Light and Momentary

Flat Stanley's Tire Pump

I read Flat Stanley in second grade, so my memory of the details is a little uncertain. But in my recollection of the book he wakes up his brother because he is sniffling sadly in the middle of one night. He's tired of being flat. It was okay for a while and now he's over it. So his brother inflates him with a bicycle pump, and Stanley goes back to his ordinary three-dimensional life.

We will gloss over the version of human anatomy in which people are essentially walking soufflés, able to puff or de-puff with no harm done to their innards. No, that doesn't quite work -- you can't blow a soufflé back up with a tire pump. 

Anyway, I was thinking about Flat Stanley because I have been walking around this fall in a state of perpetual deflation. I still can't tell you much about the current Gladly Troubles, but they are indeed troubling, and they have pretty much sapped my get-up-and-go. I can't seem to stay on top of the grading, much as I try. This morning I got up at 4:30 and worked like a woman determined to get caught up. And somehow-- I'm still not caught up.

I've been seeing a counselor since the summer, and she keeps telling me that it's normal for me to feel flattened. "This is a family crisis," she says in calm and reassuring tones. I am ready for the crisis to be over, though, and pretty annoyed that it doesn't seem to care much about my preferred timetable. 

It's not as if every day is a slog, the way it was at the beginning. The first week was so painful, kind of like I imagine an abscessing tooth would be. After the acute phase of an abscess is over, the dental patient has to get used to the new bite, the unaccustomed gap. There's not the wrenching pain that sent her to the dentist, but there's all that adjusting to the aftermath. That's where I am these days, but with added uncertainty, as if the dentist might need to pull an additional 6 or 8 teeth but maybe not and also we don't know when we'll find out.

Yesterday I pulled my SAD light out of the basement, even thought that's usually a November move. I read in front of it yesterday, and I graded in front of it today, and it did turn out to be an unexpectedly productive day despite my ongoing not-caught-up-ness. I'll keep doing what I can. But tonight an image of Flat Stanley flashed across my mind, and I can't help wishing for a quick and painless restoration, a metaphorical bicycle pump. 

Sometimes it's a bummer that life is more complicated than children's books make it out to be.

Saturday Night Dictation

What should I write a blog post about?

Climbing, says Joe.

What should I say?

Pete's insane, says Joe.

Today Pete sent a route he's been working for a while. It is BANANAPANTS hard. You guys, I can't even tell you how hard this route is. He is defying the laws of physics on this route. At first he thought it was totally impossible, and then he figured out how to do it in pieces, and then he figured out how to put the pieces together. 

Pete and Joe are trying to get me to write a post full of climbing jargon, about monos and sequenced foot chips and terrible crimps, but I will just tell you: totally BANANAPANTS hard.

We took my dad climbing today. He's 73. Rock-climbing is hard. My mom sat and read her book while we were climbing, but my dad gave it a whirl. They were good sports about the whole thing. I expect he will be sore tomorrow.

Joe and Pete want me to tell you the story of their lead-climbing adventures today. Lead-climbing is next-level climbing, and it's entirely possible to fall a long way. Pete was belaying Joe on the hardest route he's ever lead-climbed, and there were a bunch of grade-school kids who were at the climbing gym for a birthday party. Joe said, "Hey, you guys, I might take a big fall right where you're standing. You probably want to move that way." So they all moved as directed, but immediately they began drifting back into the fall zone. Pretty soon the whole gaggle was right back where they started.

Suddenly Joe did indeed take a big fall, which Pete only arrested when Joe was ~10 feet off the ground. In other words, he was swinging just above their little third-grade heads. They looked up, eyes wide; there was a collective gasp. Moral of the story: don't stand in the fall zone at a rock-climbing gym.

Joe and Pete also want me to tell you about Stella, who is making a ton of progress. Today she climbed a 5.9 route that I only sent a couple of weeks ago. I was certain she would stall out in the middle, because she's just not very tall yet. She has a surprising ability to propel herself across widely spaced holds, the law of gravity notwithstanding.

