Light and Momentary

Tranquility by Tuesday, the follow-up post

When I participated in Laura Vanderkam's Tranquility by Tuesday project, I was tired by the end. I've told you before about what a brutal semester that was, and by rules 8 and 9 I was like, "Really, Laura, you want me to do MORE THINGS? I have done a lot of things for you already."

I bought the book last month and got bogged down after rule 7, but yesterday I picked it back up and finished it off. The last two rules tell you to batch the little things and put effortful fun before effortless fun, and I am going to make an effort to implement both of them.

She says, very sensibly, that if you have a place in your calendar to do small tasks in short bursts, they won't take up as much space in your head and they won't take up as much time in your day. She advises readers to set aside an afternoon block -- that's when your energy is lower but you can still do the piddly things on your list, like calling to schedule the annual maintenance for your furnace. This is good advice. Perhaps I will implement it today, even.

When I first read the phrase "effortful fun" I gave it some side-eye, because Laura Vanderkam has some hardcore ideas about effortful fun. It would be too much work for me to take young children to the Netherlands to see the tulips bloom; it does not sound pleasant to me no matter how much she seemed to enjoy it. I would rather sit on my couch and knit than go to Disney; I have never been to a Disney theme park and I do not plan to go. So when she (a regular Disney-goer) told me to emphasize effortful fun in a semester when my life felt like an unrelenting outlay of effort, I pretty much said: 

via GIPHY

But! Then I read a little more closely, and realized that she is not telling me to pop over to the Netherlands on an ordinary weeknight. Instead, she is saying to think about what I want to do instead of scrolling. Reading counts as effortful fun. Sitting on the couch and knitting counts as effortful fun, because crafting requires some effort and results in a creative product. She's telling me not to let my life get eaten by social media and passive consumption of TV shows, and I am totally on board with that advice.

So this is my plan: a daily 3:00 block for processing email and small tasks, and an Advent social media break. Care to join me?

Now is the time

If you have ever done an endurance race, you probably have emails in your promotions folder right now with discount codes that expire tonight at midnight. If you are thinking ahead to the fitness goals you want to pursue in 2023, and if you are a person who is motivated by races on the calendar, this might be the cheapest motivation you will find all year. 

Signed,
A Person Who Is Now Committed To An April 10K And A June Sprint Triathlon

End the eye-rolling, part 2

Okay, this is the post that is actually about eye-rolling and not about generalized bad attitude.

FIRST, everybody needs to be clear on the behavior you're trying to stop. Learn from my mistakes, my friends, as described in the last paragraph of this post from five years ago. Get specific with yourself and your kid about what you want to work on. With eye-rolling specifically, I would elicit it on purpose in a fun and silly context. Make ridiculous requests of each other and roll your eyes at each other deliberately. This will allow you both to be laughing when you say, "That! That's the thing that makes me feel like my head might explode, even if you do it accidentally!" In a situation like the one Kellie mentioned, where the kid's awareness seemed inconsistent, I might let her borrow my phone to take selfie videos and connect the dots: this is what it feels like when I do the thing that makes the grownups so frustrated.

SECOND, how can you frame the "why" in a way that puts you on the same team? Adults can't demand respect from a hardcore NOPE kid; they can only let it unfurl. Rigid rules like "no sass" are more likely to spark enduring resentments than stronger relationships, and stronger relationships are the big-picture goal. If you can make it clear to your kid that you share the same long-term ideal -- for her to be a healthy, independent adult with solid nurturing relationships -- it can smooth the path for short-term behavior changes.

In setting forth the "why" I might share my own childhood experiences, places where a perceived nasty attitude damaged my relationships with trusted adults and cost me opportunities. Or I might be really candid that it's hard for me to be kind to people who treat me in a way that feels disrespectful, even if they don't intend to signal disrespect. If you say, "It's easier for me to be nice to you when you find another way to tell me what's going on," it sets you right up for step 3, which is... 

THIRD, figure out replacement behaviors. What's a less exasperating way for a small person to feel those feelings? Bonus points if you pick something that makes everybody laugh some of the time, something that can become its own gentle joke. I mentioned "yes, Mom; right away, Mom" in my post yesterday. My kids really do say that and chuckle-- not because they are afraid of consequences if they don't, but because they have internalized the message I was sending after many thousands of repetitions. An exaggerated jokey way of expressing frustration can make you both laugh and break the tension, and can also become a cue for her to muster her better self and do the right thing. Maybe in the short term she practices saying, "Dernit, I hate it when I have to pause my video," instead of rolling her eyes, and pauses the video as she's saying it. She gets what she wants (an outlet for the frustration); you get what you want (the video is paused and there is no eye-rolling).

