Light and Momentary

Mishmash on a Tuesday

You guys, did you know there is this corner of YouTube that consists of people making videos of themselves making planner pages? They stick down the washi tape; they pull the washi tape back up and straighten it out. They consider the rose-gold color scheme; they opt for the silver instead. They make videos of making planner spreads that tell them to make videos about making new planner spreads. It's like an ouroboros with washi cards* for scales.

*Washi cards, if you didn't already know, are cards onto which people wind lengths of washi tape so it will be more portable. This way they can adorn their planners on the go.

***

I just RSVP'd no to a wedding I would really like to attend, a wedding that will be attended by a bunch of people I like and haven't seen in a long time. This bums me out. I just don't know how a cool-weather wedding works safely in this particular era. And I might have been willing to show up and bug out if necessary, but Elwood was like "Nope. Not going to a potential super-spreader event."

So that's a bummer.

***

We seem to have turned a corner with online school, with more independence and fewer tears. I woke up this morning feeling excited about the work ahead of me. I expect to submit paper #3 of the semester this week. Maybe even tomorrow!

You might remember that I followed the advice I had heard from others about aiming low in my sabbatical application materials, because it's much better to have exceeded your targets when you submit your follow-up materials than to have failed to meet them. I told the provost I would submit two papers by the end of the semester, so whatever else happens between now and January I will have surpassed that goal. 

Maybe if I were an unscrupulous person I would call it good and start my own washi tape YouTube channel.

***

The weather is so much cooler now that I have pulled the lockdown blanket out of hibernation. It is very pleasant to have a big pile of wool on my lap today. And it's so evocative to be looking again at this object that is imbued with memories of our strange and isolated spring.

I'm glad I didn't know what the fall would look like.

***

I am trying to stay calm about the election BUT STAYING CALM DID ME A FAT LOT OF GOOD IN 2016 NOW DIDN'T IT?!?!?! I try not to be a superstitious person, but today when I discovered that Stephen West is gearing up for his new mystery knit-along I had this conversation with myself:

"Oh, a new Stephen West MKAL! We looooove Stephen West MKALs!!"
    "Yes, but the last time we did a Stephen West MKAL Donald Trump was elected president."
"Self. Listen. You cannot CAUSE Donald Trump to be re-elected by your choice of knitting patterns."
    "I mean, you say that but are you really 100% sure??"
"Yes. Wait. Maybe. I mean, YES. Buy the pattern, silly."

So! If we continue our slow slide into autocratic rule by the incompetent, perhaps MKAL participation will prove to be a hitherto-overlooked cause.

For real this time

Ziggy was adopted today.

We're all a little bummed that he's gone.

Maximum Division

Change my mind: I think Trump's choice of Amy Coney Barrett was deliberately engineered to intensify our polarization. 

I think the nones look at someone in a charismatic Catholic community, where members promise to yield to other people's authority, and declare to themselves that every single part of that is freaky-deaky. (Plenty of Catholics find it freaky-deaky, for that matter.)

I think a big slice of America looks at someone with seven -- count 'em, seven -- children and thinks to itself, "Freakiest-deakiest." A small but vocal segment of that big slice is looking at the combination of seven children and People of Praise membership and shrieking, "Aunt Lydia is about to rule over you, America!!!!!!" 

Still another slice of America is thinking that deep commitment to the faith is admirable, and that anyone who can combine mothering seven children with Coney Barrett's legal career must seriously have her act together.

I am just waiting for the conservative quote-tweets of the Aunt Lydia comparisons, saying, "Look how they hate your faith and your families. We can't let that hatred win!" I think those voices will be targeting Catholics who don't want to vote for either Trump (because he's unequivocally the worst president in history) or Biden (because abortion), trying to persuade them to see Trump as the more authentically Catholic option.

These quote-tweets, of course, will be criss-crossing the tweets from left-Twitter, in which LGBTQ voices are saying, "Look how they hate your rights and your families. We can't let that hatred win!"

And I know that my perspective on this is a little quirky, since I'm a Catholic with charismatic sympathies and an eyebrow-raising number of children who leans left politically and also believes firmly in the unique and unrepeatable nature of each human life. But there are so many worthwhile conversations we could be having here, and instead we will only get sound bites on both sides: they hate you. You must vote against them.

