Light and Momentary

I guess we're all making it up as we go along

You might remember that Stella is good friends with a couple of neighbor girls, and that I have a fraught relationship with their mom. Maybe the pandemic is causing all fraught relationships to be the NOW-WITH-EXTRA-FRAUGHTNESS versions of themselves, but I have been acutely aware of the differences in the way they're handling things at their house.

They seem to be very worried about surfaces. They wanted Stella to cat-sit when they went out of town on vacation, and they sanitized aggressively so she would (in their words) feel comfortable in their house. (We're not worried about Stella getting COVID-19 from a countertop in an empty house.) Yesterday the girls were eating breakfast on the deck and Stella asked if she could have a blackberry. She brushed against another blackberry in the carton, though, and the neighbor girl made a worried face. She took the blackberries to her mom and explained. "Oh, what a shame," said the mom, and proceeded to dump the remaining blackberries in the garbage can. The whole carton! In the garbage can! 

But! If it were a consistent flavor of paranoia I would be totally sympathetic! Out of sync, maybe; making different decisions, probably, but totally sympathetic. The thing that flummoxes me is that they have a rotation of different guests over at least twice a week. I fret regularly about whether it's wise for Stella to keep playing with the girls, even though they're always outdoors, because the neighbors are spending time with so many other kids.

I think the absolute risk of illness is low, and I think Stella will be awfully sad and isolated if I forbid her to play with them. And this blog offers me ample evidence of the ways in which my own levels of paranoia have been out of step with the actual risks. (Dear March Jamie, you do not need to think about putting the mail in the oven. Dear April Jamie, it's probably fine for you to run on the multi-use trail even when it seems crowded. Dear May Jamie, you can receive communion and not land yourself in the hospital.)

It feels a little strange, though, to be looking at the same information and making such different decisions.

Probably a bad idea

Whew, this is a busy busy busy busy week. But I am hopeful that next week will be a little less so, and in any event my class will be over a week from tomorrow. 

This morning I was thinking through all the stuff I needed to get done today despite feeling tired and foggy. "I shouldn't drink too much coffee," I said to myself. "It just ratchets up the anxiety, and that's the last thing I need right now." 

"Hm," burbled my id. "Maybe instead we could get hold of some speed."

That might be the actual last thing I need right now.

Sunday Miscellany

Toward the end of my spring break, that strange week that divided before from after, I stopped by the fancypants liquor store and bought a bottle of Ramazzotti. On most of the nights that followed I poured myself a tablespoonful or so. I am not much of a drinker but I do like amari. Somewhere along the way I stopped pouring my nightly tablespoonful, but this afternoon I measured out the last of it. It doesn't taste like licorice and orange peel today; it tastes like March, when my uncertainty and worry about the virus were tempered by the belief that this nation had pulled together in tough times before and would do so again. Today it tastes like dread and dashed hopes. 

I doubt I'll buy another bottle.

But maybe I'll see if the fancypants liquor store can get me a bottle of Cardamaro. It tastes like cardoons, apparently, which are an artichoke cousin. And my very favorite amaro of all the ones I have tasted is Cynar, which is artichoke-flavored.

Probably, if I drink a tablespoonful of Cardamaro every night, it will forevermore be redolent of cynicism and disgust. Whyyyyyy, my friends, why are we in such a preventably stupid place re: this virus? It baffles me. It enrages me. I sent a polite but pointed email to the county yesterday after our outing to a nearby lake. There were hordes of people there yesterday, most of whom did not seem especially fussed about social distancing. Despite the crowding, the only folks wearing masks were the Gladly family, the friends we were meeting for a socially distanced canoeing get-together, and one little cluster of three young adults. I urged the county to require the people staffing the boat rental facility to wear masks. I said, Would you really want county employees to serve as vectors for COVID transmission at the same time that your health department is warning us about a surge in local cases?

Will they listen to me? Who can say?

