the sadly all-too-common tale of my social media woes

My social media starter drug was Facebook. I was an early adopter. I don't remember exactly when I joined, but it was shortly after they opened it to non-university students. I loved it for a very specific reason-- I had young children, and we didn't live near our extended family. I had been tediously taking my rolls of film to a drugstore, having them developed, having reprints made, writing a note to include, going to the post office, and sending out photos of our kids. On Facebook, I could post the photos and be done with it. I strong-armed my parents and several other friends and relatives into joining -- you've got to try this! It's so fun!

And I did think it was fun. I loved it. I was caught completely off-guard when there began to be pushback. If you posted pictures of your kids on facebook, you were showing off. You were bragging about how great your life is. You were only showing the good parts and not being honest about the hard things in your life. Whaaaaat? No, honestly, I'm just posting pictures of my kids. There was zero intent on my part to make other people feel bad about their lives. I deleted it off my phone and quit posting almost entirely, but I still checked it daily from my laptop.

And then 2015/2016 happened, and people who would never have dreamed about posting their political opinions online suddenly started to do so, and FB became toxic. I still check in a couple of times a week, because I'm in three online groups that became FB-only years ago, but I rarely scroll past the first two screens. I really do not want to know what my neighbors think. Like everybody, I miss the days when you could be friends with anybody without thinking about it, because we were all smart enough to keep our political opinions to ourselves.

My first switch was to Instagram, and at that time, Instagram was what I had originally joined Facebook for--people posting pictures of their kids and their vacations and the birds on the bird feeder outside their window. I was really into it for awhile. I even started a separate #bookstagram account as a way of talking about what I was reading and hoping to find other book nerds.

But you know, the internet has a way of poisoning everything. Somebody figured out that you could monetize your account, and you could pose your six children in cute outfits and businesses would send you free stuff if you mentioned their brand because nobody (including me) could look away from the cuteness. Or publishers would send you free books, and you could post a highly-edited shot of the $250 set of Jane Austen novels you received for free with the caption, Aren't these pretty? I should read them someday! and get a thousand likes, and I lost patience with the whole thing. 

So then I turned to Twitter, which I had joined years earlier but never really used. It had a reputation for being brutal (the reason I had stayed away), but I found that by following the right accounts and not reading the comments, I could avoid the ugly bits. Finally, I thought, I had found the right place for me. Smart, funny people were being smart and funny online, and it was the kind of commentary that is hard to come by in the area where I live. I assiduously avoided, blocked, and unfollowed anyone who made my blood pressure rise--but honestly, once you make it clear what kind of stuff you're interested in, that's not hard. The Twitter algorithms are pretty good at showing you what it thinks you want to see. I didn't post very often--maybe half a dozen times a month--and when I did, no one seemed to notice, so I didn't have to worry about people coming after me.

And then Elon happened, and now even Twitter is ruined. I haven't deleted my account yet, because (to my untrained eye) he's driving it into the ground so fast that it's too soon to tell what will happen. But it definitely has a different feel than it did even a few months ago. Now you see a blue check mark and you think, wait, you're paying for that? Who on earth would hand that man more money? I check in some, but it no longer brings me joy, which it frequently did when it was intelligent people being funny about books and movies and Life In These Difficult Times. 

I miss it. I really miss it. Social media is great for someone like me whose favorite way to socialize is people watching. It's a continuous stream of people-doing-things that's available around the clock while you're still at home in your sweats. 

But someone always figures out how to weaponize it. Isn't that the sad thing about life these days? Someone always figures out how to weaponize everything. I've been listening to teenagers this week (more on that another time), and it occurs to me that our culture has become like a bunch of teenagers--gossipy, cruel, relentlessly critical, going for the thing that will get us noticed or liked or envied. 

This is turning into me being a gripey old person so I'll stop. Re: the long gap between this post and the last one: I decided at some point over the past couple of months that the time for blogging is past, so I was going to stop. I figured that last post would be my last post. 

But the thing is, blogging is good for me, in a purely selfish, mental-health kind of way. There's a specific atmosphere that happens in my head, a boggy, bored-with-myself feeling of blah-ness, that is at least somewhat alleviated by writing here. So, I'm not sure exactly how often I will continue to post, and lord knows, and you know, you certainly don't need to read it. But apparently I'm not giving it up.

Another book review: Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

I listened to an interview with an artist last week who said that the best, most interesting art is art that surprises him. I don’t know enough about art to know if that’s true, but I do know that a book that surprises me is one of my favorite things. This one did.   

Standard Deviation can be read as a funny, absorbing story of marriage, advancing years, raising a special needs child, and managing relationships with relatives, exes, and house guests. Graham is approaching sixty, and his second wife is a younger woman named Audra who has no filter— which is sometimes hilarious and sometimes appalling. Their son Matthew is an endearing Aspy kid with a passion for origami. That version of the story is enough on its own to be funny, heartwarming, and even sometimes wise. I was startled into laughter more times while reading this book than any book in recent memory.

But it seems to me there are other layers, and I’m making my spouse read it now so I can have someone to talk to about this. Am I making it up? Did she really intend to get into the moral ambiguity of the second half of the novel, or am I over-reading? 

(If that sounds intriguing, stop now and go read it, especially if you live nearby and we can go for coffee (tea), because I really would love to discuss this, and you should go into it without knowing the stuff I'm talking about below.)

***spoilers ahead***

I think the way you read the second half depends mostly on whether or not you think Audra is having an affair. I think she is— maybe not with the mysterious Jasper, but what else was she doing in that hotel? She certainly has no problem talking about the multiple married men she slept with before she married Graham. And then you find out that Graham cheated on his first wife not just with Audra, but with Marla, and then later he mentions “all the other Marlas” and you start to wonder if these people are really at all what you thought.

There are a whole lot of layers of truth and falsehood — from the amusing social lies/fabrications that Audra spins effortlessly to the lies of omission from Graham. Is Heiny’s point that speaking truth doesn’t really matter? I've told plenty of social "white lies" myself, usually in the name of not hurting someone's feelings, but I'll say it plainly: the deeper lack of honesty bothers me.

But even I can see that I’m being a bit of a killjoy and a preachy bore to suggest that the fun and hilarity of reading about life with Audra has darker underpinnings. What's the problem with serial adultery if it's so much fun to read about? Graham seems to consciously decide that he doesn’t care if Audra is unfaithful—which is totally his choice—but that’s not the same thing as Heiny as an author giving the impression that telling the truth to your partner doesn’t matter. Is it really true that as long as everything looks good, it is good? As long as we're having so much funnnnn, as the kids say on snapchat, does that automatically mean anything goes?

