Summertime . . .

and the living is hot. Like really hot. Like "Oh, good Lord, where's the ice bath?!" hot.

The first 100 degree day of summer is upon us here in Kansas. Instead of getting cranky about it as I sweat to death on my couch, I want to write about my favorite summer things. The power of positive thinking and all that.  ;)

Here's what I love about summer:

1. Produce, produce, produce. There's so much delicious fruit in grocery stores and at the farmers' market that I actually have to work to eat it all. It's fantastic: first come the strawberries, then the nectarines and peaches, then the melons, and, of course, there are always the apples to look forward to in the fall. And don't even get me started on the cucumbers and salad greens! Ooooo, the salad greens! (Okay, so I like food--can you tell?)
2. The smell of barbecue. I like the taste, too, but barbecue is so heavy that I prefer salads and hummus and veggie-based dishes in the summer. Ugh, who can handle a belly full of greasy brats and burgers when it's this hot? But the smell permeates my neighborhood as the college kids crack open beers and grill on their decks. All of downtown is rich with charcoal smoke, Frisbee games, and lawn chairs.
3. How cold things taste extra amazing. Ice cream. Popsicles. Frosted and dripping bottles of beer straight from a cooler. Enough said.
4. The lake. I haven't gone swimming this year, but I'm desperate to! I miss wasting a whole afternoon splashing around in Clinton Lake between rounds of laying out under the blistering sun. (Well sun screened, of course!) And it's weird, I know, but I love the smell of the lake--it's so rich, so fishy and dirty and musty and gloppy somehow. It smells alive. I like it much, much better than chlorine.
5. Music. There are silly summer hits on the radio and fantastic concerts in Kansas City every night of the week. I've only gone to one show so far this year, but I've passed up about four great ones due to time conflicts. The music industry (and the whole world, it seems) is so gloriously busy in summer!
6. Nighttime. For me, my least favorite thing about summer is that the heat makes it hard to get a good night's sleep (at least in my apartment!). But the upside is that everyone seems to stay up a little bit later to take advantage of the cool night air. Summer nights are great for parties, for camping, for movie marathons, and for reading late into the night. There's something truly wonderful about being up at 3:00 a.m. on a summer night to hear the cicadas singing in the cool, damp air, and watching the moon high and bright overhead.
7. The haze. I love how everything and everyone slows down when it's really hot. We have no choice in the matter: the air feels like molasses. It's hard to move, to breath, to even think. The promise of heat stroke makes everyone pant, sweat, and sprawl their way slowly through the daylight hours. It's a sort of forced laziness. You have time to hear the crickets creaking, to watch the lightning bugs flicker, to smell the damp grass when twilight comes. Summer may be the loudest season--full of bugs and animals, fireworks, outdoor festivals, and wind--but  it always feels like the quietest season to me. It asks me to feel the sweat and salt on my skin, to stop moving so far and so fast, to hear my own thoughts moving through my own head. 

Opinionated

In the last year, I've found myself having more opinions, a lot more opinions: more opinions on music, on cultural figures, on literature, on fashion, on politics, and even on what I think are the best ways to live.


On the whole, I think this is great. I have more opinions not because I've started thinking more (trust me, I've always done far too much of that), but because I spent a large chunk of my growing up years thinking that the best way to get by in life was to not have any opinions. It seemed like a good way to get through the world without conflicts, without commitments, without ever making mistakes.

But now I know better: being afraid of having opinions doesn't lead to universal ease and understanding, it leads to being a damned milquetoast. Being opinionated obviously put a person at risk for experiencing disagreements and making mistakes, but not having an opinion means that a) you're not paying attention, b) you're not interested, or c) you don't have enough guts to try to be anyone at all, even yourself. To me, being opinionated means not that you're incapable of being wrong, but that you're confident and grown-up enough to handle being wrong every once in awhile.

But note the "on the whole" up above. What makes being opinionated less than perfect is that it's not all that useful for writing. There are some types of writing that are built on opinion and argument, of course--opinion columns, blogs, persuasive and academic writing of all kinds--but the types of writing I love aren't at their best when they're opinionated. Personal essays and poetry thrive on ambiguity, on challenging the pat answer, on withholding judgment for as long as possible for the sake of complexity, honesty, and surprise.

Keats's negative capability is probably the most famous statement of this--"when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason"--but I like Robert Frost's version, too: "No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." I like my writing best when I've gotten from beginning to end and realized that I've turned around on my initial opinion--I don't necessarily make a 180, but at the very least I prefer to end up at an odd angle from where I started. It helps if I write about topics that I don't already have a firm opinion about; it's much better for me to start of feeling intrigued or confused instead of confident.

