bearing blog

In which I make an appearance.

The most boring kind of blog post is the "why I haven't been writing" blog post.

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Scratch that.  Sometimes, I bet, posts of this type can be gripping.  I might have just awoken from a coma.  Mark might have come home unexpectedly, weeks ago, with tickets and inn reservations for a lengthy hiking adventure in Scotland.   I might have gone bankrupt and failed to pay my Typepad subscription on time.

But, no.

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If these posts are so boring, why do they exist?  Why am I making one?  I think these posts aren't for the reader, for a reader, for any reader.  They are not really meant to be read at all.  They are for the writer:  they are the first interminable jog around the track after months on the couch.  Barely an effort.   The point is not to make an effort.  Effort has been a barrier.  This is just showing up, because  showing up is the first step.  

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 I think some of what has kept me away is a feeling of being unable to add clarity to anything at all.   The more experience one gains in any area, the more one realizes how little one knows; how very not-universal are the things one has figured out.   That sometimes translates to a sense of not having something new or useful to contribute, especially in an arena where there are already so many voices clamoring for attention.   

I guess you could say that I took some time off to listen to other people?  That sounds more high-minded than it is.  It hasn't exactly been intentional.  I just kept finding, day after day, that I wanted to read a new person's opinion and ideas more than I wanted to generate any of my own.   

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I would like to believe that my lapse into radio silence is a symptom of having passed peak Dunning-Kruger, as in the following comic, but extending from political discourse to all discourse:

Weinersmith Z, "Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal." Web. 8 Mar 2011.

That is, I would like to believe that I shut up, having finally realized that I don't know as much as I think I do, and that ever afterward I can restrict myself to writing things I actually understand something about. 

There are a couple of problems with this scenario, one of which is that (whatever readers may think) I don't blog in order to get my great ideas out into the world, I blog in order to think more clearly.  I always have done that, used writing to figure things out.  The possibility that other eyeballs will see it is only a kind of accountability:  I have to make some sort of sense, I have to write with some level of compassion and charity, or someone I respect will make fun of me for being wrong on the Internet.

Perhaps I have suddenly realized that there is no level of sense that will protect any of us for being pointed at as an example of Wrong On The Internet.

Perhaps I have suddenly realized that I do not, in fact, have anything like sufficient compassion and charity.

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A couple of years ago I really started examining in earnest the notion that persuasion is for most people an exercise in relationship.  There's nothing wrong with trying to clearly articulate a position as a mental and logical exercise alone, or even in order to compile a useful resource for interested individuals; but persuasion itself, for most people, is mediated not by the persuader's logic but by the persuader's trustworthiness.  That's trustworthy not in the sense of "reliably correct" or even "intellectually honest," but a more intuitive and emotional connection between persuader and persuaded:  a sense of a real relationship and true, not fake, concern.

It's possible that becoming aware of this has stopped me up a bit, because I cannot sense in myself anything real that can connect, that can generate true concern and charity and compassion, beyond my immediate friend-circle.  I mean, maybe I have it but I'm not sure, and I doubt I could fake it, and if I did fake it I would hate myself for it.   If Love must be seen before Truth can be heard, well, then, what point is there for me to write?  I can Love the people close to me, but invisible and imaginary potential readers are abstractions, and the only abstraction I can Love is truth itself.  I second-guess myself a lot when I think about writing hard topics.  Where I used to relish working out the connections and classifications, I find myself thinking:  but why am I doing it?  Am I just trying to win points in a game?  Am I just trying to feel satisfied that my position is the most sensible?  Is this in any way at all an attempt to communicate anything to a real human being?  Am I thinking of my imaginary reader as a real human person, a subject, or just an object which I may use as an imaginary receptacle for my polished arguments (or worse, a scratching-post upon which I can polish them)?  

I think that's where I am.  I might have a lot to say, but what is any of it worth when it comes from me in particular?

I don't mean that I know it to be worthless.  I mean that I don't know its worth, and the realization that I don't know its worth has suddenly clammed me up, made me want to figure it out, so I can put the proper disclaimer on it, whatever that is.

 

 

 

Title goes here.

And now for something completely different.

A bit more than a week ago, the curated collection of interesting women scientists among the users in my Twitter feed lit up with a new hashtag:  #ImmodestWomen.  A few clicks and I came to the origin, a UK historian named Dr. Fern Riddell.  

She — along with a number of other academics — had tweeted a criticism of the Canadian Globe and Mail’s new style guideline (link goes to the Twitter thread she was referring to):  in the paper’s articles, health care professionals were to be referred to as “Dr So-and-so” on second reference (including some medical professionals for whom, in the UK, bachelor’s level training is sufficient).  Other doctorate holders were to be referred to as Mr./Miss/Ms./Mrs. Such-and-such on second reference, even when being interviewed on the topic of their specific scholarly expertise.   

To make a long story short, although rather a lot of academics weighed in on the topic, Dr. Riddell found herself the target of a storm of Twitter invective. Some of it abusive, much of it gendered.  I think you would have to analyze the data to be certain.  I do get the distinct impression that, while lots of people might hold the opinion that an academic title is unnecessary or even mildly offensive, more of them are willing to get on with their lives when the “Dr.” has replaced a “Mr.” than when it apparently replaces “Miss/Ms./Mrs.”  

Twitterer @RalphHarrington made an illustration of some of the replies that Dr. Riddell got:

 

Anyway, one of the tweetstormers accused Dr. Riddell of “immodesty,” she made the hashtag, and it took off; a lot of women decided to come along for the ride.  Temporarily or permanently, they changed their Twitter names to include their earned doctoral titles (along with some who added other professonal titles,  “Rev.” or “Rabbi,” and one scholar I remember who changed hers to include everything she qualified for:  I think the full string included “Dr.” and “Mrs.” and “Rev.” and “OBE.”)  There were also quite a lot of cheers and supportive tweets from women and men who use different titles or no titles at all, a number of people subscribing quite simply to the “call people what they wish to be called” ethic and also of the “titles are not really necessary but if you are going to use them you should use one that is accurate,” ethic, too; a handful of men, many with stories of nontraditional paths to the academy; and (being international but primarily a UK thing) it was all rather jolly.  I found a good deal more women scientists (and other interesting people) to add to my timeline.  And there was some good discussion, too, about the odd complexity and (unnecessary?) fraught-ness of the whole thing.  

