Light and Momentary

Gracefully

It's easy for me to see the loveliness of God's design at the beginning of the lifespan. Those patches of hair at a newborn's temples, the ones that fade away mysteriously within a couple of weeks? I love those. The variations in baby coiffures, the way that some of them are born with full heads of hair and some stay bald for a good long while? I love those. Three of my kids lost all the hair on the tops of their heads at 26 days old -- like, whoosh, scissors-free tonsure on day 27. Weird, right? But after the first one it also felt to me like an identity badge: here I am, bald and vulnerable and entirely yours.

I have a harder time seeing the loveliness of God's design further on. It's the same idea, right? Some of us saw our first gray hair at 25; some of us are catching up more slowly. Some of us (okay, this one is me) have, like, the Eyebrows of Dorian Gray. I don't have much gray hair on my scalp, but my eyebrows bespeak the hard-living years of my youth. Or something like that. I believe that gray hair can be a crown of glory but maybe, just possibly, my coronation could take place a little further in the future.

One of my friends messaged me tonight, feeling that she ought to accept the gray gracefully but also not feeling at all graceful about it. And you know, there's something to be said for pushing back against the cultural message that gray hair means it's time for a woman to be put out to pasture, but also we need to tackle that message on fronts that transcend the tonsorial. Like, perhaps the beast of burden imagery is a bigger problem than the chemicals or the vanity or the support of the beauty industry. Perhaps the core issue is a culture that equates aging men with bottles of wine (they improve with age), and aging women with cartons of milk. (After their sell-by dates they get lumpy and sour.)

"I support you in dyeing or graying!" is what I told my friend, and I guess I wanted to tell you that too. We live in a time and place where we're mostly expected to modify our bodies to meet a cultural standard: trim our split ends, depilate our pits, don our anti-gravity undergarments when we go out in public. (Some people just call them bras but it's more fun if you can shout TO INFINITY AND BEYOND when you get dressed in the morning.) There's no intrinsic virtue in conforming to or rejecting any of those standards; the same is true for dyeing and graying.

But here is the thing I wish for you, my friends: I wish that you would take a deep breath and think back to when you held a sleeping baby dear to you and admired the whorl of hair at the crown of her head. Remember the rush of affection you felt as you looked at your own particular baby's very particular hair? I think that God our Father looks at us with the same affection as we trudge through our 30s and 40s and 50s-- viewing the sprinkling of gray at your temples, and the silver strands highlighting my pal Veronica's dark curls -- and also my Dorian Gray Eyebrows -- with tender love and with his everlasting appreciation of variety.

Gladlys Climb High (Again)

You guys, I have a fun new hobby. I've been not-blogging about it for a while, because (a) I continue to be vague about my location and the number of Midwestern climbing gyms is not enormous, and also (b) it feels like a departure from my usual frugal habits. But I love it and I did something hard tonight, and I am going to tell you more about it.

Have you ever been rock-climbing? We had been to the gym here in Gladlyville occasionally -- I took a belay class when Petely was 2 or so. (He will be 14 next month, if you can believe it.) Last year he asked if he could have his birthday party there, and that's when the boys' interest took off. On the day of his party I hadn't climbed in more than 10 years. My first attempts were not pretty. If you've never climbed you might assume that it's all about strength, but it's more complicated than that. It requires some flexibility, and a fair amount of balance, and some technical skills. ("Trust the heel hook!" Pete exhorted me tonight, as I stretched out five feet above the floor and parallel to it. I...am still working on a trustworthy heel hook.) It also involves more creativity and problem-solving skill than I first realized. It's as much a brain sport as an arm sport.

It reminds me a little bit of knitting (here all the Serious Climbers snort derisively, but hear me out) in the way that you can vary the difficulty of the undertaking to suit your current state of mind. If I want to tackle a super-gnarly* Shetland lace stole with cobweb yarn and wrong-side patterning, I can do that. Or I can just crank on a plain-vanilla sock while I mostly think about something else. At the rock-climbing gym, when I am fresh I can work out the next pieces of the routes that make me say "Hmmm" or perhaps "You have got to be kidding me." When my arms are tired I go and repeat some easy routes to build endurance.

