Light and Momentary

Lazy Cooking for the Apocalypse

This is a version of a recipe from a site called My Heart Beets. At some point you should visit the site, but I have to warn you: the annoying level is high. Like, if I wanted random videos to start playing on my computer screen, I would just invite a hamster to scamper across the keyboard while I am on my YouTube landing page. (This comparison is brought to you by the German class hamster, Kartoffel, who was invited to stay with us for spring break. Now he might be a long-term guest. The kids made cardboard mazes for him today and he is currently causing much hilarity as he navigates them.) 

But anyway-- this site is the source of a Very Useful Instant Pot Recipe for onion masala, which I have made a bunch of times now and have appreciated every time. If you like Indian food, you should make it too. Here's what you do: first, put your IP in sauté mode. Heat 1/3 c. neutral oil, and add 6 medium onions, chopped coarsely. Cook them down for 15 or 20 minutes, until they are pleasingly brown. Next up, add about 12 cloves of garlic, chopped coarsely, and 2 inches of ginger, chopped finely. Stir them around for a couple of minutes, and then add in 2 14.5-ounce cans of diced tomatoes. Sauté everything together for about another 5 minutes, stirring so it doesn't scorch. Now add your spices. I suggest about 3 T. each of ground cumin and coriander, about 1 T. of paprika, about 1 t. of cayenne and a shake of turmeric. Stir it all together, and then seal up your Instant Pot. Cook it at high pressure on the Manual setting for 5 minutes, let the pressure come down naturally, and then smooth it out with an immersion blender.

The reason this recipe is so useful is that you can use it to make a bunch of different speedy Indian meals. The one we make most often is what the kids call Yellow Carpet of Deliciousness. Once you have onion masala on hand, it comes together in a flash. If you wander into the kitchen on a Friday afternoon in Lent, all you have to do is turn your Instant Pot on in sauté mode and heat a little oil in the bottom. Briefly sizzle 1/2 t. cumin seeds and a sliced hot pepper. Add 2 cups of either yellow split peas or red lentils and a cup of onion masala. Pour in 6 cups of water and 2 t. salt. (Don't neglect the salt.) Cook under pressure for 8 minutes, and let the pressure come down naturally for 15. Stir in a teaspoon of garam masala and serve over rice, with cilantro. It's a single-digit number of hands-on minutes, for a cheap easy meal that everybody here eats happily.

My Heart Beets has a ton of recipes that call for onion masala -- it's probably worth poking around a bit despite the auto-play videos. I store mine in the fridge, but you can also portion it out and stash it in the freezer if you don't cook Indian food very often.

Do we need a picture of Kartoffel in his cardboard maze? I think we might need a picture. He's in the upper left-hand corner of the maze, surrounded by laughing Gladly kids.

Better

Today I had a FaceTime session with my counselor, whom I hadn't seen in three weeks. Two weeks ago she was on vacation, and last week I was worried about being around other people when I had mild respiratory symptoms, and -- what do you know? -- three weeks is a leetle too long for me to go between counseling sessions in a global pandemic with accompanying economic collapse. I guess I'll know for next time. (Hahahaaaa, what a hilarious joke that is.)

A month ago I had been thinking that it might be about time to wind our sessions down. I sought her out last summer with three specific issues on my mind, and I had been feeling better about all of them. GOSH, the world seemed different a month ago. Thirty days ago I was complaining about other parents at school drop-off, and now I'm like, "Come baaaaack, other parents at school drop-off! Be as weird and overprotective as you wish!" (Only of course I do not actually want them to come back, not until their presence is less likely to spread a deadly disease.)

My husband saw what was coming down the pike more clearly than most of us did. It still sounded like an improbable dystopian future when he first said that I should be prepared to teach online and work from home. It seemed preposterous at the beginning of this month when he suggested that the schools would be shuttered by its end, but he said we should be prepared for that as well. It seemed bizarrely cautious and entirely out of character when he said at the end of February that he didn't think it was a good idea for me to go to NYC and see Alex. And maybe it is bizarre that going to NYC was genuinely a bad idea, but my husband was not the source of the strangeness. I guess a math degree will teach a person to take exponential growth seriously.

We are settling in, I guess, the six of us rotating in and out of the various spaces in our snug house. People who need Zoom are taking refuge in the office; people who are recording audio lectures (that's me) are sharing a chilly basement room with the teenaged boys who have set up a makeshift weight bench down there next to the desk. We're muddling through, I guess. I guess that's all we can do.

