The Formation of Scholars

There's an article in today's Chronicle about the forthcoming Carnegie Foundation report entitled The Formation of Scholars, which argues that PhD-granting departments and programs aren't adequately preparing doctoral students for the challenges of conducting top-quality research today. The article doesn't explain how preparation or education in research was measured, across many different fields and disciplines, but some of the general points seem applicable to many areas:

The solution is not to add more requirements and components to doctoral education, say the study's authors, but to investigate whether many of the traditions that have grown up within academe still serve their intended purpose. The authors question many conventions taken for granted in doctoral education, such as qualifying examinations, program requirements, and even the doctoral dissertation. Many of the origins and purposes of those practices are opaque or forgotten, they argue, and continue only through force of habit.

That "force of habit" is a real obstacle to change. My own department has been through several bitter fights about proposed changes to our PhD program, which tend to pit generations of scholars against each other, most of us arguing for whatever methods and formats trained us. So if you passed a 6-field comprehensive exam, that's what you think every student should do. If you took orals, or defended each chapter of your dissertation separately, you tend to think that's the way it should be.

What's especially pernicious within my own department, and within the field generally, is the way that institutional hierarchies get mapped onto program requirements. Thus if an Ivy department required all of its doctoral students to stand on their heads while reciting the first page of their dissertation, then other departments would eventually take this method as the accepted mode of examination. Faculty are often caught between the real identity and projected fantasy identity of their own department ("we are a fourth rank research school but we want to be second rank") as well as their own internalized professional ranking, which is frequently calculated using PhD institution and number of publications as factors ("I'm a first-rank PhD with the median number of publications for graduates of my program with x numbers of years in the profession").

These hierarchies -- real and imagined -- are also involved in how we envision the futures of our own doctoral students and how we train them. In my experience of an R1 doctoral program, we were never explicitly instructed in research or professionalization. It was assumed that we were able to figure it out along the way. This meant those with good mentors figured it out sooner; the rest of us developed our own various compensatory strategies. I'm currently teaching at an R4 university, where we know we need to teach our students a lot of things they probably didn't get in their previous BA programs. Yet many of our faculty (most educated at R1s) believe one "shouldn't have" to tell students how to do basic research.

I'll be interested to see how or if this forthcoming report affects our institutional and professional conversations about graduate education.

special steps

Tonight I went to get The Boss some steps, because she's starting to slow down from arthritis. She's 14, and has been very athletic all her life. So she's kind of depressed about now having to go on the slow dog walks with Old Girl. Meanwhile, Speedy is alternately excited about having her own (fast and long) walks, and nervous about walking with only a human for company. So having her own special steps to get up on the couch with did make The Boss feel important. But we're all feeling a little sad that age has come upon her rather suddenly in the past two months.

I love to go to the companion supply store -- there's always adorable and desirable stuff to look at. And lots of people bring their dogs into the shop. But most of all I just find it heartwarming, all the people in there looking for toothbrushes or sweaters or bowls or cookies for their special friend.

December

Because December is full of possibility!

Fred Claus

Vince Vaughn and 7 year olds don't usually go very well together, so I was a bit skeptical of the parenting skills of the women sitting with 15 children in the row behind us at the movie theater. Sure, we were going to see a holiday movie, but still, it was rated PG13 and these kids were awfully young. But I enjoyed the film, for what it was, and I suspect the kids did too. It's skillfully double-layered, so that kids would only see Santa and some slapstick comedy and some elves dancing around. The adults, on the other hand, get to enjoy Vaughn's usual slacker antihero and a hilarious scene of Siblings Anonymous featuring Stephen Baldwin, Roger Clinton, and Frank Stallone. Because that's Fred's problem: he's always been overshadowed by and compared to his brother Santa. (Oh, and there's a little vampiric immortality clause invoked by the offscreen narrator to explain why the Claus family look almost the same today as they did back in their medieval hut.)

