Light and Momentary

O Frabjous Day

My brother is here! He drove up today with his two kids, a happening which caused my children to question me all day long like preschoolers on December 21: how soon? when will they be here? soon, right? it's very soon? why is it taking so long!

We had a pleasantly boisterous dinner followed by pleasantly boisterous jumping on the trampoline, and I think the boisterousness seems to be trailing away pleasantly upstairs as I type. My brother has a big generous laugh -- he makes everybody feel witty -- and we have the same big enthusiastic hair in different colors.

My 17yo decided a few years ago that he was going to read his way through a list of experimental fiction that he found on the internet somewhere. He has ticked the books off systematically, for the most part, but Gravity's Rainbow gave him some trouble. He had to start it three separate times. But do you know, he finished it this week and we are going to celebrate. How, you ask? With bananas.

I told him he could choose any four items (or maybe five, because BAKING = LOVE and also that's a really fat and daunting book), but not the mead because it's not BREWING = LOVE (does one brew mead? it's not DISTILLING = LOVE either, or FERMENTING = LOVE). So there are a lot of bananas ripening in my fruit bowl in preparation for this celebration.

My nephew is somewhat emphatic in his ideas about which foods are edible and in which combinations, so we shall see what he says about banana blancmange. He might say, "Aunt Jamie, I would like to make myself a peanut butter and honey sandwich, please."

California Envy

Mostly I am happy to let California do its West Coast thing while we hang out in the affordable low-traffic Midwest, but tonight I am feeling a pang of California envy because I read this Vox article about the ways that California has been bringing down the maternal mortality rate. I have a lot of thoughts about this article. Mostly they boil down to this: why are we getting perinatal care so WRONG in this country? It is seventeen kinds of disgraceful.

Speedy Bullets

• "There are a lot of cool things to look forward to right now," says my 15yo. They include a visit from my brother, a two-week backpacking trip with Scouts, a family trip to NYC, and then HIS DEPARTURE FROM THE BOSOM OF THE FAMILY AAAAACCCKK.
• His list is continuing but I am stuck on the departure from the bosom of the family part.
• Travel arrangements are not my favorite thing to manage, but we are trying to get them sorted out. Frontier offered to take us to NYC via Denver. You don't have to be an ace cartographer to know that Denver is not on the way to NYC from Gladlyville. Next time they will offer to take me to Portland by way of Cuba. Or to LA by way of Iceland.
• I think we are taking the train to NYC, but only if the Amtrak site does not cause my husband to die of untimely apoplexy first.
• The basement has been getting me down. It's like this hideous accretion of stuff that seemed unmanageable and intolerable. But today I asked the boys to spend 20 minutes working on it with me and do you know, it is fully 20% less will-to-live-sapping?
• We have my parents' old dining room table down there and it had been taken over by piles of crap. Sleeping bags were airing out over chairs and Play-Doh jars were scattered across the table along with cups and saucers from a long-abandoned tea party. The comic books live on a basement shelf and they were spread all across the table too. And now? The table is clear.
• Sometimes stuff to be given away gets put on a basement shelf temporarily, and I moved a bunch of it out to the car as well. Unfortunately I couldn't move it all. I keep trying to purge the kids' bookshelves and being stopped by children howling "Nooooo, you can't give away [insert preposterous book title here]! That's the book of my childhood!"
• People have a lot of books of their childhood around here, I'm just saying.
• My husband is trying to determine which accommodations in the NYC area are least likely to have bedbugs. The answer is all of them, right? No bedbugs in any NYC hotels, except perhaps the ones he wouldn't dream of considering? That is the answer I would like to hear, please.
• I can't wait to see Alex in NYC. I miss that boy. He's really happy there. He's coming back to the Midwest in August to finish his last semester of college. He hopes to wind up there on a more permanent basis, which I guess means I will continue to oscillate between pride and panic for the foreseeable future. Maybe someday I'll get used to MY KID living in the city of bedbugs that never sleep.
• It does not feel like 20 years have gone by since he was my fuzzy-headed inscrutable baby.
• If I don't push publish quickly I'm going to start singing Sunrise, Sunset. So in service to the neighbors...