That's just Susie

When I am under stress I get OCD symptoms. I think I probably met the criteria for the disorder when I was in junior high, but things have mostly been better since then. Sometimes I would need to work at pushing back the intrusive thoughts like "the-kids-will-all-get-lead-poisoning-it-will-be-your-fault" in order to deal with the actual painters, but I could do that. It was helpful to learn that scrupulosity is a religious flavor of OCD; it explained a lot and helped me to let go of some groundless anxieties. Like I said, things were mostly better.

They are not currently better.

The last time I felt remotely like this was early 2009: I was newly postpartum, Stella was tiny, and I wasn't sure if I would be able to finish a PhD while also being a competent and engaged mother to five children. I am generally more bothered by the O slice of OCD, the intrusive thoughts, than by the C slice, the compulsion to complete an action. I've had issues with both, but I'm more of an O girl. After Stella was born the intrusive thoughts were all about her: "it-would-be-so-awful-if-you-put-the-baby-in-the-oven" "please-don't-put-the-baby-in-the-oven." I was not experiencing anything like psychosis. It was just jarring and awful and unreasonable and repetitive. I called a counselor. 

I only saw her for a few sessions, but she was very helpful. She said, "What if you don't try to fight your anxiety? What if you just sit with it, while not giving it too much weight? What if you imagined that the voice behind your worries and intrusive thoughts had a name? What if you said to yourself, 'Oh, that's just Susie, and she always sounds like that'?"

Things got better.

But this is a bad season for people with tendencies toward anxiety and OCD, and I am struggling: unusually jumpy, unusually weepy. Today I joined a lunchtime Zoom meditation session that my university was offering, but I left it in tears in the middle. They asked us to think about someone dear to us, and I thought of my Alex. He feels so far away right now. I am SO SO GLAD he and his friends left NYC to hole up in upstate joint social isolation, but I am still pretty worried about him. Today's intrusive thoughts: "if-he-died-how-would-you-get-his-body-back-for-burial?" "he-used-to-have-asthma-so-he's-higher-risk-than-most-young-adults" "if-he-died-in-New-York-he-would-die-alone."

Because we're still figuring out exactly how COVID-19 spreads, there's a lot of dubious information floating around. I think it's probably the OCD talking when I repeatedly consider putting the newspapers in a 200-degree oven for 30 minutes before anyone is allowed to handle them. I think it's probably overkill to leave the groceries out in the cold for a couple of days before bringing them in. (Though I've seen that advice in a lot of places. Does that mean no one is buying ice cream right now?)

This morning when I woke up I had a momentary surge of certainty. We do not know what life will look like on the other side of this pandemic, but God does. He loves us and wills our good, and we can trust him. Things went downhill from there, but I'm grateful for that flash of knowing. I'm grateful that Sunday's gospel will be the story of Lazarus. "There will be a stink," they cautioned Jesus. But he doesn't need us to tell him that death is ugly. He loves us; he is with us in our suffering; he has authority over life and death. I believe that.

But Susie, who has been mostly quiet for a long time, has morphed into a 60-foot tall fanged version of herself like the main character in the children's book Frankenstella. Susie is pretty loud right now.

One of my best Susie-shrinking strategies is an early bedtime, so I am going to call it a night. I'd appreciate your prayers, friends.

No. Absolutely Not.

Maybe ten days ago, or a million years -- who can tell at this point? -- I saw a quote attributed to one of Boris Johnson's lackeys. We should just let the virus run its course, he said, and deal with the fallout later. Prevention would be too hard on the economy.

"Thank God," I said to myself, "that this nonsense is on the other side of the ocean from me. That right there is why the Bible says love of money is the root of all evil."

Like the coronavirus itself, this unspeakably execrable flavor of cupidity has wormed its way inside our borders and is infecting disturbing numbers of people. A man from my church posted approvingly about the president's presser today, in which Trump asserted that we're just going to have to get back to work after a couple of weeks of this.

So let's be absolutely clear about what he is saying: we should allow more than 2 million people to die, many of them in heartbreaking respiratory distress, because the economy is the most important thing here. We should allow this virus to run roughshod over the most vulnerable members of our society. We should just...stand aside while it ravages our country -- primarily our elderly, but uncountable others as well.

I have been frustrated for a long time now with the voices on the right calling Trump The Most Pro-Life President In History. Now some of those same folks are expressing support for him in this, perhaps the least pro-life idea ever to issue forth from a human mouth.

