Light and Momentary

2022

Okay! It is New Year's Eve! And do you know what we used to love in these parts? New Year's resolutions, that's what. But it's been a while since there was a resolutions post on this site. In January 2020 we were in the middle of The Troubles, and the motto was Just Get Through It. In January 2021 we were in the middle of the terrible winter COVID spike when vaccines were just barely available, and Just Get Through It was still the motto.

But do you know, this year I am feeling perkier (as long as I don't pay too much attention to the omicron headlines or the local COVID numbers), and I am going to do some resolving.

Resolution #1: exercise.

I have been reading an interesting book, Younger Next Year For Women [affiliate link]. The authors are very firm that women my age should be exercising a lot more than I have been exercising. More specifically, they say that I need to be exercising 6 days a week for 45 minutes each time, and that if I do so I will dramatically change the quality of the last third of my life. This sounds ridiculous, right? Who exercises that much in the dead of winter even when there is not a stupid omicron surge on top of an even stupider pandemic? There have been seasons when I have exercised that much, always in connection with race preparations, and I have always been glad when they were over.

But you guys, the authors make a really compelling case for figuring out a way to fit it in and make it sustainable. The science is so interesting that I am going to buy the book, which I am currently reading for free. So this is my top-priority resolution: keep the strength training, add the cardio. I am going to try jumping rope, which I used to love as a kid. I am going to look into moving my bike onto an indoor trainer, because I appear to have developed exercise-induced asthma that makes vigorous outdoor exercise unpleasant in the winter. And I'm going to look into some video options, but I do not want anything with a "be smaller!" vibe. I have had quite enough of the poisonous idea that a woman is somehow better when less of her exists. Suggestions are most welcome.

Resolution #2: cut way back on social media use.

I think the thing that works best is if I avoid social media use altogether during the week, and check in when I have finished my Saturday housekeeping jobs. This lets me see get a glimpse of what's going on with people without getting sucked in too far. I don't think I'm going to deactivate my FB account, but I am going to spend less time there. And Twitter is a really interesting place, but in large doses it makes the world seem a little bleaker.

Resolution #3: keep plugging steadily on the Palliser Chronicles. 

Trollope's Palliser Chronicles are much sloggier than his Barsetshire Chronicles. I started Phineas Finn, like, 3 separate times. But I am finally in book 3, the Eustace Diamonds, and I like it much more. I think that if I read a chapter a day I can finish the six-book series even if I take a month off for the annual May Dickens Read-Along. This year will be our ninth AMDRAL, if you can believe it!

Resolution #4: catch up on getting pictures into albums.

I got behind, friends. I hadn't made an album since July 2019. But I've been nibbling away at the backlog since the fall semester ended, and I'm hoping to keep the momentum going. If I can do a month's worth of pictures each day, I'll be caught up before the end of January and I will feel much better. I love having put pictures into albums even if I hate the putting.

Resolution #4 (oops, realized 5 days later that this should be #5): blog faithfully.

I am going to aim for 4x/week in 2022. I love blogging. Thank you for reading, my friends! A happy new year to you!

25

On this day 25 years ago, my oldest son was born. This means I have been a mom for 49% of my life now.

I was worried about being a mother. I was afraid I would be bad at it, and it seemed like a pretty high-stakes thing to be bad at. One of the great gifts of motherhood is that it has compelled me to be less afraid of making mistakes. 

Back in the summer, a couple of weeks apart, two people close to me said things that I wanted to remember and also felt shy about recording here. But I am going to blog them anyway, before they slip into the mists of murky memory.

One of my best friends has spent a lot of time here with my kids and me, and she said something that took me by surprise. She said, "It is part of the culture of your family that your children adore you." She described a moment in June when one of my big kids was upset, and looked to me to put things in perspective. She said, "It's not that I'm envious -- but no, actually, I'm a little envious." 

My brother saw us in August for the first time in two years, and he said, "One of my favorite things about spending time with your family is how much you all obviously enjoy being together."

I did not know, 25 years ago, how many good things awaited me. I did not know how much love I would soak up, how much merriment we would enjoy together. I did not know that my inscrutable baby would become one of my favorite adults. Twenty-five years ago tonight he lay in the NICU, mechanically ventilated after a traumatic birth resulting in an initial APGAR of 1. When, in those early days, I thought about what the future might hold, I was pretty pessimistic.

I was so wrong. I'm so glad I was so wrong.

Pianos, Proportions, Patriarchy, Privilege

Last month I saw a post that mentioned a fun book of piano music: Vince Guaraldi's arrangements of Christmas music for the Peanuts TV special. (I feel like Amazon raised the price for December. I think I paid $9 or $10 for it?) I've been enjoying it a lot. It makes me SO nostalgic -- it takes me right back to those 1970s Decembers, when I was counting down the days until Christmas.

It's also pretty brain-bendy. I have zero experience with playing jazz piano, or really jazz anything, and the chords are just not in my vocabulary. The book kicks off with O Tannenbaum, and the first page is fairly easy -- all of it except the first beat. The first chord requires you to play a B-flat and a C with your left hand, and a C with a D-flat in your right hand. I keep doing the same thing: I play those notes together -- B-flat, C, D-flat -- and I think to myself, "That cannot be right." I look at the music, I play them again, I think, "No, something is wrong here." But no: that is exactly what's written. I have probably tried 50 times to go directly from the first chord to the second chord, and I still have to pause and say to myself, "Whoa, that is very dissonant." I'll get there eventually.

