Halloween has begun, and, as you can see, Geeky Girl is going hippie this year. I forced her to look at Woodstock pictures to “understand” the time period. The interesting thing about them is that most people look fairly ordinary. What we think of now as hippie is a caricature based on a small group of outlandishly dressed people.
Following Geeky Girl’s lead, I’ll be dressing as Gloria Steinem. I’m tempted to burn an old bra.
Have a fun Halloween!
When I was in college and in my MFA program, I wrote poems in these hard-back blue notebooks with green ruled pages. Often I would write a draft on one page, scribble through lines, write new lines, mark out words, write in new words. On the opposing page I would rewrite the poem again, scribble through some more stuff before I’d type it into the computer. In those days, typing was a big deal, so I always waited until the poem was done before trudging over to a computer lab to type it up. Cutting and pasting were hard then, requiring knowing some special functions.
Now that I’m writing prose, I’m starting on the computer instead of notebooks. But my revision process has been a handwritten affair. There’s something about putting giant x’s through section and scribbling in the margins that is more satisfying that highlighting sentences on the screen and pressing delete.
I recently read that one shouldn’t start revising a piece until one has a complete draft. That’s quite easy to do when your piece is a poem that’s only a page long. When you’re aiming for 200 pages, it’s easy to get impatient. So I violated that advice by starting to revise the first section of my piece while writing the second. But now, I’m realizing that that’s a bad idea. I need to see the whole arc of the story before I figure out if I have the pieces in the right order or if new pieces need to go in. I’m feeling like I’ll sit at Starbucks for hours one day with the whole thing printed out, a notebook by my side, and I’ll scribble and write until I’m done, as much like my revision process for poetry as possible. I might even rewrite by hand.
I used to tell students to remember what revision means, to see the work again, to see it anew, to have a new vision for it. There’s something about having a clean page to see your work anew, not like the electronic draft that sits before you on the screen and feels so final, where deleting words means they’re gone and not visible under a line or a squiggle, where you can’t feel the page or the heft of your work. If I wait until the end to revise, going back to the beginning will feel like coming at it for the first time, like a stranger, and will be more like a real re-visioning.
My very first WoW Wednesday post was about tanking and I’m going to go back to that again. I’ve been tanking more and more and getting much better at it. It’s been very nice, especially, to have some experienced players with me, giving advice during an actual dungeon. And I’ve had some excellent tank moments. During one fight in Ulduar, which is an endgame raid, not only was I able to tank a mob, but was also able to freeze and destroy spark, all without missing a beat. I felt on top of my game. But then a couple of days ago, I was tanking a dungeon, one I’d successfully tanked before, and we wiped many times before I had to call it quits for dinner. I just couldn’t get my act together for that one. I’ve had several moments as a tank where I literally can feel my heart racing as we go into a situation because I’m so worried that I’m going to mess it up. I know how unfun it is to die over and over again. I’m pretty patient about these things but some people aren’t.
One thing that’s occurred to me as I’ve been playing and mostly in my role as tank, is the role that confidence plays in doing some of these things well. I’ve seen bad tanks who’re all overconfident and talk a big game and then can’t keep aggro. I’m just the opposite. I have almost no confidence at all going into a fight and will sometimes even warn people. But then, most of the time, things work out fine. And I’ve come to realize that my confidence (or lack thereof) in game is similar to my confidence in real life. We academic types talk a lot about the impostor syndrome. I feel that more often than I should. I don’t think my writing is as good as anyone else’s. I think I shouldn’t do this or that because I’m not good at it. I’m constantly comparing myself to others and find myself lacking. Sometimes even in things I *know* I’m good at.
What WoW has taught me is that it takes practice to be good at something and it takes work and it takes constant tweaking to get something right. I’ve logged many hours playing WoW. To be good at anything, you have to log many hours, something Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Outliers. I’ve also learned that even if you’re not so sure of yourself, it’s okay to try something and that it’s okay to mess up. You learn from your mistakes. When I feel my heart racing, I can think, what’s the worst thing that could happen? Everyone could die and we’d have to do it again. Big deal. Even if we have to give up or if I have to bow out and let a more skilled person take over for me, it’s okay. And applying that to real life, I have to remember it’s okay to stick your neck out. Fear of failure only leads to actual failure. It sure would be nice to have armor, maybe emotional armor, like I have in WoW or multiple do-overs. But really, most things we do do have do-overs. You just have to take advantage of them.
