Nancy's Musings

Interesting things rarely happen to me. Yay! This means that 1) I'm the most interesting thing in my life, and 2) less anxiety. I mean, there was that one time, the Static Cling Fiasco, and then the classic Bus Stop Slush Splash. But today was funny. So, it's April. Forecast said rain, but mostly we just had wind. Lots of wind. The sky was a brilliant blue for most of the morning, and then the dust filled the air so you couldn't see the sky. The world turned sepia. I have been trying to master a crochet pattern for a service project at the end of the month, so when I finished work I climbed straight to the enclosed bus stop (end of the line) and pulled out my yarn. I had just finished a few rounds when the bus pulled up, so I tucked my project in my bag and walked a dozen yards or so to the bus. I tapped my pass on the pad, walked to the back of the bus, and sat down. Then I noticed the oddest thing. My yarn must have snagged somewhere, because it stretched the entire lengt...

In German, the word for compassion is "Mitleid": a compound word: mit = with, and leid = suffer.*  It's also sometimes translated as "pity." I'm sure I've blogged about pity: standing above a person and feeling sorry for them. Have you ever felt that instinct - when we see somebody who is uncomfortable or suffering - to think "It's her fault" or "He brought this on himself" or "This is their choice"? When someone returns from volunteering at the soup kitchen, it's how they express frustration that the people they give their time, money, and goods to are wandering around with nothing to do, smoking cigarettes, sporting new tattoos, or otherwise not using their scant means to the volunteer's approval. It's when we meet somebody who's depressed, and tell them to "cheer up!" It's when we treat our neighbor's cold with more coldness, as if a person were no more than their germs. I once told a...

The Wizard of Grad School said something profound that has stuck with me for most of a week through all kinds of situations: she said that to get the best results from employees, listen to them and lower the stakes. I'm an academic, and am constantly being asked "What are the stakes?" whenever I propose a paper or book. It's necessary in some ways, to fit my work into the larger cultural conversations, to make my writing aware that it does not exist in a vacuum. Stakes become more ethically problematic when I'm under pressure to explain them to a non-academic, who is not only critical of my work but of my entire field - a pressure I never escape, even in my own head. And so I need to raise the stakes, because what's tacitly at stake in all of my scholarship is everything I love about the world. I'm also a fiction writer, and if you want people to get excited about the action in your books, you have to raise the stakes. Sometimes, this results in "stak...