Light and Momentary

Limbo

My husband, who never gets sick, has been sick all week. "I feel better today!" he says each morning, but then he is back in bed by the afternoon. I haven't seen him like this since 1999. No consistent symptoms -- occasional fever, intermittent headache -- but this crushing fatigue and a persistent conviction that the house is freezing cold.

It has made for a strange and lonely and worrying week. I am going to urge him to schedule a doctor's appointment on Monday, I think, unless he's much better tomorrow.

I am in limbo at work. The college committee that makes promotion decisions normally meets right before the start of the semester and issues decisions immediately thereafter. This means they would, in normal circumstances, have made the decision on my promotion portfolio more than two weeks ago. Every time I get a new email I wonder if it's the one. "Maybe the dean got sick and it was hard to reschedule a daylong meeting," I tell myself. "Maybe one of the decisions required them to consult the legal office or the provost," I tell myself. "This is a great place to practice detachment," I tell myself.

I flinch a little every time I open my email. 

The substance abuser to whom I am closest is doing Dry January and I have been trying my best to be supportive. Just between you and me and the internet, I am tired of worrying about her future and tired of trying to help her deal with her issues. "I'm not making a permanent commitment," she has said very clearly. I have learned over the years that my emphatic pronouncements are unlikely to be useful to her, so I'm telling you instead: it seems like the height of folly to abandon the effort after 31 days. And yet-- sometimes people we care about make decisions we hate.

I do not get to decide what she will do on Thursday. 

Work is always full of service responsibilities in January and February: admissions portfolios, search committee responsibilities, annual evaluations. My judger is in high demand. This semester I have 136 students, and a correspondingly heavy email load. I am going through the motions in the office, unable to muster much enthusiasm. I am trying to wrap up a huge and daunting paper with a co-author who is not especially helpful. I sit down and attempt to describe what I've done, and I struggle to put words in a row. "It's just going to get rejected," I tell myself, feeling pre-defeated. 

All of my colleagues are friendly but only two of them are actual friends, people I get together with outside of work. Both of them are on sabbatical this semester, so work feels a little strange and lonely too. That's part of the problem.

Another part of the problem is that the weather has been appalling this week: brutal cold, followed by juuust enough warming to allow an ice storm to drift through the region, then a further thaw accompanied by steady rain and ubiquitous mud, ending with oppressive fog. It was so thick last night that I went the wrong direction on the highway, at the beginning of a trip I've made hundreds of times. We haven't seen the sun in days. I know that some of my glumness arises from a lack of outside time and exercise, and yet here I sit on the couch again.

***

This morning I was reading the beginning of Exodus and thinking about waiting in unpleasant circumstances. There are a bunch of things weighing on me right now that I cannot control. Right now I feel like I am still driving on the highway in last night's fog, unable to see very far in front of me.

But I will keep moving forward, just like I did last night. There are sensible things I can do, so I will do them. I can make a cozy pot of chili for dinner. I can do a streamlined lifting session in the basement with music I like. I can knock out most of the remaining admissions portfolios today. And then I can have some fun, chatting in German with Pete (who is home for the weekend, hurray!) while I work on a happy knitting project for Stella. Check it out: elephant-patterned mittens, with picot cuffs and a Latvian braid.

Okay. Onward. Here I go.

Alas

I was going to make a nice cozy pot of turkey-barley soup tonight. Just the thing for a cold night, I thought to myself, with the added benefit of getting rid of some of the stock taking up space in the fridge. A few days before Thanksgiving I like to serve roast chicken for dinner and make stock with the carcass, so there's plenty on hand for moistening stuffing and making gravy. But I often make more than I need, which means the extra stock is competing with the Thanksgiving leftovers for fridge space.

I minced an onion and a stalk of celery and set them to browning in a mix of olive oil and butter. I cubed up a few small carrots and added them too, and once everything was turning golden I added some slivered garlic and sprinkled the veggies with salt. I poured in stock and added a couple of handfuls of chopped leftover turkey, and then I grabbed the quick barley. We had an open box in the pantry, left over from last soup season, and I tipped it all in. It seemed a little clumpy, but I told myself it looked fine. If you are reading this post in hopes of finding an actual recipe for turkey-barley soup, you're almost done: simmer until the barley is tender and check the seasoning. Easy, cozy, golden, frugal -- who could ask for anything more? But this is not primarily a recipe post, because the story takes a sad turn:

Fifteen minutes later I peeked in and discovered an armada of little cream-colored crescent-shaped items afloat in my soup. 

For a moment I thought optimistically that all the broken bits of barley must have been crescent-shaped. And then my heart sank, and I pulled up the magnifier app on my phone to survey a few ships from the fleet, kind of like Gulliver in Lilliput if Gulliver had been an iPhone user preparing to eat the Lilliputians.

It turns out that boiling one's specimens in chicken stock does not assist in the process of accurate entomological identification, but the miniature navy in my soup pot looked an awful lot like these little guys. (Don't click that link if you're an easy-queasy person.)

"Hm," said Elwood, when I asked him for a second opinion, "that doesn't look right." 

He was less grossed out by the weevil picture than I was, pronouncing our visitors "free protein." "We didn't even have to pay for it," he added cheerfully. "Joe's always trying to eat more protein. And you! You want gains too, don't you?"

I don't want gains enough to eat larva soup, I assured him.

I need to find out who the patron saint of pantry infestations is, so I can pray earnestly: deliver us from weevils.

WWJD, IJHS?

It was chilly today, chilly enough that I was wishing for gloves when I went for a run. It was chilly enough that I was not expecting to see Foundation Snake curled up by the daffodils. I think he was regretting his choice to sunbathe on this damp gray day (insofar as a creature with a brain the size of a lentil can be said to experience regret), because he was looking pretty torpid when I prodded him gently with a stick.

