Resolving a practical question, Aquinas-style

Quaestio: Whether or not it is the case that my research assistant, R, is irreplaceable.

Obj: It seems no.  We must distinguish between her replaceability and the ease of her replacement. While a smart cookie, R's skillz match those of competent researchers elsewhere. The difficulty lies in finding said researchers during the summer, and convincing them to work for only 8.50 an hour. But even in that case, it remains possible to find a replacement, though perhaps unlikely.

Obj: It seems no. R can retain all of her virtues, and retain them personally, yet it still remains that those virtues find their source in an omnipotent Provider.  Thus, because she participates but does not instantiate those virtues, she is, by nature, replaceable by that in which she participates.

On the contrary: David confirms, "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well." [Ps. 139]

Though all R's skills and virtues can be found elsewhere, she is nevertheless irreplacable as a beloved creature of God, made by grace for His pleasure and delight and for ours as we live in Him.

Reply to obj. 1: One must distinguish between the replaceability of R's skills and virtues with the replaceability of her person.  As one's person is not reducible to what one does, and as one is in unqiue posession of one's own person, it then follows that R in se is irreplaceable, and that that sense of irreplaceability, since it resides in being and not in ephemeral doings, is actually the most important of all.

Reply to obj. 2: Of course God is eminently able to provide me with either Himself or another of His creatures that participates in many if not all of R's virtues.  Who wouldn't want the Logos as their research assistant?  That God possesses what we only participate in does not make us replaceable.  In fact, that we exist at all and therefore can (and always already) participate in what God possesses uniquely confirms our irreplacability as creatures of utterly superfluous grace. The divine economy is always one of grace and superaddition, not efficiency.  All that has been made is by its created nature gratuitous; by extension, that which has been made cannot be truly replaced by its Maker, since the difference between possession and participation is too absolute.

Freshmen Pre-Reading

In the summer of 1997 I graduated from high school, passed my 18th birthday, and saw with a fellow soccer player my first rated-R movie: The English Patient. I remember the post-practice itch on my shins from the shinguards and propping my legs up on my over-sized practice bag, bulging with cleats, extra socks, water bottles, hair bands, braces for ankles, my left knee's custom-fit carbon exoskeleton, athletic tape, and a spare turtleneck still hanging around from the winter season. We had come to the theater from a day at soccer camp, and we smelled of sweet girl-sweat and grass and chlorine.  We were practically alone in the theater that afternoon, but we still covered our eyes during the sexy parts and took turns peeking to see when it was safe to look again. I remember liking the movie for its artsy-ness (the comparison of a desert to a woman's back still lurks in my imagination), but I don't think I really understood it very well.

A few short weeks later, I received notice from my college-to-be that they were asking the entire freshman class to read Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient to be discussed together during freshmen orientation.  I read it, but can't remember any provocative or interesting conversations that it started. The fault for that failure lies less with the book than with freshmen, who (myself included) were far more interested in comparing SAT's, taking internet personality quizzes together that purported to tell you what kind of medieval personality you had (White Knight, for the record), and hanging out in the dorm hallways lighting Peeps on fire.

Apparently, assigning pre-reading has become common among the top-tier colleges, and a recent report by a "back to the classics" association of scholars (as far as I can tell) surveyed the choices.  13 years ago, my alma mater chose a novel that had been premiered in the same summer as a movie, thinking perhaps that such a choice would be "relevant" to the students. From what I can see of the study, the principles of selection employed now-a-days are pretty similar.  The overwhelming majority of books assigned were written in the last decade, many of which were bestsellers or of great topical interest, such as Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (also a 2007 film).  The only four pre-1900 books read were Huckleberry Finn, Walden, Frankenstein, and the Communist Manifesto, read at only 6 of 290 programs.  The report, claiming in passing that they could detect a liberal political bias in the selections, largely aimed at making the colleges more self-aware about how their selections match up with their aims and whether or not books of recent topical interest (and frequently less challenging reading) can fill the bill as well as books of proven merit (in other words, those regarded as classics).

One aim of such a program was to have at least one book in common amongst freshmen from various curricular backgrounds and who will quickly specialize.  In the Inside Higher Ed piece that reports this story, one college official objected that the program aimed at creating community, not a common foundation for an intellectual conversation.  Another noted that easily read books covering current events are essential, since the students won't necessarily have the professors guiding their conversations. What seems clear is that while the Freshman summer read is a popular trend in higher ed, precisely what it is aimed at achieving is a bit more murky.

