Light and Momentary

On the road again

Tomorrow, if all goes well, I will see my parents for the first time in two years. At some point in the next few days I will also see my brother and my sister. It's been a long time.

#208

Last year on my birthday I resolved to post 4 times a week. Until December I was ahead of the game. But in December and January and February the world seemed so bleak and my job felt so hard that I hardly posted at all. I realized in May that I could still average 4 posts per week if I squeezed in the remainder. This is the very last one, on the very last day of my fifty-first year. Thanks for reading, friends!

Farewell to Fifty

It was the best day.

In the spring of 2019 I emailed my high school best friend to say I'd had a dream about her. It was just a short email -- thinking of you; hope all is well. She replied to ask if I wanted to set up a Zoom call. (I had only the vaguest knowledge of Zoom in March of 2019.) That call led to daily texts and semi-regular voice calls and occasional Zoom chats. Two years later it doesn't quite feel like the day has started properly if I don't have a quick conversation with Becky first.

Even though we exchange dozens of texts a day, we hadn't seen each other in twelve years. When she suggested that we could get together this weekend, I wasn't sure it would work. (Road trips came to seem a little weird to me over the course of the pandemic. You put yourself in a metal box and hurtle down the highway at 70+ mph for multiple hours? This is weird, right?) But! it did work!

We met at the beach with two of my kids and one of hers in tow, and we picnicked and played in the water and admired Stella's sand castle and climbed a massive sand dune. Afterward we ate delicious ice cream in an empty small-town bandshell. Joe and Stella and I were able to have dinner with Marie on the way back to Gladlyville, which was a nice bonus.

Tomorrow I will turn 51 years old. I am feeling grateful for many things: perfect weather and smooth travels and tasty food and kids who got along. But I am especially grateful -- deeply, joyfully grateful -- for this friend who has been dear to me since I was 16.

The pull-up quest continues

I'm inching in the right direction, friends. On Thursday I did a platform-assisted pull-up with 20 pounds offset, and it was hard but not bonkers-hard. Today I thought I'd try one with 10 pounds offset, and...close but no cigar.

Here is a weird thing I am noticing: when I try these single reps at or near my limit (is "single reps" an oxymoron? what do you call it when you're only aiming to do one because you know you can't do a whole set?), I feel it most in my triceps afterward. This is weird, because triceps don't have much of a job to do when you're completing the first part of a pull-up. Are my triceps working hard to keep me from plummeting to the ground afterward? Are they over-engaging to try to stabilize my not-yet-up-to-the-task biceps?

Do I have any women readers who do pull-ups? Have you experienced this? Joe is a little puzzled about why my triceps are more grumbly than my biceps or lats after these max-effort attempts.

(I guess I don't have to restrict this question to women, but it seems pretty certain that all the men who read here started their pull-up training with bigger biceps than mine.)

Reminder

Hi, did you need someone to remind you gently that it is better to get off the couch and be slow than to sit on the couch and wish you were faster? Consider yourself reminded.

The half-marathon training group is much smaller than the last time I did it, and the 12:00+ group is very tiny-- there were only three of us plus a mentor. The lone male was running a little faster than 12:00, and the other woman was moving slower than I was. But she cut the course short instead of running the full distance, which meant that I was the last person in the entire group to finish. This is not my favorite feeling, but OH WELL. 

I find that the group mentors make a huge difference, and this time it's Denise again-- the same Denise who was SO AWESOME about my brainweasels during the 2016 group. I woke up at 5 this morning and thought to myself, "Why did I sign up for this? I'm going to have to run 8 miles and I can't run 8 miles." But I went back to sleep for a bit longer, and when my alarm went off I got out of bed and ran through my running checklist. It's true that I can't run 8 miles at this point, but I can run 3. And I did!

Also, invigorated by my run, I went to the tire shop when I got home. I am awarding myself some bonus Adulting Points today, let me tell you.

