Heat Capacity
February is for love that is demanding, abundant and playful
This is my 100th newsletter - thank you for still being a reader! The breakdown: first a personal essay, a round up of my writing, then some thoughts on my recent work experience, media I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own.
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HEAT CAPACITY*
On a recent Thursday morning, at the tail end of Finals Week, I was working from home, at my kitchen table that is still covered by an increasingly dirty poinsettia print tablecloth, listening to Jazmine Sullivan and tearing up thinking about a particular student of mine that had, according to the spreadsheet that poses as my gradebook, done really well in physics during the fall semester. Jazmine Sullivan does not necessarily sing sad songs, and my best attempt to explain her music to my partner landed me on the somewhat undignified, millennial-slang signifier “thirsty”. Students doing well is certainly an uplifting experience, not just because it validates my work as a teacher, but also because it demonstrates that growth is possible and that hard things can indeed be done. But, as I debated on whether I should write that the student had “an excellent semester” or a “fantastic semester” in the short narrative paragraph that will show up in their report card, I was still on the edge of tears.
After a lifetime of listening to screechy, growly voices, the relentless march of blastbeats, and at times droning of genuinely near-industrial proportions I am probably quite susceptible to feeling rattled when confronted with more intimate, emotionally loaded music. In this sense, songs that make me cry surprise me in an unsurprising way. Music is very often engineered to elicit emotion from the get-go anyway. The feeling of emotional attachments to my students, the hard hitting hopefulness and optimism that their work sometimes affords me, however, still does catch me off guard. In my common state of drowning in work that needs to be completed for them to have a chance to learn and learn well, I just forget that at the bottom of it all I have lots of love for everyone on my roster as, beyond all, a person.
***
It’s February and February is for love letters and February is a good time to be taken by thirsty records and strong feelings. Every February I try to write about love, and I always find myself questioning whether it is possible to do this kind of writing without coming off as overly dramatic or maybe just plainly derivative. People have felt something they wanted to call love since the very beginning, and since the very beginning they found a calling in memorializing that feeling. In Latin class in high school we read Catullus’ love poetry and I see my students read some of those same poems for their own language studies now. It is more the challenge of translation that is the universal, shared experience we have in the school setting, but looking back on some of the actual texts, they too read as universal or at least they have the tint of familiarity that people that want to have strong opinions can sometimes mistake for universality. In one poem in which Catullus asks his beloved to
“give me a thousand kisses and a hundred more, a thousand more again, and another hundred, another thousand, and again a hundred more, as we kiss these passionate thousands let us lose track”
And seeing the numbers pile up among the lines never reminds me of math nor does it make me admire the repetition and use of numbers as a lyrical device. It does, however, make me think of the 1980 Yugoslavian movie titled “Do You Remember Dolly Bell?”. Whenever this movie came up on Croatian cable when I was growing up it was either my bedtime or I was too young to see it, but the image of the film’s young protagonist slouching in an attempt to be cool, quietly murmuring Adriano Celentano’s “24000 Baci'' or, translated from Italian, “24000 Kisses” is seared into my mind.
The film itself is a coming of age story focused on a teenager named Dino that is exposed to the world outside of his not-so-glamorous Sarajevo neighborhood through watching foreign movies and listening to foreign music. Dolly Bell is a sex worker that Dino helps provide a hiding place for and she is the character with whom my knowledge of the movie stops as this was the not-so-kid-friendly part of it all. Of course, I could rewatch “Do You Remember Dolly Bell” anytime I want now, the whole thing is on YouTube and I am certainly old enough to process it now, but I am worried that this would dilute my memory and dissolve the stills dripping with pure romantic angst that I thought I recognized in myself in years later.
The 24000 kisses are fewer than Catullus asked for centuries earlier, but the leap from an ancient poet to an awkward Bosnian teenager maybe does justify some scaling back of the ask. Ironically, Catullus died at around the age of 30, the age I am now, and the age that we now do not necessarily associate with neither deep wisdom nor brash confidence. But, then, we now also have Doja Cat who is 26 and managed to cause a viral sensation with a simple “Kiss Me More”. No math necessary, just a “more” that’s up for interpretation, but also potentially limitless. Things are all sorts of lurid and obscene with Doja Cat and just like sexual imagery in Catullus at times made my very young, somewhat pretty, always flustered, all-girls-boarding-school Latin teacher visibly blush, looking into her lyrics doesn’t necessarily uncover the kind of romance you’d retroactively tack onto an old movie. But there is a throughline of asking for more, of demanding more, of craving an abundance.
