Light and Momentary

Shoes and Ships and Stripey Socks

Long ago, maybe ten years ago, I picked up a skein of Noro sock yarn on clearance and stashed it in the fingering bin. It sat there for ages. In 2017, when we were taking the train to NYC, I cast on a sock and knitted away as the miles rolled by. I worked the cuff and the heel and the gusset before I realized that something was wrong: it was huge. I had thought I was making a sock but somehow I had accidentally crafted a file cabinet cozy.

I realized belatedly (and disgustedly) that I had chosen size 3 needles instead of size 1 or 2, resulting in this bold new line of outerwear for file cabinets. I stashed the unhappy result in the bottom of a tote bag for many months. It felt like such a hassle to frog the sock and soak the yarn and dry it and rewind it, so for a while I just ignored it. But when I finally did start it over, it caught the eye of my second son. "Who's that for?" he wanted to know. "Do you want it?" I asked him. He did.

I worked big swaths of it on our New Year's trip to my parents' house. (The thing about socks for man-sized feet is that they require only slightly less knitting than an actual file cabinet cozy.) When I reached the end of the first sock, I wasn't quite sure how to start the second one. Noro sock yarn is famous for its long stripe repeats, and this skein had been designed so that a woman's sock would consume about one repeat, with some wiggle room for long cuffs or long feet. A man's sock, though, ate up a little more than a single repeat. This meant I would have to wind a lot of yarn to make the socks match.

But when I consulted my son about his preference for the second one, I learned he didn't care whether the socks matched exactly. We agreed on a plan, and I finished up the second sock yesterday. (They are shown on my feet. They are much less baggy on his.) He is very pleased with them. We both love those yummy pink-shading-to-coral stripes across the mid-foot.

I might take a wee break from knitting man-socks now.

Shoes and Ships and Stripey Snakes

The time has come, the blogger said,
to talk of many things:
of whole-house fans and garter snakes,
of cabbages and kings[1],
of why the sea is boiling hot[2]
and whether pigs have wings[3]

Today I was returning from the office when I paused to admire my happy little herb garden. It's always a bit of a mystery which plants will come back, but it generally does pretty well. This year, I thought to myself, the marjoregano[4] is thriving so hard it's trying to take over the yard[5], the tarragon is standing up tall and proud, the sage is huge and covered in purple flowers, and the lavender is lovely even though I thought it might have died over the winter. I was standing right next to the lavender thinking these thoughts when I noticed a quiver at my feet. Or perhaps a shiver. OR PERHAPS A SLITHER???

There was a garter snake in my herb garden. It tried to hide in the tarragon, but I shook the tarragon leaves and it hopped over the bricks and escaped to the hosta bed. WELL, THAT WAS UNEXPECTED, I said to myself with a certain emphasis. 

We used to have a neighbor across the street whose house had a bounteous garter snake population. In fact, a mama garter snake had apparently nested under her porch, and vast quantities[6] of stripey little snakelets would come slithering out into her yard. Now you guys, I was pretty deep into my earthy-crunchy phase at the time but my brand of "we are gentle with living things" did not extend to NESTS of SERPENTS under my PORCH. This mom, though, took earthy-crunchy to a new level. "They're a sign of a healthy ecosystem," she said chidingly one day when I raised the issue. Okay, then! I mean, so are killer whales! Maybe I should found a killer whale sanctuary under my porch then?

I doubt she would have found the killer whale comparison persuasive. 

So here's my first question for you: where do garter snakes (especially those right down by your own personal feet) fall on your personal scale of shriek-inducing? Are you fascinated and grateful for your healthy ecosystem? Or are you thinking it's a shame you have to set the herb garden on fire now? Do tell.

Here is my second question for you: has anyone ever installed a window-mounted whole-house fan? When I was a girl in West Virginia, my father put a whole-house fan in our attic and it was magic. On summer evenings he would open the windows at each end of the house and switch on the fan, and in minutes all the lovely cool evening air would come pouring in. We didn't need an air conditioner. Gladlyville is hotter and stickier than my childhood home in the mountains, though, and I think we have less of a temperature gradient from midday to evening here in the flatlands -- it's hot at noon and it's still pretty hot at 7pm. But I think every year about a whole-house fan, because our AC doesn't do a great job cooling the upstairs. The installation seems like a total pain, which has always kept me from moving beyond the thinking stage. Just today, though, I learned that there are whole-house fans that can go in a window. We have a nice big window upstairs which could be just the right spot for such a thing. Anybody ever tried it? Any tips or tricks or cautions for me to consider? 

