Light and Momentary

Tranquility awaits

I am participating in the project Laura Vanderkam is doing in preparation for her next book, to be called Tranquility by Tuesday. Every week she sends out a rule. You take a survey about the rule beforehand, you attempt to follow the rule, and you take a follow-up survey.

Some of the rules I am totally on board with. For instance, Rule #1: Set A Bedtime. I am already on the record as a proponent of bedtimes for kids and grownups alike. Life is much better when I am getting enough sleep. Her survey prompted me to set an alarm to remind myself to get off the couch and brush my teeth on a timetable that still lets me read in bed, because reading in bed feels so luxurious. It's been great.

Another rule is about getting some exercise in each day before 3. It's a good rule and I've been following it pretty faithfully. I am currently on day 72 of a Yoga With Adriene streak, which has been very good for my focus and my triceps. The time change meant that I wasn't always getting it done in the mornings, but I'm back in the 7am yoga groove now.

But two of her recent rules are more focused on the want-to parts of life than on the ought-to parts, and I have found those to be much more difficult.

Some of it is that work remains overwhelming, and so the idea of adding in something extra feels daunting. Some of it is that planning adventures is harder in a global pandemic. On Sunday I sat down to write about three big adventures (she defines a big adventure as something that might take up a chunk of a weekend afternoon) and three small adventures (lasting about an hour) that I'd like to undertake in the next month. 

"UUUMMMMM," I said to myself as I stared at an empty text box. "I could...text a friend about meeting for a walk on the trail?" The amount of cognitive effort required to type that not-very-original idea? Embarrassingly high.

This week my two "adventures" are not actually very adventurous. I agreed to participate in a series of evening Zoom discussions sponsored by my department, focused on healthcare in the US. The conversations have been really interesting and it's nice to talk with students outside class. But instead of watching the documentaries I've been reading the transcripts, because that's so much more efficient. This week, I said, I'm putting my feet up and watching the video. Adventures are not efficient, and that's okay. When I sat down to watch the video, I discovered that we have a little break in the discussion schedule and we won't be talking about healthcare tomorrow. Instead, Stella and I watched most of Gamemaster, a documentary about game designers. As adventures go, it was very small. Teeny-tiny, even. But we both enjoyed it, and I would not have done it without the nudge from Laura Vanderkam.

My big "adventure" is that I am planning an Easter picnic. My recently vaccinated in-laws, whom we have not seen since Christmas 2019, will be coming, and they may be accompanied by my SIL and my nephew. We will seat different households at different picnic tables, but we will eat under the same (picnic shelter) roof for the first time in a long time. I have ordered a lamb shoulder, which I plan to slow-roast and serve warm with pita. I will make a vat of potato salad and a multi-tiered dessert (specifics TBD, but it has to be tall and festive-looking and also portable).

We will not see Alex (ALAS), who is waiting to be vaccinated in NYC. I am lobbying for a big Pentecost party, but we'll see what happens.

Anyway. I can know that I will lead a happier life if it is full of things that I want to do as well as things that I have to do, but I have a harder time filling in the want-to squares on my calendar. Let's hope practice makes less imperfect. Whoops, there's my bedtime alarm. Got any adventure ideas for me? Lay them on me, please.

AFO (stands for Almost Finished Object)

Look at what I bound off today:

This is the Stephen West MKAL that I started in the fall. As you might guess from the number of color changes, I have a lot of ends to weave in. A lot a lot.

Here is a closer view of the diamond section:

This was the section where my will to knit was slowly eroded by the ever-increasing length of those purl rows. The border section was an ocean of garter stitch, capped with an I-cord bind-off on >900 stitches. (All the knitters wince in sympathy.) All in all, the painful level on this one was pretty high. But hey, it's almost finished.

Fiat

Half mast again: the flags, the hearts
The world droops
As if we had all slid together into the Persistence of Memory
Time melts, strength ebbs, hope sags

We have the same arguments
We shout into the same echo chambers
No minds are changed
No hearts are stirred
(But likes are clicked)

What is truth? said Pilate as he washed his hands
At least he asked the question
Here we think we know already
No questions asked, no answers sought

It's the gravest public health threat in living memory /
It's overblown and it's crushing our children
Masks save lives /
Masks don't work

I read in the quiet mornings about the Iron Age warring tribes
I'm glad we know better
I think we know better
But what are we, I wonder, if not a land of warring tribes,
hurling bitter words in lieu of biting spears?
We talk past each other,
like undisciplined archers, casting away their arrows

Thoughts and prayers,
we say as nothing changes;
Thoughts and prayers.

The thirteenth month bleeds into the cruelest month
Shots in arms, bare faces in bars
Levees and breaches; the water rises

In the fall as the days grew shorter and the cases surged
With my son and my spade I planted
Tulips and daffodils, purple and gold
Hope, I said, Let's choose hope.

