Light and Momentary

Whole 30, Take 4

When I got together with all of my college roommates last month, we talked about the Whole 30. I had invited them to join me in January (we were doing a step challenge and I was also doing a January Whole 30). Three of them said, "That is NUTS!" and one said, "Hmmm." She wound up doing it and liking it, and [convoluted story de-convoluted for your reading pleasure] the five of us are doing it together in August.

If you want to try the Whole 30, it will be easiest if you can create low-stress habits. Pick two breakfasts that you can alternate happily. (Mine are a veggie-egg scramble and a vegan smoothie (frozen banana, coconut milk, pumpkin or sometimes berries, nut butter, and a little water). The Whole 30 people are a little grumbly about smoothies because it's easier to feel satiated when you're chewing your food, but they work for me.) If you can find a lunch groove (leftovers atop salad greens, maybe) and a snack groove (apples and nuts in your desk drawer so you don't hit the vending machines at 3:30 when the nibbling urge strikes), it will save you from the temptation to go to McDonald's already because this Whole 30 thing is ridiculous.

I'm going to have to do a little tweaking when it comes to dinners, since our Thoughtful Thursdays (beans and rice in acknowledgment of the poor) are not at all Whole 30-friendly. Beans and rice and a hunk of meat for Mom doesn't have quite the same vibe. 

You can look forward to a sizable infusion of vim and zip in a couple of weeks, with perhaps some moments of Whole 30-fueled crabbiness between now and then. Let the kale-eating commence!

Again

This morning I went to a park near my parents' house to run. When I came back the kids were bursting to tell me what had happened. "Mom! Mom!" they said. "Someone called the police on Stella!"

My mother told Stella that she should go play outside. She took a walk around half of the block: up the alley and back down the street. My parents live in a quiet subdivision in the Nashville exurbs. Kids play unsupervised in their alley all the time.

This morning, however, someone saw Stella walking along the street back to my parents' house and -- without talking to her -- called the police to report a lost child. She had gone back inside when my father came looking for my mother. Three squad cars had pulled up in front of their house, and uniformed officers were telling him they needed to speak to Stella. They were nice enough, my parents said, but Stella was a little teary when she told me about it. She was afraid she had done something wrong.

I almost can't type for facepalming here. Wait, I need fingers on my elbows. People of America, put away your damn phones. Roll down your windows and open your mouths. You could say, "Hi, are you okay?" You could say, "Hi, is your mom around? or another grownup?" You could say, "Hi, do you need any help?" You could take SIXTY SECONDS and observe the actual child you are pretending to help. Is she crying and looking perplexed, or is she walking cheerfully and confidently toward her destination? If the latter, then for heaven's sake don't go screwing that up.

Calling the authorities is not a neutral decision. (Just ask the Darwins about that.) These two responses -- striking up a conversation vs. calling 911 -- are not equivalent. 

In praise of swim lessons

Tonight was my fourth swim lesson. My gym sells adult swim lessons in packages of 4, and I bought a package a little desperately in May. I was super-stressed about that triathlon swim, and I was hoping that some quick instruction would spur a magical turnaround. After two lessons, though, I came down with a miserable case of swimmer's ear. After the triathlon I didn't feel the same urgency about improving my swimming, and so I wound up squeezing in the last two lessons just before the package expired.

All of you who told me to take swim lessons were right. I have this chronic problem with admitting that I haven't yet learned something. I'm working on it, but it's hard. My fear of swim lessons was not rational. I knew it was not rational. It still took me a long time to surmount.

Back in May I had scrabbled my way to a point at which I could swim a length of freestyle faster than a length of breaststroke. Unfortunately, a length of freestyle left me hanging breathlessly on the side of the pool, panting miserably and bewailing my decision to sign up for a triathlon. Tonight my instructor was timing me while introducing various tweaks. It wasn't the best performance I could have put in: I forgot to take my arrhythmia meds and so I was working harder than usual, and we were in the hot pool because the lap pool was too crowded. But even under those circumstances, I can swim a length of freestyle 30% faster now than I could in May, and instead of clinging desperately to the side of the pool at the end, I can turn around and do it again.

