Light and Momentary

That's a wrap

Thirty days, thirty posts, ten Novembers in a row. Thanks for reading, my friends!

And all flesh shall see it together

A couple of weeks ago I was wrapping up my hour in the Adoration chapel, thinking disgruntled thoughts about Donald Trump (as one does in the Adoration chapel). Suddenly I had this moment of grace, this flash of certainty about how much God loves Donald Trump and desires for him to turn from sin and seek the truth. These are things to which I would have assented intellectually in the past, but the feeling -- the earnest wish for him to know his redemption and to seek salvation -- was 100% new. 

I am pretty certain it wasn't my own brain spinning up that train of thought, because my brain hops right on the ORANGE JUMPSUITS BABY track when left to its own thoughts about DJT.

I believe I have a responsibility to pray for the leadership of our country but I have found it hard to pray for Trump. I do it once a week, on Saturdays, usually grudgingly. In that moment, though, I realized how much he needs prayer. It must be dreadful to have marinated in lies for so long, and to have spewed out so many of them, that you can't even recognize truth reliably any more.

As always, I am grateful for moments of grace. I can still feel an echo of that flash of certainty, but only an echo. In the wake of today's news I sent a text that said ORANGE JUMPSUITS BABY, and I came home and talked over the events of the day with Elwood. It's a lot, right?

• Cohen admits that he lied to Congress
• Money Laundering Central (i.e. Deutsche Bank) gets raided
• office of Trump's former tax attorney gets raided
• all this before lunchtime
• also what is that wild story about Putin and a $50M penthouse in Moscow? real news or not?

So I'm still hoping he finds Jesus, and I believe the angels in heaven would rejoice over his conversion. But maybe...he could convert in prison. I would be A-OK with a prison conversion. 

Pursuers and Distancers

I'm in this Facebook group for academic moms and it is a wild place. I mean, those women are intense. I started to call them "those ladies" but they would not like that one bit.

There is a lot of talk in the group about marriage struggles, and there are a lot of women who are divorced or divorcing. The good news, I guess, is that there's support available for women who are thinking about ending a marriage. Sometimes, though, it feels like people are jumping the gun.

Just yesterday a woman posted anonymously about some friction with her husband. New baby, plummeting libido for mom, ongoing frustration for dad. Normal normal normal, yeah? Except! You wouldn't believe the responses! Get thee to marriage counseling, they said. Your husband needs individual counseling, they said. I'd throw him out, they said. 

Dang, I said.

Back when Alex was a little tiny thing, I read Harriet Lerner's Dance of Anger and it blew my mind. I realized that I was overfunctioning in some important areas, and inadvertently fueling conflict. I realized that we had a pursuer-distancer dynamic going, and I was responding in an extremely unhelpful way. Lerner writes a lot, across all of the books I've read, about how easy it can be to propagate an unhealthy pattern. You get entrenched in your identity as The Responsible One and you never notice that you're cementing your spouse's role as The Irresponsible One. You get stuck on how he never responds to your bids for intimacy, and you don't notice how you're pushing past his requests for space. 

Lerner is a secular Jew who taught me a ton about Catholic marriage.

The dad in question was initiating some physical contact that the mom didn't want, and that's what caused the freakouts. Your body belongs to YOU, they said. Which is true, absolutely, but also that's not the only thing going on here. I felt a little pang of sympathy for that dad, who was asking with his words, and asking with his touch, and hearing no again and again. I would bet you a bunch of money that they're in pursuer-distancer mode. It's a painful place to be; it's also temporary, if you're willing to work at it. So if you happen to know anyone in that situation, I recommend Harriet Lerner. You can buy a used copy of Marriage Rules for a dollar. That's a whole lot cheaper than a divorce attorney.

I once was blind. I guess I still am blind, but now I don't have to see.

