What a long, strange trip it's been

We got back from our annual visit with Doug's family last Sunday. Traveling always gives me lots of time to think, and I came home with a fistful of new ideas for blog posts. But I'm having trouble wrestling them into anything coherent, so I'll just tell you briefly about our fortieth anniversary, which was a month ago (by the time you're reading this).

Forty (forty!) is a long time. I wrote a post about long marriages back in 2015, and at one point I had planned on writing an update and passing along whatever wisdom I have learned in the 9 years since. But it's a month later and I still haven't written it, because I'm not sure what to say. 

We had to go through a major transition when Doug cut back to half-time and started working mostly from home. Since we moved here in 1992, he had been going to work by at least 7:30am and getting home at 6:30 or 7pm four days a week, and sometimes he would get home much later than that, and sometimes he would work for as many as ten or twelve days in a row. 

And then suddenly, he was just home. All the time. It drove me nuts. So after several months, we actually went back to do some marriage counseling last fall. We learned a lot. We're doing better. Even when you've been married forty years, you still have things to learn. 

Every marriage is different. Don't ever think you know what is going on inside someone else's marriage. By the same token, I can't see how our marriage looks from the outside or how we might look to you. So there's no point in me trying to give you some kind of advice, or tell you nine secrets for going the distance or 7 tips to staying together forever or whatever. 

I can just tell you that he knows me better than anyone on the planet, and he still stays with me. Even when we've been through rough times, even when I'm not sure if we're going to survive, he's been my rock, my safe shelter. I'm keeping him.

And also: I love his family. We had so much fun last week. 

Hug your loved ones close and have a great weekend.

too many diet books later, plus more late night thoughts

I've told you before that I have long been anti-diet, but on the other hand, it seems that every winter I gain a few pounds, and unless I want to buy all new clothes, I have to figure out how to get rid of the fluff. 

So a few years ago, when several of my friends were all excited about the Whole 30 diet, I decided to read the book to see if it might be useful for me. Researching it turned out to be the wrong thing to do-- if you read the rationale behind it, it makes, uh, no sense. 

But that got me curious about other eating plans, and I started reading. And reading. I checked out keto, paleo, vegetarian, and vegan, to name a few. (Enneagram fives-- we do research! and if we can keep researching and put off actually doing something, so much the better!) 

If you've ever read a diet book, you know they all follow the same basic outline. They start with all the reasons why the way you are currently eating is bad--maybe it's even killing you-- and all the reasons, frequently backed up by data and research and studies, that their way of eating is going to be the ultimate solution, not just for losing weight but for vibrant health, overflowing energy, better skin, hair, and nails.

Then there will be anecdotes about people who stopped eating the SAD diet (Standard American Diet), started eating the (insert diet name here) diet, and now they've lost 50 pounds and they bounce out of bed in the morning and have clear eyes and good skin.

If you just read one, it's super convincing. If you read a bunch in a row, it starts sounding like propaganda. Really, they're sales people. They're selling you a better life, and all you have to do is a) buy the book(s) and b) do the thing, and you will be saved. 

And weirdly, even though they use pseudo-scientific language and what seems to be irrefutable logic, they frequently make directly opposite claims. Don't eat meat or any animal products, says one book. You can only eat meat and tubers, says another book. Only eat these specific foods, says another. You can eat anything, just don't eat very much of it, says yet another. Did you know that fasting and restricting your calorie intake might help you live longer? Why would you want to live longer if you can't eat good food? 

I'm no expert, so I'm not going to give you any diet advice, and if I did, you shouldn't take it because I am not thin. I'm just telling you what I observed from reading too many diet books. Unfortunately, as with so many things, you just have to figure it out for yourself. For myself, I keep coming back to something I read online somewhere-- if you don't want to diet, you can at least starting eating the way you would if you'd already lost the weight (to use the language of the diet books, skip ahead to the maintenance phase).

Or whatever works for you. People are different, which is what makes life so damn complicated. One of my sisters and one of my dear friends can tell within a couple of hours if they've eaten gluten. I've tried being gluten-free a couple of times and it didn't make any difference at all to me. What works for someone else may not work for you, and vice versa. The friends I mentioned above still think Whole 30 is great.

