Light and Momentary

We hates it forever

When generative AI first appeared on the scene I wasn't too fussed about it. I was asking my students to answer specific questions requiring discipline-specific knowledge, focused on specific portions of specific books that are not in the public domain. And I am lucky: I am mostly teaching motivated students who are enthusiastic about the things they are learning. 

But in January 2024 I pasted an assignment prompt into ChatGPT and was appalled to see that it gave me a very credible response. So I did something that felt icky, because generally I don't want to have adversarial relationships with my students. I went into the HTML window in our course management software, and I added a phrase along the lines of "mention the narwhal" to the assignment. I turned the font white, and put it in 0.5-point type. A human looking at the screen would not be able to see it. But a human pasting it into ChatGPT would get back a block of text in which a narwhal featured prominently, despite the total absence of narwhals from the source material. 

These assignments get submitted in three batches, and there were no narwhals in either of the first two. But in that third batch, which generally includes the less motivated students, I ran smack into a narwhal. He brought some friends along. I handed out a bunch of Fs. I had a bunch of conversations with our Office of Student Nonsense. The whole thing was pretty upsetting.

[...Jamie thinks about the bigger picture, hauls herself up out of the pit of despair, and keeps writing the post...]

Over the years that I've been teaching at Gladlyville U, it's become a bigger deal to tell students to read a book and write about it. You might think that people would expect to read books in college, but I don't actually have the sense that they're reading a lot of books in college. 

This semester I tried a few things to deter AI use. I talked to them candidly about my concerns and my expectations. I gave them a little extra time to read the book. I required them to take a quiz over the content of the book to nudge them toward getting it read. I carved out class time in which they wrote pencil-and-paper draft responses to the question that was most likely to prompt AI use. And it still wasn't enough. One component of the assignment is answering other students' questions in a discussion forum, and one of my weaker students submitted a response that was almost certainly generated by ChatGPT -- a florid pile of verbiage utterly disconnected from her actual writing voice.

On the first day of my summer class, on the heels of all that May unpleasantness, I talked to them about AI use. I said, "Getting a degree is kind of like training for an endurance event. You have to put in the effort consistently across time -- you keep showing up for the workouts and doing the hard thing even when you'd rather stay on the couch. Over time you absorb that training, slowly and almost invisibly, and it changes you. That's what gets you over the finish line."

I invited them to imagine a dishonest influencer who kept posting on Instagram about her triathlon prep even though it was mostly fake. "Tough workout today!" she might post, after running just far enough to break a sweat and take a cute picture. ChatGPT use, I told them, is that same kind of fakery: the user makes a pretense of doing a hard thing, without absorbing the real benefit of the task. 

I still think it's a useful analogy. But I can't make all the students want to put in the work. I have been writing this post in the hope that it would make me less sad and grumpy, but I'm still pretty sad and grumpy about the state of things in higher ed right now. Bleh, she said articulately. Bleh indeed.

Adventuring with the Band

The usual keyboardist for the 11:00 Mass was unavailable today, and her sub asked me if I would cantor. "Sure thing," I told her, but I had forgotten that singing for 11 is an adventure.

If I cantor for the early Mass, it's the keyboardist and me and a few junior high girls. Sometimes this presents its own challenges, but it's not like 11. At 11, see, we have The Guys.

Guy #1, whom we will call Elroy, always wanted to play in a band. For his entire life, he wanted to be a rock-and-roll guitarist. About 20 years ago he started playing electric guitar at church, and he's still at it.

Elroy requires some managing. One night I was at a rehearsal where a previous director said to him, "Elroy, I like all of the notes you are playing, but I would like you to play about half of them." His mission is to add in some instrumental padding around the other instruments and voices, but I have to say that the effect is occasionally...memorable. First off, no shade to Elroy, but the vibe is something like Mark Knopfler Turns His Hand To Liturgical Music. Imagine the Sanctus with some of those electric guitar adornments from Sultans of Swing. NOW imagine that Mark Knopfler vibe, only cranked up to 11.

This Is Spinal Tap This Goes To11 GIFfrom This Is Spinal Tap GIFs

Picture the keyboardist slipping back to the sound board between songs, dialing down the electric guitar and turning up the voices. The effectiveness of this strategy is limited, however, because Elroy's guitar has its own volume control.

