Thoughts on Reading The Road

I've been meaning to read The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2007) for years, but had been put off by other readers' comments that it was unrelentingly joyless and despairing. But I've read a few too many light romances recently, to the point where I was starting to not enjoy them, so I decided now was the time to tackle a dark classic.

Those other readers are right that there is no hope of hope in this gritty post-apocalyptic story of a father and son searching for a place to call home. The nature of the disaster is never specified, and that's at least part of why it can work-- is there any disaster, even a nuclear one, that would cause the absolute destruction of all plant and animal life and yet leave humans alive? There is no food to eat at all, outside of finding caches of pre-apocalypse food in half-rotting houses, or cannibalism. The man and the boy (they are never named) travel several hundred miles south in the course of the novel, and there is nothing anywhere other than desolation and coldness and ash.

But there are also plenty of good reasons to read it. The relationship between the father and son is tender and sweet and beautifully rendered, but not cloyingly so--they often argue and disagree. McCarthy may be describing a bleak, dead world, but the language he uses is beautiful, sometimes even brilliant (and also sometimes self-conscious and pretentious). You can't help but keep turning the pages, because you want to know what is going to happen to these two characters.

And there are also many things to think about. For one, there is the moment when the man is standing in a crumbling library holding a ruined book, and he is surprised to realize that all art is "predicated on a world to come" --on there being a context, or even just someone there, to appreciate it. "The space which these things occupied was itself an expectation." True? 

For another, the man and the boy frequently speak of themselves as "the good guys," and they are looking for the other good guys, but when they (rarely) encounter someone new, the man is too damaged and cynical to even begin a conversation. At what point does fear cease being a useful survival tool and become an endlessly self-reinforcing feedback loop?

But ultimately, I'm not sure if this novel will hold up over the long-term. If we survive our current mess, a hundred years from now I can imagine a university course on "Post-Apocalyptic Fiction 1950-2030" that would include The Day of the Triffids, The Stand, The Broken Earth trilogy, Station Eleven, The Hunger Games (read it before you sneer), and lord knows what else. Will this novel be there? 

*scratches head* *thinks* *thinks some more*

Well, yes. Of course it will. But it is not without faults. There is a tacked-on ending that feels false (you wonder if his publisher made him add it). And by the end, the boy has become irritating in his unrelenting purity of heart--did McCarthy take that too far? And over-arching it all, there is what reviewer David Edelstein called McCarthy's obsession with "the end of the Age of Good Men (which never existed, but don't tell him that)." When I read that, I thought, yes! that's it exactly. In that context, the novel could easily be called The Last Good Man, and you could hand it to your class and let them have at it. There are plenty of single moms out there who would argue vociferously that it's not the women who disappear into the night.

So: definitely worth reading, but don't tackle it if you're already in a depressed or despairing mood. It's thought-provoking, if nothing else. And I kind of wish I could take that class.

(This is a slightly expanded version of the review I posted on Goodreads)

This is your brain on wedding anxiety.

Planning a low-key wedding is nearly impossible. Our daughter really, seriously wants a casual wedding that doesn't feed into the capitalist wedding machine. But she doesn't want a small wedding. She's an extrovert and she loves a whole lot of people, and she wants as many of them as possible to be there. 

If you ask me, the key to having a low-key wedding is to set the date no more than a year out. (Well, and also to have a small wedding, but that was out for us.) The more time you have, the more complicated things get. The date they picked was nine months away. 

But the problem is that a) we live in a destination wedding area, and b) most people plan their wedding for a year and a half or even two years out, so that venues, caterers, florists, wedding coordinators, and photographers are booked up way in advance. When you call them to ask about a date in nine months, they all but laugh. They're not even polite about it (possibly because they field calls like this all the time.)

And then there's the problem of people's expectations. I know any of you reading this would not be in this category (right?), but there are a whole lot of people who walk into a big social occasion and start to judge. How did you do the flowers? Is the bride's hair professionally styled? Did the bride's parents choose a decent wine? and on and on and on. 