In a hundred years

One of the most gripping stories in Sandra Steingraber's Having Faith was in its chapter on lead. In the 1920s, paint industry executives lied to Congress. They had data on the impact of lead exposure in childhood; they knew that the effects appeared over time. But they cited the short-term studies, the ones where they collected data before the problems kicked in. "Look at these results," they said. "It's not that lead paint makes children stupid; it's that stupid children eat lead paint." The use of lead paint in this country continued for more than 50 years.

I think about this exchange more often than you might guess, because my house was built in the 1920s. There is lead in the exterior paint, and there is lead in the soil around the house where paint chips have fallen for almost a hundred years, and if I am not careful about cleaning then there also is lead on my floors. My kids are fine. If you never wear shoes inside, and always wear shoes outside, and always wash hands when you come inside, and take precautions with any exterior work, then lead contamination is a manageable problem. But it is an ongoing hassle, and an ongoing extra expense, and I am always mindful of the kids who are not so lucky.

The American Academy of Pediatrics sent a letter to Scott Pruitt, Surprisingly Orange and Bushy-Tailed Henhouse Guardian director of the EPA. In it they expressed alarm at Pruitt's plan to permit ongoing use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, a known neurotoxicant. Pruitt, however, seems more interested in industry handwaving. We can't really be sure that it's problematic, you see. Maybe stupid children eat chlorpyrifos.

This is a pro-life issue, because caring about unborn babies means minimizing their exposure to chemicals that will damage their brains and raise the odds that they will die in utero. This is an environmental stewardship issue, because chlorpyrifos places endangered species at risk as well. This is an issue for anyone who cares about cost containment and lower taxes, because it is a whole lot more expensive to educate children with damaged brains and in this country -- at least for now -- every child has the right to a free and appropriate public education.

Scott Pruitt is not an elected official, so he cannot feel the pressure of constituent phone calls in the same way that my congressman does. But let's call him anyway. They got it wrong in the 1920s, listening to industry executives instead of actual facts, and kids are still paying the price. Let's do it better this time around.

Blame it on the novels

I am reading a novel that I am really enjoying: Falling Together by Marisa de los Santos. I thought it was going to be about two characters I already knew, but it turns out to be a different book altogether. No matter. I love her voice; I love these characters. It is making me laugh out loud and making me think. I'm halfway in, eager to find out what happens.

I have told you before, shyly, that I am slowly writing a novel. I have been working on it in small bites this month, and today I got some accidental reader feedback. I'm doing a fantastically helpful writing challenge, in which I write 400 words 5 days per week for the month of June. This is not an onerous amount of writing for any one day, but it adds up to 8000 words by the end of the month. That's two short articles, in my world, or a couple of IRB protocols, or a big chunk of a longer article. Or, because I am free to do whatever I want with those 400 words, some pieces of my dormant novel. 

Each day I send off my word count and my text to the person running the challenge, who usually just glances at the first few words and marks me down in her spreadsheet for the day. But she sent me the nicest email about my most recent novel chunk. It makes me want to write more. More novel! All the novel! So if things seem a little cursory around here, you'll know what I'm up to.

Let's discuss

I just saw Wonder Woman. Have you seen Wonder Woman? Can we talk about Wonder Woman?

Wham

So I told you that Joe was admitted to boarding school but I never reported back: he's going. Today was the orientation. I was listening to the administrators talk about their educational philosophy and I wanted to stand up and cheer: they want to light these kids on fire. They want to nurture curiosity in the pursuit of a better world. They want to foster independence and resilience.

And they want to feed and house my 15yo.

A couple of times I stepped outside into the glorious June sunshine to take a deep breath and settle myself down. I had thought it might be easier to send a kid off into the world the second time I did it, but nope. I can't even write a blog post about sending a kid off into the world without getting a little teary.

More on outsize influence

I've been wondering when spring semester evals would be available, and the email came today. I had an immediate visceral reaction to reading it. Literally visceral: churning innards, heart speeding, too jittery to focus. This was not a sensible reaction, because I'd already seen my grad students' evals and the undergrads are always nicer. But it was also not a reaction within my control.

I decided to rip the bandaid and go read them; they were fine. I got some useful and unsurprising comments from one class (I don't like the way our textbook is structured either; I don't think they need more than 48 hours to do a 30-minute assignment but I can understand that they might like it). The other class was enthusiastic -- for some reason I get better evals for that class than any other. One student said "she knows everything about everything," which I might have to put on my business cards. (This comment caused my 15yo to say "Well, actually...")

