Archive for August, 2007
Filed under: knittingPosted: August / 31 / 2007
So, I’m working on another felt purse, because they are fun and easy and the only thing I can knit that isn’t square, and I am impressed by myself because of that. Basically, you knit a rectangle, then pick up some stitches around the edge (that’s the hard part for me) then knit on circular needles for 60 rows (+ 4 rows of purl). I always get lost in the midst of the 60 rows and have to stop and recount. I realize that it isn’t that important if I’m a row or two off one way or the other, but the stopping to count is tedious.
So I came up with an incredibly clever plan. I could have carried around a little card upon which to make hash marks and counted rows that way, but the whole point of this pattern is that I don’t need to carry around a pattern (well, not the whole point, but it is a big advantage). I am using a super-duper knitting marker. A knitting marker is a little plastic ring or bit of yarn that one loops over one’s needles to mark, say the beginning of a row, or a pattern, or something like that. Well, I got a rather big piece of contrasting yarn, and tied a little loop in the middle. I put it on my needles at the point where each round begins. Now, I knit merrily along, and, when I reach the marker, I tie a little knot in the yarn. Then I go on. It’s my Inca tribute stitch marker + counter.
Oh, yeah, and I’m absolutely certain that I’m the only person in the entire history of knitting to have come up with the idea. Still, I’m pleased to have thought of it. It’s simple, and it works.
So today I wore heels to school. Not big heels; I don’t have big heels. These are maybe 1 inch heels. Still, they change they way I walk (I cannot hurry in these things), and since I’ve been wearing loose big sandals all summer, I’m constantly conscious of how enclosed my foot is.
The wierd thing is, the combination of the heels, the flipppy shortish (knee-length) skirt, the little scarf, and wearing my hair down made me feel all twirly-girly all day long. What’s wierd about this is I know that no-one ever looks at me and thinks, “My, she’s so girly today.” They see an overweight 40 year old woman whose hair is too long.
Double Consciousness — it’ll get you at the wierdest moments.
So, while I’ve been in offices and classrooms this week, Miss Baby has decided that she doesn’t want to be a baby anymore. Every day I come home from school and she demonstrates a new trick. She is past master at standing up and maintaining that position, will walk between her parents, will occasionally get up and walk to get something she wants, and is starting to walk while holding things, which she seems to regard as the whole point of walking (crawling and holding things is difficult, and she likes to hold onto things).
Today I came home, and she showed me how she sits on the little wooden chair. First, she climbs up onto the chair so that she is standing on the seat and holding onto the chair’s back (quite the daredevil, this one). Then she kneels down and attempts to both sit and turn at the same time. It isn’t smooth, but she’s making progress.
So, it’s not unusual for the Provost (the person who oversees the academic house) to give the faculty a book at the beginning of the school year. We faculty try to glean a little info about the provost from this gift/assignment, especially this year when we have a new boss. For the past few years, our tedious and somewhat paranoid provost gave us tedious and somewhat paranoid books, primarily about the “dying of the light.” This is the fear that Christian colleges will become less Christian as they become more academic. The fear is always that “we will end up like Harvard,” which, of course, began as a seminary. Trust me, there’s no danger of our institution turning into Harvard. It’s a weird combination of arrogance (we’re academically comparable to the Ivies!?) and fear (things aren’t like they used to be). In fact, I and other not-male and not-white faculty have often noticed that excessive worrying about the dying of the light often sounds like code for, “things were fine until all these women and nonwhites showed up.” I’m not saying we shouldn’t preserve our Christian heritage and identity; I’m just saying that we needn’t live in fear of the womenfolk.
Anyway, this year, our new Provost gave us Parker Palmer. Very encouraging.
School has begun; today was our Convocation ceremony. The faculty wore their regalia, and there was a lot of music, and the university president made a little speech.
Before the ceremony, a student saw me in my regalia and asked if we were going to dance. Apparently she imagined that our academic regalia were somehow appropriate for liturgical dance. I’m not sure how much liturgical dance she’s seen, or how much exposure she’s had to academic regalia. Take it from me, the regalia is good for maternity wear, but it’s not really dance wear.
We recessed to the march from “Aida.” This raises the question: why weren’t the faculty riding out of the chapel, seated on elephants?
I am reminded of the anniversary of the 19th amendment by this posting on Mother Talkers. She quotes the delightful Alice Duer Miller, whose Are Women People?, from which this quote comes, is available in its illustrated entirety at the Library of Congress (which has a fantastic web presence, btw).
Well, we went up to see the Mouse today. The nice thing about the annual passes is that you can go for a few hours, or at the last minute, and you can meander casually while you are at the park.
While the Little Guy and DH went on the Matterhorn, I took Miss Baby to It’s a Small World. She waved and clapped for the spinning whirligigs on the front of the castle, and then sat enraptured on my lap throughout the ride, reaching out and pointing at all the little singing dolls, eyes wide the entire time. When we came out of the ride, she laughed to see her Daddy and brother waiting for us. They wanted to go on Small World too, so we did it again. She was thrilled, and climbed over Daddy’s shoulder to wave goodbye at the singing dolls as we were leaving.
