Light and Momentary

The end

It's the end of March: 31 days, 31 posts. But I'll be back soon, because I have a knitted version of salvation history to share with you. (I know! The suspense is crushing you!) Thanks for reading.

The rain, it's plain, stays mainly in the drain

I am walking home from work when I see a strange movement near the curb. It is raining; it's been raining for most of the day. As I come closer I realize it's a paw, jutting up from under the cover of the storm drain. Then there's a second paw, equally scrabbly and frantic. The wheels in my brain are turning slowly: too big to be a squirrel, please God not a humongous rat, this must be a...could it be a possum, in the daytime? 

Whatever it is, its paws are thoroughly bedraggled and there's a panicky quality to its movements. I feel that I ought to check it out. I circle around the drain, giving it a wide berth. I have zero desire to get into a turf war with a possum crazy enough to be out in broad daylight. Suddenly a face is clearly visible, also thoroughly bedraggled. Its expression is not what you'd call friendly.

It's a raccoon. It seems to have become trapped under the storm drain cover, somehow. I am mystified. What could make a raccoon wedge itself under the storm drain cover and then change its mind in the middle? I am also disinclined to provide direct assistance, because this particular raccoon looks like it could use some comfort food. Like, say, a chunk of human calf, gouged out of the leg of the foolhardy person who comes within snapping distance.*

The storm drain is in front of my next door neighbor's house, so I go inside and call the town's storm drain maintenance folks. They tell me to call animal control. (While I am on hold I am watching out of the window. I am half expecting the raccoon to come tearing wild-eyed up the sidewalk, dragging the storm drain cover on its neck.) The animal control guy comes back on the line. He says, well, you can call natural resources if you want, but they're probably going to tell you the same thing. Raccoons live in the storm sewers. That one probably just found the water a little too fast-moving down there after all the rain we've had today, and so it was clinging to the underside of the drain cover to catch its breath. No need to intervene.

Raccoons live in the storm sewers?

And cling to the undersides of drain covers to catch their breath when it rains heavily?

If I had not seen this actual raccoon clinging to the underside of the actual drain cover, I would have thought this guy was pulling my leg. Live and learn, and maybe steer clear of storm drains when the rains are heavy.

--

*PS This doesn't have anything to do with the rest of this post, except that writing the word calf made me think of the word femur. On Easter our priest was talking about the Pharisees and Jesus. I could have sworn he said, "They thought he was a blest femur!" I began rootling through my mental lexicon. A blest femur? Excuse me? Did femur have some secret meaning I'd never discovered? Most of the way through the homily it dawned on me: blasphemer. Of course.

PPS It occurs to me that this is not the first time I've missed a chunk of Mass trying to puzzle out a semantic mystery. Perhaps I should work on that.

Stealth Dress Code

Earlier in the semester I got a postcard through campus mail. "You're invited," it said, "to a reception hosted by the campus office that supports grant applications." I've mentioned once or twice here that I applied for a grant last spring; it wasn't funded but I turned the application around just in time to get a smaller university grant instead. The invitation came because I applied for an external grant, which is something the university wants to encourage. I felt a bit like an impostor, showing up at a reception where the guests of honor had actual NIH and NSF funding, but I think that (a) it's always wise to push back against impostor syndrome and (b) hanging out with people who are writing grants keeps the grant-writing wheels cranking inside my own brain. So I RSVP'd: yes, thank you, I'd be happy to come.

I'd been to a casual meet-and-greet sponsored by this office, and I was guessing that the reception would be an even more casual affair. It was at the student union instead of an upscale restaurant; it started at 4:30 instead of being squarely in evening territory. I thought there would be lots of people who were just popping over from the office.

I think there might have been an invisible ink line on the invitation: dress up, everybody. I failed to hold my postcard over a candle flame in search of invisible ink messages, and so I did not get the memo. Alas.

Tuesday is my longest day. This morning I had an 8:30 meeting with a student and then my class ran until 9pm. I usually pop home in the late afternoon to say hi and eat dinner and change into teaching clothes, but I dress down for most of the day. This morning I pulled on a pair of moderately faded jeans, an NPR T-shirt, and a fleece. The laundry-folding train has gone off the rails, and so I didn't have any plain socks in my drawer. I pulled on a pair of screaming neon red socks under a pair of Birkenstock clogs, cut for maximum sock visibility.

...And then I walked into a room full of people who had actually read their invisible ink message and dressed accordingly.

I'm still trying to figure it out. The dean and the VPs and the president always dress up, but that's not the case at all for faculty. I guess if you've been to the reception before you know it's a dressy affair? I guess if you were teaching earlier in the day you might have been dressed for class? I guess maybe I missed a clue that should have been obvious and probably everybody was pointing at me behind my back and saying, "What does she think she's doing here? Her grant didn't even get funded!"

