Light and Momentary

Let's discuss

Have you read this article from The Atlantic yet? You should read it. I kept thinking, "That's the paragraph I'm going to quote. No, wait, that's the paragraph I'm going to quote. No, wait--"

Tell me what you think.

Inspired Word

I was scheduled as a Eucharistic minister this afternoon, and for some reason my side of the church was moving much more slowly through the line. To speed things up, two additional ministers came over from the other side of the church after they were done; still it took a long time. Not many people wanted to receive from the chalice, so there was a fair amount of the Precious Blood remaining as I turned back to the altar. Mindful that the priest was most of the way through his post-communion tasks because of that weirdly lopsided line, I attempted to consume the rest of it efficiently...

...and oh, you guys, I sent a big splash of it down the wrong pipe.

I was so distressed. If I'd been at home I would have made a big eye-watering noisy-coughing fuss, because it was wretchedly uncomfortable. Instead I just wheezed quietly as I folded the purificator. My pal Sylvia, who has an answer for everything, was also there in the sanctuary and I found her presence reassuring. "I'm sure Sylvia knows what to do if a Eucharistic minister passes out," I said to myself, still wheezing.

Back in my pew I was able to cough discreetly until I felt better. It occurred to me there that a person who inspires (in the "breathes in" sense) the Word at least has a fun title for the blog post she will write later about her painful Mass experience. "Oh, Sylvia," I told her afterward, "I have Jesus in my lungs." "Well, I'm sure he's doing good work in there," she said calmly. (All the non-Catholics reading this post are like "...You Catholics are a weird bunch.")

Sometimes at church we sing the song that goes, "This is the air I breathe-- your holy presence."

I'm going to try to be less literal about that in the future.

There is such a thing as a tesseract

Wrinkle in Time: to see or not to see?

I loved the Murry family as a kid, and I am feeling alternately cautious and hopeful about seeing them on the big screen. It's not that I wanted the production team to hew closely to the original in the details. When I was a kid I loved that Mrs. Murry was a redhead, an un-beautiful kid who became a beautiful adult -- a scientist and a mom of many. I hope that girls from minority backgrounds who watch this new version also see something to hope for.

The thing that troubles me is this: Hollywood does goodness badly. Remember Prince Caspian? I'm still grumpy about the movie version of Prince Caspian. Remember Galadriel? I can't even with the movie version of Galadriel. And goodness is at the very heart of Wrinkle in Time. The core truth of the book is that humanity lives under a shadow, but the shadow can be overcome. I don't expect them to put Jesus front and center as Chief Shadow-Piercer, the way that L'Engle did, but I'm hoping to hear something like her litany of names -- people who strove for wisdom and goodness across the centuries.

I will be so bummed if the darkness turns into something to flirt with, something maybe not that bad. I guess it's hard to make a giant pulsing brain attractive. I hope so. (I typed that sentence assuming everybody and her hamster had read Wrinkle in Time, but maybe I should hide the potentially spoiler-y bit. Just highlight it with your mouse if you want to read it.) 

I'm intrigued by the special effects possibilities, which could be fun to see on the big screen. And I suppose we're living in the right era for a movie about pushing back against conformity. It's not just a book about doing your own thing, though; it's a book about how you -- yes, you -- are uniquely able to fight against evil in the place where you happen to find yourself. Maybe because you love words, maybe because you love math, maybe because you have been put together as a formidably tenacious person -- but really because you have been put together in a way that equips you to love the people around you like nobody else can love them.

Will that come through loud and clear in the movie? I'm worried that it won't.

Links

How is your day going, my friends? It could be worse: you could have 26,000 stinkbugs (and counting!) emerging from the walls of your home.

This Sergei Skripal case is horrifying: he had been released from prison and exchanged to Britain 8 years ago, before he was targeted WITH HIS DAUGHTER in a poisoning attack that also injured 21 other people.

I just read the new Marisa de los Santos book I'll Be Your Blue Sky and I would love to chat about it.

Lynne Murphy's new book is on my TBR list. Take her quizzes and tell me how you fare.

Postmark

I suppose we all have faulty mental maps somewhere. Paris isn't all sidewalks by the Seine, I know. Tonight at Alpha I bumped into a mental categorization error that made me chuckle to myself.