I joined in on the discussion, because, well, it is something I think about and on which my mind has not yet settled.  Here is an incomplete list of thoughts, tossed out quickly rather than organized:  

• I am clear with myself that I disagree with the Globe and Mail:  just because one meaning of “doctor” in English usage is a synonym for “physician,” does not mean that its other, older (and original and still current) meanings must be discarded.  And I don’t agree that the medical field is some sort of extra-special field of study that deserves to be put on a special pedestal above others.  If doctorate titles are to be discarded, fine; but why should physicians in particular  get a pass?
• I’m also aware that the systemic dis-crediting of women scholars, whether conscious or unconscious, is real; “let me introduce our panelists, Dr. Smith, Dr. Jones, and Katie” is a thing that happens, and arrangement of speakers on a dais is a thing that happens, and subtle pressure to discard outward signs of rank and expertise is a thing that happens. 
• There’s a serious discussion that can be had about the relevancy of scholarship and expertise, of ordination or military rank, or indeed of marital status, to ordinary interactions: formal and informal introductions, business cards, handwritten envelopes, adults mentoring young people who are not supposed to use the mentors’ first names.  Is it relevant, and does it matter if it’s not? 
• And there’s a serious discussion about trying to move toward egalitarianism by discarding titles:  does it help if only some people do it?   Or, if all the people in an environment discard the formal acknowledgement of their expertise (or specialization or rank), does that help or hurt the people who, not resembling the accepted model of a person with authority, relied on a formal acknowledgement of expertise as one of the tools they could wield to assert the authority they require to go about their business?   
• And what about self-perception, a sense of identity?  If I don’t feel like “Mrs.” is a name that means “me,” even after nearly twenty years of marriage, maybe I don’t have to keep trying to get used to it?  Can I not ask to be called something else from among the options available to me by ordinary English-speaking etiquette?  Whose name is it?

Some hours went by.  I kept coming back and checking the thread.  Medievalists, biologists, primary school teachers.   I had a couple of encouraging conversations.  Finally  I decided, at least temporarily, to throw in with the rest of them.  I would add the “Dr.”

On making that decision, I marveled at the internal resistance, almost dread, that rose up.  (Other people in the #ImmodestWomen hashtag commented on it.  I am not alone there.)  

Should I heed the reluctance?  Is it a kind of guilt?  Is it a kind of embarrassment?  Is it a fear?  Should I, instead of letting it tell me what to do, push through it?  It certainly doesn’t appear to be coming from reason.  

I could think of reasons, but the reluctance wasn’t from any of them.  Was it trustworthy or an error?

Unfortunately, there is no rule of thumb for gauging the wisdom of following a feeling based on its strength alone.  

The change is not irreversible; the likely consequences are small; I had been watching people add their titles to their Twitter names for a day and if I thought about these other people doing it, and not myself,  I never thought them to be unreasonable or reckless or puffed up.   It clearly is not an act that carries significant moral weight in ordinary discourse.   Also, I have enough self-awareness to know that I am prone to overthinking sometimes.  

The only thing to do for it, I decided, to recover reason, was to do an experiment:  give it a try and find out what happens—if nothing else, then perhaps I would come to understand that internal resistance a  little better.

So I did (on Twitter) and pinned the tweet,  heeding a sheepish compulsion to make clear the cause for the alteration.  As if I was saying:  Here’s why it’s okay.

More to unpack.

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Mind you:  This doesn’t change my Twitter handle:  I am @erinarlinghaus and will remain so.  The boldfaced name next to the avatar is much easier to change and change again.

I will give it some time, and report back on the outcome.   I’ve already had some fruitful discussions.  And I think I am starting to coalesce my rather diffuse thoughts about the whole thing — from the general to the personal — around a few dusty points.  Will come back to this, and in the meantime, comments are welcome.

 

In which I am an amateur linguist, just for fun.

Today I feel like blathering about an academic subject in which I am completely untrained, and yet have Opinions.

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Friend of mine on Facebook yesterday shared this post from Letters of Note, the photograph grabbed apparently from a book called 'The Elements of Eloquence,' author Mark Forsyth, and posted originally on Twitter by Matt Anderson.

Said friend and I -- alright, it was Melanie -- had a blast discussing it.  The most fun I've had on a Sunday afternoon in a long while.  It must be the long weekend.

Before we start to criticize, let's discuss the overall pattern.  Have you noticed this feature of spoken English before?  That when you prepend -- without conjunctions -- more than one adjective to a noun, often there's a particular way to order the adjectives in series that sounds better than the other possible orders?  

Native English speakers would say, unless there was some special reason of emphasis,

 The little red wagon

not

The red little wagon

 

Or

The old brass key

not

The brass old key

Or

The enormous antique rocking chair

not

The antique enormous rocking chair

nor

The antique rocking enormous chair

nor

The rocking antique enormous chair

and so on.  

(Even though the author used an amusingly long string of adjectives as an example, I'm not going to go with more than three or four of them here, since our test of validity is simply to see what sounds okay.  Overlong strings of adjectives don't sound like natural English to begin with, so they don't make good test examples.)

How do we know which order is right?  And is there a permanent pattern?  Mark suggested to me that we simply know what is right because we are used to hearing it some ways and not others, but I don't think so because I can construct an entirely novel phrase and we still know that one is better than another:

The delicious square German vegan liverwurst

is obviously (to me) preferable to

The German square vegan delicious liverwurst

but it isn't obvious why.

Some kind of pattern production program exists in our language brain.  This isn't mere mimicking.  We have a pattern inside our heads, and we know when something doesn't fit the pattern, without ever having been explicitly taught it.  What is this pattern?

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The author of the photographed excerpt considers pre-nominal adjective sets as a string.  Like beads, they go onto the noun one after another, and since we apparently prefer some permutations to others, he looks for a pattern that tells us what order we automatically identifies an ordered list of attributes that, supposedly, describes the order in which English speakers string adjectives.  Here's the order again:

Opinion - size - age - shape - colo(u)r - origin - material - purpose - Noun.

This doesn't of course mean that we are likely, in ordinary speech, to craft sentences in which we describe a noun with a string of eight adjectives.  It just means that we supposedly put size-adjectives before material-adjectives, opinion-about-the-thing-adjectives before origin-adjectives, and so on.

Let's see the examples I wrote just now:

"little red" wagon is size-color .... Check!

"old brass" key is age-material.... Check!

"enormous antique rocking" chair is size-age-purpose I guess... Check!  

 

Or is it size-age-shape?  What if the chair is, er, shaped like a rocking chair but intended for an office?  Then it would be an enormous antique rocking office chair.  Still fits the pattern, I suppose.  Check!

"delicious square German vegan" liverwurst is opinion-shape-origin-(material or maybe purpose) ... Check!

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So far so good.  But!  If one sits and thinks for a while, one may come up with contrary examples.  So the "absolutely" in the author's paragraph must certainly be struck out.

The first one I thought of was

She has a new little baby.

This pattern puts shape before age, yet it is clearly better than 

She has a little new baby.

Later I thought of

The white crescent moon shone above

which, though it puts the white color before the crescent shape, sounds more correct than

The crescent white moon shone above.

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Okay, so the "absolutely" isn't warranted for our pattern.  Yet it seems almost right.  Is there a way we can generalize?  And what makes this pattern appear in the first place?

One of our interlocutors suggested that it had to do with "essence" -- that the more essential qualities are placed closer to the noun, and the more superficial ones are placed farther away.   So, for example, a little red wagon is more essentially red and only superficially little.  A German rocking chair's rocking-ness is more essential to its nature, and its German-ness less so.

