Light and Momentary

This Lenten Observance Brought To You By Mad-Eye Moody

I've been doing better with wasting time on the computer. I've been taking breaks to play between batches of transcripts, but not really getting sucked in. For years, some kind of restriction on my use of the computer has featured prominently in my Lenten plan, but I thought to myself, "Self, you don't seem to need that this Lent. You're doing all right on that front, self."

Ha!

Last night was poker night and I don't even want to KNOW how many games of Scramble I played while Elwood was gone. (Looking at YOU, Tracy, a.k.a. the Scramble Pusher. Watch out for her, kids, if she's hanging around your schoolyard (or Facebook page) with her addictive substances.) I was up past midnight and am tired and cranky today. And for what?

For nothing.

Constant vigilance, that's what Mad-Eye always said. I may not have a nifty circumbobulating eye (that is totally a word -- I decree it so) that will let me see what's coming from behind, like sneak attacks of Scramble Pushers. But I can do better than that. I think I need a separate plan for evenings when my husband isn't going to be here, because it's easy to find myself squelching through the mire of sloth when I'm on my own at night.

No more squelching! From now on I will be clunk-clunk-clunking, like my pal Mad-Eye. Even if I have two legs, I can give him a run for his money on the crazy hair.

Off to fill my hip flask with more coffee. (And PS, I do not actually hold Tracy responsible for my addictive tendencies.)

Imposition

The imposition of ashes, we call it. Usually an imposition is an inconvenience; something imposing is something intimidating. Both of those senses work here as well, though of course the literal meaning is "putting on." Once a year someone looks me in the eye and says, "Honey, you're going to die and your body will rot in the ground." Talk about your inconvenient truths. Talk about intimidating.

I love Ash Wednesday: the fresh start, the do-over. I grew up in a mainline Protestant denomination where we prided ourselves on doing things decently and in order. We did not begrime ourselves in church. I first saw the imposition of ashes when I was 20, and I was surprised at how hard it hit me. Remember, woman, that you are dust. I scuffed home that night in fresh snow, thinking about the dark smudge on my forehead. Once it was part of something living; now, that something is dead and changed beyond recognition. ...and to dust you shall return.

Tonight I felt that same twinge of painful knowing as the minister daubed ashes on my baby daugher's forehead. "To dust you shall return," he told her, and I winced. I was surprised to feel something different when I received ashes myself -- something like gratitude, or like relief. I walked back to my pew chewing on a beloved phrase: "and though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God."

I have been thinking this evening about the frustrating slowness of sanctification. I wish I could make it happen faster somehow -- isn't there a pill I could take, or perhaps a DVD with Fabulous Forty-Day Soul-Firming Exercises and a money-back guarantee if I'm not satisfied? But I'm remembering being disappointed with myself at the end of Lent in 1993 for trying and failing to do something that's second nature now. I am thinking about how our bodies and souls walk the same path with different destinations, our souls inching heavenward and our bodies slowly, inexorably, sinking toward their graves. Remember, they told me at Mass, and I am remembering.

Tonight I went to Mass alone with all 5 kids and they did beautifully. We squashed into a crowded pew but there were no turf wars; the younger boys needed a few reminders about asking questions quietly and that was all. For years I felt wrung out after going to Mass, even with my husband there to help wrestle kids into submission. If you had told me that I would go to a jam-packed Mass with five kids and no other adults -- and enjoy it -- I'm not sure whether I would have laughed or cried. They're learning. I hope we're learning together.

Last year Joe didn't want ashes; this year I told him to go forward anyway. He whispered to me in the dark when I tucked him in: "Is my ash cross still there?" I could see it faintly, I told him. "Good," he said, "I want it to stay." I am going upstairs now to wash off the remnants of mine, but I hope I will carry its message with me. "Imposition" can also mean "putting in" and that's my prayer this evening: that God will plant this knowledge deep in me, of what endures and what is passing away.

Seven Quick Takes

You might remember that I've taken to calling my automated disambiguator Vlad, and I'm getting to know him better and better. It's all right; no need to call the mental health professionals on my behalf. I'm at 205/301 transcripts, baby, and Vlad and I only have another ten days or so to spend in each other's company. I probably will avail myself of his services again in future research, though, because he is fast even if he is stupid. "Vlad, honey," I kept telling him over the past week, "these are second-graders. They are not using 'people' as a verb. Especially not in the phrase 'those people.'" He wouldn't listen, so tonight I reached in and snipped out part of his brain to compel him to cooperate. (This is where my anthropomorphizing sets off a little frisson of alarm in me. I have never snipped out any parts of any brains belonging to actual people, just in case you felt a similar frisson.)