"Maybe I could pick him up with barbecue tongs and drop him down the storm sewer," I thought to myself. But when I opened the garage door, I remembered that the barbecue tongs were indoors, in the kitchen. And maybe this will sound weird to those of you who are less squeamish about snakes, but I didn't want to pick him up with something that would eventually be used on food I hoped to eat.

"Hm," I said to myself as I looked around the garage. 

My eyes fell on the rakes. "Will I have more nightmares about snakes if I try to move him or if I don't try to move him?" I asked myself. (I have been having nightmares about snakes in the house since the Unspeakable Event.) "Is it a bad idea to move him with an implement that is designed to bring him closer to me?" I asked myself. I decided that I would plunge in anyway.

Instead of using the rake like a rake, I adopted a sort of croquet-player stance, or at least the sort of stance croquet players might use if they were aiming their mallets at cold-blooded living creatures associated with evils including the Fall, countless deaths* by suffocation and poisoning, and unrelenting slitheriness.

*I know, okay; I KNOW garter snakes are not venomous and can't suffocate anything and still I cannot keep from shuddering at the thought of them. MUCH slithery. VERY slitheriness.

Wielding my rake like a croquet mallet, I sent Foundation Snake flying down the driveway. He landed with his pale belly upward, his body arranged in curves that I would call graceful if they weren't so darned...serpentine. If his little lentil brain does have any regret circuitry, it must have been lighting up like a Christmas tree.

Belly-up snake in the driveway did not seem like a big improvement over belly-down snake by the daffodils, so I tried another croquet maneuver. This time he landed in the street, unmoving, and I found myself on the horns of a dilemma.

If I left him in the street, he would probably get run over. If I scooted him into the nearest yard, it would be a failure in charity. I do not like the lady who lives directly across from us but I do take "love thy neighbor" very seriously. I believe Jesus understands why I do not like her and also does not want me to yeet any snakes at her. So that option was out. 

There's a narrow vacant lot next to Grumpy Neighbor's house which seemed like a good second choice, but I am friendly with the neighbor on the other side. Probably she would not be thrilled with snake-yeeting that directed Foundation Snake closer to her foundation. I didn't want to try to put him in the storm sewer because (a) he would die there and (b) my aim was not great with my rake-turned-croquet-mallet. I can believe that snakes are good for the environment even as I wish very strongly for them not to be in my own personal environment.

I went back inside. "Marie," I said, "I have an ethical question."

While I was inside, Foundation Snake shook off his torpor, righted himself, and headed off to parts unknown. At least I hope they are unknown. Maybe the likeliest outcome is that he wriggled back up the driveway and into his favorite tiny hole in the mortar. Maybe I could spackle that little hole the next time I catch him outside. Maybe then he'll find new digs until it gets warm enough for the mason to come out and do something more permanent.

The title of this post stands for What Would Jesus Do, If Jesus Hated Snakes? Perhaps it seems to you that the obvious solution is for me to stop hating snakes. But it doesn't really seem to be a decision of my conscious mind. If the snakes on your property were causing you recurring nightmares, what would you do? 

Spirals

I am having a social anxiety flare, in which I am convinced that everyone in my orbit is secretly thinking, "Well, one silver lining of the pandemic was that I spent less time with that VERY ODD Jamie Gladly. Too bad that part's over!" And then the worry makes me a little weirder than normal, which doesn't help matters.

In my home, with people who love me, I tend to lean into the quirky. Tonight at dinner Elwood asked me to sing God Save The Queen for reasons I can no longer remember even though dinner was only a few hours ago, and I gave it my best shot. Unfortunately, even though I can sing multiple verses of My Country 'Tis of Thee, I am a little vague on the words to God Save The Queen.

God save our noble queen
Let her eat all the beans?

God save our noble queen
Grant her a ZamboNI?

That one doesn't even scan but OH MY did we laugh at the prospect of Queen Elizabeth driving a Zamboni around an ice rink.

The sad thing about the world beyond my dinner table is that the line between hilarious and VERY ODD is sometimes a little hard to make out, except in hindsight.

(I am not bursting into song in any committee meetings.)

We are a third of the way through the semester now, and it is feeling like midterm season. Twice this week I jolted awake at 5, thinking, "I'M BEHIND I'M BEHIND!" Maybe the thing I need most in order to put the brakes on the anxiety spiral is a good night's sleep.

I am also mired in anxiety about house stuff. Perhaps I am not the only one feeling stuck there? I called the people who have come in the past to clear clogged drains, because our washing machine drain is backing up. The old phone number went to a new person's voice mail, and the new person did not respond. When I called back, the new person's voice mail was full.

It always causes me some stress, arranging (or trying to arrange) for a person to come and take care of something around the house. It feels more anxious-making than usual right now. How far out will they be booked up? Everybody's booked up right now, correct? What are the odds that I can find someone who's being sensible about COVID?

I guess I have blogged myself into a partial solution here: I think I will call the plumber, who recommended the first drain guy and who seems likely to be reasonable about COVID. Maybe he can come? Maybe he can recommend someone else? This is a solvable problem.

(The bursting-into-song-at-the-dinner-table thing, though -- that seems to be an intractable issue.)

Nos morituri

All right, so that's a melodramatic title. But you guys, I was a vibrating stressball last week before the events at the Capitol, and they did not improve either my focus or my peace of mind.

