bearing blog

Laïcité, freedom from and freedom to.

France is in the news this week because of an incident in Nice which four armed police officers forced a woman on a beach, in front of onlookers, to remove some of her clothing, consequent to the city's ban on "clothing that overtly manifests adherence to a religion." Since that occurred, possibly in an attempt to demonstrate that they weren't discriminating against Muslims, the city's deputy mayor insisted that habited nuns weren't welcome on the beach either, and then a French high court overturned the rule -- probably setting precedent for dozens of similar rules enforced at the municipal level all over France. This still leaves open the possibility that the national legislature could craft a law explicitly empowering local officials to ban beach clothing that contravenes their sense of laïcité, or could even craft one that sets national policy.

Here are a few related links that set some context for the matter:

Wikipedia article on the 1905 French law concerning the separation of church and state

Wikipedia article on the 2004 French national law banning certain religious symbols and clothing

Raphael Liognier writing in the Macquarie Law Journal in 2009: "Laïcité on the edge in France: Between the theory of church-state separation and the praxis of state-church confusion." This article is critical of French policy, but it provides a good historical review of how the French state put itself in this situation, explains the cultural concept that now bears the name "laïcité," and describes some of the incongruities in the existing law.

At Feministing, "A Guide for White People on the #BurkiniBan and Discussing Muslim Women" by Mahroh Jahangiri. This piece reminds us of the political history of colonialists' efforts to police Muslim women's dress, reminds us that there isn't just one true feminism, and, I should hope, reminds us not to treat Muslim women as political objects. Her seven pointers for writers are worth reading.

(I don't go as far as the author to say that it's always wrong to make analogies to other kinds of societal clothing-policing, but I sympathize. A well-crafted analogy can powerfully force an honest interlocutor to "see it from the other side" and thus open minds, but a poorly-crafted analogy can be legitimately offensive. If you're not sure how well yours is crafted, it's likely better to keep it to yourself.)

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So, not wanting to repeat what other people have written on the topic, I'll just make a couple of comments.

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First of all, I have a strong preference for American-style civil liberties. I come very close to being a free-speech absolutist, interpreting "freedom of the press" to be a freedom possessed by the owner of the press, and "press" interpreted broadly to mean any means of publishing, paying for, or disseminating speech, and interpreting "freedom of expression" to mean one's entire way of life in and out of the public sphere. So I don't like the French system, no.

At the same time, I am interested in different possible ways to assemble a consistent legal approach to philosophical diversity. I like our ideal of massively free expression; but no real system is perfect, and one does run up against conflicts from time to time, and lurking behind it always is the logical problem of tolerating intolerance, or of somehow having to respect philosophies that themselves do not respect philosophies -- the fundamental logical flaw of all relativism. Could there be better ways to deal with it than ours? Maybe. And it's interesting to explore systems that may have solved some of our own persistent problems while creating problems that we don't have. Also, I'd like to pay a little lip service to state sovereignty and to there being the possibility of having a set of priorities that is different from ours, that wouldn't fly in U. S. culture, but that makes sense and respects human persons in its own way. So I don't want to write them off entirely right off the bat -- at least not just because it's not the American way.

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So, it strikes me that one of the inherent weaknesses in the French approach to law here is in banning a kind of "symbol." An inherent with symbols is that they are not universally agreed upon, and that they are context-dependent. So the French have a truly fundamental legal problem here, namely, that they have written their law in inherently ambiguous language. Perhaps it is impossible to write laws that contain no ambiguity whatsoever, but zero ambiguity is the standard for which all laws ought to aim; one could even say that to remove ambiguities is the entire point of having laws at all, so that people can securely know how to comport themselves so that the state will not lock them up or seize their property, and so that the people have a means of creating a state whose power extends to agreed-upon bounds and no farther.

So we're stuck, because sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes an article of clothing is just an article of clothing. Jahangiri's piece in Feministing points out that it is the white colonialist mindset that first interpreted Muslim women's wear as a symbol of Islam, imposing a meaning upon it from outside. White feminists and rejected males alike continue to say implicitly or explicitly, "this is not clothing, it is a symbol." French laïcité means a freedom from certain symbols in the public square; maybe this sounds okay, a legitimate expression of a state (not consistent with the American expression, but trying to be open-minded and tolerant here toward la peuple française and their distinct culture); the problem is that apparently, for the French majorité to be free from what they see as symbols, some French minority women have to be free from what they see as their clothes.

