Light and Momentary

My new criterion

I started my day in the dentist's chair. It used to be a father-son practice, but the father -- the one I always saw -- died last year. Now it's just the son. He told me I have a small spot inside a molar groove that he wants to fill. "Okay," I said, "but before we talk about scheduling I need to make sure you know I have that redhead gene that makes me hard to numb. One of the things I'll always appreciate about your dad is that he was so careful to make sure I was numb."

"Absolutely," said the son. "I trained with the best." [meaning his dad, not a fancypants dental school -- isn't that sweet?]

When the hygienist walked me to the front desk, she said, "We'll need to schedule a little extra time because--"

The receptionist interrupted, pointing at her own red hair: "Because she's a redhead! Got it!"

She went on, "Doctor was skeptical when I first told him I was hard to numb, and then he tried to do it! He couldn't believe how many shots he had to give me!"

'Oh my GOSH," I said, "don't you hate it when people say, 'You should be numb by now!' and you're like, 'STOP SHOULDING ME!'?"

"I KNOW RIGHT?!?!"

I have found it fairly traumatic for dentists and physicians to use sharp implements on my body when I could still feel what they were doing. And their surprise at my discomfort -- as if perhaps I were hallucinating the sensation -- did not improve the situation. So! If ever I need to find a new dentist, I'll know that I have to seek out one with a redheaded receptionist.

No hypothermia here

Were you feeling worried about me today, my friends? Did you perhaps wake up thinking, "I hope Jamie is warm enough today. The high in Gladlyville will only be 92 and I hope she will have enough layers to survive." No? Neither did I actually, but if you feared I might succumb to hypothermia today I have good news in the form of an alpaca sweater.

All the cool knitters are wearing alpaca sweaters on 92-degree days. Alpaca sweaters are sweeping the nation this summer. But this is a special alpaca sweater, because it has turtles. And? To make it extra-practical? Bell sleeves.

Do you have a turtle-covered bell-sleeved alpaca sweater, one so long and drapey that you might think about calling it a coat-dress? I thought not.

I finished it this morning and blocked it right away. The kids have been cheering me on as I inched through those turtle lapels, with Elwood watching bemusedly and wondering to himself why anyone might choose to spend two years of her life knitting a tortuginous alpaca coat-dress. (Hush up, spellcheck. Find me a better word that means "full of turtles," I dare you.)

After I grafted the bottom neck stitches to the top lapel stitches I slipped it on and swanned into the kitchen. "Hey!" said my 18yo. "That looks really nice!"

"Thanks," I said. Then I rolled my eyes: "Just the thing for a 92-degree day-- an alpaca sweater!"

"Well," he said seriously, "at least it's laceweight alpaca."

I worry sometimes that I am sending my teens out into the world with gaps in their repositories of Life Skills. But at least I can be sure that if their future ever hinges on accurate identification of yarn weights, they're all set.

I wove in the ends.

I sewed on a button, but it might be a temporary button. We'll see.

Temporary button or no, I'm calling it done. It is the hardest knitting project I have ever tackled. Here is where I might normally say "I can't wait to wear it!" but it is 84 degrees in my living room right now. I can wait, actually.

Nature abhors a vacuum, or news you might be able to use but also maybe not

Yesterday I went for a bike ride for the first time this year. This is probably not a winning strategy for a person who is supposed to complete a triathlon in TWO WEEKS, but let us move along in unruffled disregard of that disagreeable fact, shall we?

It was a hard-earned bike ride. I pumped up the rear tire, no problem, but then as I was pumping up the front tire there was a loud bang. All the air went whistling out of it. I took off the wheel and eased out the deflated tube, and then I zipped over to the bike store to buy a replacement tubes.