At some point across the 14+ years I have been blogging, I must have told you guys about my blind spot for gridded schedules. It doesn't seem that hard to make sense of a gridded schedule, and yet they make my brain freeze up and then do loop-de-loops. When we lived in places where we relied on public transportation more than we currently do, I would check and recheck and umpteenuple-check (because quadruple-checking was sometimes not enough), and still sometimes I would make a silly mistake. I would aver that the #73 bus was stopping in my neighborhood at 10:31, only actually it had rumbled by at 10:13 and I (we) now had to wait for the next one. 

Just this morning I discovered a calendar mistake (calendars being the quintessential gridded schedules). I sent myself a Follow Up Then reminder to pick up the turkey on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving-- except I scheduled it to arrive today at 6am. (Luckily, I did not forget to retrieve the turkey last week.)

Our liturgical schedules come out in six-month blocks, and I laboriously transfer the days/times to the paper calendar and to my Google Calendar as well. Picture me licking my lips anxiously, looking from screen to calendar page and back again, writing a little tentatively because I know how often my brain glitches on tasks like these. Picture me in a state of chronic low-level worry that I miscopied something and will fail to show up as scheduled. And then! Picture me observing today, for the very first time, that there is an "Import to Google Calendar" button on the ministry scheduling site. One click and LO-- all of my remaining commitments are automagically swooshed over to my very own calendar. No anxious lip-licking required!

I have a niggling little concern about the permissions involved in giving a third party access to my Google account, but I almost don't care about potentially hostile third parties if I don't have to deal with gridded schedules.

Reconstructing the timeline

A character in my novel is complaining about George W. Bush in approximately February 2002, and I think her complaints might be a little anachronistic. By January 2005 I was suuuuper-unhappy with GWB, but I don't think I was in full-on-unrelenting-disapproval mode myself in February 2002. 

When he was elected I was willing to see what kind of president he would be, but I will never forget the press conference in August 2001 where he announced that he wasn't actually going to hold the line on embryonic stem cell research as promised. I was extremely disenchanted with him in the run-up to September 11, but it seemed important to preserve our unity as a nation in the wake of the attacks. So I backed off on calling him GWB, the Great Whopping Betrayer.

But then came the war, which was my first experience (not the last!) of watching a politician do something I found appalling and destructive and unjustified. By March 2003 I was permanently over GWB. 

I do not know, though, how much my own experience might generalize. Do you recall the trajectory of your own GWB approval/disapproval?

It's quiet again

Two of the three big kids were home for Thanksgiving. Alex is coming back to the Midwest twice next month, once for Christmas and once for my MIL's 80th birthday, so he stayed in New York for Thanksgiving. 

You guys, it was SO SO good to have big kids home. I just love to spend time with them. And now they're gone. There were only four of us for dinner, and we didn't make much of a dent in the lasagna. If you have leftovers that need eating, I have some teenaged boys you can invite over.

Everybody in my house is asleep except for me, and my three oldest boys are all sleeping under other roofs tonight. It's so quiet. It makes me a little melancholy.

The junior tempters operationalize their scrum outcomes

So you guys, that lunatic Screwtape says we are supposed to ramp up our efforts to convince the hairless bipeds that they should make extravagant purchases to commemorate the event in which the Enemy became poor for their sakes.

-He says what?

--Come on, they're not that stupid.

Well, I tried to tell him that and he just cocked an eyebrow at me. He referred me to some guy called H.L. Mencken. He also says we have a toehold and now we need to press our advantage. If we apply ourselves, he thinks, we can get Christmas trees into the shops by mid-August.

--No, that's when they flip out about buying pumpkin spice deodorant.

-You mean pumpkin spice lattes.

--They probably taste about the same, honestly.

Glossing over the question of why Trenchflake is eating deodorant-- old Screwtape says people used to think it was ridiculous to celebrate overspending at all, and then they started celebrating overspending in mid-November, and now we've pushed it into October. He says we're almost there on supplanting that noxious Incarnation observance with a much more palatable Feast of Consumerism.

Also I think we can get the pumpkin spice season moved to April with a little diligence. 

