Light and Momentary

Bias

It is going to be a busy winter at work, in large part because I have a couple of big service responsibilities. One of them is the Most Dreaded Service Commitment: the admissions committee. We have changed up the way we evaluate portfolios again, and it is a slow and cumbersome process. I have 47 to go, friends, and they will consume a lot of hours over the next few weeks.

One of our video prompts asks students to reflect on a class they've taken; it offers them a couple of different options to consider. One of the trickiest parts of the whole process for me is evaluating the students who say that they loved one of my classes. It's happened a couple of times now, that students will say, "Dr. Gladly's class was especially valuable for me because..." -- with a list of features that made it challenging but rewarding. 

My instinct is to say "You get a 10!!" (I do not award 10s, because it's a 1-3 scale.) I keep interrogating that instinct, and I'm not entirely sure I'm satisfied with the answers. 

It would be more clear-cut if they were attempting to flatter me, but (a) they're talking about the class, not the instructor, and (b) they have no idea if I'm even on the committee. The committee's composition changes every year and we keep it quiet -- precisely so we don't have students attempting to butter up committee members. And it's not as if every student who mentions my class gets automatic high marks from me. It's really gratifying, though, to hear students say, "Dr. Gladly asked us to do this thing that I found difficult at first, but I stuck with it and I learned so much!"

Part of the rationale for this prompt is that we want to hear students talk about the process of learning. We hope to avoid the situation where students come into grad school having coasted through their undergrad program on strong memorization skills, and then struggle to apply memorized knowledge in complex clinical cases. When I create assignments for upper-level undergrad classes, there's always a specific purpose. So maybe it's entirely reasonable to take it as a good sign when students say, "The assignment was hard, but I see the purpose clearly and the purpose is worthwhile!"

It's messy stuff, though. Rater bias can play a role in who gets into grad school, which is a decision with significant repercussions for students. Even small things, like how many successive portfolios I have evaluated, can influence the ratings I give. They put me on this committee because I have more than ten years of experience teaching grad students here; I have seen a lot of successful (and less successful) students go through the program. It's still messy, though. There's no way to make it anything but messy.

An easy meatless dinner

On Friday night I made a streamlined version of this lentil-chickpea salad from Smitten Kitchen. (Tangent: I started typing Smitten Chicken and had to fix it. When Marie was 2 she used to say "chicken" when she meant "kitchen." Can't you just imagine a starry-eyed chicken, dreaming of her true love?) Modifications: I did not toast or grind my own spices, I did not use any sage in my lentils, I swapped in preserved lemon paste for the chopped rind, and I steeped thin-sliced shallot in salt and lemon juice.

I also took about a cup of Greek yogurt and stirred in another spoonful of preserved lemon paste. I spread the mixture across a plate, for communal dipping, and sprinkled za'atar on top. We ate it with toasted pita, sliced yellow peppers, and steamed broccoli. Yummy, easy, frugal, and the leftovers vanished in a trice.

Less mad

We're not quite four weeks into 2022 here, and I have been pretty consistent about my resolution to stay away from social media almost all the time. I've been peeking in on Saturday evenings after all the Saturday jobs are done, and that's about it. Here is the #1 thing I have noticed: I seem to have a lot less free-floating anger when social media is not feeding it.

I am definitely less informed. I couldn't tell you who is speculating what about which candidates to replace Justice Breyer. I am sure I would have known a lot more about that if I'd been checking Twitter regularly this week. Perhaps I would have more thoughts about the Russian-Ukrainian tensions; perhaps I don't even know what I don't know about right now. 

We get four print newspapers, so it's not as if I am living a solitary news-free life over here. But there's definitely less rage and snark in the pages of a print newspaper than there is in my Facebook and Twitter feeds. I noticed it on Saturday night, the way a wave of fury snuck up behind me after my time on Twitter and said "BOO! Everything is TERRIBLE!"

I can't assert that it's entirely the social media shift. The people who tell you that frequent vigorous exercise is mood-boosting are correct. (It's kind of a bummer that they're correct, isn't it? Wouldn't it be nicer if frequent vigorous consumption of mocha almond fudge ice cream were similarly salutary?)

I am trying to curate the content I do see on social media, making a point of searching for posts from the people I want to hear from instead of just scrolling through the stuff the algorithm spews out at me. The algorithm definitely has the rage-y snarky part down pat -- not so much, though. with the thoughtful funny content. 