In December of 1987 I got a postcard in the mail, postmarked Twenty-Nine Palms. To my immense surprise, Elwood had taken the time to drop me a note over our Christmas break. His ROTC crew (platoon? legion? can you have a murder of midshipmen?) was training out west.

We had met in September, whereupon an immediate crush exploded into existence in my 17-year-old heart, but I was certain he was too cool for the likes of me. I was dating someone else when I got his postcard. And yet...there was an undeniable flicker when I saw his name. He signed it "Love, Elwood"! What the heck did that mean?!

It meant that a few weeks later I would break things off with the guy I was dating, and shortly after that Elwood would kiss me over my Latin dictionary. (<-That's True Geek Love right there, my friends.) Elwood and I observed the thirtieth anniversary of our first date in January of this year. ("Observed" meaning I said, "Hey, do you know what day it is?" and he said, "Um, nope, no idea" so I told him.)

In my mind Twenty-Nine Palms is a hopeful and inviting sort of place, where the trees stirring in the wind whisper about a fuzzy-edged future, full of promise. Tonight at Alpha a woman was saying that her son the Marine was heading back to Twenty-Nine Palms soon. "He hates it there," she said. "It's a horrible place, smack in the middle of the desert. They have to go there to train with live ordnance."

I like my version better.

Good Enough

I've been unreasonably worried about getting tenure.

It doesn't really make sense. My teaching evals are fine; I'm way ahead of the game on pubs; I do my assigned service promptly.

And yet I've been tense about it-- scrambling to get papers out, even though I already have two 2018 publications, fretting about a grant application. The whole tenure process revs up my fear of being judged Not Good Enough, which seems to have a taproot plunging deep into my psyche.

My day was bookended with two different versions of the not-good-enough story. This morning I woke up from a dream in which I'd been seeing preschoolers for clinical services. "What a good thing to do!" said my dream self. "It's important for instructors to have recent clinical experiences." It's been almost ten years since I closed out my early intervention caseload, and I sometimes feel a little self-conscious about that.

This evening we went to a lecture given by one of the other Scout moms, a highly regarded professor in my college. She finished her undergrad degree a year before I did, and launched herself immediately into an academic career punctuated by dozens of publications and seven-figure grant funding. I found myself wondering: what if I hadn't taken such a meandering path to this spot?

That's a silly question, I told myself. Would I want to have fewer children? What a ridiculous idea! Would I want to have spent less time with them when they were small? Absolutely not. Would I want to take time away from them now so I could work with other people's preschoolers? Not a chance. Was I ready to embark on an academic career right out of college? Not even close -- I didn't have any idea then that I would wind up in the sciences.

When I talk to my students about the recurrent laryngeal nerve I sometimes mention this Richard Dawkins video, in which he argues that no sensible creator would have designed the giraffe. "Maybe," I muse, "the giraffe's recurrent laryngeal nerve indicates that efficiency is not God's highest priority." I believe in the value of the scenic route.

One of my new year's resolutions was to prepare a tenure dossier while pushing back resolutely against impostor syndrome. "Pushing back" isn't quite the right phrase here. I might need a machete.

Recommended

Yesterday I finished a memoir that I really enjoyed: Maggie O'Farrell's I Am I Am I Am. I first encountered O'Farrell in the fall, when I fell headlong into This Must Be The Place. I inhaled it over Thanksgiving weekend, and I loved both the fragile badass heroine and the rueful linguist hero (who is not actually very heroic but you know what I mean). More books, in my view, should have linguist heroes. I wanted to know more about O'Farrell when I finished it -- I was curious about how much personal experience infused the book. There's a character with vicious eczema whose experiences she captures expertly, and I wanted to know more about where that had come from.

I Am I Am I Am describes seventeen brushes with death. The first chapter is the scariest (oh my goodness, so creepy), but a number of them are hard to read. In the last chapter she describes her daughter in anaphylaxis, and that's where we learn about her experiences with a child suffering -- no, really: suffering -- from eczema.

Another chapter describes O'Farrell's childhood case of encephalitis, which left her with cerebellar damage. It's this damage that drives a number of the other brushes with death: your cerebellum is important for determining your position in space so you don't get (for instance) run over by a truck, and for determining which way is up so you don't get (say) disoriented while underwater.

