7ToF: If you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away

1. I told you awhile ago about my happiness with using microfiber washcloths instead of single-use disposable face wipes, and I am still happy with them (in fact, I just ordered some more). I am not as happy about my attempt to get rid of paper towels. I ordered bamboo towels that come on a roll just like regular paper towels, but you can run them through the laundry and reuse them for months instead of throwing them away. Unfortunately, before they were washed, they were stiff and hydrophobic, and once they were washed, they were very "linty," if you know what I mean. They left hairy bits on everything. So I am still working on a replacement for paper towels. I don't actually use that many, so I'm not sure how important this is to me. If you have any ideas, let me know.

2. Drumming update: I have progressed to Weezer's Sweater Song. The basic version of the drum part has to be the simplest of any top 40 hit ever, bless them.

3.  If you enjoy smart, thought-provoking conversations about books, try the So Many Damn Books podcast episode about the literary canon and how it has changed/should change (episode 120, Back to School)(episode 117, about Lonesome Dove, is also relevant). The Front Porch's episode #242 from this week is an unexpectedly interesting conversation about banned books. I am forever grateful that my parents, conservative as they were, never restricted my reading in any way. It was partly because back in the sixties, parenting was a much more hands-off activity than it is now. But it is also partly because they were really in favor of reading. Left to my own devices, I tended to pick books that were pretty tame anyway (see item 5).

Aside: a further shoutout to So Many Damn Books for recommending the book Dreyer's English in episode 119, which is so fun if you are a word nerd. Funny, literate, frequently deliberately provocative. Five stars. The interview the SMDB guys do with Dreyer is also interesting, and spurred me to re-read To the Lighthouse this summer.

4. I am, for lack of a better term, an immersive reader. When I'm reading, I'm in there, in the story, like it's happening to me. When I was reading Sing Unburied Sing, I had to put the book down at one point because I was so angry and upset that the mom wasn't feeding her children. It was several minutes before I pulled myself out of it enough to remind myself that it was fiction and it wasn't really happening right that minute.

5. And I can't read horror or suspense books because they (not kidding) give me nightmares. I remember not being able to sleep for several nights when I was in junior high and read 83 Hours Till Dawn, about an heiress who was kidnapped and buried alive in an oversized coffin for more than three days. I can't give you a more recent example than that because I never read a book like that again. Gone Girl, which I tried because I kept hearing about it, gave me nightmares. I can recognize her innovations, and the on-the-nose description of a marriage that's a mess, but I'm not reading anything else she wrote. Nope.

6. I'm starting to realize that reading like this really inhibits my enjoyment of what could be some great stories, but I have no idea how to change. If you have any ideas, let me know. I'm working on it right now. I was listening to a tense part of an audiobook yesterday and I paused it, made myself breathe and reminded myself this isn't happening to me. It's not even really happening to her, since it's a fantasy novel. HA. How ridiculous am I??

7. At our house, all of us have... well... ummm.... lucky underwear. Is this just us? When you have something especially scary or stressful happening on a particular day, you wear your lucky underwear. For me, it also extends to socks. I have several pairs of socks (like the ones with pink and purple stripes that my friend Susan gave me, or the ones with goldfish on them) that help me feel brave when I'm feeling intimidated. You can't see them, but I'm wearing my lucky socks! For some reason this week it occurred to me to wonder if we are just as weird as we could possibly be, or if everyone does this.

So, that's it for me. Have a great weekend.

Musings after a writers' conference

We have a very active, very successful local writers group that I've never joined. Not because I don't like them-- I know several people who are in it and they are great. But their monthly meeting is on a night that I have a conflict, and there's the whole social panic aspect of it, and also-- well, I've never really considered myself to be a writer, even though I write blog posts and emails and Goodreads reviews all the time.

Anyway.  This past weekend was their annual writers conference, and it was great. I think I've attended two or three times over the nearly three decades we've lived here, and it is always good. I don't know how they manage to attract such great speakers and keep the cost so low (under $100 for the weekend, including food).

I don't have any writing projects I'm working on right now, or even any plans to start one in the immediate future, but I signed up as soon as I saw the list of speakers because I saw that Bob Mayer was going to be there. He and Jennifer Crusie wrote the romantic suspense novels Don't Look Down (2006) and Agnes and the Hitman (2007), which were the books that convinced me that rom-coms weren't dead and could still be funny and smart and entertaining.

It seemed like a good idea when I signed up, but then I had to actually walk into a room full of strangers and I almost didn't go. I function relatively normally in a social situation where I know people, but throw me into a room with 125 strangers and I turn into my seventh-grade self, immediately heading for the back corner of the lunchroom in a minor panic because I don't know what else to do. But I ran into half a dozen people that I know over the weekend, and it got better. If it had gone on for another day, I might have actually felt brave enough to participate.

