park. The illusion was intense, and it was easy to forget that we were right outside LA. I think we spent most of the day waiting in line, but they were so good at keeping us busy with stuff to look at that I can’t remember feeling down about it. We got to go on a few things that aren’t in Disneyworld, like the Indiana Jones ride and Mister Toad’s Wild Ride (one of J’s favorites; now gone from FL). I could swear we went on Space Mountain, but J says we didn’t.

Recently I’ve spent more time thinking of the dark side of the mouse. We spend lots of time in the class I teach talking about intellectual property and copyright and fair use, and Mickey et al. always make at least a token appearance when we discuss the Copyright Term Extension Act. I also watched Rip: A Remix Manifesto this semester (we screened it at work during Open Access Week) which takes pains to point out the plainly derivative nature of so much of Uncle Walt’s best work. I know there’s lots of money at stake, but it’s hard not to be disappointed and a little angry at the WDW Corp for those legal shenanigans.

Gus is not a big Disney kid — as is probably impossible to ignore, the company has invested heavily in the princesses for little girls (ugh). I can’t think of a newer Disney movie he’s been interested other than the underappreciated Lilo and Stitch. Lucky for all of us there’s Pixar. Lately, though, Gus had been throwing “those movies are for little kids” at us. We missed Toy Story 3 in the theaters and it sat in its Netflix envelope for weeks until I finally convinced Gus to watch it.

And now it’s late and I’m not even to the real story yet, but I think I need to stop for tonight. To be continued!

and the circus in my head

maura @ 1:06 pm

I’ve done pretty well w/writing this week, despite coming down with a cold on Wednesday. Word count’s at a respectable 4003 this morning not including this post and whatever else I manage to write today. We’re all sick now, Gus with a fever, so leaving the house probably isn’t going to happen. Right now Gus (who is crazed for cephalopods) convinced us to let him watch a truly stinky straight to netflix-watch-instantly movie about a giant shark + octopus starring Debbie Gibson. O internets, whatever did we do before you existed?

I’m working on an article about using games in my library instruction sessions so I decided to use some of those gamey tricks on myself to help keep me motivated. I’m recording my word count in a spreadsheet — watch my score rise! — and printed out a calendar sheet so I can add checkmarks to the days I get a chunk of writing done. So far it’s helping, though maybe not as spectacularly as I’d like. I find myself resisting the urge to categorize my writing: bloggy, academic, research-related, work-related, etc. I think that’s ultimately dangerous though — I have a tendency to hold research-related writing up as the most valuable thing I could be doing at any point, and I’m not certain that’s a good thing.

One thing this writing hasn’t done yet is make it any easier to write the literature review for this article. Oh literature reviews, how I hate to write you, with your endless struggles of synthesis. Sometimes I wish I could just present a list of everything I read: here’s some good research on the effectiveness of games-based learning, here are examples of games used in library and information literacy instruction, etc. I keep trying to remember how valuable a good literature review can be, but that’s cold comfort when I’m deep in the trenches of paraphrasing and summarizing, sigh.

You probably noticed that I haven’t stuck to my “what’s my current earworm?” writing prompt. For about the past week and a half it’s been “Bright Yellow Gun” by Throwing Muses. Over vacation I finally read “Rat Girl,” Kristin Hersh’s memoir of the year Throwing Muses got signed to 4AD, she was diagnosed as bipolar and also got pregnant with her first kid. As expected it was fun to read about the early history of the band, but the descriptions of her bipolar experiences were fascinating. As someone who wishes I needed less sleep it was interesting to read about how it feels to not need much sleep at all.

This earworm is much less mysterious than the last: there were lyrics sprinkled throughout, so that’s why the song’s been stuck in my head.

you own the sun

maura @ 10:05 pm

It’s early January, so it’s time for my annual summer camp freakout. I meant to write a big long post about our trip to Disneyworld over the holidays, but I’m sick again (thanks a lot, adorable but lethal nephew!) and have been periodically deep-ending on camp research for the past few days so this is easier. Sorry — I promise at least one meaty Disney post is coming soon.

Once again Gus has declared all camps *except* science camp to be boring and (loudly) proclaims that he will not attend any of them, thank you very much. We are so nice that we will stand in line for science camp again this summer (fingers crossed it’s above freezing that day!), but science camp doesn’t offer as much camp as we need for the summer. So I’ve spent the past week surfing around for other options.

I have to admit that the day camp scene is pretty uninspiring to me these days, too. Maybe it’s just that this will be Gus’s 5th summer of day camps, but the options seem pretty lame: straight-up camps (he’s done so many of these), sports camps (no), drama camps (double no). Cooler camps exist at places like the Bronx Zoo, Aquarium, and Museum of Natural History, but they are too far away to be practical.

