So You Want to Play in Traffic?

You're thinking about riding your bike to work, but nervous? Here are some answers to the questions that might be worrying you.

Problem: You'll sweat on the way to work.
Solution: Bring a spare shirt. Keep deodorant and, depending on the level of formality expected at your office, a couple of blazers at the office. Or even drive in on Monday morning with the week's wardrobe and drive home with it again on Friday afternoon.  If you use hair gel, keep that at the office too and use it when you get there after you take off your helmet.

Problem: You haven't ridden a bike since you were thirteen.
Solution: Practice. Take the bike out early on a Sunday morning when there's not much traffic and, if it would bother you, not too many spectators. Go to an empty playground or a park, and...

• Practice riding in a nice straight line.
• Keep your thumbs hooked over the handle bars, and one finger on each brake, and your elbows nice and loose so you don't feel like your fillings are going to fall out every time you hit a crack in the road.
• Look over one shoulder, then the other, to see what's coming, still while riding in a straight line.
• Practice signaling left and right, by sticking one hand and then the other wayyy out to the side so nobody can possibly miss it. And make sure you're still riding in a straight line.
• Come to a complete stop, still in that nice straight line, and then start up again without letting the handle bars sway left or right. Much.
• Try braking and accelerating while signaling.
• Practice turning with one hand, and then the other, off the handlebars.
• Find some parked cars, or a parked car by a building, and practice riding between them. Get to know how much clearance you need.
• If you can, find a dirt road or a trail and ride around to see how it feels. If you hit a patch of sand or gravel, you'll notice that you can stay up if you can keep the bike in a straight line (there's that again) and keep the wheels turning.

Problem: It might rain.
Solution: Check the weather forecast the night before, and again in the morning. Buy rain gear according to your budget, and carry it with you depending on the chance of rain and the temperature and how uncomfortable you'll get if you get caught out. If you can, get a waterproof/breathable jacket, but even then, see item one.

Today, there was a 30 percent chance of rain in the morning, plus cooling temperatures throughout the day. I biked to the train station in a T shirt, with blazer and rain jacket in my bag; I wore the blazer for the ride from train station to office, and on the way home, wore both blazer and jacket -- for warmth. I didn't get rained on during any of the legs. Layers are helpful year-round, because you'll warm up after 10 or 15 minutes of riding, and temperatures can change quite a bit between 8 a.m. and 5 or 6 or 7 p.m., depending on when you head home.

If you do get caught -- or decide to ride -- in the rain, slow down. Braking takes longer, sewer hole covers and train tracks are treacherously slippery, and you never know what's under that puddle. Also drivers will be less likely to see you, because of crud on the windshield plus because they won't expect bikers out there -- so take extra cautions.

Problem: It's dark.
Solution: Lights and brights.  Your rain jacket can be any color, as long as it's neon; you might also want a reflective vest and ankle reflectors. Put red blinking lights on the back of the bike, on your helmet, on your backpack if you carry one, and a white light on the front of the bike.

Remembering the Dead

I find Memorial Day complicated: my maternal grandfather fought for the wrong side.

My mother grew up, and I was born, in Germany. For her, there is only "the war" -- World War II, which left her family refugees, her father killed in action. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I'm glad he didn't survive the conflict and I'm glad I never had to meet him.

The story is he served in a tank unit. The story is he was a mechanic. The story is he was a common soldier. The story is he was a lieutenant. A photo shows a uniform with the death's-head insignia. The story is he was wounded and sent home, yet chose to return to combat. Twice.

Some day, I will go into the archives and find out what facts may have survived. I want to know; I don't want to know.

It's small comfort that my other grandfather served in the US merchant marine in that same war, or that my father and several of his relatives served the US military, and even, several generations back, the Union army.

Today, we're exhorted to remember those killed in action for the United States. World War II was surely a just war; the enormity of the Holocaust overshadows much else about the conflict. Yet the US did much that was unjust in that war, interning people of Japanese descent, refusing entry to Jewish refugees, discriminating against African-Americans who were drafted or volunteered to serve.

The wars we have fought since then are more difficult to justify. Yet American soldiers die, or they return alive but wounded in body and soul. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilians have died in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan. Returning veterans are refused the care they need to re-enter society as successfully functioning civilians, even allowed to die for lack of medical care.

Today's parades, in honoring the veterans and the fallen, seem also to celebrate war itself. We need to find a more nuanced way to remember the past, and acknowledge the realities of the present. We need to learn to seek peace and pursue it.

A Different Kind of Awareness

May is Asthma Awareness Month, and the Centers for Disease Control wants you to know that "you can control your asthma."

The page acknowledges that "we don't know what causes asthma, and we don't know how to cure it." But if "you" are "living with" asthma, it's your responsibility to keep it under control.

There's more:

Although asthma cannot be cured, it is possible to manage asthma successfully to reduce and prevent asthma attacks, also called episodes. Successful asthma management includes knowing the warning signs of an attack, avoiding things that may trigger an attack, and following the advice of your healthcare provider.

This bothers me for so many reasons, I barely know where to start. 

