Light and Momentary

Speedy thoughts from a speeding train

It turns out I am bad at dread. 

 

You wouldn’t think I’d be bad at dread, given how much I practice, but you’d be wrong.

 

I was awarded a small grant to fund a 2016-17 research project, but it’s been kind of a thorn in my side the whole way through. Too homogenous, too small. The people who funded me are measuring my research outcomes, though, so I applied to present my findings at a Chicago conference.

 

I worried about a lot of things. Would it be too research-y for clinicians? Would the frustrations that plagued me be screamingly obvious to other researchers? Would anybody even show up, given that I gave it a title that seemed super-boring in hindsight?

 

Mysteriously, perplexingly, I never once worried about the weather. In February. In Chicago. Which turned out to be awful. 

 

I don’t have big public-speaking anxiety, but I have huge vast distressing winter travel anxiety. Somehow the red-alert travel anxiety snowballed over the minor speaking anxiety and morphed into an undifferentiated avalanche of misery. I was pretty much a walking stressball from Wednesday on.

 

This, my friends, was not reasonable. This was a low-stakes undertaking. The funding body wanted to know that I was speaking ata conference, but they will never know how the talk went. The conference attendees were free to slip out to attend another session if mine didn’t meet their needs. There would be no one standing by with a gong to end the talk prematurely, having judged it to be irredeemable.

 

Spoiler alert: it was all fine. Travel to Chicago took a little longer than expected but nothing outrageous (shout-out to Amtrak); getting around the city on foot and on the el was squelchy but otherwise unremarkable. (My boots are bearing witness to the city’s efficiency in getting salt on the streets: they are so heavily encrusted with salt that they look like some kind of geological anomaly. It wouldn’t surprise me if a deer walked up to me and started licking them. (Well, okay, it would surprise me a little.))

 

The talk was also fine. People laughed in all the right places; people stayed put until the end. OH YOU GUYS, you will not believe this: a woman who looked to be in her 60s TOOK A PHONE CALL during my talk. I don’t mean she said “hello?" while scooting discreetly out of the room. I mean HAD AN ACTUAL (BRIEF) CONVERSATION. They booked me into a room that could probably seat 400 people — a ridiculously huge space. She was sitting about a third of the way back. I was in the middle of a slide when I heard someone making a statement. I paused, thinking it might be a member of the audience asking me a question, but it was this person having a full-volume phone conversation, loud enough for me to hear what she was saying from the podium.

 

I stopped in the middle of my sentence. I looked at her with head tipped on one side, a wondering expression upon my face. She stayed put, apparently oblivious to my gobsmackedness. She hung up and I soldiered on.

 

Phones, man.

 

Anyway. In the professional conferences I attend there is a fair amount of drift. If you don’t like a talk, you can get up and go somewhere else. I’m going to take it as encouraging feedback that I did not have a drift issue. 

 

Afterward I was so relieved it was over. I had originally planned to stay for the whole afternoon and take a late train back to Gladlyville. But I decided instead to jump back on the el. I had a late luxurious Greektown lunch of lamb and artichokes in avgolemono, and then I changed my train ticket so I could get home a little earlier.

 

I am tired. More soon.

R8D31

In Whole 30 circles people use shorthand to talk about where they are in the Whole 30 and how many times they've done it: a newbie one week in might title a post R1D7 for Round 1, Day 7. I finished my eighth Whole 30 yesterday, and I am in the same place I always am when I finish it.

Pro: I am productive and happy and I've lost half of the pounds Donald Trump loaded onto my behind with his figurative Bobcat of incompetence and would-be autocracy (and money-laundering racist sexual-assault-justifying WHOA I MIGHT NEED A LITTLE RESCUE REMEDY HERE).

Con: I am ready for a little more variety in my diet, and my family is even readier.

The Whole 30 is deeply weird. I've said some version of this before but I think it every dang time: it just doesn't make sense to me that the lectins in my legumes are keeping me from being my most productive self. And yet-- something in that combination of restrictions unchains Productive Jamie from wherever she lives in between Whole 30s, and says to her "go get 'em!"

