Z: Zoom Is Not the Same

Two months ago, I had never heard of Zoom. Over the past week, I used it 5 times, and my children used it another 3 times, while Ari uses it multiple times daily at work. While we're staying physically distant from all our friends and co-workers or clients, it seems like we've replaced as many of our in person interactions as possible with meetings using Zoom, Skype, or Google Hangouts. I am really grateful that I can see two-dimensional images of my friends', fellow church members', and students' faces, knowing that people who lived through pandemics centuries ago couldn't even have imagined this kind of luxury. But let's not kid ourselves. To single out a specific interaction type, Zoom Bible study is not the same as in person Bible study.

Earlier this year, when I went to Community Bible Study each Tuesday morning, I needed to wake up early. It was essential that I have my lesson prepared for the leaders' study as well as having prepared to teach the study to my middle school class, including gathering any materials needed for the object lesson and activities and putting my guitar in the car. I got everything loaded and drove for about an hour and 15 minutes, unless traffic was unusually bad. During that time, we all ate muffins and listened to an audiobook, and it created a clear distinction in my mind between being at home and being at Bible study.

Since the lockdown, our wonderful Associate Teaching Director set up Bible study on Zoom so that we didn't miss a single week. But the level of preparation needed was far lower. Instead of preparing to teach my middle school class, I was simply scanning my answers to the worksheet questions and emailing them to the moms so they could discuss the answers with their children if they chose to. I wasn't leading them in worship, so I didn't need to even touch my guitar. Our normal morning routine worked just fine for me to be on time to log in for our Leaders' Council study at 8:30 am, so there was nothing about the lead up to Bible study that helped me distance my mind from my home concerns. And there was nothing to keep my children from interacting with me and their noise from distracting me.

In addition, Zoom itself has numerous disadvantages over in person meetings. For one thing, eye contact and body language are impossible. My laptop's webcam can't help others distinguish which of over a dozen rectangles on my screen I am looking at, and I can't turn my body toward the speaker when I'm about to make a comment. I need to keep my session muted most of the time because of the inevitable background noises of doors slamming or boys quibbling over their Lego in the kitchen. This means there's an extra step if I want to make a comment. If I'm using speaker view instead of gallery view (essential in a large group to be able to see the facial expressions of the speaker), I can't tell if it has detected me as the speaker because I still see the previous speaker. A few people don't even turn on their videos, so I see their names but don't know if they're there. They could be listening, attentively but invisibly, or they could be in another room reading a book - there's no way to tell.

Generally, over the course of the discussion, a few people will make comments that would have triggered some sort of casual comment afterwards if we were in person - I might have gone up to the person and spent a few seconds saying, "I liked your point about..." or "I didn't know you also...". This might have led to a brief conversation, or not, but it would certainly build our relationship. Zoom doesn't allow for that sort of break-out private conversation, unless you send a private text, but the content one conveys by text isn't the same as what one can convey with eye contact.

In his well-known book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman makes the point that "the medium is the message." In other words, the way we communicate what we have to communicate can say as much about what is important as the actual content of the communication. While I'm glad we have a medium that allows us to communicate some of our message, I think it's important to remember that we are not just images or faces, but whole humans with bodies that play an essential role in how we interact. Once this is all over, I hope I'll make the most of being able to communicate all the things that simply can't be communicated using a screen.

Y: Yeast

I liked being weird.

Before the lockdown, I baked 6 loaves of bread once or twice a week. I used my Vitamix to grind whole wheat berries into 12 cups of flour, mixed them with 7-8 cups of watered down yogurt or kefir, and left the mixture overnight. The next morning, I added 2 tablespoons of yeast, 2 tablespoons of salt, 1 tablespoon of baking soda, 3 cups of white flour, 3/4 cup of water, and 1/4 cup of honey, let it rise for an hour or two, divided into 6 loaves, let them rise a second time, and baked them for an hour. My children and I would eat at least 2 loaves on baking day, often 3, and the remainder would do for our lunch the rest of the week.

I don't know anyone else who bakes all their bread from scratch. My mom always baked for us when I was a child, which made me picky - I find the texture of store bread disquieting. But I know I'm unusual; most people don't eat enough bread or care enough about its texture to prioritize home bread baking. I never had any trouble finding ingredients, and completely took them for granted.