[insert exploding-head emoji here]

I've been reading through Casey Johnston's old Ask A Swole Woman columns, because she is smart and funny and she totally gets all the weird complicated stuff about lifting while female, and this morning I came across one called "How to Prevent Debilitating Soreness."

I have been going back through it, trying to find the quote that will spur you to click through and read it, and I just want to share the entire first half. Here's one piece of it:

Soreness is actually more like the gap between what you did to break down your muscles with exercise...and what you gave them to rebuild themselves in the couple of hours and days following in terms of proper food, water, and rest.

In light of this column I am thinking about all my past experiences of painful muscle soreness, some of which are recorded in these pages. (Does anyone remember my first Pilates Reformer class?)

In a culture that tells women "The purpose of exercise is to make yourself smaller," eating for recovery is not a big focus. I absorbed the idea that I should eat some protein after a run, but I had no idea how much protein is recommended to optimize muscle growth. (A lot. A lot a lot: about a gram per pound of bodyweight per day if building muscle is your focus.) There is not a chance I was ever eating that amount of protein in my Pilates Reformer days, and Casey Johnston's take on muscle soreness makes a lot of sense to me in hindsight.

I am so curious about your reactions to her post, you guys. I feel like men get this advice in the gym but women (by and large) hear that it is better for them to restrict post-workout calories so they can chisel away more of themselves. This is bad advice, it turns out. Take a look at the post and tell me what you think!

The crowded kindnesses, COVID version

Yesterday afternoon we joined an extended family Zoom call, in which people were talking about what they've been up to, and afterward I was keenly aware of how many things we have not been doing. "I want to go to a restaurant," I said a little mournfully. "I want to look at a menu and share an appetizer and think about the specials and have someone wash my dishes without my having to ask."

"We can make that happen!" said Pete.

I thought he meant, "You can stop living such a narrow life and go to a dang restaurant," but what he actually meant was "We can bring a restaurant to you!"

He and Stella put their heads together and created a menu. I heard them in the kitchen: "What does Mom especially like to eat?"

Not long afterward they seated me at the dining room table. Stella was the waitress; Pete was the chef. The menu had an appetizer section, from which I requested the hummus with toasted pita. They brought me a pretty little plate: perfectly toasted triangles of pita, a dollop of hummus, a little glass dish of nice olives. To drink I had a glass of seltzer over ice with a splash of real lemonade.

The menu offered me a number of entrée options; I chose pizza bread with quartered artichoke hearts. Pete washed every dish afterward.

You guys, I felt so loved.

The COVID situation here has been so bad lately. Our official case count, which is surely only a fraction of the actual cases in town, just kept vaulting upwards over the top of the y axis. Our case record had stood since November of 2020, but earlier this month the official tally spiked up to almost four times that previous record. Cases, positivity, hospitalizations-- you name it, we were setting new records just about every day. The hospitals were overflowing.

So we've been living a pretty quiet life over here. We're back to online church with drive-through communion; we're wearing KN95 masks everywhere we go. I suppose it makes sense that if an extraordinarily contagious virus is unleashed in a county that's only moderately vaccinated, there's going to be a lot of viral replication happening. But watching it unfold was still astonishing.

We seem to have turned a corner; cases and positivity are down. Overall hospitalizations are still high, though our local public radio station reports that we have more available ICU beds in part because of a series of ICU deaths. It all feels pretty grim, and I think I will hold off on flipping through any menus in person for a while longer.

But at dinner tonight I told the kids again how much I appreciated their willingness to make my wish happen. And this is the best part of all: Pete sighed happily at the memory, and said, "That was so fun!"

Snails and Pattens

I've told you before that one of the things I love about a long-haul in-depth reading project is the opportunity to get thoroughly acquainted with an author's voice: the snails in Shakespeare, the echoes across Dickens novels. I was reading Sketches by Boz when I said to myself, "Hey, wait a minute, that sounds like Sairey Gamp!" The midwife who comes to attend a birth is described as "a fat old woman, in a cloak and night-cap, with a bundle in one hand, and a pair of pattens in the other, who looked as if she had been suddenly knocked up out of bed for some very special purpose."

