It's Been Too Long. . .

I have been away from this site for awhile--so long that I read posts I have no memory of writing.  Much has happened over the past several months that I will be delighted to share.  Most of all, I am unabashedly, peacefully happy.  I know that this quietude is not come by easily, but is an outcome of having gone through the internal struggles described in earlier posts.  I am anxious to share with you and will do so in the coming days.  In the meantime, just want to say hello. . . to my blog, anyone who has read it or may do so in the future.  I'm sitting in the middle of a nest that feels soft and like a little mountain of down pillows that say welcome back. Hooray!

It takes an act of God

I did something about twenty minutes ago that I should have done two hours before--turn off the t.v. and political news and put on some nice Christmas music.  I feel much better already.  This is probably the biggest understatement I could begin with, but I am not gifted with great skill at waiting for answers so I listen to noise, both annoyed and distracted by it.  I am choosing to become better at living with questions.  I am not sure if it is because I have no choice but to do so or because I will go nuts if I don't.  So I am living peacefully inside of several yet unanswered questions that have a profound effect on my future.

I have a pancreas inside my body that is non-functioning.  I am having trouble finding words for the fear and dismay I feel about it, but believe me, it is there.  I have learned (like a good academic) to adopt a certain dispassionate posture when I write, and can turn that tone on at will after many years of practice.  While it is a functional strategy under many circumstances, it is not with matters of the heart. I am in fact a bit numb, the way my skin and nerves are when I prick my fingers several times a day hoping for a "good" glucose number and four other times in the same fourteen hours when I inject myself with the insulin my pancreas is not producing to help any nutrients I consume make their way into the cells that motor my nerves, muscles and other organs. Sleep frees me of these worries and irritating routines that keep me alive.  Yet what it means to be alive is a little at issue here.

Don't get me wrong--I am grateful for my life and all it entails--even these current challenges.  I just wish I could feel more.  I have slipped into a well-practiced dispassion and traded it for adopting a one foot in front of the other mode of existence.  I don't think that is "living" in the fullest sense of the word.  I think I have too many years of practice trading my feelings for functioning. So here's what I'm afraid of. . . I am supposed to go teach in Rome in May and June, and am afraid my body will not cooperate.  I have a big opportunity that may or may not come to pass early in 2012.  I want to do my very best to make it happen if it is a good situation, but I do not know yet if I will have the ultimate chance to do so.  I am three months away from finding out if I will achieve the rank of Full Professor, but am encouraged that the first committee "pass" was positive.

I am fairly certain that things will look different when I feel better, but I've gotta say that it kinda sucks when you try to do everything right and the outcome is so unpredictable at the most basic level (e.g. pancreas).  I have never been afraid of things "known," but don't do so well with  challenges that are inexplicable. I got an e-mail from my endocrinologist today that said (dispassionately), "reduce the morning humalog to 2 units and keep doing 3 at lunch and dinner".  I can do that. 

What I don't feel like I can do is bitterly complain. To begin, it's not part of my general constitution to load others up with my frustrations. I don't want to forget the things that made me smile today--Doretha and Sabine who expressed genuine concern, Don, who said no problem when I explained that I cannot get myself together until about 1:00 or 2:00 pm to work or for that matter, be assured that I can drive safely to work.  Pictures of Cora always make me smile. Reading Amanda's blog and seeing her photos filled every part of my being with a kind of joy that was born of simultaneous pride and love. Thinking about Steffie and Ryan coming during the holidays got a smile in my heart. Even hearing about Dana Edlefson's six month old doggie that got hit by a wayward car made me sad and angry, but at least reminded me that I can still feel.  Thinking about Deb and her "not normal" life made me laugh hard inside. She would understand. Getting a little facebook note from Amy made me smile and at the same time, wonder if I will feel well enough to get to her holiday party on Friday.

So what to do? Pray. . . to continue to be able to feel--that I have not been so challenged to stay strong that I have lost all ability to connect with myself or other people.  I feel so much tenderness for the people in my life who have shown me all kinds of parts of themselves and love me in doing so. Yeah, I have faith.

life goes on. . . .

Something is changing and my point of view is like looking through a kaleidescope.   It has been about a year since I have posted anything here, but the inspiration is coming back.  I am feeling a need to write and not about anything in particular but of random occurences that need someplace to go. During the spring I was stretched to my human limits with a challenging group of students while teaching a class I have always loved to teach---intercultural communication.  I don't know if it is the influence of current tea party politics and family origins, but it was difficult to inspire any empathy for fellow human lives out of this group.  I ended up one evening defending Lil Wayne because I think he has something to say and asking them when "like" became a regular component of the king's english.  I think that is when things went south and I didn't do much to fix it except to survive the remaining several weeks. I failed the students in some ways and in others, was too stretched to notice that I had lost them.

