Barely tenured

Whatever happened to Emma Jane?

(A quick reassurance: you should think more along the lines of "Whatever happened to Saturday night?" than "Whatever happened to Baby Jane?)

I went to Weatherwood two weeks later. (Dear God, was that January? Yes it was.) Nanna was grumpy as hell and driving both Ricky and Marina stark raving mad: they were spending so much time up at the nursing home that they couldn't eat or sleep. Especially since the bus over there only runs once an hour. Baby performed beautifully, smiled and wiggled for great-grandma, and by the end of the weekend Nanna was eating a bit more, figuring out her wheelchair, and resolving to actually participate in her physical therapy sessions.

She was released home about 10 days later. Marina took out the rug she'd tripped on, and a physical therapist is coming twice a week. She's walking with a walker; next goal is a cane. I've spoken with her, um, twice, maybe? Maybe three times? I suck, and will call tonight.

Classes started. Can I tell you something? Working full-time, and exclusively breastfeeding a baby who still doesn't like bottles much, is really fucking hard. I have some terrific students now, and I'm so tickled that I can still get up in front of the room and talk and then they think and talk back—but all this eating/pumping/running around/not sleeping is wearing me down. If I were to do it over, I'd take the year off.

Oh, and then Dr. Wow got sick of my little Bartleby act and threatened to kick me off the book project if I didn't get some work done. And Miss T. caught an awful awful cold, and cut her first tooth, and I had midterms to administer, all at the same time.

But that week's over now. I'm here with two stacks of exams to grade and a wheezing sleeping baby strapped to my chest, and it'll all be okay.

(Well, as long as I can get, say, three consecutive hours of sleep tonight, then it'll be okay.)

All summer in a day

The cool kids are posting their to-do lists, some with progress reports. Here's mine from Tuesday:

• Drive colleague to airport. [The new guy—yes, we got him!] Grim conversation on the uselessness of his destination conference. Cheerful conversation on all the local taboos he's planning to violate, ones that really needed to be violated.

• Deposit checks. [Mostly medical savings account reimbursements.]

• Mail in medical savings account receipts.

• Call Dr. Brash's office. [To find out how to get my HSG films.] Called while parked at Departures. When the receptionist said, "Uh, probably you should call radiology, but I don't have their number," I gave up and drove off before security could detonate my car.

• Talk to Annajane's case manager. [To tell him that she didn't get an SSD check this month, and that the Daisyfield manager thus "extorted" a check for the full rent from Annajane directly.] I left him voice mail on Sunday afternoon. We've been playing phone tag since.

• Call radiology department. They were perfect angels, put me on hold and dug up the film right away, and I should have just driven straight there from the airport. Would have saved many miles of driving.

• Reserve hotel in New York. [For upcoming Cornell appointment.] I called too late for the Helmsley Tower, so we'll down by 51st and Lex.

• Reserve B & B in Maui. [Yes, we're leaving in 5 days and haven't fully planned our lodging. Whee!]

• Pick up Granolan admissions flyers. [For Marina's daughter, my Trinidadian step-cousin, who's gunning for the big leagues—like the real Cambridge—but why shouldn't she try applying here? And Marina did ask me.]

• Find books for Nanna. [She's been asking. I didn't send anything for her birthday this year.] Alas, our local bookstore is showing signs of financial problems. Again. Lots of empty shelf space.

• Work on abstract and bio for upcoming talk. [Need to do before we leave on vacation, although the talk's not for months.] I'm kind of trying to Boice myself back into doing work. Sitting still for a few minutes before I start writing, small goals, et cetera. I have very mixed feelings about Boice's approach, mostly because of his stronger-than-just-metaphoric analogy between bipolar disorder and poor work habits. (That's right, take two of my biggest fears and intertwine them for me!) The man got me my dissertation published, though, despite my being too afraid of his book to finish it. Also: my working title for the talk really displays my pathetic MLA envy. I've got to tone it down.

• Assemble box to ship to Weatherwood. [With flyers and books.] I called Ricky to check whether anyone would be there to receive the box, since Nanna's too frail to answer the door now. Listened to 15 minutes of him feeling sorry for himself because of how bad Nanna feels. But he is living there with her, helping her walk to the bathroom, cooking dinner, and listening is really not all that hard.

