Well said...

Six Weeks in Review

The other part of my general overwhelmed-ness has been that the first six weeks of school also brought a whole bunch of events that I either had to coordinate or travel to participate in. There were the very fun but exhausting work trips that led to weekends in Minneapolis with Emily & Elizabeth,

Emily and Rhonda and Mill City farmer's market

and a fun weekend excursion with Adria and Rhonda to Madison.

on the docks at Monona Terrace

There have been several exciting campus events including a really well-attended poetry reading (yay!) that the Writer's Club and I coordinated. My wonderfully talented colleague, Abayo, read some of his work from his forthcoming book _The Giving of Pears_.

Another exciting happening was that UW-Marinette, the second smallest of all the Wisconsin system, hosted the statewide student LGBTQ summit. So, last weekend, 100+ queers and allies descended on Marinette for a summit. It was a lot of fun (Rhonda and I both took part in the conference, including attendance of the Queer Prom), and offered such an interesting moment of reckoning about our shifting perspective on the world. At one point, an earnest college student from Madison or Steven's Point (or one of those big schools) asked the coordinators if they were expecting protesters since "we're in a pretty remote, rural community here." I was both amused and annoyed by the concern, and realized, in that moment, how much I feel a part of this community (and, how surprised I would be to find protesters outside of the conference). Needless to say all went without a hitch.

The biggest surprise of the weekend was when we found ourselves at dinner with the keynote speaker, trans-activist S. Bear Bergman, only to find out that we have one fine friend in common: the famous Mr. Gabriel Foster. So, there I am, absurdly enough, bonding with a queer tranny named Bear over beer-cheese soup and fried cheese curds in Marinette Wisconsin. We laughed a lot about the small-world of queers, and as dinner progressed (and the Rail House home-brew took hold) I began to have the most delicious sense that all is right with the world.

Bad Blog Mommy

I have been a bad blog mommy of late. I have allowed my blog to sit unattended and, at times, unbathed, for far too long. I would like to place blame on Sarah Palin, the University of Wisconsin Colleges, and Buddy, to start.

I have been having a hard time dealing with the wallop packed by the beginning of the academic year. You see, colleges and universities have this genteel etiquette of giving new faculty less responsibility in their first year. It was lovely back when I was new, and the only committee meetings I had to attend dealt with potlucks and the occasional campus event. However, as I begin my second year at a professor, I feel like it was a mean, mean trick to convince me that I really like my job, and then add twice the work. I am struggling to recapture that feeling of warm-fuzziness that was a regular part of my first-year experience, and in the meantime, I am disoriented and confused by the amount of meetings, charts, bylaws and agendas.

But enough whining. We did something very cool this morning: we bought 5 dozen ears of corn and par-boiled and then cut it off the cob. We now have 18 bags of corn (3 cups per bag) to last us all winter long.




Geez, I don't know. Maybe I complain too much. Maybe Sarah Palin is right -- we can have it all!