four eyes

maura @ 11:21 pm

I got glasses in the 6th grade. You know the story — one day I realized I couldn’t see the chalkboard in school. At first I only wore them in school when I had to, but by about 8th grade my eyes were bad enough that I had to wear them all the time. After about a year of nonstop begging, my parents finally let me get contact lenses in 9th grade.

I’ve never liked wearing my glasses. The lack of peripheral vision really gets me down, especially when driving or digging. They get all sweaty on my face whenever it’s hot out. Plus, I just don’t think they look good on me, even though I love being a nerdy librarian.

Only thing is, the older I get, the more my eyes seem to resist being encontacted. In the mornings I sorta dread shoving those little pieces of plastic in there. By the end of the day my eyes are really tired + red. And the last time I visited the eye doctor I almost got into an argument with him about daily wear vs. throwaway lenses. Dr. Man wanted me to get the latter, but the thought of the plastic waste makes me too sad, and of course they’re more expensive.

Lately I’ve been trying to wear my glasses more often on the weekends and other non-work times, practicing for the day when I might switch permanently or semi-permanently. It’s much harder than I thought it would be to wear them all the time. For all of those reasons above, esp. now that it’s firmly sunscreen weather.

I have an eye doctor appointment this week coming up. This time around I decided to go see an actual opthamologist, so I’ll probably order either glasses or contacts or both. What should I do?

from another galaxy

maura @ 11:23 pm

Sorry it’s been so quiet ’round these parts. I’ve been thinking on a meaty post for a while now but haven’t had time to get it out of my head. Sometimes when there’s a big ‘un brewing it makes me procrastinate posting something smaller in the meantime, as if I’m worried that I’ll waste all the creativity on an intermediate, less substantial blathering. Silly, is what it is.

So I’m back and have good news: I rode my bike to work today! w00t and YAY! I’m happy to report that I didn’t encounter any traffic-related problems, nor was I too hot when I got to work (I wore shorts + brought a change of clothes), nor did my bike get stolen. Even though it was the sole bike locked to the rack all day. I only went to check on it once, twice if you count when I had to go out for coffee because I stupidly allowed a meeting to end after 3 on Friday which means that all of the coffee locales on campus were closed, bah.

The route to work is pretty easy (downhill most of the way there) + straightforward, and nearly all of the streets I ride on have bike lanes. It was funny to commute with the hardcore bikers, clearly on their way to the Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridge. You could tell they were SERIOUS by their gnarly rides and the way they rushed past me as I rode my old lady bike (3 speeds! a coaster and a hand brake!). Dudes, it’s not a race! We’ll all get there eventually.

I still feel like a moron when it’s time to lock the bike up. I’m just not coordinated enough nor have I had enough practice to deal with the U lock and the cable (for the front wheel) and the variety of bike racks out there without looking like a spaz. It’s also kind of a pain to have to stash the bike in our basement. Bikes are quite popular ’round these parts and it’s hard to find a parking place.

But these are minor concerns, really. Yay for the bike and yay for the cute little cow, pig and sheep stickers I put on it, too! I recently unearthed some vintage Sanrio stickers so I’ll be stickerin’ that bad boy right up — I’ll post a picture soon.

spin that record

maura @ 10:36 pm

I am afraid to ride my bike to work. There, I said it! The bike’s been sitting in our living room for nearly 2 weeks now. It could be down in the basement hanging out with all the other bikes, but I keep telling myself that I’ll ride it to work tomorrow, yeah, that’s it.

I know I’ve whined about this before (here and here). I guess really I am still nervous about all of those things. It’s worth noting that I haven’t ridden my scooter to work since my fall last fall (ha!). That was ha! for the rhetorical turn, which Wikipedia tells me is called antanaclasis, not ha! for falling. Falling sucked.

