Sanity, regained

O. is nursing.

At five months, he finally -- finally! -- figured it out and is now able to get what he needs from me without causing either of us trauma. We started giving him the opportunity to nurse without a supplemental feeder just over seven weeks ago, and, within a few days, he was completely off his training wheels. We are ecstatic.

There have been a few bumps along the way since that first day entirely free of the pump -- some frustration on O.'s part, heat waves that have thrown his appetite off, plugged ducts from having to adjust to less frequent feeding demands -- but that's been nothing compared to the brutal routine of juggling so much nursing equipment in the preceding months (see photo). For the first time since O. was born, I've been able to sleep more than two and a half hours at a stretch. This may go without saying, but I have to write the words because I've wanted to for so long: I am a different person -- a sane one -- once more.

Sleep has meant the return of coherent thought. Instead of falling asleep while pumping -- not something I recommend, by the way, as the pump doesn't quit when it's full -- I've had the gift of quiet moments to reflect on what the last five (almost six!) months have been. O. is easily distracted these days, so there's no catching up on Netflix while he's eating. He'll even turn a nursing cover into a toy, so we keep to his room, lights down, for most feedings. He grabs at my hair, my shirt, my hands. And I sit, thinking in twenty-minute stints about the road we've traveled.

For the first two months of O.'s life, I felt robbed. Not of the breastfeeding relationship some books tout as sacred -- believe me, we didn't have any holy notions about my providing nourishment; in fact, we deliberately steered clear of any conversations with well-meaning people who were self-proclaimed boob enthusiasts because we didn't want to get into debates about lactation philosophies and politics. We just hoped breastfeeding would work and we could check it off the list of things to learn to do, like burping and diapering and giving the occasional bath.

But as a few days' nursing strike turned into weeks, I felt my ability to handle the expected abnormal of having a new baby leaching from me. I had no emotional energy left to love O. with. What I would have traded just to have fragmented sleep and unstructured days only from an infant's erratic waking, not his middle-of-the-night cries and the demands of the pump. It wasn't supposed to be this way, I kept repeating to myself, even though I knew it wasn't helpful. I'd look at O. in his rocking seat and dread the next time he'd rouse himself and then feel guilty that I couldn't enjoy him when he was awake. Every interaction we had was too fraught with the frustrations of getting him to eat, figuring out why he wouldn't eat, allotting precious time I could be using to bond with him to contact doctors who could help us help him eat. Eat already! I wanted to scream. "If it weren't for that damned risk of food allergies," I repeated to D. over and over, teary and spent, "we could just stop the insanity and give him formula. I don't care about the rest of the stupid benefits of breast milk. This is crazy."

But the risk was very real because of my family history. And putting ourselves through a few months of pumping to avoid a potential lifetime for O. of eating the way I have since we discovered what was making me sick was worth the heartache. Or so I told myself at my lowest points, when I wanted to quit and said so to O. in no uncertain terms. Fortunately, he understood none of it. He'd grin at me while I mumbled obscenities through gritted teeth, a smile plastered across my own face to disguise the misery I was feeling. I was scraping bottom then but still determined not to let him see or hear it after slipping just once on the phone with D. D. was held up at work, I was on my fourth pump-and-feed of the day (flanges attached, bottle and baby also in my lap), and I was fighting what I didn't realize was a nasty breast infection. "I just need you to come home," I all but wailed at the phone, balanced on speaker mode on a nearby table. At the sound of my agitated voice, O. burst into tears -- not a cry of hunger or tiredness, but alarm. I picked him up immediately, apologizing into the impossibly soft crook of his neck as he rested his head against my cheek and sighed a shuddery half-sigh.

If only everything could be fixed so easily, I thought.

As these recent weeks have brought a new rhythm to our days and nights, I've been drawn to the idea of putting O.'s story into a more formal body of work. Partly to process it all with the tempering effect of distance, partly to reclaim and recast some of those early memories in a way that I couldn't when we were in the midst of the chaos. Hindsight is a gift -- especially with a positive ending.

I don't know what this project will become. Maybe some of it will appear here; maybe it won't. I've learned more than I ever wanted to about making decisions for the life of someone entirely dependent on my good judgment when I was the least objective mind in the room. I know, I know -- this is just the beginning, you say. But had I had the words of experience to hang on to from someone who had once been in our position, I think I would have felt just a little less hopeless at the worst moments. That is a reason, if any, to write all this into something coherent.

