bearing blog

bear – ing n 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

Back to basics, in a brand-new way.

Here we are, in Lent again. Days have come when the Bridegroom has been lifted from us — or when we feel, acutely, the absence of the Bridegroom — or try to notice it — and so, we fast.

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I went back to St. Francis de Sales earlier this winter and reviewed the extremely basic advice on prayer in Introduction to the Devout Life. There's some stuff in there where he writes that certain people aren't gifted in the art of mental prayer, they only know how to practice vocal prayer, and so in order to help that sort of person, he gives some detailed advice (it's in part II) about how to do it.

I confess that the first time I read ITTDL I did not really take to heart the possibility of being defective in the art of mental prayer.

After all (I thought), I am not living in the year 1600; reading is not an uncommon pastime; I, unlike the good saint's clients, have also seen lots of movies; I can easily picture the things I think about. I am a thoughtful person and I think a lot, and I do not have to move my lips when I am thinking about things, or reading things. I do not need to be reciting a formula and thinking about the formula, although of course that is a good discipline to take up. Because, you see, I can think about anything I want whenever I want, like any modern who does not suffer from a particularly diminished attention span.

But it occurred to me recently that "thinking" is maybe not the same thing as "mental prayer" or even "meditation." And then I considered something I noticed a long time ago: a great deal of my attempts at mental prayer and even vocal prayer give way, rather quickly, to thinking. I can't tell you how many times I've started a brief morning offering, child's play, and twenty minutes later realized I was actually making a grocery list in my head.

So… maybe it's time to start over, with a little more humility?

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It isn't quite true to say that I reviewed the Introduction, it's more that I went back and really read and worked through the parts about "how to do mental prayer even if you are totally convinced that you will never be able to do it." You know, as if I was totally convinced I didn't know how to do it, instead of reading it as if I already knew that I knew how to do it, NBD.

I don't use the term "convicted" very much but, er, from II.5:

After using your imagination you begin to use your understanding, and this is what we call meditation; in other words, making use of considerations to raise your heart to God and to the things of God. This is where meditation differs from study and from considerations which are made to become learned, or to write or to engage in discussion.

(Après l'action de l'imagination, s'ensuit l'action de l'entendement, que nous appelons méditation, qui n'est autre chose qu'une ou plusieurs considérations faites afin d'émouvoir nos affections en Dieu et aux choses divines: en quoi la méditation est différente de l'étude et des autres pensées et considérations, lesquelles ne se font pas pour acquérir la vertu ou l'amour de Dieu, mais pour quelques autres fins et intentions, comme pour deviner savant, pour en ecrire, ou disputer.)

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Anybody out there read French, or astute enough at examining texts to notice that my English translation (Fr. Michael Day's) is missing a clause?

Here's my own somewhat dynamic translation, in case you would like help.

After using your imagination, you'll move on to using your understanding. This is what we call meditation, which is nothing more or less than to mull over one or a few things, but done in order to stir up our affections toward God and toward the things of God. It's in this that meditation differs from study, and from other kinds of thinking on things; those kinds we don't do in order to get better at virtue or at loving God, but for other intents and purposes, such as to become learned, or to write about them, or to argue about them.

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So, yes, this time through I picked up a copy in French, Texte Authentique Intégral but avec l'orthographe moderne, des notes et un glossaire.

It may seem a little surprising that I haven't dug into the Introduction à la Vie Dévote before, since I do read French, and I enjoy linguistic comparisons, and this is basically my favorite devotional work ever and I've already written about it quite a lot here on the blog.

It's really only in the past couple of years (thanks to determinedly plowing through several detective novels ALOUD) that my French has been fluent enough that I can pick up a complex work and, you know, read it. So the words go into your head? You know, without having to work very hard? I mean, I still have to keep the dictionary app close at hand because I run into new words all the time, it's not a function of vocabulary, it's more an ability for the sentences to make sense immediately in the order that the words arrive.

So anyway, that passage above hit me right between the eyes, the bit I'd not read before about the difference between thinking and meditating.   Because I pretty much always approached mental prayer as if there was something I had to figure out. And yes, quite often, in order to come up with something to write about (hello, blog) or a good argument (hello, Facebook and Twitter).

I mean, it worked? The inside of my own mind is a fountain of things to write about and argue about. Some of the arguments and the writings are pretty good! If I do say so myself.

(Luke 18:11. Depending on your translation, you may get The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed thus …. or you might get The Pharisee, standing, prayed thus to himself…  yep, or Le pharisien, debout, priait ainsi en lui-même…)

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What's been missing is that notion, that intent, to émouvoir nos affections en Dieu.  The English raise your heart to God just didn't quite make me notice it; I'm afraid that as an Anglophone, I think of "my heart" more as connoting "my innermost being, my core," for better or worse, and the thing about me is that I am centered very much in the mind and distrustful of feelings, the movements of the adrenal gland, the motives in emotion. So I passed serenely over it and never really noticed the contrast intended between the intent to "raise your heart to God" and "to study… to become learned, or to write or to engage in discussion." (Not that the saint thinks these things are bad, it's clear that he just doesn't name them "mental prayer."

It was the missing bit, with its implication: All that is well and good, but it isn't going to help you grow in virtue or love God any better.

Let's just say it got my attention.

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So I've carefully read and re-read that second part, in French, for the past few weeks, as a sort of preparation for Lent, and I've found another interesting thing, too, which is that I can't go from reading French prayer advice in French and then put the book down and immediately start talking (to myself or to God) in English. No, I generally find myself going straight into French in my mind too, which is utterly weird because I'm only kinda fluent? Although there's no one there to correct my grammar so that helps. And I don't have immediate access to fine shades of meaning? And I'm extra on alert not to accidentally switch into "practicing language learning" mode, so I'm not picking up my dictionary, but I'm forced to give voice to my prayer and meditation in much more concrete and simple terms —childlike terms — than I normally do?

And I kind of understand, now, a little bit better, a tiny piece of the special magic of having a liturgical language? The code-switching, the turning on of a circuit inside you that puts you in a different state of mind — for me, here, a fresher state of mind, a younger and more halting one?

If nothing else, I feel that I hear St. Francis's real voice a little bit better. I really do. And I am looking at this book in a whole new way (and wondering what other details Fr. Michael Day might have left out — I still think his translation is great for its conversational and intimate tone, but now I'm side-eyeing him a little bit. Maybe the publisher made him cut out bits that sounded repetitive and didn't admit it on the dust jacket).

I know that I can't necessarily recommend this particular reading to everyone, although I will go ahead and say: if you do read another language with reasonable fluidity, maybe give some of the classic spiritual works in that language a try, particularly if you've already read them in translation. It's quite a different experience.

And if you don't think your fluency is quite up to speed yet, maybe try the detective novels as a first step. Couldn't hurt!

Feb 28, 2020

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3 comments on Back to basics, in a brand-new way.
Sleep timing and other potentially poor choices. (With an important 2025 update at the end)

I have sleep on the brain this week.

I am a big believer in the importance of getting enough sleep, probably because I’ve never (not even when I was much younger) been able to function well after missing it. I’m highly assertive about myself going to bed on time, taking naps, and resting extra on weekends. Also, I’m a morning person. But for the past six months or so I’ve been having a sleep problem: not insomnia exactly… more that I start getting tired in the afternoon, and by the time 7:30 or 8 pm rolls around I’m absolutely ready for bed. And then I do go to bed, leaving the teenagers to clean the kitchen (no problem there) and Mark to send the youngest two to bed all by himself (he’s rather good at this, but I don’t blame him if he would like me to do my part sometimes), because, well, see above: highly assertive.

And then I pop awake at two or three in the morning… if I manage to get back to sleep again, I’ll pop awake at 5… and my alarm really goes off at 6.

