My one regret

I am not the type of person to regret decisions I’ve made in the past. Sure, there are some decisions I’ve made that didn’t work out quite the way I wanted, or caused way more angst and suffering than they should have **cough cough graduate school**. But I’m able to view them as valuable learning experiences that set me up well for something in my future. For instance, while there were many things in grad school that were beyond soul-sucking (like, say, the time I sat in a meeting with two professors who both argued vociferously IN MY PRESENCE about how neither wanted to advise me….or the time my advisor was initially denied tenure….), I learned (pretty damn quickly) how to advocate for myself, how to design my own dissertation project, how to apply for and navigate funding, and how to find and cultivate mentors and sponsors in a festering snakepit. And, of course, meeting my partner in grad school definitely (or, almost definitely) made the experience worthwhile.

I do, however, have one true regret: “retiring” from competitive swimming in 8th grade.

Now, this regret is a bit tricky, because it was a product of the limited options I had at the time. I was fortunate that my elementary / junior high school had a competitive swim team. It started when I was in 5th grade, maybe? My memory is a bit fuzzy. But I loved, loved, loved to swim and loved the water, so I joined and then swam all the way through 8th grade. Our season was during the fall, and I absolutely LOVED every minute of it. Practice, meets, the whole thing. I was never the fastest swimmer, but I improved every year (and won Most Improved Swimmer in 7th grade).

But the high school I attended (a small, all-girls Catholic high school) did not, at the time, have a swim team. There was a club team in my community, and I remember talking with my parents about joining that team after my 8th grade season ended. I ultimately decided against it. From what I can piece together from my (shoddy) memory of that time, it was partly fear of the unknown (the club team was GOOD and I was not super confident in my own skill and talent) and partly worry over family finances. So I gave it up.

I went on to do other things in high school and beyond — chorus and theater, leadership and service, church youth group stuff. I played softball (poorly). I did become a lifeguard as one way to scratch my swimming itch (and as a way to spend my entire summer in and around the water), and swam laps occasionally in college and beyond. But I always wondered “what if?”. What if I’d decided differently, and swam club in high school? What might have opened up for me? Would I have come to see myself as an athlete then, rather than well into adulthood?

I’m thinking about this more lately because I started swimming Masters one year ago (!!). I’m in the pool 2-3 days a week with excellent swimmers who swam in high school and college (and one who still competes at the Masters level). I work in a smaller group with a separate coach once a week to improve my skills. And…I’m improving significantly. I complete the workouts (something I couldn’t do at first) and, when I’m not chit-chatting or sneaking in extra rest between sets, I’m mostly keeping up with the group. I can do flip turns consistently, something I never thought I’d say as an adult.

Last week at our small group practice, another participant complimented my swimming and said “surely you swam in high school?” No, I said, I had to “retire” in 8th grade because there was no high school team. Our small group coached looked at me and said, with absolute sincerity, “Wow. What a waste of talent!” Which, I’ll be honest, floored me. Talent? For real? But at the same time, that one little comment brought vindication and possibly a bit of closure. The regret came from somewhere deep, somewhere that understood how very important swimming was at that point in my life, and acknowledged the cost of walking away from something so deeply held. My coach’s comment validated those deep feelings for me. And in a sense, this is freeing me to move on. I can’t change that choice years ago. But by taking up swimming again as an adult, and taking it seriously and working hard to improve and get faster and stronger, I can, in a sense, honor 8th grade me and restart down that untaken path.

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Spring term starts with a (YAWN) is it bedtime yet?

Spring term started on Monday this week, after a shorter-than-normal spring break that wasn’t really a break. I knew going in it would be a tough term workload-wise — 2 full courses plus an every-other-week colloquium plus my research group plus FPC plus wrapping up my leadership of the cohort program I coordinate. I was somewhat prepared for that coming in to the term, although I am still a bit alarmed at the lack of whitespace whenever I open my work calendar. As I told my therapist at my last session, the second course is a multiplier in terms of time added to my schedule, not additive. More time in the classroom, more prep time, more students in office hours, more staff meetings to coordinate, more things to keep track of.

I was not, however, prepared for the sheer level of exhaustion every single day.