Long-form work and I have had a tenuous relationship in the past (think: the MFA thesis that almost wasn't). But the story I was writing then had no resolution. O.'s does. I'll take it as an auspicious sign that I've actually acquired nearly two dozen books from the library just to read what's already out there for mothers who face what we have. There are a surprising number of resources from those shelves that provide information on what we had to learn the hard way or gather in fragmented fashion from so-called lactation consultants. Interestingly, all of the books I requested were readily available -- no waiting lists for holds -- unlike the majority of the popular pregnancy and childbirth books in circulation. I may be jumping to conclusions based on our experience, but I suspect they're hanging out in the stacks because no one knows they exist -- or knows to go looking before they're needed. I certainly didn't.

I hefted my finds into two big canvas bags at our library on one of the hottest days of the summer, wearing O. in his carrier as I bent to remove each title from the holds shelf. He squirmed against me, eager to be free of his constraints or just hungry; I wasn't sure. But he was motivated and so was I. So I'm putting whatever this is -- brainstorm, project, as-yet-formless cloud of inspiration -- out there to give it weight. Matter, in its many senses, because it does matter. And I'm actually a wee bit convinced, dare I say it, that I can carry it for a while.

P.S.: For those of you who have asked how that trip to Florida went, it did indeed get postponed -- and relocated. Stay tuned for our first plane trip coming up in September, as we fete Troubadour Dad's 60th in the Texas panhandle ...

Calling all savvy shoppers

I know, I know. I said I'd be more active now that I'm feeling better. It wasn't a total lie, but yes, much of the activity has been more elsewhere than here. I suppose if you could have seen the state of the Troubadour house at the end of 17 weeks, you too would have wanted me to deal with that mess first. So that's what I've been doing in the last month (when not also planning four major trips for weddings and holidays that all have to happen before we get to 36 weeks, but that's for another post).

Fortunately, I had some help with the cleanup. Our laundry room has a new resident -- a much-needed washer to replace the cantankerous 15-year-old one that came with the house, one that refused to drain every third use and would only take loads half its capacity because it was so badly unbalanced (broken ball bearings may have been the culprit). In one day, I did five rounds of serious laundry that would in the past have amounted to thirteen -- ten initial loads plus about three rewashes for the ones that didn't empty during the rinse cycle. And we wonder now why we didn't make the replacement sooner ... ! Forgive me for going on about this, but I'm in love.

The baby gear industry, I suspect, would like me to fall equally head over heels for about 10,000 other products it's been informing me of daily. (You don't want to see my inbox.) When the influx of ads and offers began, we'd already started the process of researching the items we'd need to have ready for February -- a place for baby to sleep and a car seat are the only large-scale absolute necessities -- but the lists of other stuff the industry would have us believe we can't live without are a bit overwhelming. I'm doing my best to ignore the propaganda, but I do take recommendations from anyone who's actually a parent. What did you find was really worth having around in those first months? What, in the fog of sleep-deprivation joys of new parenthood, did you love/swear by/thank yourself for buying?

Feel free to go into as much detail as you'd like. Of course, the name of the product with a simple thumbs-up like the one we got from our baby at Tuesday's doctor visit will also suffice.

Creative writing?

Another week, and still not much progress. My thesis is trying to write itself in the best way it can, but there's no brain behind it. Or rather, no heart. The paragraphs I've strung together have technical finesse, but the words feel hollow and directionless, like a blurry facsimile of the real story I want somehow to tell. And the writer in me knows it. After letting the thesis grow so many lines of text, like mutant tentacles searching for a place to catch hold, my own brain balks. This just isn't going anywhere, it says.

I've hit the point in the narrative where the story is too big for me to see its arc again. Unfortunately, this isn't a block that can be solved by reading the words of other writers for reinvigoration. In a way, it's like I've been trying to work my way out of the center of a bull's eye. The tiny circle in the middle was the first chapter; the next ring out, the four that followed. Finding a vantage point from which to see that second group of chapters took months -- from last February to last August -- and I don't have the luxury of time anymore.

