Tales out of school

jo(e) asked about how the day at Chris's school went, and I thought that ought to be a stand-alone post.

Short answer: the day went really well, and it was exactly what I needed.

Long answer:

So, on Monday Chris took me with him to his school, where I was the "guest expert" in the Socials 11 and Film and Video 12 classes, which are back-to-back morning classes with roughly the same group of students.  In Social, I gave the kids a talk about primary sources, about the variety of sources and the various ways that historians use them.  At the last minute, the teacher asked if I could also talk with the kids about how Hitler came to power, and about how he managed to take as much power as he did, and I could easily do that (especially since I already had planned on addressing that in the Film and Video class).  In the second class, I went and gave the kids a talk about the context of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, getting them to think about documentary and propaganda, and then watched and discussed the last ten minutes of the film. 

The kids were fantastic.  They were so excited that I was coming to talk with them, because Chris talks about me uncontrollably.  They were also excited because they've been really getting into World War II stuff in class, and have been grappling a lot with hard questions, and with figuring out what historians do, and were excited to talk with a Real! Live! Expert!  It was fun for me, because this was exactly the kind of low-pressure situation that I needed, so that I could get comfortable again in the classroom environment.  There's one student who recently discovered that she's really interested in history, and it was so rewarding watching her get into all of this stuff, and watching her face as she grasped the more difficult concepts. 

Oh man, that primary source was so fun.  It really was like "Introduction to Social and Cultural History," as I got them to realise that potential primary source material is all around us.  (A quilt or a dish could be a primary source!  This was a big deal for them!)  It was good for me, in terms of my research, because I brought along a bunch of my own primary sources, and had to explain to them exactly how I could use a fictional source as a historical source.  Sometimes it helps me when I have to talk it out like that.

And then I sat down in a little office near the principal's office, and spent the rest of the morning making major decisions about the course I'm teaching in June, and the afternoon making some real progress on my dissertation.  So, apparently it helped me to clear out my head and talk with some enthusiastic students for a couple of hours. 

*****

In related news, I put together the finishing touches on my syllabus for my June course, and have finalised pretty much all of my plans, and I'm proud of myself.  And really excited about teaching this stuff now.  (Although I'm a little nervous about teaching about the war in the Pacific, because I really only know Europe and Canada.)

Even though it feels cheesy

A few months ago, my counselor gave me an assignment.  I'd just told her about how I keep having to remind myself that my dissertation and my PhD are the beginning and not the end of my career: this isn't the end result of a life's work, but a first effort that just needs to be finished.  It doesn't have to be ground-breaking; it just has to be completed. 

So, after I said something along the lines of "I really should post that message on my wall above my desk, because I keep forgetting," my counselor suggested that I do just that.  She gave me an assignment: write down some affirmations and reminders and post them where I can see them when I work.

I got excited about doing that until I got home and started worrying that it seemed cheesy to do that.  My desk faces a big poster!  Where am I supposed to put a bunch of affirmations?  Won't that seem especially cheesy to any houseguests who stay in our office?

And so I procrastinated from doing that.  And procrastinated from booking my next counseling appointment.  I got a lot of work done during that time, but after I finished my last of my research, I found myself stuck.  And procrastinating a lot.

And so here I am in January, trying to get myself back on track, and trying not to feel guilty about how unproductive December was.  I've done a bit of writing in this current chapter, but it's hard getting past all the negative self-talk.  I think that the fact that I was also procrastinating from a task that I knew I ought to do didn't help.  And then this morning, as I was trying to figure out how to organize my bedroom, I noticed that I have this little photo holder stand that was taking up too much room on my dresser.  The pictures in the stand were several years old, and while I was trying to figure out what to do with it, I realised that this could be a good place to put my little affirmations, instead of finding places on my wall. 

I've written up four so far.  For a while, I wasn't even sure what to write (other than the first statement I'd made to my counselor), and so I went through my blog for some inspiration.  This post from mid-2007 gave me a lot of ideas. 

So far, this is what I have:
- I love my research
- My dissertation just needs to be finished, not perfect or ground-breaking.  I am capable of doing this.
- I am going to finish.
- I can't measure my self-worth by external validation.

So.  I'm allowing myself to be a little bit cheesy, with the hope that this will help.  Because I really want to get this writing finished.

A different sort of week

This is the first time I've stopped running around since Sunday evening. Jen's grandpa got into a car accident on Sunday evening and passed away on Monday morning, and since he was one of the seniors from our church, with no family living on the Island, I got to launch into Deacon's Wife mode and make calls and send emails.

