The rising of our women is the rising of us all

I'm too angry to blog thoughtfully about what's going on in Wisconsin.

My parents were schoolteachers under a string of Republican governors, and I remember seeing a photo in the newspaper of my dad and his fellow workers protesting at some school board meeting, singing union songs. When I became a graduate student, I joined unions and participated in picket lines, so I'm definitely feeling some solidarity with the people of Wisconsin.

Many times over the past few days, I've seen folks reference Martin Luther King Junior's reminder that "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." That sentence has become a sort of mantra for me over the past few days.

Suffragists, Section of Working Women, 1917 (source)

As many people have pointed out, the end of collective bargaining disproportionately affects women employees--as do various other actions being taken this legislative season in state legislatures across the nation.

I feel moved, then, to share one of my favorite songs. Here's Utah Phillips and Ani DiFranco performing their version of "Bread and Roses" (scroll to 1:18, where the song begins):



Lyrics (slightly different from the original lyrics):

As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray
Are brightened by the beauty a sudden sun discloses,
And the people hear us singing, “Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.”

As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men –
For they are in this struggle and together we can win.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes –
Hearts can starve as well as bodies; give us Bread, but give us Roses.

As we come marching, marching, a hundred million dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew –
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for Roses, too.

As we come marching, marching, we're standing proud and tall –
The rising of our women is the rising of us all –
No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one reposes –
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.

Crossfire

Have I shared with you my red-state nightmare?

A gunman enters a class I'm teaching in a large lecture hall. Students at first look shocked, but then they all stand up, draw their handguns, and start shooting. (Take a moment to imagine the crossfire and the terror.)

Thanks to the lovely politicians in my new state of delusion, that nightmare is one step closer to reality.

My campus has banned smoking anywhere on the university's grounds. But it's likely that very soon students will be able to bring guns to class.

Smart is sexy--in the classroom, on the job market, pretty much anywhere. Guns, not so much.
Photo by Janina Szkut, and used under a Creative Commons license

I know many students at Boise State come from rural areas and grew up hunting. They're comfortable, therefore, with hunting rifles. But let's be honest--we're not talking about letting students and others bring rifles onto campus. We're talking about handguns. (Including at football games. Because football isn't already enough of a blood sport.)

As someone who grew up in an area scarred by handgun violence perpetrated by teenagers and young adults, I am profoundly uneasy with this latest development.

I have no words

. . .except for these: the folks at this protest are bigots and racists, plain and simple. Even worse, some of them are elected (Republican) reps, one of whom made death threats against the Muslim families attending this charity event.

Please spread the word of these protesters' and representatives' hateful wrongdoing.

Ups and Downs, Ups and Downs

When I was in elementary school, a teacher read my class a book that followed the pattern "Fortunately. . . Unfortunately." It was like this one--and maybe it was that one, but the copyright date doesn't seem right. Anyhoo, cribbing from Amazon's description of that book, the plot went something like this:

Fortunately, Ned was invited to a surprise party.
Unfortunately, the party was a thousand miles away.

Fortunately, a friend loaned Ned an airplane.
Unfortunately, the motor exploded.

Fortunately, there was a parachute in the airplane.
Unfortunately, there was a hole in the parachute.

Lately my life has seemed to be a big, disjointed narrative of Fortunately. . . Unfortunately. . .

Some episodes:

I get a nasty head/chest cold. I begin to recover. Then I get a second round. Then I begin to recover again, but with a twist--my head and chest are clear but I have all the tiredness of a mononucleosis victim. Plus: insomnia! Today, in fact, is the first day in a while that I've had enough energy to make it through the day intellectually and physically intact.

Today I turned in a grant application I've been working on for months. Yay! I've even come to grips with the university's indirect cost rate scaling down the project to the point where it's a bit embarrassing. I even found the strength to correct the grants guy when he called the $50,000 grant proposal "small." (Those of you in the sciences may not realize that a grant over, oh, $3500 is pretty damn big for a humanist.) And then, just as I think I have all my ducks in a row, I learn there's another form specific to my university--a big, complicated one--that I need to get filled out and double-signed. And no, my first thought was not, "What the fuck am I paying indirect costs of $19,500 for if the grants folk aren't going alert me to the fact that I need to fill out this friggin' form?" Fortunately, the grants folks are actually quite nice, and this was in the big scheme of things a small oversight, and they'll help me get it filled out quickly.

Lucas starts kindergarten in the fall. Unfortunately, our local elementary school is kind of sketchy. I'm not one to look at test scores, but let's just say a 50% drop in boys' reading proficiency between kindergarten and first grade raises a red flag--especially when that decline isn't mirrored throughout the district. Fortunately, Lucas earned lucky #13 (of ~150) in the lottery for one of the area's best-regarded charter schools, the one to which local hippies and commies (read: the professoriate) long to send their kids. Unfortunately, through the whims of fate (read: large Idaho families + priority for siblings of current students), even #13 might not be a good enough number to get him into the school. We'll know within a couple of weeks. Keep your fingers crossed for us, OK? As Fang has detailed on his blog, Lucas has been running into a number of budding sociopaths in his preschool, and we'd really prefer that he fall in with the kind of kids whose parents are serious about sending them to a great school, even if it's in what's widely acknowledged as Boise's armpit.