The canoeing was very pleasant, once we were away from the crowded rental shack/boat ramp. While we were waiting for our friends Stella whimpered, "This is like one of my nightmares." It is still very odd to me, the number of people who did not even attempt to give us a 6-foot berth. Anyway.

This afternoon I made a batch of tapenade, and I am finding it very delicious. Do you need a five-minute recipe for a very delicious spread? Here you go: chuck a can of oil-packed tuna into the food processor with a couple of cloves of garlic. Add two heaping handfuls of pitted olives, a scant handful of drained capers, and a healthy squeeze of anchovy paste. Blitz to a flavorful puree. If you are feeling non-traditional, stir in a spoonful of harissa and another of preserved lemon paste. Eat on crackers.

Zoom stresses me out

Tonight I had three separate Zoom calls: one with three friends from high school, one with two friends from college, and one with one of my closest friends whose kids wandered in at the end of it. And I am SO stressed out at this moment. Last night we had a work happy hour with our new boss and I was mired in social anxiety afterward. Was that a weird thing to say? Was my spontaneous answer to her question also a pretentious-sounding answer?

It is silly for me to worry that my friend's kids are giving a lot of space in their heads tonight to the tail end of that conversation. They are teenagers! They have so many other things to think about! They already know that I am a quirky person and that their mom loves me anyway!

I posted back in May about the effect of the pandemic on my social anxiety, and I have to say that Zoom aggravates it. When is it my turn to talk? Are people looking away because I should stop talking now, or because it's hard to know where to look on a Zoom call? 

This post is just to say: if the pandemic is fueling your social anxiety, you are not alone. I miss in-person social cues.

Midterm

Dernit, I was halfway through a post about my summer class when Typepad ate it. Maybe it's better that way, though. I wasn't complaining about this class, which is made up of motivated grad students whose midterm feedback suggests that they are surprisingly content, but I was comparing it unfavorably to a different summer online class. Which was a TRAIN WRECK that GODZILLA picked up and munched on for a while before a COMET crashed into it and KRAKATOA covered it in a fine layer of white-hot asphyxiating ash, so maybe I shouldn't blog about it even though it's been a while.

It is much nicer to get results from a midterm survey that mostly says, "Thank you for all of your prompt feedback!" It doesn't say that exclusively, because anonymous student comments are an ongoing life lesson in "you can't please all the people all the time," but the appreciative comments outnumber the grumpy comments by a wide margin.

I am kind of drowning in email. Picture me in a small dinghy with a hole in the bottom, in which I have to row a few miles every day before the sun goes down. But I also have to keep bailing or the boat will sink. That's about the state of my email inbox. But it's only for two more weeks, and then I will finish the grading and go on sabbatical. Maybe I will pronounce it "SABB-a-TICK-le," because that way I can sing it to the tune of the Hallelujah Chorus. I can't think of anything comparably celebratory with iambs in lieu of trochees.

In the next week my students have a bunch of stuff due and it's also the mathiest portion of the class. So...maybe they will be less pleased a week from now than they currently are. But maybe I don't need to borrow trouble just now.

The pull-up quest

Back in May I decided that I was going to get strong enough to do a pull-up by my 50th birthday. I was nowhere on this goal, you guys -- seriously, nowhere. When Joe told me to lie down under the basement table and pull myself up to it, I could only manage three reps. When he had me try a negative (a slow, controlled descent from a pull-up position), I plummeted downward as if propelled by an anvil.

But it turns out that muscles get stronger when you work them, even if they are 49-year-old muscles. I wasn't consistent about exercising during the weeks that we were taking care of Champ, but even so I was making progress. I got strong enough to pull myself from a 90° flexed-arm position to the top of the pull-up range of motion, and strong enough to pull myself up from a dead hang to about 80° of arm flexion. I'm almost there, I thought, even though I can't stitch the two halves of the movement together. I've been using the chin-up hand position (palms facing me) instead of the pull-up hand position (palms facing away), but still! Progress!