At the risk of justifying this less than seamless semester, I was engaged in writing a proposal for a new graduate  program that I had worked on with a committee for several months.  I was having trouble meeting the goal deadline, so by mutual agreement, I turned it over to the dean only to have him meet with the committee, who made miniscule changes and called it done. I also wrote the proposal to go to the provost for our completely revised curriculum while doing the implementation on our registration and records system.  In the end, everything got approved and faculty are teaching the new curriculum. I made it out of the sausage grinder, but not without looking a little ugly too.

Those projects were nothing compared to the parade of facutly angrily marching into my office about their fall 2011 schedules after the provost had issued a strong armed request to use every part of the time grid after faculty teaching assignments were already in place.  We had to manipulate times and classes to create that perfect rubic's cube while instructors had ordered up teaching slots in  the past like they were requesting ingredients on a pizza. This "we" involves an administrative assistant who sends e-mails and then marches into my office with long explanations for the 140 typeset characters she had just sent me. Nobody likes anchovies and I was dishing them out left and right. I experienced my first hard interrogation from two titans of Chicago news who had created the first city bureau, and Jack engaged every technique on me about their class we had adjusted to ensure enrollments.  You see, this could-be-retired teaching team for whom I have a certain reverence simultaneously scares students away with their expectations for time commitment and excellence in hard beat reporting while trying to get their enrollments over four brave student souls. I was trying to save their class because of its irreplaceable value to our students, but tried to explain to "the boys"--our affectionate term for these hard-nosed government corruption story breakers that paralyzing students with fear and recruiting them are in a bit of conflict with each other. 

These things are happening while I am finishing up final edits from my book copy, its indices and working with the publisher's marketing team to recall and share every plausible global point of disciplinary interest so that people other than family members might think it is relevant enough to buy. The irony is that my family members are most drawn to the idea of the publication itself and my dedications to them while not being particularly inclined to delve into the (admittedly dense) academese it contains. 

An other irony is that in my role as supporter of all faculty endeavors to advance their own professional lives, I had organized two third year reviews for tenure track faculty members, one of whom balked at every well intentioned piece of advice and written (well-deserved) glowing peer teaching reviews for each.  The balking one had managed twice to show up at two significant invited situations I had looked forward to--one, a dinner with syndicated columnist E.J. Dionne and the distinguished faculty member who had secured his presence as our commencement speaker, and another time at a meeting with a distinguished social justice advocate from the provost's office wanting to secure our school's support for teaching classes on faith and justice. On both occasions her presence had not been solicited by me, and on the latter, she showed up at my office at the time of the meeting. And apparently true to the form I am now becoming familiar with, she proceeded on both occasions to engage the distinguished guests how things should be done. If I could have hooded her and taken her to Guantanamo for water-boarding, I would have except that I am against enhanced interrogation techniques. 

Two other junior faculty  had received 6,000. smackers to carry out summer research projects that I had enthusiastically supported with a precious bounty of time helping edit and shape their successful proposals.  Don't get me wrong; they had done the work and deserve all manner of credit for their success.  I don't expect bows and curtsies, but one was having a difficult time with loads of work being dumped on her by senior faculty who were receiving compensatory time or funding for not doing much of anything. I heard about it with every chance hallway passing.

This leads to my next challenge--to help the junior faculty member dump the extra work while knowing it would land in my lap because of the senior guy's long history of finding every reason not to move anything forward, using up any bit of compensatory time to write long e-mails as to the reasons for such inaction. I called a meeting to clear the air and thought it was a done deal.  How wrong I can be.  Whether it had been the anchovies, transitional challenges that masked themselves as perceived  incompetence coming out of my office or all-out distractions caused by the tri-hourly visits from my panicking co-conspirator in making schedule changes, I began to be a little wrung out. I was hanging on a closeline without having been shaken out so that the wrinkles wouldn't dry into the fabric of my being and best efforts.

No job is ever done, so my next meeting occured when a long time colleague and funny friend went through every sophisticated machination to bypass me and meet with the boss about her schedule.  I was willing to have it either way, but the boss kicked the ball back to me.  My friend wouldn't have it, so I joined the two of them to discuss why she could not hand-select her campus, teaching time and room by circumventing all protocol.  I asked her what she thought would happen if every faculty member across the university did what she was trying to do, and her response, which by the way did not seem incredulous to her when she said it was that the schedule "would probably turn out better".  She didn't add "for me".  In the end, I said no, possibly louder than I might have intended and kicked the ball back to the boss.  I saw her yesterday and she, who lost the battle in the end gave me a beginning of the fall semester hug.  Go figure.

