Light and Momentary

On the menu

If you have been reading here for a while you know I have One True Thanksgiving menu. It consists of the following:

• roasted fresh turkey (I don't fool around with all that thawing / brining / deep-frying business. Buy it fresh and stick it in the oven. Baste.)
• mashed potatoes with All The Butter
• sweet potatoes mashed with Surprise! More Butter, also pineapple tidbits and orange juice and pecans
• cornbread stuffing (veggies sautéed in yet more butter, natch)
• gravy
• Penitential Cranberry Sauce
• some green vegetable
• maybe an autumnal salad but maybe not
• maybe rolls but probably not (if I make bread dough, man, there will be BUTTER in that bread dough)
• pecan pie (moooore butter!)
• pumpkin pie (even more butter!)

We mix it up around here for Christmas and Easter and birthdays. I am not generally rigid about food. But I do exactly one Thanksgiving menu. Three years ago I made a different kind of cranberry sauce and I had to write a whole blog post about it.

I thought it was a quirk of mine, but it has become a shared quirk. The boys are very insistent about keeping the penitential in Penitential Cranberry Sauce. Today I said I was considering a different sweet potato dish, and Joe said, "WHAT?! Noooo!" He thought for a moment. "Maybe you could make two dishes of sweet potatoes."

6/7 of my family is home tonight and also my knitting is making me happy

Tonight four of my children will be sleeping under my roof, which makes me feel like all's right in the world. They are sitting at the dining room table with Elwood and playing Sheriff of Nottingham, a game in which each player tries to sneak contraband past the crooked sheriff. It stresses me out a little just listening to them play, because it pushes my rule-follower buttons. You mean the RULES say I'm supposed to LIE and SNEAK? That doesn't make ANY SENSE! 

I have been knitting instead. Remember when I told you that the election broke my brain? I tried to start a pretty happy brioche project that night and I just couldn't manage it. Today it was supposed to be a diversion in between stretches of grading, but I wound up not doing a lot of grading. I submitted a manuscript at lunchtime and something in my brain said, "Well, that's probably enough work for one day. It's Thanksgiving break, after all."

So let's talk about brioche stitch instead of grading. Do you know about brioche stitch? It is an unusually pleasant and squooshy way to knit, and it yields a warm pretty fabric. Or at least the fabric is pretty if you do it right. Brioche stitch is much more complex architecturally than plain-vanilla knitting, because you're either wrapping a stitch in a second strand of yarn or working a stitch together with its wrap. Oh, and you have to work each row twice, so that each stitch can get the treatment that it didn't get the first time. In ordinary knitting, dropping a stitch is like dropping a pea into a glass of water at the dinner table. It's mildly annoying, but you can fish it right out. In brioche stitch, dropping a stitch is like-- remember in Fellowship of the Ring when Pippin dropped a stone into a well in the mines of Moria? Kind of like that.

But I found this nifty brioche pattern and I decided to make the two-color version in a pair of luscious Malabrigo yarns. One is a deep velvety saturated purple, and the other is this gently variegated blue-green with pops of lavender and also of gold. It reminds me of the gardens at Giverny. This picture does not do justice to the colors, or to the pattern. 

Oh, HA, I did not know until I went looking for the pattern link that the texture-y bits were inspired by Princess Leia's hairdo. Here I thought they must be something floral.

Another distinctive thing about brioche knitting is that it gives you a reversible fabric. Cool, huh?

This is the third time I've used brioche stitch. I made Stella a hat, and there was a brioche section in the shawl I wound up giving to a friend a couple of years ago. But I've never quite figured out how to sort things out if they go catawampus. Learning to fix knitting mistakes was unexpectedly freeing: you can try anything if you know how to repair your mistakes. Brioche stitch, though-- so far I just stare at the mistakes and think, "Huh, that's not what was supposed to happen." In knitting as in life, the "Maybe I Just Won't Make Any Mistakes" plan is never a sensible tactic. It seems likely that knitting up 200g of fingering weight yarn in brioche stitch is going to offer me some opportunities to figure out what to do when things go catawampus.