About a week ago I bought a 35-pound resistance band to get myself over the hump. I wish I'd bought it in May, but I did not. With that resistance band I could do a bunch of chin-ups, or at least a bunch by my standards. Last Friday over the course of the day I did 14 full reps with the band, going from fully extended arms to fully flexed arms, and 5 most-of-the-way reps. I thought I'd be all set to do one actual chin-up on my birthday.

Alas, I could not do an actual unassisted chin-up on my birthday. I think I was still recovering from the Friday chin-up festival, because I couldn't do one even with the resistance band. Maybe I need more rest to make those muscles grow, I thought to myself, but I probably don't need quite this much rest.

Joe says that if you eat a hundred grams of protein every day the Gains Fairy will visit you will you sleep. Maybe that's what I need to do.

Saturday is my name day. Maybe I will be able to do a chin-up then. I'll keep you posted.

Half-Century

Today, friends, I am 50 years old.

Alex and I had planned to go to Paris together to celebrate, but then the wheels fell off the world. Recently Elwood and I joked about making a trip to Paris, KY, where I lived briefly as a kid. From that Paris it's easy to pop over to Versailles, though you have to pronounce it Ver-SALES if you don't want to give yourself away as an out-of-towner.

But this is not a great week for visiting Kentucky, so I am staying home and counting my blessings: I am alive, I am in good health (at least for now!), I am employed (so employed. very employed. summer-class-employed is a particularly intense flavor of employed). I am living happily with almost all of my family and they love me very much even after our 4+ months of constant proximity. And I get to talk to Alex today, even though we will not be ordering lapin à la moutarde in a cozy bistro. (Huh, that was a weird thing for my fingers to spew out. I was never going to order lapin à la moutarde, because I dislike mustard and tend to be a little squeamish about things like eating bunnies. But I am missing the option nonetheless.)

Maybe I will celebrate my 52nd birthday in Paris.

The music directors asked me to play bass for the vigil Mass yesterday, so I went back in person for the first time since March 14. It was good. It was weird. But mostly good. The bassist's seat is right next to the monster amp, which is a fun little bonus that I wasn't expecting. Do you happen to remember last summer when I wrote about the incarnational joys of making music? The blend of music at our church isn't especially bass-heavy, but it's different when you're sitting right next to the monster amp. It was a novel and entirely delicious experience, creating a gentle rhythmic floor for the ensemble and feeling it deep in my bones as the sound poured out of the amp. They don't need anything fancy, so it was stress-free despite my inexperience. I have really missed making music with friends to help people worship. I'm glad I went back.

(Though can I tell you one small grumpy thought? Our church has been allowing people to receive on the tongue if they go at the end of the communion line. But the volunteers all receive after that, once the folks in the pews have left. Did the deacon sanitize his hands in between? No idea. I would be pretty grouchy about it if I picked up COVID that way, preeeeeeetty grouchy. But hey! We have enough community spread now that I'll probably never know where it came from if I do get COVID. I'm going to pretend that's a silver lining that will help me to be charitable instead of a public health catastrophe that will kill a bunch of people in a wholly avoidable way.)

Okay, that is enough grumpy thoughts.

After he goes to Mass, Elwood is making crêpes for brunch at Stella's request. I am going to practice the bass with the amp dialed up nice and loud, in anticipation of the day when we can sing the Mass parts again. And I am going to pull some weeds with Pete, and maybe I will start Swann's Way. In an ordinary year I might have gone to see an outdoor Shakespeare play for my birthday, but of course all the plays are canceled this year. So instead I think I will ask my family to go with me and my Complete Works to the lovely local gardens where the plays are not happening. I will stand on a bench and read the St. Crispin's Day speech out loud, and maybe "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks" for good measure. And because they love me they will go along with it, and then we will come home and have takeout Thai food together.

I am resolving to blog four times a week across my fifty-first year. Say hello and tell me what you might like to hear about, please!

