I also read The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, over Winter Break. I am a huge Kingsolver fan anyway, and when I heard her talking about the book on (you guessed it) The Diane Rehm Show, I knew I had to read it as soon as possible.

I want the whole world to read this book so I hesitate to say much about it. It isn’t like any of Kingsolver’s other books, but then is The Bean Trees anything like The Poisonwood Bible? Is Animal Dreams anything like Prodigal Summer? In the way that it tells a story that is at once epic and simple, The Lacuna is like the others, but in its scope and its style, it is singular.

I’m afraid that if I tell you the coolest part of this book, it will sound cheesy so you’re going to have to remember that Barbara Kingsolver is not cheesy. You see, there is an element of what the bookstores call historical fiction in The Lacuna. Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky are all characters. The main character is entirely fictional, but these three political activists feature prominently in the story. I don’t suppose I have to tell you that I don’t read genre fiction. I almost didn’t read any Kingsolver at all because The Poisonwood Bible was so popular. The more popular a book is, the less likely I am to read it. That is how deep and short-sighted my snobbery is. I’ve never read anything that falls under the historical fiction label, but my understanding of the genre is that the books usually don’t involve Communism in the 1940s so that is what makes The Lacuna different.

Because I am so picky, I rarely read a novel that I only love, that doesn’t strike me as problematic in any way. Kingsolver gives me that each time I pick up her work, and I can’t wait until she writes another novel.

Folks, I think I’ve discovered a problem with my iPhone. Well, the issue isn’t with the device itself. It’s more like a complication related to becoming accustomed to the phone. The more I get used to my iPhone, the more I began behaving as if everyone has an iPhone.

The line between email and text message is getting very blurry. If I send you a really long text message, I am assuming that it will show up in a text bubble similar to the way messages appear in iChat. (See my previous iPhone post for a visual aid.) It does not occur to me that my long missive might show up as more than one text. Probably, it will go like this: You’ll be reading the first part of my text when the second part shows up, interrupting your reading. You have to stop and tell your phone that you don’t want to read the new text right now because you’re still reading the first text. And then you turn your head upward, toward heaven, and curse my name.

When you discover that what I need (employing a loose definition of the word) to tell you is long, complicated (indeed, it could require still a third part), and not urgent, you wonder why I didn’t just send you an email. “She has that stupid iPhone,” you say to your other friends, the ones you actually hang out with now that I can’t afford to go out because I have this new fancy phone. “She can send an email as easily as she can send a text message.”

It’s true. Texting and emailing work in nearly identical ways, and the choice between the two often proves too much for me. Sometimes I end up emailing and then texting to let the recipient know I’ve sent him/her an email. If I send an email and do not receive a reply within 30 minutes, I assume that the receiver is unconscious. Why else wouldn’t she get back to me? What other possible explanation could there be for not returning an email promptly? The point here is, of course, that I’ve adopted a totally irrational and ridiculous idea of “promptly.”

Basically, the problem is that I have become obnoxious. That I can recognize my obnoxiousness isn’t really abating it. In women’s studies, we spend a lot of time talking about the power of being able to identify the issue and give it a name. It isn’t working in this instance so the best I can hope for (after dying in my sleep, of course) is that the whole world will get iPhones and we’ll all be big giant brats in our big giant iPhone bubble.

Way back in September, I heard an episode of The Diane Rehm Show about a book by Deborah Tannen called You Were Always Mom’s Favorite! Sisters in Conversation Throughout Their Lives. I immediately promised myself I would read the book over Winter Break. Imagine my discomfort when I discovered that the book looks like this:

Pinkness aside, I read the book, and I liked it. The best descriptor I can give this book is that it does pop linguistics, studying language for pop culture audiences. Because I fancy myself an academic, I generally do not support the pop culturization of academic disciplines. Some things are too complicated to be explained to the populace at-large, and when such things are diluted using common metaphors and eighth grade vocabulary, key aspects get lost and misrepresented. However, if everything we study in universities can’t be applied to the “real world,” that raises too many questions about the usefulness of whatever it is we are doing. We have to give the people something to look at, and it does excite me when something as heady as linguistics shows up as the subject of a bright pink book by a best-selling author. What Tannen does is show her pop culture audience what about her research applies to them and leaves the rest out. I would have preferred more linguistics, but I am not a linguist and would likely have floundered amidst a chorus of “be careful what you wish for” if the book were more academic.

