Light and Momentary

Counting down

The last week of classes is over, and all that's left is finals week.

The first half of the semester was brutal, you guys, and I was calculating the ratio of days completed/days remaining pretty much every other day. Somewhere around the middle of the semester, I finished most of the writing tasks that spilled over from my sabbatical due to the combination of my own ambition and COVID weirdness in academic publishing. Also around the middle of the semester I was able to start using previously recorded content for one of my classes, and the weekly to-do list became less overwhelming. This is all that remains:

• I have some minor admin tasks for my grad class, but all the hard stuff, including all the grading, is DONE.
• I have to do some easy last-week-of-classes grading for one of my undergrad classes, get their final cleaned up and ready to give in both online and in-person versions, and then grade it afterward.
• I have to grade 38 student writing assignments. This will be hard and painful and also temporary.

You know how I was just posting about the value of cultivating optimism? I have a student in danger of failing, who will not graduate if she does not pass. In the pessimist approach I would waste time and mental energy imagining the post-failing-grade meetings with the student and the department chair in which there is gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands and pressure to change a well-deserved F to a passing grade. What would an optimist think about instead? How about this: Maybe she will take my most recent warning to heart! Maybe the next two things I grade will be vastly better than the last thing! (Maybe I can email her a concrete suggestion tomorrow to ensure that she gets some last-minute input. I just have to think about how to do that without throwing her most recent peer reviewer under the bus.) And probably, even if this course doesn't work out for her, it will be mildly, temporarily sad and uncomfortable and then it will be over. Probably. 

I'll let you know how Operation Glass Half-Full works out.

Unhunkering

In addition to the triathlon on my calendar, there's also a family gathering. My father-in-law is turning 80 and we are planning to celebrate in person. Even though I am fully vaccinated now, I am still feeling some reluctance about shifting back towards normal. I thought to myself, "Maybe it would be motivating to put a post-grading treat on the calendar. Like a pedicure!" And...nope. I don't feel relaxed about indoor activities. Or at least new indoor activities. I'm fine in the office. I'm fine at Mass. I won't want to eat inside a restaurant for a while. Our gym membership is frozen and I don't really see myself going back there any time soon.

All of this hunkering down has had an effect on the kids too. We went to a favorite restaurant on Sunday, and sat at a rooftop table in beautiful spring sunshine. But one of the kids was really uncomfortable with eating out as a family for the first time in a long time. We could say "outdoors, plenty of space, very brief contact with anyone outside the family," but it didn't really seem to sink in.

I guess two more months gives us time to figure out more about what vaccination does and doesn't mean, and for this nasty spring wave to recede from our part of the Midwest. Maybe even Stella can be vaccinated by then. I guess it makes sense that things would remain a little strange as the pandemic abates in the US. Probably in 5 years I will read this post and say to myself, "Huh, that was a long hard weird season and it's nice that things are normal again." Let's hope so.

I am all ears if you have stories to share about things you are doing or not doing, or if you have decision-making algorithms that help you figure out what's next as we lurch toward normal. ("Decision-making algorithms" -- that probably means "Bearing, are you reading this post?")

Bait and switch books, part 2

A few more thoughts for you about Brian King's The Art of Taking It Easy: the place where I have the most work to do, I think, is in shifting my optimism/pessimism balance. It's true that if you expect the worst you'll rarely be disappointed. There are costs to that approach, however. Optimistic people, King says, don't dwell on what might have been. Negative thoughts enter their minds and pass on through; they don't ruminate. I, my friends, ruminate all the dang time. This is a terrible habit! I could probably take up smoking or perhaps meth and be better off! (maybe not meth) 

If I experience something that could have been more dangerous than it was, I think about what could have happened even though it didn't happen. I think about what might happen in the future and I fall into the trap King describes of overestimating the likelihood of the worst-case scenario. I'm not sure he has a very clear sense of what it's like to live inside a worrier brain. At one point he's trying to think of the worst outcome you could experience as a result of being in heavy traffic, and he can't come up with anything. I'm like, "Brian, my dude, you could DIE -- that's the bad outcome and it happens every day." He suggests that I focus on actual less-bad outcomes instead of perseverating on other possibilities (For instance, remember the time that Stella wandered off and got stuck high up in a tree? She got down safely! no harm done! That is not the blog post I wrote, though.) He suggests that I allow possible bad outcomes less space in my head. This is sensible advice -- perhaps obvious advice to those of you who don't tend to worry. It is going to take practice for me.

