Talking Tuesday: Toward Telos

My kids went back to school today (hooray!).  In the rush of all the last minute back to school stuff that needed to happen yesterday, I had lots of ideas for the things I wanted to do when the house was empty again for a good period of time--the first time in six months.  There are shelves to clear out, rooms to paint, things that need repair and maintenance, and general chaos of lock down to be sorted and organized, to say nothing of getting back on a regular writing/art making schedule. 

Our walk to school was oddly quiet--we are still not fully open here and most schools are teaching remotely, at least to start the school year.  The hustle and bustle of the city is no more, its energy drained by the extended lock down.  And there are many places that have shuttered for good; it is hard to know what will replace them if the high-rise offices that largely drive the surrounding commercial corridor do not bring their workers back to the office.

I wrote last week about Matthew B. Crawford's latest book, Why We Drive.  I finished the book over the weekend, and there is still much more to write about it, but I have to sort my thoughts first.  I read back through some of the pieces I wrote about Crawford's earlier work, out of curiosity, and was struck by one theme that runs through all three books: that of human agency as necessary for human flourishing.  What that means is that in order for us to find meaning in our lives, we need to feel that we have some control over what happens to us and the decisions we make about our lives.  In practical matters, it is about working through the physical reality of our lives (i.e. fixing things).

Increasingly, Crawford notes, individual human agency is being leeched away in dribs and drabs, and that power locked into a black box of algorithmic technology, unaccountable to anyone except perhaps the gigantic tech corporations who make such boxes.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and giving it over to black boxes (and the faceless corporations who control them) is a sure path to human misery. 

There is a lot to unpack there, and I want to keep this brief today, so I'll just leave it there for now. 

Nine years in the eye of the storm

Nine years ago, Birdie exploded into our lives like a cannon shot.  She was born hours ahead of Hurricane Irene, and her personality and temperament are less of the Irenic variety and more of the hurricane. 

My mom, the master multi-tasker.

With Piglet.  He was fascinated with her.  At least at first.  These days they spend a lot of time arguing about game rules.

Boo was barely more than a baby himself, so we had to make sure he was gentle with her.  But they have a sweet (but complicated) relationship now.

I looked through baby photos today, and was again reminded of how fragile she was that first year especially, when I didn't have a good handle on her medical issues, and she fell further and further behind developmentally.  Not that it is so obvious in the photos, unless you look at the photos of her at 8-9 months and realize that she is struggling to hold her head up and cannot sit up unassisted.  Or how tiny she is relative to her age. 

But man.  That girl.  (We say that a lot around here: That Girl).  She is indomitable.  She is a force of nature, and I suppose it is that strength that has carried her through all the years of respiratory crisis and severe illness--just sheer effort of will.

She's more of a tomboy than a girly girl, but does love to dress up in princess costumes and to have her toenails painted pink.  But she prefers to run and move, hang from the gymnastics swing, and get dirty and climb things.  She's a great artist, and I look forward to seeing how her skill develops as she gets older.  She wants to know everything (she devoured the When There is No Doctor book, and surprises me constantly with random bits of medical knowledge), and her observations are spare and hilarious.  ("How do you make ice cream?  You get a goat, and freeze it!")

As for me, I'm still sifting through all the baggage I carry around from the years of sleeping no more than 2 hours at a time (if I was lucky) and being constantly (constantly) on alert for new health crises, my brain a mush of medication schedules and pharmacy refills, and late night calls to the doctor.  The management of it was so heavy. 

 

 

 

Whenever I'm tempted to get frustrated with her impulsiveness or her excess energy, I remind myself that we weren't sure if she would ever walk, or if she would ever be healthy looking.  She was frail and her skin tight on her bones for so long, it is hard to make sense of the robust girl I see now.  Her hair is healthy and long, rather than wispy and falling out all the time from the stress of chronic illness.  There have been some dental consequences to the medical interventions given in her early years to keep her alive, but on the whole, they have been relatively minor, and compared with the alternative, I'll take the teeth problems any day of the week.