The daffodils are blooming now
The tulips' rumpled leaves await the stalks, the buds
They emerge as if by magic,
summoned by the sun
undaunted by their burial
or by the winter
-- such a winter we had

I too have felt buried
weighed down and frozen
Maybe you have too
Today is the YES day, the FIAT day
My YES is rusty and my FIAT is uncertain

I think of the bulbs beneath the earth
They could not know where they were going;
They inched skyward nonetheless.
(I like to think I'm smarter than a daffodil bulb
but) I also do not know where I am going

I think about the blooms on this Annunciation day:
a golden balm to the winter-weary.
I turn my face to the Summoner and say 
YES, FIAT.

It was a long time after that first FIAT
that the fruit of it fell, ripe with redemption.
It's a quick-fix world:
Intermittent Fasting Brings Peace of Mind!
or so they tell us
Our Meditation App Will Shape Your Six-Pack!
or something like that
But one thing I know, 
fifty years in:
real change takes time.

YES, we say, and the leaves rise slowly
FIAT we say, and the stalk stands tall
ACCORDING TO THY WORD, we say,
and the bud bursts forth.

The Struggle Bus

Grading is harder than usual this semester.

I guess some of it was to be expected. When students don't have the opportunity to chat about assignments in class, misunderstandings don't get cleared up and some unexpected stuff gets submitted. Of course they're free to email me with questions, but sometimes students don't know that they're confused until somebody else asks a question they can't answer. 

And some of the issue is that students have also been slogging through the pandemic for more than a year now, and they are tired and isolated and not always bringing their A game. It is straightforward, on the one hand, to give a zero to the student who didn't turn in anything (again). It is not straightforward, though, to know what to do about the fact that she keeps not turning things in. Coupled with another fact (she did not respond to my email asking if everything was okay) and a third fact (she can't graduate if she fails my class), the zero feels weighty.

But I can't make her answer my email.

I think one of the reasons grading is hard is that it requires constant task-switching. Every time I set one exam aside and pick up another, something in my brain says, "I don't want to do this again." I know a lot of tricks to override that voice. I grade with a timer, I grade with some external accountability, I create some time pressure for myself, I give myself something to look forward to after I complete a certain number of exams. More loftily, I have blogged about trying to regard grading as an act of service for my students. And yet-- it remains slow, repetitive, frustrating, and often extremely cognitively demanding. I need to be clear in my own brain on the difference between a 13/15 and a 13.5/15-- mostly because it's the right thing to do, but also because the students who studied together will ask me why they got different grades on the same question. But it's a pretty subtle difference, that half-point.

I am finding, here in month 13 of the pandemic, that my capacity to keep making myself do slow repetitive frustrating cognitively demanding tasks is diminished -- so much so that I found myself wondering if I'd had COVID without realizing it. Maybe that would explain the brain fog, I thought. But maybe I am just tired, and lonely, and overwhelmed by the work of prepping a new class and putting two others online in a semester with no spring break. Maybe even as I felt worried about getting my revisions done earlier in the semester, I was also glad that they needed doing on a deadline, because they required me to focus on something worthwhile outside my teaching.

The view from Gladlyville

Today one of my colleagues and I made a lunch date for the first Friday in May. It's the first time in more than a year that I've planned to share a table with someone who doesn't share my address. (We will eat outside; we will both be vaccinated.) We are both looking forward to it. It's been a tough season in higher ed.

Some of last semester's difficulties are paying off, at any rate. I spent November buried in slow and painful revisions. They weren't revisions as in "you need a better word choice here"; they were revisions as in "you need to read a dozen papers from a different discipline and condense them into a paragraph while also persuading the reviewer that your interpretation is correct. SO SO SO brain-bendy. It sounds weird to call an intellectual task exhausting, but it felt grueling. Two of the three papers I was revising that month have now been accepted, including the one where I was braced for a rejection. (The third is in limbo with an editor who seems a little overwhelmed these days. Aren't we all a little overwhelmed these days?) 

The second acceptance was waiting in my inbox this morning, which was a most excellent way to start the week. Later in the day I received an email from a different editor, who was writing to thank me for completing a recent peer review task. That task had caused me a fair amount of anxiety, because the paper was written by a rock-star researcher about technology I've never used. But it was investigating a question I've thought a lot about, and so I did the best I could with the review. To my surprise, the editor dropped me a note that said "thanks for your smart and helpful review -- it will really strengthen the paper." This has never happened to me before, in all my years of reviewing manuscripts. If she was trying to encourage me to review for her again in the future, it worked.

