A Full Plate

Oh hell. I am such a Bad Blogger. I meant to be regular. I really did. But I've just been too exhausted even to think about typing a coherent, let alone interesting or God forbid I aspire to such a thing, meaningful sentence when I return home in the evenings. Which gets me to wondering, why am I so friggin' tired all the friggin' time? Here are the answers that spring to mind:

1. I've loaded way too much work on my plate.

This obvious answer, however, begs the question:  Why did I do this? I actually used to be extremely good at time management, at realistically assessing my schedule, at saying no. So why have I, in my second half-century, suddenly lost those useful skills?

Which brings me to

2. I have this sense of "if not now, then never," this new urgency, this fear that the sand is plummeting through the hour glass at an ever-escalating rate, and there's just so much I want to do, to finish, to start, to try. I have no delusions about myself. I'm not one of those scholars whose work will change the way people think. But there are courses I'd like to devise and techniques I'd like to try and curricular reforms I'd like to help make happen and yes, books I'd like to write. There are questions I'd like to answer. Shoot, there are questions I'd like to ask.

But I don't have time to ask those questions because I've loaded so much on my plate that all I can do is keep cutting and biting and chewing and swallowing, no time to savor any textures or flavors, no pause for digestion, just keep forking it in in hopes that eventually the plate will be bare. Except instead it gets ever more crowded, gravy seeping onto salad, bread rolls piled high atop the grilled tofu, as I keep on taking more and more helpings, ever more anxious that if I refuse, I'll never ever have the chance to try that particular pasta or taste that sort of chocolate mousse and I will die, encumbered by pasta regret and dreams of deferred mousse.

Cursing Doris

Oh lord, Doris Kearns Goodwin on The Colbert Report. I hate seeing historians on Colbert and Jon Stewart. Overcome with longing, I watch in sorrow and think, "why not me me me?!" Obviously I don't think this when the guest is a rock star or a movie actor or the president. But an historian?? Damn damn damn. I coulda been a contender! Instead, I had children. Sigh.
 
Not that I'd trade the kids for fame and fortune or a chance to chat with Jon Stewart. Except sometimes.

Such as last Sunday morning, for example, when Keith and I were driving up and down and around every single friggin' parking lot on the LSU campus. It's a big campus: 35,000 students, God knows how many administrators, a few faculty, and lots of cars. Lots and lots and lots of cars. Amidst which we were hunting ours. Just one nondescript black Honda Civic, lost by our horrifyingly non-penitent teenaged son during a drunken tailgating session the day before.

Sorry, what? You say you don't know "tailgating"? Ahh, guess you're not from the American South, eh? "Tailgating" = 24-hour party that precedes all Southern university football games. Picture massive encampments of those temporary pavilions, Weber grills and smokers, gargantuan generators fueling large-screen tvs and stereo speakers mounted on pickup truck beds, coolers the size of industrial refrigerators, people of all ages painted in purple and gold, vats of gumbo and jambalaya, platters of fried chicken, barbecued ribs and boiled crawfish, and miles and miles of red Solo cups filled with cheap beer. And now picture my extremely sociable, not-very-consequences-minded teenaged son in the midst of all that.

We trusted him. Dumb, eh? Sure seemed so as we forsook our usual leisurely peruse of the Sunday papers and instead toured acres and acres of concrete expanses strewn with grimy plastic red cups and broken beer bottles and chicken bones and crawfish shells.

Eventually we found the car. Son has lost the right to drive. Son thinks we are unfair. Mom is staring at the television and cursing Doris Kearns Goodwin. Sorry, Doris.

Windows 8

I have bought a new laptop. Windows 8. Oh god. I can't figure out how to do anything with the damned machine. I am typing this on my old, clunky, prone to overheating and liable to do reallly weird things but totally comprehensible laptop.

I know. Now you're saying, "But you should have gotten a Mac!" Shut up. No, really. Just shut the fuck up. I cannot cope with you Mac people right now. I have a book manuscript due at the end of December. Clearly the only way I'll meet this deadline is by chucking the horrible new laptop under the bed and hoping the cat pees on it. Yes, yes, I'm sure my life would have been infinitely better had I opted for the road less traveled. But two roads diverged in a yellow wood and I, I took the pc one.