And she (and I) just aren't that interested in those things. We've ordered flowers (*cough* many, many dollars of flowers *cough*), but not that many compared to other weddings this size. Mel doesn't want a professional stylist there doing her hair and makeup (and lord knows I don't). We're going to do the so-called tablescapes for the reception ourselves (we have the venue all day). Which is fine. It's the way we want to do it. 

But while I know that some people will look at our efforts and think how nice it is to go to a wedding that's not so overdone and overplanned, there are others will think, did they just go to Walmart yesterday and buy whatever they saw? because it's not going to look like Pinterest. It will look to some like we don't care. We absolutely do care, as you can tell because I've been losing sleep over it for months, but we care that it's casual and low-key and not overdone and overpriced. (although trust me, it's still plenty expensive.)

You know what? Probably not that many people. I'm obsessing. Welcome to my paranoia (again). It will be fine. Thank you for listening to me rant because it helps. It helps me see how ridiculous I'm being.

reporting back as promised

I told you I'd report back after the, uh, surgery. By the time you read this, it will have been ten days ago, and you know what? Surgery hurts. That's not a surprise to anyone, of course, and I knew what to expect-- I did a fair amount of research before I even made my first appointment, and I knew what was coming. But still. Living through it is always a different thing than knowing it's coming. Ouch. 

Fortunately my body has done the miraculous healing thing that healthy bodies do, and already I'm past the worst of the painful part. And it hasn't been nearly bad enough for me to regret having it done. Even in my partially-healed state, I'm happy with the results. I look much more like my mental image of myself. For the past many years, I've looked at pictures of myself and my, uh, generous assets, and it never looked like me. So, even if the headache part of it doesn't pan out, I'm still going to be glad I had this done.

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Like everybody, I'm so tired of the human pressure cooker we're in right now. It never lets up, and just when you think it is finally going to get better, something happens to make it worse. I want to think that I, and the side that I'm on, will show our true colors under pressure, and of course our true colors are to be compassionate, intelligent, and fair, right? But we haven't always shown to advantage. It just seems to get uglier and uglier.

All of us are quick to point out that we're only responding to the ugliness of the other side, but it's not too hard to imagine some cosmic being watching the pressure build, maybe even throwing in a few extra pressure points, and waiting to see, hoping, that for once human beings will surprise her and respond differently, not out of outrage and blame but out of some other, more generous impulse. At the moment, I can't even imagine what that impulse would be. It would surprise me, too.

You know-- it's occurring to me as I type this, that is mainly true online. In my real life, there have actually been some moments of connection, even among people who would probably come to blows if they talked hot-button issues. I spent some time a couple of weeks ago with a group of people I think of as being uniformly more conservative than I am, and I was dreading it. I was expecting a wall of righteous them vs. not-brave me.

But it was not like that at all. Where I was expecting them to be united in a conservative bloc, a wall of opinions that are different than mine, there was actually a lot of give. They didn't say the things I expected them to say, and they don't all believe the same things. (And of course we were smart enough not to hit the hot-button issues head-on.)

It occurred to me, as it has to almost everyone over the past few years, what a disservice we do to each other when we communicate through facebook posts and bite-sized tweets. We hear the much-promoted extreme positions and we react with outrage, and we don't remind ourselves that not everyone on the other side lines up 100% with the talking points. Not everyone, including me, has predictable opinions.

So maybe that's my task for the next few weeks-- at least until after the wedding, which is still a giant ball of dread and social anxiety looming in my future-- to look for the openings, the ways people are human, not predictable, not monolithic. Be open to being surprised.

And also to remember that weddings can be a lot of fun, right? I can do this. We can do this, because it is a family effort. Wish me luck.

Hope is the thing with the feathers / that perches in the soul / and sings the tune without the words / and never stops at all

I have a post that is half-written, but I can't bring myself to finish it today. Maybe another time. I just came here to say one thing, and that is: I still believe. I still hope for a better future. It may not be one that we can imagine right now, but I do not believe that all goodness is dying. And the reason I still have hope is that I know people in their 30s who are smart and thoughtful and they are figuring things out. I know people in their twenties who are afraid and worried, but still doing their best to make things right, to act in ways that honor their best selves. And I know teenagers who are brilliant and funny and hard-working and dedicated. Those of us who are old may have royally fucked things up, but I know these kids. Whatever mess we leave them with, they will work their hearts out to fix it. They are my reason for hope.