As you all probably already know, I have myself a sister so my interest in Tannen’s book wasn’t purely academic, but I am interested in how women communicate with each other as its own idea, separate from everything else (like how this communication differs from communication with men or between men). I didn’t learn anything explicitly new from Tannen’s book. What I gained from it was a more concrete sense of what I feel and how I behave. Most of my reading involves not gaining brand new knowledge but furthering, deepening, examining, and challenging what I already know. My interests are rather limited so while I don’t usually learn new things about, for instance, lesbians, I do gain new ways of thinking about and discussing lesbians. That is what happened with Tannen’s book.

Tannen discusses sister relationships at all stages: childhood, adolescence, middle-aged adulthood, and elderly-adulthood. She also examines the dynamics of sibling order: oldest, youngest, middle, etc. Although the book focuses on Americans, Tannen makes sure to include representations of more than just white, middle-class America; all kinds of races, ethnicities, and cultures show up. In these ways, the book is comprehensive and general. In other ways, it is quite specific, as many women relate stories about their relationships with their sisters. Tannen, the youngest of three sisters, weaves her own stories into the narrative as well. Establishing this kind of relatable narrative is key when preparing academic ideas for the mass market.

A point I find especially important is Tannen’s treatment of friendships between women that often get described as sister-like. These friendships may involve special connections and intense feelings, but they lack the one criterion required for sisters: that familial link that removes any element of choice. Of course, a woman can choose not to talk to her sister or be part of her life. She can even live as if she has no sister at all. But she still has a sister. Friendship is important, and I’m interested in the ways that female friendships get devalued in our culture. What Tannen explains and what I’m reasserting is not a devaluing of female friendships. These relationships are not the same as sister-relationships and to pretend that they are misrepresents both friendship and sisterhood.

Like I said at the outset, I liked this book. Now I’m interested in how other disciplines treat sister relationships, and I’ll be looking for anthropology, sociology, psychology, and literature texts on the subject.

We should have believed him when he said it was all fur.

About three weeks ago, Sachen got a special haircut. Last summer, when he was so sick, he became a lazy groomer and therefore his fur got matted in some epic ways. These were ridiculous clumps of fur that felt like tumors. People would pet him and draw back their hands in horror. The vet was concerned about shaving off the mats because Sachen doesn’t exactly do well with things that make noise, especially not when these instruments are aimed at him. They would have to give him a sedative, the vet explained. That seemed like a good idea to us. We can’t afford any lawsuits right now.

So, on Friday, Jan. 8, we took this to the vet at 7:30…

and at noon, we picked up this…

Whoa. The first thing I noticed was how skinny he is. This was significant information, requiring a major rearranging of the way I think about Sachen. I mean, he’s a big cat, right? That’s kind of his thing. Without big as his main qualifier, all he has is that list of synonyms for “grumpy.”

Those of you with normal-sized cats will find Sachen large, even without his fur, but to Andy and me, he just looks tiny.

For the first 24 hours, he was downright clingy. He needed lots of validation. He was all, “Pet me. Pet me. You still think I’m pretty, right?” That part was kind of nice. It was like having a dog—a cat-shaped, rat-like dog. But Sachen is pretty much back to normal now. I have been trying hard to get used to his…um…unusual appearance.

Look at how big his head looks. I mean, he always had a big head—literally and figuratively—but with this dramatic haircut, he head almost looks like it isn’t attached all the way, like it could fall off at any moment. My favorite part is his legs. He looks like he’s wearing boots, doesn’t he? UGGs or ski boots, right? The tail is obviously the least attractive aspect of the “lion shave,” which is the vet’s term for this special look. The tech originally wanted to shave all but the tip of the tail but we just couldn’t allow that to happen. That would take the rat visual too far.

The good news is that the shaved parts are super soft, like velvet or a really good fleece throw. His head and his tail still feel like the old Sachen so now we get two distinct tactile experiences each time we pet him. I think all three of us are ready for the day that he looks like this again, though.