Let's have a brief review of How To Catholic: 

• Do we protect the vulnerable and marginalized, even when it is personally costly, whether or not they have already been born? (Answer: yes)
• Do we believe in a preferential option for the poor, who are already disproportionately affected by this virus and who urgently need our assistance? (Answer: also yes)
• Do we seriously suggest that allowing more than 2 million agonizing and largely avoidable deaths to happen, primarily so rich people can get back to being rich, is a pro-life perspective? (Answer: HELL NO, we do not.)

Recently, just before the wheels fell off the world, I wrote a post for the parish blog challenging the idea that good Catholics^TM are required to let abortion drive our voting decisions simply because there are more lives affected by abortion than by any of the other issues related to human life and dignity (i.e., it doesn't really matter if a Republican candidate supports the death penalty, because so few people are executed compared to the numbers of abortions in this country). Because I just wrote that post, I can tell you the Guttmacher Institute's most recent estimate for the number of abortions per year in the US: 862,000. And yet some of the people who claim that protecting the maximum number of lives is a moral obligation have now added an astonishing asterisk: *but it's okay to consign more than twice that many people to painful deaths this year if the price is right. One wonders what they might have to say about abortion if it were more profitable.

I do not pretend that there is a clear path forward, though this article from the Atlantic makes a whole lot of sense to me. But we must categorically reject the president's idea of allowing the virus to do its thing so the stock market can return to doing its thing. The only moral code in which this proposal makes sense is the one where Mammon is Lord. No man can serve two masters, some rabble-rouser once said. Donald Trump is showing us yet again where his true allegiance lies.

Please, my friends, let's make it clear where our true allegiance lies.

It's another podcast

I whipped up another batch of thoughts about the Mass readings for this weekend, and I did another quick and anti-perfectionist session in my basement to get them recorded, and I am posting the result for anyone who might like to listen. Link to the video mentioned near the end is here.

I think the embedded player works best with Chrome, but you can right-click to download and play on your preferred media player as well. 

Podcast 2, based on the Mass readings for Laetare Sunday

 

Friday Night Updates

Okay, friends, I have my first unit of material ready to roll out on Monday morning. I had been fretting a bit about writing reasonable quizzes for the online segment of my undergrad class. Here, I feel that Boromir would sympathize:

Shoutout to my textbook publisher, though; my sales rep called me back in minutes flat and sent me a link to their test bank materials immediately after our conversation on Thursday afternoon. I've never used their questions before and I only wound up using two of them as written, but the ideas about framing and difficulty level were helpful.

We are so lucky, so so lucky, to have portable jobs. I am trying to keep that at the forefront of my mind: it doesn't matter very much that I dislike teaching online. I can do that for the good of my students and my community no matter how much I dislike it.

I am mostly planning to teach asynchronously, meaning that I've pushed to get everything for the rest of March all ready to roll so the students can work through it at their own pace. I hope this will be easier for students from rural areas and students with money concerns, who may have dicey internet and thus have trouble attending Zoom lectures or watching a lot of video. Let's all hope they like it, my friends, because it's been a pain. (Oh, wait, I wasn't going to complain. I am so lucky, so so lucky, to have a portable job. I know that.)

I went into the office this afternoon, my last trip there for at least a few weeks, to bring home my plants and my big box of washi tape. In my drafts folder I have a post from last month about my love of washi tape. I wonder if it's too fluffy for these dark days or if it would be a pleasant diversion. Maybe I'll just post it and you can tell me.

Do you want some links I found interesting and at least mildly encouraging? This one is an interview with an epidemiologist who is like a human billboard for Why We Need Epidemiology. He describes himself as a scientist and a person of faith, and I found his perspective helpful and hopeful. Was it...just two days ago that they released the Imperial College report, saying we might have to live like this for 18 months? (I am losing track of time. It's hard to believe that 8 days ago I felt overly cautious canceling my trip to Chicago.) Anyway, I haven't read the Imperial College report because I've been trying to move a class online in a week, but as I understand it the authors focused exclusively on non-pharmacological interventions: IF the virus continues to kill people at this rate (apparently mutations tend to get less lethal, and this virus is constantly mutating) and IF we don't figure out effective medical treatments (but there are already some encouraging developments, so I'm not going to subscribe to that flavor of pessimism), then we're looking at 18 months of this. BUT! Tomas Pueyo, that guy who wrote one of the widely linked ACT NOW pieces earlier in this mess, posted a follow-up saying he thinks we can be much more optimistic than that. Are his assumptions sound? I do not know. Do I need a little optimism on this particular Friday. Yes indeed, I do.