What is your reason for hope? 

(the post title is Emily Dickinson)

a deep dive (that is a joke)

The first time I came in contact with the idea that Representation Matters (the idea, not the phrase, which was still years away), it was circa 1980 and I was in college at a conservative Christian school, not the place where you would expect it to show up. 

I was taking Intro to Sociology, and the female professor was a bit of a renegade, and she wanted us to understand that male experience is not universal. This is so obvious now in 2022 that it seems difficult to imagine it was ever otherwise, but at the time, I had been trained to believe that what white men experienced applied to all of us. 

Since it was a Christian school, the vast majority of the students had been born and raised in middle America Christian homes and we all bought into this idea. In hindsight, it doesn't even make sense. In the churches where most of us grew up, only men were allowed in leadership positions, so how could their experience be the same as women who could only make coffee, teach children's Sunday school, and work in the nursery?

I still remember when I began to understand her point. We'd been having a discussion in class where all of us good little girls stated quite firmly that we didn't need to have the patriarchal language of the Bible untangled, because we knew God was beyond gender (it's right there in Genesis 1:27, the image of God is both male and female, and we were so pleased with our progressive selves for knowing that). So it didn't make any difference to always hear God referred to as capital-H Him, or Father, or even to hear believers referred to as men, because we knew that language covered women, too.

Then she had us read a number of bible passages and traditional hymns aloud, substituting her for him, and mother for father, and woman for man, and she was right. It was entirely different. There was no mistaking: it makes a difference.

Rise up, oh women of God, in one united throng,
Bring in the day of sisterhood and end the night of wrong!

(That's a hymn, not the Bible, if you didn't grow up in a similar church.) So fast forward 25-ish years to the first time I heard the actual phrase Representation Matters (meaning it matters that you can see yourself, your self, your gender and race and orientation and economic status, in a book or on the screen or online), and I got it. I may be slow to the party at times, but I can learn.

Since I'm about to talk about my own representation, I should say first of all: I know that I don't have anything to complain about. I am privileged beyond belief, especially in a global context. I understand this more and more as time goes by. I'm not trying to paint myself as a victim here, because I'm not. This is not a tale of woe, this is a tale of me sorting through my experience.  

All of that setup was just to tell this story. I know now that I am a nerd, in both the good and bad senses of the word. I love knowledge, I love being smart and knowing things, I love being good at tech. I roll my eyes when a podcaster says, "We're going to do a deep dive into (some topic) today," and then they spend about three minutes talking about it. (Seriously, that is not a deep dive. Call it something else.) When I set challenges for myself, they are intellectual challenges. I am a nerd.

But the category of nerd didn't even exist when I was a kid, and it certainly didn't exist for women. By the time I was in high school, there were Radio Shack home computers and a computer club at my high school, but the closest most of us got to personal contact with a computer was by using state of the art Texas Instruments calculators. Which were miracle enough. 

Real computers were so far out of the realm of what I could conceive of as possible for a teenage girl in East Texas in the late 70s that it didn't even occur to me that I might be interested. I didn't learn to use a computer until I was in graduate school (my first, abortive attempt at grad school, in 1983)--so like everyone else, I typed all my undergrad papers on a Smith-Corona electric typewriter. 

But once I finally made it to the world of tech, I was immediately in love. It felt like I had found my niche, my people. We weren't great at social skills and we were always wearing the wrong clothes, but we knew how to program the damn VCR. C'mon people, it's not that hard.

I loved the online forums and the listserv email groups for specific niche interests. I loved everything about all of it. I knew how to write DOS batch files. I knew how to create data-driven graphics in Lotus 1-2-3. I was a regular reader of Slashdot. I loved being the one who knew how to fix the laser printer. My favorite job ever was database programming, which I did for a couple of years in the late 80s, just as the shift from flat-file to relational databases was happening. I was ON IT. 

