Light and Momentary

The Trollope Project Continues

You might remember that I am working my way through the 47 novels of Anthony Trollope, with the goal of reading them all by the time I'm 60. I had planned to read one per season, but I'm on Trollope novel #4 for 2024 and it's only March. Today I attended a virtual meeting of the Trollope Society, and my husband laughed out loud when I told him about it afterward. So maybe I'll tell you all a little bit about it too.

After I read Marion Fay, I turned right around and started reading Cousin Henry. It's about an old man who is torn about where to leave his property, and it has a deeply unlikeable title character. It seems like a pretty bold authorial choice, actually, to name your book after the character whose downfall your readers will all be hoping to see -- as if Dickens had gone with "The Adventures of Fagin" instead of "Oliver Twist." It's only about 200 pages long, which is practically a short story in Trollope's world, and as soon as I finished it I plunged right into Orley Farm.

I loved Orley Farm. It might be the book I'd recommend to someone who wanted to read a standalone Trollope novel. It's much heftier than either Cousin Henry or Marion Fay, but I found that it moved briskly. At one point I texted my family to tell them about an exciting plot development. (They found it less riveting than I did; go figure.) It asks a bunch of interesting questions: how do we balance justice and mercy? What's our reaction when an extraordinarily unsympathetic character demands justice? How much of a court case is about truth, and how much is about lawyerly skill? 

When I finished I thought to myself, "I wish I could talk to a pal about Trollope." And LO, the Trollope Society exists specifically for people who want to talk about Trollope. Their spring book is Lady Anna, and I decided to jump in and read the first chunk of it in preparation for their initial online discussion.

A retired American chemistry teacher spoke for about 25 minutes to a surprising number of attendees (5 screens of them! 5! for a conversation about this totally obscure novel!). She had clearly put a lot of effort into investigating this book's background, and she had also prepped discussion questions for people to chat about in breakout rooms.

This is the part that made my husband burst out laughing: I told him that she said, "Now I know that this book is quite a page-turner, and many of you will have already read ahead. Be sure you don't share any spoilers in your breakout room!"

"A page-turner," he repeated to himself, chortling helplessly. "A page-turner!" 

I had started to think I was being a little nutty about Trollope, as I embarked on novel #21. But after this meeting today it's clear to me that I know nothing -- nothing -- about real Trollope fandom. 

Let them eat cake

We had friends over for dinner last night, and yesterday afternoon I was mostly thinking about what I wanted to make for dinner. (I settled on this NYT chickpea stew, with added cumin/coriander, served over rice -- tasty and easy). But at the last minute I threw a cake in the oven, and it reminded me that homemade cake is a particularly delicious form of alchemy.

First you preheat your oven to 350, and hit your 8-inch round cake pan(s) with non-stick spray. I always cut out a quick untidy circle of parchment paper to line the bottom of the pan, but this is not essential.

The nice thing about a Victoria sponge cake recipe is that it's easy to remember and to scale. For two 8-inch rounds, take two sticks of softened butter and beat them with 225 grams of sugar (this equals one cup if you prefer volume measurements, but I promise it's worthwhile to get comfortable with measuring by weight). When this mixture is fluffy, add in four eggs, and beat the mixture thoroughly. If you want vanilla, or almond extract, or lemon zest, or whatever else, splash some in. If you keep self-raising flour in your house, add in 225 grams; if you don't, you'll want about 5 grams of salt, about 7 grams of baking powder, and about 210 grams of ordinary flour. (This is approximately a cup and three-quarters, but you probably don't need me to tell you that flour is hard to measure accurately by volume. May I suggest an inexpensive kitchen scale?) You'll want a couple of tablespoons of milk as well, just enough to give you a nice ploppable consistency.

Divide this mixture across two pans, and bake for about 25 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Let the layers cool in the pans for about 10 minutes, and then turn them out onto a cooling rack and leave them alone until they're cool enough not to melt your filling.

If you're in a hurry, slap some lemon curd or good jam in between the layers and dust the top with confectioner's sugar. If you're not in a hurry, I'm partial to this chocolate sour cream frosting.

You can easily scale the recipe up if you want a majestic three-layer cake, or down if you only need a single layer. It's a super-simple formula: for each layer, you need 4 ounces (113g) each of butter, sugar, and self-raising flour, 2 eggs, and a splash of milk. Speedy, fluffy, golden, and more delicious than it has any right to be. Happy baking!