Bright and Early

Tomorrow morning I am meeting a bunch of other runners for -- gulp -- the first training run for a fall half-marathon.

Tomorrow we are only going three miles. I can do that.

For my next act

So I can't really tell you why it was such a crummy day on the work front, but it was a crummy day on the work front -- so crummy that I spent some time thinking about what I would do if I quit my job. Things I considered: 

• write books
• learn to code 

Joe thinks I'd be especially good at anything involving small children, but he also notes that I wouldn't make much money unless I became a pediatrician. (I am not going to apply to medical school at age 51.)

My friend Jenny says whenever she's feeling glum about work she imagines getting a job at the gas station near her house, where they're always hiring and they have a soft-serve machine. Having a bad day? Have a little soft-serve!

Probably the way it's going to go down from here is that I have a couple of icky meetings and then the stress dies down. Probably also I will feel a lot happier about my job once I am not trying to teach online any more. But I think I am going to put it in my syllabus from now until the end of time that any queries about final grades need to be addressed in an in-person meeting. 

Still, tell me-- what would you do if you didn't have your current job? What alternate jobs would you suggest for me?

The voices in my earliest memory

When people ask me about the first thing I remember, I have an easy answer. My family acquired a cat when I was 2, and I remember going to get her. She was hiding under the bed and I remember peeking beneath it and spotting her, small and frightened. I remember sitting with the cat in the back of our VW Beetle on the way home, with the smell of skunk in the air.

The people who gave us the cat were close to my parents when my father was stationed in Pensacola FL. Their apartment was right by ours, and we spent a lot of time together. I was very small at the time and so I do not remember life in Pensacola, but I remember my parents talking about Alan and Ellen. After we moved to New Orleans they were transferred to Hawaii (necessitating the new home for their cat), and my parents lost touch with them after that.

Today someone left two unexpected messages on my office phone. It was Alan, trying to get in touch with my dad. "I doubt you'll remember us," he said, "because you were just a little thing." I sent his contact information to my dad, who called him immediately. A little while later, I called him too.

"I do remember you!" I said. "And I wanted to tell you that your cat lived a long life. I took her with me when I moved to my first apartment, and she lived to be almost 21 years old."

Alan and Ellen wanted to chat a little. They are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, and they have been going through old photo albums. They've been reminiscing about the people they used to know, and they wanted to see if they could track my parents down, to get reconnected and to share these old pictures with them. (I have not shared the one in which I am seated on my little potty, holding tightly to the cat. I sure did love that cat. She might have appreciated a little less togetherness in that moment.) They googled me and found my faculty page right away. (I publish as Jamie Most-Gladly; the number of Jamie Mosts in the world is very small.) "That's our Jamie!" Ellen said, and Alan picked up the phone.

It's strange and sweet to think of someone I scarcely remember looking at a current picture of me and exclaiming "That's our Jamie!" It makes me a little wistful, thinking about the webs of invisible connections all around us, and how quickly the years go by.

Friday Farewell

I did not sabotage the meeting with the prospective adopter for Mickey, because I am a responsible foster-er, and even though we told her all about his very worst habits she is going to adopt Mickey. She'll pick him up from us on Friday.

But if things don't work out for him at her house I will take him back in a hot second.

High-jumping shotgun-riding muffin-stealing dog

Stella took Mickey out for a little walk this afternoon right around the time I was leaving for the post office. I pulled up beside them and rolled down the window to say hi. Mickey sprang over to the car and put his feet up on the top of the door so he could see in. 

"Jamie!" you could see him thinking. "You are in the car! I was not expecting the person in the car to be you! But I like car rides! And I like you! And I have an idea!"

Much to our surprise, he jumped through the open window and made himself at home on the passenger seat. "Let's go!" he said to me with his big brown eyes. "Drive fast and I will put my nose out the window to snuffle at all the nice smells!"

Stella tried to persuade him that they should finish their walk but he had other plans. It's hard for an average-sized 12-year-old girl to convince a 50-pound dog that he should remove himself from the place he most wants to be. So we took a short spin around the block, and I dropped them off in the driveway.

