Monday morning things

* I pulled out "Celestarium" (the big pi shawl that has yarn-overs and beads worked into it to represent the night-sky constellations in the Northern Hemisphere). I keep good notes on my knitting, I guess - it had been at least a year since I worked on it but I was able to find my place again right away, and I still had the tutorial on how to add beads (without having to pre-string every blamed one of them....I probably would not knit something where I had to pre-string all the beads and move them around in the skein as I knit)

I added a couple more rounds but right now there's something like 280 stitches in a round....so it takes some time.

But it feels good to be working again on a stalled project. Somehow, having too many projects going that are unfinished sort of....I don't know, they gnaw at me a little. Kind of like having background programs running on the computer that slow things down.

So I want to work on this for a while as I have time. (I have decided that the second sleeve of Augusta will be the knit-and-invigilate project, at least until that is done and then....well, I will have to start something new and simple and portable. Not quite sure what. Another Grasse Matinee? I have some dark brown tweedy sockyarn I bought for one, and I see the pattern author says she has "cleaned up" the pattern and issued a new version. Or maybe I do Flax out of that duck-egg blue yarn I have...

* While working out this morning, I realized what my "prayer for today" would be: that all my interpersonal interactions be more like a warm hug than a mountain lion trying to claw my face off. And yeah, okay, there's a lot of range between those two things, but I honestly find the hardest part of ANYTHING is dealing with other people - worrying I've let them down somehow, or having people get hostile over things that aren't my fault, or whatever.

I have two classes today, and office hours, and then Bell Choir and CWF and I had forgot until yesterday that (a) I am the new president of CWF and (b) I was on tap to do a devotional. Well, I found a short one online about sharing food and sharing community, so that will work, and honestly, I think people are happier when the devotionals are short.

* Some discussion elsewhere about "openness" of houses and things like how in the past people would let almost-strangers stay at their place and I am just struck of how the world has changed and also maybe how different I am from other people.

I know older folks who talk about picking up hitchhikers (and a lot of my now-gone relatives talked about especially doing it for men in uniform during WWII) and I have to admit one thing my dad always cautioned me against was doing that. (And I would only ever do it if it were someone I absolutely knew, like if I saw a student whose car had broken down).

And while my parents entertained, and once in a while they had relatives stay over (though we didn't really have a proper guest room in the house where I grew up) and I guess they tolerated my occasional sleepovers with friends, they didn't do a lot of "here's someone that used to work with us and they're passing through and we're going to put them up" and I admit the whole "random not-well-known person staying over" thing is not part of my experience, and I admit as an adult now, I'd find it kind of chaotic and uncomfortable to do that.

I mean, I technically have a guest room, but it's also my home office and where my cross-country ski exerciser is, and where  my yarn is stored, and it would take some work to get it ready.

But also, I admit this: I feel discombobulated with a person in  my space. Part of it is I've known some VERY judgy people in the past who'd be talking endlessly with their other friends about how I *obviously* hadn't bothered to scrub the grout in the bathroom or "wow does she ever have a lot of CLUTTER" and while I know I shouldn't care about that, I do.

It took a long time for me to be really comfortable with my piano teacher coming over every week.

And while I would put up a good friend who was passing through town (because I'd feel that obligation), I'd want advance notice of such so I could prepare (both in terms of cleaning up a little more than normal and in terms of being mentally prepared).

But yeah. I do get a bit of a feeling of "what's wrong with you if you aren't ready to put up acquaintances at a moment's notice" and I will just note we're all a little different, and perhaps one of the ways I am a bit neurologically atypical is that....I like my space to be MY space, and not have to worry about accommodating someone else (e.g., are there the right kinds of towels for them, and do I have food they can eat, etc., etc.)

I also find myself thinking about that man in Dallas who was shot and killed by a police officer who walked into his apartment (the door was unlocked, I guess) thinking it was hers and... I don't know, assuming the guy was a home-invader? Did she not even speak to him or challenge him or look to see if it was her place or not? I can't quite grasp it. And yes, there are racial dynamics in play as she is white and he was Black, but....it's just a horrible story (and yes, I know: she'll have to live with that the rest of her life but really? Could she not have yelled at him to turn around and explain himself?)

(Update: Apparently the cop in question shot a previous suspect under questionable circumstances; she may be someone who should never have been a cop)

So I find myself even more desiring to be a hermit.

* I also had to turn down a requested paper review. I joined Research Gate a while back, and I guess that's what triggered it - they look up papers I've been an author on and send me stuff that is somewhat related. The thing is: I don't have time for this right now. I couldn't get it done in the two-week time frame they want. I sent back a decline but the thing is it takes a tiny bit of psychological energy away from me to have to do that. I hate saying no to things I'm asked to do. And I object to the "better to ask forgiveness than ask permission" model that seems to be developing in this kind of thing; it privileges people who are all "it doesn't hurt to ask" and discomfits the people who are all "They are asking me so I must be expected to do it" - e.g., Ask Culture vs. Guess Culture.

Yes, I feel imposed upon, and I dislike that.

They also, in the "turn down" page, asked if I had a reason (I said "I am teaching four classes and supervising student research" which I think is a good enough reason) and ALSO ASKED ME TO NAME OTHER POSSIBLE REVIEWERS

and heck no, I am not doing that. Because:

a. I don't want to put someone on the spot the way I was put on the spot*
b. Why should I do their work for them? They are not paying me? The journal in question is one with (i) High subscriptions costs, (ii) page charges, and (iii) a tendency to require authors to sign away copyright and while it's not as heavily paywalled as some of the Elsevier journals are, still.....someone is making money off the unpaid labor of college faculty and more and more that makes me angry: we have to do it to keep our jobs, but we also - at least those of us with heavy teaching loads- have to do it essentially "on our own time" and forget that.

This is going to be one of my busier weeks of the semester so I just can't.

But I still feel bad about it.

*Edited to add: someone on ITFF said, "Well, I usually suggest post-docs in my department, or junior faculty who need the service points" and I am all "aha, they are assuming the "large R1 university" model and not all universities are that and CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, JOURNALS"

* Edited to add, another thought on this: Perhaps I am looking at this wrong. In the old days (THE BEFORE-TIME) people who knew me who were editors of journals would send me an e-mail, saying "I have a paper in your field and I need a reviewer, would you have time and be willing to?" and if I said yes, they sent it to me. But now, journals are jumping over that step (perhaps in the interest of time) and combining the "can you review" request with "here's the paper" and even though I deplore what I see as a loss of one other tiny bit of politesse from our lives (asking first before doing what I interpreted as assuming I would do it), maybe also there's nothing so very impolite in my saying "no."

But I hate this, because I feel like the mannered society in which I was raised is being swept away, so of course people feel entitled to cut in line or talk on the cell phone in small confined spaces where you're an unwilling spectator, and do things like presume you will say yes to something without really asking you first and making you (or at least me, given the way I was raised) feel like the "bad guy" for having to say no. (And yes, I am sure the guilt bit plays a role: if you can make someone less likely to say "no" to a thankless task because they feel guilty, you win.)

And, I don't know. It feels to me like once again something I was taught turns out to either be wrong or have been superseded by something....not better, but something more streamlined and perhaps uglier and ruder, but faster.

I don't know. More and more I'm thinking, "Sixty and out" (I can baseline retire at 60) because it would mean I wouldn't get those kinds of things any more.