When I tried to fill the new tube, though, I noticed that the pump was making weird gusting noises. I looked closer and discovered a hole in the pump tubing. Undeterred, because TWO WEEKS (so much for unruffled disregard), I thought I could get a temporary fix with electrical tape. Or maybe electrical tape plus pinching fingers. Or maybe electrical tape plus Pete's pinching fingers, because it's hard to pinch effectively and pump effectively at the same time. Using this winning strategy I got the tire filled to a non-ridiculous level and rode the re-assembled bike* over to the bike shop so I could fill it up the rest of the way with their gust-free pump.

*What's your confidence level on changing a bike tire? My husband thinks it's a Level 1 life skill, like making scrambled eggs. I think it's more like Level 3, like making Oeufs à la Neige or something: I can do it, but it feels like a hassle and it makes me a little grumpy. Also I will not be a hundred percent confident about the results. Is this a male/female thing? Maybe my brother will weigh in if he sees this post.

As I was riding to the bike store I was thinking about the weirdness of the situation. First, how did I get simultaneous holes in the tube and the pump hose? And another weird thing: when I wasn't vigilant about the pinching-pumping combo, the new inner tube would deflate. At first I wondered if it was defective, but suddenly the reason dawned on me. If you connect a higher-pressure zone to a lower-pressure zone (in this case, the partially inflated bike tire and the split pump hose), air will flow rapidly from A to B. I didn't blow the first tube at all; I blew the pump hose. Air flowed out of my bike tire and through the rupture until everything was at atmospheric pressure.

So it's almost certain that I asked the bike store to recycle a perfectly good inner tube. But maybe you can avoid making that mistake someday now that I've made the mistake for you?

I went on the bike ride. It was painful. And a car pulled in front of me so unexpectedly that I stopped short and had to retrieve my bike and myself from an oversized hydrangea bush. My dignity, alas, remained behind, awaiting retrieval at some unspecified point in the future. At least it wasn't a rosebush, she said crabbily.

Huh, I was going to put this in the Fitness category but it has pretty much nothing to do with Fitness. I have no category for Reflections On Non-Intuitive Physical Phenomena That Become Clearer While One Is Engaged In Gentle Physical Activity.

Maybe screen time is underrated as a summer activity

Today I told the kids that I needed an hour's worth of Concentration-with-a-capital-C, in which I could get week 2 of my online summer class all ready to roll, and then we went out for a picnic afterward. We pulled up to the park just as a bunch of kids from our parish school showed up, and after Stella finished her lunch she ran off to play with a friend.

Except...then she disappeared. I wasn't worried at first, because there's a lot of tall equipment at this park and there were a lot of kids running around. But after a bit I said to Petely, "I'm going to find Stella. Can you stay with our things?"

She wasn't climbing the trees on the south edge of the playground. She wasn't splashing in the little creek. I thought maybe I should run back to the shelter where the school kids had their drinks and snacks set up, but something nudged me to keep going further away from the playground. I called her name. No answer. I kept calling, thinking, "She can't possibly have come this far," and there was still no answer. But when I stopped calling, I heard crying.

The reason I couldn't see her and the reason she couldn't hear me were the same reason: she had climbed a tree -- a colossal pine tree with lovely tempting closely-spaced branches -- and wound up terrified on a high branch, too fearful to move.

You guys, she was more than 25 feet up.

In the moment I was the calmest briskest most confident version of myself. "You are going to be OKAY, darling," I called up with utter conviction. "Take a deep breath and say a Hail Mary!" [pausing for a sec here to swallow back some tears, because the certainty that infused my voice was not entirely warranted under the circumstances] I didn't quite know what to do, though. My tree-climbing skills are not what they used to be, and I was worried that I might make the situation worse if I went after her -- getting stuck myself, or blocking the path downward, or something. I tried to talk her through it, but that didn't work very well ("try that branch! no, sweetie, the one pointing east!" --not so helpful, Mom). And she was so scared. I talked her over to a spot where two branches formed a V she could sit on, and told her I was going to get Pete, the current tree-climbing champ in our family, to help her out.