My “tell” when I’ve reached my limit is that everything becomes intolerable. Everything is too loud, too messy, too chaotic. I want everything to be quite, calm, and orderly. When you live in a house with teens / tweens, multiple pets, and an extroverted partner who works from home, calm / quiet / orderly is non-existent. I have been an absolute nightmare to my family the past few nights because they’ve had the audacity to exist and be their usual boisterous selves. I may have threatened to move out at least twice last night at dinner.

Paradoxically, I can’t wind down at night either because I’m so keyed up from exhaustion and from all the things from the day. I’ll try to do something sensible, like work on a craft project, but then get caught up in a Pinterest rabbit hole trying to figure out what the “best” thing to do with my leftover yarn is, or what yarn might be the closest match for this other pattern I want to make because the original yarn doesn’t exist anymore….and then it’s past my bedtime and I never actually got around to doing the craft project and now I’m both frustrated and exhausted.

I recognize that things will likely improve soon. I’ll get used to the rhythms of this particular teaching schedule. I’ll get to know my students better, which will remove the layer of exhaustion caused by interacting with people I don’t know well and trying to figure them out. The startup costs of a term are real, and those will subside and be replaced with more predictability. And, most importantly, I will get a bit of a break this weekend, something I haven’t been able to say in a long time.

And maybe, in the interim, I’ll find a teeny slice of whitespace in my calendar and put my head down on my desk for a few minutes, so that I’m not always bringing my absolute worst self home to my family.

Spring “break”

On Sunday, I graded the final assignment for my winter term course, finalized the project grades, assigned letter grades to each student, and entered them into the system. Winter term: done!

Then I immediately turned around and started prepping for spring term. Spring break: nonexistent!

The turnaround between winter and spring terms is usually pretty short: a week to get grades in, a week to prep. There’s not a lot of time left to take a true break, but at the very least you can conceivably take one weekend completely off and maybe a full weekday.

When our term starts on a Wednesday, as it did this year, it’s shorter still: finals ended on a Wednesday, grades were due the following Monday (meaning 4 days later, including 2 weekend days), and spring term classes start the Monday after that. Realistically, this means at least some work both weekends (finalizing grades one weekend, finalizing syllabi the next) and very little room for a break otherwise.

Ugh.

Not taking any break at all is not an option, unless I want to be a nonfunctional puddle of goo by midway through spring term. Particularly since I’m teaching 2 full courses in the same term (plus a 1-credit colloquium), something I haven’t done in years due to various course releases. One of those courses — Intro — I haven’t taught since Spring 2019, so I’m a bit rusty, to say the least. So I had to get a bit creative to carve out some time for restoration.

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I settled on taking one weekday (yesterday) completely off. I got outside on my fatbike (because early spring in Minnesota is just an extension of winter), read, took a nap, booked our summer vacation, and took care of some life tasks on the old to-do list. And I made good progress on my latest craft project.

I won’t say the one day off magically rejuvenated me completely and I’m definitely NOT going into spring term restored and refreshed, but it did help. Knowing I didn’t have to get back to work at some point during the day meant that I could actually enjoy what I was doing, when I was doing it. And knowing that I blocked this particular day off means that I don’t have to spend the days I am working worrying about when I’ll get certain life tasks done or pining to get outside for a few hours (although I won’t completely rule out another outdoor adventure before the break ends).

The day off also reminded me of the importance of taking regular breaks throughout the term. Meaning: working on weekends (except for my Sunday night planning sessions) should be the exception and not the norm, and midterm break should be an actual break from work and not a catch-up day or a Schedule All The Meetings day. (For me, at least; I know many of my colleagues use the day off as a catch-up or as a place to put a bunch of meetings, and that’s absolutely fine too.) I can’t be there for my students, or my kids and partner, or my colleagues as my best self if I’ve burned myself out, so breaks are an important work and life task.

Here’s hoping I remember this in the thick of spring term when 8273 things are vying for my attention.

What I’m working on this term

Winter Term started exactly one week ago, so we are now officially in the swing of things. I’m teaching 5 days a week this term, which is great in terms of spreading out the workload but also means I don’t really have a “down” day where I can work from home and crank things out that require deep thinking and concentration. It’s also the first time in a while that I’m teaching a full 6-credit course — my course releases for my leadership role and my service on our tenure and promotion committee meant that I had a lighter teaching schedule in Spring 2022 and Fall 2022 (Comps and the Science Fellows Colloquium, both terms). It took me a few days to get back into the rhythm of a MWF class!

