Re-entry

This weekend I read an article about Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and his recent return to earth after spending five months aboard the International Space Station. Hadfield is an Internet celebrity because of the Twitter account he maintained while in space, and he became a virtual rock star after sharing on YouTube a video of himself performing a version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in zero-gravity. What I found most interesting about the article describing Hadfield’s homecoming, however, was his description of the intensive rehabilitation he and other returning astronauts have to undergo upon re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere, their bodies having become unaccustomed to the incessant pull of gravity:

“Right after I landed I could feel the weight of my lips and tongue … I hadn’t realized that I had learned to talk with a weightless tongue,” he said.

He is suffering overall body soreness, particularly in his neck and back which are again having to support his head after months in weightlessness.

These details about an otherwise healthy man having to relearn the basic mechanics of life on earth—like how to shower without fainting or how to walk on feet that are no longer toughened with protective calluses—is fascinating enough, but I found them even more interesting since I’m still reading Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, which also provides fascinating insight into life after zero-gravity. (If Roach’s book sounds familiar, it might be because I blogged it back in April.) What is it like to return to the familiar weighted existence of “home” after having floated rootless in space for so long?

I’ve previously used the term “Re-entry” to describe my own experience of coming back to my mundane life at the end of the academic year, after having spent too much time buckled down and focused on the minutiae of end-term grading. In many ways, my experience feels like the opposite of Hadfield’s: all those paper-piles and an accumulation of end-term tasks were oppressively weighty, and now I’ve been freed to float in the relative tranquility of summer, with “only” my online classes to tether me to earth.

But even so, the end of every academic year requires more than a bit of rehabilitation. While I was laden with papers and projects, I fell behind with other obligations and am now slowly digging my way out, taking my car for a long-overdue oil change on Friday, for instance, while slowly re-introducing myself to friends who don’t see much of me during the school year. I still need a haircut, which is something I never seem to find time for during a busy academic term; I still need to clean the bathroom. The dusty bookshelves and piles of unsorted junk in the basement—tasks I’d optimistically thought I’d tackle over winter break—are still staring me in the face, silently asking me “If not now, when?”

Before I devote myself to such weighty projects, however, I want to take a few days to enjoy the (relative) weightlessness of summer; before I devote myself to my summer checklist of projects, I want to spend some time doing as close to “nothing” as I can get away with. A couple times this past week, for instance, I found myself puttering around our backyard with a camera, simply content to spend time enjoying the scenery. Chris Hadfield has also been enjoying the earthly (and entirely grounding) art of puttering, noting that he and his NASA colleague Thomas Marshburn have been “sort of tottering around like two old duffers in an old folks home” while rehabilitating in Houston. It sounds like re-entry is the same regardless of where you’re returning from.

Click here for more photos of rain-bejeweled greenery, shot during this morning’s stint of backyard-puttering. Enjoy!

 

Preparing a canvas

Painters know that before you get down to work, you have to prepare your canvas. If you’re a street artist, this means painting over the work of those who preceded you, creating an empty space for your own design. Although graffiti might seem to be a hurried medium, creating a multicolored design takes time. Each layer of paint has to dry before you apply the next, so you can’t hurry the process. First you have to prepare your canvas, then you have to work through each stage to complete your work-in-progress.

This week is finals week at Framingham State, so I’m busy with end-term grading. I have two classes’ worth of essay portfolios and final exams to read along with quiz averages and participation grades to calculate. Every term, I tell myself I’ll finish these grading tasks early, keeping well ahead of my paper-piles, and every term, things go more slowly than I’d anticipated. It takes a while for layers of paint to dry, and it takes a while to read through a thick paper-pile.

Every finals week, I find myself checking off a whole list of tasks before I get settled down to the business of grading. On Monday, I balanced the checkbook and paid bills; yesterday, I went grocery-shopping and led practice at the Zen Center; today, I did laundry and caught up with my two online classes, which are at the start and middle-point of their respective terms. Just because I have a huge grading pile doesn’t mean the other aspects of my life grind to a halt: the dogs still need to go out, the dishes still need to be washed, and I still need (or at least prefer) to wear clean clothes.

