Light and Momentary

Resolutions for Ordinary Time

I have been in a bit of a funk, friends. My mood always dips in the short gray days of mid-December, but this year it dipped more deeply than usual and it has been taking longer to rebound. The day after Christmas we were driving to my in-laws' house and I could feel my anxiety pulsing, squashing me flat like a malevolent invisible anvil. "If I am not feeling much better in ten days' time," I said, "I should make an appointment to go to the doctor and request an SSRI prescription."

It is now 15 days later and I am definitely better, a largely-back-to-normal kind of better, but I am still riding intermittent swells of grumpiness, irrational anger, and melancholy. I do not really want to take an SSRI and, for separate (possibly dumb) reasons, I do not really want to go to the doctor. So for today I am just going to blog about it, and watch for a continued upward trend, and reassess as needed. So this is the frame of mind in which I am thinking about post-Christmas resolutions: they have to be reasonable and gentle. 

1. Soul.
1. Elwood and I are going to join a small group our church is sponsoring? I am not sure how it is going to go? I will report back? This first resolution does not sound very resolute, I know, but that's where I am right now.
2. After 7 consecutive years of reading the whole Bible every year, I am taking a break from the law/history/prophecy parts of OT (see above re: reasonable and gentle; I can't deal with Judges and Ezekiel right now). The 2023 morning reading plan is NT + wisdom books + some other spiritual reading, currently Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa. (I am a total Fr. Cantalamessa fangirl, but his book is not stirring my soul at the moment. We shall see.)
2. Body.
1. Prioritize joyful exercise, including daily mobility work. Nobody else is going to prioritize exercise for me, my friends, and it makes such a difference in my mood, energy level, and capacity to take ridiculous emails in stride. I am going to try to focus on M/W cardio and T/Th lifting, with some of each on Sat/Sun and Friday as a rest day.
2. Make more yummy food that I enjoy. Each week, I want to plan a couple of dinners to look forward to, and make enough to pack leftovers for lunches. I also want to find a couple of appealing salad dressings. Recommendations are welcome.
3. Mind.
1. Keep going to bed with Victorians, with the goal of finishing another three Trollope novels and some Dickens novellas/nonfiction. This was an excellent 2022 resolution.
2. Read the Dorothy Dunnett Game of Kings series.
3. Prioritize writing at work. I feel SO MUCH BETTER about every facet of my job when every day starts with an inviolable writing block. Even when I have to get to the office at 7:15 to make it happen, it's worth it.
4. Wider world.
1. Maintain a small-tasks block à la Laura Vanderkam with the goal of keeping my household in order. So many frustrations can be diminished or eradicated with a modest amount of effort. It feels better to expend the effort than to live with the frustrations.
2. Take myself and my mandolin to a local music group that meets each week and see if it seems like a good fit. Don't be bashful about being a beginner.

Coefficients of Friction

This summer I am doing something I've wanted to do for years: the Faculty Success Program from the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. It is focused on building sustainable academic writing habits, and the heart of the program is writing every workday for at least 30 minutes. This is harder than one might think. 

One piece of the program is looking squarely at our inner resistance: when you pause and listen to the voices that tell you not to write, what are they saying? I was familiar with the idea of writing resistance from Steven Pressfield's War of Art, but today I have been thinking about two insights I wanted to share from the daily practice of pushing back against resistance.

The first comes from high school physics. Remember learning about coefficients of static and dynamic friction? You need more oomph to put the object in motion than you do to keep the object in motion. I feel this SO MUCH with academic writing: I listen to the cacophony reverberating inside my brain, saying, "not worth it - won't get published - co-author will hate it - don't bother," and I struggle to sit down and start the timer. The coefficient of static friction is pretty high. But once the timer is going I remember that the coefficient of dynamic friction is markedly lower: I can zip along fairly happily for 30 minutes. (This is reminding me of the Wait But Why piece on procrastination.)

Not only do those coefficients differ from each other, they vary from week to week depending on what I've got going on. It's easier to sit down and work on a paper if that's just a Thing I Do Every Day (lower static friction). It's easier to make good use of my writing time today if I wrote yesterday and the day before and left myself some brief notes about what to do next than if I am trying to get back to a neglected paper I last worked on six months ago, now caked in metaphorical dust and guilt (lower dynamic friction). It appears that I can bring down both coefficients with careful habit formation, at least some of the time. And I want to remember that yesterday I was feeling lousy about some stuff in my personal life, but when I sat down to write it magicked away the icky feelings for a while. Temporarily high static friction, surprisingly low dynamic friction -- not what I expected. You won't know how it feels to write until you sit down and do it.

The second thing I want to remember is the framing of resistance as something intended to protect you. Academic publishing is so often terrible and stupid. The process of publishing a scholarly paper involves a lot of soul-sucking sweat and toil, with moments of joy but a whole lot of hassle. It's no wonder your brain is like "...must we? perhaps the spices need alphabetizing instead?" This framing made me say, "Oh! This is why I resist exercise! And grading! Because they often feel terrible even though I know I ought to do them!" It's not that I'm undisciplined; it's that my brain is looking out for me, or at least the short-term version of me.

My small-group coach suggested a "maximum timer" as a strategy for grading resistance: what if you are only "allowed" to do an hour of grading in a day? That could be extremely motivating, and it could also help me deal with the illogical but persuasive voice in my head that says, "You shouldn't write if you're behind on grading, but also grading is terrible so let's do it later."

Today I sent a manuscript draft off to my co-author after a year in which "I ought to write that paper / I don't want to write that paper" kept looping through my brain. Turns out it is easier to write papers if a person sits down consistently and puts words in a row. Who knew?

Habits are hard

Do you remember that I was all fired up after I read Younger Next Year for Women, and that one of my new year's resolutions was to exercise six days a week?

I am finding it difficult.

I am trying to be patient with myself, because building habits takes time, but not too patient with myself, because inertia will not do me any favors in the long run.