Goals

One of the choir directors texted me yesterday to see if I would play the bass for 4:00 Mass, and I was surprised to see how happy the invitation made me. I haven't been going to Mass. I watch the livestream with some combination of kids at 7:30 on Sunday morning. We zip over to church after the closing prayer and go through the drive-through communion line (<-there's a phrase that would have sounded like a laughable idea six months ago). Elwood usually goes to the 10:30 Mass in person, depending on the current iteration of mask guidance. We agree that it's a bad idea to sit in church for an hour with people who are not required to wear masks. He's more tolerant than I am about the risks that arise when people are instructed to keep their masks on and some of them just...don't.

I live in a purple county in a red region and so I am surrounded by folks who think that masks are an infringement of their freedom. And there has been an ongoing struggle between two related parts of my brain, both fueled by my OCD tendencies. On the one hand, OCD can express itself as scrupulosity, which means I am talking back to a voice that says "if you really loved Jesus you'd go to Mass it's not the same on a screen you could be there soaking in the actual Presence but here you sit on the couch you fearful hypocrite has God given us a spirit of fear no that's not what the Bible says but here you sit on the couch..." At the very same time, OCD can express itself as a disproportionate fear of disease. I have not permitted anyone to bring supermarket ground beef into my kitchen since I read the Fast Food Nation chapter about E. coli poisoning nineteen years ago, so perhaps it was inevitable that my level of COVID-19 anxiety would be on the high side.

I know that neither one of those voices should get much say in my decision-making; I try not to give too much weight to intrusive thoughts of any stripe. I have been trying to be very careful about potential exposures because I've been worried that getting sick would wreck my ability to teach my summer class. My department is counting on me; I'm counting on the money to put toward two sets of college tuition bills next month. There's no sick leave option for summer teaching. Ergo, I've been trying to minimize the amount of time spent breathing other people's air. And when I sit at home and hear the coughing over the livestream feed, it seems like a reasonable decision not to sit in an indoor space where people might or might not be sick, and might or might not be wearing masks.

But I miss it. I miss everything. I miss my retreat community and I miss my Alpha pals and I miss holy water and I miss sound checks with the choir before Mass and I miss being a Eucharistic minister and with the fiercest fieriest ache I miss kneeling down with a bare face before my bare-faced pastor and receiving communion on the tongue and returning to the pew to kneel in holy silence with hundreds of friends and neighbors and newbies and skeptics and visitors, and angels all around us.

(UGH I just made myself cry. ANYWAY. Moving on!)

I did not say yes to the choir director yesterday because first I have to learn to play the bass. But! Details! (No additional singers or wind instruments are allowed at this point because of concerns about the risk of COVID transmission, which is why I can't sing or play the flute. The co-directors can only add one stringed instrument per Mass.) Once I learn to play the bass I can sit in my own little corner, twelve feet or so from the two other musicians, who will both be facing away from me, and miles away from everyone else. We can do a sound check! With angels all around us!

I sat down this afternoon to play the Mass parts on the bass, and my first couple of attempts were not something you would want to amplify throughout a church. My class starts tomorrow, and normally I would not be optimistic about acquiring a new skill while also teaching a summer class. But I'm feeling pretty motivated. I turn 50 in a week, and maybe I will give myself the 50th birthday gift of returning to Mass in a way that feels both safe and fun.

the last guest post

hi friends it is Champ again friends but do you know what friends? I am leaving in the morning friends I am getting adopted. 

I have been having lots of fun at the Gladlys' house friends. do you know they have a room with a Giant Bed? sometimes after my morning walk with Jamie we come home and the house is very quiet. but! if I push gently gently on the blue door with my nose I can eeeeaaaaaase inside and then! Elwood! is in the Giant Bed! and oh! I can jump up and stretch my WHOLE SELF out next to him. I can lick the back of his neck friends and it tastes very delicious he does not usually let me lick the back of his neck but in the Giant Bed I can reach all the parts that need licking. also he has very delicious ears so tasty.