Or did Heiny actively intend all the intricate, ambiguous implications? Is her point that we lull ourselves into complicity because we want to be in on the joke? Maybe Standard Deviation is a fun-hall mirror of seeing our own distortions.

Or maybe I'm over-reading again. Read it for yourself and see what you think.

(a slightly modified version of the review I posted on Goodreads)

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.

reporting back as promised

I told you I'd report back after the, uh, surgery. By the time you read this, it will have been ten days ago, and you know what? Surgery hurts. That's not a surprise to anyone, of course, and I knew what to expect-- I did a fair amount of research before I even made my first appointment, and I knew what was coming. But still. Living through it is always a different thing than knowing it's coming. Ouch. 

Fortunately my body has done the miraculous healing thing that healthy bodies do, and already I'm past the worst of the painful part. And it hasn't been nearly bad enough for me to regret having it done. Even in my partially-healed state, I'm happy with the results. I look much more like my mental image of myself. For the past many years, I've looked at pictures of myself and my, uh, generous assets, and it never looked like me. So, even if the headache part of it doesn't pan out, I'm still going to be glad I had this done.

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Like everybody, I'm so tired of the human pressure cooker we're in right now. It never lets up, and just when you think it is finally going to get better, something happens to make it worse. I want to think that I, and the side that I'm on, will show our true colors under pressure, and of course our true colors are to be compassionate, intelligent, and fair, right? But we haven't always shown to advantage. It just seems to get uglier and uglier.

All of us are quick to point out that we're only responding to the ugliness of the other side, but it's not too hard to imagine some cosmic being watching the pressure build, maybe even throwing in a few extra pressure points, and waiting to see, hoping, that for once human beings will surprise her and respond differently, not out of outrage and blame but out of some other, more generous impulse. At the moment, I can't even imagine what that impulse would be. It would surprise me, too.

You know-- it's occurring to me as I type this, that is mainly true online. In my real life, there have actually been some moments of connection, even among people who would probably come to blows if they talked hot-button issues. I spent some time a couple of weeks ago with a group of people I think of as being uniformly more conservative than I am, and I was dreading it. I was expecting a wall of righteous them vs. not-brave me.

But it was not like that at all. Where I was expecting them to be united in a conservative bloc, a wall of opinions that are different than mine, there was actually a lot of give. They didn't say the things I expected them to say, and they don't all believe the same things. (And of course we were smart enough not to hit the hot-button issues head-on.)

It occurred to me, as it has to almost everyone over the past few years, what a disservice we do to each other when we communicate through facebook posts and bite-sized tweets. We hear the much-promoted extreme positions and we react with outrage, and we don't remind ourselves that not everyone on the other side lines up 100% with the talking points. Not everyone, including me, has predictable opinions.

So maybe that's my task for the next few weeks-- at least until after the wedding, which is still a giant ball of dread and social anxiety looming in my future-- to look for the openings, the ways people are human, not predictable, not monolithic. Be open to being surprised.

And also to remember that weddings can be a lot of fun, right? I can do this. We can do this, because it is a family effort. Wish me luck.

Hope is the thing with the feathers / that perches in the soul / and sings the tune without the words / and never stops at all

I have a post that is half-written, but I can't bring myself to finish it today. Maybe another time. I just came here to say one thing, and that is: I still believe. I still hope for a better future. It may not be one that we can imagine right now, but I do not believe that all goodness is dying. And the reason I still have hope is that I know people in their 30s who are smart and thoughtful and they are figuring things out. I know people in their twenties who are afraid and worried, but still doing their best to make things right, to act in ways that honor their best selves. And I know teenagers who are brilliant and funny and hard-working and dedicated. Those of us who are old may have royally fucked things up, but I know these kids. Whatever mess we leave them with, they will work their hearts out to fix it. They are my reason for hope.

What is your reason for hope? 

(the post title is Emily Dickinson)

a deep dive (that is a joke)

The first time I came in contact with the idea that Representation Matters (the idea, not the phrase, which was still years away), it was circa 1980 and I was in college at a conservative Christian school, not the place where you would expect it to show up. 

I was taking Intro to Sociology, and the female professor was a bit of a renegade, and she wanted us to understand that male experience is not universal. This is so obvious now in 2022 that it seems difficult to imagine it was ever otherwise, but at the time, I had been trained to believe that what white men experienced applied to all of us. 

Since it was a Christian school, the vast majority of the students had been born and raised in middle America Christian homes and we all bought into this idea. In hindsight, it doesn't even make sense. In the churches where most of us grew up, only men were allowed in leadership positions, so how could their experience be the same as women who could only make coffee, teach children's Sunday school, and work in the nursery?

I still remember when I began to understand her point. We'd been having a discussion in class where all of us good little girls stated quite firmly that we didn't need to have the patriarchal language of the Bible untangled, because we knew God was beyond gender (it's right there in Genesis 1:27, the image of God is both male and female, and we were so pleased with our progressive selves for knowing that). So it didn't make any difference to always hear God referred to as capital-H Him, or Father, or even to hear believers referred to as men, because we knew that language covered women, too.

Then she had us read a number of bible passages and traditional hymns aloud, substituting her for him, and mother for father, and woman for man, and she was right. It was entirely different. There was no mistaking: it makes a difference.

Rise up, oh women of God, in one united throng,
Bring in the day of sisterhood and end the night of wrong!

(That's a hymn, not the Bible, if you didn't grow up in a similar church.) So fast forward 25-ish years to the first time I heard the actual phrase Representation Matters (meaning it matters that you can see yourself, your self, your gender and race and orientation and economic status, in a book or on the screen or online), and I got it. I may be slow to the party at times, but I can learn.

Since I'm about to talk about my own representation, I should say first of all: I know that I don't have anything to complain about. I am privileged beyond belief, especially in a global context. I understand this more and more as time goes by. I'm not trying to paint myself as a victim here, because I'm not. This is not a tale of woe, this is a tale of me sorting through my experience.  

All of that setup was just to tell this story. I know now that I am a nerd, in both the good and bad senses of the word. I love knowledge, I love being smart and knowing things, I love being good at tech. I roll my eyes when a podcaster says, "We're going to do a deep dive into (some topic) today," and then they spend about three minutes talking about it. (Seriously, that is not a deep dive. Call it something else.) When I set challenges for myself, they are intellectual challenges. I am a nerd.