When I was a young adult I would get really frustrated with myself about trying to build disciplined prayer habits. This is the reality: it takes practice to do hard things consistently. Probably some of the things I learned in that process will be useful here. For instance, if you start first thing in the morning, other stuff doesn't interfere. The Liturgy of the Hours is a non-negotiable part of the first 30 minutes of my day. It might not happen in the first 10 minutes, but I am definitely feeling a little itchy if I haven't started by then. I can't do aerobic exercise immediately after waking up because I have to take a beta-blocker first, but I can take the beta-blocker right away and exercise once it kicks in. This strategy is probably especially useful as the weather heats up and the cool(-ish) part of the day ends more quickly.

ALSO: breaking hard things into pieces is helpful. I almost never sit down and pray the whole rosary all at once, but I never go to sleep without finishing it either. This works for exercise too, right? Actually doing a 10-minute sun salutation is better than imagining the 45-minute yoga session I might get to later, when I feel motivated, which -- oops, maybe I'll be motivated tomorrow. (Related: another useful strategy is tying chunks of the rosary to things I must do every day, like walking to work or washing dishes. Don't know quite how to do that with exercise, though -- get a dog so I have to walk it?)

ALSO ALSO: a certain amount of box-ticking is motivating for me, like with this Bible-in-a-year plan that I'm doing for the seventh time. The timing would be just about perfect for me to sign up for an August triathlon, and then I'd have boxes to tick and an event on the calendar spurring me to tick them.

ALSO ALSO ALSO: it's mostly about showing up. In my prayer life there are transcendent moments and there are ordinary moments. You can't force transcendence; the ordinary moments outnumber the transcendent moments by a wide margin. At the same time, you (probably) don't get to transcendent if you don't show up. Maybe with exercise I need more consistency and lower expectations.

ALSO ALSO ALSO ALSO: it's generally easier to make time on weekends than on weekdays -- my weekends always include Mass and an hour in the adoration chapel; my weekdays usually do not. It might be helpful if I can reframe my thinking about weekend days as "opportunities for bonus exercise time" rather than "opportunities to sit at the dining room table and do extra puzzles in between catching up on stuff around the house."

Hopscotch

Last year I found myself a little weary of the Old Testament. Maybe, I thought to myself, I wouldn't read the whole Bible through in 2022. Maybe I would focus a little more narrowly. Maybe I would cultivate a lectio divina practice. But then I decided to stick with what I'd been doing. This is the seventh year in which I have tackled the project, and seven years seemed like a more suitable place to stop than six. (Were there six fat cows in Pharaoh's dream? No, there were not.)

In one of Lauren Winner's books (probably Mudhouse Sabbath) she quotes a rabbi talking about the Torah. In my recollection he compares it to a gem. "Turn it and turn it and turn it," he says (approximately); there's always new beauty to see in its depths when you look at it from another angle. This time through I kept telling myself that in Leviticus, and in Numbers, and in Deuteronomy: turn it and turn it and turn it. There are bits and pieces of those books that I do love (Balak! that story makes me laugh and laugh!), but I find that the sloggity-slog level is high at that point and it only increases from there. I was finishing Deuteronomy and thinking about what lay ahead with a sinking heart. I did not want to read about slaughter in Joshua. And I would rather read Leviticus four times than read all those awful happenings at the end of Judges.

I skipped ahead to Ruth, and then jumped into 1 Samuel. I'm going to have to go back to Joshua and Judges another time.

The plan that I use comes from the Coming Home Network, and it divides the readings into three daily chunks: New Testament, wisdom books, everything else. Those first two are pleasant and easy. The hard part is all that law and history and prophecy.

I am reading this post over, thinking it sounds a little masochistic for me to keep pushing myself through the hard parts over and over. Part of it is my Protestant roots: I aspire to be like those wise church ladies who have built their knowledge of the Bible over many years of committed daily reading. Part of it is that you can't know where you're going without knowing where you've been. The stuff that pains me in Joshua is the very same stuff that atheists hurl at Christians in arguments about the faith: why would you serve a god who thinks that kind of carnage is a good idea?

So I will keep reading and thinking and praying, chewing on the hard parts as well as the easy parts. But maybe I will not assign myself the very hardest parts here in the gray and discouraging tail end of winter which is also midterm season. Maybe I won't do that.

Week 5

I am sticking to my exercise resolution, though the work responsibilities I mentioned yesterday are making it harder. I keep telling myself that if I show up and exercise, I will feel more energetic and cheerful about doing more work than I might actually like to be doing right now. 

Younger Next Year for Women told me that in addition to lifting I ought to work up to 45-minute sessions of cardio, 4 times per week. I've been plugging along in that direction: 20-minute sessions in week 1, 25-minute sessions in week 2, and so forth. This week I was looking at my work schedule and trying to figure out where I was going to fit four 40-minute sessions of cardio (on top of three lifting workouts). I had a moment of discouragement, and then I said to myself, "Self, do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good! What if you bump it back down to 30-minute sessions this week? Thirty minutes is much better than throwing up your hands and saying it's too hard!" 

"Oh," I thought, "I could manage 30-minute sessions." It does not seem entirely logical that showing up for 30 minutes would feel doable when 40 minutes felt unreasonable, but you know what they say about hobgoblins and foolish consistency.

On the habit-strengthening front there is one thing I would like to work on, which is that these workouts are drifting later in the day. I just don't have as much oomph at 8pm as I do earlier in the day. It just feels harder. I'm also not sure it's great for sleep to exercise vigorously close to bedtime, though you could probably find a half-dozen opinions about that without looking very hard.

As the days get brighter it will get easier to work out before work. I am not going to berate myself here -- I'm just going to aim for "before dinner" on days when working out doesn't fit into my schedule until evening arrives.

A pleasant part of winter 2022 that I want to remember: Pete has been keeping me company in the basement when I work out. He brings down a Bluetooth speaker and his phone, loaded with a playlist that he and Joe made together. He plays music for me and quizzes me about what I like. It's much better with company. Tuesdays are the days when I try not to fall over while doing Bulgarian split squats. They're easier than they were a month ago, but still pretty humbling.