My husband is more supportive about all this Whole 30 business than I would have predicted, but he thinks it must be a placebo effect. I...don't buy it. One day during my second Whole 30 I was dealing with a particularly stressful iteration of the unbloggable issue most likely to launch me face-first into the Pit of Despair, but I had no urge to sit on the couch and eat Pringles by the handful until I felt marginally better. Instead I marched upstairs and brought down the mending pile, and I angry-mended until I reached the bottom and felt marginally better. You guys, there were, like, strata in that mending pile. We're talking years' worth of mending. The geologists are probably still irritated with me for disturbing a relevant artifact. Does Productive Jamie care about hypothetical geologists? No, she just wants the mending done. 

Here is another weird Whole 30 con: Productive Jamie is not necessarily the most understanding version of me. In general the Whole 30 makes me sweeter and more even-keeled. I can say, hey, it's no big deal to spill a glass of water at the dinner table. I made brownies for the kids tonight because I knew I wouldn't be tempted to eat them. But a few years ago when my husband agreed to write the parent portion of an Eagle Scout application I was furious about what seemed like procrastination. "Why is this taking so long?" huffed Productive Jamie. In hindsight it is obvious to me that if you ask someone who hates to write to complete a writing task with a very soft deadline, some delay is normal.

So. Onward. I have restraint issues with sweets, so it works best for me to avoid them entirely except on special occasions. (Like Christmas-and-Easter corporate special occasions, not like I-finished-the-grading solo special occasions that then morph into I-read-two-emails-that-totally-counts special occasions.) I hate to say that I think gluten makes a difference in the way my brain works, but alas, I think gluten makes a difference in the way my brain functions. So I'll mostly avoid it, but not worry about legumes and brown rice.

The priority is being a calm and happy version of myself, living out my vocation faithfully. I also won't complain if the remaining Donald Trump weight disappears.

The Flute Report

I played my flute at Mass again today, with an expanded set of music. Somebody -- Mary, maybe? -- asked me to say more about the flute I bought. It's an intermediate Gemeinhardt, open-hole. 

I had the idea that I would just hit the ground running. I used to be good at flute; I would be good at flute again. It's going a little more slowly than I thought it might. At first the instrument and I didn't always agree about which octave we were going to be in. This is mostly resolved, but I am still working on the adjustment to an open-hole instrument. This flute has an inline G key (my old beginner flute had an offset G), and it's going to take me some time to feel comfortable with covering the open G key since the hand position is a little different. 

The thing that is most surprising to me is the way that my brain is clunkety-clunking across multiple key changes. The Mass parts are almost entirely in F, and I found myself needing to be very deliberate with myself about the other pieces I was playing. It didn't always work. I issued myself a firm reminder before the Lamb of God, which modulates. "Don't forget," I told myself, "TWO SHARPS." If you have any music background you are wincing at that reminder: if you're playing in F and you modulate to G, there's only one sharp. This was painfully apparent when I played a C-sharp, loud and clear, where a C-natural was called for.

The directors are so kind and encouraging, though, that I could just shake it off. They asked if I'd come back and play again tomorrow morning, actually, but I declined.

**

I am determined not to let perfectionism get in the way of joy.

Today I was sitting quietly and holding my flute between songs, feeling it cool gradually as the warmth of my breath dissipated. And maybe this is odd, but it made me think about the goodness of post-Incarnation life: I have been given the gift of breath, and I can use it to make the air dance around me. I am pulling from a set of skills I learned as a young girl -- many many hours spent figuring out how to unite fingers and breath and tongue and brain into one coordinated effort -- and when it goes well my whole heart sings through them: you alone are the Most High Jesus Christ!

I was thinking too about the mystery of hearing. You never say to yourself, "Okay, that note I'm hearing is causing my eardrum to vibrate a thousand times per second"; you probably don't say to yourself, "Wow, it's so cool that my cochlea can do a sort of Fourier transform thing." You probably don't imagine the physical movement of the air being converted into electrical energy, racing down your eighth cranial nerve, traveling to your inferior colliculi and your temporal lobes. I am thinking about young Samuel, saying, "Speak, Lord, your servant is listening" -- and about the gift of the listening itself.

That's the treasure of acoustic music, right? We use our bodies and our instruments to direct the very air around us to give glory to God; we use our ears to pull meaning from the dancing air. I say, with fingers and heart and breath, glory to God!, and you can hear it and sing along with me: glory in the highest!