Category Archives: deep thoughts

there be dragons (and sharks and rattlesnakes and mice)…

Recently I visited a friend in the desert.

It was hot. It was sandy. But it was also full of growing things:

For a few hours I stayed at her home alone (while the others were out hiking), and while sitting on the porch I spied a robust amount of bird and insect life including some rabbits and a charming chirping family of quail. There was nothing empty or deserted about that space, and small flowers were everywhere I looked.

Her property is adjacent to the Pacific Crest Trail (a place that’s been getting a lot of press lately due to Oprah’s recent Book Club pick of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, which I do hope to read soon). Here’s an image from the trail:

One way or another, as we were planning this trip it became known that I’d never slept outside without a tent. So we decided that it was probably time to remedy that, and that the desert might be a fine place to sleep under the stars. But there weren’t many stars out that night, there was a three-quarter moon so bright that everything was quite visible even after the lights were out.

My host provided a cozy air mattress and sleeping bag (it was COLD despite having been into the 90s during the day). Here’s the view from where we slept, just before sunset. See that moon?:

Though we could hear coyotes yapping not too far away and that was a bit unsettling, the night passed without an incident and we had a relaxing breakfast on that spot the next morning as the temperatures began to rise (those biscuits were still warm from the oven–yum!):

So perhaps you can understand the cold chill that went up my spine when my friend sent me this photo later. Yes, that’s a four-foot desert rattlesnake. And it is crawling under the foundation of her house just a couple of feet from where my pillow was two nights before:

Euw.

But it’s funny…I’m just starting on the 9-man season for outrigger canoeing and am spending a lot of time bobbing around in the ocean on the weekends. So everyone’s been telling me their scariest shark stories. And I was in the water a few weekends ago when there was a 15-ft Great White spotted nearby in La Jolla.

But you know what? I’m never thinking about sharks when I’m in the ocean (jellyfishes occasionally, because getting stung is a drag, but not sharks). The ocean is so big and so fun that I can’t help but jump in and swim. There’s very little that will dissuade me from getting wet.

And you know what else? My desert-living friend told me yesterday that her house had a few mice in the cupboards, and that scared me far more than did her rattlesnake photo. My whole body shook for a few seconds as I realized that I’d spent two days there. In her house. With the mice. I’m glad I didn’t know that beforehand. And I’m glad there’s a snake to take care of those mice. And I’m glad that I have some commitments on the ocean most weekends for the next few months. Because I think it might be awhile before I head to the desert again. 🙂

Library-ish

I’m rarely more content than when I am perusing the shelves of a library. There are many reasons why that’s the case, but I’ll just focus on one of them today: it’s because I know where to find the stuff I want. There’s a lot of pleasure in finding a call number in the library catalog and then heading directly to the place on the shelves where the item is located.

Because of my desire to be organized and have a place for everything I own, a few years ago our family adopted a classification scheme for our thousands of books. As a busy graduate student I needed to know where my books were, so I could consult them regularly for my research. Enigmatic piles of books and haphazard shelving practices were not my friend. So we used the Book Collector program to create a database of our book ownings and tagged the spine of each book with its Library of Congress number for easy shelving and retrieval. It was a lot of work. So much work that it took two summers (one for fiction, one for non-fiction) of data entry before our collection was entered and tagged.

When we divorced, John took the bulk of our books. I was happy about that–wanting to shed the weight of so much ‘stuff’ in the process of moving on with my life. However, I did keep the academic books for my teaching and research (and my poetry books), bringing them to my office at Chapman University. However, in moving them I didn’t pay much attention to their shelf location and also acquired many new books as I was in the final stretch of dissertating that weren’t in the book database or weren’t tagged with a library number. I told myself that when I was done with my PhD I would get things organized again. And of course that means now.

So last week I did some research on the best software for creating my new book database and settled on the iPhone app Book Crawler. It allows you to use the camera on your phone to scan the ISBN barcode on the back of any book for importing the relevant data fields into the app (i.e. title, author, publisher, etc). It can also do google searches for books on the title or author name if they do not have a barcode on the back cover (this is the case with many books printed prior to the 1980s). And, it can sync your book collection to Dropbox.com and export as a CSV file (right now I’m emailing a CSV of my database to myself daily as a backup for my collection).

