Light and Momentary

If we only had a wheelbarrow

All of the regular accompanists are traveling this weekend, so I am pinch-hitting for the early Mass tomorrow. It's been years since I've been the only instrumentalist at Mass; it is not my favorite role. You just don't realize how many details there are until you're the person in charge of the timing.

You know the part in Princess Bride where Inigo Montoya is trying to push the loaded wheelbarrow and also figure out when to light Fezzik's cloak as they approach 60 armed men at the castle gate? He keeps asking urgently, "Now? Now?" I feel like that sometimes with the Mass parts. 

It seems unlikely that I will set anything on fire tomorrow, or intone at the microphone, Fezzik-style, that I've come for anyone's SOUL. It also seems unlikely that everything will go perfectly smoothly -- that's just the nature of an unfamiliar task. Let's hope for a smooth and peaceful middle ground, shall we? 

I was feeling reasonably calm about the whole thing, telling myself that it's better to have some simple music for Mass than no music, which would have been the result if I had declined to play. Then I remembered that this is the livestreamed Mass, and the video will be available online all week. Here's hoping it does not provide me with too many opportunities to grow in humility. Growing in humility is not my favorite thing.

On the unexpected fruits of a whim

Somewhere in my archives I must have told you the story about the day in 1997 when my husband and I walked with our 4-month-old baby over to the park we could see from our front porch. We'd never been there before, but we thought we'd check it out. Another family was there that day, with two little girls and a brand-new baby boy.

We chatted with them for a while as we pushed the kids in the swings. They lived in the neighborhood too. They'd never visited that park either; they had stopped by on a whim that day, just like us.

The next day my phone rang and it was Beth calling to see if I'd like to come over for lunch. (Back in 1997 she could just look me up in the white pages and call me on my curly-corded landline.) We've been friends ever since.

Beth was the mom in this post who was bringing her daughter to Gladlyville for college, and that daughter is the favorite babysitter I posted about when she got married. Nine years later she is expecting her fourth baby. The three of us got together today for muffins and conversation.

Back in the fall Beth told me over coffee that she thought I'd influenced her daughter's parenting. I thought it was a kind thing to say, but I was not convinced it was an accurate assessment. Today, though, she brought it up again and Breanna agreed. She talked especially about giving kids the freedom to make low-stakes choices.

The year of my postdoc was really hard and I did NOT feel very much like a good influence. It felt like I was always running full tilt from the Chaos Juggernaut, which would squash me if I stopped to catch my breath. We laughed about it today, and she said even the chaos was helpful to see: in a big family, there is a lot going on, and that's okay.

I am thinking a little wistfully about the boys who were tiny babies on that long-ago April day at the park: for at least a decade now they have been taller than we are. Breanna has fond memories of toddler Stella-- when she started babysitting for us in 2010, Stella was just the age that her daughter is now. This morning I watched her little girl, who was having a tough morning, resting against her mama's 34-week belly. I am thinking about all the unexpected gifts I have been given through circumstance and happenstance, and wondering what other gifts might lie ahead.

Most of the things I like about my job in one day

Today I spent most of the day on campus. I had told a colleague I'd guest-lecture for her, and I needed to prep for a meeting coming up tomorrow, and I needed to return a set of author proofs for a recently accepted manuscript.

Did I tell you that I had to move out of my office? The building is being renovated, which requires asbestos abatement, which meant that on top of the usual end-of-the-semester stuff (which was especially abundant in this particular semester), I was packing and purging the space where I'd worked for 8 years.

I have a temporary office in an adjacent building, but it has no air conditioning and I am shoehorned into a small space partially vacated by a person with a nine-month contract. So I've mostly been working at home.

But I needed to review a big data file created in SPSS, which I don't have on my personal laptop, and I needed to be in the next building over anyway to visit my colleague's class. Ergo, a day on campus.

I enjoy guest-lecturing. I've given this particular guest lecture a bunch of times, so the content fits well in its allotted time, the jokes are road-tested, and I feel pretty confident about what the students already know and what they need to learn.

