http://academom.wordpress.com

I'll be posting there from now on. I still have some sprucing to do, but it'll do for now.

I was pretty sure I was planning on moving things over to Wordpress, whose free service has been my favorite for hosting course blogs and for setting other people up with their own spaces.

The deal breaker is that I cannot put my twitter feed into a free Wordpress blog; I must host it myself to run the scripts. Wah. So I'm kind of now wondering if I'll scrape up the money for server space and domain registration...but then I'd be unsure if I would want to continue with Movable Type, or what... I like Movable Type, although I find it to be just past what my regular intuition can mess with every six months. That is, every time I want to do something, I have to kind of relearn it all, and then because it took me so long to figure things out, I rarely go back in, which of course makes it even harder when I *must* go in and do some futzing. In other words: I'm lazy, gimmee some good ol' wysiwyg GUI, gimmee some drag 'n drop. So.

So, I've still done nothing. But in the next few days, as I continue to procrastinate with the revisioning, I expect to have a snazzy new space.

Two days ago, this here blog turned FOUR. Four whole years I've been writing in this here space.

Holy crap, guys. Four years.

I'm moving in three weeks.

I've never, really ever, lived in one place as long as I've been here in CNY. Growing up, we moved just about every year, sometimes staying two years, and ironically, staying three once J, my stepdad, began working for the Department of Defense.

I am a moving-kinda gal, in the sense that picking up from one house and moving to another, wrenching myself from one neighborhood and one school to work my way into another, became very normal for me. In fact, I remember being in 8th grade (Thomas Jefferson in Waukegan, IL, if you care to know), and because I'd been there for 7th grade as well, I felt like things were a little off for me. People knew me too well.

But soon after that strange feeling of "too familiar" crept up on me, we moved to Kenosha, WI, where I finished the last 8 weeks of junior high. My teachers were appalled, mostly, that my parents couldn't wait for the school year to finish, but I was happy. All was right with the world; we were moving again.

As an adult, I have moved pretty regularly as well, mostly trading small town houses for single-families as my own family grew, but also in service of my own figuring out what to do "when I grew up."

I have really really loved living here. I don't much care for the extreme weather, but when it comes down to it, anywhere I go there will be *something* I can complain about. Which also reminds me that where ever I go, I can be equally happy, as long as I'm looking in the right places.

Still, though, I'm feeling a bit of paralysis now, sitting in my dining room, surrounded by packages from Amazon of books I need to read (or, look at for an hour or so) for making diss revisions. The windows are open, the sun is patterning itself on the floor, and I'm thinking about packing and U-hauls and the sun hitting a new floor in a different pattern. I'm thinking about finding friends. What used to be easy for me to do as a child ("Hi, I'm new. Can I jump rope, too?") seems untenable in adulthood ("Hi, I'm new. Can my kids play with your kids, and will your husband talk about hockey with my husband, and will you go running with me??").

*sigh*

Don't get me wrong. I'm thrilled to be moving. This (paralysis, anxiety), too, shall pass. But the prospect of, the getting ready for, the doing of, etc, has me mildly wanting to lay on the couch with my eyes shut.

But I am WEAK. Weak I tell you.

So, what I have eaten at least once a day for the last week starts out sounding wonderfully good for you, and then BANG, the not-so-secret last ingredient pretty much ruins it for being tagged as "healthy."

Quarter a whole wheat pita and toast it.

Glob (or dab, as you prefer) peanut butter on each toasted quarter. I like Skippy Natural.

Slice one banana, willy-nilly, over the top of the peanut-butter globbed quarters.

(And this is where the sane person would stop. Me = non sane.)

Take a handful of potato chips and throw them on top of the bananas.

The result is a plate full of nacho-like wonderfulness.

And of course: eat over the sink. Or, in front of your Google Reader, taking care not to glob the pb on your keyboard.

But it's only hard if you want to do something silly, like PR or BQ or run the damn thing under 5 hours. None of which I am particularly interested in doing*.