Winter is always a busy term for me, and this year is no exception. So, what am I spending my time on this term?

Research

My big research deadline / push actually happens early in the term, so I get it out of the way right away — I have a conference paper deadline this weekend. The working draft is currently a bit rougher than I’d like, but definitely in a state that can be tweaked by the deadline. I also fully expect that the paper will be rejected, since I’m aiming high, so that takes a bit of the pressure off to get it “perfect”. The paper is on an experiment we did in Spring 2019, so I’m relieved to finally be getting it out for review.

For the rest of the term, my goal is to take a look at all the other work-in-progress and determine what to write up next. I didn’t realize while in the thick of campus leadership just how much mental energy that role took up, and how much that mental energy overlapped with the mental energy required to do deep thinking and writing about my scholarship. I’m looking forward to having some of that mental space back.

Teaching

I’m teaching Software Design this term, a course I regularly teach. A few years back we revamped the course, and I’ve pretty much followed the same order of topics since then. I’ve had a bunch of conversations with one of my junior colleagues about the course, in particular about where our students struggle, and based on those conversations and their experiment in moving topics around, I’m playing around with a different order of topics. I think this reordering will give our students more solid footing in some of the backend development, and better prepare them to work with web frameworks. I worry a bit that they might miss some of the messaging around user-centered design, since I’m not leading with that anymore, so we’ll see what happens.

Service

Winter is by far my busiest term as Summer Science Fellows director. I need to select a new cohort and place them into research labs on campus, and help our second year cohort find research positions, too. There are a lot of moving pieces to keep track of. I developed a pretty decent workflow using Trello last year, which I plan on using again. In addition, I’ll be searching for my own replacement as director, since I’m stepping down at the end of this year.

Personal

I test for my third degree black belt in taekwondo in mid-March (eek!). I am confident that I will pass, but I’d like to try for that elusive perfect score on the form portion of my test. (I’m pretty close, I think!) My taekwondo studio puts on a mini-show twice a year with the black belts, and last year I took over organizing and directing that. Our next show is in April, so I will be spending time this month putting together routines, and then after that running once a week practices up until the show.

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Looking at this list, there’s certainly a lot in play, although thankfully I don’t think it rises to the level of requiring a self-care paper chain. And there are things not on this list — the end of Comps at the end of the term, my work on the tenure and promotion committee, stuff at home — that are also ongoing. But I’m mindful about my limits and am working hard to ensure that I keep everything within comfortable boundaries so that I don’t completely exhaust myself.

Currently reading: Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal, by Rebecca Pope-Ruark.

Holding pattern

I’m in a weird and uncertain spot in what feels like all areas of my life right now.

Career-wise, I’m transitioning out of both of my campus leadership positions. My term as STEM Director ends sometime in December (exact handoff date TBD), and I’m stepping down as Summer Science Fellows Director at the end of the academic year. In the latter case, I’ve held the position for longer than the typical tenure (hello, pandemic!), and while I still find the work immensely fulfilling, it’s time to give someone else the opportunity to carry the program forward.

Life-wise, things are no less settled. I’m injured, and not running, again. The transition to middle school has been rough, for the Resident 6th Grader and thus for the entire family. The Resident 10th Grader is starting to contemplate life after high school while also learning to drive and generally becoming more and more independent from us. We recently had a Big Important Conversation with my in-laws about life transitions and moving. And I learned at that conversation that my partner and kids have Very Strong Opinions about place and home — opinions that greatly constrain my decision-making process about future leadership opportunities.

It’s unmooring.

When I started as STEM Director, I sort of assumed that I’d step out of that role and into another leadership role once my term was up. Or, at the very least, have a clear path to whatever the next leadership position is. Instead, I find myself stepping into a whole sea of “unknown unknowns” and a path (or set of paths) shrouded by thick fog.

This all feels very uncomfortable right now. To be honest, I’ve spent a lot of the past month wallowing in the discomfort, and ok, maybe even whining a bit. Or a lot. As a Type A first-born Upholder, I judge my self-worth by achievement and productivity. So when the next achievement is not visible on the horizon, I flounder. And other than my third degree black belt rank test next March, there are no well-defined goals on the docket for me.