Guy #2 is a drummer and I don't know his name. I've rehearsed with him once before, but the guy in charge on that day was bossier than the keyboardist running things today. And Guy #2, my friends -- he drums from his HEART.

The problem with drumming from your HEART is that your particular heart may or may not be pulsing in time with the keyboardist's tempo, and you might find yourself floating in a figurative sea of drumbeats, rat-a-tat-tatting for the glory of God, except regrettably disconnected from the beat that the rest of the ensemble is attempting to maintain.

Guy #3 is a quiet competent bassist who does not contribute in any way to the mayhem, but he does add to the Wall of Imposing Dudeliness vibe happening in the choir corner at 11:00 Mass.

Complicating Factor #1: the keyboardist had selected two unfamiliar songs, one of which has a ton of syncopation. Complicating Factor #2: another vocalist showed up 15 minutes before Mass, not having rehearsed any of the music.

It was mostly fine, even though the disaster potential was high. The super-syncopated brand-new song was the meditation hymn, and I think the drummer must have been experiencing some profound communion with God that distracted him from keeping time in a recognizable way. Elroy was undaunted by the rhythmic anomalies, and he carried on with his heavily amplified embellishments. That one was definitely a little ragged. But thankfully, it was also temporary.

I hope the next time I get called to sub it's for the early Mass.

I don't know how we move forward

Like a lot of purple counties, mine tilted right in the last election. On my block and among my colleagues I am in a mostly blue bubble, but in Gladlyville as a whole I am in the minority. At the gym, at the grocery store, on the trail, roughly every other person I encounter voted for Trump. It's almost certainly a more pronounced majority at my church. 

I expended many hours and many pixels blogging about Trump between 2016 and 2021, culminating in a post about January 6 that caused at least one long-time reader to decide she was never coming back here again. I found it unimaginable that he could be elected in 2016, unimaginable that 2020 could be anything other than a Biden landslide, unimaginable that he could think of running again, unimaginable that the 2024 race would be close. The Gen Z kids were going to turn out in droves, I asserted in the fall. The polling only looks close because they never answer their phones.

This is where Inigo Montoya turns to me and says:  

Princess Bride You Keep Using That Word GIFfrom Princess Bride GIFs

Sad to say, my imagination is not keeping pace with the preferences of my neighbors.

So what happens in a world where the unimaginable has in fact become the everyday? I do not really know the answer to that question.

I have put myself on a pretty strict news diet. I'm not even reading Heather Cox Richardson. I have called my reps once, but a once-a-month schedule feels more doable to me than the once-a-week schedule I maintained during the first Trump administration. In 2017 it felt urgent to me to follow the news closely. Did it do any good? Did it do enough good to offset the peace of mind it cost me? I'm managing my inputs much more aggressively this time around. I can't predict what Trump will do or say because he doesn't think or act like a normal human being. I can't focus on the hypotheticals while also preserving my sanity. So I won't.

But one thing hasn't changed for me: in those stunned sad posts from November 2016 I put a lot of emphasis on kindness. That's still where I find myself, trying to be intentional about kindness while not shying away from honesty. You know that old saw about people not caring how much you know unless they know how much you care? It has been my experience that kindness and curiosity are more likely to advance a conversation than the zingiest arguments. Here in my red-shifted town I am trying to take the long view, one conversation at a time -- keep the door open, share new information, invite a different perspective.

During the pandemic the polarization was visible in my church in a way that still plagues me. Our pastor handled it well, I thought, by designating two weekend Masses as masks-required and two as masks-optional. "I implore you," said the pastor, "in your charity for the vulnerable -- for the elderly and those going through cancer treatment and others who must avoid this virus -- wear a mask at these two Masses so they can be safer." A small subset of parishioners refused; they were going to Mass when they wanted to go to Mass and they weren't going to mask. One of them in particular afforded me a lot of opportunities to practice custody of the eyes; I still see him and think "WELL, IF IT ISN'T MR. CAN'T-BE-BOTHERED!" This is a failure in charity on my part, I know; he is more than his bad decisions.

