Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Winter, part Deux

We're under a Winter Storm Warning. Not a 'watch,' not an 'advisory,' but a full-on Warning.

We might get "up to 7"" of snow. ("get seven inches." I can hear my friends on CPAAG going "snerk" from over here). They're telling us to "complete any necessary errands TODAY."

I don't know. I have to laugh a little in the face of the apocalyptic warnings. I have plenty of food. The effects of this storm should last, at most, 2 days. If it's snow, the loss of power is highly unlikely. If the roads are at all bad, I lose another day of teaching (not good) but I don't have to go out in it (not so bad, at all). Last week's storm doubtless was worse but if people can avoid going out in it...it's really not that horrible. (I know - this is my Northernerness showing)

I'm ready. I have one exam for Friday (I expect we will not have class Wednesday, but we will Thursday and Friday, based on the predictions I've seen) all ready to go and will type the other one this morning.

(Part of the reason I'm in a good mood today, I think, is that I was very efficient yesterday: the lab I taught was one that involved a lot of sitting around doing nothing - in fact, for a big chunk of the time, I was in the room alone, just there so the room could be kept open, until the students came back and checked the hydrometer readings a second time. So I wrote my second exam during those three hours or so, and I also read and applied comments to the first few ecology project-proposals that came in. So, three hours that could have been wasted sitting around were spent doing something I needed to do anyway and had been planning on taking home with me)

Also, I re-jiggered the lab schedule so that the lab for tomorrow (if we meet) is one with minimal preparation - no having to go out and dig up snowmelt-soaked soil, no having to go get crickets (only to find that classes are cancelled and they can't be used). We're going to do a demographic-analysis lab based on cemetery data - which I already have in big binders; it's mostly a number-crunching lab. Some of the students hate it (because of all the math) but some think it's kind of cool (because of the patterns you can see). (I tend to come down on the side of "interesting patterns, I wonder what you'd see if you compared THESE two groups...)


***

Next week is Valentine's Day. It's funny how my attitude to this has changed over the years - from sort of a mopey, "Don't remind me that no one loves me!" attitude, to a certain...indifference...this year.

I am a little amused at the threads on one of the online bulletin boards I hang out on, titled things like "I will be so glad when Feb. 14 is over!!!" and I kind of smile and go, "been there, done that, don't need to read the thread."

I don't know exactly why my attitude has changed. Part of it may be having read a one of my mom's 1960s-era entertaining books (this was one of those little spiral-bound Betty Crocker publications). The author made a comment along the lines of "Valentine's Day, like Halloween, is mostly a holiday for children."

And I thought: you know, I like that idea. It takes the pressure off. On Halloween, as an adult, I'm content to hand out candy to the trick or treaters and smile at the cute little kids in their costumes. I'm not sad that I'm not able to go out and do it any more (even though I have happy memories of trick or treating as a child). I'm also not sad that I'm not going out to a party or something. (I did, one year. It was OK but I don't find most "grown-up" parties that much fun, unless there's a specific focus, like "it's a baby shower and we're gonna watch the mom-to-be open up the cute stuff people got for her")

And honestly, the best Valentine's Days I remember were the childhood ones - where instead of having afternoon class (even if it meant missing science class, which was my favorite), we'd have a party with cupcakes and that red Hi-C punch and sometimes the teacher would bring in a radio and let us play music and we brought those silly cartoon-character valentines to give to people (most of my teachers required us to give them to *everyone* if we gave them to anyone, which was probably kinder given the way grade school sometimes went, but it meant some agonizing choices where you didn't want to risk giving the "icky" boy in the class any kind of a wrong idea, so you very carefully chose the card that said "happy valentine's day" rather than the one that said "be mine" on it (that one you saved for the not-so-icky boy, or for a friend).

And we made "mailboxes" out of shoeboxes, and got to decorate them with stuff. And then we got to sit and open all our cards and squeal with our friends over the cute cards they chose, or really squeal if the not-so-icky boy gave us a nice card. And it was just kind of simple and silly and innocent. And I liked that.