After class I needed to stop at the library to pick up a book on hold, and in the browsing section they had a new Nick Hornby book: Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius. I checked it out, because how could I leave it on the shelf? I am not entirely sure I find the pairing plausible, but I suppose we'll see.

In the afternoon I spent a couple of pleasant hours unraveling the mysteries of my dataset. I figured out a major reason why my colleague was not finding the associations we expected to find (surprise disappearance of a huge chunk of the dataset! whoops! but a fixable flavor of whoops, thankfully).

I also met with a colleague who is teaching a tough summer class and needed a little brainstorming session. I enjoy thinking about how to help students who are struggling, but I have to say it is so much less stressful when it's not my class they're struggling in.

After we wrapped up our talk I submitted my author proofs (all easy queries, thankfully) and walked home through a beautiful summer evening to eat a dinner prepared by my 18yo. It was a good day.

Well-known liberal bias

I am taking another Facebook break, so I do not know how my politically conservative friends responded to the news that Judge Terry Doughty ruled in favor of right-wing plaintiffs chagrined by their treatment on social media. But I can tell you that they've been mad for a long time about the treatment they perceive as unjust if not outright tyrannical.

When I first learned about the option to report problematic posts, I thought, "Oh, good, this will help people to know when they've been taken in by false information! Hurray for helping people!" I did not foresee the actual outcome-- the bitter complaints and the doubling down, the growing certainty that conservatives were being silenced unfairly. 

Back in 2020 I posted about our epistemological crisis and its impact on the Church. I guess even then I thought cooler heads would prevail. Obviously, I thought, no one could argue in favor of a purported right to propagate false information. Little did I know! In a National Review article quoting from his ruling, Judge Doughty appears to say that he is concerned about social media crackdowns on demonstrably false conservative claims about the 2020 election.

I should be clear that I have only read articles about the ruling, rather than the ruling itself, and I can certainly imagine problematic forms of government interference in social media channels. Still, I have to think that when Stephen Colbert joked in 2006 about reality's well-known liberal bias, he did not foresee this particular future.

The Zumba Update

It was totally fun. Pleasant instructor, small group of students, nice mix of ages. There were a couple of spots where they all knew what was going on and I did not (we were supposed to get in a line for one song and a ring for another), but no big deal. I like exercising with other people more than exercising alone.

Another thing I haven't done since 2019

I think I'm going to go to a Zumba class tonight.

I used to be a pretty regular fitness class attendee. Mostly I opted for the Pilates/yoga/strength-building kinds of classes, but I would hit a Zumba class or one of its cousins every few months.

If you go every week or two, rather than every few months, you learn the combinations. People had favorite songs; they would come to class with the sequences of movements already mastered. The downside to being an occasional Zumba-er was that I was always starting from scratch. And I could hang in there for a while, but always -- ALWAYS -- I would get about 45 minutes into a 60-minute class and I would just be done. My brain was maxed out on learning how to put new movements in a row.

Once I went to a kickboxing class, you guys, and it was hilariously bad. Part of the issue was that I didn't have much practice with the things I was supposed to be sequencing -- my jab looked suspiciously like my hook, for instance. Part of the issue was that the teacher was not a good fit for me. I think she was trying to sound tough and imposing, but it felt like she was just screaming at us the whole time. The music was thumping, the instructor was shrieking, and then my brain, as usual, hit its shutoff point.

I was okay with this situation. I was just going to stay in my spot unobtrusively, with the goals of keeping my heartrate up and neither clobbering nor being clobbered by my neighbors. But then the teacher decided that I needed extra assistance and came over next to me. "CROSS," she bellowed, and I attempted to comply. "NO," she howled in response to my uppercut or jab or -- let's be honest here -- some maneuver that looked less like a punch and more like Jamie-wearily-fending-off-a-wayward-grocery-cart, "LEFT CROSS." I could sort of imitate her when she was right next to me, but I did not really want the one-on-one tutelage and I absolutely did not want to be the center of attention.

It made for a long 15 minutes, during which I determined that I would probably not be attending any future kickboxing classes.

Let us hope that tonight's Zumba instructor is a mellower sort.

Junior high: a bad idea

You know how other people's children always get older faster than you think they ought to? Will it surprise you to learn that the youngest Gladlys are not actually very young these days? Pete is heading off to college next month (next! month!) and Stella will go to high school.