Today Joe learned that his boarding school won't re-open this year -- his senior year. He has really loved it there and he had no idea a week ago that he was leaving permanently. So that's a big bummer. Alex and a group of friends with portable jobs all agreed to leave NYC together. They rented an AirBnB way the heck upstate and took their laptops and a big pile of board games. I found out tonight that it's a two-month rental. Good planning there, I have to say. The news out of NYC is sobering. The remaining six of us are hunkered down, trying to figure out exactly how hunkered down to be (going to the grocery store is now my husband's favorite thing). The toilet paper stock is dwindling but we'll figure something out.

Okay! I am going to bed. Hang in there, everybody. Tell me how you're doing when you get the chance.

Hypochondriacs Anonymous

How many of us are doing that thing where we sniffle and then say WAIT WAS THAT A HARBINGER-OF-DOOM SNIFFLE OR AN ORDINARY SNIFFLE? I am doing that thing.

I have been mildly sick early since last week -- so mildly and in a way so much at variance with earlier reports of COVID-19 symptoms that I kept telling myself sternly I needed to buck up, buttercup, and stop worrying. I had a drippy nose when those side-by-side charts with symptoms for cold/flu/COVID-19 were saying that a drippy nose meant you had a cold. Except -- oh, wait, some people with COVID-19 infection have drippy noses, apparently. I've had a mild sore throat, an intermittent mild headache, and some intermittent mild chest tightness for, like, 12 days. (But was it actual chest tightness or was it hypochondria? Since I could finish a run without distress, it must have been hypochondria, I told myself.) There were some minor GI symptoms mixed in there, and just tonight I read that those are actually fairly common in response to the COVID-19 virus. No fever ever, no cough ever (EXCEPT WAIT WAS THAT A COUGH [No, that was a swallow of water going down the wrong way. Calm down, self; calm the heck down]).

I don't want to live an all-caps life here while we figure out what the future is going to look like, but I've got some all-caps tendencies I need to keep reining in. You all know that I fall on the more anxious end of the anxious-peaceful spectrum. The reality of LURKING INVISIBLE PATHOGENS that will KILL SOMEONE'S GRANDMA is a tough one for folks with OCD tendencies, which is also me. 

Please pardon this self-indulgent post, which is partially me worrying that I had a mostly asymptomatic COVID-19 infection which I spread willy-nilly last week before the world caught fire, before we knew that a drippy nose didn't actually mean I could assume I had a little cold. (I was washing my hands fanatically all week, I promise. Those OCD inclinations are good for something.) I am also worrying about what comes next -- of the people I love, who will be affected, and how?

I am thinking about that line from Screwtape, about how the work of the devil is to encourage us to keep imagining our responses to a zillion hypothetical and contradictory situations, because if we seek grace to face the actual trials of the present moment (i.e., the uncertainty and fear), the supply will probably be ample. Good advice for times like these, yes?

These are some good books I have been reading

Right now I am reading High Risk, written by a maternal-fetal medicine specialist. Do you want to read about totally different varieties of looming catastrophe? This is just the book for you! I am finding it engaging and well-written enough to persist when one might think some non-catastrophic reading material would be more appealing.

Earlier this month I finished Oona Out of Order and This Won't End Well. Oona has a really interesting premise, executed competently. What if you didn't live the years of your life in sequence? What would that be like? This Won't End Well is fluffy but pleasantly so. I also finished Forgiving God, which I really liked. Hilary Yancey's first child was diagnosed prenatally with significant congenital anomalies, and she writes beautifully about the things she has learned about disability.

I had this grand idea that I was going to finish the Palliser Chronicles in time for my fiftieth birthday in July, one per month for six months. The first one went really well. I was super-disciplined about reading my three chapters every day, and I remembered why I had enjoyed the Barsetshire Chronicles so much. But then I finished the first one and thought, "Huh, do I want to spend the next six months reading nothing but Trollope? Perhaps not." I am very fond of Trollope. He is like the insightful uncle who keeps nudging you at the family get-together to murmur insightful and witty comments about your relatives in your ear. I have been trying to read Phineas Finn (the second Palliser book) this month, but there are an awful lot of opportunities for my brain to say "oooh! shiny!" just now. Phineas Finn will doubtless be skillfully drawn and gently funny once I am fifty chapters in. Fifty chapters feels like a lot of chapters right now.

