Baby Leasing

I stumbled across this doing research for something else. While I should not be writing blog posts but hauling ass on this last big paper due for this semester's coursework, I couldn't not share this. History is so far from boring that it makes my head want to explode:

The Letter. (Link to Source, Cornell University)

A 1929 letter, from the Superintendent of the Troy Orphan Asylum* (Troy, New York) to the Director of Cornell University (yep, that one) agreeing to lease infants to Cornell's home economics "practice houses." And asking please for 24 hours notice before Cornell comes to pick them up. Holy shit, people... when I was in school, it was dolls, or eggs, or, you know, seedlings. Real babies? Hard core. And very, very disturbing. There's something rotten at the core of domesticity...

* The masthead on the letter for the Troy Asylum reads both: "For children under sixteen years of age, except juvenile delinquents, truants, and mental defectives, as required by law" and "The race marches forward on the feet of little children." I'm not even going to touch these, except to copy them down.

For Your Viewing Pleasure

I'm working, I swear. Besides, these are both relevant-ish to my research. Yep, that's the story.

1. Gaga's Bad Romance a la 1919/1920 and women's suffrage. Much fun, appropriately white. (Things I Learned This Year include the effects of Jim Crow, including on voting access for non-whites. As much as I celebrate the Nineteenth Amendment, I've had to adjust my thinking, a lot. This is important stuff; why is it not part of the dominant women's rights narrative? Not entirely a rhetorical question.)





2. Angela Davis addressing students at the University of Maryland. Why we need to stop thinking exceptionalism and start thinking systemic. She speaks largely about race, but her points are equally valid for domestic violence, gun violence, hate crimes. These are not random acts.

End of Semester

I am officially out of Grading Jail for this semester (hallelujah). I may have some probation (straggling assignments), but my main sentence is over. It was a lab course; there was a shit-ton of grading.

The semester has a ways to go yet, but now it's Assignment Jail. For school: one presentation, one final exam, one short summary paper/bibliography, one substantial term paper, and a 5-day take-home preliminary exam. For not-school: one paper draft (overdue!) for pre-peer-review-review, one conference paper draft, some conference session wrangling. All with various due dates, from immediately to later, but all needs to be done by May 26.

Soundtrack

I'm Doing What Now?!?!?!?

Running.

There, I said it out loud. I've started running. Not only am I in my third week, but I'm starting to crave it and I'm noticing improvements.

Some backstory: I stopped running in undergrad. Bad knee (which oddly isn't bothering me now), overweight, out of shape. Seriously, really no running for many, many years (which I understand is not really the appropriate response to being out of shape).

Why, suddenly, have I started? I'm still overweight (way more than I was in undergrad; I'm in the vicinity of 17 stone now and I'll let you do the math), still out of shape... But the last two years I took part in a team sport that involved heavy-duty exertion, especially on race days. Practices were twice a week. And I felt AMAZING. Then, winter, personal upheaval, grad school. I'm hoping to get back into team sport this summer, but the truth is I won't be able to participate fully because of research. I needed something to get me into shape, out of the house, and, well, moving. And something that doesn't require me being in a particular place at a particular time.

Meat world friends and bloggy friends run. Colleagues who are not little slips of things are running half marathons. I was inspired.

I'm using the "Couch to 5K" approach, which starts very, very slowly and over the course of several weeks, you work up to a full 5K (3 mile) run. Though I'm in my week three, I'm still on week 2 of the program because I lost several days in a shoe-exchange (the right shoes are CRITICAL. I had the wrong shoes, and I thought my ankles were going to detach from my body in a horrible, crippling way. New shoes: whoa, no pain!).

I also need lots of reassurance, so I splurged on a Garmin Forerunner 410 (purchased in Amazon's Warehouse where they keep the returns and dinged packages, for a significant discount). It has a GPS in it, so tracks time, distance, location, pace, and calories burned. I got the one with the heart monitor, but the damn thing doesn't work well, so I quit using it (really, save your money). You can upload your data to a free account at Garmin's website, and keep track. Being able to see my improvements in numbers over time is really helpful, and helps me set small goals (a little further, a little faster...).

Why am I telling now? Because I just got back from today's run, and absolutely smashed my previous personal best pace by a minute and a half. And I feel pretty damn great. And last night, I ran -uphill- to catch my bus, and both made the bus and didn't die. I'm a runner. Who knew???