Every day is easier than some of the days

So you guys, I am finding it easier to exercise six days a week than I thought it would be. I don't have to answer the question "Am I going to work out today?" I already know the answer; the answer is yes. If I don't do it in the morning, I have to do it in the evening.

This means I don't have to deal with Sad Gertrude. Sad Gertrude is a voice I read about somewhere on the internet (maybe the Salty Running blog? maybe five-ish years ago? too long ago to remember the details) and immediately recognized. Sad Gertrude says, "But it's going to be haaaaaard," when you are trying to motivate yourself to lace up your shoes. Sad Gertrude says, "What if we caaaaan't?" as you are thinking about what your workout will look like. Sad Gertrude says, "Maybe later would be better. Don't we have enough suffering in our life already?" And at least sometimes, a person will just sigh heavily and accede to Sad Gertrude's querulous pleas.

I have hardly heard anything from Sad Gertrude this year. In years past, if I were aiming to work out three or four days a week, she would try to convince me on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday that the four days might as well be W-Th-F-Sa. And then on Wednesday she would tell me that three workouts a week is a perfectly respectable amount of exercise. Maybe you can sympathize; maybe you have a Sad Gertrude of your own. Or maybe my Sad Gertrude has gone to live at your house, because she has been very, very quiet lately. 

All of my previous attempts to work out 6 days a week have felt overwhelming to me, but this one does not, or at least not so far. I think a big slice of it is having good options for home workouts, so that I am not braving ice and snow and teeming hordes of January-ites at the gym, and trying to fit in the workout plus the drive to and from the gym where there is no parking because of all the people thinking that THIS YEAR will be the their year to get fit. Another slice of it is doing less running. I am just not a very efficient runner. It feels like I am working stupid-hard to go stupid-slow. But hey! This year I can jump rope and ride my bike and do Jazzercise and lift weights instead.

In my ideal world I would be getting up at 5:15 so I could work out before the kids are awake, but I do not love waking up at 5:15 in January. So I've mostly been working out in the evening. In my ideal world I would be able to do barbell deadlifts, but our gym is pretty much a seething cauldron of COVID right now. I froze our membership until spring, when I hope the crowds will be sparser and the COVID numbers less grim. I can do dumbbell deadlifts for a while, even if they are much less satisfying.

It is kind of weird that Joe turned me into a person who pines for barbells, isn't it? Have I already recommended @megsquats and @swolewoman to anyone who is thinking that her life could use a few more barbells? I'm always happy to hear about new people to follow, if you have any recommendations for me.

New year's resolutions, one week in

A week ago I told you I wanted to do five things in the new year: exercise, cut back on social media use, read the Palliser Chronicles, keep getting pictures into albums, and blog four times a week. Things are going fine, mostly. I haven't made a ton of progress on pictures but I've made some; I did not blog four times in the first week of 2022 but there's plenty of time to catch up. The once-a-week approach to social media is a good one, I think, even though it requires some discipline to maintain. And I am really enjoying The Eustace Diamonds, so that one has been easy.

The thing I most wanted to tell you about is the exercise resolution. I think I mentioned already that the book that prompted this resolution, Younger Next Year for Women, advises readers to work up to 4 45-minute cardio workouts per week, with 2-3 weight-training sessions as well. I also think I already told you that this plan seems pretty much straight-up bananas to me, but I am giving it a whirl.

Elwood thinks this is a great plan. (For me. He's not super-motivated to follow it himself, but he's happy to support me in this pursuit of happiness or banana-pants-ness, whichever you happen to call it.) Alex gave me some lifting equipment for Christmas, so I'm good to keep lifting weights in the basement until the COVID situation improves. And then Elwood found a bike trainer for me and helped me set it up in the basement. This one is reasonably sturdy, not too expensive, and pretty straightforward. (It is also moderately noisy, but it's working well for me with noise-canceling headphones.) Elwood also acquired a jumprope, but our basement ceiling is too low for me to jump down there and the weather is too frigid for me to jump outside. The Fifth-Grade Jumprope Champion of Seventh Street Elementary School will have to wait for warmer weather to make her comeback. I also decided to do a two-week Jazzercise free trial, and those workouts are enough fun that I think I'll probably pay for a month or two -- by which time I certainly hope we will have warmer weather and less rampant COVID.

The thing I want to record here is that one week in I am already noticing significant changes in my mood and energy level. I started slowly, with 20- to 25-minute sessions of biking and Jazzercise, but even a little bit of working up a sweat leaves me more cheerful and perky. I didn't just slump around sorting the laundry this afternoon; I put on some music so I could dance while I worked. These things may or may not be causally related, but the correlation is pretty striking. 

The weather here has been genuinely dire: ice on the sidewalks all week, bitter cold, another round of ice this afternoon with more bitter cold to follow. I am grateful to be snug and warm -- it is much nicer to be riding my bike to nowhere in the basement than skating on the sidewalks or braving the clouds of COVID-laden exhalations at the gym.

New Year's Rest-olution

Hi, I have a suggestion for you if you are still thinking about resolutions. It is this: what if you resolve to rest?

I came to the idea of a day of rest v-e-r-y reluctantly. The Church told me I should not do unnecessary work on Sundays, but I was not sure the Church knew how much necessary work there was in my life. I can't remember exactly when I took the plunge, but it was something like 20 years ago. And you guys, it is THE BEST.

On Sundays I never do laundry. I don't clean my house. I only look at my work email in the rarest of circumstances (specifically, if I am on a search committee with a Sunday night dinner scheduled -- a situation that has come up approximately twice in my career). I never grade, or prep lectures, or write for work. All of those things fit into the other parts of my week. Sundays are different.