Diverted

Oh my goodness, I am struggling with motivation today. I arranged for Petely to go to preschool this morning (Wednesdays are usually our day to spend the morning together), and I am just not getting as much done as I had hoped. The kids in my experimental group go on and on (and on and on) and it takes forever to get through their transcripts. I keep typing "PASTA" when I am supposed to be flagging verbs as "PAST," which suggests to me that I should take a lunch break.

Danielle Bean is collecting meatless recipes and I am offering this one as a nutritious inexpensive family favorite. You would not expect children to clamor for a recipe calling for a bag of spinach and a whole head of garlic, but mine do.

So take that head of garlic and separate the cloves. If you put a few of them at a time under the flat side of a heavy knife and whack it forcefully with your fist, perhaps venting your frustration about the glacial speed at which your work is progressing today, you should find that their skins slip off easily. Chop them coarsely and cook them in olive oil with a sprinkle of red pepper flakes. When the garlic is tender, add in 2 cans of chickpeas and a big can (28 oz) of diced tomatoes. Add a 10-oz. bag of frozen spinach. The original recipe says to thaw and drain it first, but I tell you what: I just chuck it in frozen and crank up the flame to evaporate the spinach liquid. Salt to taste. Serve over pasta, or brown rice if you're feeling crunchy, with plenty of Parmesan.

It should be clear from yesterday's post that my kids are not spinach-lovers, but they will scarf this right down.

Not Just for Breakfast

Have you seen that tip that's all over the internet, the one that says you can throw a handful of spinach in a smoothie and your kids will be none the wiser?

Ha! I say. Ha!

My New Year's resolutions have fallen by the wayside (good thing Lent is coming), but I decided this morning to do better. I was going to make a blenderful of delicious nutrient-packed smoothie for breakfast, and I thought I'd try the spinach trick.

Now my boys are reasonably adventurous eaters, but spinach for breakfast -- in a smoothie -- is just not going to fly. (Maybe in an omelet, but not in a smoothie.) I was trying to add the spinach stealthily, on top of the fruit and underneath the plain yogurt. My oldest kept wandering in and out and I would jump to interpose my body between the blender and his line of sight so he wouldn't say "Spinach? Smoothie? That's disgusting." Usually I let the frozen fruit sit for a few minutes so the blender doesn't have to work as hard, but the vigilance got too exhausting so I cranked up the motor.

I blended, and blended, and blended, but the small green bits would not disappear. I added more frozen strawberries, all I could grab from a bag of mixed fruit, but there wasn't enough pink to disguise the green flecks. I poured Pete a speckled glass. "Yum!" he said, but I knew the older boys would be more discriminating. I needed some blueberries, or something dark, but we had nothing in the freezer.

Cocoa! Chocolate smoothie! Who doesn't love a little chocolate in the morning? I added a tablespoon of cocoa powder, and then another, but we still had an RSVP (Recalcitrant Spinach Visibility Problem). Suddenly I noticed that the blender was spraying out green-flecked brown droplets from behind. The bottom had started leaking and I had a mess on my hands. I threw paper towels at it and served up my sludgy concoction.

I said brightly, "Look, guys, chocolate smoothie!"

They replied skeptically, in unison: "Chocolate?" Alex tasted it and said, "Could I make myself a bagel?" Marty tasted it and said, "Me too?" Joe didn't even want to try it. Who knew that chocolate would cause more nose-wrinkling than spinach?

At 7:45 I am more interested in getting them fed than in broadening their culinary horizons, so I sighed heavily and let them get bagels. I am, however, far too cheap to pour out my sludge, so I am drinking it myself.

It might take awhile.

Anybody want to come over for some antioxidants?

Tune My Heart

We moved several times after my husband got his PhD and before he figured out that academia was not for him; our piano traveled around with us from one little apartment to the next. I was surprised at how well it seemed to hold its tune, and surprised again when I finally made an appointment with the piano tuner. It had stayed in tune with itself but it was horribly flat. He struck a 440Hz pitchfork, and then played our piano's A, and the contrast was painful to hear.

The surprising part was how much better the piano sounded when he was all done: warmer, brighter, fuller. He explained that the instrument is crafted so that it sounds best when it's tuned just right. It's not only about the strings vibrating, but the wood resonating with them. As the piano coasted further away from concert tuning, it lost the sympathetic resonance of the wood. I have a feeling I am not explaining it in a way that an acoustician would approve, but we'd agree about the result: the instrument's tone became duller and emptier.

