Light and Momentary

Some unspecified number of quick takes (are those still a thing?)

1. I am making chia pudding for the first time and the resemblance to frog spawn is startling. Black speckles surrounded by islets of goo? Exactly like the jars I used to keep on my dresser as a 12yo. But it will allegedly give me the strength of an Aztec warrior. I'll report back tomorrow.
2. Tomorrow morning the 10K training group is running exactly the route that we usually did in my first running group, 5 years ago. It's a little funny: just driving past the park where we'll be starting gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I have such fond memories of running with that group during that summer. The prospect of running the same route makes me feel even warmer and fuzzier. Especially if I can look forward to doing it with the strength of an Aztec warrior!
3. I felt like a bit of a shill after I wrote that post last night. There's a running blog I stopped reading because of the relentless parade of sponsored posts, and I felt cautious about tiptoeing in that direction, even to say "They sent me a free book and it's an above-average book." Then tonight Elwood and I were talking about who was going to cook what for dinner and he mentioned that he had brought home a pork loin. "Oh!" I said, my Friday fatigue evaporating. "I will cook it in the Instant Pot! There's a pork loin recipe in my book!" Pork loin with caramelized onions and more balsamic vinegar than seemed prudent: scrumptious. Kids snarfed it down. Really, though, you could put caramelized onions in balsamic vinegar on top of an alarm clock and I would probably eat it. Caramelized onions are proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
4. This recipe called for Dijon mustard, which led to a discussion between Elwood and me about what Dijon mustard actually is. I used to think that mustard was the worst flavor in the whole world. THE. WORST. Then I realized that it wasn't about the mustard. I'm okay with mustard by itself, and I'm okay with turmeric by itself. But American ballpark mustard combines them to create a flavor that I do not put in my mouth at any time for any reason. We had spicy brown mustard in the fridge, but it also contains turmeric. I know I am the person who just talked about eating alarm clocks cheerfully, but that stuff was not going in my dinner. 
5. I was an ultra-fussy kid but I like to think I've become less fussy as a grownup. Dill? No. Ballpark mustard? No. Most of my other childhood food prejudices I have managed to overcome.
6. Huh, that was kind of a Yoda-esque sentence. Or maybe a hymnal sentence. We keep singing All In All as our meditation hymn: "Lord to give up I'd be a fool." Maybe there's an album out there somewhere, full of lines like that one. Yoda Worships. Yoda Before The Throne. Something like that.
7. I am still thinking about tastes. In my early 20s in a Thai restaurant I had an experience like the spanakopita moment, in which an herb in my food tasted so painfully awful that I couldn't finish the meal. Later, when I was 25, I encountered the same herb in an Indian meal. I asked our hostess what it was. (Politely. I thought about saying, "Why does this taste like dirt and penance?" but my mama did teach me some manners.) She gave me a name; it started with ch-. What was it, though? I have no idea.

Colossus of Roasts. And Cheesecake.

Remember when Col, my giant Instant Pot, arrived in July? He and I have slowly been getting acquainted. I signed up to review the occasional book here, and the first one that arrived in my mail was Coco Morante's The Essential Instant Pot Cookbook.

I have Thoughts about cookbooks. I want them to have a distinctive voice and to be carefully edited. I want them to tell me some things I wouldn't have figured out on my own, and to push my boundaries a little bit but not too much. I have exactly 2.5 feet of cookbook space, which means I am choosy about which cookbooks get to stay.

The short version of this review is that this book makes the cut.

There's an accessible introduction to using the Instant Pot, and there are reliable step-by-step instructions in all of the recipes. My husband is very skeptical about the Instant Pot. "It beeps," he says. (He has fond memories of a world in which appliances didn't beep.) Even so, he was able to follow Morante's directions with no fuss.

For the most part, the recipes are interesting but also straightforward. I read an Amazon review complaining about her reliance on weird ingredients, but that's (literally) a de gustibus kind of thing. I am excited, not annoyed, about the idea of mail-order sumac and ras el hanout. There are some funky recipes (honey-turmeric tonic, anyone?) and some plain-vanilla recipes (macaroni and cheese), but mostly they inhabit the space in between. In a few cases, I think she was stretching to demonstrate that a recipe could be adapted for the IP when really it would have been easier to fire up the stove already.

Instant Pot cooking works best with foods that should be nice and tender. My husband likes his green beans still firm enough to be used as bludgeons (very small bludgeons. elf bludgeons), but I am a child of the South. I thought Morante's recipe for Italian stewed green bean recipe was perfect, as was her kale with apple and onion. (I was less enthusiastic about the Indian-spiced okra, but in fairness I should add that I was missing two of the spices.)

After I made a couple of the meat recipes, I felt ready to riff on them. She has no recipe for tongue, but I dove in and made tacos de lengua in the Instant Pot because I felt comfortable with the settings and the beeping. Making broth isn't complicated, but it was nice to have clear instructions for how to do it in a pressure cooker.

I was most curious about the desserts. Poached pears, sure (thumbs up from the kids on that one), but cheesecake? in a pressure cooker? for real? I was so intrigued that I bought a 7-inch springform. Turns out that pressure cooker cheesecake works really nicely. I made her New York cheesecake, to which you add a topping of sweetened sour cream after it emerges from the steam. Adding a topping is probably a good idea, because condensation from the top of the IP can mar the top of the finished cheesecake. Well worth the hassle for cheesecake with a 30-minute cooking time and no need to rig up a bain-marie. After this success with steaming a dessert I am going to see if I can manage a steamed suet pudding in the Instant Pot. That's not a recipe anyone sensible would include in a book for an American audience, but I bet you can get around that crazy 4-hour cooking time and wind up with the same lovely texture.

In addition to the experiments I want to try, there are a number of recipes I still want to cook as written. That's a little unusual for me. The FTC wants me to spell out for you that I received a complimentary copy of this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for writing a review, but I assure you I'd let you know if I didn't like it. If you have an Instant Pot that's a little dustier than you might like, or a little more intimidating than you expected, this book is a fun way to figure it out.

