The Next Phase of Winter

Randomness

It’s sunny today. We’ve reached that point in winter where the air is too cold to hold the moisture that would allow for such things as clouds or snow. If this year continues like the last, we won’t get any more new snowfall until spring, and yet the towering piles of snow in parking lots, the tracked and furrowed snow on the lawns, and the decorative caps of ice on porch railings will all stick around right through until April.

Winter is a new kind of experience here, unlike winters I’ve lived through in any of the other states I’ve inhabited. It has its own rhythm here. And right now, we’ve hit the Frigid-But-Sunny stretch where below zero temperatures are no longer surprising or even remarkable. The weather man on the radio in the mornings will only stoop to call it “chilly” unless he sees double digits in his negative readings. People don’t talk about the cold any more, or even part with friendly hopes that everyone will “stay warm out there, y’hear?” This is just normal now. Unremarkable. But at least it’s sunny.
If I’d known this is what I’d face when I moved here, I would probably not have come. I’m no hardy winter person who comes to life when there’s adversity to overcome. No. I’m much happier when people mean 20 degrees when they say “really cold.” I’m also a bit of a wimp. And knowing this about myself would probably have made me think even harder about moving here than I did. But as it turns out, it’s not so bad. And it’s sunny.

Quite a Week

Me and My Life

Tomorrow is Friday, and today that feels significant. This has been one of the odder weeks I’ve lived through. It began with a Monday that seemed bent on showing me my place in the world and emphasizing quite pointedly that that place is more than a little lower than the angels. After valiantly keeping my head above water for 10 hours I finally gave in and went home, only to find that it really is true that you shouldn’t post anything to an online forum when you’re that tired and out of sorts. Oh well. I doubt that my moment of pettiness will have lasting consequences. That doesn’t stop me from regretting it, though.

Tuesday started out on a better foot (at least, after the early-morning dentist appointment), but just when it had lulled me into a false sense of security, it walloped me even harder than Monday had. At the end of what turned out to be 12 hours of work spread out over nearly 15 hours of the day, I got an email that forced me to confront someone I’ve been avoiding for months, tell him why I’d been avoiding him, and do it all as gently as I could (because he’s basically a nice guy). Confrontation and I don’t get along. Not even relatively benign confrontation like this. By the time I was done writing the two short paragraphs that I ended up sending, I was shaking and perilously near tears, right there in the middle of a bustling room of students. And it wasn’t just that I knew that even the direct-but-gentle email that I was writing would probably really hurt this guy, it was also the renewed realization that the behaviors that I find most frustrating in him are behaviors that I also exhibit from time to time. Reality checks like that are important but terribly painful, and this one seems to have hit me at a particularly vulnerable spot because I was still wrestling my insecurities into submission after several hours of lying awake in bed.

Which brings us to Wednesday when, by noon and after a few interrupted hours of sleep, I had taught two classes, met with a couple of students, and been notified that I’d been nominated to be The Big Cheese at an institution I’ve always respected from afar. I almost deleted that notification, thinking it was a prank. But apparently it’s not. I still think they don’t realize quite how under-qualified I am, but it’s mighty flattering, nonetheless. But more on that in a bit. Wednesday finally wrapped up (11 hours after it began) with another intense email conversation, this time about religion, of all things. It was one of those emails that I spent the entire car ride home composing, and couldn’t get right until well after a late dinner.

Thursday, today, featured the wrapping-up of all the most dramatic threads of the week. I wrote to that respected institution to tell them that I’m happy where I am, underqualified to be a Big Cheese, but won’t glibly turn down their invitation to talk with them further if they still think it’s appropriate and desirable. Meanwhile, I finally figured out and executed a task that’s complicated both functionally and politically, wrapped up the intense email exchange about religion, and talked for half an hour with the search committee that is considering a good friend for the position of Big Cheese at her current institution.

In the midst of all of this, I went to a talk over lunch at which a colleague talked about his time growing up in Burma, his activism as part of a student rebel group, his near-death experiences, his time as a refugee, his incredible academic achievements in this country, and his current work to help craft a new constitution for his home country, all accomplished well before the age at which most people experience midlife crises. It’s humbling and awe-inspiring to sit and listen to a man who has lived a life like those that I read about in my history books. Such people, with their world-changing lives laid out in black and white, always seem somehow unreal, somehow not at all like your soft-spoken colleague who reads Goodnight Moon to his young daughters and plays airplane with them to get them to finish their food.