I remembered it this evening because the opening hymn at Mass was a favorite of mine: Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. The second line is "Tune my heart to sing thy grace." I've sung it a kabillion times before, but tonight I thought about my piano as I sang it. I have also been fashioned to make beautiful music. I can contribute to creation's hymn, in which the seraphim sing "Holy, holy, holy" and the ice and snow and lightning and clouds bless the Lord together. If I yield to the one who knows the instrument best, how much more pleasing will its song be?

When a piano has slid away from its proper tuning and into flat dullness, restoring its real sound is a fiddly process. The tuner goes up and down the soundboard, listening and tweaking until the notes can ring clear and true again. I'm thinking about that tonight as I reflect on a day in which cranky and sulky dominated over joyful. I'm still singing: Tune my heart to sing thy grace.

Halfway

Dun-da-da-DAH! Disambiguator Woman here in a pretend snazzy superhero outfit. I have just finished morpheme analysis for the 151st of my 301 transcripts. Now I am swooshing away in my imaginary purple cape to be Dishwasher Woman and Rosary Woman and Toothbrushing Woman and Very Tired Sleeping Woman.

Folly of Youth Dept.

My high school best friend was telling me about a freelance writing gig she's got. "It's for John," she said. "Remember Ernest Goes To Camp?"

It is not often that a five-word sentence can make me both gasp and giggle, but that one did it. The summer that I turned 17, she and I went to see that masterpiece of mindlessness, that pinnacle of puerility, called Ernest Goes To Camp. And somehow -- how? I wish I knew how -- we hatched a plan.

We were going to meet John later that day. We decided we'd insist that he come to see Ernest with us. Neither of us had the remotest romantic interest in him, but we were going to pretend that we did. Simultaneously, one on each side in the darkened theater.

So the title credit would roll and we would -- at the very same time -- sigh heavily and drop our heads onto his manly shoulders. (He was about 5'5" and 110 pounds.) At a specified line in the opening scene, we would run a hand up and down his arm. When Ernest laughed like an idiot -- no, that couldn't have been a cue because he laughed like an idiot about every 12 seconds -- anyway, at some other agreed-upon signal we would coo "Oh, John, what's that awesome aftershave you're wearing?" We practiced the inflection: was it to be "awesome aftershave" or "awesome aftershave"? We wanted to get it perfectly synchronized.

We wrote up our cue cards (probably annoying everyone else in the theater in the process) and left before the movie was over. We ran through the script a few times, pausing frequently to laugh and laugh and laugh at our silly plan. And then we met John and the three of us went back to the movie.

The first problem was, movie theaters are very dark. I remember squinting at my cue cards -- was I supposed to take his hand or whisper a sweet nothing when the guy in overalls came on? The second problem was, we found our idea so hilarious that it was tough to execute with a straight face. Snorting with laughter didn't do much for our credibility. The third problem was, we only planned for about the first fifteen minutes of the movie. What did we think was going to happen next?

I can't remember exactly what happened next, but I am still embarrassed and amused at the memory of the two of us stifling laughter in the dark. Today we were both shaking our heads at our former selves. "Were we high?" my friend asked in her message. I can say for a certainty that we weren't high. I plead seventeen-ness, and it makes me glad to be 38 and boring.

Bleak

We were admiring an exhibit full of bugs this afternoon when one of the keepers offered my boys a chance to hold the insects. We were talking about their habits when he said, "For animals, life comes down to two things: eating and making babies." I said, "That's a pretty narrow life." He went on: "For people, there's a lot more to life. Playing video games. Watching TV. Driving cars."

There are lots of things I might have listed, had you asked me what separated people from animals. An immortal soul. Symbolic language. The drive to make something beautiful for the love of beauty.

But maybe it's just our appreciation of screens and cars. Who knew?

What's In A Name

In 1909 a redheaded baby girl was born in Kentucky. She loved to bake and she loved to sing, and she grew up to have four boys. At each birth her husband said, "Now this one's a little redheaded girl for Mama." He was wrong every time.

Still Random But Happier

On Monday I started the year 1 transcripts and it became immediately evident that I would not meet my original goal of finishing morpheme analysis by the end of February. It was a relief, actually, to realize that I had to revise my schedule. Yesterday I had a phone conference with my advisor after the faculty meeting in which they review all the doc students' progress over the past year. I passed. She told me, in fact, that when my file came up, a few of the faculty joked that I should give out time management tips. (There are a couple of PhD students with one child, and one woman who has two children, but I am decidedly an oddity with my five. My only time management tips are to give away the TV and teach the kids to clean bathrooms and load the dishwasher.) We also talked for a while about what comes next. I am working on a timeline that she thinks is ambitious, but she also thought it was ambitious for me to try to get to candidacy before the baby arrived. I'd much rather be shooting for a goal that she thinks is optimistic than be told I needed to meet a deadline that seemed unrealistic to me. So that's good.

