Light and Momentary

Post-hoc social anxiety

I used to have really painful social anxiety. When I was in high school and college I would find myself consumed by certainty that I had said the wrong thing. I remember the feeling well: my insides seizing up and my gaze drifting down. Some of the trouble with social anxiety is that it has a self-perpetuating component. If you are gripped by worry and uneasy about making eye contact, it's easier to miss cues or to lag a beat behind the conversation.

These days I am usually much more relaxed about conversations with people I don't know well. You know, weirdly, as I am typing this, I am thinking that I'm more likely to have social anxiety moments after I've been talking to old friends-- as if the presence of someone who knew me when I struggled more with social anxiety somehow zombie-fies a part of me that has mostly been laid to rest.

I spent most of the past 24 hours with one of my college roommates. We met up last night at dinnertime and ran a 10K together this morning, and she caught the last train out of Gladlyville this evening. It was great to see her. And yet now that she is gone I am reflecting on our conversations with a self-critical eye. Here's an even weirder part: the thing I am feeling most uncomfortable about was one in which I was talking about ways to avoid a person who causes me musical anxiety. That's like a zombie ouroboros of avoidable anxiety right there, friends: two things I do not really need to worry about, chasing their tails inside my weary brain. 

True confession: sometimes I remember things I said thirty years ago and flinch. There must be some kind of statute of limitations for flinching at dorky comments uttered by one's teenage self. If there is such a statute lodged inside my brain, it allows for more than thirty years of flinching. Alas. Let it go, self. Teenagers say dorky things; it's okay.

It seems to me that many bloggers cop to social anxiety -- more than you might encounter in a random sample. Does it seem that way to you too? Is it because blogging lets us take our time over the things we might want to say? Are we pale and nerdy sorts, communing with our laptop screens because face-to-face conversations are too unpredictable? I suppose it's a blessing that my own social anxiety is so much diminished from the orange-alert level that used to feel normal. I'm still looking for tricks that might help me respond effectively to the residue.

Cousin Winston

I grew up with an unusual last name, one bestowed on my g'g'g'g'g'g'g'g'grandfather when he arrived in Massachusetts in the late 17th century. An official guessed at the spelling of his name and my g'g'g'g'g'g'g'g'grandfather signed with an X, consigning his future g'g'g'g'g'g'g'g'granchildren to lifetimes of spelling it out painstakingly. He has thousands of living descendants; I trace my lineage through his oldest son. Today I saw a blog post from a distant cousin-in-law claiming Mayflower ancestry for a relative we have in common. "Huh," I thought to myself, "I am tired of grading, so perhaps I will investigate this briefly."

As much as I can tell from a brief investigation, the Mayflower claim relies on a mixup-- two people with the same name who lived at approximately the same time. Mixups like this seem to be routine among amateur genealogists; for years I believed the family legend that we were related to James Buchanan. (That connection is no great loss, am I right? Even if I hadn't learned the truth, these days I could only say "I'm related to the second-worst president in US history.") But in poking around a bit I did find out that I am descended from Arthur Howland, brother of Mayflower passenger John Howland. Arthur and another brother, Henry, came to Massachusetts a little later than John. The internet is giving me dates in the 1620s and dates in the 1640s, so we'll just say it was a long time ago.

Arthur Howland had four daughters and a son. I am wondering what he might think about this world in which his distant descendant is bringing up four sons and a daughter. I wonder about my g'g'g'g'g'g'g'g'g'grandmother and her sisters: what snippets of genetic material might we share? (I'm thinking, specifically and shallowly, about whether their hair was as wild as mine is on this April day.) When they were young children, John Donne was still writing poems.

Do you know who else is descended from Arthur Howland?? Winston Churchill, that's who. If I've counted on my fingers correctly, he is my tenth cousin once removed. Who knew? Perhaps I should smoke a cigar in his honor.

Unfortunately, this also means that my eleventh cousin is Richard Nixon, who was descended from my g'g'g'g'g'g'g'g'g'g'great-uncle Henry. Hold the phone-- maybe this means I am actually related to the second-worst president in US history.

Bright Spots

Hi, you guys, it would be really easy to write a moan-y hand-wring-y blog post about workload tonight, but how about if we do some counting of blessings instead?

I am reading Treasure Island to Stella and sometimes Pete, and it is such a good yarn.