Yesterday I looked it up and sure enough, Sairey Gamp, on her first appearance in Martin Chuzzlewit, is described as "a fat old woman, this Mrs Gamp." When she emerged after Mr. Pecksniff knocked on her window, Dickens says, she "had a large bundle with her, a pair of pattens, and a species of gig umbrella." I didn't know what pattens were until I encountered them in Dickens, but the description is evocative -- a woman preparing herself to trudge across mud and sewage without tracking them into a home that will be welcoming a new baby. 

In Sketches Dickens describes himself as a young bachelor, uncertain about the import of the fat old woman's arrival. He was only 24 when it was published. I wonder how much she is based on an actual 1830s London midwife, awakened by a midnight knock, hurrying out with her hands full. I wonder too how much Dickens based his description on the anti-midwifery stereotypes that were brewing even then -- I don't think I'd want Sairey Gamp as a birth attendant, personally.

I remember reading an interview with Liz Phair in which she talked about her first recordings as a library. "I go in there and rip stuff off," she said. I am curious about whether Sketches is something similar -- an early exploration of characters and ideas that will resurface in later works. It might be a little weird to compare the person who wrote Supernova with a person who couldn't bring himself to write the word "childbirth*," but maybe it's true that the creative process works in similar ways regardless of what's being created.

*Check out this piece of circumlocution: "Mrs Gamp had been up all the previous night, in attendance upon a ceremony to which the usage of gossips has given that name which expresses, in two syllables, the curse pronounced on Adam." It's got to be childbirth, right? What else could it be?

Every day is easier than some of the days

So you guys, I am finding it easier to exercise six days a week than I thought it would be. I don't have to answer the question "Am I going to work out today?" I already know the answer; the answer is yes. If I don't do it in the morning, I have to do it in the evening.

This means I don't have to deal with Sad Gertrude. Sad Gertrude is a voice I read about somewhere on the internet (maybe the Salty Running blog? maybe five-ish years ago? too long ago to remember the details) and immediately recognized. Sad Gertrude says, "But it's going to be haaaaaard," when you are trying to motivate yourself to lace up your shoes. Sad Gertrude says, "What if we caaaaan't?" as you are thinking about what your workout will look like. Sad Gertrude says, "Maybe later would be better. Don't we have enough suffering in our life already?" And at least sometimes, a person will just sigh heavily and accede to Sad Gertrude's querulous pleas.

I have hardly heard anything from Sad Gertrude this year. In years past, if I were aiming to work out three or four days a week, she would try to convince me on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday that the four days might as well be W-Th-F-Sa. And then on Wednesday she would tell me that three workouts a week is a perfectly respectable amount of exercise. Maybe you can sympathize; maybe you have a Sad Gertrude of your own. Or maybe my Sad Gertrude has gone to live at your house, because she has been very, very quiet lately. 

All of my previous attempts to work out 6 days a week have felt overwhelming to me, but this one does not, or at least not so far. I think a big slice of it is having good options for home workouts, so that I am not braving ice and snow and teeming hordes of January-ites at the gym, and trying to fit in the workout plus the drive to and from the gym where there is no parking because of all the people thinking that THIS YEAR will be the their year to get fit. Another slice of it is doing less running. I am just not a very efficient runner. It feels like I am working stupid-hard to go stupid-slow. But hey! This year I can jump rope and ride my bike and do Jazzercise and lift weights instead.

In my ideal world I would be getting up at 5:15 so I could work out before the kids are awake, but I do not love waking up at 5:15 in January. So I've mostly been working out in the evening. In my ideal world I would be able to do barbell deadlifts, but our gym is pretty much a seething cauldron of COVID right now. I froze our membership until spring, when I hope the crowds will be sparser and the COVID numbers less grim. I can do dumbbell deadlifts for a while, even if they are much less satisfying.

It is kind of weird that Joe turned me into a person who pines for barbells, isn't it? Have I already recommended @megsquats and @swolewoman to anyone who is thinking that her life could use a few more barbells? I'm always happy to hear about new people to follow, if you have any recommendations for me.

I am the soul of temperance, it turns out

You guys, I have to tell you about a thing I found on the internet today. Have you ever thought to yourself, "That Jamie Gladly is kind of obsessed with the Victorians"? It turns out I am not obsessed at all! Not even a teeny bit.

Today I found a corner of the internet in which dozens of people -- dozens! (dozens as in 2 and a bit, but still: dozens, plural) -- are planning to read the major works of Dickens across the next two years.

