Baby Steps...

The article inches slowly but ever closer to completion. I keep typing things in italics like "This sucks and needs to be rewritten" or "Do you really need this sentence?" But, I continue to pull at the plow.

I'm also beginning the reading for my classes, which start later this month (*gasp!* - so early!). Most of the first month or even two of this semester is stuff I've taught many times before (various medieval texts). But in one of the classes I'm beginning with a certain now canonical early feminist text and then using that as a segue into the medieval material. It's been years since I first read this canonical early 20c. text and I forgot how much I like it.

Had a lovely time with my aunt last night - she stayed until around midnight talking about all kinds of things. My uncle died a year ago and her only child lives far away across the country with his new family. She's been feeling very alone and it's so good to get together once a week or so - for both of us. When Medieval Mom comes for a visit this next week, we're going to go visit Medieval Aunt as well - even though she's my father's sister and they divorced in '83, my aunt used to live with my parents in the late 60s and they were very close. So, it will be a fun reunion.

TD also comes in two days for a visit - I'm completely overjoyed! Tonight, though, I go out with several colleagues to celebrate one of them reaching a big career publishing milestone. Fun! Busy, busy....

Update

Whew! Exams are over. Now all I need to do is grade them, but this is so much easier than grading papers. I've had the usual flurry of emails from students complaining about the way the TA graded their papers and asking me to overrule the grade within the next 24 hours before they go back home for the summer. How many ways can I say, "It ain't happening"??

So, aside from grading, grading, grading, there have been some difficult things going on the past week of largely bloggy silence (other than the existential crisis I had when we returned from grad school city).

1) My 48 year old cousin has been diagnosed with an incredibly rare kind of cancer in and around his pancreas. It's spread into the ducts that connect to the liver as well. It's so rare, in fact, that only 2500 cases are reported in the US each year. There are only two places that can treat it in the US - Johns Hopkins and the Mayo clinic. He's been at JH but they can't figure out exactly what kind of tumor it is so they can set the chemo properly. So, now he's on his way to Mayo for a couple of weeks. The survival rate for this kind of cancer is less than 2%. His son, my second cousin, is the one who goes to school at Virginia Tech, so they were talking to the doctor about my cousin's cancer when they found out that 30 people had been shot at their son's school. It's not raining but pouring on our family right now...

2) In a less dire but closer to home (and probably psychosomatic on my part) situation, I fear that something is wrong with Furball #2's kidney. Some of you might know that she only has one and has had for about 5 years now. We've always kept an eye on it (bloodwork every 6 months and more recently a urine analysis every 6 months or so) and both kitties are on a special kidney diet food. But she lost a couple of pounds recently and I think she might be drinking a bit more water than usual.

Now, in January she weighed a whopping 15 pounds - the heaviest she's ever been (butterball...) and now she weighs about 13, which is where she's usually at. Of course, I read that weight loss as a potential problem rather than as a rectification of what was an unusual weight *gain* on her part. This might explain why the vet looked at me like I was crazy before we went on vacation. Furball #2 is notoriously reluctant to cooperate with anything medical and when I tried to take her in to get a urine sample before break, she refused to give it to the vet and actually shredded her arm a bit (she was scared and was trying to jump down - it was an unintential back-claw episode rather than an intentional front-claw thing. I should also mention that I'm not very fond of this vet because I think she has a shitty bedside manner and she doesn't take my tiny bit of panic a bit more seriously - I'm not in there all the time! I just want to keep her remaining kidney healthy!!! The vet was this way before the claw episode, by the way). So, today I have F-ball #2 in lockdown in the bedroom with a box full of non-absorbant litter pellets and we're in a waiting game.

At any rate, I've just been very over-worried and hopefully for no reason, but I majorly over-react about these cats. I acknowledge this about myself and I'm willing to spend the money to pay vets to make me feel better about it. Even if the other kidney is not operating 100%, cats can still live for a while, right? If you keep an eye on it?? Her bloodwork was fine in January and she's only 9 - I guess because of her kidney shutting down years ago (it was a kidney stone that got caught in the urethra and ended up causing the kidney to fail - she lost a lot of weight rapidly), I perceive any kidney problem as failure rather than something that is probably what happens to every older cat and is gradual.

