It's 2:30 in the afternoon and I'm not dressed yet

I suppose this would be more meaningful if it were not Saturday, when most people don't get dressed before 2:30 in the afternoon, but rest assured that if I wanted to I could do this any day of the week.

That's all.

Master² Fob

Last night was the Information School convocation. The university-wide commencement is going on right now, but I decided I didn't need three more hours of sitting in my robes of the unholy priesthood in order to feel graduated. FoxyJ, my mom, my parents-in-law, and my sister-in-law were all at the convocation last night so they can bear witness that I did indeed have my name called, walk across a stage, get hooded, and receive a fake diploma.

I had a strange sense of disconnectedness last night. As opposed to the last two times I graduated from college, this time I didn't quite feel like I belonged there. As I sat there listening to the speeches and watching my fellow graduates walk across the stage, I tried to figure out why I had this strong sense of detachment.

I decided it comes largely from the way I approached this program. Whereas I got my English degrees more than anything because I loved studying literature, I came here with only one goal in mind--to earn the degree I needed to get a better library job. This was never meant to be a wonderful college experience but rather a means to an end, a necessary hoop I had to jump through to move forward in my career. With this in mind, I didn't get very involved in school beyond taking classes.

I did work in the library last year and I'm glad I did because if not I might not have made any friends at all. This past year, though, I quit my reference job to volunteer in cataloging, where I worked with cataloging librarians but very few students, and on top of that I had a fellowship that required me to take Spanish and European studies courses so I was taking only about one class from my program per quarter. This last quarter my one LIS class was an online course (and a bad experience at that), so I had basically no live interaction at all with LIS students.

And then there's the fact that last year my personal life was a complete mess so now there are some less-than-pleasant memories associated with my UW experience, and of course the fact that I'm not jumping right into a library career as I'd planned to, calling into question the point of all this. I remind myself, though, that I did learn some valuable things here and I did have some great experiences, and my degree will be very practical and useful a year or two from now when I'm ready for a full-time job. Apart from the degree, here are some of the happy memories I'm taking with me:

• Everything cataloging-related. My cataloging courses were my favorite LIS classes and my volunteer work at the library was a blast.
• I also had a great metadata class where I stretched myself to learn completely new and unfamiliar concepts, and even though I'll probably never use these skills I really loved my readers' advisory course with superlibrarian Nancy Pearl.
  
• I taught myself html and css well enough to make this portfolio from scratch (no html editing software, thank you very much). If you're at all familiar with the back-end of library catalogs or can imagine you were, it's pretty damn cool. The iSchool liked it enough to use it as one of the sample portfolios on their website.
  
• I had some great jobs here--in the library, in admissions, even the fancy soap and silverware store that got me through that first quarter.
  
• Speaking of which, I only paid tuition that first quarter and then last summer quarter. All five of my other quarters were paid for either by my admissions job or my FLAS fellowship.
• And speaking of my FLAS fellowship, the three Spanish classes I took this year were among my favorite classes ever, particularly my play production course (which reminds me--I finally got the DVD of our plays this week so I'll have to figure out how to YouTube a couple scenes).
• Perhaps one of the best experiences here for our family has been not mine but S-Boogie's--she got to be in a wonderful (and free) preschool program and made some great friends there, at church, and in our apartment complex.

So yeah, overall there has been some real good to come out of these past two years. But I'm ready now to move onto the next phase--my stay-at-home dad phase, Foxy's PhD phase, S-Boogie's kindergarten phase, and Little Dude's Terrible Two phase. Okay, maybe that last part not so much. But still.

Finish Line in Sight

Today I attended my Last Class Forever And Ever Until The End Of Time and then I went to the student union building to pick up my cap and gown--which after next weekend will hang in my closet Forever And Ever Until The End Of Time because they made me buy them instead of renting, as I did the last two times I graduated. In the next day or two I need to finish up one last small assignment, and then next Wednesday I will take a final and be done with school Forever And Ever Until The End Of Time .

P.S. Graduation is next week Friday (school convocation) and Saturday (general procession). I accept gifts in the form of cash, check, money order, or Amazon.com gift certificates. iTunes gift cards are also cool.

A Little Confession

As much as I love the Foxmobile and know it was the best choice for our family, I still have Prius envy. Every time I see a Prius pass by (every eleventh car in Seattle--I counted), I think of the gas we would save and more importantly, the message we would send if we had our very own Prius: that we are tree-hugging, war-hating*, trash-recycling liberals and proud of it. But alas, even a five-year-old Prius would have cost more than our brand new Rondo, and without the sixth and seventh seats in back. I suppose I'll just have to start a blog in order to broadcast my liberal haughtiness.


*I'm not sure, but I think all Priuses come equipped with anti-war and/or anti-Bush bumper stickers.

Out with the Old, In with the New

Today, seven years to the day (if I recall correctly) since I drove it off the Chevrolet lot in Provo, the Fobmobile left our family to go to the big used car lot in the sky. Either that or the big used car lot in Kirkland--I'm not too sure where exactly the Kia dealer will be taking it.

Although the new car is more literally a Fobmobile than the last one, having come Fresh Off the Boat from Korea and then into our hands after a week of being stuck in the port of Tacoma (had to get its immigration papers in order), I think this new car will be called the Foxmobile. Foxy's name is first on the loan paperwork because she has slightly better credit than I do (though the dealer assured us that we both have impeccable credit, thank you very much), and at any rate after seven years of driving a car named after me it's time she had her turn.