This is my first crack at HTML footnotes and Safari won't let me preview them to see if they work. So I am just going to throw them up untested, because I'm wild and reckless like that. It's kind of a jungle over here in Gladlyville, man: snakes on the loose and renegade footnotes, all in one temeritous post.

[1] We don't actually have to talk about those, though comments are open if you have thoughts on matters brassical or monarchical.

[2] Because the Koch brothers seem to have bought themselves a government, that's why.

[3] That would be a no on the pigs having wings.

[4] Marjoram and oregano look a lot alike. We don't know which one actually came back.

[5] It's another poem: thriving so hard...take over the yard. Perhaps I will become a poetry blogger! (I can hear my husband saying, "Don't quit your day job, Jamie."

[6] Well, no, I don't know exactly how many. But can we agree that more than, say, two[7] is a quantity vaster than one might wish to host under one's porch?

[7] Or perhaps one. Or, you know, zero.

If I were less tired this post would have a better title

Last night I said, "Okay, kids, can you set the table with six placemats like this one and six matching napkins?"

Stella answered, "Who's coming over?"

And we were having a dinner guest, it's true, but I felt a little bit harrumphy that her immediate assumption is matching napkins = company coming.

Today was a long day. I have taken over a 7am Adoration hour on Wednesday for the summer, and shortly afterward was the first session of a course redesign workshop I'm doing. The thing about teaching classes a bunch of times is that you figure out what mostly works, and then inertia becomes a powerful force. Like, it would be better if you used a different textbook, but investigating textbook options is a hassle and the current textbook is okay. It would be better if you reorganized the third unit, but prepping new lectures is a ton of work -- a TON of work -- and the existing lectures aren't so bad.

In the summer there's space to do a little dreaming. What's my GRAND VISION for this course? When students think back on this course in five years' time, what do I want them to remember about it? What might the steps between the first day of class and the achievement of the GRAND VISION look like? There's a huge emphasis right now in higher ed on measurable outcomes: how will you KNOW that your students have achieved what the syllabus said they should be able to achieve? But the overlap between measurable and meaningful is imperfect, and the latter should be a higher priority. Today I had the freedom to think to myself "What do I want my students to understand about the social model of disability?" without having to say in the very next breath "Here is the way I will measure their knowledge of the social model of disability."

As soon as the workshop session was over, I walked down to the repair shop where our limping van was getting its oil changed, and headed out to pick up Joe, who took his last final today. The trip there took longer than planned because of a road closure, and the departure from campus took longer than planned because he has a surprising amount of stuff, but it was an uneventful trip despite its length. Uneventful drives are my favorite kind, especially when the lateness of the hour means a glorious crimson sunset, and lightning playing in the sky -- close enough to enjoy, too far away to slow me down. And now Joe is here, hurray! Four of five Gladly kids are home to stay for a while.

No Cigar

I am typing this post at the rock-climbing gym while my 14yo chats with the staff about the right amount of painful in a good rock-climbing shoe. I didn’t know that planned shoe discomfort was a thing in the world beyond women’s dress shoes, but they are having a lengthy conversation about “aggressive” shoes. 

Tonight I almost leveled up, you guys. I have been working slowly on a route rated 5.10b, and it has been a struggle. There’s a move near the beginning that seemed like a cruel joke for a long time, but now I can do it pretty consistently. On Tuesday I made it three-quarters of the way up and ran out of gas. Tonight I got past that part, all the way to the last hold...and then fell trying to match.

In climber-speak, if you want to send a route, or check it off your list, you have to match: get both hands solidly on the last hold. I'm almost there.

I couldn't get a good picture of the route because I couldn't back up far enough to capture the whole thing. I was going to guess that the route is 40 feet tall; Joe thinks maybe it's a little taller. I'm trying to use just the green holds to get myself from the floor, down by the yellow caution flag at the bottom of the picture, all the way to the ceiling, which is three or four holds above the top of this picture. 

I'm pretty sure I can do it on Saturday, as long as they don't take it down before that. I'm also pretty sure I'll be too sore to tackle it tomorrow.

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.

In my mailbox

Gladlyville University
Office of the President

May 14, 2019

Dear Dr. Gladly,

Congratulations! As a result of the significant contributions you have made to your discipline and to Gladlyville University, your applications for tenure and for promotion to Associate Professor have been approved and will be effective August 16, 2019.

