Light and Momentary

It's TAMDRAL time, friends

Today marks the beginning of the Tenth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, in which we will wind our way through Great Expectations at a leisurely pace. Join us! Great Expectations is short (for a Dickens novel) and it will draw you in from the get-go.

We meet our hero not long after he was still too small to say his own name properly, and we see right away that he is smart, timid, and lonely. When I first read this book in 1989 I was thoroughly creeped out by the escaped convict lurking in a graveyard, demanding a file (a metal one, for removing his leg-iron, not a paper one for contesting a will or what have you) and threatening Pip with a cannibal's revenge.

In chapter 2 we meet Pip's older sister and brother-in-law, along with Tickler, whose existence tells you most of what you need to know about Mrs. Joe Gargery. And even though it might seem a little early for Dickens to start talking about social ills, it's there if you've got your eyes open: prison overcrowding is bad, kids, and convicts deserve more humane treatment than the Hulks.

If you are looking for a free version, I suggest that you avoid Project Gutenberg, which inserts a seriously spoiler-y image with a seriously spoiler-y caption right before chapter 1. When I first read Anna Karenina, the back cover copy had apparently been written by an over-eager new grad: it connected the dots between the opening and closing railway safety incidents. They described the climax of the novel on the back cover! Who does that?! This image/caption combo is just as bad, so maybe find yourself a free Kindle version instead.

Next up, pork pie at dawn! This is the slowest-paced AMDRAL we've ever done, so maybe it's your year to jump on in.

Marooned in Blarghville

May is usually the happiest time of year for me, but I've been floundering. The spring semester ended later than it usually does, I had a student who added herself to the short list of Most Memorably Exasperating Students, my summer class started sooner than summer classes usually do, and it's kind of a tricky class to boot. Oh, and I had an exhausting unexplained arrhythmia episode two days after telling you how predictable my arrhythmia had been for 18 years, and I've been on a new medication that seems to make me more tired than the old one. On top of that I've had a weird string of minor but unpleasant staph infections. I'm hoping this means that I'm a little run down and not that I"m living in squalor, since no one else in the family has been affected. 

Anyway, this is the time of year when I am usually planning All The Things, but right now I am mostly planning my next nap.

I do still want to read Great Expectations with the folks who were interested in the Tenth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, and we are running out of May in which to read it. So here's my suggestion: if we start on Thursday the 25th we'll still have a week of May in which to get the ball rolling. It's one of his shorter novels, and at this point I think I'll just plan to read it slowly: ten or fifteen pages a day should get us to the end of the book by the end of June.

I want a new drug

It's been such a long time since I said anything about my heart that maybe a recap is in order. You'd probably have to be a longtime reader with an excellent memory for this to have lodged in your brain.

When I was pregnant with Pete, who just turned 18 (!!), I had an unsettling arrhythmia episode that led to a diagnosis of PSVT. PSVT is generally benign, and I opted to treat it with medication. They offered me an ablation, a procedure in which they short out part of the wiring that makes your heart go, but I chose to keep my wiring intact.

My arrhythmia episodes are fairly predictable, and for 18 years I have taken the same medication if I am going to be doing cardio, heading into an unusually stressful situation, or spending time at high altitudes.

HOWEVER--

--this spring I started wondering if there might be a connection between the medication and my lackluster running performance as an adult. It has always seemed weird to me that I could run toward the front of the pack as a teen (i.e., I could knock out a sub-6:30 mile without working too hard) but I've always been near the back of the pack as an adult. I have written about some of that angst in these pages over the years. In the seasons when I was more serious about running I would sweat and labor and struggle and agonize, and never feel like I was seeing much improvement. I was always a little baffled about why it felt so hard.

WELL.

It turns out that there is a body of research from the 80s linking my particular beta-blocker to decrements in athletic performance. Reduced cardiac output. Reduced VO2 max. Reduced endurance. Some researchers looked at participants' skeletal muscles as well as their hearts, and found lower levels of ATP and creatine phosphate, along with impaired glycogenolysis. One study reported that they found 25-30% performance reductions in muscles with predominantly slow-twitch fibers.