But the category of nerd didn't even exist when I was a kid, and it certainly didn't exist for women. By the time I was in high school, there were Radio Shack home computers and a computer club at my high school, but the closest most of us got to personal contact with a computer was by using state of the art Texas Instruments calculators. Which were miracle enough. 

Real computers were so far out of the realm of what I could conceive of as possible for a teenage girl in East Texas in the late 70s that it didn't even occur to me that I might be interested. I didn't learn to use a computer until I was in graduate school (my first, abortive attempt at grad school, in 1983)--so like everyone else, I typed all my undergrad papers on a Smith-Corona electric typewriter. 

But once I finally made it to the world of tech, I was immediately in love. It felt like I had found my niche, my people. We weren't great at social skills and we were always wearing the wrong clothes, but we knew how to program the damn VCR. C'mon people, it's not that hard.

I loved the online forums and the listserv email groups for specific niche interests. I loved everything about all of it. I knew how to write DOS batch files. I knew how to create data-driven graphics in Lotus 1-2-3. I was a regular reader of Slashdot. I loved being the one who knew how to fix the laser printer. My favorite job ever was database programming, which I did for a couple of years in the late 80s, just as the shift from flat-file to relational databases was happening. I was ON IT. 

Since the bar for admission to all of this was being comfortable with all things tech-y, it was a self-limiting field. Pretty much everyone online back then was a nerd, and we were all self-taught. The real techies, the ones who had taken computer science classes in college, were writing machine language (code that communicates directly with hardware).

But alas, times have changed. Now there are all kinds of programs that act as front ends to the tech. That's not to say they are dumbed down-- I'm not nearly smart enough to know the social media tech that teenagers handle with ease. But there aren't the same kind of social and knowledge barriers to admission that there were back in the 80s and 90s. 

So now the internet has become just like real life. Once again I am a nerd that doesn't really get it, the one that doesn't know how to write a good post on Instagram or Twitter, isn't really all that interested in the vast library of makeup and skincare tutorials on YouTube, and really, seriously does not want to make pop tarts or ketchup from scratch from a cooking blog. I do not want to shelve my books by color, or drape them with ribbons so they look prettier. 

In other words, I no longer fit in on the internet. Those are not my people. And since years of being out of the industry have dulled my tech skills, I don't really fit there either. This has been true for years, but I couldn't figure out what had happened until an online friend from back in the 90s pointed it out to me. *sigh* It was nice while it lasted.

(You know, I'm kind of cringing to think of this as an issue of representation, but I don't have time to totally re-write this post. Just think of this post as two separate stories.) 

7ToF: off we go again, with a detour into mental health

1. We've been on two trips recently. The first was to the Oregon coast, and it was our first trip with the new camper. The camper was great, although the drive was a little challenging since it poured, I mean poured, on all of our driving days. It was like the downpour was moving with us. But once we got there, the weather was beautiful and we had a great time. My boys played a lot of golf and I got to spend time reading and relaxing and recharging. Then it rained for the whole drive back.

2. The second trip was just me, going to Texas to visit my mom and my sister. One of my nieces was graduating from high school, so that was the centerpiece of the weekend, but mostly I was there to visit. It was so hot. That is the best thing about travel: it reminds me of the good things about where we live. I'm back at home now and it's beautiful -- everything is finally green and we're even getting some flowers blooming. And it is not 93 and 90% humidity.

3. Apologies for the pity party in my last post. I hadn't been out of town in months, and that always makes me a little nuts. I used to think there was something specific about this area that made it necessary for me to get out of here regularly, but over the years I've realized that it's just me. Wherever we lived, it would have been the same. I get all tangled up in my head and it takes removing myself from my normal life to be able to untangle. The good news is that getting out of town for even a few days usually solves the problem--partly because I get somewhere else and realize that however difficult certain moments may seem, I'm still lucky to live here and to have friends who put up with me.

4.  The older I get, the more I realize that my mental health takes some care and management. I don't know if this is true for everyone. It doesn't seem like it, but then this isn't something people our age talk about. Nobody who who grew up in the fifties and sixties was raised to think about how to manage their mental health. 

We were all about conformity back then, especially for women-- there was little diversity in how you could dress, what kind of job you could have, what kind of personality you could have, all of that. And you were not supposed to be depressed or anxious or conflicted. Back then if you weren't killing it (a phrase we never would have used), you just took valium and zoned out, I guess. I was a kid, I'm not sure how it felt to an adult.

Anyway. I think I developed a persona that I thought would make my parents happy (they, especially my mom, were certainly not happy with my nerdy, introverted self), and that would help me fit in. I spent my twenties and thirties shedding that persona, and then I think I spent my forties and fifties trying to make things work without a social persona at all. I thought that was being "authentic." 

But here's what I know now: you have to have a social persona, and if you shed a previous version, it takes work to build a new one. I hope the new one I'm working on is more true, more based on being confident in myself, but it's not something that happens on its own. At least, it hasn't for me. 

Defining terms: What I mean by social persona is: a part of you that runs interference between what you're thinking and feeling, and what you actually say and do. A part of you that can consider how your words and actions will affect the people around you, and modify them accordingly. My impression is that some people have this naturally, but some of us don't. It takes some effort.

Does that make any sense at all? I'm learning this right now. I don't know what I'm talking about. I haven't vetted that with a therapist, since I haven't seen one in awhile. I spent years going to therapy and I highly recommend it, but I haven't been recently. 

Hey, OK, this can be #5. I tried the advertised-everywhere online therapy website Better Help during lockdown. I didn't feel like I needed full-on therapy, but I thought if I had a few sessions and developed a relationship with a therapist, then when I felt the need for a check-in, I would be able to just get online and schedule an appointment. It sounded like a great idea. 

But I didn't read the fine print about how you pay, so I'll tell you so you don't have to waste (an amount of money I'm embarrassed to admit) like I did. Better Help operates on the "athletic club" model of payment-- you pay a set fee every month, whether you use it or not. At the time I tried it, there was no pay-as-you-go option. Like an athletic club, if you make full use of it, the fees are reasonable. But if you're only doing 3-4 sessions once or twice a year, it's ridiculous. So, I had two sessions (which were good, the therapist seemed competent), and then I figured out the payment thing and opted out.

