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.

Reading Report January-March 2024

I haven't read very many books in the first three months of this year, and I'm not sure exactly why. I've been reading, but mostly I've been reading books that I didn't finish (life's too short to read a book you're not enjoying), or that I've read before-- and I don't usually count re-reads in my tally. So I don't really have that much to report. Here are a few: 

Circe by Madeline Miller. I know. Everybody else read this five years ago. I just finally picked it up a couple of weeks ago. It's really good, but you probably don't need me to tell you that because you probably already read it yourself. 

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman, #2 in the Thursday Murder Club series. I enjoyed the first one in this series, but not enough to prioritize reading the sequels. I'm sorry I waited so long, because this one was much more interesting. Really enjoyed it. 

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. We listened to this on our road trip, because we're in a couples book club and this was our March selection. At the beginning of the trip, we called it our homework because it was pretty dry--we made ourselves listen to 30 minutes a day before we could listen to anything else. But once we got about a third of the way through, it became much more interesting, and before long we were listening to an hour or two a day. We finished it well before we made it back home. Whether or not you agree with any of his conclusions about mind-altering substances, it is a great book to discuss-- both for the two of us on our trip, and for our book club when we finally met up a couple of weeks ago. Also, Pollan is a great reader of his own work.

All My Knotted-Up Life by Beth Moore-- if you're an "exvangelical" like me (someone who was raised evangelical but no longer shares those beliefs), this is a must listen. In the 1990s-2000s, Beth Moore represented a lot of things about being a Christian woman that I did not appreciate (to put it mildly). I was a judgy snob about her work, even though I'm not sure I ever read any of it. But she is so candid in this memoir, and so clearly trying to do the right thing in the face of enormous opposition-- by the end, she had won me over. I went back and forth between the print version and the audio and she is also a good reader. There have been some complaints about her accent, but I went to Jr High and High School in East Texas, about three hours away from her hometown, and I can verify that people really talk like that, especially when they're telling stories. Not everybody has that much twang, but enough do that it didn't seem exaggerated to me. 

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin-- I loved this at first. A young woman named Greta works as a transcriptionist for a sex therapist who might not actually be a licensed therapist. In the small town where she lives, it is almost impossible to maintain clients' confidentiality, even when she tries--and sometimes she doesn't try very hard. It is darkly comic, painful, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes crude, a bit absurd. But after about the first third, it got to be a bit too .... much for me. I skimmed through the middle and then started reading again about 50 pages before the end. It's sad and hilarious and profound, and not always easy to read. Sort of recommended. 

I was super disappointed in Tim O'Brien's new book. Maybe I'll write more about that another time. Super disappointed. I think the religion of progressive intellectuals is cynicism. They cling to it with fanatical devotion. It is profoundly boring to me. Just watch while I smack down your juvenile efforts to be sincere or hopeful or kind. Hmmm. That got a little preachy. Sorry not sorry.

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Have we ever talked about reading cookbooks? Even though I'm not much of a cook-- I'm not terrible, but I'm not very good, either-- I love to read cookbooks. I almost always have at least one going.  

Reading cookbooks is a different thing than cooking from a cookbook. A cookbook with great recipes might not be interesting to read, and the reverse is also true. I'm particularly fond of Mark Bittman, Deb Perelman, Ina Garten, the Cooks' Illustrated people, and a bunch more. Normally I don't tell you about the cookbooks I read because I'm not a good enough cook to be able to recommend the recipes, and I don't know that there are all that many other people who read cookbooks for fun. But just in case, here's one: The Essential New York Times Cookbook by Amanda Hesser, "lovingly revised and exceedingly cookable," published in 2021. 

What made it so interesting to me is that it ends up being a history of cooking in the US. There's a recipe for Clam Chowder from 1881, Fried Green Tomatoes from 1897, Brownies from 1943, Mocha Cheesecake from 1976. There are recipes from Julia Child, Barbara Kafka (who wrote the famous roasting cookbook back in the 90s), Marian Burros (including her famous plum cake that is apparently the most requested recipe ever published in the NYT), and a zillion from Craig Claiborne. Each section opens with a brief essay by Hesser about food trends over the past 140 years. It's a thousand pages long, so it took me about a year to read it, a little bit at a time, but I thought it was thoroughly intriguing. 

