Light and Momentary

Dragging

I got my COVID booster shot yesterday and it has hit me pretty hard. After my second shot in April I felt genuinely grateful for feeling crummy: grateful for the existence of the vaccines, for the opportunity to be vaccinated, for a healthy functioning immune system. Today I am just crabby about all the folks in my county who have refused to get the shot, making our town less safe for everyone else.

Let's talk for a minute about the assertion that keeps popping up about COVID, the idea that we shouldn't make such a fuss about a disease with "only" a 1% mortality rate. The thing is, 1% (which is too low as a mortality estimate for unvaccinated people in the first place) is non-trivial. Take a look. We vaccinate entire populations against diseases with much lower mortality rates. You can't go to school if you're not vaccinated against some of those diseases, because we take them seriously.

So many people have died avoidable deaths. This post by Kieran Healy shows 2020 all-cause mortality (so not just COVID deaths, which have become yet another bone of contention for the folks who think COVID is overblown), broken down by state and compared with data from the previous 5 years. So much loss tucked into that graph -- so many deaths.

Kieran Healy also looked at COVID deaths as a function of a county's proportion of Trump voters. In 2020 the lines mostly run together, except for a scary blue line that illustrates the early explosion of COVID in New York City. Since vaccinations became widely available, the lines have diverged more and more: the counties at the 90th percentile for Trump votes have seen a COVID death rate >50% higher than the rate seen in the counties at the 10th percentile. 

The focus on purportedly low mortality rates disregards the impact of morbidity altogether, as if the only people with any serious complaints are the 1%. As if long COVID weren't a thing. As if all these hospitalizations and ICU admissions are only a big deal to liberal snowflakes who need to toughen up.

My brain is not firing on all cylinders today; it is befogged by the immune system I am trying to nudge into fighting off this virus more effectively. I keep making a hash of the logic puzzles that are usually a pleasing diversion. So if I seem to have made a hash of any of the logic in this post, please be kind.

And more young-adult offspring!

Joe is home for Thanksgiving break!

I am not teaching any classes or attending any meetings until the week after Thanksgiving!

Let the festivities begin! (A week of grading is more pleasant if you call it a Festivity of Grading.)

Visitors and Dishes Passes

You guys, you guys: guess who was just here?!

Did you guess Alex? Because you would win the prize if you guessed Alex.

He and two of his friends/business partners made a quick trip to Gladlyville in an attempt to recruit a mutual friend, and they all spent a fair amount of time hanging out at our house.

I miss having company.

Alex keeps start-up hours, so we did not see each other this morning. But he called me to see if I wanted to have lunch, and we ate takeout Korean food together. Is it weird that I had not used chopsticks since the end of 2019? It felt a little weird.

He has grown a big red beard, which he strokes contemplatively. "That's MY Alex," I think every time I see that red beard.  

He will be coming back next week for Thanksgiving, so this is not a long goodbye. I sure do miss that boy when he's away.

**

After dinner I asked Pete to start the dishes. He said, "What if we have a plank contest? What if the winner does the other person's dishes?"

I wasn't sure how it would go, because Pete is strong from rock-climbing and I never do bodyweight exercises these days (except for pull-ups, which don't engage many of the same muscles). But why not? 

I won the first plank competition handily, but Pete wanted a rematch. I had told him I found it easier to plank with my arms extended than with my elbows bent, and so we agreed to mix and match for round #1: high plank for me, low plank for him. "Let's switch," he said, "and see if you can still beat me." Round #2: low plank for me, high plank for him. Winner: the middle-aged lady, not the teen.

"OK, OK," he said. "What if we have a dead hang contest AND I give you a handicap AND I do your dishes for a WEEK if you beat me?" We did some negotiating over the terms of the handicap (that boy can dead-hang for a long time) and the terms of the bet, and then we headed into the basement. And? I won again!

So if you have been debating about whether lifting is right for you, consider this: not only will you grow shiny new muscles and protect yourself from osteoporosis and discover that you are suddenly able to close windows that everyone else swears are stuck -- not only that! You will also be able to hustle your children into doing your household chores! Who could ask for anything more?

Snapshot from late in the semester

I think in my first ten years on campus I received exactly one formal notification from an administrative office about a student's mental health concerns. This semester I've had three. And even though only one of those three students had talked to me about her struggles, I've had more students weeping in my office than ever before. So much worry and sadness, so many tissues. The kids are not all right. 