We'll see how that works out, I guess.

Fast away the old year passes

When the calendar turns over there will be six weeks left in 2018. 

What's left to accomplish on your list of new year's resolutions? 

One or the other but not both

I can't remember why I decided to go to the training for new Eucharistic ministers, and I can't remember how long ago it was, but I do remember that I was consumed by anxiety about the role.

Whether or not you're Catholic, you know that communion is a big deal for Catholics. We believe that when Jesus said "my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink," that's what he meant. Ditto for "the one who feeds on me will have life because of me." Before I was a Catholic I thought this was the most preposterous wackadoodle bananapants idea that anybody's brain ever spat forth, even though my own Bible had John 6 in it. It was an issue for me even in the week before my entry into the Church in 1992, but I encountered the Lord powerfully in the Adoration chapel after that Holy Thursday service. And oh-- when I received communion two days later, I went back to the pew and trembled with the magnitude of what I had done.

So I am still totally willing to acknowledge that it sounds like the most preposterous wackadoodle bananapants idea anybody's brain ever spat forth, but I also believe it is the truth.

The very idea of the Eucharist creates some logistical difficulties. What should we do if someone drops a full chalice? If it's plain old wine, you sop it up with a dishrag and toss it in the wash. If it's the Precious Blood, it's more complicated. What do you do if a kid takes the host but stashes it in his pocket instead of consuming it? What do you say to someone who wants to receive but doesn't seem to know the drill? Imagine my scrupulous tendencies as a pack of yapping foxhounds. The prospect of distributing communion was like a hunting horn, sending them into a frenzy of baying and yipping. 

It's a little weird that I went to this training. And it's also weird that I stuck with it, because my first few experiences were stressful. On the one hand, I want everybody who comes to our church to feel welcome there; on the other, I feel protective about the Eucharist. When someone responded, "Yeah, thanks" instead of "Amen," I would second-guess my reaction, no matter what it was. But you guys, distributing communion became a channel of palpable grace. People would come through the communion line and I would get this flash, this brief intense glimpse, of how much God loves them. Sometimes I couldn't even say the words "the Body of Christ" aloud, because the immensity of God's generosity literally took my breath away. So I would mouth the words and look at them with love, and the whole thing would leave me a little weak in the knees. 

Here is the thing I am finding: I can't switch back and forth between the baying-foxhounds vigilance and the recognition of God's tender personal love for each person in my line. A couple of weeks ago I was in that happy groove where I just wanted to sing out "BEHOLD YOUR GOD!" to every person who came forward, and I was too slow on the uptake about a person who was almost certainly not Catholic. If I am focused on vigilance, on preventing the next PZ Myers from obtaining a host in my particular communion line, I cannot see the transcendence of the moment. There must be a middle ground. I am sure there is a middle ground. It's just that I seem to yaw from one side to the other.

I am finishing the gospel of John this week, and I am thinking again about Our Lord's willingness to pour himself out for those who did not understand his generosity -- which is all of us, really. I was struck tonight by this post at Where Peter Is, about God's choice to become vulnerable. If it were not November I would hide this post in my drafts folder, because drafting it has left me feeling vulnerable. It could inspire some capital-O Opinions about the right amount of vigilance for a Eucharistic minister. Mostly the point I wanted to make was this: I am learning to see how much God loves my neighbor, and her neighbor, and his neighbor. It takes my breath away. It's all too easy to lose sight of it.

Jiggety-jig

Home! Safe! Tired!

Travel blogging, day 3

Alex made it into town, hurray! He had some delays and hassles getting out of NYC, but he persevered. We met up in Cambridge and walked back across the river together. We walked through the Boston Public Garden, past the statue of Ouack and his siblings plus mom. (Poor Ouack. What a horrible name he had!) He took me out for a delicious dinner and I have spent the rest of the evening talking with my long-distance collaborator turned hotel roommate. 