Best wishes for continued success as a member of the Gladlyville University faculty.

Sincerely,

President McPseudonym

Fast Food

Our dinner is simmering on the stove right now, and while the rice finishes cooking I am going to tell you how to make it. We are having chana masala, chickpeas in a sauce that's slightly tart and slightly spicy. Super-quick, super-tasty, super-cheap, and my kids will all eat it, in welcome contrast to the last meal I cooked for them. (Mother's Day lunch. I was riffing on salade niçoise. They were unenthusiastic.)

I first encountered this recipe in Urvashi Pitre's Indian Instant Pot Cookbook, a slim little volume that is totally worth the shelf space. I have a sour tooth, and so I was immediately intrigued by the description. Her recipe tells you to cook down a bunch of onions before you make the chana masala, but you don't actually have to do it that way unless you want to. The recipe that follows is a hybrid: some of the Urvashi Pitre recipe, some of the recipe from the back of the spice box. No Instant Pot necessary.

Sauté a diced onion in neutral oil. When it begins to brown lightly, add chopped garlic (maybe 3-4 cloves) and minced ginger to taste. You'll add 1/2 t. cumin seeds and 2 T. chana masala spice mix. (Urvashi Pitre says you should not expend a bunch of effort trying to make your own chana masala spice mix. Buy in. The box I linked is not the same one for sale at our Indian grocery, but the ingredients are almost the same and the reviews are good. One box will let you make about half a dozen batches of chana masala.) Toss them around in the fat for a minute, and then add a 15-oz. can of petite diced tomatoes and two cans of chickpeas. Simmer until your rice is cooked. Squeeze the juice of a lemon over it if you, like me, do not keep amchoor in your spice basket. Serve with cilantro.

I made a gelatin salad to go alongside: orange juice, lemon juice, shredded carrots. Will the kids tell me that 1956 called and wants its side dish back? Stay tuned for more riveting updates from Gladlyville.

And they're off

Our graduation reception was yesterday afternoon. I always enjoy them. Our grad students are back on campus after their external placements, pleased and proud and a little disbelieving: it felt like their program would last forever, but now it's done. They want us to meet their families and their fiancés, and hear about the new jobs they've lined up, and we are happy to oblige.

I've known some of this cohort for a long time. Five or six of them took the 100-level anatomy class with me in 2014, and then they took my 300-level classes, and then I taught them across both semesters of their first year in grad school. Along the way I supervised their honors projects and independent studies and symposium presentations. I feel a little nostalgic: when I met them, they didn't even know the larynx had joints. I bet that these days if you woke them out of a sound sleep and said, "Quick, name the joints of the larynx," they would mumble the right answer.

(I mean, that's practically the same as witnessing someone's first steps.)

One of the good things about working in this discipline is that 100% of our students find jobs in the field. They may not land in their preferred setting right off the bat, but we can give them sincere encouragement that their job searches will be fruitful, and that the future offers them varied and interesting work with the potential to make a real difference in the lives of people with disabilities.

Ugly Cars

For a long time I was going to write a blog post called In Praise of Ugly Cars. It was going to be about buying ugly cars on purpose, something we used to do out of necessity and now do voluntarily. Just now I'm keenly aware of the drawbacks of ugly cars, though.

Consumer culture says, "What is the most house (or car) that I can afford?" Voluntary poverty says, "What is the smallest house (or ugliest car) that will meet my needs?" (We are lucky here in Gladlyville to have reasonably priced housing options, so please don't feel this post is aimed at you if you are feeling squeezed by a big-city mortgage.) I had never encountered the idea of voluntary poverty before I became Catholic, but it struck an immediate chord with me. Let me hasten to say it is a practice I engage in only selectively. Dorothy Day would doubtless look askance at our restaurant budget. But I think big-ticket purchases, and especially cars, are a sensible place to think about voluntary poverty. Our strategy has always been to purchase an older no-frills car, often one with some minor cosmetic blemishes.

