Now this is touching the future

Apparently I've been at this job long enough that not only are my former students marrying other former students, but they're opening their own cocktail bars.

Cha-Cha City has a modest wealth of appealing bars and restaurants, but not so many that there aren't dead spots in the week--nights when it seems like everything is either closed or shuts up early--and what with family schedules and teaching nights, my colleagues and I have struggled to find an appealing midweek standby. So we gave our old student's new place a whirl: to support an alum, try something different, and maybe add it to the rotation.

And oh, it's added. This bar is one straight-up, nerd-cool, English-major fantasy.

Every bar should  have a rolling library ladder

I don't know what other professors fantasize about their students doing with their lives; I mostly just want mine to be happy and secure members of the middle class (who hopefully still derive pleasure from books and movies and plays). But if I had a self-serving fantasy, one that made me feel good about myself and my proximity to talent, it wouldn't be for my students to go on to get PhDs themselves or write critically-acclaimed novels or work for the New York Times or get elected to the Senate. It would be for them to do something very much like this.

One of the pleasures of teaching at a regional institution is contributing to that region in a sustained and multi-layered way. My students teach in the urban and suburban school districts. They fix up old houses, work at local nonprofits, open their own businesses. Those are their achievements, not mine--but they benefit me. They make the place I live better. They enmesh me in a meaningful network of connections.

I may not be from here, or staying here, or have roots much of anywhere. But part of putting down roots in a place is knowing and supporting those who do.

Inside the snow-globe

Like much of the East, we've been snowed under for the past ten days. We didn't get even a third of the snow that Boston did--a fact I take great pleasure in pointing out--but we got enough that it's still heaped everywhere. Whatever surfaces aren't icy are slushy and salty and dirty and gross, so every venture out remains a minor expedition.

And you know, of all the things I hate about winter, the one I may hate the most is all the gear it requires. I hate putting on a coat just to take out the trash. I hate wearing snowboots to the gym. I hate the feeling of all those layers. I hate how grubby all my outerwear gets. I hate the monotony of always wearing the same things. And I really hate having to take all that crap off and put it back on eight times a day.

In this respect, this winter has been better than last. Last year, although I was on sabbatical, I was commuting downtown three days a week on public transportation, walking about a mile, and then wending my way through a Habitrail of skybridges between buildings to get to my Italian class. I dressed for the commute and for the fact that I wasn't teaching, so I wore lots of boring and practical layers. As soon as I entered the first building, I started peeling them off--first hat and gloves, then scarf, then coat, then vest, and finally I'd wind up at my classroom with a huge heap of clothes in my arms. I looked about as harassed and bedraggled as I felt.

This year, I'm commuting by car to MY VERY OWN OFFICE. My clothing choices aren't unlimited--I still have to plan for the walk to and from the parking lot and for the possibility that I might need to shovel out my car--but I have a reason to dress up and take pleasure in what I wear. And once I get to my office, I can throw all my outerwear in the corner, change into heels, and trot around free and unburdened, like a human being rather than a pack animal.

This is, for whatever reason, a huge psychological boost. And I need as many of 'em as I can get.

*

What small pleasures get you through the sloppy, dreary, ass-end of winter?

Lake effect snow, explained

When the rest of the country hears the term "lake effect snow," I think they understand it to mean "if you live near a Great Lake, you get a shit-ton of snow for some, like, complicated meteorological reason." And then Buffalo gets a shit-ton of snow, and the national newscasters earnestly explain the science (cold mass of air moving over a warmer body of water, blah blah), and that seems to confirm it. Great Lakes = lots of snow.

But that's not the relevant fact about lake effect snow. Lake effect snow, as Cosimo says is "guerrilla snow." If most snowstorms advance like a conventional army, cutting a wide swath of destruction--worse in some places, to be sure, but leaving nothing in the region unaffected--lake effect snow comes out of nowhere and then vanishes into nowhere, targeting areas completely randomly and unpredictably.

The photos from Buffalo are jaw-dropping. But no one's showing you photos that illustrate that while some communities in or adjacent to Buffalo got several feet of snow, many of their immediate neighbors got just a few inches.

I live an hour east of Buffalo, and the portion of the Thruway that runs just 15 miles south of me has been closed for days. Reasonably enough, I've been fielding emails from family and friends wondering how many feet of snow we're under.

