library.

tonight i was very disturbed.  you see, i was innocently minding my own business, driving home from a doctor's appointment, when this story came on the radio.  all about a library that GOT RID OF ITS BOOKS.  excuse me!?  how can a library be a library without any books?  it makes no sense!

okay.  granted the library subscribed to a database with millions of digital books.  and it acquired some kindles students can check out.  but i'm very sorry to say digital books and digital book readers do not a library make.

now, don't get me wrong.  i recognize the value of digital resources.  i use them all the time in my own research.  i love searchable text databases.  i love having online access to full text articles.  but i also print up the articles or chapters that i find pertinent to my research.  why? because there's an enormous difference between reading material on a screen and reading it in print format.

it's true that most digital readers allow for annotation in some way or another, but from what i've heard it's cumbersome at best.  i've also been told that accessing footnotes on digital readers is difficult.  both of those tools--annotating a text and accessing that text's notes--are invaluable to academic reading and research.  and then there's the small detail of memory.  i frequently find things in a text because i remember that it was at the top of the left side of a page (or somesuch).  maybe i'm weird, but there's just something more memorable about  a physical text than a nondescript screen of text.

and all of that doesn't even touch the physical beauty of a book and of stacks of books.  there's something magical about a library that cannot be duplicated.  books have lives, beyond the life they contain in their text.  they represent the interests and tastes and loves of the people who owned them, the priorities and emphases of the institutions that acquired them.  when someone dies and leaves behind a library, some part of her continues to live.  when someone gives a book, he also give some little bit of himself.  how could we possibly imagine that a world without books, even one in which all of the same information was immediately searchable and accessible through digital means, would be a world in which we would want to live?

i love digital tools.  i use them all the time.  but i hope i never get to the point that i choose digital texts over my lovely, beautiful, wonderful books.

bedlam.

tomorrow, november 9, is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall.  i remember learning about it as a freshman in high school, recognizing its importance.  but i think the most powerful experience i had regarding the wall and what it represented was when i visited the imperial war museum in london.  outside, on the museum's peaceful grounds, i found a chunk of the wall with wide open eyes and an even wider open mouth shouting the words "change your life."

i spent hours alone at the imperial war museum, wandering exhibits that captured and explained the horrors of the great war and its successor, world war II.  i've always had a fascination with these two wars--with how the entire world could get caught up in such violence.  my visit to this particular museum was as much an act of homage to those who died and fought in the wars as it was an educational excursion for my own benefit.  because i had lived through the end of the cold war and the fall of the wall, this particular piece was especially powerful for me.

but what was the most powerful was the location of the museum.  you see, the imperial war museum is housed in what remains of the priory of st. mary of bethlehem, later known as bethlem royal hospital, more commonly known as bedlam.  first the priory and then bethlem royal hospital specialized in caring for the insane.  the juxtapositions of this site, its current focus on two of the most disastrous wars in history, its name's popular connotation of insanity itself, and the birthplace of jesus strike me as not only interesting, but apt.  i do not believe that christianity necessarily causes either insanity or war, but i do believe that the bastardization and misunderstanding of christianity is at the root of a great deal of both insanity and bloodshed.  and this museum, with its long and rich heritage, captures that unfortunate history of christianity's bastard children.

problem.

so i have a problem.  just a slight dilemma.  you see, i'm in the middle of prepping for my phd exams.  and i'm getting more and more excited as i work.  but i have to pay my bills.  which means i have to teach.  which means i really should be grading the 225 paper and 75 journals (not to mention numerous homework assignments) i have recently collected.  but i just don't want to.  i want to read.  and research.  and write.  i don't want to grade.

but then there's the little problem of rent.  and food.  so i suppose i'll grade the damn papers.  wish me speedy grading.

books.

i grew up reading.  i remember being six years old and bored, pestering my mother about what i could do.  she took me into the living room, pulled a bobbsey twins novel off the bookshelf, and suggested i read.  so i did.  and i never looked back.

the living room in our house was a treasure trove of books.  novels, poetry, short stories, encyclopedias, dictionaries, art books, books on how things worked, volumes of fiction for children.  you think of a kind of book, and you could probably find it in there.  i thought it was normal to have a full wall of books in a room, to have books in every room of the house.  i didn't realize that some people relegate the few books they have to the closet or only buy books as decorating pieces.  for me, books were a way of living lives i couldn't otherwise access.

and now--now i'm a bit of a book whore, to borrow a phrase from an old professor.  i love just about any kind of book.  fiction, non-fiction, poetry, prose, biographies, essays, history.  i love the feel of a book--the heft of its weight in my hand.  i love the smell of books that you only find in a space filled to the brim with texts.  and i love the look of books on a shelf; there was one particular aisle in the BYU library that i especially loved because most of the spines were red.

but most of all, i love losing myself in a book.  which makes my current task more pleasure than task, since it requires reading and reading and then reading some more (in preparation for my exams).  last week, it was a text about relationships between women, don quixote, and community.  this week, it is the origins of the novel and a novel in verse.  and next week will bring more.  this is a life i could get used to.


