Here's something you did not expect me to post about today: LIV Golf

I live with golfers. On my own, I would probably pay exactly zero attention to golf, but like most parents, I become interested in what my family is interested in, and my spouse and my younger (25-year-old) child, who was living at home until six weeks ago, are total golf nerds.

I have at various times in my life become interested in sports, but it's the personalities that interest me. I'm not an athlete myself, so their prowess and skills aren't as much of a draw. My eyes glaze over almost instantly when the conversation turns to the angle of the club face or the purity of someone's stroke. 

But if you watch these kids--because they are kids when they start out--over the course of several years, and learn their backstory, and their ups and downs, and then they get married and have kids, pretty soon they're like your own friends. You care about what happens to them.

So the whole dilemma around the recent development of a Saudi-funded golf league, known as LIV Golf, and the exodus of several prominent golf stars to play there, has been a topic of much conversation and even some emotional turmoil at our house. 

#LIVGolf is backed by the almost unlimited wealth of the Saudi ruling family, and the players who have chosen to play for them are making more money just by signing up for the league than they might in their entire career with the PGA (at least, that's how it looks-- I have no idea what's actually happening).

I'm no expert, but of course like thousands of twitter users, that's not going to stop me from giving you my opinion. I'm definitely #TeamPGA. My sympathies are with the players who want to play the best players in the world at the historic, traditional tournaments and courses of the PGA and the majors. 

But I also think a lot of the hysteria is over-the-top. When it was first announced that some of our favorite players were leaving the PGA, I will admit that we were upset-- especially my son, who idolized DJ for years. 

But now that the dust has settled a bit, I'm finding it hard to stay that way. As plenty of LIV supporters have pointed out, the PGA has advertising contracts with a number of companies who do business with the Saudis. That's not exactly the same thing as being bankrolled by the Saudi Private Investment Fund, but it does blur the lines. 

If I were making the decision for myself, I wouldn't be able to do it, but I can see how someone who is looking at his career as a business would see the move to LIV as a smart decision. 

It isn't hard to imagine that players like Brooks and DJ are looking beyond their limited shelf-life as tournament winners and seeing LIVGolf as a way to continue to play golf while at the same time giving them the time and funding to pursue other interests. And there are the Asian and Australian players who say they want to spend more time at home. I'm more sympathetic with the players who have stayed with the PGA, but at least I can understand that.

What I don't get at all is the urge to destroy the PGA in the process, and as a long-time non-fan of the shark guy, it's hard not to believe he is the source of that. Sure, go ahead and set up an alternative league with a new format. Maybe it will be fun and exciting for the players and the fans. Let the players decide who wants to play in it and let the fans decide if they're interested. Go for it.

But why the lawsuits? Why the temper-tantrum-level subpeonas? why the shady, strong-arm recruitment methods? The LIV players made the decision to leave the PGA, and they've been well-compensated to do so. End of story. Just stop already and let us get back to cheering for Rory and Scottie and Max and Tony and Jordan and Sungjae and Xander, and a whole bunch of other players who are more motivated by the love of golf.

To list or not to list

Oddly, the closer the wedding gets, the better I feel about it. I'm still anxious, and there are about a gazillion details to attend to, but at least now I'm worried about very specific things and not just freaking out over the entire idea of hosting a wedding. By the time this is published it will be two weeks until the day of the rehearsal. I'm starting to believe I will survive it.

A theme for me recently has been realizing how people are wired differently. Obviously all of us are different, and I've already told you what a game changer it was for me to understand the difference between introversion and extroversion. But I don't think I realized until the last 2-3 years how many of the ways we are different go down to our core. No amount of therapy or personal growth is going to clear them up.

The difference that feels particularly relevant to me right now: some people handle stressful situations by meticulously preparing for them; some people find that preparation makes them more stressed and they'd rather wing it.

I think I am by nature a person who is more successful in coping with stress by being prepared. But I was raised to admire people who wing it, and by a dad who was charismatic enough to be able to pull off most situations just by letting his charm flow. So I've had to learn that I'm better off if I prepare. I've been making lists for the past week and every time I get through another round of list-making, I feel more confident and less stressed. 

And then, like all list-makers, I get the joy of marking things off the list as I do them. There's nothing better. 

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Books I've loved this summer, besides the previously mentioned The Road: Emily St. John Mandel's new one, The Sea of Tranquility. My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout (I know, late to the party). Surprisingly (to me), Jessica Simpson's memoir, Open Book. I didn't realize until I just went and looked at my list how many re-reads I've done this summer: The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, Archangel by Sharon Shinn, Good Omens (the audio version is fantastic). Those last two are a bit dated, but I still enjoyed them thoroughly.

And the Narnia books. Like most adults I know who are former evangelicals, I've had to re-think my childhood obsession with C.S. Lewis's series of seven books about the magical kingdom of Narnia. It turns out they're really pretty problematic. For example, in The Last Battle, Susan is banished from heaven because she's interested in nylons and lipstick (not kidding--I just went and looked it up to make sure I had it right)(she is no longer a friend of Narnia, Peter pompously announces). 

And then there's the blatant Orientalism in The Horse and His Boy. They're just dated. Until this summer, it had been fifteen or twenty years since I'd read them because I was more than a little embarrassed I'd loved them so much.

I was obsessed with them as a child. I re-read them every year until I was twenty. Even though I was raised thoroughly evangelical, it wasn't the Christian allegory that drew me in. In fact, I think I was on my second or third time through The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe before I realized it was a thinly veiled account of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and then it was only because my mom pointed it out to me. I just loved Mrs. Beaver and Mr. Tumnus and the Bulgy Bears, and the triumph of the Good and Kind over the Mean and Cruel. And the magical door into a secret kingdom, which caused me to furtively check the back of every wardrobe I encountered until I was eight or nine.

Anyway. I was on a road trip this summer and the audiobook I had picked out was not holding my attention, and I remembered I had picked up the entire Narnia collection for one credit on Audible at some point. So I started with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and then The Silver Chair (which is probably the one that holds up best), and I'm halfway through the aforementioned Horse and His Boy. The narrators are excellent.

I think there's enough water under the bridge now that I can revisit them as an expression of a past way of thinking, sort of like reading Little Women or Anne of Green Gables with their pious moralizing, or Georgette Heyer, who has a Jewish money-lender in what is arguably her most popular book, The Grand Sophy. And anyway, Evangelicals can try as they might, but C.S. Lewis, a high church Anglican, would never have been an American-style Evangelical. Not a chance. 

But that's an entirely different topic. I'm enjoying them. I will probably skip The Last Battle--no amount of time is going to clear that one up. 

If you made it all the way through this mess, I'm grateful to you for sticking it out. Have a good weekend.

Thoughts on Reading The Road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is your brain on wedding anxiety.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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