There's a reason they tell you that you have to return to work for a year after your sabbatical or else pay back your sabbatical salary, as I discovered in a visceral way on Monday. I suspect that this year is especially weird -- people at work are frayed around the edges after a tough fall semester, and it shows. I am walking back into a weird and volatile mix of stuff that would be unwise to blog about, so I will be vague and make optimistic noises. Challenges! Challenges help us grow strong! So many challenges to embrace!

If you are an academic still recovering from a tough fall semester, you might want to skip this paragraph, because I am going to talk about some of the ways that sabbatical was harder than expected. I knew that the work would be hard, because science is hard. I knew that I would be working alone all semester, and that I would need to find ways to feel less isolated; COVID complicated those efforts. But it was also hard in ways I did not expect. About 80% of the time I felt like I was not doing enough work, even though this feeling was not borne out by the actual outcomes of my sabbatical. I was worried that the lack of external deadlines might cause me to be too soft on myself, but -- surprise! -- it had the opposite effect. There was a ton of kid stuff to deal with at the same time. Handling the online school hassles was one of the top-ten most unpleasant things I have dealt with in 24 years of parenting. The parenting issues also stirred up some marriage issues, regarding which I will only observe that emotional labor is hard work, but I can assure you it was No Fun At All. All of it together has been wearying.

I think my colleagues are expecting me to be refreshed and rarin' to go after a semester in which I was free to focus on my research, but I am finding myself in a pretty different spot. It would be impolitic for me to be frank with them, because they really did have a tough fall. But oh, my friends in the computer, may I tell you that I also found the fall difficult, and that the winter so far is not an improvement?

Today I've been remembering that the day before my first triathlon I was overwhelmed with worry about the race. The biggest surprise of the next day was how much fun I had -- there was joy where I had only thought about catastrophe. I think I have just been put together as a person who feels cautious about new things, and I have to do a bunch of new things this semester. I am reminding myself that focusing on catastrophe makes it harder to perceive joy. I am taking deep breaths and trying to hope for the best.

Wish me luck.

Sabbatical so far

In the first part of my sabbatical I submitted three papers. One was already written but needed to be revised. One was partially written but needed a ton of work. One I wrote from scratch. They all came back to me with revise and resubmit decisions. The first one was SUCH a painful revision. One of the reviewers had said that Topic A and Topic B were not related, but I disagreed with her assessment. (I was saying that our data on Topic A had implications for Topic B; she said that wasn't plausible and I should rewrite the intro and the discussion to exclude Topic B altogether.) I, however, am not a subject matter expert on Topic A or Topic B, and so it was a mighty slog to respond to that particular piece of feedback. It sounds a little silly to call it grueling, but my brain felt like it had been to the brain equivalent of a Pilates Reformer class after spending too many months at home on the brain couch eating Brain Doritos. Anyway, it's back under review.

The paper that I wrote from scratch came back with the easiest comments, but I didn't realize until I got in there and started editing that they were going to bug the SNOT out of me. One of my reviewers appears to be a non-native English speaker, and she had lots of Thoughts about my writing. She did not want me to expand my theoretical framework; she didn't have any issues with the fact that I couldn't report the lengths of the follow-up interviews because -- whoops! -- the audio files were deleted accidentally. But she does not like my long sentences, and she does not like "it" as a subject. Did I know that it is better (whoops, did it again) to avoid using "it" as the subject of a clause? I was so mad, stupid mad, about those comments, but I got the paper resubmitted.

I am currently working on the final set of revisions. Generally with an R&R you have comments from the editor, from two reviewers, and from the editorial office. I've done everything except the R1 comments, and they are tough. They're tough in a good way; this is peer review working as it is supposed to work. But man, I am finding it difficult and stressful. This is for the journal where the Heartbreak Paper met its first crushing rejection after extensive revision. It is entirely possible that I could pour my heart and brainpower into these revisions and R1 would still say "nope, insufficient" and recommend rejecting the manuscript. Peer review isn't supposed to work like that -- my PhD advisor calls it an indication of a poorly managed review -- but sometimes it does.

Lessons learned from sabbatical: I love academic writing, I love reviewing the literature, I love analyzing data. If I block off the time to do those things without any distractions, it makes me extraordinarily happy (whoops, there's another "it" as a subject again; it's a wonder they let me out of high school (dammit, there's another one in the selfsame sentence where I'm complaining about them! they're everywhere!). But you can't get papers published unless you can get them through peer review, and peer review makes me grumpy and anxious.

I have been casting about for a tidy philosophical ending to this post, but that's what I've got for now: grumpy, anxious, have to get it done anyway.

Pipe Cleaner Queen

Back in the spring one of the kids made me a pipe cleaner crown to wear when I was working. It was such a weird season: I was trying to get my class moved online and stay on top of my work, I was consuming a lot of news, and I was trying to help the kids make the transition to online school. It wasn't always easy for them to tell when I was thinking hard while staring at the laptop screen and when I was just looking grumpy while staring at the laptop screen, so I wore the crown when I needed to work without interruptions.

Today I donned the crown again. This is hard, you guys. It's a first-world privilege-y flavor of hard, in which we have jobs and savings and health (we hope! worrisome COVID exposure for one of the college kids, so we'll see what happens there), but it's hard nonetheless.

The school assumes a degree of parental availability that I find intensely frustrating, and a degree of tween tech savvy that I find unrealistic. I mostly get it; it's a terrible situation for them. But at the same time, it is making me BONKERS. Why would a teacher assume that I can go over to the school on short notice during work hours? Why would she pressure my child about it?

It seems like the teachers assume the tech learning piece will be quick and effortless. Install the browser extension and start using it immediately in this class discussion. Create a Flipgrid account and use their interface to upload a three-minute video, due today. Download this app and use it to submit your assignment in the next 30 minutes.