In the intervening years the masks have mostly vanished but the polarization has only grown. I know many people who were tenuously Catholic then and emphatically not Catholic now; I know many people who have slid toward rad-traddery without seeming to see the absurdity of telling the Vicar of Christ that he is insufficiently Catholic. I categorically refuse to relegate my church to the crazies. I belong there, in my parish; I belong here, in Gladlyville. 

I think, maybe, because I don't know what else I can possibly think without succumbing to despair, that the best way forward is just to keep showing up. I'm going to keep talking about my trans kid in church circles, where a lot of people don't know that families they care about include trans members. I'm going to keep sending Christmas cards to that one big family we used to be close to. I hate it that the daughters in that family have less access to higher education than the sons, but I'm willing to be Christmas-card-level friends anyway. Over the years I have occasionally established connections with our friends' kids via Christmas letters (e.g., they think my letter is funny and find me on social media), and so I'm going to carry on, as one of the few women in higher education in their orbit, saying that I am happy to hear from them.

And so I am going to choose to believe that other people are out there doing the same uncertain and occasionally heartbreaking thing: showing up in their purple counties, purple churches, purple marriages, and saying, "Hey, I care about you, and have you considered that...?"

It would be the height of irony for me to write a thousand-word post about the importance of being persuadable and then follow it up with a 1400-word post in which I appear to disregard the comments disagreeing with me, so let me be clear: I've been thinking about the things you said. I hear you: that husband sounds pretty far out there. It's a tough situation, no question about it. They may wind up divorced; that might be best for everyone involved. It may be the case that she asked the question in that particular group because she knew how they would respond.

But who is better positioned than that guy's wife to say, "I love you; that's bonkers; you know better than that"? I can imagine a marriage in which she is genuinely seeking better ways to say those things, which is why I answered the question she asked. I did suggest some other resources; I did invite her to DM me if she'd like. But I started by answering the question she asked, because once we start assuming that disconnection is the best option, the world gets bleaker.

Would you cut off a parent who voted for Trump?

Would you cut off a son who announced that household voting seemed best to him? 

Would you cut off a brother who showed up to Thanksgiving dinner in a shirt with a Punisher logo? 

In every case, it seems to me, the devil is in the details, and a Facebook post is unlikely to supply those details.

I see a lot of Facebook posts from West Virginia friends steeped in the Fox News worldview, and I teach a lot of young adults from farm country whose parents' worst nightmare is that they will be brainwashed by the libs in the pursuit of higher education. Last year I got a couple of thank-you cards from students that meant a lot to me. One said, "You have made me rethink so many things, in the best way." The other said, "In your classes there is an atmosphere of joy that I treasure." I am so lucky to have the job I do, where I can waltz in as my curious goofball self and teach about why we should fund scientific research, and how access to healthcare saves lives, and why disability advocacy matters. I'm going to keep requiring my students to participate in the political process as advocates for people with disabilities, and reflecting on what they learned. I'm going to keep telling them about the costs of inequalities in access to healthcare, and our collective responsibility to enforce environmental laws that protect gestating babies and their families from avoidable harms.

I'm not going to change a lot of minds on Facebook, but I'm willing to answer questions, to offer compassion and connection. The outcomes of my work in the classroom are variable and uncertain, but I'm going to keep showing up and doing my best. And I cannot know what the future holds for the US Catholic Church, but I'm confident that if the gates of hell will not prevail against it, neither will Donald Trump.

I don't have an ending for this too-long post, except to say it again: Kindness. Honesty. Patience. Persistence. That's where I am right now. You?

The easy post

I started writing a post in response to Engie's comment, and HOO BOY there are a lot of thoughts in my head about living in this particular timeline. So! How about if I write an easy happy post instead, and keep chewing on the other one? Let's do that.

Today I deadlifted 175 pounds for the first time, and I am pleased about that. I don't think I deadlifted anything heavier than 145 pounds in all of 2024, so it feels good to be pushing myself again. This trend was largely inspired by reading an advance copy of Casey Johnston's memoir, about which more soon.

I suspect there will come a future time when I have taken a break from lifting, and am wondering about the best way to get back into it. This is a post for future me, and for anyone else who is deadlift-curious.