This post has ended up not lending itself to numbered paragraphs, but I'm pretty sure you've heard enough from me. We're already heading out again--Doug's family's annual vacation together is in North Carolina this year, and as you read this we will be on our way. We always have a great time with his family, I'm looking forward to it. I have two other half-written posts, so if I get them done and scheduled, you might hear from me next week, otherwise it will be when I get back.

7ToM: a pretty boring update

1. Doug's last day as an admin at our hospital was Friday. He is now officially semi-retired. We had a couple of really fun celebrations over the weekend, and our daughter and her fiancé came to town. It was great. Doug will still be working half-time in a different position so he's not completely free, but it's a definite step-down in terms of stress.

2. Our current dilemma is what to do with our pets. We bought a small new-to-us camper over the winter and we'd like to take it out quite a bit now that Doug has more time. We can take the dog with us, and maybe even the cat if we get her acclimated to the camper, but we can't take the chickens. How do you get rid of chickens that there is absolutely no chance we are going to eat, but that are too old to produce many eggs? We have six chickens and they produce 1-2 eggs a day. It's plenty for us, but for someone who actually wants to raise chickens, probably not very appealing. We might even just let them roam free and join the local food chain. Our neighborhood fox hasn't been around much recently but that might bring her back.

3. Did I tell you our daughter is getting married in September? My social anxiety kicks into maximum overdrive every time I think about it, but fortunately she is very socially adept and also a terrific organizer so she's doing the bulk of the work. We've made most of the reservations we need to make, now I just have to find a damn dress. Ugh.

4. Health update: I don't usually post about my health issues-- for example, I don't think I've mentioned that I've been getting botox treatments for migraines (I've had three now and they don't seem to be helping much). I don't really care that people know, it just never occurs to me to post about private stuff like that. But here you go for the next two items. Welcome to my paranoia.

5. Since I said awhile back that I didn't think I would ever have plastic surgery, I feel like I need to say this. For sure someone is going to see me coming out of the plastic surgery office and assume I'm getting it all done-- and maybe I will someday, maybe I will surprise you and myself and get a total makeover. But for now, I'm just going to have breast reduction surgery this summer. It's scheduled, so unless I chicken out (which is possible, surgery scares me), it's going to happen mid-July. The main impetus is, again, headache relief, but I definitely will not be sorry to be back to the size I was before I had kids. I see pictures of myself and the girls and it just doesn't look like me. Plus it has lots of other consequences-- it's impossible to find clothes that fit, it's hard to do any activity that requires any kind of, um, bouncing, etc. Now that I've said this, I guess I will have to report back about whether or not it worked, so I'll let you know.

6. Have you ever been a victim of the gossip mill? We live in a small town, although definitely not as small as it used to be, and this has happened to me twice now. Once years ago for something I never clearly understood, and once more recently for something that is not true, or only sort-of true from one skewed perspective. In both cases, it has surprised me how easily people believe the worst. It apparently hasn't occurred to anyone to think, huh, I wonder if there's another side to this story. I wonder if her version of this story would be different than the one I'm hearing. For sure no one has actually come out and asked me. 

But the other thing that has not just surprised but stunned me is how much it affects me. Apparently I am incapable of just brushing it off, even when I know it's not true. And in both cases--this time and the one 20 years ago-- I can look back over things I said, having no idea what was going on, and accidentally encouraged the gossip, because if people are looking for confirmation of what they want to believe, they'll twist whatever you say into what they want to hear. It started because someone threw me under the bus, but I can't defend myself without throwing that person under the bus in return. And it's someone I love and I just can't bring myself to do it, no matter how well-deserved it is. There's this weird martyr part of me that thinks, well, I'm strong enough to live through this but the other person isn't.

I didn't know how to handle it years ago when it happened and I don't know how to handle it now. Last time I just waited it out-- it was months before I could walk into a social situation without feeling people side-eye me (that's how I knew it wasn't all in my head, it definitely ended). This time I just want to move. Get me the fuck out of here.

7. I think this happens because I am so reserved. I don't project much personality, so people believe whatever they want about me. Alternatively, since I tend to project a fake persona in social situations where I don't know many people and I'm nervous, people think they're getting the real me (and that's on me, totally my fault for not developing better social skills). It has really made me think about how I present myself, but I don't know what I can do about it. I'm a pretty terrifically boring person, at least in terms of what I can share while standing around with a drink in my hand at a party-- which is when I tend to go fake, because I have to talk about something and few things I'm interested in make good party talk.

Good Lord is that ever more than you wanted to know. Forgive me for navel gazing. I did go back and edit this after I published it so this is a slightly different version, which makes me feel a little better. I probably shouldn't have published it at all, but I did, and I only regret it to the extent that it leaves me vulnerable if someone local reads it. But I don't think I have many (any?) local readers, so I'm not deleting it, which is possibly a mistake. 

Gah. Have had to re-publish twice now because I keep finding typos, which makes me insane. Apologies to the email subscribed, I don't think it makes any difference to anyone else. I'll be out of town for two weeks out of the next three so you won't hear from me for awhile.

7ToF: what a drag it isn't getting old

1. I like being 60. My fifties were transitional, and I'm not someone who deals well with change. 60 feels like I have arrived at something, although my friends who are already in their 60s seem a little mystified by this. I've written quite a bit about coming to terms with being a senior citizen and of course I'm not entirely there yet-- but once I made some semblance of a shift to thinking of myself as an elder, a crone, an old person, I really like it.

2. Which is why I've twice recently gotten myself into (briefly) tense situations. A couple of months ago, I was watching a movie with friends and when we paused for intermission (ie, snacks), one of them said, I refuse to say that I'm old. I don't feel old. and of course I couldn't keep my mouth shut about that, and I said I am embracing being old. That's one of the reasons our society has such a fixation with youth, I went on, because those of us who are old continue to chase after youth. If even those of us who are old are saying, ewwww, being old stinks! why should younger people think any different? Unsurprisingly, she was not convinced.

3. The next time was a few weeks ago when we were at a dinner party where everyone was about the same age (early sixties), but technically, I was the youngest one at the table. It was the week of Doug's 61st birthday, so I teased him that turning 60 is cool, but turning 61 is just old. There was this frozen half-second of silence (during which we can pause and recognize that I am sometimes a complete bonehead), and then one of the other women said with a fair amount of heat, why do you always have to remind us that you're the youngest one here? 