{photo by john }

alive.

last spring, i yet again faced the decision of whether to remain in school.  i was on the tail end of a serious bout of depression, just starting to come out of it.  i was out of funding.  and i didn't know if i had it in me to continue the program.  so i took another quarter off to really focus on getting myself healthy again and to think carefully about how to move forward.  by june, i had decided to return to school.  but i was still hesitant about making contact with my committee members and really taking the steps necessary to move forward.  i started some reading, but that was about it.

well, this week i decided it was time to make this decision a reality.  so sunday night, i had the doctor and the dean give me a pep talk and then i went home and sent emails to all four of my committee members.  tonight i met with my advisor, and spent half an hour talking about the logic of my project and receiving advice about books to add or remove from my lists.  tomorrow i'll meet with another committee member about my lists.  and next week with committee member three.  i'm still waiting to hear back from my 4th committee member.

it feels good to be moving.  for the first time in a very long time, i'm truly excited about my reading.  i'm talking back to my books.  i'm making connections between them.  i feel invigorated and alive.  and that feels very good.

equally.

i remember the day i proclaimed to my history class at BYU that i was a feminist.  i was 23 years old.  i had just done a group presentation about the women's rights movement.  i covered the question of abortion rights, since it would be incredibly ill-informed to explore the women's rights movement without talking about abortion rights and no one else was willing to do it.  i was alone in my proclamation.

the entire experience of that presentation was a little surreal.  it was a cold war history course.  one of the biggest assignments was to participate in a group presentation on the various civil rights movements of the 60s (and the moral majority movement of the 80s).  i naturally chose to cover the women's movement.  our presentation was to last 40 minutes.  we were supposed to make it multimedia, to dress our part, to decorate our classroom, etc.  so we did the following:

• a video-taped sketch of a woman experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace
• another video sketch of a protest for women's rights
• each of us painted protest signs covering our aspect of the movement
• in-depth research and oral presentation of our findings

we gathered on campus one saturday afternoon to film our sketches and make our decorations for our classroom.  doing my part, i painted a sign that read "it's my body! abortion on demand."  and then we proceeded to the cafeteria to stage our mock protest.  i innocently leaned my sign face out so i wouldn't get wet paint on the wall, not thinking at all about how people would react to seeing it.  we decided to move on to a quieter part of the student center so we wouldn't disturb the few people present.  we did so and began filming for our protest video, only to be interrupted by an irate woman who screamed at us about how she couldn't believe that we would do such a thing on BYU's campus, that she was going to send her children there and would not tolerate such sentiments which obviously went contrary to church teachings, that what we were doing was immoral and illegal and that she had called the police.  one of the members of my group quietly explained that we were simply doing a homework assignment, which sadly did little to placate this woman.  apparently she didn't fancy the idea of us even learning about protests for abortion rights any more than she fancied the idea of us actually protesting for them.  the police did come and we explained ourselves and then the police left.  the next week we were written up in the daily universe's infamous police beat.

after that experience, i realized i better really know my stuff about abortion before presenting the issue in class.  so i did my research--hours spent in the library and media center reading and watching documentaries.  i learned a lot doing my research; here's a sample of the more interesting points:

• prior to legalization, botched abortions accounted for thousands of deaths per annum, comprising close to 50% of the maternal mortality rate;
• abortion has a long history: the earliest recorded evidence of an abortion dated to something like 1500 b.c.e.
  
• it was only in the 1880s that the catholic church came down hard against all abortion (prior to that it was generally acceptable for a catholic woman to abort a fetus in the first trimester and later term abortions were not deemed as serious as murder)
• one of my roommate's mothers recalled one of her roommates being advised to attempt to induce a miscarriage by a doctor in the BYU health center

armed with this knowledge and other similar facts, i was fired up to make my case.  in class, i stood on the table, dressed like a hippy, with props at my feet--a bottle of bleach, a wire hanger, etc.--,which represented the methods of back-alley and self-induced abortions.  from that tabletop, i delivered a rally speech regarding the right to abortion, every bit as impassioned as the original protesters for the right.  you see, i had become so persuaded by the evidence i had gained that i had moved from being intellectually pro-choice to being adamantly pro-choice (a stance i maintain).

