Light and Momentary

Seven Quick Takes: Post-Walnut/Pre-Magnolia Version

1. The backyard walnut tree is entirely bare, but the saucer magnolia leaves have just barely begun to turn. It was downright chilly today, chilly enough that I wished I'd had my Darth Vader coat instead of my it's-not-that-cold coat. (I named it thus because it is long, black, and sweeping, not because it has enabled me to battle any Jedi knights or upend any empires.)
2. Though I'm telling you: I'd like to upend some empires about now. This Roy Moore news is weighing me down. More accurately, the reactions to the Roy Moore news are weighing me down. 
3. Shall we talk about escapes from the news? Have you seen Murder on the Orient Express? I see very few movies, but I might see that one. It's been so long that I don't remember anything about the story at all.
4. I have also been escaping into my book, The Wine Lover's Daughter. I only have about 18 minutes of escaping left to do, though.
5. Pandora is playing me a whole slew of favorite songs. Is it attempting to woo me back, do you suppose, since I've been away for so long? I have a station called Folk Radio, with a mix of Celtic folk and US indie folk as its anchors. Here, said Pandora, would you like to listen to Kate Rusby covering Patsy Cline's You Belong To Me? Google is telling me Patsy didn't write that song, but in my mind she owns it anyway. 
6. Pete cooked most of dinner tonight. He announced that he was hungry, and that he'd like to have chili. Go for it, said Elwood, and he did. He thought perhaps we needed some cooked carrots on the side. Elwood whipped up a pan of cornbread to go alongside and pulled a salad out of the fridge. I, meanwhile, lolled on the couch and read Prisoner of Azkaban to Stella.
7. One more chapter to go. What will Cornelius Fudge say about the unexpected turn of events that awaits him on the seventh floor? What will the Dursleys say when they learn about Harry's godfather? She can't wait to find out.

Third time's the charm

I resubmitted the Heartbreak Paper today. 

Do you remember the sad tale of the Heartbreak Paper? Four years ago I gave an interdisciplinary conference talk that I wanted to turn into a paper. I emailed one of the leading lights in Discipline #2 and said, "Hey, would you like to write a paper with me?" To my surprise and delight she said, "Sure! You write the first draft and I'll write the second." 

In the spring of 2014 we submitted it to a Discipline #1 journal; in the summer, we received a cautious revise/resubmit decision. Oh, boy, did I revise. Hours and hours and hours and hours invested in making the changes that the reviewers requested. Almost exactly three years ago, I resubmitted it. In the winter of 2015 it was rejected. When I got the decision email I closed my office door and cried.

Because it's an interdisciplinary paper, it was hard to find a good alternate home for it. Also, I was crushed like a weeping bug who was paralyzed by impostor syndrome. One really sad bug is what I'm saying here. But I kept looking, and sent it off in 2016 to a lower-tier journal that had responded favorably to my initial query.

Rejected again.

In 2017 I got some outside feedback on the Heartbreak Paper. I thought about pitching it as a book chapter. I thought about self-publishing it on my university's online archive. I thought about interdisciplinary journals. But dernit, you guys, I wrote this paper for service providers in Discipline #1, and they won't read it if it's in some backwater interdisciplinary journal that wants to charge them $45 for the privilege. And do you know what? They need to read this paper. I am the most self-critical person you have never met, and yet every time I come back to this paper I think, "Wow, this is an excellent paper. This is the best damn thing I have ever written for an academic audience and it deserves to be published."

So. I reworked it for still another publication. This one has a much lower word limit, so I hacked away great chunks of the paper. "Killing my darlings," said my email to the writing challenge coordinator. "Still killing those darlings," said the next email. Today I extracted the remains of the paper from the bleeding wreckage of dead darlings scattered round about and sent it off into the ether.

And if it gets rejected again, I might have to set something on fire. Wish me luck. Or pass the matches. One of the two.

Data Point

I was looking back through my old November archives, wondering when the post-time change blahs abated in past years. Anybody else battling those this week-- lethargy, inertia, feelings of futility? I know it won't persist until spring, but I can't tell much about when it might lift. So this is mostly a note for my future self: day 4 of standard time, still feeling like a bear whose alarm clock keeps clanging when she ought to be hibernating.

The only book I'll ever buy from Amazon's "Wine" category

I would read pretty much anything Anne Fadiman wrote. Your Flossing Guide, a thousand-page lipogram? Sign me right up.

She is best known as the author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which you should go and buy right now if you happen not to have read it. I'm serious: stop reading this post and go buy that book. Oh, man, I am trying to tell you why you should buy it and sounding like a 22-year-old marketing assistant unleashed on the backlist with inadequate supervision. Keenly observed. Beautifully written. Both sympathetic and unapologetic. And ooohhhh, it has the most gorgeous haunting ending.