*Does anyone say gnarly these days? Or does it serve only as a signifier of middle age?

I love the thinky part of it. Running doesn't require a ton of brainpower, unless you count the creative efforts to dissuade oneself from taking a walk break. But climbing something new and hard requires my brain to fire on all cylinders. Can I trust that hold? Will I have enough leverage if I move my foot to that chip? I want to tackle that tough move with my right hand, but will I fall off the wall if I try to switch hands? It might be better to try the tough move left-handed than to have to climb back up here again.

Routes are rated by difficulty. Beginners start with 5.6 routes; I've been hanging out in 5.8/5.9 territory for a while now -- reasonably confident about finishing those routes, daunted by anything harder. But! Tonight! I sailed up the first section of a 5.10a, the part I had managed before. I got the following move. I thought to myself, "I will probably fall off now that I am in the hard part, but at least I got a little further tonight." But! Then! I did not fall off! After the hard part I matched on the highest hold I could see and looked around, confused, for the next hold. There was no next hold! I did it! It's a milestone! 5.10a, baby! I think this paragraph needs more exclamation points!!

In climbing as in much of the rest of my life, my anxious brain has presented a formidable barrier. It took me a long time to trust the rope. I still get scared on the wall. There's another 5.10a in my sights that requires me to undertake one big dynamic move: I have to jump from a precarious position up to a higher hold. I couldn't do it tonight. But maybe next time. And if not, I'm pretty sure I'll get it the time after that.

Deep thought in the rearview mirror

Tonight I was waiting for the Scout meeting to end and inching through a chapter of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The author would not approve of what I just did there. That's an affiliate link to the Kindle version, which is (a) tempting you to click away instead of reading the words I am writing for your consideration and (b) suggesting that you purchase an e-book instead of a nice old-fashioned book-book and (c) monetizing your descent into a state of being "distracted by distraction from distraction." (That quote is from the Four Quartets, but it seems prescient, no?) Nicholas Carr says the links in online text turn reading into a constant exercise in decision-making. Do I click this one? how about this one? maybe this one? Carr says the reason we're all more impatient with long-form articles than we used to be is that reading has become more cognitively strenuous for us.

Yikes.

In some ways the book seems dated. It was published in 2011, which is practically, like, the Pleistocene Era in internet terms. He's still talking about the Blackberry, and I'm pretty sure one of those guys in a Lascaux cave painting used his Blackberry to email his wife: "Hunt successful! Butchering now. Liver y/n?" But in some ways it seems like a warning we have failed to heed. Today I was in a waiting room at the doctor's office next to a grown man, in his 50s, playing a pew-pew-pew video game on his phone with the sound on. It's no longer unusual for everyone at an intersection to wait while the person closest to the just-turned-green stoplight pulls his head out of his inbox and returns his attention to the task of driving his car. People have heard the message that combining phone use and driving is dangerous, and in surprisingly large numbers they have concluded that they do not care.

At the tail end of the Scout meeting I was talking to a pal from church who is trying to persuade a relative to attend our fall women's retreat. The biggest barrier? The retreats are no-phone zones. The relative manages a pharmacy, and she has to be available by phone at all times. "When we go on vacation," said my friend, "she's always on her phone. If something happens at the pharmacy she has to be able to address it right away." But...it's a chain pharmacy. There are two of them right here in Gladlyville. What are they going to do if she needs surgery? When did constant contact with an employee turn into a reasonable expectation?

The retreat program we were involved with as grad students asked retreatants to surrender their watches for the weekend. It's got to be a harder sell these days, asking college students to lay down their phones for 48 hours.

I am on day 29 of Cal Newport's 30-day social media fast. I haven't peeked at Facebook or Twitter or Ravelry, and it's mostly been a good thing. (Anyone who has been sending me Twitter DMs might have a different view of the situation, though.) I don't know that it has really made a difference in my capacity to sit down and FOCUS on DEEP THOUGHTS. I don't know what happens on day 31, either. But I am troubled by the erosion of my capacity to think hard about hard things, and I am going to see what I can do to shore it up again.