(P.S. Can you believe I took all these photos with my iPhone?)

Andy got me an iPhone for Christmas. I got him an electric razor. That is what marriage is all about.

The iPhone is more magical than I even imagined. It knows what I want before I do, the way an ideal lover does. Now that I think of it, it appears that Andy got me a spouse-supplement for Christmas. It picks up his slack, not that there’s much to pick up. I always thought it would be creepy to have a partner who knows you better than you know yourself, but with a phone, it’s all right.

To compare my iPhone to my previous phone would be comical, yes, but useless. My old phone was made to be the cheapest, simplest kind of phone, and Apple does not intend for the iPhone to be either.

It feels misleading to call it a phone. For one thing, we all know that as a phone, it kind of sucks. As a text messager, though, it is unparalleled. The user needs some work, but the machine is perfect. It arranges the texts in conversation threads instead of chronologically, and the visual experience is more like an IM chat than anything that happens on a cell phone. Here’s an example:

But let’s talk about that user for a moment. Folks, it is quite possible that the iPhone is too fancy for me. Those text message threads I was just showing you? I can’t keep them straight and I have more than once sent a text to the wrong recipient with results on a sliding scale of embarrassment.

Also, I’ve had the phone for over three weeks, and I’ve downloaded two apps. Andy got me the NPR app, a Tetris app, and of course Tweetie so I can tweet from wherever I am, but on my own, I have downloaded apps for MSNBC and the Internet Movie Database. I have been meaning to get a dictionary app and obviously I’ll be needing the Constitution, but I’m not nearly as into the app game as Mr. Seven Pages of Apps (also known as my husband).

And the truth is that I wouldn’t love my iPhone any less if it didn’t have an iPod feature. I put just my essentials on there—Billy Joel, the Indigo Girls, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Kris Kristofferson—but my little iPod nano remains my main music player.

I’m not saying I don’t love my iPhone. I like that I can get to the internet almost any time I want, and despite my missteps, the improved text messaging experience is my favorite part of the phone. Well, that and Tweetie. I really love how easily I can snap a photo and post it to Twitter. I’m sure my followers appreciate how much more accessible I am now that my phone can support my every Twitter impulse, especially since I’ve been sick pretty much ever since I got my iPhone and my Twitter account has basically devolved into a whine pulpit.

And, yes, I have a purple case.

I don’t know what it is about Kris Kristofferson, but y’all are used to that, right? I never can explain what it is about artists that draws me to them. With Kristofferson, it could be that all of his songs remind me of my uncle Jim or it could be that he seems to want so badly for the world to see Johnny Cash the way he saw him. That was a bromance for the ages, wasn’t it?

Instead of trying to explain, I’m just going to give you some of my favorite lines and let you sort it out for yourself. After all, it’s the songwriter half of singer/songwriter that always gets to me. For instance, the title of this post came from “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33,” which Kristofferson claims is about Cash and a bunch of others like him, which really makes it autobiographical. He has that same impulse to examine that Emily Saliers has; they go over and over the same parts of themselves, nearly crippled by their self-awareness and their helpless insight into human nature.

There are songs whose lyrics are so poetic that I barely notice the music.

From “Shandy”:

All she could pay was attention
So all they could take was her time
Proving an ounce of possession
Ain’t worth a piece of your mind.

And…

Locked in the goldhandled bathroom,
Martin was changing his mind,
Shedding his humble pretensions,
One careful toke at a time.

From “Billy Dee”:

Billy took a beatin’ from a world he meant no harm
The score was written in the scars up on his arm

From “Stranger”:

Maybe she was smilin’ in the mirror
Maybe I was, too, ’cause I was stoned
Singin’ every sad song on the juke-box one more time
Honey, they were hittin’ close to home

From “Jesus Was a Capricorn”:

Jesus was a Capricorn
He ate organic food
He believed in love and peace
And never wore no shoes
Long hair, beard and sandals
And a funky bunch of friends
Reckon we’d just nail him up
If he came down again

From “Loving Her Was Easier”:

Wakin’ in the mornin’ to the feelin’ of her fingers on my skin.
Wipin’ out the traces of the people and the places that I’ve been.
Teachin’ me that yesterday was something that I never thought of trying.
Talkin’ of tomorrow and the money, love and time we had to spend.

