Light and Momentary

And then there was one

Pete is coming home tonight to celebrate his birthday: he is turning 20 on Sunday. For the first time since 2012, I will only have one teenager.

I was so worried about having teens, but it turns out that teens are usually pretty great to have around. Now I will have four 20-somethings, who are still pretty great but who are much less likely to live in Gladlyville.

In particular for the intentions of the--

Like a lot of Catholics, I start every day with a prayer called the morning offering. In the last line we pray for the intentions of the Holy Father. I'm trying to remember -- did I notice in 2005 and 2013 that the final line doesn't exactly make sense in an interregnum? Deceased Holy Father? Future Holy Father? 

Hashtag rigid person problems, I suppose.

Currently Reading

I am about a quarter of the way through Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid, and I am enjoying it so much. I might be the ideal reader for this book, which looks at the emergence of written language in antiquity, the usual development of reading in young children, and the differences observed in kids with dyslexia. It is chock full of interesting nuggets about neuroscience and history, including some surprising bits about written language learning among Sumerian and Chinese women. (It does cite Hart & RIsley uncritically, which is not my fave.) You might not share my enthusiasm for languages from antiquity or the processes by which kids' brains acquire language skills, but I bet you'll find it interesting too.

I...think...I...can

This semester is feeling very long. That is all.

At the helm

I don't think I would have believed you if you'd told me ten years ago what the next decade would bring. Two Trump presidencies, a global pandemic, and a slow-motion cataclysm in the Church, in which "more Catholic than the Pope" became, for a subset of US Catholics, a badge of honor rather than a joke. I just could not have imagined the Pope-bashing that would become widespread in the corners of the US Church where I used to feel at home.

Tonight I am thinking about the uncertain expression on the face of Pope Francis when he first appeared on the balcony after his election, looking down at the crowds in St. Peter's Square. I am remembering his Urbi et Orbi address in March 2020, when COVID was ravaging Italy-- the monstrance held high over the empty square. I appreciated his willingness to proclaim unpopular truths to the powerful, challenging JD Vance to do better and even meeting with him on the last day of his life. 

I am grateful for his leadership across these tumultuous years. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.

Tiramisu is so yummy

This year we traveled instead of hosting, but we took food along. We made a version of the lamb and bean braise I told you about last year, and tiramisu.

I was looking for a tiramisu recipe with cooked egg yolks because food safety seemed like a bigger concern if we were transporting food. I was going to share the link but I can't find it, strangely, so I will just tell you about what I did instead.

In a double boiler heat six egg yolks with a half-cup of brown sugar. (It was supposed to be white sugar, but we did not have a half-cup of white sugar.) With an electric mixer, beat them together until they reach 160 degrees. Whip in 8oz. of room temperature mascarpone and a spoonful of vanilla. Beat 3 cups of whipping cream until you are a smidge past the soft peaks stage. Fold it all together gently.

For assembly you will need 24 ladyfingers and about 2 cups of strong black coffee. If you are using a trifle bowl, dip 5 whole ladyfingers quickly in the coffee and lay them in the bottom. Break a sixth ladyfinger into thirds, which you will also dunk briefly in the coffee, and put the pieces in the empty spaces. Spread about a quarter of the cream mixture on top. Repeat this process three more times, until you have used all 24 ladyfingers and all of the cream mixture. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and pop it in the fridge overnight. Before serving, put a spoonful of cocoa in a tea strainer. Tap the tea strainer gently with a spoon to dust the top of the tiramisu with cocoa.

I wondered if it would be too simple -- no rum, no egg whites, commercial ladyfingers. But it was a hit.

Briefly, on Holy Saturday

Resurrection: celebrated
Bass: played
Ice cream: eaten
Bed: awaiting 

Possibly too much fun for Good Friday

I am playing the electric bass at the Vigil tomorrow night with a little ensemble, and our rehearsal was tonight.

The music directors asked me to start playing bass in the summer of 2020, when there were COVID restrictions on church music. It was surprisingly fun, and for a while I was playing almost every weekend. But I stopped when the directors stepped down. I hadn't taken my bass out of its corner in many months -- long enough for the case to get dusty.