That is a gobsmacking commitment to Dickens, my friends. That is SO MUCH DICKENS.

And maybe, possibly, I will take part of the ride with them.

For a while now I have wanted to read some portion of the Dickens I haven't yet read. The problems are that (a) there's so much Dickens and (b) I have found the quality variable in my few excursions beyond the novels. The Christmas novellas, for instance-- bathos! sentimentality! blargh!! 

The club members are reading in roughly chronological order, starting with Sketches by Boz, which I have never read. I love the exuberance and playfulness of early Dickens (Pickwick forever!), so that might be a good one to read with them. I'll sit out the next two on their list (Pickwick and Oliver Twist), since I've read both of those pretty recently, but they are going to be starting Nicholas Nickleby in May. Perfect timing for an #AMDRAL pick, and I haven't read that one since 2010, when I finished up my 10-year Dickens project.

I finished up Eustace Diamonds over lunch today and started Phineas Redux tonight. I don't think I've ever had a Dickens work and a Trollope novel on the go at the same time, but I guess I'll give it a whirl.

Read this book and tell me what you think

Last night I finished book #2 of 2022, Younger Next Year for Women, and I think you should read it. I think you may find parts of it mildly annoying, but I also think you will find it really thought-provoking. I found it so interesting and motivating that I immediately checked out their book on nutrition from the library. That one is not off to a rip-roaring start (that is code for, "whoa, guys, enough with the fat-shaming already"), but I will keep reading for a bit and report back.

First, though, I have to find out what happens to Lady Eustace and Lucy Morris in The Eustace Diamonds. What will Frank Greystock decide to do?? I can hardly stand the suspense.

Advanced Age

Today I was sorting through some papers and from the comfort of my couch I dealt with a check that needed to be deposited. I have known for years that this option existed, but I've always just gone to the ATM (or sometimes to the teller inside). "Elwood," I said to the person in my household least likely to use electronic banking options, "guess what I just did? It's because I'm so hip and cool, just like the kids these days."

"Ah, yes," he said, "that's exactly what the kids these days are doing: depositing paper checks."

We laughed.

**

Today I got the itch to pull out my violin for the first time in a long time, and Pete wanted to talk about the tiny quarter-sized violin that lives under the music room loveseat. "It was mine when I was little," I told him. "I got it when I was four."

"Wow," he said. "So it's REALLY* OLD!"

*Pete, reading over my shoulder, disputes this recollection. He says it was "kinda old," which might be true. But I'll point out that it's entirely possible to say "kinda" in a tone that means "really."

We joked about it at dinner, how he keeps bumping up against the fact that his parents' childhoods fell in an era that feels like the distant past to him. 

**

Tonight he was sitting on the couch next to me and he said, "I know you've been sad today, and I wish I could help. But you don't have to tell me why you're sad if you don't want to." It was a small thing I've been trying unsuccessfully to shake off all day, so I told him. He responded so kindly. He said, "When I come to you and I feel sad, you can always help me feel better. I wish I could do that for you, but I guess it just comes with age OOOHHHHH NOOOOOOO!" He went on, "I was trying to make you feel better and instead I just said you were oooooold!"

But I laughed so hard that I did wind up feeling better.

Brutal, also fun

My dad was a runner back when it was a quirky thing for adults to do. AND, furthermore, my dad was a runner when we lived in Florida and New Orleans, where the heat requires extra dedication. He also jumped rope, in an era when grown men did not jump rope unless perhaps they were making movies about getting punched in the face until they fell down, which he was not.

[not my dad]

When I was little, little like 4 or maybe even just 3, he resolved to teach me to jump rope. This was a discouraging process for Small Jamie, as someone with a deeper knowledge of gross motor development might have told him it would be, and I labored and sweated and failed to connect consecutive jumps. He used to tell the story of the time I flung the rope onto the carport floor in disgust. (Four, I must have been four. We didn't live in the carport house until I was four.) "I'll never get it!" I said amid tears. (Those of you who have been reading my perfectionist contortions for some fraction of the 17 years in which I have been posting them on the web are nodding along here, saying, "Huh, that sounds familiar.") But then I picked up that rope once more, and LO: I could do it. Mysteriously, something clicked.

That night I jumped my little heart out. I still remember waking up in my bed the next morning, too sore to move. I believed for a couple of hours that I had done some flavor of permanent damage to my body, but I bounced back pretty quickly. And from that day on, I was sold on jumping rope.