Was it this way with typewriters? I don't think so. I don't think my mom's generation had to cope with constantly having to learn an entirely new way of typing/visualizing/thinking/conceptualizing/communicating every other year or so. Geez louise. I am trying to be flexible and up-to-date and open to new possibilities. Really. But you know, honestly, all I want to do is to be able to check my email and write my book and put together lectures with some groovy illustrations and keep up with my nieces on Facebook. I don't need to be able to program a nuclear holocaust or plan a financial meltdown of the western world or record a Grammy-winning music video. I don't even need to Skype my sons. The phone works. I can hear them rolling their eyes perfectly well, thank you.

I don't want to be that old lady who talks about the ice box and moans about not being able to find anyone to service her hi-fi. But somehow I do believe it's inevitable.

Feminine items

Today I had my favorite monthly committee meeting --honestly, it's a great group of fun folks, tho' our task (to review the paperwork for new courses) is mind-numbingly boring and often completely inane. . . 

Actually, you know, these days, inane often seems just fine to me. Sheesh, I find in these my waning years that I aspire toward inanity.

But anyway, my monthly committee meeting means I get to use my favorite LSU restroom. I love this restroom. For one thing, it's clean and it always has paper towels--a fine and wonderful thing in this era of maintenance budget cuts. But even better are the signs in each stall: "Ladies, Please do not throw feminine items in the toilet." (It really says "toliet" but let's cut the underpaid and overworked janitor a bit of slack.)

It's the feminine items that gets me every time. I fight to restrain myself from chucking aftershave and jock straps, fishing poles and football jerseys, Weber grills and Playstations, down the commode.

Feminine items. Yup. Nothing speaks femininity quite like a used tampon.

The New Rules

So at what point does one get to check out from, well, new stuff? When does one get to say, no more, sorry, enough already, brain's tired, spirit's sapped, just can't any longer?

I had a disastrous class on Friday with a lecture I'd given with great success a couple times before--but that's never a guarantee. The students change, the class time changes, I change. And technologies change. Part of this lecture involves a film clip (from Mary Poppins--never let it be said that I do not challenge my students) and my copy is on VHS. Yes, a videocassette. But we no longer have a VCR at home so I could not cue up the scene in advance and my effort to do so in class set into motion an entire series of technological mishaps, all with the students glaring at me in obvious contempt. Because of course the scene is on Youtube and of course one can embed the scene in one's Powerpoint--if one is not me, that is. Tired old me with Mary Poppins in its gargantuan plastic rectangle, a relic of my children's childhoods.

But you know, if the problem were confined to technology, I could cope. You 're mystified, you fail, you whine and moan, and then you go find someone young who shows you how. I get that. Plus it's every generation's right to immiserate the last with new technology. I get that too.

It's the new rules that are driving me nuts.

Take the Matchy-Matchy Rule. I went home in July for a wedding and accompanied my 14-year-old niece as she hunted for shoes to wear with her silver-and-black dress. I suggested a silver-and-black pair of heels and she shot me a look somewhere between sorrow and pity: "I don't want to be Matchy-Matchy," she explained. Oh. Right. I nod like I have a clue but inside I'm asking, "Wait, when did matching become a problem? Who changed the rules? Why wasn't I notified?" And now it's a Sunday morning in August and I am wearing a new black-and-white polka-dotted sundress and I have a pair of adorable black-and-white polka-dotted earrings. . .  but Hugh says no, too Matchy-Matchy. Well, dang.

Or then there's the Trim-Your-Bush Rule. Keith and I went to see Your Sister's Sister (a terrific film, by the way) and in one hilarious scene, Rosemarie DeWitt's character reveals that her half-sister (played by Emily Blunt) once came home from a date all embarrassed because the guy had laughed at the bulge in her underwear created by her pubic hair: "She didn't know she was supposed to trim her bush!" And the Emily Blunt character is cringing and everyone in the theater is roaring and I'm laughing too but I'm also thinking, "Well, damn, so you are supposed to do that." Was this always a rule that somehow Mom forgot to inculcate? Or is it a new rule and once again, I missed the memo?

Where does one pick up these memos? When are they delivered? And really, when is it ok just to chuck them in the trash and trip along unawares, earrings matchy-matching one's sundress, bush pooching out from one's underwear, videocassette of Mary Poppins firmly in hand?