I had forgotten about the pleasing chunkiness of the strings, and the brain-tickling pleasure of playing way down at the bottom of the staff while sitting next to the big bass amp. We are going to sing Matt Maher's song Christ is Risen, which I had never played on bass before. I have to think about it a little bit, because it's in E-flat, but only a little bit, because it's mostly the same four chords.

I left the rehearsal thinking, "Hm, I wonder where I could play bass more often?"

Seen on Instagram

This image is from the @marzipantzshop Instagram account; her website is here.

In case you missed it, the vice-president of El Salvador told Senator Chris Van Hollen today that the Trump administration is paying them to imprison people deported from the US.

Angry Daffodils

One day in the fall of 2023 I came home from work overflowing with grumpiness. My boss had told me he wanted me to prep a new class and I did not want to teach it. I decided to go to the garden store and get a big bag of daffodil bulbs. It was chilly that evening and the light was fading, but I dug holes in my yard until I felt better. 

Almost all of those daffodils are blooming right now, and they are reminding me that it's usually a good idea to turn frustration into productive action. I could have slumped on the couch that evening, drifting around the internet in search of consolation. But instead I did something that brought me joy last spring, and is bringing me joy this spring, and may very well be bringing me joy in ten years or more.

Note to Fall Jamie: always plant more bulbs. You never regret planting bulbs.

And another note to Future Jamie: you didn’t have to teach that class after all. Dread is always useless. 

Christmas nostalgia in Holy Week

Even though it is almost Easter I am thinking about Christmas this evening. That's because I'm going to tell you about some scraps of paper that I have been keeping since December.

I've posted before about our gift-opening traditions. We open presents in rounds, with breaks in between. The sequence of the rounds is determined by contests, and the nature of the contests is always hotly debated. They used to be tame and ordinary, and then somehow they turned weird. During the polar vortex Christmas we had a contest to see who could hold his/her hand in the snow the longest. One year we competed to see who could stay upright the longest in a one-legged jumping contest on the trampoline. Once we raced to see who could loop around our downstairs the fastest while balancing a couch cushion on their head. 

I started to say "you get the idea," but it might be weirder than you think. 

I proposed a contest in December, and everybody liked the idea. I said, "What if everybody suggests a contest on a slip of paper, and then we each rank the proposed contests? We'll tally the points and open presents in that order." This was the result:

I don't know how readable that will be, and Typepad has not been rendering pictures reliably lately, so I'll describe it for you. Imagine a collection of a dozen Post-it notes, suggesting and ranking a variety of activities. Make anagrams with Scrabble tiles. See who can scream the loudest. My contribution: eat the largest quantity of Sandy's kibble.

It was a joke, you guys. I thought I would read it out loud and everyone would burst out laughing (yes) and then we would be done talking about it (surprisingly, no). One of my children actually ranked it as the best idea of all. "Kibble!" he said, whenever it was time to think of a new contest.

We had the nicest Christmas this year, with all seven of us here and only the seven of us here. I don't know how often we'll have Christmases like that. It's always good to have company and I'm delighted when our kids want to bring their friends and romantic partners home for the holidays. And at the same time I've kept this little pile of Post-it notes since December, thinking nostalgically about our shared traditions and our shared sense of humor.

(Kids, if you're reading this, there are no circumstances in which I will ever eat Sandy's kibble. Nostalgia, yes; kibble, no.)

Favorites

Suzanne asked me which Dickens novel is my favorite, and that is a harder question than you might think. 

When I finished the Dickens novels in 2010, I would have grouped the books like this:

Short, very good	Excellent, long	Good, long	Bleh
Great Expectations Tale of Two Cities Oliver Twist	Pickwick Papers David Copperfield Bleak House	Our Mutual Friend Nicholas Nickleby Little Dorritt Barnaby Rudge	Dombey & Son Martin Chuzzlewit Old Curiosity Shop Hard Times

My ratings have changed over the course of the AMDRALs. I loved Our Mutual Friend the second time around, but the second time through I found the young women in both Bleak House and David Copperfield pretty grating. Much to my surprise, I really enjoyed Martin Chuzzlewit in 2017. 