This seems like it is on the right track towards the pattern, but not so much on the how-we-apply-the-pattern.  Deciding about the essential nature of things is a philosophical exercise.  But we don't stop to practice philosophy every time we order our tall skinny decaf latte.  We just ask for it, and make the poor barista hunt for the keys in a different order.  (From the perspective of the cashier, the size of the latte is more essential, since it specifies the cost of the item; options like decaf and skinny are not.)

But there is something to this notion, and I think if we carry it farther we will find something better than the "string-of-attributes" theory.  

Let's start by asking the question:  Why is purpose placed in the closest spot to the noun?

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I don't think it's because the purpose of the object is the most essential quality of the object, but because of the natural way in which English speakers form compound nouns made up of multiple words.

A tennis racket is a thing.  We aren't speaking French:  We do not have to say "a racket of tennis."  For all practical purposes, in English tennis racket is a single noun.  We've never joined the words into tennisracket -- we aren't speaking German -- and that has created a bit of a red herring, in that, yes, "tennis" is a modifier, behaving like an adjective, describing the purpose of the racket -- but face it, a tennis racket is a thing.  It is not a racket that might or might not be for tennis, at least not in the same way that it might be green or lightweight or expensive or homemade.  It functions as a noun.  You don't drop the  "tennis" part of the noun unless it's obvious that you're in a tennis context.

Because a tennis racket is a thing, we don't divide the "tennis" from the "racket" by interspersing any other kind of adjective, any more than we divide the "dish" from the "washer" when I describe to you my new household appliance.  I don't have a dish shiny washer, and for the same reason, I don't have a tennis new racket.

Is this because tennis-ness is the most essential quality of the racket?  Indirectly, maybe; but the proximate reason is linguistic.  When we talk of a tennis racket, we join the two words into a compound.  

So the handheld implement for striking the ball in tennis, having a certain color and size is not described with a string of three adjectives:  large-blue-tennis RACKET.  Rather, tennis is joined to RACKET:  blue (tennis racket).

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But purpose isn't the only kind of modifier that we make functional compounds with.  I talked of liverwurst up there.  We stick that together because, I suppose, liverwurst is German in origin, but we're really discussing liver sausage here -- "liver" denoting the material of which the sausage is made.  And doesn't it often function as a compound too?  Liver sausage is a thing.  If you say "liver sausage" I get a mental image of a package of braunschweiger at the supermarket, followed by a strong association with rye bread and mustard -- I don't imagine a sausage (different mental picture) and then, thinking of liver, modify my mental picture.  

"Pork sausage," same thing, until you want to mention that it's pork breakfast sausage (material-purpose-noun).  But "pork breakfast sausage" is also a thing, although not as securely as is breakfast sausage and pork sausage.

I propose that in English, when we increase the number of modifiers on a noun, what we are really doing is creating nested compounds.  Not sausage that is made of pork, and intended for breakfast, and which I think is expensive, and which is of a brown color, all on a string; but

expensive ( brown ( pork ( breakfast sausage ) ) )

That is, it's breakfast sausage that happens to be pork.

And, it's pork breakfast sausage that is brown.

And, it's brown pork breakfast sausage that is expensive.

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Let's look at our counter examples:  the white crescent moon and the new little baby, both of which violate the prescribed order.

The white crescent moon is easy to explain.  "Crescent moon" is a common compound.  Yes, "crescent" literally describes the shape of the moon.  But in the English language, a "crescent moon" is a thing in and of itself, much more strongly than is a "white moon."  So while you might write about a crescent white moon, you are much more likely to write about a white (crescent moon).

Too, look at this:

white full moon  (color before, nominally, shape)

but

round white moon (shape before color)

And that's because a "full moon" is an established compound and a "round moon" is comparatively only an adjective plus a noun.

How about that new little baby?

"Little baby" definitely functions as a compound in many contexts.  Sweet little baby, good little baby, third little baby.  Little almost goes  before baby as a tic.

"New baby" is also a common utterance.  

Why, then, "new little baby" and not "little new baby?"  I think it's because new babies are by definition little, whereas little babies may or may not be new; so when we want to say, "She has recently given birth to a child!" we say "She has a new (baby)!" or "She has a new (little baby)!" almost interchangeably.  The newness is up front.  It's what we're emphasizing.

But if we want to say "She has a BIG new baby!" we are probably talking about a nine- or ten-pounder.  It's a big (new baby).

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And what of compound adjectives?

Check out this triplet of adjectives along with the noun "baby", two nominally denoting size and one nominally denoting age, and consider how it works:

tiny new baby (but not new tiny baby)

little tiny baby = tiny little baby (interchangeable)

new little baby (but not generally little new baby)

What's up with this?  Tiny must go pairwise before new.  New must go pairwise before little.  But tiny and little are pairwise interchangeable.  

I think this is because "tiny little" and "little tiny" function, and equally well, as compounds.  "Little baby" can be a compound, but we can force it apart with the right choice of modifiers and then you can get something like

(tiny little)(American baby).

 With new, tiny, and little, there's six possible orders:

 little tiny new baby

tiny little new baby

new tiny little baby

new little tiny baby

little new tiny baby

little tiny new baby

Some of these sound better to me than others.   How about to you?  

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Anyway, that's my untrained blathering about English syntax for the day.  I have a vague notion that the concept of a "parse tree" is the one that trained linguists would use to point out the flaws in my crackpot analysis is.  As they say, any fool can criticize, and I am always happy to play the fool for that purpose.  But, as I said to Melanie via FB, the fun thing about linguistics is that any nerd can do original amateur research on your own brain and your friends' brains, something that is hard to do in other sciences unless you have an MRI machine in your cheerful spacious well-equipped American kitchen laboratory.

 

 

 

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.

Tired, in the pool.

Yesterday evening I arrived at the YMCA pool to find it moderately crowded -- three lanes occupied by swim lessons, and three lap lanes each occupied by one swimmer.   I picked the swimmer closest to the wall, waited until she came up for air at my end, and asked, "Can I split with you?"  She agreed, and moved towards the wall to give me half the lane.   I kicked off my flip-flops, sat down with my feet in the water, and fiddled with my goggles to make sure I would get them right side up.

Here's how lap pool etiquette works:

 If N_swimmers ≤ N_lanes, each swimmer gets his or her own lane (unless you came with a friend or child and you want to share).  As additional swimmers arrive, the swimmers who are already there must allow the new arrivals to share:  that's the posted rule.   Common courtesy and safety call for the arriving swimmer to get a swimmer's attention and ask to share, as I did; this prevents collisions.

If you're a new arrival and you join a lane with one other swimmer, then the two of you "split" the lane:  each goes back and forth in his own half-lane.  This works up to N_swimmers ≤ 2 N_lanes .  