This means I'm done guiding kids through junior high.

Junior high was not an especially pleasant season for any of the kids, but the last round was the hardest. Some of the issue was that online learning was never going to improve the sixth-grade experience. All of the social stuff that the grownups were sorting out over Zoom, which some of us found anxiety-inducing even with our adult self-regulation skills ("did she mean to sound so passive-aggressive or am I being overly sensitive?"), was No Fun for the junior high kids who were wading through it at the same time. It is hard enough to read facial cues when you are first learning how to do sarcasm; masks only made it more complicated.

Junior high girls are strange and mercurial specimens. Sometimes in seasons past I would listen to the bigger kids talking to their friends and think to myself, "Junior high boys are weird," but I have realized afresh that junior high girls are plenty weird. It's just a more familiar flavor of weirdness.

In hindsight I have to say it was EXHAUSTING. So much to process! So many people who forgot or disregarded or hadn't yet developed their filters! They would just let their thought-bubble thoughts morph into speech-bubble thoughts, spewing them out into the world to spread unhappiness.

I can accept that it is perfectly normal for junior high kids to be figuring out what is funny and what is mean, what is edgy and what is just unacceptable, who's a slightly quirky friend and who's a best-avoided menace. Doesn't mean I have to like it, though.

Let us all hope that high school will be a little smoother, shall we?

How's your mobility?

Last month I read Outlive, which I highly recommend. When I read Peter Attia's interview in the NYT, I found his message intriguing and his ego off-putting in almost equal measure. Not quite equal, though, because I decided to read the book. It is fascinating. He has quite the ego, to be sure, but he might almost deserve it.

The number one thing I don't like (besides (did I mention?) the ego that might require its own seat for airline travel), is the way he talks about men as the norm and women almost as an afterthought. But EVEN SO, I'm telling you: you should read this book.

Nutshell version: he talks about reducing your odds of developing what he calls the four horsemen (atherosclerotic disease, metabolic dysfunction, neurodegenerative disease, and cancer) with the goal of extending your healthspan-- the period of time in which you are healthy enough to enjoy your life and live it independently. He proposes a multi-pronged approach for keeping the four horsemen at bay, and its outlines will be familiar to you. (Again, though, he writes about them in a compelling way with a boatload of information that was new to me.) The thing that was most surprising to me was his emphasis on stability, on protecting your body's capacity to interact safely with the world around it.

I have been exploring some of the ideas in that chapter over the last month. For instance: he writes about how our toes should function, and mine are falling down on the job. I hypothesize that the years I spent wearing Patriarchy Shoes in the 1980s/1990s caused me to disregard enough sensory input from my sad squashed pinky toes that I'm having a hard time using them as intended here in middle age. Maybe it wasn't the shoes, but something caused me to need a month of consistent practice to make firm contact between my right pinky toe and the floor when I stand up. I'm still working on the left one.

Recently my Kindle suggested that I might like a book called Built To Move, and I've been working my way through that one. I'm doing their 21-day mobility challenge, and finding it a bite-sized way to address some of the effects of the passage of time. Each chapter has a simple test followed by practices for improving your performance on the test. It's fun, if a little humbling, and you might like it too.

In the balance chapter, for instance, there are two tests. Test #1: Stand on one foot. Close your eyes. Count the number of times you put your foot down in a 20-second period. I did so badly on this test, you guys! My balance is fine when my eyes are open. I can hold tree pose comfortably for a long time. But I am relying more heavily than I realized on visual feedback to keep myself in the pose. 

Test #2 is the Old Man Balance Test, a name that gave me hope initially. "I have better balance than an old man," said I to myself. I do not, however, have better balance than an old man who could pass this test. They tell you to stand on one foot with a pair of socks and lace-up shoes on the floor in front of you. Without touching your foot to the ground, bend down and pick up the sock. Put it on. Keeping your foot in the air, bend down again and pick up your shoe. Put it on and tie it, keeping your foot up the whole time. Switch feet and do it again.