A Very Weird Mother

I wonder sometimes what it would be like to be normal, you know, as in "mainstream," part of the general current, floating in the middle with everyone else. I don't think of myself as a contrarian and I'm certainly not much of an original thinker and I really rather like feeling like I belong.  And yet it so rarely works out that way. Maybe it's the consequence of being the first daughter after five sons; maybe that experience of being the outlier just got woven into the fabric of my being. More likely it's just happenstance, the random throw of the dice. But somehow I ended up a political and theological liberal and an impractical humanities grad in a family of fundamentalist Republican moneymakers, a Midwesterner in the Deep South, a city lover submerged in strip malls and subdivisions, a sports agnostic in a universe of football fanatics, a European with an American accent.

And, evidently, a Very Weird Mother.

I have just begun a new position as the sort of academic head honcho of a residential college at my university ("head honcho," that is, in the sense of "the person in charge of making lots of phone calls and begging people to do stuff," not, mind you, "the person with power or prestige"). Now, if you're my age, and you attended an American college or university, you probably lived in a dorm. You are old. Dorms are no more. Now we have residential communities, or if you're really cutting-edge in the student services industry (and yes, oh yes, what an industry it is), residential colleges. Which is all well and good, and if you're really interested, go Google it, but the point is, I now have more exposure to the parents of university freshmen than I've ever had before. And I've come to realize that I am not a normal mother.

Normal Mothers--or perhaps, given the range of my data, I should say "Normal Mothers of Freshmen Attending Public Universities in the Deep South" but then again it's an Election Year when we're all used to general conclusions based on the flimsiest bits of anecdotal evidence so hell, let's just go with "Normal Mothers"--Normal Mothers accompany their children on Move-In Day.  They come in with enormous refrigerators and microwaves and flatscreen tvs and they demand to know when Brittni's WiFi will be available. They storm down from the room with long lists of Things That Must Be Repaired Immediately. They stand in the various dining hall/mailbox/rec center lines in loco offspring-is so that their children can be free to do whatever it is such children do. Normal Mothers know their children's course schedules by heart--they know course titles, times, classroom assignments, professors, the required book lists, the tentative dates of the midterm and final, and the various ways these courses fulfill the General Education requirements. They say things like "We're thinking about Engineering. Or maybe Interior Design. We're not sure yet."

Weird moms like me? We stick the kid on the plane with a suitcase, $50, and a big hug. And then we wait for him to call. And when he doesn't, we figure he's doing ok or he'd call. And we avoid looking at his baby picture or that beautiful painting he did when he was ten and we let him be.

I guess I'd thought that was the whole point. Raising him, releasing him, letting him be. Except it's so damned hard. And now I find out it's just weird.

Well, shit. Can we rewind?

Off the Recommended Path

Grades posted. Another semester finished. Done and dusted.

Another graduating senior failed. Sigh. She's no longer graduating, I'm afraid.

Before I became a professor, I thought that teachers/instructors/professors probably got a kick out of failing students. All that power, you know. The flick of the whip. The assertion of authority. But it's not like that. Listen, you slackers, we agonize; we really do. Why, I'm not sure. You don't show up for class for weeks on end, you blow off most of the reading response assignments, you don't hand in the major paper, you never come to my office hours,  you score a 43/100 on your final exam. Did you really think you were going to pass this course? Why? GoodGodinHeaven, WHY? Because you're a graduating senior? Because you figured. . . what?  See, here I am asking these questions, whereas you, well, you're not, are you? Although honestly, why should you? Success or failure in "20th-Century European History" won't determine your life's course, tho' it probably does mean that your mom will insist you send back those graduation checks. (Even if she doesn't, you should. Really.)

It amazes me that students can and do fail with monotonous regularity, given the incredible resources that the university pours into making sure that doesn't happen--counselors and special coaching sessions and free tutoring and vigilant R.A.s and streams of emails and legions of support services and a downright fascist approach to course scheduling that involves "Recommended Paths" ("Recommended" is a euphemism for "Absolutely Mandatory") and "critical courses" (woe betide the student who fails to take the "critical courses" demanded by the Recommended Path at the "recommended" times: such a failure results in [quoting from the catalog here] "mandatory removal from the program"). Nope, no chance for the aimless or curious or misguided or just plain independent student to fuck up without the university knowing about it and marshalling its resources to rope said student back on the Recommended Path. And yet, even with all these guideposts and Big Brother accommodations, students somehow fail.

