protect your shoes from soil and muck

I've just discovered the Visible app for tracking Long Covid symptoms and I wish I'd found it back when I first had the virus.

I mean, honestly, social media has been serving me ads for it for a while and I just don't tend to click on stuff the algorithms really push hard, but I finally read an actual post about it by an actual person I know with CFS and fibromyalgia so I downloaded it.

I'm only 1.5 days into using it and It takes four days to start actually recommending things but you can track all these symptoms. I have high hopes.

I'm loving how many things I am able to mentally take a step back from and acknowledge/decide that I don't need to form an educated opinion about it, I don't need to take a position on it, I don't need to spend any more mental energy on it at all.

This could be something mundane, like the house across the street. When we moved here, there was a family over there with a high-school aged son who then went off to college. Then they sold the (admittedly huge for two people) house and moved off to the countryside. A rental company bought the house and rented it to another family with a college-age son, then they moved out about a month ago. My workroom windows face this house so I notice people coming and going from it--presumably people from the company that owns it meeting repair techs, showing it to potential renters, etc. At one point, I would have obsessively followed all these comings and goings and had a lot of opinions about what was going on over there. Now though I've decided that it's not worth devoting any mental space to it so I just...don't. I mean obvy other than the time it took to describe the situation just now.

Another example is stuff at work--there's a lot going on with interviewing applicants for the incoming fall class, there's interpersonal oddness that's flying over my head or under my radar [1], Boss Lady is interviewing for other commensurate jobs [2]. In times past, this would all have me climbing the walls with anxiety and frustration, but I've managed to be very zen about it so far. We'll get whatever students who accept our offers. There's no point what-iffing or angsting about the rest of it because either it will become my problem or it won't but for now, it's none of my business.

I know there's a tendency when you finally get therapy to place a lot of blame on your parents/guardians/family, which I try to hold them in a place of compassion. Yet it's absolutely WILD how much the minding of others' business and endlessly speculating about the problems/dramas of other was not only accepted but encouraged among my family and community in general as a kid/teen. And not in a sense of "that person is going through it and how can we support them?" but more just "that person is going through it and lets recite the litany of their woes and speculate on how it might be their fault."


[1] I can tell there's strained relations between various coworkers in other areas of the building but I can't read minds so muttered cryptic statements and significant glances are all I'm going on there.

[2] On the advice of the department chair, as a leverage strategy to give her a merit-based raise (which have been frozen for years).

                                                                                                December 2008

Dear Family & Friends,

            Happy holidays! December’s come around again and here I am, sitting down to write my yearly update letter. I’m glad to find myself still in Chapel Hill, still teaching at UNC and on the costume production staff for PlayMakers Repertory Company. This is my fourth year here, which ties my previous record of four seasons on staff at the ART at Harvard.

            I began the year by publishing my first book, an instructional textbook on parasol manufacture. (Should you wish to know more, googling my name with “parasol” will take you to the book’s site.) It’s not going to pay the bills, but it’s a useful professional volume that fills an otherwise empty niche, and I’m very proud of how it turned out. I enlisted a former student to lend a hand with the photography and put it out myself via print-on-demand, with the much-appreciated volunteer help of several friends—editors, copywriters, and a layout artist. So far I’ve sold a whopping 78 copies, which is 73 more copies than I expected to sell to my class of five graduate students! Feel free to brag that you know the author of the only extant text on parasol construction, though I suppose the chances of finding people impressed by that are slim. 

            On the PlayMakers stage, we produced two Pulitzer-prizewinning plays in repertory (Doubt and Top Dog/Underdog) shortly after the holidays and finished out our 2007-08 season with an acclaimed production of Amadeus, with costumes designed by my former undergraduate mentor at UT-Knoxville, Bill Black. It was great to work with Bill again, and I hope he comes back to design for us again some time in the future! I also taught a spring semester graduate class called “Decorative Arts,” which covered topics like glove-making, shoe modification, jewelry, and yep, parasols (that’s where my five guaranteed book sales came from). I’m so glad I’ve wound up in this company and with this university—I love the work we do.

