7ToF: How did it get to be the end of 2017 already? and the year-end reading report

1. Earlier this week, I thought I would be able to pound this one out quick on Thursday night, because I was just going to post the titles of 7 books I read during 2017 that were worth reading. But I just scrolled down through the list of books I read this year, and for some reason, none of them seem essential at the moment. I liked Station Eleven, Everything I Never Told You, 11/22/63 (my first Stephen King novel!), The Opposite of Everyone, and Magpie Murders well enough to give them each four or five stars, but I can't really remember them very well.

2. Splitting this up to make it easier to read. There were some good non-fiction books, too: Springsteen's autobio, Amy Poehler's Yes Please, Hillbilly Elegy (and a couple of others, see below).

3. And some good plane/beach reads: Act Like It, The Thousand Dollar Tan Line, Sorceror to the Crown. And I'm in the middle of a couple that I doubt I'll finish before Monday so they will have to go on next year's list. I was flying through Uprooted last week. If it had ended at the halfway point, I might have said it was my favorite read of the year. But suddenly the heroine has gone from being understandably naive and rough around the edges to being annoyingly, obtusely stupid, and I was so disappointed I haven't picked it up in days now. I really should, because maybe it will get better again.

4. And believe it or not, I'm still reading Betty Neels. You know what they're perfect for? I've suffered periodically from insomnia all my life. When I was young, I couldn't go to sleep. Now that I'm old, I fall asleep no problem, but I wake up in the middle of the night and can't go back to sleep. If I flip open my e-reader to a Betty Neels, I'm back asleep in about five minutes. Love.

5. I've been fascinated by personality types since the life-changing event of discovering that I was an introvert when I was in my mid-twenties. Being an introvert was not a thing when I was a kid in the 60s. I used to get lectured regularly about not being friendly enough, reading too much, not wanting to play group games with the other kids/reindeer. When I was 24 or 25, I took a Myers-Briggs test in a group I was in and found out that less than 5% of the US population is my type (INTJ). Suddenly I realized I didn't feel like a Martian because I was weird and bizarre (well, OK, maybe I am), but because I had an unusual personality type. It was like someone handed me a reprieve from a life sentence of torture, always forcing myself to be outgoing and chatty. Bliss. One of the few truly life-changing moments I've had.

6. Then at work this past fall, everyone in my department went through DiSC personality typing, and then two bloggers I know of published books about personality types, and the bottom line is: I've been thinking about these ideas a lot. So if you're interested, Anne Bogel's Reading People is a good overview of the different systems out there, and Gretchen Rubin's The Four Tendencies describes different ways people respond to internal and external expectations. I find this stuff fascinating.

7. And, in fact, the reason I finally decided to start blogging again is because of a book about creativity based on personality types (Creative You: Using Your Personality Type to Thrive, hat tip to Anne Bogel for recommending it). I didn't read the whole thing, mainly just the section for my type, but it helped me solve a problem that has plagued me since I start blogging back in 2003: it seems pointless to blog if only a dozen people are reading it-- I could just email it to you, right? But when I started telling people about my blog and trying to promote/market it, while it worked (I got over a hundred readers the first time I mentioned my blog on Facebook), it made me really, really uncomfortable. Seriously uncomfortable.

But this book pointed out that for people of my type, sharing our work with others isn't the point. Of course you don't want to promote your work. This seems so obvious now that it's been pointed out to me that I feel a little stupid, but I was genuinely flummoxed by this problem. The whole point of the blogosphere is to go viral, to attract thousands of readers, to get pageviews and link backs and I don't know what else. But I hate that. I just like to write about what I'm thinking about. So I've only told one person besides Dean that I've started again. I can tell some of you are reading, and I appreciate it more than I can say, but I'm trying not to pay much attention to that.

That last one really should have been its own blog post, but whatever. I have another idea to tell you about, but I think I will save it for my next post. It's an experiment!! for the New Year!! If you need things to read and you want a preview, try this.