The main message of the film, oft-repeated and heavy-handed, is simple: there are no naughty kids, just kids who have been overlooked or misunderstood. So, target one is the old-school Santa practice of divvying up the list of kids into naughty and nice. Fred's guerilla tactics on behalf of neglected siblings shakes things up at the North Pole. But Santa's also fighting the black-coated "efficiency expert" (brilliantly played by Kevin Spacey) who wants to find any excuse to shut him down. So, like most Christmas movies, this one pits heart and humanity against cold misanthropy. Guess which wins?

But there's another interesting subtext that runs throughout the film, which serves as a kind of corollary to the updating of childrearing philosophy: it's very pro-exercise and anti-fat. For instance, when Fred's working as a repo man, he tells the little girl who complains that he's removing her flat screen TV that she should play outside and do sports. Everyone makes jokes about Santa's weight problem, and he's so fat that throwing snowballs gets him winded. And the simple toys the elves make in their all-nighter are athletic, too: baseball bats and hula hoops. It's clear that Santa's responsibility to eat all the cookies set out for him are what's hindering his health, and that maybe we should start putting out carrot sticks instead.

I'm not criticizing this element in the film -- it seems more positive than a lot of the usual holiday ideology -- but it was the fact that I could agree with it that got me noticing. Yeah, Santa's fat and probably heading into diabetes, and kids who get into fights are probably misunderstood, or mistreated at home. I accept those ideas without much question. I just haven't figured out what else I might have been absorbing as I watched this movie.

Other than the simple happiness of a holiday movie that actually is fun for grownups, even if it's about Santa.

rboc

• If only I had a keyboard invisibly and magically attached to my mind, I could show you all those posts I wrote this past week, invariably while showering, driving, or sitting in meetings. Now, even unwritten as they are, they seem stale and dried out. But considering that it's midnight (or later if you're still on "the time that it was before it changed") I don't have much in the way of freshly squeezed posts either.
  
• All the mean comments this past week (which I read too late to get involved in, natch) about junior faculty going on the market are awfully disheartening. Dr C handled it fabulously well, but I would imagine several dozen junior (and not so junior) people's paranoia levels have risen to supreme stress levels. Academic departments are not families -- either of the biological sort or the mobster sort. So if you want to consider leaving, you can and should. And it's really no one else's business.
  
• Today, yoga class kicked my ass. It didn't help that a rambunctious screen door had slammed me in the kidney yesterday, or that I had to detoxify some fried veggie chips out of my system. But I think it would have been a tough one no matter what. And, as lousy as I felt during the experience (nauseous, shaky, the whole bit) , it was kind of a welcome reminder about what I love about Bikram yoga. It stretches me to my limits, and makes all the other things that seem tough seem a bit more manageable. And I know tomorrow's class will be easier. It always is.
  
• I love this time change. It's so rare that I look at my watch and actually think "hey, I have MORE time than I thought" -- usually only when I'm having a rare manic insomnia episode. Most of my life is spent with all timepieces set 5-15 minutes ahead because I'm going to be slightly late otherwise. Unfortunately, after a few days the freshness will probably wear off and I'll be struggling to get up before 6 again.
  

at home

Today is one of those wonderful days, too rare indeed, when I can stay home to work rather than go in to the office wearing my Administrator's hat. So I've been catching up on the 50 million small tasks that have been piling up: ordering books for next term, posting stuff to the department's website, writing up various memos, grading, writing some new assignments, etc etc. And given that I am constitutionally only able to work for maybe 50 minutes at a stretch, I've had a few breaks as well.

I much prefer homestyle unproductivity to what I'd typically be doing at the office. It's not like every minute there is productive: there's the socially required (and politically useful) chit chat with staff and colleagues, the trips down the hall to the facilities, the endless distractions of email, and of course, my irritating office neighbor. Here, at home, there's email -- but also the ability to get up and walk away from the computer altogether, which is much better. There are three dogs who are more than happy to distract me with tennis balls and rope toys and disarming cuteness. A whole kitchenful of possibilities: tea, coffee, fruit, nuts, and even dishes and laundry to wash if I get too anxious.