I pelted back to our picnic table, directing some very emphatic petitions to her guardian angel as I went, and sent Pete running to her tree. When I saw him in action I was really grateful I hadn't tried to go after her myself-- he seemed stuck only a third of the way up, and he was on the opposite side of the trunk unable to see how to help.

Somehow I was still entirely calm. "You don't have to be afraid, sweetheart," I yelled up at her. "You can absolutely do this. I am going to take you and Pete out for ice cream after you get down, and we are going to sit together at our table and laugh about this."

Slowly at first, and then faster, she found a path back down. I want to remember the way it felt to hug her when she was back on the ground: the smell of sun-warmed hair and the stickiness of sap-splotched hands and the RELIEF, the towering staggering RELIEF that she had not fallen from 25 feet.

"That was really hard, Stella," said Pete. "How'd you do it?"

"When Mom said we would go for ice cream," she told him, "I decided I could do it."

We have agreed that tree-climbing is an activity that requires a buddy.

This is the same park where Pete concussed himself six years ago. Maybe...we need a different park.

Back from the dead

I thought my laptop had bitten the dust. I bought it in 2011, and it wasn't very happy about using the Screencast-o-matic software to record video lectures for my summer class. The first time I recorded a batch of videos at home, my laptop needed some time to recover. The second time I tried it, the recovery time stretched into days. I thought, based on my googling, that it was probably the motherboard. Except! I took it in to the tech support booth on campus, and they took it apart and reseated the battery, and LO it is back among the living.

When I was in college my friend David once told me, "Whenever guys tell you they fixed something, it really means they took it apart and looked at it and put it back together. Works most of the time." I did not grow up with a mother who fixed things around the house, but I have taken David's advice to heart and it does work surprisingly often.

Since I last posted I have submitted spring grades (OH HUZZAH) and finished up the class I was taking in preparation for putting my summer class online. I have finished 5 of the 12 knitted turtles for my ridiculous sweater. (You guys, that is a LOT of turtle knitting. We are talking a whole WHOLE lot of turtle knitting. I am behind on Pickwick because of all the turtle knitting.)

I have not finished prepping my summer class, or enrolled the kids in their park district stuff, or taken care of any of the other loose ends that were on my list. But tomorrow is another day, one in which I will probably have a functioning laptop, and the turtles are pretty cute, aren't they?

#FAMDRAL returns

TraLAAAAA, it's May. This means it's time for the Fifth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong. This year's book is Pickwick Papers, which might be my favorite Dickens novel. (I know I keep telling you this. It's hard to pick my favorite-favorite, okay?) It is his most lighthearted, least sententious novel. Be advised, though: you have to give it a hundred pages' worth of benefit of the doubt, and thereafter it will richly reward the investment. I plan to start tomorrow. My goal is always to finish in about 3 weeks, which requires me to read 40-45 pages per day. No pressure to do it my way, of course. Join me -- I'd love some company!

World Gone Mad

Don Blankenship appears to have the lead heading into tomorrow's Senate primary in West Virginia. 

This article details some of the lies he is telling.

This article tells the story of a man who lost his brother, his nephew, and his son in the Upper Big Branch disaster.

In the last paragraph of this New Yorker article Blankenship talks about ambitions beyond the Senate. 

It seems like he must be joking, but I thought his Senate campaign was a joke too.

Voters' Guides

This evening I have been purging my Gmail inbox. It usually gets a little out of control as the semester progresses; there were 88 messages in my primary tab when I started. There are 25 at this point*, and one of them is niggling at me.

*That doesn't include any blog comments. Those go straight to their own folder, where I read them avidly but have not responded in...hmm...a long time. My apologies.

Shortly before our primary election, the parish pro-life council sent out a guide for voters. "Great," thought I, "there are lots of unfamiliar candidates and I'd like to know more about them." And then I read it.

You already know I am over the idea that voting while Catholic = voting Republican. But I am really seriously crankily over the idea that a document sent out through parish channels would tell me to vote Republican-- would utterly fail to acknowledge that we need to provide concrete support to pregnant women and protect gestating babies from harms other than abortion.

