Light and Momentary

I am the soul of temperance, it turns out

You guys, I have to tell you about a thing I found on the internet today. Have you ever thought to yourself, "That Jamie Gladly is kind of obsessed with the Victorians"? It turns out I am not obsessed at all! Not even a teeny bit.

Today I found a corner of the internet in which dozens of people -- dozens! (dozens as in 2 and a bit, but still: dozens, plural) -- are planning to read the major works of Dickens across the next two years.

That is a gobsmacking commitment to Dickens, my friends. That is SO MUCH DICKENS.

And maybe, possibly, I will take part of the ride with them.

For a while now I have wanted to read some portion of the Dickens I haven't yet read. The problems are that (a) there's so much Dickens and (b) I have found the quality variable in my few excursions beyond the novels. The Christmas novellas, for instance-- bathos! sentimentality! blargh!! 

The club members are reading in roughly chronological order, starting with Sketches by Boz, which I have never read. I love the exuberance and playfulness of early Dickens (Pickwick forever!), so that might be a good one to read with them. I'll sit out the next two on their list (Pickwick and Oliver Twist), since I've read both of those pretty recently, but they are going to be starting Nicholas Nickleby in May. Perfect timing for an #AMDRAL pick, and I haven't read that one since 2010, when I finished up my 10-year Dickens project.

I finished up Eustace Diamonds over lunch today and started Phineas Redux tonight. I don't think I've ever had a Dickens work and a Trollope novel on the go at the same time, but I guess I'll give it a whirl.

Read this book and tell me what you think

Last night I finished book #2 of 2022, Younger Next Year for Women, and I think you should read it. I think you may find parts of it mildly annoying, but I also think you will find it really thought-provoking. I found it so interesting and motivating that I immediately checked out their book on nutrition from the library. That one is not off to a rip-roaring start (that is code for, "whoa, guys, enough with the fat-shaming already"), but I will keep reading for a bit and report back.

First, though, I have to find out what happens to Lady Eustace and Lucy Morris in The Eustace Diamonds. What will Frank Greystock decide to do?? I can hardly stand the suspense.

Advanced Age

Today I was sorting through some papers and from the comfort of my couch I dealt with a check that needed to be deposited. I have known for years that this option existed, but I've always just gone to the ATM (or sometimes to the teller inside). "Elwood," I said to the person in my household least likely to use electronic banking options, "guess what I just did? It's because I'm so hip and cool, just like the kids these days."

"Ah, yes," he said, "that's exactly what the kids these days are doing: depositing paper checks."

We laughed.

**

Today I got the itch to pull out my violin for the first time in a long time, and Pete wanted to talk about the tiny quarter-sized violin that lives under the music room loveseat. "It was mine when I was little," I told him. "I got it when I was four."

"Wow," he said. "So it's REALLY* OLD!"

*Pete, reading over my shoulder, disputes this recollection. He says it was "kinda old," which might be true. But I'll point out that it's entirely possible to say "kinda" in a tone that means "really."

We joked about it at dinner, how he keeps bumping up against the fact that his parents' childhoods fell in an era that feels like the distant past to him. 

**

Tonight he was sitting on the couch next to me and he said, "I know you've been sad today, and I wish I could help. But you don't have to tell me why you're sad if you don't want to." It was a small thing I've been trying unsuccessfully to shake off all day, so I told him. He responded so kindly. He said, "When I come to you and I feel sad, you can always help me feel better. I wish I could do that for you, but I guess it just comes with age OOOHHHHH NOOOOOOO!" He went on, "I was trying to make you feel better and instead I just said you were oooooold!"

But I laughed so hard that I did wind up feeling better.

Brutal, also fun

My dad was a runner back when it was a quirky thing for adults to do. AND, furthermore, my dad was a runner when we lived in Florida and New Orleans, where the heat requires extra dedication. He also jumped rope, in an era when grown men did not jump rope unless perhaps they were making movies about getting punched in the face until they fell down, which he was not.