A remarkable triumph of the will, when you think about it.

OK, hats off to you, you slackers. Go for it. Diverge from the Recommended Path; choose (dare one say it) the Road Less Traveled. Maybe by failing you're succeeding.

Just don't you dare complain to me about your grade.

I am not an Anglophile

Watching "Antiques Roadshow," waiting for "Doc Martin."

A friend in England once introduced me to her neighbor as a "complete Anglophile." I was stunned, and rather horrified.. An Anglophile? Me? No way. Anglophiles are like antiquarians. . . you know, crazy people, those folks who bore everybody at parties.

I am not a boring party person. I"m a British historian.

Oh dear. Not a very convincing argument.

Strange, isn't it, how one ends up doing what one does? I ended up in British history because I had to pick a senior honors thesis advisor, and  I was having a really rough time, and the British historian at Calvin was a kind, gentle man who looked like he carried peppermints in his pockets. So, I chose him instead of the famous French history guy or the cool U.S. social history guy or the serious ancient history guy. It had nothing to do with the subject; it was all about the guy. At that point in my life I desperately needed a grandpa, and Henry Ippel was it. I wrote my honors thesis, and that became what I submitted with grad school applications, so of course I ended up in British history. Happenstance, really. Just a lonely fatherless girl looking for someone to care about her. And here was this aging British history professor, such a decent man, who was willing to play the part. In such arbitrary ways, one's life gets decided.

And so, arbitrarily, as a result of a kindly college professor who never actually offered me a peppermint, I've spent much of my life studying, reading about, thinking about, living in the British Isles. I know more about British politics, social life, intellectual developments, popular and high culture, than I do the Southern American counterparts, even tho' I live in southern Louisiana. Ostensibly. But can one really live in a place when one spends most of one's time thinking about somewhere else?

After more than 20 years, I still find the South an alien place. I can't figure it out; I'm constantly stumbling, careening into no-go areas and horrified by what I uncover. Would I have embrace my area of study with such passion if I'd been able to live my life in, say, Chicago? Dunno. Life didn't happen that way. All I know is that when Keith is out of town, I switch on the Baton Rouge public radio station in the evenings: At 9 pm, the BBC World Service comes on and stays on all night long. I go to sleep, and I wake up through the night and finally in the morning, to these beautiful, comforting British accents. Strangely, the sound of home.

Millicent's Cat

A couple of colleagues won some Big Awards this past week. I'm just so pleased; we all started in our academic careers at about the same time and it's just so thrilling to watch folks I knew at the very start, way back when, now reach the heights of professional success. Of course back then I aspired to those same heights and now I realize I'll never reach them, but that's fine. I'm content to sit on the sidelines, to know what it takes, to cheer on the winners.

Right.

I do wish I were such a person, that kind of good and generous person who can rejoice heartily and wholly in another's success, even while contronting one's own failure. I aspire to be such a person. I pretend to be that person. I say the words, go through the motions, follow the script.

You know, actually, I think I put on an incredible performance most of the time. Damn. I should have gone into acting.

I'll keep saying the words, honing the performance, trying desperately to own the character, to become the role. Maybe, in time, the magic will happen. Transmutation, transmogrification, the spell that will change me, completely and utterly, to that better soul.

Right now, tho',  I'm like Hermione crouching, horrified in the bathroom stall, faced with the fact that her plans have gone awry, that her preparations were insufficient, that she is not Millicent Bulstrode, but, sadly, grotesquely, Millicent's cat.

A New Semester

The new semester began this week. What do people do, normal people in normal jobs? How do they cope without the constant renewal of the semester system? Every few months my world is made fresh--new schedule, new faces, new problems, new topics, new hopes and ambitions. Of course, a few months later, those hopes lie wrecked, those ambitions unrealized. But then I get to try again, and delude myself again, and I fall for it every time.