One of the trends I have observed is that my life circumstances often influence my enjoyment of a Dickens novel. When I went back to Pickwick for the 2018 AMDRAL, I had trouble enjoying it. It's the most playful of the novels, but I was teaching a fully online summer class for the first time and it wasn't going well. I wasn't feeling very playful. 

That's the reason I am very curious to revisit Dombey & Son. I read it for the first time in August/September of 2008, and my plate has rarely been fuller than it was then. I was being investigated by CPS, I was pregnant with my fifth child (and still throwing up in my third trimester), I was drafting the first half of my dissertation in preparation for a fall-semester prelim, and I had an absurdly long list of household tasks I wanted to complete before the baby arrived, like getting a new roof for the garage. Oh! And! in the first part of that window I was still closing out my early intervention caseload!

Not long after I finished Dombey & Son (grumpily, so grumpily), I read an article asserting that Dombey & Son is the Dickens novel most likely to be appreciated by people who think they don't like Dickens novels. At the time, I thought, "Are you kidding me? DOMBEY & SON?!" (I thought I remembered that this was Adam Gopnik writing in the New Yorker, but I can't find it in their archives and Google isn't turning it up elsewhere.) For that specific reason I am very curious about what it will be like to go back to that one -- it seems like an interesting place to land after so many years and so many re-assessments.

If pressed to pick a favorite-- wait, no, I can't pick just one.

Best short novel: Great Expectations
Most fun: Pickwick
Most skillfully crafted: Bleak House
The one I am most likely to pull of the shelf and read a chunk of, just because: Our Mutual Friend

TAMDRAL season approaches

This year will be the Twelfth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, which means that we are nearing the end of the list of Dickens novels. Here's where we've been:

2024 Hard Times
2023 Great Expectations
2022 Nicholas Nickleby
2021 Little Dorrit
2020 Oliver Twist
2019 Tale of Two Cities
2018 Pickwick Papers
2017 Martin Chuzzlewit
2016 David Copperfield
2015 Our Mutual Friend
2014 Bleak House

We have three left: Barnaby Rudge, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Dombey & Son. I think I want to save Dombey & Son for last, and I'm leaning toward Old Curiosity Shoppe for this year and Barnaby Rudge in 2026. Any opinions? We'll start a month from today, after I submit spring semester grades. 

Nous prévoyons un voyage

At the end of last summer I was feeling burned out. I've been on the teaching schedule consistently in recent summers, and summer teaching is intense. The promotion process had made for a stressful year. My run-ins with generative AI-fueled cheating in April and May had been demoralizing. 

As soon as I submitted summer grades I emailed my chair and told him I would not be available to teach in summer 2025. "Maybe," I said to my college roommates, "maybe I'll go to France for a month. Rent a small spare apartment in Nice and walk on the beach every day and never look at my email, not even once."

Alex and I were going to go to France in the summer of 2020 because I was turning 50 that year, but we all know about summer travel plans from 2020. 

Let us hope that summer travel plans for 2025 are more likely to materialize, because as of today we have plane tickets. Elwood and Stella and I will be gone for most of July. Pete, who does not love to travel, will mostly be here in Gladlyville and has agreed to take care of Sandy while we're gone.

Wow! Also eek! But mostly wow!

The reluctant landlady begins eviction proceedings

We've had occasional garter snake sightings at the back door for years now, but I was still not delighted when I came home today to find this guy--

--and his camera-shy friend--

--both basking in the sunshine right in front of my back door.

I texted the picture to the family group chat, and my children were Not Helpful. Pete said, "Friends!" Alex said, "Bring them to Easter and we will play Dodgy Snake with the cousins." (Dodgy Snake is a Boy Scout camp game in which you find a snake and toss it at your friends. Or perhaps at your enemies? We did not play Dodgy Snake at Girl Scout camp and I must say I prefer the orienteering and lanyard-making version of summer camp to the snake-projectile version.)