Then there's Utah. That post was a way for me to come to grips with the fact that a doctor found a giant tumor in my 87-year-old grandmother. In her colon. Because her primary care physician is (literally, alas) in a coma and thus no one had pointed out to her that her symptoms might indicate a cancer-scale problem--which means she hadn't had a colonoscopy in, well, ever. Fortunately, the surgeon thought he could excise the tumor, do a temporary colostomy, and reconnect the remaining parts of the colon. Unfortunately, he found the tumor is cancerous, the cancer has metastasized to her liver and pancreas, and the primary tumor is inoperable because of scar tissue from an apparently botched hysterectomy from 40 years ago. The surgeon gives her two years to live.

I'll write a blog post about my grandmother when I have the emotional strength to do so. For now let's just say that I've always marveled at her strength and good humor, and that my grandmother has not just been a caretaker and adviser to me, but also a very good friend. Even today, just a couple days after her surgery, even though she'd had family and doctors and nurses and physical therapists visiting her all day long, she was chatty and even optimistic. We talked and laughed for 25 minutes--and this is a woman who recently found out she's terminally ill and had just hours before learned how to empty the colostomy bag that she'll use for the rest of her life. I love the woman dearly, and I'm having a very difficult time being so far away from her.

This geographical angst has been made even worse by Idaho politics. I love my job dearly, and what little I've seen of this state is achingly beautiful in that wind-scrubbed arid intermountain way. I do plan to stay here for a long time. Yet recent events have made me regret, just a little, putting so much distance between me and California.

Share your own Fortunately. . . Unfortunately. . . scenarios in the comments. It's good to know I'm not alone on this roller coaster.

Next stop: Hellscape

Caution: I may be channeling Fang.

Photo by Shane Gorski, and used under a Creative Commons license.

In recent years, I haven't been prone to pessimism, but I'm beginning to believe that the Republicans won't be satisfied until we're all living in heavily armed survivalist compounds outside of dead (liberal!) cities. Only then will we have achieved the vision of the Founding Fathers--only it will be a twisted, post-apocalyptic version of Jefferson's agrarian middle landscape.

I know I need not provide much evidence on a national scale to readers of this blog, but may I share a few highlights gleaned from a few of the blogs I read, and only from the past few days? (Then, my friends, only then shall we turn to the clusterfuck that is Idaho.)

First, there's Historiann's post about representation without taxation. She sums up the Colorado governor's delusion plan to make the state more "pro-business"--the plan is awfully familiar to those of us a bit to the north and west of Historiann--and then provides this commentary:

What a brilliant “pro-business” plan this is! Absolutely everyone wants to move their businesses to a state that’s cutting education! It’s so easy to get your employees to see the advantages for their children of attending schools with huge class sizes and no “extras” like music, art, sports, or anything that’s not covered on the Colorado Student Annual Progress (CSAP) tests. And if they love that, they’ll love the nonexistent state support for universities here! (And guess what? Republicans here are lauding the governor’s “seriousness,” while Democrats are treating Hick’s budget like a flaming bag of poo left on their doorstep.)

We get the politicians we deserve. The fatuousness of these conversations among our elected representatives reflects our own unseriousness as citizens. We expect to enjoy quality schools, universities, parks, roads, hospitals, medical care, emergency services, low-income assistance, prisons, public transportation, and all other services without paying taxes. We’ve been living off of the crumbling infrastructure Americans invested in fifty years ago and more, expecting that nothing would change and that no further investment was required.

A-fucking-men.

Then there's Bardiac's upper-Midwest state, which has been in the news quite a bit lately for its attempted pounding of public-sector labor unions. She provides a round-up of Republican plans to, for example, eliminate health insurance and pensions for "limited-term employees" (who, she points out, are mostly women), as well as cut funding for Medicaid, so that even the children of these newly health-insurance-free employees won't have access to affordable healthcare. She then nicely details the difference between pro-business factions and those of us on the front lines of public service and in particular education:

There's some bluster on both sides, of course. But the bluster of state workers is so much less effective. I was thinking about how ineffective our bluster is.

And here's what I figured out: our problem is that we actually care.

We value education and care about educating our students.

We care about doing jobs we think are important enough that we take less pay than we'd get in the private sector (it's in the news, not just some opinion I have).

So we aren't going to mess with students or do less work.

Can I hear another amen, people?

(Arbitrista seems to agree:

Why so glum? My nature perhaps, and the fact that these are discouraging times. But more importantly I don't have a great deal of confidence that the Democratic Party will do anything to stop it. As with abortion rights or gun control, Democrats have stopped fighting very hard for unions. They're pretty much absent from the public debate on these issues, which means that one one side you have a barrage of relentless propaganda and on the other....nothing.)

And then, via Shark-Fu, we learn of a particularly asinine proposal to eliminate child labor regulations in Missouri. Here's the summary of the bill from the state website:

SB 222 – This act modifies the child labor laws. It eliminates the prohibition on employment of children under age fourteen. Restrictions on the number of hours and restrictions on when a child may work during the day are also removed. It also repeals the requirement that a child ages fourteen or fifteen obtain a work certificate or work permit in order to be employed. Children under sixteen will also be allowed to work in any capacity in a motel, resort or hotel where sleeping accommodations are furnished. It also removes the authority of the director of the Division of Labor Standards to inspect employers who employ children and to require them to keep certain records for children they employ. It also repeals the presumption that the presence of a child in a workplace is evidence of employment.

