Bloomington

OK, like y’all didn’t already know that.  Still… I had a plan to stay strong this time.

Plan failed.

So, my glasses were *supposed* to be ready last Saturday. Got a call (the first one from them) saying they weren’t ready yet. The whole point was for me to pick them up on my way of out town, so I wouldn’t have to drive cross-town, out of my way, one more time(!) to retrieve them. Best laid plans, alas. The Better Business Bureau heard from me Saturday afternoon.

Tuesday, the glasses would be ready, but I couldn’t go on Tuesday, nor Wednesday, so today was the day. I ran some errands, purposefully putting $89 of cat meds on the credit card I used for my glasses (which I had since paid off), just so I’d have a strong reason to ask for the $88 in “thinner, lighter” lenses charges to be refunded. I was soooo strong!

And, then, I walked in the store. The woman who’s been helping me smiled, called me by name, complimented this *awful awful* haircut I got last week, but — still — I was strong. Until, after I asked for the refund (and, finally, the lenses were correct in both pairs!), and she said she’d have to see what she could do and made for the back office. But before she got there, she turned around and said, “You know what I can give you?”

I was thinking, if it were anybody else — and they didn’t know how this whole glasses fiasco has literally kept me awake at night and turned my stomach sour, and made me dread going in the store — they’d have told me they’d give me a black eye for all my whining. But, instead, she said, “I can give you another pair of glasses.” (I feel the need to move into aerobil dialogue mode here….)

me: what?

she: Another pair of glasses.

me: what?! Like new frames?

she: yes, and lenses. Cheap, plastic lenses, like you like :)

me: seriously?!

she: yes.

me: hmmm…. with what restrictions? [Thinking the cheap, ugly, wire frames would be my only choice.]

she: anything in the store, except the Oakleys and the Gallery room in the back [which has, like, $600 fancy-ass, designer frames].

me: anything in the front of the store?

she: yes, except Oakleys.

me: hmmm…. the only catch is that I’d have to come back. [said, putting my head down on the table]

she: We can have them ready on Tuesday, with the anti-reflective coating.

me: seriously?! a new set of frames. I’ve always wanted a second set of frames.

she: I really want to make this right with you.

me: New frames would do the trick.

Pinks frames, to be specific. (This, btw, is me being a suckah!) So I started looking. Found three pair I loved: one a cerulean, which matched my eyes beautifully but felt a little heavy; another a light pink fading into translucent, which fit nicely; and my favorite pair, rimless with cutesy little white swirls in the fat, pink earpieces.

She called out, “Can’t do the plastic lenses in the rimless ones, Cheryl.” She was right, so I put those back and chose the pink-fade frames. $209 + lenses with anti-reflective coating. Free, and ready on Tuesday.

the suckah,
Cheryl.

Summer signals:

• short hair (as evidenced by the marine-cut I got two days ago at the Paul Mitchell Campus Salon…sigh)
• short grass (as evidenced by the push mover I bought, got sharpened, and used for the second time today, which caused all my male neighbors — or, rather, all my neighbors, since they are all male — to comment on my masochistic grass-cutting expertise)
• summer blogging on the porch with Gizmo (as evidenced by this post), and
• talking wih the neighbors.

As summer comes, I get to see my neighbors more, which makes me happy — even though only half of the men I see around the block these days actually live here. There’s Loud Talker, who has turned down the volume lately (I think I was just too stressed that one day) and fixed my front porch bannister for me last week. There’s Single-Dad-Smoker, whose little girl reminds me of me when I was 10, playing softball (and here tell she’s pretty good). There’s old-man-neighbor behind me in the alley, who asked me today if I needed a gas mower and then seemed pleased when I said no, I liked the push mower. (He has 3 in the garage.)

There’s also Corner Guy in the crack-looking-house, whose pick-up truck/trailer was the one that got hit the night I met Loud Talker. Corner Guy seems to be fixing up the place, as is everyone else on the street, including Duplex Neighbor in the tiny white house next door. (His g-f lives there too, I think, but I can’t figure out if it’s the same girl with the little boy who used to live there. I haven’t seen either and the cars have changed, so I’m guessing no.) Duplex Guy ripped out that ugly bush I hated and is cleaning up the rental even tho he’s the renter. The other two guys I see reguarly are Mr. Nice Guy house-flipper who mowed my side lawn last week (yay!), and Mr. Sunshine, Loud-Talker’s Dad, who also happens to be the contractor at Mr. Nice Guy’s new flip. Mr. Sunshine always calls me Sunshine, which made me laugh until I realized he calls everybody, including Single-Dad-Smoker that. Now I laugh in a different way when he calls me that. :)

The amazing thing about these neighbors, though, is that I know all of their names and they are all really nice folks. It’s not all men, although that’s all who I see. There’s Newsletter Vicki, and she has a husband and kids, but I never see them. There’s also Porch Lady, who goes with Loud Talker and does some of the contracting work next door, and her kids. She seems diligent but quiet, which makes sense given her propensity for Loud Talker ;) Oh, and the dogs. Plenty of dogs all around, and, thankfully, none of them are barkers.