I never won anything in field day competitions, except once in fifth grade. There was a jumprope relay, and I headed up the four-person team from my classroom. Each girl jumped until she missed, and then handed off the rope to the next girl. The last team with a girl still jumping won the event. But when I started jumping I did not miss; I kept going serenely until every other girl (except my three teammates, who were standing behind me awaiting turns that never came) had stumbled and handed off her rope. I kept going until they told me to stop and collect my blue ribbon, because jumping rope was my thing.

It is no longer my thing, as I learned when I attempted a 20-minute jumprope session tonight. With a little practice I could jump a hundred times in a row tonight, but doing so sent my heartrate up into the 160s. The rope caught on my ponytail, and my feet weren't always quite where I thought they were going to be. So I would jump until I missed, and give my heart a little time to settle down, and jump until I missed again. 

It was hard, from both a cardio perspective and a coordination perspective. But it was also fun and meditative. There's something joyful about jumping, about knowing where the rope will be and moving your body in time with its rhythm. I remember why I used to love it.

Let's hope I don't wake up too sore to move in the morning.

Reading and listening: forgiveness, unforgiveness, the unforgivable

This morning I finished my first book of 2022: Gentle and Lowly. (A disadvantage to reading the Palliser Chronicles is that they do not permit a person to notch new items on her "books read" list very quickly. I am reading Eustace Diamonds every day, faithfully, and there is still so much Eustace Diamonds left to read.) I am not very involved with our campus organization for Christian faculty, but I get their emails. When the coordinator mentioned that they would be discussing Gentle and Lowly, the author's name -- Dane Ortlund -- caught my eye. In my early 20s I learned a lot from Anne Ortlund's books, and it seemed likely that these authors were related. (They are: grandson/grandmother.)

Gentle and Lowly stirred up some controversy, apparently, when it was released in 2020. In a now-deleted review, the folks at Grace To You panned it, insisting that the book needed more table-flipping, more of the wrath of God. (Maybe they should rename their site Wrath To You.) If you are Catholic, you may dislike the book's jabs at Catholic ideas about atonement, forgiveness, and grace. But I found that it spoke to my soul. I read it with my friend Becky, a chapter a day for three weeks, and on many of those mornings one of us would text the other some variation of "loved that G&L chapter!!" I think it is especially valuable for anybody struggling with scrupulosity or a performance mentality (i.e., my value lies in my productivity), or anyone who has struggled with a particular flavor of sin or suffering for a long time.

I have been listening to Gaslighter, the 2020 album by the band formerly known as The Dixie Chicks. (They dropped the "Dixie" around the time that this album came out.) Many of the songs are about the breakdown of the lead singer's marriage. And you guys, I'm finding it really interesting: the songwriting is compelling. The window into a marriage coming apart at midlife stirs up my sympathy. But I also keep thinking about their decision to put it all out there: let us tell you about this infidelity and its aftermath. Natalie Maines has sons in their teens, and it was definitely A Choice to craft an album so full of rage and disappointment WITH THEIR FATHER and send it out into the world.

Last fall, not long after I finished Intuitive Eating, I bought myself a book called Gentle Nutrition. I was excited to try some new things in the kitchen, and a dietitian writing from an intuitive eating perspective sounded really promising. But here's the problem: she loves dill. On page after page, there are pictures of PERFECTLY INNOCENT food with dill fronds sprinkled across it. In list after list of ingredients she tells me to add dill.

I keep telling myself not to be a big dill baby. It's not as if she's telling me to put turpentine in my food. I know how to substitute other herbs for dill; I've been doing it my whole life, because dill pretty much tastes like turpentine to me. I tell myself not to look at the pictures. (I hate dill so much that even the sight of it causes me to make unhappy faces. You should see me typing this post. I look like someone just tried to feed me surströmming with paint scrapings on top.) 

I'm not sure this book is going to work for me after all. 

So talk to me: what are you reading this January? do you have an opinion on the Art vs. Privacy question? do you hate any food as much as I hate dill? Do tell.

Still more advantages

That book I've been telling you about, Younger Next Year for Women, was written by a physician and one of his patients. The patient does not love weight-lifting, but he is very insistent about its value. One of the things he said about the importance of weight-training left me initially skeptical. But then we had a round of freezing rain that left us with annoyingly icy sidewalks, and I am here today to tell you that he seems to have been correct.