Having a medically fragile child changes you, profoundly, as a parent.  But she's nine today, and doing well, so I'll take it.

Talking Tuesday: Crawford and Why We Drive

If you've been hanging around here for a while, you will know my long-standing admiration for Matthew B. Crawford's excellent work.  (I have a whole tag dedicated to my ramblings about it!)  So it should come as no surprise that his latest book, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road, is just as excellent as his previous work. 

The title may seem like a strange one, particularly if you are like me, and you don't especially love to drive or tinker with old cars.  Crawford owns a custom motorcycle shop and has spent a lot of non-academic time messing around with engines.  His book is about the joy of driving and tinkering (what he calls "folk engineering"), but it is also about the dangers of automation on human flourishing. 

It is this last bit where the book really has my interest.  I'm not a gearhead by any stretch of the imagination, and to be perfectly honest, a lot of the technical stuff he writes about engines sails right past my head.  (Although, it must be said, I am mechanically-minded, and do a lot of the heavy-duty fixing around the house, so I'm not completely without interest in the inner workings of an internal combustion engine). 

Crawford uses the real experience of driving (and pushing the limits of a car's capabilities through driving skill acquired through time and testing) to illuminate how handing over our brains to automated processes actually takes something away from us.  When we complete mechanical tasks, the ideal is a task that requires enough skill to engage the brain, but not so much that it drains the energy for sustained work. 

As our cars have been taken over by computers, flashing screens and alerts, our brains have less to do, which mean that most people have a difficult time resisting the dopamine glow of their smartphones while driving.  With the predictable consequences we've all experienced on the road.  Crawford notes that as long as many of us drive as if our cars were already self-driving, it makes sense to push self-driving cars (5).  On the other hand, if driving required more skill (skills that humans already had), then self-driving cars would be unnecessary. 

Our cultural creative energies would be better served in making skilled demands of people, rather than cultivating some consumer experience.  "Manufactured experiences are offered as a substitute for direct confrontation with the world, and this evidently has some appeal for us.  We are relieved of the burden of grappling with real things--that is--things that resist our will, and thereby reveal our limited understanding and skill.  Experiences that have been deisnged around us offer escape from the frustrations of dealing with other people and with material reality.  They allow us to remain cocooned in a fantasy of competence and empowerment that is safe from the kind of refutation that routinely happens when you...ride a skateboard, for example" (114).

Why does it matter?  Some people are enamored of the idea that big cities could be free of traffic jams and congestion; commutes could be productive work times instead of frustrating time lost behind the wheel.  But Crawford warns that such thinking is dangerous.  The time behind the wheel can be a great time of mental freedom--to let the mind wander and think.  It is in that sort of quiet thinking time that solutions present themselves, or we can rejuvenate our souls. I personally find I get a lot of good thinking done while driving. 

But it is more than for just the freedom to quiet the mind that Crawford advocates retaining skilled driving.  He is not anti-technology; he freely acknowledges the improvements in automotive technology that have made cars safer, but those changes largely occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, invisible to the average driver.  Whereas the automation changes occurring now actually impede safety to a degree by disengaging the driver's mind, and invite further incursion on the driver's autonomy in the name of safety. 

But embodied skill is important, and contributes heavily to human happiness and flourishing.  "The new skills that we add to our repertoire when we learn to use tools and prosthetics become indistinguishable from those of the natural human body, in terms of how they are treated by the brain that organizes our actions and perceptions.  The crucial fact that makes this integration possible is that there is a closed loop between action and perception: what you perceive is determined by what you do, just as it is when we make use of our own hands.  Or a 1963 Volkswagon" (111).