Mickey was looking at me as I drove away. "That was not much of a car ride, Jamie!" his eyes said as I backed out. "Next time! I have some catch-up snuffling to do!"

He seemed less cute after dinner, when he seized the muffin pan in his teeth while we were clearing the table and proceeded to wolf down corn muffins as fast as caninely possible.

Small victories and backhanded compliments

I went back to the gym today, and it was fine. It is going to take me a while to get an unassisted pull-up, but I am nibbling away at the amount of assist I need. Joe advised me to tweak my bar placement while squatting, and it feels a lot more stable now. I benched more today than I've benched before, and when I cautiously bumped up the weight for French press it felt exactly right.

In the middle of all this, I overheard a man talking to a younger woman as she returned a pair of 30-pound dumbbells to the rack. He said, "That's a lot of weight for a girl!" I limited myself to a horrified look in response, but I have been thinking about it ever since. I wanted to say, "Hey, buddy, don't pretend to pay someone a compliment while asserting your own superiority-- and, by the way, the word you want there is 'woman.'" I wanted to say, "What if someone said to you, 'Hey, you're not bad-looking for a hairy old man'?" Or even "Gosh, that's a long sentence for a man!"

I know that two wrongs don't make a right, and that men are perfectly capable of complex syntax. But I don't know what kind of response might have sent the message I wanted him to hear. The woman in question didn't seem terribly rattled by it. She said, "That's kind of insulting," and he tried to shrug it off.

The gym is a weird place. What would you have wanted to say -- zingy, charitable, or in between?

Meltdown in the rearview

Yesterday I left the gym in tears. At the end of my workout I got a piece of unsolicited feedback on my form for the last exercise and I knew I was going to cry.

"Do not cry," I told myself, "not here in the Temple of Masculinity." 

But it was too late.

The thing about getting back to regular workouts after months away from the gym is that I am also back to arguing with the voice in my head that says "you don't belong here." It had been quiet for a while before COVID, but it is quiet no longer. It's especially loud in the weight room. 

I walk differently in the weight room: long stride, shoulders back, chin high, eyes slightly narrowed. And I just this minute connected the dots-- it's the same way I would walk down a street in Chicago if I wasn't quite sure I was safe there. It's my "don't mess with me" walk.

Fat lot of good it did me yesterday.

I've been posting cheerfully about lifting and all of those stories have been true. It's been fun to learn new things and make gains; it's been a good kind of hard. This story is also true: I am not a natural athlete. Sometimes I get so discouraged that I cry.

Tomorrow I'm going back. Let's hope it goes better.

Hi, Future Jamie, this is where you put the sloppy joe recipe that Joe liked

Do you ever do that thing where you improvise a dish, it turns out really well, and then you can't remember quite what you did? I made sloppy joes tonight and Joe loved them. I am recording the recipe here instead of scratching my head the next time I'm in the mood for sloppy joes.

I browned an onion with 1.5 lbs of ground turkey. I also threw in 4 cloves of chopped garlic and a handful of grated carrots. The carrots are not traditional, but I like the sweet earthiness they add. (I would have put in a diced rib of celery if we'd had any in the fridge, but we're out. (At least I think we're out. Elwood is the person in this marriage who finds things in the bowels of the fridge. It's possible that there's an entire celery farm in there, but if so it was invisible to me.)) 

When the meat was no longer pink, I added a 14.5-oz. can of crushed tomatoes, a little can of green chiles, a spoonful of brown sugar, and a healthy shake of Worcestershire sauce. I had every intention of adding black pepper before I left it to simmer, but I did not. I did not let it simmer for very long, because we were hungry. But I did toast the buns, which amps up their flavor and their texture enough to be worth doing even when people are hungry.