I can do this task in segments. I can get a sock on without falling over, but then I need to touch my foot to the ground before I can lift it up again and put my shoe on. I might or might not be able to tie it without tapping my foot on the ground again. I'm having fun with the trying, though, after many years of reflexively sitting down to put on my socks and shoes.

Give it a whirl and tell me what you think!

Maybe we can have some TAMDRAL updates

I am way out of the blogging groove, but I intend to fix that. I have lots of things to tell you. Maybe it's a good time for a blogging streak, yeah?

I have totally neglected posting about Dickens in a year when more people than usual wanted to read along. So let's start there, shall we? Are you reading Great Expectations? Have you read it before? What part are you on and what do you think?

I had planned to finish the book by the end of the June but I have been flitting in fickle fashion from book to book instead. I am only on chapter 36, in which Pip has just returned from a funeral.

Tap tap

I keep thinking to myself, "I should blog," and then not blogging. So here I go, throwing up a speedy post to see if it gets the gears turning again.

Things are fine, mostly. My summer class is almost over and we have a trip coming up that I'm looking forward to. I haven't made as much progress with Great Expectations as I would have liked -- I've been more motivated to read other books instead.

At some point I'd like to talk about reading Outlive last month and about the news on the heart front. But maybe tonight I'll just toss up a quick post and let it tug me back into the blogging groove. 

What's new with you? How is June treating you?

It's TAMDRAL time, friends

Today marks the beginning of the Tenth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, in which we will wind our way through Great Expectations at a leisurely pace. Join us! Great Expectations is short (for a Dickens novel) and it will draw you in from the get-go.

We meet our hero not long after he was still too small to say his own name properly, and we see right away that he is smart, timid, and lonely. When I first read this book in 1989 I was thoroughly creeped out by the escaped convict lurking in a graveyard, demanding a file (a metal one, for removing his leg-iron, not a paper one for contesting a will or what have you) and threatening Pip with a cannibal's revenge.

In chapter 2 we meet Pip's older sister and brother-in-law, along with Tickler, whose existence tells you most of what you need to know about Mrs. Joe Gargery. And even though it might seem a little early for Dickens to start talking about social ills, it's there if you've got your eyes open: prison overcrowding is bad, kids, and convicts deserve more humane treatment than the Hulks.

If you are looking for a free version, I suggest that you avoid Project Gutenberg, which inserts a seriously spoiler-y image with a seriously spoiler-y caption right before chapter 1. When I first read Anna Karenina, the back cover copy had apparently been written by an over-eager new grad: it connected the dots between the opening and closing railway safety incidents. They described the climax of the novel on the back cover! Who does that?! This image/caption combo is just as bad, so maybe find yourself a free Kindle version instead.

Next up, pork pie at dawn! This is the slowest-paced AMDRAL we've ever done, so maybe it's your year to jump on in.

Marooned in Blarghville

May is usually the happiest time of year for me, but I've been floundering. The spring semester ended later than it usually does, I had a student who added herself to the short list of Most Memorably Exasperating Students, my summer class started sooner than summer classes usually do, and it's kind of a tricky class to boot. Oh, and I had an exhausting unexplained arrhythmia episode two days after telling you how predictable my arrhythmia had been for 18 years, and I've been on a new medication that seems to make me more tired than the old one. On top of that I've had a weird string of minor but unpleasant staph infections. I'm hoping this means that I'm a little run down and not that I"m living in squalor, since no one else in the family has been affected. 

Anyway, this is the time of year when I am usually planning All The Things, but right now I am mostly planning my next nap.

I do still want to read Great Expectations with the folks who were interested in the Tenth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, and we are running out of May in which to read it. So here's my suggestion: if we start on Thursday the 25th we'll still have a week of May in which to get the ball rolling. It's one of his shorter novels, and at this point I think I'll just plan to read it slowly: ten or fifteen pages a day should get us to the end of the book by the end of June.

I want a new drug

It's been such a long time since I said anything about my heart that maybe a recap is in order. You'd probably have to be a longtime reader with an excellent memory for this to have lodged in your brain.

