I will sing a new song

I recently celebrated my 40^th birthday. Some of my friends cleverly decided to stop aging while in their 20s, but I didn't have that sort of foresight. It was a pretty low-key affair: Joe made fried chicken, the Munchkin colored me a card, there were a few gifts, and I went out for a late-night drink with my friend and birthday-buddy Pamela. Pretty much just what I wanted.

My other big "landmark" birthdays have been similarly quiet. There were no massive revelations about my life and the meaning thereof, and remarkably little angst about it all. In the few weeks that have passed since, however, I did do one thing which, to my younger mind at least, would have positively screamed "woman over 40." Namely, I purchased a new bathing suit. With a skirt.

Yes, I have become a woman who wears a swim-skirt. I don't know what the male equivalent would be, but suffice it to say that, at 18 years old, I would have been appalled at the idea. On the other hand, this is the first suit I have owned in years that isn't black, so that's something.

I have also learned that the effects of the swim-skirt can be countered through numerous trips down the waterslide. So I've got that going for me. Which is nice.

One thousand words

I have been working on the same blog post for nearly two weeks now. Over the past few months, I have started down some sort of pseudo-homesteading path, and was feeling the need to articulate why I feel compelled to do so. Words don't seem to be adequate to explain it, though. One of my favorite homesteading bloggers, Jenna Wogenrich, summed it up by saying "It’s the honesty of knowing what I do everyday directly helps keep me alive." That doesn't quite work for me, since (given our local zoning laws) I am unlikely to start raising livestock any time soon, and the hot peppers and Brussels sprouts I'm planning for the garden are hardly what you'd call staples. Still, in that statement she gets to the immediacy of baking your own bread, growing your own veggies, being connected to the sources of your food, living a more self-sufficient - and yet, oddly, more connected - life. In her case that includes raising her own chickens; in mine, it involves a growing friendship with the farmers who raise the chickens, cows, and lambs we eat.

Food is obviously a big part of this impulse, but it isn't the whole thing. Professionally (if you can call "perpetual grad student" a profession), I pretty much live inside my own head. In our classes, we have endless debates about the finest semantic points, and what seem to be simple declarative sentences get dissected and analyzed until they have lost all meaning. There are days when this sort of work is fun, when the academic exercises feel like tricky mystery plots to solve. Then there are other times, when I feel like, if I don't get out of my brain and do something constructive, I'll explode. Writing filled that purpose for a while, and might yet again, but right now it's too tied up with all that theory. I swear I used to be able to write, but grad school has made it a paralyzing process. The homesteader's life, where the product of your work is concrete, practical, and immediately tangible, is becoming a much-needed respite from that, and one which may very well allow me to continue all that theorizing without going stark staring mad.

Which is all to say that, suddenly, it seems a little pointless to spend so much time attempting to intellectualize what is, at it's core, not an intellectual thing. Instead, I think this sums it up nicely: Who knows - maybe thinking in terms of pictures rather than words will help me keep this site from becoming a complete ghost town.

Many Happy Returns

Happy Birthday to you Happy Birthday to you Happy Birthday, dear Munchkin Happy Birthday to you I am now the mother of a one-year-old, and pretty soon a toddler. It boggles the mind. Oh, by the way - all those of you who hummed the melody as you read this owe the Hill sisters a buck.

Latest Trick

The Munchkin has a new skill as of about a week ago: he can now push from lying down to sitting up. (He's been able to stay sitting if placed that way for four months now, but hadn't been able to work out getting his legs out of the way to push himself to a seated position). Since he has figured out how to do this, he seems to love nothing better than flinging himself forward and face-planting on our bed, so that he can push himself up again. This has had occasionally hilarious results, as when he decided he wanted to push himself up while nursing, and ended up on his hands and knees like a dog drinking from a hydrant. He has gone through this process with each new trick he learns. While I was teaching him to sit up, pulling him up by his hands, at one point he stiffened himself and found himself standing. Once that happened, he showed no interest whatsoever in sitting for a few weeks, and simply would not bend in the middle. Then once he figured out how to sit on his own, supporting himself, standing with help from me became less appealing, until (of course) he pulled himself up. It has made me wonder - what was the last new thing I learned that excited me that much? The closest thing I could think of was learning about how mirrors are used in film-making. They are frequently used to signify a divided self or conflicting desires. After I learned that bit of information, I started noticing the mirrors in every television show and movie I saw. Not quite as cool as pushing up, but maybe it's a similar process? So, now the question goes to you (all three of you): what was the last new thing you learned that really excited you?