From year to year, trying to write about love in February has ultimately led me to a similar point - every year my idea of love expands and it starts to feel more justifiable to insist that I have a right to be drowning in it.
***
If you consume enough writing about teaching, or are asked to do so, you quickly get accustomed to a certain kind of “edu-speak” that is replete with capitalized nomenclature for more or less anything a teacher or a student may do. Forming trusting relationships with students becomes described as a Learning Partnership Alliance that comes in three parts that also have official names. Teaching students with an eye towards structures of injustice in the world is called Criticality. In addition to Stereotype Threat we get Learned Helplessness and Internalized Oppression. Everything that may be given more than a page of space in one book or another seems to be required to have pillars, at least three at a time. The language of Allyship, something that raises my eyebrows as a queer person, is all over. It’s all a little comical in the same way that any jargon is comical and it is disconcerting in the same way that any language that differentiates those in-the-know from those who are practicing without naming is disconcerting. Recently, in trying to find my way through one of these texts, Zaretta Hammond’s Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, I encountered the warning that “loving children should not become a proxy for teaching them.” I agreed, but as the text went on to expand on ideas of allyship, support and being a so-called “warm demander”, I started to wonder whether this phrasing slightly short-shrifted love.
A Warm Demander, as explained by Hammond, is a teacher that is warm and empathetic, a teacher that recognizes the lived experience of their students, yet still holds students to an ambitious standard and encourages them to stretch and push themselves in the direction of excellence that may initial make them feel uncomfortable. To be this kind of teacher, one has to be explicit about their faith in students meeting the high benchmarks of their academic discipline, and one has to be explicit about recognizing the kinds of hardships that could stand in the way of that for certain students. The Warm Demander is more of a well-meaning but tough coach then they are a cheerleader, and Hammond warns against unintentionally crossing over from being a Warm Demander into being an Elitist or a Technocrat, or in the other direction, into being a Sentimentalist. Being in the Warm Demander’s classroom is not easy or necessarily chill, but it is not alienating either. The Warm Demander probably knows your cat’s name and your favorite soccer team, but they will also give you a C if you don’t keep your algebra straight. The idea is compelling because Hammond is clearly not advocating for toothless empathy and she favors empowerment instead. Being warm and caring puts students at ease, being demanding helps them strive for more. Together, the Warm Demander and the student can build up enough structure for the student to become an independent learner who demands excellence of themselves without all that much external prompting.
The Warm Demander, it seems reasonable to claim, does love their students. When Hammond warns the reader against confusing love and teaching the point is not necessarily about content knowledge, but rather about being overly forgiving, overly impacted by students’ discomfort or thinking that just praises, affirmations and care can release a kid from any sort of academic bind. Thinking that love only leads to the latter, however, comes across as a reading of love that does not acknowledge that love itself does not necessarily have to be, or should be, toothless. For what is love at its best if not explicit, deliberate, caring and also demanding?
I have always been resistant to the idea that loving someone sustainably and for a long time takes work - it often seems to be used to excuse bad behavior of certain privileged classes of people - but it cannot be disputed that love that lasts does not just happen to people and even if it does, it does not happen perfectly. Even under ideal circumstances, a loving partnership invites self-reflection and negotiation and renegotiation of who someone is towards themselves and towards others. Because love is by default relational, it is always something of a pact or an alliance, and there are always terms to be respected and goals to be strived for. There is no quantifiable excellence in love, but there is empowerment in learning how to love without making yourself feel small, in learning how to love people that feel like they are yours even when they let some strange part of their personality peak out. In some sense, capital-L Love is the ultimate Warm Demander.
On a more pragmatic level too, it seems to me that trusting that students can do more while acknowledging why they may take different roads and need different signage to get there is also something like an act of love. The past two years of teaching through a pandemic made many of us forget that. First, our students were flattened into squares on a screen, some unwilling or unable to engage in the new, reductive and intangible format. Then, they returned to school and they were different from what we remember so it was all a bit like re-learning to love a dear friend that has accidentally become a stranger. There is no sugarcoating what years of remote instructions have meant for some students and how some certainly did forget how to be students or are so intimidated by having to be students in this traditional mode again that they are diverting their energy to the much safer bet of acting out. But having patience for them, being willing to build new structures and routines even when they seem primed for rejecting them, still remembering their cat’s name even when they’re chit-chatting in class or failing a quiz, that all feels like an act of love to me.