When I first started teaching, I thought this urge to check off tasks before settling down to grade was pure procrastination: surely I was looking to keep myself busing doing anything but grading. Now, though, I’m not so sure. Just as it’s easier to paint a new work if you start with a fresh, empty canvas, it’s easier to focus on grading if you aren’t wondering whether the bills are overdue, the refrigerator is empty, or your students are filling your email inbox with confused queries.

These last few days, in other words, I’ve been preparing my canvas, creating a clean, clear space where I can concentrate on the task at hand. Today, I had a long to-do list; tomorrow, all that’s on my list is “grade.” Now that I can scratch “Feed the blog” off today’s list, I can focus without distraction on that looming paper-pile. Like the street artist who signed his work-in-progress “Will finish on Sunday,” I know the task at hand will be done in due time.

 

Taking back Watertown

Last night A (not her real initial) and I met at Mount Auburn Cemetery to take a quick walk before heading to the Deluxe Town Diner in Watertown for pancakes and conversation: something we’ve done more than a few times in the past. Last night’s cemetery stroll and diner date was more than just another chance to chat over comfort food: it was an intentional act of purification. Ever since Watertown, Massachusetts made the national news a week ago for being the site of the Boston bombing manhunt, I’ve been wanting to reclaim a sleepy little city that’s just one town over from mine: a normally quiet suburb that most folks outside of Boston probably never heard of until the Tsarnaev brothers made it infamous.

Yesterday marked one week since the day-long lockdown that turned the greater Boston area into a ghost town. Lockdown Friday started with emails and recorded phone messages from the mayor telling us to stay indoors, and it ended with us watching televised coverage of people cheering in the streets after the remaining bombing suspect had been captured. In between, J and I did indeed stay inside, remaining glued to CNN and local televised news reports as we waited for some sense of closure to end a truly terrible week.

Lockdown Friday was a gorgeous spring day, which made staying inside that much more difficult; what made the day surreal was watching television coverage of places that are both nearby and familiar. Although I typically describe Mount Auburn Cemetery as being in Cambridge since that’s where the main entrance is, most of the cemetery actually lies in Watertown. To get to Mount Auburn from Cambridge, you take a Watertown bus from Harvard Square; to get to Mount Auburn from Newton, you drive down Watertown Avenue. During last week’s manhunt, local and federal law enforcement used the parking lot at the Watertown Mall as a staging area, and as I watched each televised press conference, I remembered the various times I’d parked there to buy socks, underwear, or other “essentials” at the Watertown Target.

J probably can tell you exactly how many times I said “Look, that’s the diner!” as CNN showed one of their reporters standing on Mount Auburn Street, reporting on every gunshot or dog bark she heard. (Jon Stewart on The Daily Show rightly skewered this same reporter for remarking that the streets of Watertown were eerily quiet, as if someone had dropped a bomb somewhere.) J didn’t need to be told again and again and again that the shiny silver building visible in the background was “the” diner where A and I go for pancakes after our cemetery strolls: he could clearly see that for himself. But I kept pointing it out because I couldn’t quite believe a quiet little neighborhood just one town over from ours was suddenly the site of Breaking News.

Last night A and I went walking at Mount Auburn Cemetery followed by dinner at the Deluxe Town Diner as a way of reclaiming Watertown: now that Suspect One is dead and Suspect Two has been captured, it’s time for Watertown to go back to being a sleepy little suburb about six miles outside of Boston. For the most part, Watertown seems to be returning to normal: last night, Mount Auburn was as lovely as always, and the diner was bustling with Friday night customers. The only indications that Watertown hasn’t completely returned to normal were the “Boston Strong” and “Boston We are One” slogans on MBTA bus marquees and a curious rush-hour traffic jam I experienced near the intersection of Watertown and Galen Streets. From my vantage point near the end of a long queue of cars, I could see flashing lights as several police vehicles escorted something large and white out of Watertown. Only later did I figure out I’d probably witnessed police moving the infamous boat that Suspect Number Two was captured in.

