Because I do like me some book-ish poetry…
Untitled
by Elizabeth Bishop
Close close all night
the lovers keep.
They turn together
in their sleep,
close as two pages
in a book
that read each other
in the dark.
Each knows all
the other knows,
learned by heart
from head to toes.
A few of the books that are regularly stacked on my desk at home…
I sometimes make small bargains with myself to keep focused on the things that are important to me (and to reign in my time-wasters). One such bargain is that I often set is that I won’t peer into Facebook until I’ve finished reading my current book. So I’m up to that again, and have promised myself to finish Christina Lamb’s Farewell Kabul, which I picked up in the airport last week. It’s a pretty dense read, but is fascinating. I am learning so much.
(photo is of my new Little Free Library, where I can pass along all of the awesome books that I read, to others!)
From Mary Oliver:
“We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy.”
This reminds me of something that my ex said to me as we were splitting up. He said that he wasn’t too worried about me, because I was happy no matter what happened. While there’s some truth to that, and I think it comes from having a lot of really awful things that have happened over the years (so awful, so out of my control), that I generally choose not to wallow in misery but to make the best of my circumstances. But that’s somewhat different than being happy–that’s just survival.
Being happy, in my mind, is a daily act of choosing joy:
It’s the parking-lot-Chewbacca-mask Mom who can laugh at herself and at the simple joys of her life (without worrying about how she looks to millions of strangers).
It’s jumping into Walden Pond and taking a long swim even though that’ll mean that your hair is a mess for the rest of the day.
It’s pulling over to take a photo of a field of poppies even when you’re running late for your train.
It’s drinking straight out of the milk bottle because every other cup in the kitchen is dirty.
It’s getting sand in your shoes because of a spontaneous ramble at the beach.
It’s getting up at 2am to stare at the full moon.
It’s building wooden things with simple tools.
It’s a cozy chair and a novel.
It’s supporting the people you love as they embark on their own journeys.
It’s a text message with silly emojis.
It’s starting the day with a walk in the garden, noting how things have changed since yesterday and imagining how they will be different tomorrow.
It strikes me, as I read this list, that many of the ‘happinesses’ that come to my mind right now are solitary ones. In years past there were so many more that came from caregiving for my children and from time with my community. While those are still important to me, I spend most of my work-work time with people everyday, that the small acts of happy-solitude feel like a necessary counterweight to teaching/leading/collaborating.
(poppies, taken by me in Italy five years ago)
I’m heading into the home stretch of my year in IT, and am enjoying a bit of extra attention from my colleagues as a result:
When I was a kid (around the time that I was reading The Mixed of Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler), it was my dream to someday hide out in a library after hours, perhaps snoozing among the stacks and reading reading reading to my heart’s content.
I happen to be, at this very moment, nearly alone in a closed library. And musing about all of the possibilities…(so if you don’t hear from me for awhile, you’ll know why)
The past few weeks I’ve been fairly contemplative about where I am in my life. I passed a milestone birthday and I marked the anniversary of my cancer diagnosis (or rather, I didn’t mark it at all this year, which felt alright). Also, I visited with a few old friends recently where we discussed all that’s happened in the past few decades.
And after all that, I suspect that I just might jinx myself if I say that things are pretty positive right now. But it also seems worth noting that while there are still some hard days and some things that I hope to change about my circumstances, for the most part it’s just really good: my days are filled with interesting activities that are mostly of my own choosing, I enjoy my work colleagues very much, there is little friction in my family life, I have few health complaints, my home/garden are well-worth returning to each evening, and I average about 7.5 hours of sleep at night (and every once in awhile, I even take a nap).
(photo taken in my garden this weekend)
Am I the only one who misses that era of about 2008ish where everyone had a blog and part of the day’s ritual was to read all of your friends’ recent posts? Every once in awhile I peruse the lists of sites from my now-defunct RSS Reader and I can recall the thrill of having so many writerly friends that I heard from nearly every day. But mostly I miss the thrill and energy of regularly writing for an audience–my writing muscles have become pretty flaccid these past few years.
This quotation, from one of my most favorite articles about blogs, sums up the magic of the phenomenon so well:
Finally, I think I get the superhero fixation. It’s the flying. It’s the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it’s like, “Dude, the ball.”
Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that. ?