at the end of the hour, my group and i resumed our seats in the classroom and our professor took over.  he asked the class who among us would call ourselves feminists.  i was the only one to raise my hand.  i did so immediately, with no hesitation.  i remember being slightly shocked that i was the only one out of fifty students willing to claim "feminist" as a self-descriptor.

a few days later, another group presented on the moral majority.  their presentation naturally included a pro-life segment, since anti-abortion sentiment was a primary fueling force in the moral majority.  they ended their presentation by holding a press-conference where the rest of the class acted as the press.  armed with all of my stats about abortion and the horrible consequences of its illegality, i hammered the woman who had covered the pro-life movement.  relentlessly.  i called her out on her hypocrisy when it came to valuing the lives of unborn fetuses over the lives of very alive women, women who may have other children or family members dependent on them.  i threw statistics at her about the numbers of women who died annually, the lengthy history of abortion, and its dubious status as "murder."  i thoroughly enjoyed giving her hell.  and watching her squirm as she had no answers for my questions.  (i really shouldn't relish making other people squirm, but sometimes i do.)

it was an interesting class for many reasons, but i'll remember it for what i learned about the women's movement, abortion, and the culture of my church.  i was honestly surprised that not one other person in that room would identify as feminist.  i knew that feminism had something of a bad rap in the church, but i also felt very strongly that christ's gospel supported the objectives of feminism, as did many of the church's teachings.  it was hard for me to realize that i was so alone in my stance on women's issues in the church.

that realization remains a hard thing.  today i learned that BYU is closing its women's research institute at the end of the year.  and that makes me sad.  because it again underscores that my church and my culture do not value women's issues as fully as they claim to; that all of the rhetoric about women's equality and value is just that--rhetoric.  the realities don't really support the rhetoric.  mormon women remain second-class citizens and will for a long time, i'm afraid.

when the day comes that the majority of a history class at BYU identifies easily as feminist, or, even better, that the question doesn't even have to be asked because the affirmative answer is taken for granted--then i may believe that the church values women equally to men.  when we can talk openly of and pray to both of our heavenly parents--then i may believe that the church values women equally to men.  when my worthiness is not questioned because i believe in the radical equality of all of god's children--then i may believe that the church values women equally to men.  but right now i'm afraid i do not believe that the church values women equally to men.

if you'd like to voice your opinion about the closure of the women's research institute, there are some great suggestions at the exponent blog.

forward.

a year ago we voted.  it was a day of celebration—celebration of the fading of america’s legacy of racism; celebration of a new, more hopeful chapter in american presidential history.  i watched obama and his family take the stage in chicago and teared up along with hundreds of thousands of other americans.  i teared up because there in front of me and millions of other americans was the evidence that what we have proclaimed for centuries was a little more true—all mankind was just a little more equal when america elected a young black man, the son of a mixed-race marriage which was not even legal in many states of the union when he was born.

i celebrated that night, but it was a bittersweet celebration.  while my presidential candidate had won, carrying his nation forward towards equality, my state voted against equality by passing prop. 8.  all night as i watched the presidential election results roll in, i kept tabs on the prop. 8 battle.  and all night, it kept a damper on my spirits.  i have no doubt that in fifty years, this nation will look back to the elections and laws regarding gay marriage and will see them as the shameful equal of laws and elections that denied african americans the right to vote and to receive an equal education and to marry where they loved.

tonight there’s a chance that this nation will start to move out of the shadow of anti-gay bigotry.  in maine, the electorate will decide whether to uphold the law passed by their duly elected representatives legalizing gay marriage.  and right now—right now they have upheld gay marriage 53% to 47%.  i can only hope that this slim majority will be as tenacious as the equally slim majority by which prop. 8 passed in california a year ago.  perhaps this small state will live up to its motto (dirigo) tonight and lead the nation another step towards equality.

depressionware.

tonight a poem by one of my favorite poets, ted kooser.

