“He died from being alive”

Things are happening.

We signed the lease and paid the deposit on a house! Really coming in under the wire on this one–10 days before we move. Please knock on wood that it is not an elaborate scam. Huzzah! It is 1.5 miles from downtown, which is a bit far, but on the plus side, the backyard literally abuts a beautiful bike path that goes in between the two towns where we’ll be living and working. You can walk a snoopy down the bike path directly to a swimming hole in the river where dogs can swim, and there’s a rope swing. NO BIG DEAL

The house is 3 bedrooms plus an enclosed sun porch. It is enormous. Everyone there keeps calling it “little” but to us it is an immense mansion. We don’t have even 1/4 enough furniture to fill it. We’ve been together 11 years and have never lived in anything bigger than a 1 bedroom. I know living in a big house is worse for the environment but I can’t quell the longing for it in my breast. Especially because what this means is that we’ll each have our own office. AT LAST. I would say this is a major item on my bucket list or whatever. Both our lives entail so many books. You really can’t imagine how many books and stacks of notebooks and filing cabinets. When we move we will have maybe 3 boxes of clothes, 2 boxes of kitchen stuff, and the rest is just books. Actual TONS of books. And we don’t have nearly enough books–we need so many more, but there’s simply nowhere else to put them. They lie in teetering stacks and unruly piles in every hidden corner of our home. We are constantly getting more bookshelves and wedging them into niches that are unsuitable and still the books threaten to bust out of the windows of the house. Also, we each have our own methods and our own organization modes and our own weird working noises (lets be real; only my old man makes weird working noises. Specifically, he holds his breath and expels it noisily over and over again, he fidgets loudly, and he curses steadily under his breath–none of which he is aware of doing. It is very odd and frightening and has meant that sharing an office is not really a great option). My bookshelves stress him out (not alphabetized); his insane hunched-over posture and furious typing give me hives. We both have audio needs as well–he plays scenes from 1930s French cinema over and over again and I mostly listen to Springsteen (joke). Anyway, the point is, as academics you can really think of nothing more luxurious and sensuously pleasurable than your own office, with a door you can shut, with your own chosen furniture arranged in your own way, with a window open and a bird singing, and you are in there writing a book and no one can bother you or have to ask you to move so he can get to the cereal because you live in a tiny cramped hovel.

If my mother lived in a 3 bedroom house, she’d have her own yoga room. What would you do with a spare room? I think one’s use of a spare room is very indicative; you can probably tell a lot about a person based on their spare room. Is the spare room just filled with junk and un-un-packed boxes? Then son you need a hobby

The piano goes in the living room. I wonder when we will get a piano, another entry on my bucket list. Believe it or not, my hiring package includes an actually insane amount of money, in addition to my salary, that is just for things of this nature. French lessons! Flying to conferences/planning conferences! Buying a piano! Piano lessons! When people who don’t understand why I’d leave a sweet full-time adjuncting gig at my dream school to go to parts unknown 5,000 miles from every person I love, it’s because they don’t fully comprehend just how different being tenure-track is, in terms of money, status, security, feeling confident, and having a nice metal nametag instead of a paper one at campus events.

I have already filled out my calendar for next year. New faculty reception at the Chancellor’s house! Long have I dreamed of you. I still don’t know my teaching schedule and I assume it will be brutal–for example, one thing I do know is that I teach until 8:30 at night on Wednesdays and then have to teach a grad seminar at 8 a.m. on Thursdays–but fuck it, I don’t GAF

Having our own offices is especially important, as it turns out neither of us will have our own office at our actual places of work. The old man because he’ll be an adjunct, and will have to share with a bunch of other adjuncts, and me because I’m the course head for this insane interdisciplinary arts class thing that I don’t understand and that has its own course administrator (!!), with whom I share a giant office that is filled constantly with TAs and other people related to this one class. On the plus side, it is apparently the nicest office in the building, so I’m going to just cultivate a very particular relationship with it. I’m not going to expect to do any work there, but only meetings and office hours. Home office, I bless you! Also random rooms on campus where I will do course prep during the day, I also bless you! This is a funny thing about college campuses, which is that there are INNUMERABLE weird comfy rooms that are fully open to anyone who wants to use them at any time, and that almost no one knows about. If you explore enough, you’ll find like a well-appointed sitting room with a fire burning in the hearth on the fourth floor of the bio-med building or something, and you’ll go there every day for a year and never see another living soul. And you’re like, who is lighting this fire each day? And you’ll be scared to tell anyone about it for fear of breaking the spell. Then one day you’ll go in and there’ll be, like, a meeting of the undergrad Spanish society in there, and you’ll be FURIOUS

My home office will have a comfy chair, in addition to my rad vintage rolling metal office chair with the blue vinyl seat padding. I will use our small Ikea kitchen table for a desk, as we will finally have room for the big kitchen table I inherited from my parents after insisting in 3rd grade that I wanted it when they died. I will have a rug. I will have bookshelves with all my books arranged however I want. I will put a map of the Western U.S. on the wall, and my Berlioz painting. I will have a jar with pens in it. I will have a plant. Snoopy can come sleep on the rug while I’m working but nobody else is allowed in.

One still needs a desktop computer but all things come in their own time.

I am sorry for using this space to fantasize acquisitively about private property, which of course logically I know to be the root of all evil.