Tendencies

I bought Gretchen Rubin's The Four Tendencies as soon as it came out and I'm about three-quarters of the way through it. I am finding it more insightful than I expected, with things I want to remember in each chapter. 

We had a chat about the Four Tendencies in the not-very-distant past, remember? Rubin's quiz told me that I was an Upholder, but I'm definitely an Upholder with some Obliger inclinations. I could take on a ten-year Dickens project happily, but I am more consistent about reading x amount of Dickens every single day if I am hosting a Dickens read-along than if I am just doing it on my own. Rubin writes about the Upholder tendency to be rigid and I was like, "Oh, hi, have you been spying on me?" I remember once when I was following FlyLady pretty closely and Christmas fell on a Monday, I felt genuinely flummoxed. I was supposed to clean my house on Monday, because Weekly Home Blessing Hour is always on Monday, and yet I was supposed to avoid unnecessary work because it was a holy day of obligation. There are many solutions to this difficulty, I can see in hindsight, but at the time I thought I might short-circuit something inside my brain deciding what to do.

I wish I had known about this framework earlier. My oldest son is a Questioner, probably with Rebel leanings, and it took me far too long to figure out that talking to him about the importance of rules was not an effective strategy. My second son is an Upholder with Questioner leanings, and I remember how distressed he would get when he was small about learning that he had violated some unfamiliar expectation -- weeping by the side of the pool, resolving never to return, when the lifeguard said he wasn't allowed to wear his floaty vest in the water.

My husband is also a Questioner with Rebel leanings, and he is completely unconvinced about Rubin's divisions. This is a response she expects from Questioners, but my husband finds her assertion that Questioners gonna question to be utterly unpersuasive. Somehow our conversation took a turn in which we were speculating about the roads we might have traveled if we hadn't married each other. "You'd probably be living in a big city and have a tattooed hipster girlfriend," I said. You would have thought I'd been speaking Urdu. "Tattooed? hipster? girlfriend?" he queried. "Um, what are you talking about?" I tried to imagine my alternate Elwood-less life and came up empty. Would I even be Catholic? What if I'd settled down with another rule-follower and never learned to push back against my own worst tendencies? I'm glad he loosens me up; he's glad I make the trains run on time around here (though I like to think I am more pleasant than Mussolini). I had my planner open and he was teasing me gently as he read over my shoulder. "EARLY BEDTIME in all caps, I see," he commented. "That's because it's like today's MASS and RUN entries," I told him. "It's something that will make me feel better if I do it for myself but that's easy to push aside."

Obliger tendencies in action, you see. Can I get myself to bed in five minutes? Probably not, but off I go to see how close I can come.

Sweet Freedom

Back in December I blogged briefly about a really painful conversation with the mother of one of my kids' friends. At the time I estimated that I deserved about 30% of the wrath she directed at me: my kid exercised bad judgment in her home, I followed up with the kid but not with this other mom, and when the same kid had an absent-minded moment a few days later the mom flipped out. I mean she FLIPPED OUT. It was ridiculous.

All jumbled up with her legitimate frustration was this other crud that I found very frustrating. She left an academic career to stay home with her kids. She thinks I am prioritizing career above children, and she felt compelled to remind me that my children need me. Oh, the earnestness with which she told me that they love me -- as if this had escaped my notice. Also mixed in: she thinks I am dangerously negligent because I have free-range kids. She told one of my kids, in all seriousness, that it would be irresponsible for her to permit said kid to sit alone on our porch for five minutes because of kidnappers. I might be heedless of my children's safety, but dernit, she would shield them from the bad guys on my behalf.

So. If you happened to think that I might be some sort of neighborhood parenting guru, let me assure you there are divergent opinions around here on the quality of my mothering.

It's complicated, though, because of the kids. I'm not willing to say that I will never interact with her again, because that would cause avoidable distress. Our kids miss each other keenly when they don't spend time together. Yesterday my youngest invited her youngest to come to the library with us.

Our library is a friendly place and my youngest kids have been going there since they were tiny babies. Pete and I were looking for books downstairs; Stella and the neighbor girl wanted to go upstairs. "Okay, girls," I said to them as they waited by the elevator, "I'll met you up there in just a minute."

Neighbor Girl turned to Stella, her eyes wide. "We're going in the elevator BY OURSELVES?" she gasped. Reader, she lived to tell the tale.

I hope, though, that she didn't tell that particular tale to her mother. I'm already in a deep enough hole.

Parenting and pomegranates

For about 20 seconds today I thought that I agreed with John Rosemond. But then I kept reading.

John Rosemond, if you're unfamiliar with the name, is a psychologist who is perennially urging parents to do it his way. I first encountered his column when Alex was an indomitable toddler, and it worried me. What if I wasn't being harsh enough with Alex? What if Dr. Sears was wrong and Dr. Rosemond was right?

Eighteen years later I'm still giving John Rosemond side-eye. Today I was with him for about a paragraph, when he encouraged a mother to rely on her authority instead of threatening her 4-year-old. It turns out that he and I have very different ideas about how mothers can rely on their authority.

His first principle: Do not stoop down when talking to a child. That is a submissive posture that undermines a child's perception of a parent's authority.

Nope #1: I want my kids to know that their opinions and their troubles are important to me. Posture and facial expression can convey that more persuasively than any number of words from on high. On a purely practical note, everybody is more willing to listen when he or she feels listened to. One translation of Psalm 116:2 says that God bends down to listen to us. Perhaps Dr. Rosemond would advise him to be harsher as well.

He argues next that parents should keep talking to a minimum and decline to offer explanations. Explanations only open the door to arguments, he says. The proper answer to "Why?" and "Why not?" is "Because I said so."