I just deleted a whole bunch more on that topic, you're welcome. 

Here is another, slightly related, hypothetical thing to think about, though, another half-formed idea that probably isn't worth a full post. 

The whole rationale behind the so-called paleo diet is that our digestive systems developed over millennia while our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. After our ancestors began to farm (relatively recently), we added grains, dairy products, sugar, etc. The theory is that our digestive systems have not evolved as quickly as our diets have changed. So we will feel healthier if we go back to the hunter-gatherer diet: heavy on meat, with fruits and vegetables on the side; no grain, no sugar.

Because I think too much, I wonder if there's a similar situation with our spiritual selves. Human beings weren't capable of a scientific outlook until a few centuries ago. Before that, belief in a god or goddess or deities of some kind was assumed, because there had to be some way to explain the weather and the movement of the stars and the way the world is. 

What if the human psyche evolved to center around belief in god(s)? What if stripping gods/goddesses out of the center of our psyche leaves us with unstable mental health? Sure there are people who have left religion behind and never missed it, and of course religion can be its own source of psychosis, but I think there are a solid percentage of people, maybe even a majority of people, who need to believe in God, or at least in a stable higher order, in order to function in a healthy way in the world. It would explain a lot. 

Maybe the intellectual basis for religious belief isn't proof of the existence of a divine being, but a matter of pragmatism: I will function better if I find a belief system I can use as a structure, a support system, for life in this crazy world. 

Maybe. I have exactly no credentials to make a statement like that, but I think about it quite a bit.

p.s. I accidentally published this early, apologies if you saw that early, unedited version. We will be out of town next week so probably no post from me.

Typological, except maybe not very logical

I have three posts that are in varying stages of completion and I just can't get excited about any of them. So I'll tell you a story this week that might become relevant next week, or maybe not.

Years ago a friend of mine told me that she went to a professional development meeting where there were about 30 other attendees. The first thing they did was take the MBTI, the test that identifies your Meyers-Briggs personality type. After they each had their type-- it's hard to believe anyone will be unfamiliar with this, but it's four letters like ESFJ or INTP-- the conference leaders went letter by letter and divided them into their types. 

So the first letter is either an I or an E based on whether you are an introvert or an extrovert. They told everyone to plan their perfect weekend, then they sent the extroverts into another room. After 15 minutes or so, they reunited the group and asked what they had come up with. The introverts had each individually described their perfect weekend--take the dog for a walk, read a book, work in the garden, go out to dinner with a friend. The extroverts, with no additional instructions, had planned what they would do as a group--we'll go to a club Friday night, then we'll go on an all-day hike on Saturday, etc. I just love that.

The next letter is either S (sensing) if you perceive the world through your five senses, or N (iNtuitive) if you perceive the world more intuitively. This time they sent the intuitives to another room. Then they put a chair in the middle of the room and said to the sensory people: describe what you see. The sensory folks came up with a fairly detailed description of the height of the chair, what it was made of, how sturdy it was, how it was placed in the room, and so on. 

Then they brought the intuitive people back in the room and said: describe what you see. The first response was, "I see possibility!" I love that one even more. 

(If my friend told me about the final two letters, I don't remember it.) Of course no one is completely introvert or completely extrovert, and no one is completely sensory or completely intuitive. But it can be a pretty interesting way to understand yourself and others.

For the record, even though you didn't ask, I'm INTJ, although in the example of the chair, I can't imagine I would have done anything other than describe the chair. Maybe if you'd said tell me the story of how this chair got here, I would have made up something good.

It's been so long since I took the test that I don't remember exactly how it worked, but the version of the test that I took gave you back your results as a scale-- I was way introverted, and definitely on the intuitive side but not as extreme. 

The next one is T (Thinking) vs. F (Feeling), and I am pretty solidly on the thinking side of that one, and I think (har) that's getting worse as I get older and more cynical. And then the last one is J (Judging, you like structure, you don't like surprises) vs P (Perceiving, you like things looser and more spontaneous), and I was almost right in the middle on that one, barely a J. 