You know, it never gets easy being the one who goes through the church list and breaks it to every member that someone has died. No one ever wants to be the bearer of bad news, and there's never a good way to launch that conversation. (The worst was when I called Jen to make sure that someone in her family had called her.)

I'm now settling into a new normal for this week. Jen's coming from Edmonton to stay with us (she should actually be on the ferry now, but I probably won't see her until supper). I'm glad that Chris and I have something like this to do; I like being in Comforting Hostess mode. I have a good example to follow: I just have to remember how I felt having Vic and Barb take us in during our Worst Month Ever. I'm glad I have a chance to pay a bit of that forward.

And so now here's my week: spend more time at home than usual, but try to get to the library and get through some more microfilm. Put off having any meetings late this week, because I don't know when the funeral will be. Do a little more baking and having people over than usual, but also finish polishing my CV (I need to apply for sessional teaching work by Friday).

Depending on how the week goes, the posting might be a little light. But you do have to go check out the new masthead that Bronwyn made for Chris. It's pretty well the best thing ever.

My first blogger meet-up

And I've now met a ton of them, thanks to the conference happening at my university right now. The "Friendly Green Conference," as jo(e) calls it, is here at UVic this year, and this afternoon I was able to put a bunch of faces to pseudonyms. I've been trying to piece together the day I've had, and it's late and so I don't expect to put together anything eloquent right now.

I'm glad that I studied the pictures of jo(e) and the Dandelion Diva on Facebook before I went to the university. jo(e) had told me that I should drop in and have lunch with them one day, and that she was arranging to have all the bloggers meet up at the reception this afternoon. I don't think I'd processed the fact that there would be hundreds of people milling around campus, carrying the conference cloth bag and wearing name tags. I became That Person who is peering at everyone's name tags (and is clearly not wearing a name tag herself). The positive result of this was that I ended up acting as a tour guide to several conference-goers, shepherding them to their buildings.

But as soon as I saw jo(e) I knew it was her. I recognised her hair first, since I've been seeing the back of her head for years now. And she was exactly as you'd expect jo(e) to be: lively, brilliant, friends with everyone in the room, at the centre of every scheme. She asked the Dandelion Diva and I if she was anything like we expected and we both said "Yes" without hesitating.

So, I ran into jo(e) as she was walking to the cafeteria with two conference friends (one of who is the husband of another blogger), and they invited me to have lunch with them. I'm sure glad that everyone was so kind and friendly, because it took some work for me not to be as shy and awkward as I sometimes felt. I had so much fun that it was a lot less scary crashing their reception later that afternoon, where I got to meet up with the rest of the bloggers.

I had barely gotten in to the reception when I recognised the faces of Keri the Dandelion Diva and her partner (I'm really glad that I was studying Facebook photos that day). It's funny to say this because I was just meeting them, but it was a relief to see some familiar faces in that hot, noisy room. It really did feel like I'd known Keri for years (which I guess I have now, looking back and seeing that I was reading her old blog three years ago). After that, we managed to track down jo(e) again, and then Rana, Kathryn of Adventures With Ari,* and Julie Meloni.

And that's how I ended up at a supper table full of brilliant "prof bloggers" (as I've always found myself referring to them), in the University residence's cafeteria, much earlier than anyone else was thinking about supper (certain others in the group are still on Eastern Standard Time), constantly realising that we'd just said the word "take a naked picture" a little too loudly for this public place.

On Saturday I'll be attending a round table session with all of them, in which they'll discuss blogging and academia. This is all very cool, and now I'm going to spend some time looking over everyone's blogs again, adjusting the way that I read them to accomodate the voices and the faces that I know now. (It's kind of like meeting book characters in real life.)


* Note to Bronwyn: you need to check out this blog. It's framed around the walks she takes with her dog Ari, and she has a book about it, with the same name. I got to talk about dogs with her and it was delightful.

By the way...

Have I mentioned how fabulous you all are? Seriously. Thanks for being the most fabulous bloggy peeps imaginable (and I'm including the ones that I know in real life here, too).

Losing Track

I've found that I've been drifting for a while. Or perhaps stuck in a rut. It's hard to get myself motivated to make forward progress with my reading and my work, beyond the day-to-day scrambles. For the longest time, I didn't know what was wrong with me.

But then that lovely Styleygeek went ahead and finished her PhD. (!) That's when it struck me: oh, right. I'm working toward an end point!

The end was constantly in sight when I was working on my MA. It was constantly bearing down on me, as I was determined to finish before I got married. A year of classes, a year of writing, and then I was done. I got married and moved across the country.