Depression Glass

It seemed those rose-pink dishes
she kept for special company
were always cold, brought
down from the shelf in jingling stacks,
the plates like the panes of ice
she broke from the water bucket
winter mornings, the flaring cups
like tulips that opened too early
and got bitten by frost.  They chilled
the coffee no matter how quickly
you drank, while a heavy
everyday mug would have kept
a splash hot for the better
part of a conversation.  It was hard
to hold up your end of the gossip
with your coffee cold, but it was
a special occasion, just the same,
to sit at her kitchen table
and sip the bitter percolation
of the past week's rumors from cups
it had taken a year to collect
at the grocery, with one piece free
for each five pounds of flour.

i love this poem because it reminds me of my mama.  i grew up looking at her depression ware, which she inherited from her grandma.  it was so beautiful with its faceted surfaces and its warm rosy color.  and i love what it represents--the effort at refinement in spite of difficulty and poverty; the collection of beautiful pieces as part of providing for a family's needs.  i remember the surprise i felt when my mom explained that the pieces came sewn into the bags of flour purchased at the local grocer.  i couldn't imagine acquiring finery through such means.  maybe this is part of why i've always despised fine china. because in my family, the finest china was collected free with bags of flour.

someday i hope i have a piece or two of my great-grandma's depression ware to catch the light and gleam, beautifully reminding me of the simplicity and honesty of my roots.

NaBloPoMo

okay.  so that title is just about the ugliest sounding word imaginable, but it is what it is: the acronym for National Blog Posting Month, which i decided to participate in this year.  mostly because yesterday i actually looked at my post count for the last year and it's been rather dismal.  this is what happens when i get sucked into depression--i stop writing.  but i'm actually happy right now, so i don't have the depression excuse.  and there's a lot i've been wanting to write about.  so here i am.  committed to writing daily for at least a month.

so follow along if you'd like.  or participate on your own blog.  feel free to steal my logo on the right (my very first .pdf; i'm so proud) if you want a badge for your blog.

and that is all you get for today, because now i need to go and write some emails to my advisors.

romance.

what i learned about romance from refrigerator poetry:

• nothing happens to or is done by me, as there are no first person pronouns
• in other words, everything romantic happens to someone else
• everything happens in the past tense; no present or future loving, apparently
• more happens to him or by his than to her or by hers (very little by hers, actually, since there is no 's' to make her into hers)
• for some reason saber-toothed tigers are romantic
• as are big dogs
• and pirate ships
• there are some truly disturbing images for female genitalia
• and hilarious ones for male genitalia
• most nouns are adjectively enhanced
• most adjectives come coupled
• he is much more active and aggressive than she
• i'm too embarrassed of the naughty bits to display them on the fridge where my innocent taiwanese roommate would see them; they live in a little plastic box on top of the fridge

and now i know everything i need to know about romance.  too bad it won't happen to me (see items one and two, above).

questions.

"i beg you . . . to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.  don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.  and the point is, to live everything.  live the questions now.  perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." --rainer maria rilke, letters to a young poet 

i encountered this passage from rilke again yesterday, this time on a quotable magnet in barnes & noble.  and there, in the middle of busy, superficial fashion island, it spoke to me again.

i want to live this way, loving the unresolved questions of life, embracing them as bearers of knowledge and wisdom that living will bring.  there is so very much that is uncertain in this world.  far more than there is that is known and understood.  i want to coexist with the questions, rather than beat them out of existence with pompous certainty.  i want to wrestle with them, as jacob wrestles the angel--struggling all through the night and, even in the face of injury, demanding a blessing.  and the blessing?  a new name: israel, or 'one who has prevailed with god.'  i believe god lies not in the answers, but in the questions.  in living them fully and struggling with them honestly, rather than giving pat answers which gloss over the messiness of life and truth and god.  and i believe if we live honestly these questions, this messiness, we will live our way into answers, prevailing even with god.

failure.

ever tried. ever failed. no matter. try again. fail again. fail better. --samuel beckett

i've been thinking about failure lately.  it's an interesting thing, failure, because its definition is slippery.  what does it mean to fail?  does it mean not to accomplish what you set out to accomplish?  does it mean to disappoint others by not accomplishing what they expected you to accomplish?  does it mean not hitting certain benchmarks of success on a prescribed timeline?

at different moments in my life, failure has meant each of those things.  i've nearly dropped out of grad school more times than i can count.  each time i felt disappointment in my own failure to achieve what i had planned to achieve.  but each time i also felt a wonderful sense of release and opportunity for a fresh start.  and i have been accutely aware of the ways in which i have failed to conform to the expectations of others, both in my family and in my church community.  but these failures don't feel like personal failures; they feel like explorations and discoveries, my true self emerging from beneath layers of prescription.