I had just popped home to eat lunch and let Sandy out, and I had to get back to the office for a meeting with a student. On my way out, the bigger snake was there again, curled up right next to the back door. "I don't think so," I told him, and I grabbed a nearby stick. I scooped him up and flung him into a garden bed. where I found another stick and pitched him still further from the house. (I did not see exactly where he landed. It is possible that I tossed him over the fence and into the neighbors' yard. Perhaps not my most neighborly moment.) 

What do you know about the habits of garter snakes? Is this one likely to slither back to  his sun-warmed spot at the back door, or will he shake himself off and say, "I guess I live in the neighbors' yard now"? I have never seen the snake that used to ease himself in and out of a tiny hole in our foundation since the day that I launched him, croquet-style to meet his destiny. I do hope the back-door snake does not think he lives in the garden bed now, because it is full of lovely baby brunnera and astilbe and new little hosta leaves, and it would be a bummer if I had to set them all on fire.

I have so many snake posts in my archives, you guys. Every link in this post is about a different snake encounter. I never thought I would be a snake blogger but here we are.

Back at it

I hit another bump in the road with lifting motivation. Do you remember that I was aiming to deadlift 200 pounds this spring? I thought I'd just bump up the weight by 5 pounds every couple of weeks, and -- hey presto! -- I'd hit 200 pounds by the end of the semester. For a while I was cruising right along, feeling strong and happy. A month ago I deadlifted 185 pounds for the first time and it felt fantastic.

But I am still finding it difficult sometimes to be a middle-aged woman who lifts. My mom is always worried that I'm going to hurt myself because I'm lifting too much. The guy who coordinates personal training, on the other hand, wanted me to know that a good deadlift would be twice my bodyweight. (This was his reply to me when I told him, enthusiastically, that I had just deadlifted 175 pounds for the first time. Read the room, pal.) Last month I wound up deadlifting next to someone I know from work, and even though he is friendly it felt strange and unpleasant to make scary deadlifting faces next to a guy from the office. (Also my PR is his warmup.) That free personal training session was thoroughly disheartening-- both the assumption beforehand that obviously I would prioritize weight loss, and the annoying gatekeeping vibe of the session itself, as if she had to ensure that I was barbell-ready before any barbells would be making an appearance.

And this part is silly but true: after deadlifting faithfully twice a week and eating my protein and taking my creatine, I noticed some muscle growth. This was the very goal I had been pursuing, one would think, but my raised-in-the-80s brain said OH NO OH NO YOU ARE GETTING LARGER MAKE IT STOP RIGHT NOW.

This was all rattling around in my brain in the presence of the conviction that it shouldn't be so hard to deadlift 200 pounds. Joe and his friends could probably deadlift 200 pounds with a two-finger grip. Casey Johnston sailed past that milestone very early in her lifting career, so it isn't a male-female thing. But deadlifting 185 pounds with good form was absolutely the upper limit of what I could do a month ago. 

All in all, I was feeling discouraged.

But tonight I went back to the gym and I told myself I would deadlift with low expectations. When 155 felt good, I told myself I'd just do one rep at 165, which turned into a set of 4, which turned into a second set of 4. Afterward I looked up age-specific deadlift expectations and discovered that it's normal for women in their mid-50s to find a 200-pound deadlift daunting. Casey Johnston and I are both female, but she started lifting in her 20s. I was so skeptical of that linked table at first that I looked around for other points of view, but the internet seems to agree that most 54-year-old women are going to have to work at it if they want to deadlift 200 pounds.

I have put my scale in the basement for now. Maybe it's best if I don't tell my mother about my interim progress. Even though the end of the semester is always a little bonkers, I am going to keep showing up and doing what I can do. Maybe I will be able to do 190 next week. We'll see.

#27

I finished Trollope novel #27 recently and it was not my favorite.

The MacDermots of Ballycloran was Trollope's first novel. It shows. I read recently that his mother, herself an author, was preeeeetty skeptical about her son's ability to write a novel that anyone would want to read. Ouch! And yet it is true that I had to haul myself forcibly through the first half of the novel.