When I was pregnant with Pete, who just turned 18 (!!), I had an unsettling arrhythmia episode that led to a diagnosis of PSVT. PSVT is generally benign, and I opted to treat it with medication. They offered me an ablation, a procedure in which they short out part of the wiring that makes your heart go, but I chose to keep my wiring intact.

My arrhythmia episodes are fairly predictable, and for 18 years I have taken the same medication if I am going to be doing cardio, heading into an unusually stressful situation, or spending time at high altitudes.

HOWEVER--

--this spring I started wondering if there might be a connection between the medication and my lackluster running performance as an adult. It has always seemed weird to me that I could run toward the front of the pack as a teen (i.e., I could knock out a sub-6:30 mile without working too hard) but I've always been near the back of the pack as an adult. I have written about some of that angst in these pages over the years. In the seasons when I was more serious about running I would sweat and labor and struggle and agonize, and never feel like I was seeing much improvement. I was always a little baffled about why it felt so hard.

WELL.

It turns out that there is a body of research from the 80s linking my particular beta-blocker to decrements in athletic performance. Reduced cardiac output. Reduced VO2 max. Reduced endurance. Some researchers looked at participants' skeletal muscles as well as their hearts, and found lower levels of ATP and creatine phosphate, along with impaired glycogenolysis. One study reported that they found 25-30% performance reductions in muscles with predominantly slow-twitch fibers.

SO MAYBE, just MAYBE, a person who has taken this medication faithfully before running for 18 years should not be surprised that running has felt hard!! Maybe this person should not have wasted mental energy on thoughts like "lazy" or "untalented" or "why bother?"!! 

So I made an appointment for next week to talk about a different management strategy. I think I will ask to try a different medication first, and request a referral to get more information about an ablation. I am still feeling a little cautious about shorting out the wiring that makes my heart beat, but I am also feeling cautious about continuing a medication that may have been slowing me down for eighteen years. (Wait, I need more exclamation points: eighteen!!!!!!! years!!!!!!!)

I am trying to keep my expectations modest. It is entirely possible that I am just a back-of-the-pack runner as an adult, and the medication only accounts for a tiny slice of my back-of-the-pack-ness. But I'm so curious now. And I can't help being a little bit hopeful.

Remedial Student Kicks It Old School

I posted a year ago about mailing in our state tax forms, like a Family Ties character or a particularly dutiful dinosaur, but what I didn't realize at the time was that because I filed paper forms in 2022 I would temporarily lose access to the state's e-filing system. I thought I could just reset my login and sproing back to the twenty-first century, but ALAS I have condemned myself to wander the primeval wilds like a pteranodon in search of prey or perhaps a postage stamp. 

This is a problem I could have solved if I had given myself a little more lead time, but I...did not give myself a little more lead time. This led to a rather BRISK and EFFICIENT series of exchanges between Mr. and Mrs. Pteranodon, as the clock ticked down to the last opportunity for an April 18 postmark. "Fill out the dependent schedule," squawked Mrs. Pteranodon to her spouse as she worked on the primary form. "And the property tax schedule!" 

I was racing out the door with my sealed envelope when I realized I had forgotten the state's copies of our W-2 forms. So I stopped, ripped open the envelope, taped it back up with the necessary forms inside, and zoomed off to the PO. I caught the postal worker as he was walking away from the emptied mailbox. "No problem," he said, as he dropped my envelope into the bin of outgoing mail, apparently unruffled by his face-to-face encounter with a creature straight out of the Cretaceous Period.

Dear Future Jamie, do better next year. Two years in a row is more than enough.

TAMDRAL Time

This will be the tenth year in which I have hosted a Dickens read-along in this space after the end of the spring semester. Here's what we've read so far:

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

For the Tenth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong this year I am thinking about reading either Great Expectations or The Old Curiosity Shop, starting on May 15 after grades are submitted. Want to join me? Any preference?

Book Notes

Have we had a book post recently? I don't think so. I've finished eight books over the past month and some of them were marvelous. Maybe I will write about them in appreciation order rather than chronological order.