-So wait, aren't some of them supposed to be contemplating their own deaths in November? Or observing that regrettable feast day where they pretend that the incarnate Enemy has some sort of sovereignty?

--Well, yeah, but would you rather contemplate your mortality or stoke the coals of covetousness? I mean, clearly Option B is better.

Screwtape sent me an email after I told him I thought his whole approach was implausible. This is what he said:

The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present—either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure. Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present.

--Dang, does that guy go on and on.

-Careful, he's probably listening in somehow. But okay. So. We've done pretty well with morphing Advent into pre-celebration celebrating instead of that prayer and penance nonsense. Next steps?

I regret to inform you that at this point in the scrum the human observer who obtained this transcript was propelled by his exponentiating crotchetiness into centipede form, where he remains. 

Pillow Talk

One of the unexpected advantages of having bigger kids is the return of lazy morning conversations with my husband. I have fond memories from the early days of our marriage of unscheduled weekend mornings, when we would just chat in bed until we were ready to get up. I remember one long conversation about epicycles in particular, which is maybe not the topic that a post title like "Pillow Talk" calls to mind.

For years we were rousted out of bed early on weekend mornings by kids and kids' events, but these days all of our kids can entertain themselves for a while if we need to hammer out the particulars of planetary orbital mechanics. This morning the topic was Robert Heinlein.

When I was a teenager I read a lot of Robert Heinlein, as did Elwood. We had both pretty much moved on from science fiction by the time we met in college, so we never dissected his books together. Today he was trying to remember the plot of Glory Road, which I read and re-read in high school. 

It hasn't aged well. FOR INSTANCE: can we talk about the handsome yet self-deprecating hero who is hand-picked by the EMPRESS OF TWENTY UNIVERSES for an intergalactic mission? Oh, and can we talk about how said empress had to have her lady parts decommissioned before taking office because they made her too irrational to function? AND ALSO about the part where their host gets mad because our hero declines to dally with the host's wife and/or daughters, one of whom is 13 YEARS OLD? 

Glory Road is pretty innocuous Heinlein, too. I was strangely relieved when I learned that Heinlein had experienced a neurological event in advanced age, because it seemed to me to explain a lot of the weird sloppy self-referential nonsense he spewed out and slapped between two covers at the end of his career. As a high school student I thought perhaps I needed to be better-read or smarter to connect all of his dots. There was also stuff happening between the lines that I couldn't quite puzzle out. And what do you know? It wasn't that I failed to follow the plot -- he just didn't get around to writing it!

I still have a soft spot for The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, as does Elwood. There will be no Lazarus Long on our shelves, though.

In progress

You guys, I went back to my in-progress novel after months of ignoring it. And do you know, I am very fond of it. It feels a little silly to tell you this, but I am going to tell you anyway: it made me laugh out loud, and then it made me cry. Right now I have 11,999 words drafted, and a powerful urge to write more.

Hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving! 

On the menu

If you have been reading here for a while you know I have One True Thanksgiving menu. It consists of the following:

• roasted fresh turkey (I don't fool around with all that thawing / brining / deep-frying business. Buy it fresh and stick it in the oven. Baste.)
• mashed potatoes with All The Butter
• sweet potatoes mashed with Surprise! More Butter, also pineapple tidbits and orange juice and pecans
• cornbread stuffing (veggies sautéed in yet more butter, natch)
• gravy
• Penitential Cranberry Sauce
• some green vegetable
• maybe an autumnal salad but maybe not
• maybe rolls but probably not (if I make bread dough, man, there will be BUTTER in that bread dough)
• pecan pie (moooore butter!)
• pumpkin pie (even more butter!)

We mix it up around here for Christmas and Easter and birthdays. I am not generally rigid about food. But I do exactly one Thanksgiving menu. Three years ago I made a different kind of cranberry sauce and I had to write a whole blog post about it.

