Light and Momentary

Lean Season in Bunyip Territory

Our heroine came home from the Easter Vigil and headed to the basement to assess the Easter basket situation. 

Now you guys, our heroine's superpower is not organization. But in her basement there are three big green bins on a shelf. One is for Advent, one is for Christmas, and the third is for Easter. On this night, however, when the angelic crowd is exulting*, there was a moment of woe in Gladlyville: there are only two baskets in the Easter bin. 

There will be seven children expecting Easter baskets tomorrow, and seven is more than two.

Where, our heroine would like to know, and also she would like to switch to first person because there's only so much third person that her patient readers can be expected to tolerate, are the other Easter baskets? Over the years we have accumulated a bunch of them. How did they all go walkabout?

I suspect that they, like other walkabout-ers before them, met the cruel fate awaiting some of those who brave the outback: I suspect they were snared by the bunyip.

Our bunyip, you might have noticed, has been keeping it on the down-low lately. Our last bunyip post, I do believe, was last Easter evening. (And we still haven't found that egg. Can you even believe it?) There've been long lonely days down there in the ductwork, it seems, and he sought consolation where he could find it. Perhaps upon his last visit to the bunyip doctor he was advised to eat more fiber.

While I can be glad in the abstract about lower rates of bunyip cancer, I also need some Easter baskets pronto. 

*Did you ever wonder why the Exsultet is not the Exsultent? Why would there just be a single entity exulting? I came home and looked it up: it's because the entity is the angelica turba caelorum, the heavenly crowd of angels.

Happy Easter, all. The Lord is risen, which is all that matters. Even if do we wind up putting the goodies in plastic grocery bags.

Quia per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum

A blessed Good Friday to you, my friends.

Thursday Thoughts

Hi, friends, I hope you're having a blessed Holy Thursday. I wanted to take the kids around town to the different altars of repose, but we discovered that our parish's Mass is far and away the earliest. Our pastor likes to go to bed at about 8pm, so...we drove through a lot of full parking lots outside churches where the altar of repose was still sitting empty, waiting for Mass to end.

**

One of the things that has been making my work a little overwhelming lately is that I'm applying for an external grant. This is entirely an optional undertaking. I will get bonus points for applying; there's no pressure to get external funding. It's a lot of work to put one of these applications together. 

I'm motivated in large part by the desire to teach a little less. I love teaching; don't get me wrong. The sweet spot for me is two classes per semester, and the usual load at my institution is three. Seeking external funding is the most straightforward strategy I can think of for securing a course release and freeing up more time for research and writing.

So I'm writing a grant. 

Today one of my collaborators sent me an unexpected email. She said, "Jamie, I can't bear to look at these reviewer comments on my rejected grant proposal. Can you summarize them for me so I have a bit of a buffer?" I said, "OF COURSE and also I will ask you to return the favor next year."

The timing feels 100% providential, because her reviewers are saying some of the same things about her proposal that they said about my last proposal. "...Oh," I thought to myself, "they would like it if I identified a mentor to walk me through this unfamiliar modeling strategy. And power calculations. They love power calculations."

So today I drafted an email to someone who has published using a version of the analysis strategy I'm proposing, to see if she might be willing to be named in my proposal as a potential resource. (She has appeared in these pages before, actually -- I'm asking Dr. No. We'll see if she lives up to her name.) I have been working on the letter of support requests, wincing a little as I send them off.

Tonight at Mass I kept having to yank my thoughts back to the church, to remember that God can transform humble elements offered freely. Bread and wine, absolutely. Also time, and hope, and effort, and uncertainty.

Nest, Refilled

According to my mental calendar Alex was coming home for Easter on Thursday of Holy Week -- Thursday the 28th. So I was a little surprised when he contacted me this afternoon to say that the airline has mislaid his bag, and then my mental calendar sproinged into alignment with the actual calendar. The 28th is actually the Wednesday of Holy Week, just in case your own mental calendar was similarly catawampus.