Since the bar for admission to all of this was being comfortable with all things tech-y, it was a self-limiting field. Pretty much everyone online back then was a nerd, and we were all self-taught. The real techies, the ones who had taken computer science classes in college, were writing machine language (code that communicates directly with hardware).

But alas, times have changed. Now there are all kinds of programs that act as front ends to the tech. That's not to say they are dumbed down-- I'm not nearly smart enough to know the social media tech that teenagers handle with ease. But there aren't the same kind of social and knowledge barriers to admission that there were back in the 80s and 90s. 

So now the internet has become just like real life. Once again I am a nerd that doesn't really get it, the one that doesn't know how to write a good post on Instagram or Twitter, isn't really all that interested in the vast library of makeup and skincare tutorials on YouTube, and really, seriously does not want to make pop tarts or ketchup from scratch from a cooking blog. I do not want to shelve my books by color, or drape them with ribbons so they look prettier. 

In other words, I no longer fit in on the internet. Those are not my people. And since years of being out of the industry have dulled my tech skills, I don't really fit there either. This has been true for years, but I couldn't figure out what had happened until an online friend from back in the 90s pointed it out to me. *sigh* It was nice while it lasted.

(You know, I'm kind of cringing to think of this as an issue of representation, but I don't have time to totally re-write this post. Just think of this post as two separate stories.) 

7ToF: off we go again, with a detour into mental health

1. We've been on two trips recently. The first was to the Oregon coast, and it was our first trip with the new camper. The camper was great, although the drive was a little challenging since it poured, I mean poured, on all of our driving days. It was like the downpour was moving with us. But once we got there, the weather was beautiful and we had a great time. My boys played a lot of golf and I got to spend time reading and relaxing and recharging. Then it rained for the whole drive back.

2. The second trip was just me, going to Texas to visit my mom and my sister. One of my nieces was graduating from high school, so that was the centerpiece of the weekend, but mostly I was there to visit. It was so hot. That is the best thing about travel: it reminds me of the good things about where we live. I'm back at home now and it's beautiful -- everything is finally green and we're even getting some flowers blooming. And it is not 93 and 90% humidity.

3. Apologies for the pity party in my last post. I hadn't been out of town in months, and that always makes me a little nuts. I used to think there was something specific about this area that made it necessary for me to get out of here regularly, but over the years I've realized that it's just me. Wherever we lived, it would have been the same. I get all tangled up in my head and it takes removing myself from my normal life to be able to untangle. The good news is that getting out of town for even a few days usually solves the problem--partly because I get somewhere else and realize that however difficult certain moments may seem, I'm still lucky to live here and to have friends who put up with me.

4.  The older I get, the more I realize that my mental health takes some care and management. I don't know if this is true for everyone. It doesn't seem like it, but then this isn't something people our age talk about. Nobody who who grew up in the fifties and sixties was raised to think about how to manage their mental health. 

We were all about conformity back then, especially for women-- there was little diversity in how you could dress, what kind of job you could have, what kind of personality you could have, all of that. And you were not supposed to be depressed or anxious or conflicted. Back then if you weren't killing it (a phrase we never would have used), you just took valium and zoned out, I guess. I was a kid, I'm not sure how it felt to an adult.

Anyway. I think I developed a persona that I thought would make my parents happy (they, especially my mom, were certainly not happy with my nerdy, introverted self), and that would help me fit in. I spent my twenties and thirties shedding that persona, and then I think I spent my forties and fifties trying to make things work without a social persona at all. I thought that was being "authentic." 

But here's what I know now: you have to have a social persona, and if you shed a previous version, it takes work to build a new one. I hope the new one I'm working on is more true, more based on being confident in myself, but it's not something that happens on its own. At least, it hasn't for me. 

Defining terms: What I mean by social persona is: a part of you that runs interference between what you're thinking and feeling, and what you actually say and do. A part of you that can consider how your words and actions will affect the people around you, and modify them accordingly. My impression is that some people have this naturally, but some of us don't. It takes some effort.