I had noticed over the past several years that my balance is not what it used to be. It's not that I was falling over on a regular basis, but I am definitely more tippy than I was 25 years ago. Because I walk to and from work every day, over sidewalks that may or not be shoveled after winter storms, I am keenly aware of this difference. I would watch the college students go zipping up sidewalks covered in tamped-down snow, and I would think to myself, "Huh, there is no chance I could move that fast on this sidewalk." 

A regular yoga practice made some difference, but my capacity to hold tree pose in my living room didn't really transfer into a renewed ability to walk confidently on icy surfaces. So when Chris Crowley said that strength training would improve my balance, it caught my eye. He said it would do so through two different mechanisms: first, that increasing the demand on my muscles on a regular basis would improve my proprioception, my sense of where my body is in space. Second, the increase in strength would make it easier for me to salvage the situation if I did stumble. He said 50-year-olds don't stumble any more often than 20-year-olds -- they just can't respond as effectively to their stumbles.

"Hm," I said as I stroked my chin thoughtfully. "Game-changing if true."

As you know (and might even be a little tired of hearing), I started lifting weights in May. I think I had lost a fair amount of muscle mass over the years, you guys. Everybody loses muscle mass across time, of course; the actual numbers are pretty depressing. But women who attempt to lose weight are at particular risk. A determination to shift the number on the scale quickly means that your body sheds muscle as well as fat. And when I wanted to lose weight, I wanted it GONE. Have you seen this Instagram post about the long-term effects of rapid weight loss on body composition? Interesting, right? And maybe a little sobering, even if it's only an Instagram post without much hard data to back it up?

So anyway-- we've had icy sidewalks for almost all of January, and they are not stressing me out. I do not have to think carefully about every step I take. I do not worry that I'm going to concuss myself while walking to the office. Don't get me wrong; I'm still taking it slowly and I did wear my Yak-Trax for the worst of it. But I feel more comfortable walking on treacherous sidewalks than I have felt in years. This morning Stella said, "It looks pretty bad out there, Mom; should you drive me to school?" She was right; it did look pretty bad out there. But I said, "Nah, we'll be fine." And I was also right.

Tomorrow morning I am going to head down to the basement before work. It will be my Day 1 lifting workout: three sets of pull-ups, three sets of Bulgarian split squats, three sets of shoulder press, two sets of incline bicep curls. It won't take me that long; it won't hurt that much. (Except for the incline bicep curls. Those are pretty painful.) But you guys, I cannot say enough good things about cultivating the habit of showing up and moving heavy things around. Give it a whirl! You have nothing to lose but your fear of falling on the ice!

Ordinary Time

Today is the end of Christmas and the beginning of Ordinary Time, and so I am sharing a song I wrote with you. It's about new beginnings, and persistence, and it is perhaps ironic that I had to spend more than a week prying myself out of perfectionist hell before I posted it. But anyway-- 

New Year's Day

I love a fresh start

I love a clean slate

I love a new leaf, I love a blank unblotted page

Where I can try again to shape a life

from a strand of unformed days

I begin as I hope to go on

We begin, we begin again we begin, we begin as we hope to go on

 

When I was younger

I thought next time I'd get it right

I thought I'd grown up

I thought my plans were watertight

But here in middle age I have

this middle-aged insight:

we just begin as we hope to go on

We begin, we begin again we begin, we begin as we hope to go on

 

BRIDGE:

False starts and do-overs lie ahead of me

But pit stops and way stations beckon hopefully

like showers, like confessionals

where we step forth fresh and clean

For in my failures I am learning to be free

In my failures I am learning to be free

 

Here on the threshold

I look across this span of days

I cannot know the trials, the gladnesses

that wait upon my way

But there'll be mornings full of mercies

there'll be treasuries of grace

So I'll begin as I hope to go on

We begin, we begin again we begin, we begin as we hope to go on

We begin as we hope to go on

 

New Year's Day - 1:9:22 3.38 PM

If the player doesn't work in your browser, you can probably right-click to download the file or play it in a new window.

New year's resolutions, one week in

A week ago I told you I wanted to do five things in the new year: exercise, cut back on social media use, read the Palliser Chronicles, keep getting pictures into albums, and blog four times a week. Things are going fine, mostly. I haven't made a ton of progress on pictures but I've made some; I did not blog four times in the first week of 2022 but there's plenty of time to catch up. The once-a-week approach to social media is a good one, I think, even though it requires some discipline to maintain. And I am really enjoying The Eustace Diamonds, so that one has been easy.

