Christmas Shopping: Done

As you can tell by my last post, my gift-giving ability was not in top shape on Black Friday. Fortunately for me – and really lucky for the fam! – I found inspiration in the Cyber Monday Deals on Amazon.

I opted to buy board games for most of the 13 members of my shopping list. I like themes. I think that by narrowing it down to a specific category rather than being overwhelmed by every possible thing that I could get people, I was able to really focus on what people would like within that genre. So the games took care of the kids and then for the adult women, I am making a goody basket around the theme of cookies. I got a 3 tier cooling rack for $10, cookie scoops for free, and a special baking sheet for $12, then I am going to buy a package of cookie mix and throw it all together. I figure that it would be the best bang for my 25 buck(s). And for the men, I bought sporty outdoor stuff. They’re not too picky, so I’m not either. It is definitely a relief to have it all done. Now, I just have to wait for them to arrive and buy some wrapping paper at Target.

While I was doing my browsing, I came across a few great gifts that would be perfect for someone…just not anyone on my particular list.

Here are a couple of my favorites:

I know that there are many fans of The Office and I count myself among them. I think that this would be a hilarious and fun gift for a fan. Unfortunately, none of my family members even watch the show, and I guess this isn’t the kind of thing that I would buy for myself. But if I find out that someone I know gets it for Christmas, I will be over to play it with them in a hot second.

I also found this really neat (and I suppose nerdy) item while searching for kids’ toys. It’s called Moon in my Room, and you hang it on the wall of the child’s bedroom and it will go through all of the moon’s phases.

 

There is also Rainbow in my Room which is probably what I would have chosen as a child.

Something that I did end up buying that is so very, very cool is something called IlluStory. My 5 year old cousin loves books and drawing, like most kids do, so this is a really great gift someone like her. The way it works is the child will write a story and illustrate it, then they send it to the company who will then produce a hard cover book of the story. There is even an About the Author page where you can put the child’s picture. I would have loved something like that when I was her age. Actually, I think it would be pretty fun nowadays, too!

 

I am also in love with all of the Alex Toys. I can’t wait to have my own kids and buy them all of those adorable toys!

 

Switching gears from happy children’s stuff to the most disturbing item I found:  Terrorist Target Practice.  I would NOT recommend buying these for anyone. Yikes.

 

They come in a 25 pack, and I guess look like that.

 

On that darker note, I will end this post. I am just so happy and relieved to have my Christmas shopping done. And it wasn’t so bad after all. Yay! I am back to being the benevolent, selfless giver that I know that I am!!

 

 

 

Greediest Person Ever

Wow. I really want to buy a lot of stuff for Christmas.

The problem is that all of those things I want to buy are for ME, ME, ME!!!

All of this Black Friday hoopla got me thinking about what gifts I shall bestow upon my family. I started searching around online to brainstorm some ideas and comparison shop. But in the end, all of the special deals and markdowns really just appealed to me.

A GPS for my car? Oh, yes, please Santa. A new DVD player? You don’t have to check that list twice. A microwave? Well, mine has been sparking and whistling lately, so now that you mention it. My favorite clothing websites offering 50% off deals?  Boy, I can never have enough sweater dresses! And it goes on and on…

Look, I know that the holidays are about giving. And that it feels great to give the perfect gift to a loved one. And I have so much already that I really don’t need those things.

But maybe, just maybe, if my family made it a little easier to buy for them, my own wish list wouldn’t grow as vast as my frustration with Christmas shopping.

 

Trusting Instincts

This is going to be (necessarily) vague, so I will make it short.

I have never been entirely convinced that I should live by intuition and instinct because it seems so random to make life decisions based on a feeling. I would like to think that my sense of what is right for me is accurate, but I never know for sure if it is a meaningful signal or a capricious whim. Too many times, I try to resist what I feel, and analyze things to fit into a narrative of rational justification. In the end, though, I usually do what  feels right, regardless of what I think about it. When I am in the uncomfortable situation of my logic telling me to do something, and my gut feeling tells me not to do it, I try to do the logical thing first. I try to think myself into feeling what I have deemed to be the right thing. And then I feel conflicted and unhappy because my heart just isn’t in it.