One of the spillover effects is that I have an unprecedented number of requests for opportunities to make up work. "I had an emergency," I am hearing from student after student. I've been flexible about Zoom attendance because I do not want students hauling themselves to class with a blossoming case of COVID, but it's messier to have both in-person and online students. I have a bunch of stray emails sitting in my inbox: here is my version of the in-class exercise, they say. They're never really the same thing as the in-class exercise, because they weren't in class -- they couldn't discuss anything with anybody. I suppose I ought to roll with it? I am doing a lot of rolling with it, it feels like.

Another wrinkle: I have never had this many students say, "I submitted my assignment and then afterward one of my friends told me I had done it wrong because I hadn't read the directions. But can you grade it anyway? Or can you give me another chance to do the assignment?" In normal circumstances I would say "nope!" with a clear conscience. You had ten weeks to read the directions! They're straightforward directions! But these are not normal circumstances.

Learning names has been a huge task for me this semester. I've posted before about my face recognition issues -- I'm not face-blind, just sort of face-myopic, but I have s-t-r-u-g-g-l-e-d to figure out who's who based solely on eyes/eyebrows/hair. I was feeling pleased with myself when I finally got all 43 of the names in my largest class matched up with the right faces. Some of them are tenuous matches. Today in office hours a student came by to review her last exam. I could have retrieved her name in the classroom, because she always sits in the same seat. But if she is not sitting in that seat? It's too much for my overloaded brain, apparently.

So I was feeling pleased, as I say, thinking I FINALLY had all the names down for the semester, at least when I was in the classroom. But my medium-sized class is giving me a some resurgent face-name trouble. There's a little cluster of students who look a lot like each other, based solely on eyes/eyebrows/hair, and I am not entirely sure that I will get them all sorted out before the semester ends. In recent classes I've been assigning them to work in different groups, moving them around the classroom, which means I can't rely on cues like "always sits next to the student whose name I definitely know." 

I am battling some negative feelings about much of this-- I would rather know all of their names, I would rather be more caught up on grading than I currently am, I would rather have a clearer sense of how to balance rigor and flexibility. But you know, it's a weird semester. Sometimes all you can do is keep on slogging through it. 

Piles and piles

There is so much grading, you guys. So much grading.

Facebook friends and rainbow unicorns

Mary commented on yesterday's post, saying that her Facebook experience is pretty different from mine. I think my Facebook problems are largely of my own making. Back in the days when Facebook was fun, I accepted all kinds of friend requests from all kinds of people. I do want to know how my high school friend's cancer treatment is going, but I do not want to see the anti-immigrant fact-free memes she also posts. I went to high school in a county where 75% of the 2020 vote went to Trump, and that is reflected in the Facebook posts of my friends from that part of the country. It means that part of seeing other people's cute kid/grandkid pictures these days is seeing some amount of nonsense in the comments about whether it's good or bad that they are or are not wearing masks. I do think it's good for me to get out of my bubble, but at the same time I do not love my glimpses of other people's bubbles.

Also, true confession: I have a bad habit. It's like when you have a raw spot in your mouth and you keep touching it with your tongue to see if it's still sore. I sometimes click through to profiles I have hidden because I want to know if they're still doing the stuff that caused me to hide them. This is dumb, objectively dumb, and yet I do it anyway. It is partially driven by hope, partially driven by sorrow, and partially driven by less reasonable impulses.

Sometimes I think about purging my friends list in a major way, but it feels like such a messy unwieldy task because I genuinely like some of the people who seem to have gone off the deep end. Sometimes it's easier just to pull the plug. 

Facebook and the Devil

Today in his homily our pastor talked at length about the places where we are divided -- as a church, as a town, as a nation. Division, he reminded us, is the work of the devil. Although I love words and their histories, it wasn't until my late 40s that I learned (in the confessional, natch) that diabolical, etymologically, refers to separation or division.

It's a connection I've thought about often over the past 5 years, in which our polarization has become starker and more dangerous. Hell exults, I have to think, when we cannot see the humanity behind the slogans-- when a catchphrase causes us to think, "Nope, not listening to anything else that comes out of your mouth."

Facebook has a lot to answer for as an agent of that polarization, and I might have some ethical qualms about using the platform even if it were entirely a positive experience for me. But the 2016 election altered the ratio of Happy Facebook/Awful Facebook, and it does not seem to be shifting back. I keep thinking about it in an unhelpful loop: Facebook is mostly terrible / I should delete my account / what about all the people I'm only connected with on Facebook? / maybe I'll just peek in periodically / but even in small doses, Facebook is mostly terrible...