Anyway, since I've officially drafted an entire dissertation (let's not get too excited here: much much much revision will be necessary), I'm rewarding myself with a full-marathon registration (the Wineglass in October), since now I will ostensibly feel less guilty spending 10 hours on my weekends running. Also, I've been able to convince Rb to run it with me--which adds a good deal of incentive for me to train.

Normally I go with the old standby, Hal Higdon, using the either the beginner or first intermediate mileage schedule, depending on how much of a wuss I feel like when I begin the training. This time I'm going to change it up, and go with this schedule, which clumps the mileage up a little more than Higdon's and has at least two days of rest a week. Something I've noticed about my running is that I do really well if I let myself rest, and that I'm most prone to injury when I run for several days without an off day. Last year D and I ran a crazy streak, where we went every day for like 90 days**. I put myself out of commission for Buffalo in 2007 and ended up only running the half. (D of course, with her amazing biomechanics, extended the streak much longer than I could, and was still able to run the full.)

So, this schedule emphasizes the days off, some weeks giving me THREE days off. My kind of training. ;) It starts on Sunday, and I am utterly and ridiculously giddy about the prospect.

*OK, it would be nice to run another sub-5 marathon, since I've only successfully done so one other time.

**This is probably exaggeration. I'm not hunting into the archives to confirm the exact days.

Dick Cheney gaffes again.

And boy, is it still a mess (hence, the title of this post).

I'm back drinking coffee to ward off the yawns, eating to avoid the boredom of sitting in the same place all day, and running in the morning to make sure my body is tired enough to fall asleep at night.

The house, now that a contract is in the works, is slowly regressing back into a state of cluttered messiness, especially as I've taken back my favorite end of the dining room table.

Lucky for me, the kids have a new hobby:

Killing the planet with two-stroke engines.

It's only interesting for about the first minute.

A quick rundown this year, as we are gearing up for a family day of hiking at Salmon River Falls.

This year, the Buffalo race was about two things: J running her first half, and D working her ass off to qualify for Boston.

And while the weather was beautiful (blue sky, cool breezes) and J did wonderfully in her first stint as a half-er, in retrospect it seems like the day was doomed for disaster for lots of other runners.

The course was lovely as always, well-prepared at the water stops even for the slower runners like J and me. The race itself, for us, was relatively uneventful. We finished in under J's goal time (2:30), running the 13.1 in 2:28. This was an achievement, considering J has never run this distance AND we made a pit-stop in the marina around mile 5.

We finished and walked north to the hotel, showered and put our feet up for a few minutes before walking back south to the finish line to meet D. I was afraid we left the hotel too late and that we would miss her: a BQ time for her had to be somewhere between 3:45 and 3:50 (she's on the cusp of an age group, so 3:50 would have qualified her next year). She had trained incredibly hard the past several months, and even had dropped several pounds (which is quite amazing since she was a veritable rail in the first place). I was certain that this would be her year for a qualifying time.

We made our way to the barricades at the finish line, and I watched runner after runner cross the line between 3:45 and 4:00, thinking that because we hadn't seen D cross yet that we'd missed her already, and hoping hoping hoping that that was the case.

As we waited, I saw one runner barf his guts out upon crossing the finish line (thankfully it was all Gatorade and nothing too nasty), watched another runner be carried across the line between two friends, and witnessed several people crying.

And no D.

At 4:05 I began to worry that she was still out on the course, crippled or otherwise badly compromised, and tried to remember her number so I could find an official and see if she'd been picked up. Soon after I began my plan to find her, though, she came running through.

J ran into the chute to meet her, but I hung back. I knew she had to be devastated, and I saw her face scrunching up a little as she was talking to J.

My heart completely broke for her then. I didn't know what I was going to say to her, and everything I mustered up in my head sounded hollow and ridiculous.

The thing I ended up saying was probably the stupidest, though: I raised my hands above my head and said "Wineglass!" to her, indicating that I was thrilled that she'd have to run the Wineglass with me in October to try to qualify again.

Her look was murderous. I hung my head, immediately wishing I could take the words back. She sputtered something about a husband asking his wife to have another baby as the doctor sewed up her episiotomy.

