Light and Momentary

I thirst

I have come to think that one of the most telling indices of a person's faith might be her thoughts on hell. In the days when I struggled more with scrupulosity I regarded hell with a mix of horror and fascination. I did not see clearly then that God loved me so much that he wanted me to stay out of hell even more than I wanted to stay out of hell -- that he was more invested in my sanctification than I was. And yet I also had (and still have) a tendency widespread among the scrupulous: I love to be right. Here is a true fact: a person who mutters "fine, go to hell then; we'll see who's right" when an argument about the faith goes poorly is not a compelling witness to the beauty and redemptive power of the gospel.

I once heard a priest say that when Jesus said "I thirst" he wasn't just talking about physical thirst; he was saying, "I thirst for souls." The pairing of those two meanings is particularly poignant: here in my agony, says the Lord, I desire for all people to see me lifted up and be freed from the poison of sin. He came to be with us in a world full of physical suffering, to experience physical sufferings like thirst, and to love us unstoppably even in the worst of it.

COVID has offered me many opportunities to think about whether I'd rather be loving or be right. My church's Facebook announcements have recently been a forum for the most vocal right-wingers in the parish to complain nastily about the precautions in place, and I find it wearying. I hear an echo of the me from 20 years ago, thinking, "Fine, get COVID then; we'll see who's right." I don't really mean that. But the Lord wants me to pray for them, to desire his very best for them -- and I'm not there today, friends; I'm not there. (Why, though, would they be publicly ugly to our fantabulous pastor who is working SO HARD to make the sacraments available safely? I do not understand. I am tired of trying to understand.) 

I would like Donald Trump to go to prison for tax evasion and money laundering. Is that a hunger for justice or a petty desire for vengeance? Since 2015 I have tried to avoid uncharitable language about Trump -- I don't care how much he weighs or what color makeup he wears. My concern is the competence void. But it is not very charitable to wish him in prison. "Fine, face the SDNY then; we'll see who's right" is not the same as wishing eternal damnation on someone. But it feels to me like it is in the same neighborhood.

All through the pandemic I have been thinking about Our Lord's eagerness to alleviate physical suffering, even when doing so created hassles and hazards for him. And I have been thinking, too, about his willingness to walk before us into the valley of the shadow, to make a path through it for us. The pandemic is a temporal struggle to be viewed in the light of eternity. (On that topic, may I recommend this homily from the newly elevated Cardinal Cantalamessa? Love him.) Maybe tonight it is best for me to close the social media tabs, and offer up all of my uncertainties. Teach me, I will pray as I am falling asleep, how to thirst.

Done

I submitted revised manuscripts on November 2, November 16, and November 30 (today!) and I am ready to be done revising things for a while. 

I wrote 30 blog posts in 30 days. Last November I was so weighed down by grief and uncertainty that I only posted three times, and it felt good to return to daily blogging in November this year. But I might be done blogging for a few days.

I brought home another foster dog. (Laverne's family returned yesterday. She growled ferociously at the strangers on the porch until she realized they were not actually strangers, and then she lost her little doggy mind. She was so glad to see them again.) This is Duncan. He is much mellower than Laverne so far.I'll be back in a few days with some fun Duncan stories. 

Alternate Universe

Imagine a world in which Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election. When COVID-19 hit the US, she was prepared to smack it down hard. There was a non-disbanded pandemic team, there were PPE stockpiles, there were trained contact tracers ready to roll. The initial outbreak was largely confined to the coasts, with slower spread and lower caseloads in the months that followed. But remember in March when they warned us about effective public health measures? I can't remember the quote exactly, but it was something like "when public health measures do what they were supposed to do, people think they were overkill."

Our alternate-universe Hillary Clinton saw her always-fragile popularity tank across the spring and summer. "She's destroying our economy for a virus that's not even that bad!" people grumbled. "We would never have been like Italy. All that hype about overwhelming the healthcare system was just scare tactics!" The Republican candidates campaigned on restoring normalcy, protecting freedom, preserving economic stability. Clinton lost big in November.