I haven't cooked from it, though, because NYT Cooking recipes are not usually the kind of thing that I cook. Not because I wouldn't like to but because they often call for ingredients that we just can't get here, or if we can get them, they're past their prime or dusty and out of date. Then this week I tried a recipe-- Garden Minestrone, first published in 1973-- that was so good I'm rethinking that. Maybe I will try some others. 

The reason I tried it is because it was so different-- you slice/prepare all the vegetables (a mandoline makes it less onerous) and then layer them in a dutch oven, cover, and cook without adding any liquid. The veggies release their liquid as they cook and make the broth. I used a drained 28 oz can of canned whole tomatoes (no fresh this time of year in MT), frozen peas, and garbanzos instead of limas, and it was still delicious. I can't find a version of it online or I'd link to it. Maybe if I have time this weekend I'll type up the way I did it (which has enough changes that it probably wouldn't be a copyright violation)(I did it in the oven, for one thing) and put it in the comments.

Wow. Just discovered that the ebook version is currently on sale for $2.99. The print version is $40. But who wants to cook from their iPad? Not me. They probably have it at your library. The Garden Minestrone is on page 118.

Well, this got long. Here's hoping for better reading soon. Have a nice weekend.

7ToT: Trip report and various other things

1. Every time we get back from a trip, I'm surprised how many people ask, "What was your favorite moment?" I guess it makes sense, come to think of it, because it keeps you limited to one moment from the trip, instead of going on and on, which nobody wants. But it surprises me because who can do that? have one favorite moment from a three-week trip? Maybe I should just randomly pick a good one and go with it. Like watching my internist spouse eat a hot dog so loaded with peppers, wasabi relish, teriyaki sauce, and jalapenos that you could no longer see the dog, or driving a golf cart in Scottsdale up and down paths that were so steep I about bit my tongue, or standing at the edge of Canyon de Chelly with my jaw dropped at the gorgeous colors. It was a good trip. There were a lot of great moments--many more than one-- including some lovely moments with long-term friends (the best kind of friends). You know who you are. <3

2. I thought of some other possible ways to write my trip report, though. One was as a "tips and tricks" for a three-week camper trip, which would have been kind of silly since it's the first time we've ever done a trip that was more than five days. Or maybe, "Things I will do Differently Next Time," but I could only come up with one: BRING MORE TOWELS. There you have it. Even counting the towel I lost (see next item), we still needed many more towels.

3. I also considered writing it like a daily travelogue, where each day I would report on The Thing I Left Behind. Day One: Left my favorite sunglasses in the bathroom at a rest stop. Day Two: Left my entire kit of toiletries behind at a hotel (the only night we stayed in a hotel because of 35 mph winds). Day Three: Left my towel in the bathhouse at that night's campground. Day Four: Dropped my favorite hat--but lucky for me, some nice guy picked it up and ran after me with it. Fortunately, by Day Five the rain of things I was distributing all over the Southwest had slowed and I think I made it home with the rest of my possessions. But those sunglasses--damn. They were good ones (not prescription, but bifocal cheaters which are super hard to find).

4. The amount of toiletries I "need" is absurd and excessive. I freely admit it. But every time I try to trim them down, I can't figure out what to leave behind. So on our second day when we were three hours down the road and we got a phone call that I had left my toiletries behind, it was kind of a problem. Our trip was a big loop, so at first I told them to hang on to them and we would pick them up when we drove back through. Then we stopped at a Target and I spent almost two hundred dollars replacing what could be replaced. Not kidding. It's all stuff that I would have bought eventually anyway, but still. That's a lot of stupid. Then that night I realized it wasn't just toiletries; my glasses and my retainer were also missing. So the very kind hotel employees mailed the whole (literal) kit and caboodle to Scottsdale, our next stop. I am forever grateful, but the hotel employee sounded so happy to do it that I wondered if maybe it was nice to get out of the hotel and head to the post office for a few minutes.

5. Moving on. Like so many other small towns, the board of our public library has been taken over by ultra-conservatives who probably hadn't darkened the door of the library in years, if ever. Now they are worried that LIBERALS ARE TAKING OVER THE WORLD through local libraries because.... ? how? I don't know. (Aside: A friend who is friends with the librarians told me that the book they are most upset about hadn't been checked out in two years until they started complaining about it, now there are dozens of people waiting to read it.)