Notice the poor work/family/working-on-family balance. I can't believe it's August. Mid-August, even.

A weekend near Nirvana

Many of my college friends live on the west coast. I went to visit for a (very) long weekend recently. I stayed with a friend who has an eighteen-month-old and a seven-week-old, and who is still on maternity leave. We drove around to see lots of other old friends and their babies. Everyone out there is happy I'll be around next spring.

They're all ambitious and successful. They got just enough post-graduate training to get terrific jobs—but not enough to be bitter. Since they plan well, they've all spawned at least once—they got started in their early thirties. They're working on second kids, or talking about thirds. They mostly make more than their husbands, despite having cut back their hours to get more time at home.

None owns an SUV or has hired a nanny. All their husbands do diapers and day-care dropoffs. They make far more than twice what I do and live in houses that are half the size, but cost three times as much. (They were all very interested in what I thought about The Two-Income Trap, which they haven't had time to read.) They think tenure is kind of weird—do I really want to spend the rest of my life in Granolaton?

It's quite an exercise in life comparison to go visit.

Too tired to post!

But, there's a bit of news: I got the real letter from the president today! A valiant effort had been made to personalize it, which I do appreciate. And the handwritten note at the bottom congratulated me about the NERDI invitation. The title change won't go through until the summer, but I'd expected that.

Otherwise it's been meetings, meetings, meetings, midterms, midterms, midterms, and medical mysteries. Beaker's not responding to the insulin he's just been put on. At all. Meanwhile, I seem to have some sort of nasty UTI-like thing that's laughed at two antibiotics so far. My primary care doctor (whom I need to stop seeing) is giving up. Current plan is to call my RE's office, make that damn appointment (hey—am I trying to get pregnant, or what? why have I not called them yet?), and talk with the tough smart nurse about what I should do next about my, um, current symptoms. (I don't even trust the primary care doc to refer me to the right person at this point.) Yes, it's a different biological system. But it's the same vicinity. And heck, don't they pull out the dildo-cam every time I go in there anyway?

Oh, and there are cheap enough airfares that I'll be going back to Weatherwood this weekend. Annajane is getting out of the hospital. She wasn't in the other nursing home long enough to keep a bedhold, but they've found her a place in a different nursing home. I'll be able to go along on Nanna's first visit to the new home and to help bring Annajane's stuff over. On the phone, my mother still sounds like she's in much better shape, but the admissions officer at the new home had been told things by the hospital social worker (an "elopement attempt" a few days ago?) that made her very worried about accepting Annajane.

Go read Rosemary Quigley's diary at Slate. She's an assistant professor of medical ethics who has cystic fibrosis and who just got a lung transplant—at the hospital where she teaches. It's pretty weird seeing something written by someone whose life hybridizes mine and Beaker's... and scary to see how sick she got before the transplant, and how cautious that's left her about hope. A while ago she wrote a fascinating article on CF families in Ireland, looking especially hard at the reproductive dilemmas they faced.

One day to go. One day to go. One day to go. One day to go...

I did sleep last night. And had nightmares. But, they were about everything in my life except the tenure decision.

Yesterday featured, and today will feature, truly soul-sucking meetings, the kind where I lose respect for people and for the college. Hours and hours of them. What message is the institution trying to send, exactly?

Annajane's been moved again. The weekend psychiatrist at the nursing home watched her in a state of "extreme agitation" for an hour, then sent her off to a psych hospital I'd never heard of, down in Metropolis. Websurfing revealed that it's in an awfully good neighborhood, is happy to take care of anorexics with religious dietary restrictions, and has a "geriatric psychiatric unit." The last is good news: it's expressly for people with dementia superimposed on a prexisting major psychiatric disorder. Even the guy on duty late on Saturday night said more cogent things about my mother's condition than I've yet heard.

I spoke with Annajane on Sunday afternoon. She could speak, actually. She wasn't sure what hospital she was in, or what county. But, she could put words together, and she managed some classic manicky racism and snobbery: "Oh, the nursing home was dreadful. They had _Mexican_ doctors." What about the last hospital? "Well, they didn't have _quality_ people there, you know.")