Nope #2: I want my kids to respect me, not fear me. I want them to feel comfortable negotiating in unfair situations. I think a lot about what they need, and I have good reasons for my decisions. In Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies framework, there are a couple of Questioners in my family. "Because I said so" is the least useful thing a parent can possibly say to a Questioner. Is his goal to inspire resentment and rebellion? That strikes me as the most likely outcome.

If kids don't cooperate with parents' instructions, he says, parents shouldn't threaten. Instead they should do the job themselves (Nope #3) and then later announce that there's a consequence. And make it BIG! he says. (With the all-caps, and the exclamation point. As if he gets genuinely enthusiastic about hefty surprise punishments. Nope #4.) 

Nope #3: If your kids aren't doing what you tell them to, I think it's often more helpful to do some problem-solving than to swoop in and do it yourself while plotting the oversized punishment that will follow. A 4yo, the topic of today's column, will often benefit from ample transition time -- maybe with a visual timer to say "This is how long you have to play with the Legos before they go into the bin." A 4yo may have a specific objection to one part of putting the Legos away, and will object to the whole process as a result. "Which structures are special to you? Let's find some shelf space for them first thing." A 4yo will often be open to a race or other contest: can you pick up a hundred double handfuls while I work on the dishes? Can you finish before I'm done in the kitchen? A 4yo is also a little young to pick up a really big mess on his own. What if you pick up all the yellow Legos and he races to see how many other colors he can pick up in that time? He might need a little guidance if things from multiple bins are jumbled together on the floor. He might need to have some of those toys rotated down to the basement for a while to avoid future unmanageable jumbles. He might need more practice than you expect with habit formation; new habits require a lot of parental bandwidth.

What he does not need (Nope #4) is to learn after the fact that you have imposed a sizable and arbitrary punishment without warning. The world is full of unpredictable ugly events; it's true. But if I impose a consequence I want it to be a teaching consequence -- and to teach something other than "you should listen to me because I will make bad things happen if you don't." If a kid is clearly slacking (or whining or sassing), I might do part of the pickup and then put those Legos on a high shelf for a while, to be earned back via cheerful cooperation with upcoming household tasks. "You're responsible for your own stuff, and for your own mouth," would be the message I wanted to send. Not "I will give away your Legos if you don't do what I say," but "Lego ownership is a privilege, and it comes with responsibilities." I might also require a slacker-offer to do one of my jobs-- maybe mopping the kitchen floor. This strategy can show a kid that small responsibilities are more manageable than big responsibilities, and that we all need to pitch in cheerfully to keep our household running smoothly.

After years of slogging I am on the far side of the little-kid struggles. And lately I have been feeling so lucky to have my particular kids -- they are such good kids. I think that it's easier to be good if someone close to you can see the good in you. Today my 12yo was bummed out after his soccer game. His bigger brother responded in such a kind and mature way, acknowledging the bad feelings and encouraging Pete to be proud of what he had done well. I am remembering all those years of painful sibling interactions, coaching them endlessly to be kinder while also contemplating a despairing defenestration, and realizing that it only seemed endless. That they really have been learning about love all along. That I don't have any regrets about being gentle with them.

Oh, gosh, I am past a thousand words already but I want to tell you about Stella today. One of my struggles with her has been figuring out how to manage her pickiness-- how much to push her, how much to accept that she has really strong food preferences. I'm sure John Rosemond would have ideas for me about how I could do it better. But slowly she's eating more foods more happily. She was so pleased with herself when we ate at a fancy tapas place earlier this month. "I think squid is delicious," she said loftily. Today I was surprised to see her nibbling at the remains of a pomegranate. "I didn't know you liked pomegranate," I said in surprise. "It's delicious," she said. It was almost gone, but she found a pocket of jewel-like arils tucked away in its depths. "Oh," she said, "it's a ruby mine!" 

I watched her tuck in and I thought about Persephone, who did not know that the things she was taking in would bind her to the place where they were offered. I hope my kids are soaking up certainty: that they are loved, that there's room for disagreement in a family, that their needs matter. I hope those truths can weave a tether that will always tug them home. I hope they're learning that they should listen to me because they can trust me, and not just because I said so.

A tip from me to...whom?

When I was in my early 20s, I felt comfortable with tipping etiquette. There were rules; I knew them. (Have I ever confessed to you guys that I used to read etiquette books for fun when I was in junior high? I loved the idea that there were rules to cover pretty much any social situation, and I could learn them. I was skeptical about Letitia Baldridge's assertion that a dinner party guest should eat a banana with a knife and fork. But I was willing to be persuaded.)

Alas, lessons learned from 1980s etiquette manuals don't do me much good here in the third millennium. For instance: it used to be that you tipped for table service, not counter service. I worked at a little bakery-cafe in 1987-88, and we never got tips. We thought it was deeply weird if someone tipped us. These days, though, everywhere you go there are tip jars. I never know quite what to do. The person scooping ice cream is getting paid to scoop ice cream. Under what circumstances should I throw in a tip? My sort-of policy has sort of been to add a tip if I'm asking for something more complicated than average. Is someone pouring me a mug of already-brewed coffee? That's what he signed up for when he took the coffeehouse job. Is someone making me a latte with a swirly leaf design in the foam? I'll probably throw in a tip.

It all feels a little awkward. On the one hand, nobody is living high on the hog on coffeeshop wages, and tips can ease the pinch. On the other, no individual can address income inequality, and maybe expanding tipping culture is the wrong way to go about it. I googled tipping etiquette and wound up a little more stressed out about the whole thing. Real Simple says you're supposed to tip your tow truck driver -- I had no idea. (Of course, Real Simple also says you're supposed to pre-sanitize your hotel bathroom and only handle the bedspread while wearing hazmat gear. Maybe their secret mission is to leave middle-aged women feeling clueless and wrong-footed.) 