A few years back I dropped off a kid for a Scout campout, and the volunteer collecting health forms needed to write something on the paper I handed her. She laid it on the trunk of the closest car, on top of a stack of papers, and added a quick note. The car's owner came swooping down on us, furious. It was his prize possession, a Mercedes convertible, and he was incensed that she had used a ballpoint pen on top of his expensive paint job -- even with a pile of 10 papers in between. He whipped out a cleaning cloth and wiped fretfully at the (wholly unremarkable) spot. I thought to myself, "If ever I get that focused on the appearance of an object I own, I should probably throw it into the sea." I can't predict how I would respond to the prospect of damaged paint on a car worth more than the median US income, but I hope I would still be courteous to the well-intentioned person in front of me -- the person whose years of volunteer service to the Scout troop made it possible for my kid to attend camp.

I am typing this post and thinking it's practically a cosmic invitation for me to discover what I would do in a parallel circumstance. Maybe tomorrow the babysitter will overturn a glass of tomato juice on the piano keyboard or something. I would be unhappy about that (although I hope I would still be polite). But that's why I don't keep my piano on the front porch. The thing about cars is that they are uniquely vulnerable to depredations at the hands (or bumpers) of others. All it takes is a moment of absent-mindedness or bad judgment -- one inattentive driver out of the thousands of drivers who will operate their vehicle near mine across its lifespan.

It's easier to cultivate detachment from material things if your car is pre-uglified. If a teenaged driver has an accident in a pre-uglified car, it's likely to be less conspicuous, which makes it easier to say sincerely, "I'm just glad you're okay." It's easier to give generously if you're not working around a hefty car payment. All sensible observations, right?

This has been an expensive year for car repairs, though. Within the past week we've put $1800 into our newer vehicle. Elwood and I have been debating automotive end-of-life issues again. Across all 26 years of our marriage, I've always been the one saying "DNR the car!" while he says, "No, I really think we can nurse her through this crisis." It always works out. In this particular conversation I have been feeling the influence of some wealthy friends, who arrange their budget so they pretty much never have to deal with car repairs. But I've also been thinking tonight about Dorothy Day, and specifically about this quote from a blog post by a woman who interned at a Catholic Worker house: "Dorothy Day writes that though we may attempt poverty, a kind of stripping of ourselves, 'still you will reach out like an octopus to seek your own comfort, your untroubled time, your ease, your refreshment' (Loaves and Fishes, 84)."

Weekend Report

Oh, I think May is my favorite month. The light! The blooms! The demise of drear! I woke up on Saturday morning after 9 hours of sleep to a glorious spring day, full of determination to Get Things Done. The determination to Get Things Done doesn't always turn into the reality of Having Done Things, but on Saturday it did.

I’ve been in a bit of a slump, you guys. I’ve been feeling burned out and uncertain at work. I still have not adjusted to life with only two children at home — mostly because I miss the ones who are far away, but even in practical terms I've been flailing for longer than I would have expected. There is no one who is responsible for emptying the dish drainer every morning, even though I’ve had nine months to figure out the dish drainer situation. But things are looking up.

Joe came home this weekend, which was delightful. We fit in a bunch of rock-climbing along with Pete. Our rock-climbing gym opened its outdoor boulder last weekend, and Joe was excited to try out the new routes. I remain a lot more cautious about trying new things at the gym. I was not optimistic about the outdoor boulder, because Pete had warned me that it was a lot harder than the indoor routes. But do you know, I was able to top out on two routes (that’s what the climbers call it when you haul yourself all the way onto the upper surface and take the steps back down), and reach the last hold of a third route. We will gloss over the fourth route, where I slipped off a not-great hold at the top of the boulder and fell all the way to the ground. (Ouch. But I’ll get it next time.)

Pete and I got in some gardening time, to our mutual satisfaction, and Stella and I took a trip to one of our favorite spots, a nearby nature preserve. Red-wing blackbirds and yellow-bellied something-or-others, peeping frogs and trees for climbing. It’s one of my favorite places to spend a weekend afternoon. 

In an ideal world perhaps I would be less affected by gray skies and wet weather. I guess the upside of Seasonal Affective Disorder is that my November malaise yields reliably to May enthusiasm. If I can't be more even-keeled, at least I can take advantage of the upswing.

It's #SAMDRAL time

Every year that I have been on the tenure track, I have celebrated the end of the spring semester with a deep dive into a fat Dickens novel. That means this is the Sixth Annual May Dickens Read-Along (#SAMDRAL for all you hashtaggers), and this year I am mixing it up a little. I am planning to reread two of the short novels instead of one of the fat novels: Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist.

Usually I start after final grades are submitted, but do you know, I am ready to leave the cruellest month behind and plunge right in. I plan to read ToTC across about ten days, posting intermittently about it as I go. Join me! 

