A couple minutes ago I walked into the office bathroom which has a single urinal and a single stall. I was whistling when I walked in. The stall was occupied, so I immediately stopped whistling and used the urinal.
Did I do the right thing? Or did it just make it more obvious that I knew someone was pooping?
Like everyone, I’d like think I have good taste in music. But the more I listen, the more I have no idea what my taste is. I love 90′s/00′s alternative country, I love 1960′s gut wrenching blues, I love 90′s gansta rap, I love classical, if I’m in the right mood and want to impress someone. There are very few genres I don’t like.
A colleague I taught with and wrote musical reviews for some online magazines once said that he loved any music that “sounded like it took passion to make.” I understand what he meant. I appreciate passion, and it can certainly help a good song or artist become great. But I think first and foremost I want musicians to have talent. And a good writer. So for me to love a song, I want passion from a talented musician, and good lyrics. As long as the musician is authentic.
Problem is, while I’d like this all to be true, it’s not. I mean, it is true. Many of my favorite artist and songs — Bob Dylan’s Isis, Buddy Guy’s First Time I Met the Blues, Johann Sabastian Bach’s Toccata & Fugue (this is an outright lie — I had to look up what Bach’s first name and best songs were), or the Old 97′s Time Bomb involve talented musicians singing well-written songs with passion and authenticity.
But often — very often — I just want pure, unadulterated, shitty pop. It can be clever — Lily Allen and Kate Nash’s brand of Brit pop works great — but it doesn’t have to be. For a full year I could not get enough of Sheryl Crowe’s bubble-gum-like “Soak Up the Sun.” For another 18 months Gwen Stefani’s completely mindless “Hollaback Girl” was number 1 on my Ipod. I told people it was ironic. It wasn’t. I just wanted to hear that beat.
At my bachelor party, which involved steak, beer, golf, and guns, all in copious amounts, my friend asked what music I wanted to hear. ”I’d love to hear some Dave Matthews,” I said.
“You don’t have to be a dick about it,” my friend said. I played it off like I had been a dick. But I hadn’t. I wanted to hear Dave.
Perhaps most humiliating was when my mom found a single tape of Madonna’s Vogue in my room in 6th Grade. ”You like Madonna’s music?” she asked.
“Uh,” I answered.
“Because judging by this picture, it doesn’t seem like it’s her songs you like.” I stayed silent. The single cover had a pre-Gollum-armed Madonna arching her back while wearing skimpy lingerie. I did really like that picture, but that’s not why I bought the single. But I let my Mom think I was simply horny rather than admit the truth. I had a far more shameful lust for mindless pop.
Even though most of the time I feel like it’s me who needs a life coach, one of my students yesterday told me I should become one. Even though he has a full-time offer at an unnamed “big firm,” he has been exploring how he can continue to learn and grow through side projects. He said he Googled “how to become a life coach” and the first person he thought of was me.
Part of me feels like this is a stupid idea, and part of me was like, “Hmmm!” The stupid idea part thinks that life coaching is dumb. That it’s a way for people to make money off of people who don’t know any better.
However, the other part of me thinks is a good idea – with some caveats. First, I do a lot of “life coaching” already through my job. Students and alumni – actually, I’ve even had a few of our corporate partners come in for it – come to me with the sort of big-sigh, “I-don’t-know-what-I-want-to-do-with-my-life” crisis. I can’t count the amount of hours I’ve spent asking them questions, getting to know their strengths, helping them identify what it is they want to do, and then offering (fairly sparse) advice. After all, my real task is to help them discover what it is they really want. I’ve often in my mind thought, “Well, that’s not what I would have chosen,” but it’s not me who’s choosing.
This could be me. Only not in sports.
It would be fun to offer some sort of initial interview and then coaching sessions to people to help them with the same process. I don’t know what shape it would take, or if this is where I want to invest my limited time, but it is an interesting thought.
The caveats would be that the people I can coach best are my own students, and I’m not going to start charging them a fee for walking in my office. And all the people I’ve coached have been, like the children in Lake Woebegone, above average. It’s easy to coach people who already have a lot going for them. I’m not sure I’d be as beneficial for someone who’s down on their luck, and a paying client isn’t necessarily someone I can – or would be willing to – connect up with my network the way I can for students.