Does that make any sense at all? I'm learning this right now. I don't know what I'm talking about. I haven't vetted that with a therapist, since I haven't seen one in awhile. I spent years going to therapy and I highly recommend it, but I haven't been recently. 

Hey, OK, this can be #5. I tried the advertised-everywhere online therapy website Better Help during lockdown. I didn't feel like I needed full-on therapy, but I thought if I had a few sessions and developed a relationship with a therapist, then when I felt the need for a check-in, I would be able to just get online and schedule an appointment. It sounded like a great idea. 

But I didn't read the fine print about how you pay, so I'll tell you so you don't have to waste (an amount of money I'm embarrassed to admit) like I did. Better Help operates on the "athletic club" model of payment-- you pay a set fee every month, whether you use it or not. At the time I tried it, there was no pay-as-you-go option. Like an athletic club, if you make full use of it, the fees are reasonable. But if you're only doing 3-4 sessions once or twice a year, it's ridiculous. So, I had two sessions (which were good, the therapist seemed competent), and then I figured out the payment thing and opted out.

This post has ended up not lending itself to numbered paragraphs, but I'm pretty sure you've heard enough from me. We're already heading out again--Doug's family's annual vacation together is in North Carolina this year, and as you read this we will be on our way. We always have a great time with his family, I'm looking forward to it. I have two other half-written posts, so if I get them done and scheduled, you might hear from me next week, otherwise it will be when I get back.

7ToM: a pretty boring update

1. Doug's last day as an admin at our hospital was Friday. He is now officially semi-retired. We had a couple of really fun celebrations over the weekend, and our daughter and her fiancé came to town. It was great. Doug will still be working half-time in a different position so he's not completely free, but it's a definite step-down in terms of stress.

2. Our current dilemma is what to do with our pets. We bought a small new-to-us camper over the winter and we'd like to take it out quite a bit now that Doug has more time. We can take the dog with us, and maybe even the cat if we get her acclimated to the camper, but we can't take the chickens. How do you get rid of chickens that there is absolutely no chance we are going to eat, but that are too old to produce many eggs? We have six chickens and they produce 1-2 eggs a day. It's plenty for us, but for someone who actually wants to raise chickens, probably not very appealing. We might even just let them roam free and join the local food chain. Our neighborhood fox hasn't been around much recently but that might bring her back.

3. Did I tell you our daughter is getting married in September? My social anxiety kicks into maximum overdrive every time I think about it, but fortunately she is very socially adept and also a terrific organizer so she's doing the bulk of the work. We've made most of the reservations we need to make, now I just have to find a damn dress. Ugh.

4. Health update: I don't usually post about my health issues-- for example, I don't think I've mentioned that I've been getting botox treatments for migraines (I've had three now and they don't seem to be helping much). I don't really care that people know, it just never occurs to me to post about private stuff like that. But here you go for the next two items. Welcome to my paranoia.

5. Since I said awhile back that I didn't think I would ever have plastic surgery, I feel like I need to say this. For sure someone is going to see me coming out of the plastic surgery office and assume I'm getting it all done-- and maybe I will someday, maybe I will surprise you and myself and get a total makeover. But for now, I'm just going to have breast reduction surgery this summer. It's scheduled, so unless I chicken out (which is possible, surgery scares me), it's going to happen mid-July. The main impetus is, again, headache relief, but I definitely will not be sorry to be back to the size I was before I had kids. I see pictures of myself and the girls and it just doesn't look like me. Plus it has lots of other consequences-- it's impossible to find clothes that fit, it's hard to do any activity that requires any kind of, um, bouncing, etc. Now that I've said this, I guess I will have to report back about whether or not it worked, so I'll let you know.

6. Have you ever been a victim of the gossip mill? We live in a small town, although definitely not as small as it used to be, and this has happened to me twice now. Once years ago for something I never clearly understood, and once more recently for something that is not true, or only sort-of true from one skewed perspective. In both cases, it has surprised me how easily people believe the worst. It apparently hasn't occurred to anyone to think, huh, I wonder if there's another side to this story. I wonder if her version of this story would be different than the one I'm hearing. For sure no one has actually come out and asked me. 