On the last Friday of January, I had to tell one of my students that they were going to fail my college course. We had had a long conversation about a past assessment, a sort of an oral make-up exam, and got nowhere. I get animated with students, I wave my hands, draw cartoon stick-figures in my notebook with colorful pens, get up and do tuck jumps in my slacks and sneakers to make points about gravity and freefall and vertically thrown objects. Some days, however, no amount of energy I bring to the table can make up for a lack of fundamental understanding of a topic or a state of unpreparedness that can’t be remedied with the jogging of short term memory. In those times, the loving thing to do is to say “this is not working” and “we should consider broader options than fishing for half-truths” and “it would be a disservice to our shared project of learning to not honestly acknowledge the kind of impasse we have reached here.” I have always been broken up with quite ungracefully, with more malice or negligence than care, but having these conversations with students nevertheless reminds me of negotiating heartbreak more than anything else. And on this fairly drab Friday morning in the mostly empty science department office, the student I was talking to got emotional, but assured me that they understood what I was saying, that we did not disagree on the state of our alliance, that they’ll resolve to try again under different circumstances. I still felt awful when the student left, and I still felt lots of affection for them, regardless of how much of their failing could have objectively been prevented by actions they chose not to take. The thing about loving people is that, even if it cannot stand in for just any old skill, it is certainly not toothless and it certainly is not without its own lessons and demands for more.
***
I read adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism long enough ago that my copy made a trip from Illinois (where I was living) to Connecticut (where my partner was living), a pleasure seeking adventure of sorts in itself, and got caught in an improbably strong torrent of water that unexpectedly broke through the ceiling of my partner’s room during one of the days I was there. The book was in my suitcase and my suitcase was fully soaked so the already sort of crumpled paperback had to be carefully dried and allowed to retain a rippled shape. Somewhat ironically, when I look at the book from the right angle, some of the pages remind me of water waves. I was, of course, unhappy with the flooding situation, but the fact that the book did not get fully destroyed felt fitting - much of brown’s writing collected and edited in the book seems to argue against perfectionism and in favor of embracing yourself fully in whatever shape you are. Pleasure Activism is not a self-help book by any means, but it does leave the reader with a sense of hopefulness that settles at the bottom of your stomach, or maybe in a soft spot on your inner thigh, and makes it a bit difficult to keep sitting still after you close its pages. Certainly, some essays are more informative and more successful than others, but when they do hit home, they do so fairly viscerally.
I was reminded of brown’s writing recently when a friend that had read Pleasure Activism more recently shared a set of somewhat late resolutions for the new year, all neatly written out and quantified, that included going to specialty grocery stores, enjoying indulgent restaurant meals, and having more sex. My own goals, not written down but firmly lodged into whatever tapestry of anxiety serves as a backdrop for all my thoughts, mostly included working with new editors, incorporating new practices into my teaching, and being better about (not) eating after midnight. These are familiar goals, most years I set my intentions in similar areas and most years I am a similar level of successful in following through on those intentions. I had never, however, put “have more sex” or “eat more rich meals” on the list though these are things that do verifiably always make me feel good, probably more so than checking-off a long to-do list of writing and teaching on a day when I’ve only had four hours of sleep. The tendency to confuse success or productivity with pleasure has been with me for years, and though I do still think getting things done is its own kind of pleasure, the urge to win that feeling by overworking is a perverted way of getting there.
In Pleasure Activism, brown is clear that her idea of pleasure is not about overindulgence or shirking big goals and hard problems. In the introduction she writes
“Pleasure activists believe that by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us we can generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists.”
And then, again, with a little more focus on the self,
“A central aspect of pleasure activism is tapping into the natural abundance that exists within and between us, and between our species and this planet. Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for; it’s the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous.”
Much of the pleasure that you can derive from work is bound up in scarcity: there are not enough hours in the day, not enough funds for a given project, not enough jobs for all hopeful and talented applicants. The game of feeling good because of what you produce in a system where production is exploited is necessarily zero sum, it stands in opposition to what a sexually progressive acquintance in college explained to me as “play” or an engagement where no player is a winner, but everyone gets to explore and have fun.