Let me show you (and bear in mind, this is four days' worth of accumulation):

For reference, this is Depew, less than an hour away:

(Photo credit: Derek Gee, The Buffalo News, via AP)

I'm grateful not to have been clobbered as Buffalo was, but the real menace of lake effect snow isn't the volume so much as the unpredictability. When you're driving somewhere, you can't get ahead of a storm or wait it out because you never know exactly where it's coming from.

This is what highway driving is like when you're in a region where "possible scattered lake effect storms" are predicted: dry as a bone, dry as a bone, dry as a bone, dry as a bone, WHITEOUT.

Loving the low-cachet city

Though I've never been to Detroit, Frank Bruni's column yesterday ("Detroit: A Love Song") resonated with me. I live in a small and unglamorous Rust Belt city and will be spending my sabbatical in a large and unglamorous one (a place that exists, in the mind of most Northeasterners, mainly as a punchline). Both are terrific cities with lots to love, but increasingly I love the fact that they're cities that aren't all about themselves.

As Bruni writes,

The people there don't tether their identities to the luster or mythology of their surroundings. Their self-image isn't tied to their ZIP codes.

[. . . . ]

[I]f you inhabit the gilded precincts favored by those of us who fancy ourselves power brokers or opinion makers or players of one kind or another, it's a remarkable thing--and a welcome one.

The political operative in Washington, the financial whiz or magazine editor in New York, the studio executive in Los Angeles, the Internet impresario in Seattle or San Francisco: all are creatures not just of a profession but of a profession that blooms and struts in a given self-regarding place. Many have egos nourished by that terrain, which feeds a hyperawareness of status, a persistent jockeying for position.

Now, I grew up in Seattle and spent six years in Manhattan, and I love a world-class city at least as much as the next person. If I got a job offer in one of those places--or in Chicago or San Francisco, Boston or Austin--I probably wouldn't turn it down. But I find the geographically limited worldview of my creative-class peers both tedious and sad.

Certainly, there are industries that are centered around a single region, and it makes sense--it may even be necessary--for many people to live in-or-around D.C., L.A., or New York. But deriving your sense of hipness or glamor or self-consequence from where you live (or once lived) strikes me as a tragic kind of overcompensation. And I've got no time for transplants who can't forgive their current location for not being New York or San Francisco. Each of those cities? There's exactly one of. Move back, or get over it.

I wouldn't have moved here if I hadn't gotten this job, but I'd be thrilled to be here for another decade. Indeed, the fact that it's not hip and not a place that people move to means there's no anxiety about keeping up (cool new bars or restaurants open at the rate of about one per year) and no unusual cachet to doing so (at almost any venue you're equally as likely to run into your dentist, your tattoo artist, and some random meathead from your gym).

It's not that there's no tribal signalling of one's hipness and aesthetic and intellectual sensibility here, but it's not foregrounded in the same way. And thank goodness.

College recruitment

It's college-application season, which means it's also college-application-interview season. This is the fourth year I've served as an alumna interviewer for my alma mater, and I continue to have somewhat conflicted feelings about it. I do, after all, teach at a local college, and part of me feels weirdly disloyal to my institution and to my students--even though there's only a very small overlap between the students who apply to Regional U and the students who apply to INRU.* Another part of me feels pre-emptively defensive: I remember what it was like to be a high school senior snobbishly passing judgment on the local colleges and universities. And a third part of me wonders why, of all the things I could volunteer to do, I'm doing this: feeding the hungry and clothing the naked it ain't.

But I enjoy doing the interviews and I enjoy learning more about the community to which I belong. It's interesting to learn where bookish teenagers go for fun, what kinds of educational extras middle-class parents are (and are not) willing to pay for, and how the local high schools compare. By now I know which school has an IB program, which has a state-championship sailing team, and which holds its classes in three-hour blocks.

Also, I'm good at it. Unlike some of the alumni interviewers in the region (dudes who got an MBA or MD thirty years ago, never knew anything about their institution's undergraduate program, and have no idea how to evaluate a high school student's "promise"), I know INRU well: I spent ten years there, the last three of them teaching undergraduates. I can craft an effective prose profile. And much of my day-to-day life involves working with, trying to draw out, and get a feel for the potential of late-adolescents and young adults. Relative to the average, my admission success rate is high.

So I suppose that I'm serving my community by advocating for kids who, however talented and sometimes economically comfortable they may be, aren't connected to the centers of elite power. Many live in semi-rural communities, most attend public schools, and few have traveled widely. A good number of the students who leave will never come back, but they help to diversify INRU and whatever centers of power they may wind up in--and I guess that still counts as raising the region's profile.