SO MAYBE, just MAYBE, a person who has taken this medication faithfully before running for 18 years should not be surprised that running has felt hard!! Maybe this person should not have wasted mental energy on thoughts like "lazy" or "untalented" or "why bother?"!! 

So I made an appointment for next week to talk about a different management strategy. I think I will ask to try a different medication first, and request a referral to get more information about an ablation. I am still feeling a little cautious about shorting out the wiring that makes my heart beat, but I am also feeling cautious about continuing a medication that may have been slowing me down for eighteen years. (Wait, I need more exclamation points: eighteen!!!!!!! years!!!!!!!)

I am trying to keep my expectations modest. It is entirely possible that I am just a back-of-the-pack runner as an adult, and the medication only accounts for a tiny slice of my back-of-the-pack-ness. But I'm so curious now. And I can't help being a little bit hopeful.

Remedial Student Kicks It Old School

I posted a year ago about mailing in our state tax forms, like a Family Ties character or a particularly dutiful dinosaur, but what I didn't realize at the time was that because I filed paper forms in 2022 I would temporarily lose access to the state's e-filing system. I thought I could just reset my login and sproing back to the twenty-first century, but ALAS I have condemned myself to wander the primeval wilds like a pteranodon in search of prey or perhaps a postage stamp. 

This is a problem I could have solved if I had given myself a little more lead time, but I...did not give myself a little more lead time. This led to a rather BRISK and EFFICIENT series of exchanges between Mr. and Mrs. Pteranodon, as the clock ticked down to the last opportunity for an April 18 postmark. "Fill out the dependent schedule," squawked Mrs. Pteranodon to her spouse as she worked on the primary form. "And the property tax schedule!" 

I was racing out the door with my sealed envelope when I realized I had forgotten the state's copies of our W-2 forms. So I stopped, ripped open the envelope, taped it back up with the necessary forms inside, and zoomed off to the PO. I caught the postal worker as he was walking away from the emptied mailbox. "No problem," he said, as he dropped my envelope into the bin of outgoing mail, apparently unruffled by his face-to-face encounter with a creature straight out of the Cretaceous Period.

Dear Future Jamie, do better next year. Two years in a row is more than enough.

TAMDRAL Time

This will be the tenth year in which I have hosted a Dickens read-along in this space after the end of the spring semester. Here's what we've read so far:

2022 Nicholas Nickleby
2021 Little Dorrit
2020 Oliver Twist
2019 Tale of Two Cities
2018 Pickwick Papers
2017 Martin Chuzzlewit
2016 David Copperfield
2015 Our Mutual Friend
2014 Bleak House

For the Tenth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong this year I am thinking about reading either Great Expectations or The Old Curiosity Shop, starting on May 15 after grades are submitted. Want to join me? Any preference?

Book Notes

Have we had a book post recently? I don't think so. I've finished eight books over the past month and some of them were marvelous. Maybe I will write about them in appreciation order rather than chronological order.