[not my dad]

When I was little, little like 4 or maybe even just 3, he resolved to teach me to jump rope. This was a discouraging process for Small Jamie, as someone with a deeper knowledge of gross motor development might have told him it would be, and I labored and sweated and failed to connect consecutive jumps. He used to tell the story of the time I flung the rope onto the carport floor in disgust. (Four, I must have been four. We didn't live in the carport house until I was four.) "I'll never get it!" I said amid tears. (Those of you who have been reading my perfectionist contortions for some fraction of the 17 years in which I have been posting them on the web are nodding along here, saying, "Huh, that sounds familiar.") But then I picked up that rope once more, and LO: I could do it. Mysteriously, something clicked.

That night I jumped my little heart out. I still remember waking up in my bed the next morning, too sore to move. I believed for a couple of hours that I had done some flavor of permanent damage to my body, but I bounced back pretty quickly. And from that day on, I was sold on jumping rope.

I never won anything in field day competitions, except once in fifth grade. There was a jumprope relay, and I headed up the four-person team from my classroom. Each girl jumped until she missed, and then handed off the rope to the next girl. The last team with a girl still jumping won the event. But when I started jumping I did not miss; I kept going serenely until every other girl (except my three teammates, who were standing behind me awaiting turns that never came) had stumbled and handed off her rope. I kept going until they told me to stop and collect my blue ribbon, because jumping rope was my thing.

It is no longer my thing, as I learned when I attempted a 20-minute jumprope session tonight. With a little practice I could jump a hundred times in a row tonight, but doing so sent my heartrate up into the 160s. The rope caught on my ponytail, and my feet weren't always quite where I thought they were going to be. So I would jump until I missed, and give my heart a little time to settle down, and jump until I missed again. 

It was hard, from both a cardio perspective and a coordination perspective. But it was also fun and meditative. There's something joyful about jumping, about knowing where the rope will be and moving your body in time with its rhythm. I remember why I used to love it.

Let's hope I don't wake up too sore to move in the morning.

Reading and listening: forgiveness, unforgiveness, the unforgivable

This morning I finished my first book of 2022: Gentle and Lowly. (A disadvantage to reading the Palliser Chronicles is that they do not permit a person to notch new items on her "books read" list very quickly. I am reading Eustace Diamonds every day, faithfully, and there is still so much Eustace Diamonds left to read.) I am not very involved with our campus organization for Christian faculty, but I get their emails. When the coordinator mentioned that they would be discussing Gentle and Lowly, the author's name -- Dane Ortlund -- caught my eye. In my early 20s I learned a lot from Anne Ortlund's books, and it seemed likely that these authors were related. (They are: grandson/grandmother.)

Gentle and Lowly stirred up some controversy, apparently, when it was released in 2020. In a now-deleted review, the folks at Grace To You panned it, insisting that the book needed more table-flipping, more of the wrath of God. (Maybe they should rename their site Wrath To You.) If you are Catholic, you may dislike the book's jabs at Catholic ideas about atonement, forgiveness, and grace. But I found that it spoke to my soul. I read it with my friend Becky, a chapter a day for three weeks, and on many of those mornings one of us would text the other some variation of "loved that G&L chapter!!" I think it is especially valuable for anybody struggling with scrupulosity or a performance mentality (i.e., my value lies in my productivity), or anyone who has struggled with a particular flavor of sin or suffering for a long time.

I have been listening to Gaslighter, the 2020 album by the band formerly known as The Dixie Chicks. (They dropped the "Dixie" around the time that this album came out.) Many of the songs are about the breakdown of the lead singer's marriage. And you guys, I'm finding it really interesting: the songwriting is compelling. The window into a marriage coming apart at midlife stirs up my sympathy. But I also keep thinking about their decision to put it all out there: let us tell you about this infidelity and its aftermath. Natalie Maines has sons in their teens, and it was definitely A Choice to craft an album so full of rage and disappointment WITH THEIR FATHER and send it out into the world.

Last fall, not long after I finished Intuitive Eating, I bought myself a book called Gentle Nutrition. I was excited to try some new things in the kitchen, and a dietitian writing from an intuitive eating perspective sounded really promising. But here's the problem: she loves dill. On page after page, there are pictures of PERFECTLY INNOCENT food with dill fronds sprinkled across it. In list after list of ingredients she tells me to add dill.