Who is our president-elect in that alternate universe?

guest post

Hello it is Laverne friends it is my last night here friends. I am trying to write while getting belly rubs so pardon any typos. Wait, Joe has a dirty forehead and I must lick it clean before I continue.

Honestly, these people and their insufficiently licked faces. What are they going to do without me?

So these are things you might not know about the Gladlys' House:

1. They have a Beeping Pot. I can almost reach it friends if I stand on my hind legs but then they say things like DOWN LAVERNE and OFF LAVERNE. Really though would you stay down and off if you lived in a house with a Beeping Pot full of good-smelling things? Today Jamie gave me some nibbles from the pot after they cooled down maybe there will be more nibbles tomorrow. 
2. Across the street there is an Evil Minion of Satan. They laugh when I get worried about her but friends I think you would be worried too because do you like Evil Minions of Satan? (Answer: no. You are a sensible reader. I can tell from here.) Jamie says, "Honestly, Laverne, you could eat that dog up in about four bites," but is Jamie eating any Evil Minions of Satan? No she is not.
3. I have a strategy for avoiding the EMoS do you want to know in case you need it for the future? Here you go: first you whimper very loudly in place and then you pull hard to the left for 25 yards while looking over your shoulder followed by a hard pull to the right while continuing to whimper. I have been doing this for five days now and I have not yet been eaten OR possessed by the EMoS so probably you should try it too.
4. In the back yard they have a Boing Machine and it is interesting also scary. Joe likes to boing very high on the Boing Machine and I cannot decide whether this is more interesting or more scary. I think he should stop doing flips though and give me more belly rubs.
5. People in this house think they can stop giving me belly rubs before I give them permission to stop. I am working hard to teach them better manners than that but some of them are kind of slow learners. Luckily for them I am a patient dog.

I am very sleepy friends very sleepy. For my first few nights here I needed to make sure that no one was breaking in and also that my other foster family was not waiting for me in the yard. So I would go to the front door and cry for my family and then I would go to the back door and whine GO AWAY to the intruders. The Gladlys did not understand that I was being Appropriately Vigilant and they said silly things like "Laverne lie down it's 1 in the morning" (see above re: slow learners).

But you know constant vigilance makes a girl pretty tired and I think I scared off all the intruders with my fierce relentless midnight whining. So maybe I will say good night friends it was nice talking with you let me know if anybody has any dirty faces at your house.

November 27

It turns out that today is the day of November on which I say to myself, "Huh, 30 posts in 30 days is a lot of blog posting."

If you read this blog in an RSS aggregator, has it been messed up? Feedly recently burped up 6 days' worth of posts as if I had written them all at once, but my RSS feed seems to be working okay for Ravelry. I don't know if that's a me issue or a Feedly issue.

I suppose if your feed reader isn't working well, you're not going to be able to tell me because you won't see the post. 

Pie

Probably four desserts for six people is a bit excessive.

Thawing

Laverne has decided that this is not a terrible place to be. It took her most of the day to reach this conclusion, but she is seeking out affection and accepting belly rubs a little gingerly. She isn't eating or drinking very much and she seems reluctant to do her business in front of people she doesn't know very well yet (I mean, I can sympathize with that feeling), but she is doing so much better tonight.

Today I finished my portion of the revisions for paper #3. You guys, I feel SO RELIEVED. It is likely that my co-author will recommend some minor final tweaks, but we're almost there. I told a friend tonight that I feel like a crane came along and removed a house from on top of me. I have been so squashed down by the weight of that task. It was so much work! Yikes! Academic publishing is a weird little ecosystem, because it is entirely possible that the editor could look at our stevedore-esque efforts to address every single concern raised in the review process and say, "...nah, reject." But I'm not going to think about that right now.

Today I made the Penitential Cranberry Sauce and the cornbread for stuffing, and whoops, I should have turned off the stock in time for it to cool. I'm not sure there would have been room for it in the fridge, though. Hm. Maybe I will put it in the Instant Pot overnight on the slow cooker setting.

