Light and Momentary

The view from spring break

I always feel that I ought to be grateful for spring break and yet I always feel a little bedraggled at the end of it.

I've grumbled (self-consciously) about this before: spring break always means lots of the second-worst part of my job (grading) with a side of the worst part (plagiarism), and too much solitude even when I make reasonable efforts to plan time with friends. No one else in the family ever has a spring break that lines up with mine, so it's mostly just me on my own, trying to catch up on work stuff and home stuff and feeling guilty that I'm not enjoying the week more.

I have been out of the exercise groove for two weeks now. I'm feeling burned out on workouts in my damp and chilly basement; it's still too cold for outdoor runs now that I have this exercise-induced asthma thing going on. And I have been out of the blogging groove, because gloomy thoughts from a gloomy person are nobody's favorite thing to read.

All of these annoyances are pretty trivial, of course, in view of the headlines: a bombed maternity hospital, a grandma defending herself with a jar of pickled tomatoes, failed negotiations, and the Russians' ongoing onslaught. 

So I will attempt to pull my socks up here, since most of the gloom is easy to address. I am making some fun plans for spring and summer, concerts and travel with friends. I will put away the laundry and get clean sheets on the bed, and trust that the daffodils are coming even if they are currently buried in snow.

Currently reading

My morning book is Tenderness, by Eve Tushnet. I love it, you guys. I love her voice, I love her thoughtfulness, it is helpful and challenging and fun to read. I will have more to say about this one, but if you have any interest in the question of how the Church can respond more pastorally to the gay community, this book is worth your time.

I am now three-sixteenths (but who's counting?) of the way through book 5 of the Palliser Chronicles, The Prime Minister. It's fine. It's not gripping, but, you know, it's Trollope. I am going to have to give him another twenty chapters before we have any hope of gripping.

By the numbers (i.e.., chapters completed), I am more than 80% of the way through Sketches by Boz. But by the page count, the proportion is much smaller. The last twelve sketches are much more substantial than the first 44, and I have bogged down. Perhaps I will knock it out during spring break. I had a funny experience reading this one in tandem with The Prime Minister, you guys. I hopped into bed and opened up my Kindle app to read my nightly chapter of The Prime Minister. At the beginning of a Trollope novel you're always meeting a bunch of new characters, and it's not unusual for him to introduce people in groups, where he has a plausible way to say, "Look, here's the crew we'll be talking about in this novel." So I nodded knowingly to myself when I saw that the chapter title. I pulled up short at the street name, which was Something-coram Court. I thought to myself, "Like Tattycoram in Little Dorrit. How often does that -coram bit show up in Victorian novels, I wonder?" I filed away the character's name for future reference, and then I observed to myself that he sounded decidedly odd for a Trollope character. I turned another page and read a little farther in increasing perplexity. "...Wait a minute," I said to myself, as I tapped my way to the book cover. Sure enough, this was a Dickensian gathering.

I guess this is a predictable hazard of reading two Victorian novels at the same time on the same device.

The Hardcore Dickens Club has gone on to Pickwick. They make it sound so enticing that I thought, "I could reread Pickwick with them! I love Pickwick!” But man, they are a committed lot. I think I will finish Sketches and then leave them to it until they hit Nicholas Nickleby.

Two of my library holds came in this week. I galloped through Black Girls Must Die Exhausted in a couple of days and put the sequel on hold as well. I'm not very far into The Maid but I predict it will be a quicker read than The Prime Minister. I have some baked-in skepticism about neurotypical people attempting to write from the perspective of characters on the spectrum, which seems to be what's going on here, but we shall see. (Did you read the Rosie books? I found them fun but also problematic. There was also some of that same thing in Eleanor Oliphant.)

I have also been inching my way through The Church's Best-Kept Secret, Mark Shea's book on Catholic social teaching. I really like it: clear, succinct, sensible, helpful. I'm going to aim to finish that one up by the end of spring break too.

As usual, these are Amazon links; if you click through and buy a book, Amazon will send me a few cents' worth of store credit.

Every year...

Time: first Friday in Lent. Place: inside Jamie's brain.

Jamie's brain, the 2yo part: Let's go to Chick-fil-A and get a chicken biscuit for breakfast!!

Jamie's brain, the sensible part: It's a Friday in Lent. We can do that another time.

Jamie's 2yo brain, 10 minutes later: McDonald's!! Saaaaausage biscuit!! Let's goooooooo!

Jamie's brain, the sensible part: But you don't even like sausage biscuits? 

Jamie's brain, the sensible part: Maybe some nice oatmeal with blueberries. How's that?

Jamie's resident 2yo: And bacon! Don't forget the bacon!

Hopscotch

Last year I found myself a little weary of the Old Testament. Maybe, I thought to myself, I wouldn't read the whole Bible through in 2022. Maybe I would focus a little more narrowly. Maybe I would cultivate a lectio divina practice. But then I decided to stick with what I'd been doing. This is the seventh year in which I have tackled the project, and seven years seemed like a more suitable place to stop than six. (Were there six fat cows in Pharaoh's dream? No, there were not.)

In one of Lauren Winner's books (probably Mudhouse Sabbath) she quotes a rabbi talking about the Torah. In my recollection he compares it to a gem. "Turn it and turn it and turn it," he says (approximately); there's always new beauty to see in its depths when you look at it from another angle. This time through I kept telling myself that in Leviticus, and in Numbers, and in Deuteronomy: turn it and turn it and turn it. There are bits and pieces of those books that I do love (Balak! that story makes me laugh and laugh!), but I find that the sloggity-slog level is high at that point and it only increases from there. I was finishing Deuteronomy and thinking about what lay ahead with a sinking heart. I did not want to read about slaughter in Joshua. And I would rather read Leviticus four times than read all those awful happenings at the end of Judges.