She is also the author of two slim books of essays, and I love them both as well. Ex Libris is about books and reading; At Large and At Small is more wide-ranging. They are on the short list of books I pull down from the shelf when I am feeling unsettled or unhappy because I know they will calm me down. (Oh, that would be a fun comments discussion! What's on your personal list of books you return to when you need a little comfort? Mine also includes the C.S. Lewis space trilogy and...I'm trying to think what else. These days I probably refresh Twitter instead of flipping through a favorite book. Modern life, man.)

Anyway: I was thrilled when I saw that Anne Fadiman had a new book coming out this fall. You might have seen it too -- her essay on taste and taste buds, excerpted from her forthcoming memoir, was all over my social media feeds for a few days. I pre-ordered the book about twelve seconds after I heard of its existence. Today's the launch day, and I am launching myself into bed with my Kindle and my shiny new copy of The Wine Lover's Daughter. I'll report back.

Joyful Noise

A couple of weeks ago I sort of accidentally agreed to do a stressful thing that wound up being really fun.

I got an email from a woman at church, asking me if I'd sub for her in the choir on October 22. Sure, I said. I had put "sing with choir" on my list of things I wanted to do in October. 

Except, oops, she wanted me to sub for her on October 22 and October 29 too. "You can do both dates, right?" she wrote back. Sure, I said.

Then the director contacted me. "We're going to be at a wedding that weekend," she said. "Can you lead the ensemble? And play the guitar?" Sure, I said. There are always several musicians at that Mass and I assumed I'd be an auxiliary guitarist.

Except, oops, it turned out I was going to be the only instrumentalist, which felt like a whole 'nother ball of wax. So I practiced and stressed and sent out some worried messages that said PLEASE PRAY FOR ME TO PLAY UNOBTRUSIVELY.

And do you know, it went really well and I had a lot of fun. The following week, when all I had to do was show up and sing, was even better.

I miss making music with other people. There's a particular flavor of satisfaction that comes from working out harmonies and arrangements together. Near the end of our rehearsal the director was trying to play the psalm in 4/4 while another vocalist and I counted emphatically in 3/4. I miss that kind of laughing-out-loud group problem-solving.

But I don't love a lot of contemporary Christian music, which is mostly what our choirs sing. (Can we talk about the song Yearn? Like, what does that second verse even mean? "Your joy is mine / Yet why am I fine / With all my singing and bringing grain / In light of Him." So many questions. Or All In All, with that wretched couplet: "Seeking you as a precious jewel / Lord to give up I'd be a fool.")

The choir directors are expanding the options for instrumentalists, a development that intrigues me. I'd like to get the pickup in my guitar replaced, because although it's ostensibly an electric-acoustic, it's really mostly acoustic these days. I'd like to figure out why my flute isn't working right, because playing flute with the choir sounds like a lot of fun.

The practice sessions for instrumentalists are supposed to start up in the new year. I can get those repairs scheduled between now and then, right? Those are errands worth running.

While we're talking about music, tell me the most cringeworthy lyrics you've heard in a contemporary Christian song. Or hey, you can cringe at a traditional hymn if you prefer. I'm an equal opportunity kind of cringer.

Well-regulated

I didn't know about the connection between mass shootings and domestic violence until recently. I am wondering if targeting gun ownership among men with a history of domestic violence (or women, though I can't think of a single mass shooting perpetrated by a woman) would be an effective strategy for reducing mass shootings. It seems likely to be more palatable to gun rights advocates than the blanket proposals trotted out by gun control advocates after every one of these incidents.

For 20 years federal law has prohibited gun ownership among individuals convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence. That law, though, leaves some worrisome loopholes. Can we muster the political will to close them? 

I am confident that a small subset of Second Amendment advocates also argue for the right of a man to physically chastise his woman, but surely (surely!) it is a marginalized subset without much political power.

In a moment of optimism I wrote the following sentences--

The auto industry doesn't lobby for drunk drivers to retain the right to car ownership. Why would the gun industry argue that people with an established history of violence should continue to have access to lethal weapons?

--and then I started poking around a little in hopes of not sounding like an ignoramus. It turns out that the NRA does want to preserve access to lethal weapons for individuals with an established history of violence. It turns out that the "well-regulated" descriptor that seems so prominent to me in the text of the Second Amendment means something very different to gun rights advocates than it does to me. So let's just scratch that auto industry comparison.

Even so, I will be contacting my legislators tomorrow to ask them to consider this angle. If you are casting about for something to do after yet another mass shooting followed by yet another round of "our thoughts are with you," join me.