I have contacted my representative dozens of times since the 2016 election, and I tell you true: I'd sooner vote for an overripe banana. It is not pro-life to fight against accessible prenatal care. It is not pro-life to smooth the path for industry to dump teratogens in the water supply, where they can wreak havoc on the unborn. My rep did both of those things. And yet a vote for the posturing destined-to-fail 20-week ban apparently signifies that a pro-life hero walks among us.

Bah.

I have kept the email in my inbox because I'd like to write a note to my pastor. This will come up again between now and November, and I would like their next email to be a little more nuanced. I don't know how we got to a place where a candidate could spout whatever bizarre destructive nonsense took his fancy and command the "pro-life" vote as long as he claimed he'd vote to restrict abortion. I don't know how we return from there either.

I don't know of a source for sensible voting guides. I'm not sure what such a thing would look like in the current climate, at a time when so many Alabama Christians, for instance, believed they had a moral obligation to vote for Roy Moore over Doug Jones. (Roy! Moore! FTLOG: Roy! Moore!) I don't want any more "guidance" telling me to support the candidate I've already asked so many times to heed the church's dictates. He's made his priorities clear to me. I do not share them. I will not vote for him.

Recommended

I can't remember now how I wound up reading the Kindle sample of Start Without Me, but I devoured the book. It is the second novel written by Joshua Max Feldman, and it made such an impression on me that I read the first one too -- The Book of Jonah.

Start Without Me begins inside the head of a man trying to maintain a fragile hold on sobriety. We also meet a flight attendant with troubles of her own; the two of them, improbably, spend most of a day together. The thing that simultaneously hooked me and squashed me was Feldman's depiction of the impact of disordered alcohol use: the all-but-unquellable yearning, the slow erosion of the will (seen especially in the brutal rendering of a character we meet late in the book), the costs of sobriety. One of the things Hollywood gets wrong about substance abuse is the relentlessness of it, the way that continuing to choose freedom over enslavement is painful for a long time. Feldman writes about it so persuasively that I thought he must have been describing his own experiences. (That doesn't seem to be the case, based on the acknowledgments.) This is a hopeful book, but it's not a cheap or easy kind of hope. Having just made it sound like an Anti-Festival of Bleakness and Despair, I hasten to add that it's unexpectedly funny and full of surprises.

The Book of Jonah has a similar structure, in that we're mostly alternating between the perspectives of the two main characters, one male and one female. I suggest that you not read the reviews, some of which give away too much about the female character's story -- the element of surprise was exactly right. The title character is a corporate lawyer in NYC, whose world is upended when he begins getting intermittent glimpses of the divine.

I have read a lot of books in which non-believers have attempted to describe religious experience, and a lot of books in which believers have attempted to describe secular perspectives, and often they are pretty eye-roll-inducing. Feldman does something remarkable here: he captures the satisfactions of Jonah's secular life and then also offers a persuasive glimpse of the eternal. (Huh, that sentence sounds implausible now that I have written it, but read the book and tell me what you think.) Most unexpectedly of all, he intersperses hilarious slapstick-y moments. Somehow, both the divine visions and the slapstick work together. Maybe it's because their propinquity reflects a fundamental truth: life is both preposterous and sublime, sometimes in whiplash-o-genic succession. 

Some of you need to read it so we can chat about it afterward, okay? Even though it's called The Book of Jonah, there are echoes of the book of Judith as well-- the Judith character strikes an unexpected blow against a Holofernes-esque character. I want to talk more about that, and about the climax that teeters on the very brink of absurd but pulls it off. I want to talk about the idea of watching (unwelcome surveillance plays a role in both books) versus seeing. I am still thinking about the tenderness with which Jonah comes to regard human vulnerability -- tenderness with its connotations of pain as well as of compassion. 

The Whackadoodliest

In the years that I have been blogging about knitting, I have shared some whackadoodle projects. There were the octopus pajamas. 

