Britt’s Blog

I’ve be wrestling with this for a while, and I think I’ve finally come to some kind of a provisional understanding—or maybe my sense of crisis has just faded to a tolerable background uneasiness.

I freaked out at the beginning of this summer when I realized that I was attacking all the things about my life that I am unhappy about by developing systems and strategies, but holy crap, what am I going to do when things don’t work? I mean that on the individual level: what if I try five different strategies for getting my grading done in a timely manner, and none of them work? What then? HUH? And I also mean that on a collective level: I have improved several things about myself and my life by being disciplined and systematic. I have taken up exercise, and I feel healthier. I have lost weight, and my blood pressure is lower. I have become more organized, and I spend less time panicking because I can’t find things. I manage my time better and don’t flake and accidentally blow off meetings or important tasks as often. All good things. But what floored me is that I am improving my life in many small, practical ways… but I am really growing in a larger sense?

There was a panicky moment there when I wondered if I was going to have to Get Religion or sell all of my possessions and buy a goat farm or maybe just run away and hitchhike though South America. (Luckily, no rash decisions were made.)

Having pondered for a while, I think the real question I’m grappling with is: What do I want or expect to be the ultimate outcome of all these strategies and systems?

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I’ve been thinking a bit more about choice being bad. What happens when you take choices away from yourself? What happens when other people take your choices away from you?

I just finished Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel. The eponymous daughter, Suor (Sister) Maria Celeste, spent the majority of her short life, from the age of 12 to her death at 36, behind the walls of a convent. As in, she was never allowed to leave. The nuns were even separated from visitors by an iron grille; she could never touch even the members of her own family or view them unobscured.

Astoundingly, she was downright chipper about the whole damn thing.

Despite her confinement and the many demands of a life of toil and prayer, Suor Maria Celeste flourished. She did a brisk trade in handicrafts, candies, and nostrums. Somehow Galileo managed to foist her off on the cloister, and yet still have her do his laundry, mending, and a significant amount of cooking. She also did secretarial work for him, at times keeping his accounts, transcribing manuscript pages of A Dialog Concerning Two Chief World Systems, and running his household when he was called before the Inquisition and then imprisoned.

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Because you are fascinated by my ears, and all things Britt-ear-related, you will surely recall my previous battles with ostitis externa, also known as “swimmer’s ear.” I didn’t bother to blog in April about yet another recurrence, as it was just more of the same: excruciating pain, trip to acute care, antibiotic eardrop prescription, eventual relief.

When my ear canals started getting uppity again, though, I went to an actual otolaryngologist (that’s an ENT, or ear-nose-throat doc, for those at home) who after hearing my symptoms immediately pronounced a diagnosis of dermatitis of the ear canal. Then he looked into my left ear, and said, “Wait, this is the good ear?” Which is what they always say. They always want to look at the “good” ear first, and they always tell me the good ear is really, really bad. *sigh*

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We’re back from a little weekend trip. I visited my mom and my nephews (my sister and her husband were out of town) and went for a lecture/cruise that was part of Winona University’s University on the River. My mom loves these cruises and was kind enough to invite me along for a couple this year.

It was a beautiful day for a trip on the river. We went out in a very nice excursion boat, and cruised north, locking through Lock & Dam 5. The lecture was provided by Rusty Cunningham, publisher (!) of the LaCrosse Tribune and the Winona Daily News. He spoke on many newsworthy controversies in the history of the upper Mississippi. We saw a bald eagle’s nest on one of the islands, and, using Mom’s camera, I snapped a nice picture of an immature eagle roosting near the nest.

I find it soooo relaxing to get out on the water. I swear, the second I set foot on a boat, I feel the tension melt away.

I’m looking forward to another University on the River cruise with Mom in August. I might have possibly volunteered to do a stargazing cruise for next year. :)

I read pretty much everything Haruki Murakami publishes, aided and abetted by Jason, who tends to secure the latest Murakami for most major gifting occasions. I figure I should probably read something other than science fiction on a semi-regular basis, and Murakami is of the highest-quality snobby non-genre genre—trendy and well-reviewed—so, intellectually speaking, I’m balancing out the fact that I’m rereading Podkayne of Mars for the fifteenth time.

After Dark would make a great introduction to Murakami, because it has the Murakami weirdness but not on the omgwildsheepchase level. Also, the weirdness is rather nicely segregated from the main plot, while of course turning out to be absolutely integral to what is going on, which makes me kind of think of Hard Boiled Wonderland, my first Murakami love. And there’s also a bit of the “WTF? That dude seemed way too important to the plot for me to not to have the slightest clue who the hell he was and what the hell he was doing,” à la Kafka on the Shore.

But at its heart, I think After Dark is really all about the gaze: What it is to look at others, and to be looked at by them. How we gain power and lose power, how we get connected by looking and by being seen. And, maybe, how technology interferes with this fundamental relationship. I think I’m going to have to reread the book again, because, as usual, I didn’t catch on to the stunningly obvious theme until somewhere around the halfway point. Luckily, After Dark is fairly short, so it’s not so onerous to read and the re-read—or maybe I should skim it.