Have you started a side business like life coaching? What are the benefits and risks?
Last week I wasn’t feeling very well. I had been pushing pretty hard all week. I was up till midnight or later for five nights in a row, and then up at 5:30AM because the Bubus doesn’t give a poop how little sleep I get.
Even though I thought I felt bad because of the lack of sleep and mild dehydration, I decided to check my symptoms on Web MD, since one of my symptoms was procrastinating. I entered in my symptoms. I felt weak, dizzy, fatigued, stiff, achy, had a short attention span, and . . . what was I talking about? Zing!
After skipping over likely possibilities such as “the common cold,” and ”sleep deprived,” Web MD came up with this:
That’s right. I might have the plague. I knew this warm weather was going to have some strange effects. Turns out, we are all going to die from the plague.
Have you ever put off important decisions until after a particular event has occurred? For example, when I was pregnant, I put off worrying about anything baby-related until after the holidays. Or like how you might go to grad school partly to avoid having to make a decision about a job.
This year’s procrastination destination was the trip to Brazil. I had put off a lot of decisions, big and small, until the trip. Partly because putting together the trip was a lot of work, and partly because it fell at a good juncture to make some decisions. Bubus would be almost 10 months. I would be well on my way to finishing my PhD. And we’d have been in our house for almost three years, at which point we no longer had to pay back the $8K we got for buying it when we did.
So here we are, at procrastination juncture.
I need to put the finishing touches on my dissertation and give it to my adviser, hopefully to be approved for defense. Hub needs a new phone. I need to make dentist appointments for at least two of us… maybe all three now that Bub has six teeth. We need to figure out what we’re going to “do with our lives” (will I get a new job? stay put? try to take on some additional responsibilities)? And the question that’s been perplexing me the most, I need to figure out if I want to wean Bubs at a year or not. Honestly, today I’m so tired and hungry (pumping/breastfeeding makes me ravenous) that I want to wean him like, right now.
Two major things have defined my life over the past couple of years – working on a dissertation and being pregnant/breastfeeding. My mind and my body have both been dedicated to those endeavors, and now I’m facing the end game for both of them at the same time. Part of me is overjoyed, and part of me is plotting how to f everything up so I stay in this limbo for just a bit longer. Well, at least with the dissertation. Don’t see how I can f up and continue to breastfeed.
I’ll keep you posted, it’s kind of a weird/excited/anxious/nauseating place to be right now. Good things are afoot, but they also mean change.
So my main resolution this year is to be more frugal. I’m hoping to continue to document my journey. I think if I set some specific goals, that it will help in actually becoming more frugal. So for January, step one is to go and get a library card and check out e-books on my Kindle rather than spending so much at Amazon. Sorry, Amazon. I know you love me. I have kind of an Amazon addiction. You can ORDER THINGS FROM YOUR PHONE IN YOUR BED, AND THEY ARRIVE AT YOUR HOUSE. Who is not addicted to this?
My second resolution, which is really a life goal, is to make sure that family comes first.
I got a little caught up in the craziness of work this year. We have a lot of events in December, and I didn’t do a great job of saying, “Nope, sorry, gotta head home” a couple of times when I probably should have. Of course work is work, and sometimes you are going to miss bedtime. But if you don’t have to… don’t.
This one is harder to break down into smaller steps, but I think that I’ll just focus on some small things. One is to make dinner and clean up the kitchen when I’m done. Sure, it’s great for one person to cook and the other to clean up, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of the time, Hub does both. It’s also not like one person is cooking and the other is drinking wine like in the old days BB (Before Bub). If one of us is cooking dinner, then the other of us is giving Bub a bath and getting him to bed. So making sure that I start and finish a job – even a “small” job like cooking dinner – is a tangible way of honoring my commitment to my family.
Given that our food posts are less popular than they used to be, there’s nothing wrong with a simple bowl of pasta for dinner.
Plus, it helps out with that whole “saving money” thing to eat at home and not to keep asking to go out to dinner.
To recap… in January, I’m going to get a library card to save money on buying books, and I’m going to make dinner – start to finish, meaning chopping to running the dishwasher – most nights for my family. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.