Joe was not delighted when I announced that I was making sloppy joes, but then he ate three of them and declared them awesome. He prefers my less-sweet version to run-of-the-mill sloppy joes, some of which could be renamed "ground beef with caramel sauce." So if perhaps you're looking for a dinner recipe that's quick, tasty, frugal, and filling, here you go.

All over but the grading

All done with the teaching. Students can still turn some work in tomorrow. Can I finish the grading on Monday? I bet I can. 

Uh-oh

We thought Mickey would get adopted pretty quickly because lab mixes tend to be popular among prospective adopters. But we were wrong: he's been here longer than any of the other foster dogs, and today was the first time we got a call with questions from someone interested in adopting him.

She works long hours, and she wants to know how we think he would do if he were crated all day. The correct answer is "I have no idea." His previous owner didn't crate him; we don't crate him. We put the kitchen garbage can where he can't reach it, and he doesn't cause any trouble at all when we go out or go to sleep. 

Tellingly, the answer I should have given was not the answer I wanted to give. What I wanted to say was "That's a terrible idea! Why would you put such a good boy in a crate all day? Let him stretch out! Let him look out the window! Don't make him live in a box!"

I might be a little more attached to this dog than I realized.

Another bad sign: the prospective adopter asked if she could meet him to see if he seemed to get along with her dog, and my first thought was, "Hm, wonder if I could sabotage the meeting somehow?"

Elwood is out of town and unreachable (a state of affairs I am more willing to disclose on the internet since I am sharing my home with a good-sized dog with sharp teeth, a dog who has decided that we are his people and he is going to defend us (the memo that we don't need defending from the postman or the 11-year-old neighbor seems to be lost in the interoffice mail, but it's a useful trait when one wakes up at 2am contemplating ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties)). He might be surprised to return home to a permanent dog. I'm thinking about it anyway.

P.S. No shade to crate users. I am neutral on most choices related to dog ownership, which is why my emphatic response (FREE MICKEY) is so surprising to me.

I think I can

This is the last week of my summer class. I have to post their last quiz tomorrow; I have to grade some small assignments and a few discussion threads. And I have to grade their projects.

One of my students emailed me less than 20 hours before her project is due, asserting that she could not find a single peer-reviewed article related to her topic. (Let me be clear; she is investigating a topic addressed in an ENORMOUS number of peer-reviewed papers.)

I fear this augurs ill for the finished product. Wish us luck.

Tasty, frugal, quick, filling, reasonably nutritious

Tonight I pulled out my battered copy of Whole Foods for the Whole Family and made groundnut stew. I don't make it often because Elwood doesn't love it, but he wasn't here this evening.

Dice 2 onions and brown them up with a pound of ground meat. Add in a couple of cloves of minced garlic. When they've softened, chuck in two cans of petite diced tomatoes, a cup of peanut butter, and four cups of brown rice, along with a good grinding of black pepper and enough water to make it saucy instead of gloppy. Simmer it all together for 10 minutes or so. Sprinkle with chopped parsley if you have any on hand, and serve it forth with plenty of hot sauce and an easy steamed vegetable.

(I suppose it's much less quick if you don't have cooked brown rice in the fridge awaiting its destiny. But it's still tasty, frugal, filling, and reasonably nutritious.)

Mickey and the Beef Boy

The first night that Alex was here, Mickey was very curious about him. He sat down to a plate of stroganoff and Mickey stayed right next to him, tail twitching. "You want a noodle?" Alex asked him.

"Alex, do not feed that dog from the table," I said. (But not very sternly, because I hadn't seen that boy in almost 18 months.) Just as Alex slipped him a noodle, I said, "And anyway, he doesn't care about the noodles; he wants the beef."

"Oh," said Alex, "you can have some beef!" Mickey received this cube of beef with great appreciation, and Alex ate the rest of his food himself.

I had forgotten about this brief conversation the next morning, but Mickey had not. When Alex came down the stairs, Mickey was right there to greet him. Mickey wags his tail to show curiosity; he wags his butt to show affection. As soon as he caught sight of Alex, his butt started wagging to beat the band. 

