What a long, strange trip it's been

In tenure-file hell (thanks to Cath Gouge for the photo!)

A few days ago, Romantoes marked its four-year anniversary.  Our inaugural post focused on the end of our first semester here at West Virginia University, after Tom and I both ditched tenured jobs in Colorado to move back east.

Yesterday, I turned in my tenure crate.  Yes, crate.

Don't let appearances fool you--that's not just any plastic milk crate, but the College of Arts & Sciences "official container," as the e-mail from our Department admin described it.  And, indeed, it has stickers all over it identifying where it came from, and who it's to be returned to. 

Because I'd gotten tenure at my previous university, I figured it'd be no sweat to be untenured again.  To some degree, that was true: it was certainly less of a scramble to figure out how to juggle the teaching, research, and service parts of the job.  And I was largely unfazed by a lot of bureaucratic snafus that might otherwise have derailed me.

But in other ways, the experience of being untenured was much the same.  I've worried about making some huge mistake that would cost me my job.  I've been paranoid about whether people think that hiring me was a bad idea.  I've compared my own productivity unfavorably with pretty much everyone else on campus.

The tenure file itself, as you can see, is a monster.  We're required to include all of the materials that were in our past annual evaluation files, but they need to be disassembled, reorganized chronologically, and re-numbered and re-inventoried.  That part of the process nearly drove me mad, and I'm actually the kind of person who loves organizing stuff; I mean, one of the perks of this scheme was that it gave me an excuse to wander the aisles of Office Depot, debating the relative merits of reinforced hanging folders versus expandable ones.

At the end of last week, this is what my desk looked like.

Yes, I'd arranged everything into piles for each section that conveniently spelled out the word "PARTS":  "Preliminary" materials, "Administrative" materials, "Research," "Teaching," and "Service."  Clearly, I'd gone round the twist, as the Brits say.  I can't tell you how many people stopped in my doorway to laugh at me.  (This is one of the downsides of having an office located directly across from the first-floor women's restroom.)

But at any rate, I finally got everything printed out, numbered, inventoried, put in its correctly labeled folder, and transferred into the crate.  And then I hefted that bad boy down to the office and officially let it go. 

And you know what?  I knew I'd feel relieved, but I figured I'd just feel relieved in the same way you feel relieved when any big project is over.  After all, I'd gone through this before, right?  So it's not like it's a novel experience. 

But the thing is, turning that file in felt very different this time.  It felt not like an ending, but like a beginning.  In many ways, it felt like I was emerging from a four-year purgatory.  Seriously.  I don't think I comprehended just how tentative my position has felt for the past four years until I reviewed it, articulated it, packed it into that crate, and sent it off to someone else to evaluate.  All day today I've had a sense of placid liberation. 

I'm sure the anxiety will rear its ugly head again eventually, as I await the decision of the Chair and the faculty evaluation committee.  But anxiety is absolutely what I don't feel at the moment.  The word that springs to mind, oddly, is "sanctified," though for the life of me I don't think I could explain why. 

At Northern Colorado, after a couple of folks in our department got tenure, a colleague bought them a congratulatory cake that said "Greeley Forever."  Everyone laughed, and grimaced, and knew that inscription was half joke, half grim reality.  It was one of the many moments that led me to question the sacred cow that is tenure: why work so hard to get it if you assume it means you're stuck in a place and a job that you don't like?

Looking back on this blog's first entry from the vantage point of having just applied for tenure again, I'm happy to report that the sense of trepidation that comes through in that first post is gone, while the sense of wonder and pleasure about being here has only grown.  Here's to taking the leap.

Who, us--"Stylish"?

That was my reaction when I discovered this morning that my friend Beth nominated Romantoes for the "Stylish Blogger Award."  As she notes, it's a chain-letter type of award:  you get nominated, you nominate others, they nominate others, and so on and so on and so on...

As Beth says, "Appreciation is best shared out loud," so I'll thank her for the nod, and pass the award on to those whose work I enjoy.  The meme asks you to list 15 blogs, or however many you think are deserving.

I read too many blogs (or more accurately, I subscribe to more than I can keep up with).  So for me, it's about the ones I can't delete, even when Google Reader tells me I have 300+ unread posts.  As for the others:  sorry.  Sometimes hitting that "Mark All As Read" button just feels too satisfying.

Many of these are listed in the Blogroll to your right, so I'll give a blanket award to them all.  But several of those deserve special mention, including Beth's beautiful and witty photo blog, The Daily Devil.  Beth also nominated another photo blog to which I'd award the Stylish Blogger crown, Spines' alt.tedium.* 

When I want thoughtful, insightful, and drop-dead gorgeous prose, I turn to two others on that list:  Christy's Neighborhood Watch and Jane's Leaf-Stitch-Word.

