Light and Momentary

In which I opine about parenting

Yesterday I was walking Stella to school and she said, "Mom, would you ever take away my phone because I got a bad grade?" "Probably not," I said cautiously, unwilling to offend a friend's mother through a subsequent lunchtime conversation. ("My mother says it's a TERRIBLE idea for your mom to take away your phone": not the best way to endear oneself to other junior high parents.) We talked about it all the way to school, and I am still not done thinking about it. Ergo, a blog post.

It turns out that this question did not arise from a conversation with a temporarily phoneless friend lamenting her lot in life. It came from listening to the PE teacher, who says confidently, "Whenever my daughter gets a bad grade, I take away her phone." This, I submit, is short-term thinking with the potential to create future problems.

In these days of online gradebooks, I think a lot of junior high parents are hyper-aware of how things are going in the classroom. I am not sure this is a good idea. Junior high grades are a low-stakes way for kids to take responsibility for their own learning. The thing I want most for my kids to take from school is a love of learning for its own sake -- certainty that the world is a wide and interesting place, where they will make mistakes and struggle and learn over time to do hard things. In my view, aggressive parental oversight can interfere with this process. The goal isn't to get perfect scores on every assignment. Some assignments are dumb. Some are genuinely hard -- sometimes learning takes time. Perfectionism is destructive. Perfectionism about grades can directly interfere with a student's learning: I see this at work all the stinking time.

One of the biggest tasks that junior high sets before kids is the development of executive function skills. They have to meet the expectations of multiple teachers, along multiple timelines, while navigating a messy social landscape (<-euphemism alert). They have to do this at a time when their bodies are sinking a lot of energy into physical growth and development. They need a lot of sleep at a time when it's cool to pretend you go to bed at midnight. They need a lot of food in a season when classmates feel free to shoot off their mouths about their food choices and the shapes of their bodies. Junior high is hard enough. My whole goal with parenting junior high kids is to create a soft place for them to land, a place where they are loved exactly as they are, where they can leave all of the nonsense behind.

I said to Stella, "Before I decided that you deserved negative consequences at home for a bad grade at school, I would need a lot more information. Did you get a bad grade because the grading was weird and arbitrary? I'm not going to punish my kid because a power-trippy teacher is assigning points in a way that doesn't make sense. Did you get a bad grade because you genuinely didn't understand something and you need help figuring it out? That's a terrible feeling, when you think you're behind everybody else. The last thing you need is for someone to punish you because something is hard for you."

I have posted before about giving kids enough room to feel their feelings, and it remains valuable in junior high. Getting a zero in junior high is an extremely useful life experience, I think: watching the math unfold in the gradebook shows you exactly how hard it is to come back from a zero. If I swoop in and shriek "A ZERO YOU GOT A ZERO DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO COME BACK FROM A ZERO?!?!" I will only interfere with the process by which a kid says, "Huh, I don't want to do that again. Better figure something out for next time." I will absolutely help kids with writing respectful emails to teachers about whether it might be possible to make up assignments. I am 100% available to strategize about homework alarms or calendar skills. But I want those things to arise from a child's desire to do better and not from my own opinions about the importance of academic success. One thing I have learned from sending five children to junior high is that I can't create that desire to do better -- I can only make space for it to unfurl on its own. If I bring down the hammer I offer myself as a lightning rod for the negative emotion; a kid can say, "Oh, I feel crummy because my mom is so mean!" instead of "I feel crummy because I did something careless and I need to learn how to do better next time."

A key component of the work of adolescence is saying to one's parents, "I am separate from you; I am different from you." It is normal for kids to look at the things their parents value and say, "What if I don't do that? What if I root my identity in something else instead?" The message I want my kids to hear is that they are loved forever, loved unstoppably. It's okay to mess up; it's okay to get a bad grade. They never have to hide from me. They should never be afraid of me.

