Light and Momentary

Archogenic Dysboulia

Donald Trump is eroding my will. 

I don't mean will as in will to live. It's not active despair. It's just that his presence in the Oval Office, and the continued cheerleading of people who seem to think that the S&P index is the only performance index that matters, and the smaller but nonetheless noisy numbers of people who actually support evils like family separation at the border -- it's grinding me down. There's a limit to the number of times that I am willing to call my reps and talk back to the radio, to say, "Hey, truth matters. Science matters. Manners matter."

Remember when presidents didn't call people "horseface," or at least not in public? I miss those days.

I keep thinking that I am going to GET BACK in the exercise groove and GET EXCITED about the beautiful fall vegetables in my crisper (and, simultaneously, GET RID of the 12 or 15 surplus pounds I have been hauling around since the election). I resubscribed to FlyLady because I was feeling the need for MORE ORDER. (It turns out that the Rubba Scrubba ads are no less annoying in 2018 than they were in 2010. It also turns out that if you filter the FlyLady messages to their own folder because the useful bits are all jumbled up with Rubba Scrubba ads, your house does not get any cleaner.)

You know the thing in my brain that used to make me say "Let's read a Dickens novel! It will only take 3 weeks!"? That thing is only limping along these days. I've got impulse power instead of warp speed. It took me three months to reread Pickwick Papers, and I didn't enjoy it very much. I rely pretty heavily on my ability to say "Let's DO THE THING!" with enthusiasm and a measure of efficiency, and the discovery that it has become less reliable is troubling me.

Neurologists have a label for the condition in which patients seem to lose their will: aboulia (sometimes spelled abulia). When patients have aboulia they don't want to start anything, and they can't follow through even if someone else helps them to get the ball rolling. I don't actually have a case of aboulia; I know that. Even so, it's troubling to see the shift in my thinking. I know I would be happier if I got the weeds out of the peony bed...but I don't want to get out there with the spade. I might really enjoy casting on that new shawl...but brioche stitch is hard and sometimes frustrating, so why bother?

My will is not totally MIA, but it feels kind of fractured. Ergo, dysboulia. It is clearly connected to the shenanigans in DC, so I am calling it archogenic, or leader-induced. The temptation to self-medicate keeps growing. Anybody else feeling the same way?

Barbie Moments

I am sharing a room with my co-presenter, who had no idea what I meant when I said I was having a Barbie moment. Do you remember the talking Barbie who said “math is hard!” There was outrage about her existence, about manufacturers sending impressionable girls the message that they couldn’t handle math, but do you know what? Sometimes math is hard. 

I keep thinking about cross-stitching a motto for my office wall: Science Is Hard And Messy. Before I was trained as a researcher I envisioned science as a much tidier undertaking, but the reality is that you can have a beautiful hypothesis that your data utterly fail to support, or effects that go in the wrong direction entirely. And don’t get me started on the human foibles that complicate matters further, like certain unnamed people who give spreadsheets names like “really for real the right version.” (That would, alas, be me.) When I started my doctoral program, data management — naming variables and spreadsheets in transparent and clearly documented ways, and storing them safely in sensible places — wasn’t on my radar as a thing a researcher needed to handle, but it is critical for the efficient functioning of a lab. It only gets messier over time. 

Last week I went looking for some data that I know for a certainty I obtained in 2013. And...no dice. Those results might have been living on a laptop that went belly-up, or they might have been deleted by malicious gnomes bent on expanding human ignorance and folly, or I might have stashed them on the university server in a place I can no longer find. I do not know. It’s not an emergency, but it is an annoyance. 

Our presentation went fine, although our collaboration is different from the other research that’s being presented here. I think we are the only people from our discipline here at this interdisciplinary meeting, which is fine but also a little weird. We met an applied statistician last night who had a recommendation for a strategy to tackle a vexing problem in our most recent paper. I am waking up before 4 here (did you know Phoenix is on West Coast time? I thought it would be on Mountain Time instead but it is not), so I’ve had time today to start reading about zero-inflated distributions. 

I am here to tell you, friends, that sometimes math is hard. 