I have some twenty pages to fill and two years' worth of research. Even if the story isn't falling into place, my process of seeking answers is certainly well documented. So my plan, which I've now e-mailed my advisor, is to use all of that to write an afterword. It'll give voice to a lot of questions that haven't yet been asked within the narrative and reveal the as-yet-unaddressed pieces of the story, rough as their introduction there might feel to me.

It's not the way I want to finish this. But finished is what this needs to be.

Addendum 3/6: My laptop fried a portion of its hard drive today. First the adapter cord, now the disk itself? I'm not liking this trend.

2011

... is off to quite a start.

For the moment, I'm going to ignore the fact that I'm writing this on a borrowed laptop -- mine suffered a catastrophic loss of power yesterday that will only be remedied with a new adapter -- and focus only on the previous week. It was a decent one.

Given the mess that was 2010, I consider that fantastic news.

I had my concerns as the last moments of the year approached. Please, I said to myself, snuggled into a booth at a wine bar, where my family had opted for a late dinner after the concert we'd attended at Lincoln Center. Please let 2011 be better. Really, it wouldn't take much, all things considered.

I don't have a faith I can fall back on, having grown up with a mix of Buddhism, Catholicism, and atheism coloring various years in my spiritual development (none of the aforementioned schools of belief actually stuck). But the wish I couldn't give voice to, as the final seconds of December fell away, might very well have been a form of prayer. To whom, I don't know. Of late, especially as I've written more and more about family history for my thesis and studied the beliefs that shaped it over a generation or two, I've felt the ghostly presence of my ancestors in the aftermath of their influence. Whether they handed them down whole or in parts, their values -- cultural, philosophical -- had their role in making my parents who they are. So as I've attempted to bring my parents to life on the page, I've found myself consulting, in some ways, with the dead, trying to understand and illustrate my parents' ways of being as they stem from their families of origin.

My grandparents believed that their ancestors watched over them and, in some ways, protected them. In the absence of any other spiritual influences in more recent months, I'd say my own meditations on my ancestors have brought them -- or at least the idea of them -- close enough for me to feel their metaphoric gaze.

So perhaps, my wish for a year better than the preceding one was meant for them to hear. Certainly no one else would have been able to as the New Year neared -- everyone, including my family, was playing a horn or other noisemaker handed out by the maitre d', laughing, cheering, raising flutes of champagne. A perfect chaos of anticipation.

I felt some kind of weight lift as the chef and his staff appeared at last, parading down the main aisle of the restaurant while banging pots and pans to signal the official arrival of January. And that lightness has stayed with me, despite travel exhaustion (mostly jet lag), the unceremonious return to post-vacation life (mostly bills and errands and household chores), and lingering uncertainties about how this year will go.

It's a good sign.

Here's hoping the fact that my adapter fried itself at 4:44 (an extremely unlucky number in Chinese superstition because the word for four is homonymous with the word for death) means absolutely NOTHING.

Wishful thinking

I bit down on my tongue. Hard. Held my breath, fixed both eyes on a spot on the carpet by the bed, told myself don't cry. I'd managed to get from Seattle to the panhandle of Texas despite surgery, despite infection, without letting on to anyone how I was feeling. My doctor had cleared me to fly, and I needed to go home. For my research, I'd told myself -- to look firsthand at the photos and old letters from my parents' early years together, before I was born, to begin untangling their story for my thesis. That's what I'd finally realized this project was about.

Don't cry, I thought harder. Don't cry don't cry don't cry. But my mother had her arm around me.

"You've been so good," she said. "It's okay, you don't have to be strong anymore today."

Don't have to be strong? Since when did she ever use words like that? The spot on the carpet dissolved into a uniform blur and I buried my head in her shoulder, bewildered but relieved.

"You're so warm," she said after a few minutes.

I lifted my head. "It's fine," I said. I reached for a tissue and glanced toward the door, hoping my father, who usually spent the evening watching TV on the couch just outside the room, couldn't hear us. "This fever's not as bad as the first."

My mother frowned but said nothing, a hand still holding tightly to my shoulder as she surveyed the suitcase on the floor, the airline ticket stubs on the nightstand. "You've had a long day. Now you should just rest."

I pulled the robe she'd lent me closer, leaned my head against hers, and closed my eyes.