I don’t rightly know what to do about this. It’s kind of ironic, because I just today told someone that sometimes it’s good to do something that scares you, because it knocks you out of your comfort zone which can often be good. The example I used was when I went to present at that conference 2 wks ago — I actually didn’t know anyone else there, which is sometimes hard for me (I kind of hover over the line between introvert and extrovert). But clearly I really should have used my fear of self-propelled wheeled transport, which is a much better example (and doesn’t sound all smug).

It’s not that I’m scared to ride the bike at all. We’ve been riding in the park many weekends (with a more or less whiny kid, depending), which has been fine. But there are no cars in the park on weekends. And I never lock the bike + leave it anywhere. And I’ve done it before which means that I know what will happen. And…

I never really think of myself as a fear change kind of person, but clearly I am, at least in some ways. I do feel like I’ve pushed myself in many respects in the recent past — this afternoon I had a conversation in which I was reminded that when I was younger I really, really didn’t want to do any teaching, which is pretty much the exact opposite of how I feel now. But it is just so easy to come up with reasons not to ride my bike to work that it’s totally evident that I’m just scared.

Things will have to change soon — it’s just getting too hot for me to walk to work in the mornings. Plus, I suspect that the bike is actually the fastest way to get to work, and with school ending and camp starting soon for Gus our mornings will shift a bit later, so I could use that extra time. Stay tuned.

things i’m bad at

maura @ 5:51 pm

I’m sick, and it’s a drag. I know: alert the media! No one likes being sick, but this sickness was sneaky, which seems extra-unfair. I guess it’s a head cold: I’m achey and sniffly, and my main symptom is an annoying, intermittent hacking cough.

I admit that I have been known to try to work through my illness, to not use my sick days, etc. But lately I’ve tried to change my ways. I started feeling sick last weekend and I took it easy, really I did! Then I didn’t get any better, but I didn’t get any worse, either: after a shower, a cup of coffee and 2 advil in the morning I felt pretty okay. So I went into work and kept taking it easy at home. I mean, it’s not like I’m doing hard labor on a dig — many days my job involves mostly sitting at a computer or sitting in a meeting.

Yesterday morning I started feeling slightly worse, but it was my last day of class (student presentations!) and the last meeting of a committee I co-chaired (elections!) so I had to and wanted to go in. Last night it was clear that I was actually sick, so I’m home today coughing, drinking tea and alternating between convalescing in the living room and the bedroom.

During extra-busy times I’ve been guilty of occasionally wishing I’d get sick so I could have an excuse to rest all day, who hasn’t? But the reality is always much more boring and less enjoyable than I imagine. Because in my daydreams of course I forget that sickness slows down your brain, so it’s not like you can catch up on anything. It is nice to have the chance to read, esp. when you have a good book: a neighbor lent me her British copy of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (which is awesome since by the time I remembered to request a copy from the public library I was #252 in the queue, and of course it’s not even out here yet). And now that I have a laptop I can check email whilst reclining and sipping tea, which is also good.

But I hate how a sick day sloooooows to a crawl. I always feel like I’m missing everything going on in the real world, and that things are just piling up while time goes down the toilet. I want being sick to be like any other work. Today I worked at getting better. I worked hard and put in my 8 hours, why don’t I feel any better? How many days of work will it take until I finish this sickness project, anyway? This was not in the original spec. Where’s a good project manager when you need one?

power force motion drive

maura @ 5:12 pm

You know, I try to be a good hippie: hanging our clothes to dry, intermittent composting, buying most clothes secondhand, etc. I’m not the biggest fan of capitalism — the older I get, the more global income inequality bothers me. I’ve sort of flirted with doing The Compact from time to time, and since I don’t enjoy shopping all that much it’s usually not too hard not to buy much anyway.

But consumerism sometimes gets the best of me, and this week has been a particularly stark example. We’ve been planning to redo our bathrooms for a while now, at least one but perhaps both. About 9 yrs ago we got the kitchen redone, and I guess I’d been using that as a guide when I thought about how much a renovation should cost rather than doing any research on actual prices (yes, I am a librarian, why do you ask?). So I had a number in my head before we asked a contractor to come give us an estimate. And it turns out that number was really, really wrong.