I skipped ahead to Ruth, and then jumped into 1 Samuel. I'm going to have to go back to Joshua and Judges another time.

The plan that I use comes from the Coming Home Network, and it divides the readings into three daily chunks: New Testament, wisdom books, everything else. Those first two are pleasant and easy. The hard part is all that law and history and prophecy.

I am reading this post over, thinking it sounds a little masochistic for me to keep pushing myself through the hard parts over and over. Part of it is my Protestant roots: I aspire to be like those wise church ladies who have built their knowledge of the Bible over many years of committed daily reading. Part of it is that you can't know where you're going without knowing where you've been. The stuff that pains me in Joshua is the very same stuff that atheists hurl at Christians in arguments about the faith: why would you serve a god who thinks that kind of carnage is a good idea?

So I will keep reading and thinking and praying, chewing on the hard parts as well as the easy parts. But maybe I will not assign myself the very hardest parts here in the gray and discouraging tail end of winter which is also midterm season. Maybe I won't do that.

Unplugging

Today I had a chat with my grad students. They are the twelfth grad cohort I have taught at Gladlyville U., and they are the most resistant to the idea of unplugged class time. I have a standard little spiel that I use to kick off every class; I say, "Before we get started please do what you need to do to eliminate distractions -- close down your email and messaging apps; put your phones in do-not-disturb mode and stash them in your bags." But this cohort, more than any of its predecessors, has declined to follow these instructions. 

I'm not an ogre about it. It's been a rough two years. At least one of my students lost a parent to COVID, and I can imagine that many parents are feeling a little more urgency about getting quick responses to their texts. I can imagine that many students are feeling the need for uninterrupted connections with others after all of the pandemic weirdness.

And yet-- phone habits that prioritize constant connectedness disregard some of what we know about how brains work.

The science is pretty clear: you can only do two things at once if one of the things has a high degree of automaticity. Even with something like walking and talking, if your conversation partner drops a bombshell, like, "I'm filing for divorce," what's your likely reaction? You stop in your tracks, right? When conversations get complicated, even walking is too much for your multitasking skills to cope with.

Juggling multiple conversations is hard. People are bad at it. We all want to imagine that our brains are like hummingbirds, fleetly flitting from one flower to the next, but in reality brains are more like your grandma's 1981 Buick attempting to fit into a small space in an icy parking lot. That kind of maneuvering is a slow and gas-guzzling process. You can do it, yeah, but you'll be a happier driver with a lower fuel bill and fewer dings in the fender if you choose a direction and go straight.

The effect of multitasking on an individual student's learning doesn't address the effect it has on her neighbor, or the effect it has on an instructor who is attempting to read students' facial expressions for input on how much/how little detail to provide on a topic. But I can tell you it is much nicer -- much, much nicer -- to teach in an environment with fewer distractions unfolding on laptop screens.

I am not giving my grad students any tasks to accomplish over spring break, but I asked them to take some time and think about this issue: what would it take for you to feel comfortable being more unplugged in this class? What would you need in order to feel like you could block off this time for thinking about the topics under discussion, without needing to answer email at the same time? They seemed responsive; a lot of heads were nodding as I was talking. We'll see what it looks like in my classroom after spring break, I guess.

Phone overuse is an issue everywhere; it has only escalated during the pandemic. Do my students want things to be different? Who can say? But I would like things to be different.

French fries in the basement

When Russia invaded Ukraine I abandoned my new year's resolution to stay away from social media. It had been slipping, and then it shattered. But you guys, the slippage and then the shattering have reminded me just how sensible a resolution it is. Trying to stay away from social media is like working in a building with a kiosk in the basement selling fries cooked in 1980s Crisco. You know they're terrible for you. You know trans fats are not your friends. You know you feel worse after you eat them. Maybe you should just have one when your friend offers to share hers with you? Maybe you should have them as an occasional treat? But somehow that smell keeps luring you in. You keep marching downstairs and declaring, "I'll have an extra-large!"

Lent is the perfect time for a social media reset, seems like. I am starting early, even, because I do not want to know how many of my Facebook friends are watching the state of the union address while wearing their "Let's Go Brandon" T-shirts.

The biggest thing I want to give up is not social media, though. I had been thinking about Lent in a vague and blurry way until last night, when my first attempt to take those vague and blurry ideas to prayer yielded an immediate response: I am going to give up complaining about people who are approaching the pandemic differently from me. I am going to stop muttering about masks and imputing bad intentions. I'll let you know how it goes.

For the first time I can remember I have no food-related Lenten plans, other than the ones the Church requires of me. Do you remember last summer when I told you about reading Intuitive Eating? I said "I have so many thoughts about this book -- it might change my life." It has absolutely changed my relationship with food, but in a way that still feels a little fragile, a little delicate. It is not a process that seems likely to be bolstered by inviting the opinions of internet strangers. (Almost everyone who comments here has been reading my thoughts for years; you are my internet pals, not internet strangers. Posting about one's food intake remains a pretty reliable way to bring unpleasant strangers out of the woodwork, though.) Anyway, I am disinclined to jeopardize the progress I've made on that front with arbitrary food rules.

Stella and Pete are both resolving to say Morning Prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours each day; Elwood is giving up alcohol, I think, though I am not certain about that. How about you? Any Lenten plans? Tell me all about them, please.