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Hello and welcome to the 2nd entry of Geekboy’s posting on Tuesdays. If you are not used to this by now, I recommend you get used to it.
Today I’d like to bring you into my daily life. I think you’ll like it.
0000 – 0559 Sleep
0600 – 0610 Shower
0611 – 0630 More Sleep
0631 – 0635 Getting Dressed
0636 – 0645 Getting some Breakfast
0646 – 0700 Touching up
0701 – 0709 Scrambling Around
0710 – 0720 Carpooling
0721 – 0730 Waiting Around
0731 – 0955 Western Civilization
0956 – 1015 Home room
1016 – 1148 Creative Writing
1149 – 1231 Study Hall
1232 – 1305 Lunch
1305 – 1354 Study Hall
1355 – 1422 English
1423 – 1440 Trying to Get Home
1441 – 1850 Eating, Playing, Napping, Bothering Geekymom
1851 – 1940 Dinner
1941 – 2130 Ayche Dub (Code, if you break it, you get a prize)
2131 – 2399 Sleep
Rinse and Repeat.
Now that you know a little bit about me, you can now say hi to me on the street and be like “Heyyyyy I know you!” and I’ll be like “Yeah I get that a lot.” And then we’ll be good acquaintances
Now I was overloaded with questions this week so I will only answer one to make things fair.
How do I feel about limiting screen time during the school year?
Now very simply I like the phrase, everything in moderation. There should be a limit on screen time during the school year, because if there wasn’t, I wouldn’t get my work done. Neither would Geekymom or Geekygirl or Geekymom or Geekycat. We’d all be Fat ‘n Lazy, a Family Company.
All in all, there should be a limit on screen time during the school year, but you should also make sure you leave time for any form of entertainment. I think kids ages like 8 – 18 should all be allowed the same amount of time. It’s important to have fun. An hour a day keeps the stress away.
I’ll leave this spot open for more questions 
I was just reading through the comments on this IHE post about having kids or not in graduate school and one commenter says the following:
From my perspective, I find many (not all, not even most) of my female friends and my grad students can’t articulate what they want, what will help them navigate the difficult process of completing a PhD, landing a job and keeping it with a child or children in tow. For these people universities can never do enough, there’s always something more they need that will help more, that will be the magic bullet that makes it “easier” to have a child (never easy) and do their job. What I find among these women is an insufficient appreciation that everyone faces challenges about work/life balance.
She goes on to suggest that we all need to understand and appreciate work/life balance and work to make institutions appreciate that as well. The idea that there’s not enough support for parents is a common one looked upon quite often with resentment by those without children. “Suck it up,” is often the common response to the whining of mothers about how hard it is to juggle both raising a child and going to grad school or working. I’ve seen this so often lately that I’ve been trying to puzzle over why this is so common for women to feel this way or to have this perspective put on them. And I think I have part of an answer.
The default for women is still get married and have children. That’s what you’re “supposed” to do. Decades ago, that would have been it, the pinnacle of your life. Now, it’s still the default but with the added dictum that women can do that *and* pursue a career. Don’t worry, people say, your husband will pitch in, your workplace will be supportive, your colleagues will understand. When those things don’t happen, new mothers are often thrown for a loop. Too often, women don’t pay attention to the way other mothers are treated in the workplace. And that’s often not their fault since many mothers are often made invisible in the workplace. Having an honest conversation with a chair or a dean feels risky since there may then follow a stigma about one’s seriousness toward work. So a lot of moms find themselves with kids, without a plan because what they thought was going to happen didn’t. They’re left saying, “Now what?” and don’t know where to turn. And let’s face it, if we’re talking grad school, some people are young and idealistic and immature. Speaking even for myself, one doesn’t always make the best decisions when you’re young and idealistic.