At first I was disappointed at the cost, which seems so out of proportion to the size of the room (though of course I realize that plumbing, tiling, etc., is lots of work). But last week was busy so I didn’t have time to give it much more thought. Except that today, I realized that I *had* been thinking about it, just not overtly. Then I was disappointed in myself, both for being so disappointed and for my resulting compensatory behavior.

Let me explain.

I kind of have a thing for sneakers, particularly those of a certain brand. I feel guilty about this for all the usual reasons: consumerism, sweatshops, susceptibility to advertiser manipulation, etc. But I remember the royal blue Samoas with chartreuse stripes that I had in 6th grade: they’re like my Ur sneakers, and I am powerless in nostalgia’s grip. (And lest I paint too bad a picture of myself I should mention that my last 2 pairs [one for summer and one for winter] lasted about 7 yrs, so I do try to get the most out of them that I can).

So every so often I surf on over to the Adidas website and take a look at what they’ve got. Customization is huge right now, if you hadn’t noticed, and they’re no different: you can pick a sneaker type and create your very own, from a limited color palette. The other night I used the sneakermaker to make these:

I didn’t order any of these — they’re $115!!! — but still, it was kind of a time suck to create them and I’m not getting any of that time back, either. And since royal blue + chartreuse aren’t color options I can’t live out my sneaker dreams.

Fast forward to yesterday. Our building’s stoop sale is coming up which means I’m thinking about tables again. Our current table is old. We bought it in 1996 and it’s just a standard pine table so by now it’s full of nicks and scratches, many courtesy of baby Gus’s exuberant silverware drumming days. We’ve been flirting with this one table at Ikea for about 2 yrs now but I keep thinking I don’t like it. It’s heavy, it’s light-colored wood, and what I really want is a mid-century number with leaves that slide out from underneath the table top.

But with a kid + 2 cats now is not the time to invest in expensive furniture, so yesterday I made us go to Ikea to check to see if there were any new tables, just in case we could get one in time to sell the old one at the stoop sale. Well, we ended up getting that table we always look at, and I guess I’ve made my peace with it. We also got 4 black chairs in 4 different styles, a quirky twist that Jonathan talked me into. And some throw pillows and a new duvet and a lampshade to replace one the cats knocked over and a nightlight for Gus and a couple of other small things.

It’s taken me until yesterday evening to realize that I’ve bought (or thought about buying) all this stuff because I’m disappointed about the bathroom, disappointed that I’m not going to get a shiny new pedestal sink and black-and-white tile floor. This realization hasn’t cheered me up at all, I have to say. I guess it’s good to be self-reflective, but the only real takeaway I can come up with is that capitalism makes me feel bad.

(Woah, how did I end up with 2 bummer posts in a row? Next time I promise to write something more uplifting!)

and never stop to ask the questions

maura @ 10:13 pm

I know it’s lame to blag about the weather, but sometimes when the weather’s weird it’s hard to think of anything else. I mean, the weather’s sort of there as background noise for everyone most of the time, but living in the city we walk a lot so I feel like there’s more of a chance for the weather to be intrusive.

Starting before Easter and continuing into last week we had a spate of much warmer than usual temperatures here. And it’s mostly good. I mean, it’s easy to enjoy the warm sunshine of early Spring, even for those of us who prefer Fall and Winter (like me). But last week was beyond warm all the way up into hot. It’s just not right for the temps to hit the mid-80s in NYC in April, not at all.

I noticed a curious thing on the hot days: I had to check the calendar constantly because my brain kept trying to convince me that it was June. I have a couple of deadlines in June, and I had to talk myself down from freaking out that I was late meeting them. And my temperature-induced date confusion skewed my perceptions in other ways, too: it made me think several times that it had been months since I’d seen some of my friends. “I haven’t seen X since it was snowy!” my brain said, but of course the last big storm hadn’t all melted until the first week of March.