An "episode" sounds like something you watch on tv.  An "attack" sounds significantly more sinister. 

The grammatical construction of "your asthma" suggests that the person owns the illness, but the construction of all the ideas on the page suggests that the asthma owns the person.

I might live with asthma, I might have asthma, but it's not "my" asthma. And I am not "my asthma."

"You," the person with asthma, are admonished to stay away from anything that "may trigger" an attack.

"May" (why not "will"?) suggests multiple possibilities, and by extension the impossibility of avoiding everything that could trigger, let's call it an "exacerbation," which directly contradicts the insistence that "you can control your asthma." If "we" don't know what causes asthma, how are "we" who "live with" the disease supposed to recognize and be able to avoid all, or any, possible triggers?

My list of triggers includes several foods and additives; airborne things like smoke, dust, mold, and chemicals; various animals; upper respiratory infections; and exercise.

Yes, exercise. I exercise anyway, because it helps to reduce the severity of the disease on a day-to-day level as well as during "attacks," but I have to be careful.

Most of the things that trigger my "episodes" are pretty common.  I don't know if it's usual for people to have such a long list, though.

I cringe when I hear someone sneezing or coughing near me. There are plenty of respectful smokers, but others stand right under the no-smoking sign and light up, or walk down the street waving a lit cigarette, and I don't always see them until after I've inhaled what they're trailing. Eating in restaurants is your basic crap-shoot.

The problem with the admonition to "avoid triggers" is that it lays all the responsibility on the indidivual rather than calling for the community to mitigate potential toxins as much as possible.

The claim that "you can control your asthma" is made twice, alongside the exhortation to "learn to control your asthma." Maybe it's meant to be encouraging: "you" don't need to live with symptoms. But it also implies that a person who has an attack is at fault for failing to avoid the triggers. If you "can" control your asthma, then if you have an "episode," it must be because "you" screwed up.

Reality: asthma is poorly understood; there is no cure; it can't always be effectively controlled. We live with it every day. And we go on living.

Where Did April Go? (What Professors Do: Miscellaneous)

I haven't posted in a month.  Part of what happened to April was Passover, and the attendant cooking and eating and catching up with family.

Right after that, all hell broke loose.  John Ziker and his colleagues at Boise State recently did some research about how professors spend their time, and even they were surprised at how many hours their colleagues were working every week (average: 61) and how much of it was spent in meetings (17 percent) and answering emails (13 percent).

Some of the things I've been up to:

giving feedback on annotated bibliographies to guide drafting of term papers
writing recommendations for students and for colleagues
attending the various presentations, lunches and meetings involved in a tenure-track job search
reading MA theses, and providing feedback to guide revision
grading and commenting on papers to provide feedback to guide extended versions
writing, and delivering to colleagues, a lecture on digital humanities
meeting with students regarding academic work, internships, plans for graduate study
working with a former student on an article
scheduling MA thesis defenses, reading theses, attending defenses
providing comments on student presentations to guide drafting of final paper
organizing panels for a local conference, which I didn't end up being able to attend
committee meetings
attending end-of year honor society induction and awards ceremony
department meetings
did I mention grading/writing feedback on papers?
organizing an annual symposium

A few years ago, I asked my Facebook friends, many of whom are teachers, how much time they spent reading student papers; the answers ranged from three to five minutes per page.  I'd been wondering if I was doing something wrong, so that helpfully validated my own practice.

It's not over yet: I have final exams to write and to grade, a conference paper to write and deliver, term papers to read, final portfolios to review, final grades to calculate and submit, and various other administrative and teaching tasks before the semester is over. And then, sixteen months before I teach again: bittersweet.

40 Bags, 40 Days, Recalibration

Progress has been slow in the 40 Bags in 40 Days project, because life has been busy. Even so, it's already shifted my thinking.

I counted March 18 and 19 as Day 11, with some culling in the linen closet. March 23 saw more progress. Day 12: I finally looked at the huge bag of notebooks and papers The Offspring brought home at the end of fourth grade; almost all of it went into paper recycling. Day 13: outgrown clothes. Day 14: toys. Day 15: An IKEA lamp with a too-dim bulb, sitting in a corner and never used. Day 16: a duct-taped sled, scavenged from the trash, back to the trash. Day 17: I finally framed my PhD and MPhil diplomas by putting them in the same frame with my MA. It's only been sixteen years. How does that count? There was a lot of packaging.

Meanwhile, what with one thing and another, I've lost some weight, and this morning I thought, "All my clothes are too big." I immediately imagined going shopping, but then the 40-bag purge project stalled the idea. Why lose all the momentum, all the space gained in closets and cabinets? Some of my clothes still fit fine, because sizes vary regardless of the number on the label, and different materials and styles are more or less forgiving. Plus, belts.

My hope with projects like this is to initiate a lasting change in habits. Last year's failed Ten of Tens was an effort to find some areas where I could move permanently in the direction of greater sustainability; if the 40-bag purge leaves me with an on-going aversion to shopping, so that I quit over-buying because stuff is on sale, that would be a great outcome.