I had my first child while working a corporate job that I took to fund my husband’s grad school education. We decided to have a child because my job had insurance that would cover much of the cost of having a kid (though it didn’t cover it all), which we didn’t have as grad students. I had my second in grad school, so I completed a master’s and (eventually) a Ph.D. with two kids. In fact, what postponed my Ph.D. was not my kids but my husband, who left his job and dragged me across the country. There was nothing we could have done about the timing of that. But I had some advantages that some people may not:
Things really got tough for me after we moved here when the cost of daycare skyrocketed to $1000/month for one kid. I needed to work part time to cover those costs, often with a 1/2 hour to 45 minute commute, which cut into my time to work on my dissertation (as did the grading and class prep). Had our daycare costs been cheaper or non-existent, I might have been able to forgo the jobs and finish sooner. I’m actually glad in a way that that didn’t happen as I liked the dissertation I ended up with better than the one I started on. (I switched topics and advisers).
I think there are so many unknowns both in grad school and when having children that it’s very easy to find yourself in the weeds quite quickly. I think women should assess their own situations and do what’s necessary to make the balance work. I dropped a class in the fall after my daughter was born. I worked very intensely from 9-5, trying my best not to have anything to do in the evenings, which were often unpredictable in the early months. That year is certainly a blur to me in many ways and I remember when I got my first full night of sleep six months after my daughter was born, I was amazed that I’d been able to function at all. I felt so amazingly good after that, I couldn’t believe what a walking zombie I’d been before that.
In many ways, I did “suck it up,” but I was able to, in part, because of the support I felt surrounded by. No one said that I seemed like a zombie all those months. And most grad students are surviving on little sleep anyway. I never tried to make my own lack of sleep a special case, never asked for extensions, trying to plan papers well in advance. But had I really needed one, I knew I could ask for one without any repercussions. And that’s where I think institutions can do something. Because it’s often the attitudes, not the policies that get in the way. So parents can try to anticipate what parenting is going to be like and put support networks in place beforehand, but institutions can try to make sure some of those are there as well. Faculty and student parent groups might be helpful. Childcare benefits are good. But fostering a general attitude that parents are perfectly capable of graduate work can go even further than many official policies.
Geeky Boy will once again post something here after school. What do you want to know about from the teenage perspective?
I just signed up for NaNoWriMo even though I’m writing nonfiction and not a novel. Having a goal of 50,000 words will be good for me and I’m looking forward to the challenge. I did NaNoWriMo back in 2006 I think. I didn’t quite make the goal, getting stuck around 30,000 words. November is a challenging month to write in. There’s Thanksgiving, of course, for which we’re traveling this year. But there’s also election day, which I work and right after, I’m going to a conference. So my writing schedule is going to take a big hit. We’ll see if I can stick with a plan despite all the setbacks.
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My sporting weekend actually began on Thursday, when I had to bounce back and forth between two different fields watching Geeky Boy play soccer and Geeky Girl play field hockey. The soccer game was the last of the season so there were more parents than usual. I watched for a few minutes and then hit the field hockey game, where the PTO was selling baked goods and pretzels to raise money for new track uniforms. I was greeted enthusiastically by the other moms, quite a contrast to how I’d felt at the last field hockey game. I didn’t pay much attention to the actual game as there was a carnival-like atmosphere on the sidelines. I chatted with one mom about the web site, and a couple of others about the craft-costume-baked good fiasco. All of us, apparently, had been running around like crazy people until well into the night. I confessed to using a mix for the cornbread. The response was, Well of course you did. Who wouldn’t?
After the game was over, I gave Geeky Girl money to buy a preztel and some water and headed to the soccer game. Geeky Girl met me there and we cheered the team on. Geeky Boy scored in the last few minutes of the game, winning the game for the team. It was pretty exciting.
Saturday, it poured rain off and on and we thought for sure the game would be canceled. But it wasn’t, so I stood on the sidelines with the other moms under our umbrellas. We complained that the game should have been called. When I told the other moms that I was going out after the game, they told me I shouldn’t even be out there. I did leave early, sending Geeky Girl home with the coach. I have no idea the outcome of the game. It was called, in fact, not long after I left.