The only problem was that this conference is a very practical, how-to-be-successful conference, no woo-woo creativity exercises allowed. There was information about how to find an agent, how to work with an editor, how to use social media to your advantage. So pretty much everybody there was seriously working on a novel or a memoir or some major project.

All weekend every time the person next to me politely asked, "What's your current project?" I had to admit sheepishly, well, nothing, I just came to hang out with the writer people and hear Bob Mayer. I can always sit and listen to smart, interesting people talk, and there were a lot of them there this weekend. I had a good time, even though I didn't need to create a one-sentence pitch, which is what almost everyone in the room was working on.

I gave up on writing fiction years ago, since I have been so spectacularly unsuccessful at it every time I've tried, but over the course of the weekend, a couple of ideas came up that I thought I might try. I'm quite sure it won't result in a novel, maybe it won't even be fiction, but it might be fun to try something new. I'll let you know if it turns out.

Have a great day. I'm off to re-read Agnes and the Hitman, which I haven't read in at least eight or ten years.

I'm Still Standing- midlife mental health again

I'm doing better. I don't know if you can tell. Mental health is such an individual thing, I'm not sure if writing about my own issues is going to help anybody else. But it helps me, so here you go. This got a bit long. Save it for when you're in the mood.

As I told you last time we talked about this, my mental health issues are depression and paranoia. I think I will always be prone to them. It's like being headache-prone (which I also am). You can figure out the triggers, avoid behaviors that make things worse, and do your best to be healthy. But I'm always going to have headaches, and I'm probably always going to go through periods of depression and paranoia.

So understanding my "issues," and having the tools to deal with them and know when I'm headed into a spiral (of either headaches or depression), is only going to help.  

I think part of what I've been going through is the longer-term adjustment to the empty nest. That kind of surprised me. MadMax left last week to start his senior year of college, so this isn't new. We've been empty nesters for three years now.

But there's the initial oh-my-god-my-children-have-moved-out part, which is hard enough but didn't last very long, and then apparently there is another longer adjustment that I am still navigating.

The first part, that wrenching feeling that you tore your right arm off and left it in that freshman dorm, is the more obvious one, the one everyone knows about, and it's not easy. But it's pretty fast. With each of our kids, by the time they'd been gone a couple of months, we were getting used to it.

And then there's Phase Two, which I was not expecting. Why should there be a longer term adjustment? I'm plenty busy. I'm involved in a lot of things in our community. It's not like my life revolved around my children.

But you know-- it did revolve around my children. I was never a helicopter mom, but having kids in the house was the organizing principle of my schedule from 1990 to 2016. That's a lot of years.

Apparently there is a longer term adjustment that I'm still figuring out. When you're a parent, you have obvious significance, even if it's just localized to your kids. You are that child's parent. You are needed. Even when they're 17 or 18, you keep at least some track of where they are, their dentist appointments, their parent-teacher night, their band concerts.

It's going too far to say it gives your life meaning, but it does mean that you've got a certain number of default things that can only be done by you, even if it's just paying attention and being there when they need you. There's a certain amount of purpose involved in that.

And figuring out what is going to take the place of that has been a longer process than getting over missing my kids. Whom I still miss, of course. It's not like you stop missing them, but you get used to it.

So, that's part of what's been going on. Another part of it is still related to something we've talked about before, which is that feeling that this is not the life I thought I was going to have. I guess it's regret, to put it plainly.

That has been a really tough one for me. I didn't think I was going to end up at age 58, living in a rural area with only a string of part-time jobs on my resume and no professional accomplishments.

This is embarrassing to admit, because it makes me sound like such a whiner. I have a hard time even typing it out without surrounding it with snarkiness because I know I sound like a spoiled brat. I am so blessed, so privileged. But the struggle is real, as they say, and pretending like it's not there doesn't help.

My adult life has been so contrary to the way we think these days-- if your life isn't going the way you want it to, change it. Get a new job. Move. Get a divorce. Have an affair. Join a commune. Take art classes, do yoga, change it up, make your life into what you want.

We believe we have agency, the power to make our lives into whatever we want. We believe what the individual wants should be, at least to some extent, more important than family or community ties.

But I couldn't do the life that I had mapped out in my head and have my husband, my children, and my integrity. I can run back through the decisions we made every time we decided to stay here and not move somewhere with more job opportunities for me (which we considered multiple times over the years), and even in hindsight, I would make the same decisions over again. At every stage, I made the decision that was the "right" one for me/us at the time.

It just was never the decision I would have made if I'd been single and childless and unattached. I kept deferring what I wanted to do, thinking someday my turn would come. But then I hit fifty, and I ran slam up against the realization that some of the things I had really wanted to do were not going to happen. Not helped any by the people I could see around me who at least appear to have it all-- family, career, living in the location of their dreams.