Which honestly kind of stunned me. First of all, I think of us as being the same age, because I'm 60 and the oldest person at the table is 63. Who the hell is worried about a two-and-a-half year age difference? I am as old as they are. And secondly, it's not insulting (in my opinion) to be old, although I reserve the right to tease and complain about it. I am continually surprised that people are so touchy about this. Why are we so brittle and sensitive around something that is a) inevitable, and b) not so bad?

4. My conclusion (besides the one about me being an insensitive idiot) is that our culture is just flat-out weird about aging, which we all already knew, so why am I even telling you these stories. I don't know. I guess I have to write about something.

5. Another thing people can be so touchy about: when someone asks me if I've seen whatever the latest TV sensation is, and I say I don't watch much TV because I'd rather read, a perfectly appropriate response would be: oh, that's too bad, you're missing some really great shows. Because that is true, and I know it. I'd still rather read, but I don't say it to be a snob, it's just my preference. The immediate assumption is that I'm bragging because somehow reading has a reputation for being intellectual and grandiose, while watching TV is supposedly pedestrian and dumb. 

6. Anyone who follows along here knows that I hardly have high-brow taste in reading. Among other things, I read cozy mysteries and romance novels and sci-fi (I'm in the middle of a Star Wars novel right now) and all sorts of genre fiction, some of which is fairly literary and some of which is really, uh, lightweight. But it's impossible to say, "I'd rather read than watch TV," without people assuming you're being a snob. So mostly I avoid  talking about it. A friend: Have you seen Killing Eve? (which I understand is seriously well-written and -acted), me: No, tell me about it!

7. This week's worthwhile listens:
- "How to Lose a War" on the SmartyPants podcast- an interview with Elizabeth D. Samet, who teaches English at West Point and has a unique window into the minds of people in the military. I was fascinated. (SmartyPants is the podcast of The American Scholar magazine.)
- "From Evangelical Pastor to Buddhist Nun" on the Ten Percent Happier podcast- if you're interested in either Evangelicalism or Buddhism, this one is also interesting. Probably you need to have a little basic knowledge about Buddhism to follow the conversation, but the general outline of her movement from Evangelicalism to Buddhism is pretty clear.
- I'm hit or miss on Gretchen Rubin's podcast Happier, but their episode on Burnout was thought-provoking. There's a difference between burnout and exhaustion, and the solutions to each are different, too.
- And of course I always plug the only podcast that I've continually listened to since I discovered podcasts: What Should I Read Next? hosted by Anne Bogel, which is usually just Anne interviewing some normal person about what they read and why, and then she recommends three books she thinks they might like. It's so much a part of my Tuesday morning routine that when she skips a week (as she did this week for spring break), my whole day feels off. Darn it, Anne.

I just realized that this will post on April Fool's Day and I spent about 30 seconds trying to think of a way to prank you, but that's never been my thing. Be careful out there.

placeholder of randomness

I wish I had something wise and helpful to say to you, but I don't. I've been playing too many word games, and worrying too much, and wondering if any of us really knows, let alone understands, what's going on. I'm going to be out of town the next two Fridays, so maybe I will just take a break and start posting again later. 

Random recs: We watched Dune Sunday night (for the 3rd time, our son is a huge fan), and it is a surprisingly good adaptation (I'm always surprised when adaptations are good). If you liked the book when you read it 30 years ago, you'll probably like the movie now. I'm reading The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich's Pulitzer prize winner, and Jane Austen at Home, which started slowly and now is interesting. But I'm so distracted that I'm only managing a few pages a day. If you're a literature nerd (and I am), the Mr. Difficult podcast, about Jonathan Franzen, is fascinating and sometimes ridiculous, as suits its subject. And I'm reading Kate Bowler's new book of devotions, Good Enough, and I am not good enough to be reading them every day, so maybe I will finish that by summer.

I was going to say something along the lines of let it be new, but I knew I'd said it before, so I went and found the old post and I phrased it way better in 2019 that what I just wrote. Skip it if you're not feeling it today. And while I was looking for that post, I found this one, which made me laugh, so I'm linking to it, too. I warned you in the post title that this would be random. I wish you peace and some small breaks from the crazy, whenever you can manage them.

Behold, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland.  Isaiah 43.19

Pa Rum Pa Pum Pum

Awhile back I posted a two-page story I wrote in a creative writing class, and told you I would post another. But I never did, because my fellow class members didn't like this one, didn't like the ending, didn't like the title, thought it was kinda boring, etc, and I was going to fix it before I posted it. And then I could never figure out what would fix it. But I went back and read the original this morning and I like it better than any of the versions I tried to "fix," so here you go. 

From a writing standpoint, the interesting thing I learned is that even though it is somewhat autobiographical (I started playing drums in my 50s), as soon as I made her a clarinet player, she became someone else, someone not me (I play flute). First hand experience of what authors mean when they say a story is based on their own experience, but not autobiographical. 

------------------------------------------------

When Judy Warren had been playing drums for about a year, her teacher told her she was ready to play in the community band. Judy looked at him doubtfully. She might be in her fifties, but she was still a beginner, and the community band was good. The music they played was hard.

But her teacher was persuasive. And he was the leader of the percussion section, so he promised he wouldn’t assign her any parts that were beyond her skills. She finally decided to do it, because she could always play triangle. Anybody can play the triangle, right? Ding!

Judy was ahead of some beginning musicians because she knew how to read music. She had played clarinet for decades, since she was eight years old at a public school in Dallas. She had picked clarinet because her grandmother had told her she should. Her grandmother had a shelf of Benny Goodman albums and thought he could do no wrong. In Judy’s eyes, her grandmother could do no wrong.

Nearly fifty years later, Judy hadn’t played her clarinet since she couldn’t remember when. In fact, she wasn’t exactly sure where it was. But her children were off at college, and she needed a new challenge, and one day at the library she saw a flyer advertising drum lessons. She remembered being envious of the drummers, who played at the back of the band and always seemed to be having fun. The clarinets sat right under the director’s nose and could never get away with anything.

So she called the number on the flyer, and started to learn. She was awful. At age fifty-four, you don’t very often do things that make you look bad, especially in front of people. It was embarrassing, showing up for her lesson every week and knowing that she wasn’t as good as the fifteen-year-old that had the lesson before her, or even the twelve-year-old that had the lesson after. But she kept going. Soon she was no longer awful, just mediocre.

