Light and Momentary

29

Look, I made it to November 29 before I said, "Whoa, this is a lot of blog posting and I might be out of things to write about."

Sunday night blues

The big kids are all gone. The leftovers are mostly eaten. I head back to work tomorrow.

I told my students a month ago that we would not meet in person tomorrow. It seems likely that there will be a lot of new COVID cases incubating on campus this week after everyone's Thanksgiving travels, and I thought it would be sensible to move class online for a day while we give the virus time to announce its presence.

I am trying to view the omicron variant with equanimity. We don't know enough yet; it will take time to gather data. I am not encouraged, though, by the post I saw on Facebook asserting that it's a myth designed to persuade people to give up more of their freedom.

OKAY, these things are true: grading is temporary, the fall semester is temporary, the pre-solstice darkness is temporary, the omicron variant is temporary. One day at a time.

This is kind of a wacky idea but we might do it anyway

One of the first friends I made here in Gladlyville is moving away, and she is selling a baby grand piano. A piano I can open up to let the music wash over me is pretty high on my list of "Things I Might Like To Own Someday," and tonight I went over to her house to check out her piano.

First I had a conversation with Elwood. "How implausible is this idea?" I asked him. "Fairly implausible," he said. Our house is under 1800 square feet, and we already own a piano. We have a little music room, emphasis on the little, but acquiring this piano would mean a fair amount of rearranging.

We both laughed at the preposterousness of shoehorning a baby grand piano into our little house, but we also both like the idea of buying this piano. I suggested a new home for our upright piano, and he said, "Hey! That could work!" He emailed the friend in question while I went over to check out the piano.

It is not beautiful. It is an old instrument; its keys have yellowed and its frame is a little battered. But I sat down and played the beginning of my favorite Schumann piece, and the sound came pouring out and the world felt a little brighter. "I'd love for it to go to a good home," my friend said. Because it is not beautiful, and because she is selling her house in less than three weeks, it is far less expensive than I imagined a baby grand piano would be.

So these are the things that would have to happen: (1) find a new home for our upright piano (2) find a new home for the loveseat that currently occupies one wall of the music room (3) find a new home for the living room furniture most likely to be displaced by the loveseat (4) figure out piano moving for both the upright and the baby grand (5) call the tuner. Elwood says we also need to (6) buy more games, because if I'm going to squeeze more musical instruments into our small house then he would like to squeeze in more games.

"I mean," says Joe, "if we have space for a grand piano we probably have space for another bookshelf too." 

"It's a baby grand," I told him.

"Well, a baby tiger is still a tiger," he reminded me. 

Career Advice

I was driving Alex to the airport this evening (bummer bummer bummer, I miss that boy when he goes away), and we were talking about jobs and money and the future. He is running a tech startup that is doing well, and he was telling me about finding investors. These conversations have always seemed disconnected from my actual life, but tonight he surprised me.

"I sometimes think," I told him, "that if I could do anything at all that I might want to do, I would write books. I have that novel in progress, and I also started a book of food essays, and I have other ideas too." Alex jumped right on that food essays idea.

Do you know the Laurie Colwin essay collections, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking? They are comfort reads for me, and a couple of years ago I thought to myself, "I wish I had more books of food essays like these. Maybe I'll just have to write one." Kind of like the ones in the Laurie Colwin books, my draft essays are a mix of musings and how-to tips and paeans to my quirky kitchen favorites.

"You," he said, "are a very good writer, and good writing is sparse in food-focused corners of the internet." His plan: I start a food essays Substack, I build a reader base there, I get a book deal on the strength of my Substack writings. So far, so not-totally-implausible. But he's not done yet.

I also, in the Alex Plan for Mom's Next Act, hire a team to build me an app that will feature my putatively very good food writing. I said, "Alex, honey, my whole shtick would be 'let's build a thing with fun recipes and genuine if slightly quirky enthusiasm and zero autoplay videos ever.' I am not sure that long-form writing about food is very app-friendly." "Right," he said, "you'd be attracting an older market and they have more money to spend! Very attractive to investors." But you guys, in his vision I would be establishing a media empire. I pulled the emergency brake on the Vision Train when he started talking about Instagram. Alex is extraordinarily persuasive but there are limits.

"Alex," I said, "I don't ever want a big Instagram presence. Instagram makes people think they need Botox." "Well," he conceded, "you can hire out the Instagram stuff."