Trollope lived in Ireland for a while as a young man, and he set several of his books there. In this one he keeps trying to capture the dialect difference in his spellings of the Irish characters' dialogue. Because of my professional background I am the worst possible audience for that. It grated on me the whole way through. It's very difficult, I know, to spell out dialect in a way that's consistent and transparent, and still I was irritated from start to finish by the lack of consistency and transparency. 

To my eye, the narrator seemed to be looking down on the Irish people, gawping at their poverty and blaming it on their laziness and fondness for alcohol. Honestly, I was a little shocked by it at first. Imagine my surprise when I learned that his Irish novels didn't sell well because English audiences thought he was too sympathetic toward the Irish!

The second half of the novel moves more briskly than the first, and it raises interesting if familiar questions. One of the characters finds himself accused of murdering another character. What actions can a man legitimately take to protect his sister? Is true justice possible or is it destined to be corrupted by personal opinions and interests? The thing I might remember most warmly from the book is the decision of the accused man to return from his hiding place after fleeing initially, and face the legal consequences with all the courage he could muster.

One of the central characters is a Catholic priest; he might be the first one I've seen in a Trollope novel. It's also the first time I've seen a Trollope character develop dementia, and I'd say it's skillfully done: the man who was initially just cantankerous and isolated becomes unable to reason and remember, in a way that will probably ring true for readers who have watched a loved one's cognitive decline. 

Twenty-seven down, twenty to go! Next up: Nina Balatka.

Recommended

I finished the second Vera Wong book yesterday and it is even funnier than the first. I kept setting down my Kindle to laugh helplessly.

It probably works better to read them in publication order, since many of the characters from book #1 are back and part of the fun of book #1 is the uncertainty about who deserves sympathy vs. suspicion. 

In both books it's not hard to guess where the plot is going, but that will not deter me from buying the third one whenever it comes out. 

In which I am brave

Late last spring a co-author and I submitted a paper to a journal that is peer-reviewed but also a little more chill than some of the alternatives. If you're in my field and your paper gets rejected from a fancier journal, you'll often say to yourself, "Oh well, I guess I'll submit it to the Journal of Chill Peer Review."

Much to my surprise, so very much to my surprise, we got a totally bananapants set of reviews back in July. The associate editor had received feedback from SIX peer reviewers, and had passed it all along to us with zero guidance about how to implement it.

Usually JoCPR manuscripts get two reviewers. Maybe if you're writing about something controversial there will be a third. In super-rare circumstances involving bitter disagreements, you might possibly get a fourth. But we were not saying anything controversial. It was a nice little qualitative study -- worth reading, I think, but not groundbreaking. 

Feedback from six peer reviewers made for an absurdly complex revision process. When you resubmit a revised manuscript, you include a revisions table that lists every piece of feedback and your response to it. Our revisions table was nine single-spaced pages. NINE!

I was not at all sure what to expect in round two, but it was better. There were only two reviewers this time, each of whom raised interesting questions. The AE had a long list of nitpicky changes: remove this comma, say "for example" instead of "for instance." There was an extra space between two words on page 18 and she wanted us to take it out. I was surprised, again, that she offered us zero guidance about the reviewers' comments, because that's her job. I started making her nitpicky changes and found myself extremely irritated. I mean, come ON: why are you telling two adults with PhDs that they should say "for example" instead of "for instance"? I know from experience that some editors are more into wordsmithing than others. But this was ridiculous. Midway through, I handed off the rest of those revisions to my research assistant.

And then...I made a mistake. There were two files named "cursed_manuscript_final.docx," but only one of them was actually final. Without realizing it, I uploaded the one in which I had only made half of the AE's requested changes.

It's not unusual for a paper to get kicked back to the authors after its initial submission. Every journal has its own set of requirements for authors, and they go on for pages. It's easy to overlook something-- this journal wants continuous line-numbering, but that one wants the line numbers to restart at the top of every page. This journal requires that figures be in .png format; that one prefers .tiff. It's always something. So I wasn't fussed when the journal returned the paper to me with a form email. I skimmed the email and the last line stood out to me: learning outcomes must be submitted in a separate document. "Whoops," I said to myself, as I swiftly reformatted the learning outcomes and resubmitted the paper.