I told Stella that I could imagine a narrow set of circumstances in which I might take away her phone as a consequence for a bad grade. If she were repeatedly defying a teacher's instructions about phone use in class, and if her choices led directly to a bad grade, then we would need to think about putting the phone in timeout. But I would still frame it differently; I would say, "You are having trouble regulating yourself, so I'm going to do some external regulating while you figure out how you can be more respectful and attentive in class. You tell me when you're ready to try again." This is the same philosophy I wrote about when she was small, because it is still true: kids need help learning self-regulation. The long-term goal is autonomy. If I am punitive and controlling, I only interfere with the long-term goal.

You guys, I feel a little shy about posting this because I have been SO LUCKY with my teenagers. We never get into dumb arguments; they never yell or sulk. I have been blessed with kids who want to do what is right, even when it is hard. I will never know how much of that is blind stupid luck and how much of that is because my ideas about parenting are solid. But I feel reasonably certain that my choice to avoid harsh and arbitrary punishments does mean that my home is more peaceful than it would be in other circumstances. If you have a typically developing junior high kid and your oversight of the gradebook is making one or both of you unhappy, close the tab! Step away! Be free! It is ultimately their responsibility; you will not be able to make them do the work in college. The sooner you both figure that out, the better off you will be.

A good day

I've worried a bit lately that all my posts sound like I'm taking the Struggle Bus to Gloomy Town, because it's been a tough season. I've been posting about some of the difficulties at work, but all of that is happening in the context of some stuff I can't blog about. It might be hopeful stuff? I hope it's hopeful stuff? But while we're waiting to determine whether it's hopeful stuff, I have been racking up the 10-ride passes and the customer loyalty points on the Struggle Bus.

This morning I was not excited about the day that lay ahead, and I prayed an optimistic prayer. I said, "Let me see your goodness in a surprising way today." Then I had a little internal debate with myself about whether it is dumb to keep asking God for relief in a season of suffering, and then I forgot about the whole thing until the end of the day. But these are the things that happened in my day:

• a fun and effective morning class, in which I taught my students a bunch of new information and kept them laughing the whole time
• an unexpected resurgence of appreciation for the opportunity to work in a fascinating field that makes a difference in people's lives
• a surprise invitation to pop into a co-worker's office and chat for 10 minutes -- the kind of interaction that makes work so much nicer but that has dwindled away during the pandemic
• a welcome break in the middle of what is usually the busiest day of the week, during which someone else taught the grad students
• a pleasant set of brief email exchanges with a long-distance colleague
• a good outcome from a new set of exam questions -- they seem to have been fair and they were straightforward to grade
• an afternoon class with more student engagement than usual -- they don't love the late-afternoon scheduling and tend to be droopy, but not today
• a paper acceptance! for a paper I am proud of!
• an evening phone conversation with a dear friend during Stella's piano lesson
• a cozy chat with Stella and a surprisingly fun grocery store stop after piano
• making plans for a weekend get-together with one of my college roommates
• homemade cinnamon buns, courtesy of Pete

What a nice day, huh? Maybe, just possibly, it is not dumb to pray for relief in a season of suffering. Maybe, in fact, I should try it more often.

Because German wasn't hard enough

On Sunday on the way home from church we were talking about Ubbi-Dubbi and Pig Latin. Pete has decided that we should communicate not just in German, but in German Pig Latin. I need to figure out the brain equivalent of a coolant tank, and make sure mine is topped up. I fear otherwise my brain will overheat.

Nur auf Deutsch

Pete is in AP German this year, taking the AP exam in May. (Not the point of this post, but: can you even believe that my first blog baby is turning 17 this spring?) He really, really wants a 5. In the past year or so he has discovered a fiery enthusiasm about the workings of language: he reads linguistics texts for fun and has decided that he wants to study computational linguistics in college instead of majoring in plants.

His determination to get better at German has highlighted for him -- and for me -- the gulf between genuine proficiency in a language and competent performance in a high school class. He has recruited me as his companion in the quest for genuine proficiency. When I am biking to nowhere in the basement, he sits with me and we practice German vocabulary. In the evenings sometimes we listen to the Slow German podcast on Spotify. And now he has decided that the two of us should only speak German to each other. 