I thought it was a quirk of mine, but it has become a shared quirk. The boys are very insistent about keeping the penitential in Penitential Cranberry Sauce. Today I said I was considering a different sweet potato dish, and Joe said, "WHAT?! Noooo!" He thought for a moment. "Maybe you could make two dishes of sweet potatoes."

6/7 of my family is home tonight and also my knitting is making me happy

Tonight four of my children will be sleeping under my roof, which makes me feel like all's right in the world. They are sitting at the dining room table with Elwood and playing Sheriff of Nottingham, a game in which each player tries to sneak contraband past the crooked sheriff. It stresses me out a little just listening to them play, because it pushes my rule-follower buttons. You mean the RULES say I'm supposed to LIE and SNEAK? That doesn't make ANY SENSE! 

I have been knitting instead. Remember when I told you that the election broke my brain? I tried to start a pretty happy brioche project that night and I just couldn't manage it. Today it was supposed to be a diversion in between stretches of grading, but I wound up not doing a lot of grading. I submitted a manuscript at lunchtime and something in my brain said, "Well, that's probably enough work for one day. It's Thanksgiving break, after all."

So let's talk about brioche stitch instead of grading. Do you know about brioche stitch? It is an unusually pleasant and squooshy way to knit, and it yields a warm pretty fabric. Or at least the fabric is pretty if you do it right. Brioche stitch is much more complex architecturally than plain-vanilla knitting, because you're either wrapping a stitch in a second strand of yarn or working a stitch together with its wrap. Oh, and you have to work each row twice, so that each stitch can get the treatment that it didn't get the first time. In ordinary knitting, dropping a stitch is like dropping a pea into a glass of water at the dinner table. It's mildly annoying, but you can fish it right out. In brioche stitch, dropping a stitch is like-- remember in Fellowship of the Ring when Pippin dropped a stone into a well in the mines of Moria? Kind of like that.

But I found this nifty brioche pattern and I decided to make the two-color version in a pair of luscious Malabrigo yarns. One is a deep velvety saturated purple, and the other is this gently variegated blue-green with pops of lavender and also of gold. It reminds me of the gardens at Giverny. This picture does not do justice to the colors, or to the pattern. 

Oh, HA, I did not know until I went looking for the pattern link that the texture-y bits were inspired by Princess Leia's hairdo. Here I thought they must be something floral.

Another distinctive thing about brioche knitting is that it gives you a reversible fabric. Cool, huh?

This is the third time I've used brioche stitch. I made Stella a hat, and there was a brioche section in the shawl I wound up giving to a friend a couple of years ago. But I've never quite figured out how to sort things out if they go catawampus. Learning to fix knitting mistakes was unexpectedly freeing: you can try anything if you know how to repair your mistakes. Brioche stitch, though-- so far I just stare at the mistakes and think, "Huh, that's not what was supposed to happen." In knitting as in life, the "Maybe I Just Won't Make Any Mistakes" plan is never a sensible tactic. It seems likely that knitting up 200g of fingering weight yarn in brioche stitch is going to offer me some opportunities to figure out what to do when things go catawampus.

We'll see how that works out, I guess.

Fast away the old year passes

When the calendar turns over there will be six weeks left in 2018. 

What's left to accomplish on your list of new year's resolutions? 

One or the other but not both

I can't remember why I decided to go to the training for new Eucharistic ministers, and I can't remember how long ago it was, but I do remember that I was consumed by anxiety about the role.

Whether or not you're Catholic, you know that communion is a big deal for Catholics. We believe that when Jesus said "my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink," that's what he meant. Ditto for "the one who feeds on me will have life because of me." Before I was a Catholic I thought this was the most preposterous wackadoodle bananapants idea that anybody's brain ever spat forth, even though my own Bible had John 6 in it. It was an issue for me even in the week before my entry into the Church in 1992, but I encountered the Lord powerfully in the Adoration chapel after that Holy Thursday service. And oh-- when I received communion two days later, I went back to the pew and trembled with the magnitude of what I had done.