A 16-pound turkey awaits my ministrations. I didn't get around to placing my turkey order until later than usual, and the butcher shop couldn't get me a fresh turkey smaller than 16 pounds. Nobody wants big turkeys this year, the guy on the phone explained. All right, I said, 16 pounds it is. It will be fine. We go through an astounding quantity of food when the college kids are home. If they're scrounging around for snacks tomorrow night I'll tell them to go gnaw on the turkey carcass.

Tonight's burning question: will Laverne finally break down and pee before we go to sleep for the night? Tune in tomorrow.

Laverne

We have a new foster dog. She is far and away the shyest of the dogs we've had here.

Her owner surrendered her to the shelter a couple of weeks ago, and she has been living with a foster family that had planned to leave town for Thanksgiving. We told them she could stay here with us over the holiday, and they dropped her off this afternoon.

Well. Laverne had some Thoughts about coming to our house. She growled at me when I tried to take her leash from their son, so I gave it back. They wound up carrying her up the porch steps (she weighs 50 pounds, so this was not like tucking a little purse dog under your arm) and plunking her on our welcome mat. We got the storm door closed behind them, and Laverne sat there, immobile and tense, for a solid hour.

We tried the treats they brought; we tried our peanut butter-oat dog treats. We tried peanut butter on a spoon. I scrambled her an egg, which they told us she loves, and she just looked at it, like, "Haven't you ever heard that you're not supposed to eat any food when you visit hell? I'm Laverne, not Persephone."

Slowly she let us pet her, and after that first hour we got the front door closed. But things didn't really improve from there. She spent the next two hours in the same spot, waiting forlornly for her family. At one point after I thought she and I were on petting terms, she told me to back the heck off.

After a little walk she came back inside more willingly, and parked herself on the steps for half an hour or so. Our steps are not the place I would choose to park myself if I were a 50-pound dog. She did not appear comfortable, but she was also not willing to move. 

As I wrote this post she eased cautiously down the steps and took up her station on the welcome mat, right by our drafty front door. With some coaxing she consented to move a foot or so to her dog bed, and she fell asleep there. I guess there are some tenuous good signs so far: she made a small effort at grooming herself, she gave Pete's face a tiny lick (he is her favorite so far), and she relaxed enough to fall asleep. 

But man, you have to wonder what could be in this dog's past to make her feel this anxious. I hope she is not having sad dreams about her other foster family.

Speedy speedy key lime pie

Four of my five children are home this week and Alex assures me that I do not have to send him mashed potatoes in the mail. I know, objectively, that he is in Manhattan, able to obtain any quantity of any type of food his heart desires. But I cannot shake the certainty that he will be pining for MY mashed potatoes.

I am holding out hope for a spectacular Easter.

Stella is suggesting that we mix it up a little this year, since this will be the smallest Thanksgiving dinner of her entire life. She wonders: is pumpkin pie truly necessary? She suggests that key lime pie would be a better alternative.

We will of course be eating pumpkin pie on Thursday. (Side note: in another year I would have ended that sentence with "because we are not heretics." But this year I am so troubled by the conflation of heresy with political affiliation that I can't make that little joke any more. Serve pumpkin pie, or don't serve pumpkin pie. No skin off my nose. In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.) But this key lime pie is so easy and our Thanksgiving is so much smaller than usual that I am perfectly happy to make a pre-Thanksgiving pie.

Here's what you do: make or buy a graham cracker crust. If you make it, let it cool. Combine a can of sweetened condensed milk, 1.25 cups of heavy cream, and key lime juice to taste. It should be tart enough to make you wince a little bit. Whip with an electric mixer until it holds its shape. Plop into the crust and chill. I think most key lime pie recipes require eggs and baking, but we love this no-bake version at our house. If you are looking for low-stress alternatives to more conventional Thanksgiving dessert recipes here in this most unconventional November, Stella thinks you can't go wrong with this one.

A 2020 Ornament

This morning I was talking to an old friend who is in the middle of some hard things. I cannot do anything about the work stuff or the family stuff or the health stuff, but my ears pricked up when she said she had been looking unsuccessfully for a Christmas ornament: she wanted a Santa Claus wearing a mask.

That is a problem I can solve.

I am going to add a pompon to the top of his hat, and I have a bunch of ends to weave in. But he's almost done.