(I was pretty much an innocent in those grade school years. Oh, by fifth grade or so I knew the 'facts of life,' pretty much, but I also knew that it would be YEARS and YEARS before I wanted to contemplate putting those facts into practice - which is why it always seems sad and strange to me to read of 11 and 12 year olds having babies).

But it WAS more innocent, I think, and less fraught with the worries that adolescence and adulthood bring to the whole "romance" thing. Having a crush on a boy was so much SIMPLER. And when kids spoke of "going together," they weren't actually dating - they didn't actually "go out," as we talked about in high school - in fact, in a lot of the cases, they seemed to avoid one another. (It was strange, now that I think of it, and another of those things I found a little baffling about human interrelationships). I guess it could have been said I was "going with" a particular boy in my class one year, by that definition. I would have said he and I were "friends." (And "friends" in the most innocent sense of the word)

I don't know. Maybe this is just one of the things that growing up messes with badly. At some point I got shy about talking with boys and then realized I related to them best on a professional level...so I like working with men, I get along well with men, but in a social setting I sort of start to get nervous and probably send off the wrong signals.

Anyway.

Another thing I think I realized in the past year or so is that I do have it pretty good. I have family that loves me, friends who love me, and unless every particle of my faith and every bit of religious teaching I've had over the years is completely wrong, God loves me. And you know, that's enough.

Part of it may be that I've seen so many people (mostly women) that seemed to get the idea that a relationship, any relationship, was preferable to being alone...and so they wound up in bad, sad, difficult situations where the ripples that resulted affected so many other people - children, other relatives, friends, even their professors at school...

And while I know that many (most?) relationships are happy and stable, still, having seen enough unstable ones...it makes me value the relative peace I have in my life. Coming home to an empty house also means coming home to a peaceful house, a house free of crises, a house where the chicken you put in the fridge to thaw for dinner will still be there and where the place won't be messed up even though you just cleaned.

I think the other thing I realized is that even though I'm not following the path of 90-95 percent of people in this nation, I'm still happy. And anyone who pities me or thinks I'm strange or looks down on me because I'm alone, well, that's their problem. That's their failure of imagination - that they can't see that a life different from the one they have can be happy, too. (And I admit considerable cognitive dissonance at the occasional situation of having a woman tell me how "sad" or "worried" she is for me that I'm not married and don't seem to have "prospects," and then in the next few sentences she proceeds to rag on her husband or children for some minor thing.)

And for that matter - I've also had the experience over the past year of talking with a few people who really did NOT have good relationships with their parents, who didn't grow up as I did, where I was confident of their love and that they would care for me and no matter how much of a screw-up I felt like around my peers, they still seemed to see something valuable in me. And the realization that having loving parents is (sadly) not a "given" for people, makes me value mine all the more, and strangely, feel less bad about the gloopy diamond ads or the general attitude retailers try to sell that if you don't have a dude buying stuff for you, you're not really worth anything.

So anyway: valentine's day, whatever. I did send my parents a card, because throughout my life they have been the two humans that I could reliably count on to love me and be there for me. And that deserves a card, at the very least.

3 comments:

besshaile said...

You are welcome to walk in my woods any time you want to come east. We have a guest room. And spare dogs. and marsh, field, forest, even our own resident bald eagles. Just let me know when you'd like to come.

ktb38 said...

I hated when the school did the card thing. I would be the little girl handing them out to everyone and only a few people would put cards in my box.
The only good thing about VD is the 15th. CHOCOLATE.
And, every year, my dad gets me chocolate. It's always shocked me because I would never assume he would in a million years.

Anonymous said...

Agree on "better stay content, peaceful and single than toll and suffer in unhappy relationship"

Reminded me of that distant post I wrote - and then had number of angry (no, furious), visitors, mostly men, telling me I am the devil, a criminal who encourages women to break their marriage vows...