I recently reminded myself of my one (two) word theme for the year, gentle serendipity. It’s much easier to embrace the concept in theory than in practice, particularly when whining feels way more fulfilling in the moment. But I’m rededicating myself to that theme for the remainder of the year. I don’t need to make all of the decisions now. There is value in hitting pause, in gradually reflecting on what the last few years have taught me about leadership and what I do and don’t want in the next phase of my career, and my life. It’s perfectly fine, rather than forcing my way through the fog, to sit on this bench enjoying the (obscured) view and waiting for the paths to emerge.

50!

Starting the day with intention setting…of course!

Today I celebrate a milestone birthday!

Maybe I’m weird or unusual (those of you who know me in real life can now stop snickering…of course I’m weird, ha ha, thank you very much), but I actually look forward to getting older. Aging intrigues me rather than scares me. Maybe it’s because I’ve felt more powerful, more brave, and more centered the older I get. Maybe it’s because I don’t view wrinkles or gray hair or gaining weight in weird places (thanks a lot, periomenopause) as some sort of personal failing. Maybe it’s because I’ve found a way to keep having new adventures and try new things each year.

Or maybe, as I told my physical therapist last week, it’s because I’m “aging up” and get to set a whole new collection of running PRs!

Whatever it is, I’m really looking forward to what my 50s have in store.

I’ve actually been mulling over my intentions for the year for a few days now, so I need to get those on paper. Reflecting back on what I wrote at 49 was really interesting — and I was surprised at how many things on my intention list I ticked off over the year. A few things that will appear on my list:

• Returning to running — and hopefully a few races! I was cleared yesterday to start the return to run program after over 6 months off of running, and I’ll do my first workout tomorrow.
• Figuring out what’s next career-wise. This was one of the few intentions I didn’t check off last year. I do think I’m in a better place now to do this kind of work, and have a better sense of what I do and don’t want to do.
• Leveling up in taekwondo. I test for my 3rd degree black belt next March! In the meantime, I’ve started teaching once a week at my studio, and I am in the process of learning all of the weapons forms well enough to teach them. This is something I’ve wanted to do personally for a while, and something I need to do to earn my full instructor certificate.

Today I plan to bike one of my favorite long run / marathon training routes up in the Cities, treat myself to a lakeside lunch at the end of said bike ride, teach taekwondo, and eat cake. My mom and one of my sisters are flying in this weekend, so we’ll have more celebrations (and hopefully more cake!) then. I haven’t seen either of them since my brother’s wedding in 2019 (!!), so honestly just being able to hug them and be in the same physical space as them is the best present ever.

Here’s to a new decade of adventures!

New month, new adventure

Still life infused with chlorine

While I don’t completely live by the phrase “Do one thing every day that scares you”^*, I do try to do things on a regular basis that stretch me outside of my comfort zone. Some of these are big adventures — moving across the country to a state where I knew no one — but many are smaller — becoming a regular blood donor again after a bad incident drove me away for a decade.

I’d hoped to do one such big adventure for my 50th birthday, coming up later this month. I pondered hiking the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim, a several-day trek on the Superior Hiking Trail, or some other solo outdoorsy trip.

Then I got injured, started the never-ending cycle of physical therapy, and put the adventures on hold while I healed.

So I started to look for something smaller, something that still made me nervous but that I could do while inhabiting my healing body.

And that’s how I landed on Masters swimming.

We gave up our family gym membership a while ago, and along with it access to a pool. I swam competitively up until 8th grade; worked as a lifeguard and swim instructor through high school, college, and grad school; and basically grew up in and around water, swimming every chance I could get. I enjoyed getting in the pool every once in a while and peeling off some laps. I missed that when our membership ended, but not enough to seek out opportunities to swim, since I was doing so many other active things.

As my injuries dragged on and as my return-to-running date became fuzzier and further out, I contemplated a short-term gym membership somewhere with a pool, but the options weren’t great. And I realized that not only was I missing cardio, I was missing the structure of a plan. I wanted someone to tell me what to do, to create some accountability, to push me out of my usual habit of swimming leisurely and only doing sets I enjoyed.

It took me a few months to work up the courage to actually sign up and show up. At my old gym, the Masters group that swam in the early morning was a total Bro Fest — loud, brash, and completely unwelcoming. I worried that I’d end up in a group just like that — fast, former collegiate swimmers who’d be annoyed at me for being so slow and bringing down the caliber of the group. I worried about getting back into the pool after a long absence, of not being able to complete the sets, of failing at swimming.

