Light and Momentary

Afloat on a sea of endorphins

Alex gave me a mandolin for Christmas and it came in the mail today, after he had already gone back to NYC. I opened up the box and found the mandolin setting on my tuning app, and flipped to the beginning of the beginner mandolin book that had been sitting on our shelf since Alex was in high school, learning to play a different mandolin.

I knew, somewhere in my brain, that a mandolin was tuned like a violin, but about 15 minutes into my exploration that bit of stored knowledge connected itself to the things that my fingers were doing. It was like a fireworks explosion in my brain: OH [said my brain] THIS IS A SIDEWAYS VIOLIN! THIS IS LIKE A GUITAR AND A VIOLIN HAD A BABY!!!

I am having so much fun -- I do some mandolin-specific stuff in my beginner mandolin book, and then I play some of my faves from Fiddler's Fakebook, and then I feel my way through some chords and practice my wobbly tremolo.

Once when I was in high school my grandmother said to me, "Imagine what kind of musician you could be if you had put all of your practice time into one instrument instead of spreading it around." I felt guilty about it at the time, and I still think about it when I am frustrated with my more amateurish efforts. But this is me: I love to dabble. I get so much joy from being a beginner. I think it is partially because trying something new, with modest expectations, is a powerful antidote to perfectionism. And of course it is also because there is something magical in the way that ears and fingers and brains and instruments work together to create music where there was only silence before.

I took a break shortly before I wore a raw spot in my index finger. I hope my calluses organize themselves quickly so I can practice some more.

More about that wacky challenge

You have questions about wearing the same dress for 30 days; I have answers. 

Colette asked what I am doing about leggings and the answer is a mix of things. I have a pair of cheap cream-colored fleece leggings. I bought a pair of secondhand Woolx leggings and they are AMAZING. (I think this link will give you a $20 coupon if you want to try some Woolx leggings yourself, but I am not certain about that.) I had thought wool leggings would be impractical because I always wash leggings after every wearing. But! I do not have to wash them after every wearing, and they can go in the washing machine. They are cozy outside and also comfortable inside -- it's magic. In the picture from that last post I am wearing a pair of ordinary brown tights, but brrr. Leggings are better.

Nicole asked about whether it made getting dressed less interesting and I would say no. It's been fun to try different combinations. Navy cardigan? Sure, why not. Taupe tunic on top? Okay! Golden-yellow tank underneath? Can do! It goes with a lot of my existing wardrobe and so there are lots of possibilities. I felt a little weird wearing the same dress to work every day, even if it was clean and un-smelly, but I am going to be mostly home for the rest of this 30-day challenge. I can wear it with an apple-green underlayer and fuchsia socks if I so choose, and my children will probably not even notice. 

Day 18

I am doing a weird thing, my friends: I am wearing the same dress every day for a month.

Have you seen the Wool& ads? Their branding is all focused on the idea that you can be happy with fewer high-quality items in your wardrobe. Be free of fast fashion! Wear a wool dress instead! They do these challenges, in which you wear one of their dresses for 30 consecutive days or -- if you can believe it -- for a hundred consecutive days. At the end of that time they give you money (either $30 or $100) to spend in their shop.

My friend Beth did the 100-day challenge and I saw bits and pieces of it on Facebook. Last month we got together for coffee for the first time in a long time, and she was telling me that she thought I'd like these clothes. Wool doesn't retain odor, she said, and I made skeptical faces. Wool assists with temperature regulation, she said, and I thought skeptically about all the times I have removed my wool shawls and scarves in a hot classroom. 

But the dresses are beautiful. I had thought about buying one for years. Last month they had some of my favorite colors at warehouse clean-out prices, and so I took the plunge. This is not a sponsored post; they don't do coupons or affiliate links or any of that stuff, as far as I know. My entirely unsponsored opinion is that this dress is amazing. I love the color, I love the swing, I love the pockets, I love the fabric; the length and the sleeves and the V-neck are perfect. It is cozy without being too hot, and to my astonishment it actually does not appear to retain odor. (Most people seem to get by with nightly airings coupled with spot-cleaning and occasional washings, which is my strategy so far too.)

I had always thought that if I were ever to try one of these challenges, of course I'd have to do it in a black dress. It would be conspicuously weird, I thought, to wear the same green dress every day for many days, but wearing the same black dress every day would just be a clandestine flavor of weird. Last night I asked everyone in my house if they had noticed that I'd worn the same distinctive rust-colored dress every day (though not necessarily all day) for 2.5 weeks straight. "Nope," they all said, all four of them. "Not a clue."