You didn't ask any of my other ones either, but I am an Enneagram 5 with a strong 4 wing, and when I worked at our local hospital a few years ago I took a workplace test called DiSC, and I was a C. The original description I got back was C for Compliant--when I told Doug, he just started laughing-- but when I read further, it turns out that C is for Conscientious, and sadly I am that. It's such a pain in the butt but it can make me a little crazy to not have all the i's dotted and t's crossed.

Hmmmm. I'm tempted to throw out my far-fetched idea for the next post just so you can have something interesting to think about. You know, I think I will because it's not really a strong enough idea to support an entire post, so just saying it is probably enough.

So, here's the idea: I've wondered for years now if the second Meyers-Briggs letter (Sensing/iNtuitive) has a correlation with whether or not having a spiritual life is important to you. Because for some people, particularly science types--who to my uninformed brain, would most likely be Sensing, and only interested in what can be perceived through the five senses-- the idea of a spiritual life is just ridiculous, a waste of time. While intuitives might be more interested in curating a life that feeds the soul, maybe sees patterns and ideas and a larger version of reality. (I see possibility!)

That's it. I can think about this stuff for hours and hours and classify all my friends. But as crazy as it may sound, understanding my personality better has saved me thousands in therapy bills, especially the Enneagram. It's just a framework, it's not magic, and as always there are people who take it way too far. But it's fascinating to me.

Have a good weekend. It's supposed to be spectacular here-- we've had a couple of weeks of rain and finally everything is green and gorgeous. There is no place prettier than Northwest Montana when the weather is good.

mini-rants and updates, May 2024 edition

1. Like many, last Friday we watched the northern lights with awe. Unfortunately, we didn't know about the trick of enhancing the view with a cell phone camera until the next day. So the first picture is from Saturday night, which was considerably less spectacular but still very cool, and one from a few nights later, when there were no northern lights, just a beautiful night sky.

2. After four+ years of posting a mini-review on Goodreads of almost every book I've read, I suddenly found myself tired of it a few weeks back. Since then, I've tried out several alternative sites and apps, but none of them are as simple and straightforward if your main goal is just to keep a record of what you've read. (After several hours of using the most promising alternative, I still couldn't even find the list of books I've read.) Apparently the most popular features now are timers and reminders and game-like motivators, none of which I would use. 

So for now, I'm continuing on with Goodreads but without writing reviews (as far as I can tell, no one reads them except my daughter so that shouldn't be a problem). GR gets a lot of hate because it's owned by Amazon, but I have to say why not take advantage of a service that they are in effect providing for free? The current saying is, "If it's free, you are the product," and of course that's true, but the ads are way less intrusive than some of the other reading apps I tried, and I'm unwilling to pay $50 a year for what is really just a memory aid for me. I'm open to better ideas if you have suggestions. So far I've tried Book Buddy, Storygraph, and Bookly.

3. You know what works? Sportswashing. There may be plenty of unanswered questions about how the PGA (the player-owned professional golf association) and LIV golf (owned by the Saudis) will integrate, but no one is talking about human rights violations or institutional misogyny any more. It's sad and a little disgusting. Money makes all kinds of problems go away. I have rarely been as disappointed in a famous person as I was when Rahm signed on with LIV at the end of last year.

4. For years now, body positivity has been challenging cultural attitudes about women's bodies and working to end fat shaming, slut shaming, and genital shaming. And yet suddenly there is this big push for full-body deodorant and everybody seems to think it's great. Human bodies smell like human bodies. We do not need another thing to be ashamed about. I wear under-arm deodorant and I take regular showers, but I refuse to be ashamed about how my body smells. The commercials for this stuff come on sports networks all the time. It's super annoying--and this time it's aimed at men and women, which just goes to show how sensitive we all can be when it comes to body shaming.

5. The rest of this post is about migraines so you can stop reading if you're not interested. I'm pretty sure I've told you that after I had covid in November 2020, my migraines got way worse. Way worse. I guess it is my version of long covid. 

