Light and Momentary

Day 5

My friend Becky asked me if I was interested in doing an August challenge where we would each run or run/walk or walk a minimum of  a mile every day in August. Sure, I said, that sounds great.

So I got up and ran on the first four days of August, and on day 5 I said, bleh, this humidity is such a drag. I'm going to the gym this afternoon when it's quiet there. I will do a treadmill mile and then lift.

Except! I showed up at the gym and realized I had walked out of the house in sandals. NO SANDALS, say the signs at the gym. It is possible that I could have slipped in and used the treadmill without alerting the sandal police, but I wasn't very enthusiastic about trying. And there are way too many heavy things banging around in the weight room for me to attempt to lift weights in sandals.

That's okay, I said to my rule-follower self, here's what we'll do instead. We'll go to the park across the street, and we'll walk a zippity-fast mile in these sandals. We'll get it done in under 15 minutes. 

I am finding, you guys, that my natural walking pace at age 52 is *not* 4mph, and I had to move briskly to get that mile done in less than 15 minutes. I actually ran the last minute because I didn't think I'd make it and I didn't want to feel defeated by the activity that was supposed to keep me from feeling defeated.

14:54, my watch said when it buzzed at the end of the mile. Hurray, I said when it buzzed at the end of the mile. 

But, sad to say, between the brisk walking and the brief running in my inappropriate footwear, I managed to open up a blister on the sole of my left foot. That seems like a pretty short timeline in which to create a blister the size of a quarter and then rip off most of its top, but that appears to be what happened. It is a sizable raw spot on the ball of my foot. Even covered up with a bandaid, it's pretty tender.

Back in my backpacking days I dealt with a lot of blisters. I probably have some moleskin somewhere. Moleskin always works better than bandaids, in my recollection. Tomorrow morning I should probably trim down that quarter-sized flap of dead skin and make myself a little moleskin parapet.

I'm having a don't-know-what-you've-got-till-it's-gone moment about the skin on the sole of my foot, which is not a thing I pay attention to except in its absence. Reflecting on a weight-bearing raw spot is kind of a weird gratitude exercise, but here we are.

I feel like bodies are usually pretty good at adapting to small and tender islands of open skin. Like, maybe tomorrow my brain will say to my foot, "Hush, now, we don't actually need all that emergency messaging from down there. It's not an emergency; we're working on it." Maybe? If not, it probably doesn't bode well for my August streak. 

Could I hop on one foot for a mile, do you figure? And would it fulfill the terms of the challenge?

(Probably this post should not go in the fitness category, but I do not have a folly category. OR a moleskin parapet category, go figure.)

Elephant, eaten

I submitted a paper today. 

I've submitted a lot of papers over the years, but this submission was extraordinarily angst-free. Before this summer came along I'd been feeling guilty for a couple of years about this paper. "It's just a little paper," I would tell myself. "Knock it out! Get it done!" "Okay, okay," I would say to myself, and then I would open the document and freeze up. I didn't know quite how to analyze the data, and I wasn't sure where I would send it, and I would flail around in there for a while and then close it up, feeling defeated.

Earlier this summer I mentioned that I was doing the Faculty Success Program through the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. I'd been interested in the FSP for a long time, but the price tag is pretty daunting. I would never have done it if the provost at Gladlyville U hadn't announced an opportunity to apply for funding. 

It has been fantastic, you guys. If you are an academic and you have a chance to do it, I highly recommend it. It has caused me to think a lot of thoughts about a lot of things, more of which will doubtless be heading your way at some point. But it has also caused me to WRITE. That's the heart of the program: five days a week, no matter what, you sit down for at least 30 minutes and move the ball forward on your scholarly writing. This does not sound like rocket science, and yet I could never quite manage to ingrain that habit on my own. I was too tired. I was too stressed. I had too much grading on my desk. I would plan to put in extra writing time the next day.

Thirty minutes is enough to do something worthwhile, but not so much that it feels daunting. Even when I was in bed with COVID, I could (and did!) write for 30 minutes. And do you know, if you put in enough 30-minute blocks, eventually you wind up with a finished manuscript. This paper was hard and messy. It makes sense that Past Jamie flailed around in there, because there were a bunch of problems that needed solving before the paper could make its way into the world. Present Jamie solved them, thirty minutes at a time-- even when she didn't especially feel like it, even when she had a bunch of grading on her desk. She is feeling pretty pleased about that.

