New Set of Challenges

Well, the first three days of the month went somewhat successfully. I did manage my transcription task (by almost twice my goal), and I managed the pencil-edits on a story. But then I got kind of involved in the editing process, and I decided that I'd do pencil edits on three stories. Which is still better than I'd been doing, of course.

My new set:
Nov. 4: Electronic edits on one story
Nov. 5: Mail out one story to three journals
Nov. 6: Transcribe & edit 2 pages

In other news, I've figured out how to make the ginger tea that I've been mad for since I had it at the local Thai place. It's stupendously simple--boil X inches of thinly-sliced ginger in X cups of water for ten minutes, and then add a bit of sweetener of some sort. I added agave nectar to mine, though I think a mild honey would be an even better option. Right now, though, all I have is some super-robust German honey that is a bit too overpowering for beverages.

Sometime soon, too, you'll be hearing about my new fountain pen obsession. Stay tuned.

We all know what tomorrow is.

And, of course, if you don't know, it's the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, i.e. NaNoWriMo.

I'm not in a place where I can truly do NaNo, in the actual sense of the thing. (The last thing I ever need to do is to begin a new project. My troubles always have to do with finishing--and revising--what I have already begun.)

And so I set my own NaNo goals. I'm going to try to set out three days' worth of goals tonight, to be accomplished, of course, before the end of Wednesday. If all goes well, at the end of Wednesday, I'll put up another three, and so on through the end of the month. Because this is also the middle of the semester and I'm teaching four writing-intensive classes, I'm going to try to be realistic, rather than over-ambitious. But here goes, anyway.

Monday, Nov. 1: Retype 2 pages of handwritten work
Tuesday, Nov. 2: Print & pencil-edit Story A
Wednesday, Nov. 3: Complete edits on Story A & draft submission plan

In times of cold, everything draws inward.

Well. Except for water. But I'm not here to talk about water.

In truth, I'm not entirely sure what I'm here to talk about today. I suppose I'll start with difficulty.

At this time of year, everything starts with difficulty for me. I am happiest waking up early--truly, 5:15 agrees with me. In August, that hour is tinged with gray, and the sky warms and warms (at least here in Wyoming, where our days are sunny more often than not), and by the time everything has lit and the world's begun, I'll have written, I'll have had breakfast, and I might even be clean and ready to start all of the other parts of my day.

Here at the end of October, in a week that's showcased our Casper winds, "early" means having to shed the blissfully warm cocoon of blankets for a chill, chill room and no promise of daylight until seven has come and gone. The clock changes in November will perhaps help a little, but December shortens the days more, and we'll be back where we were. This all translates to me abusing the snooze button, and I know that's not an effective or useful strategy for me. I feel like the trees, the sap in my limbs slowing and slowing, and then there's very little in the way of growth. This is all well and good if one is an Ent, but I am, alas, not.

So I'll be looking for solutions to this issue as we trundle forward into winter. It's the same problem, every year. It's high time to do something about it.

The return of the weather report

This week, it seems, shows Wyoming's weather turning the precipitous corner toward spring. All this truly seems to mean is that there is no snow actually in the forecast, and there's been some balmy weather. None of this is insurance, none of this a guarantee. My students, and some of my coworkers, delight in reminding me of a year, not so far off, when it snowed on the fourth of July. I can see Independence Rock glazed white and slick on Independence Day, and I have to think back to all of those many travelers who stopped at Independence Rock on their long way west and thought of reaching it as a safety point. Make it there by early July and exit the Rockies before snowy doom. One small solace in a world of uncertainty and equipment failure. What would it have meant to those travelers that day, even a handful's scatter of wet, dense flakes, when they had to think so very hard about the continuance of summer? My own soul sinks looking toward a weekend of rain and a temperate fifty degrees; I can't quite think of what snow means anymore, not until we're well into the leaf-crunching days of October.

Anomaly

I have seen seagulls in Wyoming for several days now. I cannot think that they are here by design, unless the design is the wind's. I don't know enough about the West to know if seagulls go to the Great Salt Lake, west of here, but if they did, the winds pulling toward the continent's center are surely strong enough to push a few wayward sea birds with them. I think of them finding the snaking Platte and following it, low as they can fly, and wondering where the thick, salty sea air has gone. They tilt their wings for each winding turn, going very little distance for how far they fly. I wonder if they find the ocean again, or if they stand on some prairie plateau, flatten their wings for the sun until it leeches all sense of sea from their feathers. I wonder if they perch on beef cattle, lift themselves to our mountain just south, scrape up bits of bone and sand in their beaks, and commit themselves to fossils and pronghorn skulls when they can find no spilled popcorn, no teeming shoal.