Have a great weekend.

7ToF: Hark the Harold

1. (My dad's first name was Harold. For a long time I had some kind of hazy idea that the Herald Angels were his personal angels.)

2. I'll get it over with early this time: The Last Jedi was great. I don't know what people are complaining about. Haters gonna hate. It was a little too long, and yes, that bit at the casino was .... sort of.... pointless. But there were also several moments where I caught myself thinking-- this is the Star Wars movie I always wished they'd make. I need to see it again.

3. Through an unplanned bit of serendipity, I ended up going to see two movies in one day. See previous item about The Last Jedi, but earlier in the day, I took my mom to see The Man Who Invented Christmas, about Charles Dickens writing A Christmas Carol. In spite of its ridiculous title, it was quite good. I'm not a Dickens expert, but I know enough to know that they played a little fast and loose with the facts. But if you can put that aside, I really enjoyed it, and my mom loved it.

4. Lots of book blogs are publishing 2018 Reading Challenges (Book Riot, Modern Mrs. Darcy, PopSugar, and dozens of others). I thought this was the coolest idea back in 2016, and then again last year, but you know what? Both times, after picking a challenge and printing it out, I never thought about it again. I guess I have no problem coming up with books to read. ha.

5. So for 2018, I'm falling back on my own personal challenge from way back when. I've become so enthralled with renting e-books from my library's website that I have not read one single physical book from my own bookshelves in .... I can't even remember when. It's been months. My Goodreads "To Read" list has been entirely unchanged for over a year. So my personal challenge to myself for 2018: read one book a month that is sitting on my shelves already. Atonement, Middlesex, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Night Circus, Heartburn, Plan B, Go Set a Watchman, Cutting for Stone, My Struggle.... I could go on, but you get the idea.

6. When I lived in the south, I thought that when it snowed, it always arrived in big fluffy flakes, gently floating down. In our area, sometimes it does. But usually if it's coming down in big fluffy clumps, it doesn't last very long, so there's not very much of it. When we're really getting dumped on, it looks like salt coming very fast out of an enormous salt shaker. Sideways.

7. Which we've just seen, because we've got about a foot of snow on the ground as I write this (Thursday night), with more on the way tomorrow. White Christmas, indeed.

Last night was the shortest night of the year, so we're already headed toward more light. I hope that's an apt metaphor. Happy Solstice. And Merry Christmas, since I probably won't post again before the big day on Monday. I hope you will be surrounded by loved ones, as we will be, even though we will sorely miss our loved ones far away.

Why I am Pro-Choice

Like many people, I was astonished and mystified to find out that more than 80% of evangelicals voted for Trump. He’s a known philanderer, on his third marriage, and brags about sexually assaulting women. Evangelicals are a group of people who usually tolerate no moral missteps in their leaders. I know of a megachurch pastor who was fired because his wife had an affair. The disconnect here just stuns me.

And honestly, I still don’t get it. But I’ve now heard three Evangelical women say that they voted for Trump because Clinton is pro-choice, and since I don't hang out with that many Evangelical women, this seems important. So I’m giving you my (unasked for) opinion. I’ve never addressed the abortion debate in my blog, although I’ve considered doing so many times, so I’ll just type this as briefly as I can and move on.

First of all, no one is pro-abortion. No woman goes out and gets pregnant so that she can have an abortion. No man purposely gets his girlfriend pregnant so that he can coerce her to abort the baby. Abortion is a solution to the problem of an unwanted pregnancy--whether you consider it a good solution or a bad one is a different question. The real problem here is unwanted pregnancies. Solve that problem, and like magic: no more abortions.

Faced with an unwanted pregnancy, a woman has a number of choices. She can have the baby and raise it herself, give the baby up for adoption, have the grandparents raise the baby, leave the baby on someone’s doorstep, leave the baby in a dumpster (as sad and horrifying as that is, it happens). If she chooses to end the pregnancy, when abortion is legal, she can have it done safely and with follow-up care as needed. If abortion is illegal, she will very likely have it done unsafely and with no access to follow-up care. Women die because of back-alley abortions (as sad and horrifying as that is, it happens).

