Lord, Lord, Lord

The musician featured is one of several blues musicians who came to my institution for a panel conversation with students (which I moderated) and a concert.  It was phenomenal. You can't never find it in no book.  You just got to inherit the blues.

Poor Guy

Moody me.  Feeling icky, wanting to wrap myself up in a throw cover and abscond to our bedroom.  After tearfully and only minimally articulating "what was wrong" (as much as could be "wrong" during these times), I did exactly that.

For a while I hunched over my laptop and started reading over and commenting on a student's intro of his upcoming paper replete with quotations from Notorious B.I.G and Easy-E (and boy, saddown.  I get it, suburban white kids listen to rap, too and you're cool and in the know and want to interweave your problematically attained "cred" into a paper about the political implications of Julius Caesar, but it's woefully unsuccessful and just...nah), but then I stopped and (again tearfully) called my mom.

During this maternal phone call, my husband texted me and said he was on his way to pick up a few things from Kroger, did I need anything.  I texted back and said that I didn't.  When I finished up with mother dearest, I finally (untearfully) emerged.

He had already made it back from the grocery store and smilingly said he was making me a cheesecake.  What?  Making me a cheesecake?  Are you serious?  I went into the kitchen and saw cream cheese, sugar, Nutella, vanilla extract and a pie crust out on the counter.

I immediately broke down sobbing and (quite tearfully) wailing, "You are so sweeeeett!"

Poor guy can't win for losing.

Smorgasbord

It's been a little while.  Not much missed, just grinding on the grind.  Knee deep in Julius Caesar, cortometrajes, and still on that wait.  There's still the baby wait, albeit the countdown is much less anxiety fraught this month.  And the current job wait: Will I get an offer from another place to possibly use as leverage where I am?

A jumble of little things.  Nothing splashy.

Kale

Just as I became a born-again flosser when I got my first cavity at 19, I've become a born-again kale eater.  Like, everything I read about kale is that it is basically ambrosia.  The healthiest superfood to ever be made available to mere mortals.  And I have jumped onto the bandwagon with gusto.  So far I've only branched out into salads with kale and soups with kale, but I'm going to just start putting it into stuff.  I want to eat healthy, gosh darn it. And I want any tiny little being that may be on the way to be filled with all the healthy things.

I don't want to care about it.

Whenever there's a thing I desire, a.k.a. having a baby, that has all kinds of complex moving parts accompanying it, I don't want to care about it.  If I do anything my brain considers "extra," then I'm caring about it, and caring about it too much.  The health-conscious stuff (eating right, vitamins, exercise) isn't extra.  It's what I would or should be doing to take care of myself, baby or no baby.  But little "tricks" and teas and basal body temperature taking read extra to me right now.  I'm still in the scientifically circumscribed worry-free zone (hasn't been a year), and I'm still technically under 35 (although that's about to change quick).  I don't want to push for it. Grab at it like a little kid near the rows of candy in the check-out line.  I want to be chill and patient.  I want to gingerly wrap it up and place it on a comfy little shelf, away from me, right now.

So, I noticed you wear skirts.

After a meeting a fellow professor approached me and said, "I noticed you were one of the only ones on the hall who wears dresses and skirts and cute tights a lot.  I was wanting to start wearing more skirts, so I thought I'd talk to you."  Um?  I sort of started laughing nervously and felt embarrassed.  I admitted as much and then said something like, "I'm not a fashion expert or anything, but yeah, sure, we can get together sometime." (?)  I mean, how else are you supposed to respond to that?  What did she want to know, really?  Where I go shopping or whether I'm part of a cult?  Should I feel flattered?  Should I feel scrutinized?  I get cagey about being outed as a skirt-wearer.  I mean it's fine, and I've explained my convictions to plenty of non-skirt wearers throughout my life.  But in academia, things like religious convictions are about as intelligible as Proto-Indo-European, a language that is completely hypothetical.

Husband and home

I'm pretty pleased to have a husband who goes shopping, does dishes, washes clothes, vacuums, and is planning to be equally as involved whenever we find out we're expecting. (We're still working on the cooking part, but he can make a mean skillet of Hamburger Helper.)  I guess it's more the norm now--men sharing more of the load of chores, being more involved in their partners' pregnancies and childcare--but after growing up with a dad who wasn't one of these modern men (to his credit, he did at least wash and iron his own clothes), I feel like I lucked out.  Maybe my husband feels the same?