Rhubarb Pie

Sage Advice

A long time ago you wrote a post about how a professor of yours abruptly and impatiently summarized a deep, complex undergraduate personal dilemma by saying, "Yes, well, you have imperfect choices in an uncertain world."  You wrote about how that blew your mind, wise as it was, and how it got you unstuck. 

I've been thinking about that post because I get to sit and listen to complex undergraduate personal dilemmas, sometimes seven or eight or even (on busy Thursdays) up to thirteen a day.  They are complex and deep, some of them, and all of them are important and personal and sometimes paralyzing to the students.  And a lot of times I can help unstick a student by saying something like what your professor did. You have imperfect choices in an uncertain world.  It's possible that you might fail at this thing.  Someday, someone you would like to impress might judge you unfavorably based on this choice.  You can't do everything. When you choose one thing, you are choosing not to do something else.  I am not gruff and impatient, and I don't mean to diminish the difficulty of imperfect choices in an uncertain world.  But it is the great gift of adulthood and age and failing at things and emerging resilient that you get less paralyzed.  I work with students who are so very, very bright, so gifted and curious and ambitious and driven and warm-hearted and engaged with the world.  All I've got on them is age and its share of failures and successes and the lack of fear that comes with realizing that the world rewards courage much of the time, that most people want to help, that few people expect perfection.  What surprises me is how often my perspective does seem to help.

Today, re-reading that beautiful beautiful post you wrote, reminds me also how lucky I am to know you.  Thanks for being so wise and brave and so generous with your insights.  And, yes, strong. 

When it's over, I can wear the singlet when I fight crime.

The big day is tomorrow.  So far, I'm mostly chill about the whole thing.  I'm bummed 'cause I'm sick.  I don't remember getting sick in the past couple years and I get sick now?  I'm past the fever and ache-y stage, now it is all respiratory.  I'm hoping that doesn't make filling my body with air difficult.  Well, there's nothing to be done.

The big news is that my rival from the morning workouts hurt her back working out yesterday*.  She's out.  Now who has a natural lifting body?  My too-tall back is fine.

I look at the singlet and I just shake my head.  I remember each step of how I got into lifting and I remember the choices I made.  Shoot, I may even have written them down.  But somehow none of that adds up to the fact that I'm in a powerlifting meet tomorrow.  I'm going to put that on and do what in front of my family and friends?  I lift things?  For sport?  For the life of me, I can't think how I got here.

*More seriously, I wish she hadn't gotten hurt.  It is better to go up against opponents for real, win or lose.  And I don't want anyone to be hurt.

I like 'Yes and'.

Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod.  Have we talked about this before?  I wrote about it before, a long time ago.  Following and escalating a silly concept is my favorite humor.  (Maybe my only humor?  Slapstick breaks my heart and puns come from Satan.  I must like other types of humor, but I'm not thinking of them.)  Chris and Anand and my sister are so good at it.  My lifting group is good at it.  Yesterday we started cheering for the baby warm-up lifts like they were the most serious intense attempts ever.  That was very funny, um, at the time amongst the few of us. 

I understood it better when I learned about the improv concepts of offer and acceptance.  The imaginary what-if is an offer that the person is holding out to you.  She's trying to give you this present, of an idea and a chance to play.  I don't actually like when it goes unremarked, because then the person I'm talking to just turned down the offer.  In improv they call it denial or blocking.  I call people who do that "fun-sucks".  They suck the fun out of the air, act like dampeners on the whole room1.  So, no.  I don't really click with them.

I've never thought about whether I like to talk about the real or the imaginary.  I should watch for that.  Mostly I like to assert the imaginary as real and then wait for it to come true.  When you move here, we will grill veggies on the porch all summer long.

Question

I've noticed something lately, that I hardly have words for.  I sat at a meal with someone I didn't know very well, and someone I did know.  We started talking about something I'd learned -- the existence of another book group, actually, that might be as hard-core as ours.  And the person I did know jumped right into a conversational pattern that I do all the time with my best friends: imaginary what-if.  "You should challenge them." I riffed on that.  We should have a tug of war.  No, better, we should have a book-analysis competition.  No, better, we should assign them a book and then watch them discuss it and then tell them all the points they didn't discuss. 

What I noticed was how flat the other person at the table was.  This game, this imaginary what-if conversation, wasn't fun.  She wanted to talk about real life.  She didn't mind us jumping into it, but I could tell that she thought it was a little silly, and she was waiting for the real conversation to come back, the one that dwells in the here-and-now and the probable. 

I noticed that and a big click went off in my head, and I've been thinking about it ever since.  The truth is I pretty much hate conversations about real life.  Do I really hate them?  No, that's not true.  They have their place.  There's a certain necessity, and even a certain beauty, in speaking about what is.  But almost always, those conversations are jumping off points.  I like the part where we get into imaginary.  I like the humor and rapid-fire banter of crazy silly imaginary-what-if conversations.  But I also like the "I wonder what that means about the person who said that thing to you," kinds of questions.  I like going from facts in real life to hypotheses, or patterns, or lessons.  Why are these facts significant? What meaning is there to be construed from them? What larger purpose do they represent? 

There are people who mostly like to talk about facts in real life.  They think those conversations are real, and the others, about the invisible stuff, the imaginary what-if games or the speculations about motives or patterns or possibilities -- they think those are time wasters.  Once I noticed this, I wondered why I hadn't noticed it before.  Those are people I don't have an easy time clicking with.  When I get stuck in a conversation that has no possibilities besides the exchange of facts in real life, I feel a little desperate and trapped.  I can do it of course.  But it's not much fun.  Are you like this, too?    

It makes one long for other colors.