From “Chase the Feeling”:

And you got loaded again
Ain’t you handsome when you’re high
Nothing matters
Chase the feeling ’til you die

From the aforementioned “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33″ (I couldn’t pick just a few lines, because this song is a freaking poem):

See him wasted on the sidewalk in his jacket and his jeans,
Wearin’ yesterday’s misfortunes like a smile.
Once he had a future full of money, love, and dreams,
Which he spent like they was goin’ outta style.
And he keeps right on changin’ for the better or the worse,
Searchin’ for a shrine he’s never found
Never knowin’ if believin’ is a blessin’ or a curse,
Or if the goin’ up was worth the comin’ down.

He’s a poet, he’s a picker.
He’s a prophet, he’s a pusher.
He’s a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he’s stoned.
He’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,
Takin’ ev’ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home.

He has tasted good and evil in your bedrooms and your bars,
And he’s traded in tomorrow for today.
Runnin’ from his devils, Lord, and reachin’ for the stars,
And losin’ all he’s loved along the way.
But if this world keeps right on turnin’ for the better or the worse,
And all he ever gets is older and around,
From the rockin’ of the cradle to the rollin’ of the hearse,
The goin’ up was worth the comin’ down.

And he’s got iconic songs that give me goosebumps because of the aching vulnerability he can express with very simple words. There’s rarely anything fancy in a Kristofferson song—no SAT words like “trajectory” in the vocabulary or complicated metaphors that usually show up in my kind of songs.

From “Help Me Make It Through the Night” (also known as one of my favorite songs of all time because the music so perfectly complements the desperate, pleading lyrics):

I don’t care what’s right or wrong,
I don’t try to understand.
Let the devil take tomorrow.
Lord, tonight I need a friend.

From “Me and Bobby McGee”:

Feeling nearly faded as my jeans

From “Sunday Morning Coming Down”:

Well I woke up Sunday morning,
With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad,
So I had one more for dessert.

Are you starting to see what I mean? If Kristofferson isn’t talking about you, he’s talking about someone you know. I mean, who hasn’t woken up on a morning or two with no way to hold their head that didn’t hurt? I’m not sure that Kristofferson is the greatest songwriter who ever lived, but I am so comfortable listening to his songs. It’s like I can crawl right up inside them, pour myself a glass of bourbon, and let the warmth spread all over my body. Yeah, it smells like stale cigarettes, used whiskey, and musty guitars in there, but I like it.

We don’t need a Chinese restaurant placemat to know that 2009 isn’t the Year of the Blog. I haven’t been busy so much as distracted—by school, by gall stones, by sick cats, and by more school. It ought to be calming down soon, but I’m not going to make myself any promises. I was so distracted, in fact, that last week when I saw a commercial for Barbara Walters’s annual Fascinating People special, I was surprised that it was time for that already. Lately, I have to look at a calendar several times a day just to remind me what day it is, never mind what month.

Also, I’m still figuring out how to keep Twitter from making my blog obsolete. I tweet frequently, more often when there is something else I should be doing, and I fear that the tweeting impulse keeps the blogging impulse at bay, like the way that pain killers mask symptoms. I don’t even know that I want to blog because of all the tweeting. I like Twitter, though. It has brought me closer to people in a way that blogging never could.

So I went ahead and came up with a list of the people I thought were fascinating in 2009 because I like it as a recap for the year. Because it was a Twittery year, a lot of these people were fascinating to me because of Twitter. Well, maybe not because of Twitter but definitely via Twitter.

Without further introduction, here is the list of the 10 people I found fascinating in 2009:

10. Meredith Baxter Talk about coming in under the wire. Or, rather, coming out. I was a huge Family Ties fan in my youth. What budding liberal-hippie-commie didn’t want Elyse and Steven Keaton to be their parents? I had a small crush on Mallory and liked Alex a lot, but my real crush was on the parents. There wasn’t anything lacking about my own parents, but when my eye did wander, it wandered to the Keatons. So when I found out last week, just a month or so after I had rediscovered my love for Family Ties, that Elyse Keaton Meredith Baxter is a lesbian, I couldn’t help but smile. Plus, you all know about my secret wish that all the awesome women in the world were gay.