(Take a moment to pry your jaw off the ground. I'll wait. I'll use the time to teach Lucas how to earn pennies an hour on Mechanical Turk.)

Quips Shark-Fu, "I’m guessing that [state Representative Jane] Cunningham, ever a faithful minion, consulted Satan prior to filing this shit."

Now that we've finished a rapid tour of flyover America, let's take a look at my far-flung corner of Real America.

Via Sisyphus at 43rd State Blues, I learned about the blog of state rep Nicole LeFavour, a Democrat who represents my favorite parts of Boise. LeFavour penned a post titled "How to Tank a State Economy: Easy Steps for Lawmakers." It's worth reading in its entirety, but it's such a well-organized post that it's possible to outline it here.

1. Destroy Jobs

A. Lay off as many state employees as possible

B. Reduce wages

C. Be sure that businesses doing contract work for the state go bankrupt

D. Repel Businesses Seeking to Move into Your State

2. Increase Costs to Families

A. Force Families into Crisis

B. Make Education More Expensive

C. Remain Dependent on Fossil Fuels

D. Increase User Fees for Everything

3. Keep State Government in Perpetual Fiscal Crisis

A. Turn away federal matching funds or any form of money paid to the federal government by taxpayers in your state.

B. No matter how well the national economy is recovering, predict doom for your own state.

C. Create Political Strife.

D. No Matter How Much Things Fall Apart, Don't Raise Taxes.

4. Reduce The State's Population

A. Nothing says economic disaster like death and out migration.

But really, this outline doesn't do LeFavour's post justice. Click through to read it yourself, but here are some of my favorite recent Gem State hijinks (and their results, many of which have been realized) she suggests the state should pursue if it really wants to fail big:

• Be sure your public schools rank last in the nation for per pupil spending, class size and adequacy of school facilities, course offerings, text books, lab supplies and equipment and materials essential to teaching.
• Provide no anti-discrimination job protections for gay people. Technology companies are full of gay employees. Even if a company provides its own job protections, a state needs to project a hostile enough atmosphere to guarantee that other family members seeking jobs or educational opportunities will face discrimination in employment, housing and education in any given town across the state.
• Ensure state leaders talk as much as possible about large predatory animals decimating wildlife populations and killing domestic animals.
• Even if you can not pass such a law, at least claim you will enact Arizona-style immigration policies so that employees and business owners with darker skin or names like Martinez or Perez will fear eminent racial profiling, detainment or arrest.
  
• Fail to fund or develop a network of low cost health clinics. The fewer options families have, the more likely they are to fail to access preventative care and fall into costly medical crisis and personal bankruptcy.
• Stop funding water quality monitoring, refuse to extensively regulate day care facilities and provide as few counseling services as possible in local schools to ensure an adequate supply of physical and mental health crises statewide.
• Eliminate public Kindergarten. Make sure your state's children start out behind the rest of the nation.
• Require public schools students take on-line classes in order to graduate. Decreased teacher interaction and the lack of support for those who struggle can be highly effective at wasting years of college tuition as students fail classes or need extensive remedial coursework. The impact on families of students with disabilities can be impressive as those with certain learning styles have higher failure rates and are more likely to fall into cycles of dependence later in life should support in these early years be inadequate.
• Deny local communities the ability to fund public transportation. In urban areas this guarantees tax dollars are sucked rapidly into perpetual freeway widening projects which produce few jobs but expend state revenues on raw materials. A lack of public transportation also directly increases costs to families who struggle with with car maintenance or gas prices or for those commuters who waste time in traffic during their commute.
• Ensuring failure of your public school system can help bring on privatization and a stratification of the quality of educational opportunity available to families of differing incomes. User fees in education are not a new concept. They are a bridge to stratification and ensure that some kids will not be able to reach the same levels of academic attainment that the more wealthy do.
  
• Violate federal laws so that your state faces sanctions. Refusing to enact federal health care reform for example may well result in the state losing all federal funds for medicaid --meaning a loss to health providers, businesses and families of nearly a billion in federal dollars.

May I add "Have your State Board of Education suspend faculty governance at your state universities"?

Goddammit--I don't have time to become a political activist.

Yet I heart Nicole LeFavour. It's nice to know there's someone so bright and articulate in the statehouse. When Fang gets back on his economic feet (see: We Moved to Idaho), we'll definitely be donating to her campaign fund.

What's your state doing to transform itself into an environmental, economic, and educational hellscape?

Utah

I have several blog posts in draft, but I haven't had the energy and focus to finish them because I've been thinking about an Unbloggable Thing (UT, so I'll call it Utah).

Photo by Wolfgang Staudt, and used under a Creative Commons license

Random vague bullets of Utah:

• A person I care about deeply has gone to Utah.
• This loved one is not ready to share with others in hir family that ze has gone to Utah.
• This trip to Utah could have been avoided, had adequate steps been taken.
• The people who could have taken these steps are, I imagine, really angry with themselves that, despite their love and attention, this person has ended up in Utah, which, in this metaphor at least, is not a very nice place to visit.
• Indeed, I'm upset with myself because I might have urged others to take the steps to prevent the trip to Utah.
  
• I'm exceptionally frustrated that ze has gone to Utah, especially considering the trip was avoidable.
• Still, I'm pretty much endlessly forgiving when it comes to people I care about, even when they make mistakes that take them (or others I love) to someplace like Utah. (With myself, I'm considerably less forgiving.)
  
