Category: Me

Cards of all sizes, sent with colorful stamps and mass-produced greetings, tumble from my mail box, each one a silent reproach against me and the stack of un-signed, un-stamped, un-addressed, and (most importantly) un-sent cards sitting on my desk. Long letters from half-remembered friends point out in tiny and ornate fonts that I have not had children (or grandchildren, or nieces, or nephews, or offspring of any kind), have not published a book, have not gone on a cruise, have not recently graduated from anything, have not started a not-for-profit organization or advocacy group (or a company of any kind). Nor have I recently adopted anything that would otherwise have gone homeless, or invented anything that will surely revolutionize … anything.

I will not be writing a letter this year. I have never written a letter. There’s a fine line between writing resume cover letters and Christmas letters, and I’ve seen too few actual Christmas letters to be any judge of my own writing during this season.

Truth be told, I’ll be lucky to send out a mailing of any kind this year, no matter how silently my stacked cards reproach me from the desk. And if I do, I will limit myself to an unimaginative, though legibly printed, “Merry Christmas, Love Iris.” I will concentrate on spelling names correctly and keeping names properly matched with addresses.

Next month I will go back to opening my mail box with anticipation rather than dread.

[Update: All that moaning and 45 cards later (many with individualized notes, no less), I’m done. Now I’m at liberty to enjoy any cards that should come my way in the next few weeks, secure in the knowledge that my cards are no longer on my desk.]

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I’ve never introduced anyone before, and now I’m trying to come up with something cogent to say about a guy who’s coming to our campus on Monday. What’s more, I have to say whatever it is that I come up with not once, but twice, since this guy is speaking at two separate events on Monday. I’ve heard him speak once, and I use his online resources a lot… but that doesn’t sound like enough of an introduction.

Of course, these are both pretty informal events, so I keep telling myself not to stress about this. Not that this tactic EVER helps me not to stress about stuff. But I try it all the time anyway: “Now Iris, it’s just a [fill in the blank here]. This is nothing to worry about. So what are you worried about? It’s STUPID to worry about this stuff! GET A GRIP!!” You see how it goes. Does this sound calming?

I didn’t think so.

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Last night my car stopped shifting gears. It’s very hard to go places when you’re stuck in first or second gear. If I had a manual shift car, I’d think this was a slipping clutch. But I don’t have a clutch, just a mysterious box where gears float around in viscous fluid.

So this morning, bright and early, I got out my owners manual and figured out how to check the transmission fluid only to find that the fluid is fine. So I called my car guy only to hear that he thinks it’s electrical (which he doesn’t do) and he’s full anyway. But he gave me the name of another guy nearby whom he trusts and who will be able to do this type of thing. So I called the second guy and was able to drop off my car. Unfortunately, I was so stressed out and generally disheartened by this time that an hour long walk beside a highway seemed far preferable to asking for a ride. I’m not quite sure why that was… but there was no way I could force myself to ask for a ride.

So I set off on my highway adventure, thankful I’d worn comfy shoes. It’s funny what you notice about the outskirts of your own town when you take it at 4 miles per hour rather than 55. It forces you to stop and smell the roses that would be there if a highway weren’t belching exhaust fumes. I saw little shops that I’ve never noticed before, and I particularly noticed that the roofing and siding shops looked like they’re doing pretty well after the summer hail storm that tore up the town. I’ve never seen little shops look quite that well groomed before.

I also found a roll of art paper that must have flown out of a passing car and landed among the crushed beer cans, soda bottles, and cigarettes. Inside was printed with a reproduction of coastal scene originally done in pastels or colored pencils.

Trudging along, carrying my work bag, purse, and now a large roll of art paper, I also passed the veterans’ memorial that I’ve never walked through before. It was completed last year, but it’s in an out-of-the-way part of town. No sidewalks lead to it, and only the bike trail passes nearby.

Just before arriving at work I stopped in at the local coffee shop and got a large hot chocolate. Mmmmm.

So, it was actually a fairly pleasant morning, supremely peaceful and quiet. Now, if I can just hold on to the feeling of peace right through the moment where they tell me that my transmission is shot, it’ll cost a bazillion dollars to fix.

[Update: They called. It’s shot. It costs a bazillion dollars. And they can’t get it fixed for a week. No more peace is left.]

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I used to read a lot. I lived for library trips when I was growing up and would read almost anything I could get my hands on. I was lucky in that my mom was also an avid reader and had a good sense of what I would enjoy, so she would stretch me to read books I wouldn’t otherwise have picked up on my own. Then I went to college, and reading “good” books became a chore that it had never been before. I still enjoyed it immensely, but didn’t often do it on my own (at least, not during the school year). I was majoring in literature, though, so it’s not like I was starved for reading material. This continued through grad school, but there, again, I was studying literature, so I didn’t really notice. But I did notice that after I graduated, I had to train myself to enjoy unassigned reading again.

Unfortunately, I had just finished my re-training when I moved here and suddenly found that I couldn’t sit down and read. I was too stressed, lonely, and generally unsettled to concentrate on the flow of language, to let my mind wander into the prose and see the scenes presented to me, or to open myself up to feel what the characters were feeling. Reducing my strict control over my imagination made me vulnerable to too much that I wished not to think and feel in my daily life.

But now I look back over the last year and a half and realize that I’ve only made it through a handful of books since I moved. 11, to be exact, 6 of which were required by my participation in campus activities. I don’t think I’ve ever read so little in my life, and I’ve never read so little fiction (my preferred pleasure reading). I’ve heard many more books than that because I listen to books on tape whenever I’m in the car, which is a lot. But this is an entirely different kind of reading experience. I have to listen to books that don’t require complex thought because, well, I’m supposed be concentrating on the road, and I also have to stop listening whenever I arrive at my destination.

But now that I’m more stable, I’m trying to retrain myself. I’ve started playing with Library Thing (which I’ve been avoiding because I’d heard it was addictive…. which it is), and in doing so I’ve come across all the books I’ve read and loved, and all the books I expect to love when I get around to reading them. I’ve reacquainted myself with the smell of books, the feel of their paper, and the taste of the air around me when they are open in my lap. Now I just have to convince myself that I won’t fall apart if I let go and let my imagination play over intricate scenes and in and out of people’s lives.

I’ll probably have to start easy, with a fast-paced thriller or mystery. No sense in making this hard. And I’ll definitely have to persuade my cat that he really doesn’t have to continue with his habit of putting one fang neatly through the upper right-hand corner of each page as I read.

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