You might find some useful tips in my ZETZER post, and the post I linked above is also filled with ideas for shaping behavior that's bugging you. It won't be directly applicable if the target is eye-rolling, but the framework might be helpful in straddling the tensions. Some days it just feels like too much to be clear and firm, loving and lighthearted -- all at the same time. Good luck! Keep me posted! I am cheering for you!

Kids who roll their eyes and parents who want them to stop

Back at the beginning of NaBloPoMo Kellie requested a post on responding to a kid who rolls her eyes. I wrote this post and realized after 1200 words that it is about bad attitudes more generally, so I'll be back with a second installment that is specifically about eye-rolling. Here's part 1:

Be patient with yourself. A lot of parents have absorbed the message that their kids' behavior is a direct reflection of their parenting, but kids' behavior is unpredictable. A long time ago I wrote about YES kids and NOPE kids. It is not your fault if you have a boundary-testing kid who says "BUT WHY?" at frequent intervals. In the moment you can only control your response to the boundary-testing and but-why-ing; shaping those behaviors is a long-term task. If you look with curiosity and kindness at the ideas you have internalized about how these interactions are supposed to go, you may find that they are not ideas you actually believe with your adult brain. This realization can (a) set you free and (b) lower the thermostat in tense moments.

Be patient with your kid. A measure of compassion will leave them feeling better and, somewhat surprisingly, will often leave them more willing to comply. Here again I recommend Haim Ginott's magical strategy of granting the wish in fantasy. "Wouldn't it be fun if you NEVER had to clean your room?" you can say as you are writing a list of the room-cleaning tasks (because structure is a huge help to kids in completing unwelcome tasks; see below). "It is SO FRUSTRATING to clean when you'd rather be reading a book," you can say. "If I had a magic wand that would wipe down the bathroom for you, I would totally lend it to you." Or, "Maybe when you are a grownup you can live in a house where the cleaning fairies come in every Tuesday! That would be the coolest!"

Make it predictable. If responsibilities are routine, they will generate less resistance over time. If chores always happen at 9 on Saturday and are done by 9:45, there will be less wear and tear on everybody once the habit is established. If "clean your room" means finishing a list of 5 concrete tasks, it will feel less overwhelming and be more likely to get done, with fewer tears. If chores are followed by a small fun thing that ONLY happens after the house is clean, there is some built-in motivation for everybody to finish their tasks briskly and well.

Engage your inner goofball. Humor works better for me than sternness on this front. If you say, with goofy feigned confusion, "Wait wait wait, did you forget that your line is 'yes, Mom; right away, Mom'?" some of your children will laugh some of the time, and over the years they will learn to say "yes, Mom; right away, Mom." If you say, lightly and laughingly but also persistently, "Hold on, I am pushing the rewind button and we are taking another crack at this. I say, 'Empty the dishwasher, please,' and you say, 'Sure, I'd be glad to!'" while you push an imaginary rewind button (with sound effects, natch), you will set a better tone than if you call upon your inner drill sergeant. It's extremely important to be consistent, but power struggles rarely end well.

Model the behavior you want to see. It's worth thinking about what your kids see when an unexpected responsibility plops into your lap (though recall my advice above about being patient with yourself). I think it has been helpful for my kids to hear me talk through my own feelings occasionally, to say, "Oooh, I was not expecting to have to do that today. Ugh, I am having a little grumbly moment here. OKAY, though, I am going to do the unpleasant thing cheerfully in 3-2-1..." Here too I tend to rely on humor ("I am OFFERING IT UP for the souls in Purgatory and I HOPE THEY APPRECIATE IT"). I believe that kids benefit from role models who can show them that negative feelings can be experienced and moved through, rather than being stuffed down or over-indulged.

Find good real-life examples. We were lucky, when our kids were young, to connect with a great Scout troop here in town. One of the surprising benefits to our family was the troop's emphasis on cheerful service. If your kids are spending regular chunks of time with older peers who are willing to do hard things for other people without complaining, it will (probably) shift their attitude at home. 

Find good fictional examples. There are a ton of kids' shows and books that pit the scrappy kid protagonists against the boring demanding grownups. They make it seem hilarious to have a lousy attitude about pitching in and doing what's asked of you. Mixing up the media diet can put some different examples in front of your kids, which has the potential to make a difference in how they think and behave. You might want to be subtle about it. With my oldest son I read Little House in the Big Woods AT him as a lesson in How Good Kids Respond To Their Parents, and he responded by telling me that the only worthwhile person in the whole book was Charley, the misbehaving cousin who falls on a hornets' nest. (The nasty subtext of "look at him getting what he deserves" does not sit well with me as an adult, I have to say.) I would be cautious about revoking access to books or TV shows with a NOPE kid, but I would sprinkle in alternatives in a low-key way, seeking out vintage books and shows with characters who are both dutiful and interesting.