6. I've been a liberal/progressive/Democrat/etc since I was about 22, but you remember, I'm sure, that I was raised Evangelical, and I am mystified by this attitude. I was raised to know that what we believed in our home was not what we would be taught at the public school we attended, or endorsed by any public institution (like a library). My parents took responsibility for teaching us their beliefs, and when what we believed was different than what we were taught in school, they took it upon themselves to explain why. They did not expect that the school (or a library) would be a Christian organization supporting the Christian faith, because hello, First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."). Public schools and public organizations were supposed to be neutral toward religion so that everyone--Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Atheists, Christians, and everyone else-- would be welcome. Amazing how many people there are who want to interpret the Second Amendment (about the right to bear arms) as broadly as possible, but then pretend that the First Amendment no longer applies. 

7. Truth in Advertising: in my last post, I told you about my obsession with NYT word games. First of all, I have subsequently flailed, which I suppose is to be expected if you publicly announce how much you love something. But also, not once but twice I said I do those games every single day and it wasn't until after the post went up that I thought, no I don't. I do them every single day except when I don't. But since right now I'm at a month and a half of yes, actually doing them every day, I guess it seems like it's always this way. Also, I made it sound like *pearls clutched* I would never use hints or cheat, and while that is usually true, I do sometimes use the spelling bee grid published by NYT, and less often, the Bee Roots page, which is maintained by fellow enthusiasts.

Also, I tried Connections again after reading about Michael Chabon's method, and it didn't work for me. I am still terrible at it. Well, maybe not terrible, but bad enough that it is not good for my mental health. 

(In the midst of the type-A takeover of the then-Twitter Spelling Bee community, I changed my profile description to "Champion of Type-B Personalities Everywhere." I don't think anyone got it except me, but it made me laugh every time I thought about it.)

This post is exactly why I frequently say I'm going to start writing shorter posts, but then I never manage to do so. Hope you have a good weekend. I had to plan a party again, so it's unlikely that my weekend will be fun, but at least it will be over soon.

NYT Word Games: In which I violate the "Teri's Hair" Rule

Back in the mid-90s, there was a Superman TV show that ran for several seasons called Lois & Clark. It starred Dean Cain as Clark Kent and Teri Hatcher as Lois Lane. I've always been a (moderate) Superman fan, so I was immediately in on this show. In fact, I got a little obsessed with it. 

Looking for similarly obsessed fans, I joined a "listserv" --cutting edge at the time, antique now--where you could send an email to one email address and it would be automatically distributed to everyone on the list. The listserv for Lois & Clark was a bunch of total nerds-- as you would expect with a group of people who cared enough to find it a decade before social media was even an idea-- but they were funny and sometimes smart and I loved it. 

Anyway. This is a long story to tell you something that is not even slightly related to today's topic, but I'm in this far so I will finish. Teri Hatcher had the same hairstyle for --oh, the details are hazy, but let's say the first season. At some point, she decided to change it, and you would have thought the world was ending. There were endless outraged emails with the subject line "Teri's hair," and some of them were paragraphs long. Many paragraphs. It went on for weeks, and then would periodically revive whenever her hair changed.

It got to the point that a contingent of us absolutely refused to read any post that had "Teri's hair" in the subject line, because it's just stupid hair, and she can wear it however she wants, for god's sake. Sometimes I would be itching to make some brilliant, witty comment about her latest hairstyle, but I refused, on principle, because no way was I going to fan the flames of what was essentially a boring topic.

And that is the same reason I have so far resisted talking about my obsession with the New York Times word games. I know there are people who post their results daily, and some of them are friends of mine, and I might in my most secret heart of hearts think they're being a little over-the-top, but I bow before their right to post whatever the heck they want on social media (because everyone else sure does). 

But I was determined to not be that person myself. Then I arrived at today, and I don't really have anything to tell you this week, besides the (unremarkable) announcement that we are about to leave on a 3-week road trip, and I don't know if that means I will be posting more or less. 

So here we are. My starter drug was the Spelling Bee. If you are uninitiated, the New York Times has a games app where they post daily puzzles, including their famous crosswords, a variety of other word games, and a handful of non-word games like Sudoku. There are a couple that are free or have free versions, but I am obsessed enough that I pay for the subscription. (You can also buy "packs" of puzzles without subscribing.)

I found out about the Spelling Bee when I followed Ben Dreyer on then-Twitter, after reading Dreyer's English, a book expressly designed to make word nerds happy. He would occasionally post cryptic messages about a word game he was playing, and based on the enthusiastic responses, it seemed he was not alone. He didn't ever mention the name of the game, but he always included a bee emoji-- enough clues to google "bee word game" and find it. 