Best of all: the feeling that I'm playing hooky, even though I've actually been crossing stuff off my list. I'm not wearing mascara or shoes, so I must be having fun. . .

if only we had a fall break

Sometime this morning I actually had a minute to think, "I wonder what's been going on in the blogworld." And then it was six hours later before I got to poke around a little bit and just check that my team of usual suspects are still all there. The past week was Midterm Extreme, with no spare minutes. Made more so of course because I was playing catchup (on work, on teaching, on sleep) since I'd been away at Big Conference. But really, a week without any free time online? that's freakin' ridiculous.

This was also the week that almost half of my students decided would be a great time to skip class -- a different group each day, but still the empty seats yawned contagiously on sunny afternoons. Those kind of days when I want to tell the absent students, "I wanted to skip, too. But I came to class anyway. Dammit."

And then I read on other people's blogs of this thing called Fall Break. Ah, I remember that from my undergraduate days of yore. That would be really awesome right about now. Going to the conference charged up my professional and intellectual batteries -- but it's not exactly the same thing as a break. It's the weird anti-break that masquerades as a vacation. Because you're performing, and networking, and having bouts of anxiety in the airport when you see all the conference people. But also seeing old friends, and learning new things, and meeting some great new people. Simultaneously very energizing and kinda stressful, but not really a break.

In my fantasy version of fall break, I'd get my house entirely clean, we'd see a zillion fantastic movies, I'd cook large quantities of Italian food, and do hours and hours of yoga. I don't need a tropical beach vacation, just some pasta and family time. This weekend is full of work for both of us, but maybe next weekend we can make a date with the colander and the DVD player...

conference happiness

Since I'm basically a very shy person, it's really quite strange that I enjoy going to academic conferences. Not every conference, to be sure, but over the years I've figured out which ones are more useful for me, both in terms of networking and for actual intellectual content. Right now I'm at my favorite conference, where I get to hang out with conference buddies and talk to the 3 or 4 people in the world who actually read my published work. And hear some smart interesting papers -- as well as a few that are not so smart, and although tedious are thus somehow comforting. One doesn't want to be totally impressed all the time, and therefore feel that one's own approach is not up to par.

Biochemically, however, the conference experience is an odd one -- I'm suffering a time zone alteration which has me wide awake in the wee predawn hours, and coffee is more accessible than water. So I come back to my hotel room and chug down glass after glass. But it's the socializing that for an introvert is like speed: throughout my dreams and especially in the half-lucid pre- and post- sleep stage I find myself simply repeating the conversations I had during the day. I'm hyper on the inside of my head, if not in my outer appearance. I've had more social interaction in the past two days than in the past six months or something. I'm loving it, but I know there will be a nasty come-down sometime early next week. Pity the students whose papers I'll be grading then . . . (since I'm certainly not grading them now, even though I could/should be.)

mysteries of my process

1. Why is it that, faced with an upcoming trip to Big Conference for which I should probably expand or revise my paper, I have spent the last two days thinking about and looking for new shoes?
   
2. Why is it that although I space out the small writing assignments so as to distribute the grading effort throughout the week and month, I still wind up with a huge pile to mark all at once?
3. Why is it that after two months of faithfully adhering to my new Early Morning Riser anti-depression schedule, I'm suddenly staying up til 2 or 3 a.m., which makes the dawn thing kind of tough/impossible?
4. Why is it that even though I have planned to skip out on certain useless meetings this semester for very good reasons, I still feel a tug of dutiful responsibility?

Thankfully, I'm still getting by despite this ridiculous behavior. I think my paper is fine, I found some new shoes, the assignments are mostly graded, and a couple of emails will absolve me of my committee crap. Now, how I'm going to get to sleep and then wake up all in the next four hours, I don't know. That's still really a mystery.

tv week

I have to confess to feeling awfully excited about the television season opening this week. For the first. time. ever. we can watch all the networks! I'm still delighted about our decision last winter to get basic dish service. It sure beats the rabbit ears, which in our neighborhood only got us two stations. Plus the DVR means we build up a nice reserve of shows we want to watch. I always like that feeling of surplus, a cushion of entertainment when I just can't read any more.