We stayed up later than usual playing Pictionary with my parents. Funniest drawings: visor, ox, extinct, West Germany, Thursday, year.

'Tis the Season

My husband speaks kindly about me almost 100% of the time. Just recently I said, "Would you tell me if I looked fat in this skirt?" and he said, "You look beautiful today." Note the masterful evasion there. Would he tell me? Doubtful. Would I actually want to know? Also doubtful.

So it grabbed my attention last night when I told him about my plan for Stella's Halloween costume. His response to my idea? "That's crazy."

Stella wants to be a cat lady for Halloween. She is going to wear a battered old bathrobe with fuzzy slippers and curlers in her hair, and she is going to have cats in her pockets and cats on her sleeves and possibly a cat on one foot. It is not clear yet exactly how many cats will bedeck her costume, because I am going to knit the cats. The thrift stores didn't have any stuffed cats and eBay prices were higher than I wanted to pay, so...logic, right?

Elwood would not use the word "logic" anywhere in the vicinity of this plan. For a non-knitter he has an unusually keen appreciation of the time required to knit an item, because he has often been the person covering non-knitting holiday preparation duties while I hunch over a piece of deadline knitting with the Scowl of Total Concentration and a Wee Soupçon of Repetitive Strain Injury upon my face. There was, for instance, the Christmas I decided on December 19 to make a stuffed elephant for my nephew. 

I was finishing the elephant's final limb as my nephew pulled into our driveway on Christmas Day; Elwood was peeling five pounds of potatoes.

It seems to be a quirk of mine that I always bite off a little more than I can chew with Halloween costumes, so this is pretty on brand. But as an argument for my sanity, let me point out that the cats are a lot quicker than the elephant. Bulky weight yarn instead of DK; size 10.5 needles instead of size 2; easy-peasy knitting with no tricksy new techniques. They still need eyes and whiskers and front paws, but none of that will take very long.

Also, aren't there, like, weeks left until Halloween? I think, just between you and me and the internet, that I might rip back the lighter gray cat's head to make it match the dark gray one more closely. 

Maybe I won't mention that step of the plan to my husband, though.

Awkward Phone Calls

Joe wants to go to a party at a friend's house. It's more complicated since he's at boarding school. I used to know lots of his classmates' parents because we waited outside together for our grade-schoolers to head out and walk home with us, and then I knew(-ish) a moderate number of his junior high classmates' parents because we had friends in common, and now I only know a tiny handful of his classmates' parents because he goes to school two hours away.

It's great for him to have far-flung friends who invite him to visit and be part of things with their families. I'm in favor of that idea. It also makes the "trust but verify" approach to parenting teens a little trickier to execute. In June he was invited to an older friend's graduation party, and his plan was to stay overnight with a different kid who was also attending the party. I asked him for a phone number to check in with a parent at the house where he was going to stay. I can't remember now if Joe said "Nobody else's mom is calling the hosts," or if I just felt awkward about it after the last time I tried to check in about a party in advance, but I definitely felt a little weird about it. The other mom was great -- she seemed perfectly happy to talk to me -- but I felt like Joe's Old-Fashioned Mom Being Embarrassing.

Not long after that Joe invited some friends to come and visit. They came from almost three hours away and stayed overnight with us, and I did not hear a single peep from a single one of the parents. This still strikes me as a little unlikely. How do they know I'm not running a cult? I mean, okay, I'm probably not going to lure their impressionable children into the Cult of Soul-Suckedness, or sell their organs on the black market while they sleep, but how do they know I'm even going to be home? Would you put a 17-year-old into the car and send him three hours away without confirming that there would be an adult at his destination?