• This recent trip to Utah is making me very sad.

What would help, in the comments:

• Stories about how you had to keep quiet for a while (perhaps a long while) about something that made you very frustrated or sad, and how you dealt with that, even though it was always on your mind.
• Good vibes for my loved one in Utah.
  
• Sympathy. This is going to be hard.
  

This Friend speaks my mind

Chuck Fager, director of Quaker House, on the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell:

This change has two important effects, I think:

First, it will enable thousands of present and future soldiers to pursue their careers on their merits, which is only as it should be.

Second, beyond these individual cases, repealing DADT strikes an important blow to the identification of war with masculinity, with heterosexuality, with America, and all three with God.

This identification is idolatry, pure and simple. But it is all too widespread in American Christianity, and it is way past time for it to be broken up.

Enough

Someone who is close to me recently returned from six or seven months of service as a Marine in Afghanistan. He drives trucks for the military.

Earlier this year, family members were informed he had been involved in an "incident," but they weren't given details. Today I learned a bit more about the nature of this event.

I wasn't surprised to learn that a truck he was driving hit an IED. He regained consciousness in a helicopter.

Physically, he's allegedly recovered. But now that he's stateside, he has terrible PTSD. He can't sleep or drive, and even riding in a car is apparently too much for him. He cries a lot.

What's his family's response to this? They're criticizing him for not being sufficiently masculine. They can't make the connections among the Bush-era anti-terror wars they supported, the crappy economy made worse by Bush administration policies, this guy's joining the Marines because he felt enlistment was his one ticket out of Hellmouth, Arizona, and the total shattering of his life because of his service in Afghanistan.

The family's proposed solution is that he accept Jesus and go back to Afghanistan like a real man.

Fuck you, conservative America.

On winter fashion

Brrrrrrrrrr! It's been cold here; a few days ago it was hovering in the single digits. It's back up to 30 degrees now, but there's more snow coming down. With the snow already on the ground, we'll probably wake up to 7 or 8 inches of snow tomorrow morning. It'll make for a white-knuckle, icy drive down the hill to preschool and campus.

Is it any wonder, then, that a pair of these Timberland boots, which arrived in the mail yesterday, are among my new favorite things?


I adore them.

They're a lot more practical than the peep-toe stilettos I saw a woman wearing today on campus when it was snowing and about 25 degrees. And they keep my legs warm, unlike the leggings I keep seeing women students wear without pants or skirts. This look, I might point out, is much appreciated by some of the 50- through 70-something men on campus; I've seen them turn around or cock their heads to leer at undergraduate ass on half a dozen occasions since it became cold and the leggings made their debut.

And so, a couple of public service messages for the local undergrads:



Again: Idaho, you're welcome.

Project-manic

My therapists have never liked it when I used the word "manic" to describe my better moods. I don't mean it in the clinical way they understand it, though; I suppose a better term for what I experience is "project-manic." It's a state where, for a week to a couple of months, I am intensely focused on getting things done in a particular aspect of my life--maybe it's a creative project, maybe it's work stuff, and too infrequently it's cleaning and organizing the house.

This time my project-manic phase is centered around work. After years of not submitting an article to a peer-reviewed journal (see: full-time staff job, adjuncting, and motherhood), I've submitted two in the past month, both distillations of stuff from my dissertation. So I'm feeling pretty good about that. And I have most of the material I need, I think, for the next article, but it's probably going to take me a couple of months to write it. Still, submitting three articles in a year is pretty damn miraculous for me. Fingers crossed that they meet with sufficient acceptance.

My application was also just was accepted to participate in a program about teaching and learning with mobile devices. I proposed a project for my applied history grad course next semester, and I'm excited to see how that works out.

In other news:

• Lucas is learning to spell. He's been writing and typing his classmates' names, and every day he comes home able to spell more of them from memory. He's also been drawing a ton of fun stuff. Here's one Fang and I have dubbed "Fat Elvis":

• Jake the puppy (9 months old) now weighs at least 100 pounds. Here's a photo of him from about a month ago (photo by Lucas!), as well as a picture that puts his paws in scale--I have pretty big hands for a woman.

• I'm glad I bought that extra ice scraper last week.
• Good god even small oak trees have a lot of leaves, as do whatever kind of trees those two in the front yard are.
  
• Living indoors too much, and wearing scarves when I'm outside, turns my skin back into a teenager's--and not in a good way. As I've pointed out before, developing wrinkles and battling acne simultaneously is not fucking fair.
• Lucas is going through a pink stage. He frequently comments on what a pretty color it is, and he's declared he doesn't want to wear his black knit cap with the silver Spider-Man logo on it because he wants to get a multicolored hat that is mostly pink. On the one hand, I'm glad he hasn't yet been swayed by some of the most basic gender norming processes, but I also worry what the other kids will say to him if he wears a hot pink hat to preschool. (I have memories of one particular day in my own kindergarten experience when a boy and I wore the same style of red shorts with white stripes down the side, and I was told repeatedly by the boys that I was wearing "boy shorts." Such comments were really tough for 5-year-old me to handle, and Lucas is that age now.)
  
• I'm helping Fang reestablish his freelancing practice, which means much projectizing at home (after Lucas falls asleep) on top of my work-work. With the pay cut I took to come here, I should probably pick up some freelancing or consulting work, too.
  
