* Except for binding off, I have finished the "Northern Lights" (A James C. Brett yarn) shawl. This was a free-from-the-ballband pattern; yarn was purchased at the late-lamented Balanced Skein.
(Why can't we keep nice stores? Why does my town have virtually 20 CBD shops and not a single bookstore? Why do I have to drive a half-hour each way for decent craft supplies other than quilt fabric?)
Anyway. When I started this last repeat of the pattern I had 42 grams of yarn left and when I finished it I had about 20 so I am not going to play yarn chicken and try to do one more repeat. I've had too many shawls where I ran short of yarn because of "one more repeat" (or the pattern lied a bit about how much yarn was required, or the ballband lied about how many yards were in a skein) so I'd rather have a little yarn left over.
* I did a bunch of cleaning/sorting in my guest room while waiting on the piano tuner. Mainly to be able to unearth one of my 'springtime" quilts (probably the shabby-chic-roses one) to put on my bed in place of the flannel sheet-blanket and vellux blanket (and smaller quilt) that it's now too warm for.
I also found a bunch of yarn I had bought and half-forgotten: a bulky weight brown tweet for the Groot cardigan; a nice blue Eco Wool for Knitty's "Chalcedony," which may well be the next sweater I knit (I really, really need to finish Harvest first, though).
* My laptop is officially old; it gave me the "something is wrong with your battery and the computer may unexpectedly shut down warning" yesterday. I tried running it off the cord and yup, it shut down, despite claiming the battery was 100% charged. Okay, fine. I dug the power cord out from under the stuff on my desk that had buried it and now I can use the laptop in my recliner (where I usually use it) by plugging it into the power strip I use for my modem, router, etc. in the living room.
I did call a local computer repair place and brought the laptop down and the guy promised me they could order me a battery for $50 or less, they might even be able to get one with a larger capacity so I can "roam" for longer. They haven't called back though maybe they don't open until 10. (Or they called my home phone). I'm hopeful, though. I like the laptop; it's served me well, and I'm not quite ready to pick out something new and do all the configuring mess to get it set up and talking to my printer and the home network and deal with a new version of Word and everything.
UPDATE: they called. It will be $38. Totally worth it. Even better, they might have the battery in as soon as Friday.
* I'm working on this manuscript but my self-confidence is not great right now (the data set is kind of borked; we have a lot of species we never could identify, and I'm too honest to pretend they never existed). Doesn't help that someone who has a tendency to humblebrag/outright brag a bit was talking up their latest 'successes' and I feel very small and old and invisible and frustrated with my life-choices because it seems the things I pour most of my effort into (teaching, and also to a lesser extent, the sort of service-things like editing manuscripts to help people) is mostly invisible and evanescent and not something I can point to and go "I did that" and I'm actually wondering if that's another gendered difference we tend to see, at least in the particular culture I am a part of: that women do a lot of the behind-the-scenes work, or the "people" work, and it's the stuff that isn't a book or something concrete that can get pointed to, and while it's important work in its way, it's "fleeting" (when you get done teaching for the day, you don't really have anything to show for it) and so it doesn't always get recognized like papers or books or whatever do....
and yeah, I know: I should not care about recognition but the problem is that in what higher ed is becoming, where everything has to exist in easily-measured aliquots that can be used as bullet points in a post-tenure-review document, and yes, again: a lot of the things I value, and a lot of the things I think I am good at, are not easily quantifiable in that way, and so I worry I will look like I am "underperforming" in these things.
I know I also worry way too much about what people think of me, but the problem is, again, in this world, with work turning into what it is, you kind of HAVE to. Gone are the days of being grumpy old Professor Kingsfield (and I suspect those days may never have existed outside of Yale and Harvard and maybe places like University of Michigan, and they may only have existed for a certain demographic subset of professors) and being able to get away with it. Many days I feel more like a mother confessor than a professor....
I suspect given my personality and my pathological desire to be "liked," I would not be a Kingsfield type at any rate, but I would like to maybe....I don't know, jump less when people ask me for something, or feel less guilty about saying "no" when someone asks me for something unreasonable.
* I off and on wonder if I could be "on the spectrum" (or perhaps ADHD, or perhaps a little from column A, a little from column B - I have read that girls, because they are 'socialized' to follow rules and the like, don't present the same as boys) and this article is interesting to me because I do have some of those traits to a certain extent:
1 (which just falls into the category of "being very literal-minded"), kind of 4, kind of 6 (I like organizing and arranging things and I do sometimes think about the "taxonomy" or family-tree of non-living things), 10, sometimes 12 (literal-minded, again), definitely 13 (I think that is why I like certain yarns, and why I like stuffed animals, etc.), 14 (I have a real problem if someone stops me short and asks me something I am not expecting), 15 (oh my gosh, yes, I do the "fingers form an L for left" to remind myself), 16, 18 (I warn my students about my face-blindness so they won't be upset if I don't recognize them), 19, 20 sort of, sort of 21 (if the rule makes no sense to me: I wait to start eating until everyone is served because I know that's courteous, but the sort of "on Wednesdays we wear pink" rules, no), sort of 24, sort of 25, 26, 27, 29, sort of 31 (also maybe why I like certain cartoons), I used to be 37 but have trained myself to mostly tolerate eye contact (I still don't do it if I'm thinking hard about something else), 38, 41 but in other ways (my habit of running a knuckle down the painted mortar of the brick wall here), 42, and 44.
I dunno. Some of the "classic" things (the not understanding other people's motivation, the hyperfocus, the meltdowns) are not things I have (though if I let myself, if I cared less about what others thought of me, there are situations where I could totally melt down) but yeah, I do wonder.
Or it could be I am just an extreme introvert with a side of being overly literal-minded, I don't know.
1 comment:
First of all, I think your sensitivity to the needs and emotions of others, and your effectiveness at communicating complex concepts as a teacher, are entirely inconsistent with the criteria for an autism spectrum disorder. Second, to be brutally honest, lists like the one linked make me want to remove or disinfect the parts of my brain that have been tainted by the internetz. The author should be forced to write out the DSM-5 criteria for autism spectrum disorder - none of which involves intolerance of mayonnaise or suspicion of authority figures - a hundred times with a leaky fountain pen. I am not a psychiatrist, but several of my teaching colleagues are, and a couple of them specialize in child psychiatry and treatment of autism and other developmental disorders. ASDs are common enough that we spend a lot of time discussing genetics, diagnosis, and treatment with the medical students. I've worked with children with ASD in a therapeutic riding program for 30-minute lessons, and so have some (minimal) direct experience myself. Here's a quote from the DSM-5 that I'll bet no one is going to want to include on their internetz list: "Intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder frequently co-occur." Most individuals with ASD can't function independently or perform basic tasks like shopping, cooking, household maintenance, budgeting, etc. ... sorry, I just think it's heartbreaking for caretakers and people with ASD, so lists like that make me cross.
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