1. Romantic Comedy. I love Curtis Sittenfeld; she is on the short list of authors whose books I will always pre-order. This one is hilarious and tender and also thought-provoking. I persuaded the roommates that they should read it too so we can have Zoom book club again like we did when Rodham came out. I am still not quite sure that I buy the premise but I WISH I bought the premise. How likely is it for a famously handsome male celebrity to date someone less attractive and more intelligent? Color me skeptical, but I loved the book anyway.
2. The Latecomer. My friend Becky recommended this one to me and I gobbled it right up. It's about a family of triplets who are followed much later by a singleton sibling, and I enjoyed it immensely. This is the second Jean Hanff Korelitz book I've read; I am a fan of her characters and her plotting and her writing style. Here too I am not entirely sure that I buy the premise but I was willing to suspend disbelief.
3. The Great Divorce. And now for something completely different! Stella was telling me recently how strange she'd found the beginning of this book, and I was agreeing with her. I couldn't remember if I'd ever finished it, but I decided I'd pick it up again. I finished it tonight and I might start it over tomorrow morning.
4.  The Sweet Spot. I think this was an Ask A Manager recommendation, maybe? Funny, engaging, full of endearing characters. Yet again I am a leetle dubious about the premise, but whatever. I enjoyed it enough to give it to my mother for her birthday, and she gave it a happy thumbs-up.
5. I Have Some Questions For You. I pre-ordered this one because I loved The Great Believers so much when I read it last summer. And I liked this one-- I like her writing and she did a good job with the plotting and the pacing. But it was also hard to read because it's about violence against women and about who gets away with what in this country. I would not call it a hopeful book.
6. Dr. Wortle's School. I picked this one as my next Trollope novel pretty much randomly after I finished Miss Mackenzie. They both feel a little lightweight after The Way We Live Now, but I guess most books are going to seem less hefty than TWWLN. Both books have a lot to say about marriage. Will Miss Mackenzie choose a husband? (It's a more interesting question than it sounds.) What does a choice to violate marriage law say about a person's moral state? What should we make of a person who does a bad thing for a good reason? 
7. Run Like A Pro. I've recommended a bunch of Matt Fitzgerald books here over the years; I'm lukewarm about this one. He pushes high-volume running, which I am not really cut out for. He also says bench presses will slow you down, because they add useless mass to your upper body. You'll tear that barbell from my cold dead hands, Matt. Bench presses are awesome.
8. Honor. Included for completeness; not a fan. More violence against women; more failures of the legal system.

Today I started The Three Clerks, because I got an email from the UK Trollope Society. They'll be meeting in Cambridge this month to discuss it. It's an in-person meeting; I will not be putting my passport-less self on a plane to talk about obscure Trollope novels. But I love the idea of reading Trollope with other people, so I downloaded the free Kindle version. (Amazon said, "Did you mean the Kevin Smith movie 'Clerks III,' Jamie?" No, Amazon, I did not. Those two things could hardly be more different.) I was trying to tell Elwood about how witty it is. "He's joking about the Board of Commissioners for Regulating Weights and Measures! AND decimalization of English currency!" I told him, with all the enthusiasm at the command of someone whose middle name might be Enthusiastic if it weren't Patricia.

He does not find my fondness for Trollope persuasive, alas. But here's my plan, friends: I am going to crank through The Three Clerks, which promises to be a rip-roaring* tale of love and bureaucracy. And then! It will be TAMDRAL time! I have not given much thought at all to this year's Dickens Read-Along. Maybe we can chat about that tomorrow. If you can stand the suspense, that is.

(*Okay, okay, it's possible that "rip-roaring" is a mild exaggeration. How about "gently and consistently funny, with charming characters and a delicious authorial voice"?)

Just like old times

Back before the pandemic, a married couple directed music at our church and did a fantastic job of it. I've been singing in choirs since I was a wee small girl, and they are my favorite directors ever. There are a lot of tensions for a church music director to straddle: the music has to be more worship than performance, but if you don't pay sufficient attention to the details you can distract from the worship. You want to welcome new musicians while also keeping a reasonable standard for musical skill. You need to let people know when they have to fix something while also remembering that human error is an inevitable part of live music. You have to keep the pastor and the congregation and the choir happy even when they want different things. It's a lot, and this couple did a terrific job.

In 2021 they announced that they were resigning from their paid positions. They agreed to stay on in a volunteer role, but the Masses were divided among a team of volunteer directors and they were only in charge of one liturgy each weekend. It conflicts with my standing Sunday Zoom call with my college roommates, so I hadn't sung with them in-- gosh, probably two years.

She texted me to ask if I was available for the Triduum services, and I said I'd love to come. We rehearsed last night. And you guys, it was the best.