Pete wants me to make one for our tree too, and I think I will extend the mask a little higher (even Santa needs to cover his nose) and make it slightly less rectangular.

I started to write out the pattern, but I got to the short-row section of the beard and the pattern degenerated into "and then I kind of wung it; you can too." I'll pay closer attention next time.

This is not a post about baby hiccups

I had planned to post about knitting progress today, but I accidentally posted a time capsule instead. I republished a post from 2004 when Miriel asked on Twitter for cranberry baking recommendations. Instead of "publish on..." I clicked "publish now." This resulted in a post dated today, chronicling my trip to the zoo with friends and speculating about whether Pete was already having in utero hiccups. As you might imagine, a post about my 20-week pregnancy sparked some confusion. So! If you need cranberry recipes, they should now appear in the correct decade's archives. (I can recommend both the cranberry cake and the cranberry-dried cherry bars (scroll down to #7).) Let us now discuss knitting progress.

Do you remember that I was doing a Stephen West mystery knit-along? I should have known that it would be hard to keep up with the weekly pattern releases, because he told us up front that we needed 500g of fingering weight yarn. That is 1.24 miles of yarn, worked on 3.25mm needles. I was never going to get that finished in a month.

This pattern seems to be focused on exploring fun if not especially cohesive things you can do with slipped stitches. The middle section was a blast, but it has become less fun. The thing about big shawls is that the further you go, the more endless rows of purling are required. Current stitch count: 467 and growing. It's a lot of acreage.

That honeycomb section in the middle is supposed to lie flat, but it is rolling like the dickens. I suspect it will continue to roll even after I smack it around with a steam iron, because it's all stockinette. This is the downside to a mystery knit-along; you can't say to yourself, "You know, I'm going to edge this section with garter stitch so it doesn't roll like all the ones I'm seeing on Ravelry."

Its recipient is enthusiastic, even if its knitter is a little less so at the moment. I still have to finish the checks, the triangles, and the chevrons. I am trying to decide whether the hot pink should reappear for the triangles, the chevrons, or maybe both. I will report back.

A public health ditty

Look, it's a silly song about the pandemic. Lyrics follow.

Chorus:
It's not that hard to cover your nose
Inside your mask is where it goes
The COVID case count grows and grows
So please take care to cover your nose

Verse 1:
You wouldn't wear your pants below your privatest of parts
You care about your neighbors' lungs; you care about their hearts
You can spread the virus long before your very first symptom shows
So please take care to cover your nose

Verse 2:
Your doctors and your nurses are among the hardest hit
Spare a prayer for long-term care workers; they're in the thick of it
Pneumonia is no picnic and a vent just straight-up blows
So please take care to cover your nose

Bridge:
We are all in this together, friends and strangers
So we all must work together, no Lone Rangers
(though even the Lone Ranger wore a mask
I suggest you do the same)

Verse 3: 
It's not a magic bullet but it cuts the odds you'll spread
the virus to your neighbor, who might wind up all too dead
A quarter-million deaths and counting; here's what I propose
Let's all take care to cover our nose

Even in Australia

On this day my two youngest kids resumed online learning. It went fine for one of them. The other-- well, I'm pretty tired right now. In August it got better after two weeks. I will keep saying this to myself. (But you guys, those two weeks were bad.)

Also on this day my husband returned to working at home; his office is closed indefinitely. 

In between interruptions I contrived to lose all of the work I did in my stats program today, and learned that a collaborator thinks we should redo all of the quantitative analyses for our paper.

I know that people have no-good very bad days in Australia too. But if I had had this bad day in Australia, it would not be pitch dark at 5:08pm. And huh, I just discovered that the total number of COVID cases reported in 8 months across the entire continent of Australia is less than the number of new COVID cases in my state this week. There's something to be said for Australia.

A Cautious Defense of Ezekiel Emanuel

Ezekiel Emanuel is getting a lot of hate these days, ostensibly for an article he wrote for The Atlantic six years ago, but really, I think, because outrage is contagious and reading long-form articles requires effort. Do I like the ableism and the utilitarianism in that article? No, I do not. Is it appropriate for people to be freaking out because a EUTHANASIA ADVOCATE has been appointed to the COVID PANEL and it is MORE PROOF that Biden worships Satan?