"Huh," I thought to myself, "that's a pretty quick attachment."

As a mark of special favor, Mickey will stand right next to you and lean against your legs. As soon as Alex got to the bottom of the steps, Mickey gave him the lean treatment. 

"Huh," I thought to myself, "he must see somehow what a great guy Alex is and how much we all love him."

Alex went over and sat on the couch, and Mickey snuggled right up next to him. You should know that Pete and Joe had been working tirelessly on teaching Mickey to shake, with slow and uncertain results. But Mickey looked Alex in the eye and offered him a paw. He did it again, and then again.

The penny dropped. "He's not experiencing a deep soul connection with you!" I exclaimed. "He's saying, 'Hey, Beef Boy, fetch me some more beef. Please.'"

Women and their bodies, part 2

A couple of times now I have watched Joe interact with guys who haven't seen him in a while. "Dude," they will say, "you're looking really big."

They intend this as a compliment. "I can see you've been working hard in the gym," they are saying. But this is about the most gendered thing I can imagine, aside from "Nice Y chromosome, man!"

No woman, I've told Joe, would ever -- ever -- say to another woman "Hey, you're looking really big!" That's a surefire way to damage a friendship and get yourself labeled as a tactless ogre, a person to be avoided.

Right?

Lots of people have written about fat-phobia and the pressure it places on women to vanish (partially, at least) -- to make themselves smaller. This summer I am also bumping up against some internalized muscle-phobia.

If you asked me outright whether it was unladlylike for women to open their own jars and move their own boxes, I would snort and and roll my eyes. "Of course not," I would tell you. At the same time, somewhere along the way an idea took up residence in my brain about the "right" amount of strength for a woman to have. 

Which is weird, but maybe you know what I mean. I'm guessing you do not aspire to look like Mrs. Olympia. 

At our gym fitness activities have fairly predictable gender ratios: a Pilates class might include one man but probably not; the same is true for dance-based classes like Zumba. Spin classes and cardio machines are roughly 50-50. The weight room is 80% male; some days it's closer to 90%. 

Why is that?

Thievery

Mickey's previous owner warned us that he would counter-surf when no one was looking, but we had no idea how determined to eat people food this dog actually was. 

Week 1
In week 1 we are mindful about counters but we don't know that he can (and will) snatch food right off our high dining room table if we turn our backs on it. The tally:

• Half of a bagel with cream cheese. Stella set her plate on the table and walked back to the kitchen to get a glass of milk. Mickey leapt up, snatched one of the halves, and apparently swallowed it whole. I ran over to him and said "drop it!" very sternly. By the time I got to him there was nothing left to drop.
• A portion of a cheese plate intended for a visiting friend.

Week 2
We are trying to be smarter but with a small kitchen and a crowded table it is hard to keep things out of the reach of a persistent dog at all times.

• In a moment he will doubtless remember fondly for the rest of his time with us, he found an unguarded chicken thigh within reach on the dining room table. I jumped up and tried to grab him, but he eluded me. You could just see the wheels turning in his greedy brain: if she can't catch me, she can't make me drop it. Run, self, run!
• He actually ate that chicken thigh twice, because he barfed it up 10 minutes later and then gobbled down the vomit. Dogs are strange beasts.
• He also ate another portion of another cheese plate intended for more visiting friends. He doesn't understand why we get to eat all the cheese.

Week 3
We have figured out that we need to be vigilant. Anything interesting gets pushed way back out of reach. Mickey responds not with acquiescence and better manners but with the wildest desperation. The damage so far:

• The leftover kale chips. He knocked the plastic container onto the floor and snarfed up the remainder, licking enthusiastically at the dribs and drabs of olive oil and salt left behind.
• Carrot cake. He stuck his head in the corner of the 9 x 13 pan containing the remains of a carrot cake, and licked frantically at the crumbs until he was caught.

I have never known a dog that would go out of his way to steal kale chips. Or carrot cake.