You may have noticed that we haven’t been blogging that much.
Chalk it up to the holidays, chalk it up to work being busy, or whatever – but it became clear that blogging had to take a backseat for awhile.
This blog has been around for awhile now, and you may accuse us of getting somewhat into a sophomore slump. You know, you’ve done pretty well, but now you’re like, “What’s the point?” You start to get angst-y. You start to be like, “Where’s my book deal?” I mean, not really, but there is that part of you that does think that.
I don’t think that means that it’s a lost cause, or that keeping a record isn’t worthwhile. It’s fun to write, and that’s part of the reason for doing this. Creating a blog allows for an off-the-cuff, fun, and spontaneous way to put down thoughts. Given all the well-researched, footnoted writing I do for work and school, it’s nice not to have to cite my sources.
I can’t resolve to blog more, but I can say that I will try to enjoy it more. Make it a fun part of my day rather than a chore.
Here’s to 2012.
This morning I said to Hub, “You wouldn’t want to run a marathon, would you?” To which he responded, “I might.” Shocker. I thought he hated running. Of course, he likes competition, so there’s that.
So we decided that maybe we could run a half marathon together. Are we going to do it? Should we? It seems like all my blog friends run, so maybe we should, too.
We would probably run the National Half Marathon. There’s also a marathon associated with it, so you know, if we ever get that urge. Which I probably won’t. I ran a 10K once and thought I was going to die. Also, I heard somewhere that you will definitely pee yourself if you run a marathon, which is like my worst fear ever. Then some friends told me that was absolutely crazy, you do not pee yourself running a marathon, and I am silly for thinking that. WHAT TO BELIEVE? Maybe they are lying because they don’t want to admit that they, themselves, HAVE peed themselves. OR WORSE.
There’s also the issue of that I think my hip is busted. I’m like an old lady with a broken hip. But seriously, I think something might be wrong with it. I should make an appointment or something.
So, if we decide to run, we’ll let you all know. Maybe someone can baby-sit for us.
There’s a whole new crop of worries that I have as a parent. Of course there’s the macro level choices – how to discipline, where to send to school, how to feed ‘em – but I think the more persistent worries are the ones that are the little day-to-day choices. Here are some of my recurring ones:
What, me worry?
- Does this plastic contain BPA? What’s the big deal about BPA anyway? If it says it’s BPA free, what if it’s lying? And wait, what’s the deal with BPA again?
- When I’m leaving in the morning with the 19 bags I carry (OK, 3 – breastpump, daycare supplies, briefcase, and sometimes a separate bag for lunch), how should I get all of them and Bub in the car? Risk tripping with 4 bags and a baby by making one trip? Leave the baby in the house, where he could fall or stick his finger in a plug, while I run the bags out to the car? Run the baby out first and put him in the carseat, where he can’t move but could get stolen, while I go back and get the bags? Pack the car the night before where stuff could get stolen out of it? Just put everything in a suitcase? Forget the bags? Streamline (I’ve tried)?
- When I’m at the grocery store, how do I bring the cart back? Put the baby in the car and then bring the cart back (again, baby could get stolen – I know this is sort of suburban urban legend, but still)? Carry the baby and the cart and risk tripping with the baby?
I am in the midst of finishing the bulk of my dissertation, a biography of a former dean.
Chapters 3 and 4 have been written, and 5 is in the works. Once those three chapters are done, I can review them with my narrator and make sure I haven’t made glaring errors or left anything out. I’ll then put together my chapter on methodology and finally, the introduction. I know, it seems backwards, but that’s my plan.
The new way to do research - photograph stuff at the library instead of paying for photocopies. Thanks, Technology!
I’ve found that I’ve become superstitious about getting it finished. As I posted on Tuesday, the room I work in is an absolute wreck. I’m afraid of moving or picking up anything before I have at least these three chapters done, however. It’s as if I might accidentally throw something out that I need. Or maybe it’s the same as how an athlete has to wear a certain item of clothing or perform certain rituals before every game.
I also worry that if I blog too much, I’ll expend too much energy in writing here what I should be writing elsewhere. So I’ve been a bit reticent to write.
And now I’m off to write some more on Chapter 5. Wish me luck.