I keep telling myself not to be a big dill baby. It's not as if she's telling me to put turpentine in my food. I know how to substitute other herbs for dill; I've been doing it my whole life, because dill pretty much tastes like turpentine to me. I tell myself not to look at the pictures. (I hate dill so much that even the sight of it causes me to make unhappy faces. You should see me typing this post. I look like someone just tried to feed me surströmming with paint scrapings on top.) 

I'm not sure this book is going to work for me after all. 

So talk to me: what are you reading this January? do you have an opinion on the Art vs. Privacy question? do you hate any food as much as I hate dill? Do tell.

Still more advantages

That book I've been telling you about, Younger Next Year for Women, was written by a physician and one of his patients. The patient does not love weight-lifting, but he is very insistent about its value. One of the things he said about the importance of weight-training left me initially skeptical. But then we had a round of freezing rain that left us with annoyingly icy sidewalks, and I am here today to tell you that he seems to have been correct.

I had noticed over the past several years that my balance is not what it used to be. It's not that I was falling over on a regular basis, but I am definitely more tippy than I was 25 years ago. Because I walk to and from work every day, over sidewalks that may or not be shoveled after winter storms, I am keenly aware of this difference. I would watch the college students go zipping up sidewalks covered in tamped-down snow, and I would think to myself, "Huh, there is no chance I could move that fast on this sidewalk." 

A regular yoga practice made some difference, but my capacity to hold tree pose in my living room didn't really transfer into a renewed ability to walk confidently on icy surfaces. So when Chris Crowley said that strength training would improve my balance, it caught my eye. He said it would do so through two different mechanisms: first, that increasing the demand on my muscles on a regular basis would improve my proprioception, my sense of where my body is in space. Second, the increase in strength would make it easier for me to salvage the situation if I did stumble. He said 50-year-olds don't stumble any more often than 20-year-olds -- they just can't respond as effectively to their stumbles.

"Hm," I said as I stroked my chin thoughtfully. "Game-changing if true."

As you know (and might even be a little tired of hearing), I started lifting weights in May. I think I had lost a fair amount of muscle mass over the years, you guys. Everybody loses muscle mass across time, of course; the actual numbers are pretty depressing. But women who attempt to lose weight are at particular risk. A determination to shift the number on the scale quickly means that your body sheds muscle as well as fat. And when I wanted to lose weight, I wanted it GONE. Have you seen this Instagram post about the long-term effects of rapid weight loss on body composition? Interesting, right? And maybe a little sobering, even if it's only an Instagram post without much hard data to back it up?

So anyway-- we've had icy sidewalks for almost all of January, and they are not stressing me out. I do not have to think carefully about every step I take. I do not worry that I'm going to concuss myself while walking to the office. Don't get me wrong; I'm still taking it slowly and I did wear my Yak-Trax for the worst of it. But I feel more comfortable walking on treacherous sidewalks than I have felt in years. This morning Stella said, "It looks pretty bad out there, Mom; should you drive me to school?" She was right; it did look pretty bad out there. But I said, "Nah, we'll be fine." And I was also right.

Tomorrow morning I am going to head down to the basement before work. It will be my Day 1 lifting workout: three sets of pull-ups, three sets of Bulgarian split squats, three sets of shoulder press, two sets of incline bicep curls. It won't take me that long; it won't hurt that much. (Except for the incline bicep curls. Those are pretty painful.) But you guys, I cannot say enough good things about cultivating the habit of showing up and moving heavy things around. Give it a whirl! You have nothing to lose but your fear of falling on the ice!

