February 4, 2022

February 4, 2022 By

Got an e-mail reminder that registration is still open for the Catholic Writers Guild’s online conference this coming weekend.  If you are an aspiring Catholic writer, you should give serious thought to attending this conference.

(FYI: I forget what the clergy & religious rate is, but it’s generally *very favorable* so follow the instructions to inquire. If you qualify for it, you’ll very much like the discount.)

My experience with the CWCO:

I showed up for my first online conference with the CWG as someone who had always enjoyed writing, was the go-to person for office writing jobs, and at the time I’d just started blogging anonymously as a first foray into writing for a public audience.  My first conference did two things for me:

  • I learned about the publishing industry and what, as a writer, I needed to do in order to be published.
  • I took several writing workshops that radically improved the skill level of my craft.

I came into the conference as someone who loved to write and who had plenty of practice writing, but whose formal training had ended at the level of English 101. So the conference was my entry course in professional writing, for both fiction and non-fiction.  It was absolutely invaluable.

The other thing the conference did was introduce me to the Catholic Writers Guild.

Is the CWG for you?

As someone with no connections in the publishing world and no experience* or training in professional writing, the Catholic Writers Guild was the thing, the one thing, the life-changing thing that eventually led to my getting published.

However, let me caution you: Just joining doesn’t do the magic.  You’ll benefit from the guild if you get actively involved volunteering.  I met people across the industry while volunteering to work at the CWG’s conferences.  I gained experience by taking on projects within the day-to-day operations of the guild.  Through the process of doing that work — and it is work — I built relationships with other writers who shared my interests.

If you’re already a pro and you already have a path laid out for you in publishing the kinds of works you want to publish, then you probably don’t need the CWG.  You might enjoy it, but professionally it’s not going to be your sole lifeline.  In contrast, if you’re new to the writing industry, and especially if you are new to Catholic publishing and don’t know where to begin in accomplishing your goals, the CWG can absolutely help you succeed as a Catholic writer.

Is there a market for Catholic fiction and non-fiction?

Let me be clear: Catholic publishers are always looking for good writers with good material.  It’s a question of developing your craft (which the conference can definitely help you do) and getting connected with the types of publishers who are interested in the kind of writing that you do.

Your perfectly-matched publisher may or may not be present at this year’s conference, but the people you meet at the conference and through volunteering with the CWG can help you get connected.

My experience with CWG pitch sessions:

I volunteered at the online and (when possible) in-person conferences for several years, which let me become familiar with how pitch sessions worked before I was myself ready to pitch a book.  I will tell you that as a volunteer doing behind-the-scenes conference work, acquisitions editors who met me habitually asked if I didn’t have something of interest — I didn’t.  But they will ask if you seem like a smart, friendly, polite person, because editors are highly motivated to bring in good books, and they will sniff them out aggressively.  Eventually I had something to sell.

I pitched Classroom Management for Catechists to Our Sunday Visitor at one of the CWG online conferences.  They were interested.  I sent in a proposal, and if I recall correctly the acquisitions editor took a look and made a case for it to his committee at OSV.  The book didn’t fit with what they were looking for that year (trust publishers on this — they know their business), so I didn’t end up with a contract.  A friend from the guild recommended I reach out to Liguori next (she had written for them), and that turned out to be an ideal fit.  I did significant re-writing, by the way; one of the things editors do is look at your proposal and tell you how to change it to make it what their readers need.

Once you’ve proven that you can deliver a well-written book and that you aren’t a complete nightmare to work with, editors who know you will start fishing for proposals.  OSV is a regular at CWG conferences, but The How-to Book of Evangelization was actually a brainstormed project idea with an editor then at OSV who’d worked with me in the past on smaller projects (some of them unpaid for me — excellent apprenticeship experience, and sometimes a necessary step for someone with no prior experience in the profession, and which in turn led to paying work).

So I didn’t use the conference pitching process for my second book, but I did draw on the same basic skills. I would view pitching at conferences as an opportunity to make some initial connections, but it’s just a beginning.  It’s normal for book-matchmaking to involve testing the waters, getting feedback, and refining your ideas.

Even though OSV didn’t end up publishing the first book I pitched to them, their interest gave me confidence and direction for where to shop my proposal next, and it established the beginning of a positive working relationship. Since OSV is one of the publishers hearing pitches at this year’s online conference, I’ll just go ahead and tell you: The editors I worked with all the way through the publishing process for The How-To were top notch.  I’d happily work with them again if I had a suitable book to propose.

In conclusion . . .

  • If you’re a new or aspiring Catholic writer, I recommend the CWG’s online conference workshops.
  • If you need to reboot your career, you are moving into a new genre, or you just want some company with other Catholic writers, take a look at the workshops and see what you think. (Having looked over the schedule, if I physically *can* attend, then yes, I’m going. We’ll see.)
  • If you want to get published in Catholic fiction or non-fiction and you don’t know where to begin, I recommend joining and volunteering with the Catholic Writers Guild as your first apprenticeship.
  • If you’re not sure, click around on the various conference details and see if it looks like your thing.

There’s nothing magic about the Catholic Writers Guild, but if it’s what you need and you’re able to put in the work, it is absolutely the organization equipped to help you become a published Catholic author.

 

Catholic Writers Guild Logo

*Um: I’d written a few very nice drafts of instruction manuals explaining to my colleagues how to use our in-house accounting software? And my thesis advisors were pleasantly surprised that my research on a narrowly-defined aspect of the GATT negotiations was so eminently readable. So I mean, yeah, obviously I had genius talent. And an absolutely riveting portfolio, yes?

January 21, 2022

January 21, 2022 By

There’s a screenshotted homework assignment, reputedly from a Georgia virtual school, that’s circulating right now, generating outrage and counter-reaction.  It reads:

Writing Prompt

Trail of Tears

Write letters from the different points of view listed in the questions.  Remember to use facts to support your point of view.

The specific assignment then says:

Write a letter to President Andrew Jackson from the perspective of an American settler.  Explain why you think removing the Cherokee will help the United States grow and prosper.

My initial reaction was I think typical: If the thought of writing such a thing doesn’t turn your stomach,  you shouldn’t be teaching history.