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Long story short, I bought one of those light therapy devices, the wearable kind, which makes you look slightly like a cosplayer fan of Geordi LaForge* and shines bright LED light down at your face for 20-40 minutes. Most people who buy this are putting it on first thing in the morning, when they wake up, because most people who buy this thing either have difficulty getting up early in the morning, or they live somewhere that’s too dark for happiness and they need to trick their brain into thinking they get to sit outside and enjoy a beautiful sunrise. But if you fall asleep too early and get up too early, you might be eligible for a diagnosis of Advanced Sleep Phase Disorder, which sounds like “Long-Untreated, It’s Gotten Extra Bad Sleep Phase Disorder” but really means “The Opposite of Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder.” And that sort of person is supposed to wear the thing shining down upon them in the evening. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past few days. No improvements seen yet, but I’m hoping that at least the placebo effect will start kicking in soon.

Geordi LaForge. Not Data.

(No, I haven’t gotten a diagnosis. Yes, I have sought the help of Doctor Google, M. D. Why? Because as far as I can tell there aren’t any unpleasant side effects, and buying the thing and trying it out is significantly cheaper than seeking a diagnosis first. If it works, I’ll come out way ahead; if it doesn’t work, I’m set back by way less than the cost of a specialist visit.

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The homeschooled teenagers who live with me also have inconvenient (to me) sleep schedules, but it goes the other way. They stay up late (ok, that helps with getting the kitchen cleaned up; I drowsily noticed plate-clattering noises from downstairs when I turned over in bed at 11:45 pm last night). If left to their own devices, they sleep in well into the morning and sometimes even the afternoon.

The 16yo boy has, after a couple of years of trial-and-error, adapted his schoolwork routine remarkably well; he rarely, now, misses turning in his homework assignments on time. This morning, as I often do, I came down for my coffee to find on the counter the algebra book and a sprawl of mostly-finished homework; he’ll have time to complete it before it’s due early afternoon. I saw a similar pattern in his older brother, who’s now doing fine in college as far as I can tell: given the freedom to set his own schedule, he adapted early to a routine that’s not all that unusual among college students.

NOTE: I mean, I didn’t do that when I was a college student. I preferred 9 a.m. classes; I badly needed to go to sleep by 11 p.m.; and I successfully avoided all-nighters for my entire undergraduate education except for twice (thank you, enforced group projects with assigned partners who did not share my self-care priorities). But I can see how it can work.

The 13yo girl has only just been given control over her schedule this year, and is still in the trial-and-error phase. Occasionally I need to firmly suggest that what she is exercising is procrastination rather than Scheduling Work To Happen At A Time More Convenient Than Right Now, Namely Later, When I Will Really Be Motivated. But I am also seeing some creative problem solving; lately she’s initiated a daily trek to the public library branch, where she has the opportunity** to do her homework in an environment of enforced quiet.

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I mentioned that I really believe in sleep. I especially believe in sleep for teenagers: quite literally, one of the benefits of homeschooling that I always tick off when asked to explain myself is that we are free to find a sleep schedule that suits our bodily needs, instead of conforming to whatever schedule the school district imposed upon us in order to marshal its transport resources. So I’m inclined to (mostly) let them sleep when they want to sleep. Occasionally the outcome of this plan, confidently prescribed by Erin-the-believer-in-getting-enough-sleep, is a little shocking to Erin-the-natural-morning-person.

I didn’t really expect, the other day, after a late scout meeting, that when I said “Tomorrow, since we had to stay up late, you can sleep in,” that one of the teenagers would actually not come downstairs until 2 p.m. Who would voluntarily miss the whole morning?!? What is this sorcery?

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So, here’s a question that I think is open: Is it a problem if a teenager, able to set their own schedule, chooses to sleep as late as 2 pm on a regular basis?

Note that it’s not just homeschoolers. Around here, high school juniors and seniors can be dual-enrolled in college courses that might not start until late morning or afternoon; and of course there are some young people who are in vocational programs, or not in school for whatever reason and working jobs for now. Is it a problem?

I think I’m a little privileged, as a natural morning person. The class of American morning people seem to have been able to take a position of power in which they have set expectations for early starts to all kinds of businesses, including many that really don’t have to have early starts. So I think there’s a prejudice against sleeping late and going to bed late, a prejudice that implies moral laxity or sinful sloth, when it’s really just a matter of timing.

Some people have trouble getting up in the morning. I’m not much good by dinnertime and am almost incapable of staying up late. It’s not that hard for me to imagine an alternate world where school starts at 3 pm, where bosses expected all employees to do productive work late into the night and didn’t let you start until after lunch. This would be a world that would fail me and call me lazy. So I’m sympathetic, and I try not to assume that sleeping past an arbitrary clock time = dangerous malingering.

And nobody denies that sleep deprivation is bad for your health.

On the other hand…. we live in a scheduled time, and one day the sleepy teenager may be a sleepy adult who is required to be at a desk, or on a line, or at a post, by 8 in the morning. In the winter. Is it better to train them to be able to ignore their body’s needs, so they can meet their economic needs? Will the teenager who is allowed to sleep regularly from 3 in the morning to noon, develop a sense of entitlement? (The same entitlement, because aligned with the world, that I feel to keep my schedule of sleeping 11-to-6?)

Is it a good idea to practice the flexibility needed to keep a variable schedule (“OK, on Tuesday and Friday mornings you can sleep as late as you want, but Saturday there’s a 9:30 class and on Wednesday I need you to be up in the morning because I’ve got something to do in the afternoon”)? Or is it better to be consistent, getting up at the same time every day aligned with the earliest regular appointment, preferring regularity to getting, on average, enough?

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The whole point I am trying to make here is that I think it’s obvious that this is an open question. The answer here is “It Depends.” Different families, with different schedules and different needs, are going to approach the question in different ways and come to different conclusions. They may change their policies from one teen to the next, as well.

It’s also obvious (to me) that a large number of people will have strong opinions that only one answer is correct. I say those people are wrong.

Third obvious thing: Even the parents who make the decision that is the best choice at the time, with all the available information, and carefully and selflessly choosing for the good of their individual children… well, some of them are going to find out later that maybe a different choice would have led to a better outcome. It turns out that they were missing information that would have helped them make a choice with a better outcome.

(Missing information, because they can’t see into the future. But I digress.)

Like, maybe they pick the get-up-early-every-day option, because they truly are convinced that sleep schedules can be shifted. Maybe with the help of dark shades on the windows, special sunrise alarm clocks, melatonin pills, and light-therapy devices like the one I just bought. They expect that the child is going to need to learn to get up by 8 AM eventually, so they do their very best to enforce it. And then maybe their child turns out to have some kind of sleep disorder that they couldn’t predict, one that’s very resistant to all the light therapy, and maybe losing sleep turns out to have awful consequences later, like exacerbating a tendency toward depression or anxiety. Maybe in the end, after years of bad grades and employment struggles, the now-grown-offspring finds their niche working in an industry with late nights and late starts, or works remotely for people in a different time zone. Maybe it becomes obvious in retrospect that, if everyone had only respected the teen’s needs early on, they would have thrived under those expectations all along.

But at the time, it didn’t make sense.

Or, well, you can write the alternative. I’m living it now. I’m letting the kids take naps if they say they’re tired, and rarely wake them up before ten-thirty, and occasionally sleep as long as they want even if that’s through lunch. It seems best to me, because I think sleep is important for health, near the bottom of the hierarchy of needs. And I do wonder if someday they’re going to come back to us and say, “Mom, Dad, I really wish you had forced me to get up in the morning and drink some coffee or Mountain Dew or something and start staring at my books and papers by 8:30, like all the other kids, because now I have to get to work on time and I still haven’t learned to accept it and sometimes I sleep through my alarm and people get angry at me.”

(You can write the alternative, because I just tried to write that one, and I’m fully aware I can’t do it in a convincingly parallel fashion.)

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What’s my point here? SO MUCH of parenting is like this. SO MUCH is doing the best we can, with the information we have at the time. And SO MUCH of the answer to the question “is this good? are we doing things that are good for our kid?” is not going to become clear until YEARS after it’s too late to change our trajectories. Should we train this teen to work WITH their body or DESPITE their body? We… don’t… know! It could go either way!

From “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” of course.

We might choose poorly, and not know it till later!

