Complicated life

[liv]

So, I haven't abandoned DW altogether, I'm just in the process of moving my life to Cambridge and one aspect of The Plan that I haven't worked out is how to fit blogging into my life. I mean, partly it will be better when I'm not actively in the middle of selling and buying houses. And partly my life since Easter has just been unusually complicated.

I was in Cambridge for most of the Easter weekend, which we took fairly quietly, spending time together and with my parents. I'm glad we did, because I haven't really paused for breath since then! angelofthenorth and gwyddno came here on the way back from their Easter family obligations, which was brilliant fun. I proved that it is in fact possible to have two people at once staying in my tiny flat, though we basically had to rearrange the living room in order to be able to eat, and rearrange the kitchen in order to be able to cook or wash up (and couldn't really manage both at once.) We finally got round to fixing my mezuzah; since I hadn't got round to it for ages I thought I might as well wait until I had visitors. My lovely neighbour L, and G from shul, also joined us for the ceremony and for tea. G brought a bunch of tools to lend me; I wouldn't have treated fixing a mezuzah as quite such a delicate operation, but it was actually quite a good idea to drill holes in the doorpost and to use a dowel to protect the mezuzah itself from getting hammered. G's help did in fact make it more effective than if I'd tried to do it myself with just a hammer and pins.

We also acquired, grilled and devoured the first mackerel that had made its way into the shops this season, and did a bit of wandering around campus. I found areas that I hadn't known existed, even though I've worked here for most of five years and lived here for several months now. The bluebells were just starting to hint at blueish haze, while most of the daffodils and (nationally recognised) flowering cherries were still out as well as some amazingly pink rhodies and amazingly yellow bog arum. So generally it was an extremely fun and delightful visit in all sorts of ways.

When my guests were planning their route to leave the next morning, I joked that I wished I could come with them because they were intending to drive across the extremely pretty bits of Wales. They said, why not? I pointed out I had a massive pile of marking to get through, but they countered that I could bring the marking with me and complete it just as well in their place. I was in the kind of mood to let myself be persuaded, and the drive through Wales was easily as gorgeous as I'd expected.

Working from home at my friends' place isn't quite the same kind of thing as working from my own home, even if I'm in the slightly weird position that my home is the other side of the country from my workplace. But angelofthenorth and gwyddno were amazingly helpful at getting me set up with internet access and plenty of tea and encouragement to work undisturbed, and I actually got through the marking quite well. We had some lovely evenings chatting and eating things like soup, and they even found me a route so I could go running; running along the Towy is somehow more glamourous than running along the Cam!

Then we had the most amazing weekend ever. Basically angelofthenorth and gwyddno spent from Friday evening to Sunday lunchtime spoiling me rotten in all manner of ways. We started out with another round of really good mackerel, for which my hosts concocted a plum sauce that was so good we decided to have ersatz "meat"-balls for dinner the next day so that we could eat more of it. We curled up on their giant memory foam beanbag to watch a couple of fun, interesting and slightly edgy films: American Beauty and Moulin Rouge. We went for another drive through ridiculously beautiful parts of Wales, and saw a kite, as well as all kinds of lovely flora and fauna. I feel like a complete townie in places like that; we were in the area where gwyddno grew up and he understands both the farming and the wildlife (which only adds to his ability to appreciate them), whereas to me it's all just amazing. Oh, and we ended up making havdalah over spiced rum. All of it; I know technically you're not supposed to make multiple blessings on the same thing, but we drank the rum for the blessing of drink, sniffed it for the blessing of spices, and even managed to set it on fire (!) for the blessing of fire. And then we put the fire out and toasted the new week in the now interestingly flambéed rum (what, we were hardly going to waste good rum by burning it all up!)

The thing is that while all was going on, that is while I was way out in distant parts of Wales, jack and I had an offer accepted on the house in Cambridge we're hoping to buy, only the second place we made an offer for. So there were any number of frantic phonecalls between me and jack about committing our lives and all our wealth to this decision, and then business calls to estate agents and solicitors and family and investment brokers to actually execute it. I ended up spending about £60 on phonecalls, by going way over the normally completely adequate free calls allowance on my mobile phone plan. It's not that £60 is important when we're in the middle of spending hundreds of thousands on a house, but it turned out that I hit a hidden limit and had to go through some palaver to get my phone unblocked so I could continue spending ridiculous amounts of money. I'm actually really pleased with how well we benefitted from the effort jack and I have put into communication and decision-making ahead of time; that meant that we could make major, complex decisions quickly when we needed to, and support eachother emotionally and understand eachother's preferences clearly, even when we were at opposite ends of the country. I haven't even seen this house IRL yet; we've got a second viewing booked for this weekend.