the most difficult version of failure i've had to deal with is the failure to achieve life goals on the timeline i've always been taught to accept.  i'm 34 and unmarried.  i have no children.  purchasing a house seems like a distant fantasy.  i'm still a student after 14 years of school, and will be for another three.  finding a job in my field seems an even more distant fantasy than owning a house.  and then there's the complication of being unsure i even want to accomplish those goals.  it's a constant struggle to remind myself that it's okay not to have achieved these benchmarks by age XX, that it's okay to be different from the prescribed norm i grew up with.  when i fail to remind myself of that, i begin to fail in other ways, too.  because dwelling on the fact that where i am in life constitutes failure according to some grand schema developed by someone else interferes with my ability to succeed in my pursuits, making failure all the more likely.  it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.  not only do i end up a failure according to the prescribed metanarrative, but also according to my own ideas of what it means to be happy and successful.

so i try.  i try to remember that i don't want to be married; rather i want to be married to the right person with whom i can have the kind of relationship i want.  i try to remember that there is still time to accomplish my goals and many avenues to them, not just one.  i try to remember that owning a home is not, in and of itself, a good thing; that sometimes there are alternative and more sustainable ways of living.  and mostly i try to remember that the only measuring stick that matters is my own conscience, not others' prescriptions.

afternoon.

it's friday afternoon.  i've had a delicious mid-afternoon nap.  and now i've steeped myself a pot of my favorite rubyfruit tea.  my new apartment is clean and already feels like my home.  there's a picasso on one wall, a matisse on another, and a hopper on a third.  and now i'll settle down with my tea and my book and make progress on my work.  and life--life is very good.

and you?  how have you spent your friday afternoon?

capable.

so this year, i'm on my own.  where school is concerned, that is.  i'm out of funding until i pass my exams (which i should have passed ages ago).  so i'm paying my own way this year.  which means i'm dependent on financial aid.  can't pay tuition without a loan.  and yesterday--yesterday i got this horrible message form the financial aid office telling me i wasn't eligible for financial aid due to insufficient academic progress.  mind you, this is one day after i put nearly $4,000 in tuition on my credit card, depending on my loan to come through to pay it off.

so i panicked.  for about 45 minutes.  just sat on my bed with thoughts of failure and not being able to finish my program whirling through my head.  it was miserable.

and then i snapped myself out of it and got to work.  prepped a brief lesson for my classes.  got to school to teach.  let my students out a bit early each hour so i could make phone calls while campus offices were open.  i made an appointment with the ombudsman to begin the appeals process.  i emailed a faculty mentor to get her advice.  i emailed the chair of graduate studies to alert him to the situation and ask if we could meet to discuss it.  i called the office that helped me procure a leave of absence last year to see if they could help advocate for me.  i did everything i could think of to set an appeal in motion and get my ducks in a row.

everything except talk to the financial aid office, that is.  because they never answered their phone, there was no voicemail option (even though their phone said there was) and no email option (even though their website said there was).  it was very frustrating.

so first thing this morning i went to campus to visit the financial aid office.  where i discovered there had been a clerical error.  their computer had not registered that i was on academic leave last year and so had disqualified me.  three minutes and it was fixed.  i should get my financial aid award tomorrow.

and i am proud of myself.  a year ago i would have had a massive panic attack had this happened.  and then just given up.  six months ago, i would have melted into a puddle of tears.  but yesterday i did what needed to be done.  calmly and rationally assessing the situation and finding alternatives.  it felt lovely.  it's so good, after years of depression, to feel like myself.  to be capable and productive.

so here i go.  back into the breach, prepping for exams which i will take in may or june.  and next year i will write two chapters of my dissertation, with a third during the summer, so that fall of 2011 i can go on the job market.  and june of 2012 will see me robed to receive my third degree.  just watch and see.

happiness.

so yesterday was my birthday.  and i cannot say how glad i am to put a close to the last year--to heartbreak and major depression and everything that comes with it.  i've been thinking back over the year and have to admit that i don't have many more answers now to the questions i was asking then, but i am much happier. and it is good to be happy.  so here are a few things that make me happy:

• thai nakorn.  i just can't get enough.  and, happily, they have reopened their original location.
• a day at disneyland with a friend.  for free!  
• a birthday shopping spree at anthropologie.  that store is pure evil...
• a beautiful new niece who i can't wait to meet at christmastime.
• four rambunctious, mischievous nephews and an evening at chuck e. cheese's.
• making progress on my school work.
• seeing a copy of homer's iliad in the front seat of a slightly beat up full size pick-up.
• wonderful food and conversation with friends--not only at our birthday dinner, but often.
• a beautiful, cozy new scarf to take with me on my winter trip to new york.
• my good friend george's happiness in her new relationship.
• spending time with my beautiful little nieces, my little sister, and her wonderful husband.
• evenings out with my siblings and their spouses and our parents.

in short, life has made me happy.  and that in spite of the fact that not everything is peachy keen.  and i like being happy.