I’m talking about sleep. That’s important, but… there are even more serious parts of parenting. Homeschool, private school, or public school? What sort of food should we make freely available, and what sort should we restrict, and how much? How should we help a young person who, we discover, is engaging in risky and perhaps illegal or addictive behavior: leap into assertive action and require immediate treatment and behavioral change before it’s too late, or move carefully and prioritize a message of acceptance and unconditional love? Should we give our children lots of freedom and plenty of responsibility for their own safety, or should we take steps to protect them from foreseeable hazards; and which hazards, and for how long?

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If serious outcomes do befall our young people, experience (see: media) suggests that someone, somewhere, will confidently say it’s all our fault***, as if we had that crystal ball. When easily it could have gone wrong the other way, and then there would be just as many someones, somewhere, who would confidently say that that would be all our fault.

Much better not to listen to those someones.

You know what’s even better than that? Not to make decisions coming from a place of fear of those someones. I confess that I have a hard time with that one.

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I picked that .gif up there, “He chose… poorly” for a reason. In the movie referenced, the villain had a bad outcome because he chose poorly. It wasn’t the other way around, the way the someones often reason: the bad outcome didn’t make his choice poor.

And what did “choosing poorly” mean, in the Spielbergian spirit?

Not the choosing from a place of fear; not the choosing from a place of reduced choices; not choosing from a place of inevitability of bad outcomes; not choosing from a place of ignorance, even.

No, what was wrong here was that the villain chose from a place of extremely misplaced priorities. The villain chose from a position of moral poverty.

That—unlike the other ones—is the kind of poverty that we, we parents, are bound to avoid, and all of us competent to avoid if we wish.

FOOTNOTES

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*I had to seek the help, once more, of Doctor Google (D. F. A.?) to get this character name correct; my first guess was “Data”

**I’m no fool. There, she also has the opportunity to play computer games we don’t have at home and read books for fun, and also to sit in comfy deep armchairs. I will judge this tree based on its fruits. But I’m not going to say NO, either.

***Let’s be real. It’ll be the mother‘s fault.

AN UPDATE in 2025

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The teenager who was sleeping till 2 pm? Not quite three years later was diagnosed with a sleep disorder. Sometimes you have to dig even deeper than you thought.

Jan 22, 2020

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5 comments on Sleep timing and other potentially poor choices. (With an important 2025 update at the end)
Liminal spaces.
Once, when I was in elementary school, I was sent to the counselor's office. Her door was shut when I arrived, a minute or two early, and no one was watching me, so I wandered out into the peaceful wideness of the hallway, to look at the sixth-graders' art on the walls. A tall male teacher passed, looked at me twice: "Where are you supposed to be?"

"Nowhere at the moment," I said truthfully, and was shortly dragged (well, that's how I remember it anyway) back to my classroom where I had to stand there while he told my classroom teacher that I'd talked back. I don't remember if I got to see the counselor, but I won't soon forget the sense of being yanked out of a quiet, empty, long hallway and back to the noisy, bright classroom, along with my face, hot, the center of attention.

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Last summer I saw a tweet that spoke to me:

"I love airports as liminal spaces. I'd say more but I've been awake since 4 and I'm beginning to shut down." — @diannaeanderson

It spoke to me because I'd literally just been in an airport, all by myself, a handful of days before. My 13yo daughter had been flying back from Colorado unaccompanied, and it fell to me to pick her up. The other children were watched by the oldest, there was no school to do and no place to go, and what did I do but show up a good hour earlier than I needed to? For no other reason than that… I also love airports?

Obviously I had plausible deniability. Had I said to myself, "I must be sure to get there early, for the security lines might be long, and it's vital I arrive at the gate before her flight lands," well, nothing odd about that, right? But truly, I wanted to get there early for the sheer pleasure of strolling through the airport, unrushed, sipping from a paper cup of steaming coffee, and walking from the end of one concourse to the end of another and back, a brisk indoor walk. And I did enjoy it, wandering in and out of the shops and other spaces, sniffing the trial samples of lotions for sale, perusing the covers of paperbacks; finally arriving at my daughter's gate a good forty-five minutes after coming in. Watching all the people rushing here and there, families picnicking on the floor among their suitcases, be-suited travelers looking expectantly up at the arrivals screens with their phones plastered on their ears. Normally if I'm in the airport, I'm among the rushed ones. Not this day: I was entirely separate and apart from all the travelers, at least until my daughter came off the plane and I signed for her, like a parcel.

This was not even the first time. I have also been known to enjoy long layovers and, on a weekend trip meeting a driving friend in Chicago, to positively jump at the chance to be dropped off at the airport several hours before my flight home was to leave.

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Until I saw Ms. Anderson's tweet a few mornings later, I had never been able to articulate exactly what it is I love about airports-not-in-a-hurry. But I felt an instant "click" with the identification of airport-as-liminal-space. That's exactly the quality I love about it, its between-ness. Neither a destination nor a point of origin; not a place to live, but a place to be suspended from normal, everyday life; a place through which you carry a few things you need, to pass you through a time and space of limited access to your belongings and resources. Most of the people around–with the notable exception of the people who labor there–are coming from somewhere and going somewhere else, crisscrossing in the space, mysteries to each other. And it's a place where you can buy food, and coffee, and a drink, and something to read, or something to wear, or toys or puzzles. It's a place where you can sit, sit for a very long time; or walk, walk for a very long time; and no one will bother you.

The reason to be there is to move on, but not yet; and for that reason, everyone who is in an airport (at least, everyone past the security checkpoint)… is presumed to belong.

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Another liminal space is the public area of a hospital. I found myself sitting in just such a space on Wednesday morning, after my diagnostic ultrasound, which came after the diagnostic mammogram, which came after I got the phone call about my screening mammogram three days prior.

After the radiologist herself came in to finish up the ultrasound and pronounced the dense spot benign, pronounced me free to go and to return to the usual annual screening schedule. I was free to go and yet I didn't quite want to leave. The atrium, where the different wings of the hospital come together, is several stories tall and at that moment was full of music: there is a piano on the second floor, by the railing, and someone was playing the piano up there.

I walked out of the wing where they keep the Breast Health Center, briefly considered stopping by the cafeteria for something to eat (hospital cafeterias are liminal spaces), and instead passed the elevators, heading for the curve I could glimpse of a handrail to stairs going up.

I'd taken the elevators as I came in. Each time I stepped out of the elevator and looked about me for a directory, immediately a person walking briskly past stopped and asked: "Can I help you find somewhere?" I was grateful at that moment to be told where to go: from the parking garage elevator to the central elevators (passing the silent and lonely second-floor piano on the way) and from the central elevators to the correct hallway around the corner.

That was then, and I wanted the stairs; but before I got to the stairs I passed a row of inviting upholstered benches and chairs, and I chose one and sat on it and looked about me, listening to the melody rolling down out of the atrium, brought forth by the hands of a passerby. I could see just the top of his head, his soft cap, over the railing above, moving gently along with the notes. A passerby, someone like me, perhaps, except that he knew how to play the piano and so he'd chosen to take his momentary seat up there.

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It was while I was sitting there between the wall and the stairs that I remembered the liminal space. That's where I was now, in the liminal space between the (extraordinarily common) experience of waiting for that second mammogram after the first (extraordinarily common–something like ten or eleven percent) abnormal one; and going back home and resuming my normal life, the one where I wake up and I don't have any reason to be concerned that my immediate plans are all about to be upended. I had already passed through the difficult bit, the part where it isn't clear yet (even though it's likely) that I can return. I liked the liminal space, I was relieved, there was music, there was a comfortable chair, I needed to go home but no one was expecting me quite yet, and so I sat for a moment and just listened.

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I might have thought of the liminal space when I was ushered into the changing room. The changing room looked like a slightly cushy locker room, such as you might find at the YMCA in the tonier neighborhoods: not metal lockers but easily-cleaned cabinetry, doors with keys and hooks behind; and quilted robes that snap up the front instead of hospital gowns with ties. A separate room with dim lights and comfortable chairs for waiting, and one other woman, staring at the wall and fidgeting with her hands.