We live in a society

If you only know me from the blog you might envision me as a politer version of Gladys Kravitz, routinely sticking my nose in other people’s business. There was that time I asked the kid at the ballet recital to stop playing video games, and the time I told the fraternity guy that I was not having any of his nonsense, and the time I made noises about poisoning an unrepentant neighbor's biting dog. Earlier in the pandemic I might have made it sound like I was being bossy about masks on a regular basis. The reality is that pretty much any time I ask other people to modify their behavior I wind up blogging about it, because it stresses me out. It’s rarer for me to blog about live-and-let-live moments, even though I think I am mostly a live-and-let-live kind of person.

I think the guiding question for me about poking my nose in is this: does this person's decision make things worse for multiple people, or just me? And I'm a little more likely to poke my nose in with college students, because I am surrounded by them and it is frequently clear that they are still figuring out the nuances of adult life and neighborliness. My single biggest bossy-neighbor episode involved the college student in a nearby apartment building who wanted to let his scary dog run loose on the route between our block and the elementary school. Which-- no. Absolutely not.  

In Target last night it did not seem right to me that someone would park herself at the store entrance, laughing loud and long and open-mouthed in the direction of the front doors. There was no way into the store except through her invisible cloud of exhalations. Two weeks ago Gladlyville briefly occupied the #1 spot on one of the NYT lists of hot spots; the percentage of college students in town who have tested positive for COVID in the past month is approaching double digits. Two weeks ago most of our new cases were in college-aged people, but we are seeing that change at the same time that we are seeing record hospitalizations, along with more deaths after a long lull.

This combination of circumstances makes me think that it's a bad time for college students to be acting cavalier about COVID precautions. That's why I made the request last night.

I'm reading this post over and it sounds defensive, which is maybe a little weird since no one here has questioned my choice to ask her to put a mask on. Usually when people say "we live in a society!" they say it huffily, to condemn behavior that seems clearly outside the norm. But I think we can also say "we live in a society!" kindly: my choices affect you, and vice versa. I can ask you to do things differently if your choices make me worried about other people's well-being. You can decline, because we live in a free society, but I find that people are usually willing to consider a reasonable request, framed politely.

I have been an inconsiderate young adult; I have spewed out loud performative laughter and failed to follow posted rules. It was in large part the patient requests of people around me that taught me how to be a more considerate 20-something. And so I think sometimes it's better to ask gently for the thing that seems right to me, instead of being frustrated that the other person isn't offering it unasked.

In the Target checkout line

Tonight I went to Target for the first time in months. Just inside the door, approximately 5 yards from the sign saying "Masks required for store entry," there was a little knot of college-aged women. Two of them were wearing masks; the third, facing me and laughing uproariously as she snapped pictures of her friends, had hers around her chin. "Excuse me," I said in my politest friendliest voice, "could you put your mask on, please?"

"Oh," she answered as she complied, in a tone that made me think she had just forgotten.

When I got back to the front of the store to check out, there was a line. I stood there, zoning out, until I was startled by a masked face right next to mine. "Are you the lady who asked me to put my mask on earlier?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, blinking in surprise.

"Well," she said, with a bit of a quiver in her voice, "in the future you should think about ordering your stuff online, because it's my choice whether to wear a mask."

"Oh," I said, in the politest friendliest voice you ever heard, "or you could comply with the posted requirements." Conveniently, a register opened up and I walked over to it before she said anything else.

It will come as no surprise to you, dear patient readers, that I am still struggling a bit with the whole Cultural Norms in the Age of COVID thing. It is a true fact that gentle social pressure influences mask use in both directions. Ten days ago I wore a mask to a small gathering of church folks. One friend saw me and said aloud, "Oh, you're wearing a mask, so I will too," whereupon another person said, "I'll get my mask too." Result: 100% of people at that get-together wearing masks. But five days ago I was at a gathering of eight people where the opposite result ensued when one person said, "Does anybody care if I don't wear a mask? I can't deal with the way it fogs my glasses." This launched a string of complaints about masks accompanied by near-universal mask removal.

So I am going to keep applying gentle social pressure, mostly by example but occasionally by means of polite friendly direct requests. Clearly, though, my request did not feel sufficiently polite or friendly to the person at Target tonight. I am trying to think what could have induced me, at age 20, to march up to someone my mother's age and tell her she should just stay home if she really wanted other people to follow the rules. I am trying to sympathize with her and coming up empty: if I had a health condition that made it uncomfortable for me to wear a mask, I would not dawdle at the entrance, taking pictures of my friends and laughing in a way that seems likely to spray respiratory droplets at entering shoppers.