Have I told you my story of learning German? It was a Life Lesson in the limitations of proficiency testing. In the fall quarter of my freshman year I took elementary German and loved it. My instructor was an Irish grad student, and I am still unlearning the Irish accent with which I unknowingly adorned my beginner German. The only thing, though, was that I thought the class should move faster. I decided I would take a Latin literature class instead during the winter quarter, learn second-quarter German on my own, and jump back in for the spring quarter. 

As spring quarter approached I began to have second thoughts, and I spent a fair amount of spring break cramming reflexive verbs into my brain. But it worked out swimmingly, and I decided to do the same thing again: take French in the fall quarter of my sophomore year, and jump back into winter-quarter German.

At the beginning of the winter quarter I got cold feet. It had been more than six months since I had been in a German classroom. Was I going to land myself in hot water? What if I didn't remember enough of the German I had taught myself in seat-of-the-pants fashion? I decided to take the proficiency test, and placed into a third-year class. This seemed bonkers to me, but the placement coordinator was not eager for me to take a second-year class once I had passed his test. "Off you go!" he said. "This test is a bear! You'll be fine." 

This is how, with only two-thirds of the first-year German curriculum under my belt, I wound up in a third-year German lit class for which I was woefully underprepared. HOO BOY, I still remember the inner shiver I felt when the imposing professor would look at me over the tops of his spectacles. "Und was denken Sie, Fräulein Most?" he would rumble, and I would tremble. I squeaked by, with many tears and much gnashing of teeth, and never took another German class. (I was also left with some enduring skepticism about the merits of proficiency testing.)

It turns out that a long-ago class on post-war German fiction doesn't really equip a person to hold a conversation in German, so I have been filling in some of the gaps slowly, leaning on Duolingo, children's books, and chats with Pete. I have learned most of what Duolingo has to teach me, but there's still such a long way to go. 

Pete's idea that we should only speak to each other in German is a real stretch for me: I just don't have the vocabulary. But I am trying, with a lot of circumlocution and sound effects. This morning I was trying to tell him about a complicated local situation that arose in the wake of a snowstorm, and I needed to know how to say "tow truck." (Turns out it's Abschleppwagen: away-haul-wagon.) I also don't have good code-switching abilities. If I were fluent, I could slide back and forth between German and English without thinking too much about it. Instead of sliding, I am clunking. "SPEAK GERMAN," I tell my brain, and it does its best to comply. But then Elwood asks me a question and I have to pause. "NOT TO ELWOOD," I tell my brain, which has obligingly served up a response to his question in a language he does not speak.

I have been preaching the glories of language to my children for as long as I have had children, and they have mostly nodded along without sharing my enthusiasm. But Pete, suddenly, turned around and said "YES, GLORIOUS, SO GLORIOUS!" It's so much fun.

(He thought I should write this blog post in German, but I exercised my veto power on that one.)

Toasty toasty toast

The search committee I'm on finished the third of its three interviews tonight, after some significant weather disruptions, and we should wrap things up next week. The admissions committee had its big meeting this afternoon, squishing itself into a gap between two search committee happenings because of this week's weather disruptions, and I am hopeful that our work is done.

I got 15 emails from students asking if they could attend class via Zoom today because of the snow. Fifteen! You guys! It is February in the Midwest! Where it snows! It feels like a "no good deed goes unpunished" situation. After the Groundhog Day storm we really did have an unusual amount of snow coupled with a shortage of local snowplow drivers, and I offered a one-time Zoom option. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that so many students thought it was worth asking if I'd do it again. I am ready to be done with Zoom, except where I am required to extend a Zoom option. I'm going to remove the link from the course website to eliminate the unilateral decision-making by students who woke up late or whatever, and start replying with a screenshot of the relevant syllabus section.