There was the Cthulhu balaclava.

There was the monkey-face sweater.

But this sweater that I am trying to finish-- it takes the cake. How does it confound me? Let me count the ways. First, it's a hip-length laceweight sweater. It was always going to be a boatload of knitting. It's not just a boatload of knitting, though: it's a boatload of lace knitting, with a type of construction I'd never encountered before -- one in which you build from a suspender to make a sleeve. Oh, and can we talk about the grafting in pattern? Because there's lots of grafting in pattern. I spent months avoiding the first whack of it, before I knuckled down and braved it out.

Even so, I was making progress. I'd get to a spot where I'd think, "I...don't think I have the brainpower for that part right now," and I'd stash it in a bag for a while. Eventually I'd get it figured out and inch along to the next sticky bit.

First sleeve, check, despite the tricky cuff. Second sleeve, check; ditto. Back, completed, even though I thought I'd be grafting in pattern until Jesus came back. Waist, surprisingly easy. Skirt, modified slightly from the pattern but not hard. Just sloooooooooooooow. The whole thing is slow. Next month will be two years since I cast this sucker on.

On paper, it looks like I don't have much left to do-- just the lapels and some sort of closure. The lapels are the most distinctive thing about the whole sweater. It's called Tortuga, and there are little knitted turtles making their way up both lapels. They're so cute! And also so fussy! Each turtle repeat is 50 rows. Each turtle binds off 25 edge stitches. I'm...maybe not going to think about that very hard right now.

I made my sweater a little longer than the pattern called for based on an email exchange with the designer. This means I'm knitting six turtles on each lapel, twelve turtles with their little beaded eyes.

I I fear the world's turtle population may go extinct in the time it takes me to finish these lapels. The sun might have morphed into a red dwarf at that point, and I hear that the whole dying star thing isn't optimal for healthy turtle populations. I will drag myself out under its umber light, my arthritic hands clutched around my long-awaited turtly lapels. I may be the only person alive on planet Earth, but BY GOLLY I will be the most stylish.

(The turtle in the picture still needs a beak. I was just too busy contemplating the heat death of the universe to give him one tonight.)

Cruellest month, done and dusted

April is always stressful. The end of the academic year means weary students and weary professors, and weariness-fueled shenanigans. It's always bananas with end-of-year kid activities: sports and concerts and ballet performances and field day T-shirt orders and field trip permission forms. This spring I have a senior, who has a surprising number of forms to fill out for both high school and college.

For me in April there is always a predictable flavor of stress related to seasonal variations in the substance use pattern of the substance abuser who worries me most. That's not something that feels very bloggable to me but it is a relentless thief of peace and productivity.

This year we had the chilliest April I can remember, with snow on the first three weekends of the month. I'm okay with an April snow. I didn't even complain a ton about the second one. But three seemed excessive; I started to wonder if the forsythia would ever bloom.

But! The calendar page has turned! The forsythia did bloom, of course, and I am DONE creating content for that new grad class, and it should be a fairly mellow finals week as these things go. (I am resolutely not thinking about how much work needs to happen for my summer class to be online by its start date. One thing at a time.)

I am a little sidetracked wondering about the origin of the phrase "done and dusted." I'm having a mental image of an Amelia Bedelia-esque dusting, in which the newly laid-to-rest month is covered with a hefty sprinkle of fancy pleasant-smelling dusting powder. That way if it rises up from its calendrical grave in calendrical zombie fashion, you'll be able to trace its limping zombie footsteps through the dust. That's probably it.

ANYWAY. There are a bunch of fronts on which I need to pull things back together now that I am not prepping 5 hours a week of new grad content. That was, let me be clear, a huge and exhausting task. But it is also a completed task. Hurray!

Do you know another thing that made April exhausting? I was doing another round of the Any Good Thing writing challenge, which was FIVE WEEKS LONG, ending May 5. This post is now exactly 400 words long, which means I can go to bed. Good night.