Light and Momentary

Face-blindness in the NYT

A few years ago I wrote a post about my struggles with face recognition. The upshot, if you don't want to click through, is that I score at about the 15th percentile on the quizzes that ask you to recognize famous faces in isolation. I'm not face-blind but I'm definitely face-impaired. Face-wears-thick-glasses-and-is-still-squinting, or something like that. 

The NYT has been publishing short documentary videos about people with disabilities. The second one, about stuttering, made a big splash at my workplace, as you might expect, so I was excited to see this next one. And now I am so curious, super-curious, about your reactions.

The only reason I recognized the picture of Oprah they led with is that I've gotten it wrong in multiple face-blindness quizzes. I still don't look at it and say, "Ah, yes, that is Oprah Winfrey." I look at it and say, "Ah, yes, that is the picture I am supposed to recognize as Oprah Winfrey." In the middle of the video there is this little demonstration with faces on a clothesline. I guess all the people with normal face-recognition skills say, "Oh, of course I recognize the right-side-up faces"? I only recognized one of the famous faces, and I guessed but wasn't certain that one of the others was the subject of the documentary.

They talked about this guy as if he were way out at the weak end of the face-recognition continuum, but I have to say: I do most of those same things in an effort to counterbalance my face-recognition struggles. Gait recognition is big for me. I also make a habit of using environmental cues to help me figure out who's who, just like Paul does at choir practice.

When we talked about this before the pandemic, some of you said, "I KNOW ME TOO!!" Tell me what you think about this video -- as I said, I'm so curious about whether this guy is closer to the bottom of the normal range than the filmmaker realized, or whether I'm closer to the "definitely atypical" part of the range than I realized. And if you've never read the Oliver Sacks article about living with serious face-blindness, it's fascinating.

A post is written by me

I was a little glum after work today, down with a case of the New Prep Blues, but dinner with my family made me laugh until my sides hurt and now I am feeling more optimistic.

Stella's language arts class is being taught, suboptimally, by a guy who does not normally teach language arts. Social studies is his usual purview, and apparently it has been a bit of a scramble for him to get the language arts content student-ready. He was having them correct ungrammatical sentences today in class, as in "He took a picture of Margaret and I." Stella was happy to tell him that the correct version would be "He took a picture of Margaret and me."

"No," he told her, "you should say, 'He took a picture of me and Margaret.'"

WELL, said the Gladly family collectively, is THAT what he said?!

I cannot remember if I have told you about Pete's newfound fascination with language. Have I already told you about this? He used to think he wanted to be a botanist and then he decided he wanted to study linguistics instead. And sure, your children are not your children, seek not to make them like you, Kahlil Gibran blah blah blah, but YOU GUYS, it's SO FUN having a kid who geeks out about language.

So Pete chimed in. It's so frustrating, he said, when language arts teachers don't understand grammatical rules. He said he was just waiting for his writing teacher to tell them to avoid passive voice, which he would take as a prompt to submit an essay entirely written in passive voice.

"That choice would not be approved by your teacher!" I said, and we were off to the races, laughing our way through an entirely passive voice dinner conversation.

I am guessing that some of you may be a little vague about exactly what passive voice is, so here is a refresher if you need one: in passive voice, the subject of the sentence is not the agent of the action. Instead of "the agent verbs the object," you have "the object is verbed by the agent." Sometimes it's precisely what you need because you don't know, or perhaps don't wish to acknowledge, who the agent is. "The song was written by an anonymous medieval poet" is an example of the former. "Mistakes were made" is an example of the latter. 

Language arts teachers are most likely to complain about passive voice sentences that they want students to recast in active voice, which means most of us have much less practice constructing passive voice sentences on purpose. You wind up saying goofy things like "It is thought by me that frustration would be experienced by your teacher if an essay were submitted by you in which only passive voice was used."

"A new career path has been discovered by me!" I announced. "Other people's writing will be converted by me into passive voice!"

"Your day job," Elwood said drily, "should not be quit by you."

Pete was meeting friends at the climbing gym this evening and he wanted to keep the passive voice thing going the whole way there. "Fun must be had by you! You are loved by me!" I said as I drove away. "Driving home must be completed safely by you! You are loved by me too!" he said in response.

So, you know, just in case you had been saying to yourself, "Hm, I wonder if that Gladly family has gotten any less geeky over the past few years" -- I think that's a no. Or, alternatively, that question would probably be answered in the negative by me.

Fresh Starts and Perfectionist Foibles

One of the things that I love about my job is that there are so many new beginnings. It is rarely boring, and even the most trying semester is temporary. The tradeoff, though, is that new beginnings bring their own stresses. There's time-sensitive stuff to figure out. Sometimes I tell myself (no, always I tell myself) that maybe it will be better this time around now that I have more experience. Experience. however, has not taught me how to bend the space-time continuum to my will. 