Presentation was pleasant and low-stress. Home tomorrow!

Winter Wonderland

It’s snowing! I am in Boston at my conference, watching the snow fall. I think we’ll get enough to be pretty but not enough to cause hassles, though I suppose one never knows with the weather. Alex is supposed to meet me in Boston tomorrow, but he might have some trouble getting out of New York tomorrow. We shall see.

You know the thing I said yesterday about a five-digit number of people under one roof? That is a lot of people under one roof. Apparently there are 18,000 attendees this year. It’s bananas. There are lots of things to learn and also lots of lines for the bathrooms.

Trainblogging news you might be able to use

Mid-November, time to head to my discipline’s annual convention. This year I just have one presentation, so I’m hopeful that it will be mellower than usual. Although— maybe it’s not possible to put a five-digit number of people in an enclosed space and get something mellow as a result.

This year I tried something new with my poster: I used Spoonflower to print it on fabric. If you’re an academic you already know the poster hassle. It’s a nuisance to transport something that’s three feet long and unfoldable.

Spoonflower prints images on fabric for customers, including academics weary of hauling poster tubes around. You guys, this poster cost $18 shipped! It is nestled in the bottom of my bag, taking up less space than my pajama bottoms.The one fiddly thing about the process was using the registry editor to change the default dpi in PowerPoint. It was so worth that small hassle!

Strong Support

I wasn't expecting to hear from the department committee about my tenure application until next month, but my chair is a person who Gets Stuff Done. She popped her head into my office today, envelopes in hand, and asked if I had a minute. They'd drafted the letters to the college quickly, because she wanted us to have them before our big disciplinary conference this week.

Their letters, you might remember, are a big deal-- the college almost always follows the department's recommendation. And the department's verdict is...: heck yeah, tenure Jamie Gladly. Unanimous vote for promotion, unanimous vote for tenure, supported by an enthusiastic letter from the committee, which mentions that my external reviewers were unanimous in their support for my application. "We are writing in strong support of Dr. Jamie Gladly's application for promotion and tenure," the letter begins.

OH THE RELIEF. I have been a little frustrated with myself about my agita over the tenure process. I keep thinking that a wiser, more mature person would have just completed her application unflappably. I have not been that person over the past few months.

Elwood picked me up and took me out for a delicious pre-celebratory lunch. Nothing is final until May, but this is really good news. 

Thanks, Google

This afternoon I went searching through my email archives. I have a plane to catch later this week, and I couldn't remember exactly when I was leaving. Gmail obligingly pulled up a United reservation for me, but it was a one-way reservation.

I did a little more looking, with a few different search terms, and my heart began to sink. Had I really only bought myself a one-way plane ticket? Had I somehow left the other half of it unpurchased back in August? I checked on the airline's site. Yep, it was a one-way reservation.

A cold chill snaked through my middle as I tried to imagine how much it would be to buy a plane ticket at this late date. Help me out here, Google, said I. How many zillion dollars is this going to cost me?

At the top of the page of search results Google put a box with my profile picture in it. You're flying out at 5 pm on Wednesday, it said. On American.

When I bought tickets back in August I booked them on two different airlines so I could optimize schedule and ticket price. All memory of this decision went sailing merrily out of my head as soon as I clicked "purchase," apparently. It's a good thing Google is smarter than I am.

Sara Crewe Revisited

A Little Princess was one of my very favorite books when I was a kid. I couldn't tell you how many times I read it-- enough that I can still recite parts of it. I never once read it to my sons, though, and so it's been a long time since I dove into that riches-rags-riches story.

Stella loves it, which is really fun. I am finding myself a little skeptical about Sara, which feels disloyal. Can we talk about Sara?