I do really enjoy watching TV shows on DVD, which we have been doing a lot of this summer, but I think it might also be nice to watch some of them in sync with everyone else. We've been watching Heroes and House this summer ostensibly with the idea that we'll eventually catch up. 3 or 4 more episodes of Heroes left and then we can watch the opener that we recorded. I'm trained to look for and enjoy narrative structure, so I can't stand to watch episodes out of order.

But there's lots of new TV that looks potentially interesting too . . . Bionic Woman has been on our household's radar for months now. And nerd heroes have finally made it to the networks -- even if they're all boys, and stereotypical, etc, I still enjoyed the first episodes of Big Bang Theory and Chuck. Not sure how those shows will develop, but I'm willing to stick with them for a little while. We tend to watch heavy drama shows (Lost, Battlestar, Heroes) so having a little sitcom on Monday night is a nice treat. (Adventures of Old Christine was perfect that way last spring/summer.)

So, yay, it's tv week! Makes the craptastic meetings I've been sitting in at work seem just a little bit better...

smarter not harder

The phrase "work smarter not harder" isn't mine, of course -- and when I mentioned it last week, it was resonating because I'd heard it recently on a podcast by Cheryl Richardson, a life coach whose books I've read for years. She's not the only person I've heard say such things, or use that phrase even; but for whatever reason, I paid more attention last week and I've been mulling it over since.

In that particular podcast, Cheryl focused on three main areas which could help you work smarter not harder: organizing your physical space, working in sync with your natural rhythms, and planning your work. All areas in which I've been trying to make some adjustments, so it was nice to hear some more ideas about those things.

But what really hit me -- probably because I was listening to the podcast, rather than reading it in a book -- was the emotional resonance of the word "harder." The psychological damage we do to ourselves every time (and I heard myself do this recently in a conversation with colleagues) we say "well, I didn't get as much done as I wanted to" about a term break, or think silently "I just have to work harder." No one I know or work with needs to work harder -- it makes work sound awful and painful and difficult before you've even begun anything. Work differently, yes. Work more creatively, yes. And that's what hit me about work smarter -- not only because smart is a word I appreciate -- but because art is there in the middle too.

So my goal this week: not to use any words, to myself or others, about quantity or hardness of work. And instead, try to find the sweet creative juicy middle that is, no matter what your field, about art.

enhanced nourishment

There's a pretty common metaphor in psychological/self-help circles that labels certain people as "toxic" or "unhealthy," which is very helpful in understanding why you're left feeling awful after dealing with those people.

Since nutrition and good health are important to me in the physical realm, I've been thinking a lot about how similar metaphors might be extended. There are people and foods which are toxic; there are people and foods which are nourishing; and then there are an awful lot of people and foods that are somewhere in the middle. And too much of the food or people that are in that middle spectrum, over the long haul, is unhealthy too.

One lunch or coffee or meeting with people who are emotional equivalent of white bread won't kill you, any more than a slice of white bread would. On occasion it might even seem comforting or tasty (if we're thinking French baguette and not Wonder bread). But eating baguette more than once every few months would have me feeling lousy.

Luckily, I have a few people in my life who are like the sprouted whole grain bread I eat -- hearty, textured, complicated, and nourishing. And the rest? I'm cleaning out my emotional cupboards.

looking at the JIL

Flavia has a good post about looking at the MLA job list from the perspective of already having a job you like or mostly like. I too look at the list -- it's a good way to learn about certain patterns in my subfield (which due to curricular, ideological, or funding issues can often get paired with others, or configured in certain ways). It's a good reminder of all the things I really do like about my current position. And it's also a strong reminder of what I still need to do -- thank goodness my dream job wasn't on the list this year, since I'm not ready for that one yet. I still have some preparing, some publishing, some developing to do.