Stella and I are inching our way through Two Towers. We've said farewell to the crew on the west side of Anduin, and we just encountered Gollum. I suppose it's a good time to be reading a book about an ultimately successful war against a seemingly implacable enemy.

If you like the idea of a deep dive into a different world, I can also recommend Against Walls. Rachel-who-needs-a-blog suggested it to me -- hm, maybe a couple of years ago now. It sat on my Kindle for a long time, but I finished it up earlier this year. These days I don't read a lot of fiction that requires me to pay close attention, and so it took me a couple of tries to get through this one. Well worth the effort.

As always, these are Amazon affiliate links. If you click through and buy a book, Amazon will give me a few cents to spend on my next book purchases.

Math in Action

Hi, friends, how is it going out there? I am feeling more peaceful than I was during my spring break, which seems a little weird and out of sync with the zeitgeist. At the moment I am sitting in my living room drinking a small glass of Ramazzotti (tastes to me like licorice, orange peel, assorted mystery herbal flavors; I'm a fan) and thinking about high school math.

My algebra II teacher changed my life, because he taught me that I could be good at math. I was willing to learn pretty much anything he thought I should know, but I suffered from a long and unyielding resistance to the idea of logarithms. He was teaching us logarithms as a calculation strategy, which was much less relevant in the post-calculator era than in any era that came before. I could not suppress the grumbling. Why are we learning this? What possible use could there be for this material? Do you envision a zombie apocalypse in which we have no calculator batteries but access to log tables is preserved? I do not envision any such apocalypse, said mid-eighties Jamie. 

These days I use logarithmic transformations for a lot of my research data, and I think of Mr. Lilly pretty much every time. I have been watching the COVID-19 stats like it's my job (4 new cases since I started this post, she said obsessively), and I am deriving a weird comfort from the tidy linearity of the log-transformed data (toggle button at the top of the y axis, for those of you who also find math weirdly comforting). This is a phenomenon we can understand, because math helps us make sense of the world. We can work together to bend that line downward, because its linearity will rapidly cease to be in any way comforting.

When I googled Mr. Lilly tonight I discovered that he died in January. I don't think he ever knew that he sparked a shift in the way that I saw myself, a shift that eventually led me to pursue a PhD. I am thinking tonight about the ways we are all connected to each other, and the truth that good teachers can influence students in ways they will never see.

It's a...podcast?

Do you guys remember a couple of years ago when I helped out with a retreat team and part of my job was to prepare weekly reflections? The retreat director told me I should turn it into a podcast, which made me say, "Hahahaaaa, sure, in my abundant free time." But I was thinking yesterday about how sad I am not to be able to attend Mass, and her suggestion came back to me.

So! The readings are here. Embedded in this post is Jamie's Quick and Imperfect Podcast, put forward a little shyly in hopes of fostering community and reflection during this wild ride. I'm not a big podcast lover, because I'd usually rather read the transcript. In a nod to all the other people who would usually prefer to read the transcript, it's only 11 minutes long.

Podcast the First (and Possibly the Last; You Tell Me)

Edited to add: Chrome seems to know what to do with the file, but Safari does not. If you'd rather not use Chrome, you can right-click to download and listen on your preferred media player.

There is no toilet paper

There is no toilet paper. I think when I look back on this week I will be tempted to say, "Perhaps I was exaggerating. Maybe there was toilet paper and I just didn't know it." But I have been looking, and the aisles are empty.

Spring break never works out quite as well as I think it ought to. I have always felt a little guilty about this: I have a week in which I don't have to fulfill my primary work responsibility and I still get paid! I should live it up! But-- it's always a little lonely, because no one else in my family has time off. And I always have to finish a ton of my second-least-favorite work responsibility (grading), usually with a side of my absolutely-least-favorite work responsibility (dealing with plagiarism), and I have always made myself a Big List of things I will catch up on around the house. 

This year I decided I would plan in some fun. I would use credit card points to visit Alex in NYC! (Trip canceled due to Elwood's coronavirus concerns. I'm really glad I wasn't in NYC this week.) I would make a day trip to Chicago instead! (Trip canceled at the last minute, because yesterday was a wild day, friends.) I would get together with friends! (Both of the people I'd made plans with canceled on me, one because she was sick and the other because it's been a wild week for higher ed administrators.) I would try out a barre class! (Conflict with ballet; didn't work out.) I would nail all of my workouts for my 10K training program! (They postponed my 10K race and my motivation tanked.) I would schedule a massage! (This one I did manage to complete, but I expended too much mental energy wondering what germs were lurking in the facility.)