So far this semester three students have emailed me to say that they thought there was too much snow for them to walk in. I received all three of these emails on days when I had walked to work myself and could say with certainty that conditions were reasonable both on and off campus. "If your concern is connected to a documented disability I would be happy to work with you," I tell them. But just between you and me and the internet, the thing I am actually thinking as I send those emails is "What the heck?!"

Anyway. I am tired. My students also seem to be tired. They seem furthermore to be more attached to their devices than they have been in prior years, which is saying something. This tendency of theirs is not alleviating any of my tiredness, gotta say.

I am hopeful that there will be a little more space in my head and in my calendar now that these big service responsibilities are winding down. And if not, there are only two weeks until spring break. We didn't have a spring break last year (I think because the university wanted to discourage students from traveling and bringing COVID back to campus) and so my last recollection of spring break is from 2020, when it was the week in which the wheels fell off. Let's hope the wheels stay attached to their axles this year.

Women and their bodies, yet again

In the lab where I trained long ago, I met a woman who started working there as an undergrad and stayed on as a master's student. We've stayed in touch in a small way through social media, and over the years she has shrunk. Her face has become angular; her clavicles stand out in sharp relief in the photos she shares.

Other people's bodies are not my business, I tell myself. Changes in other people's bodies are not my business either.

But I wonder if she is okay.

She was always a dancer, and after taking some time away from ballet in college she got more serious about it again. She became a distance runner: half-marathons first, and then a marathon. She posts pictures of herself in running gear and ballet costumes, and they worry me: her ribs are visible, her arms look to be sinew and bone. "You look great!" the comments always say. "I don't know how you do it!" they say.

Tonight our former advisor shared a publicity video from the dance studio where she teaches, and from there I clicked a second link that pulled up a ten-year-old photo. She was an average-sized person then; now she is not.

I don't know enough about eating disorders to opine about what might be going on here. I haven't seen her in person in years. I cannot make any reliable guesses about her current body fat percentage, or about how much body fat she might need to protect her bone health and support healthy immune function. It's not as if I want her friends and family to be criticizing her in those photos she posts. It's not as if a person or two saying, "Hey, are you eating enough?" is likely to make a meaningful difference to a person with an eating disorder-- if she even is a person with an eating disorder.

It is weird and sad, though, that we live in a world where thinner is always regarded as better for women. It is weird and sad that women learn it is somehow virtuous to disregard their hunger cues. It is weird and sad that female "fitness influencers" on social media tend to set unrealistic and sometimes frankly harmful examples. It is weird and sad that it is so hard for women (me included) to say happily, "This is my body; this is the way I am shaped."

I hope she's okay. I really hope she's okay.

The Invisible Editor

I have been inching along through Phineas Redux, reading my chapter a day but rarely more. It's fine; it's not riveting; I haven't especially cared about what's happening. But as I say, it's fine.

And then things get weird.

I am envisioning a fiery older sister whose opinion Trollope respected. One fine day she comes sailing into his house. "Anthony!" she bellows, smacking her fan against his desk, "what is the purpose of all this parliamentary nonsense? No one cares what Mr. Daubeny said about Mr. Gresham as they debated disestablishment! I've told you before: there was QUITE ENOUGH of that in book 2 of this endless series."

"But, Aspasia," he says meekly, "I think that speech by Mr. Daubeny is really rather fine."

"EXCITEMENT, Anthony," she says, narrowly missing his knuckles with another fierce rap of her fan. "The modern reader WILL HAVE excitement. Do you wish to lose all your readers to that theatrical Mr. Dickens, or only most of them?"

"Very well, Aspasia," he sighs. "I'll add in some gunfire."

She returns a week later. "Anthony," she said, "how you DO go on about these Cabinet appointments. What you really need to do is to bring back Lizzie Eustace."

"Oh, dear," sighs Trollope, "Lizzie Eustace is so vulgar that it pains me to write about her. It amuses me for a chapter or two and then she makes me positively dyspeptic."