Shortly before COVID-19 became a pandemic, I finished the 2-lb Costco size pack of yeast in my freezer. Costco was no longer stocking it, so I got 2 of the little jars at the grocery store instead, told myself to order a big pack online, and forgot. Then a few weeks ago, I realized I needed to get around to ordering yeast online. I placed a pack in my Amazon shopping cart, added yeast to the grocery list, and searched for other items to add to my Amazon cart so I could get free shipping on my order of $25 or more. When I looked again, the yeast in my Amazon shopping cart was no longer available. Also, Ari, who has been doing all the shopping for me, went to 4 different stores and couldn't find any yeast - not even the little packages that would require 2 for a single baking day - in any of them. And white flour was getting hard to find, too - he came home with 2 small 2-lb packs of flour instead of a single 5-lb pack, saying there were no 5-lb bags of any kind of flour in the stores he'd visited.

Bother! I haven't changed my behavior, but everyone else has, and it's shoving me out of my usual routine! Fortunately, it turns out the bread rises some with the baking soda, so our loaves aren't bricks and we still devour 2 loaves on baking day. I was able to find yeast on Amazon, due to be delivered on May 11, almost 2 weeks after I placed the order. So it isn't a major inconvenience. But it does make me think about the fact that our entire society is structured in such a way that things run smoothly when everyone does what they've always done, but you end up with inconveniences to the people who've always done it that way when everyone else suddenly decides to copy them.

Of course, I'm not blaming people for doing more bread baking. It's always been the best and only reasonable thing to do - feed the stuff in stores to the ducks (if you hate them? I've heard it's bad for them) and bake real bread that doesn't turn into play dough in your mouth. I'm glad people are discovering that my way is better. Of course it is! I just need to be patient while the supply adjusts to the new, sensible demand.

(I would be making sourdough, but after a few attempts in a row where my starter grew mold before it really got started, I'm leery of wasting hard-to-find flour on another doomed experiment - since the mold spores are in my kitchen, I doubt they'll leave).

X: A Satisfying Mark to Put on a Checklist

When I was pregnant with H8, I fulfilled a lifelong dream by earning my private pilot's license. Flying is an expensive hobby, so although I keep the shiny license with the picture of the Wright brothers in my wallet where I can see it often, it is no longer current and I would need to spend a fair bit more time and money to regain enough proficiency to take an airplane up again. However, one skill from my flying lessons that is still useful on a daily basis is using a checklist.

Flying involves checklists for everything. Before you even get into the airplane, there's a list of items to check to make sure nothing is broken, the fuel in the tank is uncontaminated by water, there is enough oil in the engine, and so forth. Once you start up the engine, there's another checklist to ensure the engine is working right. Takeoff has a checklist, as does landing, and you memorize checklists for emergencies - if your engine fails, you don't want to have to flip through a manual to find the right checklist. The proper way to do the checklist is to know all the action items on the checklist, do them in order, and then systematically read the list to ensure that you actually did each item without missing anything.

Of course, if something goes wrong with an airplane while it's flying, you can't just pull over and park while you figure out what happened. But checklists are also useful in everyday life, where the consequences of deviating aren't as dire. I have often used checklists for myself and my children as we learn at home and keep it clean. The exact details of the checklists change with our needs, and during the lockdown I am using exactly one: my happy list.

Because all our outside activities are cancelled and we are restricted to only essential activities outside the home, I've been finding it less easy than usual to maintain a positive attitude. A few weeks ago, I sat down and listed things I like to do, things that make me feel good about myself when I do them. Instead of putting any kind of expectation in the title of the list, I simply called it, "Things I Like to Do Every Day". It includes Bible reading, prayer, singing a Psalm, putting on earrings, and working on several long term projects: memorizing several chapters of the Bible, learning Norwegian, practicing my violin, and writing for this blog. If I do nothing other than my happy list, I still feel that the day has been productive.

A side effect of having my happy list has been that I have more energy and joy to work with my children. Because I'm not feeling like life is all work and no play, I can encourage them to do things that give them joy, as well. This has the trickle down effect of making them happier, too. And as they see me gain fulfillment from doing things that are not only satisfying but useful, they are encouraged to spend time on things that truly satisfy them - P15 is writing, E14 is carving, B10 and H8 play with Lego, and E6 still enjoys Duplo. They spend time on computer games, but not all day. They, like me, have found that doing real things is more satisfying, even when the scope of real things is restricted by the pandemic.

What activities would you put on your happy list?