Now the pressure's really on

I got a great US book deal for more money than I deserve. Earning it out, and so getting another chance at doing this ever again, is going to be an insane challenge.

I'm going to buy a big ass espresso machine and a nice, comfortable chair for my long-suffering wife who's had to put up with my late night nattering about this and my volcanic mood swings for the past two years.

Then I'm going to curl up into a little ball and suck my thumb for a few days.

start spreadin' the news, almost

It seems that perhaps I can make it there after all.... Long-time readers will know what I mean. News pending.

Spring?

We're just off for a weekend in Toronto. In spite of the fact that I've got too many balls in the air (and a few more just about to be tossed up), I'm feeling upbeat. No particular reason to be -- I've just learned that my book pub date will be delayed, possibly for as long as six months, which means that the parts dealing with technological matters will probably need to be rewritten a couple more times. I didn't finish my main goal last week on my non-teaching week (to finish writing a paper that doesn't excite me much). We've just decided to send one of our kids to a special school next year to help her get over some of the carnage wrought by an educational system being run on a shoestring by exhausted and ill-trained teachers--I suppose this is a good thing on balance, though it will cost about the same as a year at Harvard I think. So lots of reasons not to be particularly chirpy, yet I am. I've got this sudden desire to find some room in my life for fun again. I need to get busy outside. I need to start running, or at least walking again. I need to start planning the garden (which begins with the quest to find an effective squirrel combat weapon). I need to finish the pirate story I began in LaHave. It got lost in the important upscale non-fiction foofarah, but it was a great idea.

I think spring must be coming.

I always figure that as a Canadian if you can make it to St. Patrick's Day, you've got the thing licked for yet one more year. The thing being the great white monolith we call winter.

Blowing off the day

It's reading week this week, which means no teaching for me. I've got a gazillion things that need to be done at work. So what did I do today? I stayed home, wilfed the net, talked to telemarketers, chitchatted with people over email, offered one of my extra Elton John tickets to our cute blonde neighbour, spent about two hours trying to make one simple change to my stupid friggin' el cheapo website (without any luck), watched a repairman work in our yard for a bit (ok ok we still have the hot tub but it has become more of a freezing cold moneypit this winter), tried to figure out all the features of my smartphone that I couldn't be bothered to find out about when I got it (and discovered that I couldn't really figure them out and/or that they don't work as advertised).

I did manage to make a delicious batch of lentil soup though. The great thing about soup is that if you even have the tiniest inkling of what flavours work together you can impress your friends, family, neighbours with incredibly simple brews. Start with fresh vegetables and wine and it's actually pretty hard to make bad soup.

media training

I'm still in recovery from a six hour (!) media training workshop yesterday. I used to think that the average interview was pretty much like a conversation, but with perhaps a few more formal rules, some risk, some pitfalls. Now I know better. It's like a carefully orchestrated chess game where you have a second or two to make your move rather than a few minutes. I told the instructor that as an academic, I was more accustomed to having a day, a week, or even sometimes a year to come up with an answer to a question, rather than a second or two. I will need to think differently about all of this.

Other things I learned:

1. The camera adds 50 pounds. Er, or maybe it's the years of beer and nachos.

2. My hair is far too long. I look a bit like Sitting Bull from the side.

3. When you see people on television who look as though they're shouting, it's because they're shouting, which seems to be the normal dynamic range of a tv voice. I have a fairly small voice. This will take some work.

4. The objective of an interview is to look for openings to insert "messages" which are tightly orchestrated, planned, and well rehearsed sets of two sentences, each of which has fewer than sixteen words. People say they know this is true.

Happily, my expectation is that any media coverage my book might get will likely be print or possibly radio. That somehow seems easier. They won't see me squirm and sweat.

Whatever happens, I'm glad I went through this well in advance of my book release date. There may still be time to save myself.

equanimity now!

A veritable flood of editorial feedback today, not all of it pretty. I'm really struggling hard to maintain equanimity, and I may be having some success. I seem to waver between moments where I feel as though this book stuff is just the most important thing in the entire world (very bad) and others where I step back a titch and recognize that none of this really matters. On the research front, I'm still waking up at 3 am in a panic about stuff that has to be done by next October (bad) but then thinking that I've already had a lot of fun with my work and don't really need to have a gigantic lab populated by millions of brilliant young students. In fact, I probably wouldn't even like it.

Behind all of this, standing beside me is this amazing woman who reminds me from time to time that I don't have to do any of this at all. I could just get out of this chair and walk away from it all, spend a few years playing with kids and then toddling back to that spot by the ocean. That's a perspective I like. She's my Valentine.

It's interesting, this divide between what we think we want and what we want. I'm doing experiments in my lab where a part of the agenda is to demonstrate that people think they want gigantic McMansions to live in, whereas the facts of science suggest that such abodes make them feel physically unwell. Now I wonder whether I'm falling prey to exactly the same kind of error myself, but not in my home so much as in the way I'm leading my life.

You'd think by the age of 50 I'd have figured out some stuff. Wouldn't you?

Heartburn

Valentine's Day just ain't all that for me. It's the day, five years ago, that my father willed himself off the planet. Now it's also the day I find out that a little girl was murdered and left on the banks of the river where I found my soul.

I hear the mermaids singing

Still feeling an ungodly strong pull back to our little spot on the east coast. I'm not sure what's up. Part of it I'm sure is the shifting complicated landscape in work life. I've just had a jolly year of exciting new experiments, new grants, positive feedback on my book manuscript, but now things are settling. The workload at the university is crushing -- every day sees me fall a bit further behind and in command of experiments that I know could be better if I had a bit more time to think them through. The book is at a delicate stage -- waiting for feedback on a second draft, unclear when we'll publish or what I should be doing during the wait.

