sleepless

Sometimes there is no real explanation, I just can’t sleep. But I know there’s probably some kind of explanation. Something I ate. Something I didn’t eat. Too much to drink. Too little to drink. There’s so much about my own physiology that I think I should have figured out by now, but instead just gets more and more mysterious to me as I get older. And then there’s the questions that pop into my head, and there’s the jitter I get in my feet, and then sometimes something just aches or pinches or burns. Sometimes I lie there thinking about a ping or a pain and I start to wonder about my own mortality, and that just isn’t good going-to-sleep thinking.

Tonight it isn’t really anything that mysterious. It’s 12:44 AM and today — yesterday, actually — was the first day of school. Except I didn’t actually teach a class. I did go to school and I did do some work, but the daily ritual of teaching at 8:00 AM isn’t there this semester. Instead — and this is a good thing — I’m working on new things, developing workshops, hiring a secretary, managing a budget, hosting events. It’s all part of a picture I wanted to paint, but it’s all still mysterious. The “new gig,” as I’ve been describing it, as though I’m on tour in Europe with the band, is great. And it scares the shit out of me, not because I’m afraid of screwing something up, but because I’m afraid of not doing anything at all. It would be an easy rut to ditch myself for the next three years.

So there’s that, and then there’s also the next day — today, actually — when I actually welcome my first class. I think that either, 1. It’s the first day trepidation and excitement, or B. I don’t know what to do with myself after watching the “first day” pass without a single step into a classroom. Either way, I suppose it all resolves itself in a few hours, whether I sleep or not. It’s stupid, really. There are plenty of other reasons to be sleepless, but I’m still this way after countless hours of teaching, multiple times having taught these courses before, and a new pair of back-to-school pants. (I still have the nightmare of arriving to class without pants, although usually it entails me either teaching acting or coaching football.) Undoubtedly I’m thinking of the other things I’m thinking about besides teaching, trying to remember not to forget to remember to think about something. Part of me thinks that being in a classroom will be an antidote to this spiral, but the part of me that is still awake thinks otherwise.

filling up

This summer, while we were traveling through multiple states, several geological divides, and countless ecosystems, I would pull the car into filling stations, inserting a credit card and extracting a nozzle to replenish the fuel we'd burned and exhausted from mountain pass to coastline. Karyn and I were talking about our affinity for the coast, having each grown up only an hour away from the Pacific.

Now that we're away, there's that realization that we didn't realize what we had when we had it. Yet, it isn't as though we need to return to the coast to stay forever. Instead, Karyn suggested that there are small vials inside of us, and the serum provided by the place that is the Oregon Coast fills these up -- as though there's a fluid level that needs to be topped off every 3500 miles. Then, Karyn added this: "And I'd need to be in the red rocks about once a year, too." And then I thought about the mountains, and I added this to the list of essential fluids. (I offer this exhibit as an example of one’s attachment to the mountains, and perhaps all things wilderness.) Annie Dillard summed it up for me a few years ago when I read Pilgrim on Tinker Creek for the first time, a book I understood better after reading it a second time:

The mountains ... are a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the one simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.

I've wondered if there's a set of vials within that need to be filled for some specific balance, like some set of chemicals and vitamins and minerals and essences that all have to be right. Your potassium is a bit low so you eat a banana; your coastalness is running out, so you make your way to the beach. Or maybe it's like reservoirs of window washing fluid and coolant and oil. Big jugs of stuff that aren't just small spices in the grand mix, but the actual lubrication and thermostat and view-clarifying fluids that have to be filled, monitored, and topped off. I tend to think of it as the former, like little containers of those spices that make the mix just right. Yet sometimes it seems as though I really need to remove the grime from some windshield that provides my full perspective, and the wiper blades, no matter how frantically I sweep them, seem to just muck up the view. Some other fluid is needed to intervene and cut through the dead bug pulp that accumulates.I could quickly think that this is too romantic. I’m overdramatizing the reality, that maybe I just need a vacation once in a while. But when I look back on images of the coast:

Or of the desert:

Or of the mountains:

. . . I remember and feel that place, and I long to be back. In part, that might be because there’s something I am so fond of about that particular visit, but I think that there’s also the give-and-take of the space and the self. We each leave a little of ourselves with the other: the space imprints on us, and we leave behind a bit of our soul or psyche or essence on that land. As Dillard put it, we "heave [our] spirit" into the place. We’re forever linked back to it. Maybe this is just the romanticizing of an addiction, but I would rather we acknowledge that Karyn is absolutely right: There’s an essential need to reconnect with places, and sometimes we don’t even realize the need until we finally make our way back to the sea, the desert, or the ridgelines.