Tenderly

After I wrote about the awkward sleepover situation I was thinking about the way I use my blog to process difficult interactions. If a person in my life makes me grumpy, odds are high that he or she will end up in these pages. This might leave you with the impression that I spend my life caroming from cranky to crabby and back again, but the reality is much happier. "I should write more happy blog posts," I thought to myself.

Last night was the first night of my fall running group. I was feeling a little uncomfortable about going after so much time on the couch this summer, but off I went anyway. It was, as is almost always the case, a ton of fun. We ran hills. (Well, this is Gladlyville. We ran a hill, repeatedly.) It was hard, in a good way. Everybody was welcoming. Nobody said, "Well, Jamie Gladly, I can see you've been hanging out on the couch all summer."

I didn't feel great afterward, and by the time I got home I was feeling decidedly icky-- dizzy and nauseated. I eased into the house and thought about sitting down on the steps by the back door, but instead I shuffled over to the couch and curled up there. I was okay as long as I lay still, but every movement brought a swell of nausea.

This doesn't sound like a happy post, right? Here's the happy part. 

Elwood came over and said, "Wow, you look beat. Can I get you anything?" "I'm going to be okay," I told him. "Just dizzy and nauseated."

Pete came over and said, "Mom, are you okay? Can I get you anything?" He patted me gently.

My 17yo came over separately and said, "Mom, are you okay? Do you need anything?"

Stella was playing outside, but when she came back in she checked on me right away: "Mom, are you okay? Do you need something?"

I told the kids that I thought I might just need some food, that I'd only eaten one meal that day and it had been a hard run. "That wasn't your best idea," said Pete, who fetched the tray they use for Mother's Day breakfast in bed and loaded it up. Pear, banana, Nuun, water-- all nice and digestible. "I brought you some [unintelligble] too," he said. He was aiming for "edamame," but wound up with something akin to "onomatopoeia." "I can get you some onomatopoeia if that would help!" exclaimed his older brother. "Bang! Drip! Crash! Splat! Cacophony! David Foster Wallace said cacophony is an example of onomatopoeia."

I ate the edamame appreciatively, and laughed at the onomatopoeia. I have been trying, you guys, to teach them what love looks like, and they have been paying attention. Love is feeding people. Love is trying to figure out what people need. Love is distracting people when they are suffering, making them laugh if you can. Meanwhile Elwood washed the dishes and set up the coffee for the next morning-- for him, love is service. 

Food didn't help; it seemed to be an attack of vertigo rather than low blood sugar. Elwood has used Epley's maneuvers on me successfully in past vertigo attacks, but they didn't do the trick last night. I went to bed, still wearing my sweaty running clothes because I was too nauseated to change into pajamas, and prayed for the best.

This morning I woke up free of nausea, feeling a little subdued but immensely grateful. I don't ever think (except in the wake of a vertigo episode) about what a gift it is to perceive my position in space easily: I am moving and that object is still; I am still and that object is moving. You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone, just like Joni Mitchell sang. So today I am attending to the many gifts I have been been given: a body that usually works pretty well here in its fifth decade, and a family full of people who love me more than I deserve.

Tweaks

1. Today is the last day of my sixth Whole 30, which means now I have to decide what comes next. I'm thinking the same thing I always think: it's so good for my energy and self-discipline (and waistline), and so ridiculously restrictive. Probably I add in legumes and some dairy, while keeping grains to a minimum and added sugar pretty much at zero. Probably.
2. I'm also thinking about work accountability. Time-tracking is a good discipline because it compels me to keep thinking about what I'm doing with my life, hour by hour. There's a Slack channel run by some Ravelry folks that might offer a good level of low-dose accountability. I've been hesitant to participate because they all seem like good pals. But probably "would you like an invitation to our Slack channel?" was not secret code for "just don't participate because that would be annoying." I think I'll give it a whirl.
3. In my ideal world, kid activities would not be more than 10 minutes away from my house. Pete's soccer team practices 15 minutes away, out in the middle of nowhere, and I will be very happy when soccer season is over. Stella is interested in taking gymnastics at a place that's 20 minutes away; I don't think I can do that cheerfully on a weeknight. Over the course of my time-tracking week I spent something like six hours driving, including my trip to visit Joe on Saturday. That's, like, three weeks' worth of driving squashed into one for me. There are so many people in this world who routinely drive six hours a week. Probably any of them reading this post are thinking that this sounds very silly. It's good to know your own limits, right? 

A day away

Today I left home at 6:30 to visit Joe at school. They were having an open house, so I spent the morning meeting most of his teachers. Joe joined me at lunchtime for Chipotle and a haircut. We walked around the grounds and talked and caught up and played a ridiculous game of ping-pong. We are both bad at ping-pong but we are an evenly matched kind of bad. He beat me 21-19, entirely because I cannot return his serves from the left side of the table.

You guys, it was so good to see him. I just wanted to feast my eyes on his face. This time I didn't cry when I left but I am definitely a little teary at the memory.

BUT ANYWAY. It is a great place. He is really happy there -- he misses us, but in a manageable way.

Here is a weird thought: in some ways, his entirely secular school seems more Catholic to me than our local Catholic high school. This is partly because of its diversity. It feels strange to me to be in an ethnic minority, but that's the way it is at his school. In the first class I visited there were 14 sets of parents represented. Only 4 of us appeared to be of European descent. It's also because of the value they place on curiosity and on learning as a lifelong unfolding -- not a set of hoops to jump through or boxes to tick off. Another issue is the socioeconomic climate. I am certain that there are plenty of wealthy families sending their kids there, but I asked him about how the vibe compared. At the local high school there's a troubling set of expectations: which subdivision you live in and which car you drive and where you go on vacation carry more weight than I wish they did. "It's nothing like that here," he said. "It's, like, the opposite of Gladlyville Catholic in that way."