So I am still totally willing to acknowledge that it sounds like the most preposterous wackadoodle bananapants idea anybody's brain ever spat forth, but I also believe it is the truth.

The very idea of the Eucharist creates some logistical difficulties. What should we do if someone drops a full chalice? If it's plain old wine, you sop it up with a dishrag and toss it in the wash. If it's the Precious Blood, it's more complicated. What do you do if a kid takes the host but stashes it in his pocket instead of consuming it? What do you say to someone who wants to receive but doesn't seem to know the drill? Imagine my scrupulous tendencies as a pack of yapping foxhounds. The prospect of distributing communion was like a hunting horn, sending them into a frenzy of baying and yipping. 

It's a little weird that I went to this training. And it's also weird that I stuck with it, because my first few experiences were stressful. On the one hand, I want everybody who comes to our church to feel welcome there; on the other, I feel protective about the Eucharist. When someone responded, "Yeah, thanks" instead of "Amen," I would second-guess my reaction, no matter what it was. But you guys, distributing communion became a channel of palpable grace. People would come through the communion line and I would get this flash, this brief intense glimpse, of how much God loves them. Sometimes I couldn't even say the words "the Body of Christ" aloud, because the immensity of God's generosity literally took my breath away. So I would mouth the words and look at them with love, and the whole thing would leave me a little weak in the knees. 

Here is the thing I am finding: I can't switch back and forth between the baying-foxhounds vigilance and the recognition of God's tender personal love for each person in my line. A couple of weeks ago I was in that happy groove where I just wanted to sing out "BEHOLD YOUR GOD!" to every person who came forward, and I was too slow on the uptake about a person who was almost certainly not Catholic. If I am focused on vigilance, on preventing the next PZ Myers from obtaining a host in my particular communion line, I cannot see the transcendence of the moment. There must be a middle ground. I am sure there is a middle ground. It's just that I seem to yaw from one side to the other.

I am finishing the gospel of John this week, and I am thinking again about Our Lord's willingness to pour himself out for those who did not understand his generosity -- which is all of us, really. I was struck tonight by this post at Where Peter Is, about God's choice to become vulnerable. If it were not November I would hide this post in my drafts folder, because drafting it has left me feeling vulnerable. It could inspire some capital-O Opinions about the right amount of vigilance for a Eucharistic minister. Mostly the point I wanted to make was this: I am learning to see how much God loves my neighbor, and her neighbor, and his neighbor. It takes my breath away. It's all too easy to lose sight of it.

Jiggety-jig

Home! Safe! Tired!

Travel blogging, day 3

Alex made it into town, hurray! He had some delays and hassles getting out of NYC, but he persevered. We met up in Cambridge and walked back across the river together. We walked through the Boston Public Garden, past the statue of Ouack and his siblings plus mom. (Poor Ouack. What a horrible name he had!) He took me out for a delicious dinner and I have spent the rest of the evening talking with my long-distance collaborator turned hotel roommate. 

Presentation was pleasant and low-stress. Home tomorrow!

Winter Wonderland

It’s snowing! I am in Boston at my conference, watching the snow fall. I think we’ll get enough to be pretty but not enough to cause hassles, though I suppose one never knows with the weather. Alex is supposed to meet me in Boston tomorrow, but he might have some trouble getting out of New York tomorrow. We shall see.

You know the thing I said yesterday about a five-digit number of people under one roof? That is a lot of people under one roof. Apparently there are 18,000 attendees this year. It’s bananas. There are lots of things to learn and also lots of lines for the bathrooms.

Trainblogging news you might be able to use

Mid-November, time to head to my discipline’s annual convention. This year I just have one presentation, so I’m hopeful that it will be mellower than usual. Although— maybe it’s not possible to put a five-digit number of people in an enclosed space and get something mellow as a result.

This year I tried something new with my poster: I used Spoonflower to print it on fabric. If you’re an academic you already know the poster hassle. It’s a nuisance to transport something that’s three feet long and unfoldable.