But the other thing that has not just surprised but stunned me is how much it affects me. Apparently I am incapable of just brushing it off, even when I know it's not true. And in both cases--this time and the one 20 years ago-- I can look back over things I said, having no idea what was going on, and accidentally encouraged the gossip, because if people are looking for confirmation of what they want to believe, they'll twist whatever you say into what they want to hear. It started because someone threw me under the bus, but I can't defend myself without throwing that person under the bus in return. And it's someone I love and I just can't bring myself to do it, no matter how well-deserved it is. There's this weird martyr part of me that thinks, well, I'm strong enough to live through this but the other person isn't.

I didn't know how to handle it years ago when it happened and I don't know how to handle it now. Last time I just waited it out-- it was months before I could walk into a social situation without feeling people side-eye me (that's how I knew it wasn't all in my head, it definitely ended). This time I just want to move. Get me the fuck out of here.

7. I think this happens because I am so reserved. I don't project much personality, so people believe whatever they want about me. Alternatively, since I tend to project a fake persona in social situations where I don't know many people and I'm nervous, people think they're getting the real me (and that's on me, totally my fault for not developing better social skills). It has really made me think about how I present myself, but I don't know what I can do about it. I'm a pretty terrifically boring person, at least in terms of what I can share while standing around with a drink in my hand at a party-- which is when I tend to go fake, because I have to talk about something and few things I'm interested in make good party talk.

Good Lord is that ever more than you wanted to know. Forgive me for navel gazing. I did go back and edit this after I published it so this is a slightly different version, which makes me feel a little better. I probably shouldn't have published it at all, but I did, and I only regret it to the extent that it leaves me vulnerable if someone local reads it. But I don't think I have many (any?) local readers, so I'm not deleting it, which is possibly a mistake. 

Gah. Have had to re-publish twice now because I keep finding typos, which makes me insane. Apologies to the email subscribed, I don't think it makes any difference to anyone else. I'll be out of town for two weeks out of the next three so you won't hear from me for awhile.

7ToF: what a drag it isn't getting old

1. I like being 60. My fifties were transitional, and I'm not someone who deals well with change. 60 feels like I have arrived at something, although my friends who are already in their 60s seem a little mystified by this. I've written quite a bit about coming to terms with being a senior citizen and of course I'm not entirely there yet-- but once I made some semblance of a shift to thinking of myself as an elder, a crone, an old person, I really like it.

2. Which is why I've twice recently gotten myself into (briefly) tense situations. A couple of months ago, I was watching a movie with friends and when we paused for intermission (ie, snacks), one of them said, I refuse to say that I'm old. I don't feel old. and of course I couldn't keep my mouth shut about that, and I said I am embracing being old. That's one of the reasons our society has such a fixation with youth, I went on, because those of us who are old continue to chase after youth. If even those of us who are old are saying, ewwww, being old stinks! why should younger people think any different? Unsurprisingly, she was not convinced.

3. The next time was a few weeks ago when we were at a dinner party where everyone was about the same age (early sixties), but technically, I was the youngest one at the table. It was the week of Doug's 61st birthday, so I teased him that turning 60 is cool, but turning 61 is just old. There was this frozen half-second of silence (during which we can pause and recognize that I am sometimes a complete bonehead), and then one of the other women said with a fair amount of heat, why do you always have to remind us that you're the youngest one here? 

Which honestly kind of stunned me. First of all, I think of us as being the same age, because I'm 60 and the oldest person at the table is 63. Who the hell is worried about a two-and-a-half year age difference? I am as old as they are. And secondly, it's not insulting (in my opinion) to be old, although I reserve the right to tease and complain about it. I am continually surprised that people are so touchy about this. Why are we so brittle and sensitive around something that is a) inevitable, and b) not so bad?

4. My conclusion (besides the one about me being an insensitive idiot) is that our culture is just flat-out weird about aging, which we all already knew, so why am I even telling you these stories. I don't know. I guess I have to write about something.