We were at the airport at that point, and I hugged him goodbye. I came home and peeked at the file called "Untitled book of food essays." I think that maybe this winter I will write a few more of them.

Day in the life

5:46am. I jolt awake from a dream in which I am an uneasy accessory to attempted murder. Can I get back to sleep? 

6:15am. Nope, I cannot get back to sleep. There are a lot of things to do. First up: coffee, Lauds, NYT puzzles. I don't see the Spelling Bee pangram but I need to get moving anyway.

7:15am. Sweet potatoes and beets go in the oven. Except -- wait -- I forgot to make a List. I am going to remember how to cook a big Thanksgiving dinner for company, right? I'm going to ease back into it, just like riding a bike or perhaps like childbirth? I microwave the pumpkin to make it easier to peel and put in my salad. This might have been a bad idea, because now I have very damp pumpkin. I marinate thin-sliced red onion in lemon juice for the salad. I start the bread dough and take the pastry out of the fridge. I definitely put too much water in that pastry yesterday.

7:40am. The Spelling Bee pangram plops obligingly into my brain. I write part of this post and wonder when I can reasonably wake people up to help cook. When does the turkey have to go in? I can't remember how to cook a turkey. I'm going to remember how to cook a turkey, right?

7:58am. I google "how to cook a turkey" and count backwards. Time to roll out some damp pastry. 

8:40am. The pastry rolls out like a dream, but the pumpkin is definitely too wet. What kind of mutant pumpkin is this? Who told my squash it could be squashy?

9:05am. Everybody is awake except Alex, who was coding late into the night. He is sleeping in the room where we keep the batteries, and I need batteries for the kitchen scale so I can make the pecan pie. Should I wake up Alex? Should I wing the pecan pie measurements? I decide to wing the pecan pie measurements. I also discover that I have roasted salted pecans. Eek, they are so salty. Will it be weird if I bathe them to get the salt off? Is bathed-pecan pie a terrible idea? What if this entire meal is a regrettable aggregation of unsuccessful attempts at people's favorite foods? Or...wait...what if I pause and eat a little breakfast?

9:56am. Pies are in, starchy vegetables are all roasted, bread dough is rising, dishes are done. Time for breakfast + KenKens + another installment of this post. I feel some delegating coming on, my friends. I will take a shower while the kids chop and prep.

11:05am. The turkey goes in. The potatoes are peeled, ten pounds of them, and the celery and onion are chopped for the stuffing. 

11:54am. It takes a long time to cube ten pounds of potatoes, but they are done. The Brussels sprouts are roasted and the salad greens are washed. The naked sweet potatoes and beets are awaiting their destinies. I am feeling a little wave of stress. Our guests might be here in half an hour and I am looking decidedly ulotrichous. (This is a word I learned on Tuesday, courtesy of the NYT cryptogram: having woolly or curly hair.) I am going to do battle with my hair so it is more curly and less woolly, and remove all the knitting bags and electronics from the living room, and assign someone to wipe down the downstairs bathroom, and ask Elwood to be the person in charge of beets.

12:30pm. Company arrives. It would have been better if the stuffing and sweet potatoes were already prepped, but I will get them ready now instead.

1:40pm. Marie is here!! She walks in from the train station wearing the giant purple shawl I made for her.

2:05pm. You guys, the turkey is doing something deeply weird. The meat thermometer is up in "probably dry and sad" territory, but there is a puddle of pink juice spilling out of the cavity. How can the top be dry and the juices be pink? Am I going to serve up turkey that is both dry and salmonella-laden? Also, I think I did forget how to host Thanksgiving. I still have to mash the potatoes? and make the gravy? and bake the rolls? and warm up the room-temperature things without drying them out? and share the oven with Joe so he can make a cranberry cake? St. Martha, I'm going to need some help here.

3:05pm. Dinner is served. I always think I don't love Thanksgiving food but I do actually enjoy Thanksgiving food. I know the stories say that the gods on Olympus ate ambrosia but I bet they had some gravy too. The turkey appears to be both cooked and moist. People I love are making happy noises as they eat food I cooked for them. This is one of my favorite things in the world.

4:30pm, maybe, but it's kind of a blur? Dessert! Pecan pie and pumpkin pie and cranberry cake, with plenty of whipped cream. The first dishwasher load gets going and we stash the turkey leftovers in the fridge.