We are coming up on a municipal election in Gladlyville, and the conversations are more heated than they've ever been. Usually municipal elections are quiet and boring, but not this year. One of the candidates for a position was heavily involved in drumming up local folks willing to travel to the January Stop the Steal rally, and he appears to have no regrets about the whole thing. I am finding that I cannot adopt a live-and-let-live approach toward him. I think his decision not only to proclaim falsehoods in the presence of abundant controverting evidence but also to encourage others in professing that same false belief -- especially given the near-disastrous outcome of that particular alarming aggregation of the willfully deluded --  that is disqualifying, in my opinion. There has never been another municipal election in which I have wanted to pull up people's yard signs and pitch them in the garbage, but here we are. In my everyday life I am a quiet law-abiding sort, so I will not be engaging in any stealth lawn redecorating. But just between you and me and the internet, I keep thinking about it.

Dogs then and now

I grew up with dogs and then lived a dogless adult life, which means that I keep bumping up against the ways that dog ownership has changed since I was a kid. Some of it was obvious from the outside. "Fur baby" was not a thing people said in my childhood; dog strollers, I think, would have been regarded as a mark of misguided attachment. Dogs were dogs and babies were babies, and they were not to be confused.

We owned a leash for my childhood dog, a mustard yellow leather-ish leash that was stiff from disuse. In our neighborhood in a suburb of New Orleans, dogs could go outside without their people. If they were aggressive, it was expected that they'd be chained up, but mostly dogs could run around. Those free-range dog scenes in the Beverly Cleary books about Ribsy seem so strange now, but it was still like that in my own childhood.

It is much nicer to live in a world with less dog poop lying around. I'd never heard of people picking up after their dogs until I read Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing, and I thought it was a weird NYC phenomenon. 

When we had our first foster dog, we wouldn't let him sit on the upholstered furniture because that's what we both grew up with: big dogs don't belong on couches. There's a pretty different vibe in the Facebook group for foster families, where there's a lot of concern about whether the animals are sufficiently comfortable. This is not a random sample, obviously, but the difference is striking. In the 70s we were like, "Hey, you get to come inside; don't complain that the floor is hard." Here in the third millennium we are discussing which brand of dog bed is the right amount of squishy.

Recently a German shepherd was relinquished to our shelter. He had not adapted well to the arrival of a new baby and the parents had moved him into the garage. There was much exclaiming about the bad decision-making on display, but it hasn't been all that long since it was normal for bigger dogs to live in similar spaces -- sheltered, but not necessarily climate-controlled.

When Champ first came to stay with us we snorted at the alarmist posts we saw about dogs in the summer. "Make sure your dog is getting enough air-conditioning on hot days!" they cautioned, and we wondered snarkily how dogs had managed to survive until the invention of air-conditioning. I had no idea how the list of hazards had expanded. I was good with "no chicken bones" and "no chocolate," but I didn't know about all the other stuff. No bread dough, no grapes, no alcohol, no stray coffee beans. Don't give them too much ham in training sessions, because it's salty. DO YOU WANT TO POISON YOUR DOG?!?!

Maybe the puppies of the 70s would be glad to know that their descendants would not be house-trained by having their noses rubbed in their own waste. Maybe the puppies of the third millennium would look back wistfully on an era when crate-training wasn't really a thing.

New foster!

We haven’t had a foster dog since Bandit left on Boxing Day. This is Charlotte, whose owner surrendered her this morning. 

Her own loaf of bread

Jen Fulwiler used to post about the saying that every baby comes with a loaf of bread under his arm -- the idea that when God sends a baby, he also provides for that baby's family in unexpected ways. This week I've been thinking about the career version of that saying.

Many of you have been reading here for a long, long time (thanks for that!) and you might remember that I was a little worried about what baby Stella's arrival might mean for my hopes to finish a PhD. I was torn between two dissertation topics: either I would analyze someone else's data from a large longitudinal study for question #1, or I would collect my own data for question #2. I was leaning toward question #2, but once I found out I was pregnant there was no question: I would analyze someone else's data in the quiet of my house with my baby in my lap. I would not go tromping around the community and leave a tiny baby at home. But it felt a little like cheating-- like I was taking a shortcut. 

But you guys, I am so glad I took that shortcut! I couldn't imagine then the effects that choosing question #1 would have on my career. The choice to study question #1 meant that my dissertation wound up in my field's flagship journal, where it was followed by another closely related paper a few years later. The third paper in that series was published last week. I spun off part of my dissertation into another paper, which turned into a collaboration with a different colleague; our second paper was published in January. My familiarity with the big dataset also meant that I was invited to be a co-author on another paper in the flagship journal, and that when I said to the PI in January, "Hey, what if we wrote a paper about XYZ?" he said, "Sure, let's do that!"

Question #2 would have resulted in a serviceable dissertation, but it is extremely unlikely that it would have had comparable results in terms of publications and possibilities. And being ahead of the game on publications made it so much easier to navigate the pre-tenure phase of my career with a big family.

I am remembering the regret I felt at closing the door on question #2. It's a little strange to think about all the opportunities that have come my way as a direct result of that closed door. I was worried that tiny Stella might mean the end of my nascent academic career, but instead she nudged it in a far more fruitful direction.