Phys Ed….

…..sort of.

So I’ve been going through physical therapy for my right knee, which has turned into therapy for my right knee plus custom orthotics for both feet plus some work on my tibia and femur, which have both twisted in an effort to shorten my right leg to match my left leg. It’s going well, mostly because I have an excellent therapist and an enthusiastic and engaged physical therapy student working with me and because I’m diligently doing my assigned daily stretches/exercises.*

Yesterday, I got fitted for the orthotics. The therapist who does that had not seen me before and thus had not seen my long, skinny, bunioned, twisted-and-practically-prehensile-toed feet. They are old lady feet, except they’ve been like that since I can remember. No pretty open toed shoes for poor Inez, ever. *sigh*

Anyway, the guy comes in and lifts my right foot without really looking at it yet, asking me what I suspect is his standard first question: “Have you ever been fitted for orthotics before?”

“No.”

Then he looks at my foot and says in the most shocked voice one can use and still remain professional, “Really?”

“Nope.”

“No one has ever suggested it?” He picks up my left foot.

“Uh uh.”

“Wow,” he says in the same tone of voice you’d use if you’d just seen, say, the Loch Ness Monster gallumphing down Main Street.****

“You should see my spine,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” piped up the very thorough, earnest, yet impossibly young and sweet physical therapy student. “She’s been great as my first patient work-up. You should see my notes!”

Yes, even out of the classroom, I’m doing my twisted, bony little part to educate today’s youth.

*The therapists were hugely pleased with my compliance and said lots of people don’t do their home exercises. I can’t understand that — why go to all the trouble of physical therapy if you’re not going to do everything necessary to get better? But then, I don’t understand why my students don’t read their assigned texts, either.**

**I don’t even expect them to read ALL of the assigned texts — I’ve been a student and I’m pretty lazy in general. But unless I assign reading responses which means reading = points toward the final grade, many students would do none of the reading at all. None! Since when does school mean no reading?***

***Some profs feel that rewarding reading with points is letting the academic standards team down, but I’ve tried teaching classes in which most students were unprepared and thus unengaged. That way lies bitterness, liquor, and way, way too many cats.

****Or the Abominable Snowman (anyone who mentions Bigfoot in the comments will be the focus of some very bad thoughts, KURT).

…and I’m back

Not feeling my usual, chirpy self, but back enough to blog about it.

My good friend Jennifer sent me an email a couple of weeks ago, noting it was mid-semester again and as usual, I’d disappeared. And boy was she right — this one hit me hard, for some reason. I was a bit underprepared for classes but felt WAY unprepared, and the first week of school had meetings and other non-teaching work galore, and it just didn’t let up all month. And then a couple weeks ago, when I started to feel like I was on top of things again, my right knee started experiencing bouts of burning pain that were just no fun at all.

After finally visiting my doctor (because the pain didn’t go away when I ignored it and did nothing) and having x-rays that showed that age and a lifetime of clumsiness had scarred up the tissue under my patellas fairly severely, I had a physical therapy appointment yesterday with a long-time therapist and a PT intern, both BVU grads, which was fun. They were amazingly thorough and gentle and helpful. So thorough that they found that while, yes, they can help me with the immediate problem of the knee pain, the larger problem that has caused me hip and back pain on and off my whole adult life is that my left leg is significantly shorter than my right and that my right tibia has actually twisted outward in an effort to shorten itself and create balance.

How did 46 years’ worth of doctors and my own experience fail to notice a significant difference in my leg lengths? I do indeed have a “high hip” on the right side, but it’s always been assumed that was a product of my 3-curve scoliosis.*

So, in addition to therapy to treat my current knee pain and help prevent future knee pain, I’m going to be fitted with a lift for my left heel — a type of orthotic. I may have some pain in re-training my body to a new stance, but it should mean much better comfort and health for the rest of my life, and I’m pretty excited about that.