Fog

I'm not referring to real, actual fog. That's something I haven't seen since moving to Wyoming. I hear that it exists in this state, sometimes even densely enough to warrant a warning for road safety, but it's not here. There is only one forecast for the state it seems, for everything that isn't tucked into a corner so far it's nearly another state. Yellowstone creates its own weather. The rest of us share one report, though the state is as big as three or four other states (or more, but let's go with averages along the mid-Atlantic).

No, the fog I'm talking about is much more localized. You know, the kind in your head and behind your eyes. We've reached the end of the semester, and it's its usual, exhausting self. Add in the first proper cold of the winter (both the rhinovirus and a cold snap that is going to keep us in the single digits for the better part of a week) and a kind of dry my body doesn't understand, and there you have the thick, gray curtain of hazard. There is grading to do, and it will get done, but the pace is glacial. There is not enough liquid in this world to keep my throat from seeming to crack.

I know what I have to do. I have to buckle down and buy a dehumidifier. It's not that hard, it's not that expensive, and most everyone I know in this state has one. "You have to," I'm told. And it's not that I don't believe people, and it's not that I don't notice how much better I feel just out of the shower, when there is a protective cloud of steam that seems to ease the spiny air. It's that I am from the shaded, misty bones of the Appalachians. I have never lived in a house that didn't have a dehumidifier. Both the house I grew up in and the house I left in New York were damp and dark enough to grow mushrooms in the livingroom if one were so inclined. One had a dehumidifier that had a large plastic tank that my dad emptied nearly every day. The other ran nearly constantly, and there was a hose connecting its tank to a sump pump in the basement. To consider now purchasing a machine to deliberately wet the air makes my brain ache. Also, perhaps I've already grown a western stubbornness: it bothers me to understand that my body cannot take this climate. My fingers crack and my lips chap and my skin feels like the dust in my throat. I don't want to change my environment. I want to adapt to it. But I can't last for eons while my skin changes how it responds to water, while it learns to absorb moisture wherever it encounters it. I need to respond to students and can't wait while these soft tissues grow more dense hair to protect them, bison-like, or until they scale and harden to a lizard's imperviousness.

I have to go to the store, and I do not want to do it.

Overheard

This morning, I found myself walking behind a single person in the hallway, and with every step, I heard the corduroy swish of said person's trousers. I have yet to meet anyone who can walk silently in corduroy--no matter if one has thighs the circumference of a stork's shins, one walks loudly in the cozy, ridged fabric. Blue jeans, too, have their quiet sound, though perhaps not if they are old and worn enough. There is little opportunity for me to wear that perfect, butter-soft, decaying denim at work, though. Perhaps if my office were not a scant hallway from the college president's, I might be so bold.

The sounds of walking aren't a revelation--how many odes have been written on a leaf's crunch or gravel's grate or a new snow's peculiar hush, and how many have I written myself, of course--but indoors, they are different. No one waxes about the flapping slap of flipflops springing from carpet to heel, or about the purposeful clack of someone's sensible business shoes on tile. I remember high school: the principal's shoes--always the boxy shine of professional's leather, always with heels so dense and hard that they exploded on the linoleum like little firecrackers as she walked--harbingers of doom. She couldn't catch a soul at anything because we heard her coming for miles.

I remember that, and I dress as quietly as I can. I walk toe to heel on the short indoor-outdoor nap of the halls. My arms do not swing in any jackety rustle. Sometimes I hear my trousers make their muted swish--not even corduroy, but polyester and wool blends--and I slow myself. I take more care. I do not think I am visibly bow-legged in my efforts, but I suppose I couldn't see myself to know. I wear boots with thick rubber soles or sneakers cut low and close to my feet so that when I am trying at all, I can turn any corner with surprise.

I don't know what I'm hoping to sneak up on, but I certainly won't find it if it hears me coming.

Slant of Sunlight

For the first time in my life, I am in an office where I have had to close my blinds so that the sunlight doesn't render my computer screen unreadable. I am fairly certain that this is the first office I've ever had where there's been any sunlight at all, and I feel quite guilty shutting it out in the name of productivity. I'm hoping to find a happier solution by rearranging my office at the earliest convenience, as it's still a very ecru-walled institutional space.