I think the reason I was so worried and flinchy going in there was that pair of difficult conversations at the end of the spring semester. One student in particular-- her history with me would astonish you, were I foolish or brazen enough to post it on the internet, but you will just have to trust me. I have never told her story without the other party's saying, "Wait, she did WHAT now? And then she did WHAT?!" She felt very strongly, though, that she had been wronged, and she said something I have been carrying around with me for more than a month now.

Objectively, I can know that I should not give much weight to the comments of a 20-something with documented academic integrity issues. Objectively, I can know that I should shrug off the occasional unkind comments that surface when people in their early 20s are invited to weigh in anonymously on experiences that have challenged them.

And yet. Easier said than done.

Dumb Ideas

Dumb Idea # 1: Braising lettuce. I was going to call this post "Lettuce now braised...," riffing on "Let us now praise famous men," only I couldn't think of anything to pun with the "famous men" part. Anyway: we got a container ship's worth of lettuce from the CSA and I thought to myself, Aha! I will cook it gently! It will cook down to a more manageable quantity and taste like the delicious essence of itself, because Brooklyn Farm Girl says so. Instead it tasted like the very distillation of bitter despair. Not recommended.

Also not recommended, otherwise known as Dumb Idea #2: The book I checked out of the library this evening. A Facebook friend recommended it enthusiastically earlier today and hey-- there it was sitting on the new releases shelf. You guys, it is exceedingly rare for me to be critical about books in this space because I imagine their authors stumbling across critical posts and feeling bitter despair, perhaps a flavor of bitter despair even keener than that induced by a plateful of braised lettuce. (Oh! Another problem with braised lettuce, speaking of platefuls, is that it doesn't even cook down very much. It's like the opposite of the Catskills lament: terrible food! and such huge portions!) But anyway-- I read half of this book at a gallop and then I couldn't deal with it any more and skipped to the end. (I did the same thing with Gone Girl. I don't really do thrillers.) And I have to say: do not pick up the book Behind Her Eyes unless your tolerance for implausible plot twists is higher than mine. By which I mean: super-high. Very very high. I am a little miffed about having given 90 minutes of my life to something so preposterous.

The outsize influence of the 1%

People around the internet are having a lot of capital-R Reactions to this satirical piece at the Chronicle. Here's a thing I didn't know about higher education until I became a professor: most of my students are great. They are usually motivated and together -- more together, actually, than I was as an upper-level undergrad. Here's another thing I didn't know about higher education until I became a professor: a small number of my students are going to do jaw-dropping things. And not, let me hasten to clarify, the happy kind of jaw-dropping.

The jaw-dropping students have a disproportionate influence on my syllabi and on the way that I draft assignment instructions. They're the reason I write new policies and tighten old loopholes. The large majority of students would never dream of coming back to me and say "But you didn't say that my grade would take a hit if I didn't follow the instructions, so it's not fair for you to penalize me." And yet there is a reason that I now spell it out: failure to follow the instructions in this paragraph will result in a grade penalty. The jaw-dropping students have an even more disproportionate emphasis on my state of mind. They take up vast amounts of brain real estate during the busiest times of the semester. Sometimes it's like Problem Student = Central Asian Steppes (in terms of both massive size and inhospitable climate) and Everybody Else Combined = Liechtenstein. And so when I complain about my job? I'm usually complaining about the antics of a jaw-dropper.

Once I was talking about technology policies with some other faculty and I joked about writing a technology policy that said "Offenders will be zapped with my laser eyes." Of course I'm sympathetic to techno-distractions. Of course I get it that students on their laptops are going to check their email now and  again. Of course I do not have laser eyes. I did once, though, teach a freshman who seemed unable to stop engaging in behavior that I found overtly disruptive. She has long since disappeared from our program, but she continues to influence the way I write syllabi. 

I am sure that my plagiarism policy causes distress to some of my strong students. They worry a lot about accidentally plagiarizing, despite my active encouragement to talk it through with me during office hours. Did you already guess that it exists because of the 1%, the students who insist that the 80% overlap between their submission and the Wikipedia entry is entirely coincidental and only a super-mean meanypants would fail them for it?

The more irate reactions I have seen to the Chronicle piece seem to assume that its author is actually requiring her students to provide multiple forms of documentation -- that she is routinely treating students like adversaries. A professor who consistently treats students like adversaries needs to re-assess, sure. But a professor who is kvetching about the 1%? I think that's probably okay.