I am providing a lot of tech support and a lot of reassurance: it's not your fault if Google Classroom won't load. It's not your fault if Google Drive is laggy. If the audio isn't working on your school-supplied laptop, your teacher will work with you to complete the assignment later.

The kids are also dealing with some of the same video chat woes that the grownups are. Was that mean or just clueless? Was I weird and awkward in that conversation or was it normal for this weird and awkward situation? Peer feedback from junior high students is not improved by moving it online.

What I am finding with Stella is that the amount of figuring stuff out she has to do to make the technology work is siphoning off a non-trivial fraction of of her ability to learn the curricular content that the technology is supposed to deliver. I doubt she has any idea about the substance of the class in which she installed the browser extension, because she was so panicked about not being able to get it to work immediately. "Darling," I say, "everybody has trouble getting browser extensions to work sometimes. Grownups have trouble with this stuff too. It's going to be okay."

She would prefer it, I think, if it were already okay. I would also prefer it.

I have been feeling mounting frustration about the volume of interruptions. Elwood came home from the office on Friday and asked me how my day had been, and I surprised myself by starting to cry again. "I can't think hard about hard things if I'm interrupted all the time," I said, "and the school's assumption is that the kids can interrupt me. I can't work like this."

This morning at 8 I pulled out the pipe cleaner crown and a pair of earplugs, and I said, "If the house is actively burning down at some point in the next two hours, please let me know. If something is just smoldering, I expect you to address it yourselves. The fire extinguisher is in the pantry."

After those two hours I checked in with the kids and walked the dog around the block, and then I put the crown back on again. I was not asked to assist when the smoke alarm went off during lunch preparations, but I did need to assist with a medium-sized after-lunch meltdown. Were those things related-- would it have been a smoother afternoon if I had been more available in the morning? I don't know. I just don't know.

Keeping it real around here

This was a really hard week.

I was not expecting so many teary interruptions, piling up in spite of my attempts at pre-planning to accommodate kid needs. I was not expecting so much kid anxiety. I was not expecting such a relentless quantity of teacher email.

The transition to junior high is always tricky. There's a huge jump in the executive function requirements, and most kids experience some degree of overwhelm, in my experience. In person the teachers have always been great about acknowledging that difficulty.

"Great" is not the descriptor that springs to mind for this week. It makes sense that if you haven't taught brand-new sixth-graders online before, you might not be able to predict where there will be gaps between what they actually know and what you expect them to know.

I've always been fairly hands-off with my kids' education, because they need to learn to be in charge of their own stuff while the stakes are low. I'm all about learning from cheap mistakes. But I do not know how to translate that philosophy into pandemic education. And I do not really know how to make week #2 of online learning better than week #1.

I do not have a "tie-it-up-with-a-bow" ending for this post.

With all your skill

I didn't find out until this morning that the couple in charge of parish music is out of town today, and that they wanted me to play bass for their sub. Their sub is one of the best musicians in our parish, and I have kind of a complex about her.

If you performed as a kid, ever at all in any context, you doubtless encountered the pecking-order performers -- the kids who wanted you to know that they were better than you. Or maybe they weren't better than you themselves, but had you noticed that Rhonda was definitely better than you? Maybe in your choir/band/theater troupe/dance class the pecking-order performers were tripping over themselves to tell you that Rhonda had done an especially awesome job with her moment in the spotlight. I remember having to say very firmly to my teenaged self: Talent is not a zero-sum game. Your voice is not worse because hers is beautiful.

This particular musician at my parish brings up many memories, many many memories, of days when I spoke firmly to my teenaged self. In general the culture in our music ministry is the very opposite of a pecking-order culture. It's one of my favorite things about the ministry, actually, the way that the directors balance the need for technical skill with the joy of making music for the glory of God. 

That particular joy has been feeding my soul in these uncertain weeks. The world is on fire, COVID-19 cases are exploding, the president is displaying troubling authoritarian tendencies. But for 45 minutes on Saturday afternoons I can sit next to the giant amp with my bass and create a gently percussive musical floor for my musician friends, as the eternal word of God is proclaimed and the people of my parish receive our faithful God in holy communion. This is not what I thought August would look like six months ago, or even three months ago, but the Mass remains an undeserved gift and comfort and also there is something deeply right about a I-IV-V chord progression. I was created to perceive beauty, and to learn to create beauty, in order that I might know more fully the Source of all beauty. In the midst of the unknown, beauty is a powerful solace.

I thought about canceling when I saw the schedule for today, but instead I showed up with my bass. To my surprise, the lead musician showed up late and a little frazzled, and in need of a quick check-in. I had asked Elwood to pray over me before I left home, and in the car on the way to Mass I had said, "Okay, Jesus, I need some IMMEDIATE BRAINWEASEL HELP here." And do you know, the brainweasels were quiet, and the music went smoothly, and I felt prompted afterward to send off a little extra kindness via text.

Today was the feast of St. Alphonsus Liguori, who is one of my particular heavenly friends because he struggled so with scrupulosity. I ask him to pray for me when the NOT GOOD ENOUGH thoughts are getting me down. Maybe it's a little easier when I'm playing the bass than when I'm singing or playing the flute or guitar, because the psalmist's mandate to play "with all your skill" sets the bar pretty low: I haven't played the bass long enough to have much skill. Even so, I played those I-IV-Vs (with some occasional IIs and VIs thrown in) to the best of my ability.

And I have to say: I'm glad I didn't cancel. 