• I changed my NaNoWriMo project to writing a couple ebooks for Fang and the biz; the cheesy Jefferson time-travel project will have the wait until at least the summer.
• It appears most of my lower-division students can't write a research question to save their lives, even after much coaching about what makes a good question. My faves are all along the lines of "Did the Civil War have a good or bad effect on the United States?" and "How did the California gold rush change life in the entire U.S. from then until today?" Needless to say, tomorrow's class will include more coaching so that I don't have to read 50 really really really really REALLY lousy papers.

Uncomfortable, and aspirational, conferencing

I'm attending a regional women's history conference right now. It resembles pretty closely many of the conferences I've attended. As a women's historian and feminist, it's pretty common for me to find myself at conferences where 85 to 90 percent of the participants are women, and even a higher percentage are white, with a majority (or nearly so) nearing retirement age or older.

I have a great deal of affection for such women—perhaps because I expect to be one of them in 30 years.

Yet there's something about these conferences that always leaves me a little bit cold. I often feel as if I've stepped back in time 20 or 25 years, as these conferences are very second-wave feminist—and it's not just because the women attending cut their feminist teeth in the 60s and 70s. It's because these conferences remind me that so much second-wave work has yet to be done in K-16 history education (and yet I'm beyond ready to move on). Many of my U.S. history survey students say they never had to consider women's history or black history or Chicano history in their K-12 years, and education-focused panels at this conference have reminded me that it's not just Idaho students who aren't engaging with women's history—students in much more progressive states are still getting mostly privileged-white-male history.

At the same time, if you drop me down into a more third-wave conference packed with feminists of color or with a more queer sensibility, I'd be equally uncomfortable. The cultural studies Ph.D. in me thinks they're fighting the good fight and that American society is waaaaay behind the curve in terms of civil rights, but my inner second-wave, white woman history educator also realizes that, in education at least, we haven't adequately set the foundation for such work.

So, for example, on my midterm for my U.S. history survey a couple weeks ago, I told the students they would have an opportunity to answer a question about the three greatest challenges to women's advancement in colonial and early federal America. We had just read Clarence Walker's book Mongrel Nation, and we had watched bits of documentaries addressing Jefferson and slavery. I even pointed out that slavery was a barrier to advancement for all American women. And yet fewer than half the students who addressed that question placed slavery in their top three challenges. Black women weren't even on their radar when they answered the question—even when the question itself asked them to be sure to consider women of color.

* * *

I don't mean to criticize conferences of the second-wave or third-wave persuasion. Rather, I'm trying to express my discomfort with both of them.

I'm also trying to find a way to articulate—in the sense of bones and joints, as well as of language—my own theoretical and methodological and physical space in the field of American women's history. And I need to do so in the next, oh, six hours, as I'm stepping in for a more senior colleague from another institution when I sit on a roundtable this afternoon. And hoo boy, do I ever have a sense of impostor syndrome.

When I agreed to participate in the roundtable, I didn't look closely enough at the timing and the participants. I didn't realize it was the closing plenary with a couple hundred women's historians in the audience, and I certainly didn't realize that some giants of women's history in the U.S. west would be sitting on the panel. I also didn't realize the focus would be primarily on women's history in Washington state, which is a topic with which I'm only passingly familiar. When I saw the long list of questions the moderator suggested we might address in the panel, I had a tiny panic attack.

But someone has to be the most junior person on the panel, so why not me?

I'm thinking, therefore, that my small contribution to the roundtable is likely to be methodological. I suspect if I can stave off further panic attacks on the dais, I'll be pushing (gently) for a democratization of public history, specifically for more innovative and participatory digital history projects. The subjects of public history projects are becoming more populist—for example, yesterday an architectural historian discussed attempts to get National Historic Landmark status for sites of queer struggle or sites significant in labor history. However, I'm not seeing—and maybe I'm just not looking in the right places—projects in which historians are, borrowing a couple of pedagogical terms, guides on the side rather than sages on the stage. Even many oral history projects make me uneasy on this account. I'll have more to say on this topic, I suspect, in the coming months and years, but for now I'll end with this question: How do you think we ought to go about increasing public interest in, engagement with, and initiation of history projects? Which is more important, broadly speaking, in increasing engagement—a project's subject or its methods?

Weighty thoughts

. . .or, rather, thoughts on weight.

When I met Fang, I was just about to turn 24, and I weighed 138 pounds. That is insanely thin for me; in high school, even when I was hyperthyroid, I weighed as much as 165 pounds. Last night, I stepped on the scale and found I weighed 182 pounds, which is quite a bit out of a reasonable BMI range for someone my height. (Yes, I know BMI doesn't work well as a measure for everyone, but in my family, it seems a fairly useful way to begin to measure fitness.)

So I joined Weight Watchers online--last night, just after stepping off the scale.

Today, I carefully tracked what I ate and charted my activity levels for the first time, debiting and crediting points depending on the food and the activity.

I feel like crap, all hypoglycemic and hyperthyroidy. Yay.

I biked into work today--a pleasant enough ride in the cool morning with a couple of downhill stretches. This afternoon I rode my bike home, 4.9 miles with the sun beating down and temperatures in the upper 80s but feeling like the 90s, about 0.5 miles of that uphill. I am desperately out of shape, and walked through the front door all red and blotchy, sweaty, heart pounding, and feeling faint.