So, the Little Guy and I stayed late at the park, after Miss Baby and DH went on home — she was tired. the Little Guy and I went on a few more rides and walked out to the bus stop. The bus is less frequent on Sunday evenings, so we waited at the bus stop for quite a while. The Little Guy was amused by the presence of several mice who appeared to live in the bushes and trees next to the bus stop. He was delighted when we heard some loud booms, and turned around to see the Disneyland fireworks. Tired as he was, he jumped up and down, spinning in imitation of the fireworks.
This is the thing I have never done: we rode the OCTA bus home from Disneyland. Many of the other folks on the bus were people who worked in the resort district. They got on the bus in uniform shirts, mostly from restaurants, carrying bags and styrofoam packages of food home to their families. There was one guy, curled up on three seats, asleep, which impressed the Little Guy — “He’s sleeping very hard.” The Little Guy was a super trooper, chatting and smiling and cuddling the entire time. He came home, slipped into his PJs, and barely made it to his bed.
Well, one of the benefits of spending all day yesterday in faculty meetings is that today’s half-day meeting seemed relatively short. (Really, actually, the folks that put together the meetings this year did a good job — I’ve been to 14 of these things, so I have something to compare it too).
Today the dean of students and the campus chaplain talked about student spirituality, and it was rather interesting. The whole day and a half have been focused on “getting to know our students,” discussing the various characteristics of this generation. Sometimes the speakers have confounded the general characteristics of youth (doubt, idealism, confusion) with the characteristics of this particular generation of youth (relational, anti-authoritarian, plagiarists), without accounting for differences in race, gender, or class (basically attributing characteristics of upper-class white males to all twentysomethings).
I was interested by our chaplain’s description of the student’s religion. He called them “moralistic therapeutic deists.” They are moralistic in that they they think that if they are “good” they will go to heaven, but they don’t have any strict sense of ethics that would suggest to them that plagiarism (for example) is wrong. Their faith is therapeutic in that they believe that their individual happiness and success are of the utmost significance to God (or god, for that matter). And they are deists to the extent that they think God exists, but doesn’t trouble himself (they haven’t gone so far as to question that pronoun) about small details (except, of course, their personal happiness and wealth). This seems accurate to me– but I think it is probably the case that this constitutes our civic religion — that this is what a lot of people in America mean by religion, probably even the ones who think of themselves as fundamentalists or evangelicals. This is a lot of what I hear out there, anyway.
Another interesting moment came when the Dean of Students referred to a conflict that occurred between two (female) roomates last year. One was struggling with her attraction to women, and the other was sleeping with her boyfriend; the roomates were locked in a disagreement about which of them was worse (each obviously thought the other was the big sinner). She moved on past this, and one of the faculty called her back to it (we’d moved onto a discussion of pets in dorms), asking what was done about the roommates. The chaplain answered: “We told them they had to get rid of that dog!” But the Dean’s answer pleased me: she said that, as far as she was concerned, the woman struggling with her sexuality hadn’t actually done anything wrong; she’s simply asked questions appropriate to her stage of identity development. This was a great relief to me; I’m often dismayed by the way Christian schools — and Christians in general — deal with these questions. We’ve had student life staff who were far less understanding than this (to put it mildly).
Earlier this week, the LA Times ran an interesting news story about Michelle Obama. Apparently at one point she took her newborn daughter with her to a job interview (she’s a lawyer, and she still works for the same company). This both impresses and alarms me — I could never imagine doing such a thing! We waited until I had tenure to have children, for fear that having children would indicate to administrators that I cared about something else more than I cared about academia (which is true, btw). It is interesting that fatherhood is supposed to be good for a man’s career, at least in academia — it makes him more stable, less likely to try to find a better job at a bigger school — but it’s still a liability for a woman. But I like Michelle Obama’s frankness about the difficulty of balancing her children’s needs with her husband’s needs and her own needs — and her insistence that she continue trying.
We had a series of faculty meetings today. For lunch, we were loaded onto schoolbusses and taken out. There was singing, including “The Wheels on the Bus,” with a special verse for the occasion: ”The faculty on the bus go, ‘whine, whine, whine’.”
We were taken on a tour of the campus life facilities. Given that it was 3:00 in the afternoon, it was a good idea to have us up and moving around instead of sitting in an airless room while the campus life people came through to us. In an effort to help us “get to know the students,” we were shown dorm rooms. They showed us the oldest dorm, where the rooms are particularly cramped. I think this was supposed to create compassion for the students. However, these dorms were built around the same time as many of the dorms the faculty were lodged in during their own undergraduate days. Rather than sparking pity, the tour touched of a round of reminiscences among the faculty.