Once there are two swimmers in every lane, and another person arrives -- getting the attention of both the people who occupy it, of course -- three swimmers can share a lane, not by splitting it, but by "circling."  This means you swim along one half of the lane, turn, and come back along the other half of the lane, keeping to your right.  With only three in the lane it isn't too hard to pass slower swimmers (on the left).  As you get up to four and five in the lane, it still works if everybody swims close to the same speed.  

One thing you don't do:  get in a lane that has two people already in it when it still holds that N_swimmers ≤ N_lanes.  Because it's much more inconvenient to circle-swim than to split a lane, and everybody knows it.

I got my goggles on my head and looked up, and there was a man slowly water-jogging in the lane, next to the wall, about 8 yards away.  Where did he come from?  He saw my confused look, smiled widely, and beckoned me into the water with both hands.

I pointed to the other lane.  "There's room in that lane," I said.

"It's all right!" he beamed at me.  "Come on in!"  He said something else, but it was garbled by the noise of the pool.

"I can't hear you," I called.  I pointed across at the other swimmer, who was just about to turn and head back.  "Does she know you're in this lane?"

"It's all right!"  He opened his arms widely and beckoned again.  "Come on in, it's all right!"

It seemed a little dumb to say "I was here first!" since I could move into the next lane just as easily as he could, but I suspected that the other swimmer didn't know he was in there and wasn't expecting him -- and he was occupying her half of the lane.   Occasionally you run into people who aren't aware of the rules.  I literally ran into someone, once, who hadn't been aware of the "get the other swimmer's attention before entering an occupied lane" rule.  My neck hurt for a week.   So I was just about to explain:  You have to ask first.

And then he got closer and said, "Hey!  It's all right!  Come on in!  I'm not bothering anybody, I'm just showing off my awesome body!  I've been working out, you know?  So come on in with me!"

And he flexed.

Really.

Gross.

I don't know how well the subtleties of the expression change from "You are clueless about lane etiquette and I should help you out by explaining it" to "You are, in fact, an asshole" are communicated when one is wearing goggles.  Anyway, I very quickly calculated that I was not getting into the lane with this guy, nor was I getting into the lane next to this guy.  I grabbed my flip-flops and started to stand up, and before I even reached a standing position (which was the position in which I was going to think about how to get the other swimmer's attention), the lifeguard was at my side and the man was moving away.

"Excuse me," said the lifeguard, a young man whose name I don't know but whom I have seen many times.  "What's the issue here?"

I told him how the water-jogging flexer had appeared in the lane without asking, briefly described the exchange in which the water-jogger extolled the awesomeness of his body, and aped the flexing motion.

"I'll take care of it," he said.  "You go ahead and swim in this lane."

So I did -- eventually.  At the far end of the pool, the lifeguard spent several minutes standing poolside in conversation with Mr. Wonderful who was still in the lane.  The other swimmer came up and asked what happened, so I explained.  The man in the next lane came up and asked, "Do you need to split with me?" and I confused him, probably, by saying "I don't think so..."  But eventually the asshole got out of the pool, so I got in and started swimming my laps along with the first woman.

And then Mr. I'm-so-awesome came back to the end of the lane and stood there and watched us for a good ten minutes.  I ignored him.  Eventually he walked away... but only as far as the lifeguard's chair.  I kept an eye on him as I swam.  There were two lifeguards on duty that evening, and the stranger engaged them in conversation for something like twenty more minutes.  Which is ridiculous in lifeguard minutes.  You can say hi to the lifeguard, you can ask a question about which lane you should choose or how long until open swim ends, but they have a job to do which is not chatting.  

I began to wonder whether I was going to have a problem when I got out of the water.

Fortunately, the attention span of this particular asshole was shorter than my workout.  He left (through the Family Changing Room) and I didn't see him again. 

When I finished my 45 minutes, I went over to the lifeguard and let him know I appreciated him dealing with the asshole so that I did not have to.  "No problem," he said.  "That guy was behaving really inappropriately even before you got here.  The manager dealt with him.  Said he smelled something on his breath."  I thanked him again and went to change.

+ + +

Over a bottle of wine at dinner I told the story to Mark.  "I had a lot of time in the pool to contemplate why the man's behavior, even though objectively it doesn't seem like much, was so threatening," I said.  

"It's because he communicated, in several ways, 'I am not going to abide by the normal limits of behavior,'" Mark suggested.

"Yes, I think that's it," I mused.  "You're forced to wonder, 'What other rules of appropriate behavior are you going to ignore?'"

"Which made him not actually dangerous, since you weren't going to ignore those signals.  Threatening but ultimately not competent enough to be dangerous."

"Yes, I have a pretty well-refined asshole detection algorithm."  

+ + +

But I thought to myself:  Lots of people are socialized to suppress a reaction to those signals:  they have their boundaries damaged or destroyed at a young age, or they are taught to be nice, or ridiculed for objecting to unwanted attention ("Don't flatter yourself!" -- as if there is no such thing as unwanted attention, as if swaggering boundary-pushing had anything to do with real interest in persons as persons instead of as some kind of icon that can be clicked).

(In my case, there in the pool, I was mainly pissed off that the guy was in my way.  I only had an hour free for my workout.  I was there first, and he should have gotten in the lane with one of the lone swimmers instead of interfering with the only lane that happened to contain two women.  Asshole.)

So, no, not dangerous.  Not to me, in that place.  And the Y staff dealt with him fast enough that my workout was only diminished by about five minutes.  Props to them.

But still: a symptom, a reminder, of all the things that make it incrementally just a bit more exhausting to be female.  I'm lucky.  I go a long time between these events; my lifestyle insulates me a bit.  But they're still out there.  

A strange turning point.

In the last couple of weeks, as I rushed around with Mark and without Mark trying to pull items together to help my grandmother when the relative who lives with her was hospitalized, I had the oddest impression.

It went like this: This is the week when I began to grow old.

Seriously: Maybe the feeling will go away, but I have taken away from it this very strange gut-level feeling that, when I am myself elderly and I look back upon my life, October 2015 will turn out to be a turning point, a hinge around which the whole neatly folds in half.

It seems unlikely that I have received the gift of prophecy and that my span will turn out to be exactly eighty-two years, so something else is going on here. What is it?

+ + +

Well, a lot went on in the past few weeks, for sure.

I found myself suddenly an advocate for not one but two older relatives, my truly elderly grandmother and another, not-quite-old-enough-for-Medicare relative with a severe health problem and a lack of insurance. I wasn't alone -- I have two cousins and a brother, and the four of us passed information back and forth in a Facebook Chat window for the whole time, with one out-of-state cousin making a lot of the necessary phone calls and the other two, juggling job and other family responsibilities, stepping in where they could. And I had a lot of support from Mark and his parents, who took all the children on short notice.