In like a chimera

You GUYS, I am back in the land of the-- not the living, exactly, but the land of the people who don't have to work every weekend and most evenings. PHEW. We revamped the way we handled grad admissions, which was already a huge time commitment, so that it took more than twice as long as it used to. It was unbelievable.

We finished that up on Friday, and I dug out from under the grading backlog yesterday, and today I was going to take a deep breath and rest but the Boy Scouts' big annual fundraiser intervened. The beginning of March has felt more than lion-esque. Has it felt more like an assault by a fire-breathing mutant lion, you say? About like that.

My brain has been unfurling itself after the long hunkering-down, and lots of post ideas are bubbling up inside my head today: Burned By Convection, about sad Swedish croissants and lingering distrust, How To Buy A Cow, for all your livestock needs, and maybe one in which I tell you about running afoul of a representative of the parish pro-life organization due to insufficient Republican-ness on my part. 

It is freezing today, but the daffodil foliage is peeking up through the snow and the days are inching toward a reasonable length. How's by you? 

The Discipline Ceiling

It turns out that there is a limit to the amount of judging I can do, and at the end of last week I crashed hard into that wall.

I have a service commitment that is the single most judgment-intensive thing I have ever done at Gladlyville U. I am also teaching three classes. I resolved that last week I would be the most disciplined version of myself that I could possibly be, and this is the thing I learned: there is a ceiling to the amount of self-discipline I can exert. Maybe it's a movable ceiling? I don't know? But a weird thing happened after five days of Maximum Discipline.

I came home on Friday and there was a bill in the mail from the heating and cooling company. They came out for a service call recently, but they said there was no charge because our new furnace has a warranty that covers parts and labor. Getting the bill in the mail should have been a minor annoyance. They're nice folks; if it was a mistake they'll apologize, and if we do actually owe them for the service call we can afford the bill. Instead I opened the envelope and thought about the steps required to resolve the issue, and then I laid my head down on the table and cried. "This is kind of strange and excessive," I thought to myself as the tears kept flowing.

Saturday morning I discovered that a LOWSRA* (Laundry Offender Who Shall Remain Anonymous) had dumped a basket of clean laundry into a dusty corner. This is not the first time I have pointed out to that particular LOWSRA that dumping clean laundry into a dusty corner means it is dusty rather than clean, but for whatever reason this objection doesn't seem to carry much weight. I did not aim any arrows of indisputable logic in the LOWSRA's direction; I did not yell. I just dissolved. "It is very odd to cry helplessly twice in two days over such tiny things," said the small sensible voice in my head.

Yesterday I worked through some of the grading backlog, but I could feel the crash of inner gears. "That is wrong," I would think to myself. "I do not want to explain why it is wrong. Perhaps if I look at another exam I won't have to explain any wrong things." This is not a recipe for grading efficiency, but I made a little headway.

"Can I really take a day off tomorrow?" I wondered last night. "I am feeling so behind. Does this count as necessary work?" The answer was clear and immediate: there are no emergencies in academia. The grading always gets done. Today I did not grade anything at all. After church I watched the Princess Bride with my two youngest kids; later I went rock-climbing with Joe and Pete. I will go to bed at 9:15 or so, and hope that the mysterious inner reservoir I depleted so thoroughly last week is refilled when I wake up in the morning.

Also I will be really glad when it's March.

P.S. Before I conclude this sad-sack post let me tell you what my Pete did. Yesterday he said, "Can I do anything to help? Can I bring you breakfast in bed tomorrow morning? I'd like to do that more often but you always get up so early." This morning he set his alarm for 7 and brought me an omelet with home-grown herbs, and buttered toast, and coffee. Love that boy.

What you measure

Long ago, in a blogosphere far far away, Jen Fulwiler wrote a post called You Get What You Measure. I've thought a lot about that post, about the things I measure and the things I am reluctant to tally up. On one of the early pages of my bullet journal I made a page for tracking habits, as a way of looking honestly at how often I was doing the good things I intended to do.