Not asking anyone to be “literally shaking” or whatever. Historians have to face tough subjects all the time.  It’s part of the job.  And obviously we would have no fiction, no theatre, if someone weren’t willing to step into the bad guy’s shoes.  Writers and actors have a variety of tools for probing the depths of evil without being harmed by it.  But if you both know what happened (“genocide” is not an overstatement) and you have a conscience, this should at some level be a disgust-provoking exercise.

Nonetheless, let’s move on from the personal affront that this question is for many Americans, but which apparently doesn’t provoke an emotional reaction from some, for whatever reason.

I want to address two different questions related to this type of assignment. First are the developmental milestones involved in writing “bad guy” point-of-view.  Second is the more fundamental issue: Is it necessary and beneficial to undertake exercises like this in order to learn how to reason well?

Finally I’ll finish with a reprint of my experience with teaching a debate course where students were forbidden to argue any position they knew to be false.

Seeing the World Through the Eyes of Evil

My background is this: I have designed and taught religion courses for students ranging from ages preschool through adult, in all kinds of contexts.  One of the fundamental aspects of that work is helping your students hone their moral thinking.  I have also taught literature, creative writing, debate, and history to middle and high school students. Those jobs requires cultivating an understanding of alternate points of view, including frankly immoral points of view.

(Obviously I’m writing on the Catholic Channel, duh, but everything I’m going to say applies regardless of your personal moral or religious framework.  This isn’t about a specific religion, it’s about the development of the human mind.  Also, clarifying here: I’m not sure I’ve ever taught a course that didn’t involve teaching history in some manner. So I guess I’m all-ages on that one.)

So. First thing you need to know is that human brains go through stages of development in their capacity for abstract thinking.  There is a marked difference between the thinking of ten-year-olds and teenagers, not because one group is smarter than the other or more capable of reason than the other, but because puberty brings a leveling-up of abstract thinking abilities.

(Alas, the experience of your brain’s abstract thinking during the upgrade can be quite intense — you suddenly are able to perceive emotions you were previously oblivious too, and it’s a long few years there while you develop the skill of knowing what to do with those emotions.  We who enjoy teaching middle school are a rare breed.)

What I’ve seen therefore is that fifth graders (age 10-11) are absolutely on board with being given facts about anything — including morality — and reasoning through how to apply those facts.  If you say, “racism is wrong” and you have any credibility with your audience whatsoever, they will easily see the truth of your assertion and they will happily work away at figuring out how that truth applies in real-world situations.

Because they have a strong sense of justice, they will also feel deeply anything that smacks of unfairness.  This is a good thing!  As teachers and parents, we should not do anything to undermine or dull this sense of right and wrong.

What is helpful, because the kids we know are imperfect creatures just like ourselves, is helping students explore their own tendency towards rationalization, within the framework of clearly-defined moral thinking.  So questions like “Why do you think some students are tempted to cheat on tests or copy homework?” can be good material for properly-guided discussion (not a test question!), because kids do know the excuses they make for their own bad behavior, and do benefit from learning to see ways to escape those excuses.  (The ones who would themselves never cheat need help with resolve to not cave if pressured to share answers.)

What’s not helpful is teaching students to rationalize the cheater’s behavior.  They don’t need any help with that.  They need help with learning to examine their own motivations and sort out the good from the bad and develop confidence in claiming the good and discarding the bad.

You could call it self-centered, but it’s more accurately centering-the-self: A child who enters puberty with a clear sense of him or herself as a person who knows what is right and makes an effort to do what is right is in a strong position to process the abstract thinking abilities that are going to hit like a sledgehammer over the next few years.

Conclusion: Questions like the one posed in the sample homework assignment are utterly inappropriate for children.  Developmentally this is just not where they are and what they need.  So what about teens?

This is Your Brain on Puberty

Here is a very gross generalization that you can no doubt find exceptions to: Twelve-year-old girls start getting interested in role-playing the bad guy while twelve-year-old boys still just want to always be the hero.

Not rocket science. Girls and boys experience the changes of puberty at different rates (on average) and their ability to experience and process emotions differs as well (on average). The emotional-social dynamics of their same-sex interactions (sports teams, clubs, friend groups) are different because of this (on average).

But what this means for a teacher of tweens and teens is that some students are eager to explore bad-guy point-of-view and other students need more time solidifying good-guy point-of-view.  As a history, literature, or writing instructor a legitimate assignment that respects these differing developmental needs would be something like: “Write a letter from a person living in western Georgia at the time of the Trail of Tears.”

There are students, usually a minority of students even into later teenage years and adulthood, who want to explore bad-guy point-of-view. For some people, it is a way of processing the reality of evil and thinking through the ramifications of evil.  It can be a tool, for someone who is capable of this kind of emotional task, of developing a deeper sense of morality and self-examination.  An open-ended assignment allows for students to choose to go that route if they are ready for it, but doesn’t force such an exercise on the many, many people of any age who have no desire or need to do such a thing.

Understanding Your Opponent Doesn’t Require Lying

There’s an extremely popular myth embedded in our culture that goes like this:

  1. It is important and necessary to fully understand your opponents’ point of view.
  2. Therefore, practice arguing from your opponent’s point of view is important and necessary.

#1 is absolutely true.  #2 is wrong-headed in the extreme.

(I say this, remember, as a person who absolutely does permit students to freely choose, unprompted by me but allowed by me if requested, to write bad-guy point-of-view.)

This intellectual nonsense is the justification for assigning groups of students to argue crudely-defined “debate” topics, and in some cases belittling students who protest they don’t wish to pretend to believe something they know to be patently false.

The exercises are invariably absurd in their results, but alas many instructors are unable to see that it is so, because they’ve never been exposed to authentic, reasoned debate. Others can see the problem clearly, but don’t know any better way host reasoned debate in the classroom.  They accept the wooden debate experience as the necessary cost of teaching an important skill. Unfortunately, these exercises don’t even accomplish the hoped-for learning.

When you are forced to argue a position you know to be wrong, the skill you develop isn’t reasoning but rationalization.