I have been using an idiosyncratic deadlift cue that I don't think I've seen anywhere else, and it is this: ALL FOUR CORNERS. I feeeeel my feet inside my shoes, all four corners of each foot. The littlest toe on my left foot doesn't always like to play the four corners game, but I'll keep at it. It's easier for me to press firmly into the floor with feet that are fully awake.

I find it helpful to activate my lats very deliberately, using the same cue I mentioned last year for activating pecs: SQUEEZE THE ORB. I also get more mileage out of my lower body if I am gripping the barbell very deliberately, which may or may not make sense. But in any case, I also tell myself to SQUEEZE THE BAR.

Joe recommended a cue to counteract my tendency to row the weight upward: ARMS LIKE CHAINS. In deadlifts your arms are transmitting force more than they're generating it. I feel like it's become pretty natural for me to maintain a flat back, but I used to have to think a lot more about that.

You can generate more oomph if you fill your thorax with air, but I have to remind myself of that every single time: DEEP BREATH IN.

Deadlifters also talk about taking the slack out of the bar, which I need to remind myself about as well: PULL THE SLACK. 

Put it all together and it looks like this snippet from Sunday (except I am not taking the slack out of the bar -- it's less important with a lighter load):

Open Mind, Steady Heart

Yesterday the Facebook algorithm served me up a post from a group for women in academia. A Catholic member was feeling pressure from her husband to accommodate his move toward the rad-trad end of the Catholic spectrum, and she was unhappy about it. She didn't want to wear a mantilla, she didn't want him commenting approvingly on other people's mantillas, she didn't understand why he had voted against Trump in 2020 and for him in 2024. Also, he has recently decided that women shouldn't be able to vote.

Her specific question was about the mantilla issue. How should she explain to him that she was not interested in veiling? As you might imagine, this was not the usual audience for questions about mantillas at Mass. And as you might also imagine, this was absoluuuuuuutely not an audience that has been reading First Things and saying, "Ah, yes, household voting! It would be so nice to have a man making the hard decisions for me!"

I posted a response to the mantilla question (and suggested some saner sources to counteract the husband's apparent recent immersion in poisonous nonsense), but the large majority of commenters were not interested in talking about mantillas. "Run!" they said. "Make an exit plan!" they exhorted her. "Did he have a recent brain injury?" they wanted to know.

It is possible, I know, that this husband's rightward lurch indicates an unresolvable issue that really does require the involvement of a domestic violence response team. But also? maybe not? Maybe she can just say, "There are a lot of perfectly acceptable ways to be Catholic. I find mantillas distracting and they are not obligatory. Not for me."

There is a part of me that always wants to believe people are persuadable, even though people are often not very persuadable at all.

When we first moved to Edinburgh I was surprised and unsettled by the secular flavor of life in Scotland. Empty churches, graying churches -- it felt lonely to be a 20-something practicing Catholic. One day I was walking through the city with small Alex when we passed by a Christian bookstore. I stopped in and said hello to the proprietor, who quickly discovered that I was Catholic. His instant response -- it's going to sound like I'm making this up but these are his actual words -- anyway, his instant response was: "you worship Mary!" 

After a brief and fruitless conversation I betook myself to our little stone house, where I immediately began a letter addressing his most egregious misconceptions. You guys, I laaaaaabored over that letter. I prayed, I reflected, I wrote and rewrote. I sent it off and received a swift reply. (It was the late 90s; people still wrote letters.) "You seem," the proprietor told me, "like you might possibly be a Christian. But most Catholics are not."

"Elwood," I said, waving this disappointing missive in the air, "I don't even think he read my whole letter." "Of course he didn't," said my husband. "What did you expect?"

Well, I expected him to read my letter, that's what.

That hopeful side of me still emerges with some regularity. I will EXPLAIN to the people on the internet that they are misinformed about out-of-hospital birth! I will EXPLAIN to my angry student that the syllabus policy is a good policy, stated clearly! I will EXPLAIN to Substance Abuser #1 that she is shortening her life by continuing to drink like this and that sobriety gets easier with time and practice!