Now research on the internet tells me that a 1/2″ lift (12mm) is right below the border of having to have specially-made shoes, so let’s hope I don’t need anything higher. Given the fact that I already have a lot of trouble getting good-fitting shoes, I might have to stick with lace-up styles the rest of my life.  But I can live with that because 1) having long, bony feet has meant that I’ve never been able to be a big fancy-shoe consumer and 2) I’ve got that whole Quaker simplicity and lack of vanity thing going on, or at least I’m trying to.**

More overwhelmingness to follow in terms of school — I’m teaching 2 weeks of a women’s studies class on top of my current load after Thanksgiving and I’m going to teach during our January interim and I haven’t prepared for either beyond a general idea of what I want to do. But I’m pretty sure I can deal with that and not disappear again. On the knit/crochet front, I’m in a shawl/wrap phase at the moment — oh, and I’m planning to get together with a new faculty member who knits and start a weekly or bi-weekly charity projects yarn night for students and staff. But that’s not until February, thank heavens.

*Yeah, I’m thinking my skeleton is not real pretty.

**Okay, I still have my hair low-lighted to hide most of the grey. I’ve had little enough to be vain about my whole life, so I’m enjoying the whole Iowa-humidity-curly curly pretty hair thing, dammit!

Haitus

I’ve put this blog on haitus several times in the past and always returned to regular posting, so don’t worry. But I’m feeling overwhelmed right now with things that I have to do/plan, and while I haven’t been blogging, I’ve felt like I should be, which adds to the overall stress level. So I’m thinking check back, say, mid-October and I’ll have all my ducks, if not in a row, at least all waddling in the same direction.

And what am I doing that is making me feel so overwhelmed? Well, I’m still working on course calendars for classes that started last Monday, I have to plan a two-week section I’m teaching for Intro to Women’s Studies, I have a guest speaker coming to town next week and I need to spend Tuesday and Wednesday of this week getting ready for her visit, designing a poster, sending it out/posting it, etc., plus I’ve agreed to meet 6 freshmen (none of my own students) individually for coffee as part of our welcome-retention program, start on the fall issue of the peace and social justice newsletter I took over this summer, finish a prayer shawl for a fFriend* who is quite seriously ill, publicize and plan the course I’m offering during our January term, attend faculty senate meetings and run my own monthly committee meetings, and, concurrent with all this, I’d like to write some fiction, sleep 7 hours a night, walk the dogs, and sometimes eat something that did not come from My Grocer’s Freezer.

So yeah, haitus.

See you!

*the fF (or Ff) indicates she’s both a friend (pal) and a Friend (Quaker).

I’m a baaaaad blogger….

I haven’t posted in awhile. Fifteen days, to be exact.

My sister Carol thinks it’s because we’ve been playing two and three games  of online Scrabble at a time, to which I reply, “Carol, if I were spending *that* much time on each of my moves, I’d be winning more, or at least losing by smaller margins.”

No, with the fall semester staring me down, I’ve been spending as much time as possible reading novels, napping, walking the dogs, crafting, and in general pretending that 8/31 simply will  not happen. Where’s that famous Mayan calendar stand on the end of the world? Any chance it’s 8/30/09, around midnight?

Anyway, sitting at my computer posting a blog entry has seemed too much like work to my denial-laden brain. But I can no longer put off prepping for school — I actually cleaned my office and filed last semester’s paperwork over the weekend — and so I can also bring myself to sit still and type full sentences. I mean, I’m going to take a nap directly afterward, and then walk the dogs and, after dinner, craft my way through some mediocre television, but hey, baby steps.

So, I have a lot to share. First, the yearly meeting of Iowa Quakers (conservative).* Everyone was friendly and welcoming and Scattergood Friends School, where the meeting was held, was amazing. I got to tour the attached farm and found out the students also help with the extensive vegetable gardens, the hens, and the cows, sheep, and pigs. The animals provide most of the lawn and field mowing for the school’s land, as well as much of the meat and eggs for the cafeteria, and it’s all very environmental and nifty.

We stayed at a motel about 10 minutes from the school. We drove to Scattergood by 7  every morning and left around 10 at night, and stayed busy with meetings for most of that time, with breaks for delicious meals prepared by the school’s cook and his student helpers. Meeting attenders took turns doing kitchen chores and I put in my two shifts washing dishes. But 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. always busy and always interacting with folks — that is exhausting! During one brief break on day 4 or 5, my motel roommate found me reclining limply on a bench beneath a tree and asked if I was okay. I replied, “The Quakers broke me.”