Now I recognize a lesson that I’ve had to be reminded of every once and awhile:  it is much better, perhaps the only way to live, to stay true to the signals and feelings because those are just as authentic and important as all of the “shoulds” that we think we need to live up to.

And when I am able to stop living limply and find a moment when the feelings and the mind align, it’s clear that there is no other way. There may be no rhyme or reason why it is “this” instead of “that” but ultimately, you have to do what makes you happy.

 

How Tall Will Your Children Be?

You all know about my obsession with tall, tall, super tall men, so I was fascinated to see how tall my kids would be if I do get to reproduce with a guy who is very tall.

I’m 5′4. If my baby-daddy is 6′6, our male child, let’s call him Fletcher*, would be 6 feet 1.5 inches. Our daughter, let’s call her Remy*, would be 5 feet 8.5 inches.  If this turns out to be true, I guess my  family will look down on me, and I’ll have to sit in the front in all of our family portraits.

If you are curious to see how tall your babies will be, you can go to the Height Calculator.

 

 

*I have decided that my Top 2 baby names are Remy and Fletcher. So people I actually know who read my blog, I call dibs! Not that anyone else probably likes those names; they’re kinda unconventional (but not too weird!).

 

Why Oprah Matters

Oprah with the Oprah hair that I will always remember her by….

 

As I am sure you are aware, Oprah announced on Friday that she will be quitting her talk show in September 2011.

Of course, I am devastated. Absolutely devastated.

Trust me, I know that Oprah is over the top sometimes, and some of what she presents is problematic at best, exploitative at worst, but still, she’s Oprah. In true Oprah-esque language, she has “touched my life” and challenged me to “live my best life” and helped me learn from “the stories of others,” and by God, I even had an “aha moment” or two over the years.

I was born in 1984. Oprah’s show debuted in 1986. For nearly all of my life, then, she has been in the background of my life at 4pm. Daytime television has historically been aimed at women, especially stay at home moms. This means that daytime TV is also very present in the lives of the children of those stay at home moms, grandmas, and babysitters. I recently wrote about the end of Guiding Light and how sad it made me because I associated it with my Nan. I also have an enormous sentimental attachment to Family Feud in the Ray Combs era (his suicide was another pivotal moment in my TV-Real Life emotional connections). But Oprah leaving the airwaves – well,  now, that’s just personal.

In the late ’90s when Oprah decided to use her show to uplift people rather than be part of the trashy Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones murder milieu, I became a follower. The bus dropped me off at my house around 3:55, and I made the mature decision to watch Oprah while eating my Hamburger Helper instead of The Brady Bunch and The Flintstones as I had in my elementary school days.

At first, I rolled my eyes and got really annoyed when a show was devoted to her theme “Live Your Best Life,” but slowly, it grew on me. I started buying the spiritual and self-help books that she recommended and I kept a gratitude journal. As I was forging through my angsty mid-adolescent years, it was so encouraging to have someone in my life who cared about self-reflection and questioning who you are in order to find your purpose. The real women in my life were too stressed to mentor me in that way, and I’m not sure that it ever occurred to them. So Oprah became my guru and guide as I developed my identity and put my life plans into action. Without my family, I traveled around the world and moved to New York City and decided to get a PhD. In one of the last conversations that I had with my Nan before she died, she told me that she was so impressed and proud that I had the courage to do all of the things that I have done. She envied my independence and confidence because for her at my age, it had been a challenge to drive to a nearby town by herself after my grandfather died at a young age. I never saw myself limited by where I came from, and I think that a lot of that came from developing myself through Oprah’s personal story and her show.