The last time I mentioned the local Catholic high school I was grousing vaguely yet again -- that was really just about one teacher. They've given most of the advanced literature classes to a woman who seems to be lukewarm about literature. I wrote about her here. When she took attendance on the first day she said to my 17yo, "I haven't missed you," a pronouncement that sparked my ire last month. Most of the teachers there are trying hard to teach subjects they love. They are certainly not in it for the money. The trouble with a small school, though, is that it's hard to avoid the few bad teachers. And when you couple that with the money thing, and the political climate in which social justice is regarded with suspicion-- I don't really see us sending the younger kids there.

Today's trip was possible because Elwood agreed to cover everything at home: soccer + one-car kid-wrangling + Saturday housekeeping jobs. One of the few areas of friction in our marriage is that he doesn't do housecleaning. Today, though, he covered my jobs and made sure the kids did theirs, so I was free to luxuriate in my time with Joe. I miss that boy.

Thursday Thoughts

Today I was thinking about how much my emotional state affects my brain function. I went to work grumpy after one of those mornings, and I had a hard time shaking it off. I spent a couple of hours this afternoon reviewing a manuscript, and afterward I found myself struggling to focus. Some of the issue was that the article upset me: using structural equation modeling doesn't actually allow a person to assert causal relationships if the starting points are bogus. And if they are a racist kind of bogus-- ugh. I took my vexation to Twitter:

Before today I'd never reviewed a paper that made me want to say, "Do not use your scholarly platform to perpetuate systemic racism." Yikes.

— Jamie (@mostgladly) September 14, 2017

I'm curious about how malleable my capacity for cognitively challenging work might be. To complete this review I was firing on all cylinders, drawing alternate causal maps and scouring my SEM book and digging through the literature in search of other work in this area. And then afterward? My brain was all done. I had planned some lightweight tasks -- copying exams and grading participation -- but my brain had pretty much unplugged itself for the day. How much plugged-in time can I expect of myself, I wonder?

This evening I went to church to sing at a prayer service, and our music director talked me into singing with the choir this Sunday. More music ministry involvement has been on my mental list of "things I probably ought to do," but the in-person conversation nudged me into actually doing it. Stella and I haven't been reading very much together lately, but we got in half an hour's worth of Wind in the Willows. Will Rat and Mole find their way out of the snow-covered Wild Wood? Tune in tomorrow.

Still thinking about time use

Okay, you guys, I won't subject you to the line-by-line summary of my whole week, I promise, but this is the thing that's on my mind: I cannot know how many days remain to me. I would like to use them well. There are a lot of things to fit into those days.

Mornings are pretty consistent around here, but today I didn't have to teach at 8. I got everybody out the door (Stella rode with Elwood instead of walking today) and enjoyed a quiet 15 minutes with the NYT and a plate of eggs with greens and garlic.

On Tuesdays I don't teach and it's tempting to ease into the day-- check the Washington Post, maybe. But today I got a student started in my lab space right at 8 and then dove in. I spent an hour on a revision-related task I'd been avoiding and dreading (Dear Self: It almost always feels better to do the work than to avoid the work) and then a second hour on easier revisions. At 10:15 I sent a progress report to the writing challenge coordinator and took my 8x8 KenKen out to the quad.

I made a total hash of that KenKen, though, and returned to the office feeling annoyed rather than refreshed. (Do I have any fellow NYT 8x8 KenKen lovers out there? Today was a tough one, wasn't it?) Email + getting another student researcher started + posting two assignments for my undergrads took me up to noon, when I scurried over to the Newman Center for Mass. I had a quick chat with friends afterward, and then ate lunch, with a chapter of Sourdough to keep me company.

The search committee met at 1 and I was not able to escape being named co-chair. Thankfully I don't have to create the gridded schedules for our candidates. I am so bad at gridded schedules -- they are just a weird blind spot in my brain and I fear I would assign at least one candidate to bilocate or to meet with the dean at 11pm.

Then we arrive at the slumpy part of the afternoon, in which I flailed a bit after a meeting re: yesterday's drama. (Good news, though: I think we have a much more satisfactory plan than we did yesterday.) Purposeful break, says my 2:45 cell, and in it I finished that stinking KenKen. Email and grading and prep for my 8am class tomorrow took me up to 4:30, when I skipped on home.

At home: dealt with mail, talked to kids and husband, cooked. When my part of dinner was ready I put on running clothes and headed out with Stella. She scootered (and left me in the dust); I huffed along and lamented the way that fitness doesn't stick around if you're not making use of it.

After a long chatty dinner (6:30-7:15) I decided to make coconut chai rice pudding. This was not my best idea: only one kid liked it and it made a mess and the coffeepot overflowed in the process. It felt like a scramble there, cleaning up a mess and reminding kids to finish up the tasks that actually belong in the afternoon (laundry & tidying). But Stella was in bed at 8:15, and I am just about to slather some lotion on my face and call it a night.

I like to set up coffee for the morning so it's waiting for me at 5:30, but I do not want to wake up to coffee puddled on the floor. There's a rip in our reusable coffee filter that allows grounds to get into the valve and create, like, a tribute to Iguazu Falls. I should probably just make a French press in the morning since there are no disposable filters in the house. 

It's like the Time Log of J. Alfred Prufrock: do I dare to brew a pot? I can hear the Cubs fans calling, each to each. (It's September. The radio is always tuned to the Cubs game.)

I hope they will not call to me, actually, because I am going to SLEEP.

Day in the life

This week I am doing Laura Vanderkam's time-tracking challenge, a salutary exercise that I can never seem to sustain. But one week every now and again is better than no weeks, I suppose. I don't plan to tell you all about every hour of the week (everybody breathes a sigh of relief), but I am going to tell you some things about today and we'll see how it goes. 