But now, it's not so simple as that. I was reading through my journal today and found something that I'd written on New Year's Day of 2006: "I don't know that I've thought this far. All of my plans only went so far as 2005: finish the MA, get married, move, start the PhD. Okay, so that's done. Now what? [...] I've only fathomed the beginnings of major life choices, and none of the follow-through."

And the funny thing is that I'm still there. Well, I'm much further along than I was then. I'm approaching the end of this comps reading process, but I've completely lost sight of everything in that process. And have gotten so frightened of the comprehensive exams themselves that I've kind of gone into hiding.

And so now I have to get myself back on track. I need to spend my weekend finishing my World War One books and updating my latest funding application. That way, I can make some real forward progress (and read books on Weimar Germany!) next week.

Even if the end is still far away, this is a process that has an end. And I need to remember that.

Old-School (Canadian) Thanksgiving

I'm on my laptop. Chris is on the phone with his sister (now back from Ireland). Meg's beside me, reading Harry Potter. Karl's been methodically chopping potatoes, as the water boils and boils.

And we've made far more pies than we'll be able to eat this weekend.

And for this, I am thankful

The returned prodigal

In the past half-week, I've had a chance to to do the following:

1. Pick strawberries and vegetables with Grandma;

2. Have jam sessions on violin and piano with Grandpa;

3. Explore the barn and look at the new calves;

4. Go hunting for kittens;

5. Drive all over gravel roads, including a trip to a nearby lake;

6. Run and play like I was nine years old;

7. Make up the rules to croquet;

8. Search through photo albums, playing "Guess which relative this is, fifty years ago" with the small(ish) cousins;

9. Speak with a vaguely Norweigan accent (it's addictive);

10. Cook with Grandma;

11. Get Grandpa to tell stories from his childhood in Norway;

12. Slide down the (carpeted) stairs. On purpose.

At my Little Grandma's funeral, I was visiting with my Norweigan Grandparents, and it occurred to me: unlike Chris, I still have two living grandparents. Two grandparents whom I had not visited in the past two years. And so I devised a scheme to get myself up to the farm. It ended up working out that my sister and I drove up after we went to our church camp, and we even ended up staying one more night than we'd originally planned, just so that we'd have a bit more time with the family up there.

It's funny being up there after a two year absence (especially since it had been even longer since I'd had a significant stay up there). For part of me, it was like my instincts were kicking in. Everything was so familiar: the route to the farm, the accents, the layout of my Grandma's kitchen, the places where they keep the games and where the kittens hide; how the ground felt under my feet as I ran as hard as I could.

But there was also this shock of what has changed: new buildings were everywhere, and everyone has aged more than I had expected. My grandpa has retired from farming during the time I was away, and my uncle had finally taken over the farm. And suddenly, out of the blue, my cousin Jaclyn turned twelve years old, and is no longer sure about playing kid games with her little brother and adult cousins. (And yet it didn't take much to get her right in the middle of our made-up croquet game.)

Remind me to get up there more frequently, so that I don't always feel like the returning prodigal.

(If you want to check out the whole set of photos from the farm, including whatever kitten photos turned out, it's right here.)

Re-focusing

Yesterday, after Karl's Most Amazing Thesis Defence Ever (seriously: wow), he and I were talking over our work and what frustrates us. And as we were talking, I started coming to terms with my own academic self-image. (Warning: I'm in a hurry right now, and so this might be a little stream-of-consciousness.)

I realised that -- as a result of my lack of major funding and awards, the general frustration that is comps reading, and my own tendency to compare myself unfairly against others -- I've come to view myself as a mid-range graduate student. Nothing special or earth-shattering. I do see myself as a good teacher, and so I began to focus on the teaching aspect as my future plans, so that I could ignore my own frustration with myself as a researcher. Honestly, I started viewing myself as "Not Very Clever."

There is so much wrong with that attitude. First of all, I'm measuring my self-worth by external validation (awards, money, profs acting like I'm someone extra special), and that is absolutely not the reason why I got into this line of work. And nothing drives me crazier than people acting as if graduate students who have won major funding are worth more than those who have not. My current university is pretty good for not making that difference, and yet it's still there in any university in this country. And that attitude is a bunch of garbage, and I want nothing to do with it.

Secondly, I know that the reason why I'm really feeling frustrated is that I am still figuring things out with my research. My supervisor and I have been challenging a lot of the assumptions I made with my previous work, and are in the process of making major changes to the foundations of my dissertation. That process is slow right now, because I'm having to focus on the comps reading. But that's okay. This degree is a process and I'm growing and learning like crazy.