Providence

Thanks, you all, for your interest in my new project! I will be in touch next week. Right now I am in Phoenix for a conference. I have a story to tell you about getting here. 

Do you know that driving in city traffic stresses me out? I must have told you this before. I had a mid-morning flight out of Chicago and it was inevitable that I would be driving in rush hour traffic for a chunk of the trip. Blech, I hate driving in Chicago rush hour traffic. 

I had just merged onto 190 and I was trying to figure out where my exit was. There was construction, and the lanes were poorly marked, and the exit signage was confusing, and BUMP — I went over an uneven spot. “That probably wasn’t great for my alignment,” I thought, as I steered toward the exit. DING! The low tire pressure alert light came on. 

“Hm,” I thought to myself, “I bet if I turn right here I can find a business that will help me sort this out. Let me just pull into this parking lot and assess.”

The tire was totally flat. I had never changed a tire on this car before. A guy came out of the building and started striding toward me across the empty parking lot. I was sure he was going to say, “Ma’am, this is private property and you’ll have to move along.”

But! No! He was a Rosemont public safety officer named Anton. What he actually said was “How can we help you this morning?” He and another officer changed my tire for me, lickety-split, and I got to the airport with plenty of time to spare. 

So much grace there, you guys. For the flat to happen where it did, when I was almost to the airport. For me to feel certain that I should exit there and turn right, when that was not actually my exit. The kindness of strangers is a lovely thing to see. I am also grateful for the kindness of my husband, who is planning to deal with replacing the tire while I am away. 

As I was driving toward Chicago in the early morning darkness I thought to myself “I have a hard time trusting God with potential disasters.” Through my hotel window I see palm trees silhouetted against the rising sun, and I am thinking about how wide and strange the world is, and how much goodness it contains. I hope I am learning to trust him, slowly. 

Filtered

Back in the spring I got a comment that took me aback, from someone who had been reading here for a long time. It was one of those moments that highlights how little people on the internet actually know each other. I suppose there are still big surprises for people who know one another in the real world, but it's easier to put up a front online.

It left me feeling self-conscious. I kept blogging regularly up until my birthday, because I had said I would, and then I found I didn't really want to write here very often. But: (a) I miss it. (b) It's silly to give too much weight to an internet acquaintance's random opinions about my life. (c) I forget things if I don't record them here. So here we go.

I am pretty sure that at some point in the future I will say to my husband, "When did we go to the ER?" If you are looking for an answer to that question, Future Jamie, it is Saturday, September 30 29, 2018. Elwood tried to catch Stella as she wobbled on her bike. He lost his balance and dislocated his right middle finger. He said it didn't hurt too much but he seemed traumatized: a little off-balance, eyes unfocused. It was conspicuous enough that I asked Stella if she was VERY SURE he hadn't hit his head. We got in the car and he started pouring sweat, even though it was pleasantly cool here on Saturday. Urgent care sent us immediately to the ER, where we spent much less time than I thought we would. 

My husband and I have different ideas about how injured people should conduct themselves. In my view, a person who almost falls over in his kitchen should not plan to walk a half-mile home. ("I'll be fine!" he insisted, but I drove him home anyway.) Also in my view, a person who makes his living crunching numbers should not attempt to translate these skills into crunching knuckles; he should not take it upon himself to reduce his own dislocation. He was a little annoyed when the nurse practitioner needed about 5 seconds to pop the finger back into place. "I should have tried harder," said Elwood. "I needed more force." "No," I told him with a certain emphasis, "you needed more licensure."

I have instructed him that the only situation in which he is invited to relocate something I've dislocated is a post-zombie apocalypse scenario. Let us hope we never have to assess his subluxation management skills.

On Saturday before the ER trip I threw up a quick post about a new project I'm taking on for my parish, and then a painful case of blogger's regret hit me in the ER waiting room. Elwood read the post after I took it down and pronounced it "totally innocuous," but to my eye it had an unpleasant overtone of BEHOLD MY RIGHTNESS. The upshot was this: if you might be interested in reading more of my faith-related writing at another site, and if we know each other a little bit through the internet or real life, leave me a comment or shoot me an email. (If you already commented on the other post, no need to do so again here. Unless you just want to. I love comments, almost all the time.)