Ordinary Time

Today is the end of Christmas and the beginning of Ordinary Time, and so I am sharing a song I wrote with you. It's about new beginnings, and persistence, and it is perhaps ironic that I had to spend more than a week prying myself out of perfectionist hell before I posted it. But anyway-- 

New Year's Day

I love a fresh start

I love a clean slate

I love a new leaf, I love a blank unblotted page

Where I can try again to shape a life

from a strand of unformed days

I begin as I hope to go on

We begin, we begin again we begin, we begin as we hope to go on

 

When I was younger

I thought next time I'd get it right

I thought I'd grown up

I thought my plans were watertight

But here in middle age I have

this middle-aged insight:

we just begin as we hope to go on

We begin, we begin again we begin, we begin as we hope to go on

 

BRIDGE:

False starts and do-overs lie ahead of me

But pit stops and way stations beckon hopefully

like showers, like confessionals

where we step forth fresh and clean

For in my failures I am learning to be free

In my failures I am learning to be free

 

Here on the threshold

I look across this span of days

I cannot know the trials, the gladnesses

that wait upon my way

But there'll be mornings full of mercies

there'll be treasuries of grace

So I'll begin as I hope to go on

We begin, we begin again we begin, we begin as we hope to go on

We begin as we hope to go on

 

New Year's Day - 1:9:22 3.38 PM

If the player doesn't work in your browser, you can probably right-click to download the file or play it in a new window.

New year's resolutions, one week in

A week ago I told you I wanted to do five things in the new year: exercise, cut back on social media use, read the Palliser Chronicles, keep getting pictures into albums, and blog four times a week. Things are going fine, mostly. I haven't made a ton of progress on pictures but I've made some; I did not blog four times in the first week of 2022 but there's plenty of time to catch up. The once-a-week approach to social media is a good one, I think, even though it requires some discipline to maintain. And I am really enjoying The Eustace Diamonds, so that one has been easy.

The thing I most wanted to tell you about is the exercise resolution. I think I mentioned already that the book that prompted this resolution, Younger Next Year for Women, advises readers to work up to 4 45-minute cardio workouts per week, with 2-3 weight-training sessions as well. I also think I already told you that this plan seems pretty much straight-up bananas to me, but I am giving it a whirl.

Elwood thinks this is a great plan. (For me. He's not super-motivated to follow it himself, but he's happy to support me in this pursuit of happiness or banana-pants-ness, whichever you happen to call it.) Alex gave me some lifting equipment for Christmas, so I'm good to keep lifting weights in the basement until the COVID situation improves. And then Elwood found a bike trainer for me and helped me set it up in the basement. This one is reasonably sturdy, not too expensive, and pretty straightforward. (It is also moderately noisy, but it's working well for me with noise-canceling headphones.) Elwood also acquired a jumprope, but our basement ceiling is too low for me to jump down there and the weather is too frigid for me to jump outside. The Fifth-Grade Jumprope Champion of Seventh Street Elementary School will have to wait for warmer weather to make her comeback. I also decided to do a two-week Jazzercise free trial, and those workouts are enough fun that I think I'll probably pay for a month or two -- by which time I certainly hope we will have warmer weather and less rampant COVID.

The thing I want to record here is that one week in I am already noticing significant changes in my mood and energy level. I started slowly, with 20- to 25-minute sessions of biking and Jazzercise, but even a little bit of working up a sweat leaves me more cheerful and perky. I didn't just slump around sorting the laundry this afternoon; I put on some music so I could dance while I worked. These things may or may not be causally related, but the correlation is pretty striking. 

The weather here has been genuinely dire: ice on the sidewalks all week, bitter cold, another round of ice this afternoon with more bitter cold to follow. I am grateful to be snug and warm -- it is much nicer to be riding my bike to nowhere in the basement than skating on the sidewalks or braving the clouds of COVID-laden exhalations at the gym.

Ain't Nobody Happy

Today my annual report materials were due, so I completed a task I had deliberately avoided in the spring: I read the evals for my online courses. The summer and fall evals were fine; pretty much anything that wasn't favorable was a fair criticism. But hoo boy, some of those spring comments were doozies.

In my experience, grad evals are tougher than undergrad evals. Grad students are busy and stressed because they have clinic on top of classes, and they expect a lot from instructors. But my spring semester grad students were surprisingly happy. The undergrads in my spring classes, on the other hand, were not. I think the big issue for the undergrads was that I planned for their classes to be mostly asynchronous. I did this based on advice from sources I trusted, and it just did not work out well-- especially for the class I was teaching for the first time. New preps are always hard. Maybe an online asynchronous new prep that started ten months into the pandemic was never going to be a roaring success.