So it’s going to be a good summer, with lots of neighbors around to chat with. (Although I will be sad when the flip sells and Mr. Sunshine isn’t around as often.)  All of which reminds me of the West Side Revitalization meeting I went to Thursday night. More than 200 people showed up, despite that the neighborhood’s reputation is bad (and, apparently, has been for the last 75 years, so said one ancient lady in the crowd that night who moved to the west side in 1942 and was told “don’t live on the west side!”).

Yeah, the west side has its problems — higher crime (relative to, oh, say, Chicago, however, it feels pretty nill); more people living below the poverty line; more renters and slum lords; but also, as my neighbors have shown me — and which is why I wanted to live in this little house, on this little street, with my little yard and porch — the west side also has closer-knit people and a sense of pride and commitment, even if (sometimes) that pride and commitment are settled differently according to different neighbors’ needs. I love living in a neighborhood that isn’t cookie cutter and where, while I’m sitting on my porch all summer, typing or reading or petting Gizmo, nearly everyone who drives by nods or waves, and all my neighbors know me by name.

c

(1) a 2-page letter with accompanying documents sent to Delta asking for a refund on the horrible lack of service on April 7, 2008.

(2) a phone call to Medici’s Bakery last week (as documented here) to inform them of their bad pastries.

(3) a report to the Better Business Bureau of Central Illinois to register a complaint about the Bloomington, IL, branch of All About Eyes, which (long story short) has managed to screw up a simple eye- and sunglass lens order, requiring at least eight visits over the last six weeks, totalling over 12 hours of my time, wasted.  The final straw was the phone call this morning (the first time they’ve bothered to call me, fyi)–after I told the manager I wouldn’t make her drive to my house with my new lenses because I had to go by there today anyways–just so they could tell me the order hadn’t come in yet and wouldn’t be ready until Tuesday. That makes 7 weeks running. Seriously — two months to get glasses right? The $50 credit they offered for my *next* visit (nevermind the $60 they overcharged me for special lenses I didn’t ask for to begin with!) won’t cover my anger.

This week the Council of Editors of Learned Journals finished their Suggested Guidelines for Electronic Journal Editors (to be posted soon on their website: celj.org), which feels like a big step forward for digital scholarship, but it’s probably just a small step in the scheme of things.

Also this week, the Open Humanities Press announced its beginnings with six open-access journals and an editorial oversight committee that is pretty impressive. What I don’t get is what this collective is supposed to do, other than give a stamp of approval to affiliated journals. (Which begs the question: Why these journals? And why do they need stamps of approval?) The OHP website says they welcome questions about how journals were chosen, but I’m not sure I’m ready to do that yet.

(Of course, deep down, I’m like “why didn’t Kairos get chosen? (esp when Vectors did)” But I already know the answers to that — we’re not critical and cultural theory; we’re not connected enough (which also means we’re not affiliated); and we’re not text-only (which has all sorts of repurcussions including the problems of retrieving metadata).

None of those things - imo - is a bad thing. After all, they all represent the reason Kairos exists. Now if only we could get folks involved in the formation of these initiatives who could speak to the — yes, I’ll use the word — capacious nature of digital scholarship. Then I could say I have learned to love the bomb and get on with it.

c

About a week ago I decided to call it quits on this maniac life I’ve been living. I realized that I was working too hard for too little and — duh! — I was unhappy. Not unhappy with my job description, nor my social life, just that I was spending way too much time working to beef up the former (for no good reason) and not enough on the latter (because it was too easy to work). And, no, I’m not talking about dating. I’m talking about the healthy balance between work and play.

(lol, I accidentally typed “pay” there, but I’m not really talking about money, except that there’s no reason I need to be working 80 hours a week when no matter what, I will only get paid for some unnamed quantity and quality related to whether I will get tenure. Fuck that. If I don’t get tenure, I could pay my bills in many other ways.)

Thus, I have a new rule: Just say no.  And no more working weekends, even during the school year. To help me avoid falling into the academic coma that’s held me hostage for the last few years, and to reinsert my need to learn from doing in other ways, I have been working around the house for the last two weekends. Updating my porch furniture (to ready myself for the summer reading fun), cleaning up the yard and creating a compost pile for the vegetable garden I will install next week, buying a student-serger that was super on sale so that I can start sewing again; finishing the home gym (Day 5; and it only took 5 months!) and setting up a DVD/radio station in the basement to pass the time while I’m lifting weights; setting up the serger and the rest of my sewing and (soon) scrapbook supplies in the basement so that I have a permanent place to create things; hanging the flamingo lights to make it a little fun; finding a portable fold-up bed at Kmart for $30, which I will work to doll up and create a sitting area/extra bed that I can use for me and Gizmo when company comes.

As well, the house next door is looking swell and the owner cut my front grass for me; the loud-talker has been better and offered to build a 12×12 deck in my back yard for $150 labor (I’m buying the materials with my debit card points!); I gave him my moldy, wicker sofa and he was glad to have it–one more thing I don’t have to worry about getting rid of; another neighbor I just met ripped out the ugly bushes in front of his house and offered to take out the bush that was blocking my view of the sidewalk (which helped him out too since he parks by it); and none of that would have happened if I hadn’t put my freakin laptop down for 5 minutes and gone outside. :)

So here’s for protecting my mental and physical well-being and doing fun housework on the weekends and not doing shit I don’t want to do.

C