My reflective time is at the moment constrained by a different range of duties at work. Concerte University, as you may know, has this year a new leader, which inevitably brings restructuring. In my union capacity, I am in the thick of things, to the extent that the university has seconded me to do this work. I still have my teaching, but for the next few months there will be less of it. My days are what I would call surface-busy: lots of meetings, a great deal of planning and strategising, much communication with members, and little time as a result to sit and think.
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After six blog posts in a row last Saturday and a weekend spent in that grim halfway state of staying on the internet, waiting for something to happen, I decided to take what, for want of a better phrase, I dubbed a spiritual detox. It is no disrespect to you, gentle reader, to say that I’m feeling much better for it: I’ve got a lot of reading done, for one (although I’ve yet to finish the weighty tome I’m showing off in the Amazon link at right).
This final non-teaching week also gave rise to a lively social round. The señor and I called mid-week on Governor’s Bay Jay, whose lovely blog you can now find here. Today we took Evie and Fern to visit Ashburton Jay and friends, some of whom were very young puppies. You can see my too-fast panning and unsteady walking zooms of Coco, Zsa Zsa, Evie and Fern below.
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I have non-teaching time, at this, the sweetest time of year. Most of Concrete University, and much of Sockburn too, is heavy with blossom. Individual petals blow in drifts across lawns, adhering to my clothes and hair, the north face of the house and in the ears and up the noses of unsuspecting puppies. A few days of rain at the end of last week made the gutters run with lemon-coloured pollen water. The return of the sunshine is such that, though eyes stream and grow puffy on people and animals alike, the whole of the western suburbs seems to be strolling about, amiably, in short sleeves, asking itself how nice it is to see the sunshine.
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Asides and questions from commenters send me scurrying in delightful directions in search of new artefacts. I’m not sure that I’m ready, for example, for this jelly, music for older listeners from when I was a young listener. What a treat: sleek and cool and stripped of every trace of archness. Duran Duran never had it so good.
The timing—both band and place—couldn’t be more apposite, really, given the extent to which Japan’s been on my mind of late. I have rustled up the airfare and could make the money for a rail pass in time for the southern spring during which I’d hoped to return, but I’ve decided instead not to go back at the moment. My navigatory circle has shrunk to the home front and at the moment I want to read and reflect, not voyage. To go to cities new, now, would mean having similar experiences to those on my last journey, but in different places. I want there to be some change in me before I set off again: more language, more ability to read and recognise kana, something in myself that will mean the triad of person, time and place gets differently activated. There’s the material consideration, too, by which that money could also be spent on paying dog stud fees, or that zenith of suburban life, home improvement.
There’s the fact, as well, that I don’t really want to have adventures by myself at the moment. I want to have them with the good señor, and at present there are plenty of things to do at home. What does it feel like to be at present without wanderlust? It feels … limpid. It is a happy torpor.
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I’m flattered—really flattered—when bloggers and students and friends refer to me as literary or even literate. I mean it. It’s struck me in the last few days, as it seems to do seasonally, how I don’t belong to a community of poets, novelists or even critics, at least as these things might be conventionally recognised. I have no stellar contacts nor networks to my name; I am not of the scene, as I perceive it.
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Outwardly Bound
30 August, 2009
in at home,commentatrix,O internet,teaching & learning
My reflective time is at the moment constrained by a different range of duties at work. Concerte University, as you may know, has this year a new leader, which inevitably brings restructuring. In my union capacity, I am in the thick of things, to the extent that the university has seconded me to do this work. I still have my teaching, but for the next few months there will be less of it. My days are what I would call surface-busy: lots of meetings, a great deal of planning and strategising, much communication with members, and little time as a result to sit and think.
[click to continue…]
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