Future Corset

I am living the future and yet I still own a corset. Of course, neither of those is true; still, they encapsulate a sense of displacement I experienced this morning. I’m attending a three-day working conference and have been sitting next to a vice president for research from a research-intensive university. Carving out the time for this meeting has been painful for me, and I can only imagine what it’s costing him in the off-hours of the meeting.  I have been watching him juggling the messages that are coming into his phone and computer and making lists about who to call first when we take breaks. (He’s been heroic about not answering his email during the meeting, which has increased my respect for him, especially during some of the really dry stretches of the meeting. I confess that, in a less obtrusive seat today than yesterday, I graded a paper this morning during one patch. I try not to be rude with my computer but probably was while I was grading. It was better, I consoled myself, than snorting, interrupting or saying something inappropriate during the presentation....)

Waking up this morning, I got to thinking about my office-life days, and what it was like to travel before cell phones. Airports back then had banks of pay phones, and between flights, they were always packed with people trying to get a call into their offices. When I was in the midst of an investigation or negotiating a complicated agreement, I would be one of those people. I remember a new vice chancellor once confiding that she’d always thought an earlier campus administrator had been pretentious in using phones in airports, only to discover when she took her new job, how important those calls back could be when others needed information or go-aheads on various projects.

That train of thought led to what it was like, *gasp* when most families had only one telephone, in a central location and everyone in the family knew who called for what family members and what kind of conversations they had.  

THAT train of thought led to recollections of generations before me telling stories of growing up:  both my dad and Michael’s learned to drive on Model Ts, and my father told stories of growing up on the prairie in a house where they often awoke covered with snow or ice in the winter, and how they took stones heated in the wood stove up to bed for warmth. And what it was like to have a “farm girl” (from a family with too many kids to feed, who helped out with chores for room and board and perhaps a little money) and how, if he was clever about it, he could get her to bring in the wood for the stove so she never had to say she was going to use the outhouse.  Those times seemed so remote and old-timey. My imagination all but sepia-colors them.

And yet. I went to the world’s fair in New York in 1964 and saw the outlandish and futuristic “vision phones.” Today, I skyped for a meeting. The transition from before-personal-computers-and-cell-phones to now is as massive a social disruption as many of the technological changes that existed between my dad’s childhood and adulthood.  The “primitive” communication technology of my childhood is as remote from my children and the students I teach as my dad’s was from mine. I don’t feel like either a historical or transitional figure, I just feel like me, in my now. Yet, I’m actually living a quite remarkable future, compared to my youth. It’s a strange feeling: I never had a corset, and I’m connected by a strand going way back to women before me who did. 

Millimetering Along

Finally, a complete draft of the book has gone into the press, and the next phase, copy-editing, awaits. I would never have gotten this far without the support and assistance from so, so many people that it’s hard even to know where to begin in making thanks. This is a huge milestone, and one I wasn’t sure I was going to hit; there’s a long way yet to go, and still, finally, the end is sort of in sight. 

Recent days and weeks have brought multiple reminders that neuroplasticity and time are wonderful things: today, during a car trip, I realized abruptly that I was managing to grade papers while Michael was listening to music. This was not possible even six months ago. Last week, in a crunch when a colleague was ill, I managed to do an entire day of presentation, well beyond my longstanding limit of five hours (and then crumpling). I still do not have the stamina to do that every day, or even every week, and yet it was another high water mark—the first time in almost four years I’ve been able to stay upright for that long at a stretch while working throughout. 

So, while the progress is so slow as to be almost unnoticeable at times, it does creep along, a millimeter at a time. It’s not fast enough to deserve the dignity of the label of inching. Maybe the slow hare does get there after all.

Delaying Tactics (not even grand enough to be procrastination)

I’m at that stage of this project where I cleaned my hair brush and the toothbrush rack this morning and pondered whether any interesting insights or observations could be derived from the fact that my hair is curly enough to hold pencils and pens while I’m working. There aren’t. Back to work. 

Of Houses and Dreams

The house we live in is too big for Michael and me as a living space, but it’s just right for our family as “home.” The place we stay in the summer is similarly a good family space, and perfect as a vacation perch, and too small for Michael and me as a permanent living place. We spend time, now and then, talking about what a right-sized space for the two of us would be, still allowing for family space, for the era (whenever it might be) that we downsize a bit from where we are now. It will be a while, because our house is so much “home” to the whole family, but still, it’s fun to imagine an us-centric space that fits our needs better than the space we rattle in a bit right now.  That would, of course, have a great kitchen, a dining room, places I could sit in the sunshine inside and out, replicate features we love about where we are now, like woodwork and the washer-dryer near the bedrooms, a shared study space (but room for a bigger desk surface for me and a way to have two monitors!!!!!), some good storage (but not too much so I would have to pare down a bit), probably space for dogs to run (though, will we get more after these two run out??) and it would also have guest spaces with their own bathrooms insulated from our sleeping space a bit. Would we build? Would we find an old building being rehabbed that suits us? Michael has always wanted to design and an energy-efficient house built into a berm, for example, though that seems like a pretty big undertaking at our stage of life. Still, it’s fun to daydream, since we’re glued where we are for the foreseeable future.