this week friends we have been playing Hurdle Frisbee for afternoon playtime. probably you haven't been playing Hurdle Frisbee this week too bad you have been missing out. here I will show you friends:

it is the best. I tried to get Jamie to play Hurdle Frisbee with me this morning. I said JAMIE JAMIE WAKE UP I NEED YOU. and then she got a little grumpy because I did not need to pee I just needed to eat the grass. she said "it's 1:30 in the morning back in your crate pal you can eat grass in the morning." so I said again JAMIE JAMIE WAKE UP I NEED YOU. and then she got even grumpier because we went outside again and the grass was so delicious, so delicious I forgot to pee. I wanted to cheer her up friends because I am a good and helpful dog friends so I said Hurdle Frisbee? please, Hurdle Frisbee? I was very winsome so winsome but Jamie thought it was crate time not Hurdle Frisbee time.

(I am fond of Jamie friends but she is a little inflexible about eating grass during crate time friends.)

maybe at the new house they will like to eat grass when it is dark outside maybe they will have a Giant Bed too. I do not know I will have to see wish me luck friends. oh! oh! maybe at the new house the squirrels and bunnies will want to be friends! here they have only the standoffish kinds of squirrels and bunnies but HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL.

Your faithful correspondent,
Champ the Honorary Temporary Gladly

More about Champ

Hello from Gladlyville, where Champ the foster dog is taking up a lot of space in my head. One of the kids in particular had been begging to get a dog and was entirely undeterred by our "dogs are a lot of work" speeches. We settled on fostering as a way to try out dog ownership.

Champ is kind of a lot, my friends. Champ had some kind of terrible past experience with a loose dog, we think, because he just cannot deal with leashed dogs. He doesn't care if they're inside barking their heads off; he doesn't care if they're barking their heads off behind a fence. But if they're on a leash, and especially if they're walking towards him -- then it's Katy-bar-the-door time. He barks and whines and pulls and generally flips his lid. "Barks" is not a sufficient verb there, though. He makes the most terrified/terrifying noises he is capable of making. It's distressing all around.

This morning we left for our walk just in time to encounter one of my neighbors walking her tiny little dachshund-esque dog. Champ freaked out ("I will eat you! Do not eat me! I will eat you! I am very scary! You are also very scary! Go away! No! Come back so I can eat you!") loudly enough that another neighbor a few houses away commented on it as we walked past. 

"You know what I'd do?" said this kindly older man. "I'd anoint him with oil and pray for the Lord to speak the truth to his heart that his past is over and gone. Because Scripture says that the Lord will bless us AND our animals." 

I don't know what Champ would think if I anointed his head with oil. Well, I think he'd probably want to eat the oil, and I think he'd probably be unhappy that his tongue does not stretch to the top of his head. Maybe I could anoint his belly with oil and he could lick it off afterward. Maybe I just could sprinkle him with blessed salt so he wouldn't smell funny to himself.

Mostly he has good manners. He never begs at the table, he understands perfectly that he is not to go upstairs, and he sleeps peacefully in his crate all night (except for his first night here, when I was up three times with his apparently stress-induced diarrhea). He has a couple of episodes per day of being friskier than we want him to be (he's 2 with some lingering puppy tendencies), but that's manageable.

This inability to cope with other dogs, though -- it's pretty stressful. I've been trying some gentle exposure therapy, where he watches a different neighbor's tiny dog meander across her driveway on a tether.  Even though Champ thinks exposure therapy is a bad idea, we've had some moments where he did okay with other dogs, especially if they were going in a different direction from us. But yesterday afternoon we took him down to the neighborhood school, where we've been tethering him so he can play fetch with us. For the first time there was another dog taking a walk just on the other side of the fence, and it was purely awful. He bit his tongue so that it bled; he was frothing at the mouth. We couldn't figure out any way to help him calm down. And our yard is too small for him to spend all his time there, so we need to figure something out.

Strategies so far: walk at off-peak times (6am, when it's a little early for other dog-walkers, and 5:15pm, when it's still too hot for most other dog-walkers), take advantage of his nearsightedness and change direction if another dog is approaching, and -- that's about it. We're feeling a little stuck. Any ideas? We'd welcome some ideas.