I've had migraines since I was in my 20s, and I have tried all manner of dietary changes, hormones, antidepressants, anti-seizure meds, physical therapy, chiropractic, acupuncture, cranial-sacral therapy, energy balancing-- pretty much everything, science-based and not. Some things helped (especially triptan meds), some didn't, but I have consistently averaged 6-10 migraines a month for decades--which is no fun, but manageable with the triptans. 

But post-covid, with my frequency way up, I finally qualified for stronger interventions. First up was botox injections. You get a bunch of injections, starting in your forehead and going up and over your scalp and into your neck and shoulders. Apparently the shots themselves are a deterrent for some, but the whole thing takes less than ten minutes and they don't hurt nearly as much as a migraine does.

It sounded great, and they've been life changing for some, but for me they did next to nothing, even after five or six rounds of treatment. Possibly there was some reduction in severity--and as my neurologist said, that's not meaningless-- but there was no reduction in frequency. 

So several months ago, I stopped the botox, and asked my neuro what was up next. He prescribed Ajovy, one of a number of new migraine drugs that are based on monoclonal antibodies and don't ask me to explain that. Ajovy is a monthly injection that you can give yourself at home, and I've done four injections now. 

I am cautiously optimistic. It was miraculous the first two months, the best I've felt since before peri-menopause (mid-40s). Then it started working less well, but I also had a covid-like illness during that time period (the covid test was negative, but the symptoms were similar).

So I am hopeful it will get better again. I went to see my neurologist last week and he said to do a couple more months of Ajovy before I decide it's not working. I'm not 100% cured of migraines, but even at the less effective level, it's still way better than before.

Bottom line: if you are a migraineur and you haven't been to your neurologist in years (I hadn't, pre-covid), try again, because there are new therapies. They are also super expensive, but not too bad with good insurance. I am grateful.

Have a good weekend. In case you couldn't tell, this was a filler post while I try to figure out what I'm doing next. I have two ideas, one of which I am unqualified to comment on, and one of which you're probably not interested in (apologies for dangling prepositions). Stay tuned. Maybe a third option will present itself.

Silence is golden, but unfortunately sometimes you have to talk

No one will be surprised if I say that introverts are usually not chatty people. In fact, small talk is one of my biggest anxieties. I have a long history of slipping out the back of meetings, parties, and barbecues in order to avoid having to make conversation. 

In fact, my biggest anxiety about having people over is not the food-- pretty much anyone who comes to our house knows not to expect anything fancy-- it's the conversation. What if we all sit down to eat and no one can think of anything to say? Because that has happened. I'm not a great conversationalist. Sometimes silence falls and I've got nothing. 

So a couple of years ago I started collecting conversation questions. Turns out there are quite a few lists out there. I printed out the promising ones, cut them into strips, put them in a jar, and came up with random "rules" for how this Q&A game would be played. I also keep a list on my phone for restaurants.

So here you go-- a few of my collection. They've led to some pretty fun conversations.

• Would you rather live in a tree house, a house boat, or a castle?
• What did you eat for breakfast? Do you eat the same thing every day?
• If you could organize your life however you wanted with no regard for your responsibilities, what time would you go to sleep and what time would you get up?
• You have fifteen minutes to evacuate your house. Besides the basics (phone, passport, pets, etc), what would you take?
• If you were a contestant in a pageant, what would your talent be? (men have to answer this one, too)(unconventional talents encouraged)
• It's vacation time: travel or stay home? If travel: beach, mountains, city....? If stay home: what would you do?
• If you could instantly become an expert in some skill or hobby, what would it be?
• What was your favorite TV show when you were a kid?
• Would you rather live in Barrow, Alaska (extreme cold), or Death Valley, California (extreme heat)?
• What would be the coolest thing about your dream house?
• What is your favorite holiday? least favorite?
• What was your first paying job? did you like it?
• If you're having a bad day, what cheers you up? 
• What age do you feel?
• Dog/cat/both/neither?
• Have you ever met a celebrity in person? Tell us everything.
• Who was your best friend when you were ten? 
• What kind of music did you like when you were 17?