Guided

I've been meaning to write a post about something that happened while I was out of town ten days ago: I got lost. I got really, really lost. I'm a pretty good navigator, usually, but I was driving in a city with a weird layout and a ton of construction. My phone died. I memorized directions from a friend's phone when I dropped her off for a dinner meeting, and attempted to follow them over to my hotel. Unfortunately, Google Maps tried to send me down a closed road. Not "closed to through traffic," but closed altogether. Dug up and impassable. Thanks, Google Maps!

No problem, I thought to myself. I'll park the car in this municipal lot and walk over. They'll be able to tell me how to avoid the construction and I won't have to navigate the one-way streets. But the lot was full, overflowing even, and I could not find street parking at all. No problem, I thought to myself. I'll come at it from the other direction. And then...I was off on my scenic tour. 

I tried to get back to where I needed to be, only to find that I had driven myself in a giant circle and was preparing to start lap #2 of the scenic tour. This is silly, I said to myself. What did we do in the 90s when we were lost? We stopped at a gas station and asked for directions, that's what we did. The gas station attendant was not a native English speaker. "That's a good question!" she chirped when I asked for directions to my hotel. "Maybe you should ask next door at the carwash." Which was closed.

"I can do this," I said to myself. "I have been in this city before." Slowly and carefully I drove myself...the rest of the way around the same circle. Even giving my full attention to the task of getting to my hotel, I was starting lap #3 of my giant circle around the wrong part of the city. I'd been driving around for 45 minutes at this point. I was hungry.

I pulled into a parking lot and prayed aloud. "Holy Spirit, I need you to guide me. I don't have a map. I don't know where I'm going. But you know where I'm going, and I am asking you to help me get there."

"That was kind of ridiculous," said Mean Skeptical Jamie to Trusting Hopeful Jamie. "What if the Holy Spirit just wants you to grow in patience here? How is the Holy Spirit going to operate here, exactly? Is it going to be like Inigo Montoya following his sword around in search of the Man in Black?"

I headed out, unpersuaded that this circuit would really be any different. But this time I saw a lake winking to my left. "If I keep that lake on my left," I said, "then I will wind up in the right spot." I made one wrong turn, but it was easy to sort out. Immediately afterward I thought to myself, "What if I take this little road here?" And you guys, it was beautiful -- it carried me right along the lake, with none of the traffic that had been stressing me out. "This is too good to be true," I thought to myself. "Where's the dead end?"

The lovely quiet road tipped me out at exactly the intersection I had been trying to find. And -- it gets better -- there was municipal parking right there in that first block, with spaces available. I parked the car and headed up to my hotel on foot. "It's not going to be in this block," I said to myself. "There's too much construction here. I'm going to have to keep walking." But LO: there was my hotel.

Does this sound a little freaky and perhaps implausible to you? Because I am telling you the story exactly as it happened. And it seems to me that it is full of true things about how God guides us: it's usually true that we have to use our own eyes and our own brains, even as we invite him to nudge us in ways we cannot quite explain. It's usually true that a wrong turn doesn't mean all is lost. It's usually true that God gives us more than we ask for: the unexpected beauty and peace of the drive, the immediate parking fix -- and the destination that was closer than I'd dared to hope.

Mean Skeptical Jamie was last seen stroking her chin contemplatively.

Red in Tooth in Claw, or Sad Tidings in Gladlyville

This is the tenth year that mourning doves have nested in the corner of our front porch. There are usually a couple of clutches, sometimes three, and it's a lovely part of the rhythm of our year. The mama bird sits there through the spring chill and the summer heat, keeping her eggs safe and warm until the babies hatch out and fledge.

The picture actually shows the first clutch of the season, but the second clutch was just this size yesterday. Stella showed them to a neighbor girl, who had come over to say hello. 

You can't tell that I was reeaaaching over my head to take the picture -- the ledge is too high for me to touch. So we were all astounded, and saddened, when the neighbor girl's cat came back this morning without the neighbor girl. He had tagged along with her last night, but today he was on a solo mission. He made a mighty leap from the ledge below (thigh-high on me) to the ledge above. He hung there, clawing at the nest.