            Academia and seasonal theatre mean summers off, or devoted to other pursuits at least. My summer was a pretty big adventure—I spent it freelancing in New York City and staying with an old friend from my Chicago grad-school days, Janette. In the course of two months in NY, I worked as a jewelry-maker on Hamlet for Shakespeare in the Park, as a milliner’s assistant at a couture hat studio in Brooklyn called Cha-Cha’s House of Ill Repute (an amusing name, but imagine the awkwardness of explaining those paycheck stubs to my bank teller), and as part of the “Dragon Team” on Shrek: The Musical, which opens on Broadway on December 14^th. I also went to dozens of museums and theatre productions, visited many old friends and former students in the area, and thoroughly enjoyed myself all-round. Janette and her mother, Sharon, welcomed me into their ancestral Astoria home as if I were family, and I “paid my way” doing handywoman jobs like assembling furniture and appliances, hauling storage-unit contents, and cleaning the A/C vents. It was a wonderful, amazing summer, truly an unforgettable experience, and one I hope to repeat some day...maybe even next summer!

            The official 2008-09 theatre season and semester began with a bang—a large production of Shakespeare’s Pericles and me teaching millinery class again. In tandem with the demonstration hats I typically make while teaching millinery, I began what I hope to be an ongoing tradition—the creation of one-of-a-kind couture hats for charity auctions. The first pair of them went to a fundraiser for the NC Conservation Network, an organization that safeguards the state’s natural resources. A second mini-collection will be offered in spring via PlayMakers annual fundraising auction.

            I also have been taking an introductory distance-education course in textile science at NC State, as a preliminary experiment—I’m considering going for their Master of Textiles in a couple years, with a concentration in Dyeing and Finishing. (By random chance, NCSU has one of the best Colleges of Textiles in the world, and since I’m a state employee, I can take classes there for next to nothing!) First though, I need to brush up on some undergraduate science coursework in topics like polymer chemistry. Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, I watch my class lectures via RealPlayer and take quizzes and tests via email and fax. The lectures are really just like being in one of those huge amphitheatre-seating classes, except I can pause and rewind my professor at will. What a fascinating modern age we live in! 

            Since it appears that I’m going to be staying in the area indefinitely, I’ve started the process of putting down roots. I joined the Community Church of Chapel Hill this fall (a Unitarian-Universalist congregation) and have been taking some home-buying seminars. They say it’s a buyer’s market right now, but I’m going to wait out the current economic turmoil before I take on that sort of debt by myself. If things don’t really fall to pieces at UNC, maybe next year’s holiday letter will be accompanied with new house photographs. They say they aren’t going to do any layoffs, but you never know. Right now we’ve just got a hiring freeze and they’ve eliminated travel budgets. And, mine won’t be the first faculty/staff position on the chopping block in our department, if it comes to that. I have my fingers crossed!

            This year brought the fifth presidential election I've voted in, in my fifth state. My first was in 1992, when I voted on the UT campus in Knoxville, TN. My second, 1996, was in Illinois in the lobby of an apartment complex. In 2000, I voted in an elementary school in Allston, MA. For the 2004 election, I lived in Los Angeles and voted in the lobby of a hotel. Now, in 2008, I cast my ballot in a planetarium in Chapel Hill, NC. This is definitely the first time that I’ve ever voted in a battleground state, and if you paid attention to the election returns, you know that North Carolina was so close it took three days to call. It was definitely an exciting election season this year!

            I hope this letter finds you and yours healthy and happy! If you wish, you can keep up with me on a more regular basis via my professional weblog, La Bricoleuse, accessible at http://labricoleuse.livejournal.com.                                      

                                                                                                Best wishes for the new year!

This is interesting, in that I think this turned out to be the only year I made hats for charity auctions...until this year, when I did that again. I don't know if it's a good idea though--people generally are meh about hats of the type i create. Regardless, fun to be reminded of it.