Anyway, a new semester has dawned and a colleague of mine greeted it by giving a cultural literacy quiz to the students in his introductory American history survey. About 120 students, mostly but not entirely sophomores, from all majors. As expected, they know nothing about the past. I get that (I've been a history buff since before I knew the word "history"--truly, since before kindergarten--but I get that I'm weird). So a rocking 0% identified Woodrow Wilson correctly and even here in the Deep South, only 22% correctly identified William Tecumseh Sherman (with “LSU president” counted as a complete and correct answer; what I loved was that several students thought he invented the Sherman tank). No surprises there. And really, even if they never actually learn who Wilson and Sherman were, life will go on, the social order will not be compromised, they'll live valuable and productive lives.

But then, bizarrely, 91% knew Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Huh? Why do they know that? When  (sob!) only 4% recognize a photo of George Harrison (with a guitar, mind you) and only 3% know who Orson Welles was. So much for their popular culture expertise. And of course, when you venture into the realm of the political, the results are mind-bogglingly horrifying: just think, of these eligible voters, 10% identified Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 19% knew Donald Rumsfeld (maybe that one's a good thing), and 0%-ZERO-nada-none of 'em knew that the city of Karachi is in Pakistan, that rather unstable nation-state that just may determine much of our future.

Still, lest we despair about the future of our country, take comfort in these stats:

• 99% did not recognize a photo of Jon Huntsman (oh,come on, you remember him? running for the Republican presidential nomination til just a few days ago? really rich guy? oh right, they're all really rich. . . so google him).
• 45% knew Mr. Clean, the commercial cartoon character for cleaning products.

So, at least they won't be voting for Huntsman and they'll be shiny and germ-free.

 

Grants

I spent most of this week on the utterly soul-destroying task of writing a grant application.

Now, for those of you grant virgins out there, let me just point out that not all grant applications are the same. I, for one, don't find applying for money for my own research to be spiritually annihilating, I suppose because I get to witter on and on about ideas that I care about and it's kind of a kick to try and make some group of unknown folks care about these ideas too.  (Perhaps I ought to note that for all my wittering, I'm amazingly bad at getting said funds. Which is why I am, and will always remain, an associate rather than a full professor. Not that I mind. Really. No, no. It's just my allergies. Something in my eye. A problem with my contacts. Really.)

This week, however, I was applying for "enhancement funds" for one of the undergraduate residential colleges at LSU. Don't get me wrong: I do care about this project, as much or more than I care about my own research. I mean, frankly, I research and write about British Victorian and post-Victorian religious culture. Not exactly gonna change the world, is it? Whereas this residential college, well, it won't change the world, it won't even change LSU, and it sure as hell won't change Louisiana where we just re-elected the horrific Bobby Jindal as governor by an embarrassing landslide. . . .but it might just change the lives of a few LSU undergrads. These residential colleges are a way of somehow sneaking the harmony and elegance and coherent community of a small liberal arts college experience into the cacophony and chaos of a huge state university. I had a wonderful, life-transforming and yes, even mind-altering (without hallucinogenic drugs!) experience at my liberal arts college and I passionately want the same for my hungover, disengaged, football-addicted, parochial, and utterly lovely students. (I mean, take this final sentence from one of my upper-level student's essays: "A new period began during this time, it has come to be known as the Victorian period, named after Queen Victoria, who ruled at the time." How unbelievably, utterly lovely is that?)

So, why then, did I find the experience of writing this grant so personally and emotionally and existentially devastating? Because, dear ones, winning the grant demands that the applicant demonstrate that the project will acrrue calculable economic benefit to the state of Louisiana. And tell me, how does one quantify, how does one calculate, the economic benefit of encouraging well-rounded, globally aware, internationally engaged, intellectually vital, politically active young folks?

I'll tell you. One makes stuff up. Not out of whole cloth, mind you, but one does grab meaningless numbers and one marshalls one's skill at crafting words to make those meaningless integers appear to carry profound weight.

I hate playing this game. A good liberal arts education, which is what I had--thank you Mom and what was then the Social Security dependent's benefit (axed by Reagan but not before I'd used it for all four years) and Calvin College and Northwestern University and an impressive array of underpaid, incredibly committed professors--teaches intellectual honesty. I betrayed that education in an effort to obtain at least some of the benefits of that education for some of my students. Sigh. How perverse is that?

