Life. So much randomness. So much weirdness. I suppose it’s what keeps me coming back for more every day. Well, that, and reading your blogs… So without further ado, some random life things from the past month-ish… Including snippets from my trip to see my family. 🙂

• Teaching is weird. I teach pretty much the same classes every year. Great, you say, you don’t have to learn a new class! And I say, well, yes, but. But but but. Students are so different year-to-year. So, so different. This summer’s class is the best example yet that I have of this. Last year’s students were really confident in their ideas… this year? We have some people who – at the midway point of the class – JUST figured out what they want to focus on. And, their topics are relatively novel ones, so I’ve had to shift several presentations and planned activities to meet them where they are. On the plus side? It is really keeping me on my toes, as several of them have needed a lot of discussion and encouragement as they sort through all of the ideas in their heads. 🙂
• File things under Things You Never Think Will Happen To You: When I was walking from the parking ramp (side note: parking ramp or parking garage? or, something different? which one do you use? [this is kind of like soda vs. pop vs. Coke…]) to class last week, I passed the retention pond by one of the buildings. I pass this pond every single week, just fyi. Last week, I heard birds but wasn’t paying attention. The next thing I knew, something was attacking my head. As in, flying into my head, trying to peck at me, and even trying to land (I think) on my head. From the shadow I could see on the ground (I was looking down at this point, waving my arms around my head, and shouting), it looked like an enormous flying bug. When I finally escaped the as-yet-unidentified attacker, I looked up to see 2 people I know from my school, who informed me that it was a red-winged blackbird. So yeah, I got attacked by a bird when I walked by its nest. Turns out, this is pretty common for this bird at this time of year. When I left class, I walked out with 3 students and my (fabulous, wonderful) TA. I mentioned that I was trying to figure out how to run the gauntlet of the path beside the retention pond, only to find out that the same thing had happened to one of my students. I felt vindicated – at least it wasn’t just me! (The answer: I took the same path, accepted that they would probably try to attack me again, and prepared by pulling up my hood and walking as quickly as possible without falling down…)
  • Because I’ve been putting this post together for four days or so… I now know that Sarah and her daughter had a similar encounter! So it’s not just me!
• Living a quiet life sounds like a good choice, if you ask me.
• Also, this: Why are we afraid of reading? (from the NY Times)
  • Reading is something else: an activity whose value, while broadly proclaimed, is hard to specify. Is any other common human undertaking so riddled with contradiction? Reading is supposed to teach us who we are and help us forget ourselves, to enchant and disenchant, to make us more worldly, more introspective, more empathetic and more intelligent. It’s a private, even intimate act, swathed in silence and solitude, and at the same time a social undertaking. It’s democratic and elitist, soothing and challenging, something we do for its own sake and as a means to various cultural, material and moral ends.
  • (Much later in the essay) Reading liberates and torments us, enlightens and bewilders us, makes and unmakes our social and solitary selves.
  • From a reader comment: Reading is a space ship, a time machine, a magic carpet. It can take you places that you can’t find in the physical world. Reading is equality. A great way to enforce inequality is to make reading “optional.”
• That article – including the comment from the reader – makes me think of the joy I am experiencing, rereading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Engie is our fearless reader for this online book club, and I am thrilled that she chose a book that has lived in my heart for as long as I can remember. My favorite part so far is remembering the text as I read it. Does anyone else have this experience? When I’m reading an old favorite (the list has many entries, but includes the HP series, The Dark Is Rising series, the Anne of Green Gables Series, Little House, the Wrinkle in Time trilogy, and on and an on…), there are whole passages where I know what the words will be, yet I am eager to read them again for the umpteenth time. It’s like my brain has stored the text all these years, and seeing it on the page is like seeing an old friend after far too long. So thank you, Engie, for helping to feed my soul in this busy time. <3
• Oh! the trip East. Goodness, I nearly forgot, I went so far down the rabbit hole that is the internet…
  • First things first… it was so much better than I anticipated. I always dread trips just a bit, thanks to being out of my routine (even when the destination is family…what can I say? I’m weird. But you knew that.)
  • I got to see chosen and, well, regular? default? inherited? family, and both were wonderful. My mom’s extended family – what I think of as inherited family – is huge, and I hadn’t seen many of them in 7 years. I really enjoyed the time I spent with them, despite most of them a) having no clue what I do, and b) not knowing where I live. They have very different lives than I do, but they are warm, loving, and LOUD people. 🙂
  • My chosen family. Oh, my. I could go on and on about how wonderful it was to spend two full hours with them, talking about recent travels, a bit of politics, philosophy, science, books… These are my second parents, and they are in my heart as much as my biological parents. I don’t know what I would do without them.
  • And I spent so much time with my parents, which was wonderful. I took a couple of photos of each of them in their natural habitats – my mom, in the kitchen, and my dad, in his grungy garden clothes. This is where I picture them when I think of them throughout the day. We had ice cream and summer fruit and wonderful food and just… it’s so good to just see them, even if the visits are too rare.
  • I did take a few photos of my dad’s beautiful gardens. A rhododendron for Engie, which we think was planted about 50 years ago? And a beautiful pot in another garden.
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• And, finally, this: Who’s afraid of being idle?
  • Me. Definitely me. Sigh.
• I hope you are all well. I also hope that someday I can figure out how to have some of a post in bullet points and other parts of it not. Things to learn…
• I’ll leave you with this favorite from Nick Cave:
  • Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts — be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.