My gaffe was quickly forgotten as we made our way into the convention center to get D some pizza. As we wandered around the guts of the hotel, trying to find our way out, a woman sitting on the floor, alone and wrapped in a mylar blanket, asked if we could get her back to the hotel.

"You *are* in the hotel," I told her, since the convention center and hotel were essentially one big monster building.

"I can't find my boyfriend, and I'm lost," she continued. I looked at D and J, who looked down at the woman. She shook and there were lines of salt streaked down her cheeks.

"Sure, we'll show you out," I said, and D and J bent over to pick up her water bottle and untouched cup of beer.

As we took her from the convention center to the hotel, we politely asked her questions about where she was from and how she did. She, too, had had a horrible race. She told us she'd came in 10th at the marathon in Eugene, Oregon only a couple weeks before, but that this race had been hell. She said she'd thrown up at the finish line and then immediately was disoriented and sick. I asked her if she wanted us to find her a medic but she said she just needed to find her room.

As we approached the main elevators, she said she could find her way from there. She asked our names, and we told her, and she thanked us profusely. I pulled her bib number strip down so I could see her name, and it was Michelle Chille an elite runner.

At any rate, we left the race a little melancholy, sad for D and sad for Michelle, all of us just kind of wanting to go home.

D's race report is posted at her blog. When J posts her report, I'll offer a link as well. Sadly, I no longer get to post my friends' race reports here, as they all have their own blogs now.

That doesn't mean I'll stop posting here (although the thought has occurred to me that it very well might be time to close up shop--more on that in a later post). It does mean that many of my updates are not getting through to all readers.

So, my life in some tweet-sized bites, for those who have missed the twitter side:

I finally feel like is OK to make an official announcement: I did go on the market this past year, and I did indeed get a job. I'll be at York College of Pennsylvania in the fall. I'm thrilled--so much so that I still have to pinch myself to make sure it's real.

I don't have a nightmarish job-market narrative. There were some funny (both ha-ha and strange) parts, but nothing was particularly dramatic or hellish.

B and I spent the last two months getting our house ready to sell. I think if I have to look at another paint brush anytime soon, I'll throw myself into the bushes. But the house looks really really great (thanks in large part to B's parents, who traveled up several times to help, and my parents, who took my kids over spring break so we could refinish the floors).

We got an acceptable offer on our house just 12 days after it went on the market.

The key to keeping the house "ready to show" when there are three children in said house: put all of their toys and half their clothes in storage.

Date we'll officially become Yorkers: last weekend of July.

On tap for this summer: Frankstock 2008 in June (family reunion) and my mom's 60th birthday blow-out bash in August; two events which require me to get my guitar-playing chops back.

I am suffering with chronic fatigue. I've not been diagnosed, but the past couple weeks have been hard. By about 11 am I'm sleepy and coffee is pretty much ineffectual. I picked up some vitamins and I'm going to try to cut back on the junk to see if that will pep me up a bit.

This week is the "get ready for Buffalo" week. As in years past, I've spent the week before the Buffalo marathon intent on sleeping at least 8 hours a night, (good) carb loading, and drinking tons of water. This year, while I'll only be running the half, will be no different.

This is post #500 on ye olde blog academom.

I have written 500 times here.

Hole. Eee. Sheet.

And since you're here, I'm sending you away. Please consider buying my house. It's beautiful and perfect and I don't want to leave it, but I think moving the house to York, PA would be cost-prohibitive.

Then came exams, and I decided that I liked exams better than course work. My rationale was this: the exam phase was all reading. That is, I could read, and read, and read as much I wanted to, and I was reading what I was interested in because my exam areas were *mine*. I made them, and I was invested in learning about them, and I reveled in the reading. Of course, at the end of it all (and it took me about a year-and-a-half from start to finish) I did have to write, but it was like ripping a band-aid off super-fast. The writing of the exams inhabited such a small time-portion of "the exam process" that it isn't what I remember about it. I remember, fondly, the reading.