5:30 wakeup today, with half an hour of quiet: Lauds, Job, Luke, Catechism on societal supports for individual vocations, quick journal entry
6-6:30, shower, subdue hair, make a smoothie
6:30-7, process email over breakfast, talk to kids about the day
7-7:20, flip through the Times, do the KenKens, check backpacks and steer kids out the door
7:20-7:45, walk part of the way with Stella and then up to the office; this is also rosary time for me
7:45-9:15, final preparations; teach grad students
9:15-10, meet with FOUR separate people, only one of whom was expected. One of these meetings is a closed-door affair about some brewing drama. Urgh. 
10-11:55, teach two undergrad classes
11:55-12:10, meeting with more drama, more URGHing
12:10-12:30, palate-cleansing KenKen (I might have a mild addiction to the 8x8 KenKen) + peek at hurricane updates on FB
12:30-1:30, brisk walk to fitness center, 35-min swim + the rest of the rosary, speedy shower
1:30-2, grab a sandwich, eat it while prowling through social media

(Hm, that's almost two hours away from work tasks in the middle of the day.)
(Also hm, I am bad at coming down after a morning full of teaching, and today I wound up finishing my important afternoon to-do items. Maybe there's a connection.)

2-2:30, another student meeting, a little flailing during the attempt to settle in and revise (flailing = irrelevant internet searches, skimming articles unproductively)
2:30-3:15, happy productive editing time that leaves me with 19 lines to tackle in my 41-line revisions table
3:15-4:15, kind of a frustrating hour, with two additional conversations about THE DRAMA, one of which is helpful but lengthy. Also checked in with kids and processed most of my work email from today during this window.
4:15-5:15, writing a quiz for the grad students and reviewing their readings for the week
5:15-5:30, peaceful amble home
5:30, enter the WHIRLWIND. Pete needs to leave immediately for soccer pictures. He is crying, worried about getting homework done since he also has Scouts. I am trying to update a financial thing that I forgot about but Pete needs me. We grab his sandwich/water/Scout stuff/homework stuff and hit the road.
5:40-6, try to settle Pete (pray/comfort/plan) while driving like the mom version of Mario Andretti to the soccer complex. Fill out the picture form in record time and hand it, panting, to Pete.
6-6:25, so we weren't actually late for pictures after all
6:25-6:45, after pictures, I take Pete to Panera so he can use their wifi for a quick homework session. I drink tea and read a Kindle sample of Sourdough while he works.
6:45-7:15, to Scouts, and then home
7:15-7:45, Elwood has made kebabs and four of us eat them with melon. I keep yanking myself away from thoughts of work drama.
7:45-8:15, I do the bedtime routine with Stella while the downstairs crew clears the table and starts the dishes
8:15-8:50, finish dishes, wipe flat surfaces, start laundry, get ready for bed, give the 17yo a check for renewing the minivan registration tomorrow, send the 20yo his ATM card with a hastily dashed-off letter
8:50-9:15, log time, chat distractedly with Pete and help him with math homework, pelt through the writing of a blog post and hope it is not too incoherent or inadequately edited
9:15-9:20, I cannot post a completely unedited blog post. Can't do it.
9:20-9:40 will be condensed compline and a few stolen moments of reading in bed

Huh, my inner editor says this post is kind of a mess but OH WELL I am publishing it anyway.

In which I throw up my hands

Remember when my kids quit chess club? The club was taken over by a mother who was outraged that I had checked in periodically with my kids over the course of their day at a chess tournament. I popped in regularly, making sure they were well stocked with food and water and morale and good manners, but I didn't spend the whole day on site. I wasn't even allowed in the room where they were playing. I had no idea that this would be considered problematic. But the new chess club organizer was aghast. That was completely inappropriate, she told my kid. (Disagreement #1: can kids manage separation from their parents? Disagreement #2: should you offer vehement criticism of a parent to a kid in the absence of overt abuse or neglect? Disagreement #2.5: especially if the parent is doing something that had never been a problem in years past, before Outrage Mom came on the scene?)

My husband went to the organizational meeting for chess club the following year, when Outrage Mom and her husband were running the show. You have to be on site at all times, they stressed, and you can't be in the chess club if you don't attend the tournaments, but it's okay. Because we have enough chargers for you and your kids. (Disagreement #3: how much downtime should kids spend on screens? Disagreement #4: how much downtime should parents spend on screens when they've taken time out specifically to be with the kids?)

We quit chess club.

Pete got a sleepover invitation from a classmate whose last name I didn't know. When he forwarded the email to me my heart sank a little: his last name is Outrage. I texted her for details, hoping she wouldn't remember that I'm the completely inappropriate Jamie Gladly. The kids are bowling first, she told me. Meet us at the bowling alley and we'll go to our house afterward.

I needed more information, though, so I texted her back. I was worried that a person who thought it was fine for kids to park themselves on their phones and tablets all day at chess tournaments might not object to phone-parking all night at her kid's birthday party.

I don't have a policy, she texted back. My kid knows I check his phone every day. The other guests are [nice boys, but all 12 and 13 years old]. Your son can just come for bowling.

The disagreements start piling up here, friends. #5 (this one is minor): In my view a technology policy is prudent, because it cuts down on arguments and just-this-once moments. #6 (this one is not minor): The idea of scrolling through my kids' texts every day to keep them in line makes me a little queasy. They have the right to hold private conversations until I have good reason to revoke it. #7 (also not minor): How many 12- and 13-year-olds haven't figured out how to cover their tracks with private browsing? Does it do any good to check his phone every day? #8 (the heart of the matter): I can be very fond of individual 12- and 13-year-old boys and also be skeptical of their ability to exercise prudence as a group at 2am with the wide-open internet available to them. I do not buy the argument that nice boys from nice families don't do dumb things late at night. #9: I think I would be very cautious about saying to an invited guest "If you don't like it, don't come."

There used to be consensus about this, didn't there? Keep kids off the internet in their bedrooms? Late-night internet access is bad for sleep hygiene and well-being? And yet I seem to be the curmudgeon here. The last time my 12yo had a sleepover the guest was deeply indignant about our house rule that phones stay downstairs at night. "But it's my phone," he insisted to my son.