Now, meeting for business — officially called meeting for worship for business — among unprogrammed Quakers is a funny thing when you first encounter it. Because we have no paid ministry or church officials, all business of the meeting — the budget, paying bills, making charitable donations, hearing reports, accepting new members (both individuals and monthly meetings (every “congregation” is called a monthly meeting)), reading and responding to correspondence, etc., is done by the entire membership, led by a clerk. We don’t vote, as it’s not a matter of majority rule, but rather it is the clerk’s job to determine the “sense of the meeting” and offer decisions and then write the official minute and read it back for the meeting’s approval. In between all this, moments of silent worship may be called for so we can be sure this is all being done in the Spirit.

If you’ve read this far, you can no doubt see two things: first, the clerk’s job is complicated and it takes someone with the literal patience of Job, a strong sense of organization, and, occasionally, a “velvet hammer” manner to do it (we can safely assume I will NEVER be clerk of the yearly meeting. The monthly meeting, maybe — that’s easier). Second, a two-hour session of this seems to last about four years, especially when it’s your first time and you’re sitting on benches designed by the Spanish Inquisition (we’ll get to the benches in a minute). I mean, I respect and love the unprogrammed Quaker way of doing business and after a couple of sessions I got the rhythm and I’m planning on attending next year, so you know I mean that. But in the shock of the first 2-hour session I wanted to storm the head table and say, “Oh for heaven’s sake, let me do that! We can get through this in 20 freaking minutes!” **

Fortunately, I brought yarn and sticks, and I’ll be posting the pattern for my “Scattergood wrap” as soon as I finish making one.

As for the benches, I’m pretty sure that if my monthly meeting had such achingly uncomfortable seats, I’d probably be a Mennonite or Brethren by now. Luckily, our benches have solid backs that rise straight from the seat for about 10″ and then angle slightly back to the top. Not too bad as benches go. The benches at Scattergood have a 6 or 8″ slat across the top and then nothing to the seat — your lower back is just flapping in the wind.*** I have a triple scoliosis, meaning my spine resembles San Francisco’s Lombardi street without the flowers, and by the end of day two, I could hardly walk. So I spent most of the week sitting in a padded folding chair and allowing most of the others to believe I’m just that wimpy, rather than insisting it was my bad back. I did get a couple of gentle comments — turns out there’s a sort of bench pride amongst some lifelong Quakers, akin, I think, to Catholic school graduates claiming *their* nuns were the meanest.

And so that was yearly meeting — spiritually satisfying and exhausting and relaxing in an 0utside-the-normal-flow-of-time kind of way. I give it 10 out 0f 10 boxes of oats.

*conservative in this context represents our worship and meeting for business styles, and a definitely Christian rhetoric, not our socio-political stance. If you’re wondering about our socio-political stance, I can tell you that Labor Day weekend, I’m attending a lesbian Quaker wedding.

**Which is pretty much how I feel at faculty meetings, except faculty learn early to never, ever volunteer to be in charge.

***although if your lower back actually flaps, you’ve got more serious troubles than what kind of bench your meeting uses.

I’m Back

From Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) — Quaker, that is. I’ll write more about the experience itself once I’ve had time to process and relax. But I had a good time, met many, many wonderful, welcoming people, saw Scattergood School, a Quaker boarding high school (where, if I had a teenager, I’d bankrupt myself to send said hypothetical teen—soooooo cool), designed a shawl pattern and got lots of it made, and lost 5 lbs because the while the food was good and plentiful, there was no snacking and lots of water drinking.

Now I’m off to buy groceries (including no snacks in an attempt to keep up the healthy eating) and pick up Zeke bird at the boarder. Without my parrot-y alarm clock and with my sleep debt, I slept in ’til 10:15!

Zeke: The bird, the artist

My Artist Statement

by Zeke Quaker

I feel the true purpose of art is to explore the meta-dynamics of the connection between the avian psyche and the post-post-modern world. I strive to create a neo-Marxist dialectic in which my cage both symbolizes the oppression of the parrotariat and expresses the inherent possibilities and fluid interpretation of “seizing the means of production.” I find forks (empty of food and therefore of meaning) and adding machine tape (which, in its unprinted whiteness, illustrates the inevitable death of/by commerce) to be the most appropriate media for my message. The random plopping of bird shit reminds viewers of the ever-present threat of the bourgeoisie. Plus, it adds color.