Surprisingly to me, the ones who seem to enjoy this the most are the kids. Maybe because if we go around the table to answer, it puts them on equal footing with the adults. (Of course, if kids will be present, I cull the questions to suit.) 

My "rules" are: everyone pulls a question, but if you get one you don't like, you can pull a different one. If you don't want to answer a question, you can pass. Elaborating beyond a one-word response is encouraged. That's all.

I'm always on the lookout for new ones, so if you have any ideas, let me know. I did have one-- what is your all-time favorite book? -- that I've ended up discarding because it embarrassed people who are not readers, and also those of us who are avid readers would immediately be off on a twenty minute discussion.

Have a great weekend. Ask some questions and be curious about the answers!

hyper-criticism, clumsy shoes, and messy reality

I. 

I am good at analyzing a problem. Bring me into a situation or a work group, or hand me a book to read, and the skill I bring to the table is telling you what's wrong with it, often in minute detail. If I really get on a roll, I can become passionate about my analysis, and I will wrestle your wimpy defense of the status quo to the ground. 

I was well into my 30s before I realized that other people aren't always happy to be on the receiving end of my analysis. Why wouldn't people want to know what is wrong? Of course they will be grateful for my brilliance! Surely people wouldn't want to blithely, ignorantly carry on when I could helpfully point out to them how a situation (or their personality) could be improved? But shockingly to me, that is often the case. 

There are times--especially at the beginning of solving a problem-- when skills like mine are useful. But analysis is only one small part of problem-solving, and it's not the most important part. It is the easy part--figuring out how to solve a problem and moving forward into a new way of doing things is way harder than critiquing what's wrong. Getting stuck in an infinite critique loop where you are continually, more precisely, defining what's wrong is a great way to guarantee you'll never move forward.

II.

My senior year in high school, I took calculus, which was just the next class you took if you had passed all the advanced math classes you'd been enrolled in since seventh grade. There were maybe 25 students in the class, and we all knew each other because of those previous math classes. The teacher, Mr Arnold, was much beloved, one of the best teachers I've ever had.

One day he posed a hypothetical question: if you were walking toward a wall, and every step you took was half the length of the previous step, would you ever reach the wall? We smiled smugly. This was easy. Of course not. We were used to hypothetical questions, and clearly, if every step you took was only half as long as the previous one, you could never actually arrive at the wall. There would always be tiny, ever-shrinking space between your shoe and the wall.

He let us yammer on for a few minutes and then he said, Of course you'd get there. We live in the real world. The material of your shoe, the nature of your physical presence, your ability to precisely move a tiny distance-- at some point, your shoe would hit the wall.

I still think about this (obviously) because it made such an impression on me. I thought math was all about the rules, and here was a teacher telling us that the real world answer is different than our ability to do the arithmetic to divide a distance in two.

III. 

I think in some ways, progressive intellectuals, myself included, think we have created a pristine critical space where our theory can slice and dice the problems of our culture ever more precisely. We are self-importantly sure that we know all the ways our society is wrong, and then we insist that it all needs to be changed. "Burn it all down" is not infrequently mentioned. 

But we live in the real world, and we're less good with exactly how that would happen and how things would look on the other side. We get so caught up in our dazzling ability to critique The Way Things Are that we forget that we are messy, imperfect people critiquing the actual lives of our messy, imperfect co-humans.

And somehow we think that if we can analyze a problem, it's not our problem. That's quite the mental leap. You get this from both sides of our polarized nation, of course, but based on some recent experiences I've had, I think that moderate conservatives are a little better at defusing this than we are. 

We're all in this together. If I'm sitting in the conference room at work and we're problem solving, I don't get to leave the room when the "analyze the problem" part is over just because it's what I'm good at. I'm still part of the team, and the real work is just getting started.

I'm only a few pages into Sho Baraka's book on creativity,* but I am struck by this thought in the introduction: "When our humility is low, and our anger is high and we are certain our ideology is right; we are capable of doing substantial damage," and this is true no matter which ideology you champion. Maybe the most important thing is humility, and the willingness to care about what's happening and then wade into the mess.