And there are other rewards. A while back I interviewed a kid who just didn't want to talk about himself. He was affable and laid-back, and I quickly got a sense of his wide-ranging talents, but he refused to spin the autobiographical soundbites that lots of college applicants specialize in. He didn't want to boast, he didn't want to say much about the unusual personal hardship he'd overcome, and for the first 30 minutes I felt like I had no sense of his actual personality. Finally I asked him if he had any questions for me, and the entire dynamic of the conversation shifted. He asked me at least three times as many questions as any kid I've interviewed before or since--and they were deeply thoughtful, sometimes rather personal questions: about my own experiences at INRU and my impressions of its students and its social and intellectual dynamics. He listened intently, he asked follow-up questions, and I suddenly understood why this unassuming kid was captain of virtually every sports team, why he'd been elected student-body president, and why he insisted that pretty much everyone at his high school got along: the nerds and the jocks and the goths and so on. It was pure, natural leadership--not showy, not demanding, not domineering--of a sort I'd never seen before.

Interviewing for INRU also helps remind me that students are students: the kids I interview aren't much different from the kids I teach. And most are worth getting to know.


-------------------
*For those joining us late, Instant-Name-Recognition University is the stupid pseudonym I invented for my alma mater seven years ago--i.e., too late to change it now.

Place and class

Several of the comments on my last post have been pursuing the connection between class and geographic mobility. And if we understand "class" as being about more than just income and education level, then yes: the perceived ability to move far away from where one grew up does correlate with class; it's about how many and what kinds of connections and opportunities one has.

If your college friends come from all over the country and then fan out to jobs and graduate programs all over the country once they leave, then you have a different sense of what's possible in your life (whether or not you personally choose to leave the city or state in which you grew up). Some of my students literally do not know anyone who lives more than a few hours away, and though our region does feel the gravitational pull of Boston and New York (their baseball and basketball teams are the ones locals here root for), the students who actually move to those cities after graduation--or indeed to any others, or who move out of this state--are almost exclusively those who already have family or friends there.

So in thinking about what it means to be rooted or rootless, I'm partly thinking about class. But one peculiarity of being an academic is that, unlike most people in "our class," we actually do up and move anywhere. The other people in our class? Not so much. They move to the coasts, basically, and in lesser numbers to places like Atlanta and Chicago, Austin and Houston, Minneapolis and Denver, and the bigger, wealthier college towns. I guess I had always known this, and it's certainly true of my college friends--but I still think of my class as figuring out their lives and as not having settled down yet. But at Cosimo's (ahem) 20th college reunion last summer, I realized that no one apart from the academics and a few quirky entrepreneurs lived anywhere but those places. I met person after person, waiting in line for the ladies room or making small talk at the bar, and they all lived in Fairfax or Fairfield County, or in Newton, MA, or in metro L.A. or S.F. And though they were all friendly and interested in who I was and what I did, they all seemed puzzled by where I lived. Like I said: it's not a place that people move to.

So my point, if I have one, is that even the class that seems to have infinite geographic mobility, doesn't. There are real restrictions on where, say, a high-powered corporate lawyer can have a career, and hence where he can live, but there are also cultural and class restrictions that operate to keep us where "our kind of people" live. If we're not living near our actual families (and of course I do know people who have moved back to their childhood homes), we're living near our families of affiliation: people with similar educations, professions, and interests. I'm not interested in criticizing that choice; indeed, if one can't or doesn't wish to go home again, it makes sense to choose one's new home based on the relationships one has or expects to build with the people there.

But those roots are relatively shallow, even for those who live in major metropolitan areas. And as Shane noted in his comment, those of us who live in more unlikely places often wind up doing a version of the same thing, which is to say, socializing primarily with other transplants. I have a few friends who are locals--former grad students, people I've met through arts organizations, or people I know from my church. But the people I'm closest friends with are others who moved here for jobs (mostly in academia or the medical sciences); some have put down roots here and some haven't, but none are likely to retire here. Sometimes I feel like a real local, or at least a civic booster and aspiring local; at other times I feel like I'm part of a community of expats.

Rootless

Although I've loved each of the four cities and regions in which I've lived and every one felt (and still does feel) like home, it's only recently that I've started thinking about what it means to be rooted in a particular location in the way that most people seem to be rooted. I've never had that kind of relationship to place and I'm not sure I ever will.