There is a growing body of research that finds physical effort gives psychological rewards that lead to greater human resilience. The basic tasks of securing our bodily needs, long a labor-intensive process involving the whole body, has largely been outsourced to automated processes.  Crawford speculates that the concomitant rise in rates of anxiety and depression may be a partly a result of this disengagement with the physical world, particularly the work of our hands (64).  As our work has gone online and turned to computing and knowledge skills, the loss of skilled embodied work has been a disaster, both economically and culturally.  We were not meant to live in the world of the Jetsons, however attractive the wiz-bang technology of that landscape seems.  Our brains crave agency over our environment and ourselves, and when denied it through effortless-driven rewards, turn to maladaptive practices instead.  The same body of research also finds that when we inhabit the natural world, with the resistance to our will and real-consequences problems to solve, we thrive on solving those problems with far less stress (64).

It is also true that our management of the road requires a certain level of social cohesion that our culture is rapidly losing.  Writes Crawford, "...our ability to share the road together smoothly and safely is based on our capacity for mutual prediction.  This is a form of intelligence that is socially realized, and depends on the existence of robust social norms that can anchor sound expectations of others' behavior.  Automation may become attractive, then, as a response to declining social cohesion: it is an attempt to replace trust and cooperation with machine-generated certainty....this is an approach that is likely to cause the further atrophy of our skills.  Among these are the skills of collective self-government, rooted in shared habits of cooperation.  A science of behavior management becomes necessary" (121). 

The basic point is that if you never learn to share your toys, to negotiate the complexities of social interaction in the real world, and let things get messy, as life is wont to do, you will have no idea how to react when there is no algorithm to guide you through a menu of predetermined options.  Crawford repeatedly cites the humans in the Pixar film Wall-E, who have so forgotten the basic embodied skills of humanity that they must be hauled around on automated flying saucers, talking only to screens instead of face-to-face.  He also notes the level of social control the humans allow themselves to be subject to, and cautions his readers against it, for this way lies madness. 

Which brings me to the next point, that of embodied life.  Humans were not meant to serve an algorithmic life, mediated by screens and whatever our Tech Overlords want us to think and see and do.  We were not meant for "cultivated consumer experiences" or the inscrutable wisps of whatever exists in the cloud. 

We were meant to fully inhabit our bodies and our world, in all the messiness that entails.  We were meant to stick our hands into actual dirt to grow things.  To care for actual animals to rear for food and clothing.  To raise our children, with all the bodily fluids that entails.  To stand on the shoulders of giants to move and progress.  "But tradition can itself be an engine of progress.  It organizes the transmission of knowledge.  It also provides an idiom for some shared endeavor, and a set of historical benchmarks, such that one can imagine oneself outdoing particular human beings who came before, and who worked within the same basic limitations.  Tradition thus provides a venue for rivalry in excellence, the kind that sometimes bring a whole community to new and unexpected places" (136).  There is a thingness in embodied space, physical habitation, and real things that simply cannot be replicated online without some loss of ontological self. 

There is a role for technology and the Internet in our world, but we must never lose sight of the fact that it is a tool, and we the wielders of it, rather than the other way around.  When automation becomes a way to deskill humans and rob them of the flourishing that comes with skilled, meaningful work, it has overstepped its purpose.  A tool can become an extension of our bodies through long use and acquired fluency, but it can also get in the way.  Does technology allow us to remain in touch with far-flung family members and to maintain relationships that would otherwise wither?  Yes, undoubtedly.  Does it also get in the way of in-person interaction by inserting itself loudly into intimate conversations?  Absolutely.  Does it allow us access to an unimaginable wealth of knowledge and information?  Of course. But it also provides platforms that debase our common humanity, and reduces the quality of our interactions by increasing the noise in our heads. 

I suppose the (long, rambling) point to all this can be boiled down to the following: Do stuff with your hands in the real world.  Learn to fix things that are broken, how to mend that which has ripped, develop new skills beyond a keyboard, and get your hands dirty while doing so.

There is much more to say about this book, and I hope to revisit it in a future post.

 

Talking Tuesday: It is Good That You Exist

There's an old George Carlin routine that goes, "You know how when you are driving on the road, everyone going faster than you is a maniac, but everyone going slower is an idiot?"

Yes, that. 