Next week should be calmer. Tomorrow is the last day of week #1.

This week I was thinking about how I sometimes struggle to work ahead. I will assign myself the task of planning out two weeks' worth of classes for a new prep, but then I will not complete the task. I'll make a start, I'll make thoughtful faces at the computer screen, I'll flip through a textbook, I'll google a half-remembered quote that might be illustrative. So far so normal, I think -- prepping new classes requires creativity and creative processes tend to be slow and non-linear. The thing I'd like to work on, though, is the perfectionism that trips me up.

I say to myself, "I'd better keep working on this. I'll finalize it later. It needs more attention. I won't post it quite yet." It's often the time pressure of a deadline that compels me to say, "This is good enough and I will stop now," because I can't argue with the clock (see above re: continued inability to warp the space-time continuum). I want to work on the skill of saying, "This is good enough and I will stop now," and giving myself the peace of mind that comes with being done ahead of schedule.

Banana Volcano

A few years ago I wrote a post called Hot Bananas, about a phrase from my inner monologue that made me laugh one January day. In an apparent mashup of "hot garbage" and "totally bananas," I thought to myself, "The first week of the semester always feels like hot bananas." 

I've been thinking about that all week. The bananas are very hot right now, so hot. On this particular evening I'm feeling like I'm dancing on the edge of a volcano filled with superheated bananas, hoping to avoid the spray.

Have I told you anything about my semester? I don't think I have. I'm teaching a 100-level class for a colleague who is out on sabbatical. I've taught it twice before, but not since 2015. I'm also prepping a 200-level class that a retired colleague used to teach. I'm super-excited to teach the content, and I expect that I will probably be able to teach it until I retire if I choose to do so, but it is just a boatload -- no, actually, it's more like an aircraft-carrier-load or perhaps a steaming-caldera-ful -- of work to make a new prep happen for a 4-hour class.

The third class is one I've taught a bunch, so that should be fairly low-stress. (I hope.) I am teaching five days a week this semester, which is a little unusual and not my favorite schedule. It usually works out that I have a day on which I can wear yoga pants and a T-shirt and keep the door to my office closed all day long, but this year it's all dress-up clothes all the time.

Anyway, it will be fine; it will all be fine. I am directing more independent studies than usual, but I'm hopeful that those students will be able to help with a new project in a way that both moves the research forward and teaches the students some things worth knowing. I have a little bit of a situation with my undergrad TAs, but I think it will all work out. I think.

Probably next week I will not get quite so much email (although! we're having exciting times in Gladlyville between the COVID and the monkeypox! lots of folks emailing me about test results!). Probably next week there will be fewer people saying, "Dr. Gladly, can you help me figure out this new thing?" because the things will be less new in week #2 than they are in week #1. Until then, I'll just be over here reminding myself that when life gives you flaming bananas, it might be a good time for bananas Foster.

(If this post seems a little scrambled, it is because three of my kids are having a lively discussion nearby. Overhead, from a teenager arguing with a sibling: "Just because I’m wrong doesn’t mean I’m going to stop arguing!!")

Dogs

Thanks for the post topic suggestions; keep them coming, please!

Lori asked if we would foster more dogs and the answer is maybe, but not right away.

A lot of foster dogs are a little bit broken. Some are missing their kind and responsible former owners who have died or moved away; some are recovering from abuse/neglect/hoarding situations; some have been living in situations that were not outright unacceptable but that were not a good fit, in which they may have acquired some maladaptive behaviors.

Even during the work-at-home phase of the pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty with fostering. Some of the dogs were >90% delightful; some were...not. Stella had a couple of dog interactions that left her feeling cautious about accepting new fosters, and that's a higher priority for me than the fact that a new foster might be fun.

Now that school and work are mostly back to normal, fostering would be more complicated during most of the year. One piece of it is the dogs. Maybe we could take a dog who came to us already crate-trained? There aren't a ton of crate-trained foster dogs, though. And the number of dogs you can comfortably leave alone in your house while you go to work is also small.

Another piece of it is people-related rather than dog-related. A lot of dog foster-ers have very firm ideas about what dogs are owed by their people, and they can get pretty judgy even in an organization that explicitly says, "We're not going to be judgy about people who need to surrender a dog." I sometimes feel a little uncomfortable with the shelter's determination to continue giving second (and third, and umpty-eleventh) chances to dogs with problematic histories. Does anyone remember Cooper, the chihuahua mix who appeared to have dementia? Since we fostered him, Cooper has had three failed adoptions (that I know of!) because he keeps biting people. I am not an expert, but I think Cooper should have been euthanized a long time ago. (I admit that I am biased, because he bit the hell out of my leg with no warning and no provocation.) And yet...Cooper is back on the "to be adopted" page, with his adorable floppy ear obscuring the spawn-of-Satan gleam in his eye. (Take a deep breath, Jamie; it's not his fault he has dementia.)