In thinking about love this February, I am then reminded that in addition to being demanding and calling for deliberate action and honest communication, love can also be abundant and playful. Even though I am still caught up in the fog of how hard the second year of the pandemic had been for me, I am also more than ever aware of the abundance of love in my life - an abundance that may have been waiting for me to name and recognize for a while. From past students that have stopped me in the classroom to say they miss me to friends that have shown up for me over and over whether it be at an Italian vegan bakery in the bitter cold or in my Instagram DMs with their bakes or dogs to my mom making pita zeljanica in my kitchen and gifting me jackets she thrifted because they seemed unique to my editors leaving little PS notes asking about my weekend or throwing in a line of encouragement they really don’t owe me when a pitch doesn’t work out to past collaborators that still seem touched to hear me find their work meaningful to potential new collaborators that make me shake hands with everyone important at an event to my partner who manages to forgive me a grudge I’ve been holding from a conversation about Jeb Bush from five years ago that everyone else has severely forgotten, there is so much love in so many forms for me to take in. At a point like this, who needs quantified kisses as a benchmark anyway.
Best,
Karmela
*In physics, heat capacity is a number that measures the amount of energy needed to change the temperature of some object. Objects with low heat capacities become warm even if very little energy is added to them while objects that have high heat capacities take a large energy investment to become measurably hotter.
ABOUT ME LATELY
Me and my partner, my one true love, captured one summer ago in Croatia by Sonja Diklic.
WRITING
Though scientists agree that quantum computers hold great promise for solving problems currently out of reach of traditional computers, they do not always agree on what the best hardware would be for these machines. Recently, a team of researchers from the University of Sussex, in the UK, studied this question for two pragmatic computational tasks. In their theoretical study, they estimated the number of qubits - quantum bits - needed for a quantum computer to simulate the behavior of a nitrogen fixing molecule important and to break encryption used in Bitcoin transactions. I wrote about it for Physics World, digging deeper into the competition between different quantum computer designs and the need to pack millions of quantum bits into each
LEARNING
I got to work from home for a few days in a row after Finals Week wrapped up and all that was left was grading, narratives and remote professional development seminars so returning to the classroom to start a new semester a few days into February did feel like a significant shift. I am moving my classes along towards the spring with as much intentionality and attentiveness as I can, and I am trying to make an effort to let my students know and feel that this is their chance to regain some steam and sharpen some instincts as well. The first few weeks seem to have set us on a good course, but as has been true throughout the pandemic, the logistical and administrative conundrums in the background of it all just make it hard to fully trust that we will be guaranteed a stable routine for the coming months. Regardless, I am trying to think about sustainability and the habits that sustainability, emotionally and physically, calls for. Luckily, some of the work I had done last spring is proving helpful on the lesson planning front, but building relationships with students and continuing to integrate myself into the larger school community is an ongoing project with very few shortcuts or cheat sheets.
On the writing side, I am trying to hold myself accountable to my goals and pitching more adventurously and to new editors. I haven’t been fully successful so far and I do have a few things slowly developing on the backburner so my writing work continues to feel fresh and fulfilling and just overall unambiguously good. I really hope I can keep building on this feeling, especially now that daily mores of life in New York are changing and I have been able to interact with other young science writers more than ever before.
LISTENING
In addition to being pretty smitten, and at times salaciously uncomfortable, with Jazmine Sullivan’s Heaux Tales, I am still dabbling in some more or less screechy electronic music. I fell down the Curses rabbit hole for a few days after a friend recommended their song Blood Oath which is pretty excellent. I have also been enjoying Dvory’s self-titled album that feels like listening to a black metal concert but from the inside of a submarine submerged in a lake beneath the stage (and I mean that in the best way possible). Venus Ex Machina’s Lux is a bit more upbeat, and I imagine you could dance to it under certain circumstances, but there’s still some harsh edge to it that has been attractive to me.
This episode of the New York Times’ Popcast that featured some of TikTok’s popular music bloggers felt really refreshing and I really loved hearing a well-established print critic joyfully engage with some young, diverse voices.
READING
I’m still reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance and it still hasn’t disappointed me. The blend of historical research and personal experience is really captivating and artful and every detail from how the essays are arranged to how they are titled seems very deliberate. The topics Abdurraqib writes about are not always light, but the reading is not arduous or depressing, in part because I think it is not his intention to peddle sadness and rage, even when he is writing about racism and discrimination.
This letter from Haley Nahman about short-term habits that felt very insightful and meaningful given how much of an absolutist I can be about routines. Nahman writes:
Sometimes we only need to do something for a while. Journal for a while. Meal plan for a while. Practice an art form for a while, then put it aside for something else, like going on walks. It’s perfectly natural to try things out, see how they feel, and revisit them later when the conditions of our lives call for them. Why not regard our habits and ways of being the same way we regard our other cyclical needs, like sleep, food, activity, and rest? Just as sleep and wakefulness are opposed but equally vital, the opposite of a good habit doesn’t have to be a bad one. It can just be something different, for a different aim, or a different you. In the context of self-improvement, we often use “growth” and “evolution” synonymously, but they’re not the same. Evolution isn’t about achieving our final form, but adapting to our circumstances, ad infinitum.