The last week of the Easter vacation I'd hoped to be in Cambridge while forestofglory was visiting. That didn't perfectly work out, because I ended up with meetings on campus I couldn't get out of. I ended up returning from Wales late Sunday evening, sorted out work stuff I needed to be present for in person on Monday, travelled to Cambridge Monday night to have Tuesday and Wednesday with jack and forestofglory, returned to Stoke for unmissable meetings on Thursday and Friday, and back to Cambridge for the long weekend after running services Friday night and Saturday morning. And after all that I had to drag myself back to Stoke in time for the start of term yesterday.

The time with forestofglory was excellent in spite of the ridiculous amounts of travel, including some very slow journeys over the bank holiday weekend. We did a fair bit of wandering about Cambridge, including the clichéd but delightful thing of tea at the Orchard. I ran back to Arbury from there, through the nature reserves and along the river, exactly 5 km :-) We also visited the Cambridge Science Centre run by jack's former landlords, who happily both popped in while we were there, so it was nice to say hi. It's really good for what it is, mainly aimed at kids with lots of hands-on stuff. But it's informative and educational and not just gratuitous pressing buttons. We ate Thai food in Sala Thong, South Indian food in Cocum, and Vietnamese food in Thanh Binh, which I'd been meaning to try for ages and which very much lived up to my expectations of food that was both delicious and different from standard "Asian" fare. And student grub in Eraina and tea and cake a terribly twee little café called Stickybeaks. Really taking advantage of having a visitor from abroad to enjoy touristing and eating out in our own city! We also ate lots of forestofglory's delicious cooking, really good stir-fry with halloumi, butterscotch brownies, and home-baked challah, which was just amazing. And drank lots and lots of tea and talked about everything, including doing so formally in the Botanic Gardens café at a meeting of Poohsoc, a mainly student society where jack and forestofglory are both emeritus officers.

Less successful was our planned trip to Wicken Fen. Halfway up the A10 a car stopped suddenly in front of us, and we ran into it and then another car ran into the back of jack's car. It was very briefly terrifying but I think everyone came out unscathed. The car did the thing that cars are designed to do, nobly sacrificing most of its front to absorb the kinetic energy of the crash and save the passengers; I somewhat doubt it's coming home again, poor loyal thing. We ended up sitting on a remarkably pretty verge, eating the picnic lunch that forestofglory had prepared for our trip to the nature reserve, waiting for the tow-truck. So that was remarkably unfun, but it still involved spending the afternoon in the sunshine with good company, so as accidents go it could have been a lot worse.

With all this I ended up leaving most of my teaching prep to the last minute, so I had a somewhat stressy day on Monday. However the first couple of days of term and the first year module (on pregnancy and birth) where I'm course lead seem to have gone well. I apologised in my introductory talk for the fact that absolutely all the course material assumes that the parent who makes big gametes and carries a pregnancy and gives birth is always female and always a woman and a mother, so I hope that was a tiny bit helpful. I don't think I can get this gendered language changed, though, particularly because the students don't officially learn about gender until third year.

So yes, that's me. I am going to be pretty busy for the coming month because of being course lead, and quite possibly completing the sale of my house here and the purchase of our future house in Cambridge. But on the other hand I'm likely to be spending enough consecutive days in one place to have a bit more time for DW.

Comments

[hunningham]

Wow! Busy, busy, busy! And getting so much done

I'm doing very little other than work and travel and sleep and I feel as if I don't have time or energy for anything else. Even comic books require too much concentration in the evenings.

[liv]

Sometimes work is like that, it just eats all of your life. I am quite intrigued by the view that's just starting to gain traction: it's time we had another reduction in expected working hours. Partly because of automation, partly because there's a terrifying labour surplus / unsustainably high unemployment, (whichever way you want to look at it). Just as we moved from an expectation of 6 to 6½ day weeks to an expectation of 5 day weeks, maybe it's time we moved to a 3-4 day week. I'm sure it would have consequences I can't predict from here, but still.

[rmc28]

In January Tony & I went back to full 5-day weeks from a 4-day week the previous six months (and 3-day weeks for the 9 months before that). I'm just about feeling like I'm catching up now: there were a lot of little bits of getting-things-done that I did in those two half-days, that I hadn't realised until I didn't have them any more.

In the long-term I'd like to go back to a 4-day week permanently, but it comes down to money, lifestyle, and how much I want to police our spending. It becomes more feasible as the children get older, and if we can clear more of the mortgage (and maybe I can make the necessary spending changes incrementally ...) What would I use the time for: all the stalled projects around our home, and probably a bunch of others that I'd think of once they were done.

