Stay of Execution

Why I Am So Proud of My Parents

I am the luckiest person I know, when it comes to parents.  I don't see how I could have better ones.  The other day I dropped my dog off to stay with my mom, and we had a cup of tea.  She told me all about how she is learning Mandarin Chinese.  She loves it, and what is even more fabulous than the fact that she's taking on such a project, is how she's talking and thinking about it.  She told me, "My brain gets in the way.  It trips me up, all the time."  She finds the process revelatory, about more than just language.  There's a thing that happens when she's just listening to the CDs, a door to comprehension that swings open, and it shuts down when she starts worrying about the characters or the grammar.  She is connected to her voice and her sense of sound in a new way.  I loved sitting at the kitchen table, listening to her.  My mom is endlessly fascinated by the world.  She is always learning things; always tackling things that are ambitious and new and that give her the challenge and thrill and stretch of some new discovery -- about the world, and about herself.  I love this in her.  [She writes about the Chinese lessons on her blog, here.]

And meanwhile my dad is at Pop!Tech now, without me.  We've gone to the conference together for 9 years; this is the first year I haven't been.  I love how interested in the future my father is.  I love his engaged and critical mind.  I've been reading Ethan Zuckerman's summaries of the Pop!Tech program, and wish I could be there.  Not only because I know the speakers are provocative and interesting.  No, more because I wish I could ask my dad what *he* thinks about the speakers.  Because I like seeing and hearing my father engage with ideas, and I like and trust his assessments of people.  It's been so much fun to go to that conference with him for the last 9 years, because it's full of people and ideas, and I love comparing notes with my dad about all of them. 

Elton John Songs I Like

There are more than you might think.  I like:

Someone Saved My Life Tonight
Tiny Dancer
Daniel
Bennie and the Jets
Rocketman
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Levon

I'm ashamed to admit it, but I also like Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me. 

Meaningless

I was driving south this morning, and ended up playing the frequent passing game with a nondescript white pickup truck.  On its side it had a corporate name, a logo, and a slogan: Ace Corporation, Where Integrity Meets Trust.  The logo was a red circle with a couple of wavy black lines going through it, vaguely evocative of a postmark.   I wonder what Ace Corporation does?  And where does integrity meet trust? 

Layering

This is the hardest time of year to dress.  I completely failed to dress right for my run this morning.  You wake up and it's still dark, and with your sleepy head you think the whole world outside your warm cozy bed is a chilly wasteland.  So you dress warmly: thermal long underwear, shell pants, capilene zip shirt, warm jacket, hat, gloves, scarf.  Turns out, on the run, you've called it completely wrong.  Should have worn running tights, long sleeved shirt, vest, baseball cap.  I spent the whole run peeling things off and tying them around my waist, stuffing my hat and gloves into my pockets, feeling stupid. 

Dressing for the day is tricky, too.  Mornings are cold -- steam rising off the water, frost on the windshield.  But by the sunny afternoon, it can feel almost like summer.  And then the sun dips below the treeline and it drops twenty degrees in ten minutes.  I've forgotten how to dress for this season.

Squeak, Squeak

I have been a bad doggy mommy, and this morning while I was fooling around with Lila she picked up a fragment of cloth and shook it at me, and I realized that she's chewed up all of her toys and I haven't gotten her any new ones in a long time.  So we went to the doggie store, and now she's happily chewing up a hula girl.  These Bamboo treats claim to be "combat tested" to "withstand aggressive chewers," which may indeed be true.  But Lila can still get through the tough canvas cloth, strew the fluffy stuffing all over the living room floor, and pull out the inner squeaker within about twenty minutes of getting it in her mouth.  It's fun to keep chewing even after the squeaker has been destroyed, although there's not quite the same tangible goal. 

It's Nothing Personal

If you think I am ignoring you, you're right, and I'm sorry.  The only thing I can tell you is that I'm ignoring everyone.  We're 8 weeks into the sailing season, with 4 more to go.  All of my weekends are spoken for, and have been for the last 9 weeks, and will be for the next 4 weekends.  Plus my weekdays, until an hour or two past sunset, or later if we have a team meeting.  On the dock this weekend I talked to a bunch of other sailing coaches.  We're all burned out; none of us have a personal life.  I spend about 32 hours a week outside staring at boats, and about 14 hours a week driving, and another 20 or so at my desk, writing and reading and responding.  A couple of more hours in meetings, filling gas cans, running errands.  And it's not enough; I'm not doing enough; I'm falling behind; I could be doing more, better.  I'm forgetful and preoccupied and distracted.

So if you're a friend of mine, and I haven't called you back in a while, or I haven't answered your email, it's not because I don't like you.  I'm not trying to exclude you from my glamorous and exciting life.  I'm just spent; I've got nothing left. 