Things that are rattling around in my brain on a Tuesday evening

I have been tireder than usual lately. Is it residual COVID fatigue, do you figure? I was testing positive until the beginning of July. I am usually fine these days. Yesterday, though, I ran in the morning, graded essay questions for hours, and climbed in the afternoon. At dinnertime I was beyond toast. I was, like, an 80s zwieback cracker -- so dry and crispy you might have broken a tooth on me. (If you had sneaked into my dining room and taken a bite of me. This is a weird metaphor. I seem to let the weird metaphors flow freely when I write speedy late-night posts.) It was not the first time in recent weeks that I had felt tired enough at dinner that it seemed like it might be a good idea to lay my face down in my empty dinner plate and rest there, with my hair sopping up the pooled watermelon juice and Tajín.

My hair is always wild enough in August that it does not need any watermelon juice enhancements. Today I was scowling at the computer, trying to finish up the last of the grading (done! hallelujah! red pens and spreadsheets, bless the Lord, she said in 21st-century homage to Dan. 3), when Pete said, "What made you decide to do that with your hair, Mom?" I muttered something about wanting it off my neck while continuing to scowl at the screen, and it was only later that the penny dropped: something decidedly odd must have been happening in the hairward direction for Pete to ask that question.

My kids never say that my hair looks weird, even when I ask them to. I will say, "Can I go out in public looking like this?" and my kids (and husband) will say, "Sure, looks fine to me," no matter how large the fuzzy halo may be. Long ago I shared a sweet story about small Pete, and he is still pretty much the same kid. On the one hand, I'm glad my kids aren't fussy about my appearance. On the other, sometimes a person sincerely wants to know whether she needs to put down the rebellion sprouting from her head before she goes to Target.

So this is the context in which I asked Pete about his morning comment. It had been hours since the exchange happened, but right away he was laughing helplessly at the memory. "It looked like an upside-down mushroom cloud on top of your head," he said.

But you know, in August in this godforsaken climate I feel that is a small price to pay for getting it off my neck.

I was just looking at a picture of hot-weather hair (does that link work for you if you're not on Ravelry? seems like it ought to but sometimes Rav is persnickety about who can view which pages on their site), thinking about knitting gauge. Remember that stole I started enthusiastically last week? I found myself with an increasingly emphatic sinking feeling as I knitted along. I've made a lot of fingering-weight shawls on size 6 needles, but this one was just not working out. The stitches looked too big and sloppy. This happened to me once before, with the shawl in that linked picture, and that's still the first thing I see when I look at it. Better to frog early than spend ten years saying, "If only I'd used a smaller needle." So! Into the frog pond it went. I have started over on size 4s. I will report back.

It's probably the yarn, right? Silk is inelastic, and alpaca is the Great Deceiver when it comes to gauge.

After a long stretch of feeling bleh about knitting, my enthusiasm is returning.

Actually that's true of more things than knitting: a long stretch of feeling bleh, followed by the tentative return of some enthusiasm. Let's hope it sticks. I like enthusiasm a lot more than feeling bleh.

Slaw Dogs and Farewells

This weekend was my 35th high school reunion. I ruled out the idea of going pretty soon after I heard about it; I knew I'd be teaching my summer class until the day before it started, and it seemed like it would be a scramble to get to southern West Virginia in time. My friend Angela was going, but I wasn't sure how many other friends I would see there. I graduated in a class of 424, which means there are a lot of vaguely familiar names and faces, with fewer and fewer true connections as the years go by.

So I didn't go, but then I spent the whole weekend looking for new pictures and updates and surfing a strange tsunami of nostalgia.

I have a lot of Feelings about West Virginia. I was eager to leave the state the entire time I lived there, and at the same time it still feels like home. One of my friends posted a picture of her tray at the King Tut Drive-In, which still looks a whole lot like it did in the 1980s. "SLAW DOGS!" I commented. "Wonder how far I'd have to drive to get a slaw dog?"

Are slaw dogs just a West Virginia thing? You doll up your hot dog with chili, cole slaw, chopped raw onion, and yellow mustard if you can abide it (I cannot). In my experience most people outside of West Virginia think (or at least my husband thinks) that the idea of cole slaw on a hot dog is pretty weird, but most people are wrong about that. It gives you a little crunch, a little sweetness, a little contrast. I've spent most of my adult life in a hot dog landscape dominated by Chicago-style dogs, which will never not seem weird to me. I saw that picture of a drive-in slaw dog and I could practically taste it: the softness of the bun, the kick of the chili, the bite of the onion, the hint of slaw dressing.

That is an odd nostalgia trigger for a person who might eat a hot dog once every ten years, but nostalgia is a strange and unpredictable phenomenon.