To reason is to think through a topic in the quest for the truth.  Rationalization is to gin up defenses of a position you wish to promote, regardless of whether it is true or false.

I write all this as an experienced teacher, not some rosy idealist. I promise you, there is a much better way.  You’ll have more engaged classes, your students will do more research, and you the teacher will have far more fun.  What follows is a reprint of how you teach a debate class where students are never asked to rationalize and are always required to reason.

How to Teach a Real Debate Class

In prepping my first debate class for teenagers, I instituted a revolutionary rule: No participant would ever be permitted to argue a position he or she believed was false.

I can’t be the only instructor who’s ever done such a thing. Still, the pushback is proof of how strong our cultural prisons can be. The most common objection is: “How will students learn to see the other side of an issue?”

Well, that is where reasoning and research and good arguments come into play. If you forbid straw men, your debaters will be obliged to learn the actual beliefs of their opponents or else suffer mortal embarrassment as they are vanquished by the least little assertion of fact.

Teenagers do not enjoy being embarrassed.

***
Allow me to tell you what happens when you take a room full of teenagers from similar backgrounds, with similar religious beliefs, whose parents all hold similar political views, and who mostly get along with one another, and tell them that they must, as a class, debate the topic of their choice — and also everyone must argue a position they believe is true.

The first thing that happens is that the students gravitate towards emerging issues for which prudential judgement reigns. In my first debate class, the two big topics the teens chose to debate were (1) whether teens playing video games is helpful or harmful and (2) whether marijuana ought to be legalized.

The second thing that happens is that as the teens begin to research the issues, factions form and re-form as students change opinions as they learn more.

The third that happens is that even while, by debate day, there remain stark differences of opinion on a given topic, everyone has moved closer to a consensus.

Therefore, the fourth thing that happens is that when students present their cases, they marshal far more facts and use far more nuance in explaining how their position is different from a similar — but not identical — opponent’s position.

This is what happens when debate is treated as a tool for finding the truth rather than as a device for rationalizing one’s preconceived opinions.

***

Very few Americans today have ever experienced a course, at any time in their education, where they were taught how to use debate as a means of discovering truth.

Book cover: The Fallacy Detective by Nathaniel and Hans Bluedorn

Cover art for The Fallacy Detective by Nathaniel & Hans Bluedorn. Great resource for teaching reasoning skills, recommended for 8th grade and up, but no sooner than students are interested and  capable.  For some kids, that’s going to come much later in high school or even early college.

Catholic readers, if you’re interested in exploring how reason and argumentation fit into the bigger picture of evangelization, can I recommend The How-to Book of Evangelization by someone you apparently enjoy reading?

January 15, 2022

January 15, 2022 By

I want to run through a case study from a physician who writes about gaslighting herself when it comes to difficult-to-diagnose chronic illness.  I think this example is super important because it illuminates just how powerful is the tendency to dismiss symptoms that aren’t easily assessed and explained.

This essay by Pooja Yerramilli ran in October 2020: “I have all the symptoms of a Covid-19 long-hauler — but I’m hesitant to identify myself as one.” It opens:

As a physician, I never thought that I would someday be lumped into the category of patients known as “not otherwise specified,” or NOS for short. This category is dominated by women suffering nonspecific symptoms that are inconsistently appreciated by clinicians who eventually conclude that the problem is entirely in the mind.

She explains her history:

Despite testing negative for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, the course of my illness mimicked that of the “typical” coronavirus patient. The relentless dry cough and fatigue were followed by shortness of breath. My mentors, also physicians with whom I had informally consulted, were concerned that mine was a false negative test; at the time, the sensitivity of the swab was thought to be around 70%. But my chart was never flagged as “CoV-positive,” so my story was never counted in the growing statistics of employees affected by the disease.

Unfortunately, for many people (especially women), post-infection antibody testing will not accurately indicate whether you’ve been previously infected: “A Two-Phase, Single Cohort Study of COVID-19 Antibody Sera-Surveillance.”

Dr. Yerramilli describes her slow recovery from the acute infection:

After a long month of isolation, asking every week to be cleared for work, I finally insisted that I was ready. I was no longer short of breath while walking around my apartment. The remaining symptoms — weakness, muscle aches, and low energy — were nonspecific, subjective, and, therefore, things I could surmount. My persistent painful cough was given various names. Some providers definitively labeled it as postnasal drip, others said it was new-onset asthma. My colleagues and I settled on post-viral bronchospasm.

Already there’s a disconnect between what she’s experiencing and reality.  Neither benign post-viral asthma nor a generic, non-concerning lingering cough cause this:

After working several shifts, I found myself unable to get out of bed one morning: the aches and fatigue were taking over. “Get up! Push through!” my mind scolded my body. My body and mind played this game for weeks. Every time I returned to work, hopeful to care for patients, my body protested, breathing hard and exhausted by the end of morning rounds.

Obviously something serious is going on.  But watch what she does to herself:

Four months into my “illness,” no closer to any answers, I settled on “deconditioning, NOS.” If I took the right precautions — sleeping nine hours a night and dragging a chair around on rounds — I could last through the workday.

Let’s be very, very clear: You cannot “decondition” this badly if you are otherwise healthy and making a sincere attempt to be as active as possible.

With true deconditioning, the effort of slowly increasing activity day by day will result in improved fitness.  That’s how it works. That’s what “deconditioning” is.  Even if she were deconditioned after a month laid out with a respiratory virus, she would be seeing a steady increase in stamina three months into recovery.  Very clearly Dr. Yerramilli’s on-going illness is not due to a lack of exercise.

But around that time, clinics started to reopen and I finally met my primary care physician for the first time ever. As I walked with the medical assistant and felt short of breath again, I peeked at the oximeter: My heart rate had risen to 149, almost twice what it should have been, and my blood oxygen level gradually dropped to 79%, when it should have been close to 100%. “Is this why I’ve been feeling so tired?” my body asked.

Whoa! Oxygen levels dropping to 79% while walking? There we go, right? This doesn’t happen in healthy people. This DOES NOT HAPPEN IN HEALTHY PEOPLE.