1. Romantic Comedy. I love Curtis Sittenfeld; she is on the short list of authors whose books I will always pre-order. This one is hilarious and tender and also thought-provoking. I persuaded the roommates that they should read it too so we can have Zoom book club again like we did when Rodham came out. I am still not quite sure that I buy the premise but I WISH I bought the premise. How likely is it for a famously handsome male celebrity to date someone less attractive and more intelligent? Color me skeptical, but I loved the book anyway.
2. The Latecomer. My friend Becky recommended this one to me and I gobbled it right up. It's about a family of triplets who are followed much later by a singleton sibling, and I enjoyed it immensely. This is the second Jean Hanff Korelitz book I've read; I am a fan of her characters and her plotting and her writing style. Here too I am not entirely sure that I buy the premise but I was willing to suspend disbelief.
3. The Great Divorce. And now for something completely different! Stella was telling me recently how strange she'd found the beginning of this book, and I was agreeing with her. I couldn't remember if I'd ever finished it, but I decided I'd pick it up again. I finished it tonight and I might start it over tomorrow morning.
4.  The Sweet Spot. I think this was an Ask A Manager recommendation, maybe? Funny, engaging, full of endearing characters. Yet again I am a leetle dubious about the premise, but whatever. I enjoyed it enough to give it to my mother for her birthday, and she gave it a happy thumbs-up.
5. I Have Some Questions For You. I pre-ordered this one because I loved The Great Believers so much when I read it last summer. And I liked this one-- I like her writing and she did a good job with the plotting and the pacing. But it was also hard to read because it's about violence against women and about who gets away with what in this country. I would not call it a hopeful book.
6. Dr. Wortle's School. I picked this one as my next Trollope novel pretty much randomly after I finished Miss Mackenzie. They both feel a little lightweight after The Way We Live Now, but I guess most books are going to seem less hefty than TWWLN. Both books have a lot to say about marriage. Will Miss Mackenzie choose a husband? (It's a more interesting question than it sounds.) What does a choice to violate marriage law say about a person's moral state? What should we make of a person who does a bad thing for a good reason? 
7. Run Like A Pro. I've recommended a bunch of Matt Fitzgerald books here over the years; I'm lukewarm about this one. He pushes high-volume running, which I am not really cut out for. He also says bench presses will slow you down, because they add useless mass to your upper body. You'll tear that barbell from my cold dead hands, Matt. Bench presses are awesome.
8. Honor. Included for completeness; not a fan. More violence against women; more failures of the legal system.

Today I started The Three Clerks, because I got an email from the UK Trollope Society. They'll be meeting in Cambridge this month to discuss it. It's an in-person meeting; I will not be putting my passport-less self on a plane to talk about obscure Trollope novels. But I love the idea of reading Trollope with other people, so I downloaded the free Kindle version. (Amazon said, "Did you mean the Kevin Smith movie 'Clerks III,' Jamie?" No, Amazon, I did not. Those two things could hardly be more different.) I was trying to tell Elwood about how witty it is. "He's joking about the Board of Commissioners for Regulating Weights and Measures! AND decimalization of English currency!" I told him, with all the enthusiasm at the command of someone whose middle name might be Enthusiastic if it weren't Patricia.

He does not find my fondness for Trollope persuasive, alas. But here's my plan, friends: I am going to crank through The Three Clerks, which promises to be a rip-roaring* tale of love and bureaucracy. And then! It will be TAMDRAL time! I have not given much thought at all to this year's Dickens Read-Along. Maybe we can chat about that tomorrow. If you can stand the suspense, that is.

(*Okay, okay, it's possible that "rip-roaring" is a mild exaggeration. How about "gently and consistently funny, with charming characters and a delicious authorial voice"?)

Just like old times

Back before the pandemic, a married couple directed music at our church and did a fantastic job of it. I've been singing in choirs since I was a wee small girl, and they are my favorite directors ever. There are a lot of tensions for a church music director to straddle: the music has to be more worship than performance, but if you don't pay sufficient attention to the details you can distract from the worship. You want to welcome new musicians while also keeping a reasonable standard for musical skill. You need to let people know when they have to fix something while also remembering that human error is an inevitable part of live music. You have to keep the pastor and the congregation and the choir happy even when they want different things. It's a lot, and this couple did a terrific job.