I'll try to talk with her new attending today. He's supposed to be back from his long weekend.

Meanwhile, I surged again. Entirely normal (for me) day 15, after another entirely normal (for me) 25 day cycle. My question, though: just how is the entirely normal (for me) accompanying acne in any way evolutionarily adaptive? What about the damn migraine? The two combined appear to form an effective species propagation prevention plan, really.

One week to go...

... until the phone call from the dean. (Unless they change the date again, of course.)

Meanwhile:

I found my first unquestionably white hair while showering yesterday morning.

Annajane is being transferred to a nursing home today. (The social worker has never been there, but was very impressed they had a web site. Unfortunately, Google turns up their public relations company using the nursing home as a case study—just how much did they have to improve the dreadful reputation of this place, anyway?—higher than the nursing home's own site.)

My friend close to partuition gave birth yesterday, the day before she would have been induced. Oh, did she sound tired over the phone.

And we threw a little party for the wife of our coy candidate, working along the theme "Granolaton doesn't suck at all." I hope it's a good sign that she's visiting. And I hope they decide soon. He's off collecting offers.

Pondering choices: overview

So I'm reading Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. It's a fast and amusing read (probably particularly so for me because I've seen so many accounts of the basic Tversky and Kahneman experiments that led to prospect theory—I could skim several of the opening chapters). The illustrative examples are particularly engaging. The author must be a fabulous teacher.

Overall idea: the more choices you have, the more satisfaction you expect from the decision, the harder it is to gather information about all the options, the more likely it is that you'll contrast your own choice with different choices made by others, the more opportunity for regret, the more mechanisms for disappointment. Hence higher rates of depression in affluent Western societies, etc. The author eventually advises that we figure out which decisions are actually important to us, and try to focus our efforts on making just those decisions well—where making the decision "well" includes taking into account standard cognitive biases.

I'm bad about responding to books mostly in terms of whether they feel like they're about me or not, rather than reading critically. Of course this work is mostly based on small studies where college students answer multiple choice questionnaires (at least the questionnaires are included!). Of course it's oversimplified for popularization. And it's annoying that there's no effort to connect the verbal and emotional phenomena described with underlying, say, physiological or genetic differences (not that anyone knows how to do that yet in any meaningful way).

But, it made me think differently about my life and decisions I've made and will have to make, and that's a good thing.

In about a month...

... I'll get a fateful phone call from my dean.

In the meantime, there's nothing more I can do. My nurturing department has written a long report justifying their unanimous support for my case. Perhaps the faculty council will agree. Or, perhaps they'll decide that the outside reviewers weren't quite enthusiastic enough, or that the angry student evaluations should outweigh the grateful student evaluations, or that the gadfly memos my department chair loved (they didn't go to him!) don't really count as "service." By February 16th, I'll know.

But, for now, I'm just trying to get on with my life.

My three big projects:

Actually becoming the scholar that my department and I are currently pretending I am. I know that the work won't become any easier. I am hoping that my fear of it will lessen. And that my own disappointment at ending up at a school like Granolan will be somewhat resolved after I achieve the early security (I'm only 33! It'll almost make up for the 7 years in grad school!) I'd hoped for.

Getting pregnant. Beaker and I managed to get going on this one a year ago. And if that first IVF cycle had worked, I would have been able to delay the tenure decision (of course, there would have been other consequences, too). But it didn't work, and neither did the second, and now we'll have to decide whether to try again, or to try donor sperm.

I've spent the five months since the second cycle preparing my tenure documents and trying not to think about breeding. My teaching next semester is so incompatible with our clinic's schedule that it'll be another four months before we can re-engage. (Well, maybe we could manage home inseminations. But I'm so not there yet.)

Saving my family. Ah, my crazy mother (bipolar, maybe anorexic, currently hospitalized) and my ancient grandmother (about to get her first walker). They live in an expensive suburb of a big city.

I am their only hope (well, aside from my pothead taxi driver uncle and his brand-new green-card-seeking wife). They know Beaker and I live in a giant house in a small town where life is cheaper and simpler. The tenure wait has let me avoid the entire situation for years.