With the exception of the woman having a change of heart and deciding to raise the baby herself, none of these are perfect solutions. All of them have emotional consequences for everyone involved. Clearly the best answer to this problem is to prevent unwanted pregnancies. This is a no-brainer, and yet it’s something you rarely hear discussed.

You don’t hear the pro-life folks insisting on birth control education, you don’t hear them demanding funding for research into better, more reliable methods of birth control. In fact, at least in our area, the pro-life folks are usually the ones that are protesting against sex education in the schools, and picketing outside clinics that offer free condoms.

In this crowd, it quickly becomes clear that they are not really interested in solving the problem of unwanted pregnancies. If you push them far enough, they're likely to smirk and say, "Well, if women would just wait to have sex until they get married, none of this would be a problem"-- as if no married woman ever wants to avoid pregnancy; as if once she marries, it no longer matters whether (or when) she wants to have children.

And when you get to that point, you start to figure some things out. They aren't anti-abortion so much as they are interested in insisting that people follow their religious beliefs about when sex should occur. If they really wanted to end abortion, they'd develop comprehensive, innovative sex education programs, and they'd push for better, cheaper access to birth control--because that's what works. A program to provide low-cost birth control to teens in Colorado dropped the teen abortion rate by sixty-four percent over eight years.

I'd be OK with outlawing abortions in the third trimester. For one thing, they almost never happen, and for another, I'm sorry but that's horrible. But in the first trimester, until we have widely accessible, foolproof birth control, legal abortion is a sad but necessary part of women's health care.

moderates in the middle, part 2: I tried, I really did

For a dozen years, I assiduously avoided blogging about politics. Then a couple of weeks ago, I published a post that had been sitting in my drafts folder for months. Every few weeks, I'd read it, edit it a bit, and try to decide if I wanted to start blogging again--and more than that, whether or not I wanted to write about politics. Finally, I did post it. But oddly, almost immediately after proclaiming my moderation, I gave up on being a moderate.

In one sense, I'll always be a moderate, because it's just my personality. But that stupid post went up the day before the Senate's bizarre, last minute, shoved-through approval of their version of the tax bill-- hundreds of pages, some with handwritten annotations, sent to the Senate floor mere hours before they forced a vote. (In one of my proudest moments as a Montanan, our Democratic senator Jon Tester posted a fabulous rant about the flagrant arrogance of the move.)

So, lord knows what's going to happen, but I have no more patience with elected Republicans. I still have many Republican friends and family that I respect--many of whom are similarly disgusted, and a few of whom read here--but that was such a weird, incomprehensible series of events that I find myself no longer willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

The thing that makes it most ironic to me is that I naively thought-- months ago, back in the early days of the current administration-- that genuine tax reform was the one thing they'd be able to do. I'm not a Republican, so I knew wouldn't approve of everything they put in their tax bill, but they're Republicans. Tax reform is their thing, and Trump had ridden to victory as the champion of the middle class. Surely, I thought, somewhat desperately looking for a silver lining, surely they will come up with a streamlined, middle-class friendly tax bill.

But they didn't. Oceans of ink are being spilled about this, and I'm no expert so I'm not going to try to talk economics. Suffice it to say that my hope the Republicans might have something decent to offer the American public is now gone. Would the Dems do any better? Impossible to say. But my feeble efforts to build bridges instead of continuing to widen the divide seem hopelessly jejune (I looked that up to make sure it meant what I thought it did: naive, simplistic, superficial).

