Spuddle

a vocab word that’s more commonly done now than in the Before Times.

For me, anyway.

A Spuddle Puddle

This ‘spuddle’ conundrum happens to me these days mainly because of brain fog. Is it menopause or post-Covid pandemic brain? Prolly both, but at this point, it’s pretty much impossible to say which. But I have much umbrage with the Gen X stereotype of the slacker. No Gen X person I know is a slacker—we’re all riddled with a ridiculous work ethic, let alone a guilt complex whenever we do anything resembling taking time off. Self-care? Pssh. Can’t afford it. Spoons? Hand me that knife instead. Hustle culture is real, and it’s more real the more money you make. 

Well to be fair, my personal circle is relatively small. I can’t honestly speak for literally everyone in my age range, but. The people I’ve been raised with and by and around all work their nuts off, at all times. Pretending to work while not really working isn’t something I’ve ever done. Actually, I do have a thing to say about my ex-husband... Ehhh that sounds dreary—let’s talk about me and my classroom instead. 

When teaching live in a classroom or online, I never give busy work, even to freshmen. There was a strong precedent, in my early days of adjuncting and thereby teaching mainly Freshman Comp courses in person, to fill up the class time with exercises, group work, research practice, etc., making sure that the whole time is used up. Which, on the one hand, as a general policy and a most-of-the-time practice, I understand. After all, tuition is ostensibly set for a certain number of in-person hours with home-work hours, and blah blah. And yes, of course, as a well-trained writing instructor I do recognize the merits of doing writing exercises in class in real time, and let me just tell you about how well one can learn about misinformation and how to do research when it’s done with friends in a mildly competitive scavenger hunt type activity. And how it makes my plagiarism detector that much easier to deploy when I read in-class writing. But still.

In my classroom, when you’re done, you’re done. If you’re not done, you’re graded accordingly. That’s it. And I can do that a bit more readily, I admit, with college kids who aren’t really technically kids, but you’d also be surprised how much we’re still expected to hold the hands of our unwilling students, through work they should either be doing, or be asking questions about if they’re lost. I’m a professor, not their mom (yes, Virginia, even as an adjunct). But that’s a different conversation, about unpaid care labor mostly expected from women, and others have written much more fiercely and even recently about that. Like

Anne Helen Petersen

, just the other day, for one. ‘Women Are Drowning in Responsibility,’ indeed, and there’s a bunch of reasons why most adjuncts are women these days, even as most professors are adjuncts.

Though I guess learning how to do busy work is part of learning how to be in the workforce, now I think about it. But that’s not my job as a professor—my job is to teach critical thinking, good research practices, and clear writing. At least, it should be. 

I don’t know why I like this version of the image illustrating this word. Something about the drinking servant. I feel her, is what I’m saying. (Not sure what the protocol is for crediting memes, but there’s a watermark there, so.)

Missives From Lockdown

So I was doing some research about my own thoughts about today’s vocab word and its practices and how I feel about the whole thing, when I had a vague memory that I had written about this topic before, in an old blog that was the beginning of my first ventures into personal essay and memoir. I was writing it under a pen name, with a few different themes to jumpstart my attempts at daily writing there. Vocab words were one, selfies were another, and songs (or song lyrics)  were a third. So I had a vague memory that I’d written about spuddle before.

Turns out, it wasn’t spuddle but a related term: drawlatch. It doesn’t mean exactly the same thing, but I think you can see why I remembered it as such. And what an interesting window into my feelings and life during the mostly-still-locked-down times of 2020. Check it out: see how vulnerable I’m being; how uncertainly I’m shuffling my way through. What a long, strange, trippy trip it’s been, huh?

A little background: I was adjuncting at two universities at the time just before lockdown: one was mainly online (the one I still work at, still mainly online), the other was almost all in person. Lockdown happened and the in-person school became online (mid-semester, in fact), and then a while later, we cautiously tiptoed back to our live classrooms, masked and armed with hand sanitizer. Just prior to lockdown, I was commuting back and forth from work in downtown Denver to the Birdhouse in downtown Boulder, and back and forth from my partner’s place in South Denver and all those other places and etc. About 3-4 times a week. Using public transportation. The lockdown, then, moved me into my partner’s place full time, perforce (mainly on the Balcony of Sanity), and after things began opening up here and there and everywhere, I remained at his place almost all of the time still. 

