And Monday morning

* I'm not gonna lie: This is one of those days I wish it was socially-acceptable for a nearly-fifty-year-old person to bring a stuffed animal to work and hold it while sitting at their desk. Things are hard, and I am tired and sad and I fear there may be tears on my part before this day is out. (Especially as we have faculty meeting today, and of late, these are mostly "Here's this new piece of bad news about how higher ed is changing and your job is going to get harder or your paycheck smaller"

* Because I am a pessimist, I am totally expecting the funeral will be Saturday, and I will have to "float" doing anything to celebrate my birthday for yet another week. (Sigh. It seems all too often, anything fun for me gets "floated" until impossibly far into the future. And yet at the same time, this morning driving in, I was angry, thinking about Steve's loss, and thinking about "I deserve to be happy and have fun sometimes too. Life is short and I doubt there are yarn stores to go to in Heaven.")

I don't know. Work-life balance is hard.

* I wanted to start something new yesterday, maybe crochet. I got out the yarn for the Heartthrob pony, I looked at my new Deramore's yarn. And then I decided to pull out a long-stalled project - the Color-Bar Blanket from Debbie Stoller's "Happy Hooker" book. I had started on this ages ago, got a few squares done, and burned out. I picked it up again. (Another issue: I have not found an acceptable-to-me green in a 100% wool. Maybe I look if I get to the yarn shop this weekend. I have a Red Heart acrylic that would work, but am apprehensive about mixing fibers that are that different (the other ones are 100% wool) in the afghan. (Also, I will have to be careful about how I store this; 100% wool stuff tends to attract the notice of the various six-legged critters that wander through my house in the summer. Already I found a break in one of the working balls of yarn. Fortunately no damage to the completed squares, but....

* And once again, I confess, as an old and somewhat dull person, I am slightly annoyed by the breathless, "everything must be rockstar" tone of those books. Yes, the information in them is solid and they are definitely good references (and not even just for beginners) and some of the patterns are interesting and work up into nice products. But I find the insistence on always being "cool" exhausting. In a way, it's a form of perfectionism, I think: and I know from perfectionism, though mine more often takes the form of "everything has to be done as well as it can humanly possibly be done" and I often don't see that I'm falling into that - but I can see how exhausting other kinds of that kind of thing can be, and how no one should have to do it. (No one can be "cool" all the time, I think)

I think that's related to my frustration with those who would turn education into "edu-tainment." The push to make classes "exciting" in some way and that even if you're a good teacher, if you're not doing the newest and the latest fad thing in education, you're bad and wrong and deserve to fail. And honestly? For one thing, they don't pay us enough to be entertainers in that way. For another: adult life isn't about entertainment and it should not be. The idea that everything should be "fun" leads to a world of helpless adult-babies who can't do the "hard" things like pay bills on time or clean up after themselves or shoulder their share of some volunteer burden, and what it means is that those of us who DID grow up wind up being worked to death trying to do our share and theirs. Or we're stuck dealing with Mr. and Ms. Skimpoles who, when you give them one simple job, fail at it, because it's not fun, or they have "no sense of time," or they spent the money they should have spent on whatever on video games or whatever it is people spend money on these days....

And yes, it's possible to be a fun person and be responsible. (That was one of Steve's good qualities: he could be fun and silly, but if he had something he had to get done? He did it. I suspect in the coming weeks we're going to realize all the stuff he did behind the scenes that no one saw and especially no one ever thought to thank him for). But our culture does subtlety badly, and so the image is that if you're "fun and rad" you're not also someone who follows guidelines or meets deadlines or the like.

I don't know. I'm really tired this morning despite getting a full night's sleep (more or less) and can tell I'm crabby.

* All that said: there is something simple and soothing about making granny squares. These are small ones (three rounds) and are all one color. (The Deramores' blanket may be more frustrating as you change colors each round). I will say it seems my crocheting gauge has got a bit looser; these squares are bigger than the earlier ones but I think if I block them well before sewing them together I can get them all of a size - when I stretched the older ones a little bit I could get them the same size as the new ones.

My plan originally was just to randomly do colors (so I wouldn't get bored) until I was done, but now what I am doing is taking a color and doing all the squares of it. I have all the medium-blue squares done and most of the magenta ones; I think red will be next as I already have a couple of those....and on through, probably doing green last as I'm still looking for a better woolly green. And then I'm going to block them all, and then sew them together.

*Talking about some higher-ed things elsewhere, I remarked (to paraphrase Lewis Carroll), "It's like they expect us to do six impossible things before breakfast" and I think that's a lot of my frustration these days: that some things we're asked to do are impossible to do well, and yet my nature is such that I feel pushed to do them well. And it's so hard to know what "enough" is - am I doing "enough" service? Is it okay for me to say next year, about the Sci Oly, "It's someone else's turn to run this event"? I'm also worrying about not having summer research planned out: I cannot have an idle summer where I am not doing research, especially if I am not teaching. (Though then again, I thought this morning: Maybe you engineer this. Maybe you let yourself get dinged on "not enough scholarly productivity" on your next post-tenure review, so that you can step it up and have somewhere to improve? But the idea of INTENTIONALLY slacking somewhere SO I GET CRITICIZED so I can improve just makes me want to porg-scream forever. This is so counter to how I was raised, and yet, apparently, it's how one successfully plays the game now? I don't know)