That's just Susie

When I am under stress I get OCD symptoms. I think I probably met the criteria for the disorder when I was in junior high, but things have mostly been better since then. Sometimes I would need to work at pushing back the intrusive thoughts like "the-kids-will-all-get-lead-poisoning-it-will-be-your-fault" in order to deal with the actual painters, but I could do that. It was helpful to learn that scrupulosity is a religious flavor of OCD; it explained a lot and helped me to let go of some groundless anxieties. Like I said, things were mostly better.

They are not currently better.

The last time I felt remotely like this was early 2009: I was newly postpartum, Stella was tiny, and I wasn't sure if I would be able to finish a PhD while also being a competent and engaged mother to five children. I am generally more bothered by the O slice of OCD, the intrusive thoughts, than by the C slice, the compulsion to complete an action. I've had issues with both, but I'm more of an O girl. After Stella was born the intrusive thoughts were all about her: "it-would-be-so-awful-if-you-put-the-baby-in-the-oven" "please-don't-put-the-baby-in-the-oven." I was not experiencing anything like psychosis. It was just jarring and awful and unreasonable and repetitive. I called a counselor. 

I only saw her for a few sessions, but she was very helpful. She said, "What if you don't try to fight your anxiety? What if you just sit with it, while not giving it too much weight? What if you imagined that the voice behind your worries and intrusive thoughts had a name? What if you said to yourself, 'Oh, that's just Susie, and she always sounds like that'?"

Things got better.

But this is a bad season for people with tendencies toward anxiety and OCD, and I am struggling: unusually jumpy, unusually weepy. Today I joined a lunchtime Zoom meditation session that my university was offering, but I left it in tears in the middle. They asked us to think about someone dear to us, and I thought of my Alex. He feels so far away right now. I am SO SO GLAD he and his friends left NYC to hole up in upstate joint social isolation, but I am still pretty worried about him. Today's intrusive thoughts: "if-he-died-how-would-you-get-his-body-back-for-burial?" "he-used-to-have-asthma-so-he's-higher-risk-than-most-young-adults" "if-he-died-in-New-York-he-would-die-alone."

Because we're still figuring out exactly how COVID-19 spreads, there's a lot of dubious information floating around. I think it's probably the OCD talking when I repeatedly consider putting the newspapers in a 200-degree oven for 30 minutes before anyone is allowed to handle them. I think it's probably overkill to leave the groceries out in the cold for a couple of days before bringing them in. (Though I've seen that advice in a lot of places. Does that mean no one is buying ice cream right now?)

This morning when I woke up I had a momentary surge of certainty. We do not know what life will look like on the other side of this pandemic, but God does. He loves us and wills our good, and we can trust him. Things went downhill from there, but I'm grateful for that flash of knowing. I'm grateful that Sunday's gospel will be the story of Lazarus. "There will be a stink," they cautioned Jesus. But he doesn't need us to tell him that death is ugly. He loves us; he is with us in our suffering; he has authority over life and death. I believe that.

But Susie, who has been mostly quiet for a long time, has morphed into a 60-foot tall fanged version of herself like the main character in the children's book Frankenstella. Susie is pretty loud right now.

One of my best Susie-shrinking strategies is an early bedtime, so I am going to call it a night. I'd appreciate your prayers, friends.

Hypochondriacs Anonymous

How many of us are doing that thing where we sniffle and then say WAIT WAS THAT A HARBINGER-OF-DOOM SNIFFLE OR AN ORDINARY SNIFFLE? I am doing that thing.

I have been mildly sick early since last week -- so mildly and in a way so much at variance with earlier reports of COVID-19 symptoms that I kept telling myself sternly I needed to buck up, buttercup, and stop worrying. I had a drippy nose when those side-by-side charts with symptoms for cold/flu/COVID-19 were saying that a drippy nose meant you had a cold. Except -- oh, wait, some people with COVID-19 infection have drippy noses, apparently. I've had a mild sore throat, an intermittent mild headache, and some intermittent mild chest tightness for, like, 12 days. (But was it actual chest tightness or was it hypochondria? Since I could finish a run without distress, it must have been hypochondria, I told myself.) There were some minor GI symptoms mixed in there, and just tonight I read that those are actually fairly common in response to the COVID-19 virus. No fever ever, no cough ever (EXCEPT WAIT WAS THAT A COUGH [No, that was a swallow of water going down the wrong way. Calm down, self; calm the heck down]).

I don't want to live an all-caps life here while we figure out what the future is going to look like, but I've got some all-caps tendencies I need to keep reining in. You all know that I fall on the more anxious end of the anxious-peaceful spectrum. The reality of LURKING INVISIBLE PATHOGENS that will KILL SOMEONE'S GRANDMA is a tough one for folks with OCD tendencies, which is also me. 

Please pardon this self-indulgent post, which is partially me worrying that I had a mostly asymptomatic COVID-19 infection which I spread willy-nilly last week before the world caught fire, before we knew that a drippy nose didn't actually mean I could assume I had a little cold. (I was washing my hands fanatically all week, I promise. Those OCD inclinations are good for something.) I am also worrying about what comes next -- of the people I love, who will be affected, and how?

I am thinking about that line from Screwtape, about how the work of the devil is to encourage us to keep imagining our responses to a zillion hypothetical and contradictory situations, because if we seek grace to face the actual trials of the present moment (i.e., the uncertainty and fear), the supply will probably be ample. Good advice for times like these, yes?

There is no toilet paper

There is no toilet paper. I think when I look back on this week I will be tempted to say, "Perhaps I was exaggerating. Maybe there was toilet paper and I just didn't know it." But I have been looking, and the aisles are empty.