This means -- huzzah! -- that all five of my children are sleeping under my roof tonight. I picked Alex up at the train station this evening and brought him home to be fussed over. I took a picture of the five kids all in a row, chatting and playing online chess with each other, but you know that thing I was just saying yesterday about terrible family pictures? It's a terrible family picture. It fails to capture the pleasures of our wide-ranging conversation, which at one point swirled around in an unexpected eddy while I cautioned the boys against trying to sprout almonds in heavy water. When they were small, it was "don't ride the laundry basket down the stairs"; now it's "don't pretend deuterium is good for you or your almonds."

Right at this moment the three oldest boys are laughing too hard to talk. I am heading off to sleep with their laughter in the background. Good night, friends.

Worth it

Joe was looking for a specific picture. In the spring of 2015, right after he discovered the Great British Bake-off, he made a multi-layered chocolate-orange cake with very little help from me. He was thinking about making it again for Easter, but he wanted to look at the first version.

I told him it would be in one of the albums near the end of the album train, but when he brought back a few of them to the living room, we all vanished down the photo rabbit hole. I grouse every summer about making photo albums, but they are such a delight once the work is done.

Observations:

1. We take a lot of pictures of people's celebratory cakes around here.
2. We are really, really bad -- laughably bad -- at family pictures. The Christmas picture outtakes are ridiculous.
3. You know how those 19th-century daguerrotypes are full of scowling people, as if picture-taking were too important for frivolities like smiling? My children all seem to go through a NO FRIVOLITY phase.
4. When you have a quirky family, you wind up with quirky photo albums.

Fred Flintstone's New Socks

Tra la laaaa! I have finished the socks I was making for my 18yo.

He is such a sweetheart -- he understands that man-sized socks in twisted rib contain a sizable fraction of my recent leisure-time hours, and he appreciates the effort.

I ran into a minor difficulty with resizing the pattern: if you  make the pattern repeat wider, it takes longer to work through each motif. I didn't want to interrupt the pattern in the middle of a repeat (quelle horreur!), which left me with fewer options for moving from foot to toe. The result: a toe that is squarer that I might like it to be. I prefer it when sock toes taper more gradually.

But you know, if my 18yo is ever traveling in Bedrock, his square-toed socks will blend right in. Nothing else that he is wearing will blend in and-- wait, they never wore socks in Bedrock, did they? Well, IF Fred Flintstone ever winds up in Gladlyville, he will need some socks and these might work for him.

When I was in the fourth grade my family moved from Metairie, LA to a tiny town in Kentucky. It was so small that to field a marching band they recruited kids from the grade school and the junior high as well as from the high school. I started rehearsing with the band that winter, and marched with them that following summer and fall. One of our songs was the Flintstones theme. You guys, that was THIRTY-NINE years ago and I can still play the Flintstones theme song on my flute. Memory is a strange thing.

So if you spy Fred Flintstone wandering around forlornly, looking for a brontosaurus burger, point him in the direction of Gladlyville. I can play him his song, and I bet that my son, if asked nicely, will consider sharing his socks.

Day of Rest

Work is bananas right now, and it will not improve over the next six weeks. I just need to put my head down and plow through. Sundays are for resting, though, and I am writing down the restful things we did today so I will not succumb to the false belief that life is full of hard work and nothing else just now.

This morning I slept until almost 7 and woke up to fresh hot coffee. I was a few days behind on on my BIble/CCC-in-a-year plan, but I caught up and did 3 KenKens besides. Elwood made us a glorious brunch, and after feasting on bacon and eggs and hash browns and homemade green salsa and melon and grapefruit, the six of us headed off to confession. (Our parish offers confession 7 days a week. Isn't that cool?) Our pastor offered me a perfectly delivered nubbin of gallows humor in response to my confession, and I am still chuckling to myself about it.

Going to Mass straight after confession = THE BEST, and also being there early meant that I could chat with a pal and say yes to a ministry in need of last-minute assistance. And straight after Mass, do you know what I did? I took a 90-minute NAP in the golden March sunshine. Look, you tell me to rest, I'm going to rest. Total rule-follower here.

(Do you have that dream in which you discover new rooms or wings in your house? This time it was a bathroom in the space where our disused chimney is hidden behind a wall.)