Perhaps you also grew up reading the Little House books and thinking that their idea of resting on Sunday sounded pretty miserable. I do not propose misery; enough misery comes our way without our seeking it out. After Mass I read books, exercise, knit, garden, make music, do puzzles, cook things that make us happy. Usually in the late afternoon I spend an hour in our Adoration chapel. (I do wash dishes, because I cannot abide waking up to dirty dishes.) This is the Rule for Sundays: does it feel like work? If so, it does not belong on Sunday. Does it feel pleasant and restorative? That is a Sunday kind of thing.

In the years when we had five children at home and I was finishing my doctorate, there were sometimes a lot of things that got squished into Saturdays. But OOOOHHHHH the relief it brought me, to wake up on Sunday morning and know that none of it required my attention for the next 24 hours.

We live in a culture that prizes productivity. There are plenty of people who are telling you that it's January so you should EAT BETTER and WORK OUT HARDER and by the way would you like to bullet-journal your efforts to Do The Most Stuff Ever here in 2022? I mean, hey, I'm a fan of the bullet journal. But I think it's easiest to be productive if you have space in your life where productivity is not expected. Maybe, instead of planning to push harder, you might like to push a little less.

2022

Okay! It is New Year's Eve! And do you know what we used to love in these parts? New Year's resolutions, that's what. But it's been a while since there was a resolutions post on this site. In January 2020 we were in the middle of The Troubles, and the motto was Just Get Through It. In January 2021 we were in the middle of the terrible winter COVID spike when vaccines were just barely available, and Just Get Through It was still the motto.

But do you know, this year I am feeling perkier (as long as I don't pay too much attention to the omicron headlines or the local COVID numbers), and I am going to do some resolving.

Resolution #1: exercise.

I have been reading an interesting book, Younger Next Year For Women [affiliate link]. The authors are very firm that women my age should be exercising a lot more than I have been exercising. More specifically, they say that I need to be exercising 6 days a week for 45 minutes each time, and that if I do so I will dramatically change the quality of the last third of my life. This sounds ridiculous, right? Who exercises that much in the dead of winter even when there is not a stupid omicron surge on top of an even stupider pandemic? There have been seasons when I have exercised that much, always in connection with race preparations, and I have always been glad when they were over.

But you guys, the authors make a really compelling case for figuring out a way to fit it in and make it sustainable. The science is so interesting that I am going to buy the book, which I am currently reading for free. So this is my top-priority resolution: keep the strength training, add the cardio. I am going to try jumping rope, which I used to love as a kid. I am going to look into moving my bike onto an indoor trainer, because I appear to have developed exercise-induced asthma that makes vigorous outdoor exercise unpleasant in the winter. And I'm going to look into some video options, but I do not want anything with a "be smaller!" vibe. I have had quite enough of the poisonous idea that a woman is somehow better when less of her exists. Suggestions are most welcome.

Resolution #2: cut way back on social media use.

I think the thing that works best is if I avoid social media use altogether during the week, and check in when I have finished my Saturday housekeeping jobs. This lets me see get a glimpse of what's going on with people without getting sucked in too far. I don't think I'm going to deactivate my FB account, but I am going to spend less time there. And Twitter is a really interesting place, but in large doses it makes the world seem a little bleaker.

Resolution #3: keep plugging steadily on the Palliser Chronicles. 

Trollope's Palliser Chronicles are much sloggier than his Barsetshire Chronicles. I started Phineas Finn, like, 3 separate times. But I am finally in book 3, the Eustace Diamonds, and I like it much more. I think that if I read a chapter a day I can finish the six-book series even if I take a month off for the annual May Dickens Read-Along. This year will be our ninth AMDRAL, if you can believe it!

Resolution #4: catch up on getting pictures into albums.

I got behind, friends. I hadn't made an album since July 2019. But I've been nibbling away at the backlog since the fall semester ended, and I'm hoping to keep the momentum going. If I can do a month's worth of pictures each day, I'll be caught up before the end of January and I will feel much better. I love having put pictures into albums even if I hate the putting.

Resolution #4 (oops, realized 5 days later that this should be #5): blog faithfully.

I am going to aim for 4x/week in 2022. I love blogging. Thank you for reading, my friends! A happy new year to you!

Resolutions 2021, getting the ball rolling

0. In every peer review I complete, I will make a point of writing kindly even if the paper is sub-par. I just got a decision on the paper I resubmitted at the end of November and HOO BOY that was apparently not a thing Reviewer 1 resolved for 2020. My particular worry was that we would revise the heck out of that paper and it would get rejected, which did not happen. Reviewer 2 thinks we're good to go. But Reviewer 1 has a lot to say and the editor is silent, which is not an ideal combination. 

Mostly today I am thinking about health-related resolutions and not about work-related resolutions. They are pretty much the same health-related resolutions I always make but THIS YEAR I MEAN THEM DERNIT:

1. GO TO BED by 9:30 (starting tomorrow; tonight it's looking like 9:40 might be a better bet).
2. Eat more vegetables and don't eat sweets, because it is better for both happiness and productivity.
3. Exercise gently at the student fitness center 3 days per week. I bought a membership for the spring semester today, because they are being more careful about COVID than most of the alternatives. Running in cold or even cool weather has started to irritate my lungs, so a safe indoor option seems like a good plan for the winter. But I don't think I can work out vigorously while wearing a mask. Ergo: exercise gently is the plan.

May 24

Sing it with me, friends, to the tune of Yellow Submarine:

We all live in an entropy machine, entropy machine, entropy machine.

This house, man. I usually try to go more than 24 hours between arson threats, but let me say again: I might have to set it on fire.

At the beginning of May I made myself another habit tracker. May is the time of year when I am most energetic, and I wanted to use the days well. Many of my habit-tracker columns have worked out really nicely: daily read-aloud time with Stella, daily exercise, daily writing time, daily music-making. They are not lofty goals. I haven't tackled anything new and complicated on the piano, but I learned a fun easy version of Rule, Britannia, and today when I was tempted to feel a little blue about not being able to sing Hail The Day That Sees Him Rise at church, I just sat down and played it myself instead.

