Light and Momentary

On the road again

Tomorrow, if all goes well, I will see my parents for the first time in two years. At some point in the next few days I will also see my brother and my sister. It's been a long time.

#208

Last year on my birthday I resolved to post 4 times a week. Until December I was ahead of the game. But in December and January and February the world seemed so bleak and my job felt so hard that I hardly posted at all. I realized in May that I could still average 4 posts per week if I squeezed in the remainder. This is the very last one, on the very last day of my fifty-first year. Thanks for reading, friends!

Farewell to Fifty

It was the best day.

In the spring of 2019 I emailed my high school best friend to say I'd had a dream about her. It was just a short email -- thinking of you; hope all is well. She replied to ask if I wanted to set up a Zoom call. (I had only the vaguest knowledge of Zoom in March of 2019.) That call led to daily texts and semi-regular voice calls and occasional Zoom chats. Two years later it doesn't quite feel like the day has started properly if I don't have a quick conversation with Becky first.

Even though we exchange dozens of texts a day, we hadn't seen each other in twelve years. When she suggested that we could get together this weekend, I wasn't sure it would work. (Road trips came to seem a little weird to me over the course of the pandemic. You put yourself in a metal box and hurtle down the highway at 70+ mph for multiple hours? This is weird, right?) But! it did work!

We met at the beach with two of my kids and one of hers in tow, and we picnicked and played in the water and admired Stella's sand castle and climbed a massive sand dune. Afterward we ate delicious ice cream in an empty small-town bandshell. Joe and Stella and I were able to have dinner with Marie on the way back to Gladlyville, which was a nice bonus.

Tomorrow I will turn 51 years old. I am feeling grateful for many things: perfect weather and smooth travels and tasty food and kids who got along. But I am especially grateful -- deeply, joyfully grateful -- for this friend who has been dear to me since I was 16.

The pull-up quest continues

I'm inching in the right direction, friends. On Thursday I did a platform-assisted pull-up with 20 pounds offset, and it was hard but not bonkers-hard. Today I thought I'd try one with 10 pounds offset, and...close but no cigar.

Here is a weird thing I am noticing: when I try these single reps at or near my limit (is "single reps" an oxymoron? what do you call it when you're only aiming to do one because you know you can't do a whole set?), I feel it most in my triceps afterward. This is weird, because triceps don't have much of a job to do when you're completing the first part of a pull-up. Are my triceps working hard to keep me from plummeting to the ground afterward? Are they over-engaging to try to stabilize my not-yet-up-to-the-task biceps?

Do I have any women readers who do pull-ups? Have you experienced this? Joe is a little puzzled about why my triceps are more grumbly than my biceps or lats after these max-effort attempts.

(I guess I don't have to restrict this question to women, but it seems pretty certain that all the men who read here started their pull-up training with bigger biceps than mine.)

Reminder

Hi, did you need someone to remind you gently that it is better to get off the couch and be slow than to sit on the couch and wish you were faster? Consider yourself reminded.

The half-marathon training group is much smaller than the last time I did it, and the 12:00+ group is very tiny-- there were only three of us plus a mentor. The lone male was running a little faster than 12:00, and the other woman was moving slower than I was. But she cut the course short instead of running the full distance, which meant that I was the last person in the entire group to finish. This is not my favorite feeling, but OH WELL. 

I find that the group mentors make a huge difference, and this time it's Denise again-- the same Denise who was SO AWESOME about my brainweasels during the 2016 group. I woke up at 5 this morning and thought to myself, "Why did I sign up for this? I'm going to have to run 8 miles and I can't run 8 miles." But I went back to sleep for a bit longer, and when my alarm I got out of bed and ran through my running checklist. It's true that I can't run 8 miles at this point, but I can run 3. And I did!

Also, invigorated by my run, I went to the tire shop when I got home. I am awarding myself some bonus Adulting Points today, let me tell you.

Bright and Early

Tomorrow morning I am meeting a bunch of other runners for -- gulp -- the first training run for a fall half-marathon.

Tomorrow we are only going three miles. I can do that.

