How I Spent my Spring Break

I've been busy for the past week. Some of it has been pleasant, and some mot. Still, I'm back, and happy to see you!

WHat have I been doing? Working, mostly. And spinning. And sleeping. And going to the spa. Tonight I may take in a movie. Oh- and getting ready for Easter.

I know- it makes no sense. I'm a Buddhist, and Buddhists don't have Easter. But I made a New Year's Resolution to put more ritual in my life. I think ritual is very important- it helps us stay grounded. So, just like I celebrate Christmas as a pagan holiday (and honor the winter solstice by giving presents and having a feast), so I'm celebrating Easter in a pagan fashion (and honored the vernal equinox by making a cake for my co-workers, and planning a feast for Sunday).

I ran around last week gathering items for the Easter basket I'm assembling, and I dyed and prepared a few eggs this week. I followed what for me is a custom- I went to my favorite Italian bakery and bought a marzipan lamb. It's small, and as the silliest smirk on its face. On Sunday it will be sacrificed by having its head bitten off (Mr. McSmirkersons wants to carve part of it out and fill it with fake blood so we can read its entrails, but I think that's going a bit too much- but then again, he wants me to put chocolate in the head of the bunny cake I'm making so it'll look like sweetbreads when we cut it. He's a very twisted man). I'm also making a cake, and a very expensive ham that will no doubt be delicious. I'm debating about roast potatoes and maybe carrots; or maybe a spring vegetable like asparagus would be in order. I love asparagus.

Um- What's My Name Again?, or, The Night Shift Can Suck

On Wednesday, I had tons of things to do. I finally got to bed at 6 and enjoying the idea of four gloius hours of sleep when my cell phone rang. I live in a studio apartment and slepp in a small loft area, so I went downstairs and hunted down my phone. I answered it.

It was my agency, asking me ever so sweetly if I could go into work at 8 PM. Yes. 8PM. And what time is 8 PM if your usual bedtime is 2 PM, and you usually wake up at 10PM?

At this point the thought of flushing my phone down the toilet passed through my head, but a little voice said 'OK', and my fate was sealed.

I assume this little voice is having a psychotic break from reality or something. That she speaks to both Joan of Arc and Elvis. Because why anyone would say, 'Why yes, I would love to come to work on the subway at 8 PM after having spent the day writing down my entire life history and feeling like the poster girl for a female proctology exam, especially since I have a class to teach the next day!' in that cheery voice one usually associates with Disney princesses and automated bill collectors, is beyond me. Unless that person is completely, mind-numbingly INSANE.

Which, fortunately, I am, or you wouldn't find all this so entertaining.

So, after one hour's worth of sleep, I got up, got dressed, and went in, because some muckety-muck at The Firm had a Very Important Document that had to be proofread and it Simply Couldn't Wait until the proofreader was conscious and not seeing spots.

When I got in, I found out that I had arrived four hours early for a job where the muckety-muck had changed his mind- the document needed more work. In fact, it probably wouldn't be ready for proofing until around noon.

Sooo. I found a chair, sat down, clocked in (ka-ching! $100 dollars for me to sit around doing zip for four hours) and played solitaire. In a room where the lights were so bright I thought a police officer was going to walk in and work me over with a rubber hose.

And now you know why I like night shift- because what is normal lighting for most fully-awake people makes me feel like acid has been thrown in my eyes.

Imagine however, that I am not fully awake. Imagine for a moment that I have only had one hour of sleep, and that the night before I'd only had four. Imagine that the lights are stressing me out. Imagine that I am annoyed and am putting a brave face on it.

In other words, while I am being so calm and nice on the outside, inside I am praying to whatever Deity might be listening to Please Kill Me Now Before I Get a Gun and Shoot Everyone In The Office.

Somehow I made it until midnight, when the people who are in the office where I work in what is near-darkness to a normal person leave, and I can go to my cave without clawing out my pupils with my bare hands at which point I fled. Work came in- a ton. I have no idea what any of it said. I'm not sure it was in English. Then in the morning, when there was an evil yellow thing in the sky and it was freezing enough to make one's parts fall off, I went to Port Authority, caught my bus to Westchester, and tried to find a quiet place on campus where I could sleep- but no basements with unhallowed earth and a large rectangular box or two could be found. So I tried to hid in my office, which was doing a good imitation of Grand Central Station at rush hour, since all the adjuncts have to share it.

Somehow I managed to avoid murdering a single student, although I did give them a rather colorful togue-lashing during which words like 'moron' and 'nimrod' might have popped up- they haven't been good about handing in work on time.

then I came home, got four hours' sleep, went back to the Firm, had a job that lasted six straight hours while I was exhausted, and then went to the Spa.

Sometimes I wish I could scream without being put in a straitjacket.

