I laughed with joy when I saw the photo of my dear friend Gul's beautiful little girl Ayla in the holiday greeting card she sent, complete with scribbles and the greeting that she misses me and wants to paint with me again. (Her little pink barrettes, and her long slender arms -- she's grown so much, she's not a baby anymore.) And then, I had the sudden and unexpected reaction of breaking down crying, hard. I want a little girl . . .

And I also want to hear from my sweetie.

And I think I've been pushing myself pretty close to the edge the past couple of weeks. And today was. . . a hard day.

I'll be good to be at home, methinks.

I got a card from Debs, too. Oh, I love the photos. You all look so nice. Mal looks so pretty in her dress with that beautiful necklace. And I can't get over what a sweet young man Michael is.

Even my neighbor sent me a Christmas card. And I still have the card sitting here I wrote and addressed to Sandy when she was in the hospital. I just can't keep up with correspondence anymore. It's so depressing, how life passes you by. I look in the mirror and wonder how another year has passed. At least my hair is growing back.

Loose ends

Well, just one more big messy hurdle to get through.

Or . . . one big messy day, three big messy hurdles. Return the student papers, finish out my time at AFG, and submit my field paperwork for my MSW.

It'll be nice to be back at AFG; just sad, since it'll mark the end of an era there. But I'll be back in January to do some more work on the evaluation. So the only difference will be no more clock ticking, no more surveillance of the same variety. I don't like to be surveilled.

I have submitted the student grades, submitted all my work for the time being, and am now sorting through the detritus of the end of the semester. I got to the bottom of the laundry hamper and realized two interesting, if slightly disturbing things: (1) I had clothes in there from Thanksgiving, which means I probably haven't done laundry since then, unless I did it and just left the handwashables at the bottom (which is possible, but in any case, I can't remember, and that in and of itself is kind of telling) and (2) my laundry was so cold, there is no doubt that it helps to insulate the wall the hamper sits against in my office. Hmm.

Well, now I have both the washing machine and the dishwasher running, and I'm debating what to do next. Something about having an intense stress-induced adrenaline rush for several days makes it a bit anticlimactic just to go to bed, though it probably would be wise. I feel a bit too pumped up for that, anyway, though. If I drive to the supermarket to buy O'Douls and get gas, though, I'll probably be done for the night. Well, at least I wouldn't have to stop for gas in the morning on the way to Detroit.

One option would be to work on my field paperwork now, but my arms are tingling from all the typing for days. So I probably shouldn't be blogging, either, I know.

I did buy a ticket to California, FINALLY. Hooray. And I've left enough time for me to clean up the house thoroughly before I go, so everything will be pristine and fresh and tidy and all my personal crap will be a little less overwhelming. So I pulled out a suitcase, and can finally start thinking about being a person who is something other than a teacher and a student and a social worker, for at least a few days.

Oh, just to give myself a sense of accomplishment, I just tallied up my writing I've done since Thanksgiving: 1 28-page paper, 7 pages of short response papers on readings, 1 23-page paper, 1 35-page paper, 1 8-page paper, and 1 page of prelim questions. That's 102 pages, and just shy of a hundred if you knock out title pages and bibliographic material. Nutty. And that doesn't even include comments on student papers, or emails, or blog writing. I guess it's been a productive few weeks. I'm not saying all of it is good. Heck, plenty of it isn't. But a little of it, I think, actually is.

Between that and the very exciting meetings with a few faculty members I love, I think I'm going to head off to California pretty blissed out despite all the last-minute stress of grading and running around for field placement.

Little victories

Well, having eaten enough to sustain a small village for a night or two (bacon and pierogie fried with onion right in the bacon grease, covered with sour cream, and washed down with a bottle of nonalcoholic beer, perfect food after working for two days straight with hardly a crumb in my stomach, and then trudging home in the snow), I'm going to bathe and go to bed for a few hours. I pulled my second all-nighter last night (okay, okay, I slept from 8 am til 1 pm on Monday and 5:40 to 8 am this morning, but that doesn't really count) to get the portfolio finished for my democracy course, but it is FINALLY in. I'm accepting incompletes in my independent studies, and have worked out the arrangements with the professors. Now, on to finish my undergraduate grading, and to magically make an ungodly number of field work hours and my final field work paperwork happen between now and Friday, and I'll be finished with this semester of craziness. Thank God I never have to be a first-time Anthropology 101 GSI ever again. Next time, it'll be the second. And that makes all the difference in the world!