In other news, I go in for my second MRI today, in which they will inject dye into the cartilage of my hip to see how bad the damage is. At my family reunion, which we attended over the weekend in Colorado, my OTHER hip went out in the exact same way as the first hip. I knew it was only a matter of time but still when it happened it was jarring and depressing. I spent the day yesterday googling and found some stretches and exercises that are good for hip dysplasia/arthritis, and I also found a girl’s blog where she documents everything about getting the crazy pelvis surgery I am contemplating. You have to rent a recliner for your recovery! You have to shit into an old-person toilet in the living room that your husband cleans out! You don’t put weight on the leg for 3 months. Jesus. I think if you do both hips at once you are in full-on wheelchair for months. I just don’t know.

I am confused because they say you are supposed to wait to do the surgery until the pain is unmanageably bad because all your cartilage has been worn away (apparently the informal deciding point for getting the surgery is when you CAN NO LONGER PUT ON YOUR SHOES), but I thought the point of the surgery was to PRESERVE cartilage? So I don’t get it. Obviously my pain is extremely minimal right now, it’s more just depressing because of how limited I am in my physical activities. Not like I was ever a jock or an outdoorsman—some of the message boards I found are pretty heart-breaking, with like lifelong marathon runners having to give it up, or one girl who spent years pursuing her dream of becoming a pastry chef but then had to give up her job and go to library school because her hip dysplasia meant she couldn’t stand up for that long–Steve was correctly pointing out that I’m really lucky that I have the lifestyle/career I have, all things considered, because I genuinely do spend the majority of my days just sitting in a chair reading or staring out a window. What the fuck do you do if you make a living via manual labor, and you don’t have health insurance? I guess you become homeless. That is literally the trajectory of so many people’s lives, what the goddamned hell. Still, one used to love to go jogging with the dog, one might wish to play softball or run to catch a bus, one would like not to be prevented from certain yoga poses, one is sad to be only 36 years old and already worried about walking 1.5 miles to a bus stop every day. I went to help Katy move yesterday and she very sweetly and without making a big deal out of it delegated all the non-heavy-lifting jobs to me and it depressed me. Anyway, there are worse things. But can you believe that shit????? (re: my other hip busting out all of a sudden). The wages of just living your life. “He died from being alive”

Note to new or expecting parents–apparently hip dysplasia can be diagnosed in infancy AND CORRECTED, via non-surgical means like I think the baby wears a harness for awhile, to direct the joints into growing in a better position. Look into it!

Family reunion was great. We always play this epic game of whiffle ball that has become the real centerpiece of the whole event. That entire side of the family–my dad’s side–is ALL coaches. My uncle was a famous football coach in small-town Texas (he’s friends with the real-life Friday Night Lights coach). Even though he and my aunt are the only registered Democrats IN THEIR ENTIRE TOWN AND POSSIBLY COUNTY, every single citizen treats him the way normal people might treat the governor or Mother Teresa. Whenever you’d visit and he’d take you around to restaurants or whatever, every single person he passed would respectfully greet him and call him “coach.” His former players for the rest of their lives leaping to attention and whipping off their hats whenever he appears. Texas and football is BATSHIT. Also my cousin told me a story of how humiliated she was in high school because everyone was gossiping about how her dad got so mad at a ref during an away game that he said “Hell.” I can not imagine my uncle saying this word. He is the dearest, kindest man. And a great coach! And now his son is a coach, and his son-in-law is a coach, and his daughter coaches little league. Everything’s coming up coaches. It’s so interesting to get the perspective of coaches who work in under-funded, crime-ridden, highest-teen-pregnancy-rates-in-the-state public schools in the middle of nowhere. It’s a whole separate ball of wax. It makes you feel like, thank god for school sports, as bullshit as the whole enterprise is. I feel like a good coach in that environment undoes the work of like 25 shitty dads.

Anyway the whiffle ball is fun because it’s this huge family of coaches all talking nonstop in a supportive yet instructive coachy way. And the game is this weird variant my uncle made up where there’s no teams and you rotate in the outfield every time there’s an out, and anyway somehow it works out that the same person can basically be up to bat 20 times in a row, depending on if they keep hitting home runs, which everyone does. Also the bases are all giant pine trees so lots of times the ball either gets stuck up there OR it lands up in the branches and bounces down, presenting a real challenge to the fielders trying to catch it. At one point my little second cousin got my old man out because a ball he hit landed in a bush and stayed there and my cousin ran over and picked it up, and it was declared legit.

Three years ago during the whiffle ball game, my husband struck out so many times that it went from being funny to frustrating to sort of honestly disturbing, such that no one wanted to talk about it. HOWEVER, my aunt just happened to have taken a picture of my old man whiffing mightily, and the picture gave him the idea of making a huge trophy with that picture on it and giving it each year to the person who whiffed the most times. Thus turning defeat into victory, for everyone LOVES THIS! The next year my little second cousin won it and we had a big trophy hand-off ceremony. This year unfortunately my husband won it back, which was less awesome. It came down to a whiff-off between him and this guy who I think is my fifth cousin (he’s the son of my uncle’s wife’s sister; we briefly had kind of a far-flung love affair via the U.S. mail system when we were in high school), who whiffed so hard at one point that he fell all the way down and pulled his hamstring. My old man won (i.e. “lost”) the whiff-off, while everyone jumped up and down and screamed, so now we’re stuck with this dumbass trophy for another year. Plus the whiffle ball game is when I fucked up my other hip. So this year was not a successful year for my family, in terms of sports. Not to mention that 3 months ago a snowboarder tripped my mom getting off the chairlift and she fell down and somehow broke every single thing inside her knee and now she’s facing either a lifetime of hobbling around and not being able to ski, OR a crazy surgery that will allow her to ski but will PREVENT her from doing yoga.

It’s a tough world out there!

Shit I’m gonna be late for my haircut