Words’ End

Last week I gave a talk at the second annual conference on distance ed put on by the BU Faculty Advisory Board on, You Guessed It, Distance Education.

It was a great time! I was heartened to see so many people thinking so creatively about classroom technology. Distance ed may not equate to using technology (networked or not) in the classroom, but there’s a lot of crossover, so I was asked to reprise a talk I’d given few months ago through the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching.

I’ve taken recent thinking about slide presentations to heart, so looking at my slides wouldn’t yield anything particularly coherent: there’s little text on them. So I’ve inserted the slides here instead of putting them on SlideShare; click on a slide to see it full-size.  Alas, I haven’t figured out yet how to open the full-size images in the same page, with a gallery-like overlay (is there a WordPress plugin for this?), so—apologies—they’re set to open in a new window.

This gets long; here’s hoping the LiveJournal crosspost can deal with the more tag. If it can’t, sorry, LJLand—I don’t do this often… Read the rest of this entry »

My friend and housemate Martin is riding this weekend in the Brain Tumor Ride. He’s raising money for it, in memory of his dad. It’s a good cause. Read about it here, and donate if you can.

Life’s been chugging along, and the best I can do sometimes is keep up. In the now-venerable tradition of good-thing, bad-thing, here’s my week and a half, give or take.

• ++ Birthday! I had one. I went out to dinner with mom and Vlad, and later had a party. It was well attended by lovely people; Mark supplied lights and gorgeous swathes of cloth to drape around things; the food was appreciated; much merriment was had.
• - Then last Monday I started feeling sick.
• - Then last Tuesday I came in sick to cover library supervision in the evening (until 9pm), and proceeded to lie on the table floor for most of the time I was in, unable even to watch stupid TV online, much less work.
• — Then Wednesday I discovered that what I had was strep throat! I don’t remember whether I’d ever had it before; certainly not since I got to the States almost twenty (!!) years ago.
• + Yet I recognized it for what it must be, went to get myself checked out (thanks for the encouragement, mom), and got
• +++ penicillin, which is a wonder of (semi-)modern medicine, even though it’s kicking my butt by greatly diminishing my baseline energy level. But hey, it’s only for ten days.
• - Meanwhile, I missed my weekly playdate/kid-sitting night with four year old Natalie. SO looking forward to seeing her today.
• ++ On Saturday, I had fantastic dinner with my family, all of them—even brother Zhenya, sisinlaw Jo Ann and nephew Tesher came up for this—as a first, early celebration of my mom’s 70th birthday (coming up in May). I do so like hanging out with them, particularly when it involves food and then sleeping in my own bed.
• + The last two nights, I had excellent dates, with conversations and food and laughing that left me feeling hale and whole.
• + Yesterday, I finally finished up the saga of having had to have a tooth extracted a year and a half ago, then get an implant, then get a crown for the implant. Dentistry has been the bain of my didn’t-grow-up-with-fluoride-in-my-water body, and I’m glad this one’s over.
• ++ Also yesterday, I acquired a physical therapist and a therapy schedule to finally fix a year-and-a-half-old shoulder injury. I like the therapist, and I like that he’s two T stops away from the building where I work. Major win.
• + I’ve been productive and happy at work (except for that miserable evening with the strep throat). We submitted an NEH grant proposal; I’ve been talking to faculty about teaching with technology; we have several IT and digital library projects going; and as terrifying as it is to essentially be my own boss most days, I’m also learning new stuff at a pace I can feel. Mostly learning about managing time and expectations. Valuable stuff.
• - Work is also exhausting and often frustrating. Yesterday I shut down my computer after reviewing and commenting on four long library policy documents, and literally couldn’t think for a while, just let myself be on autopilot going home.
• + Good thing cooking perks me right up.
• - I’ve also been chronically under-sleeping again, mostly by making bad time-management choices in favor of being with good people.
• + Good thing I got plenty of sleep while sick with strep throat!
• + On a different note, I’m participating in a Tufts study on how people manage their personal finances (or at least that’s what they claim the study is about). This got me thinking more deeply about my own personal finances, and once again coming to a conclusion that I can manage them well even if the jam-tomorrow enticements that just keep coming from my ex never materialize, and I have to pay his share of our mutual debts too. I wouldn’t be happy doing it, but not having any choice, find it more pleasant to be sanguine about it. Of course I have a rant about that, but that’s not the point: the point is, this isn’t driving me crazy anymore.
• +This past weekend, I saw a bunch of old friends and acquaintances from my days of hanging out on the interactive fiction MUD.  I also got to see a screening of the excellent documentary Get Lamp, by Jason Scott of textfiles fame, which (both Get Lamp and textfiles) I’m highly recommending if you’re into that sort of thing.
• ++ My house and my life are full of people so good in so many ways, it makes me dizzy sometimes.