But even though I read the list from the very comfortable perspective of being tenured in a job that's a good fit for me, it still raises up all sorts of anxieties. They're not the real concerns so many people face, about whether they'll get any sort of job, or whether they should stay in the profession. For me I think the list is the clearest reification I encounter of all the hierarchies of the profession: the evaluative terms that pop into my head as I look over the postings, automatically ranking jobs according to the list I internalized 15 years ago of what constituted a great job, a good job, or just a job. Even though I know I wouldn't have been the right person for most of the jobs the profession would consider to be the top of the pile -- never mind the self doubt about my qualifications, I know I wouldn't have played the game in the right sort of way -- reading the list makes me begin to question some of the choices I did make. Some of that questioning is good, but some of it just feels horrible.

If I can stand it, later this season I might read through the entire job list. That's how we used to have to do it back in the olden days when I was on the market: the list came out in paper hard copy format and was mailed to the department in mid-October and then photocopied by the staff for the nervous graduate students. There were only a couple of later updates to the list, which put a lot more pressure on institutions to get all the funding approvals lined up in time for the October release; that pressure is still there today, but mitigated somewhat by the weekly updates to the electronic list. There was no sorting of the list by rank or field or keyword -- typically when I look at the list lately, I just look at the postings in my subfield. But there was something valuable about having to read through the whole darn thing (which was organized by state if I remember correctly) because you did get a sense about the profession more generally, the shifts and patterns that meant one year was strong for medieval and another was strong for eighteenth-century.

Of course, spending too much time trying to interpret the tea leaves that are the job listings isn't necessarily that productive. Like most fortune-telling devices, it tells you much more about your own state of mind going in to the palm reader's or shrink's office rather than any definite information about the future. So, last weekend the JIL told me I think I need to work smarter (not harder; but that's for another post) -- and that's definitely true, whether it leads to a different job or not.

awwww

Yesterday I saw this story about the baby macaque who loves a bird. Like the well-circulated pictures and stories of the baby squirrel raised by a dog, the hippo who's friends with a tortoise, the pig acting as wet nurse for tiger cubs, or the classic stories of Koko and her kittens, these images just pull at my "awww" response. (A lot of the reporting on such stories recognizes the likelihood of such response, and semi-ironically deflects it by commenting on it.) So, I've been wondering, why is this?

The cute factor. I'm as susceptible as anyone else to pictures of cute baby animals. I get the Daily Puppy update in my inbox each day, and on crappy days I've been known to surf Cute Overload and the like.

I don't think that for me, at any rate, it's an idealization of maternal love. Biologically speaking, many animals are inclined to care for young infants who can't care for themselves -- particularly those who have long nursing times. So that's why the zoo keepers in China brought the pig in to nurse the tiger cubs. Why do we think such arrangements are cute, when the idea of human wetnursing tends to seem more icky? (To my students, anyway, whenever it comes up in a 19th-century text. To me it does too, but my horror of milk might be a factor there as well.)

But the idea of cross-species friendship, now, that's appealing. Partly, of course, because I share my life with three dogs. The experience of cross-species communication and affection is something very powerful. It has definitely changed who I am as a person -- made me a more affectionate and open human being. Seeing examples of animals who develop what we can only understand as friendships (though of course their understanding of what a friendship is might encompass some different elements than ours typically do) seems somehow hopeful to me. But it's not interesting or appealing to me to look at pictures of people's friendships (in fact, what's more boring than looking at a stranger's myspace party pics?). It's the possibility of reaching out past the species barrier -- the hope we could someday communicate even more deeply with dogs, with dolphins, with elephants, with horses, seems somehow promised in these examples of animal friendship.

Maybe this is just my misanthropy coming out in a socially acceptable cute form?

presbyopia

I got my first pair of glasses in the fifth grade, starting off my years of Extreme Ugliness. (I got braces the same year, and although my mother let me pierce my ears as consolation, it didn't do much for my looks.) But the glasses did make a huge difference in my myopic life -- I still remember the shock at putting them on for the first time and seeing threads in the carpet, and individual leaves on trees. Things that I knew were there if you were up close to them, but never knew that people could ordinarily see them. Being fairly stubborn and logical, even as a kid, I had come up with all these explanations for why pictures in books looked a certain way even though the world never looked that way to me: I saw stop lights as three splayed-out starry blobs, not as three perfect discs -- but I figured that was too hard to draw. It never occurred to me (or to anyone else) that I might need to have my vision checked until I was seated at the back of the classroom and didn't even know how many math problems were written on the chalkboard.