Lately, I have a sort of spiky feeling inside me, one that doesn't want to give people the benefit of the doubt, doesn't want to give way, doesn't want to try to understand.  It's the ragey feeling that Carlin describes so well. It's not generally how I think about people or life in general, so it feels awful to feel like this.

I keep going back to Ulrich Lehner's bit in God Is Not Nice, where he talks about the most basic definition of love. It is acknowledging: It is good that you exist. 

That's it.  Everything that proceeds from that statement then determines how we treat the other person and interact with them.  Sounds simple, but it isn't, not really. Not when you get down under the statement and think about what it means to say: it is good that you exist.

I keep thinking too how we are all grieving--as a nation, as a world--for all that has been lost in the past months, and for all that will not be in the months to come.  We're not very good at grieving, culturally speaking, so it comes out in weird ways.  There's been denial and anger, depression and bargaining, but I don't think any of us has come to real acceptance of the thing.  That life is never going to be as it was, and some things are going to be forever changed. 

Does that mean we will always feel out of control and crazy?  No.  Does that mean that the current stage is the "new normal?"  Of course not.  But it does mean that this maelstrom of grief has to be gone through in order to emerge on the other side in a place of healing and growth.  If we don't go through it, the grief will continue to haunt us, to leak around the edges until it has its way.  There's no way forward but through the tunnel.

It's a messy business, all of it.

Yarn Along: August

 ~knitting~

I finished a thing!

This is the linen scarflet I've been noodling away at since late May, although I'm not sure how much use I'll get out of it this season. 

It is a nice little layer when you need a little something, but it has been so hot and humid this summer, and I'm at home in my non-central AC home, so I'm just sticky all the time.  Even in air-conditioned spaces, I find I'm hot because the humidity is so high. 

That said, I do think it will be great in the spring, as I'm generally still wearing scarves, but it is too mild for wool ones. 

I wear my yellow cotton-linen Chinook a lot in the spring and fall, so this should be a nice transitional piece.

I'm also still working on my textured shawl, and am getting near the end of the first ball.  I was planning to knit two full balls, and probably still will.  

 I did a couple repeats of the Simply shawl pattern that I used on the linen piece, but wanted to add in more texture, so I'm adding in some repeats from other patterns that have easy to follow patterns with high texture.  

~reading~

Still working through Yuri Slezkine's House of Government.  I'm about half-way through (475 pages or so of 900) and am still quite riveted by his work.  

I also read a few light novels when I needed a break from Slezkine. 

~sewing~

Underwear, mostly.  (Ha!)  I never thought I'd get into it, but I'm tired of unders that don't fit well, or meet my requirements, and while I've altered some of my RTW to meet some of those requirements (more on that in a separate post), I'm kind of enjoying these little projects.  I'll blog about the specs in a separate post at some point.

~watching~

I finished season five of Grantchester and went back to the beginning and have enjoyed that very much.  I find Sidney's sermons to be a bit better than Will's on the whole, but Will's sermons are more theologically sound (with the caveat that most of it is borderline on the theology to start with).  Also, Robson Greene is the man.  The scenes between Geordie and Kathy this past season were pure gold, and Greene should get an award for the episode with Kathy's mother.

I also saw Mr. Jones, which is a very important film that everyone should watch if they can.  My husband wanted to see it too, so I ended up seeing it twice, which I was glad for, as I missed a couple of details the first time round, plus the story packs just as big a wallop the second go-round.  James Norton plays the real-life Gareth Jones, a Welshman who worked at Lloyd George's foreign advisor who speaks Russian because his mother spent time there and he studied it at Cambridge.  He questions how the Soviet Union can be on a spending spree in the middle of a global depression, and goes there to investigate the question.  He pays a high price for being unwilling to lie.  There are a number of great reviews floating around, and I found these two quite illuminating.

~garden~

A tomato harvest!  This bowl was half full last night before dinner, but we ate them before I got a proper picture.  We have two red tomato plants and one orange pear, but the orange pear has been slow to ripen and there haven't been as many fruits as on the other two red tomato plants.  Which is a shame because the pear tomatoes are more delicious!  