Tonight I had a thought: if I let people know that I'm planning to delete my account, maybe at the end of this calendar year, then I can round up missing contact information and download the stuff I'm going to want to save. Facebook is almost entirely bad for me, and it would be smart to pull the plug.

This post title sounds clickbait-y, I know. I would roll my eyes at a post called "Harry Potter and the Devil" or "Heavy Metal and the Devil." But Facebook has spurred me to think ill of my neighbor, to withhold the benefit of the doubt, to gossip and complain. Those things don't happen when I read Harry Potter or listen to AC/DC. It's probably time.

They have their own thoughts

The title of this post comes from the Kahlil Gibran poem about children, the one with the line about how we can house their bodies but not their souls. When I was a kid I thought it was very sensible, especially the bits like "You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you." When I got older I wondered if Kahlil Gibran had had any children of his own. (Google suggests that he did not, but I could be wrong about that.) It is a true fact about teenagers that they have a knack for taking the things that are particularly important to you and choosing them as the ground in which to plant their flags, to say, "I am separate from you; I am different from you."

Case in point: I have a kid who spent his entire childhood hearing that it is good to live simply, to embrace frugality, to go thrifting instead of buying new, to opt for less house and less car than you can afford so that you have more margin for giving and saving. And this child, once grown, pursued affluence with determination bordering on ferocity. He is a generous guy with a good head on his shoulders, but he is not interested in eating any more lentils.

This has happened in different ways with both of my 20-something children, and I have done my best to roll with it -- to let them know that I love them always, whichever flags they happen to be flying in whichever bits of territory I had marked out as important. But you know, sometimes a parent has to take a stand.

Joe came home last weekend and he said, "Mom and Dad, I might get disowned for this."

I raised an eyebrow.

He cleared his throat. "I've been buying fat-free cheese."

So yes, it's true: you can spend almost TWO DECADES telling a kid that fat is what God put in food to make it taste good, and backing it up with actual taste-bud-tickling evidence, only to have them reject the truth and embrace the lie of fat-free "cheese."

I'm still getting over that one.

Indoor Season

I've been pretty calm about Pete doing stuff with Scouts. On campouts he shares a tent with another vaccinated kid, and it's hard to get COVID outside. Even if another Scout showed up sick, it wouldn't be very likely to spread during outdoor activities.

But now things are different. I just sent him off on a campout that is going to be riskier than I realized. It will start with a 1.5-hour masks-optional bus ride, and they will be spending most of their time indoors once they arrive. It's not as if I want him to go sleep in a tent outside by himself in this weather, but it is true that his odds of COVID would decline if he did so (even as his odds of frostbite rose).

He especially wanted to go this weekend because they'll be planning their activities for the next year. I made the mistake of assuming they'd be planning outdoors.

I do not feel confident in my ability to assess the risks here. I am guessing that something like 40% of the kids on these campouts are vaccinated, but I am only guessing. We are having a little post-Halloween COVID spike here in Gladlyville, mostly concentrated among younger folks. Lots of messy questions, right?

I am frustrated by the voices saying prematurely "we're just going to have to learn to live with it!" when COVID caused more deaths in September than anything else except heart disease. No one would suggest that we should all just make our peace with cancer, I don't think, and COVID killed more people in September than all the varieties of cancer combined. No one would suggest nonchalance about strokes, one would hope, but the number of September stroke deaths was less than a quarter of the number of September COVID deaths. There's a lot more work to do before we can treat COVID like a garden-variety disease. Does some chunk of that work consist of me telling my 16-year-old that he should hunker back down until it's easier to do things outside again?

I do not know the answer to that question.

Gains in the mail

I am writing this post with my feet propped up on the coffee table, next to a big jar of protein powder that landed on my front porch this evening.

I fear I have wandered deep into Bro Madness territory now, and if I am not careful I will start sporting tank tops in February (sun's out, guns out!), spouting pseudoscience, and sprouting tattoos of my squat PRs.

But it turns that occasionally, just occasionally, the Beefy Buff Bros are onto something. It is hard to eat the amount of protein that's recommended to optimize gains (oh gracious, I just used the word "gains" in a blog post and I wasn't even joking), and I'm enjoying the gains (twice -- I did it twice in one sentence).