Christy is a friend of mine from way back (high school), and I loved her wit and brilliance then, and I appreciate those qualities even more now as she directs them toward questions of what makes a struggling urban neighborhood in Chicago work, and how to face its challenges.  Reading her work always makes me think more critically and sensitively about how I live in my own world.

Jane is a friend from college--well, from a very brief but troubled moment in my college history.  We lost touch and reconnected through Facebook a few years ago, and it's no exaggeration to say that the re-acquaintance has gone a long way toward healing some of the old scars from that experience. 

My memories of her had always been positive:  she was so smart, so funny, so level-headed, so curious and kind and unassuming.  And so she is in her writing, too.  It never fails to move me, and now she's added an additional blogging venture focused on her adventures with Type 1 diabetes at sweetlife.org, so I get a double dose of her goodness.  Both Christy and Jane's work helps me take more risks with my own writing.  Thanks to you both!

Then there are the blogs that make me laugh--I never delete those.  Among them are Retro Recipe Attempts, which chronicles "Retrochef's" fearless preparation of such culinary delights as Jellied Bullion with Frankfurters and Veg-All Pie Plate Salad.

I also love Better Book Titles, in which people submit Photoshopped covers of well-known books with titles that more accurately reflect their content, such as this one for Robinson Crusoe, this one for Walden, or this one for Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

In a similar vein, there's Awful Library Books, which features, well, awful library books that submitters--mostly public librarians--have found while weeding the stacks.  This "best (i.e., worst)-of 2010" post provides a taste of the blog's flavor.  But be warned:  this Burt Reynolds book is just plain unappetizing.

Random weirdness:  Scanwiches, which is just what it sounds like:  scanned images of sandwiches in cross-section.  And Running from Camera, which features a guy, well, running away from a camera, usually somewhere in the Netherlands.

Gotta give a nod to some of the work-related blogs that I read, too.  There are about 1.5 million young-adult literature blogs, but among the many that are must-reads for me are the following:

Lee Wind's I'm Here, I'm Queer...Now what the Hell Do I Read?
Pickled Bananas, written by a ten-year-old bibliophile
The Graphic Classroom, a blog that reviews graphic novels and passionately and persuasively argues for their inclusion in the K-12 curriculum
Guys' Lit Wire, which recommends books for those reading-resistant boys in your life.

I'm also gonna put in a plug here for my friend Erin McCahan's blog, Beach Notes.  Erin is a young-adult writer whose first book, I Now Pronounce You Someone Else (2010), was one of seven finalists for this year's Cybils, the Children's and Young Adult Bloggers' Literary Awards.  Erin is a bit of a reluctant blogger, but I love to read her stuff, so let's urge her on, OK?

So...I'm up to fourteen now, right?  Let's see...what do those Hollywood types do when they're blanking out on names, and the orchestra strikes up the get-off-the-stage music?  Oh yeah:  they apologize for leaving anyone out, and reassure those they unintentionally overlooked that they're appreciated and loved just as much as those who were mentioned by name.

*I might note here that the title of Spines' blog was inspired by a running joke that a group of us had almost 20 years ago in grad school about what we'd call a Usenet newsgroup of our e-mail conversations.  We were old-school internet nerds, baby!

Wherein Rosemary tears up her PhD and hires on at McDonald's

Part of my job at WVU is to work with our English-education majors, both in the classes I teach--especially the young-adult literature class--and out in the local schools where they're doing their observations and student teaching.

I love this aspect of my work, and in fact applied for the job here three years ago specifically to do more of this sort of thing, which I'd started doing at UNC when we were short an English-ed faculty member or two.  There are few things more rewarding than working with future teachers, and seeing (sometimes in scary ways) exactly how the content students learn in their English major gets filtered down to the high-school classroom.

And then, I come across something like this.  Perusing our SiteMeter stats for this week to see how people arrived at Romantoes, I learned that someone in Port Saint Lucie, Florida, found us by Googling "the advenchers of tom scourer who is the author."

You know, Tom Scourer, by Samyul Clemmunts, better known as Margt Wayne.  Sigh.

Wow--people actually read blogs!

I had an interesting voice mail on my work phone yesterday, from a guy in Charleston, who said he needed to talk to me about some of the things I'd been finding out at yard sales and so on. It took me a little by surprise, and it wasn't until he mentioned some old WVU dance cards that I realized he was talking about an old blog here on Romantoes.

Apparently, one of the dance bands mentioned there had been led by his dad back in the 1920s, and he had been surprised and delighted to see his dad's name on our blog.