The below entry is during this time of tentative openings, and I had just begun working with Herb on my memoir. The pub I refer to as a work sanctuary here is Slattery’s, and my partner’s name has been changed, for privacy on what was a public blog. Parallel Bars, that I mention here, was another pen-named blog that I’ve dipped into a few times recently, that Partner and I both contributed to. It’s still pretty rough reading and rather personal so I won’t link to it, but I have found some really great pieces on both blogs that are fodder for new stuff at least. But the following entry I’m keeping intact, because it’s such an interesting relic. I’ve done this before, but this one…

I find this particular entry interesting, for a few reasons: 1) my personal essay/memoir style is in its infancy here: you can see the buds about to bloom; you can tell I’d just started my work with a coach that was teaching me how to write like this, let alone also in the midst of teaching others how to do so. 2) it’s wild, to look back at how I was living at that time, and how I felt about it, and compare it to what’s happening now: how my relationship with my partner has strengthened and deepened, how my relationship with my stepkids has grown by leaps and bounds, how accustomed I am to being here and not ever in Boulder anymore, and yet… just… just, wow. We went through it, man. All of us that are left, we went *through* it. 

Read this little delicate mini-essay of mine from 2020 that I’ve shared below, and after? Give yourself a pat on the back, a scoop of ice cream, or a wee dram. Or all three. You deserve it.

DRAWLATCH  

(from August 2020)

This word does not refer to artistic talent and door handles—rather, it’s something I’ve suffered from on & off for quite some time, that’s been exacerbated by something that I’ve heard called Quarantine Brain.

Back when I was more frequently and regularly back and forth from Seamus’ Chateau to my own Birdhouse, I would often need to gather up my work and take it to a pub, just to be able to get it done. Home was too distracting, maybe? Or maybe it was more a matter of being overwhelmed—that anything I brought with me in my little briefcase (whether it was to t’pub or to Seamus’) was all I let myself work on. Not that there wasn’t always the internet in my pocket, but. It parceled out the work, and made the parcels digestible, doable.

Now that Seamus’ place is where I am pretty much 24-7, and the odd version of cabin fever that comes with the quarantine has absolutely set in, I find I need to take drastic measures to get all the work done I need to. On the one hand, having Seamus on the horn in his business meetings all day does mean I’m in work mode more hours of more days than would be true at the Birdhouse, it also means that getting anything (let alone everything) done is like pulling teeth. It’s a weird paradox but it’s true. And so I’ve started to do little tricks for myself so that I can keep up with all the work that paralyzes me with its volume. I’ve noticed in recent weeks (especially since we came back from our vacation in the mountains at Seamus’ mom’s place), that it takes me hours to accomplish a relatively small volume of work. Now some of that has to do with me actually attending live trainings and faculty meetings, which in the Before Times I would skip, and being distracted by children which was never a thing in my life before, but it’s more than that. I’m noticing that I’m getting energetically and emotionally overwhelmed with a relatively low amount of work. Because of this, I’ve started to try new things, to jumpstart my brain into getting more things actually done.

[BIG caveat: I work as a professor in writing, literature, and theatre. As such, my workload is ENORMOUS at all times. My musings above are a comparison to how I handled the workload before being locked down w/ Seamus as opposed to after. I am still overworked, underpaid, and have an intense Irish work ethic (if not guilt). So. Lest ye think I’m suddenly idly lazy or something. Nothing doing.]

Today, for example, I decided to venture out to one of the only pubs that have remained open, and also comfortable, to get the last phase of work done that I needed to. And here’s the kicker: I came out on my own, knowing Seamus was coming home from the office jaunt he’d been on, and also knowing he wasn’t going to be meeting me here. This is not usual for me in the Before Times, but I knew that if I didn’t get my cute flower-clad ass out the door, I wouldn’t have finished what I needed to. I was sinking into torpor in the apartment. In order to break even with my immense week’s work, I had to leave. So I did. Not only did I succeed at getting to a reasonable stopping point with work, but hey look—it’s the first blog post I’ve gotten done since the very beginning of the plague!

I have to say I’m thankful this place is open and with a customary (and safe) environmental bustle to support me. And since I’m living w/ Seamus full time now, I find I don’t covet the precious moments with him so much; I know I’m going home to him, I know he’ll be there when I get back, and it’s a heck of a lot healthier a way to live with a person. It’s much more like being a spouse than a girlfriend, which makes me feel quite a bit more secure. I don’t know if that makes sense or sounds creepy but it’s neither of those things and anyway I don’t have any readers here, so who cares indeed…

One of the three classes I’m teaching this summer is called Writing and Healing. As such, I’m tasked with showing my students various exercises in how to write from one’s self & one’s life. Along with many readings which are analyses and examples of same (some are both at once). Though I have given those students both this and Parallel Bars to look at as extra examples, it’s now week 8 of 10 of that class and this is the first I’ve written here in all that time. In that vein in general, even. Thinking about both these blogs as examples (or exemplars) in writing & healing goosed me today. My students deserve my walk as well as my talk. And I’m constantly telling them to just write and not worry about quality.

So.

Here there be lots of time, on not much work. That’s, I think, okay, in these cursed interesting times. Don’t you agree?