I'm having the same reaction to Sara that I did to Esther Summerson when we read Bleak House for one of those AMDRALs. Virtue takes practice and maturity, and young girls who leave shining trails of virtue behind them, like garden snails clad in gauzy Victorian-era frocks, arouse my ire. The idea of a 7-year-old who is unrelentingly patient, generous, polite, and unflappable seems less plausible to me in adulthood than it did when I was 7 myself. Why would Sara have needed to cultivate those virtues in her years of fabulous wealth and ease? How could Esther have cultivated those virtues in her years of deprivation? Why would anyone want to teach kids that virtues arise ex nihilo? 

I suspect my skepticism will intensify as Sara moves from the parlor boarder suite into the attic. If memory serves, she slides capably into a life of servitude.

One of the early chapters sparked an all-but-forgotten memory of a conflict at Girl Scout camp that I tried to resolve by channeling Sara Crewe. "We," I said imperiously to the doubtless puzzled ringleader, "are not little gutter children." 

It worked better in Sara's schoolroom.

It would be unfair to expect Frances Hodgson Burnett to write in a way that isn't quite so classist and colonialist; we're all products of our times. It doesn't seem unreasonable, though, to expect her to write in a way that has some connection to the actual moral development of actual children.

The Mittens of Uncertainty

Stella and I were walking together earlier this week when she said, "I wish I had a pair of mittens in fall colors." I asked her to tell me more. Flame orange, she thought, perhaps with some golden yellow.

Coincidentally, I had stumbled across a leaf-patterned mitten when I was in my Rav library on Tuesday night. (You guys, the election temporarily broke my brain. Do you remember that stretch on Tuesday evening when Nate Silver started revising his House projections downward? I just-- I couldn't do anything. I cast on a new brioche project that was supposed to be a pleasing distraction and I couldn't manage it. I have never met a knitting pattern that was too hard for me, but I unraveled my cast-on attempt and set it aside, confounded. When I start it over and add it to my notebook I will have to give it a suitable name, like maybe Free & Fair Elections Forever.)

I went stash-diving that very day and asked Stella to pick two of the three yarns I found. She chose a beautiful red-orange paired with a cheerful golden yellow, and I cast on last night while we read A Little Princess together.

I am not entirely sure about this mitten, you guys. While in theory the colors should remind one of a grove of beauteous autumn trees, I fear they are more reminiscent of ketchup and mustard. Some of the acorns are looking like they were attacked by famished squirrels before they made it to the mitten. Here, I'll show you. In person the yellow is much brighter. It's pretty much Lego yellow. It's lovely on a tree. Some find it delightful on a hot dog. The jury is still out on Lego yellow mittens.

There's also a possibility that the finished item will be way too big for Stella. It's an adult-sized pattern. I tried to scale it down by using DK yarn and smaller needles, but she may still end up with a lot of extra room. This is a theme across my knitting posts. There was the hippopotamus cozy hat, and the hippopotamus-friendly socks, and now it seems that Stella will be able to tuck a pet pangolin into her mittens when she heads outside.

I hope her pet pangolin likes mustard.

Milestone

Last week I got an email from Research Gate. "Jamie," it said, "you have a NEW CITATION!" I clicked. The full text of the article was available, and I skimmed through to see why they were citing me.

I found the sentence where they wrote about my paper. I frowned at it. It sounded very familiar. It sounded...too familiar. It sounded like ME, dernit.

I pulled up my original article and CTRL-F-ed for the giveaway verb. Sure enough, they had pasted in my very own words. There were a couple of minor tweaks to my sentence, but it was unmistakably my work.

Probably the only thing I'm going to do about it is write this post. It's in an OMICS journal, which means that your pet tarantula has higher ethical standards than the publisher. I once agreed to review for an OMICS journal, back before I knew better, and it was an eye-opening experience. I said, "It is imperative that the authors with undisclosed formula industry connections complete the required disclosure forms accurately." It was egregious: transparent pro-industry bias evident in the manuscript, multiple industry relationships apparent within minutes of googling. I recommended that they reject the paper. Surprise! They accepted the paper. There were no disclosure updates.