The Foxmobile is a 2008 Kia Rondo. We decided on the Rondo because it seats up to seven people but is one of the most fuel efficient vehicles of its size. It's sort of a cross between a large station wagon and a small van, with just a touch of SUV thrown in. It's really not very large on the outside, but has that extra room on the inside for cargo on road trips or for giving people a ride without making them feel like the children's car seats are on the verge of shoving them out the window. We were close to getting a Mazda 5 instead, but we liked the fact that the Rondo is less minivanny and, with rebates, a couple thousand dollars cheaper. We'd been planning on buying a one- or two-year-old used vehicle, but the Rondo has only been around for a year and we couldn't find any used '07s that were more than a couple hundred dollars cheaper than we could get a brand new one.


As you can probably see, you wouldn't want to drive around with six full-grown passengers on a daily basis nor would it be possible to do so and also have anything more than a little duffel bag in back, but we can certainly fit a fifth person in comfortably (like when we're staying with my mom this summer and don't want to leave her stranded at home while we go gallivanting about Utah), and it's nice to have the seven-person capacity as an option.

But the absolute best feature of all, that which we've lusted after for seven years now (and honestly, all my life)?

Power locks and power windows (with remote entry, to boot). Welcome to the twenty-first century, J-Fob family. Or at least the last decade of the twentieth.

Birthday Reflections and Self-Evident Truths

Today was Little Dude's second birthday. We had a nice little family party with balloons, presents, veggie burgers, and a very cool bus-shaped birthday cake that FoxyJ made.

One year ago we celebrated LD's first birthday with yummy food and cupcakes and a few friends. Besides the additional company, the big difference last year was that, even though I helped out with the barbecue, I was technically a guest. Foxy and I had been separated for a couple months at that point, with plans to divorce. For LD's birthday, though, we played the role of happy family, not to fool our friends who were very aware of our current situation, but because the role came rather naturally to us, all things considered.

I have a very distinct memory of sitting on the floor during the party, watching the kids play while Foxy chatted with the adults. I looked around and thought, "This is my home. This is where I'm happy." As far as I can recall, that was the first time since moving out that I really questioned whether being divorced is what I really wanted. I had questioned to the point of obsession whether it was the right decision, but until then I was fairly convinced that it was what I wanted, speaking strictly of selfish motivations.

Wary of making a rash decision I'd regret later, I didn't act right away on that thought. I let it sit for a few weeks and in the meantime paid close attention to how I felt when I was with FoxyJ--we had an arrangement during the separation where we were having family dinners together at least twice a week, and then there were the drop-off and pick-up times on the weekend as well. I was far from miserable in my newfound bachelorhood, enjoying above all the time alone it gave me, but I was surprised to find that I felt even happier when I was with Foxy and the kids. I found that, all questions of morality and religion and responsibility aside, I actually liked the life I'd had and chosen to leave behind.

The next question to answer was whether Foxy was happier with me or without me, and after a bit of trial time she decided she could live without me just fine, but if she had a choice she'd rather not. It's nice when things work out that way.

It's strange now to think about how different things were a year ago. Objectively I recognize that less than a year after reuniting it's premature to make any sweeping conclusions about the longterm success of our marriage, but speaking subjectively and in the moment it's hard to imagine anything other than the us that exists now, to imagine that it was ever in question or that it ever could be. I'm a complete person alone but I'm completer with Foxy and the two of us together with our two children feels to me like a self-evident truth that stands at the center of the universe.

Perhaps this is why I've talked about our marriage here quite a bit less in the last year than I did before that. In the past my talking publicly about our reasons for getting and staying married has led some people to believe that I was opening the topic for public debate. How can I debate truths that are self-evident to me? Thankfully, when it comes to matters that affect only our family, I don't have to. So long as the same truths are self-evident to me and Foxy, we're good.

At any rate, I'm happy to have spent today with my son, my daughter, and with a woman who makes creative cakes, who folds origami boat invitations for our daughter's upcoming going-away party, who writes thoughtful posts on the seemingly miraculous birth of our son and how that fits into a world where similar miracles are denied to others, who answers just about every random trivia question I throw at her (and knows what she's talking about 95% of the time), who gets annoyed with people who ask how I feel about being a "Mr. Mom" but is empathetic enough to understand the cultural norms behind such sexist terminology and judge not the people but the norms, who cooks mostly vegetarian because the meat industry is destroying the environment, who regularly exposes me to cool foreign and classic films that I might never have heard of if not for her, who has now qualified twice to be in Jeopardy!'s contestant pool, and most of all who continues to love me despite my personal shortcomings, my eccentric obsessions and time-consuming hobbies, my inability to express emotions in a healthy way, and my passive-aggressive tendencies. I look forward to celebrating LD's twelfth and eighteenth and forty-ninth birthdays by her side.

Typos (A FobRant)

Believe me, I understand typos. Even though I obsessively read each blog post two or three times before publishing, I know the occasional typo sneaks through here. There are situations, though, where they should not exist. Among these are professionally published books. Nothing takes me out of fiction more than having to mentally reconstruct what the narrator meant to say, and nothing is more useless than a textbook that obscures the facts it's trying to teach in language that forces the reader to guess.

The situation where typos are unacceptable are in teacher feedback on class assignments. I'm not talking about simple misspellings here, where the student knows exactly what the teacher is saying, but rather the exclusion of key words that completely change the meaning of your intended message, like saying "You have included discussion of the Keller’s ARCS model of teaching model" when you meant to say "You have not included discussion..." (Notice I'm not complaining about the redundant model here.) Besides confusing the student, such thoughtless oversights send a clear message that you are rushing through the grading process and not paying much attention. I understand that it takes a long time to grade--I decided not to be a teacher largely because I got burnt out from grading 80 12-page papers in the course of a week--but that's an inevitable reality of teaching. It sucks, but you're the one who chose the career. If you'd given my paper just a little more attention, you might not only have missed that typo, but you might have noticed that I did in fact discuss Keller's damn ARCS model of teaching model.