My cucumber vines are a disappointment--lots of leafy growth, tons of male flowers, but no females.  I've pruned and trained the vines, but I don't know what else to do to encourage female flowers--it's not a pollinator issue, it's a flower issue.

 

 Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along.

Strange Neutrals

I love strange neutrals.  You know what I mean--those colors that don't really go with anything but actually go with almost everything.  It can take a while to find the strange neutrals in your color palette, and sometimes a closet orphan can turn into a strange neutral that you don't expect.

Last year, I bought a pair of ballet flats that were a kind of burnt sienna color, mostly because they were half the regular price.  I wasn't sure how versatile they would be, but actually, they go with everything and nothing at the same time.  And for anyone who has a terrible time finding ballet flats, these are the real deal.  I can't wear flats usually, and almost every shoe in this style pulls on my heel, makes my toes numb or gives blisters, and makes my high arches ache.  The Chaste Ballet have a padded insole, soft flexible elasticated back end that doesn't rub or pull, rubber sole with actual tread, and come in wide widths that actually fit my toes! 

But enough about shoes.  Another strange neutral I discovered a couple of years ago is yellow.  Like a lot of people descended from northern Europeans, I have a hard time finding a yellow that is flattering to my skin tone, and rarely wear it next to my face.  That said, I have a bright buttercup yellow cardigan that goes with a lot of thing by virtue of not going, and my beloved marigold linen skirt is a strange neutral workhorse. 

This summer, my strange neutral discovery is pale lavender.  Birdie has a pair of shorts that color, and isn't into fashion or matching at all, so she wears them with whatever is in her drawer, and I've noticed that the lavender kind of goes with everything. 

The lavender striped top that I thrifted this spring was another such neutral.  I decided that a pale lavender Rose skirt was in order, as I have a few tops this summer that don't seem to go well with my warmer-toned skirts (the pink clay and orange, respectively), or with the teal skirt that I wear a lot.

As a kind of birthday treat for myself, I spent yesterday sewing it, watching an arthouse film plus some light comedy (recommend The Hustle for this) and thoroughly enjoying the time.  It was possibly the nicest birthday I've had in a long time.

I experimented with a different waistband interfacing (leftover t-shirt scraps from altering some too-big camp t-shirts for the girls) and I think I like it!  I went for a 2" waistband this time, since 2.5" is clearly too tall for my short waist (which is basically right under my bottom rib), and 1" is fine but tends to roll a bit during the day. 

I used two layers of the t-shirt fabric to interface, and if I do this again, I'd probably use one and be more careful about grading seam allowances.  I did grade a little bit, but I'd grade at a different stage of the sewing in the future.  I don't think it is possible to make a roll-free waistband on my figure, as even 3/8" waistbands or faced waistbands roll a bit, but I'm hoping this iteration works well.  So far, it has been comfortable against my middle, and retaining its shape pretty well.

I used the Kaufman Brussels linen again and was mindful of my experience with the Poppy colorway for the orange skirt, because this fabric does stretch with overhandling due to the rayon content. I could probably stand to hem up another half inch, but this is okay for now.  Next time my machine is out I'll probably take it up a smidge.

I received some rayon poplin for my birthday that is a kind of yellow-chartreuse color in the background with teal and gray and marigold in the print, and am pondering what to make with it.  I think it will be a fun addition to my early fall clothing because the print is kind of summery but the colors are definitely more autumn-like.  A lightweight dress that I can wear with my super thin teal sweater (and a perfect color match)? A swishy maxi skirt?  A two-piece outfit (Emerald+Rose skirt?) 

It's a nice creative distraction anyway, and I'll take it, in this summer that seems to have taken on Biblical proportions.  My mind is crowded with so many things, and it is hard to turn it off and let my brain rest.  It's not good for me or my kids, so I know I need to develop more strategies to get the downtime I need to recharge and recover.  I'm working on it.

