Light and Momentary

Stick a fork in me

Okay, I am calling it good on the research front for 2020.

Of the three papers I submitted early in the semester and revised in November, one was accepted on Wednesday (tra-la-LAA!), one is still with the reviewers, and the other one is going into timeout until next year, when perhaps I will feel less grumpy about the editor's response. I have until January 22 to submit the revisions, which should only take a single-digit number of hours if I can prevent myself from pausing every 15 minutes to bellow "I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS NONSENSE," so I won't worry about them for now.

I also submitted two additional papers this month, so I'm finishing out the semester with five papers at various points along the publishing pipeline. I was talking to a colleague on Wednesday about our 2021 plans to write a grant together. She graduated from our PhD program two years before me, and has spent her career working at more research-oriented institutions with a correspondingly lighter teaching load. She said, "I have never had five papers in the pipeline at once."

I have spent the fall worrying that I should be doing more-more-more, worrying about the time that the kids' transition to (and then from and then to) online school has required of me, worrying about whether I have been accomplishing enough to set myself up for promotion to full professor when I am eligible to apply. When I checked in with my new chair in October and told her what I'd finished so far, she said, "That is an incredible amount of work." Weirdly, this caused me to feel that I needed to do a comparable amount of work in the second half of the semester so she would not think I was a slacker. Even more weirdly, two of the papers I have under review at this time consider the impact of self-compassion on women's mental health. Dr. Gladly, heal thyself.

I am not very far into teaching prep for the spring semester, so I will need to put in some recording time and some editing time before the end of the year. But I am going to take a wee break from thinking about academic writing. It's been a gift to have this semester without teaching and service responsibilities, and it has highlighted for me how much I love to have time blocked off for research. It's hard to explain the geeky thrill I get from exploring a new corner of the literature and then figuring out how my work fits into it-- it's the best way to start the workday.

And at the same time-- I might not submit any new papers for a little while here.

Academic publishing is kind of terrible

Okay, friends, I need to grumble for a few minutes.

Early in the semester I submitted a paper. Two and a half weeks later I heard back from the editor: she thought I should either remove the quantitative data or beef it up. Okay! No problem! I removed the quantitative data and resubmitted.

Six weeks later I heard back from the editor: revise and resubmit. Okay! No problem! I revised and resubmitted.

This was a weird R&R, I thought to myself. The only substantive piece of input across the two peer reviewers was that I needed to expand the section on theory. Everything else was comments on my writing style from someone who did not seem to be a native English speaker. The editor offered me no comments at all in the introductory email.

I was feeling optimistic-- I had expanded the theory section and I had attended to all of the complaints about my writing, even though they seemed to me like pretty trivial complaints. Editorial Manager told me that the reviewers submitted their input on 11/25. I kept refreshing my email, looking for that magical decision email that would surely say ACCEPT or at most MINOR REVISIONS.

But no! Instead, after 17 days of sitting on the completed reviews, the editor emailed me to say that the peer reviewers are happy but she has eight -- count 'em, eight -- paragraphs of things she wants me to revise. On my first reading they seemed like reasonable comments, but the timing is all wrong: you don't introduce a bunch of new feedback in the second round of revisions. That's just not the way it is supposed to work. She should have sent me these comments along with the peer reviewers' feedback, back in the beginning of November.

Today I sat down to start the revising, and now I am even more unhappy. One of her paragraphs is asking me to restore a chunk of the material she asked me to cut in September. Another is full of complaints about minor APA style errors, like the single sentence in which I moved a reference out of parentheses and into the text of the article, but forgot to put the word "and" in lieu of an ampersand. But the paragraph that is making me question my life choices is the one where she told me to expand my lit review and emphasize more recent references. When I first read that comment I thought, "Okay! No problem!" This isn't my primary research area and I wasn't surprised that she wanted me to look a little further in the literature. But YOU GUYS, she told me to add four specific references -- of which two are ALREADY CITED IN THE PAPER and two are MORE THAN TEN YEARS OLD and not especially noteworthy.

I am trying to be reasonable and temperate here. I know that online teaching has been especially hard on older instructors. She is probably tired. Maybe she had COVID this fall, or was caring for a loved one with COVID, and is digging out from under a pile of backlogged responsibilities. But I am still exasperated.

Also: pansies and jam

I meant to include two other items in my post last night: pansies and jam.

For years Pete and I found pansies frustrating. They seemed so delicate -- they died no matter where we put them. Finally we learned from the lady at the garden shop that everybody's pansies die when it gets hot. It's just part of living in Gladlyville: pansies can't hack the August heat here, even if you put them in the shade. It wasn't a gardening failure; it was a choosing-to-live-in-this-dumb-Midwestern-climate reality. This year we went back to the garden shop after the weather cooled off again, maybe in early October, and bought a bunch more pansies. Like, a BUNCH. We put some of them in our new shade bed in the backyard, and some of them in pots flanking the front steps, and a few more in the north beds. It felt mildly extravagant to spend $25 on annuals that seemed unlikely to live very long, but they were irresistibly pretty. 

It turns out that pansies are not actually delicate. They are still blooming! In December! After multiple hard frosts! We keep saying, "Oh, that's probably it for the pansies," and then the sun comes out and they rally once more. We bought them in every color: velvety purple and cheerful yellow and deep wine-red and even black. They make me improbably happy.