[liv]

That's a very useful data-point, thank you. I think financially I could well afford to live on 80% of what I currently earn, I'm saving about half my take-home as it is (since I'm not in fact trying to provide for kids or service debt). But professionally, even a 40-hour week is a considerable career disadvantage in academia. That's not at all how it should be, but it's the reality. Right now I care more about career ambition than about having free time for things like sorting out the house. My solution to not having time for domestic stuff is not to bother with most of it, which isn't ideal. If it were the expectation that everybody works a 4-day week, academics would still be fools about doing uncompensated overtime, but it might balance things better.

[rmc28]

Among the many reasons I am not an academic is the fact I physically can't sustain the effort. If I average more than a 40-hour work week for any length of time, I get ill. I have two established chronic conditions which I need to manage (RSI and migraine) and I'm beginning to suspect a third needs to be added (my pregnancy-related pelvic pain that still turns up if I don't walk regularly and/or sit on the wrong sort of chairs for too long)

I need to take breaks doing something other than my job, every lunchtime, and I need to go home on time, every day. I need to take regular keyboard breaks throughout the day. I can do a limited amount of other stuff requiring the ability to think hard each week, but I need breaks in between, and I need the "other stuff" to be different to my day job.

If I don't do these things, either my hands start hurting or my head starts hurting and I can't work at all.

This has been the case since before I had children, though I don't expect the extra childcare load *helps*. I've built up my life around these constraints such that I almost forget them until I run up against pressure to change (e.g. certain colleagues pressuring me for more hours or trying to schedule meetings in my lunch break).

[liv]

This is another reminder of why academia is in fact a really toxic working environment. It really shouldn't be impossible to succeed as a parent with some (relatively manageable) chronic conditions. Good on you defending your breaks and working in a way that's healthy for you in the career you do have, though.

[rmc28]

Thank you. And I realise I didn't comment at all on the car crash, and I just wanted to say how glad I am that you are all ok so far.

[hunningham]

Coming back in after a week away from the internet and everything - I love the idea of a 4-day week becoming commonplace, but what I see happening is almost the opposite. We have the under/un-employed who just don't have enough (10 hours on a zero-hour contract?) and we have the over-employed, the over-worked, the over-compensated where people expect you to put in all the hours and all the energy and working until 2am or only sleeping four hours a night are both bragging points. And you end up paying other people to run your life - do housework, wait at your house for deliveries, walk your dog, care for your children.

I love the idea of a four-day week becoming a norm but am really not seeing moves in that direction.

[rysmiel]

Yay lots and lots of good stuff, even with excitingly ungood stuff included also. *hug* It's nice to think that you aren't limited to enjoying really good fish only in my company after all.

I am quite fond of Moulin Rouge mostly for the clever music and visual spectacle; I can see the way it turns the melodrama up to twenty as a comment on the ridiculously melodramatic nature of light opera in general but my principal emotional reaction is still "Oh, get on with it". American Beauty felt to me very much like taking Fight Club and watering it down and down until it could be a mainstream hit; not quite homeopathic amounts of what's worth having, but much less dense and much less ambitious.

[liv]

Thank you for celebration and hugs. I haven't quite committed myself to giving up fish, but I'm still pondering it. Partly it's that angelofthenorth and gwyddno both have fairly restricted diets, to the point where me being vegetarian is substantially unhelpful for meal planning if the three of us are cooking and eating together.

I should write up proper reviews of the films. I do like Moulin Rouge a lot, both as a comedy-melodrama and for the serious aspects. But I think it could have pushed the boat out further, basically. We did also pick it partly for the ogling-pretty-people value, and there may be better films for that purpose but they didn't happen to be to hand in the DVD collection.

I've generally assumed that Fight club would probably be too much for me, but maybe I should be brave and watch it anyway, I know it's a real classic. If American Beauty is a watered-down version, well, that was about as much violence and cringe humour and sexual nastiness as I normally want to watch, especially in the context of unwinding with friends at the end of the week.

[jack]

I've not seen fight club for years and years. My recollection is that it's more violent than AB but less cringe-worthy and less sexual nastiness. I think you'd find it interesting, but probably not interesting enough to make it worth it.

I'm glad you've seen AB, not for the film, but so I can use it as an example of a narrator who physically can't be narrating some parts of the film.

[(Anonymous)]

Eek at the crash. Glad you're all ok.

Halloumi stir fry and butterscotch brownies sound awesome :-)

Rachael

[liv]

It's always hard to be sure there isn't some hidden long-term injury, with something like that, but it does seem like we're ok, and the other drivers involved were able to drive off so I hope they're also unhurt.

Halloumi stir fry is indeed awesome, it's one of my favourite motivations for eating vegetables. forestofglory is a very good cook, which is one of the reasons she's an excellent houseguest! Here's me talking in great detail about making the butterscotch brownies to her recipe, if you're interested.