So that's how I started. The Spelling Bee is run by a kid named Sam--I think he was 25 or 26 at the time--who is just a year or two older than my kid named Sam, so even though there were occasional word choices or exclusions that made me roll my eyes (like the day the pangram was "anklebone")(really?), I mostly thought that its quirkiness made it more interesting and lovable. 

Then the shutdown happened, and a bunch of hyper-competitive people were home with nothing to do, and suddenly our weird little #nytsb community got cutthroat. I quit following the discussion, but I still play the game. Every single day. And also Wordle and the Mini Crossword.

My limitation with the NYT word games is the amount of time I'm willing to spend on them. It usually takes me less than 10 minutes to do the Mini, Wordle, and make a start on the Bee. I might do the big crossword on Monday or Tuesday, but around Wednesday or Thursday (they get harder as the week goes by), they get hard enough that I run out of patience and/or time. I'm not great at it-- there are people who can solve a Friday puzzle in 10 minutes, and it takes me 30-50 minutes or more. It's not that I can't do them (she doth protest), I just don't care enough to spend 45 minutes a day on them. Unless I'm bored. Or traveling.

For the record, I quit doing Connections, because I would only get it 3 or 4 times a week and it made me feel stupid. (You can put on my gravestone that DISH is a category, not an item like PLATE or CUP. Thank you.) Same with Letterbox. 

So that's my routine. It's often the very first thing I do when I pick up my phone in the morning. I usually only play the Bee until I get to the Amazing level-- really, it isn't all that amazing since it's only half of the available words for the day-- but most days I don't have enough patience to push through to Genius (although I've been getting it more often lately because Doug has started helping). Kinda weird, right? I'm obsessed enough to do it every single day, but not obsessive enough to push through to the end.

And even Genius isn't the absolute end. It's the end they tell you about, but there is another level called Queen Bee that you don't know about unless you suddenly hit it (has only happened to me once). Queen Bee means you've found all the possible words for the day. For those hyper-competitive folks, once they know about it, they're not going to stop until they hit Queen Bee every single day. 

If you ask me, that must require cheating, because there are weird words or variant spellings that make it on the list, and unless you know about them, they're not exactly going to occur to you as possibilities. For example: when the letters are there, MAMA, MAMMA, and MOMMA are all accepted. And there are all kinds of ways to get hints or cheat-- just google "Spelling Bee hints," or even the NYT publishes a daily column with clues and spoilers.

My other favorite game, Wordle, was started by a software engineer as a birthday present for his girlfriend. In a matter of weeks it had exploded to several hundred thousand users. NYT bought it a couple of years ago. My Wordle strategey-- and all of us who do it every day have one-- is that I use a different word every day, and I try to use up consonants. 

You have six guesses to get a five-letter word. Apparently what most people do is try to use up vowels, so they start with a word like ADIEU. If you're using up consonants, usually by the 4th or 5th guess you're doing a word scramble with four or five letters instead of trying to guess what _A_E_ is.

It takes more guesses-- usually four and five, and the only way I'm going to get it in two is if I start with a totally lucky guess--but it's much more reliable than the vowel method. I think. People have done studies of this stuff, so probably someone knows. My streak was over 300 last fall when I got stuck early in the day and forgot to go back and finish. I was OK with it because I had been thinking about purposely breaking my streak anyway since we were about to go on a vacation and I didn't want to feel pressured to do it if I wasn't in the mood. 

Good grief, I am even boring myself. Are you still reading? I guess you must be if you read that.

Anyway. My streaks have been much shorter since then so it's not working as well as it used to, but it's good enough for me. If you really love Wordle, you can try out all the non-NYT variants (easy to find if you google), including Duotrigordle, a super fun version where you are solving for 32 words at once. I did it for awhile but eventually I quit because it takes so much longer.

Enough. Like I said, we are about to leave on a 3-week road trip, and sometimes traveling makes me want to post more often, and sometimes I forget all about having a blog and don't post at all. Have a great weekend, and I'll be back in 3-4 weeks or maybe sooner. 

(Arriving in and then) Leaving Las Vegas

Vegas is the perfect place to go for a winter weekend getaway from Northwest Montana. Of course there are hundreds of other warm, lovely places that you can visit to get away from winter, but most of them require more than one flight, and also we wouldn't want to leave after only two days. 

