the rest of it

Today I went to a wake for my friend Julie Coultas, who died on the 3rd of August. It was lovely to have the opportunity to sit with others and hear Julie stories, which has helped crystallize in my mind the things that I owe Julie.  I started to get to know Julie in mid-2000 when I was invited to join a small group of COGS (School of Cognitive & Computing Science at Sussex) women who went out for dinner at the then-modest Brighton institution Food for Friends. (We called the weekly event 'Food for Friends' long after the restaurant went upscale and we relocated to Pizza Express. It was still food for friends.) I was brand-new to England, and those dinners were a huge part of my enculturation. Often, Julie would tell me that she loved my accent. You know, I can't think of another Englishperson who's ever said that to me—certainly not repeatedly. I was pretty self-conscious about being an American teaching about English to the English at that point. The compliment di...

Today I went to the celebration of Magdalena Portmann's life. I wanted to wait for this before writing my gratitude post for Magdalena. I'm glad I did wait because the event was so lovely and gave me so much to think about. Thank you to Jackie Cassell and everyone who made it so special.  I met Magdalena when I first came to Britain. She was school administrator in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (COGS) and one of the first people who made me feel like I had a life in England. I cannot remember the details of my earliest encounters with her, but at some point Magdalena started inviting me to Pizza Express in Lewes on Friday nights, where various friends (some from COGS, some from elsewhere in Magdalena's life) would gather for a nice supper and lots and lots of talk. I was the odd one out, not living in Lewes, but it didn't feel like an effort to take the train in the opposite direction from home at the end of the week. It felt like sanctuary.  Magdalena ...

Today I got to live my natural timetable. (Well, almost. I still had to get up at 7 in the morning, which is not natural.) Phil had bought us tickets to a play I didn't care much about, so I arranged for a friend of Grover's to go in my place. Great choice. I ate my lunch at 3:30. I worked at the office till 9. I came home and had yogurt and blueberries for my dinner. And since then I've been knitting and listening to podcasts and music—because when you work till 9 and have your dinner around 9:40, there's no need to work a second shift after dinner. It was one day of living my old pre-child schedule. That said, I have lots of abandoning-my-family-almost-every-evening-this-week guilt. So, I was grateful for that today and I've also been grateful for some small and big and medium-sized things: Dinner out with a friend last night. Oh my goodness, that was nice! The first years turning up for their tutorials.  >> This Aveda oil, which I bought when I lived in Tex...

Every once in a while, I google people I'm sad to have lost touch with, just to find out if they're findable. Either I find them and think "Ah, that's nice" or I don't, and then I wonder that it's possible to be hard-to-find in this day and age. One who had very little online presence was Alex Guest, the other half of my first real, "grown-up" relationship, and so it was a surprise to find him this time. And very, very sad .  Alex and I were together for nearly five years, the first three in person, the last bit long-distance, with a prolonged and not-very-nice break-up. He remained one of the most important people in my life, nonetheless. This is perhaps inevitable, seeing as we got together when I was 19 and he was 20. I learned a fair amount about being a grown-up while with him (or at least about pretending to be a grown-up, which is mostly what I did in my 20s) and I learned a huge amount about a huge number of things from him.  Alex—which i...

My friend Tucker Childs died this week.  Tucker interviewed me for my first real academic job. I applied as 'practice', a year before I planned to finish my PhD. I was shocked to be offered the position. I can think of nothing that affected my life as absolutely as the decision to move to South Africa, sight unseen, to be a linguist. And I can't think how I would have survived it without Tucker. I had a wonderful Head of Department in Tony Traill, who was a bit of a father figure, but Tucker was the person who could tell me what's what. There's a lot you need to know when you move to a new university and a new educational system, and Tucker knew what I, as a product of the US system, would need to know. There's a lot more that you need to be taught when you're a 20-something American with a newly minted passport living in a very different society than the only one you've ever known. I needed someone to tell me when I was being an ugly American. In a way,...