I still watch her show now and then. As I’m older, I find myself being a little more skeptical about some of the things she does, but when I was younger and so hungry for guidance and a sense of self, she was a wonderful resource. Oprah is renowned for her cultural and market influence, but I think that she is also a sign of this era of self- help and personal testimonies and a search for meaning in an increasingly technological and shrunken world. I think that she provided comfort and inspiration to many women who wanted something deeper and who, like me, needed a mentor to talk about the things that we didn’t yet have the language of self growth and personal meaning nailed down. When she leaves, there will be a void in the sense that the cohesive source of all that will be gone. In her absence, her minions, the Dr. Ozes and Dr. Phils and Rachel Rays will carry on the legacy -  fragmented and cheaper versions of Mama O.

 

 

 

Pug Wedding

Surprisingly, I was not the little girl who spent copious amounts of time fantasizing about my wedding, and I grew up to be pretty ambivalent about marriage in general.

BUT if I ever do happen to have a wedding sometime in the future……………

THIS. MUST. HAPPEN.

 

 

Source:  http://www.jaggerphotographyblog.com/

 

 

Cute

Undergrad Marriage

Today was wonderful for 3 reasons. First, my Gender class was canceled for no apparent reason. The professor said that no one had posted on the forum so we will “postpone” class until next week. We never post until the last minute, so I really don’t understand what happened. I suspect that the prof was the one who wasn’t prepared or maybe had a pressing deadline. I’m not going to overthink it because I randomly got a day off in the middle of the week. It feels like a snow day!

Except it is actually really warm and nice outside for November which brings me to the second reason that today was wonderful. I love this comfortable Fall weather. I wish it would stay like this for the rest of winter. The time change has really bummed me out this year for some reason. Usually, I barely notice but lately it really bothers me that it gets dark by 6pm. So, these sunshiney days that only require a light jacket or sweater are making me feel better about the whole situation.

The third reason is that I had lunch with one of my former undergrad assistants. She’s such a nice person, and a very bright student. It was really fun to catch up with her, and I realized that I do want to be friends with some of my (former) students. I think it is tricky when they are in your class, but after the grades are submitted, why can’t we be friends? I had a student send me a friend request on facebook, and I feel a little ambivalent about that. I ultimately decided that facebook has to be thought of as a public space and it is not just for my personal friends from college and high school anymore. Now, I am friends with both my professors and my students, so I need to adjust my online presence to recognize this. I certainly will not send friend requests to my students, but I will accept them if they request me (and I like them).

Anyway, back to my lunch with my former assistant. She told me that her boyfriend proposed to her this past summer and they will be getting married in June (she graduates in May). Now, maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, but I was genuinely happy and excited for her. Usually, I think that it is a mistake for people to get married really young, and right out of college seems very young to me. But she seems like a very reasonable and mature person, so I didn’t even feel a little judgmental about her rush into marriage and postponing her own education and career plans for him. In fact, the only judgment that I had was marveling at my own lack of judgment. I think that in general most people would be better off waiting until they are older and more settled  in who they are and what they are doing in life before getting married, but there are certainly exceptions to this. I think that she is one.  And she was just so darn happy that I couldn’t help but get caught up in it.

It does make me chuckle a bit to myself that my students are surpassing me in adultness. Oh, well. For me, 30 is the best age to get married and I don’t plan on tackling grown up-ness until then.

Academic Destiny and The Men Who Stare at Goats

This weekend, I went to see the new movie, The Men Who Stare At Goats.

It was weird. Really effing weird.

But I knew that going in, and I laughed a bit, so no real harm done. It’s basically about a unit of the army that was commissioned to develop psychic warfare methods. Apparently, more of it is true than you would believe. At least, that is what the movie tells you at the beginning. I totally believe in all of it, and even though the movie portrayed the people as over the top wack-a-doodles, I also think that there might be some legitimate uses for outside of the box thinking in the army. But then again, I am a pacifist so I probably shouldn’t want harm done by either brute force or mental will.

There was one really hilarious line in the movie about Anne Frank. I don’t remember it exactly, but it went something along the lines of saying that we all have a destiny and we can’t fight it. If Anne Frank wanted to be a high school teacher, tough titties, she’s instead going to write something that will be read by millions.