Earlier this week I was thinking about an in-law relationship where I always seem to get it wrong with regard to parenting. A year ago I was too lax when I gave Stella permission to hang out some distance away from me. This time I was too strict -- I told Stella that she could not get up and cavort in the restaurant aisles, that she could not hang out on someone else's phone taking selfies, even though other kids in our party were doing those things. Suddenly I understood the reason behind the apparent inconsistency: I am confident that my kids can demonstrate adult-like behavior. They can be separated from me briefly and live to tell the tale. They can order from the adult menu and participate in the conversation. (And also? They can stay the hell out of the way in a busy restaurant aisle). I was being consistent; my in-law was also being consistent.

And maybe this sounds a little strange, but I think I am also setting adult expectations for my kids with regard to technology. I have a nighttime cutoff for recreational internet use myself (11pm), because having a rule keeps me from arguing with myself at the time of day when my willpower is depleted. I don't let myself buy Kindle books after the cutoff, because I make dumb purchases when I'm tired. I keep my phone in my room to read books and use the alarm, but there's no Twitter happening overnight. In the places where I know I am most likely to make bad decisions, I try to limit the number of bad decisions I can make. And if the kids disagree with my internet policy, they are free to do it differently after they leave home.

I didn't reply to Outrage Mom yet. I feel certain that I'll get it wrong, whatever I say.

Yours wearily,
The completely inappropriate Jamie Gladly

PS Please tell me how you handle this at your house, and why, and what the magic words are that I can say to Outrage Mom. And would you send your kid to the sleepover under the circumstances?

Filing things is not my charism

You know those moments in your life when you say to yourself, "This is a thing I should put in a safe place for some unspecified point in the future"? I am bad at those moments. My filing system is opaque to everyone but me, and frequently to me as well. For years the social security cards lived in a file called MOVE & DOCS, a name that did not suggest the presence of social security cards to the uninitiated. Those moments are the reason I am the world's leading ductwork bunyip blogger. (I have not actually verified this claim; feel free to leave the names of other contenders in the comments.)

The last time I switched purses, I downsized. I had to get rid of my pencil box and little notebook because they just wouldn't fit in my new purse. I remember holding the pencil box in my hand, thinking, "I will want to use this again when I buy my next purse." And then? I do not know. There is only a void encircled by frustrated question marks.

Past Me did not stash them in an old purse, or in the drawers with office supplies, or on the art supply shelf, or in her sock drawer. (I was getting a little desperate.) She did not put them on a school supply shelf, or in the laptop bag, or in the dishwasher. (Like I said, desperate.) It is possible that Past Me put them somewhere sensible, at least by her standards, and then Slightly More Recently Past Stella relocated them. In that case I'll only find them when we move out.

Putting things away does not seem like a super-complicated skill. I'm not trying to learn to play the oboe here, folks. I'm not pursuing the world's one-armed curling championship. And yet I am here to tell you: the fact that papers are filed, or objects are put away, does not mean that the filer/putter-away-er has done her job well.

Just ask my sleek and burping bunyip.

Receipts

About 20 years ago I organized all of my recipe clippings. There were dividers and topic headings and sub-categories. And then followed 20 years of reading about food and cooking for a family. Oh, and stashing kitchen equipment manuals, because I might need a refresher on how to adjust the peeler thickness on the apple peeler-corer-slicer. Or how to make jiu niang in my Instant Pot. Wouldn't want to forget that, would we?

It was a MESS, is what I'm saying.

As I tried to sort it out I realized that there were at least three different kinds of recipes in there. There are the ones I like and want to make again, like pan bagnat. (But I don't want to look it up on the NYT website, because that yellowing clip from August 2007 reminds me powerfully of picnics past. It stays.) Then there are the aspirational recipes, like Sri Lankan Dal and Stuck-Pot Rice and Lentils. I would like to be the kind of cook who knows exactly where to buy curry leaves and exactly how to coax a perfectly browned rice crust out of the bottom of the pan in one piece. Someday I would like to host a traditional New Orleans brunch, with Eggs Sardou and Crêpes Suzette.

Finally, abundantly, a little absurdly, there are the sentimental journey recipes. 

In the summer of 2011 my husband and oldest son went together to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. In theory, I was 100% on board with this trip. But they were gone for almost three weeks at a time when Stella was sleeping like a feral little batlet. Which is to say, hardly at all. Near the end of that time my mother-in-law drove to Gladlyville and we took the other four kids south to my aunt's farm. We met up with my mother, and I spent a few days surrounded by grown-ups who loved me and cooked for me. My aunt made this bean dish and it tasted so ambrosial in the moment that I asked her for the recipe. Her handwriting is like and yet not like my mother's. And when I hold this recipe in my hands I remember the fierce heat of that day, the noise of the cows cooling off around their pond, the blessed relief of being tended after two weeks of relentless tending. I can't recycle that, even if I will never make this bean bake.

"What's a can of real celery?" asked Elwood, who did not grow up reading the Riley sisters' handwriting. "It's red kidney," I told him.

When Joe was 6 or 7, judging by the spelling, he wrote up a recipe for Goo. It calls for 31 cups of marshmallows and 12 inches of chocolate, which you must mirowave for 20 seconds. "Well," said Elwood, "we'd have to find a mirowave if we wanted to make that one." But I will never recycle that recipe either.

Most precious of all, I found a cake recipe in my grandmother's handwriting. She's the person who taught me to bake as we turned out pound cakes together, Saturday after Saturday. It's the only thing I have in her handwriting in this house, though there may be some old letters lurking at my parents'. It is jotted on the back of a school lunch menu; a quick search of the day-month-year alignment suggests that it dates from either 1970 or 1964. I am never going to make a prune-spice cake that calls for 1 C. Wesson oil; it's just never going to happen. But when I brush my hand across those words, gently and with a full heart, it is a form of connection with my long-dead grandmother, who wrote those words on this paper when she was still strong and capable.