But Vegas? It's a non-stop flight, and even better--it's only fun for about 48 hours and then you're done. You walk around shaking your head at all the crazy things people do when they have more money than sense (sometimes with just a smidge of envy and admiration) and then you're ready to get out of there. It's the ideal weekend break.

AND..... OH MY..... for Christmas our kids bought us tickets to see U2 at the Sphere. Yup. 

U2 at the Sphere!!!!!!

Our son-in-law knows a guy who knows a guy, so they got at least a bit of a discount. I was so afraid it wasn't going to work out (for any one of a dozen reasons--schedule, weather delays, plane going down, etc) that I wouldn't even let myself think about it until we were actually at the airport. 

We've been U2 fans for decades-- Doug is more dedicated than I am, but still they are one of my absolute favorites. Joshua Tree was a formative album for both of us, back when formative albums were a thing. (Are they still? I'm too old to know.) There are a dozen+ of their songs that stop my heart. All the obvious, plus Running to Stand Still, Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World (best bass line ever), Stay (Faraway, So Close), Stuck in a Moment, Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Our flight down was delayed by two and a half hours, and the on-time departure would have already been past our usual bedtime, so by the time we got there, we were more than half asleep. But our Uber driver knew exactly what he was doing and took us around a back way until he could turn onto the road that has the Sphere dead center and all lit up like an enormous sparkling planet sitting half a mile in front of you and we both gasped. It's definitely spectacular. 

I had scouted around for something to do Friday night since our U2 tickets were for Saturday. If we'd done the Sphere first, anything else would have been a disappointment, but the Motown Revue at the Westgate on Friday was super fun. In an hour and a half of three minute songs, there was maybe one that we couldn't sing along with. Highly recommended, and the venue is very small so the cheap seats are just about as good as the expensive ones. Two thumbs up from us.

Saturday afternoon we took an Uber to the Springs Preserve, which is normally a garden and arboretum with hiking trails and the Nevada State Museum, but on the particular day we were there, there was a Black History Month festival going on, so there was music and special food trucks and lots happening. Very fun. The museum is not large but it is very well done (I confess I was not expecting dinosaurs).

There is also a re-creation of the original 1905 downtown with a bank, general store, hotel, and train depot, and actual small houses that have been moved to the site and restored, one of which you can go in. Well worth an afternoon, and it gets you away from the Strip for a bit. 

And then there was the concert at the Sphere. It was so good. They may be as old as we are, but they can still do their thing. The whole time before they start, the enormous screen in front of you is a boring visual of rows of concrete tiles that you're just staring at waiting for something to happen. Then the band comes out, the opening riff of Zoo Station starts up, and it looks like the vibrations from the sound are crumbling the tiles away and light comes pouring in and it is breathtaking. 

The concert itself was excellent, but there's also the venue, and the Sphere is practically unbelievable. The spherical screen is the size of four football fields, and it's so huge you lose track of size. We were high enough up that the actual band members were about the size of ants, but a good bit of the concert was projected up on the screen at larger than life size, and the images were so clear and sharp that it felt like we were actually watching the live action. They say there's no such thing as a bad seat and I believe it.  

(I tried for about 45 minutes to upload photos so you could see, but for some reason I couldn't get it to work this time, so you'll just have to imagine it.) (No, it's better than that.)

Toward the end, when the Edge locked in on the intro to "Where the Streets Have no Name" after an extended introduction, it was so perfectly perfect that I started crying. I'm sure they are beyond tired of playing those old songs from the 80s but I've never seen them in concert before and I would have been sad if they hadn't played at least a few. They did that one and "With or Without You."

The whole experience was crazy and amazing. We loved it. They didn't have Larry Mullen Jr (who has had neck surgery and is recovering), but the guy that replaced him seemed to fit right in. I don't think they're going to be at the Sphere much longer, but if you get the chance, definitely go. Also I heard Beyoncé is next and I kind of want to go again.

Details for the concert-shy: We haven't been to many big arena concerts like that because they feel too loud and overwhelming to me, but I had ear plugs (believe me, you can still hear just fine), and I did ok. If it had gone on a much longer I might have faded, but I knew so many of the songs, I was relieved I could stay the whole time. Also, I am terribly prone to motion sickness, but the visuals for this concert weren't of the rollercoaster/cliff-diving type, so there was only one song where I ended up shutting my eyes. Overall, very doable for concert wimps like me.