In 2021 they announced that they were resigning from their paid positions. They agreed to stay on in a volunteer role, but the Masses were divided among a team of volunteer directors and they were only in charge of one liturgy each weekend. It conflicts with my standing Sunday Zoom call with my college roommates, so I hadn't sung with them in-- gosh, probably two years.

She texted me to ask if I was available for the Triduum services, and I said I'd love to come. We rehearsed last night. And you guys, it was the best.

I stopped playing flute for Mass in 2020 and I never went back to it. Do you remember those articles about viral particle spread via wind instruments? I'm remembering a particular story that put the flute right behind the vuvuzela in its capacity to serve as a COVID dispersion machine. When we were permitted to have musicians at Mass again, they couldn't be wind instruments; there was too much concern about virus transmission back in the pre-vaccination era. I am still happy that I learned to play the bass during that time, so I'm not complaining. But I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed playing the flute for Mass.

Last night we were paging through the music together and I was jotting down notes in my binder about which parts to play where. At one point the director said, "Jamie, can you play the tenor part for the refrain? And can you pad on the verses?" In a calm voice I said, "Sure," and penciled "R-tenor, V-pad" on the page. But inwardly I said this instead:

Snoopy Happy Dance GIFfrom Snoopy GIFs

Padding on the verses means I'll add in something pretty and unobtrusive -- maybe a little harmony under the vocalist's line, maybe a little echo of the melody, maybe just the roots of the chords if I'm putting more emphasis on unobtrusive than pretty. Padding is where the structure of planning and rehearsal gives way to the spontaneity of improvisation. 

For two years before the pandemic I played the flute for Mass more often than not. So in some ways this feels entirely normal; I have plenty of pages of music marked "R-tenor, V-pad." But at the same time it feels like a homecoming. At the beginning of the pandemic when all the churches shut down I felt like I was walking around with a limb missing. I wrote about the sadness and the weirdness in that first pandemic summer. Even after we had access to the sacraments again, we didn't really have access to the church community. Though I've been involved in simple ensembles pretty consistently, I've really missed that larger community of musicians.

So tonight I am feeling lucky and grateful about this thing I get to be part of tomorrow and the day after and the day after that: a trusted director, a big and joyful ensemble, and a shared commitment to doing something beautiful and evanescent, in the service of something beautiful and eternal.

Self-compassion ripples outward

This morning I volunteered with a friend. It went smoothly, for the most part, and afterward we hugged each other and exchanged a smile about the bits that didn't go exactly as planned.

It sounds unremarkable, right? The thing I am thinking about this evening is that none of it would have seemed likely a year ago.

A year ago I wouldn't have called this person a friend, because I found her so prickly. I would not have answered the call for volunteers, because I did not spend time with her by choice. But last summer and fall we were on a retreat team together, and things changed.

I was not expecting things to change. We'd been on retreats together before, and the usual retreat magic had not really improved the situation. I am still not sure what enabled me to relax this time around, to go in with low expectations. I resolved to be helpful where I could and not sweat the prickliness.

Whatever the reason, something shifted in an big way. I learned a thing I had not known before-- namely, that she struggles with self-criticism. When I looked back on all the past interactions that had hurt my feelings, I saw them with a new understanding. This is a true fact: it's easier to speak kindly to other people when you can speak kindly to yourself.

I think it used to be that when we spent time together I slipped into chilly-distant mode. I was always waiting for her to say something resent-able, which did not have a great effect on my disposition. At one point during the retreat she said to me, in a tone of surprise, "Jamie, you're fun! I didn't know how fun you were!" "Huh," I thought to myself, "I guess it takes two to make a relationship tense."

One morning during the retreat she was leading a song and she got stuck in the intro. It happens sometimes when you're playing from lead sheets: you have the chords in front of you, you've rehearsed the music, but you can't find the starting note. I've been there; it stinks. I bowed my head and prayed for her-- not so much that she would find the note (although there was some of that) but that she would know the love of God right there in her moment of getting it wrong. That she would see her own goodness and perceive the Lord's tender affection for her in all circumstances. Afterward she said to me, "I looked over at you, and I could tell you were praying for me not to be too hard on myself."