Queen for a Day

I came home from teaching, threw my bag in the corner, and shouted, "If I were Queen of the World for a Day, I would ban all straightening rods, straightening creams, and straightening blow-outs for all time!"

Keith looked at me, nodded, and immediately left the house.

Pitiful, isn't it? What sort of person chooses hair straightening as the thing that must be eradicated to make the world better? Not hunger? AIDS? Malaria? The Tea Party? Glenn Beck? And really, truly, I'd get rid of all those first, if I were Queen. Absolutely. It's a promise.

But I've had it with straight hair. For years now, I look out at my classes, and all the white women look absolutely identical. Same shoulder-length straight hair, seat after seat after seat. Absolutely utterly the same. It's weird. Creepy. Downright Orwellian. When I first started teaching, lo, these many decades ago, I had trouble tellling the white guys apart. They all wore baseball caps and sat in the back row and threw down their pens whenever I used words like "patriarchy" or "gender" or "femininity". The women, however,  were easy--some had short hair, some long, some in between, in a wide range from downright nappy to board straight. Jennifer stood out from Jessica; Alison could never be mistaken for Emma. Now the women in my classes look like they've all been cloned by some alien mastermind out to take over American universities. There's the occasional rebel with a variety of piercings and tattooss--but even she sports that same damned straight hair. I can't stand it. How am I supposed to tell Taylor from Dakota from Hannah from Jordan from Katelyn from Michelle from Holly? And good lord, what's wrong with a little curl? the occasional spontaneous bounce? even, God forbid, a wee bit of frizz now and then?

Mom, the Microwave, and God

My mom believes God spoke to her via her microwave.

This was awhile back. My cousin and his wife had put their house on the market and my mom, unbeknownst to her children, had been thinking about moving (i.e. selling our Home, the one we grew up in, the place invested with all the memories, you know, that place). So Mom shows up at my cousin's house and when she discovers that her microwave will fit in their specially built microwave cabinet, she discerns a divine sign: This is the house God wants her to buy. And she does. And she's happy.

Does God speak through ordinary events, if not ordinary household appliances? Two days ago I received an email informing me that the publishing firm with which I've signed two book contracts has now cancelled its entire history list. Is this a sign? Is God talking? Is He/She/They saying (cue James Earl Jones voice, except maybe with some strong feminine/feminist undertones), "Oh, Facing-50, 'tis time to rethink your career?"

Or maybe 'tis time for a new microwave.

It Was Simple

I'm home after four weeks abroad with 34 undergrads. Home to my lovely husband and bright boys and lovable pets. Home with my good bed and thick towels and uninterrupted internet access. Home (amazingly) to temperatures lower than those baking much of the United States these last few weeks. 

Home. No more lengthy headache-exacerbating bus rides listening to America's Future discussing  where they drank last night, what they drank, how drunk they got, where to go to drink tonight, what to drink, and how drunk they hope to get.

Home. So why am I incredibly out-of sorts, ill-tempered, cantankerous, downright bitchy?

Perhaps it's the fact that I'm on Day 2 of the 17-Day Diet. Sadly, four weeks in the company of 34 undergrads is not good for the Facing-50s waistline. Every day one wades through mounds and mounds of french fries and gummy bears and candy bars and potato chips. . .  But, no, this bitchiness is more than just hunger, more than the grumpiness induced by having to forego bread and wine and chocolate. (Although, gotta admit, seeing those words in stark print-- bread and wine and chocolate, I am doing without bread and wine and chocolate -- sheesh, it really is enough to send someone over the edge, isn't it?)

Still, more than diet is at work here. I'd love to blame jet lag, but as an incurable insomniac, I've lived most of my life in a state of chronic jet lag, and actually I think I'm fairly good at it.

So, nope, not a matter of food or sleep deprivation. Instead, I do believe I am suffering from the loss of simplicity. Life for the last four weeks has been stunningly simple: a small suitcase, a series of barebones hostel rooms, breakfasts of tea and toast, and best of all, a packed and inflexible schedule. Everyday I got up and knew what I had to do and when I had to do it. I did it. And then I went to bed. Few decisions, limited choices, and oh! glorious bliss! no self-flagellation at the end of the day. No "I shoulda coulda"s.  No wondering at how little I achieved. No guilt at chapters not written, errands not run, chores not completed and checked off the List. No sense of failure because I didn't make phone calls or dinner or love.