The transition, although it was temporary, was jarring. My primary work is usually my own children's education, from the teenager all the way down to the toddler. I am engaged most of the time in the same sort of thing I was doing when I was about 27. Suddenly, instead of mother of small kids I became for a couple of weeks the adult daughter caring for elderly and ill relatives. Never mind that I am technically the granddaughter here. This is the kind of thing that I associate with women whose own children are mostly grown; the women in my family who have spent a lot of time concerned about their parents' generation have done most of that in their own sixties. I got a taste of that this past couple of weeks. And I had more than a few moments of "Aren't I too young to be doing this?"

(But what else am I supposed to do, eh? My mother died twelve years ago at 54, leaving a gap between myself and Grandma, a wound that doesn't flare up often these days but that ached awfully these past few weeks.)

+ + +

So I nearly gave myself a plugged duct, I was away from my nursing toddler for so many hours. Trips to the hardware store, and hours scrubbing down bedframes and wiping surfaces, and moving things around in a dusty basement, standing up from time to time to stretch my back and adjust a paper dust mask that grew sweaty and moist as the hours went by.

Mark and I nearly got in a car wreck on one of those trips from the hardware store. It was just the two of us in the van, the seats folded down to store a thick stack of new packing boxes, and as I drove and came past the front end of a queue of cars in the turn lane, a sports car coming the opposite direction turned left directly in front of me. I stomped the brake to the floor and felt the anti-lock system pulsing back at my foot; I saw the sports car's rear quarter panel rotating towards me; Mark shouted, we braced for impact; and then we found ourselves still driving, unscathed, and both of us laughing nervously, genuinely shocked to find ourselves in the region of the multiverse where the collision did not happen.

+ + +

I spent time with my grandmother, walking at her speed, seeing a room with her eyes. Is this chair sturdy enough to lean on? How far is it to the next doorway? Should we take the steps which are closer, or go around the long, no-steps way? How will we hold this heavy door open wide enough to go through together, with her leaning on my arm?

I spent time explaining my ill relative's complicated insurance history, and history of poor self-care, to the social service staff at the skilled nursing facility. Privacy laws prevented them from telling me anything about my relative's condition, but no rule prevented me from, for example, warning them that my relative (and the relative's belongings) had come from a house terribly infested with bedbugs. (They were visibly grateful that I told them.)

In my grandmother's living room emptied of its infested furniture, sitting on wooden chairs and at a table pulled from various other rooms of the house, I met a representative from a company that provides in-home services to elderly people: laundry, light housekeeping, errands, meals, eventually more intense care. We discussed what Grandma needs and doesn't need. Gradually it became clear that Grandma, who knows what she wants and is completely mentally competent and financially solvent, does believe that she would benefit from having someone to come in and do her laundry, but emphatically does not want to bring in any hired helpers unless she is certain that doing so won't hurt my other relative's feelings.

In the privacy of the car, later, I wept. I gnashed my teeth.

+ + +

Meanwhile, my children were enjoying a last romp around Mark's parents' farm. Yes, a last romp: my in-laws are selling the twenty-something acres of orchards and fields and gardens and ponds, the barns and sheds and greenhouses and tractors. They are looking forward to a future with more travel, more visits to the grandchildren, more time with their three adult kids who live in three different cities. Time and attention if not love being a zero-sum game, that means less attention available for fruit trees and farmers' markets. The weeks we stayed were also weeks of watching my mother-in-law wonder how she was going to pack up her sewing room, weeks of wondering when that appraiser was going to come through.

The new house will be large enough to host us all at holidays, but there will be no farm nor field nor pond. We will miss it. It makes my heart hurt a little to think that my youngest son will not remember the old home place, nor sit on Grandpa's lap to steer the tractor. Mark has known other homes in his childhood, but I haven't known him or his family in any other place; it has been a home to me since before he and I were married.

But even though we are going to miss it, there is no denying the sense of downsizing now while the two of them don't actually have to, and can take the time to do it right. We have learned a lot from those two and they still have a lot to teach us.

+ + +

Illness, hospitalization, emergency surgery, and recuperation struck in what is left of my family of origin, too, at the same time as Grandma's crisis. My brother and I agreed: I would focus on helping Grandma and he would focus on helping in our family of origin.

This was certainly the best possible division of labor.

It left me introspective.

Time runs short for everyone, at every moment. And nothing we do, say, or wish -- not even when we happen to notice time running short -- can ever change a person who does not want to change. This is what "acceptance" can mean. It can even lead to forgiveness, of a particularly silent and one-sided type.

I am dead to you. This means that I am free.

I highly recommend dying to sources of harm, of mockery and deceit. I am certain that I am not the first person to come up with the idea.

+ + +

And then a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to help her start up an invitation-only FB group called "NFP After 40." A bit more than 20 women immediately accepted the invitations, all of us with a collective "WTF are we supposed to do now with what we're seeing here." I have a feeling I will be enjoying this group. Nevertheless, beginning to think collectively about menopause, coincidentally or not, certainly added to my feeling of having hit a tipping point.

+ + +

So what happened here? Why the sudden bout of wrinkly-navel-gazing? How is it that, if I feel that way now, I didn't feel that way before? It's not like I had been ignorant of my status among the middle-aged.

I guess... This past couple of weeks, Mark and I looked the future in the eye, just a bit. We contemplated disability, decline, disease, death. Sometimes you just can't avoid it.

When I say "This is the week I began to grow old" I do not mean, the start of a decline. I don't mean anything bad at all. Growing old is better than the alternative. I guess, it has been a kind of a wake-up call. I saw before me many different ways of growing older, this week. I think this was a week in which I grew wiser. I hope I will look back on it that way.

I know two things in a concrete way I didn't before. The wise person looks ahead with clear eyes and prepares for the future. And the wise person knows that the future can't, actually, be seen clearly.

What I do with this new knowledge, well, I am not sure yet. I suppose it depends still on the present.

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Sister things.

I started to read Laudato Si' last night, in bed with an iPhone, and didn't get very far into it before I was too sleepy to go on and had to put it down.  The dim rectangular afterimage of a glowing screen danced before my eyes for a few moments as I rolled over, snuggled in next to a baby, and let my mind wander.

Occasionally it's at this time that my brain makes odd connections.

+ + + 

I've written a little bit recently about Japanese author Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  Mostly I wrote about the practical advice on getting rid of stuff.  I haven't written so much here about what a deeply foreign book it seems to be.   I don't think the content must have been updated very much for an American audience.   Kondo is Japanese, and wrote for Japan.  

She takes for granted, for example, that the reader's home is laid out like a Japanese home.  Here she is on closets:

If you have built-in closets in your home, most of the things in your house can be stored inside them.  

Japanese closets are ideal storage spaces.  They are deep and wide, are divided into top and bottom by a broad and extremely sturdy shelf, and have a cupboard built into the wall above.

And on the "fatal mistake" of storing things near where they are to be used:

For people like me who are naturally lazy, I strongly recommend focusing storage in one spot... If it only takes ten to twenty seconds to walk from one end of your home to the other, do you really need to worry about the flow plan?