But one of my goals was to spend some time every day making the house a little nicer, and I am tired of that habit. I did a lot of small good things in the service of that goal. I painted the walls in the back entryway; I smote the mildew in the downstairs tub with a paste of bleach and baking soda. I fixed the hole in a bedroom wall from that time when someone opened the door too vigorously and the doorknob punched through the drywall; I fixed the hole in the ceiling from that time when the bunkbeds put a Gladly kid up too high. I cleared a lot of junk from a lot of places. But somehow there remains a lot of junk, and I have been losing steam over the last week.

"There's something to be said for moving every two years," I said to my husband today. "Ah, yes," he said sarcastically. "You loved it when we were moving every two years." [Reader, I did not love it.] "But it forces you to live a stripped-down life," I told him earnestly. "There's something to be said for that."

Joe went back to his boarding school for the last time yesterday, to pick up the stuff he left there in mid-March when they announced that spring break would last a bit longer than originally planned. He has been a whirling dervish of order and industry today. He cleaned out a closet, unprompted; he purged and organized his room from top to bottom. I suppose I should be happy that the kid who used to insist that I should save his toenail clippings came downstairs today to announce "I will NEVER be a hoarder."

Maybe one of the keys to avoiding burnout is getting help from other people in my family. Fighting entropy alone is a lonely job, but the kids have been great about noticing and appreciating the things I've been doing around the house. And I think, too, another piece of it is the habits/goals tension. It might work better for me to say "We are going to clean all the JUNK out of the basement by June 30!" instead of slashing away at random disorderly spots, one solitary stroke at a time.

We shall see. The habit-tracker I made on April 30 only had 23 slots, so I have spent this 24th day of May feeling free of pressure to tick any boxes. But tomorrow I will make another one, and perhaps I will figure out an approach that allows me to have less entropy and also less frustration. Are you braced for more exciting habit-tracking updates? Don't turn that dial!

May 2

I am making some modest resolutions for May. This is the time of year in which I am always most energetic; it's the combination of longer, brighter, warmer days and the predictable need for a reboot at the end of the academic year.

This May I want to make some music every day, even if that just means I sit down at the piano for 5 minutes. And I also want to take a daily small step to push back against entropy around the house. I figure even if I bail in 10 days I will have addressed 10 small annoyances that would otherwise have continued to annoy me.

Yesterday it was the groaning freezer. A week or two ago I woke up out of a sound sleep at 3:30 in the morning. There was this unfamiliar noise. Was it an alarm somewhere on our block? It had to be some kind of emergency, I thought. But no, it was just the freezer. Perhaps it was singing itself a little ditty called Pandemic Dirge or COVID-19 Blues -- it was not a happy tune. I was up for the day, it turned out, and none too pleased about it. The noise stopped as mysteriously as it began, but it started up again yesterday.

I thought it was the evaporator fan; Elwood thought it was a problem with the defrost cycle; neither of us knew what to do about it. Near the end of dinner I sprang up from the table. "No singing at the dinner table" is a firm rule in our family, but the freezer was not listening and suddenly I was D-O-N-E with the noise. I went resolutely to the kitchen and started taking everything out of the freezer. After I unplugged it I began unscrewing the bolts at the back, but I needed a little help with the stickier ones. We took off the rear panel and inspected the fan. ("Yep, that's a fan," said Elwood incisively.) He was skeptical about whether WD-40 would have a salutary effect, but he agreed that it couldn't hurt. So I fetched it and he applied it. We reassembled the rear panel and plugged the unit in again, and LO the noise was gone. Our fingers are crossed that it stays away.

HUZZAH and FAREWELL to Lockdown Threnody for Solo Appliance.

Today we are tackling the dishwasher, which has caused us a long string of small annoyances. For EIGHTEEN MONTHS now it has needed to be secured in position so that it no longer gets jiggled in a way that interrupts the wash cycle, and for EIGHTEEN MONTHS we have failed to complete this task. I think, fingers crossed, that today is the day. Step 1, the careful repositioning, is done. Step 2, the test wash cycle, is also done. Step 3, the screwing-in, is happening as I type.

I also excavated the stovetop today, a process requiring most of a Magic Eraser. When I reassembled it afterward, one of the burners wouldn't light. The igniter would spark and the gas would flow, but somehow they didn't seem to connect. Elwood gently rotated the burner top a quarter-turn as I was grumbling about this, and what do you know? It worked again.

"Maybe we should go into appliance repair if the pandemic kills our jobs," I said, and we laughed together at the idea of starting an appliance repair company where our MO is looking perplexedly at mystery parts, applying WD-40 liberally, and giving things a hopeful twist. Maybe we'll call our new business Fingers Crossed.

Purge-atory

My outsides are covered in dust and my innards are marinating in grumpiness. I am continuing the battle against entropy, friends, and right at this moment my progress is feeling like a Pyrrhic victory. But you would still like to hear about it, wouldn't you? I thought you might.

Yesterday I took down all of the question-mark outerwear items from their hooks and piled them up in the office floor. Question-mark coats are the ones that people wear occasionally, like if they're going on the Boy Scout ski trip, or maybe they aren't quite the right fit or the right material or maybe they have a broken zipper or maybe their SOLE REASON for EXISTENCE is to taunt you with the first-worldliness of your problems. The question-mark coats sat there in the floor for a day, while rising discontent flowed through my innards like a mephitic and corrosive variety of lava.

Tonight I went through them with Elwood and we divvied them up: this pile should live on the coat hooks for easy access, this pile should live in the basement for occasional use, this pile should be donated, this last one requires repair before it can meet its destiny. Elwood and I had a disagreement about donating coats; he says that they are most likely to get cut up for rags or wind up in a landfill. I think, myself, that this is an excellent time of year to be donating clean and functional coats in the frozen Midwest. But I don't have any hard data about the eventual destinies of Goodwill coats. Any thoughts or links? And does anyone else with multiple older children find that coats have a weird tendency to multiply? It's perplexing.