For instance: I have a solid morning Divine Office habit, but I often found myself catching up on the week's Bible readings on Saturday. I wanted to extend my good habit to strengthen a more wobbly habit. As you can see below, that worked really well in January. (The morning reading blocks are the first three items: one for Augustine, one for the pair of short easy readings, one for the Old Testament reading.)

You can also see that my motivation to sustain good habits fell off precipitously once it got to be 4pm. This is probably a hazard of trying to track my progress on two dozen different wobbly habits at the same time. 

I filled up that whole page last week and found that I missed the motivation. So! For the rest of February and all of March I have a new super-sized habit-tracking grid. Blue is for things that feed my mind or my soul; green is for things that strengthen my body. Orange is for work-related or adulting kinds of things; yellow is for mom habits like getting the laundry folded regularly. Pink is for things I want to avoid, like staying up too late. (This is because I don't like pink.)

Today is my first day with the new habit tracker, and I won't be able to fill in the "in bed @ 9:45 square" with pink highlighter if I don't end this post promptly. So: happy bullet journaling to you! also the end!

The post equivalent of WD-40

Oh, goodness, I didn't realize it had been more than two weeks since my last post. I have not had a lot of space in my head and I have been trying to be disciplined about going to bed early, and the combination is bad for blogging consistency. I am imagining the blogging habit as a sort of rusty gate hinge, and throwing up a quick post as a sort of writerly WD-40, just to loosen things up. 

Books I am reading: Digital Minimalism (good, though I find Cal Newport a little smug and am not quiiiite ready for a social media fast), Augustine's Confessions (oh so good! love love love), bunch of Kindle backlog stuff

Books I recently finished: Ambition Decisions (annoying), Edwin Drood (would like the second half please), The Darlings (quick and engrossing), I Burned for Your Peace (Peter Kreeft's book about Augustine's Confessions; it's okay)

Things I am thinking: winter is long, ice is bad, work is busy. I have a mammoth service commitment just now and I am trying to be cheerful about completing it. Mostly I am failing at the cheerful part, but I am trying.

The college committee on promotion and tenure voted yes unanimously on my portfolio and the dean concurred. It goes to the provost from here. It's possible for the provost to override unanimous votes from the department and the college, but it would be super-weird. So that's a huge relief. Whopping. Gigunda. Brobdingnagian.

I have a million things to grade this weekend but it dawned on me yesterday: in eight years of reading student evaluations that have complained about a kajillion different things, no one has ever once said that I grade too slowly. I always stress about not getting things back promptly but apparently the students don't expect me to work any faster than I'm working. (Let us hope I do not use that insight as license to procrastinate further.)

How's by you?

Eeyore is today's guest blogger, apparently

Brr, it's cold. It's cold and our quiet little street has too many icy patches for my taste and more snow has been falling and I am feeling a little glum about the whole weather situation.

Really the thing I am feeling most glum about -- and it is a pervasive creeping flavor of glum -- is that substance abuse is stupidly relentless in the way it sinks its claws into people. I would like my Hollywood happy ending now, please. You know where the person sees the folly of her ways and resolves tearfully not to be an addict any longer? I would even prefer that plot development to a Time Turner, which would be a pretty useful gadget to have on hand.

I could use a Time Turner for the grad class I am currently teaching, which is also a part of the glum: too much to do, not enough time in which to do it.

Tonight I was going to make a yummy Instant Pot dinner from this cookbook, which has never once let me down in a year of fairly consistent use, and it was the worst Instant Pot meal I've ever made. Shrimp! Curried in coconut milk! What could go wrong with such a delicious plan? Well, I'll tell you: the shrimp could emerge from their cooking time mostly raw, that's what. It occurs to me that perhaps my shrimp were bigger than the shrimp in the recipe? But I was steaming them inside a bowl nested within the pot, per the recipe. Wouldn't you expect a pound of shrimp to steam in about the same time if they were all stirred into in one bowl? In a single layer it would take longer to cook a bigger shrimp all the way through, but that's not what was happening here.

Oh and do you know what else? We were out of aluminum foil with which to cover the smaller bowl, and so I used wax paper. It left a light waxy residue on the inside of my pot, grumble grumble.