So fast forward from age 10 to 39. Over the past few months the natural aging process that affects the focusing muscles in the eyes started kicking in big time. Over the summer, frustrated with how tired my eyes were feeling at the end of every day, I somehow figured out that I could read in bed without wearing my lenses or glasses. The distance from face to knee while half sitting, half lying in bed, while looking at the average font size used in contemporary hardback fiction books, is apparently the perfect focusing distance for my now aging eyes. Other close-distance work (reading other kinds of books, or reading at the desk, or reading on the computer) is a little more awkward. It's not bad enough yet as to need reading glasses on top of my existing contact lenses, as was confirmed at my annual optometry appointment today. We adjusted my Rx a little and I'll do some eye exercises, continue to shift my desk chair a bit, maybe wear my glasses more than my contacts, that sort of thing, for a few more years at least.

But in the frustration of realizing all these sudden changes (which are hard not to see as declines no matter how typical they are) I have to also celebrate the pretty amazing fact that I can now read without any glasses at all, at least some of the time. I'd forgotten what that was even like!

academics and money

Somehow I wound up reading New Kid's post about house envy just before reading an article in the Chronicle about the strategies faculty are using to get by financially in areas with higher costs of living. (Unfortunately I think the article is in the subscriber-only section of the CHE -- part of some new special section called The Academic Life. I haven't looked at my print copy yet to know what that actually looks like, probably one of the folded magazine-type sections.) The Chronicle article is pretty good, though hardly a surprise to anyone who is also living in a high-cost area. Of course, they sought out extreme examples -- the faculty member who got tenure while living in her parents' home, the professor who butchers meat at the grocery story to help pay his bills. But the article overall raises some good points about the discrepancies between the cultural positions and the actual economic positions many of us inhabit.

As I've no doubt said before, I've always found Bourdieu's account of the dominated fraction of the dominant classes to be extremely compelling in pinpointing that weird dynamic that occurs in the households of academics. But I think it comes out most strongly around the issue of home ownership - - particularly as the ideology of home ownership begins to be assailed by the economic realities for many younger professionals in their 20s or 30s. It's no longer necessarily the best choice -- or even a possible choice. And yet, of course, it's an ideal that many people still aspire to.

I should specify that New Kid's points were about feeling unsettled, about transitions, and space, not necessarily financial concerns. But all of these things resonate around what she called "feeling like an adult." I'll be real clear about this: GF and I don't live in what most middle-aged folks would consider an "adult" type house. We don't have a guest room. We don't have a dining room. Our at-home lives are spent happily piled on one saggy couch. It's partly because certain bourgois markers don't matter that much to us (if they did we probably wouldn't be educators); it's also because our happy family includes three dogs; because we're introverts who'd rather make our personal space comfortable than company-presentable; and because we can't afford to live in the kind of house that grownups live in.

Who are the grownups? the Chair of my department, obviously, who not only has a Chair's salary but significant family money. He can have the whole department over for a catered holiday party during which we stroll around examining his rare books and antiques. Certain faculty married to professionals in industry. Others well into their 50s-- in my department, many people don't buy homes until their parents are deceased -- the small estates the previous generation's middle class can leave are usually suitable down payments in our real estate area. There are a few other "grownups," mostly those with children, who've chosen to live in the far away suburbs in order to purchase a home. The rest of us in the department tend to live in much more bohemian, eco-friendly, or downwardly mobile ways. (pick the label you prefer)

I'm definitely a grownup in most other areas of my life, and I don't spend much time worrying about this one. But when an old friend who's my age but definitely far ahead of me on the house scale came to visit, her shock and dismay told me quite a bit about how my life would look from the outside. Would I trade? no way. I'm pretty happy with the choices I've made. Flexible time and professional autonomy definitely trump swimming pools and new cars.

beginnings

I had a good conversation last week with an old friend about the eerie deja vu of returning to the department hallways and routines after the summer. It's a strange mixture of welcoming the familiar-- getting into the rhythms of teaching, seeing former students, seeing colleagues again-- but tinged with faint notes of familiar despair: the first department meeting, the low morale in the main office, the pompous grandstanding at the welcome reception.