9. Melissa Harris-Lacewell This one is brought to you by Twitter. I was first introduced to Dr. Harris-Lacewell by Dr. Rachel Maddow (excuse me while I have an academigasm), but Twitter really revealed her brillance. She is exactly the sort of academic I want to be: socially engaged, pop culturally literate, unapologetically a feminist, and a damn fine thinker. She writes for The Nation, she appears on The Rachel Maddow Show, and she teaches at Princeton. The thing I love most about Twitter is the fact that a Princeton professor can live-tweet her watching of an NFL game without compromising her academic integrity.

8. Meghan McCain A Republican? I know! Meghan is very much a Republican. I’m not going to dispute that. What I like about Meghan is that she doesn’t let her dad’s shadow eclipse her. Sure, she’s proud of Sen. McCain, and she’ll tweet on and on about how much she loves him. One of my favorite stories about Meghan is actually more a story about her dad. I don’t recall where I read this, but it’s a campaign story so I probably read it some time ago. Anyway, it goes like this: Sen. McCain is introducing Meghan at a campaign stop and he says, “This is my daughter Meghan. She just graduated from Columbia. So if anyone knows of any jobs for art history majors, let me know.” That is totally something my dad would do, and it somehow brought Meghan and me closer together. I faithfully read her stuff at The Daily Beast, and although I only agree with her about half the time (she is a vehement supporter of same-sex marriage), I always like her style.

7. Peggy Olson You didn’t expect the whole list to be made up of real people, did you? Even when I wasn’t watching Mad Men, I knew it was the best show on TV. Peggy Olson is the kind of character that feels tailor-made for me. As she navigates the murky waters of being a career woman in the 60s, she is the perfect precursor to the Mary Richardses and Rhoda Morgansterns of the 70s. Peggy is at once naive and assertive. She is easily smarter than any of the other women on the show, but she isn’t nearly as good at figuring out the sexual dynamics of the 60s as Joan or Betty is. She stumbles in ways that feel familiar. I knew Peggy was my favorite when she announced to Harry and Paul, “My name is Peggy Olson and I want to smoke marijuana,” and I haven’t looked back since.

6. Nancy Lee Grahn Alexis Davis has been my favorite General Hospital character for ages, and because in the soaps the actors are so closely associated with the characters, I have had some degree of respect for Nancy Lee Grahn for a long time as well. She is politically outspoken, which I always appreciate, especially when the politics being spoken out so echo my own. I mean, this is a woman who started a pro-choice organization in the notoriously conservative community of daytime television. What made Grahn especially fascinating this year is Twitter. She could sometimes use a filter (and a proofreader), but I prefer these raw bits of her actual personality to 140 carefully-constructed characters from her publicist or assistant.

5. Kris Kristofferson There is a whole group of artists I profess to love when I haven’t seen their movies, bought their CDs, or put their art on my walls, and Kris Kristofferson, with his ridiculous name, used to be part of that group. Recently, I started actually listening to his music rather than just whining about how much I love “Sunday Morning Coming Down” but I can never listen to it because I don’t actually have a copy of it. In this day and age, there is no excuse for not listening to the music that you want to listen to, especially when we’re talking about Kris Kristofferson. It took me 0.5 seconds to find a torrent of his 2006 album This Old Road and a collection called The Essential Kris Kristofferson. I’m still looking for his newest album, Closer to the Bone, which came out in September, but I’m enjoying what I’ve got. I might as well acknowledge the crustiness and admit that it is part of his appeal. I like that the kind of life he has lived is evident not just in his songs but on his face, in his voice, in his wild hair, and even in the way he walks. I wonder what it must be like to wake up every morning knowing that you wrote one of the most iconic songs (“Me and Bobby McGee”) of the century.

4. Portia de Rossi I already explained about Portia on this blog back in March. I had some stuff to work out and I worked it out. Things could not be better with Portia and me these days. When she and Ellen were on Oprah last month, I was again blown away by how sweet Portia is. I know that’s a common reaction because she always plays characters that are so frigid and just completely the opposite of how she really is. Speaking of the roles she plays, Portia has really good taste in TV shows. Better Off Ted is really great. It has that rare thing that so many sitcoms think they have; it’s called The Funny.