Well, okay: about 85% of me is enjoying the gains (oops, that's three) and 15% of me remains a little ambivalent.

An illustration, if you are not weary of these posts in which my current fitness regime collides with decades of messaging about what's attractive: I was in the bathroom, preparing to jump in the shower, when I caught sight of my shoulder in profile. "Oh, ugh," I thought to myself, "look at that back fat." I took a closer look, and said to myself, "Hold on, fat deposits do not usually end in a tidy visible line running obliquely across the scapula. I think what you mean is 'Look at those REAR DELTS.'"

I have been working for those rear delts, my friends. I do rear delt flies at the very end of my Day 2 workout and they always hurt. I always think about skipping the last set, because they are painful, but I keep at it until all three sets are done. AND LO, now I have an unfamiliar bulge on my shoulder. It's a good bulge, a hard-earned bulge. But dang, I have absorbed a lot of BULGES ARE BAD bunk across the past 51 years.

I am thinking about the gym bros who walked up to Joe over the summer and said, "Dude, you're looking big," fully intending it as a compliment. What would I do if someone walked up and said that to me? My inclination might be to drop a 2-pound jar of protein powder on their toe. But hey, if you're going to eat the Bro Diet you might need to speak the Bro Lingo.

I will continue to provide you with periodic anthropological updates from the weight room-- and, apparently, from the kitchen too.

The Thursday Murder Club

I borrowed the first Thursday Murder Club book from the library when Swistle blogged about it last month, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. There were some spots where the plot seemed to get away from the writer, and some authorial decisions that made me say "...really?" but it was so sweet and funny that I couldn't put it down. I requested the second one right away, and I'm in the middle of it right now. This will be a short post, in fact, because I want to put on my fleece pajamas and read about murders in my nice cozy flannel-sheet-covered bed. Nothing says hygge like some nice cozy murders, right?

Now that I know the characters, they are even funnier. They make me laugh and laugh. I am hoping the body count will be a little lower in this book than in the first one, because I do not actually love reading about murders, but I will read about murders for the sake of spending more time with these characters. I want to invite them over for tea and a lemon drizzle cake or perhaps a Victoria sponge.

I am reflecting on the Sherlock Holmes stories I loved as a kid, and I am remembering how often they focused on crimes other than murder. The Red-Headed League: theft. The Copper Beeches: an involved strategy for ditching a persistent boyfriend. The Blue Carbuncle: someone is eating the wrong goose for Christmas, oh no! But it seems like contemporary crime fiction tends to require dead bodies rather than geese gone astray. I myself would enjoy crime fiction and movies more if there were more misplaced geese and fewer jump scares, but I seem to be in the minority on that one.

Doctor Knows Best

There's been a lot of talk about the difference in the public's response to 1950s polio vaccine campaigns and its response to the 2021 COVID vaccine push. There's been a lot of justifiable frustration about folks who say they've done their "research" when the research consists of dubious Facebook links shared by people inside their echo chamber. (I say this as a person with an echo chamber of her own, just so we're clear.) But there hasn't been, I don't think, much focus on the changes in the culture of medicine.

In my ten years as a La Leche League Leader, I often thought about the paternalistic approach to medicine that the founders of the organization were responding to when they started hosting meetings in 1956. "Your baby isn't getting enough food; that's why he's nursing so often," said doctors who didn't know anything about normal variations in maternal storage capacity. "Your milk isn't rich enough," said doctors who didn't know that the fat content of human milk is a moving target, changing across every feeding and over the course of every day. "Formula is scientifically designed to give babies what they need," said doctors who didn't know that the absence of LC-PUFAs in 1950s infant formula could influence both the structure and the function of infants' brains. 

Don't even get me started on the long-since-debunked obstetric nonsense that was the norm in 1950s maternity wards -- practices that were hard on mothers, hard on babies. When the founders planned their physician-attended births at home, they were reclaiming their autonomy in a way that inspired many thousands of women to figure out birth options that would work well for them and their babies.

At the time, the demise of the "doctor knows best!" approach seemed to me like an unambiguously good thing. I mean, sure, doctors know best about some things, but they may not know a lot about lactation. "Watch for your baby's cues," I said to the women who came to meetings and called me seeking help. "Your baby will tell you what he needs."