The more I learn about brains, the more an intact one seems like a marvel. I can close my eyes and my fingers will find their way to the keyboard and type this sentence, free of errors. (Oh, hey, look at that. I wasn't 100% sure that I could produce an error-free sentence with my eyes closed, but it turns out I totally can.) I can string together the words that attempt to tell you how much the book moved me: how it made me grateful for my beating heart and my breathing lungs, and aware, too, that the day is coming when the beats and the breath will be stilled. O'Farrell is no longer Catholic but her book is a good Lenten read regardless.

Here I go, engaging my prefrontal cortex to send myself to bed earlier than I might like to. I was up repeatedly last night with a sick child. But that's another thought I want to take with me from this book: she writes about how readily minor annoyances roll off her back in view of the gravity of her daughter's allergies.  Which is a good perspective for a person who still needs to deal with a little patch of residual puke in the upstairs carpet.

Adaptation

I was out of the workout groove for the second half of 2017. I just couldn't seem to muster the motivation to exercise consistently, and then the less you work out, the less you want to work out. It hurts-- both your muscles and your pride. I made noises about getting back in the swing of things with that Nov/Dec roommate fitness challenge, but my heart wasn't in it and then somehow neither were my feet.

So it's been a relief, albeit a humbling relief, to be sticking reasonably closely to a 10K training plan. I am doing the late April 10K I've done a few times before, using the Matt Fitzgerald plan I've used before. I am finding, as always, that six workouts a week is a lot of workouts, but I am also finding that I can make time for things that are important. (I only managed five workouts this week and last week, but still: progress.)

This is the first day of week 5. You guys, I was pretty demoralized by week 1. I thought I was going to be limping along that 10K course like a geriatric snail. My long-ago Sunday school teacher told us that lepers used to have to shout "Unclean! Unclean!" when they came in contact with non-lepers. I was starting to think I'd have to carry a sign that said "Unfit! Unfit!" (because of course I'd be too out of breath for shouting, even at my geriatric snail pace), warning away all the real runners in case my galumphing gastropoddery might be contagious.

It turns out that bodies -- who knew? -- are adaptable. A month in I am feeling more like my old self: resting heart rate is slower, paces are faster. For cross training in the first two weeks I was using an exercise bike at the fitness center, directing it adjust the resistance to keep my heart rate in the low 120s. I was a little embarrassed by the mileage numbers it spat out at the end of those first workouts. But tonight I covered 9 miles in my 30 minutes, a number I was pleasantly surprised to see. (It's possible that there's a calibration difference across bikes, but that number feels about right.)

So: if you happen to be feeling out of shape and discouraged, I can recommend Matt Fitzgerald's 80/20 plan. The first 25 workouts are likely to feel kind of crummy, and then the magic happens.

Speedily

For Christmas Elwood gave me a pair of tickets to see a group that was right up my alley: a trio of women singing harmony, backed mostly by acoustic instruments. I would tell you more about them, but it's also pancake breakfast weekend and the alarm is going off early. More soon.

Lately

So you guys, it has been A Week. 

One of my colleagues had a baby on Tuesday morning. We knew, obviously, that this was coming, but the original plan was for baby to stay put a little longer. She had prepped materials for this last week, and we had talked about the possibility of my taking over for her this week, but...I was pretty stressed about taking over for her this week.

She was in the middle of giving feedback to our grad students on a lengthy project, and I have stepped into the middle of those conversations. I am doing my best to provide useful comments on something outside my specialty area. It has been eating a lot of my time and an even larger chunk of the space in my head.

This week was also crunch time for two service commitments. I was co-chair of the search committee until my colleague went on leave, which put me in charge. I was also on the admissions committee, a task which has required approximately six kazillion hours in the past few weeks, culminating in our marathon meeting this afternoon.

Earlier this semester, when my teaching load was lighter, I was in Write All The Papers mode, and I am still scrambling to tie up some of those loose ends. It's also been a hectic time for some non-work commitments. I'm kind of a stressball here, is what I'm saying. 

Tomorrow I have to stop back in the office, to give one more round of feedback and purge desk + inbox. But tomorrow I am also going to go for a nice long run and empty the laundry basket that's been sitting in my bedroom for too long. And on Sunday I am not even going to think about work. There will be enough time for that on Monday.

March 1

"When are you going to blog again?" asked my 12yo.

"Tonight," I told him. Also tomorrow, and the next day and the next. It's about time for a 31 days/31 posts kind of thing around here, don't you think?