[cxcvi]

articularly because the students don't officially learn about gender until third year

Does this have any context? Because this kinda wrong, on levels that I can't words.

[liv]

Yeah, I do think it's wrong. The only mention of gender at all in the first half of the course is generalizations about differences between how men and women behave, like women are more likely to go to the doctor / men are more likely to be emotionally repressed. Even on the level of "trans* people exist" (or indeed gay people, though that's only tangentially connected to gender) everything to do with gender identity and expression is considered "advanced" and we don't teach it until the middle of third year. It bothers me that any kind of non-normative sexuality or gender is treated as academically advanced, even to the extent of mentioning that the norm is just a norm, it's not a universal truth.

This is silly if nothing else because at least some of the students will themselves be non-straight and non-cis and non-binary, and having two years of the curriculum acting like they don't exist can't be very pleasant. Let alone for the straight cis ones, when it comes to how they'll deal with patients, it's not good for them to assume that anything to do with GSM issues is some obscure advanced thing for super keenos.

I am lobbying within the medical school for making a few minor changes like having example patients from GSM backgrounds; we're very careful to make sure our case studies include a diversity of ethnic, class and age backgrounds, so it feels like gender and sexuality should be in there too. But I'm getting pushback not because of overt homophobia, but because introducing these "advanced" concepts is considered to be confusing. I really do feel that a curriculum that teaches about sexual behaviour at all should include at least a mention of sexual orientation and gender identity. But it's going to be a lot harder to make that level of change to the curriculum, it's quite delicately balanced and over-full as it is.

[rmc28]

Bah. My seven-year-old understands the basics of this stuff. Medical students ought to be able to cope.

[liv]

Yes, I think part of the problem is that people making an unjustified assumption that anything other than binary gender and compulsory heterosexuality is "advanced" knowledge. But part of the problem is also that lots of people are very strongly emotionally attached to the binarist view of the world. In some ways your C is at an advantage, being seven, since he's more willing than most adults to question cherished assumptions. I think what might ensue if we mentioned gender issues in first year is not so much that the students wouldn't be able to understand such complicated concepts, as that they'd get defensive emotionally. That would require delicate handling, and might end up eating a lot of time that we don't really have for this part of the curriculum.

[(Anonymous)]

Apologising for gendered language at the beginning sounds like the best thing you could do under the circumstances, and it would have helped me enormously. (I am not everyone, etc, but.)

[liv]

Thank you, anon, it's good to have at least one personal view that it might be helpful to some of my students. Most of what I'm doing is signalling (I hope) that I'm sympathetic. Hopefully the students who've never really thought about this stuff will just think I'm being pedantic, and the ones who may feel erased by assuming that pregnant person = mother will get at least a modicum of comfort.

[mathcathy]

Isn't the person who carries the big gametes and has the pregnancy always biologically female? I'd think that was appropriate for a course on the subject and that any help mentioning it to the minority would be outweighed by confusion from the majority. Did you get any feedback?

[liv]

Yes, in as far as that's inherent to the definition of "biologically female". But as soon as we're talking about "women" and "mothers", we're into social gender, not just biological sex. I absolutely agree it could be confusing to start getting into the nuances of this for students who still have simplistic, school-level understandings of sex, and are just trying to get to grips with what gametes, sex hormones etc even are. That's why I didn't at all get into it in detail, just mentioned, this is a simplification, you'll learn more in third year, and moved on.

The equivalent course at Cambridge, I hear, they start with gender and sexuality as the very first lesson, before they even mention the mechanics of how gametes combine to form embryos and eventually babies. think part of the problem is the definition of "the subject". It's a course on human reproduction, yes, but because we teach in an integrated way, that doesn't mean we only want to talk about hormones, uteruses, cell division etc. We're also talking about attending antenatal appointments, influences on decisions about reproduction, communication between doctors and patients who are pregnant. So I don't know, it's a tricky line to hold, is all I'm saying.

No feedback so far, no, but right now the students are two weeks from exams, they're much more interested in "will this be in the exam" and "can we have more revision notes" than any kind of subtle discussions.

[gwyddno.livejournal.com]

Having established that kidnapping a Liv is possible, practicable and fun, I hope we'll be able to persuade you to let yourself be kidnapped again before too long. The reports of you muttering under your breath "I shouldn't be doing this. This is silly," whilst packing your bag were most amusing :-D

[liv]

You should have heard my reaction to that pic of Mr Smith you sent me the other day... But totally, just exactly the circumstance where I would have regretted doing the sensible, responsible thing and I don't in the least regret being persuaded into that escapade.

[ephemera]

Hurray for the good kind of kidnapping, and for walking away from an accident, and keeping on keeping on.

[liv]

Thank you! I'm having a hard week just now and this comment was really cheering.