So that's part of why I'm happy I took swim lessons. It's not the only reason, though. A few weeks ago I took the kids to the pool and I watched them go down the water slides. "That looks like fun," I thought to myself, so I ran up the stairs to join them at the top. "Mom!" they said. "You're going to slide with us!" It wasn't that I ever thought I'd drown at the bottom of the water slide in years past; it just seemed...icky and uncomfortable and as if maybe there actually was a kraken who used that spot as his hunting ground. I sort of thought that doing a triathlon was a selfish goal-- something just for me. It turns out that the process of getting myself more comfortable in the water has been fun for my family as well.

It's a happy running post

I was not looking forward to the half-marathon training run tonight. Everyone was a little gloomy about the anticipated difficulty of this run -- we were doing hill repeats in the middle of a 4-mile run. I thought to myself that perhaps I should bump it down to the slowest group. Or maybe I should even run with one of the 10K training groups, since they were doing something shorter.

And then-- it was terrific. I ran the full distance, with my usual pace group, and it went really well. I actually love running hills for the same reason I love running intervals -- it's a short intense burst of activity in which the end point is always clear. I suppose the end point is always clear during a 7-mile slog as well, but there's something delicious about cresting the top of the hill, knowing that there's a moment's respite ahead. You can take the girl out of West Virginia, I suppose, but you can't take the West Virginia out of the girl.

After the run was over, the coordinator invited us over to have a beer in her driveway. I met another mom of 5, and we talked about sending kids off to college. I am feeling more comfortable, and less like an outsider in this group, and boy do I love riding that endorphin buzz after a hard run.

Accepted!

I just got an email: my paper was accepted! 

It describes research from my first funded grant and it's my first crack at a qualitative study. I was really expecting it to be rejected on its first outing, because this isn't my primary research area and peer review is a slow and painful process. But hey-- it was not!

There are many things I appreciate about being at a university that emphasizes teaching, and one of them is that I don't face the same pressure to publish that I would at a more research-intensive institution. This is my sixth publication since I started my tenure-track job, my eighth altogether. I'm expecting another acceptance in the next few weeks here, which will mean that my track record follows the Fibonacci sequence: 1 pub in 2013, 1 in 2014, 2 in 2015, and 3 in 2016. 

I can probably manage 5 in 2017 -- it's a good goal to shoot for, anyway. But 2020 is looking pretty tough.

What gives, Ezra?

This year I've been reading through the Bible and the Catechism, and I was looking forward to Ezra. It was a long slog through Chronicles, but I knew that better things lay ahead: the ruler who is unaccountably moved by promptings from on high! the hope of restoration! the first-person perspective of someone who earnestly desired to serve God!

Have you read Ezra recently? I did not remember that Ezra's weeping over the apostasy of the nation is stirred up specifically by intermarriage. I certainly did not remember that the solution to this problem is for the men to send their foreign wives and children packing. Imagine me standing at my kitchen counter reading the tenth chapter of Ezra, rubbing the page between my fingers because SURELY there's something else before Nehemiah starts. Right? Isn't there??

Perhaps this remedy is not quite as unfeeling as it seemed to my late-night self. Maybe there was some sort of settlement available for the wives and children who were being sent away? Or safe conduct back to the places they had come from? The USCCB notes suggest that Ezra's marriage reform didn't get much traction. It's still troubling me.

It is maybe a little weird that I slogged through all of the earlier Old Testament shenanigans -- child sacrifice, among other things -- only to be pulled up short by divorce. I guess it's Ezra's zeal that's getting me down here. What became of those women and their children, I wonder? 

Ducks in a row. Slow-moving, overheated ducks.