When I posted about our 25th reunion I mentioned the number of classmates who had died. That number was never going to go anywhere but up, and yet I couldn't quite get my mind around this year's In Memoriam board. Since our 25th reunion, eleven more of our classmates have died. I've posted about a couple of them: the woman who died in an appalling domestic violence incident, the theater pal whose absence still pulls me up short. I wasn't close to any of them, and yet it is so strange to see their yearbook pictures next to dates of death. They were arranged chronologically, and I zoomed in and scrolled through them one by one.

I had the good fortune to be 20 years old, and then 30, and 40, and 50-- and they did not.

The past couple of years have taken an especially heavy toll; there are too many deaths from 2020 and beyond. One man emerged briefly from his COVID delirium at the height of the Delta wave to post on Facebook, begging someone to pick him up at our hometown hospital and take him home. It seemed like a sign that he was getting better-- and then he was gone.

We seem so much older now, all of us. Maybe it's because that decade between your early 40s and your early 50s is the window when most people go gray; maybe it's the result of all those 1980s hours spent lying in the sun slathered in baby oil. I zoomed in on a nametag and recoiled in shock-- that white-haired guy is...RICK? 

That white-haired guy was indeed Rick.

Ten years ago Stella was only 3, and Alex was only 15, and when I think about all the things that have happened between then and now I suppose it is unremarkable that I have more lines around my eyes (so much laughter) and across my forehead (so many surprises, so many worries). I have not set foot in that little West Virginia town in the intervening ten years -- and I had not been back for 18 years before that -- but I could still tell you exactly how to navigate the streets that wind and swoop through the mountains. I know just how to get to the reunion venue, and to the drive-in with its slaw dogs, and then back to the brick house built into a hill, in the neighborhood where I used to live.

It hasn't been my parents' house since 1995. But somehow, unexpectedly, it all still seems like home.

Surprisingly prescient

When I finished Hamnet I was looking for something similarly satisfying. There is a lot of sadness in Hamnet, because it is about a child dying of bubonic plague, but the sadness is embedded in so much goodness. I loved the sense of place, and the illustration of a family grieving together, and the reminder that doing what you are made to do requires time and perseverance (and may never seem reasonable to your parents), and its ideas about how we remember the people we have loved and lost. It was definitely going to be hard to follow. Something deep in my brain said, "Hmm, feel-good books about the Black Death..." (Probably a short list, huh?) Its workings whirred and clicked and spat out...Doomsday Book.

I posted about Doomsday Book when I read it six years ago, but it hits differently in 2022. I had only the vaguest memory that the residents of the Oxford time-travel universe had lived through a capital-P Pandemic in the mid-2010s. Theirs killed 65 million people, which probably earns it the capital P. (Globally COVID-19 deaths are at about 10% of that number right now.)

I was amused (and also impressed!) when I read that the early stages of quarantine in Oxford caused a toilet paper shortage. And one line in particular lands more forcefully this time around. There's a group of American tourists who get pretty shirty (do we say that in American English? or is a British expression springing to my fingertips because I'm writing about Oxford?) about the quarantine restrictions. "In America," one of them huffs, "nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can't go." Mr. Dunworthy says to himself, "And over thirty million Americans died in the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking."

I suppose anytime you read a book set in a future to which you are much closer than the author was, you're going to bump up against oversights. When she wrote in 1992 about a flurry of unsuccessful attempts to reach a university administrator on holiday, Willis did not foresee the world in which I keep muting group texts from my colleagues in a futile attempt to be marginally less reachable. ("Email!" I want to tell them. "This is why we have email! Do not text me about fall syllabi when I am not under contract!") Willis is surprisingly perceptive, though, when she writes about our collective reactions to an unknown and dangerous disease-- the way that fear and uncertainty bring out both the best and the worst in us.

Friday night musings

It used to be that when I went back to the climbing gym after a hiatus, my arms would proclaim their unhappiness emphatically over the next couple of days. Once in particular I was so sore that I couldn't lift my hands up to scrub my scalp the next day in the shower.

Today I have a teeny bit of soreness in my arms and a little bit more soreness in my lats and rear delts. I never used to have a sore back after climbing -- never once. But I have a theory: I think that pull-up training taught me how to use those muscles more effectively. When Joe first told me I needed to train my back to get a pull-up, I was like, "Whaaaat? I think you mean my arms." He was right, of course: you use a lot of muscles to do pull-ups, including your lats and rear delts. I think all those months of Joe saying, "Mind-muscle connection, Mom!" have made a difference in the way I use my body now. Which is cool, don't you think?