For a comparison, as I write this, I am actively sick with COVID.  Confirmed test to a textbook set of symptoms.  Short-COVID, Lord willing, but five days in I have the dry cough, the fatigue, all that.  (Probably the peaking infectiousness, too. Unless you’re intentionally trying to catch a potentially deadly or disabling illness, stay away from people who are just a week into their infection, eh?) For journalism reasons I just interrupted this paragraph and went out for a brisk walk with the pulse ox.

Results: Walking quickly (it’s cold out), HR was 120, O2 was 97-98%.  Heart rate is maybe slightly high for me, hard to say because having COVID will skew your perception of speed and effort.  Call it normal. After a short full-speed run (admittedly: my “full speed” is not very fast, but that’s not what we’re measuring), HR went up into the 150’s (normal), but oxygen? It actually bumped up to 99%.

That’s normal.  I am not an athlete. I am a pushing-50 slightly overweight housewife with a disabling chronic illness.  My exercise level (which varies from year to year depending on where we are in the disease experience) over the past six months has been light housework and going out for a walk when I can.

Here’s a non-paywalled NYT article on COVID and healthy O2 levels. In a South African study, high-risk COVID patients whose home pulse-oximeter readings dropped below 95% were instructed to call a doctor, and if below 90% to come to the emergency room ASAP for care.  This single intervention dropped death rates 50%.

So naturally a doctor who experiences this extremely worrisome drop in her blood oxygen saturation while just walking is surely going to recognize that something is very, very wrong . . . right?

Dr. Yerramilli describes what she and her fellow physicians decided for a course of treatment, now that they realized her intense, unremitting fatigue was linked to this extreme, emergency-room-level drop in oxygen saturation:

But the results of these preliminary tests, completed five months after my first symptoms, were nonspecific. I was given no clear diagnosis or treatment plan. The consensus reached by the specialists was that the oximeter readings, which repeatedly showed my oxygen levels dropping as I walked, were faulty. Case closed.

“See?” my mind retorted. “It’s always just been in your head.”

Link to the whole essay.

***

Readers: If you are experiencing symptoms that you know aren’t right?  Take your body’s signals seriously.

I think Dr. Yerramilli’s story is a powerful cautionary tale of just how deeply ingrained is the mindset of “if we can’t explain it then it must be your imagination” in the practice of medicine for many people.  Pray for those doctors.

Then, if only for your own sanity: Keep looking until you find a physician who won’t give up on you, even when easy answers aren’t forthcoming.

Doctors who recognize the limits of their own knowledge and the reality that medical science is a field with many unanswered questions are out there.

More than ever, unfortunately.

File:Vincent van Gogh - Portrait of Doctor Félix Rey (F500).jpg

Artwork: “Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey” by Vincent van Gogh (Public Domain).

PS for those who are wondering, I actually do have a lot of years of firsthand experience with:

  • Respiratory viruses that lay you out for a month, and then you recover.
  • Post-viral asthma.
  • Chronic (benign) post-infection cough-of-death that lasted years.

None of that caused anything like what Dr. Yerramilli and others are describing with Long COVID.  Just not the same thing.  Not at all.

January 7, 2022

January 7, 2022 By

The following essay is a detailed discussion of the political implications of the meanings of cuss words.  I’m not the one who made this an international civil rights issue? But the topic is crucially important, and a clean-version is not possible. Can I recommend Happy Catholic* if you’d like something beautiful and good to contemplate today instead?

The Wine-Dark Sea is lyrical and thought-provoking, if you’d like to scroll some back issues and be edified.  How about Siris, if philosophy blogging is your thing? Or at the other end of the clean spectrum, Aleteia is really quite good.

No? None of that? You want the cussing?

Okay, you were warned.  Read at your own risk.

***

Our topic is the interview with French president Emmanuel Macron, described here (in French) and printed here (behind a paywall).  We’re going to look at his word choice in French and its implications, and then, more briefly in conclusion, the decision of English-speaking journalists to mistranslate that word.

***

Imagine for a moment that Donald Trump, or President Biden if that’s more suited to your situation, made the following statement about people like you: “I am going to piss them off.”

You would rightly infer that this person planned to use his power to make you very, very angry. That’s what pissing off means.  It’s the provoking of an emotional reaction.

Now imagine instead that your opponent threatened to “Screw with you” “F*ck with you” “Screw you over” “F*ck-up your life” or something else on those same lines.  Different meaning.  Now they aren’t just planning to make you angry, they are planning to sabotage you. To embroil you in genuine problems.

“I am going to piss them off” might be said of, say, a new paperwork requirement that’s irritating but manageable. Or perhaps a symbolic undertaking, such as displaying an offensive flag or monument, or intentionally naming a highway in honor of someone you find morally repugnant.

“I am going to screw them,” in contrast, would be paperwork “requirements” that effectively inhibit your ability to go about your daily life.  Or, in the highway example, creating a “highway improvement project” that intentionally limits your ability to get to work, run a business, etc.

Both are displays of ill-will, but whereas the first aims to hurt you emotionally, the second aims to, well, screw you over.

***

So I’m honestly not great at the finer points of French grammar because I developed fluency in the language not by years of formal study but by attending high school in France.  As a result, however, cussing in French comes quite naturally to me.  And let me tell you: There are fine distinctions to vulgar language in French that have important implications even among, to the non-native speaker relying on dictionary translations, apparently synonymous terms.

***

First, the word Macron didn’t use: In French if you want to level-up from ticking someone off to full-on pissing someone off, in France you don’t urinate but defecate, using the verb phrase faire chier.  Which means “shit” (literally: to make someone shit) and definitely shit in this case, not poop or crap or anything like that.  Expressions built around chier are expressions of being made angry or frustrated.  (And no, don’t use these in an interview.  In my experience, the verb chier is somewhat more vulgar than emmerder discussed next, but there are plenty of ways to politely express a desire to anger others if that’s your intended meaning.)

The apparently-synonymous noun merde of course means “shit” (or “crap” if you prefer) but it’s not quite as vulgar nor as strong in France as the English-language counterparts are in the US.  The president using it in a speech doesn’t have the same shock value in terms of word-choice generally, so set that aside — it’s how he uses the word that matters more.  The related verb emmerder, which the word President Macron used in his interview discussing the forthcoming pass vaccinal, lacks an English counterpart: Enshitten would be the verb, if it existed.

