With a little help from my friends


If I were able to do this more, pretty much every single post would be about my friends.  It's no accident that somehow the things I write about are, underneath, really about how we strive for these relationships despite all the obstacles.   



I don't want to write about how much I miss the community of people who held me together in Pelham and Amherst.  It's one of the other critical aspects of my life where words fail.  I have been working hard on finding local friends. I'm doing okay at it. Not great, mind you, but okay.  The cultural divide is sometimes uncrossable, the geography of suburbia unforgiving, and the weirdness of academia infuriating.   The other day I compared it to how my African American students feel when they are in the minority in class and everyone expects them to "speak" for the black experience.  

As. if. there. were. just. one.  

Through all this, I am unaccountably blessed (and I almost never use that word) with a far-flung network of friends, most of whom are academics, most write about food, and most (but not all) are women.   We usually see each other once a year at a conference, sometimes more by chance and luck.   But we talk on email every week and by Friday I am always laughing.  This week one friend (she is a budget goddess in an academic school) had a boss who really needs a time out (for those of you without kids, follow the link).  Another has a new college president with plans for borrowing heavily and building an amusement park on the campus (I am honestly not exaggerating much here: an example and another).   A third one spent the week doing administrative work requested by her chair (work the chair probably should have done herself), only to have the information deemed "irrelevant" in a meeting by -- you guessed it -- the same chair.  My other two friends are struggling with tenure, underpaid, and have toddlers.  That should be enough right there.  Me: well, there's always a saga.  This week I read the program for my beloved conference (the place where the universe comes together and the planets align) and lo and behold, the department chair who was central to my intimate understanding of sexual harassment as "hostile work environment" is presenting a paper at my conference. MY conference.  where I go to be with MY friends.   

Being my beloved friends, they devised at least seven terrific ways to make me feel safe, including something called the Cape Breton Liberation Army, which involves seagulls on laxatives.    Since we'd all planned on coming to the conference in our favorite Michelle Obama outfits (yes, we love her), I suspect that our showing of arms (the flesh kind) will be enough of a wall of protection (although my Italian friend says he does not look so good in pumps and pearls...)

This Friday, we each strategized our survival: infusing ginger ale with alcohol, living closer so we can share hair dye (a joke I cannot explain, but I do not believe any of us actually use hair dye, although I think at least a few might have gone for purple in the 80s), and watching movies all weekend long.   

Do you think this is what the Beatles had in mind?  I do.



turtle image from here.

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