Spring break never works out quite as well as I think it ought to. I have always felt a little guilty about this: I have a week in which I don't have to fulfill my primary work responsibility and I still get paid! I should live it up! But-- it's always a little lonely, because no one else in my family has time off. And I always have to finish a ton of my second-least-favorite work responsibility (grading), usually with a side of my absolutely-least-favorite work responsibility (dealing with plagiarism), and I have always made myself a Big List of things I will catch up on around the house. 

This year I decided I would plan in some fun. I would use credit card points to visit Alex in NYC! (Trip canceled due to Elwood's coronavirus concerns. I'm really glad I wasn't in NYC this week.) I would make a day trip to Chicago instead! (Trip canceled at the last minute, because yesterday was a wild day, friends.) I would get together with friends! (Both of the people I'd made plans with canceled on me, one because she was sick and the other because it's been a wild week for higher ed administrators.) I would try out a barre class! (Conflict with ballet; didn't work out.) I would nail all of my workouts for my 10K training program! (They postponed my 10K race and my motivation tanked.) I would schedule a massage! (This one I did manage to complete, but I expended too much mental energy wondering what germs were lurking in the facility.)

So I spent a lot of time this week avoiding my grading and refreshing the coronavirus case counter. I took a 48-hour Twitter break when it got to be too much, but I am not sure how to balance the "it's too much" part of Twitter with the "offers smart funny human contact in a season of social isolation" part of Twitter. I don't know how much my OCD history and tendencies come through here, but I am trying to be patient with myself, to remember that my particular brain is not well-suited to this degree of uncertainty but that things will probably be okay just the same.

It's a strange time to be alive, I keep saying. Would I feel better if we had more toilet paper? Maybe the decision to subscribe to four print newspapers was prescient and not just anachronistic. I hope that's just a joke. Who knows, though?

A week

On Monday morning one of my college roommates texted me: "I need to talk to you. Extremely important." One of our friends from the dorm where we lived as freshmen died suddenly on Sunday night. It still doesn't seem real.

On Tuesday morning I learned about the monster tornado that tore through Nashville and parts east. My entire family of origin lives in the Nashville area. I could tell pretty quickly that my parents and brother were south of the devastation, but I wasn't sure about my sister. She's fine, it turns out; no property damage, no people damage. But if I were the Weather Empress, I would ensure that monster tornadoes stayed a little further away from my entire family of origin.

On Wednesday my university decided that the coronavirus threat was enough of a concern to take action. (Vague vague vagueness, she said vaguely.) I was going to visit Alex over spring break, but Elwood and I had a sobering conversation about some of the small-tail possibilities, and I decided to stay home instead.

Today Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the presidential race, and I am sad about living in a world that seems bound and determined to tell smart women that they're not electable. "I couldn't stand her," said some middle-aged white guy on a friend's Facebook post about her post-Warren sadness. COME ON, middle-aged white guy; surely you can see this is not the place. 

Tonight the Supreme Court permitted the execution of Nathaniel West to proceed. West was involved in the deaths of three Alabama police officers; prosecutors say he lured them to the house where a confederate shot them. He did not pull the trigger, and he declined a plea offer when an attorney assured him he wouldn't be sentenced to death. A divided jury sentenced him to die. The Supreme Court granted and then lifted a stay of execution. Nathaniel West died by lethal execution shortly thereafter. 

This was not a pro-life decision.

So I am kind of wondering what tomorrow will bring. I was thinking about Psalm 91: though a thousand fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, near you it shall not come. I know that's supposed to be comforting, but it also sounds like a lot of nearby carnage.

Flat Stanley's Tire Pump

I read Flat Stanley in second grade, so my memory of the details is a little uncertain. But in my recollection of the book he wakes up his brother because he is sniffling sadly in the middle of one night. He's tired of being flat. It was okay for a while and now he's over it. So his brother inflates him with a bicycle pump, and Stanley goes back to his ordinary three-dimensional life.

We will gloss over the version of human anatomy in which people are essentially walking soufflés, able to puff or de-puff with no harm done to their innards. No, that doesn't quite work -- you can't blow a soufflé back up with a tire pump. 

Anyway, I was thinking about Flat Stanley because I have been walking around this fall in a state of perpetual deflation. I still can't tell you much about the current Gladly Troubles, but they are indeed troubling, and they have pretty much sapped my get-up-and-go. I can't seem to stay on top of the grading, much as I try. This morning I got up at 4:30 and worked like a woman determined to get caught up. And somehow-- I'm still not caught up.

I've been seeing a counselor since the summer, and she keeps telling me that it's normal for me to feel flattened. "This is a family crisis," she says in calm and reassuring tones. I am ready for the crisis to be over, though, and pretty annoyed that it doesn't seem to care much about my preferred timetable. 

It's not as if every day is a slog, the way it was at the beginning. The first week was so painful, kind of like I imagine an abscessing tooth would be. After the acute phase of an abscess is over, the dental patient has to get used to the new bite, the unaccustomed gap. There's not the wrenching pain that sent her to the dentist, but there's all that adjusting to the aftermath. That's where I am these days, but with added uncertainty, as if the dentist might need to pull an additional 6 or 8 teeth but maybe not and also we don't know when we'll find out.

Yesterday I pulled my SAD light out of the basement, even thought that's usually a November move. I read in front of it yesterday, and I graded in front of it today, and it did turn out to be an unexpectedly productive day despite my ongoing not-caught-up-ness. I'll keep doing what I can. But tonight an image of Flat Stanley flashed across my mind, and I can't help wishing for a quick and painless restoration, a metaphorical bicycle pump. 

Sometimes it's a bummer that life is more complicated than children's books make it out to be.

Free-range mom musings

One of my favorite things about our location is its proximity to a multi-use trail. We live half a mile from a junction known as the Triangle, where visitors can grab a drink or stop in the bathroom before they head north or south or east. There's a little amphitheater as well.