Her friends thought she was crazy. She spent hours a week practicing, and no one she knew was doing anything similar. None of them knew how to play any musical instrument at all (except she found out her friend Liz had minored in piano performance in college but didn’t even own a piano anymore). They couldn’t understand why she would want to spend hours every week banging on drums like a teenager.

It wasn’t until she showed up for her first community band rehearsal that she realized why she had wanted to do this. Making music, each of you reading black marks on a page and playing your part, was miraculous. There was nothing else like it in her life. It was three months until their first concert, but even with all the rough edges of early rehearsals, there were moments that lifted her soul. She remembered what it was like to make something beautiful with a group of people who had nothing else in common.

Playing clarinet in her high school marching band had been her life. They sweated and practiced under the August sun. They stood nervously together under the lights waiting for half-time to start. They traveled (oh, those school buses) and won competitions. They banded together and thumbed their band nerd noses at their high school’s strict social hierarchy. It had been a place where she belonged.

Percussionists don’t play just one single instrument. There are snare drums and tom-toms, the big bass drum and the tiny triangle, marimbas and bells, cymbals and wood blocks and maracas and chimes. And tympani. There was one woman whose only job was to play the tympani.

As the newcomer, Judy played all the parts that no one else wanted to play. She counted and counted, then crashed the cymbals at the climax of the first movement. She played the wood blocks at the beginning of another piece, and dinged the triangle on the second and fourth beat of each measure for nearly a page in another. By the end of the first rehearsal, she was exhausted.

But it was fun. And the second rehearsal was even better—she was starting to learn her way around. She made the comforting realization that even experienced drummers get lost while sight-reading. She came home and told her husband that playing in the community band was the best thing she’d done in years.

During her third rehearsal, right in the middle of a tense moment in the hardest piece they played, she whizzed by the percussion table to grab the crash cymbals and her hip caught the black flannel tablecloth. Maracas, wind chimes, wood blocks, and two sizes of triangles went crashing down. She wanted to sink through the floor, because everyone turned around to see what had happened.

But after that initial turning of heads, no one said a word. The conductor didn’t even pause. One by one, for the rest of the rehearsal, the other drummers came by with amusement in their eyes and whispered their own mistakes. One had knocked over a similar table of instruments during a competition. One had dropped a pair of cymbals in the middle of a concert. Another simply said, “Welcome to the percussion section! We’ve all done it!” She suddenly, deeply understood why drummers were so fiercely loyal to each other. And she determined, just as fiercely, not to let them down.

7ToF: I find your lack of faith disturbing

We're headed out of town this weekend to go cross-country skiing a few hours from here. The place we're going is out of cell range--in fact, it's off grid-- so I'm writing this on Wednesday. If I remember how to schedule it correctly, this will work, right?

1. We are, as always, watching the Olympics in the evenings. I get addicted, every time. Before it started this year, though, I wasn't sure I would watch because like everything, it turns out the Olympics are problematic and awkward right now. But finally I just decided to go with it. I'm tired of making decisions because of the principle of the thing. Really, really tired. I love the Olympics. I'm watching.

2. This was fascinating: The Dissenters Trying to Save Evangelicalism from Itself by David Brooks. It's in the NYTimes, which is usually behind a paywall, but I used the "gift an article" feature so maybe it will work. It's long, but if you're interested in evangelicalism either as a friend or a foe, it's worth a read. It gave me some hope that maybe Evangelicals are finally starting to come out of the reactionary thinking that has defined them for the past (half dozen? forty?) years, but what gave me even more hope was reading some of the reactions. Sure, there were some who intentionally misrepresented what Brooks said, but there were also many who were either agreeing, or thinking about it in intelligent ways.

3. Another interesting read on an entirely different subject: Ezra Klein on whether or not policy really matters.

4. Skip to #5 if you're not a Star Wars fan. One of my pet peeves in movies is when someone walks up to a computer they've never seen before, sometimes even a computer belonging to aliens, and they know exactly what to do to save the planet or the human race or whatever. It happens in Independence Day, it happens in Rogue One. We watched Rogue One last week, and although I did like it better than I have other times we've seen it, it's just absurd at the end. But you know what I loved this time? Darth Vader in the final sequence. That's one of the few times the presentation of Vader on screen has lived up to the reputation he is supposed to have as the fiercest, most skilled warrior of the empire. It's terrific.

5. I'm having trouble reading right now. I know I'm not alone, but it's messing with my understanding of the universe.

6. I walked into Target today without a mask, and it felt weird. It was the first time in months I'd been in an enclosed public space without a mask. The store policy, which they announce over the loudspeaker every ten minutes or so, is that you should wear a mask if you are unvaccinated, but I'm pretty sure the people who are unvaccinated aren't wearing masks. I've had two vaccines, plus the booster, plus I've had covid. I'm pretty sure I'm as covered as you can get. But it still felt weird-- and oddly, I felt like I was betraying the other people who are still wearing masks. I'll tell you what, though: I'm not interested in wearing a mask forever. *shrugs* But when I went to Costco later, I put my mask back on. Baby steps. 

(For the record, Montana doesn't have a mask mandate. I'd guess the percentage of people wearing masks in public spaces runs 10-20% in our town, higher in some of the larger towns, and zero in the more rural areas.)(Our county has a population of about 100k divided up among four towns, making it one of the more populous areas of the state. One of my favorite Montana moments occurred after we'd lived here for several years when a co-worker told me she wanted to move back home to a more rural area because she didn't like living in a big city.)

7. I might wear a mask on airplanes forever, though. It's so nice not to find out you have a cold two days after you get home from vacation.

That's all. Have a nice weekend.

(for the non-Star Wars nerds, the title is a Darth Vader quote.)

take a bite of this nice shiny apple and learn to see

I was raised Evangelical. My dad was an ordained Baptist minister, although he chose to go into academia instead of the pastorate. I spent my childhood going to church every time our church was open. I went to Christian camps in the summer, I sang in the youth choir, I listened to Christian music and studied my Bible, and I prayed a lot. When it came time to choose a college, I chose an Evangelical Christian one, because of course.

I believed. I bought the whole thing, the whole ball of wax, the whole shooting match, every cliché you can think of. I did all the things, and I had a lot of cool experiences as a result. I went to Explo '76 in Dallas with my parents and heard Billy Graham and Andrae Crouch, and we seriously believed the world was being changed. I attended concerts by Second Chapter of Acts and Amy Grant and others I can't even remember that left me feeling joyously transcendent; I went to fireside talks at camp (and even gave a couple when I was in college) that felt meaningful, like we were really making a difference. I believed it was all about love, God's love, and as Christians, our love for each other. They'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, yes, they'll know we are Christians by our love.