Then I had a conversation this summer that has really helped (beyond what we've talked about before, which is realizing how damn lucky I am). I had dinner with one of my college roommates a couple of months ago, the first time I'd seen her in thirty-five years.

I was talking through a brief version of this issue with her over dinner, the decisions I had made that weren't always the ones that I wanted to make. And she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, you made those decisions according to your values. You made exactly the decisions you wanted to, because those are the things you value.

It's one of those ideas that was interesting at the time, but later, it bloomed in my head. It's re-framed the way I think about the past and let me begin to be able to forgive myself for (supposedly) not being "strong enough" to "create the life I wanted."

I've been so angry at myself for not following through on all the things I felt like I should have done, all the accomplishments I should have under my belt. (I should have just put my foot down and demanded that we move!) But I was strong enough to make the decisions that deep-down were the ones that I felt were right for our family. And that's something I can live with.

Refusing to forgive leads to bitterness and hardened anger, even if the person I can't forgive is myself. I'm working on extending grace to myself for not being the person that I thought I would be. I don't think I'm quite there yet, but the more I work on it, the easier it gets. Work in progress.

There's another piece to this, but this has already gone on long enough. More later.

My So-Called Reading Life, Part I Stopped Counting: Bookstagram and Reading Challenges

I've been on Instagram for awhile now. I like it better than Facebook, because for people my age--or at least, among my friends-- it isn't about presenting your best fake self, it's about pictures of grandkids and craft projects and vacations. And we don't usually write long captions, so there's not much in the way of opinions and rants. In other words, it's the way FB used to be.

Matilda, for a book and ice cream prompt

Then last year I discovered #bookstagram, which isn't a separate app, it's just a hastag within instagram. People post pictures of their books or their bookshelves or their bookish stuff. For booknerds, it is totally fun.

I've enjoyed it enough that I've created a separate account for it (@bookspate). Finding people my age with my interests is not exactly easy, but I've found a few who are my age-ish and who love to read. Some of them take amazing photos, and some just snap a pic of what they're reading next to a cup of coffee. It's fun.

And I've discovered to my surprise that it's really fun to mess around with my way-too-many books and my way-too-many tchotchkes and take pictures of them. (The photos in this post are from my bookstagram account.) Weird, yes, but I suppose there are stranger hobbies. I just don't know what they are.

Reading challenges: In a reading challenge, someone comes up with a list of somewhat arbitrary categories--a book with a blue cover, a book set in Asia, a book that was published in the year you were born-- and challenges you to read something in each category within a certain amount of time, usually a year.

The first one I ever saw, maybe four or five years ago, was PopSugar's (their most recent challenge is here), and I thought it was a great idea. I printed out the list at the end of December, set it on my desk, and promptly forgot all about it.

The whole point of a reading challenge is to get you to read more, and since I already read plenty--some might say, and do, too much-- I then decided that I wouldn't do reading challenges.

But somewhere on Instagram I found Book Challenge by Erin. Twice a year, you're supposed to read ten books in four months. At the time, I was looking for a way to motivate myself to read some books that had been on my shelves for far too long, so I decided to try it.

I'm in the middle of my second time, and it is working well for me. It's run through Facebook and I know that's an immediate no for several of you. But if the idea of a book challenge appeals, there are dozens of them out there (google "reading challenges"), so keep looking until you find the one that works for you.

Favorite books-into-movies prompt

I think a year was too long a time frame for me. Ten books in four months is do-able, but it's a short enough time period that I have to get to work on it. Having an accountability system to get specific books read has worked great.

The only problem is that there are sometimes categories that are (for me) a little obscure, so I end up picking a book that I don't really care about just to finish the challenge. For example, in the current challenge, one of the categories is "a book with 'rain,' 'lightning' or 'thunder' in the title," and I don't have a single unread book on my shelves that meets the criteria.

I picked up a used copy of James Lee Burke's Rain Gods, but it is now my tenth book of the current challenge, and I cannot get excited about reading it (unlike several other non-challenge books I have on my TBR pile).

Should I read it and finish the challenge? or bag the challenge and read something I really want to read? There's no penalty if I don't finish, of course, just my own personal need for completion.

Black and white #bookstack prompt

I'm going to start it next weekend and see how it goes. Maybe I will discover an untapped love for James Lee Burke, who lives part of the year near Missoula and is considered one of our own around here. I just don't usually read thrillers. (Is it a thriller? police procedural? I actually don't know. I guess I'll find out.)

Every time I write the last 'reading life' post, I think up six more things to say, so I think I will stop numbering them as part 4, part 5, etc. and post them occasionally.

Have a great day.