So that was our amazing weekend in Vegas! This weekend will probably be a lot calmer. And also not 70 degrees. *sigh*

getting old, part 17: old lady skin

Last week I reached for something while I was wearing short sleeves and was shocked to realize that I have crepey skin. Maybe it's been there a long time and I just noticed it because I've been wrapped up in cold weather clothes, but whoa--the sight of papery, wrinkly skin on the underside of my arms was kind of a surprise. To put it mildly. Because we all know we are getting older every single day, but then you see crepey skin and are briefly knocked breathless from shock. 

I mean, theoretically I am okay with this. Some of my favorite people from childhood had crepey skin, (though they probably would have died if I'd pointed it out to them). My grandmothers, my great aunt Virginia, various teachers and mentors--I loved those women, even adored some of them. I don't have bad memories associated with wrinkly skin. I don't remember having specific thoughts about it at all, but if I did they probably ran along the lines of huh. that must be how older women's skin looks. Which is exactly right. 

But on the other hand, also: who the hell thought of this? Because it is a really bad idea.

So of course I googled it, because sometimes you really do need information. Apparently the number one cause of crepey skin (which some sites elegantly spell "crépey" which made me laugh because my college French may be rusty, but isn't the french word actually "crêpe"? ) Anyway. The number one cause of elderly-female skin is sun overexposure, which is ridiculous, because the main place I've noticed it is the under side of my arms and I can guarantee you my under arms have never been overexposed to the sun. I mean, how would you even do that? Recline on your chaise lounge with your arms raised up over your head?

Other causes of *cough* that kind of skin -- tobacco use (no), hormonal changes (maybe), dehydration (maybe), excessive weight loss (definitely not), but mostly it's just a symptom of aging. And the main way you counteract it is with moisturizers. Have we talked about moisturizers? Because it is a fraught issue for me. 

Some people have always had very dry skin. My younger sister is one of them. She's had dry skin since she was in her twenties. When I go for a massage, I have to go home and shower off the massage oil because it sits on top of my skin and makes me feel greasy. But if my sister goes for a massage, she tells me her skin soaks that massage oil right up. And if you have that kind of dry skin, you probably know all about the best moisturizers for dry skin because you've been dealing with it for years. The recommendations below are not for you.

But this is new for me. Until I was in my 50s, the only type of moisturizer I could use on my face was oil-free, because otherwise I would break out like a teenager. The one I use now has "SODIUM PEG-7 OLIVE OIL CARBOXYLATE" fairly far down on the ingredients list (I just looked) so maybe this has changed. I do clean it off at night, though, with a microfiber washcloth. 

On the off chance that you are in the same situation as me, here's what's working for me, and please let me know if you have additional ideas. Besides Kiehl's, you will notice that I tend toward drugstore options because there are plenty of things I would rather spend money on than moisturizers. Seriously.

Daytime moisturizer: like everyone else I know, I use Olay Regenerist Micro-sculpting Cream Moisturizer with SPF-30. Great stuff, and not all that expensive compared to the department store options.

Night-time moisturizer: Kiehl's Ultra Facial Oil-Free Moisturizer (I would use this during the day but it makes my face shiny)

Hands: Aveeno Daily Moisturizing Lotion (I have to rinse it off my palms after I apply it, but it works great)

Cleavage (if you don't know why you need cleavage lotion, move along): Kiehl's Creme de Corps

Why the hell do we need so much moisturizer? 

Those are not affiliate links (i.e., I don't make money off them), but for the record, I have no problem with people who use affiliate links, I'm just too lazy/privileged to figure them out for myself.

Have a nice weekend. We are doing something super cool this weekend but I can't quite believe it's going to happen so I'll let you know next week how it turned out.

7ToF: the dang phone

Like everyone, I'm trying to cut back on my phone time these days. So I will tell you some things that are working for me, but as usual, I'm no expert. These are pretty basic things, but sometimes I'm surprised at what people don't know about their phones. Also, all of the steps I describe here are for iphones, apologies about that, but I've never owned an android phone, so I don't know much about them.

1. I don't remember where I heard this but it is not an original thought. The first thing to do is figure out what is most addictive for you about your phone. Social interaction? Games? Keeping up with breaking news? Feeling involved? Passing the time? In other words, what do you get out of it? For me, it's partly a way to pass the time when I'm bored, but mostly I'm addicted to information. Google and iMDB are my downfall. I mean, you can get the answer to anything, and I love that. I can start by trying to remember the name of an actor in the show I'm watching and twenty minutes later I've moved on from the TV show to her co-star in her most recent movie and an interview with the director and before you know it, I've learned all kinds of things that I'm curious about but none of them are things I need to know. And I do that multiple times a day. 