I will write more tomorrow, and put up some lovely pictures. But right now, I'm going to sleep, and I don't care who knows it, especially since my life-changing exam is being administered to me tomorrow.

I call him Smirky Mc Smirkersons, or, How Could Something So Right Feel So Wrong?

After two years of gently telling me I was smart enough to work for the government, my sweetie's words finally penetrated the thick melon that serves as my skull. In other words, on a whim on Monday morning, I looked into taking the State Department Written Exam. And guess what? The Exam. Is. Next. Week.

Before the government allows you to warm a seat in their exam rooms though, you have to tell them all about your life- your last ten jobs, your greatest triumphs, what you think makes you good enough to represent the US Government abroad. That meant going through my entire work life, tracking down people who might have to vouch for me, and so on.

OK. On the surface I am a pretty cool customer. Public speaking doesn't distress me. I can boss around undergrads with the best of them. But we all have a secret shame, and mine was that, although my parents loved me, they had me pretty much convinced that I was invisible.

I have spent most of my life as a ghost. I'm the second best friend who holds the camera, the audience member, the girlfriend, the red shirt. I'm a Beta. I would have made a great spy, or a con artist, or a courtier. There are people who have known me for close to twenty years who have no idea what my hobbies are, what my favorite color is, what I like for lunch. And to a great extent I reveled in it, or at least accepted it. And then Smirky McSmirkersons came along and spoiled everything.

Smirky thinks he's very funny. He thinks it's amusing to taunt his girlfriend about how she's more brilliant than he is, and how he stands in awe of her. He giggles with glee when he tells me I'm compassionate beyond his capability, and have the patience of a saint. This is because Smirky apparently didn't realize that after spending a childhood learning to make myself invisible to people who don't like blacks, women and strange opinionated types, I somehow never learned how to become visible on command. In fact, pretty much the only times I have been visible of my own free will have been when someone else has been unfairly picked upon, or when I've in front of a class. Or, online, amusing the perhaps 5 people who read this.

I spent most of today fine-tuning the application. It was strange. I didn't realize how high my grad school average was- I've been carrying around the pain of college, where I was a bored and depressed underachiever, for most of my life. And then I called people to let them know they might get calls from the government- and they remembered me. The mother of two boys I tutored told me for the first time that I had made a real difference in her kids' lives- one is going to Harvard, and the other to one of the best prep schools in New York. She told me I should call again when her son gets home from college so we can hang out. The secretary of the high school where I worked in 1985 recognized my name and voice- back then I was teaching and then disappearing after work as quickly as possible. She gave me the number I needed, for an old friend who is still working at the school- and who told me she can't wait to tell people (what people? I'm a non-entity, remember?) I got the advanced degree I dreamed about getting back then. It took me so long to get it in part because I was so busy getting potential dropouts to graduate and not become drug dealers, I put my own dreams aside. I'm having lunch with her next week, and we'll talk about my coming in and trying to inspire a new set of kids. Another call was to the first college where I adjuncted- the chair was my boss back then, when the department was part of a mishmash of academic gerrymandering. He and I joked and we're having lunch in two weeks. He's going to see about any adjuncting positions- he says he'd love to have me. I left that place because of the memories surrounding 9/11 (the school is downtown), and had seen myself as a quitter ever since.

I know- like my sweetie, you all are probably laughing right now. You read my blog and say the writing's good. But you don't understand- my life has always been lived for other people. I was a happy go lucky loser. A genial failure whose name and face no one remembers. The person who gets cut out of the picture because I don't fit in the frame. This never felt like low self esteem, and I don't think it ever was- it was an acceptance of a reality that didn't just exist in my head. But now Smirky and a bunch of other people are telling me that I'm not a ghost to them, that I actually matter, and not just because I make good cookies or crochet a bit, or have boobs the size of my head. I matter because the very things that make me invisible to everyone else are the very things that make them treasure me; I thought I'd lost that ability to be seen clearly when I was widowed and was no longer a reflection in my husband's eyes.

I'm crying right now, because I've been given a chance to rewrite my mental life story, and see myself as a success. I'm not just the friend's strange daughter who is smart and unnerving but never talks to anyone, or the weird girl who reads Milton for fun, or the wife and then widow of a political activist, or the next door neighbor who isn't seen for months. Part of me always knew this, but I've avoided making moves that would put me in the spotlight- backup singers don't dare take the spotlight, except in the 30's musicals I love so much.

Love.

Valentine's Day wasn't a big whoop around here. My sweetie lives out of state, and between ice, snow, and fog we haven't seen each other in a bit.way right now, driving up to be with me. Yay!

I played hookey on the big day and stayed home, baked a cake from a box (unusual for me- I felt lazy) and did some crochet (what a surprise). I should have slept, but no. I spoke to my mother the night before (she called me in the middle of my sleep cycle, effectively waking me at what for me was 3 in the morning and wanting to have a conversation), went to work, came home, and decided my ankle was sprained. It was fun not going to School.