Maybe not that last part. 

Anyway. I had some pleasant conversations with people from another department, and I set up my dean to tell a crowd-pleasing story at my table (in a natural, non-sucking-up kind of way), and then I excused myself to go teach my evening class. But I tell you what: it is way more comfortable to be at the 40th percentile for dressiness than it is to be at the 4th.

Dear Future Jamie:

If you assign your students to work with a piece of free software that is high on the "powerful" scale and low on the "user-friendly" scale, you should be prepared for the ensuing avalanche of emails. 

Yours wearily,
Present Jamie

Easter dinner, streamlined

Last Easter went all kinds of wrong, mostly for messy unbloggable reasons. But it didn't help that dinner was too fussy and I didn't start until the day itself. This year I spent most of Holy Saturday grading (so glad to have that batch of assignments done, though), and I was hoping to avoid a repeat of last year. So I reined myself in, and we wound up with something that was festive but pretty quick.

I always start with dessert. This used to make my husband crazy, but if it still bothers him he doesn't complain about it out loud. I didn't realize until I started filling Easter baskets that he had bought chocolate chips (if I'd known I would have probably whipped up something chocolate, or something chocolate and something lemon), so I decided to make a cake I'd paged past for years in Nigella Lawson's book Feast: lemon meringue cake. It's kind of weird-looking, frankly: you make a little bit of cake batter and spread it across the bottom of two 8-inch cake pans, and then you spread meringue on top and bake it at 400 until the meringue is crispy and bronzed. After it's cool, you slather the bottom layer with lemon curd and whipped cream and rest the other layer on top. The recipe is here if the idea intrigues you. (The kids thought the lemon curd was a little too zingy, but I love tart desserts and so it worked for me.)

As soon as the cake was in the oven and the pans were washed up, I set a boneless leg of lamb on top of some slivered garlic and a few of the thyme branches that are already green again in my herb garden. I poured over some olive oil, some lemon juice, and salt and pepper, and let it soak up flavor while we dealt with vegetables. 

Elwood peeled a vat of potatoes while I halved Brussels sprouts and rubbed them with oil and salt. The potatoes had a cold-water soak while the sprouts went into a hot oven (425 degrees) with some foil-wrapped beets. I set a timer for 30 minutes and threw in a little dish of cut-up broccoli (also oiled and salted) about 5 minutes later. Elwood had peeled and cubed a couple of mammoth sweet potatoes, and they took up the last of the available oven space. The green veggies were done when the timer went off (balsamic vinegar for the sprouts, lemon and red pepper flakes for the broccoli), and their absence made room for the lamb to go in at 475. After 30 minutes I turned the oven down to 350 and let the lamb finish cooking. If I were a really helpful blogger I would report on cooking times for the sweet potatoes and beets, but...I can't remember how long they wound up taking. Mashed potatoes are always a last-minute thing around here, and they were accompanied by a loaf of grocery story ciabatta.

The idea of simultaneously roasting a whole bunch of different veggies with different cooking times comes from Tamar Adler, and I found it to be lower stress than managing something steamed plus something braised plus whatever else. I wondered if all of that olive oil + salt would make things taste too similar, but it turns out that Brussels sprouts do not taste very much like sweet potatoes even if you put olive oil and salt on both of them. Roasted veggies are flavorful enough to enjoy at room temperature, which takes off some of the pressure to get everything ready at just the same time. 

Dinner was a success, the dirty dishes were manageable, and I was 15 minutes early for 5:30 Mass. (I was scheduled as a Eucharistic minister. I'd never been to an Easter evening Mass before. It was good. Also the Vigil was AWESOME and all went smoothly with the RCIA folks and I am tearing up remembering how my friend cried when she received the Eucharist. BEAUTIFUL. Christ is risen, alleluia!)

Wherever it pleases, ten months later

My friend Colleen is becoming Catholic tonight, with St. Elizabeth Seton as her patroness and me as her sponsor. Please pray for her.

Perfect timing

I have been inching my way through the Catechism this year, and the timing of today's scheduled reading could not have been any stranger:

625 Christ's stay in the tomb constitutes the real link between his passible state before Easter and his glorious and risen state today. The same person of the "Living One" can say, "I died, and behold I am alive for evermore":⁴⁶⁵

God [the Son] did not impede death from separating his soul from his body according to the necessary order of nature, but has reunited them to one another in the Resurrection, so that he himself might be, in his person, the meeting point for death and life, by arresting in himself the decomposition of nature produced by death and so becoming the source of reunion for the separated parts.⁴⁶⁶

The rest is here if you are pining to read more.