It would be less problematic if the French had just come out and said "We are banning visible crucifixes that are longer than 325 mm, and little round hats worn on the back of your head, and when we said that you have to show your face in public, we also mean your hair, unless it's below a certain temperature Celsius or raining enough that drivers have to turn on their windshield wipers." At least the ambiguity would be gone, and though we might object to the infringement on personal freedom, we could at least say, "Well, it's clear," and then we could debate its rightness or wrongness. But no, they had to ban "religious symbols," which means one thing to one person and another thing to another. Which puts government in charge of deciding what your clothes really mean. And which means that you will never be judged on what they mean to you, but only on how they are received by other people, whom you cannot control. In other words, in a regime that bans "symbols" rather than banning specific objects and articles, individuals are liable for other people's thoughts about them, whether those thoughts are correct or incorrect. And that is about as illiberal as you can get.

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Third, it is important for Americans to understand the French system as a kind of warning of where we might go, if the forces of "freedom from" get out of balance with the forces of "freedom to."

Already there are hints of this in all the parts of the First Amendment. Politicians are speaking, it seems, more and more often of religious freedom interpreted as a "freedom to worship," which is rather closer to the traditional French understanding than to the more expansive American one; our tradition is one of "freedom of expression," meaning the freedom to live our lives, private and public, in accord with our beliefs. Speech codes which attempt to give people the freedom to live without hearing offensive speech are constantly being crafted at government institutions, struck down, and tweaked to sneak back in; they enjoy a great deal of popular support; and yet they exist in opposition to the American ideal (I won't say tradition, because it has been so unevenly lived by minority communities in this country) of the freedom to express minority ideas. Interpreting expensively produced publications and expressions as a financial transaction that can be regulated -- for some government-friendly spending entities and some points of view and not others -- is another way the definition of "freedom of the press" is being interpreted narrowly. Some "presses" are favored as shrines of freedom of expression; other "presses" derided as mere businesses, the speech they produce interpreted as a product for consumption, and subject to intense regulation.

The French problem is a warning to us. They have tried to favor "freedom from" over "freedom to." If we object to the results of that effort, we can learn from it and try to craft a balance between the two that will result in something more to our particular American taste.

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Writing your own charter.

Saturday morning I took a walk from Lyndale Farmstead Park, where I left the car, a mile and a half to the Lake Harriet bandstand.  I'm taking a break from running, because of my hip, and wore no athletic gear; just a tank dress and sandals. The late-summer sun beckoned me to the lake.  From the lakeside restaurant Bread & Pickle I bought ice water for $3 in a reusable stainless steel water bottle.  The cold bottle sweated big drops of water.  I took it to a table and rested my hip there for a while before walking back.

There was a 5K going on at the lake, a walk-and-run, and bluegrass-tinged rock music wafted from the bandstand.  August in Minneapolis can be brutally humid, but it usually looks beautiful, with lots of sunny days and blue skies.  There's something about August here that makes me wistful:  the cool weather will be here soon, and fall is sometimes cut short, with the snow arriving before the trees have even lost their leaves.  

It's hot now, but.  You know that the bitter cold is coming.  

I don't like to hide from the heat in August, at least not in the daytime, at least not all day.  I want to stand in the sun and soak it up, like a house of adobe, and radiate it inwardly all winter long.

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As I wandered back with my empty metal bottle swinging by its lid-loop from my finger, I was passed by a woman and a tween boy walking quickly, a mother and son.  She was dressed in sunglasses and running clothes, he in the ten-year-old-boy uniform of basketball shorts and a graphic tee and well-worn-in sneakers, and they were chatting easily.  It sounded as if she were explaining something, and he was nodding with real interest.  They walked faster than me and soon disappeared ahead, one parent, one child, being together, here at the lake.

I find I don't spend a lot of one-on-one time with any of my children.  It's the kind of thing that you have to deliberately create, in a family of five children at home (practicing that terminology; it will feel soon enough before one of them has aged out).   I do try to create it:  take one with me to the grocery store, take another on a trip all by himself to buy shoes, drive my daughter to camp. A biteback effect of safety regulation on family life:  no one younger than twelve is legally allowed to ride in the front seat with me, and who knows how many would-be conversations were thereby squelched before they came to be.

Maybe the mother and son on the walking path are like me, stealing time away from a large family on a Saturday afternoon.  Or maybe the boy is the one child at home.  I considered what it could have been like, me homeschooling a smaller family, one where I felt that I had enough time to get around to everybody.  Things would be different for sure.  I have a few homeschooling friends with one or two kids, or maybe just one or two left at home after the others have grown and gone, and it always seems as if they get to go very deep and run very far, and all together, not so much sending the middle-schooler with another family to see plays, not so much dropping the teenager off to go with the group to the museum exhibit that frowns on toddlers.  