For a moment it looked like the mama bird would be able to get the babies away, but the cat was too fast. Stella is still heartbroken about seeing her favorite cat eating the little bird whose growth she had watched with keen interest.

We're all sad about that, actually.

The hostile octopus unmasked

We've been spending a ridiculous amount of time at Lowe's. Ridiculous. (Joe would like me to insert "Mom being devoured" noises here.)

Yesterday we were wandering around in circles, having spent so much time already wandering around in circles that a spot of cannibalism came to seem inevitable, when Joe opined that Lowe's and similar stores have hidden sales staff. Well, not exactly sales staff, unless sales staff are typically tasked with eating the customers.

He envisions an invisible octopus responsible for the time-sucking events that always seem to occur in big stores. The youngest child disappears, resurfacing by the racks of dog fancier magazines and unable to explain her sudden interest in dog-fancying. (It was the handiwork of the octopus.) A tentacle snakes around behind the deli counter and pushes the pause button on the world's clock while we wait for the slicing machine to do its work. Empires rise and fall; our ham remains unsliced. The end caps lure you in to check out this week's deal on charcoal or Cool Whip and slurp -- the octopus seizes the moment. And the shopper. And perhaps a couple of her children.

I do not have a better explanation for how long it took me to get out of Lowe's yesterday and today. Shoppers beware!

Summer Update

My 15yo wants me to write a blog post about the hostile octopus we encountered while buying pavers at Lowe's, but I told him the hostile octopus would have to be immortalized another day. I'm writing an accountability post today. Remember all of those things I was going to do every day this summer? It turns out that I put a large number of things on that list. Who knew? 

I'm three weeks into the 12-week summer. I have been consistent about writing for work and I have been exercising enough to finish a triathlon (3 minutes faster than last year!). I have been decluttering and deshabbifying with some regularity. I have not been doing yoga at all, let alone daily. (I was doing a Yoga With Adriene series that's mostly 30-minute videos. Twenty is a better length for me.) I am behind on 1 Kings and the CCC. (1 Kings is kind of a willpower sink. But I'm almost to the Elijah part.) Pictures are completely untouched because I hate dealing with pictures. I love having dealt with pictures, though.

The food thing-- I have been super-unmotivated to eat carefully. SUPER SUPER unmotivated. This is true even though it might be the #1 influence on my get-up-and-go. So. Tomorrow: new leaf on food. Re-assess on some of those other things that were initially going to be daily tasks but are not happening on a daily basis. Onward.

The Anti-Kraken

How fast can a hot grumpy person with unhappy innards run a 5K? The answer to that question was shaping up to be "not very fast." "Let's run up this little hill to the sidewalk!" I said to myself. "...or maybe a walk break is a better idea," replied myself to me. "What we're going to do here is run 6 minutes, walk 1," I said to myself. "You know, 3 is the new 6," I distinctly heard in reply. I was approaching the halfway point and losing steam in a big way when I heard a familiar voice behind me. It was my roommate Shelley.

I was totally baffled about where she had come from. She had a faster swim leg than I did (as did several sea monkeys and a dead caterpillar propelled by the froth) and I knew I hadn't passed her on the bike leg. And yet there she was! It was so good to see her! Shelley is a faster runner than I am, and I expected that she would say a quick hello and speed off toward the finish. But she didn't. She said, "A walk break sounds great." When I said, "I don't want to slow you down," she shook her head. She said, "I know what I can do, and what I can't do, and I'd rather finish with you than finish alone." So we chugged along together.

You'd think I would know by now that running with a calmer person is good medicine for my brain weasels, but somehow I was surprised again by how well it works. Even though most of our conversations these days happen via email or text, the cadence of Shelley's voice is still so familiar to me from the years that we lived together. She didn't expect me to respond (which is good, because my conversational gambits would have been limited to "hot very hot sweaty tired CRABBY need a porta-potty now HOT dumb idea hot"); she just kept talking steadily. She thanked all of the volunteers, she chatted with the runners who said they liked our shirts (in big letters on the back: "Nevertheless, they persisted"), and she offered opinions about race etiquette.

I can't say the time raced by, but it definitely sped up beyond the arthritic trudge it had been doing before she came along. We passed the spot where I met Bad Cop Julie last year, and I could hear her voice in my head. We passed the spot where Joe joined me last year, and I ran a little faster remembering his encouragement. Soon we could hear people yelling for us -- our cheering section had camped out near the 3-mile marker. We sped up for the final tenth of a mile and finished with identical times. 