Offer occasional opportunities to see that grownup chores are harder than little-kid chores. This is an approach I would recommend deploying only judiciously, but it can be very useful in small doses. If your evening job is to scrub the pots and your kid's job is to put silverware in the dishwasher, a switch can make it very clear that everybody pitches in according to their abilities. Adult life is not an idyll of staying up late and eating cookie dough; adults do hard things to keep the household running smoothly. When pushed to my limit, I have sometimes said to a kid, "You have required me to do a big unhappy extra job in providing repeated reminders and patient responses to your terrible attitude, and consequently you will need to do one of my jobs for me." This is not usually well-received, but as a rarely used strategy it can be illustrative. If you can stay calm and let the learning happen, sometimes the lightbulb will flick on: my parents are asking me to do reasonable things at reasonable intervals, and I can oblige.

One more time: patience. It's totally normal for kids to resist unpleasant tasks. It's totally normal for parents to struggle with teaching kids to leave behind annoying behaviors. This is going to take some time -- not because you are doing anything wrong, but because it's intrinsically slow and difficult. Kindness will help. Hang in there! It gets better!

There are always new mistakes to make

We got a giant turkey this year. I ordered an 18-pounder, but they gave us a 22-pounder instead. That has to be the biggest turkey I've ever cooked. I didn't catch the size discrepancy until this morning, and I blanched when I saw the cooking time.

The oven we bought in 2018 has a convection setting, which I have never used. But today I resolved to Branch Out and Try New Things, and roast my turkey with the convection fan going. It was going to take 2.75 hours instead of 4.25 hours, which sounded like a good plan to me.

But I discovered today that the Math Part of my brain doesn't seem to function well at the same time that the Branching Out Part is ticking and whirring, because when I crunched the numbers on Go Time for the turkey I was off by an hour. We wanted to eat at 3, which meant that I wanted to the turkey to come out of the oven and start resting at 2:30, which should have meant that it would go in the oven at 11:45. Instead I was very insistent that people needed to finish their other oven stuff up in time for me to put the turkey in at 10:45. I was a little miffed when 10:45 stretched to 10:55, because did I want to eat at 3:10?  No, I did not.

Weirdly, the Math Part of my brain kicked back in all on its own. I was sitting on the couch at 1:30, reading my book in the lull between wrapping up the advance prep and the arrival of our out-of-town guests, when it said, "Ahem! Jamie! The turkey is going to be done very soon!" Or maybe it was the Turkey Smelling Part of my brain rather than the Math Part-- who can say? 

I have been roasting turkeys for almost 25 years now without ever making that particular mistake; I suppose there's a first time for everything. I had a moment of inner flailing, certain that I had wrecked Thanksgiving dinner, but then it occurred to me that it's not actually critical for the turkey to be done exactly 30 minutes before the meal. It always cools off during the slicing, so it's not like anyone expects the meat to be piping hot. I was roasting it upside down because it was so enormous that I'd been worried about drying out the breast meat, so it wasn't going to be shriveling to a state of drywall-esque desiccation.

I switched the oven to its warm setting and hoped for the best. It worked out surprising well: the turkey was juicy and the rest of the food was good. Next year I will be sure to ask someone to check my math. 

Love and Can Openers

We have a strong can opener preference, chez Gladly; we like the side-cut kind and NOT the top-cut kind. The side-cut kinds don't last as long, though, and we are currently between can openers. The last one, in its death throes, spat some metal shards into a can of evaporated milk over the weekend, a lapse that caused it to be ejected from the premises post-haste.

When Elwood and I were dating, I felt like I kept bumping up against new kinds of can openers in his family's kitchen. "How am I supposed to open a can with this thing?" I would harrumph, and Elwood or his mother would attempt to give me instructions. They must have had every one of the fifteen types of can openers listed in this article, and I found many of them bewildering.

While we waited for our replacement can opener to arrive in the mail, I was reluctantly opening cans with the pointy end of a churchkey. "This can is an ER trip waiting to happen," I announced in the kitchen, having once accompanied a kid to urgent care who tried to go up against a can of sweetened condensed milk armed only with a churchkey. The next time we needed to open a can, Elwood found a multi-tool with an attachment labeled "can opener," and busted a series of moves that I could not duplicate if I were starving on a desert island.

