Pain transmission II

Well, is there?

I'm giving more money to charities, which is not enough.

Campaigning? I don't believe it's right to tell other people what they should think or feel. I don't value gimmicky stunts. I'm not prepared to tin-rattle at other people when I can directly give more myself. (This train of thought always ends in donation.)

Educating: yes. I believe in education. But I'm ignorant in the face of the deep-rooted and tangled, eternally complex social and political circumstances behind the news stories. And you can't educate from a position of ignorance.

Well, I suppose the response is there, isn't it? I need to know more about some really important things, I need to get more clued-up about the work that different charities do, and what's actually going on under my nose. It's been a long time since I did any actual, practical volunteer work.

Not enough time in the day or hours in the week. But getting the priorities straight: life's too short NOT to try and make a change, I suppose.

I wonder how long this resolution will last? How do I make it more realistic? Might have to be small scale. OK. The commitment is: pay more attention to the way that I translate my beliefs and ideology into the habits of my daily life.

Worth a try.

Pain transmission

I've got a completely different view of pain these days. It's familiar now in new, physical and emotional dimensions. I've got more respect for pain, and more understanding of how little I know of it. Pregnancy and childbirth put me through my paces, but motherhood makes you feel other people's pain, too.

All the suffering that's broadcast in the news at the moment, it is all real, it all comes home. I was numb to this before. Now I understand that every infant and every adult who suffers in wars, in hunger, in poverty - they are all someone's child. This must sound familiar to any regular church-goer. Well, I'm not - but even so I have echoed the sentiment in the past, imagining that I was imagining how terrible it all was. I wasn't, I can't.

I've taken a few days off work, and it's not quite been the alcohol and caffeine-fuelled knees up that I was hoping for. A side effect of the mental decompression from just... stopping is that I've paid more attention to the reported news.

I don't really have words at the moment to think or process all of it: the Victorian-age inequalities exacerbated by welfare cuts; the utter, brain-numbing awfulness of one couple's self-serving behaviour; the scale of the refugee crisis in Syria...

Is there anything we can do?

Coffee and alcohol

Baby-brewing being all about denial, I've spent much of the past two years resisting both of these delights. Pre-conception, post-conception, post-natal, breastfeeding... I've been SO GOOD during all of these periods, and the last one went on for bloody ever.

If we decide to go through it all again, that will be another couple of abstinent years of my life.

I just realised that I now have a window of opportunity to GO CRAZY!!!

That'll be me chewing my fingernails, talking very fast and teetering into the gutter.

Deferred Groceries

We moved house a few months ago. Between the work hat and the mummy hat I haven't had much time lately for the home-maker hat (knitted with a bobble?).

As a consequence, the decor is nondescript (as when we moved in), the furniture is inappropriate (some of it quite literally picked up off the street), and the location of anything that's not used every day is anyone's guess.  Husband has done marvellous things with essential maintenance, but I NEED to paint over that desolate wallpaper in the hall. When will it ever happen?!

Although I'm desperate to do some organising and sorting and decorating, the daily hat-swapping routines are all-consuming. I'd promised myself that I would take a week's proper annual leave during this sabbatical, to peruse some colour charts and indulge in a bit of home-love. But I'm as preoccupied as always at work. There are always more deadlines, nothing ever feels FINISHED so there are no natural break points. Not even for grocery-shopping. I need to make sure dinner is on the table. And right now the food cupboard is - well, not bare, but very random.

Q1: If there isn't a perfect time to take annual leave, is next week as good as any?
A: Yes.

Q2. Is tinned tomatoes with capers an acceptable tea-time food for a 1 yr old? 
A. Yes! If I put it on toast.

Grown up shoes

The Boy has a new pair of wellies, and I have a new pair of shoes. We both look great.

Now I just have to resist the urge to slip back into those disgusting old boots that I've worn all winter.

I've been contemplating my wardrobe quite a lot lately, in a bemused way. I'm the same dress size that I was before I was pregnant, but I feel a totally different shape. Clothes that (I'm pretty sure) used to look special now look...wrong.

Once again, I'm grateful that I'm on sabbatical - the meetings are few and far between so I only look a wreck in the eyes of my PhD students. Not good for my self-esteem, but not doing anyone any harm.

The shoes should help. But will I be able to resist the powerful lure of those sloppy winter boots?!

Murphle luffle massive generalisation

Once upon a time, I used to wear the sharply turned Trilby of Eloquence.

Nu-uh. No longer.

I can still go through the motions of articulate, fluent speech - but the CONTENT, my god, the content is DRIVEL.




When I get the chance, I'm going to do a bit of reading and see if I can find advice on how to chair discussions properly.

Supervision Minefield

Having an enthusiastic group of PhD students around is great for motivation, camaraderie and intellectual stimulation. It can also be a bit of a minefield. As Occam's Typewriter blogger, Erika Cule touches on here, students are apprenticed to/by(?) their supervisor in 'hidden' ways, as well as through the obvious aspects of academic expertise. It's a special relationship in many respects, and yes, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure that apprenticeship is the best way to describe it.

Once again, the parenting analogy comes to mind. There are things about yourself that you just can't know until you've been in a supervision/parenting relationship for a while. Where else do you get to see reflected, clear as a bell and right back atcha, not what you SAY but what you DO?

Ergo, if you don't want The Boy to run around while he's eating toast (how does the jam get behind his ears?) then you have to stay sitting down yourself all the way through breakfast. And if you want your PhD students to be ethical in their research, you can't cut corners yourself, or treat something like participant consent in an offhand manner.

PhD students are adults, but they're often pretty green ones. I certainly was (ahem. am.).  So, even the student who grumbles about their supervisor - and let's face it, what are the chances of getting through 3 + x (+ xx) years of regular contact without pissing each other off once in a while? - is still going to be deeply influenced by them. The way we behave at conferences, the way we interact with local colleagues, our attention to detail, how we deliver feedback... Whether we like it or not, we nurture attitudes and mannerisms, and whether we (or the student) think we're getting it right or not, we habitually model what it is to be a professional academic.

Minefield, huh?