Tonight I cast on something new, an As You Wish shawl/stole sort of thing. Long ago (in, like, 2014) I bought some lovely deep green alpaca-silk yarn during a Knitpicks sale, and it has languished in the bin of fingering weight yarn ever since, awaiting a suitable project.

The pattern calls for four colors but I am planning to mix it up a little more to use up some odds and ends. The advantage of doing a mystery knit-along after the mystery part is over is that it's much easier to figure out which colors are going to go in which places.

The Writing on the Wall

Today was the final exam for my summer class, and after I proctored it I decided I would not jump immediately into the grading. I went home, I ate some food, I took a nap (in which I dreamed, alas, that Joe fell in love with the single most frustrating student I have ever taught), I put in my writing time. And then, my friends, I went to the climbing gym with Pete.

There was a stretch of time when climbing was our thing. Joe was mostly away at supergeek boarding school and no one had ever heard of COVID-19. Pete and I would spend a couple of evenings every week sweating our way up to the top of the wall, joined by Joe when he was around. [Insert a heavy sigh in memory of 2019: you don't know what you've got till it's gone.] Pete still goes regularly with his friends, but I could count on two hands the number of times I've climbed in the past two years. I don't enjoy their outdoor climbing options as much as the indoor walls, and they have not been great about COVID mitigation practices. Pete either climbs outside or climbs in a mask; neither option really appeals to me.

But it turns out that if you go in the middle of a weekday afternoon, you might have the place to yourself.

When you hire young adult staff in a college town, it's natural to have a lot of turnover. We used to know all of the route-setters' names: the guy who always put a toe hook in his routes, the lone female with her distinctive setting style. All of the old setters have moved on now, and the new routes are not the same. 

Climbing is like a time-lagged conversation. The setter says, "Here, I am making a puzzle for you -- can you solve it?" If you have comments ("your puzzle is very hard"), you can submit them by scanning a QR code at the bottom of the route. Over time you can get a sense of what to expect from a particular setter. (Sometimes this means you are 40 feet in the air yelling "I do not like this move! Why does this setter love this move so much?") 

Today I was noticing my unfamiliarity with these setters. I would stand at the bottom of the wall, trying to read the route and feeling flummoxed by their figurative handwriting. Or I would get partway up the wall and think, "Now what??" Some of it is that I just haven't been using those skills lately, but some of it is also the turnover at the gym: I don't know this new crew. I don't know what they think is fun or hard or novel.

I'm pretty sure they're all taller than me. It's a little frustrating to be climbing a route that should be within my abilities, based on its rating, only to find that I do not have the wingspan for it. Pete says maybe as I remember more climbing technique the routes will feel less reachy, but we'll have to see whether or not that's true. My guess is that most of the people setting routes are 6' men, whose imaginings about the abilities of 5'6" women are a leetle off the mark.

Anyway, climbing remains a super-fun way to make the happy neurotransmitters fizz in my brain. I sang out "DOPAMIIIINE!" as I sailed down from the top of the first route -- there's something so satisfying about solving the puzzle and seizing the topmost hold with both hands.

While I was digging up links to old climbing posts I came across this video from three years ago. You'd never know, watching it, how many tries it took me to figure out the moves at 0:10-0:16. Maybe it's a good time to get back in the groove.

Put that on a T-shirt

I was cleaning out my closet this week, because months after my observation that my old blouses do not fit my new shoulders, they were still sitting in my closet.

I was texting Joe, because he's the person I always text about lifting, and I said, "It's not that I want less muscle. It just feels weird, in a culture that prizes petiteness, to say, 'No, actually, I like these broad shoulders. I am planning to stay in bigger clothes.' Patriarchy, man." He texted back: "How can you overthrow the patriarchy with small delts?"

This, I feel, belongs on a workout tank top.

 

 

Happiness Awaits

The Slaw of Happiness varies in its veggies but its dressing is pretty consistent. The recipe I got from my internet pal Jodie more than 20 years ago is this: to a cup of mayo, add 1 T. apple cider vinegar and 1 T. sugar. You can vary it to suit your own tastes: make it a yogurt-mayo blend, use lemon or lime juice in quantities that suit you instead of the vinegar, and change the amount and/or type of sweetener. You want a dressing that's mostly creamy, with some tang and some sweetness.