My life in administration is funny.  It is funny to me in the first place that I am a dean, but I could not have imagined that I would need to hold meetings with faculty members to say, "please don't ever offer your students extra credit points for going to see your band play while charging them admission", or "please don't sell copies of your unpublished book to your students at a publisher's price rather than for the cost of making the copies; you WILL be expected to reimburse them", or "please do not circle the administrative staff work area talking out loud to yourself and passing wind; it interferes with their ability to help the students; you have an office--please work in there." Or to students--"you received a lower grade in participation points because I had no idea who you were when you gave your presentation at the end of the semester despite my ability to name every other student in the class and where they sat." I did not expect to have to call security on a screaming mother who insisted that her son be allowed into a class that was full when he was only a sophomore and would have his pick of the litter sometime during his next seven semesters at the university. 

The grand finale of the semester happened at a meeting I had arranged to have the tenure track faculty talk about their summer research plans. When I entered the conference room, the air was as thick as  a high index heat factor day in Chicago summer. I had ordered a tray of cookies for refreshment and as if in an act of all-out defiance, all but one person in the room and me refused to enjoy the gesture or flavor of homestyle chocolate chip morsels. I had also brought my biggest mistake.  The day before I had received some great practical tips from the provost's office about promotion files, and in my enthusiasm for this good information, began the meeting by sharing some of the tips. I cannot say I had in any way imagined or understood the response, but I learned later that apparently some of the people in the room considered it to be a change of agenda and additional pressure to an already pressure-cooker situation. I was met with a series of aggressive questions from two of the faculty, which I fielded with answers as clear as I could conceive.  I made recommendations to one person to write several small pieces instead of banking on only getting a book contract, and she countered with "I'm going to write the book". 

Realizing that I was being met with nothing but obstinance from a group of over-tired, over-stressed faculty trying to get final grades in, I made a choice I'm still not sure I would have every made except that I felt like I was not getting through to anyone except the other person who ate a cookie.  I checked to see if the dean had time to come and sit with us to field questions, and when he entered the room, they morphed into church mice in the face of my six foot four boss who has the demeanor of Yogi Bear or Fred Flinstone and the intelligence of Einstein.  They asked all the same questions and he gave all the same answers I had just recited.  With each interchange, I grew a little and then a lot angry.  I have a very long professional fuse and a pretty good sense of humor because it all goes with the job.  But on this particular day at this particular meeting I found their behavior outrageous and a bit indecent since this meeting had been my brainchild as a way to help them all keep moving toward a successful tenure application.  After the dean left, I expressed my incredulity at what had just happened and qualified my forthcoming rant with "this is coming on the back end of six weeks of people coming at me like tigers over course scheduling". 

I did rant. About the outrageousness of what had just happened--how they had accepted the dean's answers without question, how I had arranged the meeting to support their efforts, and that they all have Ph.D's, they're all smart people and it's a bit like applying for a job--they all do different things, so no one can tell them how to explain their research programs; at some point they're just going to have to figure it out. At that point they had succeded in increasing my heat index to the level of their own.  In retrospect, I think I led with the sexist nature of prior events. I also made sure they knew that after the meeting I would go into the dean's office and explain to him exactly what I had said.  I did.  I would have handled the situation differently if I had it to do over again, but I didn't.  I received a summer research plan from each of them as well as the ones who (I think fortunately) missed the excitement.  Later that week I saw them all gathered for a beer at Pippin's pub and went the other way so as not to pass their (I imagined) unflattering debriefing.   

It is the beginning of a new school year.  My book was published in April. Our new curriculum is rolling out as I write this.  All the conversion in course numbers and descriptions have been entered into our course catalogs with the help of my steady Assistant Dean.  My administrative assistant has constrained her long explanations to a couple of office visits and anomalous shouts of details as I pass by her desk to use the ladies room or when I am near the elevator--either to arrive for the day or leave the building.  Faculty are starting to teach their classes and I am putting together my file for promotion to full professor.  I think I have earned it. I have a meeting with the dean next week about a big new assessment project and launching the implementation of our graduate program. The book seems to be selling and life goes on.  More later because as Dylan would say, "the times, they are a changing. . . ":)    

U.K. here I come!