Even with the handy Book Crawler app, cataloging my books is taking a lot of time. I set a goal to do one shelf per day and have accomplished that on most days since I began. But in the midst of the project my office is looking a bit untidy, which is good motivation to power through and get this done as soon as possible (because I like people sitting in my groovy office chairs, not stacks of books):

Not only is there a lot of pleasure in getting my books in their rightful places on their shelves, but it’s also fun to peruse each of them and consider how I acquired them and why I’ve kept them (I regularly cull my books to keep the acquisitions from getting out of hand). Along the way I’ve found a few treasures, such as this early self-portrait by Catgirl, and this signature by author Terry Tempest Williams, which spawned a series of memories that will be another blogpost soon.

I feel certain that many of my readers are probably rolling their eyes at my desire to be so organized with my book collection. I’m sure you think I’m over-the-top with my need to control my shelves. But for me, one of the best parts of owning books is that they are there when I need them. So if I’m having an I-need-Mary-Oliver-right-now moment, I can reach over and grab that book in an instant. Because if I didn’t know where to locate my books when I needed them, it would hardly be worth the owning of them for me. If I can’t find it, what’s the use of having it?

PS: One of the biggest charms for me, in meeting my current partner, was seeing the library in his home for the first time. Knowing that he cared about books as much as I do confirmed my hunch that we had a future together. I think you can tell quite a lot about a person by how they treat their books, right? 🙂

Digital

Last night when you were steering a canoe through some heavy swells you caught the edge of your thumbnail on the gunnel of the boat and the angle was just so that it pulled off half of the nail. And you swore and then realized that was going to hurt a lot and then you kept paddling because you needed to. If it was just that one thing perhaps you wouldn’t have wondered so much. But if that followed an incident over the weekend when you grabbed your razor wrong when you pulled it out of your suitcase and sliced through the pad of your fourth finger (and thank you concierge for the band aid and the sympathy) and last Tuesday when you grabbed a pan from the oven the wrong way and got second degree burns on three other fingers and just a few weeks ago you accidentally sliced off the tip of your middle finger…

If this is you, you might wonder why such things just keep happening to your fingers. And whether you ought to just preemptively bandage them all because you’re worried about what will happen next…

Identity (and relationships)

Since being single I’ve felt a strong resistance to dating anyone with young children (young as in, still living at home). It’s not that I don’t like children (I do like them, very much), or it’s not that I have any prejudice about dating a parent per se, but my reticence seems to stem from a desire to maintain an identity for myself that’s separate from my role as a mother.* Perhaps it doesn’t make much sense as I try to articulate it here, and perhaps it sounds especially odd given that I’m a parent and anyone that I date has to accept that part of my life…But what I seem to crave now is to be defined by my own merits and not to be put into a situation again where I will be defined or restrained by a caregiving role.

Navigating romance and relationships in the middle-stage of life is tricky business and I certainly have my fair share of baggage from the past to make it more complicated. So I’m figuring all of this stuff out as I go along–proceeding with caution and listening as closely as I can to my various inclinations in the process. These matters aren’t entirely logical and there are few models to follow, so it feels like I have to depend on my own intuition as I move forward.

I’m curious if any of you have made similar decisions about dating and relationships? Do you have ‘rules’ that you follow (e.g. no kids) as you evaluate potential matches?

*FWIW, I’ve also not been interested in dating anyone LDS or formerly-LDS for the same reason. I’ve put my natal religion completely behind me now and I don’t want it to play any part in my future relationships.

back in the day…

Monday I went to lunch with an old LDS friend, someone I’d known back in the days when most of my time was spent corralling toddlers and keeping house. Because she was on her way to Italy and I just returned, we planned to discuss travel. But instead we talked mostly about change. I wondered if she would recognize the now-me, and how different I would seem from the Jana of twenty years ago.