*

I remember getting sick as a kid -- flu, strep, bronchitis, the usual. All of which meant long mornings at the pediatrician's office that smelled like old vinyl seats, worn-edged board books, and that nose-wrinkling soap you found only where there were doctors. We never said it aloud, but I don't think my mother or I particularly liked that place.

My mother tended to look worried during those visits, but not because of me. My father would be irritated when he got home. While he doctored the sick every day at the hospital, giving his all to an endless string of cardiac patients, he didn't tolerate illness in his own house. Most of the time, he'd just ignore the problem, leaving my mother to handle all the nursing duties -- administering medication and fluids, keeping track of symptoms, cleaning up vomit. On occasion, he'd pop his head into the bedroom doorway to assess the situation, but he never crossed the threshold.

He did, however, expect my mother to keep the rest of the house running as usual. A hot meal ready to serve, the newspaper waiting by the couch, bills paid, phone calls made, my younger sisters bathed and fed. If things weren't as he felt they ought to be, he'd whine -- at me ("Are you still throwing up?") and at her ("How much longer before dinner? It's getting late."). My mother couldn't help growing annoyed in turn. She never said anything directly to me, but the look on her face when she was caught between my needs and his said plenty: he wouldn't cut her any slack. Couldn't I?

Hers was obviously wishful thinking, but I felt guilty all the same. So I learned to downplay how I was feeling, even if I was miserable. It was better than feeling like a nuisance, even if I wished deep down that it didn't have to be that way.

*

My body remembered this as I leaned against my mother, so many years later, in the dimly lit guestroom of my parents' new house. The mattress on the bed was old, but the comforter was brand-new to match the pillow shams my mother had sewn. "To update things," she'd said a few weeks earlier on the phone, telling me how much she couldn't wait for me to see what she'd put together. She'd wanted to work on the room sooner, but in my parents' nearly four years in Panhandle, she hadn't gotten around to it until then. It didn't matter to me -- being with her, no matter what kind of bed I slept in, was what made home feel like home. Though I did like what she'd chosen, knowing that I would be the one to curl up there.

And how I wanted to do just that. But I didn't want to move while she sat next to me, holding me close. How I'd wanted this too, in those moments when she'd been forced to choose between me and my father. Even early that evening, he'd only grunted, when my mother mentioned I'd been ill, and then complained about what had taken her so long at the grocery store, where she'd gone to get the fresh fish he'd wanted for dinner. Nothing seemed to have changed.

But my mother's arm stayed around me as I glanced toward the door, listening for sounds of the TV, long after the meal had ended. "He's gone to bed," she said. "Don't worry about him."

I dabbed at my eyes, not sure what to say. But for once, she seemed to understand how much I needed her, even more than I'd realized.

In which I am a bad patient

This whole recovery thing is not what I'd anticipated.

Don't get me wrong -- I know I had surgery, which means not trying to do more than my body can handle. Even if all that that entails is sleeping A LOT. (Seriously, I had no idea I could crash all day and then still sleep a full night without waking up in the middle of it.) But I'm off the prescription pain meds as of today, which means I have a clear head for the first time in 48 hours (yay!) even if I'm still stuck in bed.

It also means the gears are turning.

They should, if anything, be turning on Chapter 4 of the thesis. (Forgot to mention somewhere in the last two weeks -- I turned in a revision of Chapter 2 and a new Chapter 3 to my advisor!) If recovery continues as expected (and it should), I should be cleared for a research trip I'd had in the works long before the health mess ever happened. That's scheduled for next week, so I'm looking guiltily at my files, which I need to back up and organize so I can make the most of my time while I'm up to my elbows in old photos and supplementary documents. Actually finishing the Chapter 4 draft would be good too.

But the kitty is pawing at the bedroom door, which is not conducive to any sort of concentration, and the ibuprofen is only so effective, and I've been distracted by more pressing thoughts since I got my brain back.

It's been an isolating year.

Seattle, I've been told, is a friendly place but a difficult one in which to make friends -- as in those who will make room for you in their established social circle. This cultural oddity even has a name: the Seattle Freeze. Seriously, a name? How's that for intimidating. I know I haven't tried my hardest in the last year to reach out to people, but I have tried, despite all the other stuff I've written about here (2010, you've been difficult). I've gone to get-togethers hosted by D's work colleagues; tried to start conversations there with the wives and girlfriends; suggested and pursued follow-up lunch dates, coffee dates, dinners. Much response?