The trail runs all over town, through neighborhoods better and worse, and now and then there are incidents. Maybe once a year, on average, there's a story in the newspaper about a bad encounter -- a robbery, or an assault. There are thousands of trail users in this area, though, so one newsworthy incident per year is a rate that I can live with. I've had my own moments of uncertainty. A mentally ill man used to hang out on my most-frequented stretch of the trail, muttering and occasionally carrying a big stick. Once I was biking at dusk when I saw this huge guy ahead of me. He moved onto my side of the trail and lifted his hands over his head in what looked like a menacing gesture. I wasn't sure what to do. Just bike past him? Bike at him? As I got closer I realized that he was plugged into his headphones, jamming out. He had danced over to my side of the trail, not realizing that anyone was nearby.

About ten days ago a woman was assaulted at the Triangle. She headed out for an early run, but a man knocked her down and began pulling at her clothes. She fought him off and called the police. She's okay. They haven't found the attacker. In the past I've had a dozen reasons for not worrying too much about trail incidents. It's almost always well trafficked, I tell myself. That assault happened right by the sketchy neighborhood. I don't run with any valuables. Etc. But this assault did not happen by the sketchy neighborhood. It happened in my neighborhood, in the place where I am most likely to run.

Stella is doing a summer camp at the amphitheater. In past summers, we've had pairs of Gladly kids walk home from camp by themselves; this year she's the only attendee from our family. Today I walked over to pick her up, and we headed down the sun-dappled trail together. And I wondered: how much weight should I give this news? Should it change my own decisions about where and when I run? It's the happiest place in town for me. I'd hate to think it was unwise for me to be there alone. (But is it?)

And what about Stella? She's 10 now. It is entirely reasonable for her to walk home from the amphitheater after camp is over. But should I tell her to walk home on the town sidewalks, avoiding the trail? Should I tell her what happened on the trail and let her decide how she feels about taking the trail alone? Should I contact the neighborhood mom whose kid lives a block away and see if she's interested in having them walk home together? I'm undecided. And I don't know if I'll get pushback from the camp staff if I tell them Stella will be signing herself out and walking home from now on.

I was mulling it over at the breakfast table when I saw this article about Dutch parenting. I suspect a Dutch parent would chuckle about my concerns. Twenty-first century America is a weird place to be a mom.

The tenure timeline

Today, in the middle of the day, I knocked back a shot of bourbon with two of my colleagues.

We are up for tenure this year, the three of us, and as of today things are out of our hands. At least until February, there's pretty much nothing we can do. We lost access to our document repositories at midnight.

Would you like to know how getting tenure works? I bet you have been waiting with bated breath for someone to tell you all about it, or at least for someone to tell you what persuaded Jamie Gladly to take up day-drinking.

You already know that I've been working on The Application for a long time. I had to write a letter to the provost, and fill out an application for the provost, and fill out a separate application for the college that wound up being 21 pages long what with the teaching philosophy and the research statement, and update my curriculum vitae eleventy-one times, and make sure it aligned with my online productivity report data.

The two hardest pieces of the process were: (1) the part where I had to unearth documentation for every single activity I put in my application. Not just every single peer review I've ever completed, but every single committee assignment, every single grant submission receipt. I just did not know in 2013 that I should be saving committee assignment rosters.

Also (2) I had to re-read every student evaluation and pull out representative examples of feedback, both positive and negative, to accompany my table of quantitative results. (Guess which comments lodged in my brain afterward?)

Huh, I am afraid this is already boring but YOU GUYS there are SO MANY MORE tasks I could list. I have been working on this for months, picking my way through a ravaged minefield in perfectionist hell. Remember my new year's resolutions post, where I said I was going to complete that application with aplomb? Haaaaa, I'm so hilarious. But here I am on the other side of that particular minefield, with all four limbs and all 20 digits.

The department committee in charge of faculty performance will complete its formal review of my portfolio (in contrast to the unofficial review, in which they requested some teeny-tiny edits, like line-spacing kinds of things) and write a letter summarizing their recommendation by December 15. It goes to the college committee, which meets about a month later. That's the Big Decision, even though the result won't be official until I hear from the provost in May. It's rare but not unheard of for the college to override the department, and it's even rarer for the provost to nix a college-level recommendation.

It's a little silly for me to be angsty about it, because the department wants me to get tenure. Even if something bizarre happens, like if the college committee stands up as one and says JAMIE GLADLY, WE UNMASK YOU AS AN IMPOSTOR; GET THEE HENCE-- even then, my chair will have my back in the appeal process and she is a freaking wizard. Wizardess? Wizardina? (Witch is not the word I want here.)

I know that I can trust my chair. If my external reviewer letters were terrible, she would have discreetly asked me to suggest some additional names. If I had a secret backstabby enemy on the department committee, my chair would respond masterfully. (Side note: how come men get to be masterful wizards while women are mistress-ful witches? I do not approve.) And yet there is something irremediably stressful about boiling down the last twelve years of my work life into a single up-down decision: Is Jamie Gladly good enough Y/N?

Ergo: bourbon at lunch. Wish me luck, y'all.

Archogenic Dysboulia

Donald Trump is eroding my will. 

I don't mean will as in will to live. It's not active despair. It's just that his presence in the Oval Office, and the continued cheerleading of people who seem to think that the S&P index is the only performance index that matters, and the smaller but nonetheless noisy numbers of people who actually support evils like family separation at the border -- it's grinding me down. There's a limit to the number of times that I am willing to call my reps and talk back to the radio, to say, "Hey, truth matters. Science matters. Manners matter."

Remember when presidents didn't call people "horseface," or at least not in public? I miss those days.

