it was recently reported that there have been so many cases of strep throat among our city’s children that several clinic’s and pediatrician’s offices ran out of strep tests. class enrollment was low. grace seemed a little peakish yesterday when i returned home from work, felt a bit warm, and asked, do i have strep throat? i replied, why, does your throat hurt? and she gingerly answered, yes.
you see, this is my main quandary as a mother, the ultimate dilemma. do i lean toward hyper vigilance and call the pediatrician immediately and get her in there today all for the prospects of penicillin, keep her home from school, and stand at the ready to catch this so early it nips out? or do i relax and wait a couple of days to see if it’s really strep, to see if her sore throat just goes away on its own, not feed the un-immunized child antibiotics, and alleviate the stress of taking more time away from work (although deep down i don’t really care about that) and ship her off to the concrete cubicle of curiosity control? (that’s kind of a mean label for her school). does the answer fall somewhere in between?
i bumped into my old, good friend yesterday. quite literally bumped into her. she was standing at the bus station at spirit winds cafe (i was going to stick their website address in here, but it looks like it’s under construction. the text on the “about us” page reads “we are spirit winds” over and over, and then “we sometimes like dogs when they are not pooping” over and over again. weird.) anyway, her son, who during a playdate with grace when they were about 3 years old bit her in the stomach whil lori made spinach and strawberry salad and we laughed that we both enjoyed a good pampered chef party, is now 8 and tall and handsome and being homeschooled by his lovely mother who i was so excited to see. do you know those friendships where, once upon a time in our youth we were the best of friends, inseparable, couldn’t live life without the other, then some time passed, we moved away and came back, had children, attempted to reunite and it just never felt right, so we lost track of each other, lost touch for a time… now, about 5 or 6 years later we stand again face to face, embracing, exchanging phone numbers, and now i wonder whether she will call. i love you lori.
argh, i must prepare for work. it’s one of those jobs that is so difficult i learn massive skills every day just to ride the wave. who thought i’d be a whiz at grantwriting? now i’m planning fundraisers? get out.
i submitted a series of questions to my committee chair, all that i would like to tackle both in my prospectus and over the course of my official fieldwork. yes, i’ve said all along i’m in the field, but there’s that official period where you actually get your research stamped by the human subjects review board, blah blah blah. let’s see what he says, cause i think they’re all pretty pertinent and valid questions. want a sampling?
how do we locate the field and how do we speak truth to power and how do we produce and reproduce ecologies of the self and how do we reimagine our collective relationships to environment and community and SELF and everything? what does identity mean in these shifting spaces? as i explore the shifts in space and place of one rural town going urban in the face of a contested landscape that runs the spectrum of poverty and affluence, arable and lifeless, opportunitied and lacking access to everything, and caught between boundaries and borders that are reinforced from without, shift from all directions and on whims it might seem, i ask what is the nature of change in a place like this? what is the change in nature? when rural begins to urbanize and we’re on the peri-urban brink, where environmental justice is in the forefront of citizens’ minds, where issues of popular discontent are organized by embedded non-profits, where faith sisters and organizations and agencies are the catalysts for social ties when community might be temporary…..
that is all you get. and i meant for it to be like that.