This caught my eye because a colleague of mine recently assigned his incoming freshmen to read Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book.  Love Adler or hate him, you have to admit that you can learn a lot from him about what it means to seriously study (and not just quickly ingest and spew for a test) a book. Students who have struggled with reading slowly during their first semesters at college have emerged from reading this book with dewy eyes, a sigh of relief, and renewed enthusiasm, exclaiming, "If only I'd read this sooner I wouldn't have wasted so much time re-reading ineffectively!" Unlike a summer read of the Kite Runner or even Huck Finn--an exercise which may, or may not, inculcate critical thinking, community, or whatever else they're supposed to do--a read of Adler's book actually prepares you to be a student in an explicit way. So few college freshmen come with the ability to read and analyze a complex book well, even on the most literal level. I can't remember how good of a reader my 18-year-old summer self was, but my guess: not that great, valedictorian or no. I can't remember much of the English Patient (even with the movie's prompts), but I don't think it deserved the burden of trying to independently usher me into "critical thinking", "community", or "issues". I'd rather take the commen-sense advice of Adler, and then get the advantage of adapting it with a faculty mentor to how I think and learn. So kudos to my colleague, for that's exactly what he's doing with his students as they prepare to slog through the classics and the not-so-classic.

Holidays as a Moral Imperative

A holiday is a luxury, and yet I feel in a small sense morally obliged to take one if I have the means to do so.  Taking a holiday for me is like having wine at dinner; it goes beyond necessity into a kind of properly human virtue. Wine bespeaks festivity, a holiday, leisure. Both are jolly with a delight in superfluity.

Leisure poses a challenge to me. I seek out activity--usually intellectual and relational--and find it difficult to rest. During Lent I gave up reading blogs and other forms of internet-delivered news. I was surprised to find the wheels of my mind restlessly spinning. I'm tempted to pile on metaphors here: I kept looking for sneaky ways to supply grist for my mind's mill, fodder for thought. My mind felt like a sewing machine running and clacking and whirring but without any thread in the needle. Josef Pieper writes of restless activity as a species of sloth, which masquerades as the virtue opposite to a dull indolence. For Pieper, the opposite of sloth is not busy-ness, but leisure. My inability to quiet the vain chatter of my mind in the darkness of the nights as I nursed Al shows that this is a sin to which I am prone.

My busy indolence has come even more to the foreground with parenthood. As a mother who is trying to work and be present to her baby, I feel the ticking of time passing as steady forward pressure on my back. If Al is asleep, a million things deferred cry for my attention, and I rush from dishes to laundry to emails to paperwork until she wakes. I wonder sometimes if working is a red herring here, though. I feel "on call" for Al at any time, day or night, and I never know when she will need me, so I rush my other tasks to be ready and available and fully present. I suspect non-gainfully-employed me would feel little different.

So all the more, a holiday has become a moral imperative. It is something I ought to do. And yet, to do it puts another task on my list: planning! But what is another task, really? The list is never all crossed off anyways. I need to learn to live well with my list, and not make myself a slave to its seeming demands.

Side-Sleeping

She squirms, scrunches her legs up, knees crooked, and tilts to her right. Always to her right. In a little while, she will dig her face into the mattress, twisting her torso even more, but the end of the mattress blocks further rotation and she is, for the moment, stymied. Slow rhythmic breathing attests to the singular fact: all this has been done while she is yet asleep. Soon, she will slowly uncurl; it is barely perceptible in the grey of our darkened bedroom, but you suddenly are sure that her arm has unbent, her hand unfurled like a flag of surrender. If you're unlucky, her frustrated attempts thrust consciousness upon her and she begins to cry herself awake. If you're lucky, she sighs and continues to sleep. But if you're very lucky, she does it all over again while you smother giggles and try to convince yourself to stop watching and go to sleep.

Product versus Process

While trolling through some notes on book and article publishing, I discovered an old book recommendation for junior faculty: Wendy Belcher's Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks (the intro and first chapter are available as free samples from the publisher's website).  I ordered it from our library and printed out the samples and have been working through it ever since.  It's tempting to think of oneself as above "how-to" guides, but frankly, I'm not that unique nor the exception to the rule.  This is a recurring theme in my life these days: I'm not so different from everyone else, and that's just fine.

The most powerful epiphany I've had so far came from an exercise where you scribble down the emotions you have about writing.  I immediately separated those emotions into two categories: the writing I do for my job and the writing I do for myself.  Writing for the job elicited a host of negative feelings like guilt, burden, isolated, paralyzed, inadequate; writing for myself, however, turned words like joy, freedom, silliness, eagerness.  Why such a difference?  Clearly, I like to write, so why does it all turn so sour when I think of writing in my area of most intense study?