First, you don’t hear too many Anne Frank jokes these days, so that is notable.

Second, even though it was a stupid movie and a joke in questionable taste, I did start thinking about whether I am fighting my destiny. How do you know that you are doing the right thing with your life? What if there is something bigger and better that I could be doing? How much positive reinforcement does one need to know that he or she is on the right track?

Grad school has a way of making you feel small and insignificant. The only thing that makes me feel that what I am doing has a positive impact and is worthwhile is teaching. I love my students, and I am pretty sure that most of them really like me. Lately, they have been really engaged and interested, and this makes me feel like I have an important platform to get them to think about life differently.

At the same time, I want to to do that on a bigger scale. I want a broader audience than just my students. I just don’t know what that is yet. I also suffer from a lack of overarching passion for one topic. There is nothing that I fight for, nothing that gets me out of the bed in the morning and drives me. Sometimes, I wonder if I would feel better about my purpose if my life was more centered around activism. But what activates me? I haven’t found it yet, and I worry that I never will.

On the other hand, maybe I am just not an activist type person. On top of that, I still feel like I am not on the top of my research game. I don’t put enough time and effort into that, either. Teaching comes so easily, but writing is so very hard. The drive to be a great researcher and to get published is based on feeling not good enough, like I need to prove myself.  I think  I feel that way because my program is competitive and some people are very successful at getting published as grad students. One thing that I have noticed from taking classes in another department for my minor is that the expectations for grad student publications and professionalization activities are much, much lower there. They expect students to focus on their dissertation. That’s it. I am really looking forward to my doing my dissertation, and I hope that it will be the breakthrough for me. I don’t expect it to be some blockbuster type thing, but I hope that I will feel as good about that as I do about teaching. I want to be excellent at both teaching and research. It’s scary how invested I am in academia and yet I wonder if maybe I would have been even more successful and things would have come easier had I done something else. Since that is very speculative and hypothetical, I’m going to say No. In fact, I’d probably be far worse at any other type of job. So, here I am,  stuck in the middle with grad school.

Pregnancy Dreams

I have been plagued by pregnancy/having children dreams for the past few weeks.

It started with a really vivid dream where I discovered that I was 5 months pregnant while treading in the deep end of a pool. The weightlessness of the water masked the pregnancy until I looked down and saw my very pregnant stomach which led me to surmise that I was indeed pregnant. When I pointed this out to my friend who was also in the pool, she confirmed nonchalantly, “Yes,  you are.” The next scene of the dream was a conversation with my mother and we were trying to calculate when my due date would fall and whether it would interfere with the semester and my teaching schedule. The final scene of the dream was my discovery of the father of the baby (a male from my past) and a feeling of relief. “Oh, it’s you.”

I told my Spiritual Guru about this dream, and she was very intrigued. She spent a lot of time trying to map the timing of my dream pregnancy onto my real life. If I was dream-5 months pregnant, then what was going on in my life 5 months ago? And what will happen in 4 months when I am supposed to give birth to whatever?  According to Spiritual Guru, everything in your dreams is some aspect of you. For example, if someone in my dream had been resisting my pregnancy in some way, that would show that I am at odds with myself over something. In the actual dream, everyone was very accepting, and my only concern was logistical (and I suppose being somewhat surprised that I was so far along without having known it).

I’m not sure if Spiritual Guru is right on this one. I don’t know if the timing means anything. I think she wanted me to see things like this: Five months ago, I was deeply unhappy. In February, I will give birth to happiness. But that seems pretty silly to me.

I have a far more literal interpretation of this dream and the others that I have had recently. And my dramatic conclusion is:  I want to have kids. Ok, so it’s not a spiritually groundbreaking assessment, but I think there is something to it. I have had dreams about pregnancy, adopting children, and babysitting children several times a week for the past few weeks. I think my biological clock is firmly seated in my subconscious.

I am still strongly convinced that a pregnancy right now would be inconvenient and undesirable in my waking life, but try telling that to my dreams.