Writing like this helps me to remember to hold my opinions lightly. They're great, obviously, and probably 100% correct and as brilliant as I am (like, duh!), but writing helps me remember that the world is a fantastically big, complex, and surprising place; we're all muddling through as best we can, and all of our dearest beliefs and conceptions of the world may be proven absolutely false tomorrow. Writing helps me to remember that it doesn't matter whether I'm proven right or wrong in my views, only that I must remember to laugh when I'm proven wrong and to be gracious on those rare, glorious occasions when I can call myself something like "right."

My Big Fat Summer Reading: Vanity Fair

Last summer, it was Middlemarch. This year, I'm having a go at William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair. My annual way-too-long novel read has begun!

I was inspired to read Vanity Fair for two reasons: 1) Vanity Fair, the movie.

Actually, I've never seen it, even though it came out seven years ago. I make it a point to never watch a movie about a book that I might someday want to read. I get the actors' faces in my brain and I can never get them out again, which shapes the way I visualize the characters forever and ever and ever. I was afraid that I'd watch the film and never get Reese Witherspoon out of my version of Becky Sharp again. So, basically, I couldn't watch the movie (which looked really, really tempting) on Netflix until I committed to the novel.

And 2) I came across this awesome The Hairpin article about great classic novels with mean female main characters. It was funny and clever and totally convinced me that Thackeray was worth tackling. (Carrie Hill Wilner also wrote an article that convinced me to read Charlotte Bronte's Villette, which I totally enjoyed. So she's pretty much batting a thousand at this point!)

Anyway, a long jaunt through 19th-century England felt like exactly what I was looking for this June, and, so far, it has been! The novel is rife with earnest yearning and satire, innocence and deceit, creditors and debtors, outrageous wealth and the illusion of outrageous wealth. I sort of love Becky Sharp for all her shallow, back-stabbing, social-climbing ways--she's so good at what she does that it's difficult not to admire her. She's selfish and sometimes cruel, yes, but she's also doggedly clawing her way up in the world in the only way available to her, and her savvy and determination are remarkable.

But I also love her tender-hearted, naive, helpless best frienemy Amelia Sedley. In fact, I think that Thackeray is a great novelist precisely because he makes it possible for me to love both characters. Though the novel is known as a biting work of satire, I think that, at its heart, it's also a book written with a lot of empathy, understanding, and even gentleness.

I'm about 580 pages into its 800+ pages, and I'm on a pretty good tear (now that I'm past that really dull stretch about the battle of Waterloo--sheesh!).

 In fact, the only thing I don't like about Vanity Fair's length is that I have a huge stack of library books on my kitchen table that I desperately want to get to. There's Lord of the Flies and Howard's End and Wives and Daughters and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (which is my new book club's first read!). I'm definitely looking forward to the last forth of Vanity Fair, but I have so many treats in store--it's looking to be a great summer so far!

Leading Ladies in University Administration

There are plenty of things that I love about working at a university (good karma, student hijinks, excellent benefits, an abundance of general and free-floating intelligence, etc.), and a few things that I hate about it (bureaucracy, dowdy clothes, bureaucracy, student hijinks, bureaucracy, etc.).

But one of my favorite things about being a university employee is the number of brilliant women leaders hanging around. Of the two deans and three department heads I work with, four are women, so 80% of the leadership I'm exposed to is female. They're all brilliant in their own unique ways: this one's a great communicator and an excellent team manager, that one's efficiency and ability to think long-term is unrivaled, this lady bursts with a never-ending stream of fruitful ideas, and that one's kindness creates the type of team-oriented culture that makes working for her a pleasure. My last department at the university was also lead by a brilliant female director--one with a lot of invaluable stubbornness and savvy who was able to create and shape her program from the ground up. Trust me: I've worked with a lot of impressive ladies.

In institutions of higher learning, I love that there doesn't seem to be a glass ceiling in sight. Women can be leaders and managers here and still be genuinely respected and valued by their colleagues--and have I mentioned the fact that they're usually nationally respected, brilliant scholars leading research in their respected fields? Oh, yeah, that too.  ;)

All this is great news for me because I'm surrounded by strong, intelligent, successful women who I can readily adopt as role models. It's also great news for the flood of young women entering college campuses (57% of all students graduating from universities are women, according to USA Today): they're frequently exposed to intelligent female leaders in their classrooms, heading their departments, and piloting their universities (including the recently appointed chancellor at my university!).

I like to think that seeing women in leadership roles at the university-level will encourage young female graduates to go out and believe that they can do great things in the world, because they can. Maybe in 30 years, that 57% of college graduates will translate to 57% female leadership in corporations and government--here's to hoping.  :)