My parents weren't natives of the state in which I grew up, and neither were most of my friends' parents; indeed, on the rare occasions when I met someone whose grandparents lived across town or whose parents had attended a neighboring high school, I was astonished. Although the families I knew were all well-anchored in our community--our parents bought houses, joined churches, ran for office, and stayed put for 20 or 40 years--it just seemed to be the natural order of things that each generation moved elsewhere. Every summer of my childhood featured a rolling temporary diaspora as my friends and their families traveled to one state or another, or even overseas, to visit their grandparents and cousins.

And sure enough, I moved across the country for college--and moved again, to Manhattan, then back to grad school, then back to Manhattan, and finally to Cha-Cha City when I got this job. That's more or less what all my friends have done, though some have moved farther and some less far, some more times and some fewer. We've moved basically by choice: for school, for a job, for a partner, or just for a change of scene; our choices weren't infinite and were usually circumscribed in various ways, but moving somewhere new always meant doing something new, and usually something better. Haven't Americans always been a people on the move?

But as it turns out, Cha-Cha City isn't a place that people move to. In my first year or two here I was continually getting asked--by shop clerks, tradespeople, my students--why I'd moved here. When I told them cheerfully that it was for a job, they'd repeat the question. At first I thought this was about the local residents' modesty, or maybe low civic self-esteem: they didn't realize what a cool place this was! And so I talked up all the awesome things about the city, and why I loved it, and why I was happier here than I'd been elsewhere.

But then I realized that that wasn't it. It's that, for most people--not just here, but across the country--it's odd to move around a lot and even odder to decide to settle down in a random location to which one has no personal connections. Most people I meet find it strange that Cosimo and I grew up on opposite coasts, strange that we each at different points attended schools 3,000 miles away from our families, and even stranger that, now that our schooling is done, we live close neither to school nor friends nor family.

I'm tempted to call this a class difference, but it isn't, or at least not in the usual sense of that word: there are plenty of prosperous, educated, well-traveled people in this city and cities like it, people who may have lived elsewhere at various points in their lives, but who are here, now, mostly because they're from here. (And, of course, there are just as many people in my own "class" who have fled their childhood homes but now can't imagine leaving their adopted homes of New York, Boston, or D.C.; L.A., Chicago, or San Francisco; Austin, Portland, or Denver.)

It's that kind of rootedness that feels foreign to me. I'm ready to settle here. I could live here for twenty years. But at any point I could probably still leave on six month's notice--because I'm not from here and because being with my spouse and having a satisfying career is more of a priority than living in a specific place, even one that I love.

The thing is, I love lots of places. Lots of places could be home. But that means there isn't one, in particular, that is home.

Life in a northern town

I don't think I ever had specific fantasies about what the life of a professor would look like. When I was in grad school, I wasn't sure enough that I was going to get a job--and although I hoped I would, I guess I figured that I couldn't afford to imagine its specifics, lest I be disappointed.

But spending a Sunday afternoon reading on the sofa, in front of a roaring fire, is probably someone's professorial fantasy. The reality isn't half bad either--though I suspect that, in the fantasy, the reading isn't mediocre student writing.

City living

When I started looking at houses, I noticed that a lot of the real estate listing for homes I was interested in included some variation on the phrase "nice city home": charming city home, perfect city home, etc. It didn't quite seem to be a euphemism, but more of a necessary descriptor: "a house, but in the city! If that's the kind of thing you want."

Most of the time, when people talk about living in "cities"--and especially about the difficulty of living in cities or the impossibility of raising kids there and so on--they seem to imagine that they're talking about living in apartment buildings. Not necessarily apartment towers, but places where you're schlepping up a lot of stairs or contending with an elevator, where it's an expensive pain in the ass to have a car.

But living in a city does not mean living in the urban core, which isn't where most of the housing in most American cities is anyway. A lot of city neighborhoods involve single-family homes on leafy streets. They may be sited pretty close to one another and they may not have private, covered parking--but they have porches and backyards, attics and basements, and more than enough space to raise a family. They've got the benefits of the suburbs, in other words, while also being walkable and neighborly, with shopping and dining nearby.

And if "city homes" in your particular city are anything like those in mine, they're half the price of homes just a mile away, in the technical suburbs. They're also, probably, handsomer and more architecturally interesting.

So in many ways, "city home" seems code for "a nice house as long as you don't care that the city schools suck." Except, at half the price? I've done the math. I could buy a city house, send two kids to the local (highly-rated) Catholic school for all four years of high school, and still be ahead financially relative to someone who bought in the suburbs. Actually, I could send two kids there for junior high and high school.

