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Posted at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
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.
Posted at 09:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
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!
Posted at 10:02 PM in Music | Permalink | Comments (0)
Welcome to my blog, where I mostly natter on about my life with five kids. Occasionally (not very often, because teenagers keep a person humble) I dispense parenting advice. Occasionally I write about other things, like books. (Those are probably affiliate links in posts about books. If you click through and buy something, Amazon will pay me a little bit of money.) Or faith or food or my secret strategy for dealing with annoying kid behavior or whether I am fit to be a mother. Also: who is the mystery intruder? And: does stay-at-home mothering rot the brain?
If you are worried about slow weight gain in a breastfed baby, this is my most-viewed post — hope it's helpful to you. Want to read more? I have some favorite old posts linked here, or you can find my archives here.
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