I might have thought of it, because locker rooms are another kind of liminal space; a reason I like swimming for exercise isn't despite the extra time it takes in the changing room, the showers before and after, the extra work with hair and clothes, but because of the extra time, the time between; time for stepping out of the day and into the water, out of the water and through the steam and terrycloth and hot blowing air, and so back to the day again.

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But I didn't think of it then, and instead (after the second, more detailed mammogram, after the tech came in and said, "Well, they would like to go ahead and do the ultrasound, too") I thought about the Gulag Archipelago. I'm going to apologize right now for the ridiculous comparison, there's just one little aspect that I remembered. I was sitting in a consultation room, alone with several comfortable chairs and boxes of tissues and books displayed on the shelves, books with little pink ribbon designs on them, with titles about being inspired and courageous and communicative, and I was thinking how very much I did not want to be living in the world where I might seek assistance from the pink-ribbon books. I kind of glared at the closed door I'd just come through, and thought about how I'd just walked through that door and sat down to wait, warm in my quilted robe, and how now I was finding myself in one of the anterooms of the secret world of the sick.

And that made me think of the Gulag Archipelago, which I haven't read. Just some of it. But I was really, really struck by a description from early on in the book, a sort of introductory description; the sort of thing that made me put the book down to think hard about it (and then I guess I didn't pick it up again):
We have been happily borne — or perhaps have unhappily dragged our weary way — down the long and crooked streets of our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood, rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given a thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to penetrate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous number of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but nonetheless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.
Reading that, I was struck in the imagination: the G. A. as a disconnected, other world, another dimension almost, where the disappeared lived; and the many, many doors, just through which one could be thrust immediately from the real world to the parallel world of the G. A., doors through which people disappeared into the other world, doors everywhere and anywhere.

It's not the Gulag Archipelago, but I suddenly thought of the door to my consultation room as being a similar door. Doors everywhere, some in hospitals, some in clinics, some the doors to ordinary cars and buildings, I suppose; and on the other side, maybe, a different world; the archipelago of the sick. I sat in the consultation room, knowing I'd soon be ushered out of it and into another room for the ultrasound, and I hoped that the ultrasound room door would be one of the doors leading back out.

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It was, you know; it was a door back out, out to my regular life. I sat in the atrium and realized: the thing that's peculiarly frightening about Solzhenitsyn's gates–I mean, besides the fact that they were real, and to be disappeared through them meant real, awful horrors–I mean the thing that chilled me and has come back to me over and over about them–is that they are gates without liminal zones.

There's something peculiarly horrible about the other world, the otherworldly, the place where the rules don't follow– being so close, just on the other side of a door, with no sense of passing through; just there one moment, and somewhere else the next. The theme appears again and again in our deliberately thrilling cinema: I was terrified by Poltergeist on HBO as a child (that cloacal closet door); a more childlike, similar thrill recurs again and again in Harry Potter, on Platform 9-and-three-quarters and in Diagon Alley; just a couple of years ago, Stranger Things hinted at the same terror with the Upside Down.

Even on my way out of skirting the edges of wondering–just a couple of days, days in which I could and did reassure myself that most likely everything would be fine and in fact there are a very large number of cases that get called back and turn out to be nothing significant at all–even on my way out, even with the children waiting at home and with many things left I was very glad to be able to return to doing today–I preferred to sit for a moment in the hospital hallway, with nowhere I needed to be at the moment.

I like to be the one who decides that I am ready to come out of the in-between space, and move on.
Jan 17, 2020

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An expected relief.

The 19yo is home from college for another few days; he has a plane ticket to another city, where he will meet a friend, see the sights, and then drive back to school.

Most of his break between semesters was filled up with our usual long car trip back to Ohio to stay with Mark's parents. I imagine there's more than a little culture shock involved when you go straight from your five-guys apartment with your own bedroom, to folding your long legs into the minivan with six other people for an eight-hour trip. I think we had a good Christmas, though, all together; the little boys are thrilled to have him home, and the teenagers are pleased to have another companion. Sunday he suggested we all go skiing at the local hill, and he spent most of the time partnered with the 9yo, practicing whirlybirds on the easy slopes.

+ + +

I was 39 in my last pregnancy, the one with the boy who is now 6, and remember well the sense of dread that pops up now and again as the unknown day of labor approaches. It's not that it was a particularly difficult pregnancy; none of mine were all that bad, none particularly scary, all low-risk. It's that you just don't know how it's going to go. No one ever does! And I am the sort of person who really, really does not like being in the situation where I don't know how things are going to turn out.

(Yes, yes. We are all, always, in that situation, all the time. We do not know how anything will turn out, and our world can change in an instant. But the great majority of the time it is possible to pretend otherwise. Pregnancy, not so much.)

That last pregnancy had a particularly harsh final week, during which I struggled almost minute by minute with many immediate fears. In the end it did all turn out fine. I had a quick and peaceful birth of a healthy and strong baby, and suffered no adverse complications to myself either.

For a long, long time afterward, though, I would startle myself—a rush of warm relief would come out of nowhere.  It's over—I got through it—no bad thing that I feared happened—it all turned out okay—the waiting and worrying, about THAT anyway, is over.

Kelly commented on one of my posts after the 9yo was born, "That moment when the afterbirth is out and I hobble to the bed and lay down. That feeling of being not pregnant. As not pregnant as you can ever get. It's the greatest feeling in the world." It's almost exactly that same feeling, the one that would come to me for months afterward, in a rush of surprise: The hard thing is over, and it turned out okay (and I don't have to go through it again).

+ + +

Where am I going with this? Some time ago I stumbled across a crumpled sheet of notebook paper, something that the 19yo had clearly discarded while he was home: an errant draft of a homework assignment for one of his college classes. It was a sheet of mathematical calculations; I was in a hurry at the moment, so I didn't pause to examine it to decide if it was a sheet from a calculus class, or statistics, or financial mathematics. I dropped it in the recycling bin and went on.

Something about seeing the rows and rows of double and triple integrals in my 19yo's familiar handwriting tickled the back of my mind, though, and gave me little bursts of that same sort of relief all day.

Even if everything is going very well, there's a lot of how is this going to turn out rumbling around under the surface of raising children, all the time! And of course, since we went ahead and decided to manage all their schooling ourselves, there's some extra how is this going to turn out related to that as well.

Look, we're all going to screw up along the way. I did. I stumbled through a lot of this. Mark will be the first to tell you that he stumbled too. We didn't know how it would turn out. And of course it's not done "turning out" — there are many more steps along the road, even for this young man, who's doing his own thing now and is mainly responsible for himself, and is getting to take math classes that I didn't get to take.

It's still not done turning out. I can't see inside the 19yo's head, nor would I want to. I know that when I was that age I still had many things going on unformed inside my heart and mind, many things that needed to be dealt with, troubles that would surface later, so much left to learn.

But… some of the hard thing, the part that was my job, is over for me. I have handed it on to someone competent to take over from me. And it turned out… better than okay: whole, and complicated, and deeper than I can see and know even if I were to read every book on the shelf.

I expected it would probably turn out okay, but knowing that it did is enormously better than that.

Jan 7, 2020

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Purposeful procrastination.
Normally I score pretty high on executive function, but I have one counterproductive (or maybe it's contraproductive?) quirk: the more ideas I have for new, fun, fulfilling projects I could embark on , the less likely I am to do any of them. And the more attractive it feels just to move forward on ordinary daily things, like making dinner or doing another round of school planning.

Yes, that's right: the more exciting, challenging, and fun things I could be doing, the less likely I am to get around to any of them. I become too paralyzed by choices even to procrastinate appropriately.

+ + +

I think this year I am going to try to procrastinate something every day. I'm doing it right now: I have a history exam to write, and also the whole week's upcoming school to plan, and instead I am forcing myself to use one of my Pomodoros (let me google that for you) on this blog post. Because, naturally, one of the fun and exciting and challenging projects is returning to blogging.

