budding scholar

I leave for the metro at 7:30am. The day is young, air still cold, the sky just growing light in the distance. I pass a mother carrying loaves of bread, and I see a line has already formed at the bakery. A man talks on his phone, sitting next to a bucket in front of a hotel, hand lightly resting on the window-cleaning brush. The grocery store, pharmacy, bank, and produce stand are all still dark, most not opening until 9 or 10. I stop at a crosswalk and the buzz of motorcycles taking off fills my ears, while I fumble in my pockets for gloves. I hear a train just leaving as I walk down the metro stairs, and the platform is empty of people. No one taking the train this time of day, I think. Then the next train roars up, the doors open, and I have to slide my bag down my arm to fit in the car, my gray wool coat crushing against the blacks and browns and whites of other winter coats.

My days are colored by these pieces of city life. The first thing I see out the window when I wake up are which windows in the loop of apartments outside have light. When we go to sleep late, I notice which windows still have light. There are too many to keep track of which ones have light from day to day, so I invent stories about anyone and everyone. On the weekends, I see people hanging their laundry on drying racks that take up half the balcony, covering them with plastic when the sky threatens rain. The traffic is a distant roar, punctuated by the honk of sirens during rush hour. The elevator takes my attention more when I’m home, and the distant rumble of a train 8 or 9 floors down under the ground, and the hum of the neighbor’s motorized shutter. Quiet, compared with our apartment in San Francisco.

And yet, all I crave today is open space, somewhere else. A different kind of noise. The sound of wind in pines, or rain soaked leaves whipping the windows at night. Birds singing, or the silence of fresh snow. Perhaps the slap of waves on a lake shore, or the roar of a river. After five years and two different cities, I’ve never yearned for trees and water the way I do now.

Yet here I am, in this city, at my desk in a windowless spare room, hearing the elevator gears and clink of a neighbor’s dishes. I sip peppermint tea and turn my thoughts to tomorrow’s school visit and interviews.

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What are the sounds of “here” for you right now? Is this where you want to be?

A new year has arrived, one with a blue moon on New Year’s Eve, and family visits that kept me busy and gave me a break from worrying over my project for 10 days. I really needed the break, the complete focus on being an aunt. The fact that you never really disconnect has been one of the most challenging things about doing a Ph.D. for me. I know people doing startups, or writing novels, or becoming artists, or doing other original work probably face this too. Your work is with you all the time, and feels all tied up in who you are, in your identity in the world. How the work is going seems to matter more for for how you feel about yourself than in other jobs where you’re not trying to create something new. The rewards feel few and far between.

It often makes me miss teaching, the satisfaction of knowing you’re helping people learn every day. When I taught I had days where I was exhausted, my home life was a mess, and I didn’t know where I would find the energy to go to work. But then I got there, and the connection with my students was so rewarding that it made the problems pale in importance. I can’t wait to have this connection with students at the college level, in classes on culture and education, immigration, language policy, qualitative methods, and social networks. One of the most rewarding experiences in my life is helping people learn, mentoring them, supporting and encouraging their growth. I just need to get past this milestone/rite of passage of the dissertation!

A post soon about my goals for the new year. I’ve seen others do some last year/this coming year reflecting on their blogs and it’s inspired me. I haven’t made new years’ goals in years, but feel like it would help with the next stage of my study.

More and more lately I find myself spending breaks from writing up pages and pages of fieldnotes reading blogs. Sitting on this black pleather rental apartment couch in the Eixample of Barcelona, or holed away in my windowless office, I follow links and photos to far-flung places where people write about their lives, and take pictures, and put it on the world wide web for all to see. New York, Seattle, more Seattle, San Francisco, Texas, Sweden, New Zealand (I think). And all the places these writers and photographers and foodies lead me through their links and inspirations, like Colorado, and Long Beach, California or Portland, ME and Portland, OR. My first love in blogging had long been my one and only, but the extra time home on the computer here, and lack of a social life in this new place, mean there’s more time to hop around from site to site finding new loves.

These escapes fill my mind with delicious food and images of neighborhoods and houses and places that are not HERE. They also make me think how HERE could be so much more through the effort of sharing it beyond our family and friend blog. What if I take a walk around my neighborhood every day and post pictures? What might I find, what might it add up to mean, when put out there in images and words, day after day?

Mostly they take me away from the frustrating process of trying to figure out how to do what I’m doing here. How to get access to people who will talk to me, get access to schools that will let me observe, and get over the hurdles of language and shyness. They provide connection to real people (mostly women) figuring out their lives. They fill some of the space left by not having friends here (yet).

So thank you, blogging world, for putting yourselves out there for the rest of us.

I’ve always dreamed of writing children’s books. Bilingual stories that take children on journeys through other cultures, peoples’ homes who are different from them. Opening up the world through books. Teaching kids to be curious rather than fearful of people who are different from them. Starting conversations about tolerance and the kind of society we all dream of. (Decidedly not the topics of the beloved books I remember!)

It would be really neat to pick up this dream. Go through the library, read all the stories I can find that try to do what I’d like to write about. Learn about children’s book authors, who is out there doing the kind of work I’d like to do. Find an illustrator. A good place to start would be to begin collecting ideas, writing snippets. This seems far from my academic work, but in fact is not so far since it involves cross cultural learning, potentially immigration, language issues.

Children’s books shaped my thinking so much when I was young. Through stories I grew to know other families, imagine other worlds. I would love to create this for a new generation of kids.