Apart from traffic delays caused by evidence removal, it felt good to return to the familiar calm of Mount Auburn Cemetery, and it felt even better to enjoy comfort food at a diner that was bustling with Friday night customers. Like other businesses in the greater Boston area, the Deluxe Town Diner lost a day’s worth of business on Lockdown Friday, so A and I made a point to leave our waitress an extra-generous tip: a small token of appreciation for a sleepy little suburb that I’m guessing is eager to return to relative obscurity.

Click here for more photos from last night’s purification trip to Mount Auburn Cemetery and the Deluxe Town Diner. Enjoy!

 

Over hot beverages

A little over a week ago, I had dinner with Seon Joon, who was in Cambridge on her way to visit friends on the west coast. We went to an Eritrean restaurant in Central Square, sitting at one of the traditional woven-basket tables at the front of the restaurant, where we shared a platter of savory lentils, spinach, and curried vegetables arranged on flat injera bread. Seon Joon and I hadn’t seen each other since June, and before that, we hadn’t seen each other in seven (seven!) years. After lingering long over food and conversation, we ordered hot beverages—ginger coffee for Seon Joon, and cinnamon-spiced tea for me—and talked until we’d sated ourselves on conversation and conviviality.

On Thursday, it was Pica who was briefly in Cambridge, visiting by train from the west coast. I’d seen Pica last spring, when we’d gone on an early morning bird walk at Mount Auburn Cemetery, followed by pancakes and conversation at the Deluxe Town Diner. On Thursday, the weather was unseasonably cold, with sporadic snow showers, so instead of birding and sketching at Mount Auburn, as we’d initially planned, Pica and I met in Harvard Square, where we talked and admired her sketches over steaming cups of Burdick’s famously intense dark hot chocolate.

There’s something magical about spending time over hot beverages with an old friend. Whether it’s been a year or seven since you’ve seen one another, the time gone by seems to melt under the influence of warm caffeine. You pick up old conversations as if they’d never been interrupted, remembering the various milestones that have passed even as your friendship has remained the same. Conversations shared over hot beverages somehow feel timeless, a ritual all their own. You remember the people you were the last time you met over a warm, comforting cup, and you feel inspired to envision who the two of you might be the next time you meet up, where or whenever that might be.

 

This time last year

Last Friday, I received my most recent Photojojo Photo Time Capsule, a twice-monthly email that automatically sends me a random assortment of photos from my Flickr photostream, all taken this time last year. My twice-monthly time capsule serves as an interesting reminder of where I’ve been, what I’ve done, and what I’ve repeated from year to year. There’s no clearer proof that you’re a creature of habit, for instance, than receiving an email containing photos you took last year but look like you could have taken them yesterday. The details change from year to year, but the basic story stays the same.

All the images in my most recent Photo Time Capsule were from a single set of photos I shot on a sunny Sunday morning last February on my way to the Cambridge Zen Center. Since I shoot the window mannequins at the Great Eastern Trading Company nearly every time I go to the Zen Center, I have countless shots of the same heads decorated with a changing assortment of hats, wigs, and masks: same o’, change o’. When I checked Flickr to see what photos I’d taken last February besides the same old images of the same old mannequins, I was startled to remember that this time last year, I took (or at least posted to Flickr) only eight photos: the seven photos in that set, and one of my favorite photos of Reggie, taken when he was still alive and alert, resting comfortably in a golden spot of sun with Crash the cat.

Seeing this fondly remembered picture of Reggie startled me for several reasons. First, in many ways it feels like Reggie has been gone a lifetime, so it seems strange to realize that this time last year, I was still coaxing an increasingly incapacitated dog through a regimented routine of food, water, medicine, and potty-breaks. (I can’t count the number of times during our recent snowstorms when I’ve thought quietly to myself, “Thank goodness I don’t have to navigate Reggie through this.”)