Aspasia has been peering down at his newest chapter, and now she eyes him pitilessly over the top of her lorgnette. "If you aren't willing to suffer for your art, Anthony," she announces acidly, "then all the rest of us will have to do so."

"Very well, Aspasia. Lizzie Eustace you shall have."

Alas, after another week Aspasia is beside herself to discover that readers will be wading through more discussions of decimal coinage. "Anthony!" she roars. "Decimal coinage and disestablishment! Were you to seek out the most soporific subjects known to man you could hardly find any more suitable. I shudder to think what your readers have had to slog through. You must make it up to them."

Our long-suffering author has had enough. "Fine!" he says. "Out!" he says. "Excitement they shall have. Leave me in peace, Aspasia. I'll give them some excitement but you must let me write in peace."

What, he wonders, will keep Aspasia at bay? A murder, he decides. He'll throw in a nice little murder.

Whatever will become of the decimal coinage initiative now? The suspense! Who knew Trollope could be suspenseful?!

Saturday Report

Today, my friends, I finished the admissions portfolios. [heavens open, angels sing.] That was a JOB. I had a wee-hours admissions anxiety dream, in which I was sitting in the committee meeting noting how far my ratings diverged from everyone else's ratings. I suppose it was better, though, than the professor anxiety dreams in which I have forgotten to write the syllabus and also I am late for the first day of class which is in a building I have never been to. It was definitely better than the professor anxiety dreams where I have to lecture about the French Revolution for 75 minutes or the ones where I forgot to write the final exam.

Wait, I just had a happy thought! Maybe all the times that you dreamed you were going to take an exam for a course you had never attended, you were actually going to my classroom, where I was kicking myself because I hadn't written the exam yet and the students were showing up to take it! Maybe neither one of us needs to worry in those dreams, because we are each other's best-case scenarios.

Tonight I did a thing I haven't done since before the pandemic: I went to a play indoors. Elwood misses Life With Activities more keenly than I do, and he asked if I would go with him tonight. Their website said they required either a vaccination card or a negative test for admission, and (somewhat surprisingly) they were checking them at the door. They also required masks in the theater, regardless of vaccination status, and the actors were all vaccinated AND freshly tested AND masked. 

They wore a kind of mask I'd never seen before: made entirely of clear plastic, cupping the chin, open at the top. Like this, only a little snugger-fitting. It seems unlikely to make much of a dent in aerosol transmission, but it covered their lower faces without much interference at all in the sound of their voices and no barriers at all to seeing facial expressions.

It was an odd play, but I'm glad we went anyway.

I am thinking a little nostalgically about the concert we went to in February 2020. Elwood had given me the tickets for Christmas, and we crammed into a local venue to hear a bluegrass-flavored band. I've been to classical concerts since then on campus -- everybody masked and quiet -- but I haven't been to a raucous concert since then: a couple hundred strangers, coming together to enjoy a carefree evening, cheering and calling out requests.

Someday! Not this month, but someday.

Milestone

Stella wanted to go outside, but she was deterred by the puddles: last week's piles of snow have mostly melted, and there is icy water everywhere.

"You can wear my boots!" I told her. I like those boots: waterproof, work-friendly, comfortable. They're a tiny bit too long for me, but they work.

Stella came back in a bit later. "How did the boots work?" I asked her.

"Well," she said, "they're a little small for me."

You guys.

This means--

I have the smallest feet in my household.

All five of my children have outstripped me, at least in the shoe-size department.

Does this mean Stella is going to be taller than me, do you figure?

Where we go from here

Today I asked a person interviewing for a job at Gladlyville U what kinds of changes she envisioned in higher ed as a result of the pandemic, and she pretty much brushed off the question. But I have been thinking a lot about this question, and I am going to muse in your direction about it for a bit here.