Of Birthdays, Jade Songbirds, and Haircuts in the Quarantine

I'm 41 today, which feels about right.  My body is getting older, and I can feel it (and see it).  But that's okay, really.  My body is my home, and I'm settled in for the duration. 

A couple of weeks ago, I fell in love with some cotton lawn on Hart's Fabric website, but paused a bit about the price.  The cost was above my usual comfort zone, but it was extra wide yardage, and I knew I could get a dress out of my usual yardage enough left over to make an Emerald or a dress for one of the girls.  I've been impressed with how lawn wears over time, so hopefully it will be a dress that sees lots of wear.

I knew that the Lepidoptera dress was a fail for me, and wanted to have one more lawn dress option in my hot weather closet because the heat is just never-ending this year.  It started around Memorial Day weekend, and there really hasn't been a break since--high humidity, temps in the 90s most days.  Gross.  It also means that while I can technically get more than one wearing out of my clothes, I generally don't like to because it is harder to get the fabric clean, which means it wears out faster. 

This summer reminds me of the summer of 2011, when we had six weeks of heat dome that included temps over 100 degrees plus high humidity.  I was 7-8 months pregnant with Birdie at the time and we don't have central AC (and in 2011, we only had one floor unit in the office/guest room to keep the computer cool), so it was a fairly miserable summer. She was born at the end of August, just ahead of Hurricane Irene (apt, given her personality).

But I digress, as usual.  So I bought the fabric (admittedly, somewhat impulsively, but I decided it would be a birthday dress) and made it up almost as soon as it arrived, shortly after finishing my husband's replacement kombu.  I've gotten away from florals these past couple of years, and while this is technically a floral, it is somewhat more botanical than ditsy print (and those colors!!), so it works. 

I did have to make it in stages because of how my sewing time was that week, but I even made my own bias tape for the neck binding!  I did the continuous method for the first time, using an 8x8" square and it worked a treat!  My husband spotted my bias tape maker case sitting on a cabinet after I was done and was intrigued.  

My only change to the pattern was to put a bit of elastic in the back of the waist ties for comfort.  I don't know why I didn't think of this before--my one complaint about this dress pattern is that while it is very comfortable overall, the ties need to be adjusted throughout the day because: woven fabric. 

So I split the waist tie in the middle, added about 11" of knit elastic to the gap, zig-zagging the edges to the elastic, and then ran it through the casing with a bodkin.  (I did this with Ponchik's Butterfly dress ties as well and it worked a treat). What a difference!  So comfortable, unbinding, but yet flattering waist-shaping.  I also think it doesn't shift around as much in the casing.  Perfect in disgusting heat. 

Incidentally, I cut my hair Monday, after being unable to get a haircut myself for probably two years.  I've been cutting the boys' hair every month or so since early in the lockdown, and cut my husband's hair once (that was nerve-wracking!) and cut the girls' hair over the weekend--just a little trim for them. 

My hair has gotten increasingly unwieldy not because of the length but because of the frizz and thinning.  I've had to get pretty creative to cover the areas where my scalp shows through.  I still do curly girl hair care, and it does help, but the ends were thin and scraggly, so I flipped my hair over after a wash and trimmed off about 1.5" all around, cutting carefully in sections.  My hair is so thin this wasn't too hard, but  I ended up cutting long layers in my hair by doing it this way. 

That said, the shorter layers actually look pretty good!  I probably just need to find a salon that is open (it is still hit or miss for that here; we aren't totally in green phase yet) and get the back trimmed up even more, because what is scraggly still is the ends on the bottom in the back and I can't reach that as well to get a nice even cut.  I'm wearing my hair up almost all the time right now anyway, so it's not that noticeable, but once it cools down, I'll probably want it down again.

I have no firm plans for today--maybe I'll put together my Cedar Sweater pdf at long last, or cut out some more gigantic undies (more on that in separate post), or work on something for a friend.  Or maybe I'll just knit in a chair and watch something.  Or forge on with Slezkine.  Maybe all those things!  The day is my oyster!