[Update 1/30/2022: Thanks to The Diary of Samuel Pepys I learned that shitten is an adjective, anyhow. Okay, carrying on . . .]

On the face of it, comparing emmerder and faire chier, the dictionary seems to be proposing synonyms that largely can be translated to piss off.  But, dear readers, President Macron picked the term that has an additional and politically very important implication, and one which he spelled out quite clearly: The plan is to emmerder the non-vaccinated minority by denying them a “social life.”

Access to restaurants, cafes, and theaters is what gets mentioned in most reports of the interview, so you might imagine vie sociale is just the nice, fun stuff people do together in their free time, as wikitionary’s definition indicates.  In French, however, vie sociale can take on a more profound meaning — your life as a member of society, period.  In most interview excerpts, it’s unclear which one Macron is implying.

If you look at the text of the passe vaccinal, however, you’ll see that the new law in question also denies access to regional public transportation — which in France means you are crossing over from merely “social” activities in the American sense (you can live without restaurants and movies) to making it impossible to, say, go to work in the morning.  To participate in community life whatsoever. While some parts of France are, like the US, car-dependent, an enormous portion of the nation’s population is concentrated in urban zones where public transportation is the only viable means of travel beyond your immediate neighborhood.

Correction 1/13/21: On a closer look, local neighborhood public transit isn’t affected, my error there.  Inter-regional trains are the big debate, with the complication that crossing regional lines, just like crossing state lines in the US, is more or less common practice depending on how close you live to a border.  Many people won’t be affected at all, but others will find short, local trips subject to restrictions.   And of course many people living in Paris or other densely-populated metro areas simply don’t own cars, and therefore, yes, would face massive problems if work or family obligations required a trip across regional borders. 

As of this morning, here’s a good English-language synopsis of the current status of the bill.  I’m once again noting how those of us at the “extremes” of Left and Right are finding common ground in defending basic civil liberties.

–> And as long as I’m in here admitting to my errors, I’m going to remind readers that all of this law is concerning a virus that is being actively transmitted by asymptomatic vaccinated people.  The idea that vaccine mandates are stopping the spread is strictly fantasy. Vaccination is doing wonders for reducing the severity of the disease.  But surrounding yourself with only-vaccinated people will in no way protect you from infection.

Okay, picking back up with the original essay:

Hence the word emmerder was chosen quite accurately.  It’s not a strategy to aggravate you; it’s a strategy to create emmerdements or more colloquially, des emerdes — which are real problems that truly screw up your life.

All of that the French are discussing quite freely. Now getting to my point for US readers:

What strikes me as very important from a journalistic point of view is not only Google Translate’s imprecise rendering, but that an outlet like NPR alludes to the translation error but never clarifies it. There is a significant difference between a president creating emotional hostility with a portion of the general public and a president vowing to screw you over.

“I’m gonna piss you off” is, when it comes to legislation, radically different from “I’m gonna screw you.”  The latter is what Macron vowed to do.  To sugarcoat his words, as NPR and others are doing, is to be complicit in hiding the reality of the stated intentions of the law in question.

[Additional update 1/30/22, since I’m here: Anonyme Citoyen is an account documenting the protests in France. Turns out that actively provoking your citizens isn’t a popular move.]

***

Related: Please read this excellent essay from a fellow pro-vaccine columnist (note the part at the beginning where she mentions her husband is triple-vaxxed) who lays out the serious civil rights implications of vaccine passports.

For your own well-being, please put serious consideration into being vaccinated if you haven’t done so already. But also for your own well-being, please don’t destroy the republic. It’s not worth it.

And also, regardless of your politics, no matter desperately you really do want to screw over the people you are so angry at, please please please join the Clean Air club. It is both one of the lowest-risk interventions available and at this point appears to be the only viable option we have for actually stopping the pandemic.  Worth a shot, seems to me.

 

File:Blue Angels in delta formation during Fleet Week 2018.jpg

Photo: Blue Angels flying in formation against a clear blue sky © Frank Schulenburg / CC BY-SA 4.0. This is a non-metaphorical picture of one of the reasons I’m so dang insistent on this whole civil rights business, as those who know can attest.

 

*Full disclosure: Julie Davis and I once got into a private debate about, among other things, cussing in movies.  In retrospect, I think she was more right than I gave her credit for at the time.  So her irony-meter is getting a full workout with this post.  Though honestly looking through it, I ended up cussing less than anticipated.

PS: The etymology on chier is absolutely hilarious. If you’re into irony, anyway.

January 4, 2022

January 4, 2022 By

What caught the eye of your internet-mom this afternoon was a weird bit of cross-discourse about body image, fat-shaming, and weight loss.  No links, I’m going straight to bullet point answers to the questions and arguments these various voices are circulating:

  • Why yes, our culture is obsessed with body image, and it can’t help but fuel psychological hang-ups about being thin enough (women, generally) or muscular enough (men, generally).  For women, in particular, take this challenge: Keep a tally of what portion of movies and television shows feature a female lead who isn’t noticeably slender.  It’s a thing. The star is always skinny, that’s how it works.  It’ll mess up your brain.
  • Absolutely, sloth and gluttony can cause weight gain.  Doesn’t work for everybody, but it works for a lot of people.
  • Other things cause weight gain too, and you can’t control all of those things.
  • Also, some people just aren’t slender even when they are perfectly fit and healthy.  Other people have serious health problems usually associated with obesity even though they are slender.
  • Therefore: Being either ashamed or proud of your weight is an emotional time-waste for most people.  Your weight may or may not be something you can control, and it may or may not be an accurate reflection of your health.
  • Furthermore, it may be relatively easy or more difficult for you to adopt practices associated with good health, so pride, once again, is not just a deadly sin it’s an absurd one.
  • What you can control is the effort you put in to taking care of your health. Not your weight, your health.
  • While physical health is not more important than spiritual health (so you are deluding yourself if you look fantastic on Insta but your soul is a fetid pit), making an effort to improve your physical health is a good spiritual exercise.
  • There’s nothing like trying to work on your physical health to help you uncover other underlying factors that need to be addressed more urgently.  So even if your resolution to be a better steward of your body doesn’t work out the way you hoped, if you allow it to do so it will help you discover things about yourself that you need to know.  So that’s good.