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Of course, I'll have a chance to find some of that out eventually, when the ones who are little now become big and there aren't more coming up behind them.  We'll see if I do all the things I imagine I would do.

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Comparing yourself, inside and out, to what you can see of other people, that's a losing game.  I know this.  I also know that I wouldn't have it another way:  the large family is exhiliarating and challenging (in a good way) and I'm so glad I have every one of the children, and am grateful that we were gifted with them, and aware of those who long for many children and haven't seen that longing become reality.  

The most important thing to remember -- I don't know why it seems so hard sometimes -- is that whatever you are, whatever your family is, you too have strengths that others don't have.  It's not a kind of "I'm better than they, so there" mentality, it's more -- let's restore some balance to our vision.  Instead of constantly seeing "They can do things I can't -- she has advantages I don't -- he accomplishes what I don't -- they can give their kids something I can't --"  see that you too have your specialties.  

There's something to the Incredibles message "When everybody's super, then no one is."  But there is another side of this,  entirely true: the differences among us mean we can excel in different things, for real, not in a wishful way.  We can be our own self better than anyone else.  

Sometimes the things in which we are uniquely gifted are not things that are widely celebrated, and that's too bad, but we can work to appreciate those things in our own quiet way, when we see them in ourselves and in others.

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Last week I was talking to a friend of mine, a homeschooling parent of four, a part-time working professional musician herself married to a music professor.  They're in almost the opposite academic position from Mark and me -- we are both engineers, one PhD between us, and Mark working full time.  She fretted about finding good science teachers for her bright science student (who, by the way, is also a gifted musician himself -- none of those in our family!) while I commiserated in an analogous sort of way because I'm nearly hopeless in the arts and am not a gifted English or writing teacher.  Both of our families have solved this problem by outsourcing the relevant subjects to someone better qualified, one way or another.  It's a common thing for homeschooling families to do, urban ones anyway.

"Think of it this way," I said, "it's not that your kids are unusually handicapped in a subject you aren't expert in.  You've had at least a high school education in everything, college classes in some of it, and you get to have the teacher's manual.  Lots of public schools put first-year teachers into classes that they've never taught before and don't have particular expertise in.  You meet the minimum standards in every subject, and you far exceed them in others.  And you can find tutors where necessary."

The notion of being Adequate not seeming to be comforting, I went on ---

"If you have to compare your family's achievement to a school, then think of your family as a super-exclusive, super-specialized magnet school, or charter school.   You run an arts magnet school.  I run a STEM academy.  And where we both are only so-so in the other sorts of things, we do make up for it with, you know, small class size and a lot of personalized attention.  

"Also an extremely flexible schedule."

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We all have to be who we are.  It's tempting to see that as only limiting.  There have certainly been times in human history where the limiting aspect was emphasized even more than it is now, where people were chastised for dreaming too much of things that were closed to them for purely arbitrary reasons -- or for reasons that were thought incorrectly to be rational but really weren't.  It turns out that we do well to eliminate the arbitrary limitations, but we can swing too far the other way in insisting that anyone can do and be anything or everything, and excel in it.  The main problem with that is that inevitable difficulties are sometimes cast as "not working hard enough," "not wanting it bad enough," "not believing in yourself enough."  There are certain realities that are not arbitrary, and except for the extraordinarily gifted and/or extraordinarily privileged, wanting is not enough to overcome them.

Buried within the truth that we all must be who we are, though, is that it isn't just a limitation but also an encouragement, an identity.  If I must be who I am, then no one else can be it for me.  I have unique gifts and I should exploit them, use them to every advantage.  If they are the sort of thing that is not recognized as a strength, or even if they are the sort of thing that some call out as a liability, then I still have options:  go where these qualities are rarer and valuable, or, well, surprise people.

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One precondition is logically necessary, and it cannot be taken for granted:  the philosophical conviction that every human person has equal value, whatever his or her circumstances.  It's a sad truth that not everyone agrees with that, and even fewer behave in accord with it.  Some people see the good in everyone except themselves;  such a reflex has a useful side, in that it maintains humility, but it has a dark side too, one that misses opportunities for gratitude and tempts to despair and apathy, and risks swallowing others in its wake.   You have to practice finding it in yourself too, as an exercise in truth-seeking if nothing else.