5:15pm-ish. We play Telestrations, which continues to be one of my favorite ways to spend time with groups of 8 or 10 people. Joe is sitting next to me, and he asks me to draw an outhouse with a parking meter and to identify a post-COVID stock market drop. I do my best. I laugh until I cry.

6pm. We play charades. This is a Gladly family holiday tradition. It is, frankly, a little bonkers. I ask Elwood if he thinks TItus Andronicus will be too hard, and then Alex gets it in, like, 20 seconds. It takes us longer to figure out "The Quotations of Mao Zedong," but we get there in the end.

7:05pm. Our guests leave, and Elwood figures out how to fit all of the leftovers into a crowded fridge while I sit on the couch and blog. His task is made more difficult by the fact that I want to save everything. Yes, I want to eat the leftover salad tomorrow (greens with roasted squash, marinated red onions, and pecans -- so yummy and seasonally appropriate). Yes, I want to save the leftover whipped cream. It will go in my coffee tomorrow, naturally. Yes, I want to save all the gravy. ALL THE GRAVY.

7:53pm. I need to go and tackle the rest of the dishes.

7:54pm. Here I go. Tackling in 3-2-1...

8:44pm. That was a lot of dishes. I feel like my batteries are running down as I lurch back to the couch in slow motion. What are the things I want to do before I collapse in a puddle of drool? Finish this blog post, do a quick Duolingo story to keep the streak going, pray the rest of the rosary, brush teeth.

8:52pm. Probably there are some interesting things on Twitter? Maybe I should check, yeah?

8:54pm. I engage Grownup Mode and shut the Twitter tab. I hurl myself bedward.

Apples and Trees

One of the gifts of having a large family is that I am disinclined to give myself too much credit or too much blame for the way my children are turning out. This was the background for the post about the evils of fat-free cheese that I wrote earlier this month. There are some values -- like frugality -- that I have attempted to impart to all of my children. Mostly they are frugal. One of them out-frugals me, actually. But I have not persuaded all of my children that frugality is a desirable trait, and I am feeling pretty relaxed about that these days. They are who they are, and it's not my job to make them into something different.

When my children were younger I felt a great sense of urgency about teaching them to love God. In hindsight I think the urgency was sometimes counterproductive -- partially because it was born of scrupulosity, which is incompatible with true Christian freedom, and partially because urgency is not great for long-term relationships. My hope for my children is that they will grow into certain knowledge of God's presence with them in all circumstances, that they will perceive his love as a shield about them and a fire within them. I worry less about whether they're genuflecting on the correct knee these days. I wonder what damage I might have done in those days when rigidity felt like zeal to me, but at the same time I cannot blame my past self too harshly for being where she was.

The thing about having five children is that they make it clear to me how unpredictable parenting is. Some days I feel like I'm outfitting the White Knight from Through the Looking Glass: take this! you might need this! don't forget the mousetraps! watch for shark bites! Some of those things my children are still carrying across their metaphorical chessboards. Some of my children have laid down their mousetraps and moved on. Sometimes I hear them calling to their siblings on adjacent chessboard spaces: you don't need to worry so much about the shark bites! I could not have predicted what they would lay down and I cannot guess at what they might take up again someday.

Tomorrow night all five of my children will sleep in this house for the first time since 2019. I am not sure what Past Me would say about the shape of our life these days; I cannot hear the words of wisdom or caution that Future Me might wish to share. But Present Me is going to enjoy the heck out of the day tomorrow, and she needs to be up bright and early to bake some pies.

There is a vast sea of grading and I am emptying it with my teaspoon

I am doing that unwise thing tonight: I kept grading after dinner, and now I'm feeling like there hasn't been enough evening quite yet, so maybe I should stay up a little later and see if I feel more ready to go to bed.

But really I should just go to bed.

Careful what you pray for

Okay, so this is weird. And, frankly, unwelcome, and entirely unsurprising.

This morning I was praying in my dark and quiet house and I asked God to help me grow in holiness. I was thinking about how I've been focused on just getting through things for a while now. I haven't really been thinking about growth; I've just been keeping my head above water. "I'm ready to start growing again," I said this morning."

Soooooo maybe I should have seen this coming.

