The Well-Adjusteds (with this post)
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Teenagers are right to be embarrassed at the love of their parents. Its affect is everything they aim, in the name of cool, to spurn: without relent, oblivious to fashion, and perhaps even increasing in intensity with passing of time. This is not so much what we heap upon the harvestbaby, now three months old, but what her merely being elicits out of us continually. Call it oxytocin, call it the baby crack, but its power as nurture is a force of nature. These days I find it hard to think past it.
Falling bricks and ruined façades are the public outcome of the earthquake (not to mention some hard heritage questions, of which more in another post), but at home its effect has been to sweep aside any lingering ambivalence about my new role, the intensity of my commitment becoming clear in the sunshine daylight hours during which she and I sat on the shaking family bed and her father prepared a succession of emergency escape kits. What it means to be in this together has been brought into the sharpest of relief, an understanding at which I would have arrived anyway but whose passage has been sped by the thought that our house might have tumbled around us.
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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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I’m working solely with weekend creativity at the moment, as my cold proves difficult to shake and I complete my workplace tasks in a slightly zombified fashion. Or not: I came home sick on Thursday and spent most of yesterday in bed. I dislike minor illness with a passion. It fails in its role as memento mori, since it places one in the class of walking wounded only, but at the same time it incapacitates the body enough for the mind to get on to some really first-class worrying. Thus my catarrh and neuroses feed each other and Arthur gets woken in the middle of the night as I run my hands along his sides to make sure, for no reason, that he’s still breathing. From the same location, the señor orders me not to sleep on my back, so he isn’t woken by my cold-related sleep apnœa, wondering, should I wake her and tell her to breathe, or not?
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Little Boxes
20 May, 2011
in commentatrix,in Aotearoa,teaching & learning
There are nine boxes stacked in the garage, their contents the sum total of my ten-year work archive. They took perhaps ninety minutes to pack up, under the instruction that all our goods were to be packed for storage then shifting, then another ninety minutes across two different days to shift into my car, when the instruction changed to culling all but an under-desk set of drawers and two further drawers in the communal filing cabinets. In a large institution, inside which we are all in varying degrees of displacement, the instructions change frequently and sufficiently that the same task gets done over and over again, minor variations on the same theme. Even with the majority of buildings cleared for occupancy, there is not enough viable space, and a hierarchy of needs sees many of us moving or ready to move.
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