So yes, it has been quite a week. Tonight I hope to read more of the Odyssey, but that is my only goal. I need time to stare at my wall, decompress, and hope that tonight I’ll be able to sleep well and soundly for the first time in several days.

Reflections: or, Things I Thought Of While Sitting in the Coffee Shop

Randomness

My sister finally started a blog. She’s been reading mine for forever and has talked about following my example for a while, and she finally took the plunge. I’m so excited!!! The best part about having one or the other of us be away from home when I was younger was getting letters from her. They were always full of random interesting observations, and everything was written in a way that so perfectly mirrored her personality. Now my RSS aggregator stands poised to snap up each new post for me. It’s like getting letters, only without having to go down to the mailbox. The only things missing are the paper itself and the notes and illustrations on the envelopes.

…

I’ve wondered for a while about starting yet another blog. Then I realized that this is a bad idea. Having a place devoted to only those things that I’m not comfortable posting in my public blog or this blog would just be granting myself permission to wallow and whine and post trivial nonsense about the mundane happenings in my life (because that’s really what’s left out of my two current spaces, for the most part), and there’s something to be said for just letting that stuff go. What I really should do is take up my paper journal again… but that’s unlikely. Paper journals don’t have spell check, and they don’t make my scribblings legible for me, and they’re harder to edit, so I just don’t enjoy writing in them. Still, I think I’m going to broaden my view of what’s “appropriate” for this space. I miss writing and I need to do more of it, which means loosening up on my mental definition of what goes here at least a little bit.

…

I’ve seen a man walking around in short sleeves today, and others driving cars with their windows open. Never mind that it’s still well below freezing; it’s 40 degrees warmer today than it was yesterday. This puts people in mind of spring. I would expound on the stupidity of relying on relative rather than actual temperature except that I also left the house without putting on my hat or mittens, so I guess I should just be quiet.

…

My heart hasn’t beat with an even rhythm since Wednesday. I’m beginning to wonder if I just don’t have the stamina for working until 10pm yet or if I’m headed back into the hell that was Fall. I’m hoping it’s just a lack of stamina, but so far all my efforts to make my schedule work for me have failed, and next week promises to be no better. Meanwhile, exhaustion causes the irregular heart rhythm which causes more exhaustion which kills my appetite which causes more exhaustion. Not fun.

…

I’m simultaneously anticipating and dreading reading the Odyssey for a book group I joined. I haven’t done that kind of reading a long while, and the other people in the book group are all incredibly well educated and widely read. But it will feel good to stretch those particular mental muscles.

The book sits beside me now, thick and superior, reminding me how natural it used to be to read it’s like. And this particular copy is mocking me with it’s faux deckle edges. Such pretension is not only unnecessary but actually makes reading more difficult. I refuse to be daunted, though.

Well, tomorrow I will refuse to be daunted. Today, I’ll let it sit and weigh down the space next to me on the couch while I finish a book intended for children, full of fairies and fantasy and fierce bad guys. There’s no sense in being too grown up all the time.

Dark Carnival

Portraits of People and Places

No matter how you describe intense cold, it comes off sounding cliché, but there was nothing cliché about this week’s cold. Digging our way out of layer upon layer of woolly, fleecy, and downy insulation, we shared stories of blowing bubbles that turned hard, watching boiling water turn instantly into ice and steam when thrown into the air, and school buses stranded by their gummy bio-diesel. It felt like a quiet carnival had come and infused our everyday lives with its exotic attractions.

But it wasn’t all fun and games. Highways, bedecked in black ice, clogged with crashes day in and day out. A sleepwalker died in this most un-cliché cold.

As the cold settled into my neck and fingers and thighs, restricted my comings and goings, cocooned me within sparkling but unrelentingly dense frost at every window, and sipped my still-fragile stores of energy dry, I remembered that I’m not prone to sleep walking.

It’s Cold

Portraits of People and Places

It is very very cold.

It’s so cold that salt doesn’t melt the snow off the roads, so they’re switching to sand in the hopes of preventing even more spin-outs, flipped cars, and other nastiness.

It’s so cold that antifreeze-infused windshield wiper fluid freezes.

It’s so cold that when I blink, my eyes freeze shut just a little bit, so that every time I open them again it feels a little like lifting a foot up off of a sticky movie theater floor.

It’s so cold that exposed skin will become frost-bitten within 10 minutes.

It’s so cold that they tell us, “If you must travel today, be sure to pack your winter survival kit.”

I have no such kit. I didn’t know such a kit existed. But I duly cancelled my appointment 30 minutes north of here. I don’t want to die for the sake of new contact lenses.