I showered, drank a ton of water, and ate dinner. Only after I ate did I step on the scale: 178 pounds. No wonder I feel like crap; my body shed four pounds over the course of 20 hours.

People following Weight Watchers are supposed to lose a lot the first week--allegedly mostly water weight--and then lose a pound or two each week thereafter. I suspect I'll feel pretty happy with myself in a couple of weeks, but this first week is going to suck.

Things I'm noticing:

• Riding 4.9 miles in work clothes in the warm sun, on somewhat roughly paved streets, some of it uphill, in a state where auto emissions laws seem significantly more lax than in California, is very different from riding on smooth bike paths, mostly in the shade, for two flat miles. I didn't think it would be that different, but hoo boy, for me it is.
• I'm going to need to dedicate myself to more exercise. Fang has agree to take Lucas into preschool one day a week, and he already keeps him home one day, so that means I can bike into work two days a week, for a total of about 20 miles/week. It's not a lot, but it's a start, and it's equivalent to a full week of commuter bicycling in Davis.
• I need to get up from my desk in the middle of the day and take a walk. There's a decent path by the river that I could walk, or I could treat myself to an occasional lunch-hour trip to the zoo, which is only about a five minute walk from my building.
• I need to plan ahead so I have some kind of exercise I can do when winter sets in, and especially when it's dark before or after work. I'm loath to ride my bike here in the dark, even with lights and reflective tape, as Boiseans are nowhere near as attuned to bicyclists as are people in Davis. In Davis, drivers frequently looked over the right shoulders before turning right. Here, not so much, so I'm being extra cautious.

Want to help me reach my goal of shedding 30 pounds?

If you've been on Weight Watchers before, I'd love to hear about your experiences--what should I try to do, avoid doing, etc.? And if you live in a part of the world where it gets too chilly to exercise outside (I have asthma, and very cold air is my lungs' kryptonite), how do you stay active?

On self-censorship

I generally don't write blog posts and leave them in draft form, but for the first time in the five years I've been writing in this space, I just did so, both out of my own inclination and on Fang's advice.*

So instead, I solicit your 100-word essays on the censored post's title: "Giving at the Office." Leave 'em in the comments.

* Maybe I'll publish the post if/when the issue arises again in a year or so, but now is not the time, even though the argument I was making, at least in the opinion of the very talented and exacting Fang, is exceptionally timely and well crafted--so rare for me these days!

RBOC, Reflective Late Summer Edition

I'm putting all my intellectual effort these days into course planning and harvesting articles from my dissertation, so all I have in me are random bullets:

• Lucas and I were pulling dandelions from the lawn yesterday, and a bee or wasp stung me right in the middle of the palm of my right hand. Thank goodness the critter didn't get Lucas. If I recall correctly, this is only my fourth bee sting, but hoo boy is it by far the worst. My hand has been swelling over the past 24 hours, and I can't make a fist, plus--oversharing alert!--the hand just started breaking out in hives. I almost went to an urgent care clinic, but in light of our new high insurance deductible,* I'm going the Benadryl route instead.** The pharmacist said not to take Benadryl until the evening because it'll knock me out, so I'm waiting until Lucas goes to sleep, but meanwhile I can't use my right hand for anything but typing, and even that is a stretch. It's made me VERY grumpy, but it also means I haven't had to grade papers. :)

• Someone who matters tremendously to me just let me know she's pregnant after trying for what seems to me to be a reasonable amount of time, but which I'm sure to her felt like for-ev-er. I'm very excited for her and her husband. As soon as she's told a few more people and is into her second trimester, I'll blog about it more openly.

• Lucas's development is proceeding in leaps and bounds. His drawings are becoming more and more complex--check out Fang's blog if you're interested, as he's been posting several pieces of Luke's art--and his language, too. Today he wrote his last name flawlessly, without any prompting. We're also getting a bit more insight into how his mind works. For example, on Friday, Fang told Lucas they would watch an episode of a Batman cartoon at 5 p.m., and he showed Lucas a clock with hands on it. Fang reminded him when the small hand was on the 5, they would watch the show. Lucas pointed out there was a dial on the back of the clock, and they could turn it right away to make it point to 5 so that they could watch Batman immediately. Ha!

• We had to administer a series of questions and exercises to Lucas for his preschool teachers. One of them required us to ask Lucas to "Draw a boy or a girl." Fang did this exercise with him while they sat across the desk from one another, and Lucas proceeded to draw a person, only he drew it upside down, so that it was right-side-up for Fang.

• These latest developments, coupled with others, worry me--I fear we might have a gifted child on our hands. Oy. I'm not sure I'm ready for that, particularly in a state not known for funding quality public education.

• This weekend I took Lucas to the local birds of prey center. The folks there don't rehabilitate birds, as do many raptor centers; rather, they breed, raise, and release endangered birds. They have a very intimate bird show--the hawk's feathers actually brushed repeatedly against my legs, and the crow took a dollar bill from Lucas (the bird can't have quarters because they're shiny and he hoards them)--and some raptors that can't be returned to the wild for various reasons, including a couple of California condors and some really neat eagles. Despite all the bigger birds, Lucas was really taken with the crow.

• Jacob has finally noticed the five or six squirrels that frequent our backyard, but still has a pretty sedate reaction to them. He's recovering nicely from his neuter surgery, which he had last Thursday. He's tipping the scales at more than 85 pounds now.