And yet-- I know also that one of my least attractive traits is my tendency to be stringent about rules, to value being right above all else. The god made in my image, à la Voltaire, is a god that prizes regulations and compliance. Striving to grow in faith means turning away from that particular idol, day after day, to fix my gaze on the actual Author and Perfecter of the faith. What does God ask of me in the pandemic? To protect the vulnerable, yes, and also to extend compassion to folks who don't seem to approach that task in the same way or with the same degree of concern.

Which means that my brain remains a messy place to be, here in month 7 of the pandemic. I think it will probably be a while before I go back to Target.

Surprise!

Zig's adoption fell through, so he'll be staying with us for a while longer.

I know you were all worried about how I was going to keep the back of my neck clean after his departure.

There was much cheering after the rescue organization called me this morning.

I do not think Ziggy would be very happy in our post-pandemic life, because he hates to be alone. I do not think it makes sense to adopt him.

But I keep thinking about it anyway.

Farewell to Ziggy

I told the kids I expected Ziggy to be adopted quickly, but I was still surprised when they called me up yesterday to say he would be leaving us on Saturday. It's only been 2.5 weeks.

Last week Pete asked me to text him from the driveway when I came home from church, so he could record Ziggy's welcome. The whole video was 2.5 minutes of enthusiastic dog greetings. I am sharing the middle 25 seconds here.

That's been pretty nice to come home to.

It wouldn't make sense to adopt a dog in the middle of the pandemic when our non-pandemic lives are not especially dog-friendly. But I'm thinking about it anyway. And if Ziggy's adoption fell through and they asked us to take him back, we would say yes in a hot second.

All My Children

Today I hit my work goals, and the smoke alarm did not go off, and no one cried when the technology didn't work properly, and we all took a long pleasant walk with Ziggy when school was over for the day. We'll call it a win.

Remember my grand fermentation plans? My legions of lactobacilli are multiplying. My kombucha is on its second ferment, and my kimchi is delicious in an eye-watering way.

I was really glad that I posted about how to brew kombucha back in 2016, because I wouldn't have remembered otherwise. After a while I got kombucha-ed out and passed my brewing setup along to a young adult of my acquaintance. As sometimes happens with young adults (and older adults too, I suppose), he was enthusiastic for a while and then his enthusiasm waned. When he returned my stuff I found [shudder SHUDDER SHUDDER] a grub living in the threads of the jar. 

Obviously, I set it on fire in the driveway, my preferred method of dealing with unexpected annoyances, and did not even think about brewing kombucha again for years.

So when I wanted to try it again, I needed a new scoby. This one seems to be working fine. If I get aspergillosis I'll be sure to let you know.

I followed this kimchi recipe, with 4 T. of gochujaru, and so far I'm very pleased with the flavors. Doesn't it look tasty?

There wasn't much brine at all, though, so today I mixed up some more and added it to the crock. Pete asked if I'd pull some out and store it in a little jar out for him before it got any funkier.

I have to say, it gives me a my-work-here-is-done feeling that Pete wants his very own kimchi.

Next up: sourdough. MORE lactobacilli! ALL the lactobacilli! 

(Let us disregard the weirdness of calling this post "All My Children" when I am raising all these lactobacilli specifically to eat them. Moving right along!)

Pipe Cleaner Queen

Back in the spring one of the kids made me a pipe cleaner crown to wear when I was working. It was such a weird season: I was trying to get my class moved online and stay on top of my work, I was consuming a lot of news, and I was trying to help the kids make the transition to online school. It wasn't always easy for them to tell when I was thinking hard while staring at the laptop screen and when I was just looking grumpy while staring at the laptop screen, so I wore the crown when I needed to work without interruptions.

Today I donned the crown again. This is hard, you guys. It's a first-world privilege-y flavor of hard, in which we have jobs and savings and health (we hope! worrisome COVID exposure for one of the college kids, so we'll see what happens there), but it's hard nonetheless.

The school assumes a degree of parental availability that I find intensely frustrating, and a degree of tween tech savvy that I find unrealistic. I mostly get it; it's a terrible situation for them. But at the same time, it is making me BONKERS. Why would a teacher assume that I can go over to the school on short notice during work hours? Why would she pressure my child about it?