A lot of the music is difficult for me. Some of it is the unfamiliar chords and jazz rhythms (I refer you to Nicole's post, which advises the musician to pretend she has just smoked a big doobie, man), and some of it is that Vince Guaraldi must have had bigger hands than mine. (Wait a minute, though, Google tells me he was exactly my height. It wouldn't surprise me if a man my height (5'6") had bigger feet than mine (women's size 7), so I suppose his hands could very well be bigger.) I cannot span a tenth on the piano -- my max is a ninth. But there are a lot of tenths in this music, and tenths are impossible for me to play without rolling the chord.

This is an occasional problem in the classical music I have played, but only an occasional problem. Today I decided to look up how different hand sizes are for men and for women, and I came across this interesting chart on Reddit. Did you know that specialty keyboards exist, which are more comfortable for women with smaller hands, and less comfortable for men with larger hands? Did you know that 76% of men can play a tenth on a standard keyboard, and 87% of women cannot? That link takes you to a website dedicated to alternate keyboard sizing, a rabbit hole I knew nothing about before today.

I said to Elwood, "This is more evidence of patriarchy in action: the standard keyboard fits men's bodies better than women's, even though millions of women play piano. It should not be significantly more expensive to get a suitably sized keyboard if it doesn't affect the instrument's sound production." He was skeptical. He said, "There are always standards."

But it seems to me that one way to recognize privilege is to observe the places where your group defines the standards. The "flesh-toned" bandaids are the color of your flesh; the default pronoun refers to your gender. And pianos -- who knew? -- are constructed with your hands in mind.

The stereo or the brain?

This afternoon I got in the car and Tracy Chapman's song Talkin' 'bout a Revolution was playing. "That's a groovy little bass line," I said to myself. It was the second time in recent weeks I'd had the same reaction to a song I thought I knew well. Back in late October I was listening to Aretha Franklin on Spotify and I thought the selfsame thing.

When I was in college I played the heck out of both those albums. Dissatisfied Women was kind of a theme in my dorm room; Melissa Etheridge and Patsy Cline were also in heavy rotation. But I had never noticed the bass parts that stood out to me so clearly on my recent listens.

It is possible that my college-era stereo didn't render the bass parts very faithfully with its cheap little woofers. I did not own a subwoofer until I married Elwood and became a subwoofer owner-in-law, and from that point on the Dissatisfied Women got less airtime. It is also possible that I just didn't pay much attention to bass parts until I learned to play the bass last year. It has changed the way I listen to music, because I always keep an ear out now for that percussive floor.

I am curious: was the issue that I couldn't hear the bass part clearly back in 1989, or did I just not pay attention to it because the voices seemed more important? I suppose I'll never know.

Some of the things I am not saying to the gym manager

I am really motivated to keep lifting weights, and also I do not love the news about the transmissibility of the omicron variant. I did not expect to find it so satisfying to move barbells around, but here we are. I'm not going to buy a powerlifting setup, so I keep going to gym, aiming for the times when it's likely to be empty.

There are usually a few other people there wearing masks, but not today: today I was the only one. Maybe all the other cautious people are staying home because they know omicron is coming? Maybe they're waiting for the data on how sick it seems to make people? Who can say? 

There's lots of talk in my Facebook feed about the left's overreaction to COVID, and I was thinking about it as I was driving home from my workout this afternoon. Have you seen this graph? In both September and October, COVID was the #2 cause of death in this country. Only heart disease killed more people. In three of the last 13 months (Nov '20 through Feb '21), COVID killed more people than heart disease. Do you know anybody who had a heart attack last month? or the month before that? I do not. I don't actually know a whole lot of people who've died of heart disease across the 51 years that I've been alive. But it would be a grave error for me to extrapolate too far from my personal experience. If I were to say, "Heart disease is no big deal! Hardly anyone dies of heart disease!" -- obviously, it would be a false statement.

My gym acknowledges the reality that sometimes people's hearts stop beating unexpectedly. They have paid to install defibrillation units; someone on staff gets paid to inspect them at intervals. They have paid their staff for the time required to get trained in AED use. They've invested time and money into protecting people at the gym from the adverse consequences of a cardiac event. They've done so not because people are keeling over every other week, but because cardiac events are (usually! maybe not this winter!) the thing most likely to kill American adults.

AEDs aren't magic bullets. More than half of people who experience cardiac arrest are going to die, even in communities where AEDs are widespread. We invest in them because they shift the odds; they have significant potential to reduce suffering and death, even though that potential isn't always realized.

So here's my question: in September the number of deaths caused by COVID (1899 of them) was just slightly under the number of deaths caused by heart disease (estimated at 2056). How is that not serious? In October the number of COVID deaths dropped to 1683, but that number is higher than any other cause of death recorded in this country -- even when you group every form of cancer together. More serious than cancer = pretty dang serious.

And yet-- the same folks whose membership fees pay for seldom-used AEDs are balking at the idea that they should wear masks in the building. It's true that masks, like AEDs, aren't magic bullets. It's also true that masks, like AEDs, have the potential to reduce suffering and death.

I don't understand the discrepancy.