I signed up for a half-marathon training group this summer. I've been thinking for a few years now about doing a half-marathon. Hmm, let me think about the ways this idea has gone wrong to date: first I was going to run one with a friend, but she is faster than me and I injured myself (and stressed myself out in a big way) trying to meet unrealistic pace goals in training. At some point I tried to use a training plan from the Another Mother Runner ladies that was way too demanding and I wound up injured again. In 2014 I couldn't get the long runs in during the winter and so I did a 10K instead. Last summer I thought I'd do a fall half-marathon, but OH MAN running 8 miles alone in the baking Midwestern heat is not my idea of fun.

At the triathlon last month I ran into someone from work who had done a triathlon training program organized by a local running shop. (Remember Bad Cop Julie? BCJ quit her teaching job to start this running store with her husband.) When I ran into Good Cop Jill at the kids' museum a couple of weeks later, she mentioned that she was going to be a mentor for one of the summer programs. "Hmm," I said to myself. "Hmm."

So I signed up, and it's going okay. It's not the simply happy experience of the summer running group I was part of from 2012 through 2015. But it's okay.

Part of the problem is that it's just really hard to run 5 miles in the heat. I mean, okay, hard is relative. It's not like I'm mining coal or even detasseling corn. Even though we started early today, temperatures were already in the mid-80s when we finished. This picture needs a thought bubble: "If you were not snapping my picture right now, I would totally be walking this miserable broiling shadeless stretch of trail."

Part of the problem is that there's this unexpected cognitive load for me in planning a summertime longish run. That sounds silly now that I've typed it out, but here's what I mean: do I have the gadgets I mean to take with me? Are they charged? Have I taken the meds I need? Have I eaten enough carbs for glycogen repletion, given that my usual diet is fairly low in carbs? Have I drunk enough water but not too much, given that a person who has borne 5 children might not want to be overhydrated? (Sorry, TMI there.) Should I take fluids along, and if so, how? Is it worse to skip sunscreen or to have sunscreen dripping down into my eyes when I get really sweaty? Darn it, I forgot my yoga mat AGAIN and now they want me to lie down in the parking lot to do these hip-strengthening exercises after the run. (Oh, man, they are painful. My legs are like, "Did we not just run 5 miles for you in the scorching heat? What is your problem here that you want us to do EVEN MORE things?")

I wouldn't get fussed about a 5-mile treadmill run, and so it's been strange for this to feel so different. It might not surprise you to learn that I tend to devote too much space in my head to what-ifs -- BUT I MIGHT NEED A BATHROOM AND WHAT THEN? That's part of the trouble.

Today I was thinking to myself, "I should write down the reasons why this feels hard. Maybe it will seem less hard, or maybe it will just be a way for me to mark progress when I get it figured out." So here I go, writing it down.

Dispute

I was in the kitchen listening to my folk Pandora station and cooking dinner. (A tip from me to you: if you ever think to yourself, "I know! I will shred the summer squash and the fennel and some carrots in the food processor, and cook them in a little butter and a little wine with a little squeeze of something citrusy before I add the garlicky lentils from yesterday to the pan" -- if you ever think that thought to yourself, be sure to say, "No, self, Jamie Gladly did that and most of her family thought it was weird and unpleasant.") Simon & Garfunkel's The Boxer came on, and I was singing along. Elwood was in the dining room, trying to squeak out a Words With Friends victory against our pastor. Joe was sitting at the dining room table, working on his online algebra 2 course.

When the third verse started, I was mindful of Joe's presence. (If your Simon & Garfunkel lyric retrieval is rusty, you should be able to see the relevant lines when you mouse over the link.) I didn't sing about any whores on Seventh Avenue. I sang, "I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome I went to confession instead."

Elwood looked up from WWF. "What?" he wanted to know. "What are you singing?"

I left the destined-for-weirdness veggie saute to do its thing on the stove. "I'm offering an alternative version of the story, in which the narrator does not seek any ill-advised comfort," I told him. He looked blank. "That's not what it means," he insisted. "The comfort is the come-on. He's so lonely that he finds it comforting when the women find him attractive."