I did not notice, because the AE's changes had all seemed so trivial to me, that it was still the not-quite-final version.

The changes, however, did not seem trivial to the AE, who sent me the most infuriating email I received in all of 2024. She said she had stopped reading when she realized we hadn't swapped out one phrase for another with the very same meaning, and that she was going to reject our paper if we didn't get it right this time.

She was going to

reject

our

paper

?!?!?!?!

Did I mess up? Yes, I did. Is it annoying when people don't fix their mistakes? Yes, it is. Did this threat have anything to do with the substance of our paper, its scientific merit, or even its readability? Absolutely not. 

In the moment, I found the right document and apologized for the oversight. But I said to myself, "Once this is published, I'm going to have a chat with the editor-in-chief."

It was accepted in short order, once I eradicated the dreaded "for instance" and its ilk. And then I found myself reluctant to contact the editor-in-chief. I had messed up, and then I had failed to catch the mistake. I didn't want to sound entitled or demanding. I hesitated to tell the story in an email because I didn't know where it might get forwarded. I dithered about it for a while. But finally, just last week, I bit the bullet and called the editor-in-chief.

And you guys, she was fantastic. I framed it very explicitly as information I wanted to share with her so she could decide whether it rose to the level of a concern for her, and I said that I wanted to be sure that there weren't any junior faculty on the receiving end of similar missives. But it turned out that the editor-in-chief agreed with every piece of my assessment of the experience, and wanted to ensure that it was not repeated. She emailed me later to say that there was in fact evidence of similar problems with at least one other manuscript. 

It seems likely to me that the AE will know where the complaint originated; I probably did not endear myself to her with this phone call. But it also seems likely to me that she will have fewer opportunities to demoralize junior faculty and create needless delays in the publication of their manuscripts. Peer review is bruising enough without an overlay of folly and incompetence. 

So this is just to say: if you have a phone call you've been meaning to make, or an injustice you've been meaning to protest, sometimes these things go better than you expect them to.

Squat Camp

Joe and Pete were both in town this weekend, and Joe offered to go to the gym with me and help me work on my squat. 

Recap, since I've only told the squat story in piecemeal fashion: I started working on barbell squats in the summer of 2021, and I found the form really difficult. I kept at it, but it was my least favorite of the big three compound lifts (squat, bench, deadlift).

In the fall of 2023, when I was doing the Strong for Science program, the coordinator noticed an asymmetry in the movement of my left side. Under load, my left knee kept wandering inward. My trainer had me work on some hip mobility and hip strengthening exercises. They moved me to Smith machine squats and instructed me to restrict the range of motion so that I was not squatting to depth.

Joe did not think this was a great plan, because he says you lose an important chunk of the benefit of squatting when you don't squat to depth. He was far away, though, and I figured it was better to get some of the benefit of squatting while also protecting myself from injury. So I did what they asked me to do. But then afterward I wasn't quite sure what to try next. I didn't know how to fix the asymmetry, and it didn't seem like a great idea to push forward with a lopsided squat. Mostly, I skipped squats for a while.

It seemed like such a happy idea to get a free personal training session entirely focused on my squat, but it was not very happy after all. The assumption that of course I would be working on fat loss, the trainer's reluctance to introduce a barbell into the session when I had specifically said, "I want to work on symmetry in my barbell squat" -- it didn't feel like I was getting what I signed up for. 

And! it turns out!! she wasn't even giving me very useful advice for barbell squatting!!! Argh!!!!

Here is the game-changing thing Joe told me today: it works better to hinge forward a smidge instead of trying to sit back in your heels. He had me start in a gentle hinge and then hinge a leetle more on the way down, and it felt SO MUCH BETTER than any barbell squats I have ever done in all the time I have been squatting. SO MUCH MORE STABLE -- yes, I'm shouting a little.

Joe had me doing paused tempo squats-- slow descents, holding my position in the hole, and then pushing up briskly. And it went really well: good depth, good symmetry, good control. I think I will probably be pretty sore on Tuesday because I'm not used to descending slowly. But I'm going to go back and do it again once I'm done being sore. I'll be sure to tell you all about it.