I realized that what sabotaged my professional writing was my preoccupation with the product.  Rather than enjoying the process, I was plagued by fears about the outcome.  Would it be publishable? In the right places? Will it "count" for promotion? Will it undermine publishing my book (currently on hold)?  When I write for myself, I am at leisure, enjoying just rolling words around the page, crafting them (at least a little bit), making jokes.  I am unhurried and free.  Nothing constrains my choice of subject, my length, or my quality.  I can just write, and delight in it.

To bridge this gap, I have decided to stop obsessing about what's "best" to publish, and just focus on what I'd enjoy writing up.  I will pray to be faithful and truth-loving in my process, and pray that God would make the product glorifying to Himself, regardless of what it does for me.  I know I cannot control outcomes in the lives of my students or my family; now I realize that I cannot do so for writing either, no matter how much it seems that it is I alone who make this product.

A Scale is Never Neutral

This morning, I walked into the women's restroom in our administration building and was surprised to find a scale tucked into the corner. My thoughts went something like the following:

Why is this here?

Is there one in the men's bathroom too? I bet there isn't!

Oh, calm down - maybe someone is just trying to lose some weight and this is helping her.

But still! how is this not a suggestion to every woman in this building that she needs to measure up and might be failing?

Who can I complain to about this?

Wait, I wonder how much I'm weighing these days, after Al's birth...hmmmm.....

Wait, if I weigh myself, am I showing myself totally hostage to an image-based assessment of myself?

Relax and stop overanalyzing - just have a look at how much you tip the scale

[check to see if I can read it without my glasses]

Shoes or no shoes? No shoes.

[Result: just shy of 150, near my pre-pregnancy weight]

Hunh. That was unexpected.  I weigh practically what I weighed before, but still have lots of new pooches.  How does that work? Will they ever go away?

Should I feel guilty that I weighed myself?

...Well, at least now I have something to write my 500 words about!

As a woman in this culture, a scale is never neutral; it poses a dilemma and a temptation. 

During most of my pregnancy, I ignored the scale except when at the doctor's office.  Since I lost weight early on due to feeling sick to my stomach, I was happy to be gaining weight, happy to eat just about any full meal, no matter how atypical.  Somehow, In 'N Out burger never seemed to pose problems to my appetite, even though home-cooked chicken stew was noxious to me.  I'm not even sure what I weighed towards the end (I think just over 170, just shy of 25 pounds of gain) and I didn't care what I weighed in the first 6 weeks after birth. But after those first two months, people start wondering aloud at you about your weight. My dear mother, bless her, started hinting that we should get out and walk the pounds off together. I was (and still am) still wearing maternity clothes and began to wonder when (and if) I would get a semblance of my body back. The necessity of buying new (and bigger) clothes loomed before me. Even affirming comments ("wow, you already look great!") prompt internal criticism ("I guess she can't see the pooch, and the extra loads in the legs and arms that tighten my sleeves and necessitate wide-leg pants"). 

My body is not only a bit larger; it has changed its overall shape from pear to hourglass/apple. After years of dressing as a "pear", I no longer know how to dress myself. Nursing has wreaked havoc on my ability to fit into tops: to get shirts to fit on my ample top (and be easy to nurse with), they have to be huge on the bottom as well as long for my lengthy torso.  Hence, I'm still wearing maternity shirts! And let's not talk about bathing suits beyond the observation that with a long back and a nursing upper half, the tankini is the only option.  As there are almost no modest tankini's with the ability to support my upper half, hoochie-mama here I come. 

Nursing mothers typically need to consume lots of water and about 500 extra calories a day. I'm hungry all the time, and mostly crave sweets. Just drinking water doesn't do it for me, but give me some juice (or even better, a Jamba Juice!) and I'm in heaven...until the extra calories pull me back to purgatory.  Now I feel that I have "watch what I eat" and just be a bit hungry all the time so I don't gain weight.

So here I am, an educated, confident woman, slightly obsessed with her weight and body. Much as I know my own value in the sight of God and those who love me is secure, I am not immune to the siren song of the scale and what I think it purports to say about me. 

The dilemma posed to me was to know or not to know a measure that says little about my overall health or about my self.  Idle curiosity versus a pretense of indifference. If I truly were indifferent, it would be no dilemma.

The temptation posed to me was to use the scale's measure as a measure of things beyond my weight: of my self-discipline, of my time management, of my desirability to Pancho, of my professional stature (sadly, pudgy women professors command less respect). It could never have been registered as anything but a rebuke.  I could have weighed in at my college weight (135) and still felt chastened. 135? Nice going! Now you have to weigh even less to lose this extra pudge! That it doesn't matter what the scale says shows how I already tie the scale's measure to a critical view of my body and my self. In that sense, the scale only furnishes me an opportunity to articulate what I already think about myself. It is a mirror only in the sense that it shows me what I already imagine myself to be. Thus, it is no mirror at all, but a canvas upon which I paint my self-caricature.