Just me, Irish history, and 34 hungover undergraduates.

Simple.

Undergraduates in Ireland; or, Suburbanites Unleashed

Do sheep bite?

If I were a sheep, I'd totally want to live here.

We don't have sheep in America, do we?

How do you tell the difference between a sheep and a lamb?
     I think the lambs are the little ones. Except there are rams, too. I'm not sure how they fit in.

On a Cliff's Edge

Today three dozen undergraduates and I climbed through torrential rain, gale-force winds, and a steady slamming stream of tiny hail stones to a prehistoric fort perched on a cliff's edge at the very end of the civilized world. Just another typical day in the life of a typical European history professor. Sort of.

It's a good life, all in all. The pay is crummy but the perks are splendid. At least if you like fierce winds and dramatic rain and the icy cold that slices through your skin and settles deep within your bones. Which I do. Always have. It's weather with integrity, sharp-edged, clearcut, purposeful, direct. Not like the miasmic heat of the Deep South, the humidity that envelops you, the heat that first lures you in--"shush now," it whispers, "just slow down, have a rest, why don't you put your feet up and have a nice cold drink?"--and then warmly smiles as you slowly suffocate.

After I made my way down from the cliffs, I sat on the bus, my jeans completely soaked, icy cold against my skin. And just like a certain smell can suddenly catapult you into a memory so vivid, so present, that the lines of time and space collapse, so this physical sensation sent me spinning into Mrs. Wolterstorff's third grade classroom. Eight years old, just in from recess, the windows all fogged up, water beneath my desk puddling up as the snow embedded in my corduroys slowly thawed, the cold and clammy cotton firmly stuck to my thighs, my feet little blocks of ice within wet socks. This is not, actually, a happy memory. I was an extraordinarily grumpy child, and I sat there on my plastic seat, my hands so cold they burned, even my underpants soaked from the snow, and I glowered at Mrs. Wolterstorff. How in the world, thought my indignant eight-year-old self, can I be expected to concentrate on homophones and homonyms while my butt itches and prickles as it thaws?

I imagine many of my students, Deep Southerners born and bred, were asking themselves something along those lines today. But, the thing is, integrity is not comfortable. It cuts and chills and makes your butt prickle. Still, it's rather bracing when you're perched on a cliff's edge at the end of the civilized world.

Grading II

Still grading final exams. Universal suffrage seems more and more like a really bad idea.

A student in my "Western Civilization since 1500" class thinks that Germany failed to defeat the Soviet Union in World War II because Hitler insisted on mounting the troops on elephants for the invasion.

Really.

I suppose she sat there, probably hung over, terrified of failing, knowing nothing, and somehow, in some mysterious way, a little glimmer, an inkling, a scrap of a fact, a ghost of a memory drifted down and settled in. Something about a commander whose name started with an 'H' and who suffered a terrible military defeat.

Hannibal. Hitler. Ancient Rome. The Soviet Union. All in the past. A bunch of dead guys. History.

Grading

I'm grading final exams and therefore, inevitably, I am depressed and out of sorts.

And then I hit this line in a student's paper: "If these secularizing trends continued, martyrs would be a dying breed."

I love my job.

The Problem with Bicycling

I've been bicycling to work, a fact of which I am ridiculously proud, considering it's only a 2-mile ride between home and the university. On a bike path. Along a lake. In the flatlands of south Louisiana. Still, temperatures are already in the upper 80s down here, so I do sweat. And thus have the right to feel proud.

I thought that the sweating would be the huge problem with biking to work, but there's still enough of a morning coolness and a light breeze that it's ok. So far, at least, I don't walk around all day smelling like a pile of dirty gym clothes.

But I do walk around with Really Bad Hair. This, I had not anticipated. If I wear the helmet, I look something like a tonsured Gene Wilder. If I decide to risk brain injury for the sake of my vanity and forego the helmet, I show up looking like the mad scientist in the Back to the Future movies. Today it was so bad that I actually stuck my head under the faucet in the ladies' room before I went to class. It didn't help things much. Instead of looking like a crazy old lady, I looked like a wet and crazy old lady. Ah well. It all keeps my students amused or, at least, bemused. The Batty Bicycling Prof. You know, the one with the hair.