More challenging than exciting right now, I think, but it's there.

+ + +

What are all the projects that float around my head making demands on me, that I keep not getting around to because I feel bad about the ones left unchosen?

Well, there are all the languages I am sort-of-trying to learn: Swedish and Greek to support two of my children who are learning them; Latin for the students I'm actually facilitating; the Somali I started to learn and haven't touched for a few months but that I see on signage all around me reminding me that it's just a flashcard pack away; Italian and Spanish because maybe I will get to use one or both on an upcoming trip; and always, always, the French that I want to keep nudging asymptotically closer to fluency and correctness. Not to mention the ones I've never started learning but am secretly intrigued by (I'm looking at you, Basque). I'm not sure what will happen next, but I made myself a little language tracker for the time being, one block to be filled in each day I spend time working on improving the language:

Then there are all the books I want to read. I still have a giant pile of unread books on my nightstand, sorted into fiction and nonfiction. Last year I swore I'd read (or give away) the books I already had before buying any more (physical) books, and unfortunately this did nothing more than to instill in me a sense of obligation that I resisted, so that last year I wound up completing FEWER books than probably in any other year of my life since I was two years old. I now think that perhaps I need something akin to the Dave Ramsey Debt Snowball, but for catching up on my unread books. It would go something like this:
1. stack my unread fiction books from shortest to longest regardless of interest rate sense of importance, "goodness," or how long I've had it on the shelf
2. pay minimum attention to all the books except the smallest
3. put all my available reading time towards the smallest book until I finish it OR give it away
4. repeat until each book is read OR given away
I've also got a few pending projects regarding my mental health and relationships—nothing urgent, just me working through some philosophies and priorities, and doing the necessary self-examination to make good decisions. Mostly I do this by carrying around half-finished legal pads, hauling one out when I feel like working on it and have a few minutes. I probably don't have to do anything more to keep these in mind. The paper pads are enough.

I have other creative projects in mind that I don't want to get into here on the blog today, but suffice it to say that they are vague enough that I haven't invested deeply in them. I think that these will rise to the top naturally as they become more important to me—if they become more important to me. So I am going to try not to let them bother me anymore. I think I will ritually inscribe them on a page in my bullet-journal-type-thing as "Something that I have decided not to act upon yet"—perhaps knowing that they are there, whenever I am ready to think about them some more, will free me from the tethers they have kept on my attention.

+ + +

But for all, any of this, to work—I literally have to procrastinate more. It will not happen unless I decide, day in and day out, to spend twenty minutes on something fun instead of twenty minutes on a have to. And, crucially, I have to pick one at a time, and not let any feelings of guilt about not picking the others derail me.

Nor the sense of having "more important" things to do.

Because I am never, ever, ever going to run out of important things I should be doing. I will leave some undone. I won't do everything I should do.

And, having established the kind of woman I think I am, there's nothing left but to haggle over the cost.
Jan 4, 2020

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All those weight loss posts: Bathwater or baby? (Updated Oct. 2025)

Anyone who has been reading this blog for more than a few years knows that starting in 2008, I wrote a long series chronicling a number of lifestyle changes: learning to run and swim, ending some destructive food behaviors, and dealing with the mental and physical fallout of the significant weight loss that followed.

And anyone who has been reading this blog for the past few years knows that I have not been adding to the series very much recently. Let’s talk a little bit about why.

+ + +

I have a bit of a compulsive personality, and it’s hard for me to live in the wide, slippery gray area between two extremes: habitual, mindless grazing, self-soothing with food; and anxious, obsessive dieting, self-soothing with control. All that writing helped me detach from the emotional content, put it into something that was more cerebral and philosophical, and less fear- and shame-based. As a Catholic I tried to grapple with the connotations of loaded words like “gluttony,” paring away dehumanizing associations and finding useful definitions that honored the body and its theology. And I tried to be honest about how my mental health fared (hint: not always well) as I went along.

All the writing helped me. It did. But as the years went on I have begun to feel less confident about its being good for readers in general.

Oh, taken all together, I know it is a good thing. It is my true story, for one thing, as much as I felt comfortable sharing. And as a whole, I think it is balanced. I try out ideas, some of them don’t stick, others do. My general approach was to perform experiments on myself, keep good records, and report back. I still think this is a good approach to all kinds of life changes. What worries me is the taking out of context: that one post all by itself might encourage extreme behavior, or fat-shaming, or trigger someone who has struggled with serious eating disorders. I can’t say with confidence (unless I embark on a long project of combing through all the posts, considering them as individual posts, and annotating them) that I haven’t written something problematic.

And I have thought to myself: Maybe I shouldn’t create any new blog posts about my weight maintenance until I have done that comb-through, and come up with some principles of harm reduction, and perhaps put in content warnings or updates to how my thinking has changed. This thought has given me pause lately, whenever I have thought about writing anything related to food.

+ + +

A second obstacle, probably related to the first, has been the nature of the work I have been doing on myself in the past few years. To put it bluntly, I have been trying to get off the diet train completely, in hopes I might ditch the constant, low-level anxiety and shame that I still carry around. I still have this idea that if I get rid of the anxiety and shame, I will gain weight again (so far, evidence bears this out), and so I am in a somewhat ridiculously fraught state of mind about it, in which I am not entirely convinced that the anxiety and shame is wholly unhelpful. So it’s been very difficult to write honestly about, because I can’t quite commit to being ready to let go of all that anxiety, and I am not yet sure that I can’t harness it somehow instead, and channel it into a healthier kind of motivation. It seems sort of irresponsible to be honest about all this, lest anyone take it as an endorsement of, well, anxiety.

At the same time, I have clearly (well, to myself) made some progress on the shame and self-hatred front. And who knows, it could maybe be good to write more openly about dealing with a very real decision to find the place I want to live, the unsteady compromise where I am choosing behaviors I can feel confident are good for me, and that don’t activate a cycle of destructive thought patterns.

It seems that the destructive thought patterns have been doing much of the maintenance lifting for me, so I have that to work through. On the other hand, there are some other things that have changed over the same time period; for example, I’m now no longer breastfeeding, a situation that is entirely new to me as a post-lifestyle-changed person. Surely I’m also adapting to that as well, and other changes that come with the journey through middle age.

+ + +

So, what brings on today’s post? Well, just before the holiday season really started to take off I received an incredibly kind email. I’ll not quote it directly here because I haven’t the author’s permission, but she described a yearlong journey of significant transformation informed by much of my writing—not just an improvement in health and fitness, she said, but also in self-image. It made me feel a little bit better about what I’ve wrought, at least about the work as a whole.

I still suspect that I could improve some of the language in individual posts, and reduce the chances that the material could encourage fat-shaming and general body negativity. I’d like to do that work now, sooner rather than later. Maybe I won’t toss the baby out with the bathwater after all.

UPDATE (October 2025): After having moved the blog from Typepad to WordPress, I began in earnest to do the work I mentioned above. The first step has been to go through posts having certain keywords and add a disclaimer to them. For example, most posts that mention “gluttony” are getting a disclaimer that looks something like this:

[Editing note. Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.

I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.

I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them. Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]

It’s the best I can do quickly to start setting things right. I have something like 3,000 posts altogether to go through. I don’t stand by everything I ever wrote in the last 20 years (who does?) and of course I wish I could go back and fix all the mistakes I ever made, put things in context, say things like “I’ve changed my mind since then.” But a project like that takes time. Deleting or hiding posts would be quicker, but it seems more honest to me to leave things up, and add caveats where necessary. So. Do let me know if you notice anything that needs attention.

Jan 3, 2020

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Happy new year, happy new day.

We rolled into town at nearly midnight on the first of January; Mark got up and went to work in time for a nine o'clock meeting; and here I am, back again, in my bathrobe, at my computer.

Piles of suitcases and boxes, bottles of wine, and new Christmas acquisitions are visible just over my shoulder. The Advent wreath is on the shelf above the monitor, now a Christmas wreath: I swapped the purple and pink candles for honey-colored beeswax, and the purple and pink ribbons for red, on the last day before we left town. I just brought down a few empty laundry baskets. The smaller children, the ones who slept in the car, are wandering about; I made them nachos for breakfast. The bigger ones are sleeping in, and someone will fetch milk from the store as soon as they are awake, so maybe there can be cereal for lunch.