Scholarly papers often include the timeline for the submission process: when did the manuscript first cross the editor's desk, and how long was the revision process, and how long has it been in press? This journal used the framework established by more reputable outlets to undermine its own credibility: submitted 8/24/17, returned for review 8/31/17, accepted 9/14/17. Those dates do not suggest a rigorous peer review process. That's how the predatory journals roll: they persuade academics to pay for the privilege of being published quickly.

Academic writing is kind of a lonely gig. You sweat and labor over papers only to hear that the reviewers want you to rewrite them and the editor isn't sure she can accept them. You finally parturite* them out into the world, only to discover that hardly anyone reads them. 

*I am coining that verb to describe the uniquely struggle-filled oxygen-deprived soul-depleting puuuuuuush required to propel a baby out into the world-- the kind of push that leaves a person bruised in her tenderest places and utterly exhausted. Can I get an AMEN from my fellow academic writers?

But hey! Somebody read my paper. And liked my writing, evidently, at least enough to repurpose it. If the author were my student I would give him an F. Since he's not, I'll just shake my head and blog about him.

Set in its ways

Every year my body clock is a little less inclined to listen when I tell it that time change weekend has arrived. Last week I thought, "Maybe I'll just stay on DST myself -- move back my bedtime, and get up when the clock says 5:10 instead of 6:10." Instead I've been going to bed when the wall clock says it's bedtime, and waking up when the body clock says it's morning. 

Anybody else still muddling blearily through? This strategy is not great for my mental acuity. So: short post, early bedtime, fresh start. 

Fences on the Range

This is our thirteenth year at the little neighborhood elementary school, and I'm noticing a change in the drop-off norms. It used to be that parents who drove would stop their cars in front of the school. The kids would grab their stuff and scoot across the parking lot to the front door as the parents pulled away. 

The new trend is for parents to leave their vehicles idling on the street and walk across the parking lot with their kids.

I find this totally perplexing. The parking lot is blocked off with sawhorses for all of drop-off, so there are no cars moving through that might pose a hazard to the kids. I guess the kids could...run into a parked car? or make a break for the playground? or run all the way through the playground and over the fence to take a nice refreshing dip in the creek behind the school?

It seems more plausible to me that increasing congestion on a crowded narrow street will cause a car accident, an event much more likely to result in harm to a school family than an unplanned playground detour.

Drop-off is always staffed by a pair of teachers. Rain or shine (or sleet or hail), they stand in a spot where a parent can ask them questions from the street, while at the same time they can see the school's front door. I suppose it's possible that there's been an epidemic of weeping or confused or defiant children melting down in the parking lot while the overwhelmed teachers look on in horror? Maybe? 

As you have no doubt deduced by now, I suspect that the real epidemic is parents who don't want to be under-supportive. If your kid tells you that Braden and Jaden and Hayden get to say goodbye to their parents at the front door, then maybe it starts to feel like an expectation instead of an anomaly. Maybe you begin to wonder whether all the good moms are walking their kids to the front door.

At the same time, fewer kids are walking from our neighborhood, and an even smaller number walk without adults. When my oldest sons went to school there, a big noisy crew walked from our block every morning. It was easier to be a free-range parent when the kids traveled in a pack and looked out for each other. There's a new batch of neighborhood kids who could form their own noisy crew. But most of them are driven, most of the time.

There's evidence suggesting that walking to school is good for kids' executive function and self-regulation. Day to day, kids who walk are more able to focus their attention once they're inside the school building. I'm more curious about long-term outcomes, though, and here I know of no data. What is the effect on kids when their parents don't think they can handle walking a half-mile without an adult?

What is the effect on kids when their parents don't want them to walk across the parking lot without an adult?

All stressed up and no way to know

I'm not sure that post title makes any sense. But I am ALL hopped up. SO SO SO hopped up. I thought I knew how things would go down tonight in one of the races I'm following, but it's so close. 

"Jamie," says Elwood, "we're not going to know until 3am." I have an 8am meeting and I teach twice tomorrow morning. BUT HEY-- 3 am is not totally unreasonable, is it?