But it's not just about the schools. Ultimately, city living means "economic diversity": there are people who don't keep their houses up, or renters with innumerable family members coming and going. There are people on the street at midnight--heading home from a bar or restaurant or just from visiting their friends--who have loud conversations under your window. Your neighbors have friends who honk, repeatedly, rather than ringing the doorbell or using their cell phones. And let's face it: there are more potholes, crappier post offices, and generally poorer service.

And I guess most bourgeois don't have a high tolerance for economic diversity and a lack of sufficient buffering from the lives of others (I also think that many people who insist that there's so little space in the city do so somewhat disingenuously, as a cover for a resistance to city living that has more to do with class and race). But it's still hard for me to understand, because I can't imagine wanting to live anywhere else. I love that I'm out in public and yet in private when I'm having a drink with a friend on my front porch. I love that the neighbor kids play basketball in the street and in my driveway, and that when I'm outside or when the windows are open, I can hear snatches of conversations from several different houses. (I even kinda love the young woman across the way who has shouted cell-phone arguments while sitting in her car with the windows rolled down.) I love that this is a mixed-race neighborhood. I love that I can walk to a couple of bars, a barbeque joint, and a pizza shop--as well as a store specializing in exotic reptiles.

I moved scarcely more than a mile, from a neighborhood with more apartment buildings than single-family homes. But somehow, in acquiring a house and a porch and a yard, I moved more decisively into a city.

Cocktails + fireworks: what could go wrong?

I've been spending every available moment this holiday weekend on my new front porch. Since we seem to need to go to the TargetHomeDepotPlex approximately every 29 hours and since I have an extremely overdue book review that I'm determined to get done before Tuesday, it hasn't been quite the all-day-every-day affair that I'd like. But still: there has been grilling. There have been cherries and berries, newspapers and novels, watering the plants and watching the neighbor kids play in the street and wondering WTF is up with that cop car that keeps circling. And most importantly: there has been drinking.

Independence Day Americano, à la Flavia:

2 oz. Campari
1 oz. sweet vermouth
4-6 oz. club soda
Pour over ice and garnish with blueberries

Celebrate it with me, kids: your independence from crappy beer and cheap white wine!

College admissions blues

The other day I interviewed a local high school student who's applying to Instant Name Recognition U. This is only my second year as an alumni interviewer and she was only my second interviewee, but each time I've scheduled a meeting I've had some anticipatory misgivings.

I'll be frank: teaching at Regional U makes me feel differently about my alma mater. Now, I don't accept the claim that the Ivy League is a bastion of snobbery and privilege; for one, there's plenty of school-related snobbery to go around (where I grew up, it was an article of faith that people who went to the University of Washington were much smarter than people who went to Washington State), and for another, the Ivies and similar schools are actually incredibly economically diverse--much more so than the pricey St. Whoevers or Private Basketball/Football Unis that criss-cross this great nation.

But when one believes, as I do, in the mission of a place like RU, it's hard not to feel conflicted. I love my alma mater. But I also love my students. I see the differences between the two institutions pretty clearly, and I doubt that RU is even a safety school for most of the INRU applicants from this region. That makes me feel defensive and protective of my students--as if, somehow, they were the ones being judged.

The kid I interviewed last year did nothing to dispel this feeling. He showed up in a suit and tie, with a copy of his mile-long resume, and spoke like a frequent attender of "junior leadership" conferences. He was smart and personable and socially-conscious, but he didn't seem much like my students.

He didn't seem much like an INRU student, either, and he didn't get in, but the experience made me feel that much more ambivalent about going to interview my second candidate last week.

She was totally different. Charming and gawky and confident and nervous, she too had a long resume, but she had more than a resume. She didn't have a prefabricated bit to give me, but as she talked it became clear how boundlessly curious she was, and what a passion she had for breaking things apart and creating new syntheses--how studying physics transformed the way she thought about everything from sailing to singing, and how the quantitative gave her a means to understand the qualitative. She reminded me of so many of the students I knew or taught at INRU.

Curiously enough, she also reminded me of the students I teach at RU, or at least some of them: all earnestness and potential, ready to be set afire by a new subject or idea. They may not all be starting out with the same cultural capital as she, but they're not, actually, so very different.