For years and years we had a Lego Advent calendar. There used to be elaborate rules about which kid could open which window, and complicated barter negotiations about the contents of those windows. And then (sniffle) all my children got too big for Lego Advent calendars. This year, for the first time since the LAST CENTURY, we have a different Advent calendar. It has tiny pots of jam, one for each day. I do not know why Amazon is now charging more than twice what I paid for this Advent calendar back in October. I would not suggest buying it at the current price. But I would be happy to buy it again at the lower price. We have all enjoyed our tiny pots of jam, and the quantities are just right -- enough for everybody to sample (a reminder: we only have four people living here right now), not so much that we're buried in tiny pots of weird jam. Out of the first 13 days, 12 jams were tasty and appealing and one was weird enough to be funny. That's a pretty good ratio, I'd say.

Bits of Joy

Early in the day I was feeling stressed out and unhappy, and I said to myself, "You can choose joy in this situation." And LO, just saying that to myself made an immediate and palpable difference.

This is the time of year in which choosing joy is a repeated act of will. Sometimes it goes better than others. Maybe tomorrow I will tell you about the journal editor whose failure to do her job in October is causing me stress in December, but today I will tell you about the bright spots instead. Last night I was feeling especially cheerful as we lit the pink candle. It's our tradition on Gaudete Sunday to close out Evening Prayer with the old camp song Rejoice in the Lord Always, and we sang it loudly in a round. (Okay, true confession, I told my family that we were also going to do an absolutely ridiculous dance while we sang and they went along with it, because they love me.)

I made St. Lucia buns today. My little box of saffron from the Indian grocery store was not unreasonably priced, but in my mind it is still labeled as A Thing I Should Save For Special Occasions. Using it liberally in December brightens my mood reliably: I can have sunshine-colored food even if I cannot have sunshine-colored skies. 

Small efforts in the cooking department bring my kids outsize happiness. Yesterday morning I sprinkled some cinnamon into a pan of hot cocoa and served it forth with a quick decade of the rosary. For dinner we made tortilla soup and flan. When I was a younger mom I worried that I was not doing enough to teach the kids about the riches of the liturgical calendar, but here at age 50 I will observe that if the Tomie de Paola picture book* about Our Lady of Guadalupe is lying on the coffee table, even big kids will want to reread it. (Huh, it looks like that one is out of print but the Kindle version is available.) And it turns out that if you quietly do geeky Catholic mom things like writing the O Antiphons on the whiteboard, at least some of your children will say "When do the O Antiphons start? You're putting them on the whiteboard again this year, right?"

I have made it to the minor prophets in my fifth annual Bible re-read. It gets easier every year, but the Old Testament remains a weird place. I have been inching forward in a German children's novel, and I am finally feeling like it's getting less effortful. (I've lost so much German vocabulary since my comparative literature major days. But some of it, at least, is coming back.) And as soon as I finish this post I am going to hop in bed and finish the Nagoski sisters' book Burnout, which has been sitting on my Kindle since its publication. It's really interesting, full of science and a surprising number of Disney princess references. I might have preferred fewer Disney princess references, but I will recommend it anyway.

Pete asked me to make another masked Santa ornament for our family's tree after I sent the original off to my friend. I finished knitting him today. He still needs me to embroider his eyes and his mask ties, and I will add a tassel to his cap. Plus intarsia always means a bajillion ends to weave in. But I think he's rather a handsome fellow, don't you? I was going to take careful notes on how I did the short-row section of the beard this time so I could post the pattern, but this is another improvised beard. 

*As usual, these are affiliate links.

I thirst

I have come to think that one of the most telling indices of a person's faith might be her thoughts on hell. In the days when I struggled more with scrupulosity I regarded hell with a mix of horror and fascination. I did not see clearly then that God loved me so much that he wanted me to stay out of hell even more than I wanted to stay out of hell -- that he was more invested in my sanctification than I was. And yet I also had (and still have) a tendency widespread among the scrupulous: I love to be right. Here is a true fact: a person who mutters "fine, go to hell then; we'll see who's right" when an argument about the faith goes poorly is not a compelling witness to the beauty and redemptive power of the gospel.

I once heard a priest say that when Jesus said "I thirst" he wasn't just talking about physical thirst; he was saying, "I thirst for souls." The pairing of those two meanings is particularly poignant: here in my agony, says the Lord, I desire for all people to see me lifted up and be freed from the poison of sin. He came to be with us in a world full of physical suffering, to experience physical sufferings like thirst, and to love us unstoppably even in the worst of it.

COVID has offered me many opportunities to think about whether I'd rather be loving or be right. My church's Facebook announcements have recently been a forum for the most vocal right-wingers in the parish to complain nastily about the precautions in place, and I find it wearying. I hear an echo of the me from 20 years ago, thinking, "Fine, get COVID then; we'll see who's right." I don't really mean that. But the Lord wants me to pray for them, to desire his very best for them -- and I'm not there today, friends; I'm not there. (Why, though, would they be publicly ugly to our fantabulous pastor who is working SO HARD to make the sacraments available safely? I do not understand. I am tired of trying to understand.) 

I would like Donald Trump to go to prison for tax evasion and money laundering. Is that a hunger for justice or a petty desire for vengeance? Since 2015 I have tried to avoid uncharitable language about Trump -- I don't care how much he weighs or what color makeup he wears. My concern is the competence void. But it is not very charitable to wish him in prison. "Fine, face the SDNY then; we'll see who's right" is not the same as wishing eternal damnation on someone. But it feels to me like it is in the same neighborhood.

All through the pandemic I have been thinking about Our Lord's eagerness to alleviate physical suffering, even when doing so created hassles and hazards for him. And I have been thinking, too, about his willingness to walk before us into the valley of the shadow, to make a path through it for us. The pandemic is a temporal struggle to be viewed in the light of eternity. (On that topic, may I recommend this homily from the newly elevated Cardinal Cantalamessa? Love him.) Maybe tonight it is best for me to close the social media tabs, and offer up all of my uncertainties. Teach me, I will pray as I am falling asleep, how to thirst.