Today I texted him this grocery list--

--and he came home with a carload of stuff. "Can I get some grocery help?" he asked as he walked in. Just looking at the grocery bags left me feeling appreciative: Joe asked for lots of bananas and so Elwood, on the worst day of the year for grocery shopping, made sure to get lots of bananas. He went to two Krogers because the first one was out of cranberries.

Then I pulled the newly purchased Kroger-brand can opener out of the bag. "There was a time in our relationship when you would have just told me to suck it up and figure out the multi-tool," I told him. "So I kinda want to press this can opener to my heart and exclaim about how loved it makes me feel." And then I found the pineapple, with its ring-pull top, and I did press it to my heart. "That's so sweet!" I said, because I can assure you I would not have had much patience for digging through pineapple cans in search of a ring-pull top on the day before Thanksgiving.

Stella came around the corner. "Mom?" she inquired, "are you...pressing a can of pineapple to your heart?"

I think at 13 I would not have thought it especially romantic for someone to bring me an emergency can opener, or a can of pineapple with a ring-pull top. But I am older and wiser now, and I can tell when someone is saying he really loves me.

Looks like the NYT could use a nitpicky freelance editor

The NYT published an article yesterday on the correct pronunciation of Qatar. I am all in favor of helping people understand how to pronounce unfamiliar names from unfamiliar parts of the world. This is a worthy goal. It helps, however, to get one's facts straight.

The article tells us that the first sound in Qatar is produced by the glottis, requiring the speaker to lift the very back of the tongue up to the roof of the mouth. Unfortunately, the two halves of that sentence are anatomically incompatible.

Let's go with the second half: lift the very back of your tongue up to your uvula, the dangly part of your soft palate. Briefly stop the airflow. You'll notice that the sound is a cousin of our /k/ sound, but it's not the same.

It is also not the same as a glottal sound. Gently pinch the middle front of your neck with your thumb and index finger, and swallow. Did you feel your larynx rise and then sink again? Your glottis is in the middle of your larynx. It's the space between your true vocal folds. You use it to make the /h/ sound, and you use it to stop the airflow in the middle of "uh-oh."

The NYT tells us that the glottis is "a muscle English speakers don't get to exercise much," a phrase that is about 12 different flavors of wrong. You reconfigure your glottis all the dang time and have been doing so since you were a wee tiny palm-sized fetus. You do it by coordinating the movements of a bunch of different muscles, not just one. You manipulate your glottis around the clock, because you have to keep your saliva out of your airway even while you are sleeping, and protecting the lower airway is the primary reason you have a glottis. Seriously, that is the silliest thing I've read in the NYT in a while, even though I slipped up and read part of a David Brooks column last week.

Thus far the reporter is responsible for the silliness, but even the Arabic instructor she is quoting says some questionable stuff. The initial draft of this post enumerated more of my objections (the head tilt! the "hollow" T!), but I am thinking a streamlined version might be more palatable. (Palatable! Ba-dum-CHING! I'll be here all week.) 

Here's the TL;DR: this is the not the first time the NYT has fallen flat in its efforts to tell readers how to use their articulators. Paging the NYT: if you need a nitpicky editorial consultant for your articles about language, my rates are reasonable. And, bonus, I know where the glottis is.

A review of the Strong Strong Friends program

I decided to subscribe to Meg Gallagher's Strong Strong Friends training program back in September, feeling mildly uncertain about spending money on a strength-training program. Short version of this post: it has been money well spent and I am going to buy the next installment too.

Could I just tell myself what to do in the gym instead? I mean, sure, that is a thing I could do. I tend to get in ruts where I just keep doing the same things over and over, and I tend to go around and around inside my brain about how much weight to lift on a given day. Meg tells me what to do and gives me short videos to show me how to do it. If I look at her short video and I am like, "No, Meg, I decline," she will give me a list of substitutions that target the same muscles. Usually there's something on the list that will quiet down my inner Bartleby-the-scrivener-who-would-prefer-not-to.

I also really like being told how much weight to lift and how many times to lift it. I am not a person who objects to math, but 77.5% of 97.5 would require some face-scrunching. Meg's app does the face-scrunching number-crunching, and it keeps track of what I've been doing across time. I had no clue where to put the pin for lat pulldowns today, because I haven't done a lot of them this fall. But the app said, "Here you go, Jamie, I've got you." 

(Do you anthropomorphize your apps like this? I do know that this app has no literal face to scrunch and no actual kindness to offer me, but that last paragraph reads as if I have made a new friend and not just paid a subscription fee.)