How we measure time

In the German film class I am taking this quarter, we have spent a little bit of time talking about how the passage of time is depicted in early film. This, of course, was one of those things that was suddenly possible in film, where it had not been in stage plays. Sure, drama could indicate that time had passed, once playwrights threw out that whole Aristotelian unity notion, but what film could do, and what drama had not been able to, was show the viewer that time was passing at something other than a natural pace. Our real-life perception of time is fairly malleable. It all depends how we look at it. Groundhog Day is just past, and although Punxatawney Phil predicted six more weeks of winter, Buckeye Chuck anticipates an early spring. Of course, as Carol at May Dreams Gardens points out, an early spring for us in Zone 5 would come in March, or around 6 weeks from now. Still, one of those predictions makes the process feel shorter somehow. Today is Mardi Gras, the end of epiphany, meaning tomorrow is the start of the spring season of Lent. I'm not Catholic, but Easter is one of the more pagan Catholic holidays, and it's nice to be able to start the countdown so early this year. Of course, the end of football season is a landmark too - one that places us in the gray nether-time before spring training begins. (Don't talk to me about the NBA. Bunch of thyroid cases being refereed by guys who wouldn't know traveling if it was announced on the JumboTron.) My mother called over the weekend to ask about coming to visit for the Munchkin's first birthday. It completely caught me off-guard. On the one hand, it only seems like a few days since he was a teeny little guy looking up at me from his sling - the fact that he's almost mobile is astonishing. On the other hand, the idea that, only a year ago, we had not met him yet, is equally unbelievable to me. OBs and people who have been pregnant measure a pregnancy in weeks. Just about everyone else measures in months. Pregnant women themselves measure by milestones - finding out, hearing the heartbeat, feeling the first kick, seeing their belly-buttons vanish, feeling the baby drop down. Given how much a crap-shoot it is to even determine a due date, it seems to me that these sorts of milestones make a lot more sense in measuring that time. When you're gardening, a lot of the instructions on seed packets tell you to "plant after last danger of frost," or "start indoors n days before last frost, then transplant outdoors after danger of frost has passed." Being a geek, I tend to have to hunt around online to find out when that tends to be in Ohio, and then count backward. Best I can tell, the best gardeners don't do this. Like expectant mothers, they look at the other milestones in the garden and use them to gauge how warm the ground is, how ready the weather. Watching for these natural signals (today's word of the day: "phenology") can tell you that the best time to attack the crab grass in your lawn is just as the forsythia are starting to flower, or that peas are best planted when the daffodils bloom. As I start preparing for the baseball draft, perusing seed catalogs, and watching my son struggle to crawl, I shall try to keep in mind that, regardless of any structure we try to impose on time, it has its own ideas. Maybe it's best to just roll with it, and let those without clocks and calendars tell us how to proceed.

Of Blogs and New Beginnings

Once upon a time, I had a blog. It was one of those all-purpose blogs where I would jot down things about my life as they happened. Then, as so often becomes the case, life got busy enough that I ran out of time to post. Actually, that's not quite fair - it was not just that I was too busy to post, but that the things that were happening either seemed too big or too small to commit to the interwebs.

In the intervening months, while I was on this unplanned hiatus, a whole lot of life happened. In no particular order, I had a child (now more than 8 months old), that child acquired a few cousins, some friends got married, others got separated or divorced, I stopped teaching in the interest of actually getting my thesis done, cut back to part-time at school, and seriously questioned whether or not I want to continue in musicology after the MA. I still enjoy musicology, love teaching (except the grading), and sometimes really enjoy research, but I felt like I was missing out on too much of the Munchkin's life, and frankly too much of my own.

Looking back on some of my posts to the old blog, although many still ring true (the quality of student papers is an eternal headache), many seem to have been written by someone else. I no longer have the urge to post about politics or social causes, much as I still care about them. At some point I'll no doubt want to write about music for fun, but at the moment it's a job, and I like my blog to be an escape of sorts. I'm no longer teaching, so I cannot really write about that, and while motherhood is turning into quite a journey, the ins and outs of diapers, breastfeeding, sleep problems and the like are really only interesting if it's your child. Besides, I know how embarrassed I am by some of the home movies my mother took when I was a baby - can you imagine having all that detail out there in the ether for eternity? The Munchkin would be in therapy for years.

One goal for the new year (I refuse to call it a resolution) is to pay more attention to the changes around me as the seasons progress. What is in bloom, what is poking up through the ground, what is dying off, what birds are visiting the feeder, what fruits and vegetables are at their best? This is where I will be doing that. It may eventually turn into a real garden blog, as the yard eventually turns into a real garden, but that will undoubtedly be a slow process. It will, I hope, be interesting.

Happy 2008, all.