We got your "festoon" right here

Modern sculpture -- I makes it

I call this "cascading prophets"

The real question is, how come all this building never attracts me a mate?

A Quaker *and* a Dork…

My Quaker meeting maintains silent worship, which means we sit quietly, listening for the Spirit. This is called an unprogrammed meeting and is what differentiates both conservative and liberal Friends meetings  from Friends Churches, which have pastors and weekly services.

During silent worship, if someone feels that the Spirit (God, Christ, Spirit, Light — we gotta lotta words for It) leads them, that person will speak, usually briefly. Some of the “old school” Quakers in my meeting say that as children, they were told they should only speak in meeting if they felt the force of the Spirit “kick them out of their seat.”

My meeting is a quiet one. It’s not unusual for a whole hour meeting to pass in complete silence, and 90% of any speaking is done by two of our elder/ly women. Meetings in which lots of people speak are sometimes called (derisively) by Quakers “popcorn meetings,” giving the impression that folks may be more focused on speaking up for themselves rather than waiting for the leading of the Spirit. We are the opposite of popcorn. We are humble little kernels, lightly buttered, perhaps, waiting for an elusive heat.*

It will probably surprise my friends and family to know that I have attended Quaker meetings sporadically here in Iowa and in Ohio for more than 6 years, and consistently attended the meeting I joined last summer for about 2 years, and I have never, ever spoken during meeting.**

Until last week.

I was sitting there in the old meeting house, which we only use in the summer because the heater is funky and we can all imagine the winter headline “Shocking Local Quaker Carbon Monoxide Suicide Pact” with an accompanying quote about how nice and quiet we all were, and a thought popped into my head. Now, this is not unusual because while I can keep from speaking during meeting, my head is all over the place. The thought was spiritual and enlightening (to me), and had to do with something I’d read earlier that week in a fantasy novel, and of all the things I might consider sharing at meeting, that would not be one of them because while I feel true affection and acceptance from my fellow Quakers, I’m already the tattoo flaunting, speculative-fiction reading, joke-cracking wackadoo from Nevada.

And then I felt a little kick, in the form of uneasiness.

No, I said to myself and to any Light that might be listening, I’m not going to share my little fantasy novel-related epiphany.

And I felt more uneasy.

No, I said, really. At meeting for business before meeting for worship, we even discussed how few people speak up at our meeting and if I say something right after that, it will look bad. Pushy. Popcorn-y.

And I felt even more uneasy. Uneasy enough to make me want to squirm.

And so, haltingly, I spoke up. I said that I get a lot of spiritual and philosophical ideas from good fantasy and sci-fi novels, because stories are about people even when they seem to be about aliens or rabbits or whatever, and I had recently re-read one*** in which, as in our world, the Spirit works among us through people, but can only do so when they have “cracked open” and become roomy. Then I said I wondered what my life would be life if I could be truly roomy for God.

And then I shut up and experienced what I’d always known happens after speaking up at meeting, but is way more disconcerting when it happens to you (or at least to me, a new Quaker). Think about it: when you are conversing with someone, or speaking up at a work meeting, your words always receive some sort of reaction, even if it’s a rolling of the eyes. Silence is even a telling reaction in a non-silent situation. When someone speaks in Meeting, however, folks don’t make eye contact or acknowledge the comment/message — it’s just Silence/words/Silence. You say your bit and that’s it, and you have no idea how anyone else received it.

See? Disconcerting.

But I also experienced something I wasn’t expecting: As uneasy as I had felt before speaking, afterward I felt peaceful, even joyous. And not nerdy or dorky, which is probably a more telling part of the little miracle that is silent worship.

After meeting was over, a woman thanked me and said making room for God had been on her mind a lot lately. And that’s the other (third? I’ve lost count) thing about speech during meeing for worship: it might not be about you, the speaker, at all. I have certainly heard others speak words or ideas that seemed to be exactly what I needed to hear right at that time. Again, Spirit works through us.