Tomorrow is “back to school,” an annual tradition that I’ve always loved. Even at the university, there’s a sense of energy, and even as we move more and more to an academy which operates in a continual, non-stop mode, the first day of the fall term still has a sense of “day one,” beginnings of new courses and new students and new backpacks and new shoes. There are, of course, other “news”: New chores, new jobs, new budget woes. But mostly it's a time that seems bright and shiny and new, full of possibility and potential.

This morning I headed up to the mountains, stepping out my front door and walking up the street to the trailhead with my canine companion. The skies were clouded over and the breeze came up, and as we made our way up into the hills the rain started to fall. Overlooking the valley and my city below, I imagined that the rain falling was part of that fluid that was doing the “filling up.” As my dog and I got continually wetter, I could imagine that I could literally smell my summer; and in fact, I realized that it was my hat, not washed after a backpacking trip last month, giving off the smell of campfire smoke as the rain stirred out this essence. It so happened that the cap was my favorite, well-worn hat with the words “half full” on its front, an icon with a half full pint glass just above the writing. As the rain continued to fall, I imagined that the cup was becoming even more filled, so that the script could have read “mostly full.” That seemed to me to be a good way to start the new year, as well as a good measure of the summer now past.

productivity; or, in which my neuroses spill onto the page as individual paragraphs

My Saturday morning has been a satisfying, sloth-like laze, enriched by a cup of coffee, blueberry pancakes, and a couch to myself while I listen to weekend NPR shows on the radio. Pleasant but not productive, the contrast to the rest of my week.

It isn't so much that other things I've been doing have really felt that substantial -- they could more accurately be described as lying on the blurred fringes between neurosis and busyness, but this all seems fine. I've cleaned out the lab that was the staging area for kids' science activities and other workshops, and simultaneously have been getting ready for back-to-school and turning the crank in the new office. Office #2 is still rather organized and respectable, in contrast to Office #1 that resembles a refugee camp for journal articles, stacked and scattered on my floor. I move, organize, and clean in bits and spurts, but it's still an embarrassing disorganization, though a pretty good metaphor for my psyche this summer.

Either office and their occupation of files and books, papers and trinkets, offers a contrast to the recent images of my insides. These are now a few weeks old, but I just recently pulled them out of my notebook and onto the glass plate of the scanner in Office #2.

The insides of my stomach are void of anything that shouldn't be there, and even the wrinkles throughout my upper gastrointestinal area seem to have an organization. Funny how some things just work without any deliberate action or thought on my part.

Yet, I have been deliberating about very (not-so) important matters, like blogspace. Recently I've been toying around with a completely new place to host this, and have now decided that it's all going to move to zerothdraft.wordpress.com. There are lots of little reasons for this, including the fact that my writing software could so easily upload the above image, something it wouldn't do as easily with blogspot. Most of these aren't really substantial, but they each added up. I think that the biggest reason to move could simply be for the sake of change itself. I'm not sure if that's really progressive as much as it's neurotic.

[I'll post exclusively to wordpress starting in September-ish, I think. For now I'll just continue to mirror this on both hosts.]

Other productivity happens serendipitously. This week, over Indian food, what started out as a joke got re-worked in the period of about 10 minutes until it became a pedagogical innovation for the senior seminar class I'm teaching this semester. The final outcome: Have a physics seminar given that would be a contest between five faculty members. Each participant creates a 10 minute talk and prepares the slides for the talk, but then puts the sequence of slides into a virtual hat. Then, at each 10 minute interval during the seminar, a name is drawn from another hat, followed by the drawing of a set of slides. The faculty member whose name is drawn then has to use the slides given to create the talk on the fly. Students in the class will rate the talk and the slides -- a chance for the to think hard about what makes a good presentation, and a chance for the rest of us to entertain and embarrass ourselves in public.