I ended up signing up for the Masters group run by my elder kiddo’s swim club. I figured, for better or worse, I knew the coaches, and surely they wouldn’t make too much fun of me knowing that I’m Resident 9th Grader’s mom, right?

I was terrified to attend my first practice, which was on Monday. I had trouble falling asleep, and checked and rechecked my swim bag the night before.

But as soon as I walked in the door, someone recognized me as a newbie, and came up to say hi. And introduced me around. As it turns out, Monday is a more lightly-attended workout, so I didn’t even have to share a lane (and “drag down everyone around me”, another fear of mine). No one cared that I didn’t do all of the sets, or that I put my flippers on for the kick drills because I’m more comfortable doing so. Parts of the workout were challenging because I was out of practice, but I did way better than I expected. The coach even noticed a small thing that was affecting my stroke that I’ve never been able to diagnose, and correcting it has already made a difference in my endurance. I went back on Tuesday and did even more of the sets and it was still challenging but more doable. Circle swimming was not as hard as I remembered, and as it turns out my swimming speed was totally on par with the other two swimmers in my lane. And I met even more people who went out of their way to welcome me and engage me in the conversation of the group.

And the coaches didn’t make fun of me, either.

I’m still not sure if this is going to be a one-month-only thing, or if Masters swimming will be something I incorporate more regularly. I do know that this group does not swim in the summer — but I’ve heard rumors that my younger kiddo’s swim school might be starting a Masters group for the summer….

What’s one thing you’ve done recently that’s scared you?

^*Which, contrary to popular belief, was written by Mary Schmich, and not Eleanor Roosevelt. If you’d like to go down the same rabbit hole I did regarding the history of this quote, start here.

A time to rebuild

I haven’t run since October.

I’ve spent the better part of the last year in and out of physical therapy. A sprained ankle from spring 2020 that never quite healed, then another sprained ankle (the other one, at least — equal opportunity injuries!). Muscle imbalances and tightness. PT would “fix” one issue and another would pop up like a game of Injury Whack-A-Mole. I’d build back up to running, and then have to stop. My last run, in early October, ended with me hobbling with achilles pain and one really specific painful spot in my hamstring.

When resting and yoga and foam rolling and strength training and pleading to the running gods for several months to just let me run again already, please didn’t work, I broke down and scheduled an orthopedic visit. And ended up back in, this time, pretty intense physical therapy. “Postural therapy”, as my chart puts it.

TL;DR: my body is pretty darn broken.

Through PT, I’m slowly retraining my body to support itself properly, to undo years of overcompensation for muscle weaknesses and realign everything back to where it’s supposed to be. It’s hard and maddeningly, maddeningly slow. Understandably, my body’s fighting the changes — it’s difficult to unlearn habits honed over a lifetime! If PT doesn’t ultimately help, I’m not sure what the next steps are.

The hardest part, of course, is not running. Sure, I do other active things — my fatbike and snowshoes saw a lot of action this winter, and the taekwondo studio is my home away from home. But running has always been my go-to, my most satisfying workout. And it’s a key, key part of my mental health toolkit. Walking is great, but it’s not running. I’ve been mourning the loss of running (even if it turns out to be temporary and I’m back at it someday) as keenly as any other loss. I’ve had to mourn the loss of running, so that the thought of possibly never running again doesn’t consume me.

I find that I’m not just rebuilding my body right now — I seem to be in a state of rebuilding. I’m rebuilding my mental health toolkit to make up for the absence of running. (Yoga, which was my go-to for a while, is off the table for now too, until my body gets in a better, supportive place.) With the end of my tenure as STEM Director approaching at the end of the calendar year, I’m rebuilding my career goals and figuring out what I might want to do next. I’m rebuilding connections to community partners, to jump-start collaborations that went dark during the pandemic. And I’m looking to rebuild my relationship to my work in general, so that it doesn’t leave me so burned out and demoralized.

The trick with rebuilding is that nothing is guaranteed. I may indeed need to let go of running even if I do get my body to a better place. My career goals, and community collaborations, may not pan out. Given the state of the world and the still ongoing pandemic, continuing burnout seems likely. But even if rebuilding gets me to a different place than I’d hoped, in any or all of these realms, I still believe that I end up ahead — and that’s worth the risks and the costs.

