1. Hello, people. I could list all the things that happened that resulted in the title of this week's 7ToF post, but I don't need to. We're all living through this. The good thing is that I think everybody is noticing this comrade-in-arms friendship that has sprung up, even between strangers with opposing views. Maybe eventually we will come out of this OK. I don't think it's going to be any time soon.
2. Remeber back in December when I said that my reading challenge for myself for this year would be to knock one book off my longstanding TBR list each month? The idea was to concentrate on actual physical books that I've had for years. Yeah, well, it hasn't happened yet this month. There are several reasons for that, but I haven't given up on the challenge yet. Stay tuned.
3. Part of the problem is that there are (were) several ebooks in my queue at our library's website that I'd been waiting for that became available this month. So I had to get my queue cleared out. There are still a few there, but not nearly as many as there were. I've got a couple to finish in the next two weeks, but I should be able to move on by mid-Feb.
4. One of the books that I cleared out of my queue was Columbine by David Cullen. It's fascinating and absorbing and disturbing. It's about the school shooting, of course, but it's also about the media and teenagers and mob thinking. Sadly, it turned out to be timely with two more school shootings this week. I don't know what the answer is, but I do feel a little better educated. If it's a topic you can stand (Dean declined to read it), highly recommended.
5. I'm not teaching my short story class this spring. Teaching while working was just too much. My job is a one-year position, so it will be over in April. I will probably start teaching again next fall. But in honor of the class I'm not teaching this spring, here are my favorite short stories from the past four years of teaching this class: "Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son," by Kurt Vonnegut; "Today Will be a Quiet Day" by Amy Hempel; D'Arcy McNickle "Hard Riding"; Tim O'Brien, "The Things They Carried"; Tobias Wolff, "Bible"; Elizabeth Gilbert, "Elk Talk"; anything by Edith Pearlman or John Updike (not a huge fan of his novels but his short stories are amazing). I'm looking over the lists of stories we've done and there are so many good ones. "Walking Out" by David Quammen, "Roman Fever" by Edith Wharton. I could just keep going and going.
6. Remember a couple of weeks ago when I gave my family a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10 for being environmentally aware? Yeah, well, as soon as I posted that, I started noticing a bunch of ways that we could pretty easily do better. The first and simplest was to dig out the cloth napkins I bought years ago and ditch the paper ones.
7. If you never see your landfill this may seem a little silly to you, but I drive past our landfill at least a couple of times a month and (for once I'm not being snide when I say this) I'm not making this up-- it's frightening how much that landfill has grown in the 15 years we've lived on the north side of our town. Back then, you couldn't see it when you drove by. Now it's like a butte or a plateau or something looming up in the background. Paper napkins may not make much difference, but little changes can add up to bigger ones. I hope. I don't know what else we can do but do what we can.
And on that note, let me just wish you a nice weekend. Sorry to be a downer. This was a rough week.
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