I'd like to add that I consider issues of social justice to be nonpartisan, which is why I hadn't given up hope before. I don't think you have to be a democrat or a liberal to be supportive of the LGBTQI community, or people of color, or women's rights. Certainly there are Republicans who are horrified by white supremacists. Sexual harassment knows no party lines. I didn't think that having the Republicans in charge necessarily meant huge setbacks in civil rights (after all, no one is talking about de-legalizing same sex marriage). However, maybe I'm wrong about that, too. I don't have much of a track record going here since my one political post flailed. In spite of that, I have two more to post sometime soon. Maybe.

7ToF: lots to catch up on

Someday I will take a good pic of her, but it is not this day

1. Well, first of all, we have a new family member. She is a shelter kitty named Wynnie, short for Eowyn, and she is a year-and-a-half old. I love having a cat, so this makes me very happy. The mice were getting out of hand over the summer, and we're counting on Miss Wynnie to be a huntress. She's still a little skittish, but she's warming up to us. Now we just have to solve the sibling rivalry with our dog Sadie and we'll be good.

2. In our ongoing battle with the neighborhood foxes, we are losing. Badly. We're down to four chickens at the moment, which brings us to a total of seven that the foxes have carted off this year. It's impossible to hate them-- they're just doing what comes naturally. But I have to admit I shake my head when I see them around the neighborhood because you have never seen such healthy, well-fed foxes.

3. I went back to work, and for the most part, I love it. Only three days a week, which is perfect for right now. Our local hospital is transitioning to a new electronic medical records system, so my co-workers and I comb through old records looking for dates of procedures, etc that need to be transferred to the new system. It sounds boring, I know, but it can be surprisingly absorbing to read through people's medical records. Also, I love getting paid, and this is the best hourly rate I've made since we moved here (although still not quite as much as I was making in NC before we moved here twenty-five years ago).

4. I've been singing in a community choir this year. I've sung in choirs all my life, but usually church choirs. This choir, Valley Voices, works off a semester schedule, so we practice for three-ish months and then have a concert. There are no intermediate concerts, just one big one at the end (well, actually two, because we perform Saturday night and Sunday afternoon). The downside is that we were practicing Christmas music back in September when I was definitely not in the mood. The upside is that we can tackle difficult music because we have enough time to work on it. The concerts are this weekend and I'm looking forward to them. If you're local, look us up on Facebook.

(I know some of you are never going to appreciate superhero movies, and if that's you, skip the rest of this and see you next week, because not one, not two, but THREE of my things this week are about superhero movies.) 

5. The Thor-Loki movies are definitely my favorites of the so-called Marvel universe, so in preparation for Thor: Ragnarok we went back and watched the first two Thor movies and the first two Avenger movies. The first Thor movie and the first Avenger movie were better than I remembered, and the second of each was worse than I remembered. There are two reasons I love the Thor movies: Idris Elba and Tom Hiddleston. I'm not usually one to root for the bad guy, but Tom Hiddleston is just so good as Loki.

6. Then we finally went to see Thor: Ragnarok. I assiduously avoided spoilers and reviews (having been told by a friend to do so), so we went in without knowing what it was about--although I did know that Ragnarok is the Norse version of the apocalypse, more or less. I had no idea that Cate Blanchett was in it, for example. So the best part was that it kept surprising me. The second Avengers was kind of a yawner, honestly, especially when it's the fourth Marvel movie you've watched in a week, so it was a bit of a relief that Ragnarok was so much fun. The humor was good, but maybe a bit overdone. And I do wonder how they're going to play the changes they made to Hulk's character in future movies. But other than that, I loved it. I didn't miss Natalie Portman (to my surprise). In fact, if it weren't that I was a bit disappointed by the ending, I'd say they knocked it out of the park. SLIGHT SPOILER COMING-- skip ahead now if you want-- I really thought Thor was going to step aside at the end and let Valkyrie take the throne. That would have made it just about perfect. I don't know anything about the original comics, though, so maybe that's just too far out there.