There's a lot of truth in that, I continue to think, but even then it was clear that a person could take it too far. There was some anti-vaccine sentiment among the moms who came to meetings, along with some reluctance to set limits with toddlers, and there were an awful lot of people trying to determine whether their babies were fussy because they'd eaten too many tomatoes or too much broccoli or whatever else. (NB: It is very unlikely that a tomato in mom's diet will cause a baby to cry.) Sometimes your baby's cues are not the most reliable source of information. Sometimes the things that seem true to you are not actually true.

I would still say it's a good thing that we've left the "doctor knows best!" days behind us. Informed choice is better than uninformed lack-of-choice. But an emphasis on informed choice is going to mean that some patients wind up more informed than others, and some patients make better choices than others.

I was hopeful that we would see 1950s levels of enthusiasm for the COVID vaccine. It really does seem to me like a gift from God that these vaccines became available so quickly and have worked so well to reduce disease transmission, severity, and mortality. I guess, as with any gift, you can't predict how people will receive it.

43

I have spent too much of 2021 counting down the days until the next thing. The spring semester was so hard -- I was constantly adjusting the mental tally of days completed/days to go. My summer class was also really hard and I was doing the same kind of countdown there. The fall semester has been much better, for the most part. It's so nice to be back in the classroom again. On the work front I'm back to my usual level of tallying: the end of week 12 means 80% of the semester is over. But it is the beginning of Dark Season, which always makes me feel a little gloomy. There are 43 days until the winter solstice, when the days will get brighter again.

Things I am doing: taking fish oil, working out consistently, getting enough sleep.

Things I am planning to do: use my full-spectrum light instead of thinking "I should use my light", eat a little better, read the book on hygge I checked out of the library in hopes of finding my inner Dane.

Tonight I made cocoa for Stella and me to drink while we watched an episode of the show we've been watching about Taronga Zoo. I am hopping into bed just as soon as I publish this post, with fleece pajamas and a fun book to read.

The usual Dark Season challenges are augmented this year by some not-really-bloggable stuff. Seasonal affective disorder with a side of someone else's untreated mental health issues -- it's not my favorite. But I think I can I think I can. One day at a time, right?

Recommended

I bought a copy of Mark Shea's most recent book not long after it came out, but then it sat on my Kindle for a while. It's called The Church's Best-Kept Secret: A Primer on Catholic Social Teaching [affiliate link], and I really like it. I wasn't enthusiastic about starting it. Mark Shea can be strident on social media, and I didn't know how much of that might spill over into this book. But I am finding the book to be very compelling and not at all strident. It is both easy to read and thought-provoking.

Back to the gym with Joe

I asked Joe if we could lift together while he was home this weekend, because I was pretty sure I could bench a hundred pounds today, but only pretty sure. It was so nice, you guys. I miss that boy when he's away. He spotted me and -- milestone alert! -- I did indeed bench a hundred pounds for the first time. 

The nice thing about going with Joe is that he will give me as much or as little input as I would like. He has many, many sensible thoughts on how to optimize efficiency, but he also knows that it can get a little overwhelming to hear about 25 things I could do differently. So I tried a wider grip for bench, based on his comments (he was right about that, by the way), and I didn't worry too much about whether I was fully extending my arm for every single rep of incline bicep curl. 

I love having someone to chat with about how much harder it is to do incline bicep curls. 

Scrappy underdog songs

Recently Youtube suggested that I might like to watch a video about musicians in an airport who started playing music when their flight was delayed.

Much as I hate to admit it when Youtube is right about my taste in videos, I did want to watch that video. It made me want to learn to play the Irish bouzouki, and it also made me curious about the singer.

You don't have to dig very far into Daoirí Farrell's music before the Youtube algorithm serves up this suggestion:

I love this song. I was expecting it to be a lament about the sad death of the bonny white hare, but -- plot twist! -- that's not how it unfolds. I love the figurative twist of his lip when he sings "pedigree greyhounds" and I love the bouzouki accompaniment. (I'm still thinking about acquiring an Irish bouzouki, but maybe I should just learn how to play the banjo that is already in our house instead of buying another instrument.)

I might need more songs about scrappy underdogs in my life. Any suggestions?

"I want to put that in my MOUTH."

Back in the spring of 2020 I ordered goodies from New York Shuk for the first time, and I continue to shiver with delight every time I lick the spoon I've used to add preserved lemon paste to something. I feel about it like Miracle Max felt about his MLTs-- so perky.