She said I was still the same person, but suggested that maybe my years spent as a mother-of-young children and as a dutiful-Mormon-wife were more of an aberration from the “real me” than is my life now. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that since we met and I’m not sure. I think I have changed in some pretty fundamental ways–that was the major insight that I had while ruminating on my life at Cape Cod last year and that feeling has persisted since then.

Just like I look back on the essays that I wrote when I was a college freshman or even the blogposts that I wrote a few years and cringe a bit at my naivete, I do the same when I reflect on some of the decisions that I made in the past. I don’t have any regrets, per se. But my lens is not the same as it was before, and that change means that I make decisions differently and hold other priorities than I used to. It feels right to see an evolution of behavior and choices in myself, instead of stagnation.

But perhaps the biggest change in me is that I used to be afraid of change. And I’m not so much anymore. Maybe it’s just a phase that I’m going through and eventually I will find a familiar path and will no longer want to deviate from it. But for now, I’m enjoying the exploration and the traveling. It feels right to be trying new things, even uncomfortable ones. And it’s a liberating feeling to not be constantly measuring myself against the expectations of a church, a community, or a relationship that doesn’t fit my values. In general I feel more present and alive to my experiences and possibilities than ever before, which seems right to me at this mid-stage of my life.

Jana, PhD

Yesterday I finished those last final steps to doctorhood. Afterwards it was more than surreal to walk out of the Administration Building and across the quad, recalling the time just over 20 years ago that I first walked across that same space…at the beginning of my freshman year at UCI. So today when I walk across the stage to be hooded by my adviser, it will be the close of a long and circuitous journey that began in 1989 when I aimed to become a physician because of my medical history, and ended when I became a professional historian who researches the history of medicine.

Being a doctor doesn’t make me feel any smarter or more worthy. Instead, it’s a testament to the fact that I persisted and knew when to call something “good enough” to be finished (after 35 years of school, one would think that it was definitely time).

As I thought about all that’s happened to bring me to this point in my life, one small story from nearly three decades ago stood out in my mind. I was 13 and was nearing the end of my chemotherapy treatments for bone cancer. There were warnings given to me and my parents that the treatments would have cognitive side-effects, including memory loss.

Yet that spring, as an ailing 8th-grade cancer patient wearing a wig and walking on crutches, I won my school spelling bee. I then went on to the district level and won that match, and moved on to the state championships.

The details of that experience are dim in my mind now. I would imagine that it must have been tedious for the audience to watch me stand up and use crutches to walk to the microphone each time I had to spell a word. Or perhaps the judges allowed me to remain seated for the competitions because of my limited mobility? I don’t remember.

But even though the details are fuzzy, the thought that keeps bubbling up about that moment now, is one of persistence. I just kept at it. Kept doing my best at spelling each word slowly into the microphone whenever it was my turn. I wasn’t thinking too hard about what I was doing, I was just doing it. I didn’t let the doctors’ predictions or my own self-consciousness at being a one-legged-and-bald teenager bother me. I just spelled.

Today I’ve got the urge to take that fragile-yet-determined 13 year-old me in my arms and tell her a few things…

I want to let her know that someday she’ll be walking confidently across a stage to earn another award because she worked hard at something, and kept at it even in complicated circumstances. I want to tell her that she will be rejected the first time she applies for graduate school, and will be rejected from most schools the second time–but what matters most is that she found one match among the many attempts. I want to tell her that during her years of coursework she will sleep less than those years when she was caring for a newborn, but that she ought to get up when that alarm rings anyways. I want to warn her about how tough it will be to TA and tutor and do odd jobs to pay her tuition, but remind her that she can do it even while keeping things balanced with mothering and gardening and researching. And I’ll tell her that when she does have funding she ought to make sure to work and write everyday, that it’s a luxury she can’t take for granted. I want to explain to her that getting your PhD isn’t about doing things perfectly–often it’s about doing things as good as you can while facing down the fear of failure (oh, comprehensive oral exams, I am looking at you right now). I’ll leave some of the hardest parts out–about the drug-resistant infection that would persist for so many months that there were fears of losing her other leg and about the unraveling of her marriage. Instead, I’ll remind her that she will find true friends to support her through the long dark nights ahead, and remind her that there will always be roses (and roses and more roses).