A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump

I used to think self-rising flour -- flour with added salt and baking powder -- was an old-lady kind of purchase. My mother only ever bought it by mistake. But moving to Scotland changed my mind about flour. (And healthcare too, but that's another post entirely). There's a much stronger home baking culture in Britain, and self-raising* flour, as they call it there, lowers the bar between a busy home baker and a pan of biscuits. True, it doesn't take very long to measure out salt and baking powder, but it's quicker still just to weigh up** one ingredient and pitch it in.***

Earlier this week soul cake recipes were flitting across my feeds, and all of the ones I saw were unleavened. Blech, I thought to myself, that sounds pretty hockey-puck-y. Last night a Twitter pal and I agreed to test this recipe in the morning. I split my butter-sugar-egg mixture in half, and put self-raising flour in one bowl and plain flour in the other. It wasn't a perfect test -- I didn't divide quite evenly and needed a splash of milk to moisten the leavened batch.

So I can't say if it was the milk or the leavening, but the cakes with self-raising flour were browner as well as airier and less crumbly. They were the hands-down winners among the kids, although Elwood insisted the unleavened ones were all right. (He has a contrarian streak, does Elwood. He also thought I was telling him to get out of bed in order to try my "tuna soul cakes," so perhaps the warm dried-cherry-scented hockey pucks were delicious in comparison to his fish-flavored imaginings.)

Kids prefer the leavened version. pic.twitter.com/937Zp1XmUg

— Jamie (@mostgladly) November 4, 2017

If you decide to whip up some soul cakes here in the month of the dead, I suggest a little leavening. Unless, of course, penitential baked goods are part of your prayer and sacrifice plan.

*Self-raising is a better name than self-rising, IMHO. The flour raises itself. It can't rise itself, since rise is an intransitive verb.

**Have you taken the kitchen scale plunge? Do it! A few batches' worth of uncertainty and you'll never go back, I predict.

***Does it seem a little inconsistent that I am pro-SR flour and anti-Bisquick? The difference is the fat. In order to make Bisquick cheap and shelf-stable, they use shortening + additives. Butter forever, that's my motto. Love might make the world go round, but butter greases the axis****.

****Light & Momentary: come for the mom chat, stay for the alternative geophysics.

Rodent vs. Gladlys, Round 2

There is something nocturnal in the wall. Scritch-scratch, it says in the small hours. Scritch-scratch, pitter-patter.

Oh no, I say in return. Take your scritch-scratching pitter-pattering self back into the great outdoors where it belongs. Do not scritch-scratch or pitter-patter in my house, buckarodent.

It's cold out there in the great outdoors, say the little claws. It's warm in here. Scritch-scratch. Pitter-patter.

We wonder if it gnawed through the zip-ties on the roof to make its way back in via the vents, but we don't know yet. The amount of daylight available after Elwood's arrival home from work is dwindling and our evenings have been busy this week. I also wonder whether it made its way in through the spot where the power lines enter the house -- the position is right even if the ramifications (chewed insulation, 1920s wiring, aaaiiiieeee!) are horrifying.

So. Tomorrow, if the roof is dry, we'll see if we can figure out whether our impromptu screens are still in position. (That's the uxorial we, where "we" = Elwood. In the royal we, one person refers to herself as if she were two people. In the uxorial we, the wife sounds like she's referring to two people but she actually means one. As in, "My husband probably can't wait to tackle that job! He loves rodent duty!")

I'm scritch-scratching my head, though, about what else to do. I tried calling the power company when I got home from work, but they don't handle non-emergency calls on the weekends. (I recognize that the emergent nature of the scritch-scratch pitter-patter situation is probably less persuasive to the folks at the power company than it is to me.) How can I ascertain safely whether a squirrel has gnawed its way in through their snarls of wires? Is it the homeowner's responsibility if a death-defying rodent breaches whatever security measures they put in place? (Probably. Almost certainly.)

I imagine myself luring our visitor out of the walls with a giant bucket of almond butter, and sealing up its route of entry with an oversized caulk gun or perhaps a nice gobbet of Acme cement.

Maybe not the Acme cement.

De-wobblifying

Last night I was hit by a stomach bug. It wasn't entirely unexpected -- Stella was out of school on Monday after a rough night, and I am the person in the family most likely to pick up somebody else's stomach bug. (My husband never gets them. Never. Once he felt a little queasy after a bug had ravaged the rest of the family like a juggernaut oozing chyme and bile, but it passed quickly. Is that fair?) So I am remembering that I am dust, and feeling grateful for quiet innards, and hoping to get caught up quickly.

#BL05

It’s November, y’all. Thirty days, thirty posts.