I like this life -- I love that I'm outside so much.  I love my students, and the chance to be a part of their lives.  I love the college.  But the season is a sprint, and the fall season is a long one, and this far in I start to feel a little ragged.

Fried Green Tomatoes

I had fried green tomatoes for dinner last night, and I blame them for my fabulous, vivid, chock-full night of dreaming.  I dreamt of real estate, of mexican food, of law school classmates, of strange and interesting sailboats, of smells and sounds and conversations.  I feel like I slept for a week or two, and like while I slept my soul went travelling and adventuring. 

All Requests: Comments on the Blog

Jenny asks me to write about what I think about blog comments. 

What can you say about the role and purpose of comments on your blog?  .... How do they affect what you write about, how you feel about your writing, and you in general?

That's a good question.  While I think about it, I'll direct you to what I've written before about blogging, and my thoughts about the relationship between blogger and audience.  I try really hard not to tailor what I write to y'all.  I try really hard to write honestly, about what I'm thinking about, whether it's light or descriptive or introspective or polemical.  But I am not unaware of having an audience.  I know this is a public project.  That's part of the fun of it.  There are some topics that I avoid even if they are on my mind because they don't seem easy to reconcile with the relationship I want to have with this indeterminate public audience; it requires too much trust, or it distances me in what feels like an artificial way, or it doesn't make a meaningful contribution to whatever identity or tone I've established here.  [I break these boundaries almost as often as I honor them, however.]

I feel really lucky to have the set of readers at Stay of Execution that has arrived here.  You are an insightful and generous bunch.  I think a lot about the comments you leave here.  "L."'s comment the other day about being on the receiving end of snarky junior league comments from friends really hit me hard, and made me realize how belittling I can be without intending.  Bill caught me out not too long ago equating extroversion and happiness, and he was right to chide me for that kind of thinking.  Those reflections and perspectives are really valuable for me, and are one of the biggest rewards of blogging.  Another, of course, is the feeling that I'm not alone -- that some of my loneliest or most vulnerable or confused feelings are not so bizarre or isolating, and in fact are shared by interesting and kindhearted people of all different ages and paths.

I've been lucky not to have a lot of really scornful and angry commenters here, who tear me down.  I have pretty thin skin and I do think a lot about what y'all say, probably because I think highly of the people who read and comment.  But I don't consider the purpose of this weblog to interact with commenters, or to gain your approval.  If I did that I think I would lose my way pretty quickly, and I couldn't be honest.  That's what this weblog is about, in the final analysis.  It's a project where I am trying to speak the truth about my experience as I fumble along trying to live a life that fits me. 

Is that a good answer?  I don't know if it says very much.  As far as measuring the quality of my writing, I've not found comments to be all that predictive.  Sometimes I write something that I feel really proud of and good about and nobody says boo in the comments, but in person or by email someone will tell me they were really touched, or that they remember it months later with some vividness.  Meanwhile I can guarantee you that if I mention a leaky pipe in passing I'll get 12 comments about fixing it.  [My favorite example of that is what felt like a vulnerable emotional post that mentioned physics.  What part did people respond to?  The physics, not the emotions.  Sigh.]  So although it's very difficult to do, I have learned to unhook my own ideas about the quality or caliber of a post from the comments.  Still, if I hear back from you that something has touched you or struck a chord, it means a ton to me, and sometimes surprises me (as with the responses to this post).

All Requests: How Are Things With NBT?

Someone wants to know how things are with Mr. NBT.  For those of you new on the scene, Mr. NBT stands for Mr. "Next Big Thing," a new relationship I have with someone I met through this weblog.  It's all very meta and Web 2.0 and we could probably be a nice case study for someone's PhD thesis if anyone were still interested in blogs instead of v-logs or podcasts or MySpace or whatever you kids are into these days.

Anyway.  The question -- how are things?  Things are crappy.  He came to visit, and now he's gone home.  And the crappy part is that having him here was so good, and having him gone is really really hard.  It is much harder than when he was gone before, because I didn't know how nice it was to have him here.  It was normal to communicate by phone or email or text message.  Now I'd rather look at him and smile or raise my eyebrows, and I don't WANT to talk on the cell phone.  I don't want to have to tell him that it was so stormy last night that the windows rattled and I thought my boat blew over on the trailer.  He should just know because we would have both heard it.  So, I have this bad attitude about the distance between us.  Next up is my visit down there, which is being schemed and planned now.  You'll hear about it, I'm sure, in due time. 

All Request Day

I guess now I'm on a loose once-a-month-or-so timetable of inviting requests.  If there's something you'd like to ask me, or you'd like to see me post about, please leave a comment or send me an email, and I'll do my best to give you an honest response.  If you've previously asked me something, and I haven't posted about it, don't be shy about pinging me again.  Things fall through the cracks.