I've already registered for next year. So has Shelley.

Escape from the Kraken

When last we saw our heroine, she was struggling.

The bike is my strength, relatively speaking, and I was discouraged to see how slowly I was going downhill. Things got better when we turned out of the wind, though, and I was pleasantly surprised when my watch buzzed to tell me I had completed the first five miles at just under a 15mph pace. I was even more surprised shortly afterward, because I was heading uphill on the stretch that was painful last year.

But this year the wind was blowing from the south -- right behind me -- and I found myself cruising up that hill. The thing about tailwinds is that they can be hard to recognize. I have a rule for myself: if it feels easy to go 19mph, there's a tailwind. Save some energy for getting home. Yesterday I was doing a painless 19mph uphill, which should tell you that this was a serious wind.

I didn't smile for the cameras this year, because I was focused on hitting a goal. I don't have a triathlon bike; it's just a regular secondhand Cannondale with fattish tires and no aerobars. Last year I overheard two women talking about their bikes, which cost more than we paid for our Ford Focus. I knew I wasn't going to keep up with the serious competitors on my secondhand Cannondale, but I wanted to go >15mph on the bike leg. That goal kept me pushing hard when we went back into the headwind -- especially when I saw my second 5-mile split time -- and all through the rest of the second loop. 

It paid off! My Garmin tells me I averaged 15.5mph for the bike leg, compared to last year's 14.4. The timing chip numbers are a little lower (15.27), because they're based on the shortest possible distance rather than my actual distance. You'd have to be the only cyclist on the course and hit all of the tangents exactly right to go only the advertised distance. I won't complain.

When I headed back into T2 I felt significantly less defeated than I had in T1. "Now you only have to run a 5K!" said a spectator who probably intended to be encouraging. I doubt, however, that this spectator had any intention of running a 5K in those conditions. In contrast to last year's weather, which was unexpectedly and deliciously cool, temperatures were climbing toward 90. Blech and double-blech. I racked my bike and drank some Nuun and gobbled down some unpleasant chewy things. One of my roommates came tearing into transition a little behind me. She's the fastest of the five of us on foot, so when when she went rocketing back out of transition at breakneck speed I didn't expect to see anyone I knew until the finish.

My innards were grumbling. My legs were tired. I wasn't feeling confident at all. But off I went.

Return to Kraken Lake

Good news: I finished my second sprint triathlon today! 

Better news: All five of the roommates did it together, including the one who declined last year (hurray hurray hurray!) and the one who is flying to Paris later this evening. (People kept making puzzled faces at her and asking, "Why are you doing a triathlon the same day you're flying to Paris?" She would shrug and say, "Peer pressure." Let's hear it for peer pressure!)

News of uncertain import: I am going to tell you all about it.

Let's talk about the swim first. Do you remember my long and exclamation-point-y post from last June about the swim and bike legs of my first triathlon? I forgot something important: even though I typed those words with my own ten fingers (nine, really; I never use my left thumb when I'm typing -- do you?), I didn't remember the weight of those words. I knew I had been really anxious in the run-up to the triathlon because I was afraid I'd be last or need rescuing, but I didn't remember the magnitude of the anxiety that assailed me during the triathlon itself. "The course is shorter than advertised!" I told myself when worries would loom up from the depths of my psyche like an unwelcome Loch Ness Monster. "No big deal!" I estimate that it's a 600-yard swim course, and I swam 600 yards in turbulent 12-foot water in our practice tri two weeks ago. It wasn't my favorite thing I did that day, but it didn't stress me out too much. I thought I was over my swimming anxiety.

[cue sea monster music] (well, no, I've never seen anything billed as sea monster music either, but I imagine it's like the Jaws theme with additional legs and bonus suckers)

I'd say that my overall swim anxiety is down by about 75%. The whole unmanageable childhood fear thing-- it doesn't really rear its head in a pool these days. But OH is it different when I'm not in a pool. There is something deep inside me that puts its foot down. It says, "No, I am not going to put my head under this turbid water and propel myself forward at speed. I only propel myself forward at speed when I can see where I am going because do I look like I want a BRAIN INJURY??" It says, "Unless I can see with my very own eyes that there is no kraken in this body of water, I am going to operate under the assumption that it could contain a kraken." I tried a few times to swim like an actual swimmer instead of a patient old lady, and NOPE was the unambiguous and immediate response from some part of me that doesn't usually get to run the show. 