Some of what he suggests to shift the landscape in one's brain is familiar-- cultivate gratitude, tell the people you love that you love them, laugh frequently. Here's an idea I hadn't encountered: write about a future in which a problem that is weighing on you is resolved exactly as you'd like it to be. Describe everything about that imagined outcome. Try it again the next week, focusing on a different outcome. King says there's some empirical evidence in support of this activity, which trains the brain to think optimistically about distressing situations.

I know exactly which situation I would write about it, and I know most of what I would say. Writing it down feels weirdly risky. Maybe I'll try it and report back.

Bait and switch books

I just finished two books in one day that did the same strange thing: switching directions on the reader in an unexpected way.

Our parish often gives parishioners a book on major feast days, and our Easter book was Matthew Kelly's I Heard God Laugh (affiliate link). People rave about Matthew Kelly, but I have never finished one of his books. This one, I decided, I would finish. He began, as he usually seems to begin, by talking about how prayer can change your life. Ten minutes a day, he says over and over, can transform everything. He has a formula for those ten minutes, and I thought the book was going to focus on applying the formula. But then he changes direction. He talks about his experiences as a teenager learning to pray, feeling drawn deeper and deeper into prayer. The title of the book comes from a mystical experience that occurred after he had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours of prayer, in a season of his life when prayer was his highest priority.

Is it just me, or is that a little odd? In my view a prayer life is a little like triathlon training. You can't get ready for a triathlon in ten minutes a day. It's better to run ten minutes per day than zero minutes per day, absolutely! It's 100% worth doing! But you can't go the distance if you don't build up the endurance beforehand. Would I have a mystical experience of God's presence if I used Kelly's formula faithfully for ten minutes every day? Maybe? I think I'll let someone else try it and tell me how it works out, though.

A few weeks ago I was checking out an e-book from my library when a different book caught my eye. A guy named Brian King, a standup comic with a PhD in psychology, wrote a book called The Art of Taking It Easy. Sure, I thought to myself, I'll see how it is.

The first chapter was really good! Smart, funny, polished! I was a fan! And then things got considerably less polished. My suspicion is that he smacked that first chapter around until it sparkled when he was in the proposal stage, and then he was like, "Wait, now I have to write a whole book??" There are insights and funny stories scattered all the way through, but I would not have been as enthusiastic if I had read, say, chapter 4 first.

These are some of the things I want to remember from the book:

1. He says stress is a reaction to a perceived threat, but most of the threats we perceive are not actual threats. If you live your life thinking that the unlikely bad outcome is worth losing sleep over, you will lose a lot of sleep. The thing that stresses us out most is...nothing. We stew and fret, we think of the worst outcome, and what happens is...nothing.
2. If you can learn to think differently about situations that are stressing you out, you can change your stress level. Does that sound obvious? I found his presentation of contrasting options here to be smart and funny, but it sounds pretty straightforward now that I have typed it out. I guess I thought that the stress level drove the thoughts, but apparently the thoughts drive the stress level. You guys know how much I tend to worry, and King thinks this is a terrible use of my brainpower. If you can't do anything about a situation, he says, then why worry about it?
3. I read that question and a stream of defensive thoughts flowed: I don't know; it does sound dumb when you put it that way; that's just the default mode for my brain. King says that people who have formed the habit of worrying tend to default to worry when their brains are not engaged in a task. Occupy your brain with something better than worry! Busy brains are likely to be happier brains!
4. I want to keep thinking about the relationship between resilience and happiness. Like, I wish that I could bellow, "I get knocked down, but I get up again; you're never gonna keep me down," but instead it's more like "I get knocked down; I lie on the ground briefly and contemplate the unfairness of the universe. I gingerly palpate the part that hit the ground first. It hurts, dernit! Who knocked me down? Can I speak to the manager? Also, in order to process this I need to write a blog post from my position on the ground -- could someone bring me my laptop?" Which (a) doesn't scan and (b) doesn't make for a very happy life. King says we need to reframe difficult situations by thinking about what actually happened instead of what could have happened. This is timely for me tonight, because I am still feeling some adrenaline residue from earlier. Stella came in shrieking in pain and disgust; a bird had pooped in her eye and she was really hurting. King would tell me to think about the actual outcome (eye flushed, good cheer restored) and not about the uncertainties.