So if you have been thinking to yourself about sustainable clothing purchases, or wishing for a little less laundry, or if you have perhaps eyed the Wool& website while wondering if the dresses are worth the price tag, I can tell you that this one has exceeded my expectations by a wide margin so far.

Girl Cooties

As a kid my husband read plenty of Hardy Boys and no Nancy Drew. He read voraciously, but he never made the acquaintance of the female characters whose stories filled my childhood: no Anne Shirley, no Rebecca Rowena Randall, no Caddie Woodlawn, no Laura Ingalls, no Sara Crewe, no Mary Lennox, no Heidi (whose last name I have forgotten if ever I knew it). No Ramona Quimby or Ellen Tebbits, no Harriet the Spy, no Judy Blume.

I have known this for years, but for some reason we were just talking about it at dinner. "What would have happened if you'd read a Nancy Drew book?" I asked him. He shrugged. "I would have been a sissy?" he suggested, struggling to remember the logic of late 70s/early 80s playgrounds and classrooms.

This morning I read Nicole's recent post (HI NICOLE) in which she mentioned The Mists of Avalon, and it sparked a memory for me of a high school friend who loved that book. I asked Elwood, who read boatloads of science fiction/fantasy as a kid, if he had ever read it. "Nope," he said, "girl book." "ELWOOD," I said with a certain emphasis, "do you hear how ridiculous that is? It would not have caused your penis to shrivel up and wither away if you had read a book about women!" He agreed with me, because that particular piece of logic is inarguable, but I do not expect that he will hasten to rectify the imbalance.

I have known about this asymmetry for years; I perpetuated this asymmetry with the books I gave my own boys to read. But it struck me forcefully this morning: this is patriarchy propagating itself. If girls are expected to read books about boys, but a boy's masculinity is threatened by reading books about girls, we are going to live in a lopsided world. Things get better more quickly when we understand each other's perspectives more thoroughly.

So! Here is my suggestion for anyone who is in gift-buying mode: buy a man you love one of your favorite childhood books, written by a woman for an audience of girls. Ask him to measure the number of girl cooties visible on his body before and after he reads it. Tell him it's for science. 

Hold the phone

Guys guys guys, did you know that we have already made it to the earliest sunset of the year?! Did you know that the sunset starts getting later on THURSDAY?

It's true, of course, that days keep getting shorter until the solstice and the sunrises will be later day by day until then. But! weirdly! the sunrise and the sunset are on slightly different schedules and there will be an entire EXTRA MINUTE of afternoon light on Thursday.

Perhaps on Thursday afternoon I will go out in front of my building and soak up those 60 seconds, arms flung wide, spinning in delirious circles.

["Delirious sounds like the right word for that sentence, Jamie," you may be thinking to yourself about now.]

Check it out and tell me if we should have a Thursday spinning-in-delirious-circles party!

I learned about this from Fit Is A Feminist Issue. Analemma -- not a word I had ever encountered before.

Maybe not

This morning I was making coffee glumly, while contemplating (also glumly) the length of my to-do list. "I wonder," my brain proposed glumly, "if there's some kind of, like, pill that a person could take so she could muster the energy she needed to do all of the things that need doing between now and the end of the semester."

And then I had to laugh: there is indeed such a pill. But maybe, Glum Jamie, speed is not the solution to seasonal affective disorder.

Currently Reading

Demon Copperhead. I might be the ideal audience for this book, as someone who loves David Copperfield and enjoys Barbara Kingsolver and grew up not far from the pocket of Appalachia in which it is set. It's good; it's tough to read. You can know what happened to David Copperfield's mom and still find the analogous section of this book pretty painful. I need to finish it before Libby takes it back.

How the Word is Passed. "You must read this," said my college roommate Amy, and so I am reading it. It is also both worth reading and hard to read. It also has an upcoming due date that I am trying to beat.

The Way We Live Now. Excellent. Very long. Finally into the part where I am invested. Aiming to finish by the end of the year.

How about you? What's on your bedside table these days?

December with the Gladlys

Weeks and weeks ago when I asked for post topic suggestions, Celeste asked about holiday traditions. At the time it was too hot to think about holidays, but here we are in December.

When my kids were small I felt a lot of pressure to Make Christmas Magical. The gifts felt fraught; the Santa thing felt fraught. (On which topic, have you seen this guy's posts at Psychology Today? He also hates the Elf on the Shelf. We did neither Santa nor the Elf, but I hope we were less bossy about it.) These days I am grateful for less pressure and more clarity. We know what we like, mostly, and we've mostly figured out how to make it work.