For my next act

So I can't really tell you why it was such a crummy day on the work front, but it was a crummy day on the work front -- so crummy that I spent some time thinking about what I would do if I quit my job. Things I considered: 

• write books
• learn to code 

Joe thinks I'd be especially good at anything involving small children, but he also notes that I wouldn't make much money unless I became a pediatrician. (I am not going to apply to medical school at age 51.)

My friend Jenny says whenever she's feeling glum about work she imagines getting a job at the gas station near her house, where they're always hiring and they have a soft-serve machine. Having a bad day? Have a little soft-serve!

Probably the way it's going to go down from here is that I have a couple of icky meetings and then the stress dies down. Probably also I will feel a lot happier about my job once I am not trying to teach online any more. But I think I am going to put it in my syllabus from now until the end of time that any queries about final grades need to be addressed in an in-person meeting. 

Still, tell me-- what would you do if you didn't have your current job? What alternate jobs would you suggest for me?

The voices in my earliest memory

When people ask me about the first thing I remember, I have an easy answer. My family acquired a cat when I was 2, and I remember going to get her. She was hiding under the bed and I remember peeking beneath it and spotting her, small and frightened. I remember sitting with the cat in the back of our VW Beetle on the way home, with the smell of skunk in the air.

The people who gave us the cat were close to my parents when my father was stationed in Pensacola FL. Their apartment was right by ours, and we spent a lot of time together. I was very small at the time and so I do not remember life in Pensacola, but I remember my parents talking about Alan and Ellen. After we moved to New Orleans they were transferred to Hawaii (necessitating the new home for their cat), and my parents lost touch with them after that.

Today someone left two unexpected messages on my office phone. It was Alan, trying to get in touch with my dad. "I doubt you'll remember us," he said, "because you were just a little thing." I sent his contact information to my dad, who called him immediately. A little while later, I called him too.

"I do remember you!" I said. "And I wanted to tell you that your cat lived a long life. I took her with me when I moved to my first apartment, and she lived to be almost 21 years old."

Alan and Ellen wanted to chat a little. They are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, and they have been going through old photo albums. They've been reminiscing about the people they used to know, and they wanted to see if they could track my parents down, to get reconnected and to share these old pictures with them. (I have not shared the one in which I am seated on my little potty, holding tightly to the cat. I sure did love that cat. She might have appreciated a little less togetherness in that moment.) They googled me and found my faculty page right away. (I publish as Jamie Most-Gladly; the number of Jamie Mosts in the world is very small.) "That's our Jamie!" Ellen said, and Alan picked up the phone.

It's strange and sweet to think of someone I scarcely remember looking at a current picture of me and exclaiming "That's our Jamie!" It makes me a little wistful, thinking about the webs of invisible connections all around us, and how quickly the years go by.

Friday Farewell

I did not sabotage the meeting with the prospective adopter for Mickey, because I am a responsible foster-er, and even though we told her all about his very worst habits she is going to adopt Mickey. She'll pick him up from us on Friday.

But if things don't work out for him at her house I will take him back in a hot second.

High-jumping shotgun-riding muffin-stealing dog

Stella took Mickey out for a little walk this afternoon right around the time I was leaving for the post office. I pulled up beside them and rolled down the window to say hi. Mickey sprang over to the car and put his feet up on the top of the door so he could see in. 

"Jamie!" you could see him thinking. "You are in the car! I was not expecting the person in the car to be you! But I like car rides! And I like you! And I have an idea!"

Much to our surprise, he jumped through the open window and made himself at home on the passenger seat. "Let's go!" he said to me with his big brown eyes. "Drive fast and I will put my nose out the window to snuffle at all the nice smells!"

Stella tried to persuade him that they should finish their walk but he had other plans. It's hard for an average-sized 12-year-old girl to convince a 50-pound dog that he should remove himself from the place he most wants to be. So we took a short spin around the block, and I dropped them off in the driveway.

Mickey was looking at me as I drove away. "That was not much of a car ride, Jamie!" his eyes said as I backed out. "Next time! I have some catch-up snuffling to do!"

He seemed less cute after dinner, when he seized the muffin pan in his teeth while we were clearing the table and proceeded to wolf down corn muffins as fast as caninely possible.