5. Another thing people can be so touchy about: when someone asks me if I've seen whatever the latest TV sensation is, and I say I don't watch much TV because I'd rather read, a perfectly appropriate response would be: oh, that's too bad, you're missing some really great shows. Because that is true, and I know it. I'd still rather read, but I don't say it to be a snob, it's just my preference. The immediate assumption is that I'm bragging because somehow reading has a reputation for being intellectual and grandiose, while watching TV is supposedly pedestrian and dumb. 

6. Anyone who follows along here knows that I hardly have high-brow taste in reading. Among other things, I read cozy mysteries and romance novels and sci-fi (I'm in the middle of a Star Wars novel right now) and all sorts of genre fiction, some of which is fairly literary and some of which is really, uh, lightweight. But it's impossible to say, "I'd rather read than watch TV," without people assuming you're being a snob. So mostly I avoid  talking about it. A friend: Have you seen Killing Eve? (which I understand is seriously well-written and -acted), me: No, tell me about it!

7. This week's worthwhile listens:
- "How to Lose a War" on the SmartyPants podcast- an interview with Elizabeth D. Samet, who teaches English at West Point and has a unique window into the minds of people in the military. I was fascinated. (SmartyPants is the podcast of The American Scholar magazine.)
- "From Evangelical Pastor to Buddhist Nun" on the Ten Percent Happier podcast- if you're interested in either Evangelicalism or Buddhism, this one is also interesting. Probably you need to have a little basic knowledge about Buddhism to follow the conversation, but the general outline of her movement from Evangelicalism to Buddhism is pretty clear.
- I'm hit or miss on Gretchen Rubin's podcast Happier, but their episode on Burnout was thought-provoking. There's a difference between burnout and exhaustion, and the solutions to each are different, too.
- And of course I always plug the only podcast that I've continually listened to since I discovered podcasts: What Should I Read Next? hosted by Anne Bogel, which is usually just Anne interviewing some normal person about what they read and why, and then she recommends three books she thinks they might like. It's so much a part of my Tuesday morning routine that when she skips a week (as she did this week for spring break), my whole day feels off. Darn it, Anne.

I just realized that this will post on April Fool's Day and I spent about 30 seconds trying to think of a way to prank you, but that's never been my thing. Be careful out there.

placeholder of randomness

I wish I had something wise and helpful to say to you, but I don't. I've been playing too many word games, and worrying too much, and wondering if any of us really knows, let alone understands, what's going on. I'm going to be out of town the next two Fridays, so maybe I will just take a break and start posting again later. 

Random recs: We watched Dune Sunday night (for the 3rd time, our son is a huge fan), and it is a surprisingly good adaptation (I'm always surprised when adaptations are good). If you liked the book when you read it 30 years ago, you'll probably like the movie now. I'm reading The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich's Pulitzer prize winner, and Jane Austen at Home, which started slowly and now is interesting. But I'm so distracted that I'm only managing a few pages a day. If you're a literature nerd (and I am), the Mr. Difficult podcast, about Jonathan Franzen, is fascinating and sometimes ridiculous, as suits its subject. And I'm reading Kate Bowler's new book of devotions, Good Enough, and I am not good enough to be reading them every day, so maybe I will finish that by summer.

I was going to say something along the lines of let it be new, but I knew I'd said it before, so I went and found the old post and I phrased it way better in 2019 that what I just wrote. Skip it if you're not feeling it today. And while I was looking for that post, I found this one, which made me laugh, so I'm linking to it, too. I warned you in the post title that this would be random. I wish you peace and some small breaks from the crazy, whenever you can manage them.

Behold, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland.  Isaiah 43.19

Pa Rum Pa Pum Pum

Awhile back I posted a two-page story I wrote in a creative writing class, and told you I would post another. But I never did, because my fellow class members didn't like this one, didn't like the ending, didn't like the title, thought it was kinda boring, etc, and I was going to fix it before I posted it. And then I could never figure out what would fix it. But I went back and read the original this morning and I like it better than any of the versions I tried to "fix," so here you go. 

From a writing standpoint, the interesting thing I learned is that even though it is somewhat autobiographical (I started playing drums in my 50s), as soon as I made her a clarinet player, she became someone else, someone not me (I play flute). First hand experience of what authors mean when they say a story is based on their own experience, but not autobiographical. 