3. Jane Fonda I’ve been a Jane Fonda fan for so long that I almost couldn’t justify putting her on this list because I didn’t want it to seem like I had just discovered her. This is another instance of rediscovery through Twitter. Yeah, that’s right, even Jane Fonda is on Twitter. She doesn’t tweet a lot, but when she does, she does it in such a way that I believe it’s really her. Back in the Spring, she was doing a play on Broadway and she would tweet from backstage. That was when I started to believe it was really her. A lot of the time, her tweets are just links to her blog, which I love. Like many of the people on this list, Jane’s political (read: feminist) convictions mirror mine, and I can’t really express how validating it is to be constantly reminded of what a good choice I made all those years ago when I chose her as a role model.

1 & 2 Madeline and Logan So there’s a unshocking tie. Even if I could rank them in order of their fascinating-ness, why would I do that? It’s very important to me that these kids know that I love them both in equal amounts. Of course, they are fascinating for different reasons. You should see the hilarious expressions that Logan gets on his adorable little face. There was this one time that Andy picked him up and he looked at Andy with these huge eyes that said, “Maybe if I don’t make any sudden moves, I’ll be ok.” He didn’t cry or fuss, he just stared. Come on, Logan. Andy is the least scary person on Earth. And then there’s Madeline. You should hear the way she articulates my name: “Kay-tee.” She says it a lot. I’m not trying to brag, but she pretty much adores me. The feeling is mutual.

Here are some photos from Halloween that have been collecting metaphorical dust on my computer.

It’s almost silly to post pictures of Logan that are this old because he looks different from one moment to the next. I wish I had a picture of him from the last time I saw him. He was wearing a flannel shirt and his face has really lost all of its newborn-ness. He is just impossibly cute these days.

As you can see, Madeline was a duck, and every time she wanted me to pick her up, she would say, “Duck up.” That kid has such an awareness of herself and the way things around her work that it is almost frightening. But mostly it’s amazing.

Before I represent myself as someone who cares about punctuation, let me provide some context. I teach freshman composition. That means that I spend most of my time with college freshmen who think they hate writing because their high school English teachers over-emphasized grammar rules. These kids (some of them are actual adults, but most of them are kids) are nearly paralyzed by the cacophony of shrill instructions, strong caveats, and dire warnings swirling around their minds. So you see, I can’t help but care about punctuation. I don’t want to care about punctuation, but my students can’t bring themselves to care about anything else.

I am honest with my students. I tell them that the rules of punctuation are completely arbitrary and their only hope is to memorize them because trying to make sense of them will just make them crazy.

Take the semi-colon. First of all, where did it get that silly name? Yes, it is part of a colon, but its functions aren’t like the colon’s functions. It functions more like a comma, which it also physically resembles. The semi-colon symbol is really just a comma with a dot above it.

A lot of the semi-colon’s frustrating mysteriousness would disappear if the thing had a name that had anything to do with what it does. Therefore, I propose that it be called a super-comma. Please hear me out. This will change your life.

Basically, a semi-colon has two possible functions:

1) joining two independent clauses

I grin every time I see Madeline; there is no other viable reaction.

2) to separate the main parts of a list from mini-lists within it

I own the following gay DVDs: The L Word, seasons one, two, three, four, and five; The True Adventures of Two Girls in Love; Loving Annabelle; and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, seasons five, six, and seven.

Notice how both of these situations are scenarios when a student-writer might just use a comma. However, a comma is not strong enough to hold two independent clauses together or to make sense of lists within lists. What is like a comma but stronger? A semi-colon? Does that sound like a strong punctuation mark? What about a super-comma? Now, that sounds like something that could keep a sentence from running-on, doesn’t it?

Many of my students come to me baffled by the semi-colon. They don’t know what it is or how to use it. Hopefully, they leave with super-comma confidence.

More than anything—the steady income, the benefits, the “Dr.” before my name—I want to be a professor because of sabbaticals. Before you assume this realization was brought on by the fact that I taught for about a second today and have spent the rest of the day in bed with a cold, let me explain that I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.