* Sho Baraka, He Saw That it was Good: Reimagining Your Creative Life to Repair a Broken World.

road listens

I'm in Louisiana this week and have been busier than expected helping my mom get her new place together (and adopt a rescue cat). So this is just a filler that I started writing at 9pm on Thursday night. I thought I would pass along some things that we enjoyed listening to while we were endlessly driving on our three-week road trip. 

Listening is not my favorite way to consume any type of media, but if I'm in the car and there's no other way to do it, I've listened to plenty of audiobooks and podcasts over the years. When you're traveling with someone, it's super hard to come up with things you both will enjoy. Here are a few that worked for both of us.

- We were latecomers to the "60 Songs that Explain the 90s" podcast, hosted by Rob Harvilla (available through all the usual podcast apps, as are all the podcasts I mention here). By the time we found it, Rob had already bumped up from 60 songs to 90, and then from 90 to 120 songs that explain the 90s. We skipped around and listened to the ones that sounded intriguing, so we've only listened to about 20 so far--which means we have plenty more to listen to the next time we travel.  

- I've told you I'm hit or miss on the "We Can Do Hard Things" podcast, hosted by Glennon Doyle, her wife Abby Wambach, and her sister Amanda Doyle. But episode 282, "Your 'Stuff' Personality Type" was a great one to listen to and discuss. 

- The audiobook You Only Die Twice by Brynn Kelly was surprisingly fun and absorbing, and I say surprising because it's not something either of us would enjoy reading in print. But the reviews were intriguing, and the narrators are great. Unfortunately it is only available from Audible-- it isn't even a print book as of this writing-- and I know that is a deal breaker for a lot of you. But if you're ok with Audible, it kept us completely hooked from start to finish. 

- Another hit or miss podcast for me is "10 Things to Tell You" hosted by Laura Tremaine. Episode 209 ("Best Books Lately") had some interesting stuff about how we talk about books online, which is admittedly more interesting to me than to Doug, but it's his payback for me listening to all the sports podcasts (see below), and he didn't dislike it. Episode 189 from last fall about the Hollywood strikes was also interesting (it's probably pretty basic if you already know all about them, but I knew nothing). She has a new "Best Books Lately" episode (#218) with R. Eric Thomas that just came out this week so I haven't heard it yet-- but usually those episodes are good, even though Laura and I have very different reading tastes.

We also listened to various episodes from our usual favorite podcasts-- ESPN Daily, Pop Culture Happy Hour, No Laying Up (golf), Radiolab, and Throughline. The key is to find some podcasts you enjoy, even if you don't want to listen to them every single time, and then before your trip, scroll through and find the episodes that look intriguing. It works for us.

Have a great weekend. I will eat an extra beignet for you. I'm not proofing this so I hope it is ok.

Grandma Grammar

1. Public Service Announcement: Clamor is not the same as clamber. You do not sit on the floor and then clamor to your feet, you clamber. Good grief. What is the world coming to? The first time I saw this it was in a novel published by a big five publishing house and I rolled my eyes so hard at their carelessness. Then I saw it in another novel today, also published by a big five house. Apparently this is now acceptable linguistic drift.

I know, I know, my shrew is showing. And you've probably read enough here to know that my grammar-- tinged with equal parts East Texas roots and aging brain--is not perfect, either. But still. 

*sighs* *gives up*

This is apparently a decision that copy editors have already made. I wonder what is the age limit for being bothered by this one? Do people under age 60 really think that those two words mean the same thing? And probably people of all ages are thinking, wait, does she really care about this? seriously? because nobody else does. Except the twenty-seven of us who do care, and I bet I'm not the only one who reads here who is one of them.

2. In my previous blog, I used to run a weekly post about words. It's been more than ten years now so the details are hazy, but I think it was called Words on Wednesday, and I would pick words that were frequently confused (like peak/peek/pique) and explain why/how they were different. But I stopped doing it because I figured I was preaching to the choir (cliché). 

3. We are human beings who communicate through language, so we'll never get to the point that words don't matter. But I think we are quickly reaching the point where precision in language doesn't matter. It's easy to get all up on my high horse (cliché) about that, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad change. 