Okay, it is actually totally unreasonable.

Here I am, being a responsible grownup and heading off to bed. I will sleep a little more peacefully tonight, feeling relieved that I will not have to move to Belgium after all.

A boy named Chip

I went to high school with a boy named Chip. In my memories he wears his wavy hair in a mullet; he has a wispy mustache. In the right hip pocket of every pair of jeans he owns there is a faded ring, left there by his ever-present can of snuff. We were never friends but we were friendly acquaintances; we have many mutual Facebook friends.

Chip left our small West Virginia town for the Carolinas, where he still spends time with his crew of WV expats. He shows up all the time in comments on friends' posts. I knew he was a Trump supporter. I knew he eschewed what he labeled "political correctness."

I didn't know he'd gone off the deep end.

One of my Facebook pals posted about a Trump rally in Tennessee. Her college-age kids had attended the protest outside the rally, and she was posting in support of the protest with a side of worry about the potential for violence.

Chip showed up spewing nonsense about triggered libs, the snowflake left, and the failure of my friends' children to recognize the Greatest President in History. I rolled my eyes and kept scrolling. But it got worse: when another commenter pushed back, he erupted. "I hope some migrants come my way," he said, "so I can use them for target practice."

Target practice.

I reported him to Facebook for hate speech, a first for me. Today the post is gone. I'm curious about what happened-- would Facebook take the whole post down and not just the offending comment? Is there a way for me to tell how they called it?

Generally I don't get in arguments on Facebook and I certainly don't go around reporting people there. Live and let live and go complain on Twitter, that's my motto. But I'm still thinking about the boy I knew. Chip remains friends with one of the few out gay men from our high school class, who treats him with surprising patience. He is still close to the son of an immigrant from the Philippines, who seems not to have been marked out for target practice quite yet.

I feel confident that Chip's grandpa took him hunting when he was a little kid. I bet he got a rifle of his own sometime in his teens; gun culture is huge there. I also feel confident that the people who taught him to shoot were very clear about suitable targets.  

In the wake of the attempted pipe bombings and the Pittsburgh shooting, there's been some debate about the actual impact of Trump's rhetoric. He's just shooting off his mouth, you snowflake-y liberals! He's not actually radicalizing people!

Something surely is.

"This provision is unambiguously ableist"

I have been trying to write a post about the proposed changes to the public charge policy for the parish blog and HOOO BOY I need a break from being calm and measured and not swearing. 

via GIPHY

There, that's better.

Is this issue on your radar? If not, allow me to put it there.

The discussion about how self-sufficient an immigrant needs to be is an old discussion. The phrase "public charge" dates from the late 19th century, when it became part of immigration law. An individual deemed likely to become a "public charge" -- someone in need of extensive government support -- could be denied entry to the country. 

The public charge guidance that's been in place since 1999 focuses on cash support from the government-- things like TANF and SSI. If those payments make up more than half of an individual's financial support, or if an individual seems likely to require long-term care in a publicly funded institution, s/he can be labeled a public charge. A would-be immigrant can be denied entry to the country or a legal immigrant can be denied permanent resident status, based on the public charge policy.

In September, though, the wretched Scooby-Doo villains masquerading as leaders of the free world proposed a significant revision of the public charge policy. If their proposed rule takes effect, use of non-cash government benefits -- Medicaid, SNAP, subsidized housing -- could disqualify a person from obtaining permanent resident status. We're talking about legal immigrants, whose sponsors have submitted affidavits of support, being denied permanent residency. We're talking about people whose children are US citizens -- did I mention the part about legal immigrants? -- worrying that they might not be able to keep their families together.

This rule change will disproportionately affect people who are poor, disabled, pregnant, unborn, or very young. This is not a pro-life action. This is the very opposite of a preferential option for the poor and vulnerable. 