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When Judy Warren had been playing drums for about a year, her teacher told her she was ready to play in the community band. Judy looked at him doubtfully. She might be in her fifties, but she was still a beginner, and the community band was good. The music they played was hard.

But her teacher was persuasive. And he was the leader of the percussion section, so he promised he wouldn’t assign her any parts that were beyond her skills. She finally decided to do it, because she could always play triangle. Anybody can play the triangle, right? Ding!

Judy was ahead of some beginning musicians because she knew how to read music. She had played clarinet for decades, since she was eight years old at a public school in Dallas. She had picked clarinet because her grandmother had told her she should. Her grandmother had a shelf of Benny Goodman albums and thought he could do no wrong. In Judy’s eyes, her grandmother could do no wrong.

Nearly fifty years later, Judy hadn’t played her clarinet since she couldn’t remember when. In fact, she wasn’t exactly sure where it was. But her children were off at college, and she needed a new challenge, and one day at the library she saw a flyer advertising drum lessons. She remembered being envious of the drummers, who played at the back of the band and always seemed to be having fun. The clarinets sat right under the director’s nose and could never get away with anything.

So she called the number on the flyer, and started to learn. She was awful. At age fifty-four, you don’t very often do things that make you look bad, especially in front of people. It was embarrassing, showing up for her lesson every week and knowing that she wasn’t as good as the fifteen-year-old that had the lesson before her, or even the twelve-year-old that had the lesson after. But she kept going. Soon she was no longer awful, just mediocre.

Her friends thought she was crazy. She spent hours a week practicing, and no one she knew was doing anything similar. None of them knew how to play any musical instrument at all (except she found out her friend Liz had minored in piano performance in college but didn’t even own a piano anymore). They couldn’t understand why she would want to spend hours every week banging on drums like a teenager.

It wasn’t until she showed up for her first community band rehearsal that she realized why she had wanted to do this. Making music, each of you reading black marks on a page and playing your part, was miraculous. There was nothing else like it in her life. It was three months until their first concert, but even with all the rough edges of early rehearsals, there were moments that lifted her soul. She remembered what it was like to make something beautiful with a group of people who had nothing else in common.

Playing clarinet in her high school marching band had been her life. They sweated and practiced under the August sun. They stood nervously together under the lights waiting for half-time to start. They traveled (oh, those school buses) and won competitions. They banded together and thumbed their band nerd noses at their high school’s strict social hierarchy. It had been a place where she belonged.

Percussionists don’t play just one single instrument. There are snare drums and tom-toms, the big bass drum and the tiny triangle, marimbas and bells, cymbals and wood blocks and maracas and chimes. And tympani. There was one woman whose only job was to play the tympani.

As the newcomer, Judy played all the parts that no one else wanted to play. She counted and counted, then crashed the cymbals at the climax of the first movement. She played the wood blocks at the beginning of another piece, and dinged the triangle on the second and fourth beat of each measure for nearly a page in another. By the end of the first rehearsal, she was exhausted.

But it was fun. And the second rehearsal was even better—she was starting to learn her way around. She made the comforting realization that even experienced drummers get lost while sight-reading. She came home and told her husband that playing in the community band was the best thing she’d done in years.

During her third rehearsal, right in the middle of a tense moment in the hardest piece they played, she whizzed by the percussion table to grab the crash cymbals and her hip caught the black flannel tablecloth. Maracas, wind chimes, wood blocks, and two sizes of triangles went crashing down. She wanted to sink through the floor, because everyone turned around to see what had happened.

But after that initial turning of heads, no one said a word. The conductor didn’t even pause. One by one, for the rest of the rehearsal, the other drummers came by with amusement in their eyes and whispered their own mistakes. One had knocked over a similar table of instruments during a competition. One had dropped a pair of cymbals in the middle of a concert. Another simply said, “Welcome to the percussion section! We’ve all done it!” She suddenly, deeply understood why drummers were so fiercely loyal to each other. And she determined, just as fiercely, not to let them down.