Recently I bought a bottle of kafe hawaij, and I find that I am using it all the time this fall. It's nice for chai, it's delicious on roasted squash, and I used it for soul cakes on Tuesday. Just tonight I mashed together sweet potatoes and squash with butter and a healthy shake of kafe hawaij. Pete smelled the result and his eyes went wide. "I want to put that in my MOUTH," he said, and proceeded to gobble it down. Maybe you already have the individual spices in your cupboard, but the proportions in this blend are just right.

If you find yourself in need of some fun fall treats for your own household or some fun fall gifts for someone else's, I've been pleased with everything I've ordered from NY Shuk. This is not a sponsored post, just an appreciative one.

Antennae: Permanently Aflutter

In yesterday's post I didn't even tell you about the nascent friendship Thing that was most on my mind. It felt too weird and vulnerable so I wrote about a coffee meet-up from a month ago instead. But here it is: I had an odd lunch with a friend this week.

We were on the retreat team together last month, and after the retreat was over I sent her an email. It said something along the lines of, "Hey, I really enjoyed getting to know you better during the retreat preparations. Would you like to meet up for lunch sometime?" It took a little back-and-forth to set a date, and then we had a weather-related cancellation/reschedule, and then we finally got together this week.

The whole time, she seemed kind of irritated. This could have been a zillion things, I know. Maybe the maintenance light had just come on in her car and it felt like ONE MORE THING for her to deal with. Maybe she's having some kind of friction with a loved one, and she didn't want to talk about it but also couldn't quite set it aside. OR MAYBE-- she was irritated because she didn't really want to have lunch in the first place. Or because, even though she had warmly assured me that eating outside was fine, she actually didn't want to be outside. Or because I had ordered online and she had not, so she had to wait in line and it was a zoo in there.

In my life I have been in situations like this a kazillion times. Other people get annoyed at stuff. Sometimes it's my fault, mostly it's not; annoyance happens. It just felt unusually bothersome afterward, as if I could have prevented it with a little additional forethought or perhaps a little less personal quirkiness.

I think the pandemic has recalibrated my awareness of other people's unhappiness. Sometimes when I am lecturing it's like there's a little alarm going off: THAT STUDENT IS BORED!! SPEED UP!! BE FUNNY!! STOP BEING BORING!! It happens in office hours, too: THIS STUDENT IS UNHAPPY ABOUT THE THING YOU JUST SAID EVEN THOUGH YOU HAD TO SAY THE THING. I feel more aware of the way that a joke lands, or doesn't. 

This week in one of my classes I am talking about autism spectrum disorder-- about challenges with managing sensory input, and difficulties with making sense of other people's emotional states and responding appropriately. Just today I was talking to my students about how we refine our understanding of the workings of peer relationships by experiencing peer relationships. I'm pretty neurotypical, or at least I like to think so, but phew! No wonder people on the spectrum struggle with this stuff.

I suppose it's not surprising that I would need to recalibrate after so many months of connecting with other people asynchronously and through screens. It's as if I have relationship antennae, and right now they aren't really distinguishing between "light breeze you can ignore" and "gale that requires you to take shelter immediately." Here's hoping my antennae and I figure it out soon.

Friendship at fifty-something

I am lonely.

I have a little circle of true dear long-time friends, all of whom I've known since 1980-something. We text each other all the time, even though we don't see each other often. I have a wider circle of friends who seem happy to see me when we cross paths. But I am finding that making new friends or strengthening recent friendships is not easy for me these days.

Some of it is COVID. Some of it is that people are busy. I guess my worry is that some chunk of it is also about me.

Someone I knew when we were doctoral students together took a job at Gladlyville U. Her building is across the street from mine and I asked if she'd like to have coffee. I thought we had a very pleasant conversation about being academics with big families. But I am not sure she would agree. I emailed afterward and said, "That was so nice -- let's do it again sometime." She said, "Maybe next semester!" 

She is busy; I know she's busy. She commutes for an hour to get here, and her kids are younger than mine with a full slate of activities, and she's pre-tenure. It doesn't have to mean that I misread the situation completely.

It just makes me wonder if I misread the situation completely.

I have heard lots of people say that adult friendships are hard, so I hope it is not that I am too quirky or too intense or too...whatever else. But you know, after a while a person starts to wonder if maybe she's the problem.

Party like it's 2004

It's November 1, friends, and even though I am the only blogger I know who longs for the days of NaNoBloMo, when all the cool bloggers would write a post per day for the month of November, I am gearing up anyway. Thirty days, thirty posts, here we go.