+ + +

The exciting new things that we received as Christmas presents now must be wedged in somewhere in between the other things in our house. I'll hand each of the younger children a garbage bag later, and challenge them to go into their rooms and open up the bins and find broken toys to throw away, older toys to hand down, perhaps some that have lost their shine to be squirreled away in the storage room and brought out later when (if) they are remembered. Time to make room for some of this new stuff. There is a new expansion set for a bulky building toy, so I'll dig in the basement for a larger bin to keep it in. And then there's my own things: I'll have to do the same myself: pull out little-used items in the kitchen, find a place to store new ones. There are many new items for the pantry that must find places. I will have to defrag the bookshelves again.

And there are all the shiny new plans for the new year that must somehow find a home in our everyday lives.

+ + +

Neither Mark nor I are very big on New Year's resolutions exactly; but we often find ourselves, anytime we are on vacation or otherwise removed from our routines, saying "We really should start doing such and such" or "When I get home, I'm going to set up an appointment for this, that, and the other thing" or "I've left this thing for far too long, it's time to do it for real." It's not so much that the New Year is the time to turn over a new leaf, it's just that we are nearly always away from home at the holidays, at the end of all things and the start of the next, and our everyday lives have retreated away into our imaginations, an idealized form of themselves; it's so easy to rearrange one's priorities in one's mind, like a puzzle which fits together effortlessly any way you wish, the picture's outlines soft and indistinct and agreeable in every shape.

I am very tempted to make lists today. Probably I will, at some point. But I have resisted up till now, and I'll keep resisting a little longer. I am starting today by doing, and will make the lists later, working hard to trust that the urgent and important tasks, the urgent and important Such and Such, will rise naturally to the top.

I've already started.

Did you notice?

Jan 2, 2020

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Love your neighbor wrong.

Love your neighbor as yourself — one of the two great commandments — has sometimes been taken to imply "You cannot love your neighbor unless you first love yourself." Let's take a look at that idea and see where it goes.

Suppose we start by rejecting a wholly superficial reading of that statement, one that would have you grabbing the goods to yourself and making sure you are satisfied and comfortable before turning to help others at all.

Suppose we also set aside, as territory already well explored, the "airplane oxygen mask" analogy. You know it: it argues that you are justified in meeting your own basic needs before turning your attention to others, on the unselfish grounds that lack of those needs can make you useless to serve. (Territory well explored or not, I wonder if this gives us a useful definition of which needs are "basic.")

+ + +

Here's the thing: it's a commandment and, as far as I can tell, plainly enough stated that most translations come out essentially the same.  Love your neighbor as [you love] yourself.

C. S. Lewis (in Mere Christianity) pointed out succinctly the first step:

[w]e might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbor as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself?

and, remembering that "neighbor" includes "enemies," went on to decide that "loving yourself" doesn't mean thinking yourself a good person, and it doesn't mean appreciating what you have done. In another comment (from a Q & A session) Lewis implied that we love ourselves by always wanting what's good for ourselves, and said: "Love is… a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."

He's not wrong. I think he probably implies (by saying "as far as it can be obtained") that loving means, also, trying to act in a way that works for and not against that good. This is a great way to (theoretically) understand how to use "love your neighbor as yourself" to understand the answer to the question "how shall I love my neighbor?"

What we're up against is:  And what about people who don't love themselves, or know how to love themselves? Where do they start?

+ + +

Remaining in the domain of smug theory, my first impulse is to point out that "love your neighbor as yourself" is the second great commandment, and so we should expect any incompleteness or difficulties in it to be resolved by the first one. Which is, you might remember, to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. Presumably if we manage to obey the first great commandment, we'll grok precisely how the second one makes sense. And presumably (says the smug theorist), this really implies something more like "perhaps what Jesus said means you can't love your neighbor before you love yourself; but if so, it's just as likely that you can't love yourself before you love God. So get your priorities in order. If love of self must precede love of neighbor, surely love of God precedes love of self."

I mean, it sounds right (says I, the smug theorist).

+ + +

But does one precede another in a time series? I think not. It's tempting to say "Well, once I've mastered loving God, I'll be able to master loving myself correctly, and then I can turn to loving my neighbor." Except that we know that "loving God" is not a master-able skill in this world. You're not going to figure it all out. What you can do–what I think we're commanded to–is the hard work of trying to get better and better at it your whole life long. So do that!

And… knowing that you'll never have "mastered" loving God… you know that you cannot wait until mastery to start trying to love yourself correctly, with clear eyes.

Lewis gave a prescriptive definition of love. If you love yourself correctly, you have a steady wish for your own ultimate good (and, I expect, it means also you act as far as you can to secure it). But of course I can do this incorrectly. Perhaps I don't really understand what my ultimate good is. Perhaps I don't understand what actions will actually secure my good. Perhaps I think I am helping myself when I actually am hurting myself.

(And many people might say: perhaps I don't actually love myself at all; I deserve no ultimate good; when I see myself, I see a hated enemy; and "love your neighbor as yourself" is nonsense, or a prescription for lashing out.)

What about that? If I love myself wrong, should I even try to love my neighbor? I'm bound to make mistakes. That's maybe not too big a deal when we're talking about wishing someone's good, but sooner or later I will have to do something for them. Will I screw up?

Often I try to give myself something that I think is good for me and it turns out not to be good for me (in the long run) at all. I train myself or punish myself with suffering, and to my surprise it doesn't always make me stronger or better, but sometimes crushes and weakens me. I indulge myself or nurture myself with comforts, and it doesn't always nourish me or heal me, but sometimes increases my demands and makes me soft. I miss the mark all the time. If I love my neighbor as myself, when I haven't figured out how to love myself correctly, won't I make those same mistakes?

+ + +

Presumably, yes.

The smug theorist is forced to conclude that if one cannot love God correctly, one cannot love oneself correctly, and therefore cannot love others correctly. Since we never can love God perfectly, we'll never do the other two things correctly.

But we can try to get better and better at it.

And that means… practice.

The first commandment is: Love God with everything you have. I understand that as telling me to do the hard work, every day, of getting better and better at loving God—wanting what God wants. Loving truth. Loving justice. Loving mercy. Loving creation. Loving everything God created—including myself.

The second commandment is: Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Present tense: right now. However I love myself—however imperfectly—however I try to give myself what is really good for me, whether it be something that brings pleasure or suffering—that's the model I'm to look to, in the moment.

(Caveat: It's an analogy, right? Our ultimate good is always the same end, but the means by which it may be secured may differ. This is a tricky bit, and comes down to seeing my neighbor as a unique human being of equal worth to myself.)

I think we're basically being commanded to make stupid mistakes if necessary, but to continually try to be less stupid.

If I act, I am going to love my neighbor wrong. I'm being told to do it anyway, with the understanding I have about what's true about me, and what's good for me. And understanding (from knowing and loving God) that part of what's true about me is my uniqueness, meaning that what's good for me (here and now)—the means that help me secure my end— is not actually identical with what's good for my neighbor. So, while modeling my love of my neighbor on my wanting-what's-ultimately-good-for-myself, I have to think outside the what's-good-for-me box a bit. Something I'll never be able to do perfectly, even if I were able to want perfectly what's ultimately good for myself. Which I'm not.

But what it sounds like I'm being told is to do it anyway, today, as blundery as I might be. And to do the work every day to understand my errors and correct them, within and without.

Sep 24, 2019

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Hot takes and small talk.

I read too much news, and not enough books. Is it just that? Is that the source of the writer's block?

+ + +

I don't know if there are any well-established "reasons" why it's so terribly difficult to sit down and dash off blog posts these days.

It seems to be multifactorial, but not — not — because of a lack of time. I am pretty sure I get as much time sitting down, not attending to anything in particular, as I ever have. Maybe I should do another time study just to be sure. But what it feels like to me is that I passed some threshold where, when I get a chance to sit down, all I want to do is take something in.