More tellingly, though, when I look at that photo now, I recognize what it is: the picture of a dying dog. I knew when I took it that Reggie’s time was short: when I shot that picture, I remember thinking, “One day, this will remind me what Reggie was like when he was alive.” Remembering how emotionally exhausting it was to guide Reggie through his final months, I’m surprised to remember that this time last year, Reggie was still alive.

Reggie’s decline was one thing I was facing last February, but the rest of “this time last year” was fuzzy…until I checked my blog archives. This time last year, I was teaching two classes at Keene State while wondering how much longer I could afford to continue teaching there part-time; this time last year, I was in the middle of a career crisis, wondering whether a PhD and nearly 20 years of college teaching experience had brought me at last to a dead end.

Remembering last February, I remember what a miserable time it was. I didn’t blog much in February, 2012 because I was juggling a busier-than-usual online term, but I didn’t blog much then, too, because it was such a dark and cheerless time. Looking back on this time last year, I remember how demoralized I was every time I drove to Keene to teach at an institution where it felt like the administration was closing up shop around me. This time last year, I kept a box of tissues in the car for the times I spent my commute weeping, knowing that just as Reggie’s days were numbered, so were my days at Keene State.

Looking back on this time last year, I’m grateful for many things. I’m grateful to be in a better place, literally: this year, I don’t have to worry about an increasingly incapacitated dog, and I don’t weep when I make my wonderfully brief commute to teach at a school where I don’t feel demoralized, devalued, or depressed. I’m grateful to be in a better place, emotionally: last year, I worried that my job turmoil would permanently transform me into a bitter, cynical person, but on all but the most tiring of days, I can honestly say I like my job, I like my students, and I generally like my life.

Looking back on this time last year, I’m grateful to be here rather than there…but I’m also grateful to have been there. This time last year, I was doing the emotionally messy work of anticipatory grief, saying goodbye, gradually, to two things I loved. As painful as it might be to know you’re losing something, there’s something emotionally honest (and thus freeing) about facing the present moment, experiencing whatever emotions that moment evokes, and admitting the terrifying (but universally human) fact that you don’t know what comes next. Last February wasn’t a fun time, but it was a time when I made a conscious effort to be awake to my own life, weathering whatever tumultuous emotions arose and not numbing myself to a single second. As much as I wouldn’t want to relive this time last year, I wouldn’t want to erase it, either.

Although I’ve taken plenty of photos this year, the ones illustrating today’s blog post come from this time last year: images I originally blogged last March, grateful to have weathered the month of February.

 

Holiday hiatus

This afternoon I submitted another batch of fall semester grades: four classes down, two to go. My next and final grade deadline is Thursday afternoon, which means I technically could spend Christmas day grading papers, but even my Inner Ebenezer isn’t that much of a Scrooge. I’ll be keeping my laptop OFF over Christmas, so here’s hoping you have a happy one. I’ll see you (and my remaining paper piles) when I’m back online on the 26th.

 

Taking a break

I always vow to get caught up with grading before Thanksgiving, so I can take a proper break over the holiday…and inevitably failing to do that, I always vow to get caught up with grading over Thanksgiving, so I can finish the remaining weeks of the semester in a calm, leisurely fashion.

Instead, I’m woefully behind with grading, with looming paper-piles from all six (!) of the classes I’m teaching. It felt great to take Thanksgiving day off from grading, teaching prep, and even the thought of teaching and grading: on Thursday it was sunny and mild, so J and I took a long walk in downtown Boston, where we saw people sitting and enjoying the sun on the Charles River Esplanade, albeit in coats. Even when it’s not really summer, it can be fun to pretend it is.

So, after a long holiday weekend of pretending I could take a break from grading, teaching prep, and even the thought of teaching and grading, it’s time to get back to it. I probably won’t have time to blog much over the next week while I’m digging out from my paper-piles; I’m even taking a break from writing my daily hour, having finished the three-month contract I’d made with my writing partner, with plans to resume the practice in December. For now, it’s time to get down to the business of reading rather than writing, those paper-piles not having disappeared despite all my attempts to ignore them out of existence.