I mean, I will always regret it for myself, because words are My Thing. But it probably doesn't spell doom and gloom (cliché) for our culture. The culture snobs thought that the world was ending back in the 19th century when the novel eclipsed poetry, right? (in English speaking countries, I don't know the timeline in other languages.)

Tastes change, technologies change, and for some time now, the cutting edge of narrative art has been visual, not literary. It's no less art, and it's no less creative or challenging to create. I've seen plenty of movies that blew me away, not to mention well-written TV shows, and even music videos.

But I'm not quite to the point where I've reconciled myself to books and movies that are essentially video games in another format. I know the same argument applies-- it's not bad, it's just a new way of telling stories-- but it's harder to wrap my head around. 

We went to see "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare" last week, and about halfway through I leaned over to Doug and said, this is a movie of a video game. They gather a team, and then they walk around shooting people and blowing things up. It was well made, and it wasn't exactly a waste of time, but it didn't do much for me-- at least partly because I don't really find violence to be all that entertaining. And you know what? That probably wouldn't bother Guy Ritchie one bit. Senior citizen word nerds are not his target audience.

Have a good weekend. Go for a hike and clamber over some rocks. 

My Inner Shrew

Edited to add: this turns into a rant at the end. Avoid if you're not in the mood.

Back in the 90s (a lot of my posts start with that), getting in touch with your “inner child” was a thing. A huge thing. There were books and seminars and people talked about it with their therapist and then told you more than you ever wanted to know about having play dates with their inner child, the pure innocent being that supposedly lives deep inside us, covered over by the cares and responsibilities of adulthood.

It was helpful — maybe even life-changing — for a lot of people, even some people I knew. But it never worked for me. I was in therapy at the time, so I remember doing a quasi-hypnosis thing with my therapist, and I remember going to a "Find Your Inner Child" workship one Saturday, and I'm pretty sure I read at least one book, to no avail. I never got in touch with anything that resembled a sweet, luminous inner child. 

Then a couple of weeks ago I think I figured out why: it’s because my inner child isn’t pure and innocent, she’s as mad as a hornet trapped in a window. I was thinking about a couple of things that happened when I was four or five—not anything out of the ordinary for 1965, just how it felt to exist in my family in the world at that time— and my younger self's voice sounded in my head with perfect clarity: These people don’t know what THE FUCK they are doing. 

“These people” being my parents, and “fuck” being a word that of course I wouldn’t have known when I was four (it was not a word that was said casually in 1965), but somehow that inner self scooped the word out of my adult brain as the best way to describe how she felt. 

My parents had good intentions. They were not bad parents, especially not for the times. But they were incapable of seeing my need to be something other than what they expected me to be, and they were definitely not going to protect me from the expectations of our southern Baptist subculture.

They weren't even aware there was a problem. In their minds, and in the minds of at least a few Sunday School teachers, girl scout leaders, and other kids' moms, when I didn't fit in, the problem was me. 

Oddly, finding that enraged little knot of confused child shaking her fist at the universe has felt as freeing as I imagine the other sort of inner child would feel. I'm sure there are those who would say I just haven't dug deep enough yet; and maybe they're right-- maybe somewhere further down inside me is a pure innocent little angel. Or maybe some of us are just born to be little shits and I should own it.

OK, I said little shits because it made me laugh, but of course I wasn't really a little shit, or at least not any more often than most kids. I was just already a jaded mini-adult by the time I was five, and I couldn't foresee any chance things would ever change. I gave in early and often; I did not try to resist.

Maybe the reason this has come up is because for the past several months I have been so angry. So angry. Angry that we might end up with that conman as president again, angry that our guy didn't step aside for someone new, angry that the world is so fucked up right now, angry that there is so much hatred and spite in the air.

Most of us just want peace and safety for ourselves and our loved ones and a reasonable amount of prosperity and why is that so hard? Why are the people who are in power so determined to stay there that they will lie and propagandize and sell their own souls, no matter what it does to the rest of us? Why are the people in economic power, the billionaires who create our economy without having any sort of mandate to do so, scooping hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, out of our economy as their compensation for some weird biz school concept like "being willing to take on risk" and stagnating the wages of everyone else because anyone can be a secretary/plumber/custodian? 