So. I swam on my back for a while, and I old-lady-breaststroked for a while, and I tried to find a groove. But I? was a mess. I was trying to calm myself down, because I have lived with this anxious brain for almost 47 years now and I know a few things about dialing down the adrenaline. "If you pray a decade of the rosary," I told myself, "you'll be at the first buoy before you're even done."

The rosary is my go-to strategy for digging deep when I am suffering and also for putting a metaphorical hood on the cage of the Panic Parrot that lives in my brain. If I ever say, "I was working too hard to pray the rosary," I know that was a tough workout.

I was too hopped up and stressed out and miserable to pray the rosary.

I got through it, slowly and wretchedly. It took me a minute longer than last year. Instead of the relief and delight I felt on the sand last year, I was suffused with frustration and embarrassment. I headed up to transition, where I touched base briefly with the next-slowest roommate before she headed out on her bike.

I was looking forward to the bike leg, which was such a joy last year. I got myself out of transition and onto the bike a little faster than last year, and set to work trying to find a good rhythm and shake off the residual misery. I was passing someone when a voice from behind bellowed at me to get out of the way. "Ride on the RIGHT! Pass on the LEFT!" she spat angrily, pelting by at what must have been 25mph. "I was passing," I snapped back. There was plenty of room for her to pass me on my left while I was passing the slower rider on our right. I'm not sure why she had to be so nasty, but the figurative ash from her eruption left me sprinkled with another layer of self-doubt and bad feeling. 

I biked right into a headwind, which did nothing to blow away this encrustation. The first half of the two-loop bike course is downhill, but I was gasping for breath at 13mph. "Oh, man," I thought to myself, "coming back uphill is going to be AWFUL."

WILL our heroine shake free from the Shackles of Self-Doubt?
WILL she be slower on both the swim and the bike this year?
WILL the kraken rise up out of Kraken Lake to seize her as she struggles past, held up by the roaring headwind?
(BONUS QUESTION: IS there broadband internet at the bottom of Kraken Lake?)

Tune in tomorrow.

The Emperor with Bionic Ears

I am typing from a quiet hotel room, sprawled across a bed in which I will sleep alone tonight and tomorrow. I'm at a conference. It took me longer to get here than I thought it would (construction + optimism, the twin foes of accurate travel time estimates), and I slipped right into the first session instead of eating lunch beforehand. I decided to get something to eat between the two afternoon sessions instead. One of the field's leading lights was going to be speaking, someone I've called The Emperor in this space before.

I missed the beginning of the second session, and the only person in the hallway outside the presentation room when I returned was a woman with a cute baby. I stopped to chat with them for a minute. "She was doing really well," said the woman, "and then she got fussy." 

"Maybe she was saying, 'I disagree with your theoretical perspective,'" I joked. "Maybe she was saying, 'Sorry, Mr. Emperor, but you are wrong.'"

The woman looked distressed. She spoke urgently to her baby. "Do not say that to his face," she told her 5-month-old.

Kids and screens

Did you guys see the reports that came out last month about a study showing an association between little kids' use of mobile devices and language delays? It popped up in my Twitter feed again tonight and I have some quick thoughts about it. 

Thought #1A: I have questions about their data collection. Specifically, what kinds of neighborhood effects might they be measuring? Kids in higher-crime neighborhoods spend more time on screens. Kids in higher-crime neighborhoods may face risks for developmental delay that are caused by factors like, say, toxins in their water supply. Blaming parents for problems caused by infrastructure would be a dismal idea. (Not that this would stop us from blaming parents for problems caused by infrastructure; I'm just putting it out there.)

Thought #1B: I have more questions about their data collection. The lead author has published a bunch of work on kids and screen time, and at least some of the time they corroborated parents' reports on kids' screen usage. Which is good, because that seems like an area in which sneaky third variables could cause trouble as well. Are moms with more education more likely to downplay screen time, underreporting to reflect what they think should be happening instead of what's actually happening? That could introduce a bogus association or strengthen a weak association, since maternal education buffers against language delay.