So I spent a lot of time this week avoiding my grading and refreshing the coronavirus case counter. I took a 48-hour Twitter break when it got to be too much, but I am not sure how to balance the "it's too much" part of Twitter with the "offers smart funny human contact in a season of social isolation" part of Twitter. I don't know how much my OCD history and tendencies come through here, but I am trying to be patient with myself, to remember that my particular brain is not well-suited to this degree of uncertainty but that things will probably be okay just the same.

It's a strange time to be alive, I keep saying. Would I feel better if we had more toilet paper? Maybe the decision to subscribe to four print newspapers was prescient and not just anachronistic. I hope that's just a joke. Who knows, though?

Fluffy

Whew, my smart husband who is not usually given to discussing small-tail possibilities is taking the coronavirus very seriously. Should we maybe talk about knitting instead?

I got the second installment from the Colourwork Club in the mail earlier this week, after a pretty ridiculous amount of anticipatory happiness. Would it be the Vibrant colorway or the Neutral colorway? (You can pick a single colorway in advance if you want to, but Alex gave me the one-of-each membership. Next month will be Neutral.) I received an electronic version of the pattern before the parcel arrived, and I pored over it in advance. I found myself on the horns of a dilemma.

Many knitwear designers sketch out "snowflake" designs with eightfold symmetry. This has long bothered me. This hat design had a six-pointed snowflake at the crown, but only in size M. I can make a size M work for almost anything, friends, but headgear is an exception. I have a giant whopping head. It is an XXXL head. I used to feel somewhat self-conscious about this configuration but now I just say it is for holding all of my brains. (Because people in this country love smart women, as evidenced by Elizabeth Warren's -- oh, wait. Never mind about that right now.) But the largest size would yield up a 7-point snowflake. Team SCIENCE and Team CLOTHES-THAT-FIT waged a brief war inside my brain, but my math-loving children told me about the existence of theoretical seven-point crystals and OKAY I cast on the largest size. On the recommended needles, because I thought it likely that this would give me a looser gauge than the designer.

But...do you know what happens if you cast on a giant hat at a slightly larger-than-recommended gauge? Yarn crisis, that's what. I pulled out the kitchen scale and weighed my shrinking ball of blue yarn at regular intervals. I threw in a bonus stripe in Exactly Right Acid Green to save a little more blue for the crown. I switched to smaller needles and started the crown decreases a little earlier than the pattern told me to. 

I think it is going to work out. Coronavirus may shutter our schools and sicken our elderly and deplete our 401Ks (seriously, WSJ, I feel like every coronavirus headline in your paper is about the economic impact and not the human suffering and epidemiological uncertainty), but at least I should have a charming Elsa-blue hat to wear to the apocalypse.

A week

On Monday morning one of my college roommates texted me: "I need to talk to you. Extremely important." One of our friends from the dorm where we lived as freshmen died suddenly on Sunday night. It still doesn't seem real.

On Tuesday morning I learned about the monster tornado that tore through Nashville and parts east. My entire family of origin lives in the Nashville area. I could tell pretty quickly that my parents and brother were south of the devastation, but I wasn't sure about my sister. She's fine, it turns out; no property damage, no people damage. But if I were the Weather Empress, I would ensure that monster tornadoes stayed a little further away from my entire family of origin.

On Wednesday my university decided that the coronavirus threat was enough of a concern to take action. (Vague vague vagueness, she said vaguely.) I was going to visit Alex over spring break, but Elwood and I had a sobering conversation about some of the small-tail possibilities, and I decided to stay home instead.

Today Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the presidential race, and I am sad about living in a world that seems bound and determined to tell smart women that they're not electable. "I couldn't stand her," said some middle-aged white guy on a friend's Facebook post about her post-Warren sadness. COME ON, middle-aged white guy; surely you can see this is not the place. 

Tonight the Supreme Court permitted the execution of Nathaniel West to proceed. West was involved in the deaths of three Alabama police officers; prosecutors say he lured them to the house where a confederate shot them. He did not pull the trigger, and he declined a plea offer when an attorney assured him he wouldn't be sentenced to death. A divided jury sentenced him to die. The Supreme Court granted and then lifted a stay of execution. Nathaniel West died by lethal execution shortly thereafter. 

This was not a pro-life decision.

So I am kind of wondering what tomorrow will bring. I was thinking about Psalm 91: though a thousand fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, near you it shall not come. I know that's supposed to be comforting, but it also sounds like a lot of nearby carnage.