God is my parole officer

Driving to campus the other day, I saw this sign on a freeway overpass:

WANTED BY THE LAW?
River Christian Fellowship

As far as I can tell, there's no pun or joke or deeper meaning here--it would be kind of groovy, at least insofar as Flavia knows groovy, if it were intended as some sort of Pilgrim's Progress-y, "yes! you are convicted under the law [of Moses]! but you are redeemed by Christ!"

As it is, I'm left thinking it's just a stupid and/or desperate attempt to drum up church membership. And maybe not the best way to welcome visitors to a depressed, post-industrial city with a non-negligable crime rate.

This must be the place

It's been just over a year since I moved to New City, which I suppose really needs a new name but isn't going to get one in this particular post. And you know, I'm surprised by how very much I like it here: it's a decent-sized, post-industrial city with some economic woes but a great arts scene, quite a few colleges and universities, and lovely architecture and housing stock. It reminds me in some ways of Alma Mater City, in some ways of Northwest City, but in other ways of nowhere I've ever lived or visited.

When describing it to friends, I say, "you know: it's a blue city in a red county in a blue state." Or I use the description on my sidebar ("land of trade unions, mandolin repair shops, and pickup trucks"). I like that balance. I like the fact that most people here are social and economic liberals, even if they don't necessarily use those terms, instead viewing themselves as entirely sensible and traditional and family- and community-minded.

Nothing, I think, demonstrates that better than the Catholic church I attend. It's an old church, and this is a very Catholic region of the country, and some parishoners have obviously been attending for the better part of their lives. But in the parking lot, on a regular basis, I've seen a car with the bumper sticker, "If the Church doesn't want to ordain women, it should stop baptizing them!" And last Sunday, also in the parking lot, I passed a group of middle-aged women just getting ready to go in to mass; they were trim, overly tanned, with ankle bracelets and fake nails and the distinctive accent of the region. One was exclaiming to the others, "We just saw the Michael Moore, whasis, Sicko, this weekend? Oh my God, you have to see it! It's so good!"

I guess that that's what I like most about this area: it doesn't conform to liberal/conservative expectations, and it seems free of the educational and cultural elitism of some of the places I've lived (and which has always made me uncomfortable) without being at all anti-intellectual.

Of course, it wouldn't be such a great city if I hadn't already made some friends here, but I've been lucky enough to have done so and to be meeting more cool people through them.

If location were the only consideration, I could contemplate staying here for the rest of my life--or certainly the next decade of it. Will I? Probably not. But I could.

That does it: I can stay here

I've lived in this city for almost exactly eleven months. And yet it wasn't until yesterday that I noticed that the checkout lanes at my local supermarket have illuminated signs that read "15 items or fewer."

Maybe this is the first time that I've actually used an express lane, or maybe I've just become so accustomed to signs that read "15 items or less" that I stopped expecting anything else.

But when I finally noticed that my local purveyer of selzer and salsa must have had, at some point in time, an employee who understood the difference between less and fewer, it was as if choirs of angels had burst into song.

Renews one's faith in humanity, is what I'm saying.

Still spring

I realize that I've already posted on the gloriousness that is spring. But really, I'm just not getting over it.

I'm originally from the Pacific Northwest. I grew up being very comfortable with a limited number of seasons and a lot of rainy, grey days. And for years after I moved to the Northeast I continued not to think much about the seasons--yeah, I hated the bitterest parts of the winter and the disgusting parts of the summer, and I was happy when each ended, but I didn't have a strong emotional or physiological reaction to seasonal changes and I coped quite well during dismal grey Novembers and late Februaries.

In about my sixth year out east, though, all that abruptly changed. I still recall that April, and the period in which my coworkers and I would go out for lunch every single day and sit in the sun in view of the Brooklyn Bridge. That's all we did: sit in the sun, barely talking. And it was that April--when I'd find myself smiling insanely every time I stepped outside--that I realized: this is what spring fever is all about!

I think my response to spring has grown more extreme every year, and this early time change isn't reducing the effects any.

Effect one: a newfound interest in my wardrobe. Now, I love clothes year-round, and I particularly love the way that each seasonal change gives me the illusion of an entirely new wardrobe, but lately I've been assembling ever-new and increasingly flamboyant outfits. Several days ago I showed up at the office in what I can only describe as some kind of demented homage to the Technicolor 1950s: knee-lenth black skirt topped with a fuschia sweater, fake pearls, patent-leather peep-toe pumps, and a teal brocade coat. When I walked into the department, my chair exclaimed, "Flavia! Did you just step out of a musical? You look like you're about to burst into song!" (And I was all, dude. I am about to burst into song. It's sunny and 60 degrees today and I'm BARE LEGGED for the first time in six months.)