2. Then the next thing is to figure out what you do want to be able to do on your phone. For me, it's usually texting, phone, camera, calculator, reminders, GPS, and weather. (I almost never make phone calls, and my texting is usually under 15 minutes a day, so I don't worry about those. If those are your downfall, your list will be different.) So you go to settings, then Screen Time, and then "Always Allowed," and move all of those things to the Always Allowed section. 

3. Then you go back to Screen Time, and under "Downtime," schedule the hours of the day that you want to restrict your other apps. My downtime is currently set for 9:00pm to 7:00am. (I stay up till 11:30 or 12 most nights, if you go to bed earlier, you may want your downtime to start earlier.) During those hours, the only apps I can easily access are the ones I set to be Always Allowed. You can override your downtime, but so far I've been able to keep that to a minimum-- or at least enough of a minimum that I haven't had to figure out a stricter system. 

You can also set a "Focus," which is a more flexible way of scheduling downtime, but it will take too long to give step-by-step instructions here. If you want to just wing it, choose Focus under Settings and follow the prompts, or google how to set it up. You can turn a Focus on and off on the Control Center (the screen you get when you swipe down from the top right of your home screen).

4. I also have an app called Forest, which you can customize in a lot of ways, but basically it throws up a lock screen for an amount of time you specify--say, 30 minutes. During that 30 minutes, a tree or a shrub grows on the lock screen. If you dismiss the lock screen, you kill the tree. It's surprisingly effective if you just need to keep yourself from using your phone for awhile while you get something done. You can set it to allow phone calls and texts.

5. The thing I am loving the most right now is something I read about back in January when everybody was making New Year's resolutions-- you can turn color off on your phone so you're looking at a black and white screen. This is supposedly less addictive-- the bright colors are part of what keeps your eyes glued to the screen. To turn this on, go to Settings, then Accessibility, then Display & Text, then scroll down to Color Filters, and turn Color Filters on. Grayscale (Black and White) is the default option. But the surprising thing is, after you've been looking at a black & white screen for a couple of hours, when you turn colors back on, they are positively garish. 

6. The next super-cool thing you can do is set this up as a short cut. Start at Settings, then Accessibility, then scroll down and choose Accessibility Shortcut, and choose Color Filters. Then you can use a triple-press of the side button (the one on the right) to go back and forth between colors and black&white. It is great. This is my current favorite phone trick. 

7. I also try to remember the things that make phones great. Like, if I'm sick or I've got a travel day, I destroy my screen time stats because why not use my phone to pass the time when I don't have anything else to do? It's one of the best things about having a phone. I'm not a big fan of the screen time stats, because sometimes I do want to use my phone. I just want to feel more in control.

So those are my ideas. This is obviously a work in progress, because I still spend more time than I'd like on my phone. But it's better. If you have some good hints or tricks or whatever about managing phone use, let me know. And have a great weekend.

In which I prove that women in their sixties (well, me, anyway) are absolutely capable of carrying a grudge for 45 years

So here is the conversation that popped full-blown into my head the day after I published last week's post, which was (in part) about the difficulty of being friends with people who have different priorities than I do, namely because I don't want to put much energy into hair, makeup, and fashion, and I am friends with a bunch of women who are stylish and put-together in a way that I probably never will be. 

My internalized mother (who bears a somewhat distorted resemblance to my real-life mother, and who will hereafter be referred to as IM): Well, Barb, if you really care about your friends, you should be willing to put in the little bit of effort it takes to be more stylish when you meet up with them. What's important to them should be important to you.

Me (deflates significantly, because it's not like she and I didn't have a variation of the conversation a million times when I was in high school): But Mom, isn't what I want just as important as what they want? Also, define "a little bit" of effort.

IM, who apparently speaks 90% in clichés: Looking your best is important, dear, especially when you're going out in public. You only get one chance to make a first impression. Why wouldn't you want to put your best foot forward? It shows that you are a competent adult who knows how to present herself in public.

Me: But trying to conform to cultural norms about clothing and beauty is exhausting! And demeaning! And I have other things I want to do! And anyway, why does dressing up always mean being uncomfortable*? 

