Tense day

It is snowing heavily, and I am afraid that my husband's flight home may be delayed or canceled. Fingers crossed.

I have a lot of work to do, but instead of doing the academic work, I'm washing sheets and taking out trash, etc. That must mean that I want my husband to be home! I am even washing his pillow cover. How in the world that man can get so greasy, I do not know. He has oily skin, and even though he is an impeccably clean person, and he always washes his face before bed, he gets the pillow cover (not just the case) really dirty and stained. I remember that his dad was like that. My mother-in-law had put a cover on his chair where his head rested because he stained it so badly.

Simon is eager for "Daddy" to be home, too. He won't know what to think with our schedule change. I'm going to have to drive up to Big Rapids on Sunday afternoons because I'll be teaching Mondays and Wednesdays. My husband will be teaching Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'll probably often wait until Thursday to drive home because of various events, meetings, etc., but having a "long" weekend (Thursday-Sunday) will be nice.

I've been rethinking my analogy of the bell jar that so many people live in, especially people who live in the same area all their lives and don't ever see how other people live, think, work, and make sense of the world. My husband calls it their "echo chamber" (he got the idea from another source, he says). They don't want to hear any opinion except ones identical to their own--like shouting out something over a ravine and having an echo of the same words come back. I like that analogy, but another one has come to me, a version of the bell jar. A fish bowl. A little bitty dirty fish bowl, with water so murky that the fish in it can't see very far. They are living in the poison of their own worlds and don't know it because they think others live the same way. It is a shock to them (if indeed they ever come to that point) that someone else can live differently. I am thinking in particular of my Louisiana relatives. In a long conversation with Sylvia (my late uncle's wife--she and I are quite similar in age and outlook), we discussed this idea and wondered how people could live the way that so many of our relatives seem to live. She told me that the Houston relatives (my mother's people) consider me "uppity" (which she said I should consider a compliment) because I managed to get myself educated and don't still dwell in narrow-minded squalor in the dirty fish bowl.

I've been thinking of the ways in which I am different from my Louisiana/Texas relatives, and one of the biggest, perhaps the most important, is my love of and value of language. Of course, language is my business. I can no more use language loosely and trivially (using "your" instead of "you're" or using--as one of my students recently did--"forgotten" instead of "begotten") than I could loosely and trivially substitute ingredients in a recipe. Imagine that the recipe called for cubed chicken, but the cook, not having cubed chicken, decided to use cubed apple instead. The chicken a la king would hardly be the same, yet so many people think it's okay to (mis)use words that don't mean the same thing in the least. Then when I ask them what they mean or meant, they get angry (like my relative Sue did).

Language is one way I'm different. Like George Carlin, I love playing with it. I love seeing relationships. It occurred to me that batteries and bras both come in AAA, AA, A, B, C, and D. (Bras, of course, don't come in 9-volt, but maybe they should, especially for women who have been surgically enhanced!)

So much to do--and I don't want to do most of it.