It seems like the teachers assume the tech learning piece will be quick and effortless. Install the browser extension and start using it immediately in this class discussion. Create a Flipgrid account and use their interface to upload a three-minute video, due today. Download this app and use it to submit your assignment in the next 30 minutes.

I am providing a lot of tech support and a lot of reassurance: it's not your fault if Google Classroom won't load. It's not your fault if Google Drive is laggy. If the audio isn't working on your school-supplied laptop, your teacher will work with you to complete the assignment later.

The kids are also dealing with some of the same video chat woes that the grownups are. Was that mean or just clueless? Was I weird and awkward in that conversation or was it normal for this weird and awkward situation? Peer feedback from junior high students is not improved by moving it online.

What I am finding with Stella is that the amount of figuring stuff out she has to do to make the technology work is siphoning off a non-trivial fraction of of her ability to learn the curricular content that the technology is supposed to deliver. I doubt she has any idea about the substance of the class in which she installed the browser extension, because she was so panicked about not being able to get it to work immediately. "Darling," I say, "everybody has trouble getting browser extensions to work sometimes. Grownups have trouble with this stuff too. It's going to be okay."

She would prefer it, I think, if it were already okay. I would also prefer it.

I have been feeling mounting frustration about the volume of interruptions. Elwood came home from the office on Friday and asked me how my day had been, and I surprised myself by starting to cry again. "I can't think hard about hard things if I'm interrupted all the time," I said, "and the school's assumption is that the kids can interrupt me. I can't work like this."

This morning at 8 I pulled out the pipe cleaner crown and a pair of earplugs, and I said, "If the house is actively burning down at some point in the next two hours, please let me know. If something is just smoldering, I expect you to address it yourselves. The fire extinguisher is in the pantry."

After those two hours I checked in with the kids and walked the dog around the block, and then I put the crown back on again. I was not asked to assist when the smoke alarm went off during lunch preparations, but I did need to assist with a medium-sized after-lunch meltdown. Were those things related-- would it have been a smoother afternoon if I had been more available in the morning? I don't know. I just don't know.

He has looked with favor on some of his servants

I didn't tell you guys about the Big Kerfuffle last year around this time, when my pastor told the leaders of the parish Sanctity of Life committee that nobody could be in parish leadership who wasn't willing to acknowledge the authority of the pope. This resulted, apparently, in a pretty tense meeting and the departure of two long-time committee stalwarts. He told the committee that they were expected to take a broader view of life issues going forward, and he asked me if I would be willing to get more involved.

This has been a bit of a struggle for me. I'm pretty sure I didn't tell you about the Respect Life month blow-up last year. I had written a blog post about climate change as a sanctity-of-life issue, and the pastor put it in the bulletin. I asked my family to edit THE HECK out of that post before I put it up on the parish website, but I did not foresee the intensity of the reaction: many, many angry emails about the folly of putting liberal claptrap in the parish bulletin. The pastor was entirely supportive and unruffled, but DANG I found it stressful.

The people on the committee are lovely, generous people. It's just that they like the way they've been doing things, with the Life Chain and the October fundraiser for Birthright and the Five Non-Negotiables voting guides from the days before Fr. Pavone jumped the entire shark. They're not so interested in a parish campaign to urge our congressman to oppose legislation that makes it easier for corporations to dump chemicals in local waterways. That doesn't feel like protecting gestating babies to them, even though gestating babies are the ones most likely to be harmed by that piece of legislation.

Today is the national day of remembrance for the unborn, and I went over to the Catholic cemetery in the rain for a prayer service. I was getting dressed in a hurry and pulled a random T-shirt* out of the drawer. "Maybe that's not a great shirt to wear to this particular meeting," I said to myself, but I put it on anyway. It's the feast of the Holy Name of Mary, and Our Lady is the patroness of the unborn, and most importantly I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO WORRY about wearing a shirt with LITERAL SCRIPTURE QUOTES to a PRAYER MEETING full of CATHOLICS.

"Jamie," said one of the participants after the prayer service was over, "what does your shirt say?"

"It's the Magnificat!" I said, with cheerful voice and sinking heart.

They read it aloud: cast down the mighty, send the rich away, fill the hungry, lift the lowly.

"Oh," said someone. "Well, let's not send all of the rich away."

*It's a great T-shirt: soft and durable. If you decide to buy your own Magnificat T-shirt, be advised that they run small. I ordered two sizes up and the fit is just right.