Another lingering office issue: the printers. Today after much gnashing of teeth I got the all-in-one printer functioning again. Unfortunately, it isn't happy on the circuit where it used to live. Every time it gets jiggled, it seems to reset the circuit. Which is also where the modem/router are plugged in. Which means that using the printer usually results in the disruption of internet service. Which is problematic for wireless printing, and which also makes me wonder if it's, like, a warning of a massive electrical fire waiting to happen. Next step: find a new home for the printer. It's too bad I can't hang it from a coat hook, now that I have some extra space there.

Because I did not have enough accumulated frustration at this point, I tackled the worst of the basement clutter next. The basement, you guys -- it's been like a slow descent into hoarder hell. The camping gear can't fit in the camping closet, but there was a lot of wishful thinking about the actual size of the camping closet -- like if things were near the camping closet, maybe that would count as fitting inside. (News flash: it does not count.) There is this appalling little nest of teenager-size hiking boots. I don't know where they all came from. It's like the footwear version of the snacking-after-midnight Gremlins, in that scene where they all jumped into the swimming pool. 

No matter what criminologists say about broken-window syndrome, it is a real issue for flat surfaces in houses inhabited by large families. Once somebody leaves a thing on a previously clear coffee table or what have you, it becomes fair game for anybody to set a thing there. But as of tonight the basement table is clear. The school supplies that had mysteriously migrated from the school supply shelf are back where they belong. The comic books that live in the basement are reshelved. The sleeping pads are neatly bungeed together, standing in a corner out of the way. The Nerf guns that had been spread out across the table during involved pre-Christmas discussions about which ones to pass along to a younger cousin -- back in their bin. The climbing gear has its own shelf space now instead of living on/near the basement table. This last was an Undertaking that left me with cobwebby hair and eyelashes and a less-than-sunny* disposition, but it's a past-tense Undertaking now.

*what's the opposite of sunny? thunderhead-y? typhoon-y?

OKAY, thanks for reading if you made it this far. I feel better having written it down. Does it say something about my priorities if I write the blog post about having cobwebs in my eyelashes before I take the shower that will remove the cobwebs from my eyelashes? It might say something about my priorities, I'm thinking.

Onward

You guys, 2019 was SO HARD. The first part of it (Jan/Feb/early March) was hard because of work. I was pretty much working at maximum capacity, which was a tough thing to sustain. The second part of it (late March/April/May) was hard because my anxiety was out of control. It did not make any sense to be so worried that the provost would overturn the tenure recommendation from my department and my college. It made even less sense to fret that the president would reject the provost's recommendation. But fret I did. It was weirdly isolating to be so anxious about something so irrational, and also weirdly exhausting. 

Summer was a little better. I started seeing a counselor, to whom I could say, "Whoa, this anxiety is totally out of control and it's kind of eating my life." I submitted my first NIH grant, but instead of giving myself permission to call it good after that, I spent a lot of the summer feeling too burned out to write and also incapable of saying, "Huh, it would be totally fine if I didn't write anything right now.

And then came The Troubles, which remain unresolved, and another hard thing which I will tell you about at some point but not right now. Anyway: not sorry to see the last of 2019.

On the first day of 2020 I smote the disorder in the downstairs bathroom. It was a nightmare in there. It's a tiny space, and so things just kept getting shoved into the available storage until it was all overflowing and disorganized. I emptied out every inch of storage space, and cleaned the smeared and speckled shelves, and threw away the things we don't need, and put the things we do need into sensible places alongside other similar things.

I've been going in there all day long to admire the fruit of my labors.

This evening I went climbing with Pete and Joe, and they assigned me to climb a 60-foot 5.10 route for Weakness Wednesday. I had tried this route a couple of times before, and bailed in the middle. I was not sanguine about my odds of finishing this route, you guys. My impression the last time I tried it was that it's a bunch of stuff near the edge of my abilities, all strung together, for 60 vertical feet. But the boys said, "You can do it, Mom!" 

Pete wants me to cut to the chase here, to say "And so I did it!" Which is true, but also incomplete. It leaves out the times that I bit back the inner voice saying "can't do it don't wanna let me down NOW," and kept climbing. It leaves out the times that I bellowed STUCK down from an increasing number of feet above Joe's head, and then figured out the way forward even though it seemed improbable. 

I was going to be pleased if I got a little further than my last attempt. It's at the edge of what I can do, or that's how I remembered it. But it appears that the edge of what I can do has shifted from where it used to be. Even though I needed takes* to rest and shake it out, I kept climbing instead of giving up. And do you know, if you keep climbing for long enough, eventually you get to the top.

*Takes = supported rests, where you sit in your rope sling while your belayer keeps you from plummeting to your death below.

So maybe that's a good theme to consider for 2020: order, persistence, and a reasonable degree of courage. I feel like that combo can get a person through a lot of things. 

In which I am once again ambushed by entropy

I have this perpetual idea, you guys, that I could Get It Together if only I applied myself diligently. Inbox zero, empty paper trays, and a tidy dust-free home. But then I buckle down and attempt to apply myself diligently, and entropy fights back like whoa.

For instance: I got it into my head that I would tidy up the music room. I would get rid of the random unloved picture books, keeping only the picture books with sentimental value, and merge the music room bookshelves to create more space in there. Maybe I could even get rid of one of the music room shelves and slide a secondhand prie-dieu into its erstwhile home! Wouldn't that be nice, I thought to myself.

I started culling books and was met with immediate and vocal resistance. You can't get rid of [the horrible Lego story] Mission To The Arctic, they shouted. You can't get rid of The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine: Or, The Hithering Thithering Djinn! (I didn't even try to purge The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, even though I hate it. Weird things happen when people who write postmodern adult fiction turn their attention to children's books. But the boy-turned-young-adult who loves postmodern fiction has a surprisingly fierce attachment to it, so I think I am stuck with it until he moves out permanently. On that day I will wrap it up as his housewarming gift.) There were consultations with the boys who are not at home, and with each consultation the "keep" pile grew while the "cull" pile dwindled. It was pretty clear that both of the bookshelves would need to stay.