Once upon a time

So, are you watching on Friday?

Oh, come on. 'Fess up. I won't tell. I'll think you're a lunatic, but I won't tell.

If you haven't a clue as to what I'm talking about, well, kudos, my friend. But, umm, you are sort of uninformed, tho', aren't you? As the rest of the sentient universe knows, Wills and Kate are finally tying the knot on Friday and the whole world will be watching.

My students were rather surprised and, in fact, somewhat dismayed to discover I am not planning to get up at 3 am to watch the live coverage of the wedding. "But you're a British historian," they protested. "This is history! Being made!" Which would be sort of cute and adorable if I hadn't just spent a semester trying to teach them a slightly more nuanced definition of history and the making thereof.

It's not like I dislike the Royal Family. I don't. When I'm in the checkout line, I'll always pull down the magazine with a royal on the cover. Beats Brangelina and Britney any day. And in fact, I have something of an exotic pedigree as a royal watcher. I don't imagine there are many other Americans who can boast hosting a Queen's Jubilee Garden Party.

It was all Hugh's fault, of course. While we were living in Manchester, the Queen celebrated her Golden Jubilee. Hugh, then about six, attended the local primary school where they held a picnic on the Friday afternoon in the Queen's honor. Hugh came home simply on fire about the whole concept of the Jubilee and proceeded to draw up and distribute invitations to a Jubilee Garden Party in our back yard ("back garden," in Brit speak) to the entire neighborhood. Without telling us. So suddenly on Saturday afternoon, we found ourselves with a party on our hands. I think, had we not been "The Americans," the party would not have happened. But, confronted with this (seemingly legit) invitation from The Americans celebrating Our Queen, the neighbors were too embarrassed not to come--and come they did. And stay they did. We ransacked the fridge and cupboards and concocted weird party food on the spot and once we had drained our actually rather abundant liquor supply, the neighbors dashed back to their houses and returned with six-packs of beer. Hugh's Garden Party turned into one of the highlights of our three-year sojourn, an alcohol-sodden, pretzel-and-cake-filled, hours and hours-long delight in the rare Manchester sunshine, complete with beery toasts to a portrait of Her Maj.

So, no, I'm not opposed to the Royal Family. I'm not opposed to Wills or Kate. I'll even make sure I buy a souvenir wedding mug this summer, to match the Charles and Diana cup in which I keep my pens.

And yes, way back when Diana tumbled into marriage with the yet-debonair Charles, I did watch the ceremony live--from a tiny living room of a rented house in what was then West Germany, crowded on the carpet with the 25 other students with whom I was spending the summer traveling in Europe.

And then, a week later, in a London still bedecked with wedding bunting, I stood in line in the pouring rain (not your typical London mist, mind you, but torrential drenching rain, with tremendous cracks of thunder and spectacular blasts of lightning) for several hours and then tramped through St. James Palace, soaking wet and muddy, to view the Wedding Gifts. Room after room filled with not only the various precious items sent by various global dignitaries of behalf of various unsuspecting publics--I believe the American People gave Charles and Diana an American Primitive painting--but also, and so much more interesting, the ordinary gifts sent by ordinary people to a couple they seemed to believe would be happily ordinary. Yes, the toaster from Paul and Sheila Thomas of Somerset, the tea cozy from Thomas and Margaret Ashton of Kent, the plastic picnicware from George and Vera Barnes of Birmingham. As if Charles and Diana, like Paul and Sheila and Thomas and Margaret and George and Vera before them, were really embarking on an ordinary, toast-making, tea-drinking, picnic-laden married life.

Such innocence. Rather like The Dress. That amazing puffball dress. The Fairy Princess Dress. Only a 19-year-old blonde virgin could pull off that dress.

Kate, the fashion commentators assured me as I was flipping thru the channels several nights ago, Kate will not wear such a dress. Hers will be more sophisticated and slender, more befitting her willowy frame and the worldly wisdom of her 28 years. And Kate has not been subjected to a physical exam to confirm her virginity, with the results trumpeted across the globe. We have moved on. Good for us. Good for Kate.

Still. Hardly worth getting up at 3 am for, is it?