Every year I have to write a letter to the committee that reviews faculty productivity every year, and this year's letter has a long paragraph in which I say, "These factors may explain the grim and painful feedback from these undergraduate students." But I have a theory that I did not include in that letter: I was so miserable in the spring semester, you guys. I thought every single day about what a relief it would be to quit my job. One of the things students generally say about my classes is that they appreciate my enthusiasm, and I did not have any enthusiasm whatsoever about the spring semester.

You know the saying "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy?" It might be true in the classroom too.

I am still thinking a lot about COVID

One of the factors that determines how vigorously we respond to COVID is the seriousness of the disease. This has been a contentious point from the very beginning of the pandemic. First the COVID minimizers insisted that it was like the flu, which would only have been true if the flu were twice as transmissible and ten times as deadly. Now they're saying that the omicron strain is pretty much a cold.

If COVID were always a short-term respiratory illness, then it would be silly to make a big fuss about it. But I am still going to attempt to avoid COVID. I'm not especially worried that it's going to kill me at this point, but I am concerned about the degree and the duration of COVID-associated morbidity. Even if I were to develop a mild case myself, I hate the idea that I could spread a disease with the potential to cause significant disruption to someone else's life.

For a subset of patients -- most often but not always those with risk factors -- COVID is associated with significant morbidity. Let me tell you a story to show you what I mean. I know a woman whose case of COVID landed her in the hospital. Although she was my age, healthy and active prior to her COVID diagnosis, the virus attacked her heart and left her with atrial fibrillation.

Atrial fibrillation is one of the serious arrhythmias. It disrupts the steady, strong coordinated contraction of the heart and allows blood to pool in the atria. When blood isn't moving steadily, it clots. If you spin up a blood clot in your heart and push it out into your blood vessels, bad things will happen. Atrial fibrillation significantly increases your risk of a cardiac event and it quintuples your risk of a stroke. If you say "untreated atrial fibrillation" to a doctor, the doctor will grimace and wince.

So they impressed upon her the urgency of treating the arrhythmia. They tried to fix the problem with a cardioversion; the process of administering electrical shocks to her heart was unsuccessful as well as much more unpleasant than advertised. Next they did an ablation, running a catheter up from her groin to her heart and burning out the problematic wiring. I doubt that any of these healthcare expenses are tallied up anywhere as COVID-related costs, but they were the direct result of her COVID infection.

She was on blood thinners all through the attempt to get the arrhythmia under control, because nobody wanted this 51-year-old woman to throw a clot. When you get a prescription for blood thinners, the pharmacist warns you about the potential side effects, but the events that ensued still took her by surprise. At age 51, she thought her ovaries had closed up shop. It had been six months since they had last alerted her to their activities, but suddenly they were back in action with a torrential vengeance. We're talking go-build-yourself-an-ark levels of nonsense.

Because? Blood thinners. Because? Atrial fibrillation. Because? COVID. If you're telling your blood to clot less effectively, torrents may result.

She got home and tried to run upstairs to grab some Advil and start a load of torrent laundry. But the situation was bad enough that instead she blacked out on the stairs, and hit her face as she fell. 

Guess what happens if you fall and hit your face while on blood thinners? Massive facial bruising, that's what. Appalling facial bruising, of the sort that makes everyone who interacts with you for the next two weeks say, "Are you...safe...at home?" to which you reply, "Oh, I'm fine; I just fell down." ...Sure you did, they think to themselves, because no one bruises like that from a simple fall.

Unless they're on blood thinners, because atrial fibrillation, because COVID.

In the big picture she has had a good outcome. The doctors did eventually get the atrial fibrillation sorted out. The COVID fatigue did eventually abate. The bruises did eventually recede. But also...dang. That was a lot of hassle and expense and medication and time off work and worry and intrusive questions and avoidable suffering. 

That doesn't sound very much like a cold to me.