Even diminished, the cull pile required three milk crates. They are in the van now, awaiting their new homes. I am going to give the non-religious books to a charity that redistributes gently used children's books to low-income families, but they ask that you don't send them religious books. So I think I'll try to give those away to friends at church and see how it goes.

One of the music room shelves was crammed with poorly organized music, which is now thinned out and at least loosely organized. I have cleared off the top of the piano and I have sifted through the piano bench. I aspire to make myself a big binder with page protectors, in which all of my sheet music is arranged alphabetically. 

The piano tuner will come next week, and I am going to return the cello to my father-in-law since the boy who once played cello no longer does so (and no longer lives in this time zone). All of the random stuff that had drifted under the loveseat has been re-homed, including a lonely bugle mouthpiece and a children's version of the Ramayana. ("Oh!" said Stella, "I've missed this!") Hm, I looked up the Ramayana at Amazon to see if I could spot the version we have, and I wonder what my targeted ads will look like now. Amazon has been trying to sell me romance novels for weeks now. Dear Amazon: I will never buy a book with a shirtless man on the cover. You could have exclusive rights to a lost Jane Austen novel, and if you put a naked man on the cover I would just have to wait for the copyright to expire. Because no -- just no.

Anyway: I am declaring a tentative victory in this round of Jamie vs. Entropy. Stay tuned for round 2.

Deep thought in the rearview mirror

Tonight I was waiting for the Scout meeting to end and inching through a chapter of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The author would not approve of what I just did there. That's an affiliate link to the Kindle version, which is (a) tempting you to click away instead of reading the words I am writing for your consideration and (b) suggesting that you purchase an e-book instead of a nice old-fashioned book-book and (c) monetizing your descent into a state of being "distracted by distraction from distraction." (That quote is from the Four Quartets, but it seems prescient, no?) Nicholas Carr says the links in online text turn reading into a constant exercise in decision-making. Do I click this one? how about this one? maybe this one? Carr says the reason we're all more impatient with long-form articles than we used to be is that reading has become more cognitively strenuous for us.

Yikes.

In some ways the book seems dated. It was published in 2011, which is practically, like, the Pleistocene Era in internet terms. He's still talking about the Blackberry, and I'm pretty sure one of those guys in a Lascaux cave painting used his Blackberry to email his wife: "Hunt successful! Butchering now. Liver y/n?" But in some ways it seems like a warning we have failed to heed. Today I was in a waiting room at the doctor's office next to a grown man, in his 50s, playing a pew-pew-pew video game on his phone with the sound on. It's no longer unusual for everyone at an intersection to wait while the person closest to the just-turned-green stoplight pulls his head out of his inbox and returns his attention to the task of driving his car. People have heard the message that combining phone use and driving is dangerous, and in surprisingly large numbers they have concluded that they do not care.

At the tail end of the Scout meeting I was talking to a pal from church who is trying to persuade a relative to attend our fall women's retreat. The biggest barrier? The retreats are no-phone zones. The relative manages a pharmacy, and she has to be available by phone at all times. "When we go on vacation," said my friend, "she's always on her phone. If something happens at the pharmacy she has to be able to address it right away." But...it's a chain pharmacy. There are two of them right here in Gladlyville. What are they going to do if she needs surgery? When did constant contact with an employee turn into a reasonable expectation?

The retreat program we were involved with as grad students asked retreatants to surrender their watches for the weekend. It's got to be a harder sell these days, asking college students to lay down their phones for 48 hours.

I am on day 29 of Cal Newport's 30-day social media fast. I haven't peeked at Facebook or Twitter or Ravelry, and it's mostly been a good thing. (Anyone who has been sending me Twitter DMs might have a different view of the situation, though.) I don't know that it has really made a difference in my capacity to sit down and FOCUS on DEEP THOUGHTS. I don't know what happens on day 31, either. But I am troubled by the erosion of my capacity to think hard about hard things, and I am going to see what I can do to shore it up again.

The Discipline Ceiling

It turns out that there is a limit to the amount of judging I can do, and at the end of last week I crashed hard into that wall.

I have a service commitment that is the single most judgment-intensive thing I have ever done at Gladlyville U. I am also teaching three classes. I resolved that last week I would be the most disciplined version of myself that I could possibly be, and this is the thing I learned: there is a ceiling to the amount of self-discipline I can exert. Maybe it's a movable ceiling? I don't know? But a weird thing happened after five days of Maximum Discipline.

I came home on Friday and there was a bill in the mail from the heating and cooling company. They came out for a service call recently, but they said there was no charge because our new furnace has a warranty that covers parts and labor. Getting the bill in the mail should have been a minor annoyance. They're nice folks; if it was a mistake they'll apologize, and if we do actually owe them for the service call we can afford the bill. Instead I opened the envelope and thought about the steps required to resolve the issue, and then I laid my head down on the table and cried. "This is kind of strange and excessive," I thought to myself as the tears kept flowing.

Saturday morning I discovered that a LOWSRA* (Laundry Offender Who Shall Remain Anonymous) had dumped a basket of clean laundry into a dusty corner. This is not the first time I have pointed out to that particular LOWSRA that dumping clean laundry into a dusty corner means it is dusty rather than clean, but for whatever reason this objection doesn't seem to carry much weight. I did not aim any arrows of indisputable logic in the LOWSRA's direction; I did not yell. I just dissolved. "It is very odd to cry helplessly twice in two days over such tiny things," said the small sensible voice in my head.

Yesterday I worked through some of the grading backlog, but I could feel the crash of inner gears. "That is wrong," I would think to myself. "I do not want to explain why it is wrong. Perhaps if I look at another exam I won't have to explain any wrong things." This is not a recipe for grading efficiency, but I made a little headway.

"Can I really take a day off tomorrow?" I wondered last night. "I am feeling so behind. Does this count as necessary work?" The answer was clear and immediate: there are no emergencies in academia. The grading always gets done. Today I did not grade anything at all. After church I watched the Princess Bride with my two youngest kids; later I went rock-climbing with Joe and Pete. I will go to bed at 9:15 or so, and hope that the mysterious inner reservoir I depleted so thoroughly last week is refilled when I wake up in the morning.