The first addition to the office, though, is a very lovely, warm-glowing floorlamp that a friend picked up for me from Ikea. After having been on campus last night well past the hours of natural light, I can say that it creates a very pleasing atmosphere for work. The one thing that does concern me is that the dimness might make people think I am not here (though my door is open).

On a discarded corduroy slipper

I've been taking a slightly different route to school these days, essentially the L side of the L7 square that is one full block in my walk. I'm not entirely sure why I changed--perhaps the perception of it being 50 less feet in the sometimes rather chill mornings, but more likely I've changed because it's on the less-traveled sides of the streets. It's a mostly unremarkable change--still residential, still perilously sidewalked, and perhaps skirting a marginally less affable block, but nothing that anyone can honestly notice at eight in the morning or four in the afternoon. I think the reason I keep walking that route is because one of the yards contains a discarded black loafer. It's got a red plaid interior, and the shoe appears to be in fine condition. It doesn't look chewed or stained or soiled. But it is certainly a black corduroy loafer near the farthest reach of their fence (because most yards have fences here--to keep dogs in or to keep dogs out or both, in fact). I don't stop to look more closely at it--no one wants an odd, trenchcoated person eyeballing her yard before lunch--but I wonder who is looking more closely at it. Certainly it's not the yard-owners, because it's been there more than a week. But there is a spindle-armed shrub that grows through the fence not ten feet from the slipper, and every morning and every afternoon, it's full of small, busy sparrows. I have to walk around the naked hedge because it spills over the sidewalk, but I am close enough that the little flock--four or five of them, not dozens--puffs and flits to the next shrub. I pass that one, too, and they hop along to the next, and it's only after that do they mutter into their stitching feathers and go back to their original place to contemplate that single slipper. They rattle like crumpled paper in the dry branches, making leaf-crunching noises where there are no leaves to crunch.

Vampire Bats

Seems like a more appropriate title for a post from last week, no?

Yesterday, I attempted to be a responsible, health-conscious adult.

Yesterday, I failed pretty spectacularly at it.

There was a free campus blood draw & test (the kind where they take your blood and then mail you an analysis of all of those things adults are supposed to know and monitor: cholesterol and glucose and triglycerides and so on), and I decided that I would go. (Not only because doing so would help along a program we have for reducing one's insurance premiums, but because I'd never done so before, and I would like to know what's going on with my hemoglobins.) Friends of mine were also going, and so it was going to be a group activity and, because I was expected there, I couldn't chicken out. (Believe me, I thought about it.)

You see, I have an incredible aversion to needles. It's not the pain level (it's really a very tiny pinchy feeling), but it is the kind of pain and the concept of it. It's invasive, and having teeth drilled doesn't freak me out even a third as much. Also, it's traumatic: I have small veins, and I have blood that doesn't really want to come out of them. My one trip to the Red Cross Blood Drive left me with a collapsed vein and a full hyperventilation. How very embarrassing, on top of everything else.

I reasoned that yesterday would be different because they weren't trying to fill a bag; it was just a wee test-tube. I was nervous, though, and just holding my arm underside-up is enough to give me palpitations. The elbow is there to bend and protect, like the knee, and I don't even like to look at the insides of my elbows, let alone bare them for needles. It's against every instinct I have.  But I survived the stab, and I felt the needle withdraw, and I was relieved. I hadn't cried, I hadn't hyperventilated, and it was over.  And then I was told (because I certainly wasn't looking at the process) that she'd missed, and rather than stab me again, I was to be sent to Roanna, two tables down, who was an expert, and she'd get it in the other arm, no problem.

Roanna did, indeed, get the blood lickety-split, with no fishing or anything, but the damage was done, so to speak. While I didn't hyperventilate (thank God) this time, I teared up, I shook, and I was thoroughly mortified (because there's nothing like being sniffling and blotchy in front of people you've only just met).

Luckily, there was a good 2.5-hour cushion between that and my needing to teach, so I sat in my office and answered e-mails until I calmed down, and then I had coffee with one of the friends who went along and tried very valiantly to be comforting and cool about the whole thing. And I survived. But I'll be wearing long sleeves and avoiding my own elbows for days.

Here's the question for discussion, then: how does one get over fear of something if doing the thing consistently contributes to the fear?