I stopped playing flute for Mass in 2020 and I never went back to it. Do you remember those articles about viral particle spread via wind instruments? I'm remembering a particular story that put the flute right behind the vuvuzela in its capacity to serve as a COVID dispersion machine. When we were permitted to have musicians at Mass again, they couldn't be wind instruments; there was too much concern about virus transmission back in the pre-vaccination era. I am still happy that I learned to play the bass during that time, so I'm not complaining. But I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed playing the flute for Mass.

Last night we were paging through the music together and I was jotting down notes in my binder about which parts to play where. At one point the director said, "Jamie, can you play the tenor part for the refrain? And can you pad on the verses?" In a calm voice I said, "Sure," and penciled "R-tenor, V-pad" on the page. But inwardly I said this instead:

Snoopy Happy Dance GIFfrom Snoopy GIFs

Padding on the verses means I'll add in something pretty and unobtrusive -- maybe a little harmony under the vocalist's line, maybe a little echo of the melody, maybe just the roots of the chords if I'm putting more emphasis on unobtrusive than pretty. Padding is where the structure of planning and rehearsal gives way to the spontaneity of improvisation. 

For two years before the pandemic I played the flute for Mass more often than not. So in some ways this feels entirely normal; I have plenty of pages of music marked "R-tenor, V-pad." But at the same time it feels like a homecoming. At the beginning of the pandemic when all the churches shut down I felt like I was walking around with a limb missing. I wrote about the sadness and the weirdness in that first pandemic summer. Even after we had access to the sacraments again, we didn't really have access to the church community. Though I've been involved in simple ensembles pretty consistently, I've really missed that larger community of musicians.

So tonight I am feeling lucky and grateful about this thing I get to be part of tomorrow and the day after and the day after that: a trusted director, a big and joyful ensemble, and a shared commitment to doing something beautiful and evanescent, in the service of something beautiful and eternal.

Self-compassion ripples outward

This morning I volunteered with a friend. It went smoothly, for the most part, and afterward we hugged each other and exchanged a smile about the bits that didn't go exactly as planned.

It sounds unremarkable, right? The thing I am thinking about this evening is that none of it would have seemed likely a year ago.

A year ago I wouldn't have called this person a friend, because I found her so prickly. I would not have answered the call for volunteers, because I did not spend time with her by choice. But last summer and fall we were on a retreat team together, and things changed.

I was not expecting things to change. We'd been on retreats together before, and the usual retreat magic had not really improved the situation. I am still not sure what enabled me to relax this time around, to go in with low expectations. I resolved to be helpful where I could and not sweat the prickliness.

Whatever the reason, something shifted in an big way. I learned a thing I had not known before-- namely, that she struggles with self-criticism. When I looked back on all the past interactions that had hurt my feelings, I saw them with a new understanding. This is a true fact: it's easier to speak kindly to other people when you can speak kindly to yourself.

I think it used to be that when we spent time together I slipped into chilly-distant mode. I was always waiting for her to say something resent-able, which did not have a great effect on my disposition. At one point during the retreat she said to me, in a tone of surprise, "Jamie, you're fun! I didn't know how fun you were!" "Huh," I thought to myself, "I guess it takes two to make a relationship tense."

One morning during the retreat she was leading a song and she got stuck in the intro. It happens sometimes when you're playing from lead sheets: you have the chords in front of you, you've rehearsed the music, but you can't find the starting note. I've been there; it stinks. I bowed my head and prayed for her-- not so much that she would find the note (although there was some of that) but that she would know the love of God right there in her moment of getting it wrong. That she would see her own goodness and perceive the Lord's tender affection for her in all circumstances. Afterward she said to me, "I looked over at you, and I could tell you were praying for me not to be too hard on myself."

I have blogged a little, here and there, about my experience of working through Kristin Neff's Self-Compassion. I didn't say a lot about it, because it was hard and slow and it left me feeling too vulnerable to tell the internet all about it. I think the experience of learning to be kinder to myself has made it easier not only to feel more at peace in my own skin, but to be more at ease in all kinds of relationships.