Joe wants to go to a party at another friend's house this weekend, far enough from school that he'll be staying overnight again. I would like to check in with the parents before I give my teenager permission to leave campus with them, but I'm a little uncomfortable about being Joe's Old-Fashioned And Embarrassing Mom -- especially if I'm the only mom in his friend group cut from that particular cloth.

I'm pretty sure I'll do it anyway, but only pretty sure.

We'll have no bananas today

When the news broke on Tuesday that the White House was declining to participate in impeachment proceedings -- call it the Bartleby approach to a constitutional crisis -- I assumed that the letter saying "we would prefer not to" had been written by some sleazy lawyer. He was ridiculed on Twitter by conservative attorneys, including Gregg Nunziata. 

Wow. This letter is bananas. A barely-lawyered temper tantrum. A middle finger to Congress and its oversight responsibilities.

No Member of Congress should accept it, no matter his or her view on the behavior of Pelosi, Schiff, or Trump.

Things are bad. Things will get worse. https://t.co/AesJ6cGHrl

— Gregg Nunziata (@greggnunziata) October 8, 2019

George Conway also came down hard on the writer:

I cannot fathom how any self-respecting member of the bar could affix his name to this letter. It’s pure hackery, and it disgraces the profession. https://t.co/igPGL45oRS

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) October 8, 2019

So I was surprised to see the New York Times coverage of the author in Wednesday's paper. White House counsel Pat Cipollone, author of the bananapants letter asserting that the rule of law is not a thing, has 10 children. He's been an active supporter of Catholic charities, especially of pro-life efforts. He co-founded the National Prayer Breakfast. He introduced Laura Ingraham to the faith.

This is like the Mike Pence maneuver all over again. Remember how that played out in your Facebook feed in 2016? Trump is terrible, said one of my friends at the time, but Mike Pence is trustworthy. Vote GOP, because Mike Pence!

Ah, yes, Mike Pence, lodestar of integrity.

Pence is trying as hard as he can not to go down with the ship. pic.twitter.com/jrA8aoQSfb

— Matt Rogers 🎙🎃 (@Politidope) October 10, 2019

I suspect that the choice of Pat Cipollone as White House counsel was a deeply cynical move designed to shore up Catholic support for Trump. If the National Prayer Breakfast/March for Life guy says it, then it can't be an egregious violation of democratic norms or an attempt to subvert the authority of a coequal branch of government. 

Or maybe, actually, it can.

This morning I said to Elwood, "The longer we spend saying to each other, 'This is not normal,' the less true it is." We used to agree that someone who talked unironically about his great and unmatched wisdom would probably need psychiatric intervention. When the person saying it holds the nuclear football, the question of an appropriate response is more urgent. And yet somehow some Catholics are still saying that the current state of the White House is an acceptable flavor of bananas.

Kurdish children are dying because of Trump's determination to carry out Putin's agenda.

I have no words to write to this tweet as I speechless after receiving this video from Syria 😔 pic.twitter.com/JKUrbNW6fh

— Mutlu Civiroglu (@mutludc) October 12, 2019

Our failure to reckon with climate change is threatening lives around the globe. (My own Alex is in Tokyo right now, weathering the record-breaking typhoon that just pummeled Japan. The tweet below shows footage from an earlier, weaker typhoon. Horrifying, no?)

This Typhoon in Japan last year was 400km wide.#Hagibis is 1400km wide.

Stay inside.#RWC2019 pic.twitter.com/RtGX2VWrzu

— Martin Cross (@MartinXRugby) October 11, 2019

And yet for a vocal subset of US Catholics, the only legitimate way to be pro-life is to focus narrowly on changing US abortion laws and building a judiciary that will uphold additional restrictions. As of this week, when every news source is exploding with stories about Trump's failure to comply with US election law or with House impeachment proceedings, Abby Johnson is still exhorting folks to vote for him in 2020.

To be a universal Church is to see the big picture, the forest and the trees. Truth matters; the law matters. Say no to the bananas. Say it loud.