You are right, darlin'.  This time of year, the trees are barely what they should be.  The palette in January is all purples, a few reds, not much else.  Gloomy colors, but they're the first promise that spring will come, so we love them anyway.
 

Pretty little darker purple magnolia.

I love, love, love Hardenbergia. 

Looks like a stonefruit of some sort.

A very handsome magnolia.

Even the cauliflowers are purple!

Even the new foliage on the roses!

What Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Strong

Dear friend, I know that you are curious about the character-building environment here in northern New England.  I can assure you that it is full of challenges, all of which are great opportunities for personal growth.  Living in a sunshine-flooded world dripping with citrus fruits and honey hasn't taught you the personal stamina that we Mainers know.  I guess that's why you have to lift heavy objects for fun.  When I want to test the vigor of my back and shoulders, I just wait for the next snowstorm. 

Our furnace stopped working the other day.  It got cold.  This teaches stamina way better than any kind of bench press. 

We got lots of snow the other night. Until we close on the house we're selling, I get to shovel two driveways.  How many driveways do you get to shovel?  

But look how pretty the trees are on campus.  This kind of vertical snow adhesion happens when a storm starts out with mist and ice and sleet, and then the snow is blown horizontally, and it sticks to the wet icy surfaces.  Your trees are pretty and all, with their "leaves" and their "flowers."  But can they do this?

Big day.

I'm going to this meeting, on how to hold a Constitutional Convention.  I'll tell you all about it when I get back.

Our friend had a shaky meet, but was amazed we came out for him. Of course.

I've been such a grinch about competing that I think I should mention that I do like some parts of it.  Saturday morning, a few of us from the gym went to watch a kid from the gym compete in Olympic lifts.  It was a small local meet of the sort I complain about, and it was very, very sweet. 

I love watching the support when a competition has a good vibe.  I love when people cheer for a scrawny kid who isn't lifting much.  He's working as hard as anyone, so I love when the (small, sparse) crowd gets behind him.  The announcer was kind and casual.  When someone missed a lift, he'd say assuredly, "He had a lot of speed on that one, so he'll come back and make that lift on his next attempt."  It must be nice to hear that over the loudspeaker, you know?  I like watching coaches tell their lifters they'll make it, watch them fail, give them a correction and tell them they'll make it.  I like how coaches draw their lifters in for a hand on the shoulder or pound on the back or some other touch after a lift.

For all that I snark about amateurs, I also don't run out of stuff to watch.  We're all joking about the singlets, but I always think people's bodies are beautiful.  I like seeing that musculature and different builds.  There were a lot of high school kids there, and it was fun to see how different they are.  One kid had the most amazing concentration.  He was lifting in the heavy rounds, but his focus was the thing that stood out.  I like seeing people come off the platform, lift or fail, and get a clasp on the shoulder from the coach and a breakdown of what to think about for next time.  You'd think it would wear out, but the drama of seeing someone try, fail, and try again never gets old.

I'm still a grinch about competing.  I still think it is the price one has to pay for the good part, the training.  But I've told you how much I hate it, so I should also tell you about the parts I like.

Now we taper.

I only have a couple minutes before guests arrive, but I wanted to get these up.

We're a week out, and my recent (and all time) maxes are:

Bench press: 135 lbs   (I feel like this is low, relative to my size.)
Squat: 185 lbs  (Decent, and I like that it is proportionate to my deadlift.)
Deadlift: 255 lbs.

Obviously I wish all of them were higher, but that's where we are going into my meet.  In a week we find out how I respond on competition day.

(Also, the trainers are (in the kindest way) trying to prep me for a loss to this other girl at the gym.  "She just has a lifting body," they say.  "She's much shorter, so everything is easier for her.  Shorter distances to lift, shorter levers to haul about.  She's just build for it."

I can't believe that after all those years of being too short and stocky for tkd, I am now too tall and willowy for lifting.  BOOOO!!!)

I Did A Sneaky Thing To My Book Group This Weekend

I gave my book group a pop quiz.  It's never been done in the history of this book group, which is a long and storied group indeed, but they took to it quite well.  (Question 3 -- True or False: "There is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried.") We read The Black Prince, by Iris Murdoch.  It's a complicated book, and good, good, good.  But it's hard.  This is the biggest breakthrough I have had in my Year of Planned Reading. Knowing that I have plenty of time to read, I am less headlong and impatient about my reading.  It doesn't seem crazy to read a book twice.  In fact, it seems necessary. 

In How to Read a Book, Adler and Doren recommend that.  They say, read it through the first time to get the gist.  Skim it, really.  Notice what you understand and what you don't.  Then go through again and read it for real.  Your second reading will be better because you understand what the whole is, and you have a sense of what you missed in the first pass, so you can focus on that and incorporate it into the whole.  This makes so much sense!  I have been a lazy reader for a long time.  Lazy?  Well, more like, impatient, dashing through books and carrying away only my hasty impressions.  Worse, I have often blamed the author.  If an ending was ambiguous, or I didn't fully understand something, I blamed the author for being unclear, even though I hadn't done any work at all. 

Not that I'm fully reformed, yet.  But it is great to have permission to read a book twice.  They say that any book that's worthwhile is worth that attention, and of course, any book that isn't worthwhile, there's no harm in just skimming it and abandoning it after that cursory read.  It's starting to make sense, a more deliberate approach.

Anyway, Iris Murdoch has now been responsible for two complex, exciting, and mysterious books, and it's nice to know there is a whole shelf full of others that I've not yet read.  The Black Prince is a book I didn't understand when I closed the cover the first time.  I'm not sure I fully understand it now, although after writing the pop quiz and arguing about it with the supersmart ladies of my book group I am closer. 

Here's the pop quiz, in case you want to play along at home.  Nobody got a hundred, not even me. Download Book Group Pop Quiz