Long time no blog

Hi, friends, it's been a long time. How are you?

I am hanging in there. I am having the usual April issues with Substance Abuser #1: it feels dishonest to say nothing and unwise to share the details of somebody else's struggles in a public forum, so I just don't say very much at all. 

A happier regular April thing is that I did the fun 10K again this year. One of my college roommates joined me again, for even more fun.

Pete is 14 today. 14! He is having a rock-climbing birthday party tomorrow. We had almond cake at home and I have been asked to bake brownies for the party. I thought I knew just what he wanted for his birthday, but he had a last-minute change of heart. So! That will require some creativity tomorrow.

I was invited to be part of a mission retreat team, taking the program we use at our parish to another parish a few hours away. I am supposed to give a talk tomorrow night on theology, and right now it is still pretty larval. Or maybe it's not even in the larva stage yet. Maybe it's still unhatched. Tomorrow it's going to have to wing its way through hatching and pupating pretty quickly, I'm telling you.

It's been a weird chilly spring and I'm ready for some warm (but not hot) days. I have some tidying up to do outside, but it's too gray and dreary and cold right now. I think I am going to turn over a strip of the grass next to our driveway and plant flowers there this year. I am not going to do it on a day that requires a coat, however,

I have some tidying up to do inside as well. I've been in a weird sort of limbo recently. When will I hear from the university president with the final tenure decision? What if I quit my job to become a novelist? (Never mind that I have written about an eighth of one novel. Details!) What will I do if SA#1 continues to decline to get it together? I think a vigorous decluttering might have salutary effects. I Kon-Mari-ed my wardrobe a few years ago, but maybe I will Kon-Mari the whole house this summer. 

I'm not teaching this summer, and I am really looking forward to not-teaching. I'm thinking that this year's May Dickens Read-Along will be a couple of the shorter books, like maybe Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist. But if anybody's pining for a Barnaby Rudge party, I could be persuaded.

Ideas from Digital Minimalism

Hi, you guys, I have been meaning to tell you about finishing Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism over spring break. I was expecting it to cover well-trodden ground: phones are bad for concentration, smartphones are unhelpful at least as often as they are helpful, your attention is a valuable resource. We know all this, right? (Maybe you all will disagree on assertion #2. I am not convinced that smartphones are a net gain for the world.) It turned out to be a book that was more thought-provoking than guilt-inducing, so maybe you will want to read it too.

He seems to have mellowed somewhat on social media since he published Deep Work. He recommends a 30-day digital detox, in which you avoid all the sites that steer you toward immoderation, but he isn't asking readers to live austere lives in sparely appointed houses with only tin-can-and-string phones connecting them to the outside world. He suggests that if you want to have Facebook or Twitter or Instagram in your life after your detox, you should eliminate use on mobile devices; the mobile versions of these tools are specifically designed to elicit more compulsive use. He says that you can probably get what you're looking for on Facebook (i.e., actual updates from the people you actually care about) in 20 or 30 minutes per week; he acknowledges that this will vary.

If you are an average social media user, eliminating it entirely for a month will free up a lot of hours in your day. Newport invites readers to be purposeful about what they're going to do with that time. Perhaps the single most memorable piece of the book is his recommendation to engage in active leisure. Some of what he means by active leisure is familiar -- walk outside, play board games if that's your thing. Here's the thing I'm still thinking about: he challenges readers to improve or repair something once a week as a leisure activity. Use YouTube judiciously, to learn how to tile your backsplash or replace your light fixture or fix that hole in the drywall. And then -- get in there with your own hands and make your environment a little more homey.

(My backsplash remains untiled. But I'm THINKING TILE THOUGHTS, friends.)

The other idea that made me say "...whoa, that's really smart" was his suggestion that do-not-disturb mode should be the default. It's not hard to configure a phone so that calls and/or texts from your loved ones can get through while everybody else waits for you to finish what you're doing. "Treat texts like email," he says, which I think is excellent advice. As I was reading the book I was imagining a table:

Level	Required Response Time	Adverse Outcome If Disregarded
1	<1 minute	Harm to someone I love
2	<10 minutes	Irreparable property damage
3	<1 hour	Avoidable distress and worry
4	<4 hours	Annoyance
5	<12 hours	None

Contemporary phone culture makes it easy to treat every buzz of the phone like it's a Level 1-1 emergency: if I don't check this immediately, harm might come to someone I love. In reality, most of my texts from non-family members -- and many of the texts from family members -- can wait with no ill effects. Most of my texts probably fall in 4-4 or 4-5 territory: it would be good to respond before I eat my next meal, but I certainly don't need to respond before I finish my next sentence. It's not like I'm a realtor, whose income depends on prompt responses to inquiries from strangers, or a physician on call.