Now it's the dissertation, the book-length researched argument. I've been writing on it for almost a year now (holy crap. I'm going to ignore that small detail). And I do love it. Because I feel like this is what I've been waiting to do since I got here: to revel in some thick writing-making.

To be sure, I didn't always know that I've been waiting to do this. In fact, I think I just realized it in the last few days, when I was given a small directive by my advisors: make a little more sense, please--the chapters are not fitting together yet.

And after some mildly-frantic heuristic-making and outline building, I realized what the problem was: I'd been hoping that all the stuff I'd written so far would fall logically, neatly onto the minds of my readers in such a way that the argument would delicately but obviously appear in their brains without me having to actually, uh, argue it.

I had no thesis. No over-arching claim or theme even, to show readers what I was getting at.

Part of me said, "Well, you were saving it for the end!! Here's four chapters of interesting material, here's chapter five that is the grand finale of 'How It All Fits!!'"

And the other smarter part of me said, "Hello? Is anybody in there?? You've been trying to get your OWN STUDENTS to EXPLICITLY ARTICULATE their own claims for weeks."

So: what have I learned?? Dissertating is about making an argument. And it's about NOT making an oblique, creatively meandering maybe-argument. It's about a little bit of structural repetivity, a little bit of data-making and data-analysis, a little bit of gathering and summarizing existing scholarship, and a whole lot of showing how it all fits together. It must fit together.

And then: whatever the fit is, or however the fit works, is the argument.

I imagine that partially why I've resisted articulating an explicit argument is that attendant to such writing is responsibility. If I'm going to make an argument, I have to stand by it. I have to be invested in it. I have to allow it to be important to me. I must connect myself to it. I must commit to it.

And as a student (and my profs and advisors will all concur), I'm not much for commitment. There's an authority move that happens when one commits to an argument that I'm only now becoming a little more comfortable with. I have to acknowledge that I am smart enough, entitled, even, to make an argument. And the humility of my student-hood, the presence of a bunch of really brilliant people that I work with and among, sometimes make my being "good-enough" a hard thing to admit.

What I realize now, just now, is that I have to make that allowance (even if it requires a little pretending) in order to get this project finished. I have to allow myself to be able to do it; I have to admit that I'm smart enough to do it.

I am, dammit. I am.

Ha! For once, I'm getting the good weather instead of the crap. For once.

However, when your mom tags you, you oblige. So I'm back on the blogging horse, for now.

Five things in each of the following categories:

10 years ago, I was:

1. 22
2. A junior at Norfolk State majoring in English.
3. Mother to a toddler.
4. Living in Virginia Beach.
5. Writing a lot of poetry.

Today’s to do list:

1. Mop kitchen floor.
2. Try not to eat all day.
3. Do tons of laundry.
4. Try not to eat all day.
5. Write 500 words on the diss.

Snacks I enjoy:

1. Corn chips with cream cheese mixed with salsa.
2. Corn chips with avocado.
3. Granola.
4. Doritos.
5. Trail mix.

If I was a billionaire, I would:

1. Pay off my student loan, and all my friends' student loans.
2. Put enough aside so I could write full time.
3. Give the rest away.
4. Give the rest away.
5. Give the rest away.

My bad habits:

1. I judge myself and others much too harshly.
2. I yell at my kids.
3. I don't always "clean as I go," which makes it hard to teach my children to do so (hence, much yelling about "Pick up after yourself!!")
4. I squirrel time away reading crap on the internet.
5. I sometimes drink coffee too soon before bed, and then suffer with insomnia.

Pet peeves:

1. Tailgaters.
2. People who drive too slow in the fast lane.
3. Know-it-alls.
4. Ignorance.
5. Hypocrites.

Places I’ve lived:

1. Lincoln, NE.
2. Waukegan, IL.
3. Ceiba, PR.
4. Chesapeake, VA.
5. Colorado Springs, CO.

Jobs I’ve had:

1. Lifeguard.
2. Volleyball Ref.
3. Writing tutor.
4. Writing teacher.
5. Writer.