It's not only the recipes from people I know and love that have sentimental value for me. Back in 2002-3, Nigella Lawson wrote a column every other week for the NYT. That was the year we were living outside NYC, the year when I was so lonely and miserable. Every other Wednesday I would thump down the stairs happily, eager to read her column over a cup of coffee. I look at those clippings and I remember: there are always bright spots. Hard times do get better.

I suppose that a person who keeps blogging about how BAKING = LOVE is destined to have a hard time trimming down her recipe collection. And organization is just not my defining trait. (Can you imagine if organization were your defining trait? I'll pass on that one, thanks.) I do not know quite what I will do with this pile of potential and remembrance and useless old Vegetarian Times recipes taped to the back of recipes that I do actually want to keep. For tonight, I will pat my grandmother's recipe one more time, tenderly, and tuck the loose odds and ends back into the binder pockets.

People used to call them "receipts" instead of recipes, and there's something fitting about that name: receipts are confirmations that something has been given and received. I can't flip through these pages without remembering all the gifts I have been given.

In which I discover that I need a candy thermometer. Like, NEED a candy thermometer.

I finished Make the Bread, Buy the Butter on the way back to Gladlyville, and if you like books in which people get a little compulsive in the kitchen and tell you about the results with good humor and charm, this is a book that belongs on your shelf. I found it thorough but unpretentious, inviting but realistic. It made me want to go forth and can some jam.

I must have flagged a dozen pages with recipes I want to try. I do not expect that I will be curing my own prosciutto in the near future, or brewing my own bitters, but this book has reminded me that the world is wide and full of possibilities.

The author has a blog as well. I expect I'll spend some time prowling through her archives over the next few weeks.

Trainblogging

I am writing from a window seat on an Amtrak train into Chicago. I am going to see some in-laws and a niece and -- best of all -- both of the boys who no longer live in my house. I fear I will burst into tears when I see Joe, but I suppose we'll see. 

While I muster the gumption to dive into the last chronicle of Barsetshire (900-odd pages, and I'm still a little miffed about the end of #5), I am reading Make the Bread, Buy the Butter. I tried to insert a link for you, but dernit, in the process I lost the whole post and had to start over. No links in phone posts, I'm afraid. It's a lot of fun-- good writing about thoughtful cooking. 

The premise of the book is that she's advising the reader about whether it's more sensible to make or buy a whole raft of different foods based on cost, hassle, and taste. I agree with her judgments about taste, but our opinions on the hassle factor often diverge. She deems napoleons too fussy (despite a couple of recipes for other laminated pastries), but she says shucking oysters, even with a butter knife, isn't so bad. 

I myself would roll out a lot of pastry before I would serve oysters on the half shell at home. 

Make it stop

Tell me, please, about schools that handle communications with families wisely. Because I think there must be a better way.

Our district sends out automated calls to families multiple times per week. In theory, I'm on board with that. If there's a school closing or another kind of emergency, I want to know about it promptly. By all means, call all of the numbers you have on file.

Emergencies are rare, though. (Thankfully.) Unfortunately, our district handles all notifications like emergencies, blasting out information across every available channel. If there's an already-planned change to the next day's schedule -- one I put on my calendar when they told me about it last month -- I don't need to get four separate notifications about it. They call my landline (at dinnertime, natch). My cell buzzes from across the room. They call my office, even though it's 6:30 in the evening and I won't get the message until the following day, after the schedule change is in effect. And they send me an email notification for good measure.

This is excessive. Strangely, they never call my husband, even though his work number is current in their system. Is there an automated decision process somewhere, some algorithm deciding that five notifications would be a bridge too far? Or is it institutional sexism, in which the assumption is that moms handle school issues and are more likely to do work that can be interrupted?

I also get four separate notifications every time a school official wants to remind families about something. Go to the restaurant that's giving us a portion of their proceeds tonight! Come to the dance tomorrow! Wear nice clothes for pictures on Friday! Listen while I read aloud the policy on lunch accounts or tank tops or both!

I do not need four separate notifications about any of those things.

It's unlikely but not impossible that I'll take the whole family to Noodles for a school fundraiser. But I really seriously do not need four separate notifications about things that don't pertain to my family at all. The junior high vice-principal is the worst offender. The first time I got a menacing message saying, "Parents, this message is going out to families whose students have received multiple detentions this term," I was pretty alarmed. I didn't know about even one detention! What could have happened? 

What happened, and what keeps happening, is that the vice-principal is having a hard time figuring out the messaging system. Instead of targeting the families whose kids have received multiple detentions, or the families whose students are actually on the delayed bus, he sends his messages out to the whole school. That's nine hundred families, each getting four notices (or more? almost all dads have cell phones, right? even though my husband is trapped in the last millennium searching fruitlessly for a pay phone?), when the target audience was a tenth or a twentieth that size.

I don't even listen when he calls these days. In fact, the district has taught me that the best use of my time is to ignore all of their calls, to assume they're calling about a minor issue that I can deal with at my convenience, or never.

It's like a newer version of a 1990s car alarm. At first we all whipped our heads around -- emergency! Then we all learned to disregard them -- even if they were telling us something worth listening to.

This fall has brought a record number of email contacts telling me that the schools are using new third-party sites which require me to sign up for effective communication with my children's teachers. Also, the teachers can choose which platform they prefer, so I'll need to check multiple platforms for optimal results. Also, Google Classroom is going to send me weekly updates that describe every assignment my seventh-grader is doing. What would my mother have done if my seventh-grade teachers had wanted her to review every assignment I did in a week, I wonder? Something emphatic, I am certain. Some days I think 1982 took place on a different planet.

I am having a wicked thought: maybe all of the frustrated Gladlyville parents could make a pact: we could filter our unwanted email notifications so that they skipped our inboxes and were forwarded to the technology-challenged vice-principal at my son's junior high. Probably then he'd be too busy with his delete key to spray out grumpy messages to the wrong audience. Win!