The thing I most wanted to tell you about is the exercise resolution. I think I mentioned already that the book that prompted this resolution, Younger Next Year for Women, advises readers to work up to 4 45-minute cardio workouts per week, with 2-3 weight-training sessions as well. I also think I already told you that this plan seems pretty much straight-up bananas to me, but I am giving it a whirl.

Elwood thinks this is a great plan. (For me. He's not super-motivated to follow it himself, but he's happy to support me in this pursuit of happiness or banana-pants-ness, whichever you happen to call it.) Alex gave me some lifting equipment for Christmas, so I'm good to keep lifting weights in the basement until the COVID situation improves. And then Elwood found a bike trainer for me and helped me set it up in the basement. This one is reasonably sturdy, not too expensive, and pretty straightforward. (It is also moderately noisy, but it's working well for me with noise-canceling headphones.) Elwood also acquired a jumprope, but our basement ceiling is too low for me to jump down there and the weather is too frigid for me to jump outside. The Fifth-Grade Jumprope Champion of Seventh Street Elementary School will have to wait for warmer weather to make her comeback. I also decided to do a two-week Jazzercise free trial, and those workouts are enough fun that I think I'll probably pay for a month or two -- by which time I certainly hope we will have warmer weather and less rampant COVID.

The thing I want to record here is that one week in I am already noticing significant changes in my mood and energy level. I started slowly, with 20- to 25-minute sessions of biking and Jazzercise, but even a little bit of working up a sweat leaves me more cheerful and perky. I didn't just slump around sorting the laundry this afternoon; I put on some music so I could dance while I worked. These things may or may not be causally related, but the correlation is pretty striking. 

The weather here has been genuinely dire: ice on the sidewalks all week, bitter cold, another round of ice this afternoon with more bitter cold to follow. I am grateful to be snug and warm -- it is much nicer to be riding my bike to nowhere in the basement than skating on the sidewalks or braving the clouds of COVID-laden exhalations at the gym.

Ain't Nobody Happy

Today my annual report materials were due, so I completed a task I had deliberately avoided in the spring: I read the evals for my online courses. The summer and fall evals were fine; pretty much anything that wasn't favorable was a fair criticism. But hoo boy, some of those spring comments were doozies.

In my experience, grad evals are tougher than undergrad evals. Grad students are busy and stressed because they have clinic on top of classes, and they expect a lot from instructors. But my spring semester grad students were surprisingly happy. The undergrads in my spring classes, on the other hand, were not. I think the big issue for the undergrads was that I planned for their classes to be mostly asynchronous. I did this based on advice from sources I trusted, and it just did not work out well-- especially for the class I was teaching for the first time. New preps are always hard. Maybe an online asynchronous new prep that started ten months into the pandemic was never going to be a roaring success.

Every year I have to write a letter to the committee that reviews faculty productivity every year, and this year's letter has a long paragraph in which I say, "These factors may explain the grim and painful feedback from these undergraduate students." But I have a theory that I did not include in that letter: I was so miserable in the spring semester, you guys. I thought every single day about what a relief it would be to quit my job. One of the things students generally say about my classes is that they appreciate my enthusiasm, and I did not have any enthusiasm whatsoever about the spring semester.

You know the saying "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy?" It might be true in the classroom too.

I am still thinking a lot about COVID

One of the factors that determines how vigorously we respond to COVID is the seriousness of the disease. This has been a contentious point from the very beginning of the pandemic. First the COVID minimizers insisted that it was like the flu, which would only have been true if the flu were twice as transmissible and ten times as deadly. Now they're saying that the omicron strain is pretty much a cold.

If COVID were always a short-term respiratory illness, then it would be silly to make a big fuss about it. But I am still going to attempt to avoid COVID. I'm not especially worried that it's going to kill me at this point, but I am concerned about the degree and the duration of COVID-associated morbidity. Even if I were to develop a mild case myself, I hate the idea that I could spread a disease with the potential to cause significant disruption to someone else's life.

For a subset of patients -- most often but not always those with risk factors -- COVID is associated with significant morbidity. Let me tell you a story to show you what I mean. I know a woman whose case of COVID landed her in the hospital. Although she was my age, healthy and active prior to her COVID diagnosis, the virus attacked her heart and left her with atrial fibrillation.