Stella asked if she could watch Princess Bride (answer: of course!) and I re-read the beginning of Victory of Eagles with "I am not left-handed either!" in the background. I ran an errand that offered me a delightful chunk of one-on-one time with Joe, who is home for spring break, and afterward I went for a lovely endorphin-buzzy 4-mile run. I came home to a dinner prepared and cleaned up by my husband, and also chocolate chip cookies prepared and cleaned up by Joe, and a pleasant game of Jenga with a neighbor kid.

I read some of my new Blair Braverman book while Stella fell asleep next to me, and now things are quiet downstairs. Maybe I will read a little more Victory of Eagles, which makes me laugh, or a little more Blair Braverman, which makes me shiver pleasantly. Either way I will go to bed soon, because, you know, REST.

Over and out, friends.

Mush!

You guys, check out this Twitter thread: 

So! We arrived in Dawson City to head out on the 200-mile @percydewolfe race. My team was Pepe, Jenga, Brewtus, Xander, Anya, Colbert, and Flame -- and since poor Clem has stitches and doesn't get to run, we borrowed two dogs from Ryan: Teddy and Ladd. pic.twitter.com/I64iIr5vVj

— Blair Braverman (@BlairBraverman) March 24, 2018

It does not make me want to compete in a dog race, because brrr. But it totally makes me want to spectate at one, or maybe drink coffee at an old miner's cabin while the dog-sledders come and go, talking of icy glaciers, yo. 

Seriously, check out those wide open spaces, or the dogs navigating the tricky bit where a glacier spills across a frozen river. Imagine a life in which you might think to yourself, "Maybe I'll stop and butcher some of that wolf-killed caribou for my dogs-- but no, we'll keep going. We only have 30 more miles to run in frigid temperatures so we can qualify for a race five times as long and considerably more difficult."

I was thinking about buying another Kindle novel fueled by East Coast PTA wars, but the dog-racing milieu is striking me as more interesting and perhaps a smidge less hostile. I am going to dive into Blair Braverman's story instead. I'll report back.

Le Retour de Madame Beurre-Noisette

Vous souvenez-vous notre amie Mme. Beurre-Noisette? She has been plugging happily along in the years since we saw her last, but this week she is scratching her head again about one of the students in her pastry class.

Madame always asks the students to choose something written by one of the field's leading lights as the basis of an assignment. She mixes it up from term to term-- sometimes they write a paper, sometimes they make a video. In a couple of recent classes the students were assigned to submit a 1000-word paper to her and then describe their findings briefly in an online forum for their fellow students.

In the most recent class, our heroine decided to condense the assignment. Just write a discussion post, she told her students. Make it about 700 words. One of the submissions, she was startled to discover, included a bonus 1000-word paper as well as a discussion post. It was almost as if...the student had been working from...a different set of instructions, one no longer available to current students.

Most of the students who attend L'Université des Patisseries et Fricatives are motivated students, eager to learn the difference between a pâte brisée and a pâte sablée. No one, though, in all the years she has been teaching at L'UdPeF, has ever written her a bonus 1000-word paper before. It is not a thing that happens.

The mystery deepens: the student's responses to questions in the discussion forum are, shall we say, unpersuasive. Inspection of the bonus paper's metadata reveals that it was apparently created and edited in the space of a minute: created at 4:14 the day before it was due, last modified at 4:15.

One could imagine explanations for all of these things. Perhaps the student was so gripped by the writings of Escoffier that she could not restrain herself from singing his praises, and felt confident that Mme. Beurre-Noisette would be equally enraptured. Perhaps she labored long over an online document in order to share it more easily with her peer editor, and downloaded a near-final version onto her computer. A fair amount of digging has failed to unearth a similar document produced in a previous semester and resubmitted under this current student's name.

And yet-- Mme. Beurre-Noisette cannot shake the feeling that this is a suspicious concatenation of events. 

True-False

T   F

Jamie loves grading with her whole heart.
Jamie has been grading all day long.
She is trying and failing to offer it up.
Probably nothing bad would happen if she converted all of her assessments in all of her classes to T/F tests.
Probably she will not actually be grading until the end of time.
Probably she will get to bed sooner if she grades the papers instead of writing desperate blog posts.