* Crickets chirping *

I'm still looking and asking, because it's not healthy to be so isolated. I've even gone so far as considering sites like Meetup.com (where there are actual references made to the Seattle Freeze). But a lot of what's offered isn't quite my style -- dance parties on a boat in themed costume? Sure, but I do better in smaller settings. Then how about speed friending? Um, that's kind of an oxymoron.

How about just a meal and some good conversation?

I know, these are things I shouldn't be worrying about before I can walk around the house without feeling exhausted. But being stuck in bed gives you a lot of time to think. And I'm thinking my list of local friends could use some rejuvenation.

So, dear bloggy friends (how I wish you were geographically nearer). How do you make opportunities for new friendships where you live -- and encourage them to grow?

Bone weary

I thought the weekend was supposed to be for relaxing, but I think it's just allowed me to feel the weight of all the stuff from the past week (or two), now that there is space for that. And the feeling is necessary, so fine. But I'm warning next week right now: ease up or ... else.

(I'm not very good at actually coming up with threats, but I'm cocking a very pointed eyebrow at Monday and everything after it. It's my teacher look, which actually won a stare-down contest in a teacher-training workshop many years ago. See that, next week? See that eyebrow?)

My thesis is moving forward for real. I have two solid chapters that make sense in succession and are pointing very clearly to a third, which is more exciting than I have the means to describe. But it's been drawing on a lot of mental resources, and when I've come to the end of the day, I've had nothing for anyone else. D and I both go through this -- he'll return after a particularly intense day, having successfully left work at work, but he doesn't quite make it home in his state of mind for several hours after he gets through the door. He floats in some kind of limbo that makes for pretty quiet dinners. I understand -- sometimes the brain doesn't reset for a little while. So I leave him alone until he's ready.

Last week was my turn to be zonked -- not just from all the research interviews and the mental gymnastics of writing, but from the emotional pull of trying to tell a difficult story. (Forgive me if I don't get more specific than that; I did just spend the week up to my ears in the details.)

I'm glad the writing is working. But it's at the expense of other pressing concerns I need to resolve, like the fallout of getting sick while no one was around. D and I didn't come through that situation in the best way, and we've wanted to talk about it, but I've been too frayed to do it without getting upset, which D doesn't deal well with. Our attempts to have a conversation about how we handled things on both our ends have been kind of rocky. And then there's the question about what all these seemingly separate problems -- blood sugar, GI tract, kidneys -- are really indicative of. I've pushed that out of my mind for a while, but Labor Day weekend was a reminder that all is not perfectly well and that we still don't have real answers as to why three different body systems decided to get wonky, all starting in the first half of 2009.

So I want some emotional reserves for this stuff. I know I can't always have enough for all of it, but for next week, I need more.

The only way out is through

At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

The last few days have been challenging on the work front. I've reached the point where it's time to get going on the writing and I'm really not sure I know what my story is. I have no outline, as my thesis committee has more or less forbidden me to use one (it's for my creative good, to free up my mind from all the structure I like to impose on it). All I have as a result is a pile of personal documents -- letters, journals, school records, etc. -- and a lot of questions.

I've been gathering and sifting through these artifacts all summer, partly in an attempt to organize all the debris, partly to determine what can be thrown away. A lot of this stuff was boxed up, occupying unnecessary space in our closets, so it needed to be dealt with. I think I've finally streamlined everything as of yesterday, so the logistical work is done. Which means I can no longer avoid the really tough part: the emotional excavation of the memories in those boxes, memories I've blocked out for a long time.

I unearthed something in one document yesterday that brought back a lot of feelings, so many that I had trouble disentangling them from one another. Anger, shame, fear, hope, confusion, gratitude, grief -- I imagine there was more in there, but I couldn't stay with the memory long enough to identify anything further. It was too overwhelming.

I'm sure I'm afraid of the memory because there are truths about myself and others wrapped up in it, truths I didn't want to see before because they would cause me pain. Now that it's been so long, bringing those truths to the surface is going to be much harder work. And at the end, I get pain as my reward. Why am I doing this?

Good question.

The writing of this work plays some essential role and fulfills some crucial need in this whole process, I know, so maybe I'll have an answer eight months from now. That's the deadline if I want to graduate this spring.