Sunday, Geeky Boy had his last game before the playoffs. He plays goalie for this team, which makes me nervous every time. I spent much of the game yelling that the ref wasn’t calling offsides or pushing and pushing the players to “go to the ball.” I was a bad soccer parent. They lost the game, but it was a good day to be outside.
It’s all almost over for this year, all this running around from game to game, keeping soccer socks and uniforms clean, and hauling lawn chairs in the trunk of the car. I won’t lie. I won’t miss it. But I’m very glad the kids do it every year and that they enjoy it. Geeky Boy is talking about doing winter soccer so that he has something to do before lacrosse season. And Geeky Girl is planning either lacrosse or soccer in the spring. I don’t have to push them to sign up. They ask me to sign them up. As long as that’s the case, I’ll keep doing it.
A couple of days ago, Collin pointed me to Chore Wars, a site that lets you keep track of the things you do around the house. Better yet, it lets you keep track of what your family members do around the house. I set up a party for our family, The Geeky Household, and emailed everyone the link that invited them to join our party on its chore adventures. On the way home from not one, but two kid sports events yesterday, I was telling Geeky Girl about it, and she wasn’t too thrilled. But then when we got home, she checked her email and followed the link. “This is so cool, Mom!” She said. Apparently, I didn’t do a good job of describing it in the car.
The way it works is that each person sets up a character. The dungeon master (me) sets up adventures like vacuuming, taking out the trash, or making a bed. People can then claim an adventure and earn experience points and gold for each adventure. Sometimes you run into monsters. I faced a soap elemental yesterday while doing the laundry. There’s also a chance for treasure either from the adventure itself (I got a spatula from making dinner) or from killing a monster.
So far, it’s a big hit. Geeky Girl unloaded and loaded the dishwasher, cleared and set the table, and vacuumed the living room. Geeky Boy loaded the dishwasher, hand washed the pots and pans, and made his bed. Geeky Girl raced to make her bed and claim it this morning so she could see if she encountered any bed bugs.
The kids get an allowance every week, one dollar for every year of their age, under the assumption that they help out around the house. They’re good about cleaning up the kitchen after dinner and I make them clean up their rooms from time to time, but other than that, I can’t really track what else they might do. So, now, I’ve told them that if there are no chores claimed via Chore Wars during the week, they won’t get their allowance. Geeky Girl and I also decided that for every five levels they gain, they’ll get something special, perhaps a new DS game or a book or a dinner out at their favorite restaurant.
We’ve all kind of realized that we’re a competitive lot, so making chores into a game is a good idea. I hear Geeky Girl unloading the dishwasher. I gotta go do some laundry so I can hit level 2 today!
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Dear Teachers,
I love you, I do. I know you work hard and often work long hours grading, participating in after school activities and more. Your job is difficult. You have to teach kids who are often squirming in their seats, pulling the hair of the girl in front of them, or passing a note to the kid next to them. I support you in every way I can. I vote for increases in funding for the schools. I pay my taxes. I volunteer at the school and buy stuff so the school has even more funding.
I am willing to do a lot to support my child’s education and learning. I help with homework. I provide her with a good breakfast and lunch. I enhance her education by going to museums, encouraging her to read, and discussing current events over dinner. But I’m a busy person, as are most parents. So, I’m begging you, please, don’t have a costume, craft, and baked good all due on the same day. I can’t sew, nor can most of my fellow parents. Crafts? Foam crafts, sure. You know, the kind you can buy kits for. But crafts involving colonial products? Not so much. Also involved sewing. And baking? Baking I can do, but I’m betting some moms or dads aren’t so good at that. And it had to be done after dinner, so yeah, it was late.
I appreciate the concept behind all this and I know, you gave us notice. I know. Did I mention we were busy? That we didn’t get home until late? Maybe next time, just one of those things. I could handle doing just one. K, thnx.
Geeky Mom
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