As I have done for you

Back in the fall I had a rough weekend. My husband was on a retreat team and I was supposed to run music for a Saturday night gathering. I didn't have enough childcare, I hurt my back trying to change a tire with rusted lug nuts, I was 15 minutes late to the rehearsal I was supposed to be in charge of, and when I got there I was on the very edge of tears. 

And then, afterward, some of the women at the gathering wrote a letter to the pastor complaining about the music. The gathering took too long, they said, and some of the songs were too old. I didn't read the actual letter; the people who did told me it was nasty. The other music leader just rolled her eyes. "You don't need to worry about that for a minute," she said. But it's niggled at me ever since.

I don't know who wrote the letter, but the pool of possible authors is small and I've been nursing suspicions about one of them ever since. Tonight I was sitting where I could see her during the Holy Thursday Mass, and having a familiar conversation with myself: "You need to let that go and move on. --But maybe it would be easier if we just knew for sure who needed forgiving. --Or maybe, JUST MAYBE, you should just let that go and move on."

I knelt there after communion and prayed as people streamed past me. It was one of those lovely post-communion moments in which the goodness of God and the joy he offers shone especially clearly, and I was thinking about God's love for each one of the people in the aisle. I had a quick flash of tender feeling for my children waiting at home, whom I hadn't seen all day, and a quick flash of worry about how their outing with Elwood had gone, and then a surge of wonder at the idea that God loves each one of those people in the aisle -- and their neighbors, and their neighbors' neighbors -- with a ferocity and concern far keener than my feelings for my own children.

With sudden conviction, I knew it was also true of the woman sitting near me, the one I haven't wanted to look in the eye for months now. And as I reflect on it now, it occurs to me that this is an especially good night on which to offer up the pain of feeling betrayed. If Jesus had only stewed and muttered about that unbelievably unappreciative Judas, it would be an altogether different story, would it not?

Gone, long gone

I am multitasking in an unpleasant way, talking to a TracFone representative who does not seem to be the sharpest tool in the shed. So let me steer you to a nostalgic little post I just republished, from way way back in 2004. Hot dodo! I'd forgotten all about the hot dodo.

Dear Dr. Gladly

Your slides are organized. I like that. But sometimes I don't know if you're talking about bullet point #2 or bullet point #3. Could you tell us explicitly when you change bullet points?

I could learn better if you uploaded recordings of your lectures. Also [says the same student -- are we surprised?] you will pry my distraction machine (more generally known as my laptop) out of my cold dead hands.

Small group work is super-helpful. Also, small group work = THE WORST. I don't want to spend so much time talking to my classmates. Group discussions are where I learn the most.

More practical. More practical. More practical. Don't give me these fancy labels and categories and theories. Just tell me the stuff I need to know to get my work done. [Dr. Gladly dies a little inside.]

I don't think you should expect us to apply things on the tests unless you tell us exactly how to do that beforehand. It's not reasonable for you to expect us to make new connections unless we practice that in class. 

Maybe at the end of a three-hour night class you shouldn't give us instructions for our assignments. That's probably why I did badly on the assignments. Maybe you shouldn't give us individual tasks at the end of a three-hour night class. They stress me out. Maybe at the end of a three-hour night class we should all assume the shavasana position and reflect deeply on the things we have learned.

**

Maybe at the end of a three-hour night class I should not review students' midterm feedback.

Follow up when?

I have learned a bunch of interesting things from Bearing-Erin, like a delicious way to cook collards and an even more delicious way to cook cabbage, and what a Mersenne prime is. In the life I currently lead, however, I do not have much call for Mersenne prime knowledge. (I imagine an alternate universe in which shadowy figures sidle up next to me and hiss, "Your money or your life-- unless you can tell me the first ten Mersenne primes." Of all the possible universes, I am glad I do not inhabit that one.)

The thing I learned from her that I use most often is how to send my future self a reminder: Follow Up Then. Over spring break I went to the DMV to renew one car's registration, and I thought to myself, "Oh, I should send Future Jamie a reminder about the other one." To: [email protected], Subject: renew Odyssey registration, send. Future Jamie will get an email on the morning of September 15 headed "renew Odyssey registration," which will give her enough time to figure out when to get to the DMV but not so much time that she blows off the task. Do you want to make sure that the Amazon third-party seller actually got the right item in the mail? Or that you don't forget to buy Advent candles before things get nuts in late November? Or that you take some time to review the thing that seemed potentially interesting but appeared in your email at a time when you had zero spare brainspace? Follow Up Then will help you with all of those problems.