Things I love about Alpha

When I was first asked to help out with an Alpha course at my parish I was skeptical. I thought it would be too focused on the lowest common denominator and too Protestant. It turns out that I love Alpha.

If you're not familiar with it, Alpha is a 10- or 11-week introduction to the Christian faith that encourages skeptics to come with their questions. It welcomes everybody; it makes no assumptions about anybody's starting point. You eat dinner together, you watch a video together, and you talk about the video over dessert and coffee. In the middle of it you spend a chunk of a weekend together learning about the Holy Spirit.

Part of what I love about Alpha is Nicky Gumbel, an Anglican vicar who converted from atheism as a college student. I love his enthusiasm; I love his accent.* (You already know I get excited about British accents, even though they added some Americanisms ("sweater" instead of "jumper," e.g.) to his script.) I helped out with one Alpha course in which all of the videos were just Nicky Gumbel talking, which was fine by me. More recently, there are globe-trotting younger people appearing in the videos, but the content seems to be mostly the same. 

I love Alpha's focus on lives redeemed: prisoners, post-genocide Rwandans, people healed and transformed. There are so many powerful stories.

I love the structure of the Alpha program, the way you ease into knowing each other week by week. Tonight at my table I was laughing uproariously with this group of people I barely knew, or didn't know at all, in January. (Topic under discussion: how high-maintenance can a romantic partner be, and does it make a difference if s/he is extremely attractive?) The early weeks of discussion sometimes limp along, but I love to watch people unfurl themselves a bit at a time like slo-mo human peonies. Maybe that's actually kind of a creepy visual but we'll just go with it, shall we?

I didn't expect Alpha to touch my own heart the way that it did, to remind me that the goodness of God surrounds me on all sides. Alpha has taught me how to quiet my heart and rest in God's love for me.

Tonight as I was walking out the door the director said, "I'm going to call you in the fall to see if you're up for another round!" "You do that," I told him. I'm a little sad that it's over.

Once more with feeling

I don't know how to tell them any more clearly: if you need to use words written by someone else in your assignment, you have to tell me that they are someone else's words. Put them in quotation marks, and cite them in APA format (i.e., give me a page number). I am confident that the student whose assignment I just graded was not trying to put something over on me. I know this student. And yet in the assignment there are two separate chunks of text, lifted verbatim, without quotation marks or page numbers.

BLARGH.

Terminable

Back in November I started a pair of socks for my 18yo. I thought at first that I would give them to him in time for Christmas, but I'm still having knitting mojopenia (the scientific-ish term for severely diminished but not entirely absent mojo, natch) and this pattern is really slow. For a few years there I thought I had worked enough twisted rib that I ought to be able to do it faster, but now I have reached the acceptance phase of twisted rib: it's really slow. It takes a long time; that's just the way it is.

Back in my November post I wondered if it was worth ripping back my slow and painful accretion of twisted rib to revise the pattern in a more sensible way. I bit the bullet and ripped the sock in progress, and lo I did not have a pair of socks to put under the tree for Christmas or even Epiphany. But hey: slow and steady finishes the sock even if it doesn't actually win the race, and I have finished the second foot of this pair of socks that seemed interminable. 

Next up: I have to reconstruct the decrease pattern I used for the first toe. It bears no resemblance to the toe recommended by the pattern, because I wanted to finish a pattern repeat and then I had to do an emergency-hurry-up-and-decrease-crash toe to avoid the capybara stowage situation that has confronted me in past handknit socks. (That previous capybara stowage situation was remedied effectively by a trip through the dryer.)

I'd been feeling a little worried about that improvised toe, but right in this moment I am having a surge of confidence. I can wing that sock toe so that it at-least-sort-of matches the one I wung earlier. I can weave in those ends and hand off those socks. And then? It will be a long time before I take on another twisted rib project.

Underneath

There's a bunch of crud in my life that feels unbloggable right now. It's the reason I disappeared for a while last month -- didn't feel quite honest writing about my life without talking about it, didn't feel quite right blogging about it. I was thinking that blogging daily during March would be a way to focus on other things, but it still feels like I'm writing around the topics that are really on my mind.