By the way, my final paper for Democracy ended up being 35 pages. And you know, I feel pretty good about it. I hope she likes it too.

The other good news: I have a prelim committee forming, and prelim ideas being generated, for Social Work. And the whole team is people I think are amazing and fabulous and whom I love working with, and am excited to spend time getting to think with. And they seem enthusiastic too. About the ideas and about each other. Score. Like, major score. I just need to talk to the last of the four (four is the upper limit; three is typical and I've already got three on board), but assuming she has time, I'm pretty sure she'll be game, because I know she's positive about working with me although I haven't approached her specifically about prelims. She gave me an A+ in her class. So yeah, I think I can hope for her support. :) So, life is looking nice from here. Although it's a little blurry, since I need to rest my eyes. Now, on to the bath. Hello and good tidings to you, world.

Well, I just stayed up all night working. After staying home all weekend working. Now I'm going to catch a little snooze for a few hours, before I hopefully finish up my paper and the rest of the course portfolio for this class, so I can turn it in. I'm meeting one of my favorite professors at 3:00 today . . . and I'm just hoping I'm vaguely coherent for that.

Coulda woulda shoulda

I should have been in Budapest today.

But instead I am writing. Writing, writing, writing. It's late, but it's coming, finally.

'Tis good, though. I think that what I'm writing isn't crap. Lately that feeling is pretty unusual, I have to say. Actually, I think it might even be good. But it's early to tell.

It's taken me AGES to get through my field data from Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania to the point that I can make heads or tails of it. I didn't leave my house all weekend, and today only went as far as the cable company a few miles down the road to restore my troubled internet service. I filed away about two inches of papers into a three-inch binder, added tabs to six field notebooks, and have been creating indexes for myself. I feel like this is the kind of stuff they don't teach you. An archival methods course would be so handy. I know there are probably more intuitive digital ways of creating cross-referencing tools. But I'm just working with the skills and tools I've got. This is even before transcribing, which will add PILES and PILES to the data I've already got in the form of field notes, photographs, and documents from field contacts.

I've started making a more comprehensive database than I've had up until now, except the one in my head, and realized today that I probably have met at least a few hundred people "in the field" at this point who have something to do with my project. No wonder I feel a little loopy sometimes, and like I haven't had a real chance of synthesizing my life while I've been doing coursework. Thank God I took a semester to do independent study so I could start to process this, a little.

wordpainting

These things I see, I could not create if I tried . . .

A gruff man in a cowboy hat with a lit cigarette hanging in his mouth, sitting with the engine running in his tan metallic long-bed Ford pickup truck with a full load of firewood dusted with snow, waiting outside the cable company . . .

The golden stubs of a corn field poking their stalky fingers out of the thick blanket of white, against the fading pale pink horizon. . .

A weathered red barn, the wood in danger of collapse at any moment, against the stark winter landscape. . .

A tiny round bird resting beside a tuft of snow in the bare stalks of the hedge in my front yard . . .

The morning sight of a lone figure making his way on cross-country skis across the lake . . .

In the afternoon, another with a device like a massive corkscrew, shuffling on foot back from a center point where he has drilled, presumably to test the ice thickness for its readiness to hold the ice fishermen . . .

And then the narrow glimmering fingernail of moon rising in the pale blue arc of the sky at sunset over the cottage when I arrive home.

They are things I drink in every day, images I think I will carry in my heart for life. It is so very beautiful out here.

(Despite the 40 minutes of shoveling the driveway this morning . . .)

Japanese Video -- What to do if Mugged Abroad

Passed along to me by a Hungarian friend through Facebook. Oh, our wonderfully globally connected world is good for something. Apparently posted on YouTube by someone who found it on Kontraband.com.