He loves nature, animals, swimming…all of these things point to sleepaway camp. There’s just no other way to get a hefty daily dose of nature when you live in the city, as far as I can tell. There are a couple of day camps in the northern suburbs that are naturey, but they’re a bus trip from Manhattan much less Brooklyn, and I can’t see asking my kid to commute like a Wall Streeter just to go to camp.

Gus’s reaction to the idea of sleepaway camp has been mixed. We have friends that go (an older + younger brother), and after talking with them last fall Gus was into it, esp. after hearing about archery. Then he changed his mind, because he would miss us so terribly. We would miss him too, and I’m not sure that we’re ready for it either. I went to a 1-week session of sleepaway soccer camp as a kid for 2 summers, but I can’t remember if that started as early as the summer between 4th and 5th grade. I don’t remember being particularly homesick, but a week is not really that long. And we have friends who have been sending their kids to sleepaway camp since they were 7.

But some of these camps look fabulous. Nature, swimming, animals, woodworking, archery, zip lines, climbing walls: what’s not to like? Maybe we just need to talk it up while waving around the brochures. One of the camps has a Family Camp over Memorial Day weekend that we are seriously considering — could be a good way to ease into it.

On second thought, maybe we should go to camp and Gus can get a job for the summer!

and they call him sandy claws

maura @ 4:07 pm

This holiday season was fun and hectic, and it’s going to take me a while to process it all. I’m going to try and write it out in a couple of posts as a way to get myself back on that writing train again, which I’d fallen off of so successfully so many times last semester. New year, new resolutions, blah blah blah — I’m not really going to make them because they are always the same, and always things I try to do all the time anyway: write more, read more (esp. non-work-related stuff), exercise more, stress less.

So, the holidays! This year the Santa situation came home to roost. You may remember my ambivalence about Santa from previous posts around this time of year. My mom didn’t want to lie to us so we never believed in Santa (though I never burst anyone else’s bubble when I was a kid!). We always put Santa on gift tags + stuff, though, just for fun. Before Gus was born Jonathan and I used to visit some of his relatives at xmas and it was fun to do the Santa thing for their little kids, so it wasn’t too hard to convince me to do Santa w/Gus. But I’ve always been kind of jealous of Santa — he does none of the work and gets all of the credit, lucky fatso! — so in our house the *best* gifts are always given by actual real people, and Santa has been known to bring socks + underwear.

There were some cracks in Gus’s Santa belief showing last year, but they were easy to ignore. He wrote a note on xmas eve that read:

Dear Santa,
please fill in a box that tells me if you are real.
_ Yes _ No
From Gus
P.S. Merry X-mas

Jonathan got out his fancy red calligraphy pen, checked “yes,” and wrote “Love S. Claus” on the note, and that was the end of that.

This year things were different. About 3 weeks before xmas we were coming in from somewhere and as I was unlocking the door to the apartment Gus just asked me out of the blue: “Mom, is Santa real, or is he just parents buying presents for kids?” Now, this is where I need someone to be with me at all times as an adviser, because when I told this story to a friend later she said “why didn’t you just say: ‘what do you think?'” But I don’t and I didn’t, instead going for the whole truth.

And of course Gus got angry, threw “you lied to me!” at me and everything. I felt really bad, tried to explain that we can still write Santa on gift tags because it’s fun, right? Nope, no dice.

Luckily after a week or so of moping he mellowed out, and we ended up having a perfectly nice Santa-free xmas. And in the end I was relieved because I hadn’t been sure how Santa would fit in with our plans to be on vacation on xmas day — when we went to London two years ago Gus was very concerned with whether Santa would deliver the presents in time (we traveled on 12/25). As you can probably guess, I’m really pleased to be done with Santa, and glad too that we’ve safely navigated our first xmas in which Gus doesn’t believe but his younger cousins (still) do.

And the obligatory funny ending? A week or so after the revelation, Gus turned to me out of nowhere and exclaimed: “you and Daddy eat the cookies!” And the carrot sticks, too.

how can i be sure you’re breaking all the rules

maura @ 12:31 pm

I’ve been mulling over a semi-regular blog thing. Really what I need is something to make me write every day. Not too much, maybe 200 words or so, but more often than I usually blog. It’s a prompt problem, really. What kind of a prompt can I use that would make me write something different every day?

So here’s my attempt: today’s earworm. What song is stuck in my head and why. Let’s give it a shot, shall we?

Last week “Don’t Tell Me” by Blancmange popped into my head. I do have this record (vinyl), though I can’t recall the last time I listened to it. And I think it’s one of the records that a pal gave me a few years ago when she was ditching all of her vinyl — that is, I don’t think I bought it when it was released.

But I did like this song. My guess is that I listened to it via Rock Over London, a radio show I used to listen to in 9th or 10th grade (Wikipedia says 1984). We lived in this strange house on a hill surrounded by trees, and because my bedroom was on the 1st floor it was hard to get radio reception so I used to listen to it on the family stereo upstairs in the living room. Of course I taped the show on cassettes to listen to later — who didn’t? It’s funny to think of this now with all the hoo-hah over illegal downloading. I remember hearing that all of our cassettes would disintegrate over time, but it’s surprising to me how well some of mine have held up. Of course, the only tape player we have anymore is in the car. Let’s hear it for old media!