We're now in our fourth week of the term, so we're hardly beginning anything any longer-- I've graded two sets of student writing and feel pretty accustomed to this semester's schedules and routines. But I'm trying to focus on what I had suggested to my friend: that we have the opportunity this semester to rewrite some of the patterns and outcomes of last year. That we have the opportunity this week, this day, to change something, not just to fall into the dull mediocrity of the routine. I always am happier at the beginning of the semester, when I'm excited about new courses, new texts, new students. But I'm also trying to focus on what actions or attitudes I can cultivate that will help new ideas or events emerge.

So far, I'm deliberately stepping back from a lot of things. I'm thinking or writing about my current research every day, even if only informally. I'm doing a lot of mantra chanting. And I'm trying to think of each day as a potential new start.

unplugged

unplugged. at least for now.

grading: side effects may include...

OK, I realize I'm basically the only person in the blogosphere who is STILL grading. And it won't even end today when I finish this stack of papers: I give a final exam this afternoon so I'll have that fun to look forward to tomorrow. But exams don't require comments, so it's a much faster process.

And of course I procrastinated on reading the papers, blah, blah, blah, so I'm up against a deadline for returning them. Same old story, familiar to me and my three readers. But this term I experienced a new side effect: last night from 4 a.m. to 6, after waking up to let the Old Girl out, I dreamed that I was grading papers. Not new ones -- the same papers I'd read yesterday afternoon. I regraded them all in my dream. I was actually reading text and thinking about grades. Not at all restful.

kilter

Kilter: Good condition, order; state of health or spirits. Used in the phrases out of kelter, in (good, high) kelter, to get into kelter. [OED] [U.S. form kilter]
But when you look more closely at the examples listed with the definition, the latest example of kelter being used in its positive sense was 1828 -- most of them are 17th century. In recent centuries, and especially in U.S. usage, the negative phrase of something being "out of kilter" or "off kilter" is far more prevalent.

It's often easier to talk about things being out of balance than it is to focus on the things that are in order. It's easier to see what's disordered, to focus on the problems, than to see what's actually working. It's perversely easier to complain than to talk about what's already good.

I've been literally off balance for a few weeks as an ankle injury heals. It's always the same ankle, the one weakened years ago by a bad injury that didn't heal properly, the one pre-disposed by genetics and physical anomalies towards injury. Thankfully I wasn't born into a time and place in which my only function was to sit still and look delicate, since the rest of me doesn't exactly fit the latter requirement, but my ankle would be perfectly happy just flirting under a fan sipping tea and knitting lace. My ankle is a bit of lady - -grafted on top of a leg that's built like most of my ancestors, for peasant work out in the fields. It's only an uneasy truce these warring class factions have been able to negotiate, and the ligaments who police
the ankle treaty are at fault for being too lenient, too flexible.

I'm never a very good patient, for all my attempts to cultivate patience in the rest of my life (my deliberate choice of the slow lane on the freeway, my deep breathing in the grocery store): I hate to be sick or injured and too easily fall into all or nothing doomsday foretellings: if I have a cold, I become convinced that I'll NEVER be able to breathe through my nose AGAIN. If my ankle sprains, I imagine never being able to walk, dance, jump freely. Of course, this is a good reminder to be grateful for what I mostly still do have. This week, as I'm able to return to half of my normal level of activity (with ice and a brace and all the rest) I'm better able to contemplate my good fortune. How good it is that it was only an ankle sprain that has been making me feel so sad, so slothful, so trapped. Something relatively temporary, no matter how long three weeks can feel to my ego, to my fragile brain chemistry, to my waistline.

I'm moving back into kilter. Slowly, slowly, but ever so gladly.