Yeah, she's not thinking about American ramblers, or four-level urban homes with detached garages.

And then there are little tidbits like this:

I once worked as a Shinto shrine maiden for five years.

A very noticeable feature of the whole book, one that is central to her concept, is a relationship with inanimate objects that can seem a little bit bizarre.  It fits right into my personal preconception of Japanese household culture, which I admit is heavily and almost exclusively influenced by Studio Ghibli movies such as My Neighbor Totoro, populated with strangely alive, anthropomorphic objects, down to spidery, googly-eyed balls of soot.

Anyway, to sum up, Ms. Kondo describes the process of selecting, storing, and using possessions as almost a dialogue between herself and the objects.  Here are a few selections from different parts of the book.

When you come across something that's hard to discard, consider carefully why you have that specific item in the first place.  When did you get it and what meaning did it have for you then?  Reassess the role it plays in your life... [If] that particular article of clothing has already completed its role in your life,... you are free to say, "Thank you for giving me joy when I bought you," or "Thank you for teaching me what doesn't suit me," and let it go.

...

Can you truthfully say that you treasure something buried so deeply in a closet or drawer that you have forgotten its existence?  If things had feelings, they would certainly not be happy....Let them go, with gratitude.  Not only you, but your things as well, will feel clear and refreshed when you are done...

...

When you are choosing what to keep, ask your heart; when you are choosing where to store something, ask your house.

...

This is the routine I follow... First, I unlock the door and announce to my house, "I'm home!" Picking up the pair of shoes I wore yesterday and left out in the entranceway, I say, "Thank you very much for your hard work," and put them away... I put my jacket and dress on a hanger, say, "Good job!" and hang them... I greet the waist-high potted plant by the window and stroke its leaves.  My next task is to empty the contents of my handbag ... Before closing the drawer, I say, "Thanks for all you did for me today." 

 So, this stuff is kind of weird.  A few amateur reviewers I've run into have described it as "delusional."  I think it's more that this comes from a culture, and a way of relating to inanimate objects, that most of us are not familiar with.  

It's not like Westerners don't anthropomorphize objects; it's just that we mostly do it when we're annoyed with them, as in "OUCH! Damn this car door!" when we slam our fingers in it, or "This stupid shopping cart doesn't want to roll straight!"  or sometimes when we need to pretend we are explaining them, like "This material won't dissolve in water because it's hydrophobic."

+ + +

So I had kind of brushed off the Kondo-isms as "probably just a Japanese thing."  And then I encountered something small and almost entirely unrelated that made me reconsider it in a slightly different light.

I only got a little way into Laudato Si' where there is a short discourse on St. Francis of Assisi.  In par. 11, Pope Francis briefly described the saint's attitude toward non-human things:

He communed with all creation, even preaching to the flowers, inviting them “to praise the Lord, just as if they were endowed with reason”.  His response to the world around him was so much more than intellectual appreciation or economic calculus, for to him each and every creature was a sister united to him by bonds of affection....

His disciple Saint Bonaventure tells us that, “from a reflection on the primary source of all things, filled with even more abundant piety, he would call creatures, no matter how small, by the name of ‘brother’ or ‘sister’”. Such a conviction cannot be written off as naive romanticism, for it affects the choices which determine our behaviour. If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs.

By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously. The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled.

Mind you, Francis (the pope) is mostly writing fairly narrowly here, about Francis (the saint)'s attitude towards "nature" -- by which we often mean plants and animals and the sea and the air and the earth, not always the collection of all objects around us.  That Saint famously called natural objects "brother" and "sister" because they, like us, are created by the Father.  His words remind us that in many respects, though we are persons and not objects we are more like to the rest of creation than we are to the Godhead.  They are words of humility.  But that's not all they are words of.

Some of what St. Francis was getting at, when he preached to birds and addressed "brother sun, sister moon,"  is gratitude.  Because that is what a Catholic vision of "respect for the natural world" must, in the end, be reduced to.  Respect is actually something owed to persons, and all "respect" for objects, natural or man-made, is really a respect for persons; the object is merely a means of transmission.  Example:  we show respect for, say, an American flag, not for its own sake, but because it's a way to visibly respect people who also share that flag, sometimes (as at a military funeral) very specific people.  

And we "respect" the natural world, not for its own sake, but (practically speaking) to steward it and share it for the sake of other people's livelihood, and (more fundamentally speaking) out of gratitude to God for making a gift of it to all of us.  Wastefulness and an attitude of total control risk us taking for granted this world of objects for which we should give thanks every day.

+ + + 

So, I told you that I sometimes make really odd connections when I'm drifting off to sleep.  I realize this is kind of a corny one.  I am not putting The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up on the same level as a papal encyclical.

But the slight cross-cultural glimpse into Kondo's world of paying little homages to her possessions connected in my mind with St. Francis calling creatures "brother" and "sister."   I think that there is something to be said for "speaking a language of fraternity and beauty" -- not just about blades of grass, vast canyons, colorful birds, cherries in bloom -- but even about the mean little things that we surround ourselves with, the things that we make, buy, and use.  

Kondo recommends addressing our excess things personally as a literal act that frees us from needing to cling to them.   She has you looking your possessions in the face, so to speak, and intentionally choosing which to let go.  It is not hard to imagine that, having practiced this small asceticism, one might find it easier to choose not to acquire so much in the first place.  To avoid waste not by keeping many things that "someday" you might use, but by never buying up so many things in the first place.  Treating useful or beautiful possessions "the way they want to be treated" -- that being a sort of shorthand for "the way that will keep them functioning for a long time."  Passing on things that still have some use in them, without dumping unwanted items on people.  While acknowledging that this is a bit of a corny connection to make, I wonder if it might not be a good practice to behold and handle each of our possessions with some spark of gratitude for each one to the God from whom all blessings flow.

John Paul II's life's work, one could argue, was spent teaching us not to treat persons as if they were objects.  

I could quip here that in this introductory part of Laudato Si', Francis is teaching us not to treat objects as if they were objects, either.   At least:  not objects "simply to be used and controlled."  

May we use objects?  Yes!  That is one of the things that separates them from persons.  We are not allowed to use persons.  We are allowed to use objects.

May we control objects?  To the extent that we can do so, yes.  Again, this is one of the things that separates them from persons.  We are not allowed to control persons all the way to their innermost being, who retain  their free will and capacity to use reason absolutely, and no one has the right to interfere with those.  We are allowed to control an object.

So the problem is in "simply" using and controlling them, I think.  There is at least one other thing we must do with all objects:  receive them with gratitude.  Not really for the sake of themselves, but for the sake of the one who gives them to us as gifts.

Montana trip, and a "we're not from around here" moment.