We have offered students a lot of flexibility over the past two years. We have wanted to treat them humanely, compassionately, as they go through something unprecedented. It was the right thing to do, and they appreciated that flexibility. And now...I'm ready to be a bit less flexible again. If I put a due date in the syllabus and I remind you about the due date in person and you write to me to say, "I did not know if the thing would be due because it was snowing," I am going to have a facepalm moment before I reply politely to say that the posted due date was in fact the date the thing was due. It used to be a big part of our department culture that dates and deadlines mattered, and I would like to move in that direction again.

It is not a massive colossal hassle to allow students to attend via Zoom, but it's definitely a hassle; there are a lot of things to think about if I'm going to make a class work in two formats at the same time. Students have seized enthusiastically upon the idea that there are alternatives to attending class in person. I am ready for fewer alternatives. I'm tired of having in-class work submitted in multiple formats (sometimes on multiple days). It's not totally unreasonable for a group of students to ask me if I would record class for them on a day that they're attending another university's grad school open house, but it is not a request they would have made two years ago. (Oh, and would you like to hear about the student who ANSWERED A FACETIME CALL DURING CLASS yesterday? Because that is a thing that happened, and I attribute it at least in part to shifting norms.)

Our enrollment is up, which is both a good thing and a problem. My undergrad classes are >50% larger than they are supposed to be. One of them is a writing class. This, my friends, creates some difficulties. I cannot give thoughtful feedback on student writing if they have packed the class with 75% more students than it is supposed to contain. Can't do it. I think we have to decide: are we going to chase the tuition dollars, or protect the original purpose of the class? It has to be one or the other.

We can't just dust off our hands and declare that we're done with pandemic flexibility RIGHT NOW, any more than we can dust off our hands and declare that we're done with the pandemic. I can imagine that well-intentioned people will come down on different sides of questions like "Where does higher ed go from here?" If one of the most important things about higher ed is making strong connections in a classroom, maybe we push back harder against adjunctification. If one of the most important things about higher ed is ensuring access for all kinds of learners, maybe we put more energy into making technology more available to more people.

I do not have a road map for the next phase of the pandemic, any more than I have had a road map for the past two years. But I am tired. And I have a lot of questions.

The way we live now

This morning I was having a happy and unexpected chat with a group of old friends. One of them added me to a conversation about our high school's upcoming production of Fiddler on the Roof -- he thought it would be fun for us to go back together, since we'd all done it together in 1987. I am not going to travel to West Virginia to sit in a crowded auditorium in a month when I am just barely keeping my head from popping off, but it was fun to reminisce a little and see who's still in touch with whom.

"Kevin!" I said. "We have to add Kevin!"

One of my friends DMed me right away: Kevin died last year.

Another friend followed up in the group chat: COVID hit his church and his family pretty hard.

I knew that Kevin's father had died of COVID, and that his mother had been terribly sick at the same time. But I had no idea he had been sick himself. 

He was a vivid person: bright red hair, full of personality, a trumpeter. In Fiddler on the Roof he played Motel, Tzeitel's husband, and I can still hear him singing Miracle of Miracles to her.

I have a silly story about him: when we were rehearsing Wizard of Oz, one night we went to the Garden Club meeting and performed the long scene where Dorothy meets the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion (played by Kevin), and the Tin Man. I was cast as Glinda the Good, but for some reason I was filling in for Dorothy that night. I was supposed to slap Kevin when he tried to scare Toto, and the first time we rehearsed it for the Garden Club ladies I gave him a light little play slap. 

"You've really got to hit him," they told me. "I've really got to hit him?" I thought. "I've really got to hit him," I told myself. "I've really got to hit him!" I said as I marched up to him the second time we ran through that bit.

You guys, I knocked him down. I was so horrified.

He picked himself back up, gingerly, and he said, "Not quite that hard, Jamie." 