But the chinks in my faith were already starting to show, because (of course) Christians don't always act in loving ways, and Evangelical theology usually ends up more about whether or not you've got it Right, whether or not you are correctly supporting the party line, than whether or not you are acting out of love. Going off to a Christian college didn't help. I thought it was going to be like four years of going to my beloved summer camp, but it was just like high school. There were cliques and popular people, and the kids who came from wealthy families or famous Christian families were more popular than the rest of us. 

I had some great experiences there, and I will never regret going. But it didn't help my frustration with the limitations of the theology I was being taught, the theology that we weren't allowed to question. There were certain ways of thinking about the Bible and heaven and hell and salvation that weren't optional. You couldn't say, "The Bible is an amazingly varied historical document with the wisdom of the ancients embedded in it, the history of the Jewish people, and the start of a new religion as described in the Christian New Testament, but I don't believe it contains literal, word-for-word instructions for right now." If you said something like that, you were wrong. Not just a polite disagreement over the dinner table, but you-are-going-to-hell Wrong.

I didn't know there were any alternatives. I thought you either were a Christian (which for me, back then, was synonymous with being an Evangelical Christian), or you were going to hell. I didn't find out until I started visiting other churches in college that there were people--millions of them-- who considered themselves to be Christian, but who didn't believe in the Bible the way I was raised to believe. I thought it was either believe the whole thing, or you're out. And being out was unthinkable, because I had a whole life of sweet, lovely, transcendent spiritual experiences that I equated with being Evangelical. 

But by the time I was 23 or 24, I just couldn't make it work anymore. I started attending one of those other churches, and I gradually extricated myself from the way I was raised. It's a long, slow process that involves a lot of grieving for the way you thought the world was, and the people you wanted to belong to, not to mention a fair amount of self-judgment because why couldn't I make it work? If you're going through it, all I can say is: just keep going. It gets better. But you never entirely get over it. My heart still lifts when I hear those old Evangelical songs.

Then the Moral Majority came along, and Evangelicalism became even less recognizable as the religion of Jesus who transformed the world through subversive acts of love. It became the religion of purity, the religion of 1950s sexuality, the religion of outward acts of moral conformity that had nothing to do with what was happening in your heart and mind. And then Trump happened, and I just can't even begin to figure out how the religion I believed in so deeply when I was growing up has turned into the mass of lies and delusions and the judgmental lack of mercy that characterizes the far religious right today. It breaks my heart that good-hearted people are being preyed upon by power mongers and conspiracy theorists who get a charge out of proving that they can delude people into believing whatever they make up. ---------

-------- This is another one from my drafts folder. I think I felt like people who are new might need some background, but it is surprisingly difficult to believe that this is interesting to anyone but me, so it has been sitting there for months. Also, I compressed a very long, convoluted process into a handful of paragraphs, so if it sounds ridiculously over-simplified, that's because it is. I spent a couple of years in my old blog writing about the process of leaving my childhood faith behind, and even that wasn't enough to really describe it. But at least it gives you a bit of context.

This week's nostalgia listens: Peace of Mind by Boston, and Jet Airliner by Steve Miller Band. I think after this week I will let you find your own nostalgia listens, because the ones that take me right back are going to be different than the ones that take you back. The trick to finding a good one is to find one that you haven't heard much in the meantime. I went through a Led Zeppelin phase when I was in my 40s, so "D'Yer Mak'er"-- which used to take me straight back to the summer between fourth and fifth grade (for very specific but boring reasons)-- now reminds me more of being 44 than it does of being ten.

Have a great weekend.

anger, part one

I've been sick this week-- not deathly ill, just viral yuckiness. I did finally get a covid test yesterday, which came back negative today, so at least it isn't that. But I spent an outsize amount of time sleeping and sitting on the couch, and not enough time thinking about what I wanted to write this week. So I'm pulling this one out of the drafts folder at 11pm on Thursday night, even though I'm not sure exactly where it's going. If I ever get around to writing part 2, we can both find out.

I've been thinking about anger, lots. Both thinking about it and also feeling lots of anger. I'm angry about so many things right now-- social injustices, lack of change, anti-vaxxers, corporations who are making millions off lies and "misinformation," things in my personal life, and of course there's always the hulking, looming shadow of the pandemic in the background. 

How can you be angry about a pandemic? It's completely out of my individual control, although of course I'm doing my part to stop the spread, and it's no one's fault. What a waste of energy, to be mad about a virus. It's just out there, doing what viruses do. And yet, I am mad about it. I'm mad that I haven't been able to travel freely in two years, I'm mad about events that have been canceled and plans that have had to be changed, social occasions that didn't happen, community groups that have acrimoniously split over covid arguments-- it just goes on and on. 

What to do with all this anger? Where to direct it? I don't know. I'm working on it. Maybe I'll have answers in part 2, but probably not. The thing I've been thinking about this week, though, is the frequent disconnect between anger and having a spiritual life.

Having a spiritual life is an integral part of feeling healthy for me, but it's hard to find a spiritual "path" (sorry, I know it's a cliché) that makes room for anger. Being "spiritual" is supposed to be the same thing as being calm and serene, right? It's supposed to be about floating through life on a fluffy cloud of unwavering trust that God is in charge (if you're theist), or peacefully (smugly) observing the crazy swirl of emotions and over-reactions of the less spiritual (if you're not). 

And that's just not going to work for me right now. Maybe it is because I'm immature and unevolved. But a spiritual life that's founded on dishonesty is hardly worth the effort, not to mention that it's pretty much the definition of hypocrisy. And if I pretend I'm not mad, or frustrated, or even sometimes despairing, I'm lying. I want to believe spirituality is about being real, being grounded in myself, in authenticity (hmmm, lots of buzzwords there). 

Maybe it's because traditionally, spirituality has been connected with various religious paths, and institutionalized religion has a vested interest in keeping its people wrapped in cotton wool, not asking questions, and not thinking about the ways you're being coached into supporting the status quo. 