Atrial fibrillation is one of the serious arrhythmias. It disrupts the steady, strong coordinated contraction of the heart and allows blood to pool in the atria. When blood isn't moving steadily, it clots. If you spin up a blood clot in your heart and push it out into your blood vessels, bad things will happen. Atrial fibrillation significantly increases your risk of a cardiac event and it quintuples your risk of a stroke. If you say "untreated atrial fibrillation" to a doctor, the doctor will grimace and wince.

So they impressed upon her the urgency of treating the arrhythmia. They tried to fix the problem with a cardioversion; the process of administering electrical shocks to her heart was unsuccessful as well as much more unpleasant than advertised. Next they did an ablation, running a catheter up from her groin to her heart and burning out the problematic wiring. I doubt that any of these healthcare expenses are tallied up anywhere as COVID-related costs, but they were the direct result of her COVID infection.

She was on blood thinners all through the attempt to get the arrhythmia under control, because nobody wanted this 51-year-old woman to throw a clot. When you get a prescription for blood thinners, the pharmacist warns you about the potential side effects, but the events that ensued still took her by surprise. At age 51, she thought her ovaries had closed up shop. It had been six months since they had last alerted her to their activities, but suddenly they were back in action with a torrential vengeance. We're talking go-build-yourself-an-ark levels of nonsense.

Because? Blood thinners. Because? Atrial fibrillation. Because? COVID. If you're telling your blood to clot less effectively, torrents may result.

She got home and tried to run upstairs to grab some Advil and start a load of torrent laundry. But the situation was bad enough that instead she blacked out on the stairs, and hit her face as she fell. 

Guess what happens if you fall and hit your face while on blood thinners? Massive facial bruising, that's what. Appalling facial bruising, of the sort that makes everyone who interacts with you for the next two weeks say, "Are you...safe...at home?" to which you reply, "Oh, I'm fine; I just fell down." ...Sure you did, they think to themselves, because no one bruises like that from a simple fall.

Unless they're on blood thinners, because atrial fibrillation, because COVID.

In the big picture she has had a good outcome. The doctors did eventually get the atrial fibrillation sorted out. The COVID fatigue did eventually abate. The bruises did eventually recede. But also...dang. That was a lot of hassle and expense and medication and time off work and worry and intrusive questions and avoidable suffering. 

That doesn't sound very much like a cold to me.

New Year's Rest-olution

Hi, I have a suggestion for you if you are still thinking about resolutions. It is this: what if you resolve to rest?

I came to the idea of a day of rest v-e-r-y reluctantly. The Church told me I should not do unnecessary work on Sundays, but I was not sure the Church knew how much necessary work there was in my life. I can't remember exactly when I took the plunge, but it was something like 20 years ago. And you guys, it is THE BEST.

On Sundays I never do laundry. I don't clean my house. I only look at my work email in the rarest of circumstances (specifically, if I am on a search committee with a Sunday night dinner scheduled -- a situation that has come up approximately twice in my career). I never grade, or prep lectures, or write for work. All of those things fit into the other parts of my week. Sundays are different.

Perhaps you also grew up reading the Little House books and thinking that their idea of resting on Sunday sounded pretty miserable. I do not propose misery; enough misery comes our way without our seeking it out. After Mass I read books, exercise, knit, garden, make music, do puzzles, cook things that make us happy. Usually in the late afternoon I spend an hour in our Adoration chapel. (I do wash dishes, because I cannot abide waking up to dirty dishes.) This is the Rule for Sundays: does it feel like work? If so, it does not belong on Sunday. Does it feel pleasant and restorative? That is a Sunday kind of thing.

In the years when we had five children at home and I was finishing my doctorate, there were sometimes a lot of things that got squished into Saturdays. But OOOOHHHHH the relief it brought me, to wake up on Sunday morning and know that none of it required my attention for the next 24 hours.

We live in a culture that prizes productivity. There are plenty of people who are telling you that it's January so you should EAT BETTER and WORK OUT HARDER and by the way would you like to bullet-journal your efforts to Do The Most Stuff Ever here in 2022? I mean, hey, I'm a fan of the bullet journal. But I think it's easiest to be productive if you have space in your life where productivity is not expected. Maybe, instead of planning to push harder, you might like to push a little less.