But but but-- the good parts of having a dog in the house are so pleasant that recently we applied to adopt a lab mix. He went to someone else, because lab mixes get snapped up really quickly, but one of the volunteers contacted me about another dog who seemed like a good fit. (He likes his people to sing You Are My Sunshine to him when there is a thunderstorm. If ever there were a good house for a dog who needs to be sung to by his people, it is this house.) For a few days I thought Tippy would be coming to live with us -- but then he didn't wind up on the transport van after all.

So I think we'll keep an eye on the available dogs page, and maybe we'll wind up with a permanent dog. And maybe we'll think about fostering again in the future -- maybe when I'm not teaching, maybe when Joe is home on break. I'll keep you posted.

New year, new habits

My semester starts tomorrow and I"m mostly excited about it.

I would like to get back in the blogging groove but I probably do not want to blog about my fraught relationship with my extremely difficult relative.

What should I write about instead? Would appreciate some suggestions.

Triangle in reverse

Back in May I posted about drawing a big triangle with my car: I drove to Joe's college apartment, we went together to Chicago with his things for his summer internship, and then I drove back home alone. Yesterday I made the same trip in the opposite direction: Chicago, college town, home. He is back in his rental house with his roommates, ready for his junior year to begin.

It's been a couple of week since I posted here, because I took the kids out of town to see family, and then I needed some time to process the trip to see family. I have one particularly difficult relative who has been taking up a lot of space in my head lately. [many thoughts elided here, many many thoughts]

This is the last weekend before classes start, and my yard looks like I hired a lawn service owned by drunken gibbons who took the money and used it to buy more rum, which they then drank in Barbados while my grass got longer and longer. And the laundry situation is somewhat dire, a state of affairs I will need to rectify pronto.

It's a gray and quiet morning here, and I am thinking about the way that life is a strange tangle of fresh starts and old garbage. Today I am choosing to focus on the fresh start strand of that particular tangle, and throw some clothes in the washing machine.

Day 5

My friend Becky asked me if I was interested in doing an August challenge where we would each run or run/walk or walk a minimum of  a mile every day in August. Sure, I said, that sounds great.

So I got up and ran on the first four days of August, and on day 5 I said, bleh, this humidity is such a drag. I'm going to the gym this afternoon when it's quiet there. I will do a treadmill mile and then lift.

Except! I showed up at the gym and realized I had walked out of the house in sandals. NO SANDALS, say the signs at the gym. It is possible that I could have slipped in and used the treadmill without alerting the sandal police, but I wasn't very enthusiastic about trying. And there are way too many heavy things banging around in the weight room for me to attempt to lift weights in sandals.

That's okay, I said to my rule-follower self, here's what we'll do instead. We'll go to the park across the street, and we'll walk a zippity-fast mile in these sandals. We'll get it done in under 15 minutes. 

I am finding, you guys, that my natural walking pace at age 52 is *not* 4mph, and I had to move briskly to get that mile done in less than 15 minutes. I actually ran the last minute because I didn't think I'd make it and I didn't want to feel defeated by the activity that was supposed to keep me from feeling defeated.

14:54, my watch said when it buzzed at the end of the mile. Hurray, I said when it buzzed at the end of the mile. 

But, sad to say, between the brisk walking and the brief running in my inappropriate footwear, I managed to open up a blister on the sole of my left foot. That seems like a pretty short timeline in which to create a blister the size of a quarter and then rip off most of its top, but that appears to be what happened. It is a sizable raw spot on the ball of my foot. Even covered up with a bandaid, it's pretty tender.

Back in my backpacking days I dealt with a lot of blisters. I probably have some moleskin somewhere. Moleskin always works better than bandaids, in my recollection. Tomorrow morning I should probably trim down that quarter-sized flap of dead skin and make myself a little moleskin parapet.

I'm having a don't-know-what-you've-got-till-it's-gone moment about the skin on the sole of my foot, which is not a thing I pay attention to except in its absence. Reflecting on a weight-bearing raw spot is kind of a weird gratitude exercise, but here we are.

I feel like bodies are usually pretty good at adapting to small and tender islands of open skin. Like, maybe tomorrow my brain will say to my foot, "Hush, now, we don't actually need all that emergency messaging from down there. It's not an emergency; we're working on it." Maybe? If not, it probably doesn't bode well for my August streak. 

Could I hop on one foot for a mile, do you figure? And would it fulfill the terms of the challenge?

(Probably this post should not go in the fitness category, but I do not have a folly category. OR a moleskin parapet category, go figure.)

Elephant, eaten

I submitted a paper today. 