Anyway, once you have this conviction, the conclusion boils down to:  whoever you are, you have strengths.  They aren't the same as mine.  You can exploit them to your advantage, to your family's advantage.  Go forth and win at your own game.

 

Catchup post: a good son, a Chicago getaway, my IT band, and something to read.

On account of the two weeks since I last wrote a post, I'm going to do a catch-up roundup.  Here we go:

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In mid-July I wrote about sending my oldest off to World Youth Day.   He spent  twelve days there, and returned safely.

I didn't make it a secret that I wished I could have gone along (even if I didn't have small children to care for, the chaperone spots filled up rather quickly).  "Text me and send me pics," I asked, "not because I'm trying to be a super helicoptery parent, but because I want to see the things."  And... he did!  I didn't expect him to send me so much, but he sent me pictures every day that he had access to wifi.

 

 

 

 

 

He told me about the deafening, constantly circling military helicopters, the grapefruit-flavored Oshee brand soda (so ubiquitous he was sure that Oshee was sponsoring the event), the crush of the crowd waiting for the Popemobile to pass by, the poutine he bought from a stand.  He told me about the huge arena for English-speaking pilgrims, and how a few rogue groups of young people impulsively ran in circles around the arena with their big national flags, an unauthorized parade of nations, to pass the time while waiting for the start of catechesis.  He told me that Filipino Cardinal Tagle gave a great talk and that NY Cardinal Dolan gave him a pat on the back while he was venerating the relics at the stadium.  He told me about the food in the pilgrim package ("This stuff had the same dimensions and texture as bird food blocks.  Tasted awful") and how a couple people in his group got heatstroke.  He told me about how their group hashtag became #InDmitriWeTrust, Dmitri being their local escort employed by the tour service they had contracted with.  He told me that when they got tired of singing hymns they walked along singing "Hotel California."

 

 

 

And he told me about the ambient noise of a million people sleeping in the field, of his surprise to find that the daily routine never got repetitive but was different every day, about how the park was sometimes loud and sometimes peaceful, about how the exuberant atmosphere almost changed instantly when Mass began.

I don't know if I've been able to express to him how appreciative I was and am that he took me along, so to speak.  I was moved.

He asked to go out to a barbecue restaurant for his sixteenth birthday, just a few days after coming back, and we gladly obliged.

 

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I went to Chicago for a couple of days, the day after my son got back from Poland.  

The occasion:  my youngest child, at 2.5 years old, is now night weaned and sleeping all the way through the night.  And I am not pregnant.  So I took the opportunity to spend two nights in a row away from my entire family... for the first time in sixteen years.

I'm a little sheepish even writing that.  Doesn't it seem like I should have managed to get away once in all that time?  But, you know, we set up our family to work a certain way, and I haven't needed to for any reason, and there's nearly always been a nursling around.  I've been away from home, yeah, but I've generally had a baby to tote with me. 

So when I realized this was possible, a few months ago, I texted my good friend from high school, the one I used to hang out at the mall with when we were twelve, and asked what she thought of a Chicago getaway (Chicago is close to midway between where I live and where she lives), and -- bless her, may she live long and prosper -- she did not say "maybe" or "I'll check and see what's on my calendar" but immediately said YES and figured she would work out the details later, which she did.  She reserved a hotel room, I bought a plane ticket, and off we went!

I know.  It is not that big of a deal to buy a plane ticket and spend two days away from home.  But it felt like a big deal.  

Here's the thing.  I could have done stuff like this at times over the past sixteen years if I had made it a priority.  Generally I'm pretty good at giving myself the things I need, rather than letting the needs of the family always take precedence over mind.  And the things I need, on a daily basis, to keep myself fed, are a steady diet of little things, which I've made space for by insisting on a few hours to myself every Saturday.  Breakfast out by myself, a quiet coffee shop in which to knock out a few items on my to-do list in peace, time to shop for my own clothes or get my hair cut, a visit to a local museum, Mass on my own, a run around the lake.  All that keeps me satisfied enough that I haven't felt the need to ask more of my family.

So it suddenly got to the point where it wasn't really asking too much to be gone for two whole days, and I took it.

It wasn't a complicated itinerary.  We stayed at the Drake and had access to the executive lounge for the free fancy breakfast (thank you, friend's husband's Hilton points) with a view of the lake.  We went out for nachos and margaritas close to our hotel the first night.  The next day we walked up and down Michigan Avenue (she bought candy for her daughter; I bought a hat for myself) and spent 3 hours in the Art Institute.