Have they ever even looked around? OF COURSE not just anyone can be a good secretary. We have receipts that prove not just anyone can be a good plumber. Not just anyone can be good at cleaning a bathroom or replacing a transmission or flipping burgers.

How did we get this weird idea that the people at the top of the economic food chain deserve to be paid as much as possible, AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE, and the people at the bottom are just shit out of luck because .... ? I don't even know why. Maybe because to acknowledge that the burger flipper deserves dignity and respect and a reasonable living would mean that those people at the top wouldn't be able to win at the uniquely American game of Cutthroat Competitive Greed, a game that becomes more terrifying and more world-destroying for the rest of us every day. 

I'm starting to rant. No, I'm well into a rant. It just makes me so fucking angry. I heard a young athlete, probably 25 or 26, who has already made his first millions because he is very good at what he does, say in an interview, "I believe in capitalism, I'm going to make as much money as I can," and I thought, that is not what capitalism means-- except in our country, where self-centered, no-holds-barred greed has somehow come to be known as capitalism, and the phrase "but we can make money" is an excuse for anything and everything. 

Somewhere along the way we managed to let caring for our fellow human beings and community involvement and just plain and simple kindness become optional, the thing that seems silly and delusional, while lining our pockets is what really matters. I'm just sick of all of it, and of the people who look at you like you're a naive idiot if you push back.

Well, believe it or not, this post was originally supposed to end with some positive, hopeful commentary about something that I can't even remember anymore. I guess I got a little carried away.

Related: check out this story about an enormous study that found that venting doesn't reduce anger. But I think I do feel a little better, so maybe they're wrong. I suppose I'd better go back and add a rant warning at the top of the post. Have a good weekend. Do something that the "capitalists" would think was stupid.

a post that will make no sense if you haven't read the last two posts

I've got two half-written posts I could subject you to, and another half-dozen in my head, but I am feeling singularly unmotivated to post anything this week, so I will just leave you with a couple of addenda to past posts and maybe I will do better next week.

I did go back and add the recipe for Garden Minestrone in the first comment to my last post. But I did it in a hurry, and I didn't remember until I found half of a bag of frozen peas in my freezer that I only used half of the bag of peas. Apologies if you already tried it. An entire 14-ounce bag would have been a lot of peas.

Also, I was so excited to tell you about reading cookbooks that I neglected to mention a book that I meant to pass along to any other dark fantasy fans. You probably know me well enough to know that I don't like my dark fantasy very dark, but I don't know what else to call a book about a school whose students die regularly-- as in, one in four students will die before they graduate. A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik is a about a school of magic so of course it gets called a dark Harry Potter, but really it has much more in common with The Hunger Games than Hogwarts. I loved the main character El, who is doggedly determined to do the right thing in spite of being shunned by her fellow students. There has been some controversy about veiled, unintended racism-- Novik has apologized for one particular comment, but there was nothing in the book that rose to the level of boycott this book for me.

Honestly, I am so tired of hair-trigger reactions to the smallest things leading to books being canceled or boycotted. I know, I KNOW, that's a sign of my own privilege. I get that, but I'm still tired of it. This book is actually one of the best illustrations I've read of how privilege works so at least it has that going for it. You could hand it to a teenager who doesn't believe privilege exists and let them learn. It's the first book in a trilogy. The other two were good, but I think this one is the best of the three.

And finally, it occurred to me that a conservative who read my mini-rant in this post (see #5 and 6) about the agenda-driven takeover of local libraries might think that the way my parents raised me is obviously wrong because I turned out to be a liberal or progressive or whatever we're calling me. So I thought I should clarify that my parents have three daughters (I'm the middle), and I'm the only one that is no longer evangelical. The other two are still firmly within the fold, so to speak, and they are the reason that I so often say that there are conservatives I deeply love and respect, because I do love and respect my sisters who are amazing people.

And after that bunch of nonsense, I'm done. Have a good weekend. I know this was a pretty boring post but believe me, the half-written posts I didn't finish were way more boring so really I did you a favor.