I found multiple sources citing the DHS itself, assessing the likely impact of this rule change. Here's an example from the American Immigration Council:

DHS admits that many U.S. citizens will be affected by the rule because immigrant families will no longer take advantage of benefits. The agency’s list of negative effects includes “worse health outcomes … especially for pregnant or breastfeeding women, infants, or children,” as well as “increased use of emergency rooms,” “increased prevalence of communicable diseases,” “increased rates of poverty and housing instability; and reduced productivity and educational attainment.” In fact, even before the regulations have gone into effect, health providers report that fear among immigrant parents has already caused many to forego nutritional benefits for their U.S.-born children.

I went looking for that text on the DHS website and, strangely enough, it seems to have been scrubbed. I wonder if there is an online repository for all the things that have disappeared from .gov websites under the current troglodytocracy, all the pages that used to say climate change is real and mercury is bad for gestating babies and PREGNANT WOMEN NEED PRENATAL CARE.

In my world, it is better for pregnant legal immigrants to have access to prenatal care via Medicaid than for them to forgo prenatal care and place their babies at higher risk. In my world, it is better for legal immigrants with disabilities to receive services than to avoid them for fear of being denied a green card down the line. I could keep ranting for a while here, but maybe I will share some links instead:

• Thousand Days summarizes the impact for pregnant women, gestating babies, and young children
• AAP points out that 1 in 4 US children has at least one immigrant parent
• Kaiser Family Foundation contrasts the old guidance with the new version of the rule
• Center for American Progress describes the policy change as a form of targeted discrimination
• ASAN provides historical context (and the title of this post)

The public can comment on the proposed rule change until December 10.

Aflame

Yesterday I kicked off the morning with a mammogram. It was better than eating a live frog, for sure, though I have to say that the day improved from there. Breast cancer is not a thing that keeps me up at night, but it was the second time in ten days that I had paid someone to assess the possibility that a tumor might be snaking its tentacles through my body. Afterward I walked to the office through the autumn leaves, thinking about mortality.

I always think about dying in the fall. I probably post about death more than your average blogger-in-good-health -- there was this post in the fall of 2005, and another one five years later -- but I think about dying every November, whether or not those thoughts surface in a post. It's been on my mind more than usual this year.

Last week I went in for my annual skin check. I have the right amount of melanin for a person living at the 55th parallel, where my g'g'g'g'g'g'g'g'great-grandmothers lived out their lives, but I spent the first half of my childhood at the 30th. This was in the 70s, when sunblock was widely regarded as an affectation that prevented a person from attaining a healthy bronzed glow. I have had multiple blistering sunburns, and no amount of SPFing in the present will undo that history. So every year I haul myself into the dermatologist's office.

I was sitting on the table as she checked out my face, my thoughts far away. I wasn't expecting her to say anything about my face, because I look at my face every day. My back, maybe. Or my legs-- I can't see them clearly in the shower, with my glasses off, and it's no longer shorts season so they're mostly covered up the rest of the time. But she stopped suddenly, and handed me a lighted magnifying mirror. "Is this a new bump?" she wanted to know.

I frowned. I did not actually recognize that bump, despite the fact that it had taken up residence on my own personal face. "Would it be all right if we biopsied that bump?" the dermatologist asked. Yes indeed, I replied, thinking of a Twitter acquaintance recently diagnosed with metastatic melanoma. Biopsy anything you want to biopsy.

There was a release form, and a stinging injection of lidocaine, and murmured instructions to the assistant. "Left-side goma," I heard her say, and I wanted to whip my head around and demand more information. "Goma?!"I wanted to wail. "What's a GOMA? How can I not know what a GOMA is if I taught anatomy of the face to college students?" I did not whip my head around and demand more information, and a second later the syllables rearranged themselves in my brain: left zygoma.

It is a little weird how much better I feel about life challenges when I can spell them correctly.