Okay, so these are the good things to which I am directing my attention:

1. Joe is coming home tonight.
2. I have our YNAB account up and running and the process was less intimidating than it first appeared. Perhaps now I will be able to determine where all of our money goes.
3. I am near the end of the bind-off on the Free and Fair Elections Forever brioche shawl, and it's making me happy. They say that brioche stitch grows a lot in the blocking and I hope they're right. At this point it's like a little mini-shawlette for an undersized leprechaun. A well-dressed undersized leprechaun.

Inbox Fatigue

I have a night class this semester, and I am finding once again that the time required for me to coast down after class does not quiiiite fit into the time available between my arrival at home and my preferred bedtime. So I am throwing up a quick blog post in hopes that it will de-froth my brain a little further.

Did you read that millennial burnout article? Did you react by saying to yourself "I sympathize with a lot of this" and also "Why can we not pull up our socks and get on with adult life these days"? Part of my trouble is the sheer number of input channels I am expected to respond to these days. Electronic messages make it quick and easy to communicate, but now we have all of this extra communication to deal with.

It might be most conspicuous at work, where email frees students up to ask me questions that I would never have asked a professor back in the days when the options were (a) go to office hours and ask in person or (b) make a phone call and hope to catch her in the office. Almost all of the time I am glad students have a frictionless means of asking me questions. I wonder sometimes what my working hours would have looked like if I had pursued a PhD and an academic career as a young woman. It would have been annoying to send off manuscripts and grant applications by US mail, for sure. But all of the stuff -- notifications and reminders and reply-all oversights -- must have been a much smaller part of the workday.

I used to be really guarded about giving out my cell number, but these days everybody and his pet gecko asks for it and sometimes I just say yes. It's easy to lose track of stuff in the text inbox, especially as more dumb notifications pile up. (Do I need three reminders for that appointment? No, I emphatically do not.) I deliberately set my Messenger notifications so that the app is not allowed to disturb me, which is mostly good but also means that stuff gets lost in there. Ditto for the Group Me app -- I don't let it buzz at me, but then I need to keep an occasional eye on what's going on in there.

When my kids first started getting involved in activities there was no expectation that every parent would have an email account. Communication was more of a pain in the days when you had to call everybody's landline to relay information, so there was less of it. If it was 40 degrees on the morning of a soccer game, the coach would assume you knew your kid needed to dress warmly. Our last soccer coach would send out messages tagged URGENT via both email and text. WARM LAYERS, he would say. I'm okay with the warm-layers-for-cold-days piece of adult life, thanks, but not so much with the inbox management.

I don't really think life was easier in the 80s, but there's something to be said for having a mailbox and a landline (and probably not even an answering machine) as your sole sources of Stuff That People Outside My House Need Me To Accomplish.

Twenty things you can do with little kids when it is snowing a ton

What is the largest amount of time you can spend outside? It will cheer them up and wear them out.

1. Build things in the snow: snow monsters and snow forts if your kids have the stamina for it, or snow possums if they have short attention spans. If a snowman is too hard you can make a snow squid: make one big blob for the head, and then use sand toys to carve out legs curling around it.
2. Sledding is super-fun on the way down, and those trips uphill will make for excellent naps afterward. Pro tip: promise them hot cocoa at home and leave 15 minutes before they think it's time to leave. If you wait until they think it's time to go, you might be in meltdown territory.
3. Kids love to move snow. Give them each a shovel and set them to work, man. (Keep your expectations very low -- any snow removal they manage to complete is snow removal you don't have to do. Even if they move snow back onto the walk you just shoveled-- hey, they are not squabbling inside.)
4. Make snow cream! I have such happy childhood memories of snow cream. In my recollection it works better to make snow cream outside.
5. Go on a polar explorer walk. Be Amundsen! Or Shackleton! (Just not Scott.) Take binoculars or a camera and take note of the signs of life that you encounter: footprints, scat, birdsong, actual critters. If you see a penguin, he might need a map.
6. It's true that snowball fights are only fun until somebody loses an eye (or takes a snowball square in the face), but they're really really fun up until that point. You can level the playing field if your kids are different ages by requiring big kids to throw with their non-dominant hand, or letting the littler kids start with twice as many snowballs, or something along those lines. 