I won't say that it's entirely passive. I have thoughts. I have reactions. But… I don't desire to share them, at least not enough to do the work.

+ + +

What's going on here? It could be a good sign, or it could be a bad one.

Is it humility? Have I decided that the world doesn't need my fresh takes on the latest thing that has come over the transom? Well, it would be nice to think so, and (perhaps for that reason) I'll say it might be part of it.

This is true: The last few years of revelations in civic and organizational politics have demolished a number of my assumptions. Along with that, a very real awareness of how easy it is to be very wrong and (this is the tricky bit) nevertheless to think I am correct, or at least that I have a useful or interesting point of view that I ought to share. I've done a lot more listening and reading, withholding judgment. And the kinds of things I have been drawn to are less often the breathless takes and the analyses leading to a point, the kind of things that invite refutation and alignment. More often they are personal recountings.   This happened to me, and this is how it affected me. I have lost my taste for criticizing and analyzing these things. Or at least, for putting them out into the world.

So much of the hot takes out there are worthless pap. I am not employed to produce them honestly, so what do I gain from adding to the endless stream? Don't I have something more productive to do?

And the answer is nearly always yes.

I think this is true: I don't want to write things anymore, even by accident, that aren't centering people as persons. I used to think that all that was necessary was to step back and be perfectly reasonable, or at least as reasonable as possible, because right reason is never opposed to personalism.

That's not wrong! But:

(1) I'm not always right; and

(2) right reason may omit truth about persons, without ever making false statements; and

(3) this omission is a kind of error that makes false pictures.

I don't intend to be wrong. I don't intend to omit significant truths from my analysis. But I'm less interested in centering my intent. I'm more interested in the effects of my words. And I've become less tolerant of error, more perfectionist. To put it bluntly, I don't want to hurt people. (Not don't want to hurt people's feelings. Don't want to hurt people. There's a difference.)

+ + +

That's the scrap that might be a bit of humility, borne of realizing how easy it is to be wrong about things.

There's a scrap that's pride too: I have a strong aversion to being wrong these days.

One of the ways I figure things out is by writing them down, and often I've done this on the blog. It's led to some lively conversations over the years, with back-and-forth between me and some of my favorite commentators, a number of which have become real friends. I used to do this relatively freely and with an understanding that I might write something that turned out to be woefully boneheaded, but I was willing to do it because I wanted to put things out there to be tested for boneheadedness.

I mean, I can still figure things out by writing them privately, sending emails to myself or (still my favorite) clearing out space in a coffeeshop and putting pen to paper for hours in a journal, then later going back and assembling it into some sort of logical order. It still works pretty well. But it lacks quality control: it lacks the sounding board of putting it out there where smart people who disagree with me, and care enough to explain why, might find it.

Here is the easy, non-humility-based reason that I might say out loud in order to sound good:

Well, it's not fear of the smart and caring people that's made me unwilling to hit the 'publish' button. It's all those other people.

Do I want to go viral? Nope.

Would it be okay if I went viral and suffered because I put out thoughts that were really true and really needed defending? Ye-es….

But am I actually sure that what I write will in fact be true enough, beautiful enough, or useful enough that it would be worth it?

Actually… no.

There is, however, a strong possibility that I simply don't want to be wrong, and it no longer seems worth it (especially given that, truly, people jump on wrongness rather quickly these days) to throw out things that might be wrong on purpose, just so I could possibly make them better.

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One of the frustrations I have about leaving the academy in my very early stages, as much as I don't miss the stress and the politics, is that I am no longer in touch with serious work, critical work, slow work. Mark will remind me that academic science, being made by human beings, throws up a great deal of weeds and tangles, in the form of literally bad (not just disappointing) results and even more damaging, in the form of perverse incentives. These make the good fruit hard to come by.

But that's nothing compared to the selection of articles that appear in the newspaper or come across one's social media feed. I'm just completely tired of that being so often the way that information (or at least words) about research comes into my view. I used to kind of like digging into those various news articles, tracking down the references, and finding out if they were really bunk or if there is anything to them, but I've lost my taste for even that. It feels like a waste of time: that it's better not to look at all.

A better source for feeding my interest in news about what's going on in the research world has been to follow individual researchers on Twitter. It's a narrower feed; but it's a better-quality, curated one. And—interestingly enough—it rarely makes me want to pound out reactions. Instead, because I'm aware that I don't have special expertise and am following them because I am legitimately interested in what they are writing, I… listen and learn? And sometimes ask questions.

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There's a real downside to this discrimination, and I shouldn't have been surprised to find that it's plaguing me, because it's part of a very old theme in my life.

Issuing instant reactions to the latest passing Moment, as intellectually frustrating as it might be, now has social utility.

I have real friends (intelligent ones! fun ones! people whose takes I am interested in!) who have real conversations, online, sparked by news items diverted from the stream and shared in their own little tributaries. If I disentangle myself from the stream, I miss out on those conversations. The conversations are not always very deep, although they can be (it's a sampling frequency issue). If I decide that the nuggets are too few and far between to make it worth dipping into the rushing stream of takes, then (for good or bad) I miss out on the nuggets.

And (this is crucial) even if the nuggets are not worth the effort… I would also be saying that the relationships are not worth the effort.

(here's the part that all this yammering has brought me to, which I literally did not realize until this very moment as a result of putting out all the verbiage above)

Hot takes are the small talk of intellectuals on social media.

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I do not like regular small talk in real life.

I was embarrassingly old and educated before I came to an intellectual understanding of the purpose it serves and realized that I needed to make use of it as a tool.

It's where you start, for reasons of common humanity (maybe not ALL of humanity, but of a large enough majority that it's essentially everyone you run into in most organizations and societies).

Without it, you often cannot get at the deeper stuff, even if it seems like you should be able to.

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Do I need to come to a new understanding of the Hot Take?

Maybe. Maybe I do.

Sep 11, 2019

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Harvard and MIT, and more Italian food.

Thursday Mark suggested Cambridge, so we hopped on the T and headed to Harvard, aiming for the museum of natural history.

Let me just say: for not being enormously big, the Harvard natural history museum is fantastic. I could have spent a very long time there. (But, you know. Children. And also the parts that I wanted to see the most were not the ones the little ones wanted to see. So I made do.)

I have been to the London museum of natural history, and that one is pretty exciting in part because there are very famous specimens on display (Archaeopteryx! Darwin’s finches! Mary Anning’s collection! A dodo!) and this one has only a few such items and is much smaller. And I have seen a vast quantity of very cool paleontological specimens at the museum in Utah. But I never got the sense that having been to London and Utah had spoiled me for this one. It is a sparkling collection, both literally and figuratively. Just, well, perfectly curated.

We spent most of our time in here, for obvious reasons.

I wish that I could have returned with my two older kids, both of whom are focusing on biology this upcoming school year, and encouraged them to make a careful study of two particular exhibits. The glass models of botanical specimens, for my daughter who is about to study botany and also appreciates art. And the entire section devoted to the evolutionary tree (including more hominin fossils than I have ever seen in one place), for my son who’s about to spend a year on evolutionary biology. I just skimmed through it, but it’s a super exhibit.

Lots and lots of taxidermied animals, three big whale skeletons, and a stellar rock room. Honestly, this is at the top of my list for returning someday and spending the time I would like to spend.

I rewarded the little ones for their patience by buying them gift shop items: the Box of Polished Rocks for the 9yo, the Two Plastic Pteranodons for the 5yo.

On our way off campus we stopped at the Putnam Gallery, a tiny room which has some historical scientific instruments. This was kind of fun, but for this one I really was spoiled by London. When you’ve seen Joule’s own calorimeter and the clockworks that solved the longitude problem, what’s a few sextants?

On the other hand, the cyclotron console was kind of cool, if only because they preserved the little notes and comic strips taped up on the wall and the carryout menus tacked to the corkboard.