If I use my email inbox as a to-do list, disaster ensues. I mean, not disaster like Krakatoa, but disaster like missed opportunities and rudely delayed replies. So when I told a pair of students that I'd send them a plain text version of an SPSS output file first thing in the morning, I wanted to be sure to get a fresh reminder in front of my eyes. I sent off an email: [email protected], re-send SPSS output. 

Follow Up Then works great almost all the time, but it has the same problem that any computer-driven interface has: it does what you tell it to. So when you tell it to send you an email in 800 Tuesdays, the confirmation email you get back will alert you that you will absolutely get that reminder...in July of 2031. Luckily, the confirmation email comes with an edit option: 0800tuesday, Follow Up Then. 0800 is what I meant to say.

Stick a fork in me

A toasting fork. Toast is what I feel like, so tired that I might not even notice if you slathered me with marmalade.

Stella shared her cold with me, with the added bonus of a killer sore throat. So. I am sick, and behind, and probably I should just go to bed instead of complaining on the internet. Say a prayer for me, please, because I don't really have time to be sick.

Notes from the road

Joe and I are sitting in the lodge at Kentucky Dam Village, looking out over the lake together. We're staying in a cottage with no wifi (I know!! What's next? no running water? no roof?), so he is helping me to say a brief hello before we return to the place that the new millennium forgot. We spent most of the day at the Land Between the Lakes -- we met a bobcat, and a flock of wild turkeys, and a red wolf, and a king snake, and built fairy houses in the woods. (Joe would like you to know that red wolves are endangered, and only 300 of them remain in the world.) It's strange to be back in a place I used to visit as a child-- piecemeal memories are surfacing for me, of watching boats moving slowly through the lock, and sand between my toes.

On the road

We are making a flying trip to see my family, and I have miles to go before I sleep. But we are stopping briefly at a Starbucks specifically because I said I'd post every day this month, dernit. So here's my question: after you take a bite of the Cracker Barrel turnip greens, you remember that their yumminess comes in part from pork. Is it more in keeping with the spirit of Lent to eat them so they are not wasted food, or to leave them?

Notes from the junior high talent show

The junior high talent show was tonight, and Joe really wanted me to go.

So I went. I have to say, I wasn't looking forward to it. It was supposed to last from 5:30 until 8, which is a lot of junior high talent. I was hoping he would perform at the beginning and then maybe I could discreetly slip out instead of sitting through a lot of earnest Taylor Swift karaoke, but he was next to last.

I was sitting in the front row next to a dad and his son, and they were not delighted to be at the junior high talent show. Their phones were out almost the whole time; they were talking at ordinary conversational levels while the kids were performing; the dad kept complaining. "I've never heard of these songs," he said. "We're going to be here until 8:00?!"

I was feeling protective in advance of my next-to-last Joe. "If you are rude about my son's performance," I thought with a scowl, "I might be forced to jab you in the ribs with this knitting needle." The organizers had structured the show so that most of the better acts came later. As the minutes ticked by, more of the singers were in the same key as their recorded accompaniments. And then Joe took the stage: my hard-working Joe. He has been so determined to learn magic-- practicing for hours, searching out new tricks, constantly seeking feedback. 

His act made me nervous, because being the source of much of his feedback means I've seen a lot of tricks in progress (read: a lot of tricks that don't go according to plan, a lot of "wait, that's not your card?"). He had been peeling potatoes for me right before the show and he'd accidentally removed a chunk of thumb with the peeler. "How am I going to do that flourish?" he'd lamented in the car. I had to put down my knitting and take a deep breath. There were a lot of people in that gym, and I only had two knitting needles with which to address any discourtesy to my son.

You know the old joke-- how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice practice practice! It's also how you get to a prime spot in the junior high talent show. His act was exactly right; the audience laughed and gasped in all the right places. The dad next to me put down his phone in search of his program. "Who is this kid?!" he wanted to know. "He's a real showman," he told his son. "Magic isn't just about the tricks; it's about the patter and the presentation too." 

And even though he was still talking in a regular conversational voice, I did not feel the need to issue a pointed rebuke.

It is not a Zumba class

Last night I left my class and discovered that my step counter had tallied 6000 steps during those 3 hours. This struck me as a little nuts: how could I have walked >2 miles in that time? I do pace slowly as I'm lecturing, and I circulate during group activities to see how everybody's doing. And I gesticulate whenever I'm talking, apparently with enough enthusiasm to make the little accelerometer at my wrist think I'm race-walking to Nebraska.

I assumed it was a fluke, and then I looked at it again before and after my 50-minute class today: 3000 steps.

Weird, huh?