Definitely not, I said. The comfort happens when he buys what they're selling.

Definitely not, he said. He can't afford to buy what they're selling. He's just glad to know that they'd like to sell it to him.

You guys, I've been listening to that song since I was in junior high and I never once thought that the comfort in question was anything other than a sordid transaction. My husband has been listening to that song for at least as long and he never once thought that a sordid transaction took place.

What say you?

Phone Etiquette

Discuss this assertion: the world was a better place when it contained no smartphones.

Mrs. Darwin was just posting about the phone issue earlier this week. Here, let me quote her:

But surely, surely we can all agree on this. When you are in a situation when your attention is required, when, even if you are not actively participating, you may be called up, or need to have stored up the information presented for later application; when you are in a situation where etiquette demands your quiet, attentive presence -- church, school, meetings, play rehearsals, band practice, dance class, you name it -- your phone should be out of your hands, put away, silenced. This is not controversial. This is not even being out of contact with the world. This is simply being in the moment you are required to be in, away from a constant stream of entertainment and virtual interaction. It is a matter of courtesy towards the person presenting to you or to others, and to the others trying to focus on that presentation. It is a matter of mental discipline, to train your mind to absorb information that may not be instantly amusing or applicable to you, because it is applicable to the whole project in which you play a small role. It is a good training in silence, not just in the physical silence required when someone else is speaking, but in the mental silence necessary for learning new material and growing as a person. When this mental silence is not cultivated, people and projects suffer, and the culture suffers. 

This should not be controversial, but I think it has become so. A meeting? Where I'm supposed to turn my phone off? But what if it's important?!

I've been thinking about this issue all summer. I have tried to arrange my life so that my phone buzzes only seldom. I avoid giving out my cell number whenever possible. I use aggressive email filtering to boost the odds that the items landing in my inbox are things I really want to read. This pruning strategy should mean, theoretically, a higher proportion of "important" buzzes, should it not? And yet, since I started tracking this question in May, the actual number of time-sensitive, cannot-wait-an-hour buzzes has been...zero. (There have been two occasions in the past 2.5 months when people had time-sensitive, better-now-than-later questions for me about the kids. Strangely, there were phone mishaps both times that kept the calls from getting through. So the two times my buzzing phone might have told me something important, it failed to buzz. In both cases they called my office number and all was well.)

Do I sound smug? I promise I am not being smug here. I still jump when I hear the buzz. Ignoring it takes discipline every single time -- even though I know, based on the numbers from my own real life, that there is less than a 1/1000 chance the buzz will matter. There's a 99.99% certainty that it can wait, but I don't like waiting.

Here's the thing many people don't realize: vigilance has a cognitive cost. Vigilance means that some part of your brain is constantly thinking, "Was that the phone? Should I pick it up and check? No, wait, maybe that was the phone. When is so-and-so going to text me back? Maybe he did and I just didn't notice." Vigilance means that your brain is less able to engage deeply with the world around you. Even a choice to disregard the buzz makes you less able to participate in the circumbuzzular events (hush up, spellcheck), because you are diverting cognitive resources to the decision. 

This is on my mind tonight because my two youngest are attending theatre camp right now. Just like the kids in Mrs. Darwin's production, most of the theatre camp kids are pulling out their phones when the rehearsals get dull. Today one of them showed Stella a video that left her really distressed -- unwilling to be alone this afternoon, unable to fall asleep this evening. It does not sound like a particularly egregious video, given the range of nastiness that's out there, but it made her unhappy for a chunk of the day. I emailed the camp coordinator after my unsuccessful attempt to settle her down this evening, echoing some of Mrs. Darwin's thoughts above. 

I will be pretty surprised if she thinks the solution is for the kids to put their phones away. 