The smell of burning hit my nose as she cauterized the biopsy site. Bandage, instructions, handshake-- off she went. I headed into the October sunshine, feeling wobbly and uncertain. Rational Jamie was trying to jolly Wobbly Uncertain Jamie into a better state of mind. Basal cell carcinoma is annoying but not a big deal, she said. This will be fine either way, she said. Wobbly Uncertain Jamie remained wobbly and uncertain, not willing to become a person with a cancer diagnosis of any stripe.

I got the biopsy results back earlier this week. Negative, thankfully.

The older you get, the more people you know whose biopsies and mammograms were not reassuring. The farther you travel through this life, the clearer it becomes that alive is a temporary state. I scuffed through fallen leaves on a perfect autumn morning, thinking again about the trees. Somehow they perceive the dying of the year, as days shorten and temperatures fall, and they respond not with a defeated slump but with a blaze of glory, russet and gold and impossible crimson. 

My route from the hospital took me up a street I don't usually travel and there I saw a baby tree, shorter than I am. It was dwarfed by its neighbors but it shone out more brightly than any of them, its leaves a stunning scarlet.

"That's what I want to be," I said to the Lord, not for the first time. "Let your glory and your beauty shine through me. Turn my awareness of my mortality into something lovely. Set me ablaze with the fire that does not consume."

The tenure timeline

Today, in the middle of the day, I knocked back a shot of bourbon with two of my colleagues.

We are up for tenure this year, the three of us, and as of today things are out of our hands. At least until February, there's pretty much nothing we can do. We lost access to our document repositories at midnight.

Would you like to know how getting tenure works? I bet you have been waiting with bated breath for someone to tell you all about it, or at least for someone to tell you what persuaded Jamie Gladly to take up day-drinking.

You already know that I've been working on The Application for a long time. I had to write a letter to the provost, and fill out an application for the provost, and fill out a separate application for the college that wound up being 21 pages long what with the teaching philosophy and the research statement, and update my curriculum vitae eleventy-one times, and make sure it aligned with my online productivity report data.

The two hardest pieces of the process were: (1) the part where I had to unearth documentation for every single activity I put in my application. Not just every single peer review I've ever completed, but every single committee assignment, every single grant submission receipt. I just did not know in 2013 that I should be saving committee assignment rosters.

Also (2) I had to re-read every student evaluation and pull out representative examples of feedback, both positive and negative, to accompany my table of quantitative results. (Guess which comments lodged in my brain afterward?)

Huh, I am afraid this is already boring but YOU GUYS there are SO MANY MORE tasks I could list. I have been working on this for months, picking my way through a ravaged minefield in perfectionist hell. Remember my new year's resolutions post, where I said I was going to complete that application with aplomb? Haaaaa, I'm so hilarious. But here I am on the other side of that particular minefield, with all four limbs and all 20 digits.

The department committee in charge of faculty performance will complete its formal review of my portfolio (in contrast to the unofficial review, in which they requested some teeny-tiny edits, like line-spacing kinds of things) and write a letter summarizing their recommendation by December 15. It goes to the college committee, which meets about a month later. That's the Big Decision, even though the result won't be official until I hear from the provost in May. It's rare but not unheard of for the college to override the department, and it's even rarer for the provost to nix a college-level recommendation.

It's a little silly for me to be angsty about it, because the department wants me to get tenure. Even if something bizarre happens, like if the college committee stands up as one and says JAMIE GLADLY, WE UNMASK YOU AS AN IMPOSTOR; GET THEE HENCE-- even then, my chair will have my back in the appeal process and she is a freaking wizard. Wizardess? Wizardina? (Witch is not the word I want here.)

I know that I can trust my chair. If my external reviewer letters were terrible, she would have discreetly asked me to suggest some additional names. If I had a secret backstabby enemy on the department committee, my chair would respond masterfully. (Side note: how come men get to be masterful wizards while women are mistress-ful witches? I do not approve.) And yet there is something irremediably stressful about boiling down the last twelve years of my work life into a single up-down decision: Is Jamie Gladly good enough Y/N?

Ergo: bourbon at lunch. Wish me luck, y'all.