Emerging

After pressing “submit” this morning on the study abroad program website, uploading the weeks-ago promised letter of recommendation, I felt something I hadn’t experienced in quite some time:

Relief.

Going into the term, I knew that Winter Term would be a whirlwind. It’s always my busiest time of year service-wise — reviewing applications and selecting the next cohort for the Summer Science Fellows, coordinating the review of applications for faculty-student research funding (and suggesting how to allocate those funds), managing the end of the Fall/Winter Comps cycle with the Comps Gala and the oral exams and all of the other administrative tasks that entails. On top of that, I have a large Software Design class (36 students). And this year, I’ve added reading tenure and promotion files to the mix and attending meetings for the tenure and promotion committee I was elected to at the end of last year.

It’s…a lot.

It’s been particularly a lot since mid-February, starting with Advising Week and going non-stop since then. I’ve worked every weekend in February and so far in March, sometimes both days (particularly in the last couple of weeks). Early mornings, late evenings, random bits of time I’d usually spend on other things — work, work, work. (When I grumpily kicked my partner and my elder kiddo out of my home office last night, both of whom bounded in wanting to brain dump their days on me, both of them rolled their eyes at me and deemed me “no fun anymore”. Ouch.) Work often feels like an avalanche — as I finish up one set of tasks, I can see the other ones quickly bearing down on me.

I’m definitely not at my best. Because of all the work, and because I lack some of my coping mechanisms like running (more on that in a future post), I have limited energy reserves. I find myself spending those limited reserves on my students and my colleagues — which means that my reserves are even more shot than normal by the time I get home.

The recommendation letter is not the last item on my way-too-long to-do list. Not by a longshot. But that letter was the last thing in the overwhelming backlog of tasks. I can look at what’s left on the list and slot those tasks, many though they are, into mostly normal working hours that don’t involve frantically keeping one eye on the clock and worrying about the 8000 things I’m not currently doing. I have time to pause and take breaks in between tasks! I can take the entire weekend off if I choose! I might even spend a wild evening (gasp) playing board games with my kids tonight!

For the first time in a long time, life feels….manageable.

(At least until the final projects and reflection essays come in next week!)

Random thoughts, week-before-classes-start edition

I attended my first in-person retreat yesterday — our annual Department Retreat. I was surprised by two things in particular:

1. How much I didn’t know I missed meeting with, and discussing things with, my colleagues in person. While we’ve certainly had our share of deep and important discussions over Zoom and Slack over the past year and a half, there’s just a different level of engagement, particularly around difficult topics, that occurs when you’re all sitting in a circle in the same physical space.
2. How draining meeting with people in person is, after a year and a half of meeting online. I had a few things I meant to tackle post-retreat, but instead I found myself looking at everyone’s first day of school pictures (school started in my kids’ district yesterday) and tackling my email backlog. I have another retreat today, and will try to remember to give myself some grace if I’m mostly brain-dead and unproductive afterwards.

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I have a longer post brewing about my goals for the year, including (especially) my leadership goals. I spent a lot of unproductive time this summer beating myself up for all the things I wanted to do as STEM Director this year that…just didn’t get done. Conveniently forgetting, of course, that perhaps leading and shaping a brand-new collaborative model among independently-operating departments DURING A GLOBAL PANDEMIC and *waves hand at everything going on in the world* is, perhaps, an accomplishment in its own right. And, after taking a few weeks “off” from STEM Board stuff, I am able to reframe some of the past year as “growing pains” for this new model.

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As I alluded to above, the kiddos started school yesterday. 9th grade and 5th grade. One kid was excited / nervous, the other more of the “let’s get this first day over with” mentality. (I’ll leave it as an exercise to the readers who know my kids in real life which kid was which.) By all reports, the first day went well. I’ll admit that I feel less panicked about the school year now that our district requires masks in all the elementary and middle schools. (Do I wish they’d included the high schools? Yes. But this is better than nothing.) Fingers crossed that we get through at least a few months of “normalcy”.

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What I’m reading: We Begin at the End, by Chris Whitaker. I got this recommendation from What I’m listening to, which is Episode 251 of the You’ve Got This podcast. I’m still on the fence as to how I feel about this book, because it’s not exactly a light-hearted romp, but it’s so far managed to suck me in.