I guess one strand of my jumbly feelings about this Facebook conversation is rooted in decades of observing that most people do not want to be persuaded; mostly they want to believe what they already believe. And yet-- and yet. How can we do better if don't know better? And how can we know better if people shrug their shoulders and assume we will not be persuadable?

Another strand of those jumbly feelings is my ongoing surprise about the speed with which the women in that group consign other people's marriages to the trash heap. I used to follow someone on Twitter who would often share links describing men behaving badly. "You gotta throw the whole man away [trash can emoji]," she would post over and over again. I'm not going to tell anybody to give a badly behaved Tinder date another chance, but a marriage is a different situation.

To be a spouse is to be an annoying spouse some of the time. But over the decades, someone else's annoying behavior can be an opportunity to grow in kindness, to see the whole person more clearly than the irksome habit, to learn to laugh together about the things that used to drive you up the wall. Just yesterday Elwood and I were joking about one of my annoying-spouse traits, my inability to see things in the fridge.

I do not mean to suggest that time and patience will solve every problem. We have certainly had low points in our marriage, places where I could not see a way forward. "I don't understand why you would stay," a friend once said to me about a particularly painful flavor of stuckness. "Well," I said, "because I made a vow before God." By the grace of God here we are, almost 32 years in.

Maybe other humans are fundamentally unknowable; maybe persuasion is mostly luck or serendipity. Maybe I am the old-fashioned one in the conversation, with my quaint and earnest thoughts about vows before God. But maybe also this is how we grow, slowly and with difficulty -- by being willing to reconsider even when we think we're right, by being willing to persevere with the people we have chosen to love.

26 of 47

On January 1 I started Trollope novel #26, The Vicar of Bullhampton, and I finished it last night.

Its central character is a clergyman named Francis Fenwick, who lives with his wife Janet in a village with a mill. We see a lot of the miller's family, because they're at the heart of one of the three plot strands. One of their sons gets mixed up with some unsavory characters, who are implicated in a murder. This situation arises in the wake of another sorrow: one of their daughters was beguiled by a scoundrel, and she has been cast out. There's so much Victorian vagueness that it's a little hard to tell what's going on with Carry Brattle, honestly. Is she an occasional sex worker? because she didn't have a lot of other options open to her? or is this a more permanent state of affairs? The vicar is trying to figure out how to help the Brattles, and floundering. Carry is perceived as being so degraded that she's beyond help, but the vicar is determined to figure something out.

Another plot strand involves the vicar's closest friend, Harry Gilmore, the squire who owns the mill. Gilmore is hopelessly in love (I'm using that phrase literally) with a character named Mary Lowther, who does not love him in return. Trollope, as is his wont, spends big chunks of the book musing about marriage through these characters. How should we make our decisions about marriage? How much influence should money have? How much should we care about the perspectives of our family and friends? How much does falling in love matter? 

The third plot strand involves a conflict between the vicar and the Marquis of Trowbridge, a silly and pompous old man who resolves to believe the worst of the vicar. The Marquis decides to punish the vicar by allowing the local Methodists to build a hideous chapel with a cacophonous bell right outside the vicar's front gate. (In Trollope's day, Methodists were dissenters and outsiders, not the mainline denomination that they are these days.)

I really enjoyed the character of the vicar, who wrestles persuasively with what it means to live a Christian life in a messy world. He keeps asking himself hard questions: what's the role of a clergyman in assisting his flock to live virtuous lives? I also enjoyed Janet and Mary and their relationship. 

This is a Barsetshire-adjacent novel, in which we get a brief glimpse of the Dragon of Wantley and hear from a familiar bishop, but it's not part of the chronicles. In addition to the marriage theme, we see some other Trollope touchstones: the human costs of the slow grinding of the legal system, the useful work that a skilled lawyer can do. We have a sprinkling of quirkily named characters (the tailor Cutcote, the publishing house of Bringémout & Neversell), and a uniquely Trollopean mode of condemnation: the dreaded annuity. It seems to me that whenever Trollope writes "..and they settled an annuity upon him," he's pretty much channeling this woman: 

Next I think I'll read one of Trollope's Irish novels. Watch this space for more scintillating Trollope content!