Later in the week, in the midst of lots of other things (meetings, interviewing for a secretary, hosting two workshops, preparing for classes, etc.) I learned from the liaison between the committee I'm now in charge of and the faculty senate that she didn't have time to create a draft list of charges to bring to the "executive committee" in time for them to prepare a final list of charges to me. So I offered to draft the charges myself, one more thing to do, but an opportunity. How often does one get to write the assignments that his "superiors" are going to assign him? I got to craft things exactly as I wanted them. And what did they do with this draft? Approved them exactly as-is, with the exception of adding a timeline to one of the charges.

This weekend there are a couple of syllabi to finish writing, some classes to plan, some papers to review, and some of my own writing to get done. And then next week it's "back to school," a time that seems to have its own order and tradition. In spite of all that needs to be done, I think that the regularity of the academic year is going to be a good way to structure both my thinking and my time. I'm hopeful that the natural order of things will be a good mechanism to organize my time and projects. If only I can get Office #1 as clean an organized as my stomach. Or, maybe it's simply not possible, since my office, like my stomach, always seems to be digesting so many things all at once.

longevity

"Can you believe we've been married fourteen years?" she asked me.

"I know. It seems like it's been eighteen, at least."

It turns out she meant that it seems like it's been so much less than the result of subtracting 1995 from 2009. I knew that; and she knew I knew that; but we bantered this way regardless. Because we're both right. It seems like just yesterday, but so much has happened since yesterday. Two cats, two surgeries, two kids, two houses, two apartments, two landscape projects, two hearts, and two minds, all wrapped into fourteen years or one day, depending on your perspective.

Between our four eyes (three on a bad day) and two points of view, the world takes on a dimensionality that neither one of us could have seen on our own. It seems like just yesterday, or it seems like forever, and we banter back and forth. In the exchanges I can see the naïve 19-year-olds, their youthful playfulness and lust wrapped in the shell of a wrinkled old couple in rocking chairs. On August 12, 2049 I can only dream that she'll ask, "Can you believe we've been married fifty-four years?" And I'll tell her that it seems like just yesterday.

"all that we can do"

In a meeting today I was told repeatedly by a representative from another office on campus that they would "do all that we can do" to help us. This is wonderful. Except that she meant it exactly as she said it. "All that we can do" could mean that such a group will do everything in their capacity to help. But what if their capacity really isn't so much?

"We'll do all that we are really able to do, but no more," is another way of saying this.

Or, "We'll do just as much as we have ever done in the past," is another, albeit less inspiring, way they could have expressed their work ethic.

Perhaps, "We are prepared to do only the things that we are sure we can do, like input phrases into a search engine and let you know what comes out; or, you could do this yourself, if you'd like."

But mostly what they meant to say was, "We've only done this much in the past, and we don't want to learn to do it any other way, and we'll continue to do just as much as we've gotten away with before because no one (including you) is going to change the way we do the things we do to help you . . . We'll do all that we can do."

Tonight I started reading The Phantom Tollbooth to the girls, because none of us had ever read it and it was there on the shelf. Milo, the main character, finds himself in the second chapter already arriving at a place called "Expectations." And, as the story sets things up, he's about to go beyond this place. I wish others, in real life, could sometimes be so bold.

tools

I seem to spend an inordinate amount of my time looking for things that will save me time. I quickly see the irony and I would give up on the madness immediately, except for the possibility that these potential tools might also make me more productive and creative. Some of the things I find and consume are really useful, like an iPod that keeps track of my calendars and email and music and free books all in one spot. But some things are really distracting, like like an iPod that keeps track of my calendars and email and music and free books all in one spot.

Trouble clued me in to this tool I’m trying out right now, a piece of software called Scrivener, that’s supposed to be a good way of organizing big writing projects. By the time he'd sent me a link to the download page, I'd already installed trial versions of the software on three computers. I thought that at least it would be a way of compiling essays, thoughts, loose ends, and the like. (It doesn't do anything to help with blogs, much to my dismay.) In the process of looking for other options, I found that there are all kinds of “word processing alternatives,” things that will do anything from creating giant structures to organize writing, to things that will remove all formatting and instead give you nothing to stare at but a black screen with green type. So I ended up downloading programs like Nisus Pro and WriteRoom and was well on my way to finding other aides before I pulled myself away from the futility of it all.