No. No, it is not.

To my eye, that article is an exhortation to think seriously about your own preferences for end-of-life care, and to have the hard conversations up front with your loved ones. It is a distortion of Catholic teaching to suggest that maximum lifespan should be the goal in managing end-of-life care. If an 80-year-old woman is diagnosed with advanced cancer, she can absolutely refuse the chemo that might give her three more months of retching and brain fog. If I get seriously ill with COVID, I want to be treated aggressively. I have a lot of living left to do. But I might be less willing to be mechanically ventilated if I were 25 years older -- it's hard on anybody to be intubated, it's especially hard on elderly people, and the last time I looked at the numbers on post-extubation recovery for elderly COVID patients, they weren't very encouraging. I'm not obligated to consent to a highly invasive treatment that's not very likely to help.

Far too often, this kind of risk-benefit analysis turns into accusations about DEATH PANELS and KILLING GRANDMA (although, weirdly, many of the people who were yammering the loudest about DEATH PANELS in 2008 are now loudly asserting that Grandma's had a good run so let's protect the economy). Let me be clear: direct action to end a patient's life is gravely immoral. But Emanuel seems to agree with me about that: he says, "Since the 1990s, I have actively opposed legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide."

Making good decisions about end-of-life care is hard work, and we often do a rotten job of it in this country. I cannot say enough good things about Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, which treats many of the same questions Emanuel considers in his article. (Seriously, read it. One of the best books I've read in the last ten years. The usual reminder applies: if you click my affiliate link and purchase the book, Amazon will pay me a few cents.) When I worked in long-term care facilities, I was often a part of these conversations: your mom is dying, and she can't eat safely, so let's talk about the options. This stuff is never going to be easy, but it is a whole lot more straightforward if the family is in agreement and confident that their decisions align with their loved one's wishes. If the loved one has just had a massive stroke and you can't tell whether they're asking for water or quiet or a bedpan, it's significantly more complicated to have a conversation about DNR orders.

It is a core truth of our faith that we cannot be ruled by fear of bodily death. We see this in the writings of St. Paul, looking with equanimity at his prospects of living and dying. It's kind of weird that St. Francis called death our sister, but I am not going to argue with him about it. It seems very odd to 21st-century eyes that the Mother Superior at the Carmel in Lisieux required St. Thérèse to forgo pain medication, but it is another piece of evidence that refusing medical treatment is compatible with living a holy life. We cannot deliberately speed death's arrival, but we don't always have to fend it off vociferously.

I dislike much of the reasoning that undergirds Emanuel's thinking. His distaste for disability is problematic, for one. (Although-- he is making an excellent point when he writes about how seldom people understand that disability can be an unexpected side effect of medical treatment. We want to believe that a recommended treatment will make us all better. Sometimes it makes us worse.) His emphasis on productivity as a metric of human worth is also problematic; my value as a human being is unrelated to the number of papers I wind up publishing. But his conclusions seem correct to me: end-of-life care in this country is a mess, and we can make it better by approaching it thoughtfully. Furthermore, he is not saying that his decisions should be your decisions. He says explicitly that he provides concrete assistance and emotional support to elderly people who want to pursue medical treatment that he would decline for himself. I think we do him an injustice when we assume that his thoughts in a personal essay will translate into egregious policy errors. There is nothing in this essay that makes me think he will be sneaking into hospitals, holding pillows over the faces of elderly COVID patients in order to free up intensive care beds for younger people.

When it was just people ranting on Facebook about the evils of this appointment, I wasn't too fussed. But today America published an article that I find weirdly alarmist. I was braced for the worst when Emanuel started talking about policy recommendations in his Atlantic article, but I'm 100% comfortable with his policy recommendations. He suggests that we rethink our emphasis on lifespan as a metric of healthcare quality, and that we put more money into researching the disabling conditions that affect the elderly, such as Alzheimer's.