We're on our way back home after five days of skiing in Montana at Big Sky Resort. It is one of my favorite mountains to look at from the bottom:

And also from the top (well, midmountain anyway -- you'll have to ask Mark to take a photo from the actual top, because I don't go there):

 

Big Sky is now bigger since it bought up its neighboring little sister resort Moonlight Basin. This was a little bit of a disappointment for us, because we loved Moonlight (we've been there twice before); it was smaller and cheaper, with a homely little vibe that said "We are about skiing, not about seeing and being seen in your expensive gear."

Now it is bundled with the other side of the mountain, like the one good cable channel that you cannot buy unless you also buy all the others you don't mind watching but you really don't need. As I was putting on my boots in the parking lot for my first day, an older man with two young men -- my guess is it was his grown sons -- clomped by shaking his head, on his way back from the ticket office. "Things have sure changed," he said. "Next year I think we'll stay in town and drive up to Bridger."

But all the things we love about it are still there, so we had a great time even with a bit of sticker shock.

+ + +

Mark's dad and mom met us out there, which was what you call a win-win situation.

We got to visit with them, which is always a good time.

Chip, meet old block.

The kids all got some wonderful grandma-and-grandpa time. Especially the one member of the family who can't ski.

And that meant that the six of us who do ski had plenty of time on the slopes together.

The five-year-old skied from the lift for the first time this trip. Exciting!

 

And Mark and I even got in some time together, on the slopes and in the slopeside restaurant and in the hot tub outside on the deck with snow blowing down on us keeping our beer cold.

Sorry, no hot tub pics.

We chose the more expensive route of a slopeside (sort of) resort condo, instead of staying in town and driving to the hill, because that makes it much easier for me to come back and nurse the baby without it putting an end to my skiing day. While I am not usually prone to leave my nursing one-year-old behind for hours and hours in a single week -- I took the opportunity to spend some time skiing with my 14-yo and 11-yo.

(That's them, at the top of an expert gully called "Sticks and Stones." I took the picture, then skied around another way and met them at the bottom.)

 

Because babies don't keep, it's true, but neither do teenage boys who want to ski with their moms.

+ + +

We had more than eight hours' driving time ahead of us from Big Sky to Bismarck (whence I am writing this morning), so we left at six-twenty a.m. on Saturday. I usually drive the first shift, since I'm quite awake after I have had my coffee, but I gladly let Mark start the drive down to the mouth of the valley as he has logged more driving hours in the mountains than I have. It was dark and a bit drizzly, with some sloppy snow on the road, but the conditions were not slippery.

We sipped coffee from a thermos as Mark made his way down the winding mountain road. We had not yet reached the little village with its grocery store and gas stations, when Mark interrupted me to ask, "Are those cars flashing their lights at me?"

I looked up. There were not many cars on the road, but there were more of them driving up than down. Several came around the bend, and the posts strung along the median passed between us and their headlights, causing a flickering effect. But then I thought I saw one of them flash its brights at us. Or was it just the flickering? "I'm not sure. Do you have the brights on?" I leaned over to check and he squinted at the dashboard. No.

"I wonder if there's something wrong with the car?" We were both thinking of the cargo container strapped ti the top of our minivan, the one with all the ski gear in it.

"If it was loose it would be making some noise," I started to say, and then Mark interrupted me again.

"Look," he said, "there's another one flashing at us."

I thought I had seen it too. "That's weird," I said, "that guy only just came around the bend. He didn't have time to see us."

"That's what I thought, too," said Mark.

"The sign says there is a turnout in a quarter mile," I pointed out, "why don't you pull over and check the car. Be careful," I added.

On the mountain roads, when there is only one lane in each direction, the roadbuilders leave a turnout every so often, a place (usually on a curve) where a wider shoulder is carved out of the mountain. Slower cars and trucks can pull over there to let the faster drivers pass, so that each slow vehicle doesn't accumulate a long queue behind it as it makes its way down the curving road.

Mark pulled into the next one and leaned over to rummage through the glove compartment for the headlamp we keep in the car. "Be careful," I said again, "put the blinkers on," and he did and shut the door. I listened to the blinkers clicking on and off and watched the swinging shadows as he went all around the van with the headlamp in his hand. I watched his expression as he came in front of the car to look at the cargo container -- easy to imagine an "Oh shit" moment right the -- but there was no alarm, it must be fine.

"Nothing," he said, getting back in and buckling up. "I wonder..."

"Maybe we were imagining the flashing," I said. "Those posts in front of the headlights."

"Maybe," he said as we pulled out and headed around the next bend, "maybe -- HOLY COW!"

I looked up and saw the leaping shadows on the road in a strange shape that resolved itself before my eyes into a big, square rock -- maybe half the size of a small refrigerator -- right in the middle of the single northbound lane just ahead. There was room -- the next set of oncoming headlights was just coming around the next bend down hill -- Mark steered into the oncoming lane and around it, then back into our own lane. It was sharp-edged, roughly cube-shaped, and almost a meter on a side.

"Whoa," I said. My heart pounded.

"That was huge!"

"Thank you, Montana drivers," I said.

"No kidding," said Mark. "I was on edge and going slow because of the flashing. I knew it was something, and not a speed trap up here, but I didn't know what it was."

"I'm glad you were driving and not me," I said after a while.

"I wasn't going to say that," said Mark, "but I was thinking that."

 

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Deliberate heart-to-heart.

Last week this article from the NYT was making the rounds:

To Fall In Love with Anyone, Do This

More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes...

I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.

“Let’s try it,” he said.

It's a little bit scary to think that one could just make attraction and connection happen, rapidly, in such a way. On the other hand, most people trust in random interaction to bring them together with potential mates.

We have so little time to spare once we set out into adult life; maybe it makes sense, in some circumstances, to try to speed up the getting-to-know-you process. Arguably such a series of questions might help you spot red flags as well as attractive qualities in a potential partner.

(The 36 questions are here.)

The story, true to the tradition of journalists writing (partly) about scientific research, has seized on the aspect of the research which makes for the best story: the one with the happy ending. I would have been very interested to hear the stories of pairs of people who answered the set of personal questions and did not fall in love with each other. Was anyone repulsed? Did anyone stand up and say "I'm not going to do this any more" and leave the room? Did any subject later go out with friends and relate over drinks the hilarious story of the loser from the psychology lab?

I would think this is at least as important. Surely it is just as practical -- and more protective -- to be able to realize quickly that the attractive stranger across the table is not a good potential mate for you.

+ + +

I find myself wondering if a similar battery of questions could be devised for a broader purpose: sparking not romantic love, but friendship.

We are increasingly isolated from people in our physically proximate communities, turning instead for moral support to friends we've never met before in real life, linked by shared interest, and long-distance old-friend relationships maintained lightly via social media. These friendships by correspondence are as real and important as friendships carried on by letters have ever been, and in a way they illustrate how rapidly mutual affection, good will, appreciation, and charity can develop. With letters or emails or blog posts and comments, one can go straight to the intellect, giving and taking commentary and ideas at one's leisure, letting one side of the conversation percolate through the mind and memory before sitting down and composing a complete, and thoroughly spell-checked, thought.