The problem I’ve run into is that there’s no tool that will actually just get my work (or play) done for me. In fact, it seems like there’s as much or more work necessary to put into finding the tool and learning the tool as there is in actually using the tool. For me, software is particularly troublesome, since I know that there must be things out there that could help me with ______ (fill in the blank: writing, organization, data analysis, great love advice, genealogy, etc.), but I generally don’t even know what the possibilities might be. At an accidental trip to the Apple store the other day, I came across a piece of software that looked like a fantastic tool for organizing data, mail, addresses, calendars, and to-do lists. The problem was that once I’d downloaded the trial version and started running it, I didn’t actually know what I was going to use it for. So, apparently there are tools out there which I can’t find that could help me do new things I have yet to imagine, but there are also tools out there that do operations for which I already have better solutions. At the same time, there are tools being developed that reform and re-form my lifestyle. Goggle, for example, has me by the earlobes, since it is responsible for keeping my marriage and family life in tact. Right now it has the multiple calendars of kids, spouse, work, home all synchronized and viewable together. If they ever decided to start charging me money for this, I'd have to bend over and reach deep into my wallet for whatever they asked. (As Google hosts this very blog for the time being, I might be afraid to admit this, but I'm pretty sure that they already know. This makes me think that they have some other plan, for better or for worse.)

The other day I walked into the library with a hammer in my hand. I had a big grin on my face, enjoying myself as I was playing a role in creating this image where the tool and the place were so paradoxical. What is the guy with the hammer going to do when he walks into the library? I could head to Q181 and start hammering away on shelves, finding new room for old books, or perhaps just beating on walls to wake up the sleeping students in their cubicles. If I Had a Hammer started whistling its tune in my head as I imagined the possibilities. And maybe that's exactly the fascination I have with tools of any sort: there are unrealized possibilities. One software tool might be the lynchpin to creating the Great Book; the new backpack that should arrive today could be what finally organizes my life without adding to this chronic pain in my left shoulder; the right pair of shoes may be all that's needed for me to take up trailrunning; a desk organizer to separate the files from the pens from the paper clips could suddenly shift productivity into high gear; the best combination of blades and clippers and philips and flatheads and files in a one-piece could be the survival tool that saves my life. It's all possible. But eventually I realize that the best tools are the simplest ones. Maybe the hammer in the library is what will really rock the world and reform society, but there has to be a hand swinging the hammer. And that hand is my own.

incredible

When I talked to Karyn on the phone tonight to check in, she told me that they were picking out a movie to buy from the "previously viewed" rack at the video store. It was down to four selections, a couple I don't remember as well as The Princess Diaries and The Incredibles. Asked for my opinion, I gave it with zeal, and the girls (I was told later) went with my choice because they wanted to make sure I participated in movie night.

I chose The Incredibles for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I didn't think I could stand to see anything with "princess" or "diaries" in the title even once, and shuddered at the prospect of owning such a film. But the truth of the matter is that the story of the Parr family is more than just an animated action-adventure. It's about a family; and the heart of the family is clearly in Elastigirl.

Elastigirl holds my heart in the palm of her hand. On one level, it's admittedly completely physical. Who could resist the woman who could wrap her legs around (and around and around and . . . ) you? There's more than this, though. This is the woman who, in one scene, can be found foiling bad guys closing in from all sides:

And in another moment, she's separating her kin from killing one another:

Midway through the movie I told the girls the truth of the matter is that The Incredibles is based on the real lives of their parents. Anna rolled her eyes. Grace suspended disbelief, but kept her eyes focused on the movie for the moment. But we all know that I'm not any kind of Mr. Incredible. And there are no superhero powers in the home. The truth of the matter is that Karyn isn't really Elastigirl. But then she does have my heart in the palm of her hand, and she does keep the girls from killing one another, and she does foil evil as it closes in from all sides. The truth of the matter is that she's rebounded and bounced and stretched to limits that I never have had to imagine. The truth of the matter is that there are no masks with Karyn, no red and black suits, and no pilot's license. But the truth of the matter is that she is Elastigirl, only with better shoes and glasses.