So there it is: I spoke up at meeting for the first time, confirming my status both as a Quaker and as a speculative fiction dork,****** and the earth didn’t open up and swallow me or anything and I didn’t even want it to.

And that’s all I have to say right now.

*At which point we will become (ex)salted. Oh come on, it’s a good pun!

**Yes, I can hear your disbelieving laughter

***Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls***** (which, along with Curse of Chalion, is not only well-written and a good read, but has middle-aged protagonists.)

*****I did not feel led to give the name of the book or the author. Luckily God seems to understand about the Dork Factor.

******Now that it’s done, I feel a bit dorky again. I almost didn’t include the paragraph about what I actually said. But if anyone in cyberspace laughs at me, at least I can’t hear ‘em.

Facebook Revisted

Okay, I have to admit that I’m enjoying the connections and whatnot on Facebook. That said, it seems that the primary Facebook result for me thus far is that my sister Carol can trounce me in Scrabble in the comfort of my own home. So far, I’ve lost 3 concurrent games. I’m not loving that.

Will George Clooney “friend” me?

You know, I used to be fairly up to date on computer and communication technology. Sure, I didn’t get a cell phone until everyone and their dog had one, but I regularly replaced my computer so we (ex-hubby and I) could play the latest games and we regularly played Diablo when it was THE innovative online game to play and I had a PDA when they first came out and I had a micro-computer way back before laptops became popular and crowded the micros out and thus I crack up whenever I hear that micro-computers are coming back.

But the PDA drove me crazy with its tiny pen and tiny keyboard and I refused to buy a portable, fold-out keyboard for it because HELLO — micro-computer/laptop! And my cell phone is not top of the line and can’t even take photos because I also own a digital camera and I don’t have an X-box or a Wii and I no longer play multi-player games online because 1) they aren’t free and 2) you have to play with everyone* and I refuse to text-message on my phone because IT’S A PHONE AND YOU CAN DAMN WELL CALL ME and while I have, of course, a blog, I refuse to Twitter because I DO NOT need to know what someone else is doing/thinking/eating/reading/farting every damn minute and I cannot image anyone else wants to know the same stuff about me.

And despite the above grumpiness, I really am a lovely person *in person*. Unless I have a migraine. Or I’m in the middle of a really good book. Or you’ve just woken me up out of a sound sleep. But otherwise, lovely. Really.

But you’ll understand why I felt very grudging today when I finally caved and opened a Facebook account. I did it because many of my friends are on Facebook and they regularly invite me to “friend” them (which reeks to me of middle school and who the hell enjoyed that?) and they post pictures and invite me to view them, and I really wanted to see Jennifer’s new tattoo.

So I joined. I see on a knitting board that I frequent many folks asking questions about Facebook that also reek of middle school — so-and-so wants to friend me and I don’t want to friend them, or I posted while drunk and my boss who’s also on Facebook saw it, or how do I unfriend someone because I can’t stand them but I don’t want to actually let them know the extent of my can’t-stand-you-ness.

So my question is, is it possible to be on Facebook without the drama? Can I ignore friend requests from people I haven’t spoken to in 20 years without feeling like a bitch? Am I too far down the road that leads to shaking my fist at passing teenagers to even be on Facebook? Does Facebook have any redeeming qualities (other than Jennifer’s tattoo, which I *still* can’t manage to see) that I should know about? Convert me, folks, or justify my grumpiness. The comments are yours.

*As a Quaker, I really do believe that there is “that of God” in every person and we all have worth. But that doesn’t mean I want to spend my evenings with a few hundred thousand strangers.

Not in Kansas Anymore….

I just returned from spending 8 days in Peabody, KS, with my sister and her family. It was lovely. We chatted, we crafted, we shopped,* we snacked, we didn’t find time to play Scrabble, but that just means I didn’t lose.

I came home Wednesday to find my yard overgrown and maple seedlings colonizing my rock garden. Today, I get to clean out my gutters, which are also full of maple seedlings. Looks kinda pretty, though — like windowboxes for the roof line.

*nothing bonds two women more than buying bras and then eating Chinese food.