It's been almost three weeks since any baby pictures were posted on this blog, which is a situation that must be rectified. I call this one "Baby with Brothers and Laundry." (My MIL has been asking me to dress her in pink and take a picture. I never dress her in baby pink, you might remember, because I have always hated baby pink, but I finally obliged.) Here she is (still in pink! two whole pictures of her in pink!) with her oldest brother; here she is with the youngest. Joe and Pete made her a bed of stuffed animals, which she thought was intriguing and they thought was hilarious. Pete loves, LOVES to hold her and to be photographed holding her; she is sometimes uncertain that this is a good idea.

Alex is making sure that she'll know how to text-message before any of the other babies can do it. Pete's eyes are closed in this one but I love it anyway: he has his shirt hiked up too so he can nurse his baby, who shares his sister's name. I am realizing the 9yo is not in a single one of these recent pictures, which is another situation to rectify.

I was up late last night grading (late by postpartum standards, which is to say midnight), and that always jacks up the cranky potential for the next evening. I am going to go make onion soup, and fold laundry, and tidy up the living room. Which means I should end this post pronto. Catch you later.

Untitled

This was going to be a seven quick takes post for Friday but I was too busy on Friday even for seven quick takes. I have finished morpheme analysis for all the year 3 transcripts, but I don't think this pace is sustainable. I am dreaming of morpheme markings every night. In addition, there are more of the earlier transcripts (people drop out in every year of a longitudinal study) and they are longer. They may be less complex because they are conversations rather than narratives, but I have many, many hours of work ahead of me. Anyway, here are my random paragraphs strung together for Sunday.

Having a child in junior high is bringing back a flood of memories for me. We've had some recent conversations about appropriate reading material for kids his age. I am hopelessly out of date, you may not be surprised to learn. But I remember being in sixth grade, when awful books were being passed around among kids who thought they were more mature than they really were. I still wish I hadn't read them. Hard to know how to guide someone who is emphatic about not wanting guidance. His math grades plummeted during a recent unit where he made one sign error after another. It sparked a painful memory for me: first-year algebra, weeping in despair because I kept making sign errors. I got a D on a test. I was not a girl who made Ds on tests, ever. I was sure I'd never get it. I wish I could remember what got me over the hump.

Having a child in junior high also helps me to enjoy my baby. Her needs are so simple and I know that I can meet them: nurse her lots, change her lots, hold her lots, love her lots. Blessedly uncomplicated. It's not that I don't appreciate Alex, not at all. I'm just more confident about mothering a six-week-old than mothering a sixth-grader. Even if I goof up, and nurse her when she wants to be changed or vice versa, it's a low-stakes mistake that she'll never remember. It can be humbling, mothering children who have clear opinions about the decisions you've made.

I have begun calling my automated disambiguator Vladimir, or Vlad for short. He is like a very dim ESL speaker who keeps thinking that "to school" should be a verb and not a prepositional phrase. When I run my next batch of transcripts I am going to delete "school" from the lexicon of verbs because I am tired of changing it manually. He also wants "behind" to be a noun, which tells me something about his predilections. Sometimes I want to say, "Vlad, don't be a moron -- how could 'yelled' be a perfect participle in the sentence 'they yelled'?" Then I remember that I'm talking to a piece of computer software.

My husband brought a friend home from work unannounced the other night. Things have been crazy at his job in connection with the economic craziness, and he's been working late a lot. I was wiped out well before he got home. After I got Pete to sleep I thought about putting on my pajamas, but I decided that instead I'd hand Elwood the baby when he walked in the door and go straight into the bathtub. I didn't know that his friend would give him a ride home and Elwood would invite him in, but I'm glad I wasn't greeting a guest in my bathrobe. Anyway, I was telling Elwood about my day and his friend was listening in some perplexity as I nattered on about Vlad and his limitations. "This is...a computer thing?" Makes me glad that my husband is a math geek with an imagination. He would never anthropomorphize his own computer software, but at least he will smile at me when I do.

I've got a post about our baby's name mostly drafted but then abandoned. I have four neglected knitting projects on the needles. I have clutter on most of the flat surfaces of my home, and a rather alarming aggregation of fluff and cracker crumbs and small sequins from a disintegrating knight costume scattered across the dining room carpet. All of this suggests to me that I need a little more balance re: the dissertation. It's strictly internal pressure that's been driving me, produced by my fear that I'm going to be one of the PhD students who gets to candidacy and then just languishes there. I'll see what my advisor has to say -- we have a phone conference set up for Tuesday to talk about progress and goals.

The trouble with random strings of paragraphs is that they so rarely lend themselves to tidy endings. So I will end untidily instead.