In my orbit there is a person who pushes every single button I have. The odds are low but not zero that the person in question will view this post, so I will not share the button-pushing details. Instead I will just say that if I were the elevator in which Charlie Bucket and Willie Wonka took flight, which in my memory if not in reality was simply covered in buttons, every one of my buttons -- every last one -- would have been thoroughly pushed in my past interactions with this individual.

Who is expecting to participate in festivities at my house later this week.

Who, despite having attended a gathering earlier this year at which everyone was supposed to be vaccinated, did not get vaccinated.

I could tell you more reasons why I think this decision is especially egregious in this particular set of circumstances, but I would just get all riled up again. No one reading this post will be surprised to learn that I think frequent interaction with vulnerable people necessitates special attention to COVID prevention.

But, as I was reminded earlier this evening, not everyone agrees with me on that one.

This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, more and more as my patience wears thinner. Glaring at the folks who defy a store's mask mandate is not going to change any hearts. My narrowed eyes are unlikely to broaden their perspectives. But this isn't just about a 10-second interaction with a stranger in the toothpaste aisle at CVS. This is someone who wants to come to our house and sit at our table and eat our food, while also making choices that I find appalling.

This is also someone who just recovered from COVID, so the infection control question does not seem pressing. But the love-thy-neighbor question -- that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish. I have known for a while now that my attitude about vaccine refusal was not great for my soul. And hey-- here is my same-day answered prayer, my very own opportunity to grow in holiness.

So tomorrow morning in my dark and quiet house I will say to God, "OK, I forgot about your knack for hilarious timing. That was pretty much a stroke of comic genius there! And also-- what the heck do you want me to do?"

Boosted, baby

I am entirely better, 100% better. My experience, for what it's worth: I had Moderna shot #1 in March (mild arm soreness, NBD) and shot #2 in April (massive whopping arm soreness, fatigue, achiness, under the weather for most of a day). I had Moderna shot #3 on Friday, and I felt like hell yesterday from about hour 20 to hour 28 after the shot. Fever, aches, significant arm soreness, fatigue, and ALSO I kept messing up my logic puzzles. Maybe I should report that last one to VAERS, because it was vexing as all get-out. I felt so crummy that I wondered if the nurse made a mistake and gave me a whole dose instead of a booster dose. But I went to bed early and woke up feeling perfectly normal.

I would still prefer to live in a country where 90% of people had had two mRNA shots, so that I would have less need of a third shot, but what are you going to do?

Dragging

I got my COVID booster shot yesterday and it has hit me pretty hard. After my second shot in April I felt genuinely grateful for feeling crummy: grateful for the existence of the vaccines, for the opportunity to be vaccinated, for a healthy functioning immune system. Today I am just crabby about all the folks in my county who have refused to get the shot, making our town less safe for everyone else.

Let's talk for a minute about the assertion that keeps popping up about COVID, the idea that we shouldn't make such a fuss about a disease with "only" a 1% mortality rate. The thing is, 1% (which is too low as a mortality estimate for unvaccinated people in the first place) is non-trivial. Take a look. We vaccinate entire populations against diseases with much lower mortality rates. You can't go to school if you're not vaccinated against some of those diseases, because we take them seriously.

So many people have died avoidable deaths. This post by Kieran Healy shows 2020 all-cause mortality (so not just COVID deaths, which have become yet another bone of contention for the folks who think COVID is overblown), broken down by state and compared with data from the previous 5 years. So much loss tucked into that graph -- so many deaths.

Kieran Healy also looked at COVID deaths as a function of a county's proportion of Trump voters. In 2020 the lines mostly run together, except for a scary blue line that illustrates the early explosion of COVID in New York City. Since vaccinations became widely available, the lines have diverged more and more: the counties at the 90th percentile for Trump votes have seen a COVID death rate >50% higher than the rate seen in the counties at the 10th percentile. 

The focus on purportedly low mortality rates disregards the impact of morbidity altogether, as if the only people with any serious complaints are the 1%. As if long COVID weren't a thing. As if all these hospitalizations and ICU admissions are only a big deal to liberal snowflakes who need to toughen up.

My brain is not firing on all cylinders today; it is befogged by the immune system I am trying to nudge into fighting off this virus more effectively. I keep making a hash of the logic puzzles that are usually a pleasing diversion. So if I seem to have made a hash of any of the logic in this post, please be kind.