• Tomorrow afternoon Fang will take Lucas to observe a martial arts class to see if it's something Lucas might want to try. Meanwhile, I'm plotting to take the boy to Friends meetings and First Day school. Would having ninja-level martial arts skills disqualify 18-year-old Lucas from conscientious objector status with the Selective Service?

• This conversation just transpired between Lucas and Fang:

Lucas: Daddy, will you do something with me? We can do something you like.

Fang: Sure. What do you want to do? (thinking he'll get out the guitars and play some music)

Lucas: (very sweetly) Well, you like to watch superheroes on the TV, right?

The boy knows how to work his dad, that's for sure.

• Fang is trying hard to be more social, which he admits has always been a challenge for him, even though he's very good with people. He was waitlisted for a guitar class offered through the city's community education program, and he found out today they opened up an additional section of the class. He starts next Wednesday, and he's enthusiastic about meeting some like-minded people. He went to a Smashing Pumpkins concert with one of my colleagues last week, and they seemed to hit it off; they seem to have plenty in common to gripe about, if nothing else. (Waves to colleague, who sometimes reads this blog.)
  

• Overall, I'd say what has most characterized our first two months in Idaho is resilience, and really, we're not a resilient people. (The phrase "highly sensitive" is a more apt descriptor.) I'm really happy about that, as these are the times that try a family's souls--a big move, a new job, pay cuts, new social circle, no support network to speak of, a new preschool, a Cliffordesque lab who thinks he's still the size of a shoebox. My colleagues and new friends here have been a huge help in easing our transition, and for that I am exceptionally grateful.

*Thank you, State of Idaho, for lengthening the new-employee health insurance waiting period from 30 days to 90. Much appreciated!

**I've never taken Benadryl, but I'm going to take my first pill in a few minutes. Fang is a little too excited about this prospect--he knows I can react strongly to new meds, and he's crossing his fingers for a good show. Will it include further crankiness, slurred speech, or giggles unbecoming a bee-sting victim? I'll keep you posted. (As if.)

Give some books to kids

I have to admit I'm a sucker for DonorChoose.org. Today I heard some history department colleagues talking about how many students in Boise go without books, so when I saw this DonorsChoose project asking for funds to buy books for the school library, I signed on as a supporter.

If you have a few spare bucks--and hey, I know it's payday for many of you!--you might consider tossing them in the direction of this high-poverty elementary school.

. . .and things I don't love so much

Weather today and tonight in Boise:

• 104 degrees (tying the record high)
• Humidity this afternoon

Current weather alerts for the region:

• Record temperatures
• Air quality alert (yellow--the alert, not the air)
• Severe thunderstorms
• Fire weather
• High winds (50 mph--not so bad as last weekend's 70 mph)
  

Tomorrow's forecast? 78 degrees and pleasant.

Welcome to Idaho. It's like Iowa, only with more consonants.

You've got to respect any region whose local broadcaster offers this list of potential weather challenges:

(from KTVB.com)

Writing group?

My copy of Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks just arrived, and it looks fabulous. But now I need a writing group.

I know some readers of this blog are doing really interesting research and writing. Any humanists or social scientists want to join me in writing or revising an article this fall?

E-mail me: trillwing -at- gmail -dot- com.

Busy busy--and distracted

My moving-into-a-new-rental to-do list has been insane, and much of it has put me in the car, running errands on the unfashionable side of town, which conveniently begins one block from where I live. :)

I did manage to make it downtown yesterday for Urban Lunch, "a monthly informal gathering for urban-minded individuals who want to further the discussion surrounding Boise's urban issues." I ran into a departmental colleague there, and met two terrific folks with whom I hope to work in the future--one of the founders of Urban Lunch, who also works in my dean's office, and a visiting assistant prof who works on urban rhetoric. This town is packed with interesting people.

I was about 25 minutes late to Urban Lunch, however. I actually arrived 25 minutes early, but as I was parallel parking my compact car in a tiny space downtown, someone in a large SUV was trying to fit into the same-sized space in front of the car parked ahead of mine. The idiot kept bumping--ramming, really--the compact car in front of me in an attempt, I suppose, to make a larger space for his giant vehicle (even though there was an appropriately sized space across the street), and he set off the smaller car's alarm. I was also worried that he was going to push the small car into mine.

I left my car and pulled out my iPhone to find someplace to grab a lunch to go. Grabbing lunch took longer than I expected, so I rushed back toward the location for Urban Lunch, propelled by my smugness about my punctuality despite being a newcomer to town. Yay me.

But as I was passing by my car, I heard an engine running. And of course, it was mine. I was so distracted by the a-hole ramming the car in front of me that I had exited my car with the keys still in the ignition and the engine running. (In my defense, I've been driving for 18 years, and never had this happen.)

So I called Fang, who was out and about running errands with the boy. He got lost on his way to downtown--he has even less a sense of direction than I do--so by the time he arrived with a key I was late to lunch.

Eventually I'll learn that payback for being self-congratulatory is a real bitch.