The best part of the day, however, was saying smoochy stuff to my sweetie. For thise of you underthe age of thirty, it might be a shock that old people such as myself still get romantic. Even more shcoking is that I can get romantic after having been widowed. Yes, widowed. As in, Having The Love Of Your Life Drop Dead.

The truth is, people obsess over the wrong thing, like the divorce rate. Yes, people get divorced, and that's rough. Horrible, even. But falling in love, being happy and then having that person die- that's the fate which faces exactly 50% of those who marched down the ailse and worked it out. Loving someone- really, truly loving someone- means that you may very well have to bury the one you love, and not always when you are 93, either. The good news is that widows and widowers not only have a high rate of remarriage, but a lower rate of divorce in in the new marriage than do those whose first marriage ended in divorce. So in case you thought there are no second chances- there are. Frequently. You just have to want them.

My sweetie is wonderful in very different ways than was my husband, but both were and are very funny guys with skewed sense of humor. They both work(ed) hard and sometimes forget that I need attention- but I'm a workaholic and more than a bit of a misanthrope, so it all works out. Both were/are romantic souls who try to hide it. I love them both in very different ways, but I'm honored to have had not one, but two very special men want to be in my life. It's all good.

The Usual Boss Rant; or, Even Though It's Illegal, Can't I Just Smack Him in the Head Once?

As you know, I work nights at a law firm. You would think that would be the miserable part of my life, but no. My boss, whom I hardly see, is great. He's intelligent, funny, and takes me seriously, and he's incredibly cute to boot. The rest of the job is ok except for a few small problems, which I'm not going to discuss at the moment. No, my problem is with my day job, the one that should be filled with joy.

You may have been wondering where I teach. Twice a week I get on a train and go up to Westchester to a medium-sized state university and teach social science. I like the school. The students are only 60-70% dim-witted and I don't see my fellow faculty most of the time. The ones I do see are incredibly intelligent and funny people, and make me feel honored to be among them. But my boss- well, that's another story.

To be direct about it, my boss is an idiot. A moron. A benighted self-important dimwit. My boss is such a twit that he makes the average fifth-grader look politic and wise. And, with all due respect to the chairs of academic departments and the difficult, boring, thankless, and hard work they do, I want to punch this jerk in the head. Hard. Until my hands hurt and my knuckles bleed. And then I want to hit him again.

It started a year and a half ago, when I finally found some ambition, spoke to a friend of mine in the humanities department where I teaching, and asked him to approach the then chair with a an interview for a possible job. Robert, blessed be his name, is a senior faculty member and has clout everywhere on campus. Considering that he comes across as a bit geeky (look up the word 'bookish' in the dictionary, and Robert's picture will be there, waving back at you), he is quite the social mover and shaker, and I begged him to use his clout in my favor, which he did. And so I nervously went off and met with the then chair, a woman who was absolutely wonderful and who pretty much defines the adage of 'sisterhood is powerful.' One thing led to another, and she offered me an adjunct position in her department, two classes in areas out of my expertise, but which wold have pushed me to grow as a teacher. I was thrilled. Quite frankly I would have taught pretty much anything she had asked, but I felt humbled by her trust. Dr. Helpful, as I'll call her, made me want to stay in teaching for the first time in a while.

That was last spring, towards the end of the semester. I taught two mythology classes for humanities, and began to look up information in the subjects for my classes. Yet sometimes I have this inner voice that talks to me, and I've learned to trust it. And against all logic this inner voice was telling me not to order books yet.

Towards the end of summer I got a call from the department, asking me to come in to see the chair. Which I did, and found not the woman who had signed me up, but someone else. We'll just call him Dr. Lunkhead.

Dr. Lunkhead told me he was the new chair, and he wanted to meet with all the adjuncts and say hi. He had one of those faces and voices that seem very friendly but make you feel in your purse for your wallet. He proceeded to ask me about my academic background, and when I told him my dissertation topic, he decided I wasn't qualified to teach my course. I should really be teaching something else. He looked over the schedule, saw an opening, and gave me two sections of the same course that he felt were better suited. Now, I can pretty much teach anything if I have time to prep- but at this point I had about two weeks to order books and decide on a syllabus. We talked some more and I asked him if there were any openings in the department, and he said there really weren't (whic hwas the opposite of what I'd been told by Dr. Helpful). He also expressed concern because he didn't know how I could live on an adjunct's salary.

If you didn't know, adjuncts make crap money. However, They usually work at morethan one school, or have some outside job- so this was rude. Quite frankly it was none of his business how or if I was making ends meet. And then the capper came- he told me that there would be seminars where professors could present during the semester, and when I mentioned my work again, he said the seminars were full up for the year.