I can't know exactly why things changed between us, but we did something good together this morning and it brought us both joy. And I am thinking back on it this evening, glad and grateful.

Nice guys at the gym

I have a pretty consistent Sunday afternoon routine: I go to the gym around 2:30, when it's usually fairly empty. I deadlift, I bench, I do a superset of upper-body accessories, and I'm done. But today I got to step 2 and all the flat benches were occupied.

I stood nearby and waited for a few minutes to see if anybody seemed to be wrapping up. One of the guys walked up to me while I was resting and asked politely if I was using the machine next to me -- he wanted to snag one of the weights. "Go right ahead," I told him. Politely, oh so politely, he said, "Do you need any help with anything?"

You guys, this man was jacked. Like, his name could be Yoked McSwolerson and it still would not convey the massiveness of his mighty muscles. Also he was, like, 6'5". "Oh, no," I told him, "just waiting for one of the benches to open up."

He asked me if I'd ever tried decline bench. I never had, because it looks a little scary. You have to put your knees over one thingummy and your shins under another thingummy and uncurl yourself backward without thwacking your head on the barbell. If you fail a rep on flat bench, you can roll the barbell down to your middle and escape that way. But if you fail a rep on decline bench I feel like you're kind of stuck, with a barbell that's well-positioned to roll right onto your neck. 

While he was resting between sets, he showed me which thingummies went where. After his next set I asked him a form question and he was friendly and helpful again. There was no skeeviness at any point.

I don't know how often I'll do decline bench, but it was fun to try something new. I was expecting it to be hard, because incline bench is significantly harder than flat bench, but it was not hard. I am mostly blogging about it because I want to remember the unexpected friendliness: I would not have expected Mr. McSwolerson to reach out and offer to help me out of the blue like that. "People at the gym are friendly," Joe assured me back when I first started lifting. I still think his gym experience as a muscular 20-year-old is different from mine. But what do you know-- sometimes people at the gym are friendly.

Back to it

This last week was my spring break, and for the first time in many years I left town for part of it. Back in the fall I was asked to serve as a program reviewer for another university: they offered to pay me to come out and evaluate the quality and sustainability of their grad program, which is located in an area where I have good friends. Sure, I said, I can do that.

I left on time change Sunday and drove to my friend Becky's house. We have an ongoing daily text conversation about everything under the sun, but we hadn't seen each other in person since the summer of 2021. I'd never met her youngest; I hadn't seen her husband in-- hm, probably 20 years. We went to a concert that night, I got to tour her office the next morning, and then I headed out after that.

The weather was worse than I expected, and I hate driving in bad weather. The sky dropped so much slush on the front of my little rental car that its cruise control cut out because the radar system couldn't function. But I kept plugging and made it to the other side of the state, where I had lunch with friend #2. After one more hour of icky driving, I got to the city where I'd be staying.

I had expected the university to put me up in a hotel that was clean but un-fancy, so I was pretty surprised by the reality: mammoth chandeliers, high ceilings, much swankier than my usual hotel choices. I had a little time to review my materials for the next day before I headed out to dinner with my friends who live in the city. We had the nicest dinner together -- we talked and laughed and talked some more.

The next morning I met my co-reviewer and we headed into two days of meetings. I wasn't expecting the job to be so interesting, and it was fun to be looking at the program as an outsider, with the freedom to recommend anything at all. They built in time for us to start drafting our report, which we appreciated. I had an uneventful trip back on Wednesday evening.

Spring break is always filled with grading, and I hadn't really done the math on how many hours of grading I would be trying to squish into Thursday and Friday. I wound up working a fair amount yesterday and I'm still not finished. It will be okay, though; the grading always gets done. Spring break is usually a lonely week for me -- usually I am on my own doing the least pleasant parts of my job while the kids are in school -- but this one was the opposite of lonely.