Waiting my whole life

"Your children are not your children," I said to myself very firmly a week ago. Stella and I were talking about whether she wanted to continue piano, and she was not sure that she did. I have tried a bunch of different approaches across the years that Stella has taken piano: I have encouraged and offered space and coaxed and helped with technical details and stepped back to let her figure stuff out. I have done what I could do to support her in learning piano, but this is a true fact: in the end she has to decide if she wants to do the learning.

"I don't understand why Stella doesn't play the piano for fun," I said to Elwood. "You mean like everyone else in this house except for you?" he replied, to which I said "...oh." I have furnished a music room full of instruments and books, a room I would have loved to have access to when I was a kid, but that doesn't mean any of my own kids will want to linger there.

One night I said, "Hey, Stella, you know there are only like 4 chords in most Taylor Swift songs, right? Want to try to figure out some Taylor Swift?" She sat down and sang All Too Well with me, but her heart wasn't really in it.

This was the point at which I got stern with myself: she is under no obligation to play the piano for fun. She is not responsible for my lingering issues about what teenagers should or shouldn't do with their musical abilities. She can quit piano lessons if she chooses to do so.

But maybe she won't quit quite yet. Because yesterday I said, "You know, I was thinking that All Too Well would work better for us if we played it in E instead of C -- want to try it?" And vocally E is probably a better key, but I was fumbling around trying to hit all four sharps. "Maybe D," I said, and moved it down a step.

"Mom," said Stella, watching my hands, "can you show me how to do chords?" 

This baffled me, because her piano teacher pushes her students to learn a ton of technique. Stella has learned the I-IV-V chord sequences for every single key. But here's what I didn't understand until yesterday: she never really knew why she was learning them.

Yesterday her inner lightbulb blinked on with spotlight brilliance. If you want to play All Too Well, all you need is four chords: I - V - VI - IV. The original version is C-G-Am-F, but we like it better as D-A-Bm-G. If you want to play it in G-flat, more power to you. But the sequence is the same the whole way through, so once you've got it in your head you can sail through the whole 10-minute version if you're so inclined. 

We sat together on the piano bench for a little while, but it wasn't long before she was playing it all on her own. "Wait," she said, "Clean uses the same chords in the same sequence?" 

We sang in unison; we sang in harmony. I flung my arms around her and said, "I've been waiting my whole life for this!" I can buy myself instruments and books, and I can find a lot of joy in solitary practice. But there's no joy quite like the joy of making music together, and I can't sing harmony with myself.

She spent a long time at that piano yesterday, much to my delight. I don't know if this newfound interest will last; I'm not going to pressure her, obviously. But I do love to watch a lightbulb flicker on, and I will hold on tightly to the memory of our voices blending together as she learned how to do something new and satisfying.

More about muscles

I am following up on my post about pushups, which made at least two readers say "huh???" Let's see if I can be a little clearer this time around.

You already know that you can accomplish very similar actions using different combinations of muscles. Maybe you've taken voice lessons, and learned that inhalation is much more complicated than you ever suspected. If you use your diaphragm, you can inhale a larger volume of air with less neck tension. This is great for vocal quality and long-term vocal health. But lots of us have to practice for a long time if we want to move our diaphragms and keep our shoulders still when we inhale.

One of the reasons that training programs for runners include recovery runs is that we use our muscles in different ways on different days, even if we're completing the same action. When you run on fatigued legs, you engage different groups of muscle fibers. This process of learning to recruit a wider array of muscle fibers makes you a stronger, more fatigue-resistant runner over time.

When you do a pushup, you can engage different muscles to different extents. You can't do a pushup with zero trunk engagement; you can't do a pushup with zero arm engagement. But your pecs can do more or less of the work, depending on the signals they get from your brain. I don't have EMG results to show that I'm getting more pec activation when I think deliberately about using my pecs, but I know I can do a whole lot more reps with a whole lot less effort when I consciously call on the patterns of movement I learned while bench-pressing.