***

One of the people in the group chat scanned and uploaded the program from our production of Fiddler on the Roof. It is a mix of names I remember well and names I do not remember at all, people I am in regular contact with and people I haven't heard from since 1987. I can know, objectively, that this is the way of things with playbills from long-ago performances: one by one, the people who filled those roles will fade away. It is too soon for Kevin to be gone, though. He was a pastor, a husband, a father, a grandfather. His grandchildren are so little that I doubt they will remember him. It is not right.

I am certain, though, that this will not be the last time I have this conversation about someone I used to know. It seems inevitable, as the pandemic death toll draws closer to the million mark. We're all going to be having this conversation, aren't we? "Oh, hey, how's so-and-so?" we will ask a mutual friend. "He died in the pandemic," the reply will come.

So much loss.

Ups and Downs

This afternoon I got an email from a student, asking if I could give her feedback by tomorrow (Sunday) on a small task completed today (Saturday). This thing is due on Monday, hours after our class meets, meaning that (a) as they already know, there is a block of class time set aside to discuss this task and then (b) she will have the entire rest of the day in which to fine-tune anything that needs fine-tuning in this brief assignment. I am scraping and straining in an effort to view that email compassionately, but it just reads as presumptuous. Bleh.

Related: talking to students about professionalism is always an uncertain undertaking. Sometimes they really appreciate it. Mostly they do not. And I get that; it's never fun to be corrected, even gently. Earlier this semester one of my grad students narrowly escaped a formal write-up for something that struck me as astonishingly tone-deaf and entitled. But when I said something along the lines of "I invite you to consider how a situation like this might play out in the workplace," I got a WHATEVER reaction that further surprised me.

OKAY, that is enough work-related grumpiness. The admissions committee is NOT GREAT for my equilibrium, you guys; my judger is PLUMB BURNED OUT. Here is a little piece of good news: the restaurant/bar I mentioned in last night's post is reopening, hurray! We are not the only people who are excited to go back -- they're opening at limited capacity and I couldn't get a dinner reservation until the end of March. But on the last day of March I am going to enjoy a fancy meal preceded by a fancy cocktail, and even though it is going to be Lent I will order dessert. Huzzah, something to look forward to.

We are still digging out from under the snow dumped upon us by the Groundhog Day storm, and it is messing with my plans to be a person who embraces friluftsliv. It's good to spend time outside every day, I fully agree. But man, it is a little treacherous to spend time outside right now. With a normal amount of snow I can just step off the sidewalk when the sidewalks are too icy. The snow is too deep right now for that plan to be practical, though, and the sidewalks are frequently sketchy, what with thawing and refreezing and temps too cold for ice-melting compounds to do their jobs well. Yesterday I was walking home from work (in the dark, because I was determined to empty my inbox before I left), and trying to remind myself to be grateful: for a walkable commute, for legs that can carry me safely, for the seasons.

The effort was not enough of a success for me to be eager to get back out there today.

Things I miss, an incomplete list

1. Singing harmony with friends
2. The bar with friendly staff and fancy cocktails that does not seem to have survived the pandemic
3. Seeing students' entire faces
4. Popping over to a restaurant at lunchtime
5. The days in which the RNC did not appear to regard smearing feces on the walls of the Capitol as "legitimate political discourse"
6. My friend David, who died in March 2020, when it was still shocking for a healthy 51-year-old to die suddenly of respiratory illness
7. Playing flute at Mass
8. Carefree winter parties
9. Our local sing-along Messiah
10. The conviction that most Americans would want to pull together to protect the vulnerable

For more than 5 weeks our local case counts have spent every single day above the record set during the very worst part of November 2020 -- sometimes way, way above that record. It was bad, you guys. Today, for the first time since December, we're finally down below that line. In our hospitals, as of today, 11% of the beds are free -- after weeks in which it was usually 1-2%. Feels like progress.

I think I will feel more cheerful when we are a little less hunkered down. And I know I will feel better when the admissions committee work is over. It's like an exhausting part-time job on top of my full-time job.

Books

I am in the middle of a bunch of books. Would you like to hear about them?