The weekend before last we made a family trip to the snow zone, and on the way home we were playing B is for Botticelli* as we always do on Gladly road trips. I was Ben Gunn during one of our rounds (Elwood's gotcha question: Are you, perhaps, very fond of CHEESE?!) Afterward it occurred to me that I hadn't read Treasure Island aloud in ages -- it's probably been nine years. So I am addressing the Treasure Island situation pronto, because that's practically a children's literature emergency.

*Huh, I am sure that somewhere in my archives I have posts about B is for Botticelli, our favorite car game, but a Google site search suggests that those posts exist only in my imagination. Maybe, Google says, I would like to remember the time I attempted to dispose of an organ discreetly and wound up with conspicuous bloodstains splashed across my sidewalk. Or MAYBE NOT, Google.

While I read I am knitting away on the positively bananas laceweight sweater I started in the summer of 2016 after a couple of years of trying to work up the nerve to cast on. I am not usually cowed by a knitting project but this is no ordinary knitting project. Earlier this week I was looking at my Ravelry entry and thinking, "Huh, maybe my initial difficulty rating is higher than it needs to be," but then I started the edging. I love a good knitted-on edging like nobody's business -- it's like equal parts geometry and magic -- but this particular knitted-on edging is a big pain in the behind. OH WAIT, bright spots only in this post. It's a beautiful pain in the behind that keeps my brain firing on all cylinders -- how about that? Also I have become fairly blasé about grafting in pattern, which used to feel like alchemy on an tightrope.

Slowly, slowly, I am working my way down the List of Lasts. Today I gave the last lecture in my grad class; the rest is all lab assignments and a guest lecturer talking about topics outside my area of expertise.

This weekend I am covering a 10K course with one of my college roommates. I am not going to be moving very quickly, but I'm going to finish the race and collect my shirt. And see my friend, which is really the point.

Okay, my friends, I am going to finish the rosary and start the dishwasher and set up the coffee and zip off to bed. The end.

Small talk here in the third millennium

Last weekend we were eating brunch in a hotel restaurant. Things were slow and the waiter was chatty, so we chatted back. And then all of a sudden the conversation took a weird dark turn. He was talking about his kids, about how boys these days can wind up medicated for being a little wigglier than average. He was saying he thought boys had a particularly tough time of it. What I was trying to say in response was, "Hey, it's not super-easy to be a girl either." But boom, he was off to the races -- to the Hippodrome of Delusion, specifically. He told us that the women speaking up as part of the #MeToo movement had chosen freely to acquiesce to the demands of their alleged harassers so that they could get ahead. He'd lived in LA for 25 years, he told us. Happens all the time there.

I mean. Where do you even go from there?

Tonight I was asked to man a table at a career fair for homeschoolers. I was next to a psych nurse who was also a homeschooling mom. You guys, there were so many things I wanted to ask her about. Like: it's interesting to me that you are telling these students they have to nail their high school science courses if they want to be nurses, but also using a creationist science curriculum with your own kids. (Maybe you need to know me in real life to know that I wouldn't have said it in an accusatory way. But is that not an interesting juxtaposition?) We were talking around a bunch of interesting stuff. Like: she was saying it was frustrating that she couldn't pick up a newspaper any more without being bombarded by bias dressed up as news. She was saying journalists used to get fired if they had undisclosed connections with people or topics on which they were reporting. I wanted to say, "So I think you're telling me that you prefer Fox News to traditional sources, but surely we can agree that the Sean Hannity/Michael Cohen connection is problematic." Instead I just said, "This has been an especially interesting week for thinking about bias in journalism."

On those introvert/extrovert items (or extravert if you're an old-school personality tester) I always split the scale right down the middle. I get overwhelmed in big groups of people (I'm still coming down from the career fair), but I love striking up conversations with strangers -- taxi drivers or parents at the park. It's always been the case that a conversation with a stranger could shift unexpectedly -- I'm thinking specifically about an early 00s taxi driver arguing emphatically for the wisdom and benevolence of Robert Mugabe -- but it feels different now.

There are so many places to put a foot wrong these days. I would bet you money that when I said, "Oh, I just read this heartbreaking story in the New York Times" (we were talking about Christians and racial injustice), that my career-fair neighbor had a little "...oh, she reads the NYT" moment. But polarization is bad news for truth. Right at this moment on Twitter if you click the #ComeyMemos hashtag you will see that people are looking at the same sets of facts and coming to opposite conclusions. #ComeyMemos exonerate the president! #ComeyMemos incriminate the president!