Effect two: a weird compulsion toward physical activity. As those who know me in real life know, I am not a worker-out. (This isn't a matter of principle, but merely of practicality: I've been essentially the same size and shape for 10 years without working out--and if I were to start a gym routine, when the hell would I find time to blog?) For the last week, though, I've been doing something aerobic for 20 or 30 minutes, virtually every day. What's up with that?

Effect three: a complete lack of interest in prepping for my classes. To be honest, I'm not sure that this is spring-related, but it's convenient to think so.

Spring

God Almighty, it was 65 DEGREES here today. This morning it was sunny and blustery--but with a warm, damp wind that no one, I'm sure, minded in the least. Since noon it's mostly been rainy and overcast--but again, what's to mind? By tomorrow the very last remnants of snow will be gone.

I wore a sleeveless top today that hasn't seen action since September. Some of my students were in shorts.

Surely, this is too good to be true.

To hell with you, NYT

I just attempted to get home delivery of the New York Times. I haven't been a subscriber since I lived in Grad School City, where I tended to sign up at the introductory rate, remain a subscriber for several months on into the regular rate, and then cancel when I couldn't justify the expense any longer. After I moved to Major Eastern City I definitely couldn't justify the expense, but I did periodically buy copies at the newsstand or (more often) scavenge copies left behind on the train.

However, I've always loved newspapers, and I'm fond of the Times, and now that I have a real job I was looking forward to being a regular subscriber.

Until I learned that there's no weekday home-delivery in my area.

People! I live in a good-sized city, one with a population larger than that of Providence or Hartford. I'm in the Eastern time zone. The Times is widely read and widely available around these parts--I can buy the damn thing not only at the supermarket but also at the tiny convenience store a few blocks away (if I wanted to make the trek every day and pay the newsstand price, that is).

I'm trying to give you money, New York Times. I'm trying to show my support for a publication that I enjoy and the journalistic work that you do.

And people wonder why newspaper readership is declining in this country.

Settling in

Three lovely discoveries:

1. The art-house theatre across the street from my apartment, which shows a different movie (classics, foreign, independent) every night of the week. I knew that I was going to love it and so went ahead and sprang for a membership when I was in town to sign my lease--and I haven't been disappointed. Last week I saw a Jean Renoir film (which I won't name, to discourage Googling) and then last night George Washington Boyfriend and I saw Lemming, which was fantastic; it's a bit like Caché, in that both deal with happy suburban French families whose lives are suddenly disturbed by an apparently malevolent individual--but I thought Lemming was much better and more satisfying.

2. The nearest Catholic church, which I'm hoping turns out to be the one I want to join. So far, so good: a lovely old structure, well-tended but a bit worn; an engaging priest who gave a good homily today; altar girls; the use of inclusive language at points in the Mass when it often isn't used; a location that draws from both the largely gentrified arts district that I live in and the grittier, much poorer neighborhood to the south. Also, the weekly bulletin and the website highlight the parish's social justice and community outreach initiatives (rather than, say, a weekly "Rosary for Life"--which was just about the only thing that came up under the "activities" section of the websites for some of the other churches I investigated).

3. Lots of used bookstores! GWB and I went into one today and I wound up buying a book on Donne, a copy of Empire Falls, and two huge Miss Manners books of etiquette. I've been lounging around reading one of the latter for the last few hours and chuckling continually.

(Them that knows me knows that I LOVE etiquette books, and I own several, dating back to the 1930s and including ones focused specifically on such subjects as dining, letter-writing, and the like. I've certainly used these books to look things up and ascertain the "right" way to do them, but really, I like to browse through etiquette books in much the way that some people like to read cookbooks: as escapist fantasy. The possibility of a world in which there is a proper--elegant, courteous, considerate--way to do everything is highly appealing to me, as is the belief that that proper way can be easily identified. . . if only one has the right book!)

. . . In with the new

I love my new apartment--so big, so bright, so airy. I've also met my next-door neighbor, an awesome 60-something (and his handsome, dramatically younger "friend").

My neighborhood smells beautiful. I don't know what's in bloom, but it's heady, heavenly, and intoxicating.