First there is Phineas Redux. Do you remember what a trial I found the first half of Phineas Finn? All is forgiven. I have grown genuinely fond of our hero and I am enjoying this return to his world. Also this book has fewer Parliament scenes and cabinet meetings and the like, which featured prominently in Phineas Finn and always made me want to turn to reading some nice refreshing phone book pages. 

I am also trucking along through Sketches by Boz with the Hardcore Dickens Club. I can imagine that it would have been easy to get distracted without the steadying influence of the HDC folks, so I'm glad we're reading it together. It's interesting to see how many of the things that caught Dickens' eye at 20-something continued to rattle around in his brain for the rest of his career. It makes me wonder: how much are our middle-aged selves like our younger selves, generally?

My morning book is Interior Freedom by Fr. Jacques Philippe, and it is fantastic. Our pastor loves Fr. Philippe and has encouraged the parish to read his books for years. They've never really done it for me, until now. This one is exactly what I need to be reading. I am underlining and marginalia-fying and taking pictures of especially stirring bits to send off via text.

I am also still plugging along in Thinner This Year, but I do not love it. Too moralizing, too fat-shame-y, too willfully oblivious to the charms of butter, which is a GIFT of the LORD. I am going to finish it before it is due back to the library, because the nutrition science is presented at a level and in a way that works for me and because I want more details about implementing the exercise plan described in Younger Next Year for Women. But I am going to finish it a little grudgingly.

In between I am reading No Cure for Being Human, which I purchased in the fall because someone on Twitter told me to, and then left languishing on my Kindle until my friend Becky mentioned that she was reading it. It's really good. I might be enjoying it more if I weren't reading too many other books at the same time though.

In a decision that might seem a little strange for a person who already thought she was reading too many books, when the Kindle app suggested that I might like to read Miss Cecily's Recipes for Exceptional Ladies I said to myself, "Everything I am reading right now is so heavy; maybe a nice fluffy novel would be fun." It feels like I am interspersing bites of metaphorical Cool Whip with bites of metaphorical kale salad. I do not know if I will finish it; a tub of Cool Whip is a lot of Cool Whip. We shall see.

Week 5

I am sticking to my exercise resolution, though the work responsibilities I mentioned yesterday are making it harder. I keep telling myself that if I show up and exercise, I will feel more energetic and cheerful about doing more work than I might actually like to be doing right now. 

Younger Next Year for Women told me that in addition to lifting I ought to work up to 45-minute sessions of cardio, 4 times per week. I've been plugging along in that direction: 20-minute sessions in week 1, 25-minute sessions in week 2, and so forth. This week I was looking at my work schedule and trying to figure out where I was going to fit four 40-minute sessions of cardio (on top of three lifting workouts). I had a moment of discouragement, and then I said to myself, "Self, do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good! What if you bump it back down to 30-minute sessions this week? Thirty minutes is much better than throwing up your hands and saying it's too hard!" 

"Oh," I thought, "I could manage 30-minute sessions." It does not seem entirely logical that showing up for 30 minutes would feel doable when 40 minutes felt unreasonable, but you know what they say about hobgoblins and foolish consistency.

On the habit-strengthening front there is one thing I would like to work on, which is that these workouts are drifting later in the day. I just don't have as much oomph at 8pm as I do earlier in the day. It just feels harder. I'm also not sure it's great for sleep to exercise vigorously close to bedtime, though you could probably find a half-dozen opinions about that without looking very hard.

As the days get brighter it will get easier to work out before work. I am not going to berate myself here -- I'm just going to aim for "before dinner" on days when working out doesn't fit into my schedule until evening arrives.

A pleasant part of winter 2022 that I want to remember: Pete has been keeping me company in the basement when I work out. He brings down a Bluetooth speaker and his phone, loaded with a playlist that he and Joe made together. He plays music for me and quizzes me about what I like. It's much better with company. Tuesdays are the days when I try not to fall over while doing Bulgarian split squats. They're easier than they were a month ago, but still pretty humbling.