7.  It occurred to me that Ragnarok is actually a pretty decent movie about post-colonialism (colonialism being a catch-all term for the period in world history when all the major powers believed they had a God-given right to rape and pillage indigenous societies as they spread their empires). When Hela talks about how the wealth of Asgard is based on destroying cultures throughout the nine realms, she's saying words that could be said by the rulers of Spain or England or Portugal, or the United States if you look at it from the perspective of the Indians. This could be an entire series of posts, but maybe I'll stop there since I'm not nearly smart enough for that. But it definitely adds a layer of self-awareness to this movie that wasn't there in the others. So, bottom line: all thumbs up from our house.

Have a great weekend. I'm headed to Texas next week to spend some time with my mom who had surgery this past week, so you probably won't hear anything from me for awhile.

Two years ago on To Square a Circle: Re-Thinking Self Care. Four years ago on Aunt BeaN's Third Blog: Odds and Ends, because it's too cold to do anything else. (I'm shamelessly stealing this idea to link to old posts from Modern Mrs Darcy.)

moderates in the middle

(The original version of this post was written back in May and has been in my drafts folder waiting for me to decide if I want to start blogging again. Maybe I do.)

I will be forever grateful that I was not blogging during the end of the election season last year, or during the first few months of the new administration. I've heard the same from other bloggers-- absolutely the last thing most of us want is to wade into the fray, but how can you not talk about it? It feels like ignoring the largest elephant ever in a teeny tiny room if you don't talk about it, but what in the world do I have to say that hasn't already been said?

I'm starting to think the real political divide in this country isn't between liberals and conservatives, it's between moderates and extremists. By moderates I mean those of us on either side who want to stop yelling at each other and get on with the business of life and governing. Those of us who would be happy to compromise on some issues in order to get something done, those of us who care less about ideals than living in a functional world. We've been completely drowned out by the people with the finger pointing and the hyper sensitivity and the insistence that our way is The Right Way.

I suspect that moderate Democrats have more in common with moderate Republicans than they do with the extremists in their own party. But there are only about eight moderates left in the entire country, so we don't have much of a voice.

I'm not happy about Trump. I've disliked him since he was a preening, self-important playboy back in the 90s, before he had political ambitions, when he was already insulting women at every turn. I didn't vote for him, I wouldn't vote for him now if I had the chance to do it over, and I don't think he's doing a good job.

But I do have a great deal of respect for responsible, intelligent conservatism, especially the fiscal conservatives who are socially progressive. All the yelling and the outrage and the fury-- it's just feeding the problem, if you ask me, which of course you didn't. I suspect that when Fox News or Breitbart get the liberals riled up, they just sit back and smile. See? Toldja they were just a bunch of hysterical, whining babies. We must be doing something right if we're pissing them off.

We're not convincing them that they're wrong, we're just proving their point about how uncooperative liberals are. I've talked to conservatives who are unhappy with Trump, but I haven't talked to a single one who wishes they'd voted for Hilary. We are not changing their minds. If our goal is to start winning elections, we've got to win some of them over, and it's not going to happen unless we stop having such a short fuse and instantly leaping to criticize the smallest move the Republicans make.

I remember once back when Dean and I were in marriage counseling, we kept re-defining the same problems, reiterating how we disagreed, re-analyzing what the issues were. At one point the counselor said, OK, you're always going to disagree about this. At some point, if you're not getting a divorce, you've got to just move on.

Yeah. We're all still here, living in this country. At some point, we've got to just move on.

So I'm just going along, doing my thing, protesting in ways that seem helpful to me, expressing my opinion as calmly as I can, and biding my time until the next time I have a chance to vote. Sometimes when faced with homophobia or misogyny or racism, we have to plant our feet and not back down (like Charlottesville, and there are a whole lot of Republicans who agree). But Charlottesville aside, we also need to be careful we're not fanning the flames.

I've seen moderates get shredded on Twitter and elsewhere for being naive and unaware of how difficult our problems are. So maybe I am, but six months after I originally wrote this post, this is still how I feel, and moderates get to have freedom of speech, too.