Reframing my vicissitudes in these terms has shifted my self-regard. A hyper-productive day is not the result of discipline or “being good” but giving myself enough rest.
WATCHING
My partner and I finished watching Station Eleven and though there is much of this show that still doesn’t work for me, its finale seemed to be in the exactly correct emotional register. It was also really well done if not from the point of view of storytelling then at least from the standpoint of cinematography and, for the lack of a better word, vibes. I went out of my way to listen to an interview with Station Eleven’s showrunner Patrick Sommerville on The Watch and while his enthusiasm was commendable, he did not say much that would persuade me that the show was always going to be major vibes and question marks beyond that. To be clear, I don’t dislike this show, but much like Sommerville’s previous effort with Maniac, the whole thing feels like a great idea executed with lots of gloss, but not enough written in-between the lines of the first sketch of it all to make the final product truly meaningful.
We have been re-watching Star Wars movies in chronological storyline order while also keeping up with the Book of Boba Fett so this franchise has held a lot of space in my thoughts recently. I’m a bit perplexed concerning what’s happening with this show that suddenly features the Mandalorian and Luke Skywalker as much as any of the characters the show started with (including the one it shares the title with), but as this is extended universe entertainment simultaneously at its most niche and its most popcorn-y, I’m not sure whether being perplexed makes any difference at all. This is all just a long winded way of saying that I am pretty mindlessly amused by Star Wars content and that it is ultimately, excepting implications for the TV and movie industry, pretty inconsequential. I feel similarly about the movies since even though episodes 4, 5 and 6 pack a big nostalgic punch and the practical effects still make them look pretty masterful, seeing it all in sequence has made me realize that Lucas’ original story truly was so generic that any world or mythology of questionable quality could be built around it and that it could itself be iterated upon fairly endlessly.
How To with John Wilson is as weird, wholesome and, ultimately, as good as everyone says and I would definitely recommend it as something to drift off to sleep to or even as a pick-me-up with just a little bit of edge for gloomy days.
We’re a little over three hours into The Beatles: Get Back and I got sucked into it a lot more than I expected. I have never cared that much for their music or the myths around them, but Peter Jackson’s approach to just cutting together hours of rehearsals where the famous four musicians fluidly switch from song to song, from genre to genre, and from argument to argument, feels too real to not be at least a little captivating. It is remarkable how the band comes off as pop in the most basic sense of ‘popular’ with very little attachment to a single musical style. Their bickering similarly feels mundane and generic until we, the viewers, are reminded of how young they are and how they got famous too quickly to learn to argue like adults. Get Back is a fascinating watch all together and I am for sure willing to commit more time to it.
EATING
Around Lunar New Year I made a version of these whole wheat steamed buns (mantou) and a riff on this vegan chili ‘crab’ (with tofu in addition to cauliflower) and the two made for a really satisfying meal. The saucy chili dish was one of the few I’ve made over the years that my partner didn’t add hot sauce to and it was not just hot, but also really flavorful and fragrant. Once it soaked into the soft buns, there was really little to complain about.
I revisited this dal tadka recipe and these chickpea flour pancakes called besan chilla. Both of these are very reliable recipes that I return to whenever I’m not sure what to make, and both are pretty easy to pull off on a weeknight. If you’ve never tried to temper lentils or have never worked with chickpea flour, I’d certainly recommend starting here.
We had a vaguely Eastern Europe themed dinner party with some dear friends so I attempted veganizing burek for the occasion. I did not make my own phyllo dough, but the effort was quite successful otherwise and the rest of the dinner (Mashed potatoes! Cabbage! Pierogi and borsch! Chocolate cake!) was really excellent as well. I hope to make more burek variations soon as the taste and the texture have lots of nostalgic value.
I impulsively ordered some baked goods from Kozy Toast while hungry at work and was consequently delighted to pick up my box of vegan hot dog and otherwise stuffed buns the following Friday in-between school and a late evening family hangout. The dough was perfectly fluffy across the board, the savory fillings were just the right amount of salty and umami and the coconut custard buns were a major hit among my non-vegan family members as well. I’m looking forward to trying out more of this bakery’s offerings the next time work gets me down.