This is a predictably hard time of year. One of the three active substance abusers in my orbit always does some version of "work on substance abuse" for Lent, and it always leaves me feeling squashed and hopeless about now. (Oh, you guys, I want so badly to be snarky about this person's choices. I am so weary of this situation. MOVING ON and DECLINING to be snarky even though this person richly deserves some snark and perhaps some arson.)

A couple of big kid situations are weighing on me as well, but those are not really my stories to tell. Jody has commented about this before -- the difficulties of sharing the experience of mothering teens without sharing too much of the teen's experience -- and it's weighing on me. If you have ever thought to yourself, "Gosh, Jamie writes so confidently about parenting that I wonder if she ever feels like a human casserole of failure and incompetence," the answer is yes. Sometimes (today, in fact!) that's exactly how it feels.

I feel a little like these ducks, actually-- 

--because the usual view doesn't quite show the viewer the frenzied round-and-round that's happening underneath.

Date Night Conversation

• Why does the crème brulée of the day have Oreos in it when Oreos do not go in crème brulée?
• Snippets prompted by our companionable co-completion of a WSJ puzzle (viz. spelling of Mohammed Ali's daughter's name)
• Inaccurate speculation re: the full name of UMBC
• Differences between Twitter peeps talking about UMBC/UVA and Twitter peeps talking about Loyola/Tennessee, with a side of Twitter criminal justice insights
• Happy anticipation (on the part of one participant; nodding tolerance for the other) re: the impending start of baseball! season! GO! CUBS!
• Fantasy football follies rehashed
• Demographic differences driving variations in Trump approval ratings
• Bad attitudes among the Gladly grownups about still-if-you-can-believe-it-pro-Trump evangelicals and the optimal response thereto
• Speculation re: potential timelines for the forthcoming Great Unraveling With Orange Jumpsuits For All
• Attempts to reconstruct the whole Comey firing/Congressional hearings/Special Counsel mandate-ifying sequence
• Retreats and retreat teams we have known
• Better to smash obnoxious cell phones with hammers or douse with super-soakers? Unclear.
• Reading from Kindle app in bed: best thing ever or situation requiring hammer + super-soaker? Unclear. (To one of us. The Luddite one of us.)
• Challenges of staffing allied health programs; awesomeness of my boss
• General awesomeness of our life in Gladlyville: great kids, happy jobs, cheap housing, 10-minute commutes
• Choice of parent to attend upcoming Girl Scout campout
• Optimal response to the surprising shriekiness of girls in gaggles (not hammer, probably not super-soaker)
• Future trips to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico
• Probability that the 14 years between Pete's birth and his eligibility to go to Philmont actually lasted less time than the same period for Alex. Opinions divided.
• Staggering providential goodness of the life we live
• Need for more date nights

In the drafts folder

Today is the midpoint in my self-imposed March blogging challenge: 15 posts written before today, 15 more to go after this one. I was doing a bit of digging in the drafts folder to see if I could unearth any inspiration. It's like an archeological dig in there, man.

Top layer: things that need more research or that strike me as potentially pretentious

Middle layer: maybe I should take this down in case the extended family member described herein remembers that I have a blog

Further still: rubbly pile of question marks and mystery

One post is called "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Or, you know, not." I saw that one and thought, "Oh, Tennyson! I love that poem! Wonder what I was writing about that day?" Nothing, apparently-- I didn't save any text at all, just the title. What would I have been thinking about drinking life to the lees? I suppose I'll never know. There's one called "grapes" in which I was trying to preserve the anonymity of someone from my church while also describing an extremely annoying habit of hers. Probably a good call to keep that one in drafts, past self. There's also "Chicken Little, Evangelist" and "Time Does Fly," the accuracy of which observation is confirmed by the fact that the draft is now four years old. 