I went out for breakfast a couple of weeks ago with a woman who lives a couple of blocks away and has two children whose ages closely bracket that of my 4th child. We'd been Facebook friends for a while, having met at a block party, and she had messaged me (weeks earlier) to ask if I had any thoughts about trying to stay connected to the neighborhood; she was feeling pressured by family to move out to the "safer" suburbs, and knew me as someone who planned to raise my family in the center city.

I really enjoyed talking to her, and we both lamented the difficulty of finding time to nurture real friendships among neighbors. The thing is, even though living near someone is no guarantee that you're going to hit it off or get along -- especially in areas that attract a diverse population, so that you could well find yourself surrounded by people who don't speak your language, or have entirely opposite social philosophy, or have a vastly different lifestyle -- it's incredibly useful to have neighbors who are friends and friends who are neighbors. The opportunity for mutual support, whether it's emergency babysitting, keeping a spare key, or bringing dinner over when someone is ill, is multiplied by the ease of offering that support across the backyard fence. And it's pleasant, too.

And yet: there is so little time. My neighbors mostly have children in school, of course -- not the same schools, since Minneapolis has many charter and magnet schools, and children bus all over town, further meaning that they aren't brought together with each other by commonalities in their kids' schedules. Certainly the schedules have little in common with that of my kids, who sleep till nine and stay up till eleven. There isn't time to build the kind of ongoing conversation that brings people into a real relationship. And why would we invest the time, in the unknown stranger across the backyard fence, when we can take that conversation back to our computers and get instant gratification from faraway friends we've already made?

I think the answer is to be more deliberate, to voice the wishes we have for "connection," to take it from abstract to personal. As awkward as it may be: "Let's try to become friends." Once we've grabbed coffee with that other mom after preschool music class, or played a lunchtime chess game with the guy from the cubicle down the hall, what if there was a fast way to move from casual acquaintance to more -- to "one of my good friends," to "buddy from work."

There are less efficient ways, even more ludicrous ways, than a questionnaire. But even the questionnaire is just an excuse, a peg on which to hang the real act of deliberate connection: revealing your real self with honesty, possibly to be disappointed, even rejected.

 

 

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Deliberately vague.

When I'm really in the habit of regular blogging, I find that I look at the world around me and at my regular, ordinary, lovely life with a journalist's eye.  I compose in my head.  I analyze my experiences, and thereby enjoy them twice.  I thirst for feedback -- checking the "comments" tab throughout the day -- wondering if people will enter into discussion with me.  I've met some wonderful people that way, some of them in real life.  Blogging is like letter-writing:  real connection, only with the advantage that you can throw it out scattershot and have a chance of "catching" some new interesting people that you might never have met.

Sometimes, though, the openness and the publicness of a blog makes us hesitate, doesn't it.

I know that a few bloggers have made their niche in the brutally-honest, tell-it-like-it-is genre. 

I am not one of those, I think.

+ + +

It's open.  It's public.  This isn't an anonymous blog, although I don't put my name on it in a prominent way.  Many people who know me in real life read it.  It's a way for me to keep in touch with them, and I appreciate that.  Also among my readers are a number of people that I hope someday to meet in person, but haven't had the chance yet.  I am so glad for the chance to trade thoughts with them.

Google Analytics tells me that I get a lot of pageviews from Moscow.  (Russia, not Idaho).  What's up with that?  Spam bots?  Dunno.  I guess I won't worry about those.

+ + +

One thing to keep in mind, when my writing trails off from time to time... is that I don't choose to publish here everything that I am thinking intensely about.  

(Please trust me for a moment to be up front with these facts:  Neither I nor anyone in my immediate family or support network is ill or in danger.  My marriage is happy, loving, and safe.  My children are well.  I am not in a spiritual crisis, nor a financial one.  If anything, the things that are on my mind have recently improved my outlook significantly.  So:  put worry for me out of your mind, if you have any.)

I have something on my mind that I prefer not to share.  I almost wrote "that I'm not free to share" -- but that's not quite right; I'm completely free to write what I want.  I believe it would not be right to share it, so I choose not to.  

And yet, I wish I could.  I'm bursting with a sort of epiphany I recently had.  I understand something that I didn't understand before, or, at least, I have a new interpretation of the facts.  And that interpretation has changed so much.

+ + +

Did you ever see the movie The Sixth Sense?  (Spoilers ahead.)  

You know how -- at the very end -- unless you figured it out along the way -- the viewer suddenly realizes that the way that she has been interpreting every scene in the movie was basically wrong?  The film suddenly offers an alternative interpretation -- and thinking back over the film, the viewer realizes that it changes the entire meaning of every scene.

What's more, that new interpretation almost instantly provides the protagonist with the answer to the problem that has haunted him from almost the beginning of the film to almost the end. 

That's the kind of thing I mean.  I have an alternate interpretation of many scenes from the past.  

Experiences that were baffling, now are grounded in a coherent theory.  In that light, the scenes make sense, fit together.

And in that light, a problem that has been gnawing at me for years has seemingly withdrawn, lifted off, and... just blown away.

+ + +

I can't know if the interpretation -- the theory -- is correct.  No, really -- I can't know.  There is no fact-checking in my power that can confirm it.  On the other hand, there's nearly no likelihood that any facts will arise that can controvert it.  This hypothesis is testable, but it is not likely to be tested, and if it were I would not be permitted to know the outcome.  

But the new idea suggests to me a certain plan of action that I hadn't thought of before.  If I am right, it is, I believe, the best plan.  So if I assume that I am right, I know what to do now.

But the brilliant bit is that this newly conceived plan of action is also an acceptable plan, possibly even an excellent one, if I am wrong.

Hence:  the lightness of heart.  The lifting of a weight.  Long have I struggled between conflicting duties and desires.  Suddenly the waveforms coalesce and I have all the  information I need.

+ + +

But at the same time I have some grieving to do.  Because certainty comes always at a cost, and here the cost is the death of a particular measure of hope.

Not Hope but a hope, a garden-variety ordinary one.  The kind of hope one can place in a human being.

That hope out of the way, I can leave more room for the capital-letter kind to blossom.

I have a sorrow, but it's better than what I had before.  I am grateful for it.  I am grateful for clarity, for sorrow -- because I know what to do with sorrow -- and for hope that is finally placed where it belongs.

+ + + 

And I choose not to go into more detail. 

But it's not because I don't have anything more I would like to say.  

It's just... not what I choose.   Not right now.  

So, yes, I'm deliberately vague.   I am not anonymous.  I could have written nothing, but instead I wanted to write something.  So I wrote this.    After weeks and weeks of constipated writing, jammed up inside with The Post I Want To Let Out But Won't. 

I have a name, and them's the breaks.

+ + +

To reiterate:  I am well.  My family is well.  My work is satisfying.  My health is good.  I see more clearly than I had before, and I am -- in a way I wasn't before -- free.

But you'll just have to take my word for it.