You see, I’m always running across things that I want to think about and study, but there isn’t enough time or intellectual energy left after I’ve graded eighty research papers. I’m not exaggerating; I have over eighty composition students.

Lately, what I want to think, study, and write is sisters. I’m dying to read this book I heard about on The Diane Rehm Show called You Were Always Mom’s Favorite. This book is about conversations between sisters, and it’s written by a linguist so I am counting on it to really focus on language. I’m interested in the ways that people with intense nonverbal connections communicate verbally. You all will recall my fascination with Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Animal Dreams because it tackles the often complicated relationship between sisters.

So that’s what I would do if I were on sabbatical. Now I suppose I ought to get back to writing a sample APA research paper.

It is pledge week at the local public radio station, NIPR, and even though I really want to give them my money, there is approximately $1.67 in my checking account. We gave during the last pledge drive and we may give again on Friday. Right now, though, all I can give is my time. I spent a couple hours last night answering phones at the pledge drive and that gave me an opportunity to talk to other people who listen to NPR in Fort Wayne and the surrounding area.

And I have to admit that I was surprised by how many listeners there are. One of the on-air pitches claims that 40,000 people listen to NIPR. When you consider that there are more than 250,000 residents of just Fort Wayne (and the NIPR listenership extends far beyond the city), I suppose 40,000 isn’t that amazing of a figure. Most of my friends listen to NPR, but as soon as I step out of that bubble, I run into people who don’t even know who Ira Glass is. Can you believe it?

As part of the drive, the station is running testimonials from local listeners. These are really great, and they got me thinking about my own history with NPR. The truth is that I haven’t been an NPR listener for very long. I know that’s hard to believe because NPR fits so well into my general way of being in the world. I don’t know why I resisted it for so long. It wasn’t that I was opposed to NPR. It’s just that I find that radio listening happens most of the time in the car, and my driving time used to be strictly devoted to listening to music—not commercial radio, but CDs and now my iPod. I liked the alone time, just me, the music, and the road.

But I married a guy who really likes NPR and then I became very good friends with a woman who really likes NPR. So I decided to give it a shot.

I don’t remember what the first thing I consciously heard was. It took me a couple days to get used to hearing talking in the car and not singing, but I was committed to being a certain kind of citizen so I stuck with it. After not too long, maybe a week, I woke up one morning and found myself wondering what Diane Rehm was going to talk about today, and I knew I was hooked. Then I started listening to WBOI’s livestream on the internet, and I began to rethink how and where radio-listening happens.

My favorite time to listen to NPR is during my office hours, while I’m grading, eating lunch, writing blog posts (*wink*), or just staring at the wall. Last semester, I had to teach during The Diane Rehm Show, but this semester, my office hours are from 10:15 to noon so I get to hear nearly the entire show. This American Life is probably my favorite NPR show, but Diane Rehm is on every day. I would probably explode from over-stimulation if This American Life were on every day so I suppose the schedule is all right.

That is all national programming, of course. I’m not going to lie and claim I listen to NIPR just for local programming. I listen for Diane Rehm, Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, and This American Life, but I so very much appreciate that there is quality local programming available. When I realized that basically none of the hosts of those local shows get paid, I began to appreciate it even more. As far as I can tell, there are about five paid employees at NIPR and the rest of them are volunteers. I really like my job, but I would not do it for free. People who give their time and their talent to the community constantly amaze me.

I hear a lot of conversations about how behind-the-times Fort Wayne is, how uncultured and narrow-minded the folks here are. I’ll admit that some of this conversation takes place in my own mind, but much of it comes from other people, too—people who are displaced from other parts of the country and people who grew up here. Those people should listen to NIPR. Not only does it make me feel more connected to the world, it makes me feel like there might just be people in Fort Wayne who have heard of Ira Glass.

I wish I had a cute story about how my parents made me listen to NPR and when I was little I would sing the All Things Considered theme song for their friends, but I didn’t grow up like that. I came to NPR as an adult, somewhat already set in my ways, and I consciously changed those ways in order to become the kind of person I wanted to be.