No harm in that, really — the temperatures are back down to normal now, and my brain has stopped trying to confuse me. But I *am* worried about the flowers + trees. During the hot spell nature freaked out too, and now it seems like everything is blooming. It feels much too soon. I mean, the cherry blossom festival at the botanic gardens isn’t for another 4 weeks, and already the tree at the end of our block has tons of full flowers. We haven’t been to the gardens in a while and I hope we haven’t missed anything. We’re planning a visit tomorrow* so I guess we shall see.

* that is, if we can manage to drag Gus along, who has recently declared the gardens to be “SO boring” and asked us “why do we have to go there all the time?” The likelihood of ice cream bribery tomorrow is high.

can’t stop this crazy thing!

maura @ 8:55 pm

It’s December 1, why am I still blogging? Well it’s Twitter Tuesday, for one. Also I’ve begun to suspect that my hair has stopped growing, and I needed someplace to say that. It’s just weird — my hair never seems to get any longer recently. I don’t cut it as often as I probably should, but once I do it seems to grow to its former length and then stop. Bizarre.

Last Week’s Tweets:

working on my CUNY IT conference presentation, hoping that my open office slideshow looks okay in powerpoint.
2:15 PM Nov 30th from web

@alevtina All those English comp classes w/the Ps — bet our stats are similar. Tho I did send some students to our Hs last week.
2:12 PM Nov 30th from web in reply to alevtina

Listening to Gus & his cousins play pirates in the other room. “Are there any girls on this pirate ship?”
8:34 AM Nov 29th from Echofon

@lwaltzer Wasn’t it great? Jonathan & I want to see it again. The digging scenes were so much fun.
8:31 AM Nov 29th from Echofon in reply to lwaltzer

“I’m not as lovely as I could be.” “None of us ever is.”
9:52 AM Nov 28th from Echofon

not that anyone needs them, but apparently I’ve got some google wave invites — ping me if’n youse want ’em.
3:56 PM Nov 27th from web

What’s more fun than an enormous model dung beetle? Searching for the eggs in the dung, of course. http://twitpic.com/r6rt6
1:13 PM Nov 27th from Echofon

Mmmm, cornbread & sage sausage muffins are good for breakfast, too.
9:43 AM Nov 27th from Echofon

there’s no smiling in kung fu. this is an embarassment!
9:59 PM Nov 26th from Echofon

Yum. http://twitpic.com/r38d3
7:01 PM Nov 26th from Echofon

@boonebgorges transferring files to my mom’s new laptop here. nothing says holiday like family tech support!
1:09 PM Nov 26th from Echofon in reply to boonebgorges

RT @notjonathan Roasted sw potatoes & cauliflower, kale w/bacon & onions, cornbread & sausage dressing. Someone else make the damn turkey.
7:53 AM Nov 26th from Echofon

@listentomyvoice they can stuff it! I’ll take education over $$$ any day, man. 8:47 PM Nov 24th from Echofon in reply to listentomyvoice

i stole your time, made it mine

maura @ 5:33 pm

Last weekend Gus couldn’t stop talking about My Sims, which he’d watched his friend play on the schoolbus. So Jonathan broke out our 9-yr-old copy of The Sims and installed it on his computer. Gus was extremely obsessed for about 72 hours, though it’s since faded. The interface is actually kind of difficult to manipulate, and I’d forgotten how clunky it is to move furniture around, build new rooms, etc. Ultimately I think the intensive mousing required got Gus down.

Short as it was, the obsession was intense, and brought me right back to my own obsession when we first got the game years ago. It’s true that Gus was much more amused by certain aspects of the Sims than I; of course it cracks him up that the sims forget to relieve themselves and have accidents. And he didn’t care as much about decorating as I did. He was always annoyed when his prissy sims complained about the blue formica table that Gus bought for them. (The simplistic consumerism of the game is kind of hilarious — they are happy when you buy them nice stuff! How realistic!)