I was going to write a quick paragraph about the things I highlighted in the book, but it turns out that I highlighted a whole bunch of stuff and this post is already pushing a thousand words. Maybe I'll write a little more about it tomorrow.

Upcoming

I registered for a triathlon last night, you guys, and today I went for a run for the first time in six months. It was not pretty. But it's good to have a goal, right? I'm always more motivated by an event than by a vague sense that exercise is good for me.

ALSO Pete is turning 16 tomorrow (16! can you believe it?!) and is kicking off his birthday with an 8am vaccination appointment. Twelve hours from now, all of the eligible Gladlys will have had at least one shot. I am three weeks out from shot #2.

Did I tell you this? I just can't remember what I've told you and what I haven't. I've been feeling a little blocked up lately, because one family member wants me to write a post about which I feel some reluctance, and one family member does not want me to write a different post about the thing most on my mind recently. But the first of those posts is also on my "upcoming" list.

ALSO upcoming: it's almost #EAMDRAL time. Next month will mark our Eighth Annual May Dickens Read-Along. What should we read this year? I'm considering Great Expectations (maybe it's a good year for reading about the transformative effects of serious illness), and I'm also considering Little Dorrit. I last read Little Dorrit in May of 2002 as I was advancing from 8 months pregnant to 9.3333 months pregnant and badly in need of a distraction. In that season, as the last of the 9/11 rubble was being cleared away and the future began to seem a little brighter again, I had a similar sense of emerging from something horrifying and unforgettable. Maybe it's good I didn't know that we'd still have troops in Afghanistan on Joe's 19th birthday. But here's to the emerging part, not the unforeseen long-term consequences part. May we move speedily to the far side of this.

ALSO ALSO upcoming: the women's retreat has a date. It was scheduled for September of 2020, and then it was postponed indefinitely, and now it is scheduled for the very end of September 2021. Everyone who goes on the weekend has to be vaccinated, a decision that seems destined to generate pushback in these weird and polarized days.

This paragraph is not about an upcoming event for me, but maybe it can be an upcoming event for you. Vaccination is the connection here-- on Friday night I waded into a Facebook discussion about vaccination in which one commenter attempted to steer us to a homily about vaccination that should really come with a warning label. DANGER, DESTRUCTIVE ANALOGIES AND INSUPPORTABLE CONCLUSIONS, it would say. I was not polite about my reaction on Facebook, and then, unsatisfied, I went over to  Twitter to complain further. And the next day I hied myself to confession for the first time since Advent. YOU GUYS, it was the best. THE BEST. That feeling of lightness and freedom and belovedness (and also the awareness that it's time for another social media break, because there is enough angry in my life without Twitter to fuel it)-- I almost want to get off the couch and do a little Snoopy dance as I remember it. But it's late and I'm tired so I will do an Inner Snoopy Dance instead. If you too could use an Inner Snoopy Dance moment, I suggest gently that you investigate the reconciliation schedule at your parish.

Okay! I will be back soon. Tell me what our #EAMDRAL book should be, and tell me what you are most looking forward to in your post-vaccination life. At the top of my list is when Alex comes home for the first time since Christmas 2019, an event for which I will need an entire box of Kleenex all to my weepy self. But I was also pretty tickled when the college roommate with whom I am doing this triathlon (a triathlon, you guys, after all these months on the couch-- this is kind of a nutty idea, but oh well) said that perhaps we could get an AirBnB for TWO nights, and just have a luxurious stretch of time in which to hang out after our race is over. Doesn't that sound delicious?

P.S. The enthusiasm pervading this post is brought to you by yet another item from my "upcoming" list: the end of the spring semester. This is the last week of classes, and I have now posted all of the online content I will have to post for the spring semester. That was a mammoth task. COLOSSAL. I am currently shoveling my way through the massive pile of grading, but do you know what awaits me on the other side? Freedom, and ease, and a nice fat Dickens novel -- that's what.

Bitten, not smitten

We said goodbye to foster dog #9 this morning. He spent a little less than 16 hours with us, and it was not a happy experience.