What I’m going to recommend you work on is one of two things:

(A) Make an effort to improve your blood sugar.  See, for example the results of this study reported in Science Daily: “Long-term blood sugar history predicts risk of severe COVID-19 among diabetics: Two- to three-year history offers more accurate prediction than shorter time period.”

If you are not sure where to start on dealing with your blood sugar problem, here’s a list of a few resources I mentioned last time I lectured you at length on this topic.

If you aren’t sure you have a blood sugar problem, invest $20 in an inexpensive but reputable-brand glucose monitor available over the counter at Walmart or your nearest pharmacy and for goodness sakes find out.  Type II diabetes doesn’t tap you on the shoulder one night in a wave of the wand from the Sugar Fairy; it’s a condition you develop slowly over time, and which you can detect before you start developing serious health problems, rather than waiting for some random doctor’s appointment to finally catch it farther down the road.

It is one of the cheapest, easiest, most potentially life-changing diagnostic tests you can run, and you can do it at home whenever want.

And reminder, y’all: Even though you’re fully-vaxxed (good) and all your friends are fully-vaxxed (good for them, too), COVID infections are spreading among people who are carefully ensconced in their vaccine-mandated bubble, and they are causing serious disease among fully-vaxxed patients with underlying health conditions.  Poor blood sugar control is the one underlying condition that is both tightly associated with serious disease and death and which you can have some control over.

PS: If you’re doing everything your doctor says to do to control your diabetes and it’s not working, then resolve to find out if there is a different approach to managing the disease that might work better for you.

(B) If you don’t have a blood sugar problem yourself, resolve to be genuinely supportive of people who do.  And by that I mean I quit friggin’ flooding the world with cookies.  And the like.

You know what I mean.  You don’t need to drop hints.  You don’t need to assist other people with their meal choices.  But you could just completely quit bringing food to non-meals, and start only bringing real, unprocessed, unsweetened foods to actual meals.  That would be fun.

(Also: Did you really need to have this meeting? Because there are people who’d like to be out getting in a quick walk, and instead you are making them just sit there?  Fewer meetings is a great way to help other people improve their health.)

***

Finally, as long as we’re talking Plague 2022, resolution for everybody: Join the Clean Air Club.

Duisburg, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord - huge rusty pipes with blue, green, and red spigot valves

Photo of a rusty pipes with big colorful valves courtesy of Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Duisburg, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord — 2020 — 7824-6” / CC BY-SA 4.0.

December 30, 2021

December 30, 2021 By

There are many good things in your life that you may have to walk away from.  Your marriage is not one of them.

There are many taboos, and trends, and social pressures that may be chaining you down, and that you may find great freedom and fulfillment in rejecting.  Staying faithful to your wedding vows is not one of them.

There are many good uses for literary prose.  Glamorizing the destruction of a family is not one of them.

Don’t fall for the trap.

It’s normal in midlife to examine what you’ve accomplished this far and to ask serious questions about how you ought to proceed from here.  It is normal to find that your current occupation isn’t quite what you’d hoped, and to ask whether some changes are in order.  It is normal to discover some years in that your spouse is just this ordinary person with faults, and weaknesses, and attributes that are boring, or not-that-attractive, or which, if you had it to do all over again, maybe you wouldn’t choose.

You don’t have it to do all over again.

You have this marriage.  You vowed faithfulness to this person.  You are now the protagonist in one of those romance novels involving the boorish male lead and the impetuous bride, forced into an arranged marriage by people who perhaps meant well, but frankly they’ve stuck you with someone you’d never have picked for yourself — except alas, that you did.  The person who arranged your present marriage is the much-younger you.  He or she meant well.  He or she had good reasons for thinking you’d be happy with this person.  And your job, hero or heroine, is to embark on a torrid midlife romance in which you discover all the ways that this no-longer-chosen spouse is indeed the love of your life after all.

Meanwhile, divest yourself of the fantasy that your tiresome marriage is somehow anything, at all, special or different than the life of everyone else out there.  The happily-married people? They are happily-married to ordinary, weak, fault-prone, body-odorous, flabby, wrinkly, not-that-rich, not-that-successful, not-that-anything normal spouses.

Maybe there’s a couple couples out there who’ve never had a fight in their life? I’m doubtful of those claims. It’s normal for happily married people to experience conflict and disappointment.  It is normal for middle-aged persons to examine their lives and find areas where changes are in order.  It is normal to have to work through these discoveries with your spouse, and find ways to support one another through sometimes-difficult changes.

Destroying your marriage and wrecking your children’s lives is not the solution.

***

Maybe, though, you are in an abusive relationship.

In that case: Get out.  Definitely get out for now, and probably you’ll have to get out for the long term.  Do whatever it takes to protect yourself and your children from your abusive spouse.

There is nothing romantic about being abused. There is nothing heroic about allowing your children to be abused nor to witness your being abused.  Get out.  GET OUT.

***

But if your marriage is just kinda boring? Your spouse is a little clueless, but never intentionally hurtful? You can honestly say that things are fine, they’re just boring?

Or maybe things aren’t fine, but you aren’t being abused (if you’re not sure about that, get yourself to safety and then consult a professional for confirmation on how to proceed) and with some serious changes things could be fine?

Then work on your marriage.  Work on your life.  You can increase intimacy and trust and companionship in your marriage while also exploring new interests and fulfilling unmet needs.

***

If you’re Christian of any flavor, I highly recommend the classic work Boundaries by Cloud & Townsend, which is crystal clear on the difference between abusive relationships (GET OUT) and run-of-the-mill unhappiness.  The paperback is cheap enough you can get yourself and your spouse each your own copy.

(I think it could be just fine for many non-Christians, too, but I’ve read some reviews by readers who were clearly not looking for a Biblically-centered work, and that’s what this is. I think for the price you could just take a sharpie and black out the theology-parts and still have perfectly sound advice for how to build emotionally-healthy relationships, but also you could just look for a different, secular or your-faith-centered book that covers the same material.)

