Happy birthday, birthday twin, and many hugs. I wish you strength in the year ahead. <3

It's my birthday! I turn 33 today! It's been a pretty amazing year, especially considering that I was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer when I was 31. Age 32 was about picking up the pieces and figuring out how to move forward. I started a classical music blog last month, and I'm very grateful that a few Toasties checked it out when I shared a link here a week or so ago. That blog caught the attention of the right people, and this week it led to a job offer! I'm going to be consulting on a music history textbook. I can't believe how lucky I am--this job combines writing, music, and teaching, AND I get to work from home. I've spent the last year and a half worried about whether I'd be able to go on the academic job market when my health is so precarious (I mean, I'm able to move around and stuff, but I definitely don't have the stamina I used to, and adjuncting and/or pursuing the tenure track is wearing down even the healthiest of my friends, so the prospect of uprooting and putting myself out there was very scary), and a fantastic alternative presented itself! It may not be long-term (but it could be if they like my work enough!), but it's SOMETHING for now!

Sorry to brag. I'm just celebrating, and I want to share. It's the kind of situation where you just keep working hard at stuff, not knowing what it's leading to or whether it's going to go anywhere at all, and then some pieces fall into place. Those moments in life are rare, so I want to celebrate it while I can. :D

"Prayer always felt performative" got to me, too. I grew up in a more liberal church, but I went to a Christian music camp (that turned out to be evangelical), and I lived with my evangelical aunt-in-law for awhile, and she took me to her Titus 2 women meetings, and that style of praying really unnerves me. I used to wonder why anyone would like the rote Catholic prayers, but in contrast to the performative evangelical ones, I see the appeal.

A few people expressed interest in my classical music blog, and I updated this morning with a post that was inspired by events in Orlando. It's about Tchaikovsky and the erasure of LGBTQ+ composers' sexuality, so it's relevant to Toasties: Is Tchaikovsky’s "Pathétique" Symphony a Suicide Note?

Oh, absolutely! I didn't get a spiffy tam (they cost a few hundred dollars), but my friends and I were definitely passing time at the ceremony trying to find the most Hogwartsian regalia among the professors.

So, I got hooded yesterday! As is typical when you have a day of celebration planned and then a huge tragedy happens to coincide with it, I felt conflicted. I'm posting all these pictures of smiling faces on Facebook, in between my friends' posts of anguish and anger. There was a moment of silence during commencement for Orlando, and my husband's giving blood today (I can't for medical reasons), but I still feel a bit disconnected from it.

(I won't actually receive my PhD until I file in September, but I walked yesterday anyway.)

I love cribbage! I picked it up from a computer game version, but it turns out that cribbage is Serious Business to both sides of my husband's family, so it was a way for me to get accepted by them very quickly. It also gives me something to do at gatherings of in-laws. My husband recently joined the local cribbage club, where he's the youngest member by at least two decades.

That is, ten thousand percent, exactly how it went down.

My mother-in-law keeps wanting me to read it. She is pushing it on me, bringing it up in nearly every conversation.

We don't see eye-to-eye on very many things (to the point where I've thought back to an interaction and realized that we were having two entirely different conversations between us! "My mother used to dress me and my sister in matching outfits." "Oh, wow, that sounds extreme." "I LOVED IT."), so when she noticed that I'm a Bookworm and she's a Bookworm, she seized it as something we have in common. But our tastes are sooooo different, and she hasn't quite realized it yet.

...I made it about 300 pages in, and with 500 still to go, I just gave up.

Just thinking about how many things I had to repeat on multiple papers ("This is not a thesis statement," specific comprehension errors), I could see a spell worked out to hunt for those errors and mark them with a rubber-stamped phrase.

Then you could glance at the paper and decide how much personal attention it warrants. Paper already full of marks? That's enough; it's not worth your time to pile on. Paper bearing only a few marks? Go ahead and read it, since the student understood the assignment well enough to use your feedback. No marks? Probably Hermione. Save it for last, or when you've given up hope.