That's probably a lot more than any of you want to know about my cat, but there it is. Maybe the general feeling of worry about all the health stuff in my fmaily and the cats are connected?

Random Bits of Emotional Musings and Existential Crises

I've been wanting to post a bit more about our trip to grad school city and the host of emotional reactions - both good and a little tough - that attended our trip.

First off, seeing our friends who are still in the area even after we finished school (and who will be there for years) was so wonderful and it brought home a bit the old truism that school friends are made far more easily than colleague or "grown up" friends. The Dutchman and I have moved around quite a bit over the past couple of years and in my past three teaching situations I was on the fringes of a department and university (i.e., as a VAP and an adjunct). I was happy to have these positions (god knows!) but socially it was a real low point - I naturally wasn't a part of the culture of the department, never went to meetings, and my office was usually off in a different building, etc. The school where I'm at now is slightly different because I made an effort of introducing myself to the colleagues in my field here and it's been nice.

But being back "home" for a few days reminded us of how much we loved being with our friends, who are all in either gone on to academic jobs or other professions in the area but with whom we still have a lot of fun. We don't gripe about the difficulty of grad school and dissertating (as we were wont to do before), instead, we talk about our work, our careers, etc. and still have an amazing connection. Even though most of us "survived" grad school together, that's not even remotely the only thing we have in common. All in all, I guess I realized that I didn't have to go back in time to a nostalgic, sometimes gruelling, past in order to enjoy these friendships. They have continued to develop long after grad school is over and they've survived the intervening geographical distance very well. This is great because I know we'll always have them, but it's tough, because - dammit - I want them all the time!

This brings me to my second emotional musing, which was also brought into sharp relief through this trip: babies. We made the rounds to see all our friends and two of the couples had new (2 months) and new-ish (7 months) babies that we'd never seen before. They were fantastic, lovely little nippers and it was just a giant ball of fun to hang out with all of them - with the adults drinking margaritas and beer, eating velveeta and salsa "cheese" dip, and helping our friends' 4 year old put together a dinosaur puzzle while trying to keep my margarita glass out of grabbing range of the baby I was holding. It was a wonderful time.

Just before we left for our trip last week, we heard that some of our closest friends, one of the Dutch couples we're going to Tuscany with this summer, are expecting a baby in November. This is one of the Dutchman's closest and oldest friends - they got married a month after we did. We were completely overjoyed for them, but after we got off the phone with them, we both cried.

Pretty early on in this last hiring season I knew that I wouldn't have a fourth job market in me - at least not now. As time went on and the options naturally began to narrow, we sat down and gave some serious thought to what we would do if no job offers were forthcoming this year. We knew we could count on a 3-year contract here that would pay very well, but would not be renewable. So, we decided that if the Dream Academy didn't come through, we would stay here for the next few years and start trying to have a family in a few months. It felt good to have a game plan in any event - I stopped trying to think about the implications of my actually getting the job and then *taking* the job. When I did get the job I was overjoyed personally and professionally - in the back of my mind has been the nagging issue that we will be living apart very soon, but to be honest, the happiness of being able to begin my career outweighs that on most days.

But when we heard about our friends and saw all the babies, I remembered in a very visceral, emotional way that another part of that game plan was also being put on hold indefinitely - having a family. Now, intellectually I know that I'm still young, I have lots of time, and that it's much better for me to start my career now rather than divert it in a significant way. With my new job I have options and security and the opportunity to teach and conduct research in my own field. Staying here with a 3-year contract means teaching a lot of courses I'm not really trained to teach and hitting a brick wall in the near future.

The trip last week combined with the news from our friends hit both of us very hard with the realization that we can't start a family right now. Ironically, almost right at the moment we both decided that we wanted to try for a baby (literally in January), I got offered the job a week or so later. [*cue Alanis Morrissette's "Ironic"*] Hopefully we can in the near future, but it could take years for us to live together again - it could also take one year. Who knows? Either way, we're not able to do it now and it saddens us both.

Why couldn't one of us have wanted to be a real estate agent? Or something we could do just about anywhere??