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maeve6618. What were you once seeking that no longer seems important?
Same as Microbie! A PhD! I have my MA in history, and all my research done... but I never sat down and wrote the dissertation. It would be agonizingly difficult to get back in touch with the University of Missouri History Department and try to reassemble my advisor and whatever, the panel of other professors. My stepmother thinks I should turn the research into a historical novel when I retire (roll on, that hard to imagine time)... I think the race aspects might be a bit hard, coming from me.
19. When is the last time you were too hard on yourself?
I seem to oscillate between thinking I do great, and thinking I suck, at least around work stuff. I had some success dealing with this in therapy a long time ago, now (2006 - 2008? Maybe?) and should perhaps re-engage with that.
20. What are some things you should let go of?
Hm. Needing or wanting approbation from managers (adminstrators, I guess, in an education setting). Being hard on myself (see above) based on my health.
21. What material possessions make you happy?
Almost all of my possessions make me happy; that's why I have them. -- what Microbie said, exactly! My apartment is not terribly cluttered; I got rid of as much stuff as I could when I moved almost five years ago. I love everything I have, now, except for a few miscellaneous items in what was my mom's room. As a spare room, I don't think about it much, though maybe it could be a project come this summer.
22. How much personal time do you need daily to function at your best?
I get a lot of personal time, if I understand what this means, and if I didn't, I'd need it. Working from home, what joy. That may change next year (I just found out at a staff meeting on Tuesday).
23. What part of your life has surprised you the most?
Huh. If I think about what I confidently expected as a five year old, it was to be living in a commune (not sure I used that word, but) with other women. Seriously, that was my counterposition to playing "weddings" with Barbies. Well, half a surprise: I'm not married and don't expect to be, but I don't live with a group of women, either.
24. What music did you love as a child?
I have a playlist that identifies the songs (yeah, from the Top 40, I guess) I loved when I was five years old (told you, about the strength of nostalgia) -- here they are: "Top of the World" -- the Carpenters; "Black and White" -- Three Dog Night; "Windy" -- The Association; "Joy To The World" -- Three Dog Night; "A. B. C." -- The Jackson Five; "Rose Garden" -- Lynn Anderson; "American Pie" -- Don McLean; "One Tin Soldier" -- Coven; "Delta Dawn" -- (surprisingly; I did not remember that she did this) Helen Reddy. I also had a couple of 45s, one of Bob Dylan "Blowin' In the Wind" and "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" (which, again, I don't remember that being the B-side... I would have said it was "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall").
25. What do you know about your genealogy?
Probably way too much. My father and I both get very absorbed in it -- he's been doing it the hard way, slogging to different county records offices and Catherine House in Britain and so forth. But once Ancestry.com got going, the fever hit me, too -- it's so EASY, and easier if you have experience in history research. I see a lot of people's Ancestry Family Trees that have terrible fuck-ups because they copy anything they find and just jam it in regardless. But I cross check a lot of stuff. My dad is only interested in his side of the family, while I am interested in both my mom's side and his. As far as background, it's pretty simple: I'm more than half-Irish, er, genetically speaking (I mean, is that a thing? It sounds weird, put that way) and the rest is essentially English and a little Scottish. Seriously, that's it. For both my parents, one parent was from a predominantly Irish background, so they are (or were) about half Irish in ancestry. My sister and I are therefore a bit more than that. Now that I type that it seems odd. But that is what Ancestry DNA says! I have photos of almost everyone in the last five generations, counting from my nieces to my great-grandparents. And a lot, otherwise, too. I love old photographs. On the other hand, information dries up as soon as you get to the generation before those Irish emigrants left for the USA. I have no idea what I could get from Irish churches, for instance. Their records are generally not online. Nor is almost anything else from Ireland, sigh.
Hm. I am editing this to say that, as far as genealogy goes, it is also something that my dad wrote about in The Chronicle of Higher Education and I agree with -- starting really with Roots in the mid 1970s, searching for your roots is also a way to create social history -- the history of ordinary working people, generally speaking, since that is the majority of the world and has been in every era. When I was a TA in grad school, twice I did an early computer-using assignment where I got all 100 students in my class to get as much as they could of information about four generations of their family onto a form, and then input that information into a database -- Filemaker Pro, I bet. I used Filemaker Pro a lot, sigh. I miss it. Anyway, it was not just names and origins, but as much demographic information as they could get -- how far the person got in school, what job he or she held (or retired from), what age he or she married at, how many kids they had, place born, and more. When we pooled the data in the database, you could do really cool searches and show percentages of each generation (and gender per generation) that did certain things. It really illustrated the social trends we'd seen in the second half of the American History survey, and it was all from their own families. That's honestly why I like genealogy, in part. It IS history.