I recommend this book for non-married people, too.  It’s about relationships generally, so it’s helpful for dealing with friends, colleagues, employers, doctors, neighbors, sales reps, roommates . . . anyone at all in your life, and also your pets.  Especially your pets.

–> If your only two modes of operating right now are “this is fine” and “burn it all down” then you seriously, seriously need this book.

***

There’s nothing edgy or glamorous about destroying or abandoning a pretty-good marriage.  It doesn’t matter how sexy the protagonists are nor how thrilling the script or the prose: Wrecking people’s lives and betraying your own spouse and children is not romantic.  It’s bad for you.  Don’t do it, and don’t fawn over the poor souls who have mistaken immaturity for bravery.

It’s a terrible way to live. All you’ll discover in the end is that if you can’t be happy with faithfulness and kindness, you really just don’t know how to be happy.

Moscow Metro Volokolamskaya : Beautiful marble-tiled subway station, with modern white-plastered arches above. A train is passing by on the track on the the right.

Photo: Moscow Metro Volokolamskaya, A.Savin, WikiCommons, Free Art license.

There’s nothing new about the temptation to adultery and divorce.  Related columns of possible interest:

December 20, 2021

December 20, 2021 By

Today’s topic is me as your internet mom lecturing: You, personally, are responsible for taking care of the body God has put into your care.

(Make that bodies, plural, if others in your family, your workplace, or your community are dependent on the decisions you make on their behalf.  But today I’m mostly talking about the specific body your soul is animating, and then the rest will follow by extension.)

Yesterday when I picked back up on the COVID-blogging, I did something unusual and largely resisted making any public policy prescriptions.  And understand: One of my early childhood memories is me laying in bed circa 1981, thinking about the Reagan-era Cold War discussions on the news, and forming a youthfully-innocent recommendation on how to achieve world peace.  (It was: Mind Your Own Business.  If you want to know how my third-grade self tended to think.)  So for me to go never mind all that is a big deal.

And I’m going right now, to you my readers, that where Omicron is concerned: Never mind all that.  You have much more pressing things to re-think right now.

Here’s a nice summary from a physician with the NHS about more or less what I gave you links on yesterday.  (Yes, he’s writing in Al Jazeera.  I like them as a source for learning about the existence of Africa/South Asia stories that the US press doesn’t cover.  In this case, though, it’s just a guy who is looking at the view from his practice and the current, very limited data on the latest COVID outbreak in the UK, and it looks like we’re seeing a similar view of the horizon.)

Here’s The Atlantic’s summary of the state of the science as of this morning, which includes significant discussion of the part about how you’re contagious before you know to test, and that reality includes vaccinated folk. (FYI – Coronavirus coverage at The Atlantic is not behind the paywall. So you can just go read and check behind all the links and see what you think.)

So let’s talk about public health, and why I am very much urging you to reassess and update where COVID is concerned.

***

Updated (7:30pm EST 12/21) to add this link to the White House’s press release:

On Monday morning, a mid-level staff member, who does not regularly have contact with the President, received a positive result for a COVID-19 test.  Three days earlier, on Friday, that staff member had spent approximately 30 minutes in proximity to the President on Air Force One, on the way from Orangeburg, South Carolina to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This staff member is fully vaccinated and boosted, and tested negative prior to boarding Air Force One, as is required for everyone traveling with the President. This staff member did not begin to experience symptoms until Sunday, and was tested on Monday.  

Fortunately so far President Biden is asymptomatic and testing negative.  But guys: Fully vaxx’d, boosted, and coming down with COVID?

Vaccination status is not a sufficient protective strategy.

***

 

 

In my opinion, the US has had one single public health success in managing the pandemic, and that is in making vaccines available to the entire US population.  I have many complaints about many things, including some of the details of this thing, but this one thing did happen, and I’m grateful for it.

If you were hoping widespread vaccination would do the trick, I do think a vaccine-oriented approach to ending the pandemic was a reasonable hope.

Unfortunately, what I’m seeing with the growing wave of infection and transmission within groups of vaccinated persons is that many of us need to reassess the extent to which we were relying on personal and population-level vaccination as our primary means of self-protection.

I want to be very clear here: I think there remains strong evidence that vaccination is a good strategy for most adults’ personal health.

(–> Though I qualify with “adult”, my youngest child is fifteen and fully vaccinated; I’m hesitant to make any further comments on vaccinating young people because I’ve had no call to look into the question for children-generally.  Since I don’t have younger children, I’ve only assessed what applies to my specific offspring with their various personal medical histories, states in life, etc.)

Furthermore, even though it is becoming very clear that vaccinated persons are experiencing breakthrough infections and spreading the virus among themselves, I think there is still strong logical evidence in favor of using household vaccination as a way to reduce (but not eliminate) risk to vulnerable persons.  In other words: Even if you didn’t think your child personally needed the protection of vaccination, it would still make sense to vaccinate your child if you or another family member is higher-risk for COVID complications.  No, I am not satisfied with the data I’ve seen on household transmission as of yet, but seriously? If you are spending two-thirds or more of your day in close quarters with somebody, it’s gotta be easier to get less-sick if that person is also less-sick and for less time?  I mean, just guessing?  But yes?

So vaccination remains a good strategy even though it cannot be a total strategy.

***

The reason I am writing yesterday and today is because public health moves slowly and Omicron does not.  Over the next week or two or three, if you are relying on vaccination-status as your means of not getting COVID, you are very likely to make decisions that will put you at significant risk of infection.

(Again: If you are a person who is indifferent to being infected, I’m unclear on why you aren’t scrolling @catworkers like I told you to yesterday.  If you exhausted that feed, can I recommend @hourlyfox, @corgieveryhour, @rabbiteveryhour, and probably also a long talk with a good friend?)

I know a lot of people who have serious reasons to minimize their exposure to COVID-19.  Many of you have, very rationally, taken the approach until now of using vaccination status (or immune status generally, if you also include prior-infection history) as a means of striking the balance in the trade off between the real and serious risks of isolation and the real and serious risks of infection.  I am not in any way suggesting you panic.  I am saying that you need to update your strategy, and that at this time you are the only person who is going do that for you.