Those things cannot both be true. I don't really know where we go from here.

Speedy April updates

Hi, I'm alive; it's just really really busy right now.

I got my grant proposal submitted. You guys, it was SO MUCH work to get that puppy together. Twelve parts. Thirty-six single-spaced pages. A whisker under 12,000 words. As I was finishing it up I was thinking, "This proposal pulls together just about everything I have learned about conducting research." I was thinking, "This is about 97% of the very best effort I could possibly give." 

Odds are good that 97% of my best effort will not suffice to get the funding. Grants are suuuuuper competitive and most of them go to R1 schools. But we'll see what happens.

Now I really only have two must-do tasks remaining in the spring semester: finish prepping this new grad class, and finish out the program in which I'm prepping my summer class. They feel like big tasks, though. This grad class is so intense: four afternoons per week, for 75 minutes each time, I need to provide new grad-level content. This week, in the wake of the big push to get the grant out, I am juuuuust keeping up. I mean, I'm staying on top of it, but only by dint of working ridiculous hours after the kids are in bed. 

Huh, this is kind of a whiny blog post. 

Pete has been asking me every day when I am going to blog again, and he will be disappointed if he wakes up tomorrow and discovers that I only told you about how much I've been working. He would like me to tell you about the missing Easter egg, I bet. So here goes:

Last Easter I hid 18 eggs and the kids found 17. We hunted high and low. We scratched our heads and invoked St. Anthony and looked everywhere we could think of. No dice. No egg, either.

This year I hid 24 eggs, taking careful notes about where they were going. Our tradition is that Easter eggs get hidden after Easter dinner is eaten -- no chocolate for breakfast in this house. This year, though, was a bad year for sending kids to the park while the Easter magic happened, because it was SNOWING. The kids were good sports, and went to the park for a while, but they returned before I had quite managed to stash 24 eggs and 7 baskets. The trouble was that I wanted to affix Joe's basket to the underside of the dining room table. First I tried to make a yarn sling for it (fail), and then I tried to use painter's tape (fail), and finally I resorted to duct tape (winner winner chicken dinner!). All of these machinations cost me egg-hiding time, so that I had one egg to go when the kids returned. "Oh, look, I will stash it in the outside pocket of this electric bass case," I said to myself as I whipped it open.

"Huh," I said to myself, "why does it smell like putrescing meat inside the outside pocket of this electric bass case?"

The light dawned: the heavy case had buffered us from the smell, but there was a year-old hard-boiled egg lurking inside that pocket. I hid the last egg in the outside pocket of the cello case instead, and told the kids in no uncertain terms to stay away from the bass case. Reader, it was thoroughly befouled. Or do I mean befowled?

Anyway. My bed is calling me. Think of me. It's a little wild just now.

Things that have transpired since last we spoke

• We had a lovely Easter, complete with an answered prayer that leaves me hopeful for the future (cryptic, I know, sorry)
• I FOUND the egg that went missing last Easter.
• It smelled every bit as delightful as you think it did.
• I worked through the last of the already-prepped content with my grad students, which means I start prepping new stuff this week.
• I made a time budget for the next three days (my grant goes out for routing on Thursday) and it's going to be an adventure.
• But today is Sunday and so I rested aggressively (totally a thing).
• Early in the day (I went to the vigil Mass yesterday) I read the NYT with TWO cups of coffee and made pancakes for the kids.
• While they were at Mass I knitted and ran and read a chunk of a totally fascinating book.
• The five of us went to the more cosmopolitan town an hour away, where we attended a low brass concert and ate Korean food.
• OH YOU GUYS my dish was a combo of pork belly + squid and it was AMAZING.

Things I still want to tell you:

• Details of the super-fun Easter basket hiding places.
• Also probably details of the less-fun wayward Easter egg hiding place.
• Thoughts on books I have been reading.
• Progress update on that incredibly slow laceweight sweater I've been making since the dawn of time -- or, okay, 2016.

I also need advice please on the slouchy hat I am making at Alex's request. I will have to return with pictures to get your input: should the pale green be C2 or C4? I cannot decide.

I bet you're on the edge of your seats. Think of me over the next few days. It's going to be a little wild.