When you get cold, go inside and pretend you're still outside.

7. Every big snowstorm, in my opinion, requires a fort. Possible materials: couch cushions, blankets, towels, clothespins, clamps. Folding chairs are useful because their frames are sturdy enough to provide some height but narrow enough for clamping. Also needed: materials for making "no grownups allowed" signs. If you can let them take over the living room to make their polar exploration station, they may hang out in it peaceably for a surprisingly long time.
8. Read about cold weather trials inside your warm cozy house. My kids have been riveted by the story of the Titanic. Shackleton's story has a happier ending, but what a heart-pounding story it is. Dust off Andersen's fairy tales and read about the Snow Queen. Oh, and I also love the story of Snowflake Bentley. And The Mitten! I might have to read The Mitten tomorrow even though my youngest child is 10.
9. Make your own snowstorm. Here's a how-to for the snowflakes I made when I was a kid; I never saw this kind until I was an adult but they're pretty nifty.

Snow day food offers lots of opportunities for creating lovely memories and scoring big Fun Mom points.

10. Muffins are pretty painless to make with small children and they can signal "it's a special day!" starting with breakfast. And if you say, "Guess what, kids, frosting for breakfast!" -- even though your "frosting" is lightly sweetened cream cheese thinned out with a little milk, you will still be a hero.
11. All-day hot cocoa is a favorite snow day thing. If I'm making a mugful, I stir together a spoonful of cocoa, a spoonful of sugar, and a tiny sprinkle of salt. I add a splash of milk to make a lump-free paste, and then add milk up to the brim. Microwave until hot. More often on a snowy day I would mix it up in my two-quart saucepan, for which I would need about a third of a cup of cocoa and the same amount of sugar, with a tiny pinch of salt. Here again you need to make a cocoa paste instead of pouring in all the milk at once. You can add vanilla when it's hot, but the kids won't complain if you leave it out.
12. If you are bringing cocoa to the table you can also put marshmallows into an empty sugar bowl and shift into your best snooty waiter accent. "Does Mademoiselle wish to add any marshmallows? Pairhaps she would like ze tongs to transfair ze marshmallows?"
13. Even a small thing presented enthusiastically can be a happy memory in what might otherwise be a long blank bickery day. "I know! Let's get the popcorn popper! Who wants to be my salt sprinkler?! And then! After it's popped! Would you like to eat popcorn...IN THE FORT?!" (I might designate a Fort Popcorn Eating Towel to cut down on the popcorn bits in the living room carpet, and shake it out in the back yard afterward for the squirrels.)
14. If you're a person who likes to spend time in the kitchen, it might be an excellent day for multi-step projects: make cookie dough in the morning (whoever volunteers to wash the mixing bowl gets to lick the beaters!); roll it out, cut out your snowflake cookies, and bake them after lunch; eat a few while they're hot but save the rest for after naptime, when you'll drizzle them with simple snowy frosting (confectioner's sugar + water + vanilla).
15. If you're a person who does not like to spend time in the kitchen (or a person who burned herself out while making cutout cookies with small children), simple comfort food is a perfect way to end a snowy day. Grilled cheese and tomato soup, or macaroni and cheese, or something like that.

Some fighting is inevitable if you have small kids thrown together for a long snowy day. If they get grumpy:

16. Don't try to logic them out of it. Sibling squabbles are generally impervious to logic in the moment. Brief brisk sympathy followed by distraction is your winning strategy here. "Oh, that sounds frustrating. Let's do XYZ instead."
17. XYZ might be a collaborative game like Forbidden Island. (It says 10 and up but you do not have to be 10 to play Forbidden Island.)
18. Another fun non-competitive game is Telestrations. I love it so so much. If your kids can read and write a little, you can have a blast with Telestrations. (We never score it; we just trace the mangled words through their permutations and lie on the floor laughing helplessly.)
19. A brief distraction could be a winter song like The Frozen Logger.
20. (If you become truly desperate, you could send a kid out with instructions to see what happens if he licks the downspout.)

Please share your own ideas in the comments!