The next time you're sitting at a desk, try this: hold your arms close to your body, and push yourself away from the desk. Next, imagine that you are a smuggler, and you have a valuable golden orb tucked into each armpit. Squeeze your chest and your arms together tightly so that your hidden cargo doesn't go crashing to the floor, and hold that position while you push yourself away from the desk again. For me, there's a huge difference in the amount of oomph I can generate. Option A is mostly arms, option B is mostly pecs, and pecs exist precisely so you can push heavy things effectively.

Tell me if that makes more sense, please.

Use your trunk, not just your arms

At the end of last semester I realized that I had been doing pushups wrong for my entire life. It dawned on me that a person who could bench-press 110 pounds shouldn't have so much trouble with pushups, and I closed my eyes and tried to envision a pushup as an upside-down bench-press. It was a total aha moment as I zoomed up to the top of that rep.

It's the opposite of automatic. I have to think about it every single time I do a set of pushups: engage the pecs. Remember, I tell myself, it's a chest exercise more than an arm exercise. If you ignore your pecs and rely on your arms, you'll get needlessly tired out.

Something similar is true of pull-ups. When Joe first told me I needed to train my back to get a pull-up, I scoffed. But he was absolutely right: executing a pull-up is more about strong lats and traps than it is about strong arms. In the spring of 2020 I had no idea how to engage my lats, but these days I use my lats for all kinds of things.

I think this problem is probably widespread among women. People tell us early on to do knee pushups because they expect us to have trouble doing standard pushups. We absorb the idea that standard pushups are too hard for us instead of learning how to use the bigger muscles that are made for pushing heavier loads. I can't say for sure that the reason women (including me!) take a while to get a pull-up is that they have to learn to use their lats and traps more effectively, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least. 

We live in a world where Kim Kardashian keeps erasing her traps instead of saying, "Hey, I worked hard for those and it's good to be strong," so I am not optimistic that this blog post will make much of a difference. But if you've always wanted to be able to be better at pushups and pull-ups, the trick is in your torso, not your arms.

Secret Ingredient

Stella's been preparing for today for months. People came from all over the region for a daylong music competition at her high school. She had a piano solo in the morning and a voice solo in the afternoon. 

It's a stressful thing to perform a solo for a judge, and she was feeling it pretty keenly in the run-up to the event. She told me today about an anxiety dream from last night, in which her teeth liquefied and came streaming out of her mouth and Dream Mom was really angry about it. Yikes, right??

I was aiming for a mix of sympathy and lightheartedness in response to her anxiety. I told her to imagine slurping out all of her anxiety with a vacuum and dumping it in my invisible wheelbarrow, where I would keep track of it for her. "Leave yourself just a tiny bit of that alert feeling," I told her, "because when your heart beats faster it carries lots of blood to your brain and your muscles. A little teeny bit of adrenaline is just your body's way of saying it's getting you ready to do a hard thing." Thankfully, she was more amused than embarrassed by my choice to trundle the invisible wheelbarrow across the high school parking lot, and she asked if we could play I'm Going to Grandma's House as a diversion while she waited to be called.

Do you ever play this game at your house? I've been using it to distract kids for more than 25 years now. I'm going to grandma's house and taking an armadillo, you're taking her an armadillo and a banana, I'm taking her an armadillo, a banana, and Corinthian bagpipes (I don't know what those are either; they were Stella's idea), etc. When we got to L I said, naturally, that I was bringing liquid teeth. I was also in charge of T: tooth smoothie. We had a good laugh about tooth smoothies, they called her in to perform, she nailed it, and we headed out in a haze of relief.

At dinner we were talking about the contest with Pete, who came home for a visit today. "Stella had a dream in which her teeth liquefied!" I told him. Right off the bat he said "tooth smoothie!" He and Stella and I were laughing together about the fact that our brains did the same thing with that dream, and then Elwood spoke up. "TOOTH SMOOTHIE?!" he said, horrified, and the three of us fell apart. We were gasping for breath, clutching our sides, howling with laughter, imagining a world in which the Tooth Fairy runs a Smoothie King franchise with some very special add-ins.

When I think back on today I want to remember the sweetness of Stella's voice and her confident treatment of a tricky Mozart piece; she earned the top rating for both solos. I also want to remember the girl who said this morning with a quiver in her voice that she felt like her anxiety was an elephant sitting on her chest, and the way that same girl was laughing uproariously at the end of the day, her nightmare transformed into a source of shared hilarity.