I am curious about your reactions. Are you intrigued by the active leisure idea? It might just be a natural fit for me as a person who finds joy in creating to-do lists. I'm also curious about where other people's texts tend to fall on my made-up urgency scale.

Gracefully

It's easy for me to see the loveliness of God's design at the beginning of the lifespan. Those patches of hair at a newborn's temples, the ones that fade away mysteriously within a couple of weeks? I love those. The variations in baby coiffures, the way that some of them are born with full heads of hair and some stay bald for a good long while? I love those. Three of my kids lost all the hair on the tops of their heads at 26 days old -- like, whoosh, scissors-free tonsure on day 27. Weird, right? But after the first one it also felt to me like an identity badge: here I am, bald and vulnerable and entirely yours.

I have a harder time seeing the loveliness of God's design further on. It's the same idea, right? Some of us saw our first gray hair at 25; some of us are catching up more slowly. Some of us (okay, this one is me) have, like, the Eyebrows of Dorian Gray. I don't have much gray hair on my scalp, but my eyebrows bespeak the hard-living years of my youth. Or something like that. I believe that gray hair can be a crown of glory but maybe, just possibly, my coronation could take place a little further in the future.

One of my friends messaged me tonight, feeling that she ought to accept the gray gracefully but also not feeling at all graceful about it. And you know, there's something to be said for pushing back against the cultural message that gray hair means it's time for a woman to be put out to pasture, but also we need to tackle that message on fronts that transcend the tonsorial. Like, perhaps the beast of burden imagery is a bigger problem than the chemicals or the vanity or the support of the beauty industry. Perhaps the core issue is a culture that equates aging men with bottles of wine (they improve with age), and aging women with cartons of milk. (After their sell-by dates they get lumpy and sour.)

"I support you in dyeing or graying!" is what I told my friend, and I guess I wanted to tell you that too. We live in a time and place where we're mostly expected to modify our bodies to meet a cultural standard: trim our split ends, depilate our pits, don our anti-gravity undergarments when we go out in public. (Some people just call them bras but it's more fun if you can shout TO INFINITY AND BEYOND when you get dressed in the morning.) There's no intrinsic virtue in conforming to or rejecting any of those standards; the same is true for dyeing and graying.

But here is the thing I wish for you, my friends: I wish that you would take a deep breath and think back to when you held a sleeping baby dear to you and admired the whorl of hair at the crown of her head. Remember the rush of affection you felt as you looked at your own particular baby's very particular hair? I think that God our Father looks at us with the same affection as we trudge through our 30s and 40s and 50s-- viewing the sprinkling of gray at your temples, and the silver strands highlighting my pal Veronica's dark curls -- and also my Dorian Gray Eyebrows -- with tender love and with his everlasting appreciation of variety.

Gladlys Climb High (Again)

You guys, I have a fun new hobby. I've been not-blogging about it for a while, because (a) I continue to be vague about my location and the number of Midwestern climbing gyms is not enormous, and also (b) it feels like a departure from my usual frugal habits. But I love it and I did something hard tonight, and I am going to tell you more about it.

Have you ever been rock-climbing? We had been to the gym here in Gladlyville occasionally -- I took a belay class when Petely was 2 or so. (He will be 14 next month, if you can believe it.) Last year he asked if he could have his birthday party there, and that's when the boys' interest took off. On the day of his party I hadn't climbed in more than 10 years. My first attempts were not pretty. If you've never climbed you might assume that it's all about strength, but it's more complicated than that. It requires some flexibility, and a fair amount of balance, and some technical skills. ("Trust the heel hook!" Pete exhorted me tonight, as I stretched out five feet above the floor and parallel to it. I...am still working on a trustworthy heel hook.) It also involves more creativity and problem-solving skill than I first realized. It's as much a brain sport as an arm sport.