I really need a car. Walking half an hour to the supermarket (which I'd misremembered as being much closer), and then back, with groceries, in the heat, was not a good idea. On the other hand, my neighborhood IS generally quite walkable for one's daily errands and activities, so I won't have to drive most places. This is a relief, as a) I don't particularly like driving or being dependent on a car, and b) I really DO like walking. . . and I'd also prefer not to suddenly gain 10 pounds because I no longer do it!

I think I'm going to like it here.


[Regular, academic-style blogging to resume soon. Soon, I tell you!]

The longest way round is the shortest way home

The above is a quotation from Ulysses that I like to trot out in the classroom, not only when I'm pretending to be a modernist, but also when I'm teaching The Faerie Queene or Paradise Lost. It's also a statement that I mutter to myself frequently, whether I've just completed a seemingly neverending project or have cleverly circumvented a traffic jam. But although I say it frequently, I've been saying it even more often these last few days.

However, I'm not entirely sure what I mean, this time, by "home."

Part of what I mean, or what I think I mean, is This City: the one that I'm still in, but which I'm leaving in just four days. The thought of leaving depresses me more than I can explain. Yes, I have many friends here, whom I'll miss terribly. Yes, I have years of memories here. But it's more than that. This city feels more profoundly like home, more like me, than anywhere I've ever lived. Even if I didn't know a soul here, I'd still be happy.

I moved here right after graduating from college, and I'd only been here for two months when I went back west to see my family for a long weekend. It was a lovely weekend. But what I remember about that weekend was when I returned: I caught a cab back to my apartment from the airport, and when the city first came into view my shoulders relaxed, I smiled, and I thought, involuntarily (even though a moment later I realized how weird it was to think this), "Ah. Home."

Of course, I do feel "at home" in Northwest City, just as I feel at home in Grad School City; I don't feel as strongly about either place as I do about This City, but I still miss things about both and I enjoy every single visit I make to each. And I'm quite sure that I'll like New City--in fact, I already like it. But I've been crying off and on for the last few days at the thought of leaving This City; it just feels like the worst break-up of my life.

Part of the reason that I'm so afraid of leaving is that I remember what it was like last time. Leaving This City to start grad school was sad, but I was sick of my job; I was looking forward to my program; I wasn't moving too far away; and I'd come to realize how completely and utterly over my head in debt I'd be if I stayed here. Also, I had no idea that I'd be gone for so long--I began grad school as an M.A. candidate.

Within perhaps 15 months, or by the time I was officially a second-year student in the Ph.D. program (I applied in December of my M.A. year, got in, and continued straight on through), however, I lost whatever it had been--excitement? fear?--that had propelled me through year one, and I became deeply, deeply unhappy. Yeah, that's grad school for you, and I knew then that most of my unhappiness was due to academic and social stress, but what I fixated on was how I was going to get back to This City.

For about a year I considered dropping out, but once I'd started to get excited about my research and teaching I decided, instead, that I could move at the end of my fourth year--as long as I had my finances in order and money saved up. I worked a part-time job and stayed in my tiny, cheap apartment, paying down an amazing amount on my credit cards [alas, that debt has now returned, and then some]. I amassed enough money for movers and a rental deposit. And of course, in the interim, I spent many weekends here, I cried every time I listened to certain songs, and each time I talked to my friends here, I'd say, "In a year and a half. . . a year from this month. . . in just over six months. . . in eight weeks. . . I'll be back."

Obviously, I did get back, and I've been lucky enough to have had three years here rather than the two I anticipated. And even though living here involved working even more hours at a different part-time job (and, this year, commuting more than two hours each way to my lectureship), I HAVE been happy to be here, and just about every moment of it; I've certainly been saner and healthier on a daily basis than I ever was in Grad School City.

So I'm afraid of leaving at least in part because I'm afraid of missing this place that much again--even though I know that leaving it for a real job, a nicer apartment and a better life is quite a bit different than leaving it for grad school. And I suppose that I'm at least half hoping-against-hope that I'll be able to work my way back here again in another five or seven years (or that George Washington Boyfriend will get a job here, which is really rather more likely).

That's part of what I mean when I talk--or when my subconscious talks--about taking the long way home.

But good things did happen while I was in Grad School City, and even if I wasn't happy while I was actually there, I returned here as a person whom I like much more than the person I was when I left. So I'm wondering whether maybe I shouldn't be thinking of "home" differently: as a state of comfort and satisfaction with oneself and one's life--personally, professionally, socially. Even if I never love another city as much as I love This City, it's possible that there might be enough compensating factors, elsewhere, that I don't notice the loss.

Maybe that's what my subconscious has meant by that statement all along.