In a way, I've been working on the project itself for much longer than just my recent years at Little U. on the Prairie. Elements of the subject matter have shown up time and again in creative essays I've deliberately tried to make about something else! Apparently this isn't unusual either -- one of my professors commented in a workshop that for a while, every single piece she wrote was about her dead mother. "You'll get a lot of mileage out of this," she said, about the subject dogging me. I wasn't sure at the time whether to feel good about that or taken aback by it. Does anyone really want to look at his or her personal griefs as something to "get mileage" from?

Anyway ...

I finished another reading this week -- a collection of short stories by Madeleine Thien called Simple Recipes. Many of the stories were published in literary journals before becoming part of the collection, and interestingly, now that they're side by side, the repetition of one theme among them is very noticeable. Specifically, each story seems to deal with a child's experience of being caught between parents whose relationship is slowly unraveling. The cause of that dissolution changes from one story to the next, and the actual conflict doesn't always take center stage, but the author does seem to circle the theme over and over as if she's searching for some way of understanding it. I can't say it makes for great variety in a short story collection, but the gaze trained on that repeated idea is compelling.

Speaking of which, it's time I turned my eye back on my work. To the dig, then ...

Unpacking

This weekend, D and I tackled the piles of boxes we'd stuck in the room that will eventually become D's office. Since our arrival, the space has essentially been an extra-large walk-in closet for us, but now that my parents and Newly Graduated Sis are coming to visit in a week, we're inclined to get it somewhat tidied -- so it can fit the boxes that have spilled over into the guest bedroom.

We got through the majority of D's stuff by Sunday night, which leaves the rest of this week for me to figure out what I want to do with mine. Much of it is memorabilia from school that needs to be organized so it can be sifted through more easily should I ever need to access anything from a specific time, and being on the point of starting to write this thesis has made me reluctant to toss things that provide potentially useful information about my past. Not the best mindset to be in when you're trying to make space!

It doesn't help that the texts I've been looking at as possible models for my work all incorporate the use of personal documents and other such things to really interesting effect. In the last few weeks, I've managed to steal enough time (mostly on planes) to finish three books that do this.

The first is Five Thousand Days Like This One by Jane Brox. Her memoir is one part a collection of family stories passed down to her by her father and the other part a history of New England farm life. Both portions of the work use old records to reanimate scenes from the past in Brox's poetic style. I don't think it's a style I would follow -- sometimes the way the records are quoted into the larger narrative feels a bit choppy against the original language of the writer; the two just don't blend -- but it's striking how much those records help Brox situate her father's apple farm in the culture of American commerce when industry arrives. Context is everything.

The second book that makes great use of personal documents is Honor Moore's The Bishop's Daughter. In a way, the work relies almost too heavily on these -- primarily letters between Moore's parents in their dating years as well as letters between father and daughter and mother and daughter. The goal of incorporating all of this correspondence is to aid in creating a portrait of the family's private life while its members navigate a very public existence (Paul Moore was the 13th Episcopal Bishop of New York). I love how much access the narrator has to all of these rich primary sources -- I certainly don't have that volume to work with! On occasion, though, the specificity of each piece of evidence meant to illustrate some detail makes it difficult to see the big picture that the narrator is painting. It overwhelms, to a degree.

The most recent book I've finished is Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex. This one isn't actually a memoir, but it reads very much like one and situates its narrative over three generations of a Greek family adapting to life in America between the 1920s and 1970s (which includes Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement ...). It is extremely clear that the author has researched the influences of these six decades on Detroit -- the city where most of the narrative takes place -- and he weaves that information into the background of the story in a way that doesn't detract from the focus on the protagonist, a girl coming of age in that third generation of her family. Her coming of age is complicated by biological factors that have their own story, and this narrative thread's ability to hold its own as a driving force in the novel against such a tumultuous historical backdrop is what really amazes me. The two elements work in sync with each other to even greater effect.

All right, enough pseudo-book-reviewing from me. I know I've been behind on updating my reading list for the summer, so there you go (see the full list in the sidebar). Also, for those of you keeping track, I've got six more nominations left for the One Lovely Blog award, so if you like reading about what other people are reading, here are some blogs I've discovered recently:

• Books and Cooks, written by Tara
• Breaking the Fourth Wall, written by Lisa
• Tripping Toward Lucidity: Estella's Revenge, written by Andi
• Incurable Logophilia (author unnamed)
• Writing Under a Pseudonym, written by Jade Park.