And these are just the highlights. Life’s full, and mostly good.

A bright soul. Ethan and I spent a weekend with him and his family once, at their home near Chicago. I also talked with Alex a lot online. I’d met him through Ethan and an online community; when I fell off that community’s radar while doing my dissertation, Alex fell off mine. I didn’t go back to that IRC channel until today.

We were out of touch for three years or so. He was diagnosed with cancer in January of last year. He died yesterday.

I spent a while reading his blog and crying like I haven’t cried since dad died. He was young. He had two small daughters with his wife Celeste. He was a partner in a law firm, and seems to have really enjoyed his work there.

Only thirteen months from news to gone. I fucking hate cancer.

I got bitten by the cooking bug, bad. I mean, worse than usual. And I don’t remember when I last had almost an entire weekend’s worth of unstructured time, so this morning I took the bus to the Brazilian supermarket and got a ton of edo roots (“like yucca and potato combined! SO GOOD”) and plantains both green and ripe, for alcapurrias. (Those are Puerto Rican, fried starchy-dough pockets with a meat filling.)

Turns out, the alcapurrias are for making tomorrow, because today I turned five cups of flours into a boat load of dumplings.

Housemate Marta is much happier not eating wheat gluten, so I decided to try making wheat-free dumplings. Much as I love to cook, anything involving dough is not my forte; add to that weird flours, and I was in unfamiliar territory — a noteworthy event in the kitchen. Lo, I experimented, and it was good. No, it was great.

I found a gf dumpling dough recipe online, but the proportions seemed all wrong. Here are the ones I came up with, for the dough:

1c tapioca flour [same as tapioca starch]
1c white rice flour
2t xanthan gum
2T oil
14T cold water

Whisk the first three together. Add oil and water, then mix well first with a spoon, then using your hands. The dough should neither be crumbly nor stick to your hands.

Separate the dough into four parts. Cover three of them well with a damp towel. Using rice flour on both the board and the rolling pin, roll out the fourth as thinly as you can. This takes more patience than with wheat doughs, but patience is worth it. Do work quickly enough to not dry out the dough too much.

Using a small glass or your favorite thing with edges, cut out as many circles as you can from the dough. Immediately gather up remnants, ball them up so they don’t dry, and stick the ball to the next quarter of dough, under the damp towel. Cover the cut-out circles with another damp towel.

Take each circle into your hand, put a bit of filling in the center (a line works better than a ball) and pinch the edges closed to make a half-moon. Take care not to break the dough; it’s a pain to patch.

The filling I used ended up needing 2.5 of the above dough recipes, and consisting of:

1lb ground pork
0.5lb ground beef
0.5 can pumpkin
garam masala
crushed cumin
Penzey’s dried onion flakes
Penzey’s dried garlic flakes
soy sauce
salt
pepper

A note on the Penzey’s spices: their onion and garlic are worlds different from any powdered stuff. They’re essentially dehydrated (freeze-dried?) flakes. The garlic is actually spicy.

The dumplings turned out delicious, feeding four people with two cookie sheets’ worth left over to freeze. I boiled them until they floated, dumped in a mason jar of cold water to slow the dough cooking and allow filling to catch up, brought to a boil again, then took them out and fried some of them. Because there’s nothing in the dough that really browns, they weren’t exactly well browned after frying. Butter might have helped with that, but I was using pork fat mixed with canola oil.

Both the boiled and the fried dumplings were delicious with Shane’s dipping sauce: half soy sauce, half rice vinegar, with a motherlode of garlic and ginger. (If you are not a fan of Very Vinegary Flavor, do a 2:1 with the soy sauce.)

Today was victory over unfamiliar cooking territory. We’ll see how I do with the alcapurrias tomorrow.

Something Completely Different — SCD — is the name of my house. It’s a good house, with good caring quirky people who have been extremely indulgent of me these past couple of weeks.