But I was surprised by some of his inventive strategies. He bought his sims a computer before getting a TV, explaining: “they can use the computer to play games and look for jobs.” Ultimately, he had to buy them a TV because his woman sim didn’t want to play video games and needed something fun to do (blurgh, Will Wright, I lost a little respect for you on that one).

Somewhat alarming was the realization that in many ways Gus and I played the game very much the same. Just like in real life, Gus hoarded his money and bought his sims something expensive only when it really seemed necessary (e.g., when he realized that the fancy computer breaks less often than the basic model). And he spent lots of time really scripting every move for his sims. The sims will take care of some, but not all, of their “needs” automatically, and if you really want to do well in the game you need to control most of their actions. Gus realized this pretty quickly, as did I, and we both got kind of obsessive in trying to make them do the “right” things. So it was kind of weird watching him play.

This week we were both back to our regularly scheduled games: Gus and friends can’t get enough of Super Smash Bros Brawl on the Wii, and I’m still rocking Harbor Master on the iPhone.

whoops, nearly forgot a title there

maura @ 9:23 pm

So yesterday would have been our last day of soccer, except that we ditched it a couple of weeks ago. Gus was just not into it, and we were tired of dragging a complaining kid all the way down to the bottom of the park so he could be the first one to volunteer not to go in (and roll around on the astroturf). The games were much sportier this season–we moved up an age bracket–and, while I think he does like running around and kicking the ball, he’s definitely not a star player, and doesn’t really get the whole dribbling-passing-shooting thing.

Me? I’m torn on it. Despite all of my whining I do like having something to do on a weekend morning. Gus has more AM energy than PM (until bedtime, of course), and the day always seems to go better when we get out of the house. Though we can certainly find a class or something else to do on the weekends. (I’m going to call about ice skating tomorrow!)

I am pretty far down the sporty ladder (on the klutzy rungs), but I did play soccer as a kid and it really seemed like something Gus could like, too. But I don’t know, most of the time I think the whole team sports thing is bungus. Of course it’s important to be able to work in a group. But I also think that kids get a lot of group work in many different contexts at school, from playing at recess to more organized things like gym class and building projects, etc. So I don’t really think that you HAVE to play sports to learn to be part of a team.

More than anything what keeps me worrying about sports/no sports is that horrible word: normal. Isn’t it normal for boys to like sports? Will other kids think he’s weird if he doesn’t?

(I fully realize that these are my own childhood demons rearing their ugly heads — I always felt like a nerdy weirdo, even when I had a group of good friends. Until college, of course, because you can’t feel like a nerd when you’re surrounded by other nerds!)

But it’s stupid for me to worry, for so many reasons:
1. No one is weird in NYC, because everyone is. That’s one of the reasons why we live here!

2. I have never seen such a strong sense of self-confidence in a small person than I see in Gus. Seriously, when he was about 3 he once shouted a kid twice his age (and 3x his size) right off the slide, so he could climb up it. I don’t know where he got it — certainly not from me.

So I shouldn’t worry. And I try not to. If only parenting weren’t so completely judgementified these days, it would be so much easier.

Normal, normal, normal — isn’t it just a town in Illinois? Of course it is.

wheezing and sneezing and

maura @ 9:45 pm

And speaking of Cocteau Twins lyrics, here are the last 3 captchas I had to enter when I posted a blag tonight for the coop environmental committee:

pingba
wasill
ancyc

I haven’t twittered or facebooked at all today, how can that be?! I do find that excessive twittering + facebooking suck blag energy. What can you do, there’s only so much time in the day. (Okay, I just twittered. I cannot say “tweet,” it is just too precious.)

Hey, my leg is feeling better! So much so that I walked 1/3 of the way to work today. For the remainder of the week I have 3 days in which I’ve got meetings/presentations in Manhattan, so here’s hoping I really am on the mend.

Thus ends tonight’s random entry. I really do mean to write about compost someday, but not tonight.