I've submitted a lot of papers over the years, but this submission was extraordinarily angst-free. Before this summer came along I'd been feeling guilty for a couple of years about this paper. "It's just a little paper," I would tell myself. "Knock it out! Get it done!" "Okay, okay," I would say to myself, and then I would open the document and freeze up. I didn't know quite how to analyze the data, and I wasn't sure where I would send it, and I would flail around in there for a while and then close it up, feeling defeated.

Earlier this summer I mentioned that I was doing the Faculty Success Program through the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. I'd been interested in the FSP for a long time, but the price tag is pretty daunting. I would never have done it if the provost at Gladlyville U hadn't announced an opportunity to apply for funding. 

It has been fantastic, you guys. If you are an academic and you have a chance to do it, I highly recommend it. It has caused me to think a lot of thoughts about a lot of things, more of which will doubtless be heading your way at some point. But it has also caused me to WRITE. That's the heart of the program: five days a week, no matter what, you sit down for at least 30 minutes and move the ball forward on your scholarly writing. This does not sound like rocket science, and yet I could never quite manage to ingrain that habit on my own. I was too tired. I was too stressed. I had too much grading on my desk. I would plan to put in extra writing time the next day.

Thirty minutes is enough to do something worthwhile, but not so much that it feels daunting. Even when I was in bed with COVID, I could (and did!) write for 30 minutes. And do you know, if you put in enough 30-minute blocks, eventually you wind up with a finished manuscript. This paper was hard and messy. It makes sense that Past Jamie flailed around in there, because there were a bunch of problems that needed solving before the paper could make its way into the world. Present Jamie solved them, thirty minutes at a time-- even when she didn't especially feel like it, even when she had a bunch of grading on her desk. She is feeling pretty pleased about that.

Things that are rattling around in my brain on a Tuesday evening

I have been tireder than usual lately. Is it residual COVID fatigue, do you figure? I was testing positive until the beginning of July. I am usually fine these days. Yesterday, though, I ran in the morning, graded essay questions for hours, and climbed in the afternoon. At dinnertime I was beyond toast. I was, like, an 80s zwieback cracker -- so dry and crispy you might have broken a tooth on me. (If you had sneaked into my dining room and taken a bite of me. This is a weird metaphor. I seem to let the weird metaphors flow freely when I write speedy late-night posts.) It was not the first time in recent weeks that I had felt tired enough at dinner that it seemed like it might be a good idea to lay my face down in my empty dinner plate and rest there, with my hair sopping up the pooled watermelon juice and Tajín.

My hair is always wild enough in August that it does not need any watermelon juice enhancements. Today I was scowling at the computer, trying to finish up the last of the grading (done! hallelujah! red pens and spreadsheets, bless the Lord, she said in 21st-century homage to Dan. 3), when Pete said, "What made you decide to do that with your hair, Mom?" I muttered something about wanting it off my neck while continuing to scowl at the screen, and it was only later that the penny dropped: something decidedly odd must have been happening in the hairward direction for Pete to ask that question.

My kids never say that my hair looks weird, even when I ask them to. I will say, "Can I go out in public looking like this?" and my kids (and husband) will say, "Sure, looks fine to me," no matter how large the fuzzy halo may be. Long ago I shared a sweet story about small Pete, and he is still pretty much the same kid. On the one hand, I'm glad my kids aren't fussy about my appearance. On the other, sometimes a person sincerely wants to know whether she needs to put down the rebellion sprouting from her head before she goes to Target.

So this is the context in which I asked Pete about his morning comment. It had been hours since the exchange happened, but right away he was laughing helplessly at the memory. "It looked like an upside-down mushroom cloud on top of your head," he said.

But you know, in August in this godforsaken climate I feel that is a small price to pay for getting it off my neck.

I was just looking at a picture of hot-weather hair (does that link work for you if you're not on Ravelry? seems like it ought to but sometimes Rav is persnickety about who can view which pages on their site), thinking about knitting gauge. Remember that stole I started enthusiastically last week? I found myself with an increasingly emphatic sinking feeling as I knitted along. I've made a lot of fingering-weight shawls on size 6 needles, but this one was just not working out. The stitches looked too big and sloppy. This happened to me once before, with the shawl in that linked picture, and that's still the first thing I see when I look at it. Better to frog early than spend ten years saying, "If only I'd used a smaller needle." So! Into the frog pond it went. I have started over on size 4s. I will report back.

It's probably the yarn, right? Silk is inelastic, and alpaca is the Great Deceiver when it comes to gauge.

After a long stretch of feeling bleh about knitting, my enthusiasm is returning.

Actually that's true of more things than knitting: a long stretch of feeling bleh, followed by the tentative return of some enthusiasm. Let's hope it sticks. I like enthusiasm a lot more than feeling bleh.