Thought #2A: I have questions about whether kids' inclinations might drive the association. Some kids are more motivated than others to learn to talk, and it's often a self-reinforcing preference. When you can only say "ba" and nobody knows whether that means "ball" or "sheep" or "Please play Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata," verbal exchanges are less motivating than they are for kids who have figured out how to express their preferences more clearly. Kids predisposed to autism may find screen time less stressful than human interaction. In neither case does the screen usage cause the language impairment.

Thought #2B: I have questions about whether parents' habits might drive the association. I'm curious about how often kids who spend a lot of time on screens have parents who spend a lot of time on screens themselves. How much of the variability in kids' language outcomes might be related to parental absorption in something else?

Thought #3: Even if it turns out to be true that kids' screen usage causes language to unfold more slowly in toddlers, it's unclear how much we can extrapolate from that. We really don't know what will happen at school age to kids who are a little behind as preschoolers. I'm not comfortable with the suggestion toward the end of the article that screen use might be setting kids up for long-term literacy problems. That's what we call an unwarranted prognostication, friends. Different cultures do things differently with regard to child-directed language, and most kids figure it out anyway. I suspect that the same is true in cultures where heavy use of mobile devices is the norm. 

I'll be interested in seeing how it shakes out in future studies. It seems beyond question to me that mobile device use is shaping patterns of interaction -- between adults and children as well as among adults. One day a toddler whose older sibling was being seen in our clinic came marching into my office. "Well, hello," I said, "are you making a break for it? Have you come to help me write this paper? Did it get too boring in the waiting room?" I paused here, expecting the mom to chime right in with a response like, "Come on out of her office, sweetie!" or "What are you doing in there?" When she didn't say anything at all after a long pause, I looked up from the child's face to see that the mom was on her phone. It felt a little like I had lobbed a tennis ball to someone who had laid down her racket to pull up weeds by the back fence. But I know that I am old-fashioned about phone use, and I do believe that language development is a resilient process. I'll be curious to see what the next study reports.

Summer Reading

Books I have read or am reading since I finished Martin Chuzzlewit:

Fix the World

I am currently reading How Cycling Can Save the World, which I picked up on a whim at the library. It is SO interesting and motivating despite its overly earnest title. My university has a wellness office and I want to send the director a copy. And my mayor is into bicycles -- I wonder if he's read it yet.

I am also reading Searching for Sunday by Rachel Held Evans. I read Year of Biblical Womanhood a couple of years ago and found it pleasant but mostly unmemorable. This one is much better: appealing writing in a distinctive voice. I am still battling post-election angst (60! percent! of! white! Catholics! voted! for! Trump!), and her perspective is helpful. The author and I have some theological disagreements but I'm enjoying her book anyway.

Science and Recreation

I've told you before about how much I enjoy Matt Fitzgerald's books. I bought How Bad Do You Want It? last year, and then it languished on the shelf because almost all of my reading is on Kindle these days. I finally finished it last week. It's about the role of mental toughness in sports. Fitzgerald has a knack for describing scholarly papers clearly and illustrating their findings with well-chosen stories. 

It's a little funny that I already wrote about theological differences in a post that also talks about Come As You Are, also finished last week. Emily Nagoski and I appear to be poles apart theologically, but I'll be thinking about her book for a long time. Lots of interesting material on how women differ from men -- not in a squishy Mars/Venus way, but based on parameters like responsive desire and non-concordance. She spends a big (and absolutely fascinating) chunk of the book talking about neuroscience, the ways that eagerness, expectation, and enjoyment interconnect in our heads.

Escapist Kids' Fiction

How had I never read Swallows and Amazons? Loved it. Pure delight. Could be an instruction manual for free-range parents. (Well, free-range parents who are willing to be investigated by CPS for negligence. Hard to fathom the changes we've seen in cultural perceptions of kids' abilities over the past 90 years. I bow to the Swallows & Amazons moms.)

Another library pick: The Lotterys Plus One. My La Leche League friends and I used to email each other about the commune we would found someday. This is a book written by someone who has clearly had similar email conversations. It's written by Emma Donoghue, author of Room, which is why it caught my eye. It's an earthy-crunchy fantasy, and it made me roll my eyes about eleventy-zillion times. OH PLEASE, I said when I learned that all of the kids were named after trees. SPARE ME, I said in its many heavy-handed moments.  But then...I finished it in an evening.