Maybe that's why I'm so tired. Or maybe it's the time change. Or maybe it's the cold Stella shared with me. In any case, I'm calling it a night.

Encouraged

When it goes well, teaching is the best feeling.

I was feeling discouraged about my grad class before spring break, as you might have noticed. But I think tonight's class went really well. I decided to try a new frame for the class, telling them at the beginning how we would break down the three hours and what questions I planned to address. At then end I went back to that slide full of questions and asked them to tell me about something they'd learned and something they still wanted to know more about. It was encouraging to skim through a pile of responses about things they'd learned, and the lingering questions are very reasonable.

We went through the exam, which can be a PR exercise in disguise. I was feeling particularly down two weeks ago because OH MY GOODNESS did I labor over that exam. I thought it was structured in such a sensible and helpful way; the students just thought it was hard. I have to keep telling myself that just because something is hard for students doesn't mean it's bad for students. They do not always share this opinion, but tonight was an opportunity to say, "Here's what I wanted you to learn from taking this test."

(That's always my goal: to write an exam where students learn from the process of taking it, where they are asked to synthesize information in ways that can spark an aha! moment right there in the classroom. Sometimes it works better than others.)

In preparing for this class I had a helpful realization: I'm not preparing for a doctoral seminar; I'm teaching MS students. I think I've been worrying needlessly about some aspects of preparing for class. So tonight we spent some time on breaking down a useful but slippery concept, and then a lot of time talking about examples and uses. I think it was a good mix of practical and theoretical information. They took lots of notes; they laughed out loud frequently; they talked energetically in small groups. (I did have an exercise lined up that didn't go according to plan at all because of unforeseen file management issues, but there's always next time.) From the front of the class, at any rate, the 3 hours zipped by.

I am posting this mostly for my future self, who will inevitably have moments of thinking, "Can't do it, don't want to do it, have to do it, UGH." (I know this because my 2:00pm self was saying that very thing about tonight's class.) It's a great gig, Future Self. And you can too do it.

Rendering...unto...Caesar

This year we are kicking it old school, as the kids say: we are doing our taxes on paper. I was going to write a post about it, about how I do my best to pay my taxes cheerfully but DANG there's something to be said for user-friendly software. Instead of writing that post, though, I was wrangling with form 2441 and its cousins. The whole shebang has to be submitted tomorrow in order for us to be eligible for a sibling discount at the Catholic high school next year. Which could spark its own (SUPER GRUMPY) post, but it's probably better for my equilibrium to go to bed instead of grousing.

Next year I will suggest that we can kick it old school with some nice kerosene lanterns or some linsey-woolsey underwear or something along those lines.

I might like linsey-woolsey underwear. This is more than I can say for doing taxes like it's 1989.

Well, that's a relie--

This morning I was reading Numbers and thinking about what a terrible Israelite I would have been. It was Numbers 9 that was stressing me out: I was imagining myself living in the desert, eating mystery food that I had to pick up off the ground ("Where is my list of INGREDIENTS? Is this Whole 30-compliant??") but not being allowed to pick up extra food from the ground (except before the Sabbath) because it would grow worms. ("Worms, I ask you! Worms! I never had a wormy cucumber in Egypt, not once.") "Looks like bdellium" would probably raise my eyebrows even faster than "tastes like chicken," because that linked picture does not look especially delicious to me.

The uncertainty about travel would have been especially frustrating for me, the not knowing whether it would be a week or a month or a year before we moved on. ("Should we dig a well?") Even within a day, the cloud might lift in the morning or it might lift at night. ("I need to wash these clothes but I hate packing damp things!") And the unspecified length of the journey, and the unfamiliarity of the destination -- I would not have been a happy camper, I thought to myself this morning, because my inner control freak would have had a lot to say about life in the desert.

And so I said to myself, "It's a good thing I don't have to travel an uncertain road of unknown length to an unfamiliar homeland. It would be way too hard to trust God to lead me and feed me all the way there."

Oh. Wait.

 

The Pearl of Great Price

It's been 12 years since I read Leviticus all the way through, and the thing that stood out to me this time was the cost of holiness, the cost of attempting to live according to the dictates of the law. In an era when livestock equaled wealth, God told his people to set aside sheep and cattle for him. Not just to make a special feast in his honor, but to be burned entire. The law also says, Hey, don't try to sneak in your ugly diseased livestock; bring the good ones.

I wonder if it seemed painfully extravagant to them, or if it seemed right and just.

It makes me think about the ultimate cost of holiness, of God's own blood poured out. It makes me think of the times I have sailed on past the sacrifice that should stop me in my tracks, the most extravagant sacrifice imaginable.