* Seriously. Putting on comfortable clothes is synonymous with getting home and taking off your fancy clothes. There is no definition of "getting dressed up" that includes "putting on clean jeans, my favorite sweater, and a cute pair of low-cut hiking boots" which is what I want to wear when I go out to meet up with friends. Also "cute hiking boots" would be an oxymoron to my mom. And she could (rightly) point out that people who only go hiking half a dozen times a year don't get to wear hiking boots to a restaurant. Thank God I live in Montana, where hiking boots are acceptable just about everywhere.

Et cetera. You get the idea. Of course my 87-year-old mother would never say any of this to me now that I am 62. Although come to think of it, that might be because she lives 1500 miles away and never sees me when I'm getting dressed to go out. 

You know, typing this brought back a very distinct memory from high school that I probably haven't thought about in twenty (thirty? forty?) years. My senior year, there was an all night "casino" party at the mall after our graduation ceremony. I had picked out my outfit a couple of weeks earlier and I was happy with it-- jeans with blue satin stitching on the pocket, a blue and lavender striped short sleeved cotton top, and sandals (so shoot me, it was the 70s). My mom had no comment until my boyfriend showed up at the door in dark jeans, a black shirt, and a velvet jacket. She marched me back up the stairs and made me change clothes. 

I don't know how to describe the outfit she made me change into, I just remember that it was super uncomfortable and I kept on having to readjust it and pull on it and untwist the top. I can remember arguing with her-- moo-oom, I hate this top! and her hissing at me, you can't wear that other one! you're embarrassing me! I was mad at her for years. Ha. Since it's making me mad to type it out now, I guess I still haven't forgiven her. I'm so mature. 

This was going to be the first half of a longer post but it got so long so I'm done. Also I should probably edit it a bunch more, but in an effort to be less of a perfectionist, I'm just sending it off! Wheee!

I'm just standing in a doorway, I'm just trying to make some sense

I've been thinking quite a bit recently about how difficult it is to truly be supportive of other people's individuality. It's hard even with my friends, let alone with people I barely know or don't know at all. One of the amazing things about human beings is how different we all are, and the older I get, the more I realize how true that is. But our differences aren't just a matter of liking different kinds of music, or whether or not we love horror movies, or we say sneakers or tennis shoes or trainers.

For example-- a simple one, just among my friends-- I'm not a person who puts a high value on fashion, hair, and makeup. It's not that I don't care at all, but I definitely don't care enough to put a lot of time into it. My clothes are clean and in good repair, and they're within the larger boundaries of what is currently in style (was that vague enough?), but most of the time I probably look more like a grad student than a real adult. 

Which is fine with me. The thought of putting more effort into my appearance exhausts me before I've even tried, and honestly, I've never recovered from my 80s feminist thing about fashion and beauty being an enormous waste of time and money meant to distract women from accomplishing more important things.

But I have friends who dress well and care about their hair and have put some thought into the makeup they wear. They have a definite personal style. It's important to them that they look put together and stylish when they go out. I get that, but I don't do that. In fact, if I'm being honest, I can't do that, because style is not something that I understand or value.

Obviously, I can be supportive (and slightly envious) of my friends who are more into this than I am. They look measurably better than I do when we get together for lunch or whatever. And of course they can be tolerant of my lack of care, because they (I hope) like me and want to get together. 

But there's a fundamental disconnect, too. Because I refuse to put much time into my appearance, I am saying that those things are not important. And because my friends do put a lot of thought and effort into their appearance, I'm de-valuing something that is meaningful to them.

It's kind of a dumb example, but it's the easiest one I could think of to say something that is actually really important to figure out about how to have civil discourse. How do we really, truly honor someone else's values and choices and opinions, when that someone's choices undermine our own choices, or go contrary to something that is important or even dear to us? 

Because obviously we are having this problem in our country right now about a lot of things that are way more important than what we wear to go out to lunch. How does someone with exuberant sexuality express that without making her friend who is more reserved feel like a prude? How does someone who believes that religion is the cause of endless evil in our world support someone whose religion is her deepest, most cherished set of beliefs? I could go on for paragraphs.

It's not easy. Or simple. And I think in order for it to truly be mutual, it takes awareness on both sides. I comprehensively disagree with you but I value you as a human being, and I support your right to make the choices you do-- that understanding has to be coming from both sides. All sides. Maybe our common ground is how strongly we hold our convictions, even if our convictions are very different. 

I don't know. This isn't very well-reasoned, I know, because even though I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently, I don't have any answers. Hmmm. I started to go off on a tangent here, but it's late, and this is probably already long enough. More some other time. Have a good weekend.