Good thing, because I haven’t been well lately. Out of the last week and a half, I’ve spent about four full days in bed, watching Farscape and intermittently crying, hating the world, hating myself and resenting the fact that sometimes I have to talk to human beings.

I’ve written about SAD before, though not at any length. It’s not cool to write about depression, and I mostly don’t have the words to do it right. But here’s my experience of it anyway, in the name of context and better understanding.  Here are some things that happen regularly in the winter.

• It doesn’t seem to hit until it gets cold.  Then it hits with a vengeance.  A sane person would move somewhere warmer, but my people and my life are here, and I love it here except for the damn SAD.
• I cry a lot.
• Sleep is erratic: I stay up too late and get up too early or too late, and my sleep schedule gets all out of whack.  For example, it’s 1am now.
• Because of this, a 9-5ish work schedule is excruciatingly hard.  I operate at about a third of my usual capacity for weeks on end.
• Until I get angry enough that something flips and I’m a productive fiend.  There’s no telling how long that will last before I have to build up an anger reserve again. (Gosh, put that way, there must be a better way to flip that switch.)
• (There are better ways, but their effectiveness is no more predictable than anything else during the cold season.)
• Mood shifts are unpredictable.  My arsenal of coping strategies for this is impressive.
• I get even more down on myself than I usually am.
• Accomplishments feel hollow unless I work very hard to make my brain think (but not really believe) otherwise.
• Good, positive things that people say to me take about five times more effort than usual to sustain in my mind without perverting them somehow.  ”She didn’t really mean that.  He doesn’t really think that.”
• I feel helpless.
• I eat erratically, which in itself affects my mood.  That’s a nasty feedback loop.
• It’s even more effort than usual to drink enough water.
• Everything is more effort than usual.
• I get lonely but can stand to spend only limited time with large groups of people, even people I adore.  Cravings for one-on-one company are overwhelming, so I sequester myself in order to not become a barnacle to my closest people.
• Accepting genuine offers of help is nearly impossible, and the need to respond to them often reduces me to tears.  Of course, I also crave the offers of help.
• Everything takes more energy.  Everything.  Brushing my teeth, setting down the computer, reading a book, getting enthused about food, everything.

I could go on.

I’m still functional, still me, still capable of surviving — at least I don’t battle suicidal ideation these days.  But it’s a nasty, debilitating, unpredictable depression, and I’m tired of it.

Still, life goes on, right?  Right.  It’s been intercession for a week now, with a few days to go, and the days that I haven’t spent in bed have been full.  I’ve attended parties, gone through all my clothing and the stuff in storage boxes, reduced the amount of stuff I possess again, reviewed three conference paper proposals, put my dissertation back up online and tweaked it to update the logistical bits, backed up all my data, hosted locally *and* remotely, spent some quality time with friends and beloveds.

The only thing left on my to-do list is this grant proposal that I’m supposed to start writing before the end of break.  Maybe I’ll get to it tomorrow morning and actually have three and a half days of true vacation without any obligations beyond the familial.  Maybe I won’t get to it at all, and feel bad.  The part about feeling bad never goes away.

So I’m exhausted.

Depression is real.  Seasonal depression is particularly hard to deal with because, though it may be finite, it’s also completely unpredictable… like the weather, I suppose.

Life goes on, and we all go on, but some of us are craving sunlight and warmth a little more than others.  Probably more than is reasonable.  If you don’t, and you have the opportunity to be someone’s ray of sunshine, please do.  ’Tis the brutal season.

He even has his own URL now: rolandht.org.

If you’re just tuning in, that’s my dissertation over there.

A few weeks ago, due to a fantastic coincidence of events and a generous friend willing to share the experience, I saw Kate Bornstein perform. She’s a force of nature, she is. She was standing before us, all 75 or so audience members, revealing to us bits of her head and heart with her own words. She used Keynote freely, showed us slide shows of family pictures, talked about her parents separately and together. These days his mom thinks he’s a nice girl.

She talked about living in the interstices of definition, defying it and longing for it or something similar, recognition of what she is, at any rate. “Look at me,” she half-invited, half-acknowledged. “I’m not a woman.” Then smirked, “I’m not a man, either.”

I mean, I’ve known for a long time that gender is a continuum, but I’d never been in the presence of someone so fluid, so grounded, so kind and generous and loving after having been through a hell of haze and doubts and danger — because we beat and kill and damage transgendered people, because we fear the absence of neat little boxes — that I’ll only ever imagine.

