New

I didn't start learning to play an instrument until I was fourteen.  My mother hated noise.  She wanted me to play the quietest of the instruments my school had on offer: a flute. I never really liked it.  I wanted to play piano, or saxophone.  Nonetheless, I still have my flute, and the music I learned in my teens still, as if by magic, resides in my fingers despite my brain's inability to read sheet music any longer.

In November, Clara saw a busker on Vancouver's Granville Island.  He was a spirited fiddler, good-natured, and even energized by the enthusiasm with which Clara and Winton danced to his playing.  Since then, Clara has wanted to play violin.

I'd ask every few weeks to see if she had changed her mind (mildly trying to dissuade her: I presumed on the basis of recordings of orchestral music that I liked violins even less than I like my flute).  She has remained steadfast.

Today we went to Perrin and Associates Fine Violins, an outfit 4 floors up in an unrestored 1927 building on Lexington Avenue, in Baltimore (in other words, resplendently deco, with an original elevator).  The walls are hung with gorgeous wood-bellied instruments from cello to teeny violins for rental to young beginners like Clara. 

She was fitted for a tiny violin, a tiny bow, a tiny case, and a puck of sticky amber rosen.  The strings even as she toyed with them had a surprising depth of sound.  The cello being test-driven in the next room sounded like a tree singing.  It was like being in the clubhouse of a cult I'd never heard of before: the stringed and bowed instrument club.

Clara was excited, but for Me (selfish, selfish), it was magical, and all the more so for being an experience I would never have had were it not for the stubborn and highly individualized tastes of my oldest child.

Volume

Yes, I do think it's OK that I let the children play their toy guitars loudly at 9AM on a Sunday, as they hollered through a rendition of "jingle bells."  It's retaliation for the neighbors using their treadmill from 3-4AM two nights in a row.

MLA aftermath

Here's how academic hiring often goes in my field (English):

-300 qualified people apply for one job (November)
-10-15 of them get interviewed at the Modern Languages Association convention (Dec-Jan).
-2-3 of them get interviewed on campus after the MLA (Jan-Feb).
-1 gets hired (March).

When I was on the job market, looking for a permanent job (for 5 years), I always hated that good news traveled by phone.  *Ring* "We'd like to interview you at the MLA."  *Ring* "We'd like to interview you on campus."  *Ring* "You got the job!" (I didn't get that last one very often, obviously.)

Bad news invariably came in an envelope, on a single sheet of paper, and regardless of how far I'd made it in the process, always came at the end of April.  There'd be weeks and weeks of hoping that I was just dealing with a really slow department before I acknowledged that my letter (the "PFO", or "Please Fuck Off" letter) was in the mail, the slow mail, the mail slated to arrive in April.

I resolved that as department chair I wasn't going to do that to people.  We interviewed 14, we're bringing 3 to campus.  I just phoned all of our "no"s.  I'd like to vomit now.  It has been an unpleasant afternoon.  I hope those "no"s feel, as I did, that knowing was better than no-ing in uncertainty.  But perhaps they think I am simply sadistic, wanting to hear them react to my bad news?

Mummy, Forced to Discuss Christian Theology

Clara: "But.  What happened to baby Jesus?"
Me: "You mean after his birthday?"
Clara: "Yes, after Christmas.  What happened to the baby?"
Me: "He grew up.  And then he died, which is kind of a long story.  But he did get to grow up.  He did woodwork, they say.  Like Grandpa."
Clara: "Oh.  Was it 115 years ago?"
Me: "Longer. 2,000."
Clara: "But that's when there were dinosaurs!  You're wrong Mummy."
Me: "Uh.  Well.  I could be wrong, but I think it went: dinosaurs, Jesus, us in the present day."
Clara: "Are there more muffins?"

Claraism du Jour

When I grow up, I'm going to send Daddy a chicken as a present.  Because I know he wants to have chickens in the garden.  I'll have to send it though.  Because I'll be living in Africa then.  The chicken will have to go in the mail.

I should add

The "resolutions" below involve a large dose of fantasy, as I am recuperating but into week FOUR of feeling fairly bad every day.
Depressing.

Be it resolved that . . .

Nothing like a good long bout of pneumonia to make me ask myself "how did I get to be so low" (where "low" means: ill, tired, demoralized, shut-in, bleak).  Here are my plans. (Who cares, right?  But perhaps making them public record will make me act on them.)

Stress management:
Maintain my "regime" (half hour of yoga M-F; half hour dog walk w/ kids every day), and add one "excursion" a week in the form of either a bona fide yoga class at a yoga studio or a hike somewhere off campus, weather permitting.

Dullness Abatement:
Do something once every two weeks, possibly with a friend.  Eg visit a gallery, attend one of Goucher's many free cultural/ entertainment events, go somewhere I haven't been before.

Teaching/ Parenting tweak:
Be clear what my objectives are, but flexible about how to attain them, thereby balancing the goal (learning something specific/ putting coats on) with the needs, constraints and desires of the individual I am encouraging to meet that goal.