The posts I am most likely to abandon or take down are the ones in which I worry about exposing somebody else's underbelly. There's a post about a 2013 rough patch in our marriage, for instance. It will never appear on the blog, but here is a bit of painfully acquired wisdom from the end of it:

I've been thinking that maybe marriage helps you prepare for heaven in two ways. The first is that you see your own flaws more clearly through the eyes of your spouse. You see the damage those flaws can do, etched on the face of the person you love most. And this is the second: you see up close the crazy miraculous heartbreaking impossible truth, that you are loved anyway.

It's just seven weeks

I have a weird teaching schedule this semester. One of my colleagues had a baby at the end of last month, and so she was squishing her teaching responsibilities into the first half of the semester. I picked up where she left off for the classes we co-teach: I'll be spending five hours a week with our grad students until the end of the semester. 

For January and most of February, I had a little bit of responsibility for the grad students but nothing onerous. Mostly I could focus on my undergrad class. I had some whopping service commitments and a weird feeling of urgency about my research agenda, but not much in the way of teaching responsibilities. From here on out, though, it's going to be intense.

I've taught the material for the next three weeks before. In the last chunk of the semester I'll be prepping new stuff for them. It's going to be tough.

But-- I can do this. I can do it more happily if I am eating well, sleeping well, making time for exercise and fun. I will feel much more peaceful on Monday if I get a boatload of grading done tomorrow. So this is me, saying that tomorrow I'm going to do a boatload of grading. And then next week? It will be time to bring the A game.

Winter is coming

That's not the post title you want to see in March, I know, but it is true. Lands' End was running a big sale today, in which outerwear that had already been discounted because it was mid-March was further discounted for Pi Day. I got a great deal on next winter's coats for Stella and Pete, and at the end they offered me an additional coupon code. Apparently you can click through and get 40% off any one item, and if you do then they'll send me a further 40% off code in two weeks. So if you were also thinking that you wanted to keep an eye out for coat sales, there you go.

Torture is a pro-life issue

You've probably already heard that Rex Tillerson was fired abruptly (the day after his public criticism of Russia, peculiarly) and that Mike Pompeo will be leaving the CIA to become secretary of state. Gina Haspel, the CIA's current deputy director, has been nominated to lead the agency.

The trouble is that Gina Haspel presided over appalling misuse of power, including egregious instances of torture and the destruction of evidence. This nomination, in my view, demands an outcry.

There's a pocket of internet Catholicism in which "pro-life" is only supposed to mean "opposed to abortion." And oh, this frustrates me: Catholics are pro-life because we believe in the unique and unrepeatable nature of each human life, in its immense value. We are pro-life because every human life is precious in the eyes of its creator. I invite you to look back at the images from Abu Ghraib and caption them accordingly. The naked bleeding man: "redeemed by the death of Our Lord"; the person with a dog's leash around his neck: "possessed of equal dignity before God"; the prisoner sodomized with a broomstick: "loved with a profound and enduring love."

The director of the CIA must grapple with difficult questions about the optimal response toward foreign actors who have demonstrated hostility toward the US. I believe in the justice of God as firmly as I believe in his mercy. But torture does not, cannot bring justice, and its use by American authorities is a foul stain on our history. Gina Haspel's history should disqualify her from taking the reins at the CIA. Tell your senators to vote against her confirmation.

Some boats need rocking

My 12yo is sitting at the dining room table on the very edge of tears. He's been working on math since he got home from Scouts. First Elwood was helping him; now I'm walking him through the last few problems. I just learned that this isn't a homework set: his teacher wanted them to complete all of these practice problems so they would be ready for a standardized test tomorrow. He didn't happen to mention whether they'd be graded or not.

"Please don't email him," said Pete, inching closer to tears. But I'm telling you: this guy deserves an email. Too much homework for any weeknight, too many disparate half-forgotten topics cram-jammed into one assignment, and too little clarity about his expectations, so that kids are left thinking, "If I bail, I might fail."

"Have you ever had trouble because of an email I've written?" I asked him, surprised. (I write very few unhappy emails to teachers; this would be the second for Pete in his eight years of school.)  "No," he said, his voice wobbly. "But please don't."

"Some boats need rocking," I told him, but I also told him that for tonight I would write a crabby blog post instead. Some boats need rocking, I tell you.