We had lunch at Legal Seafoods. I finally got my bowl of chowder, and a superior crab cake. There is lobster on the kids’ menu, but the younguns wanted macaroni and cheese and hot dogs.

And then we walked allllllll the way on Massachusetts Avenue to MIT, passing another Legal Seafoods on the way. We stopped at the small MIT museum, where there were only a few things to see, and then headed back with very tired children.

Mark and I went out later for another Italian dinner, including cannoli. Something I didn’t anticipate as much as I should have: how pleasurable it is to dine in a city that has a legitimate “little Italy.”

I went with cod puttanesca this time, trying to hit the perfect fusion of New England and Italian food. No pasta: cod on a bed of ethereal mashed potatoes, with the sauce deconstructed: thin tomato sauce, olives scattered about, anchovies draped over. Cod and potatoes go together like nothing else, and the light application of the strongly flavored elements of the sauce made it just about perfect.

Wine: Primitivo.

I generally think I am pretty good at picking wine to go with dinner, and this evening I applied a bit of critical thinking to the matter to decide if I am right about this.

I concluded: there’s this very nice feature of matching wine with dinner on your own. It requires three ingredients. If:

(1) you are disposed to think highly of your own skill; and

(2) you have at least a very basic level of competence, i.e., you have a general sense of what will go with red and white, sweet and dry; or you are capable of googling discreetly at the table; and

(3) the restaurant has already done most of the work by having a well curated wine list;

then you will harness the power of cognitive bias to enjoy your own wine pairings and feel good about yourself while you have a delicious dinner.

So, I basically can’t go wrong in the North End. QED.

Sep 7, 2019

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More Boston.

We have to pack and leave in a few hours, so: highlights.

Wednesday. Fancy macarons and pastries at a coffee shop on Newbury Street:

Boston Common and Public Garden:

That was a long walk, which we capped off by another longish one back to the North End for Italian food (dinner for lunch, as Mark put it). Another thing we have learned about sightseeing with small people is that it pays to have a large and somewhat lengthy lunch for a good break in the sightseeing day, and then the afternoon siesta.

We ordered a very pasta and meat-heavy lunch. I am not sure why we didn’t mix it up a little with some salad. Likely because everybody wanted something different when it came to the pasta and pizza. Gnocchi, rigatoni with sausage, arancini, sausage-and-red-onion pizza, meatballs. The arancini were really wonderful. I am at a loss to understand why they cannot be had on restaurant menus wherever there is both risotto and deep-frying.

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Later, the 9yo wanted someone to take him to the Bunker Hill monument which is not far from where we are staying, so I dragged myself out of my nap and we went up together. It was the hottest day of our week, and the place was not crowded.

It’s a bit of a hike on the hilly streets of Charlestown, and then when you get there you can climb 294 stairs to the top.

Just as at most of the museums, I could have spent a lot longer at this one than the child accompanying me had patience for. It is a tiny one, but has a nice big diorama with an audible narration that illuminates different parts of the battlefield and different groups of teeny soldiers as it recounts the tale. There are also loads of then-and-now maps. I am endlessly fascinated by trying to see, in the paper maps of my youth and the zoom-and-swipe roadmaps on my phone, the vestiges of the past: the Roman castra in a tiny gridded square of streets in an Italian town, the bridges across the Thames.

Our own city is not very old as a city and likes to demolish old buildings anyway; but I am told that some of the odd-angled roads date back to old, old footpaths between river and lakes, older than the arrival of the men the streets are named for. That is a history worth knowing more about.

Anyway: Boston has a longer history as a paved place than the Twin Cities, although the hills have been made low and much land made out of fill in the harbor, and it is fun to pick out recognizable features. The old maps show a forked road along the Charlestown Neck that used to connect this little peninsula to the mainland; there is still a big forked road following what looks like the same path, although the neck has thickened, and you can use it on the map to find landmarks. The very top of the real Bunker Hill, for instance (I can’t be the only one who, in elementary school, stored away factoids about the famous parts of the battle being on Breed’s Hill, right?). There is a church there, and a cemetery, and for that reason it didn’t get carved up like the rest of Charlestown. Little things like that.

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I went shopping and bought vegetables and made dinner in the apartment, a coconut red curry soup with spirally wheat noodles and tofu and a bit of shrimp and lots of crisp vegetables on top. So everyone got to rest, and eat food that was the exact opposite of the heavy Italian lunch. And I got to make the food myself, something that I need to do every few days, it seems, even on vacation.

Sep 7, 2019

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Two museum days (II).

A brief continuation from the last post…

Tuesday we headed down to the U. S. S. Constitution, where we had to show ID and go through a metal detector before boarding Old Ironsides. Melanie had promised that seeing the ship would be “a treat,” and it was.

Navy sailors in checked shirts answered the kids’ questions—how do you fire the guns? how far can they shoot? They answer in the first person: we load them like so, when we looked out through the gunports we could see the British sailors looking back at us, our sides are made of white oak with live oak planking sandwiched between.

More questions. What are the pilings for, a few meters out in the water? (The 5yo hoped the pilings were for target practice.)

It’s really a lovely ship to tour. Our family had toured the Cutty Sark in London and a big replica ship at the Genoa maritime museum, and this had a similar feel to it, with the added excitement of being a Real Ship Really Afloat And Sometimes They Take It Out For A Spin.

Docked nearby is the U. S. S. Cassin Young, a destroyer. “The metal ship,” the 5yo called it. Also a good ship to explore, and I think the smaller children were equally impressed.

We got a number of questions answered by a couple of men in USS Cassin Young caps who were painting (until one of the little boys started hopping from foot to foot and we had to leave to find the closest restroom).

Hobart mixer in the galley. Troy, OH!

After the restrooms we went to the museum, which was sizable and really very well designed for families. There was a daily-life-of-sailors exhibit with a mock mast that children could climb upon to “shorten the sail,” and a little wind-tunnel tank with a model boat whose square sails you could turn to show how the sails can be “taken aback” to change direction (but not tack). Two of our kids spent a good long time with an electronic design-your-wooden-warship game. I was pleased with an elegant little demonstration where you could raise up three metal ball bearings and then magnetically drop them onto samples of three different woods, including the Georgia live oak. The live oak is so hard, the ball bearing bounces back from it about three times as high as from the others. There are also blocks of wood you can heft, to feel its density.

Download 02AB829C-5BFB-40EA-8AC5-AC3CC04476A1

The exhibit underlines that the people, mostly enslaved, who harvested the live oak had a nasty, difficult job to do under terrible conditions.

Mark and I at least could have spent a lot longer at these two museums, but the younger children were getting hungry and hot. So it was down to the ferry, and across to lunch (tavern-type restaurant with sandwiches and mac-and-cheese) and then the New England Aquarium.

Schooling!

Okay, so the best aquarium we’ve ever seen is the one in Genoa. This one is much more compact but still pretty great. Highlights for the little people: the really big turtle in the Great Ocean Tank, the octopus tentacled against the glass, and the two touch tanks. Some tiny moon jellies in an illuminated tube held by a docent, so you could see them up close. (I love the sea jellies myself.) Oh, and we watched penguins for a good long while. The 9yo was very excited and amused to witness one pooping in the water.

I let the 5yo drag us all over the aquarium at will, which meant we backtracked and wound up on the wrong level a lot, as I squinted at the map in the low light. He was really happy, though. This kid loves fish and sharks and rays. I am always charmed by the monomania of a small child who has a passion. Really, I went to the aquarium so I could see the 5yo at the aquarium.

On the way back: some time playing in the playground. I have come to believe that playground time is crucial to traveling with littles. They remember it.

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That evening we gave the kids frozen pizzas and took the bus into the North End for an Italian dinner date. Which was an occasion to reminisce about being in Italy for real. Inside the restaurant, with wine and a huge pile of burrata and carciofi and proscuitto and arugula “appetizer” … it did not feel very different. Buona sera.

Also my favorite, linguine alla vongole. This seemed like the place to order it.

We finished with espresso for me and limoncello for Mark and a walk back to Charlestown. Really lovely.

Sep 5, 2019

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