Same as Microbie! A PhD! I have my MA in history, and all my research done... but I never sat down and wrote the dissertation. It would be agonizingly difficult to get back in touch with the University of Missouri History Department and try to reassemble my advisor and whatever, the panel of other professors. My stepmother thinks I should turn the research into a historical novel when I retire (roll on, that hard to imagine time)... I think the race aspects might be a bit hard, coming from me.
19. When is the last time you were too hard on yourself?
I seem to oscillate between thinking I do great, and thinking I suck, at least around work stuff. I had some success dealing with this in therapy a long time ago, now (2006 - 2008? Maybe?) and should perhaps re-engage with that.
20. What are some things you should let go of?
Hm. Needing or wanting approbation from managers (adminstrators, I guess, in an education setting). Being hard on myself (see above) based on my health.
21. What material possessions make you happy?
Almost all of my possessions make me happy; that's why I have them. -- what Microbie said, exactly! My apartment is not terribly cluttered; I got rid of as much stuff as I could when I moved almost five years ago. I love everything I have, now, except for a few miscellaneous items in what was my mom's room. As a spare room, I don't think about it much, though maybe it could be a project come this summer.
22. How much personal time do you need daily to function at your best?
I get a lot of personal time, if I understand what this means, and if I didn't, I'd need it. Working from home, what joy. That may change next year (I just found out at a staff meeting on Tuesday).
23. What part of your life has surprised you the most?
Huh. If I think about what I confidently expected as a five year old, it was to be living in a commune (not sure I used that word, but) with other women. Seriously, that was my counterposition to playing "weddings" with Barbies. Well, half a surprise: I'm not married and don't expect to be, but I don't live with a group of women, either.
24. What music did you love as a child?
I have a playlist that identifies the songs (yeah, from the Top 40, I guess) I loved when I was five years old (told you, about the strength of nostalgia) -- here they are: "Top of the World" -- the Carpenters; "Black and White" -- Three Dog Night; "Windy" -- The Association; "Joy To The World" -- Three Dog Night; "A. B. C." -- The Jackson Five; "Rose Garden" -- Lynn Anderson; "American Pie" -- Don McLean; "One Tin Soldier" -- Coven; "Delta Dawn" -- (surprisingly; I did not remember that she did this) Helen Reddy. I also had a couple of 45s, one of Bob Dylan "Blowin' In the Wind" and "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" (which, again, I don't remember that being the B-side... I would have said it was "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall").
25. What do you know about your genealogy?
Probably way too much. My father and I both get very absorbed in it -- he's been doing it the hard way, slogging to different county records offices and Catherine House in Britain and so forth. But once Ancestry.com got going, the fever hit me, too -- it's so EASY, and easier if you have experience in history research. I see a lot of people's Ancestry Family Trees that have terrible fuck-ups because they copy anything they find and just jam it in regardless. But I cross check a lot of stuff. My dad is only interested in his side of the family, while I am interested in both my mom's side and his. As far as background, it's pretty simple: I'm more than half-Irish, er, genetically speaking (I mean, is that a thing? It sounds weird, put that way) and the rest is essentially English and a little Scottish. Seriously, that's it. For both my parents, one parent was from a predominantly Irish background, so they are (or were) about half Irish in ancestry. My sister and I are therefore a bit more than that. Now that I type that it seems odd. But that is what Ancestry DNA says! I have photos of almost everyone in the last five generations, counting from my nieces to my great-grandparents. And a lot, otherwise, too. I love old photographs. On the other hand, information dries up as soon as you get to the generation before those Irish emigrants left for the USA. I have no idea what I could get from Irish churches, for instance. Their records are generally not online. Nor is almost anything else from Ireland, sigh.
Hm. I am editing this to say that, as far as genealogy goes, it is also something that my dad wrote about in The Chronicle of Higher Education and I agree with -- starting really with Roots in the mid 1970s, searching for your roots is also a way to create social history -- the history of ordinary working people, generally speaking, since that is the majority of the world and has been in every era. When I was a TA in grad school, twice I did an early computer-using assignment where I got all 100 students in my class to get as much as they could of information about four generations of their family onto a form, and then input that information into a database -- Filemaker Pro, I bet. I used Filemaker Pro a lot, sigh. I miss it. Anyway, it was not just names and origins, but as much demographic information as they could get -- how far the person got in school, what job he or she held (or retired from), what age he or she married at, how many kids they had, place born, and more. When we pooled the data in the database, you could do really cool searches and show percentages of each generation (and gender per generation) that did certain things. It really illustrated the social trends we'd seen in the second half of the American History survey, and it was all from their own families. That's honestly why I like genealogy, in part. It IS history.