I am open to other perspectives here, but I do think that if a person says, "I have reached this conclusion about my own personal decisions, but other people are welcome to conclude differently," we should not infer that he is SECRETLY PLOTTING to MAKE everyone do what he would do for himself. If he has other published writings I should know about, I'd be happy to read them. (I'll let you know up front that I don't think being more deliberate about end-of-life healthcare spending is evil, as implied by the America writer.) If your work with dying patients is more recent than mine (I haven't worked in long-term care since 2003), I'd be very interested in your point of view. If you just want to share some thoughts about end-of-life decision-making, I'd love to hear from you too. [Wonders briefly if it's a bad idea to write about euthanasia on the internet; pushes "publish" anyway...]

And counting

How many people do you know who have had COVID? I know six people who are currently ill, one person who had it in the summer, and one person who probably died of COVID in March.

A week ago I only knew one person who'd had confirmed COVID and one person who'd had probable COVID. It's kind of troubling that the number quadrupled so quickly. But I bet I'm not the only person seeing the nationwide acceleration happening in my own friends and family, right? You too?

This is a post about vacuum cleaners

Occasionally I bump up against something that makes me say, "Wow, I am totally middle-aged. My younger self would have wept if she had known this was her future." Last month I met an old friend for a hike, and she said, "I drove below the speed limit to optimize my gas mileage!" I burst out laughing when I imagined how her 20-year-old self would have greeted that dispatch from the future. But here I go, writing an entire blog post about vacuum cleaners.

Three years ago my husband the Mighty Bargain Hunter found a Xiao Mi robot vacuum on super-sale. It worked really well for more than two years, and then its performance began to decline. It complained about its new filters. I bought different filters and it complained about those too. I turned the volume down so I didn't have to listen to its complaints about perfectly good filters. This did not work at all, because the volume would be minimized for warnings I actually wanted to hear -- "please rescue me," it would whisper inaudibly, "I am trapped beneath the bed" -- and then it would override the app's volume control somehow so it could grouse about its filter at the usual volume. "I don't like this filter! Clean it! Or fetch me a new one! Not that new one, a better new one!" 

It didn't affect the vacuuming, so we all just learned to tune it out. But then it came time to change the main brush. And you guys, this vacuum cleaner just could not deal with its new main brush. I bought the replacement parts from the recommended vendor, but something was badly wrong in Vacuum World. "I can't do this," it would whimper, "there's something STUCK in the main brush." 

Now the first 47 times it told me that there was something stuck in the main brush, I rushed right over to sort it out. But there was never anything stuck in the main brush. You think I'm exaggerating about the 47 times, but it started happening every five minutes. What is the point of having a robot vacuum if you have to leap off the couch to manage its hypochondriacal discontent every five minutes for an hour?

"It was really cheap," said my husband, after a factory reset failed to improve matters and I pondered my other options. "You could just buy a Roomba." So I bided my time and watched for a sale, and bought a Roomba.

If I were grading them, I'd give the Xiao Mi an A- for its first 2.25 years of service, the span between when I figured out how to get it to stop berating me in Chinese and when it started to believe it was being done in by its replacement parts. I'd give the Roomba a D+. It will just decide randomly that it's done, nine minutes into a cleaning, and return to the charging station. Or it will fail to notice that it doesn't have enough battery to return to the charging station, and die in the middle of the floor. It prefers to have its charging contacts aligned just so, and it may or may not charge if it's not perfectly situated.

The Xiao Mi would draw a map as it cleaned. I could view the map inside the app, so I could tell approximately how soon it would be done. I could pull up the map of my house and tell it just to clean the dining room, or to clean under the dining room table in MAXIMUM SUCTION mode. The Roomba's app tells me that a comparable zone cleaning option is Coming! Soon! but it is not coming soon enough for me.

This problem could not possibly be any first-world-ier, but that's what's on my mind tonight. Please regale me with your robot vacuum stories and advice.

Maybe this is a niche recommendation

The kids and I have been watching a show called Critter Fixers on Disney+. It is set in a veterinary clinic a hundred miles south of Atlanta, where two black men own a vet clinic. Part of what I enjoy about the show is their relationship. One is a little older and a little more sedate, and the other never seems to stop joking around. Pete said, "Mom, he's like you if your goofy streak was activated 100% of the time." They laugh, they diagnose and treat, they laugh some more.