(Note: the peonies have nothing to do with blogging, but they seemed worth including anyways…)
The language, mores, and workflows of IT aren’t all that different from what occurs in other areas of the campus, but it felt important to me that while I was in IT this year that I become adept at IT-speak and processes (just as if I were living in a foreign country and adopting the customs and colloquialisms of that region).
One of the ways that I’ve accomplished the task of learning The Ways of IT, is to seek an ITIL Certification. In fact, by next month I ought to have two of them under my belt.
I don’t know that getting certified makes me a better IT manager or employee, but it does make me feel like less of an impostor among my colleagues.
A post in the series My Year in IT
For me, working in IT has required a healthy sense of humor.
There is the easy, obvious humor that comes from working in an environment that is straight out of an Office episode. That leads to silly shared memes, bad photoshopping of each other’s headshots, and the occasional inflatable monkey at my desk. But what it really comes from is that in IT we are working in teams and not solo.
From my years doing historical research in the solitude of an archive, I’d become used to working through problems myself, and developed workflows for my personal productivity that rarely hinged on others. My first few days at an IT cubicle were a completely different experience. Paper planes whizzed over walls and news would spread across an entire hall of offices simply by having an audible conversation. I soon learned how valuable that ‘spread’ of overheard conversations would be, as others in nearby cubes who heard me speak of a problem on the phone might soon pop in and add their two cents to the issue. And among team members, it became apparent that humor is necessary to diffuse stress and to create strong working bonds with each other (or just to revel in the fact that it is Friday and almost the weekend!)
Humor also comes in handy when one realizes that a problem cannot be fixed. There is a mantra in IT that “anything is possible with enough resources” and this is usually said in a preface to an explanation of why that desired thing is not possible. It may be an unplanned system outage, the inability to modify out-of-the-box software, or the impossibility of churning out an immediate web programming change. Grappling with finite resource limits is maddening, especially when one is aware of the frustration that users feel when something is not working as expected. Enter, humor. These moments are not the laugh-out-loud silliness of youtube mishaps, but are times when one has to smile and forge ahead to provide a workaround, or reach out and communicate as clearly as possible what the impact of the problem/outage/malfunction will be.
Perhaps most importantly, I’ve needed to keep a sense of humor about myself. Despite knowing all that I know about technology there are days that my printer isn’t working, times when I need a password reset, and moments when it feels like every click yields an error message. It is then that I get most exhausted by the tangle of spaghetti powercords in my bag that seem to include every single one except the one that I need and it’s high time to start laughing instead of cursing. Technology is frustrating even for those of us who spend all day mired in it (or perhaps even more so).
This is the first post in a series about My Year in IT.
Last year I moved from my central campus office-with-a-window to a cubicle in our IT building. In preparation for the move my academic books went into storage and I bought a fancy new pair of noise-canceling headphones (which were deemed a necessity for my new digs). The move was a willing change for me, as I had just accepted a one-year position managing the computing service team for our university.
My motivation for this move was driven by the disconnect that I see between academics and operations in HigherEd. We are a house divided, with few people who navigate the gap. Nowhere is this more obvious to me than in IT, whose technical functions undergird teaching, faculty productivity, and campus communication. Yet there is near-invisibility of the technicians who sit at their screens all day ensuring that when a professor walks into the classroom they can access the classroom projector, open Blackboard, and log into their storage drive to retrieve their powerpoint slides.
Given that our campuses incorporate cutting-edge digital tools and methods, the impact of IT on HigherEd is ever-expanding. Our libraries house digital repositories, our faculty each have an online presence, and even the campus gym is expected to have wireless. Added to that are the data needs of campus support services, which are critical for hiring, enrolling, advising, coaching, and so forth.
Serving on the front lines of the campus IT department has given me a window into how all of the campus systems function and interact with each other (and also a view onto how difficult it can be when services don’t function). I have a growing respect for my highly-skilled colleagues who offer technical support, fix AV, install routers, write programming scripts, manage projects, and implement technology policies.
From where I was sitting a few months ago, to where I sit now, the view could not be more different. Yet it is also very much the same–in both seats I am surrounded by people who work hard and who are passionate about their jobs. On the academic side my colleagues focus on teaching students and excelling in research. And in IT, they focus on providing timely and helpful service for clients. Both are necessary. Both keep the university humming along everyday.
And I might add that those noise-canceling headphones are now dusty from lack of use. Instead of tuning out, I’ve been listening and learning constantly, which has reminded me why I got into academia in the first place–to better understand what’s happening around me. And that is definitely not noise.