I left his office smiling like an idiot while imagining what he would look like with a crochet hook shoved up his ass. When I spoke to Dr. Helpful later that day, she told me that Dr. Lunkhead an his friends had pulled off a coup and gotten her removed; it seems they didn't like a woman being in charge. I told her what had happened to me and she said it was typical of him to act very sympathetic while pulling the rug out from under people, especially women, and trying to make them feel unimportant.

I spent the semester avoiding Dr. Lunkhead. I ignored his idiot emails in which he suggested people go to this or that museum, while mentioning that he had no idea if one could get to those places without a car- but never putting the website urls up that had links ot how one could get to the museums by bus or train. I ignored invitations to departmental events, just so I wouldn't see him. When the department secretary had a baby, I made mittens and a hat, gave them to him to send to her- and he told her someone else had made them.

Today I had to go see him regarding some paperwork, and asked him again about seminars for the semester. Presenting at a seminar is a good way of getting the word out about one's work while having yet another item to add to a curriculum vitae, so I wasn't seeing him just to gaze upon his beauty. He told me that the next semester was completely open, who was on the seminar committee, said I should contact them and asked me what subject interested me, and I said I was intrigued by the networking capabilities of Ravelry, and how it not only connected people but seemed to have it's own versions of class conflict. He informed me that I shouldn't get my hopes up because they were concentrating on the idea of community since the department would be offering some certification in that area. I said that I was talking about community, and he said that it wasn't community as they were viewing it. This went around in circles for a while until I finally reminded him that my doctoral work had been on community- and he said that maybe they might have a slot for me. I walked out, came into my office, ran into one of the committe members, and have an appointment to speak with her later today. Meanwhile, I'm feeling so glad that I can't get arrested for my thoughts.

Red Hair Day, or Having Age Both Ways

I dyed my hair this morning. It's red again. My hair is usually a deep brown, with increasing flecks of silver that look like tiny curlicues. I've been dying my hair on and off for years now, which is kind of funny, since when I was a teenager I was completely anti-cosmetics. Part of it was having to do with being a feminist in the seventies, when many of us showed our allegiance to the cause by acting like even lipgloss was the Tool of Satan. When I got older I started experimenting, because I was teaching high school and looked so young that on my first day I was ordered to get a hall pass from the office by a fellow teacher. By my thirties I would doll upon the weekends, and it was fun because it wasn't every day.

My mother dyes her hair red, also. Her natural hair color is lighter than mine- she claims it's mouse-brown. I have no idea what my mother's natural hair texture is like anymore. I can only imagine that it's slightly less woolly than my own. While I've seen my mother's scalp go ever so slightly natural, I've haven't seen her hair in full bloom since I was maybe 7, when she had a fashionable afro for a while. Ad even then, her hair was red.

When I started dying my hair, I did so by worshiping at the High Church of Manic Panic. I wanted a hair color not found in nature, except on flowers. I realized that I was simultaneously mocking and paying homage to my mother's Nice and Easy fetish. For me, hair color was about wanting to look unnatural in a totally different way. But I've never been obsessed, and as I actually like my normal hair I've often left the Manic Panic (or henna, or clairol, or whatever I was using at the moment) alone.

But every now and then the face that looks back at me seems tired and wants a change. Lipstick will cheer me up; I'm a creature of habit and buy similar shades every time. But coloring my hair makes me feel as bright as a new penny, and I treat color like wearing a hat- I'm not loyal to any particular shade of red.

Today's shade actually looks normal, maybe because today I want to cover the silver, which is beginning to annoy me. It's annoying my because I feel about 20 today, and my hair says maybe 30. My birth certificate says something else entirely, and if I weren't so vain I'd be happy to be mistaken for 30. However, I want to be a young flirty matron, not a grave one, so on went the hair color. When I teach I like to claim how elderly and cranky I am, and there are days when I actually feel that way- but I like being young, too. It's nice to have that choice, since so many women don't.

What the heck is a 'widdershins?'

'Widdershins' means counter-clockwise or moving towards the left in a circle, with attendant meanings of 'unlucky.' It's a movement in the opposite direction of the sun. When I finally put items on my Etsy shop, they will be listed under 'Widdershins Crochet'.

Some of you might be familiar with the term through neo-paganism and wicca, but I'm a follower of neither. I am, however, left-handed, or sinister. In Latin, the word for left is 'sinister', which is where we get the term '(meaning left, unlucky or evil). I thought 'Sinister Crochet' had implications I didn't want to give, as did 'Ham-handed Crochet' (another term sometimes used to mean left, or clumsy). However, as a queer liberal left-handed person of color who crochets and who likes Middle English, I thought 'Widdershins Crochet' was the perfect name for my blog.