Stay tuned.

Disability Theory and Illness

I've been trying for some years to think about chronic illness through theories of disability, but it's a very problematic fit. I'm writing this post in the hopes that some of you my readers may point me to articles or books that might help me think this through... if they exist. And if I'm giving disability theory short shrift, I'd appreciate corrections as well.

-----

A core insight of disability theory, as I understand it, is to understand disability not in terms of physical impairment but rather as social construction. This means, for instance, that a person who uses a wheelchair is disabled by physical environments that require stairs for navigation, not by the condition of using the wheelchair in the first place.

To some extent, I can understand my own illness as constructed by social environments. When I was first looking for my first job after college as a newspaper reporter, I applied for a position where, I was told, the newsroom was a smoking area, and if I were to work there, I'd have to live with it. I couldn't pursue the job because I wouldn't have been able to breathe. So the changes to US law making most indoor places smoke-free have a significant structural effect, enabling me to work and eliminating impairment as the relevant conceptual framework.

A few years later I applied for another job where it turned out the employer, who worked from home as a literary agent, had a cat. Again, I had to turn down the job. Keeping cats as indoor pets is another socially constructed phenomenon, i.e., it's not "normal" or "natural" that people should do so, but culturally determined: cats were probably domesticated around 4000 years ago, probably by Egyptians. On the other hand, cats are, well, natural creatures. Mushrooms are also natural, as are forest fires, at least some of the time. One of my worst attacks occurred while packpacking several hundred miles downwind of a forest fire, another after eating mushrooms.

The other side of arguing for social construction as the site of disability is that it downplays the role of impairment.

It would be one thing to have to forego the occasional workout; anyone who's ever had a cold can probably imagine not wanting to go for a long run while seriously congested. But when breathing difficulties affect even talking and eating, then the notion of "impairment" becomes crucially important, and a focus on seeking out medical resources to mitigate impairment becomes a critical first step.

Disability theory helps me to formulate ideas about how our culture constructs the notion of "normal" and renders invisible people who don't fit that construction. It helps me to fight back against the idea that medical patients should be passive objects in the all-knowing medical enterprise. (Feminist approaches to women's health were, in fact, instrumental for me in coming to that perspective.) But it doesn't help me work through ideas about how impairment, and reliance on medical help in managing impairment, fit within disability theory.

Sometimes, Despair

Do I write a post about how hard it is, sometimes, to keep my chin up? About how aggravating it sometimes is, to have asthma that's triggered by upper respiratory infections and by multiple allergies, environmental as well as food, and is also around, year-round, as an underlying thing, and it's not always possible to "manage" and keep from flaring up, and sometimes I just get TIRED, from the medication side effects and the sleep loss and the on-going fatigue of having the disease in the first place, and of over-compensating all the time so people won't see me as being sick or sickly and writing me off? About how sometimes nevertheless I feel I am too sickly and I worry I'm just not doing my job effectively?

And above all else, how I curse the knowledge that I've passed the disease on to The Offspring and he will have to live with it his whole life, unless some day Medicine finds a cure?

But that all feels like whining, and complaining, and we in the kingdom of the sick are supposed to be above all grateful for all that the medical profession offers, not to complain about the side effects or the fact that only symptoms can be treated, because sometimes there's no cure, or when medical assistants treat you like meat (there aren't many of those, the vast majority of medical professionals at every level are compassionate and gentle, but the other few are oh so memorable), above all patient, patient with medications that don't work right, and patient with side effects, and patient when medications that do work well get taken off the market, whether because the drug companies can't make money on them or because the side effects turn out to be too dangerous, patient with the process, the endless rounds of doctors' appointments and medication refills and medical billing errors that will never end until I do.

And grateful for the opportunities Medicine affords to be ferried back, close, so tantalizingly close, to the kingdom of the healthy, sometimes even to travel within it and to pass as one who belongs, but never truly of it, because there's always the knowledge that one slip -- a label misread, a mistake by a waiter, a thoughtless smoker, an unanticipated cat, a virus making the rounds -- will eject me from the kingdom, propelling me forcefully back to the other shore.

Today, the kingdom of the sick is my sofa, surrounded by bottles of pills and glasses of water and medical paraphernalia and books and iPad and my phone. One of the pills will not let me sleep, and so all I can do is stay put, try to rest, try to let my body heal itself. I'm too fuzzy-headed to work, which is probably a blessing, because it means I can't try, but MUST rest.

And these are not first-world problems, exactly, but they are certainly problems shaped and formed by first-world privileges of various sorts, and even as I want to cry out with frustration and fatigue I remind myself of the vast network of privilege that has long kept me alive in these conditions, and still today keeps me relatively comfortable in the dealing with them. 

I write about life with chronic illness because I want to push back against those strong social currents that suggest that happiness is possible only for the healthy. ("Health isn't the most important thing, it's the only thing.") To push back against the not-so-subtle claim that we're in control, and if we fail at health, we're responsible and at fault. And I guess it's also important to acknowledge that it's not always possible to remain cheery. I have to admit to the despair that somtimes comes.