It feels better to recognise the problem. Now what I'm going to do, over the next few weeks (at Karl's suggestion), is I'm going to start identifying exactly what I love about my research. What I'm doing and why. I think that will help a lot, because I seriously love my research, and I've hardly let myself think about it lately.

When do you feel creative?

I've been pondering a lot about what makes me feel inspired and what gets me working. Recently, Trillwing asked the inverse question to her readers: "What are some things that damper your creativity and energy?" I was amazed by the lists that her commenters compiled. I was especially amazed when I came up with my own list:

- Too little exercise
- Eating too much crap
- Too many distractions
- Too little time having actual conversations
- Too little time to reflect
- Too much distance from play [referring to a comment that someone else made, meaning "I don't get to play nearly enough. Age has nothing to do with it."]
- Stress
- Repetitive routine and too much of the same scenery all the time
- Many menial tasks without any sense of a goal

Upon reflecting on this list, I realised that you could take the inverse of this list and that would be a pretty accurate portrait of when I'm at my most creative: when I'm exercising (wow, even running up the library stairs cleared my head a lot), eating properly, and not filling my life with distractions.

But now I'm starting more of a list of those things that get the creative juices flowing, beyond just "take the inverse of what saps my energy":

• The right kind of stress or pressure. Some of my best work has resulted from me fighting my way out of a tight spot. I have an easier time decorating difficult small spaces than I have when I have lots of large, blank walls. If I have a looming deadline near (but not so near that I get frozen by anxiety), I pick up the pace and start making real progress. I think it's because it forces a certain external structure on me, which compensates for a lot of my lack of internal structure. It could also be that I work best when I'm responding to specific challenges. That's why some of my best writing is the result of editing: I have an easier time coming up with a better way of saying something already written than I can fill an empty page.
• Spending time with enthusiastic, positive people. If you're excited about it, I'll feel excited as well. That's why I felt so much better after working with my students on Thursday.
• Working within my own research interests. This one only works right now, while I'm being spread so thin first by coursework and then by comps. Touching base with my own research is enough, right now. (It'll be a different story when I'm working on my dissertation and it's just me and my research. I'm sure that then I'm going to need contacts with the outside world to make my brain work properly.)
• Changing scenery. Sometimes it's as easy as moving from my desk to the kitchen table or the office at the university. Often, when I'm really needing a creative boost, I need to change perspective entirely. Hang upside down on the couch and pretend like the furniture's hanging from the ceiling. Sit on the other side of the bathtub and study the shape of the taps. Work on top of the deep freeze. Set up a lawn chair in the back yard and face a direction that I normally can't see from my windows. Take a walk, but take a route I've never taken before. Get myself lost on purpose, and then use my wits to find my way home. This is my favourite. (I first read about this method in a Reader's Digest when I was a small child, and it was suggested as a good way to problem-solve.)
• Baking or cooking something from scratch.
• Dressing up while I'm working. (I've mentioned this one before.)

How about you?

Just what I needed

For me, the difficult thing about comps reading is that it's so broad. Seriously, I still haven't adjusted back from my thesis work, where I got to focus on my own particular research all the time. And then I took coursework, and felt disconnected. And then I started comps reading, and I felt even more disconnected, because now I'm hardly even around other grad students. Just me, my books, and my students in my seminars.

There are books in my comps lists that are related to my particular scholarly interests, but usually I'm working on filling in the gaps in my knowledge, studying everything but my specific scholarly interests.

I didn't realise how disconnected I was feeling until this week. You know, this past week has caused a lot of simmering feelings to rise to the surface. Everything's been magnified, as I've been trying to sort through and confront my own emotions. (Is it odd to discuss my scholarly work in terms of emotions? It's the only way I know how to do it. Have I mentioned that I'm extremely off-the-charts INFP?) The other day, I hit a point of frustration with my work. I complained to Chris that it felt like I didn't care about what I did anymore. I just kept working because I didn't want to get a real job and I didn't know anything else that I could do. And because I couldn't picture myself outside of academia. When I looked at things honestly, I knew that what I'd said wasn't entirely true. But it was true that I was having a lot of trouble caring.

And then, this afternoon I went to the website of the major scholarly association in my field, to look up next fall's conference. (One of the other grad students mention that their Call For Papers was up, and that it's on the West Coast this year. I'm not going to submit a paper this time, but I wanted to look up the previous conferences, to see who would be there and how much it would cost.) And I got giddy, just looking over all of it. Titles and names jumped out at me, and I got all excited about different people's research. On that website, I also found a fellowship for which I want to apply. That gives me two different funding possibilities for getting me to Germany.

And, just like that, I cared again.