The rules are changing so quickly. Recently I took a kid to a specialist medical appointment. I was being billed >$400 for this guy's time, and yet he whipped out his phone to answer a personal call when I was right in the middle of answering one of his questions. I found this obnoxious. Even though his half of the call made it seem that he had a sick relative, I was still annoyed that he would cut me off with no warning or apology in the middle of a sentence. I've thought a lot about that moment, about how the culture of urgency says, "Hurry, hurry, answer the call. You might miss something if you wait. This is more important." 

I am not a fan of the culture of urgency. But it seems that I'm in the minority.

Kninja

It has been ages since I posted about knitting, in large part because it's been ages since I was excited about knitting. I told you at Easter that I would be right back with a post about a salvation history shawl...and then no such post appeared. I was knitting a kid's dragon mitten that made me grumpy, and a pair of grownup mitts that also made me grumpy, and a quilt that will probably take me up to retirement, and a couple of misguided gray things that really just need frogging. Did you want to hear about any of that nonsense? No, you did not.

This summer I cast on something I've been thinking about for ages. A couple of years ago I bought yarn during a KnitPIcks alpaca sale to make a Tortuga. (Click that link [she said bossily] -- you have to see how pretty it is.) But a laceweight sweater is A Commitment, and that pattern is not for sissies. It took me an awful lot of face-scrunching and head-scratching to determine that you start by knitting a sort of suspender, and then knitting the underarm and grafting the two sides together so that you can knit the sleeve in the round. I have never grafted in pattern before, but I'm going to be doing a lot of it to make this sweater. I'm almost done with the first sleeve, except for grafting the cuff edges together. I could just wear one sleeve around town, don't you think? If I wait until I have a whole sweater to wear I'm going to be waiting for a while.

I'm also working on a Fox Paws. 

If you're at all into knitting you've probably seen this pattern somewhere -- it's been wildly popular. It is super, super fiddly. I had to rip my first couple of attempts at a swatch because the stitches just wouldn't line up for me. Something weird is happening at the end of row 8 and I don't know why. But it is fun to see those nutso increases and decreases form themselves into wee paw shapes, and I love using up yarn leftovers from other projects that made me happy. The pale green was last used to make space invader socks for my firstborn; the blues are both from fun summer MKALs, and the darker green was a fun surprise package from my mom -- a skein of Madelinetosh from the upscale yarn shop in her neck of the woods.

This morning we had no coffee in the house (the horror!) and tonight we have no dishwasher detergent. First-world problems, I know, but I am off to lay in provisions. Because I might spend 30 hours knitting myself a funky scarf stitch by painstaking stitch, but I'm not about to pull those dishes out of the dishwasher and wash them by hand. 

Resolved

Today is my birthday: I am 46 years old. It has not been a very good birthday, but the optimistic take on that situation is that the year is likely to improve from here.

In recent years I have often groused about the state of the internet, and how much I miss the blogosphere of ten years ago. The blogosphere has moved on since 2006 but I have stayed put, writing my picture-free thousand-word posts. Do you know, though, I love blogging and I love having blogged, and so I'm going to do more of it this year, DERNIT.

So I am going to chronicle this my 47th year. I'm planning to write 6 posts a week until I turn 47, at which point we might all be ready for a break. Let's see how it goes.

Sometimes the twig doesn't even notice that it's bending

My husband and I were talking about our dinner plans for the Fourth: hamburgers, potato salad, cole slaw, deviled eggs, red-white-and-blue dessert.

"Wait a minute," said the 16yo. "You're putting chat masala in the potato salad, Japanese turnips in the cole slaw, and pesto in the deviled eggs?" (He didn't comment on the pavlova, but it might be a little quirky to serve an Australian dessert on the Fourth of July.)

That's right, we told him.

"What about the hamburgers?" he wanted to know. "Can we have those with just lettuce, tomato, and sriracha, like God intended?"¹

That's fine, we told him. Lettuce, tomato and sriracha.

Like God intended.

--

¹He wants you to know that (a) he was surprised, not displeased, and (b) he is 100% right about sriracha on hamburgers.