Most importantly, I will tell her that by the time she’s earned the PhD she’ll be stronger than she’s ever been before, more satisfied with her life than she could have ever imagined, and more sure that there are great things ahead if she’s willing to just keep at it, everyday.

*Photo is from my recent visit to Tuscany, where we stayed in a villa with so many blooming roses that their petals lined every pathway.

dedication

I was filling in the template for my dissertation file last night. As I typed up the dedication page, I was pretty humbled by all of the people that I wanted to name–those who listened and read and helped and were just there when I needed them. (really friends, you are amazing and I owe you so much…)

But as I thought about what it meant to me to do this degree and how it impacted the lives of the people around me, I realized that getting a Ph.D. is probably the single most selfish thing that I’ve ever done. I did this for me. Not for my kids or for the money or for my parents or for god.

For. me.

almost there…

Ten years ago I took the first steps to something important, this becoming-a-doctor thing. It’s so close now, that the last step is consuming all of my mental energy and my discretionary time. In the midst of it all I’ve left emails unresponded-to, missed appointments with friends, and have been a bit short-tempered in situations where I would usually be calm.

I’m told, by others who’ve done their PhDs, that this is normal. The end is hard and intense and time-consuming. For me, it feels a lot like when I’m almost to the top of a rock-climb and I’m exhausted and my whole body is shaking from the effort to get there. At that point it’s all I can do to keep focused on what’s in front of me and take it one step at a time. If I get distracted by anything other than reaching the top, it’s likely that I won’t have the energy to do that one last push to get there.

So…I apologize for my flakiness in the meantime. Just a few more weeks and I’ll be on the other side of this and life will go back to photos and paddling and poetry and time-with-friends once again…

the wild west (of the internets)

Recently, I received an email from someone in the marketing department of an institution that I’m affiliated with. Turns out, he was expressing concern about some of my web activities that didn’t carry appropriate institutional branding. He explained that I was “going all wild west” and doing things my own way instead of following policy.

Boy, did I get a kick out of that message.

Because I realized that what I like most about the various digital spaces where I play, is precisely that they are all “wild west.” As soon as such venues are codified and monetized, they lose their appeal for me. I need a place to play and get messy and make mistakes. I don’t much need a place to play by the rules. I already have plenty of those kinds of places in my life.

For example, lately I’ve lost interest in Twitter. While I still auto-tweet some blogposts and post photos of what I’m eating, I don’t generate much new content there nowadays. Instagram, which seemed a lot of fun for awhile, lost a lot of its appeal when it was bought by Facebook. Ditto for Gowalla and Brizzly (Gowalla I miss especially–I liked it early on when I was earning badges and toting items around wherever I traveled). I though maybe Pinterest would be my new digs, that is until Ann Romney joined. That kind of killed it for me. I dabbled a bit in Storify until I realized that it was cross-posting all of my stuff to Facebook. Ugh. Hate applications that go there.

So…I need a new online frontier. Anyone have any suggestions for me?

Note: photo above taken while I was on a western road trip two weeks ago–driving from one end of California to the other…

make me smile…

Heather’s post about her changes in blogging since her marital separation got me thinking about how my blog has changed over the past couple of years. That, and the recent attention that my Mother Work post* garnered from various media outlets made me remember a time when a lot of what I wrote here was meaningful and interesting and widely-linked.

A huge change in my blogging practice is due to working full-time. Gone are the times when I could devote an entire morning to composing a blogpost. Added to that, is the fact that I’m not getting as personal anymore–for so many reasons. And, I’m working so much in ‘auto-pilot’ mode most of the time, that I’m not sure that I even have many deep thoughts to share anymore.

So, instead, I post random bits of poetry and some photos, my travelogues, and the music that’s driving my day. Because they make me smile and that happiness seems worth sharing with you.

These days I feel more like a magpie who’s pulling at random bits of string and shiny things to feather her nest, than I do a writer with something important to say.

*That Mother Work post was the product of a two-hour middle-of-the-night writing jag when I just couldn’t sleep. Those nights are few and far-between now that my alarm is ringing at 6am.

PilgrimSteps

just one step at a time…