To this dressing, add a big pile of small pieces of cruciferous veggies and their friends. Shredded cabbage is fine. Finely (finely finely) minced broccoli is also good. Grated salad turnips are scrumptious. (I never use the ordinary purple-shouldered ones; salad turnips are solid ivory, sometimes called Japanese turnips. They are milder and sweeter.) You could probably use just about anything in the brassica family. Radishes that you have manhandled through the food processor and coated in slaw dressing become more pleasant, less pungent versions of themselves. If you get kohlrabi in your CSA share and you have no idea what to do with it, peel it and shred it and cover it with slaw dressing. No one at the dinner table will have any idea that you're feeding them something unfamiliar and kinda weird-looking in its natural state. It's just another bowl of slaw. 

When I said "and their friends" in that previous paragraph I especially meant shredded carrots, which are sweet, colorful, familiar, and cheap. From there you can go in a variety of directions. Do you want some minced red onion? Maybe some chopped scallions? Maybe something with a little crunch, like sesame seeds or walnuts? If I am using broccoli, I will probably go with wee small bits of red onion (a habit left over from when my kids were small: strongly-flavored foods are often less objectionable if they're cut into teeny pieces), a handful of raisins, another of sunflower seeds, and some crumbled bacon. If I'm using cabbage, I might also toss in some grated apple.

Basic formula: dressing, shredded something-or-other from the brassica family, shredded carrots, plus a couple of additional ingredients that please your palate. Here's to happy microbiomes!

Things that make me happy

1. Hamnet. You guys, this book is so good. I downloaded a sample when it first came out, but I found that I did not want to read about children dying of plague in July of 2020. The sample sat on my Kindle for a long time, causing my thoughts to run in a loop: you loved those other Maggie O'Farrell books -> maybe you should give this one another try -> but children, dying of plague -> but you loved those other Maggie O'Farrell books, etc. Recently Overdrive suggested it to me when I was looking for a different library book, and I thought, "Sure, why not?" I want to find out what happens next and also I do not want it to end. I love the writing, I love the characters, I love the world they inhabit. So so good.
   
   
2. This may seem unrelated to item #1, but there is actually a direct link: I love weightlifting. I was thinking back to the other two Maggie O'Farrell books I've read: I Am I Am I Am and This Must Be the Place [affiliate links]. I have a tactile memory of reading This Must Be the Place. I very much wanted to know what the characters would do next, but I was sitting very still, purposefully still, while I turned the pages to find out. I joked about it at the time, even though I did not feel much like joking: I had sustained a mayonnaise injury, and my back kept shooting out fiery tendrils of pain when I moved the wrong way. 
   
   Since I started lifting heavy things I have been (knock wood!) completely free of the random back and neck pains, from twinges all the way to immobilizing fiery tendrils, that had plagued me at unpredictable intervals for my whole adult life. I would have thought I was reasonably strong in 2017; I had completed a 10K and a triathlon earlier that year and I was doing yoga with some regularity. I cannot say with certainty that the disappearance of cricks in my neck and pains in my back is causally related to lifting weights, but the timing is definitely suggestive.
   
   
3. Does anyone remember hearing about the Slaw of Happiness? It was a gentle little joke, right? Haha, slaw can't really make you happy. But! You guys! In that Next Level book I was just telling you about, the authors say that women at midlife need to be eating cruciferous vegetables every day. They feed your gut microbiome, which is adversely affected by perimenopausal changes, and which is linked to mental health in ways we are just starting to figure out. The authors also assert that cruciferous veggies are rich in a compound that is important for optimizing the hormonal milieu, but I have to admit that I am a little vague on the differences between estrone and estradiol and all of their cousins.
   
   The authors say you should put frozen cauliflower in smoothies, an idea that causes me to retch a little if I even think about it for too long, so I'm not saying that I'm going to run with all of their advice. I do, however, think it might be smart to whip up a nice big batch of the Slaw of Happiness. Or maybe another batch of Speckled Slaw, which I made for the first time on the Fourth of July. I was not sure what our guests would think about raw beets in slaw but they scarfed it right down.
   
   
4. Item #4 may also seem disconnected from its predecessor, because German sock yarn and funky beet cole slaw do not appear to have a lot in common. But I got them both from the Modern Daily Knitting site, and they are both bringing me joy. I cast on a new pair of socks for Marie today, after finishing up Stella's newest pair over the weekend. The picture does not do justice to the yummy saturated colors. If I could only knit one thing with one yarn for the rest of my life, it would be Zauberball socks. I also bought a Zauberball in fiery gorgeous shades of orange to make a pair for myself. Mmmm, I can't wait.

How about you? Reading anything good? Are you tearing off to put cauliflower in a smoothie? Do tell.