I have blogged a little, here and there, about my experience of working through Kristin Neff's Self-Compassion. I didn't say a lot about it, because it was hard and slow and it left me feeling too vulnerable to tell the internet all about it. I think the experience of learning to be kinder to myself has made it easier not only to feel more at peace in my own skin, but to be more at ease in all kinds of relationships.

I can't know exactly why things changed between us, but we did something good together this morning and it brought us both joy. And I am thinking back on it this evening, glad and grateful.

Nice guys at the gym

I have a pretty consistent Sunday afternoon routine: I go to the gym around 2:30, when it's usually fairly empty. I deadlift, I bench, I do a superset of upper-body accessories, and I'm done. But today I got to step 2 and all the flat benches were occupied.

I stood nearby and waited for a few minutes to see if anybody seemed to be wrapping up. One of the guys walked up to me while I was resting and asked politely if I was using the machine next to me -- he wanted to snag one of the weights. "Go right ahead," I told him. Politely, oh so politely, he said, "Do you need any help with anything?"

You guys, this man was jacked. Like, his name could be Yoked McSwolerson and it still would not convey the massiveness of his mighty muscles. Also he was, like, 6'5". "Oh, no," I told him, "just waiting for one of the benches to open up."

He asked me if I'd ever tried decline bench. I never had, because it looks a little scary. You have to put your knees over one thingummy and your shins under another thingummy and uncurl yourself backward without thwacking your head on the barbell. If you fail a rep on flat bench, you can roll the barbell down to your middle and escape that way. But if you fail a rep on decline bench I feel like you're kind of stuck, with a barbell that's well-positioned to roll right onto your neck. 

While he was resting between sets, he showed me which thingummies went where. After his next set I asked him a form question and he was friendly and helpful again. There was no skeeviness at any point.

I don't know how often I'll do decline bench, but it was fun to try something new. I was expecting it to be hard, because incline bench is significantly harder than flat bench, but it was not hard. I am mostly blogging about it because I want to remember the unexpected friendliness: I would not have expected Mr. McSwolerson to reach out and offer to help me out of the blue like that. "People at the gym are friendly," Joe assured me back when I first started lifting. I still think his gym experience as a muscular 20-year-old is different from mine. But what do you know-- sometimes people at the gym are friendly.

Back to it

This last week was my spring break, and for the first time in many years I left town for part of it. Back in the fall I was asked to serve as a program reviewer for another university: they offered to pay me to come out and evaluate the quality and sustainability of their grad program, which is located in an area where I have good friends. Sure, I said, I can do that.

I left on time change Sunday and drove to my friend Becky's house. We have an ongoing daily text conversation about everything under the sun, but we hadn't seen each other in person since the summer of 2021. I'd never met her youngest; I hadn't seen her husband in-- hm, probably 20 years. We went to a concert that night, I got to tour her office the next morning, and then I headed out after that.

The weather was worse than I expected, and I hate driving in bad weather. The sky dropped so much slush on the front of my little rental car that its cruise control cut out because the radar system couldn't function. But I kept plugging and made it to the other side of the state, where I had lunch with friend #2. After one more hour of icky driving, I got to the city where I'd be staying.

I had expected the university to put me up in a hotel that was clean but un-fancy, so I was pretty surprised by the reality: mammoth chandeliers, high ceilings, much swankier than my usual hotel choices. I had a little time to review my materials for the next day before I headed out to dinner with my friends who live in the city. We had the nicest dinner together -- we talked and laughed and talked some more.

The next morning I met my co-reviewer and we headed into two days of meetings. I wasn't expecting the job to be so interesting, and it was fun to be looking at the program as an outsider, with the freedom to recommend anything at all. They built in time for us to start drafting our report, which we appreciated. I had an uneventful trip back on Wednesday evening.

Spring break is always filled with grading, and I hadn't really done the math on how many hours of grading I would be trying to squish into Thursday and Friday. I wound up working a fair amount yesterday and I'm still not finished. It will be okay, though; the grading always gets done. Spring break is usually a lonely week for me -- usually I am on my own doing the least pleasant parts of my job while the kids are in school -- but this one was the opposite of lonely.