The Advent bin comes out on Saturday afternoon after Thanksgiving (unless TG falls on the 22nd or 23rd, because in those years Advent starts a week later). From it we retrieve two Nativity sets: one for the living room and one for the dining room. It is imperative that the wise men start out on the other side of the room from the stable folks (they have to travel; they'll get there on Epiphany) and the baby Jesus goes back into the basement until Christmas morning. In some years (true confession time) the baby Jesus stays in the basement for part of the Christmas season, because in some years a person gets distracted with all the December goings-on.

We also pull out our little Advent wreath, which I love even though the openings for candles are just slightly the wrong size and the candles are always catawampus as a result, and three decorative items: an angel, a shiny tree, a felt tree. And that's all, folks; with that 15-minute effort I am done decorating until Christmas Eve. Elwood occasionally does a strand of outside lights, but not usually.

We aim to light the Advent candle and pray vespers together consistently, but we probably only do it 4 nights a week. Maybe 5. This was such a battle when the kids were small, but no longer. Instead of fighting over prayer books and yanking on ribbons, they just pull up the iBreviary apps on their phones. We start with O Come O Come and end with The King of Glory Comes (with clapping, natch), followed by mildly competitive candle-blowing-out and a piece of chocolate for everybody.

Once December rolls around, this is followed by the opening of the Advent calendar (Bonne Maman again this year! so fun!) and the placing of the magnetic ornament on the Melissa & Doug tree. Oh, wait, that tree makes a fourth decorative item that comes out of the Advent bin. Oh, ALSO, another thing that comes out of the Advent bin is the SEASONAL WASHI TAPE. I am very fond of the seasonal washi tape. I love to see those little gold foil gingerbread guys bedecking my bullet journal.

A couple of days ago, as Stella and I were walking to work and school I was telling her how much I appreciate the way the liturgical calendar parallels my own frame of mind in the waning of the year. November: we're all going to die! most people are already dead! Most of December: pray, fast, go to confession! Late December: rejoice! the people that walked in darkness have turned a corner at last! I just do not feel very festive in the early part of December (thanks, SAD), and the focus on quiet preparation works much better for me than forced cheer. At the same time, Advent is chock full of fabulous feast days, and we usually observe a handful of them in a low-key way.

We never do all of these things but we always do some of these things.

WEEK 1:

St. Andrew: haggis (usually vegetarian) and a saltire in the dining room. St. Francis Xavier: Indian food for dinner. If I miss St. Francis Xavier on December 3 I have sometimes made felafel in honor of St. John Damascene on the 4th. We do stockings on December 6: St. Nick's Day means a small gift and a stocking with clementines, nuts, and sometimes chocolate; the stockings go back in their basement bin afterward. On the following day we eat birthday cake for the first time this month but not the last.

WEEK 2:

Some years I get fancy with food for Immaculate Conception, but usually we just go to church. And I'm not very consistent about Our Lady of Guadalupe, but it's pretty easy to make enchiladas and maybe dig out the Tomie de Paola picture book for old times' sake. The kids are fond of St. Lucia buns, and I am happy to bake with saffron. I will take my good cheer wherever I can find it on the 13th of December. The skies may be gray but at least the dough is golden-yellow.

WEEK 3: 

We light the pink candle and switch out King of Glory for Rejoice in the Lord Always. This week is often when we make our stelline d'oro, because one round of saffron baking is not sufficient. If I am knitting Christmas gifts it is also the week in which I suspect I have a repetitive strain injury.

WEEK 4: 

More birthday cake! This year there will be fourteen candles for Stella -- can you believe it? Before the pandemic this week often meant music rehearsals, with a couple of kids and me joining in the joyful noise. Maybe we'll be back there this year. On December 24 Elwood takes some combination of kids to cut down a tree, while I stay home and pull out the Christmas bin. Do the lights work? Is our slightly decrepit tree stand going to make it through another year? Let's hope so, because Ace hardware may not be open by sundown on Christmas Eve. We decorate the tree with Bruce Cockburn's Christmas album in the background. The apocalyptic angel goes on last.

CHRISTMASTIME!

We mark the end of the penitential season with a celebratory fish dinner, and go to midnight Mass together. ("Midnight" Mass is usually at 8pm. Our pastor is an early-to-bed early-to-rise kind of guy.) After Mass, everybody opens one present.

This is a long post, isn't it? Maybe I'll do a second installment about Christmas itself instead of making it even longer. I must have told you before about the whole present-opening song-and-dance, but if not it deserves a post of its own.

Dydw i ddim yn siarad cymraeg

J asked me about my Welsh presentation, and here is the story.