 

Ask a busy person

It’s the midpoint of the semester—a notoriously busy time—but whenever it feels like I can’t possible fit anything more on my proverbial plate, I find myself saying “yes” to something more. Sometimes the “yes” is work—yes, I’ll accept a last-minute online teaching assignment I wasn’t planning on—and other times the “yes” is play—yes, I can find time for a walk on a gorgeous autumn day. For good or bad, my unofficial motto has become “people before papers,” and it’s a mantra I invoke whenever a student appears with a question, J suggests we go for a walk, or my body screams for a nap. People and their needs are time-sensitive, but that pile of papers isn’t going anywhere: it will be there waiting for me after I’m done tending other concerns.

At both the mid- and endpoint of the semester, I typically practice to-do list triage, the invaluable art of prioritizing items on one’s task list. Given three competing paper-piles, which one do I really have to finish first? This might sound like a simple question, but it can be rather complicated. If I’m commenting on rough drafts, I need to return those drafts in time for students to revise them before the next draft is due; if midterm progress reports are due, I have to finish grading final papers before I assess students’ midterm status. My grad students are typically more “antsy” to get their graded papers back than my undergrads, and grading the first batch of papers, when students at all levels are particularly nervous about expectations, is more urgent than grading the second or third batch. All of these tasks are important, and I’ll finish them all, eventually. But some things can be put off until tomorrow, others can wait until the weekend, and yet others can (in a pinch) be set aside until next week.

In a typical triage scenario, the immediate takes precedence over the long-term. Answering a student’s emailed question takes priority over planning tomorrow’s class, but planning tomorrow’s class is more pressing than grading last week’s rough drafts. Planning tomorrow’s class is time-sensitive: class time is precious, and once a class is over, you can’t go back and re-do it. Over the years I’ve discovered that students are far more willing to cut you slack about how long it takes you to read and comment on papers if they know you’re prompt about answering questions and are present and attentive in class. I’ve also discovered that students are more willing to cut you slack about how long it takes you to read and comment on papers once they realize the level of attention you’re giving to their writing. Students are willing to wait their turn, in other words, if they realize you’re actually going to pay attention to them when their turn finally comes.

Whenever I find myself practicing this kind of to-do list triage, I remember the old truism, “If you want something done, ask a busy person.” Busy people know that you can’t do everything at once, so the only way to tackle your to-do list is one item at a time, trusting that it will all get done eventually. Busy people know that fretting over your to-do list does no good: it just consumes time and energy that would be better spent on other, more-productive tasks like taking a walk, taking a nap, or actually getting down to the business of tackling the tasks on your to-do list. Busy people know that the cemetery is full of indispensable people, so it’s important to keep everything in perspective. Sometimes it’s sanity-saving to put off for tomorrow something you could exhaust yourself doing today, and if you’re already busy and behind with to-dos, saying “yes” to one more thing won’t necessarily break the back of a camel who’s grown flexible, strong, and resilient from a lifetime of loads.

 

Furlough

Today was a quintessential New England fall day: blue-skied, brisk and bright. I taught in Salem, NH this morning, and the foliage on the drive up was a burnished tapestry of red, orange, and gold. There was a crew of inmates collecting trash on the side of the road, clad in an autumnal attire of red jumpsuits, orange vests, and yellow hard-hats, and as I drove past them I thought, “What a great day to be out of prison.”

What a great day to be out of prison, indeed. Thursday is the end of my face-to-face work week, which means I come home on Thursday afternoons feeling satisfied but bone-weary, spent from the effort of juggling classes for two different colleges. I use the weekends to catch up with grading, teaching prep, and the single online graduate class I’m teaching at the moment: even my weekends aren’t “off.” But my weekend schedule is more flexible: I have work to do, but the freedom to choose when to do it, with only myself as a task-master.