The end of her evening’s performance took me by surprise, and I stood there with Michel, shell-shocked, at words’ end. Later we talked with Kate for a few minutes, and I must’ve articulated something or other well, because she asked me if I was a writer. The question took me aback, and I spent most of the rest of the evening composing this post in my head, but that was weeks ago and is lost to time. Now I dust off dim recollections to make them shiny again for a moment.

This is why I don’t think of myself as a writer: to me, that identification comes with a need to write, and what I have is the occasional need to cook.

Been cooking… some. In the last month I’ve made kickass chocolate pudding (for the first time ever; what took me so long?), water chestnuts wrapped in bacon (thank you, fellow party goer, for the idea), bacon wrapped asiago stuffed dates (ditto), and a bunch of unremarkable meals, some involving bacon. I need a challenge involving reasonably priced ingredients.

Thanksgiving, though, oh! It was perfect. I dislike the holiday, I think it puts gratitude in bad historical company, but this year it was exactly right. Four of us, just my brother, sister IL, nephew and me. (Mom opted to stay in MA, as she and her partner were taking off for warmer places that weekend.)

We had no dinner table. We had things in the oven and other things on the grill, and no timing congruency at all. We ate food as it got done, cooked with wine glasses in hand and chatted. All evening. Then we spent most of the rest of the weekend sitting by the fire with tasty drinks, mustard seeds, mortars and pestles, other fiddly food tasks such as scraping out a dozen roasted squashes, and ice cream. It was pretty much my idea of idyll.

---

Emily and Jesse are settling in, and the house is homey. Emily’s cat Destroyer of Worlds (Mundi, for short) is getting comfortable despite Nochka’s grumpy growling. Life is re-acquiring a rhythm at SCD.

Work is the kind of chaos that makes you throw your hands up in the air and go with it.

Winter is undeniably here, in my ribcage. Copious amounts of vitamin D help a surprising amount, but winter still sucks.

Still, Equinox (wedding anniversary) is past, and November 17 (the day my marriage was pronounced dead) is gone, and we’re fumbling towards Solstice. Strange, that in only two weeks the days will start growing again. Autumn lasted so long that wintry weather is really only just beginning. The time of long sleep, warm blankets and tiny LEDs is upon us.

I’m still trying to figure out what holidays I celebrate. For that matter, I’m still trying to figure out the shape of my understanding of divinity, but that’s a much bigger and less concrete problem. The holidays are easy: just have to discover and honor my own responses to days that are special to some large number of people.

Samhain is like entering a lucid dream. It’s deep sleep—winter is coming—and also reflection, contemplation, rediscovery of still awareness. I’ve imagined that it might be conceptually similar to the state vipassana yogis achieve when they rest without sleeping. If that hubristic notion turns out to be true, that’ll be cool.

Yesterday I baked an impressive number of cheesecakes: four small eight-inch ones and 14 ramekins of varying sizes. Yesterday I went to a Halloween party, where the cheesecakes got an enthusiastic reception and I got to bask in dear friends’ tenth wedding anniversary. Yesterday ended with a puppy pile of fascinating, half-drunk conversation about socially important topics. The conversation was defeated only by sleep.

Today I was thrilled to acquire two new housemates, who will likely be moving in gradually, and who are excellent, and oh yay. Today a friend who lives in Oregon came to visit with his six-month old and his toddler, both of whom he carted over to this coast all by himself. That was some impressive kid-wrangling fu, all love and concern. Today I had bonding time with my housemates and a scary, ultimately affirming and warm conversation with a beloved.

I also thought of my dad, because today we think about big cycles, and his is over, but mine with him is not really. I thought of the grandparents I’d known (my mom’s side) and ones I hadn’t (my dad’s side), of war and peace, of the pricelessness of time, of equilibrium.

Someone pointed me at this video of a Ukrainian sand artist. She tells a haunting story in a bit over eight minutes, with sand and stunning talent and sensitivity.

The radio broadcast near the beginning is a famous one; it was Moscow’s announcement to the Soviet people that Nazi Germany’s armed forces had attacked our borders, and that we were at war. The song that follows was a mobilizing anthem that still stops me in my tracks. It’s not all about military anthems, though; the soundtrack is beautiful, including even a bit by Apocalyptica.

Kseniya Simonova tells it like it was.