I told my phonetics students that they would need to tackle a new language. They'd need to figure out where its sounds overlapped with the sounds of English, and learn how to make the unfamiliar sounds. They'd need to find a way to practice regularly, putting forth a little bit of consistent effort all across the month of November, and do a 5-minute group presentation about their language in December.

I also told them that they could pick a language for me to learn, and I'd present first to give them a sense of what I was looking for. They picked Welsh.

Dutifully, wanting to set a good example, I started the Duolingo Welsh course. But Duolingo changed its interface in November, and I'm not a fan. I had also forgotten that I don't like being a total beginner, and so I kept saying to myself, "Seems like a Spanish kind of a day!"

Good news: I did advance in the Spanish course in November. Bad news: the Spanish course does not help a person speak Welsh.

The other good news, the news that saved my bacon, is that a 5-minute presentation is pretty much nothing and I had told them it should have some interactive elements. A chunk of it had to be in English, because even if I were able to talk about divergent sound systems while speaking Welsh, it wouldn't have made any sense to any of my students. So with a lot of help from Google Translate and the blithe confidence that came from knowing the room held no actual speakers of this language I could not actually speak, I plowed through it.

The title of this post (at least according to Google Translate) means "I do not speak Welsh." Still true, unfortunately.

Walkabout

Our robot vacuum continues to struggle. It will betake itself to a spot that looks unremarkable and declare that it is stuck. ERROR SIX, it will bleat until someone takes pity on it. It will sit on its charging plate and complain that it needs to be charged -- won't someone please charge it? Sometimes it keeps complaining even after I clean the contacts. We have an end table with a low shelf that is exactly the wrong height for the vacuum -- it keeps wedging itself between the shelf and the carpet and yowling piteously. (It doesn't actually yowl. Here I go again, anthropomorphizing my electronics.)

It also tries to escape at regular intervals. You might not think that a robot vacuum could run away from home, but it dawned on me last night that I hadn't seen it recently. We have an old-fashioned secretary that belonged to my husband's grandmother or great-aunt, and the vacuum loves to hide out underneath it. Sometimes it gets lost under the loveseat, or the futon. It seems to like to keep me on my toes [she said anthropomorphizingly].

It is set to vacuum every night at 8:45, and I am usually in bed before it finishes. This means that if it runs into trouble near the end of its run, it is dependent on the big kids for rescue. They might respond to its pleas if it's stuck in the living room, but they're unlikely to venture any further. 

Sometimes it calls out in the middle of the night: charging! I neeeeeeed charging!! It is loud enough that I sometimes get up out of bed to make it stop. But it has not been calling for me, and it has not been vacuuming, and I do not see it under the futon, all of which makes me wonder if perhaps it has headed out in search of greener pastures.

I imagine it wandering the neighborhood, its robot voice calling "FREEDOM! GLORIOUS FREEDOM!"

Instructions

Work is feeling like a lot right now. This morning I had to get to a 90-minute 8:00 meeting and then run two 75-minute classes chock full of content I did not feel quite qualified to teach. In the first one I had to give a presentation mostly in Welsh, a language I do not actually speak. Then in the second one I had to teach the anatomy of the middle ear and the vestibular system. Your middle ear is more complicated than you ever suspected, my friends, and your vestibular system is even more so.

Silver lining: I did not get to the cochlea today, so I have a few days to brush up. Ears, man -- ears are hard. Give me a nice familiar larynx any day of the week. I can talk cheerfully at great length about the larynx. (I bet you're lining up to invite ME to your next party, huh?)

I did not tell you about the academic integrity situation that landed in my lap earlier this semester when I gave two different forms of a quiz without announcing that I was doing so. If a student submits Form A of the quiz filled out neatly with the Form B answers, it might cause her instructor to wonder whether the student had been glancing across the aisle instead of keeping her eyes on her own paper. I probably should not tell you much about the drama that resulted, but the aftermath was dramatic indeed. This is my twelfth year at Gladlyville U and this was the first time I thought to myself, "Hm, there are some potential safety issues for me to consider here." 

So that was exciting. Today's quiz also had two forms, but the difference between the two was in the instructions. "Be sure that you read the instructions carefully," I told them emphatically. You'd think I'd know better than that by now, but hope springs eternal. "Dr. Gladly," says an as-yet-unanswered email in my inbox, "I didn't have time to read the instructions but I figured out afterward that I did it wrong. I hope it won't affect my grade." 

'Tis the season: worried students, weary instructors. It always happens; it's always temporary. Wish me luck, friends.