***

Listen, I know many of you reading this are hopeful that whatever governments are local-to-you will take appropriate public health measures.  There’s a reason I’m not commenting on what those measures should be, and my reason is this: They aren’t actually happening in a way that will protect you.

We have seen multiple incidences of the very leaders who imposed strict lockdown and isolation and mask-wearing rules brazenly breaking their own rules.  Um, so . . . there’s a vector for you.  I can likewise assure you that in institutions and jurisdictions where vaccine mandates, test-and-trace, and quarantine protocols are official policy, there are standard practices of ignoring, circumventing, or outright lying to get around the rules any time there is a perverse incentive to do so.  Maybe people are behaving in front of your face?  But they aren’t behaving.

Your understandable anger at this situation will not keep you from getting infected.  You have to decide whether you’d rather be angry-and-sick or angry-and-not-sick.

***

In any case, your anger is rapidly growing obsolete.  Omicron is not playing by the rules put in place under the regime of earlier mutations.

***

So where does that leave you?  It leaves you with reexamining the ways you can take responsibility for reducing your risk of infection and reducing your risk of complications from infection.  What are they?

#1 Clean Air

@CovidIsAirborne is a fairly good aggregator of info on this.   Ditto @jljcolorado. I would say that for most of my readers, the big change you can make is to buy or build a good air purifier for your home (if you share air with people) if you don’t have one already, and ditto for your workplace, classroom, etc.

I haven’t seen anyone mention this, but y’all: If someone in your home is higher-risk for respiratory infections, do a serious assessment of how much you can cut down on sharing exhaled air.  It’s okay to have weird sleeping arrangements so that your child with severe asthma isn’t spending a third of his life breathing whatever germs the sibling brought home, even if they need to share a room during waking hours.  Your marriage will be just fine if your spouse who has comorbid risk factors uses the marriage-bed for intercourse but some other room away from your germ-exhaling self for a sleeping-bed.  (Yes.  I said that.  Clean air is a great way to prolong your marriage and all the good things that marriage has to offer.  If you’re too young to read about that, you need to get off the internet.)

#2 For-Serious Masks

Again, I am not making risk-benefit decisions for you.  But if in your own estimation it is important for you and the people you breathe around not to get infected with COVID, it’s time to upgrade to N95s.  Use them when you are indoors (or crowded outdoors) around people who are breathing, and also when you are indoors in places where people have been breathing, even if the people themselves have moved on.

Even (especially) if you are not concerned about your own risk, use an N95 when you’re visiting a high-risk person.

In close quarters, such as when you’re packed into an airplane, even if the air filtration overall is top notch, use an N95 to prevent exposure to the unfiltered air coming straight at you from the person who keeps taking your armrest.

#3 Your Underlying Health

Being perfectly healthy won’t prevent Long Covid, and it’s no guarantee against severe (even fatal) infection.  In any case, you probably don’t have it in your power to be perfectly healthy.  What you can do, though, is take small steps to be healthier than you otherwise would be.  Then, no matter what happens, you’ll have that much more of an edge.

Get your blood sugar down to a consistently healthy level. Because it is so strongly associated with poor outcomes, this should be a very high priority.  You can make improvements to your blood sugar numbers even when weight loss isn’t happening.

Eat healthy foods. Heavy on the fresh vegetables, and then whatever unprocessed or minimally-processed foods seem to work the best for you.

Exercise the amount that you can.  Maybe that’s a lot, maybe that’s not a lot.  If you’re currently dealing with Long Covid, another post-viral syndrome, or some other exercise-limiting illness or injury . . . believe me, I know.  I know. It is very, very hard in difficult cases to know exactly how to balance out rest and activity levels.  Do the amount that you safely can.  It’s okay to err on the side of a little too much rest, you can always do a little bit more tomorrow.

But especially if you’re dealing with a serious illness or underlying condition, the amount of physical activity that you can safely accomplish is super important.  Don’t fixate on the big picture here.  You’ll go bonkers if you try to compare yourself to people who can follow some generic plan and push themselves and all that.  Just do the amount today that you’re confident will be okay.

Get fresh air and sunlight.  Go outside if you possibly can.

Cultivate friendships. Find people who support your mental and physical health and let them be the people who predominate in your life.

Discover the deeper meaning and purpose in your life right now.  Chances are that if you are someone who has an above-average need to prevent COVID-19 infection, maybe your life is pretty difficult?

Maybe you are dealing with a lot of social isolation because you’ve been in this situation for a long time, even when others around you felt relatively safe.  Maybe your risk profile has changed because of some serious losses that have occurred over the past year or two.  Maybe your underlying health condition, or your state in life that has people so desperately depending on you, involves hardship.

Hard situations are just plain hard.  They aren’t fun, and they usually involve you not getting to live life quite the way you’d hoped.  Maybe you’ve been valuing the person you wish you could be, and you’re feeling like right now your life just isn’t all that.  You can’t contribute, or be involved, or do the important-to-you thing that you have long considered to be who you should be.

Well, that picture of an “ideal” life might be perfect for somebody, but guess what?  It’s not your vocation.  If it were your calling, you’d be able to live that life.  You’re not.  Your calling is to live well the life you’ve been given at this very moment.  Whatever that is.  Richer or poorer, in sickness or in health, until death do you part: Live the life that you have.

painting by Albert Bierstadt - Storm Clouds (c.1880), shows heavy, puffy white clouds over a teal-blue sea.

Artwork: Albert Bierstadt – Storm Clouds (c.1880), public domain.  

 

PS: If your reason for not-vaccinating yet is an understandable concern about running medical experiments on yourself, it may be that there is now enough safety-related data accumulated to put your mind at ease.  Keep in mind that even if you don’t trust the US or XYZ other country’s data, there are studies being put out all over the world, in all kinds of different political, social, and environmental conditions, so you are much more likely today to be able to find information that answers your questions about the risks and benefits to someone in your situation.  It’s worth looking into.

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