 Then we got gratuitously dressed up, and had dinner and drinks in the historic hotel restaurant.  And the next morning she dropped me off at the airport, where I killed time happily browsing through bookstores and finding a tasty box lunch to take on the plane (sixteen years of only traveling with kids can make solo airport time not suck at all), and I flew back home and took the train back to our 'hood.

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I think my hip pain is getting better.  After a frustrating few days of attempting to exercise carefully, and then hobbling around with pain for hours afterward, I settled on the following regimen:

• Assume, arguendo, that I have bursitis.
• Take sodium naproxen faithfully every twelve hours to reduce inflammation.
• Stop running.  Switch to swimming and the occasional walk of no more than a couple of miles.   Get full rest days after exercise.
• Stretch the IT band whenever I think about it.
• If it's not better in two months, go see the sports med doctor.

I'm kind of bummed that I'm missing the best time of the year to go running outside (well, if you're like me and don't get bitten by mosquitoes much, and like to get up early), but I'm already seeing some improvement.  So maybe I self-diagnosed correctly after all.  One piece of evidence:  Taking the naproxen makes the pain go completely away for at least eight hours, which makes me think that all the pain is coming from inflammation and that I haven't actually torn or sprained anything.

A nice thing about IT band stretches, relative to other kinds of therapeutic stretches, is that they are very easy to work into your daily life.  There are standing IT stretches, sitting IT stretches (I'm doing one now while I type!), and lying-down IT stretches that you can do in bed.  So wherever you are, if you think of doing one, you can do one without interrupting your activity much.  You don't need to take off a shoe or go find a towel or a yoga block or clear a space on the floor. 

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That takes care of three old things.  Now here's one new thing.  I've recently discovered the webcomic (graphic serial?) Stand Still, Stay Silent by Minna Sundberg, a Swedish-Finnish artist who writes in English and paints in digital.  

I encountered SSSS by accident via a link to a piece of her art, a language tree from the comic, reproduced below (link to full size at her site):

I'm a sucker for linguistics, and this really drew me into the SSSS world.  Post-apocalyptic literature is fun enough on its own, of course, but this comic is especially fun if you are interested in languages, because linguistic and cultural differences between the characters drives a fair amount of the plot.  

I would classify this as a near-future post-apocalyptic novel of the Zombie Plague type, although it isn't exactly zombies.  The general background is that a worldwide plague has shrunk the size of the "known world" of the comic to Iceland and scattered parts of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.  (That's why the language family page only includes two families).  Fantastic elements (e.g., some characters are mages) draw heavily on Nordic and Finnic mythology and traditional culture.  

The world is well built and intricate.  The art is beautiful:  spare in its color scheme, eerie, and (though digital) resembles brushed watercolor.  People and animals have wonderfully expressive faces.  There's plenty of action scenes with monsters to chop up and buildings going boom, but the real drama is psychological and interpersonal so far.  Another fun aspect of the website:  the well-populated fan forums and comment sections, which include people from all over the world, sometimes offering fanfic and fan poetry, and helpfully translating text that appears in the background art for the benefit of non-Nordic, non-Finns.  

Catching up on the nearly six hundred pages already posted was a weekend's leisure reading, and now I have to settle down and resign myself to reading updates just one day at a time.  

Cats are extremely important, so if you are particularly fond of kitties, there are many drawings of them to enjoy.

To start reading SSSS from the beginning, go here.

New IT experience.

In the summer, I like to get up early on Sunday mornings and go for a run around Lake Calhoun.  

 A breeze comes off the lake even in high summer.  Most of the way around is tree-shaded.  It's never crowded at 7 am on a Sunday.  The scenery is pretty all the way around, at least to my urban tastes:  the busy waterfront restaurant, wheeling gulls, a small forest of boat-masts, big houses up on the hill, public beaches, dogs and frisbees and volleyball nets, the sun glinting off the water.  The running path around measures exactly 5K, and I'm not in a season in my life where I have time to train for longer runs than that.  

Sometimes I try to go fast, and I check my watch to see how well I did against previous timed 5Ks I've run.  Sometimes I just go out with the goal of enjoying the morning.  My PR is a not-embarrassing but not-particularly-special twenty-seven-something; for lazy Sunday runs I am happy to come in between 30 and 38 minutes; if I try to go fast I want to be between 28 and 32 minutes.  