Or maybe it's just a mid-February thing.

I keep coming back to this single image of myself, walking along a high bluff by the side of the ocean, watching my feet scuff the dirt, having the kinds of thoughts I never thought possible. I wonder if I'll ever get that again.

pointing me towards home

So sad to be reading the story of a little girl who disappeared from the parking lot of a shopping centre in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. This was the same parking lot, the same shopping centre, where I spent many a frigid Friday night laying in supplies for a weekend of fun in LaHave. One of the oddest memories of the place was the night in 2006 I was wandering the centre (the only one within a couple of hours drive of my village) when I was paged overhead by security and asked to return to my car. When I got there, two uniformed guards told me they'd seen teenagers lingering over the doors, acting "suspiciously" and so they thought I might have left a door unlocked.

Now, police have found the body of a young woman, buried in the snow, halfway down the highway between the shopping centre and the old oceanside house where we used to live. They're not saying it was the girl who disappeared, but it's hard to think otherwise. Also hard not to think foul play given the time spent beating the woods with dogs and diving in the nearby river.

It's horrible to even think about any of this. My own daughter, the same age as the girl who went missing blanched when she found out the news, only unclenching her fists when she heard the name and realized it was not a dear friend of hers who had lived nearby and whose father, like the missing girl's had lived in Halifax.

Most telling of all for me was that my immediate reaction was a huge wave of homesickness for the place. I spent a couple of hours afterwards scanning through realty listings, trying to imagine how we could move back. The events of the past couple of weeks have felt like an assault on something sacred to me.

Even keel

My keel is more even now after a chat with my editor and a good night's sleep. Nothing particularly encouraging from editor other than confirmation that my worst fears were simple paranoia.

I'm trying to read for fun today -- We Need to Talk About Kevin -- but am having less than great luck because my mind is jumping from place to place -- the sick boy sleeping on my couch, the mounting pile of laundry in the basement (now that my second draft is done my wife finally cashed in one of her coupons for a week away from the hamper), interesting questions from students about potassium and Alzheimer's disease and, last but not least, what to make for dinner now that we've had to cancel our social soiree due to said ailing son's big cough and fever.

I know it's temporary, but these lapses in my ability to concentrate always make me wonder if this is what it is like when age slows down mentation. I imagine that those vast numbers of neurons that I used to be able to band together to chant in unison until the solution to some difficult problem emerges are now spaced a little further apart and have to shout at each other across extracellular space. I see them leaning in towards one another, wrinkly little dendritic hands cupped around droopy synaptic spines, saying "Eh? Come again?"

Rejection

It's one thing to be rejected on the basis of a proposal. Then you're usually told it's because the idea may not quite have legs or because you're not famous enough to market. It's something else again to be rejected by an editor who's read your entire book, likes the idea, but then finds it strangely uncompelling, not quite interesting enough. Stings way more. Some days I love being a writer. Some days I'd rather just have another snow day. I'm going to handle it with the maturity and judgement of a 50 year old, though. I've got some vintage rum here somewhere.

Another snow day?

There's another wet, cold nasty, icy mass of air on the way. Don't get me wrong. I love weather. But another snow day? Could it be? Can the human heart endure? My wife went out tonight and bought me candy. What does she know?

snow day

It's been quite a week. The final day of it started about about 7 am this morning as my favourite 12 year old bellowed up the stairs to us as we were creaking out of bed:
"ITS A SNOW DAY". Sometimes this still conjures images of cozy times spent by the fire reading books and drinking cocoa, gazing on adoringly at the cherubs playing happily with lego blocks and puzzles. Sadly, the reality is a little different. One daughter stomps through the house whining that the dance she had planned to attend tonight might be cancelled. Another scours the kitchen for any food that might have mood-altering additives or high levels of transfat. One pre-schooler boy is obsessed with the words "fart" and "poop" today and will insist on shouting them to the hilltops with glee, almost as if he knows about all those parenting books we've read that tell us the one thing we must absolutely, positively NOT do is pay any attention to his obsession with scat, lest we just reinforce it. One peripatetic pre-schooler daughter is screaming back and forth through the house at high speed, often with both feet off the ground at the same time, aimed more or less horizontally at whatever the target of the moment might be. Her mother and I stare in wonder at her, marvelling that she's never had a serious injury or even a broken bone.

Then mother leaves.

She's not in the "teaching profession" as she graciously referred to it this morning (which is not what it was last night when we reviewed what some of our kids' semi-competent teachers were doing for our kids math skills. She's a healer, so she gets to go out and heal. I stay here with my broken, racking lungs, wishing for some healing myself, trying not to yell at the kids, suspending all rules. Want to surf the net? Go for it, kids. Grind that computer mouse to dust on the Bob the Builder website. Want to watch some video? Sure thing. I've got a whole season of Sopranos guaranteed to freeze your bum to the chair with horror for the whole weekend.

And through all of this, I sit ensconced in the big easy chair, trying to hold virtual office hours via chat room with students whose class was cancelled this morning. Except that chat rooms are more associated with socializing, cyberdating, goofy things. So when one student turns up and discovers that it's just her and me in the room, she flees quickly. Another struggles to find a question, and then tries to make small talk about the weather, which feels awkward. We both lapse into silence. Which, for me, is pretty easy to manage because while I'm pumping up my mind so it's ready to answer complicated questions about metabotropic neurotransmitter receptors and second messenger pathways, I'm ALSO trying to score some Elton John tickets to please my wife. Elton John. In Kitchener. Two Canadian dates: here and SUDBURY.

I've got the tickets. My chat room is empty. My kids are playing with Shrek. My lungs still hurt (even though my wife, the healer, tells me that lungs can't actually hurt....). The snow is still falling.