Okay, I am not really going to England, but found out this week that my book is.  I have a copyright, and ISBN number and 2011 publication release date for both the U.S. and Europe from Routledge Press.  That was something I had not expected, but is a big, big, big cherry on top of getting the book done and into production.  Wowie zowie. Everyone needs one really nice thing to be grateful for now and then, and I am grateful and pleased. It feels like the reward for believing in my ability to finish and make it "my" book over so many years. Exhale. . . again.

Good Vibrations!

I felt so good today!. . . I do not understand why and I am not going to ask; just going to embrace the blessing:) But I do kinda wonder if it's because I got my new bioidentical hormone butt implant recently.  Ha! Cheers. . 

Nostalgia

I missed my 34th class reunion last weekend and it sent me into a bit of a tailspin of homesickness, some regret for not going and some relief  that I did not.  Thinking about high school is a mixed bag for me.  I would have loved to see many of the people whose faces I have seen in pictures posted, and there is but one person I would not have liked to see at all.  The story is very, very old and has little relevance for my life today, but there is something about seeing the big smile on a face of someone I just plain don't like for reasons that are as old as the story that made me a little angry all over again. Don't get me wrong--I am not derailed, and in fact have so enjoyed seeing photographs of a true community of people that have genuine affection for one another. 

I think my tailspin has to do with having most of my family and several friends far away on the west coast while I am holding my breath and gathering the strength to make it through another Chicago winter.  I do not think I had realized quite how much this cycle of seasons affects my overall sense of well-being and what it is possible to do on a day to day basis.  It is fall now, and we had a beautiful summer and these days are special as the trees begin to show different colored leaves, the mornings become cooler and evenings grow dark earlier now. I like this time of year because for me it has always been a time of new beginnings and the excitement of another calendar year, set by the inception of a new school year.  I have lived on this clock since I was a little girl because my family's life during my growing years did too.  My father was in education, so September was always the beginning of the year.

I began this new year in late August and have been sprinting through the weeks with meetings, a new crop of students and new projects I have been tasked to do.  Every year I say, "I love my new students" and every year it has been no less true than the last.  They keep me young, spirited and feeling like I have something to share and give to the world.  My work as a mother is not over, but I am at odds without the daily comings and goings of daughters in my home.  My circle of friends in Chicago has shrunk--partly because of this stage of my life, partly because the people I like most are part of my work life, so a certain professional distance is appropriate and necessary.  I also realize that I have changed--I have little to say to some of the girlfriends who reach out to me and a lot of affection for others I would love to reconnect with.  There are more of the latter than former.

I have less time outside of work, too.  I am having a lot of difficulty still adjusting to a year-round position that leaves me 48 hours on a weekend to do my household upkeep, do a bit of self-care and relaxation and let go of the week's responsibilities.  I am able to let go of work responsibilities, but have been ridiculously inept at the upkeep and self-care. This does not feel good, but I am having an impossible time figuring out how to make it better. There  are  only so many hours in the day and I am very, very tired by the time the weekend comes around. I am trying not to lose Saturdays to rumination and sleep, but they pass like that. Then I find myself getting to bed early so that on Sunday I can make  up for all I didn't do Saturday, and the week's quick cycle begins again, leaving a bread trail of things undone, letters not written, little packages not sent, shopping not done, a refrigerator unfilled, mail not read, friends not seen and phone calls made sporadically returned.  I am lonely for one good conversation with somebody I care about. 

I am glad that it is football season again because I love to watch Bears games and share them through the miles with my father.  I ball up on the couch, turn the game on and lose myself in their successes and missed opportunities, talked about at half-time with dad, and then again at the end of the game.  This is my one great weekend pleasures, but I think if I said this to anyone they would wonder at the uneventfulness of my life.  But my life has been eventful. . . too eventful at times, and I have never taken so much pleasure in adopting an attitude of "I just don't want to" and then following through with it  to the extreme.  I have a friend who is taking trapeze classes, another who teaches beading, a daughter who is bestowing mad love into the life of her family and another who is adopting a kitten, moving, buying a new car, working full time, nurturing a new marriage and looking for new workout programs. I have a 78 year old father who golfs three times a week, finishes a short stack of books in the same time frame, pops by to see his grandchildren periodically and rises at 5:00 a.m. to go walk four miles at the gym.  It is this knowledge that gives me the feeling that I am still not doing enough.  I'm not if we're talking about playing.  To some  extent my work is play because I like it so much, but I need new and different kinds of play.  Oh heck, maybe I'll sign up for trapeze classes too.  To be continued. . .

Got a Cold

Yes, that's it. I miss this blog. I want to write, but I feel like if I open the box again, I'll never stop. . . . so, another day, another weekend. I have had quite some life, now that I think about it. Till soon.