An accounting

Pounds loaded (thank God not by us) onto the moving truck: Approximately 14,000 (damn books, comic books, and CDs)

Cars driven from Davis to Boise: 2

Hours spent on the road between Davis and Boise: 11

Wrong turns taken on that trip: 1

Nights in motel rooms: 3 so far, likely to be 4

Toys and gifts my dad brought with him for Lucas: at least 4

Number of said toys the dog destroyed while we were out: 1

Toys purchased by my dad for Lucas on the trip: 2

Number of hours I spent today listening to Lucas prattle on about "germ scrapers" he made out of Legos: 6, going on 7

Number of times Lucas asked me if his redesigned germ scrapers are "cool": too many to count

Motel coffee tables consumed by dog: 0.1

Motel coffee tables for which we'll have to pay: 1

Muzzles purchased for dog: 2

Dog hair in this motel room because I was too embarrassed to allow it to be cleaned with the coffee table chewed up: 3 cubic feet?

Times in my life UC Davis has issued me a physical paycheck instead of direct deposit: 1

Miles I am from said paycheck: 565.3

High temperature the day we left the crazy hot Sacramento Valley: 95 degrees

Current temperature in Boise: 101

Times divorce narrowly avoided: 4?

Blog posts I've written during the move: 1

Blog posts Fang has written during the move: 5

Debt we owe to my dad for helping me drive a car 575 miles, walking the dog, buying all our meals here, handing us an anniversary card brimming with cash, and entertaining Lucas at a time of great physical, emotional, and financial stress for our family: God only knows

Window the moving company gave us for delivery: 3 days

Day on which our stuff will be delivered: day 3

Movers due to arrive: in 15 hours

Melancholy, and missing a friend

Fang has been feeling melancholy, and in my waning days in this charming college town, I can't help but join him in his nostalgia for a part of our life that has passed.

But as I set off on the next stage of my academic life, I find myself reflecting even further back, to college--the last place I was very sad to leave--and even to high school, to friends I haven't seen in a long time and to one in particular I will never see again.

I've been thinking about my friend killed seven weeks ago while bicycling. I hadn't seen Erik for many years, though I had been meaning to do so, since we ended up living a short stretch of freeway from one another. Erik and I ran in the same circles in high school--those awkwardly earnest folks, geeks, and nerds who constituted the gifted magnet at our high school.

We had many classes together--the most memorable being the tenth-grade P.E. class comprising those few of us who weren't on a sports team and who, thanks to the gifted program's odd block schedule, ended up taking P.E. only every other day. It resembled not so much a gifted P.E. class as an adaptive one, and to this day I have great sympathy for the soccer coach who tried to lead our class of intellectually curious, hormone-addled misfits through track, basketball, weight training, and especially swimming and badminton.

I remember a girl classmate and friend of ours, upon seeing the wild-haired, gangly, and Scots-Irish-pale Erik in gym shorts, asked him, "Do those legs go all the way up?" It wasn't meant as an insult--we had all experienced too many of those and we knew we looked dorky in our not-quite-regulation P.E. uniforms--and I still smile at the memory of Erik, with his big, bouncy, ground-covering gait, blinking through his round glasses in shock at someone commenting on a body that (again, like all of ours) was not usually an object of sexual attention.

Our last couple years of high school, we also often ate lunch together with the same circle of friends, on the lawn near the entrance to the band room--where we gravitated because so many of us spent a couple hours a day in symphonic winds, band, or orchestra. It was pretty obvious that Erik had a crush on me, but I wasn't ready--wouldn't be for years, really--for a boyfriend. Still, my feigned ignorance of Erik's interest never kept Erik from being ridiculously nice, and I regret that in my shyness around boys I never really let him into my life the way I might have.

On one of my birthdays--I can't remember if it was my fifteenth or sixteenth, but it was on a weekend afternoon--he looked up my home address and rode his bike quite a distance from his neighborhood to mine to deliver a birthday card. I was in a foul mood--in tears at the moment he showed up--and thanked him without letting him into the house, in part because of my mood but also because I was too embarrassed and confused about boys to let my parents know that I even talked to any. I've often regretted not letting Erik in that day because he was such a nice, if earnest and awkward, guy--exactly my kind of friend, really. He deserved more kindness, as well as a glass of lemonade, on that warm June day. I wish I had found a moment in the intervening years to tell him how much his gesture meant to me. It was a revelation and a confirmation I needed as a teenage girl whose out-of-control thyroid was busy wreaking havoc with her body, mind, and self-esteem.

From third grade on, I was one of those kids--and I suspect Erik was, too--who was a bit too earnest, a bit too bright for my age and too uncomfortable in my own skin. I got picked on a lot from fourth grade through junior high and a bit into high school, and my defense was not to retaliate--I was never good with the quick retort--but to be not only nice to everyone, but to show a genuine interest in whatever they were enthusiastic about. (In fact, Erik often--to my exasperation at the time--started sentences with "You'll find this interesting.") In junior high, high school, and college, I think nerdy or geeky boys like Erik found my kindness and interest, my willingness to really listen, to be a respite from the myriad unkindnesses of adolescence and young adulthood.

One of the last images Erik uploaded to his Flickr account, and a favorite of mine.

I've tried to carry that kindness into adulthood, but one thing I learned from boys and young men like Erik--all those fiercely dorky yet (I now see) lovely guys who took an interest in me when my interest was very much elsewhere--is how to speak and live plainly, in the open, bravely. It hasn't been an easy lesson, and I certainly haven't learned to live as authentically and passionately and creatively as Erik did.

So this past week, as I've been thinking about all the terrific people I've had the great good fortune to have known here and before here, I've been returning often to Erik and to the nice boys--and realizing, to borrow a phrase from Yeats, that my glory was I had, and continue to have, such friends.