I keep thinking that I am going to GET BACK in the exercise groove and GET EXCITED about the beautiful fall vegetables in my crisper (and, simultaneously, GET RID of the 12 or 15 surplus pounds I have been hauling around since the election). I resubscribed to FlyLady because I was feeling the need for MORE ORDER. (It turns out that the Rubba Scrubba ads are no less annoying in 2018 than they were in 2010. It also turns out that if you filter the FlyLady messages to their own folder because the useful bits are all jumbled up with Rubba Scrubba ads, your house does not get any cleaner.)

You know the thing in my brain that used to make me say "Let's read a Dickens novel! It will only take 3 weeks!"? That thing is only limping along these days. I've got impulse power instead of warp speed. It took me three months to reread Pickwick Papers, and I didn't enjoy it very much. I rely pretty heavily on my ability to say "Let's DO THE THING!" with enthusiasm and a measure of efficiency, and the discovery that it has become less reliable is troubling me.

Neurologists have a label for the condition in which patients seem to lose their will: aboulia (sometimes spelled abulia). When patients have aboulia they don't want to start anything, and they can't follow through even if someone else helps them to get the ball rolling. I don't actually have a case of aboulia; I know that. Even so, it's troubling to see the shift in my thinking. I know I would be happier if I got the weeds out of the peony bed...but I don't want to get out there with the spade. I might really enjoy casting on that new shawl...but brioche stitch is hard and sometimes frustrating, so why bother?

My will is not totally MIA, but it feels kind of fractured. Ergo, dysboulia. It is clearly connected to the shenanigans in DC, so I am calling it archogenic, or leader-induced. The temptation to self-medicate keeps growing. Anybody else feeling the same way?

If you can't say anything nice

I try to post mostly good things about my job here, or to be vague if I feel the need to grumble. BUT YOU GUYS my job is making me a little hyperventilate-y just now. I am teaching an online summer class and it is not going well.

I think before you take a summer class it's easy to think of summer classes as laid-back. Mellow. It's summertime; ergo, the living is easy. Students also tend to think that online classes are easier than the face-to-face versions. So a summer online class should be approximately as onerous as taking a nap, right?

Except I am the person trying to squish a semester's worth of material into a month, and there is no way for that to be anything but onerous. This is stuff they will need to know, and many of them are just not learning it. A few of them don't even seem to be attempting to learn it. I can view the user stats on the back end of my course management software, and I still have students who have viewed a single-digit number of files here in week 3 of the term.

My chair and I had a helpful conversation about the class last week. I also sat down with our campus coordinator of online education, and implemented a couple of her suggestions. But here is a true fact: I can spend a lot of hours captioning my lecture videos to spell out the hard words for my students, but it's going to be easier for them if they watch the videos than if they don't. I have several students who are taking this class while working full-time. One is taking two online classes and also working full-time. As far as I know the Ministry has not issued her a Time Turner.

Right now the very last student is taking the second exam. It's tricky to write an exam for an online class. I don't want them to be able to google their way through it, and so I'm asking them to think and synthesize. I've been watching the scores trickle in today and the conclusion is unmistakable: thinking and synthesizing are hard.

One-way enthusiasm is also hard. I am doing my best to give them engaging and thought-provoking lecture videos. I am trying to set up online discussions in which they can learn from each other while contemplating interesting questions.

It doesn't seem to be working.

Post-hoc social anxiety

I used to have really painful social anxiety. When I was in high school and college I would find myself consumed by certainty that I had said the wrong thing. I remember the feeling well: my insides seizing up and my gaze drifting down. Some of the trouble with social anxiety is that it has a self-perpetuating component. If you are gripped by worry and uneasy about making eye contact, it's easier to miss cues or to lag a beat behind the conversation.

These days I am usually much more relaxed about conversations with people I don't know well. You know, weirdly, as I am typing this, I am thinking that I'm more likely to have social anxiety moments after I've been talking to old friends-- as if the presence of someone who knew me when I struggled more with social anxiety somehow zombie-fies a part of me that has mostly been laid to rest.

I spent most of the past 24 hours with one of my college roommates. We met up last night at dinnertime and ran a 10K together this morning, and she caught the last train out of Gladlyville this evening. It was great to see her. And yet now that she is gone I am reflecting on our conversations with a self-critical eye. Here's an even weirder part: the thing I am feeling most uncomfortable about was one in which I was talking about ways to avoid a person who causes me musical anxiety. That's like a zombie ouroboros of avoidable anxiety right there, friends: two things I do not really need to worry about, chasing their tails inside my weary brain. 

True confession: sometimes I remember things I said thirty years ago and flinch. There must be some kind of statute of limitations for flinching at dorky comments uttered by one's teenage self. If there is such a statute lodged inside my brain, it allows for more than thirty years of flinching. Alas. Let it go, self. Teenagers say dorky things; it's okay.

It seems to me that many bloggers cop to social anxiety -- more than you might encounter in a random sample. Does it seem that way to you too? Is it because blogging lets us take our time over the things we might want to say? Are we pale and nerdy sorts, communing with our laptop screens because face-to-face conversations are too unpredictable? I suppose it's a blessing that my own social anxiety is so much diminished from the orange-alert level that used to feel normal. I'm still looking for tricks that might help me respond effectively to the residue.

True-False

T   F

Jamie loves grading with her whole heart.
Jamie has been grading all day long.
She is trying and failing to offer it up.
Probably nothing bad would happen if she converted all of her assessments in all of her classes to T/F tests.
Probably she will not actually be grading until the end of time.
Probably she will get to bed sooner if she grades the papers instead of writing desperate blog posts.