Periodically, I night-dream about houses and space too, usually revisiting the same places across the years. There’s a modern house we inhabit in some of these dreams (really unlike anything we’ve ever lived in), and an old barn inside which we are constructing rooms, and even floors. That one seems far more likely to me than the modern one, but who knows what my subconscious is trying to tell me?  The really modern one has a great infinity-edged swimming pool, and occasionally an out-of-style country manor house library/ballroom. That’s always strange. Last night, it was a new space, the first time in years I’ve dreamed outside the usual repertoire. This one was an old boarding school going out of business we’d bought. We seem to have been summering there for a while in a rehabbed wing for a family (house parents???) and there are two other local families (not people we know well at all, just acquaintances) who also had been summering there, who have signed long-term leases to contribute to the payments. I was touring some of the scores of bedrooms that were the dorms and thinking about possibilities. There sure was LOTS of space in this “house.” Strange dream.

Back to struggling with the book.  Cheers. 

Checkpoints

I’m teaching a negotiation class this semester for the first time in a couple of years. Since my records are pretty good, it wasn’t that hard to pull out my notebook, dust it off and do the necessary revisions. I adjusted some things in the content and moved on to the logistics of starting a new semester. Then, I taught the first class. The lecture notes/lesson plans are so detailed, it’s dizzying; thinking about it, it dawned on me that those notes were created at what must have been near the height of pre-diagnosis compensations for tumor effects. I’ve come a long way since then, as notes for classes created post-surgery look very different indeed. It’s been an interesting checkpoint. It will be interesting to see if these notes ultimately have to be redone, as they’re so intricate they may not be usable any more.  

While that’s been encouraging, I’ve been working on coming to terms internally with the fact that I may be approaching a major personal and public failure with this most recent book project.  It’s due shortly and I’m getting pretty scared.  Michael, as always, is reassuring, and he reminds me that I had the same reaction last time, which I do not remember. At all. However, I’d rather go down in flames having tried than not attempted it. So I’m working on getting to the finish line and then will let other people judge and will live with the result, chin up and willing to live with the consequences. Onward. 

Puzzling

To take my brain’s temperature, as it were, I generally start the day trying my hand at some kind of puzzle, usually sudoku, because it’s quick and a pretty good indicator of where things stand. Previous Self--the phantom self that itches--could readily do even fairly difficult puzzles, though not the ones labeled ‘diabolical’ or its ilk. On days when even the easiest puzzles lead to trouble, I try to navigate around projects that require intricate thought because hard experience shows that work will mostly need to be redone at some point, and who needs that? For a while, thinking this was a self-defeating cycle, I stopped doing it. It wasn’t; it's a reasonably accurate indicator worth heeding.

Interestingly, there are some kinds of thinking that are almost never affected, the ones that involve tricky human/organizational problems. They seem engaging and the solutions that emerge are pretty consistent, no matter the outcome of the morning brain check. That they remain engaging when the puzzles come and go is somehow related to the root issues, it seems: on the long period where no puzzles of any sort were possible, it was as if they didn’t exist, as my eyes sort of glossed over them in the newspaper or wherever they appeared. It's like the comics, where I still cannot collide the words and pictures to interpret them. Michael still shows me ones he thinks are funny, and sometimes I get it, but my attention and interest are never drawn there without some external intervention. The puzzles draw my attention and I can (mostly) do them now. It’s all weird. The NYT has a story today about the strain on marriages after traumatic brain injury, and includes a couple where a brain tumor affected the husband's personality (not positively), so I approached my morning brain-check today with an extra dollop of gratitude. It’s all mysterious, and really, looking back at what it could have been, fairly miraculous.

I’m in the end game struggles of trying to figure out if this new book will work--or not--and revisiting all the self-doubt that goes with this phase. Another part of this phase, at least for me, is the strange phenomenon of waking up with lists of words that don’t appear in the manuscript. This happened the last time and it’s happening now, too. Here’s today’s list of words: asphalt, convertible, cupcake, arctic, bothersome, pestilential. It varies by day and I have no clue what this is about. It seems harmless enough, so mostly they appear and float on by. Sometimes, I try to make sentences that encompass all the words. Here’s today’s thought using them: if your cupcake is bothersome while driving the convertible, may the asphalt be smooth and may you not encounter anything pestilential; if you do, may the arctic winds solve the problem.

Or something. Back to book-wrestling.

p.s. has anyone mastered how blogger decides to format posts? I'd prefer a consistent size and font and spacing, and cannot figure out how to achieve that, in either the old or new structure. Frustrating! The font size that finally appears has no relation to what I choose and the spacing seems beyond my control. Insights welcome.

Music! Reading!

In the quiet of the break, with commitments in the outside world reduced dramatically, both music and some fiction crept back into my life. The absence of a soundtrack in our lives has been one our our hardest long-term adaptations; I’ve been pretty much unable to take much aural load and still get things done since the surgery. It’s especially hard for Michael, as in many ways, he connects with the world through NPR and music. Over the break, though, the combination of continuing small improvements and (I conjecture) being at home without external stimuli, I affirmatively felt like listening to music for the first time in ages. That leap empowered me to take another stab at reading fiction, and while that didn’t produce as big a step forward, every tiny bit of progress there always feels disproportionately important.

The music urge first surfaced doing puzzles with Shea, a traditional holiday activity. She always listens to something and has, in recent years, been characteristically generous in adapting to my inability to stay long in a room with much sound in it. This year, though, it just felt right to have music, and one thing led to another. Something must have been stirring around in the back recesses of my mind all along, as, in the oddity of the fact that I’d bought Michael five or six CDs for Christmas hadn’t struck any of us until we started listening together. It was a bonus gift for all of us.

As demands of external life pick up, the ability to pull that off is receding. But that’s ok with me--knowing the capacity is there, and it’s a matter of balance and how, not if, it’s possible is hugely encouraging. It is a nice way start to a new year. I hope yours has glimmers of promise and hope as well.