They see a surprising variety of animals, which is part of the fun: wild turtles, whopping snakes, a chinchilla in need of an amputation, a bulldog in need of a C-section, a donkey in need of less testosterone, a cluster of alpacas in need of pregnancy confirmations. I also love the sense of place, the way they talk about their alma mater and their part of the world. 

The kids do not enjoy this show quite as much as I do, because the gross factor is indisputable. Tonight they exteriorized a cat's bladder and talked at length about how angry it looked, and they showed exactly how the vet removed three stones approximately the size of ping-pong balls. (Hold the phone, I just typed ping-pong into the browser bar to confirm hyphenation, and the internet wants me to know that ping-pong is also called whiff-whaff. Have you ever heard of whiff-whaff? Is this regional? Or is it a disinformation campaign at Wikipedia? Whiff-whaff, hmph.) They are not romanticizing the work that the vets do; there are plenty of shots of people up to their shoulders in animal orifices.

But if you share my interest in bodies' inner workings, you might like seeing what goes on in their lively and diverse clinic. Weirdly, the hard part for me is not the scenes where they are removing maggots. Instead I feel a little sad every time they hug their clients, which is a thing they frequently do. SOMEDAY we will be able to hug our veterinarians again if we choose to do so. 

Snip

Today was the day of the pandemic on which I cut off all of my hair.

I had let it get really long. It never looks very long, because it's so curly, but back in July I stretched it out for a picture -- my hands are at my waist.

The first time I gave myself a dramatic haircut the stakes felt a little higher because I had to go back to work the next day. But now-- who cares? It will grow out by January. The next time I get a professional haircut she may well say "who the HECK put these layers in the back of your hair?!" Oh, well. I won't be the only client who looked at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and said "this is a good day for a big change."

Heck, maybe I'll dye it blond to boot.

Alternate Reality Jamie

Do you ever wonder to yourself what your year might have looked like without COVID, or in a world where COVID was aggressively contained starting in January? This is a thing I contemplate sometimes.

Alternate Reality Jamie has submitted five papers, not three, in this sabbatical semester where her kids go to school five days a week, but she still hates revising for anonymous peer reviewers and she's a little worried about getting the revisions done for all five of them. She's also a little stressed about hosting Thanksgiving. Tonight she and Elwood pop down to a little restaurant they both love for cocktails and kvetching. 

Alternate Reality Jamie ponders the cocktail menu. She doesn't know who comes up with the specialty cocktails in this place, but whoever it is seems to have a window into her brain. Last year they had a winter cocktail with beet puree and artichoke amaro. I mean, really: if you were going to design a cocktail with widespread appeal, would you come up with beet puree and artichoke amaro? Perhaps not, am I right? But pre-COVID Jamie looked at that description and said "SOLD!" Alternate Reality Jamie can't wait to see what's on the cocktail menu this winter.

While she waits for her drink, Alternate Reality Jamie wants to talk about Thanksgiving. There may or may not be a difficult Thanksgiving guest this year. (Would like to tell you all a story or two, but...it would be a bummer if this particular guest read the post. Unlikely, but it's a small world.) Will the turkey be big enough? Is it weird to keep serving Penitential Cranberry Sauce* to people outside the family? Where should Alex sleep now that the bunkbeds are gone?

*Penitential Cranberry Sauce: cranberries boiled in apple cider, pinch of cloves, pinch of salt. No added sweetener or the kids will howl in protest. We love it here but I think my kids have developed the cranberry sauce version of Stockholm syndrome.

Instead the little restaurant is closed indefinitely and its cocktail menus are only a memory. There will only be six of us here for Thanksgiving, not a dozen. Alex will be sleeping in his NYC apartment. Maybe I will mail him some Penitential Cranberry Sauce.

Maybe it will be better next year.

(Huh, you know that thing in yesterday's post about the reviewer who said I shouldn't use "it" as a subject? This post contains five clauses that have "it" as a subject. Wonder if my undergrad alma mater will revoke my English degree.)

Sabbatical so far

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

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

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

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

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