Cooper is a 9-year-old chihuahua mix, and I know that chihuahuas can be cranky and old dogs don't always do well with change. But he was supposed to be mellow and sweet. He would warm up slowly, they told us, and then he would just want to lie on the couch next to us while we worked. He was hostile toward the cats in his last foster home, they said, but they thought he would do well in a home without other animals. Oh, and by the way, he snapped at the woman in his last foster home for the first day or two; he preferred men to women. She stayed out of his way and it got better, she said.

Things we did not know going in: (A) he had only been in his last foster home for two days and (B) he came to this shelter because otherwise he was going to be put down due to behavior concerns.

I stashed a cheese stick in my pocket when I went to meet in him, and he nibbled delicately on morsels of cheese while we talked about him. He was nervous in the car on the way home, but we're used to that by now. New foster dogs are often nervous in the car on the way home. Having him here was fine at first. Or mostly fine -- there was a weird moment when I walked toward him and he snarled and snapped at my ankle, but I wasn't too worried.

But then he snapped at Pete, and he snapped at Stella. He wanted to camp out right next to Elwood, and in our small house that means we were walking near him to get from the kitchen from the living room. Not touching him, not moving in a loud or scary way -- but he was still scared. I started to wonder what had happened to this dog. Was he used to getting kicked when people walked by? What the heck was going on? He snapped at me for a second time when I went to put his leash on. Okay, I thought, maybe he doesn't want my hands near his neck while we're getting acquainted. 

Elwood was clearly his favorite; Cooper sought him out for pets and didn't mind at all for Elwood to put on his leash. But we have a deal in our house: Elwood doesn't mind how many dogs we foster, as long as he doesn't have to do very much of the work. This was not quite what he signed up for.

The weirdest thing for me is that this dog was happy to accept affection from me for a while. He would reach out his little front paw and stroke it across my hand twice to ask me to scratch behind his ears again. He asked me for belly rubs. He was eating out of my hand, for heaven's sake.

So I thought we were on good terms when he seemed to want to go out again. I squatted in front of him. I scooted the ring on his collar around to the back of his neck, thinking that might be less stressful for him than reaching toward his throat. I was the calmest, gentlest version of my calm and gentle self -- and with no fear or distress cues whatsoever he lunged forward and bit the heck out of my right knee.

"Well," I said aloud as I sat down on the couch and surveyed the hole in my pants. "Huh," I thought as I felt liquid inside my pants leg. "What could be wet on my knee? There shouldn't be anything wet inside the knee of my pants. Am I...bleeding?"

I was indeed bleeding. I emailed the foster coordinator, because a dog that bites with no warning is not a dog that can stay in the house with my children. Elwood assumed the mantle of Dog Caretaker, and the rest of us kept our distance.

But! Even that was not sufficient! Cooper got worried when I lowered the blinds, because apparently this is a menacing act in his sad little universe? He launched himself onto the couch and ripped another hole in my pants, though thankfully not in my actual flesh. This time I bellowed NO, STOP -- which seemed to cement his view that women are bad and scary. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, yeah? 

He continued to think that Elwood was the bees' knees, so Elwood slept on the couch with Cooper curled up at his feet, leashed and tethered to the coffee table to prevent any midnight peregrinations. The foster coordinator made a special early trip into town so we could hand him off before she went to work. She was hoping we would take another foster dog with us when we left, an easier dog, but I was like "NOT TODAY" and inwardly "MAYBE NOT EVER." 

It shook me up, you guys, the way he seemed to turn on a dime. One second he was fine, and the next second he was ripping holes in my pants. I was trying to play it down so I wouldn't alarm the kids last night, but WHAT THE HECK, COOPER?? I gave you cheese sticks and let you sit on my couch and in return you gouged holes in my leg with your teeth?!

It was weird to feel fear about a 10-pound dog. I am embarrassed to put it on the internet that I felt scared of a 10-pound dog. But a dog that does not have inhibitions about hurting a person can do some damage to a person who is not expecting it, even if he only weighs 10 pounds. Pete and I were talking it over today. (Pete, the gentlest teenager you'll ever meet, the person most likely to shed a tear when we take a foster dog to be adopted, saw the bite happen and described his reaction thus: "I wanted to vault over and snap his little neck.") What would we have done if Cooper had also been weird and unpredictable with Elwood, or if Elwood hadn't been around? Could we have restrained him without hurting him badly? 

I don't know. I'm still thinking about it, though. That was No Fun.