It reminds me a little bit of knitting (here all the Serious Climbers snort derisively, but hear me out) in the way that you can vary the difficulty of the undertaking to suit your current state of mind. If I want to tackle a super-gnarly* Shetland lace stole with cobweb yarn and wrong-side patterning, I can do that. Or I can just crank on a plain-vanilla sock while I mostly think about something else. At the rock-climbing gym, when I am fresh I can work out the next pieces of the routes that make me say "Hmmm" or perhaps "You have got to be kidding me." When my arms are tired I go and repeat some easy routes to build endurance.

*Does anyone say gnarly these days? Or does it serve only as a signifier of middle age?

I love the thinky part of it. Running doesn't require a ton of brainpower, unless you count the creative efforts to dissuade oneself from taking a walk break. But climbing something new and hard requires my brain to fire on all cylinders. Can I trust that hold? Will I have enough leverage if I move my foot to that chip? I want to tackle that tough move with my right hand, but will I fall off the wall if I try to switch hands? It might be better to try the tough move left-handed than to have to climb back up here again.

Routes are rated by difficulty. Beginners start with 5.6 routes; I've been hanging out in 5.8/5.9 territory for a while now -- reasonably confident about finishing those routes, daunted by anything harder. But! Tonight! I sailed up the first section of a 5.10a, the part I had managed before. I got the following move. I thought to myself, "I will probably fall off now that I am in the hard part, but at least I got a little further tonight." But! Then! I did not fall off! After the hard part I matched on the highest hold I could see and looked around, confused, for the next hold. There was no next hold! I did it! It's a milestone! 5.10a, baby! I think this paragraph needs more exclamation points!!

In climbing as in much of the rest of my life, my anxious brain has presented a formidable barrier. It took me a long time to trust the rope. I still get scared on the wall. There's another 5.10a in my sights that requires me to undertake one big dynamic move: I have to jump from a precarious position up to a higher hold. I couldn't do it tonight. But maybe next time. And if not, I'm pretty sure I'll get it the time after that.

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.

In like a chimera

You GUYS, I am back in the land of the-- not the living, exactly, but the land of the people who don't have to work every weekend and most evenings. PHEW. We revamped the way we handled grad admissions, which was already a huge time commitment, so that it took more than twice as long as it used to. It was unbelievable.

We finished that up on Friday, and I dug out from under the grading backlog yesterday, and today I was going to take a deep breath and rest but the Boy Scouts' big annual fundraiser intervened. The beginning of March has felt more than lion-esque. Has it felt more like an assault by a fire-breathing mutant lion, you say? About like that.

My brain has been unfurling itself after the long hunkering-down, and lots of post ideas are bubbling up inside my head today: Burned By Convection, about sad Swedish croissants and lingering distrust, How To Buy A Cow, for all your livestock needs, and maybe one in which I tell you about running afoul of a representative of the parish pro-life organization due to insufficient Republican-ness on my part. 

It is freezing today, but the daffodil foliage is peeking up through the snow and the days are inching toward a reasonable length. How's by you? 

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!

The post equivalent of WD-40

Oh, goodness, I didn't realize it had been more than two weeks since my last post. I have not had a lot of space in my head and I have been trying to be disciplined about going to bed early, and the combination is bad for blogging consistency. I am imagining the blogging habit as a sort of rusty gate hinge, and throwing up a quick post as a sort of writerly WD-40, just to loosen things up. 

Books I am reading: Digital Minimalism (good, though I find Cal Newport a little smug and am not quiiiite ready for a social media fast), Augustine's Confessions (oh so good! love love love), bunch of Kindle backlog stuff

Books I recently finished: Ambition Decisions (annoying), Edwin Drood (would like the second half please), The Darlings (quick and engrossing), I Burned for Your Peace (Peter Kreeft's book about Augustine's Confessions; it's okay)

Things I am thinking: winter is long, ice is bad, work is busy. I have a mammoth service commitment just now and I am trying to be cheerful about completing it. Mostly I am failing at the cheerful part, but I am trying.

The college committee on promotion and tenure voted yes unanimously on my portfolio and the dean concurred. It goes to the provost from here. It's possible for the provost to override unanimous votes from the department and the college, but it would be super-weird. So that's a huge relief. Whopping. Gigunda. Brobdingnagian.

I have a million things to grade this weekend but it dawned on me yesterday: in eight years of reading student evaluations that have complained about a kajillion different things, no one has ever once said that I grade too slowly. I always stress about not getting things back promptly but apparently the students don't expect me to work any faster than I'm working. (Let us hope I do not use that insight as license to procrastinate further.)

How's by you?