And yes, the final nominee will be forthcoming soon.

In which I become an undergrad again

Well, not really, but it sort of feels that way for two reasons. The first is that I spent most of last week wandering the grounds of my alma mater and (re)experiencing the university's commencement ceremonies. Almost Dr. Sis and I had a terrific time -- both of us felt we could actually enjoy the hoopla properly since neither of us were preoccupied with the uncertainties of the next day: how to get completely packed and moved out of the dorms by 5 p.m. as well as how to make the transition to that thing called the Real World after four years in the protective bubble of those dorms. They provided hot meals and an instant community when we arrived. How were we supposed to find those things again on the outside?

Actually, I think our younger sister will have no trouble. She's amazing in the kitchen (having worked for a catering service helps in that area) and she's incredibly comfortable meeting new people (even in early childhood, she was never panicked by the presence of strangers as we were). Wish I were as outgoing -- I'm not quite so shy anymore, but I am apprehensive about finding ways to make new friends once I get properly settled in Seattle. Perhaps I should start looking for special-interest groups in the area, or maybe sign up to volunteer somewhere once or twice a week? Otherwise, I'll end up too easily content to stay at home, nesting.

But yes, back to graduation. Almost Dr. Sis and I tried to chase down the parade of seniors from our younger sister's dorm to get a picture of her marching (each dorm's residents process to the ceremony through the city streets after breakfast, escorted by bagpipers). Unfortunately, we couldn't locate anyone from her dorm and kept running into folks from others. In the end, after sprinting around madly in heels with cameras in tow, we made it to the university church in time to see the last of the seniors filing in for some final words of wisdom from the reverend:


Still not the group we were looking for, but at least it's representative ...

We finally caught up with Newly Graduated Sis in the afternoon -- and from then on, time moved in leaps: a celebration at a lovely restaurant, a few hours of sleep, and then speed-packing NG Sis's belongings. D, who flew in for the graduation dinner, schlepped ALL of the boxes over crazy cobblestone sidewalks to the nearest Staples for shipping the following day. No question, he's the best. Wish I'd had that kind of assistance when I was moving out!

Now, the second reason I'm feeling like an undergrad again (sorry, I got carried away talking about the previous one): I've been staying this week with a former college roommate, who is pursuing a Ph.D. at another university nearby -- and I have to say, it's been an adjustment returning to dorm life. At Little U., there were no graduate dorms, so everyone rented apartments. Here in Boston, the rent is much less budget-friendly, so the university has to provide other options. My friend has a single room in a group of three that share a bathroom and standard-size refrigerator (no common space, just a corridor connecting everything). A kitchen for the entire floor of residents is available down the hall (not sure exactly how many people use it, but there are about 500 students housed on five floors, some living in suites with private kitchens, if they can afford it, and some without).

I think the obstacles to cooking a proper meal are what have really stood out to me in the last few days. We've been making use of the kitchen as best we can, but because of the limited fridge space and storage for cooking utensils in the tiny rooms, it's not easy to eat cheaply without eating poorly (i.e., prepackaged stuff meant for the microwave rather than meals using fresh produce and actual pots and pans). We've found that stir-fries are a fairly economical, single-pan way to go without sacrificing our health -- my friend's diabetic so agreeing on a menu has been pretty easy. I have to admire her creativity in finding space for her cooking supplies:


The shelf is actually a shoe rack, and the drawers are empty clementine crates. Genius.

When we were true undergrads, we had access to a kitchen during our sophomore year but not a lot of funds to invest in cookware. So we bought an all-metal pot that doubled as a skillet and baking pan for many recipes. We remembered that this week while we were jury-rigging a lid for her current pot so we could boil water (a large plate works well). It's been useful to my research, unearthing such memories here, as my thesis will examine a part of my life in those first years away from home. I never expected this trip to provide this sort of "data" though -- I only intended to conduct interviews with some Boston-based contacts when I arranged to stay the week. The magic of serendipity, I guess.

Notes to transcribe, groceries to pick up. More news as soon as I can sort out more of my whirling thoughts.