I was surprised, too, I can tell you. We write here on this blog a) for ourselves, b) for a small group of people who we know are readers because they comment or give us occasional feedback in other ways, and c) for a possibly somewhat larger group of more-or-less regular readers who don't comment all that often--and that's about it. But sometimes, it seems like there's other folks who find something of interest on our blog, and it was a pleasant surprise to be reminded of that.

I called him back this evening, and we chatted about this and that (everything from comic books to rescue cats), before the Mountaineers game got started.

It turned out that only one of our dance cards came from a dance where this guy's dad had played, which was kind of a shame. But the card itself is a sweet little thing, from the Pi Beta Phi Spring Formal, March 26, 1927. The band is listed, there's a dozen spaces for names of dance partners (none filled in, in this case), and lists of Patronesses, Chaperones, and Active Members of the sorority. But it's got a nice leather cover and some neat glassine endpapers in a very 1920s spiderweb design.

I'll drop it in the mail to him tomorrow.


Image via CakeWrecks.

The Cake Wrecks bump

Ours is a small-time blog. And we're fine with that. We here at Romantoes have never had any pretensions about "monetizing" our blog...frankly, we're just glad that a few folks actually bother to read and comment at all.

Last weekend Jen over at Cake Wrecks was kind enough to refer her readers here for a summary of the theories that people threw out about the origins and significance of the smoking-lamb cake that she featured on her blog before Easter. I knew Cake Wrecks had a lot of readers, and for sure, we got more (and more varied) comments on that post than we usually get, so I knew that more folks than usual were reading as a result of her shout-out.

Still, I have to say I was astounded when I got on Site Meter to check our numbers for the week. On the Friday I posted that particular blog, we had 87 hits, which are great numbers for us. On the next day--after the Cake Wrecks link went live--we had 1,672 hits. The next day, it was 1,754. The average number hits per day was over 900.

Meanwhile, a sad little note at the bottom of the Site Meter summary page reminds me that when we joined Site Meter a year ago, four months after we'd started our blog, we'd had a whopping total of "405 visitors before joining." That means we had twice as many visitors per day this week than we had for the entire first four months of blogging.

Now I get why blogging is seen as a real threat to the print-journalism industry. I honestly don't think I would've had that reality driven home quite so clearly without having been the grateful and humbled recipient of the "Cake Wrecks bump."

Still, I like our loyal readers best.

And because you all are so patient, please indulge me once again by allowing me to post a Cake Wreck of my own. I sent photos of this to Jen last fall. My wreck never made the big time, perhaps because it's a little too "local" of a wreck.

The backstory: Morgantown residents are oddly proud of the fact that, after contentious football games (win or lose), students enjoy setting couches alight in the street. Now, I've lived in several college towns, and this behavior is not, unfortunately, unique to Morgantown. However, Morgantown is the only place I've lived that actually embraces couch-burning as a revered tradition.

So revered, in fact, that the creative folks at the Kroger bakery decided to immortalize it in pastry. And thus we have the Burning-Couch Cake:




And yes, I did buy it just to take photos of it and send it to Cake Wrecks. And yes, I know that's pathetic.

Wanna write a blog that's a guaranteed success? Start one about Bob Seger.

We haven't yet contributed to the "who's visiting your blog?" discussions that Jim and others have posted, mostly because at least 40% of our traffic is from people looking for images of Bob Seger. Seriously. I'm talking visits from virtually every continent on earth, though old Bob seems to enjoy a particularly obsessive fan base in Germany and France.

So, welcome, Seger fans. Though I don't share your appreciation of the "Bruce Springsteen of the Midwest," as one commenter described him, I'll aid your search by adding the following:

For those of you here for other reasons--searching for "biology geek comebacks," "tetris bookbags," or "fantasy plots we hate"--sorry. I mean, I'm really sorry.

Romantoes' lab results are in--it's a worthless, feeling neuter!

My blog is worth $1,693.62.
How much is your blog worth?

Actually, I'd like to have that $1,693.62 right now, since I just got a bill for some masonry repair that's only about fifty bucks less than that. Where do I cash in?

The "What is your blog worth?" analyzer is just one of the blog-analysis tools linked on the LibraryBytes site, along with a "Typealyzer" (analyzes your blog's Myers-Briggs type--this one's an ESFP) a Genderanalyzer (ours is "gender neutral" and proud!), and a Readability Test (not so sexy).

So, all you fellow bloggers: check it out and let us know what your blog's type is! Why does this sound like a bad 70s pickup line revised for the new millennium: "What's your blog sign, baby?" Still, I wanna know.