This most recent installment of the plan has been a bro split, where you focus on one major movement in each lifting session. It has shown me that I much prefer lifting sessions with two compound movements, so I've been adjusting accordingly. You can sub in whatever you'd like, and the app will plop the results right in with the rest of your data. The next session is apparently going to focus on deadlifts, and I am here for it. I love deadlifting. I've made a bunch of deadlift progress this fall and I'm excited to make more.

I do find the workouts long and exhausting, so I trim them down to a length that works for me. I might make faster progress if I did all the exercises every time, but I might also persuade myself that going to the gym was too hard and painful so maybe I should go tomorrow, or maybe the day after.

Meg is not paying me any money to write this post; it is an unsolicited review from a happy first-time subscriber. If you feel comfortable with the big three compound lifts and have been looking for a nudge to get back to lifting or progress more systematically, I highly recommend it. If you don't yet feel comfortable with the big three, I suggest Casey Johnston's LIFTOFF program. 

Barbells for all, osteoporosis for none, deadlifts forever! And on that cheery note, good night, my friends.

Jamie Gladly, Nitpicky Freelance Editor

Pete's favorite author is Guy Gavriel Kay and he has been trying to get me to read more Kay for MONTHS. I introduced the big kids to Kay, but Tigana was the only one of his books I had read until June, when I read Under Heaven after, like, a year of coaxing. Now I am 60 pages into Lions of Al-Rassan, but I am taking a quick break. There is a character with no tongue and the dialogue is frustrating me. You cannot say /s/ with no tongue, my friends; it is not possible. You can't say /r/, either.

I'm putting it out there: if you ever need to write dialogue for a character with no tongue, my consultant rates would be very reasonable.

Also, if you ever need to put some Latin in your fiction and want to double-check your Latin grammar, my reasonable consultant rates apply here too. I get disproportionately irritated about sloppy Latin. It's like people think, "Well, no one will notice if I just wing it." SOME PEOPLE NOTICE [she said irascibly and perhaps pedantically].

Also also, if you are a native speaker of British English and you wish to introduce an American character, I will proofread that dialogue for free to avoid situations where putatively American speakers produce utterances like "I learnt from my mum." This drove me up the wall when we lived in Scotland. Whenever the newspapers carried alleged quotes from AmE speakers, I would shake the paper at my husband and say, "That is NOT what came out of her mouth, I guarantee you."

How about you -- what's your freelance editing niche? And can we also talk about that Louise Penny/Hillary Clinton collaborative novel, in which a key plot point was the radiation from MRI machines? even though MRI machines produce no ionizing radiation?

This is a pretty niche book recommendation

I can't remember now how I ran across Tony Ginocchio's writing, but it was probably somewhere on Twitter. He has an intermittently updated Substack called Grift of the Holy Spirit, which is mostly hilarious takedowns of the Church's more takedown-worthy elements. Here's an example from August, about right-wing Catholic responses to that Atlantic article about the weaponization of the rosary. (You guys, I recently met a woman who talked enthusiastically about how the rosary is Our Lady's AK-47, and I am still trying to get my mind around the idea of the Blessed Mother asking all her children to use Russian assault rifles every day, please and thank you. What even, I ask you.)  He also has another Substack where he writes about Newbery-award-winning children's literature.

Earlier this week he posted about his novel, Anybody But Us, and I enjoy his writing enough that I downloaded it immediately and read it over the next few days. It's about a fictional master's program at a fictional Catholic college, where grad students live in community and teach in archdiocesan schools, and I really enjoyed it.

I appreciated its sense of place. There's a scene where a character takes the bus south after a job interview on the north side, and I found it surprisingly evocative in its descriptions of Chicago's divisions between rich and poor. I loved the characters' blend of idealism and cynicism. There's one hilarious character who rants endlessly about justice, and I love the glimpses we get into what he's really thinking. As the book goes on we see the characters making decisions about what comes next; the process is poignant and believable.

I am probably 15 years older than his target audience and I did not get all of his jokes, but I laughed and laughed at this book. I would love to sit down and have a chat with the author sometime. I have questions for him. (For instance, when the ranting character attributes Evangelium Vitae to Paul VI, is that the author showing us the character's error, to indicate that he's not as smart as he thinks he is, or was that an authorial oversight?)

Among the people who read this blog, I know there are some who love Chicago and some who have thoughts about Catholic education and some who are wrangling with questions about how the Church can/should do its work in the world, and some who wonder sometimes how much any of us can make a difference. I feel like you probably need to fit into a couple of those categories to enjoy this book. But if you do tick any of those boxes, you might really like it.