Spoonflower prints images on fabric for customers, including academics weary of hauling poster tubes around. You guys, this poster cost $18 shipped! It is nestled in the bottom of my bag, taking up less space than my pajama bottoms.The one fiddly thing about the process was using the registry editor to change the default dpi in PowerPoint. It was so worth that small hassle!

Strong Support

I wasn't expecting to hear from the department committee about my tenure application until next month, but my chair is a person who Gets Stuff Done. She popped her head into my office today, envelopes in hand, and asked if I had a minute. They'd drafted the letters to the college quickly, because she wanted us to have them before our big disciplinary conference this week.

Their letters, you might remember, are a big deal-- the college almost always follows the department's recommendation. And the department's verdict is...: heck yeah, tenure Jamie Gladly. Unanimous vote for promotion, unanimous vote for tenure, supported by an enthusiastic letter from the committee, which mentions that my external reviewers were unanimous in their support for my application. "We are writing in strong support of Dr. Jamie Gladly's application for promotion and tenure," the letter begins.

OH THE RELIEF. I have been a little frustrated with myself about my agita over the tenure process. I keep thinking that a wiser, more mature person would have just completed her application unflappably. I have not been that person over the past few months.

Elwood picked me up and took me out for a delicious pre-celebratory lunch. Nothing is final until May, but this is really good news. 

Thanks, Google

This afternoon I went searching through my email archives. I have a plane to catch later this week, and I couldn't remember exactly when I was leaving. Gmail obligingly pulled up a United reservation for me, but it was a one-way reservation.

I did a little more looking, with a few different search terms, and my heart began to sink. Had I really only bought myself a one-way plane ticket? Had I somehow left the other half of it unpurchased back in August? I checked on the airline's site. Yep, it was a one-way reservation.

A cold chill snaked through my middle as I tried to imagine how much it would be to buy a plane ticket at this late date. Help me out here, Google, said I. How many zillion dollars is this going to cost me?

At the top of the page of search results Google put a box with my profile picture in it. You're flying out at 5 pm on Wednesday, it said. On American.

When I bought tickets back in August I booked them on two different airlines so I could optimize schedule and ticket price. All memory of this decision went sailing merrily out of my head as soon as I clicked "purchase," apparently. It's a good thing Google is smarter than I am.

Sara Crewe Revisited

A Little Princess was one of my very favorite books when I was a kid. I couldn't tell you how many times I read it-- enough that I can still recite parts of it. I never once read it to my sons, though, and so it's been a long time since I dove into that riches-rags-riches story.

Stella loves it, which is really fun. I am finding myself a little skeptical about Sara, which feels disloyal. Can we talk about Sara?

I'm having the same reaction to Sara that I did to Esther Summerson when we read Bleak House for one of those AMDRALs. Virtue takes practice and maturity, and young girls who leave shining trails of virtue behind them, like garden snails clad in gauzy Victorian-era frocks, arouse my ire. The idea of a 7-year-old who is unrelentingly patient, generous, polite, and unflappable seems less plausible to me in adulthood than it did when I was 7 myself. Why would Sara have needed to cultivate those virtues in her years of fabulous wealth and ease? How could Esther have cultivated those virtues in her years of deprivation? Why would anyone want to teach kids that virtues arise ex nihilo? 

I suspect my skepticism will intensify as Sara moves from the parlor boarder suite into the attic. If memory serves, she slides capably into a life of servitude.

One of the early chapters sparked an all-but-forgotten memory of a conflict at Girl Scout camp that I tried to resolve by channeling Sara Crewe. "We," I said imperiously to the doubtless puzzled ringleader, "are not little gutter children." 

It worked better in Sara's schoolroom.

It would be unfair to expect Frances Hodgson Burnett to write in a way that isn't quite so classist and colonialist; we're all products of our times. It doesn't seem unreasonable, though, to expect her to write in a way that has some connection to the actual moral development of actual children.