It always seems sad—a bitter shame—that New England’s prettiest season is also my busiest: living in New England, it’s sad not to be able to spend as much time as possible outside when both the trees and the air itself seem to gleam golden. If I could, I’d save my fall paper-grading until winter, when the weather drives us indoors. But teaching is time-sensitive work, a harvest you must tend when the fruit is ripe, not rotten. For the time being, I have to content myself with short stints away from my work—a brief walk here, a brief break there—stolen moments when I soak up sun as greedily as an inmate on afternoon furlough, a chance to glean golden memories from a fleeting season.

I took the top photo yesterday morning, through a rainy window on the second floor of the library at Framingham State University. I took the second photo last week as I was parking my car to go grocery shopping in Chestnut Hill.

 

The walking wounded

It’s funny how even a mild, temporary impairment makes you acutely aware of similar, but more severe impairments in others. At some point over the past week or two, I managed to sprain my foot, an injury I initially ignored and then exacerbated, thinking it was “just” the lingering aches of intermittent tendonitis: something I could, I told myself, walk off. After too much walking this weekend, my foot is now obviously injured, tender and swollen on the top of the instep: a different kind of pain than the chronic achiness I’ve been accustomed to walking through, and something that causes me to walk with a noticeable limp. When I had two feet that were equally functional, I was oblivious to the walking wounded, but now that I’m hobbling around on what amounts to a foot and a half, I see similarly injured people virtually everywhere.

Today at the pet supply store, for instance, I limped my way up and down the aisles, looking for items that have been rearranged in the store’s current remodeling, begrudgingly counting every extra step. After buying and taking to my car one cartload of items, I came back for a second, and on this second trip to the cash register, I noticed an older man with a visible limp going to the wrong counter before realizing the register I was at was the only open one. I let the man go ahead of me because he approached the registers first: he was there before me, albeit in the wrong line. But more than that, the man was limping, and I felt pity for him, even though I too was limping: there was no need, I thought, to make him stand on his sore, achy feet a minute more than necessary.

After I’d limped to and then loaded my car with pet supplies, I went to FedEx to pick up last-minute photocopies for tomorrow’s classes, again begrudging the extra steps I had to take because construction workers had blocked the entrance to the parking garage with an over-sized dumpster, forcing me to park next door. After hobbling into then out of FedEx, I was bemused to notice a man with an even more pronounced limp than mine hobbling across a crosswalk while I waited to turn out of the parking lot: something I’d normally bemoan as an annoying traffic delay, but something that was more empathy-inspiring today.

The man appeared to be in this forties, like me, but seemed to have some sort of congenital deformity where one leg was noticeably longer than the other, so he had to hitch his entire body to one side to make his mismatched legs work. How seldom, I’m learning, is even the smallest malady limited to one region of the body; instead, a sore foot makes for a lopsided gait, a lopsided gait leads to uneven hips, and uneven hips lead to a crooked and achy back. If your body works as intended, you never notice the precision with which it was designed, but as soon as even the smallest glitch in your personal bioengineering causes an ache, pain, or tremor, everything else is thrown off kilter: a reminder of life’s tender, tenuous nature.

On my limping way to pick up those photocopies, I passed a podiatrist’s office that was surely always there, but that I’d never noticed. I’m sure in my younger, nimbler days, I would have smirked at the thought of podiatry: what are feet that anyone would need an entire doctor devoted to them? Now that I’m middle-aged and have ankles that are prone to Achilles tendonitis, soles that are prone to plantar fasciitis, and an instep that is currently sprained and swollen, a podiatrist seems like a god among men. For the want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, and indeed I’m realizing how the most humble, overlooked anatomical detail can have an overwhelmingly influential effect. I’ve never been lost because of a missing horseshoe nail, but I’ve learned the hard way how one’s choice in shoes–or a seemingly simple decision to walk off a persistent pain rather than promptly heeding it–can make all the difference.

Today’s photos of Hans Godo Frabel’s “Longfellows” come from my recent trip to the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, pictures of which I’ve already shared.