Freed from sin and from the wounds inflicted on me by our image-obsessed culture, I will one day relish tiptoe-ing onto the scale out of a true and holy curiosity that can look at any number as a fact about the world and about myself to be celebrated and enjoyed. I will be able to walk into a bathroom with a scale and regard it as a child, who will feed a quarter to to that giant scale staunchly stationed on the train platform. Neat! I get to see how much I weigh - how fun!

Writing Retreat

My university is generously sponsoring a writing retreat this week on campus, and, thanks to Grandma and Abuelita, I am attending all three days.  In fact, I'm there right now.  I have realized that I am so woefully out of practice writing that I'm having an inordinate amount of difficulty just setting down to it.  Thus, each day, one of my goals will be to write at least 500 words about anything.  Anything.  Just to write will be enough.  To give myself some bare accountability, I will post said 500 words each day on this blog.  

Sorry about that!

I have to run back to Al now, so my first day is a bit of a wash, since I only re-drafted an old post on coffee (below) and wrote this.  I will try to get a few more words in later today while Al sleeps.  If that is to no avail, I will START my writing day tomorrow with my 500 words. NO MATTER WHAT. 

See you tomorrow!

More on the Moka

Thanks to Jones Coffee Roasters of Pasadena I've been enjoying some pretty top-notch espresso made in the moka, and I've learned a lot from making a couple of hundred cups in this method so far. My rubber gasket was looking pretty worn, so I replaced it two days ago and discovered something interesting:

The newer the gasket, the lower the temperature of the flame and the less packed the grinds there needs to be.

Also:

Once you've brewed your preferred serving size in the moka pot, pour immediately. The best part of the brew occurs in the first seconds. This may mean that more may sputter out after you pour and that you make larger servings than you drink. Forget about the leftover coffee and throw it down the drain.

In fact, I now believe that the fit with the gasket makes quite a lot of difference to the finished result. Here's why: after I fitted my new gasket in, I made myself an espresso the way I always do, and suddenly the pot behaved very differently. It was back to sputtering and spitting quite early on in the brew, just as it had at the very beginning when I was learning how to use it. Sputtering in this way usually leaves you with boiled coffee - not terribly yummy. I prefer to have the brew escape in a slow, steady fashion. It's safer too! When it did this at first, I blamed the water temperature and the grind, but now I think it was a matter of temperature and amount of grinds.

For your reference, an earlier fact-finding mission on the web discovered this helpful link. And my recent read of acclaimed coffee guru Kevin Knox's (of The Coffee Review) book Coffee Basics has panned the moka pot as a general killer of coffee in comparison to the virtues of the French press, Aeropress (his and our favorite for best coffee taste), and paper cone filter methods. From Knox I also learned the true shelf-life of coffee and the true shelf-life of ground coffee (hours if not in an airtight container, about a week max if in an airtight container away from light and heat). Since I preferred buying moka grind (thinking that it was the key to the perfect moka brew), Knox helped me see that I was drinking stale coffee within a few days of opening the canister. So a new tip:

If you buy ground coffee, store it in a airtight canister in a cool, dark place and drink it within a week, or sooner. Or just don't buy it ground.

Experience proved him right: I had a week-old Jones Cara Mia espresso in the canister and compared it to fresh ground from that day. There is no comparison. The freshly ground coffee was so dramatically superior I began to wonder why I drank the other instead of, say, Folgers or some other such horror. But I simply can't make it through 1/2 lb. of coffee in a week (especially not as a nursing mother). So I'm a bit stuck: either I waste coffee (and take a trip out to Jones every single week) or get inconsistently ground coffee that might affect the quality of the brew (the jury is still out on that one). My current halfway house idea is to buy the 1/2 lb. at Jones (the smallest increment they sell), and then have them grind HALF of that, and take the rest home whole bean. Next time, Jones, next time...

When all is said and done, though, using a moka is a finicky way of brewing yourself coffee and tends to burn the coffee at least a little (and sometimes a lot, if you don't watch out or don't know what you're doing). Which is just as I'd like it to be. Who wants an easy way to brew? That takes half the fun out of making yourself some coffee. I want to fiddle and faff and have a good half-dozen mini-steps or tips to make it come out juuuuust right.

Coffee is no mere beverage or energy drink; coffee is leisurely activity.