A couple of Sundays ago I went for a lazy Sunday run in which I did not check my watch.  I specifically did not try to go fast, and was thinking to myself that the victory was just in showing up that morning.  I was just ending an unusually symptomatic menstrual period.   I don't typically experience much in the way of cramping, heavy/prolonged bleeding, or mood swings; for me it's more lower back pain, fatigue, and general feelings of crappiness.  I crave extra rest, and if I can just take a couple of extra naps and some ibuprofen, I weather it fine.

This past cycle I felt like I had been hit by a truck, with pronounced achiness and several days of exhaustion.  For the first half of it I wondered if I was pregnant, I felt so exhausted.  For the second half of it I wondered if I actually had some kind of intestinal bug.  In the end I decided it was just my normal menstrual symptoms, just intensified.   I'm old enough now that things are starting to fluctuate and get weird, and I guessed I had just had some kind of hormone surge that made all the usual stuff feel a lot worse.  I spent several evenings in bed.  I skipped one swim workout, which is not unusual, and took the second one a bit easier than usual.

So anyway, back to this Sunday.  I went on my easy run, enjoying the feel of moving a bit faster.  At the end I got in the car and drove a short distance to one of my favorite breakfast spots, where I  enjoyed coffee and toast and eggs and a very nice fruit cup.  Everything was perfectly lovely until it was time to get up out of the booth and OH MY WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY HIP.

I limped out the door, bent like an old person, and eased myself into the driver's seat of the Prius.  Once I got all the parts aligned in the seat, with my foot on the pedal and such, the pain disappeared.  "A bit stiff," I thought, and drove home, and then when it was time to get out of the car again OW OW OW.

I spent the whole day and most of the next day being totally fine except when I had to change from sitting to standing and from standing to sitting, and it was worse the longer I had been sitting.  Just this intense irritation in the outside of my right hip, wrapping around a bit to the back and shooting a bit down the outside of the thigh.   It diminished over the next few days.

I skipped another swim workout for good measure and then tried a very slow and easy swim.  There was the pain again, not as bad as after that Sunday run, but still annoying.  I quit early and took ibuprofen, but I still spent the next couple of days stiffly and painfully sitting down and getting up out of chairs.

I'm a little afraid to go for another run.  

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I fretted aloud to Mark about my injury that came out of nowhere.  He was unsympathetic.  "I hurt every time I do anything," he pointed out.

"But this is new!  I'm not you!  I don't hurt when I run!  I definitely don't hurt when I swim!  This is terrible!"

He observed that I was still walking just fine and that I had not even tried increasing my ibuprofen dose.  I realized I was not going to get any sympathy for my very first ever running-related pain from a man who has had (mostly in series, not parallel) plantar fasciitis, shin splints, a compressed disc, tibial stress fractures, and chronic injury to an assortment of muscles in both legs, and who wants to do a lot more than I want to do.

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First, since the only unusual thing about the past week was the massively worse-than-usual menstrual syndrome, I thought that maybe I'd had some kind of immense hormone surge that had loosened up my joints and the like.  But all the information on that seems to be about knee injuries, so that rabbit trail was inconclusive.  

I did some more reading and convinced myself that the best match to my symptoms was greater trochanteric bursitis, although the match wasn't perfect.  Pain when changing positions: check.  Tenderness over the greater trochanter:   not really.   Then I found out that gluteus medius tendinopathy is often mistaken for trochanteric bursitis.  So maybe it's one of these things?  They're both associated with scoliosis among other things.   I have a type of scoliosis that tilts my pelvis to one side (can't remember which side is higher than the other); in my twenties I had a spate of back pain that was treated by an OMPT, by putting a lift in one of my shoes to force the pelvis back to level.  Maybe I should go see an OMPT or sports med physician to see if that is part of the problem.

At any rate, it seems that iliotibial band stretches -- "IT band" stretches -- are the thing to try for both diagnoses, so I guess I'll be doing that for the time being.  I tried a few of them this morning and the stretches felt good, so that's one thing in their favor.  It's inexpensive and unlikely to cause more problems, so it's worth a try, especially since the pain isn't severe enough to interfere with most of my activities, just really annoying.  

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The one significant thing I am not clear on is whether I should stop running and swimming for a while, or whether to cut back on either or both.  And here's where the silver lining lies:  I find myself hoping that I don't have to cut back.

Not looking for an excuse to skip workouts, but hoping I can keep up my (admittedly time-constrained and not very rigorous) routine.

I've unlocked a new achievement:  my first encounter with running-related pain -- and with hoping to keep running, or at least swimming, hopefully both, right through it.

I'm one of you, athletes.

But if Mark is any indication, I probably still shouldn't whine about it to the rest of you.