P.S. I didn’t know what Blancmange was when I first heard the song, and was later dismayed to discover that it’s a custardy dessert. I have a dread fear of puddings and custards.

art update!

maura @ 9:35 pm

The silver inflated cow is back! And a big coffee bean, too.

Sadly the big ball is now deflated. It’s been cold + windy here — hard for inflatable art to survive, I guess.

i’ve got blu-tack on my back

maura @ 11:04 pm

As part of my 11 days 4 presentations early December extravaganza, my research partner and I presented a poster last Friday at a local conference. The speakers were great — more about them elsewhere later this week.

It’s been a long time since I’ve presented at a poster session, and I came away having had a great time and with new respect and admiration for this type of conference experience. I feel like posters are the least-desired of conference options. Everyone wants to give a paper, of course, or a panel. At the national conference for academic librarianship, at least — we didn’t really have panels back when I used to go to archaeology conferences. Papers are more exclusive, have a higher rejection rate, and thus they seem more serious.

But after last week I think posters should get more respect. It took us — by which I mean my research partner, who took the biggest time hit working with the very pretty but fussy template we were using — hours and hours and hours to get that poster laid out for printing and full of compelling text + images. It also took time to create a handout and to get the supplemental materials up on our project website, just in case anyone followed the link on our handout.

The poster session was also lots of work on the day of. At this symposium poster time = breaks, so we sort of ran back and forth between our table and the poster, running out in turns to grab coffee or hit the restroom when things got slow. There were only about 8 or so posters and 180-ish attendees, so our traffic was pretty good.

Despite all the work (and my complete inability to ride the subway home without whacking numerous passersby on the legs with the damn thing), I thoroughly enjoyed our poster presentation. It was so nice to have the opportunity to spend some time speaking *with* folks about our research rather than talking *at* them. I still get a bit nervous delivering papers/talks, too, and there are (thankfully) no butterflies when you’re just standing by an easel talking to a few people at a time. I got to meet and talk to lots of colleagues from CUNY and beyond.

Would I preferentially submit a poster in the future, given the option? That’s a good question. There is that pesky prestige problem — papers just look better on the CV. But the experience was definitely eye-opening. For sure I can say that I will certainly not avoid posters in the future. Especially if I can find a simpler template.

another year…

maura @ 9:31 pm

…another NaBloPoMo come and gone. I missed 3 days this year and posted short or photo entries more than I probably should have, but I’m glad I kicked my butt into some sort of gear, however low.

And now I think I might be getting sick, so off to sleep with me.

now she’s in purple, now she’s a turtle

maura @ 10:16 pm

You may have heard about this newfangled invention the kids are all crazy over: text messaging.

Texting! OMG!

For the longest time we did not have free texting on our phones. Mostly it was stinginess thriftyness: I don’t like talking on the phone at all, but I also couldn’t really fathom that I would text enough to make it worth the money. Plus it bugs the hell out of me that we can have 40 million billion jillion unused phone minutes (see above re: my dislike of telephone communication) BUT the phone company has the gall to charge us, charge us!, for texting. Harrumph! Get me my tin cans and string, you whipper-snapper!

It was sometimes hilarious not to have a texting plan. Occasionally I get wrong-number texts, which are even more annoying when they cost $0.25 a pop *and* when the sender refuses to believe that you are not her/his friend. But now that we have a text plan, I can get into true identity SMS fights with ease!

I guess it was one text too many, but one day I said, “hey, maybe we should get a text plan.” And thus it was to be, and verily, we were texting by nightfall. Mostly I just text Jonathan. Thanks to the fabulous iphone emoji app, we can also send each other tiny pictures of hearts, clouds, food, drink, and smiling poop (scroll down on that page for the poop).

But recently I’ve started to text others more and more. My siblings + parents, esp. over the holiday. Pals, esp. when I am running late. Tonight was a breakthrough — Jonathan texted a new babysitter we’re hoping to engage, and I was texted by one of Gus’s friend’s parents. OMG this texting is amazing! No putting off phone calls forever because I don’t want to make them, no awkward small talk is possible in 160 characters. Texting FTW!

zooming

maura @ 10:31 pm

All weekend I have sort of been avoiding taking a look at the calendar because the next couple of weeks are kind of insane. Gus’s birthday is soon, and Xmas is practically right around the corner. Also, I somehow managed to get myself involved in 4 presentations at conferences and various other events between 12/3 and 12/14. It is all very exciting but also a little scary. So instead I’ve been catching up on my feeds + twitter and playing Carcassonne and listening to music and hanging out with family + friends.

Only a few more minutes of that before I should go to sleep so I can get up and start freaking out getting back to work tomorrow. Later, gators!