Also I will be really glad when it's March.

P.S. Before I conclude this sad-sack post let me tell you what my Pete did. Yesterday he said, "Can I do anything to help? Can I bring you breakfast in bed tomorrow morning? I'd like to do that more often but you always get up so early." This morning he set his alarm for 7 and brought me an omelet with home-grown herbs, and buttered toast, and coffee. Love that boy.

What you measure

Long ago, in a blogosphere far far away, Jen Fulwiler wrote a post called You Get What You Measure. I've thought a lot about that post, about the things I measure and the things I am reluctant to tally up. On one of the early pages of my bullet journal I made a page for tracking habits, as a way of looking honestly at how often I was doing the good things I intended to do.

For instance: I have a solid morning Divine Office habit, but I often found myself catching up on the week's Bible readings on Saturday. I wanted to extend my good habit to strengthen a more wobbly habit. As you can see below, that worked really well in January. (The morning reading blocks are the first three items: one for Augustine, one for the pair of short easy readings, one for the Old Testament reading.)

You can also see that my motivation to sustain good habits fell off precipitously once it got to be 4pm. This is probably a hazard of trying to track my progress on two dozen different wobbly habits at the same time. 

I filled up that whole page last week and found that I missed the motivation. So! For the rest of February and all of March I have a new super-sized habit-tracking grid. Blue is for things that feed my mind or my soul; green is for things that strengthen my body. Orange is for work-related or adulting kinds of things; yellow is for mom habits like getting the laundry folded regularly. Pink is for things I want to avoid, like staying up too late. (This is because I don't like pink.)

Today is my first day with the new habit tracker, and I won't be able to fill in the "in bed @ 9:45 square" with pink highlighter if I don't end this post promptly. So: happy bullet journaling to you! also the end!

DOMS of the Will

Over the weekend I was trying to get back in the exercise groove. I ran on Saturday and Sunday. I did yoga on Saturday; I went rock-climbing with Joe on Sunday. And, perhaps predictably, by Monday afternoon I was too sore to reach up and scratch my head. I needed, like, a robot hairstylist to assist me. 

In this week where the kids are in school and I am not, I have been trying to Get Stuff Done. I did so many things on Tuesday in particular -- phone calls and emails and errands. On Wednesday I spent part of the day at a big noisy symposium, and part of the day trying to do more things, and by Wednesday night I needed, like, a robot hairstylist except for routine brain tasks. They call it DOMS when it's in your body -- delayed onset muscle soreness. I was feeling something DOMS-like in my brain. 

Up to a point this is part and parcel of being a person who loves new year's resolutions. If you always resolve to push your body a little farther in the new year, you're always going to be a little bit sore in January. It would have been smarter if I had preserved my ability to apply conditioner without assistance, I know, but a little muscle soreness can be a pleasant reminder of a happy productive workout. Generally, I think, I am able to read my body's cues about how hard to push and when to back off. (Rock-climbing is a different kind of workout, with shorter bursts of high intensity.)

The thing that causes me perpetual perplexity is how hard to push and when to back off when it comes to matters of the brain. I have a problematic tendency to measure my value in terms of my output. Sometimes when I feel myself getting brain-tired I pause and say to myself, "What would feel restorative right now?" Often the answer is "Finding a different kind of box to check!"

I have arranged my life so that doing things I enjoy often gives me boxes to check: when I finish the cowl I am binding off for my 19yo, I will check it off my knitting list. When I read a Watership Down chapter to Stella tonight (the story of the king's lettuce!) it meant not only that we enjoyed the mysterious doctor describing the perils of the festering Lousepedoodle but also that I had a box to fill in on my habits page. Sometimes I say to myself, "Do you really want to do this thing or are you actually trying to please someone else and check a box in the process?"

Sometimes I'm not sure what the answer is.

All The Things

"All The Things!" I exclaim every January.

"All The Things?" I ask a week later.

Don't mind me; I am just doing my usual January expectations dance. If dances still had names (what was the Watusi, anyway?) you could call it the Washing Machine: throw a bunch of stuff in there, shake it around, see what you get on the way back out. This year it is the Washing Machine With Added Washi Tape. (I bought a package of 48 tiny rolls from Amazon and my family is a little mystified by how much fun I am having with it. Well, to be honest I am also a little mystified by it, having long been baffled by the appeal of washi tape. But you guys: I have hedgehog washi tape. And pineapples. Also there are some stencils landing in my mailbox on Monday.)

Every year I go back to my resolutions post from the year before, and see what needs to be tweaked, or rebooted, or discarded with a wry and knowing chuckle. I had thought that it would be a little painful to walk through that process this year, because I kept thinking about the stuff I had resolved to do that just didn't get done. I had planned to read a bunch of Victorian literature and only read a little; I had resolved to do some adulting that remained un-adulted or only preliminarily adulted. (Is "adult" a transitive verb? I am not sure it can appear in a passive voice construction. But I suppose if I am going to verb that particular noun I can bend it all the way to my will.) It wasn't actually that bad, but there are some places where I'll need to try try again. That tenure packet, you guys, coupled with the bananapants state of the world in 2018, was not good for my resolver. 

I usually make Epiphany resolutions rather than new year's resolutions. The first week of January is a good time for me to think about possibilities and try some things out, and we're almost always on the road near the first of the year. To stick with that plan I'll have to fill in some blanks tomorrow, figuring out how much to emphasize habits vs. goals, and how high to aim. As Robert Browning wrote, a mom's reach should exceed her grasp, or how else will she manufacture a painful mid-February crash with spasms of self-loathing and a side of despair? (I kid! I kid!)

One of the lines on my shiny new habit grid says "L&M (3/wk)" and another says "in bed @ 9:45." Tonight I could only pick one of those things. Sometimes that's how it goes, I guess.