I’ve been doing some reading about reading—that is, how to read well—in preparation for teaching a course in the fall, and I keep coming across this “skimming” idea, but frankly I don’t know if I’m capable of it. I seem to be able to skim for a few pages, but then I get sucked in and I’m reading again, which defeats the purpose of skimming. But perhaps skimming, and only slowing down for important passages, is a skill I should learn. If it works out I’ll let you know.

Games Played:
Great Wall of China
10 Days in Asia
10 Days in Europe
Apples to Apples
Ticket to Ride
Ticket to Ride: The Card Game
Thurn and Taxis
Power Grid
Hanging Gardens
Carcassonne: The City
Lascaux
Yspahan
Rock!

Booty:
10 Days in Asia
Gavitt’s Stock Exchange
Rock!
Rat Hot
Halli Galli: Christmas Edition
Gone Fishing
Crocodile Pool Party
Mission: Red Planet
Times Square
Power Grid: Italy/France Expansion
Lascaux

Insanely Good Ice Cream Eaten:
Dark Cocoa Gelato
Queen City Cayenne
Lime Cardamom
Mango Lassi
Riesling Pear Sorbet
Cherry Lambic Sorbet
Sugar Daddy’s Brownie Cream Cheese

Memorable Catchphrases:
“Play the player, not the game.”
“Cameeples!!!”

Created by OnePlusYou

It’s science!

I’ve been trying to work on my drawing lately, working through the book How to Draw What You See, which I refer to as Drawing on the Left Side of the Brain. That’s in contrast to the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which is about turning off the analytical side of your brain to allow unlock the amazing hidden drawing talent that we all have, apparently. I found Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain interesting to work through, no doubt, but I don’t know that it helped my drawing all that much. Plus, the analytical side of my brain and I are on pretty good terms, and How to Draw What You See appeals much more to that side, starting with basic geometrical shapes and perspective, which I can grok. I’ve managed to turn out some fairly satisfying line drawings of simple objects.

I’m kind of stuck at the part where you start doing shading and shadows, though. I haven’t been having much luck with my subject. I wanted something white and matte-surfaced, and the only thing I found around the house was an oversized coffee mug that has kind of a weird shape, and I feel like I’m fighting against the unusual shape of it while trying to also master a new skill. I wanted to try a different subject, but haven’t stumbled across anything useful IRL.

However, I am reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which has lead me to do a little googling for interesting shells, and I found this gorgeous page of shell photographs. I couldn’t wait for my next official drawing session, and did this goofy little sketch of a Martin’s Tibia with a gel ink pen on a piece of scratch paper:

It hardly does the original justice, but it sucks less than my malformed coffee mug sketches. It was considerably more fun to draw, too!

In Mindless Eating, Brian Wansink describes, with perverse glee, how easily we can be tricked into eating much more than we want, need, or expect to. I was most intrigued by the many examples of the food researchers themselves being tripped up by the exact phenomenon they have just discovered. The moral of these stories is it isn’t enough to be aware of the effect that variety, portion size, environment, etc. have on your eating habits—you can’t outsmart your own psychology.

I’m currently reading Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, which has a similarly ticklish paradox.

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Writing syllabi is like casting on in knitting, and assigning course grades is like casting off.

First of all, each process is a little tricky—I’d say that casting on and casting off are just slightly more difficult than just knitting along. To an even greater degree, writing a syllabus and computing course grades are just plain hard work.

Secondly, they’re important. A poor cast-on will make an edge that is either too tight and inflexible or else too loose and sloppy, and start your project off on the wrong foot—eerily similar to how your syllabus will determine whether your semester glides along smoothly.

A bad cast-off can ruin an otherwise acceptable garment. But you can always unpick a bad cast-off and try again. Grading is like casting off with a hard deadline.

Lastly, you just don’t cast on or off, or write syllabi or assign final grades as often as you do other stuff.

With most knitting skills, like increasing and decreasing, cabling, short rows, etc. you might start out a garment feeling like a clueless novice, but by the time you are finish, you’ve practiced them over and over again and you get pretty good at them. But I always feel like a beginner every time I have to cast on and cast off, because I do it rarely enough that the skills are never really deeply ingrained.

Similarly, I seem to make “rookie” mistakes every time I write a syllabus, leaving off important information, overwhelming the reader with too much detail in one area and being too vague in others.

Creating assignments and writing exams is hard, but you do that several times a semester. Grading problem sets and exams and essays is also hard, but, you get lots of practice at that, too. Writing and delivering lectures, designing and supervising activities, and the other day-to-day management of a class becomes second nature long before the end of the semester.

But calculating the final grade requires unfamiliar tools and techniques, and it is easy to forget that the fact that you just don’t do it very frequently makes it harder and ramps up the anxiety level.

And of course, unlike knitting, grades affect whether students make the Dean’s list, get on or off academic probation, keep or lose their scholarships—and, since it’s spring, GRADUATE. It’s really no wonder that the whole process is so stressful.

But now I’m done with it, for this semester. I wish that meant that I can just kick back and relax, but I get so stressed out over grades that I feel about two weeks of solid anxiety after the semester ends and I am incapable of just enjoying the fact that I don’t have any deadlines breathing down my neck. There’s not much to do about it but try to put that nervous energy to work on some of the summer projects I’ve been looking forward to.