No. I want a spiritual path that can deal with my anger. I want to be set free to feel what I feel rather than herded into following along. And that's complicated to figure out, because of course acting blindly out of uncontrolled rage isn't a great idea, either. I'm having a hard time right now untangling the beauty of a fully-present life, a life that includes anger and fear and jealousy and pain as well as joy and peace, from my own preconception of what a spiritual person should be like. And a spiritual person doesn't get angry??? That can't be right. 

Huh. That's where the draft post ended. No wonder I hadn't published it yet, because it's like half a thought. It may not even have made much sense. But maybe you will grant me a little leeway since I'm still feeling a bit sickly and I will try to explain better in part 2. 

In other news, one of the things that made me angry this week was watching women my age chase after youth. Give it up. Good grief. Why the hell do we care if a 16-year-old thinks skinny jeans have gone out of style? Why do we want to look like we're 35 again? (well, OK, you got me there.) but since it's not possible, why are we wasting time and money chasing after something we can't have?

Which is one of the reasons I post the nostalgia listens. It's a way of celebrating the things we know, the things we've experienced, that those teenagers haven't and never will. They do not know what it was like to hear "Sweet Baby James" when it was brand new, or "I Just Called to Say I Love You," or "I'll Take You There." And we do. So there. (We're also super mature. ha.) I'm adding links to those songs and they can be this week's nostalgia listens.

Twitterpated, part one

Like most of us who use social media, I have a love-hate relationship with it. I've written about this plenty before, it's not a new topic. My goal has been to "get a handle on" my usage, learn how to steel myself against the addictive qualities of The Scroll, and have a healthier relationship with my phone. Um, yeah. 

In the meantime, while I was figuring out how to be a Social Media Superwoman, I fell into a pattern. I would find myself doom-scrolling Twitter at 11pm, unable to stop. So I would delete it. For a few days, it would be such a relief. Then for a few days, I would miss the interaction, but not much. Then after a few more days, I would re-install the app, and think, why did I delete this? It's so much fun! I love these people! And for a week or two, I would healthily manage my social media interactions and everything would be great. And then after a few more days, I'd be doom-scrolling at midnight again. Repeat.

A few weeks ago it occurred to me, wait, maybe this is the way I healthily manage social media. I don't have to be all-in, I don't have to be all-out. I don't have to figure out what way smarter, more savvy people than me have been unable to figure out (how to resist the addictive qualities of The Scroll, which are purposely programmed in by evil geniuses). Maybe if I reframe the way I think about the cycle, this is how I do it.

So I've been through it a couple more times, and you know what? It works pretty well. I use my social media apps (mainly Twitter), making judicious use of iOS 15's productivity features (more about that another time). When I get to the point where it feels unhealthy, I delete it for a few days or a week. When I start to miss it, I reinstall it and start over. It doesn't seem right to manage it that way-- it seems like I should totally conquer my unhealthy habits, or if I can't, I should abstain 100%. And maybe that's the way it works for some people, and maybe that's the way it will work for me at some later date. But for now, this is the way I "manage" my social media. 

This was going to be a lot longer, but I'm out of time, and I always say I'm going to start writing shorter posts, right? So here you go. A short one. 

p.s. I remember my mom used to use the word "twitterpated," but I had no idea where it came from until I just googled. It is a song from the old Disney movie Bambi. Who knew? And since I didn't, that can't be this week's nostalgia listen, so hmmm.

OK, this week's nostalgia listen: "Jazzman" by Carole King. Listen here. She is a goddess. For extra amazingness, click here for "So Far Away." I wonder if I could find my Tapestry CD.

post-Beatles Beatlemania

If you were born in the fifties or early sixties, and you haven't watched Get Back: The Beatles yet, put it on your must-watch list. It's tedious at times, sometimes for long stretches of time, and we've fast forwarded over, um, a bit of it. But mostly it's fascinating. 

I will confess I was never a huge Beatles fan, at least partly because believe it or not, I was a bit young for Beatlemania--I was eight when they split up. But their music was everywhere in the sixties, the playlist of my childhood. They were so much a part of pop culture that everyone knew who John, Paul, George, and Ringo were. 

But it turns out, they--the four Beatles-- aren't who I expected them to be. Watching them interact with Linda's daughter Heather is just sweet, there's no other word for it. And I've always thought that John was sort of self-consciously art-y and pretentious, so that if I'd known them, I would have been more on Paul's side. But if I'd had to listen to Paul's long-winded, half-whiny lectures for ten years, I'd have wanted to exit stage left, too. Immediately. Good lord. 

Interestingly, even though he's easily the one who talks the most, he rarely wins out-- witness his long argument about why they shouldn't do a rooftop concert (ha). And however arty and avant-garde John and Yoko were, John is also kind of hilarious. He's the one who's always goofing around, trying to lighten the mood.

Watching them work, you wonder that they ever got anything done, they spend so much time clowning around and goofing off and trying this and trying that. It's probably exactly the way musicians write songs, I've just never watched it happen. You can tell that the whole enterprise is frequently in danger of completely coming apart (and it did, a year later, but this is not the last album they recorded--that would be Abbey Road-- even though it was the last to be released, so they lasted through at least one more set of studio sessions). But you can also tell that they are deeply, deeply embedded in each other's lives, the irritating teenage best friends that you can't quite live without.

When they're working on one of their iconic songs and they don't have the words or the melody quite right yet, you want to yell at the screen, No, you dummies!! That's not how it goes!! It's "attracts me like no other lover," not "attracts me like a cauliflower" (granted they're joking around with the cauliflower but they haven't yet come up with the words we all know by heart, and it seems like it should be so obvious). 

And then suddenly they get it "right," i.e., the way we know it's supposed to go, and it's like the finicky car engine you've been fiddling around with for days suddenly starts up and runs smoothly. I confess, I've been a bit obsessed. In case you couldn't tell.

Get Back is only on Disney+ right now but I suppose eventually it will be released more widely.

the right write

For a very long time, when I was in college and into my twenties and thirties, I thought My Destiny was to be a novelist. I like to write, and I love to read novels, and I was convinced that meant that I should be a novelist.

But two things happened to change that. One was that I discovered that I hated writing fiction. I sit down to write a blog post with a fair amount of enjoyment, but writing fiction never, ever felt like anything other than having my fingernails pulled out one by one, or whatever other form of medieval torture you want to imagine here.

The other thing that happened was that I read two or three novels that were the kind of thing that I dreamed of writing, but were far better than anything I had ever managed to produce. I don't even remember what they were at this late date, but I remember several times putting a novel aside with a sigh of satisfaction/admiration/envy and thinking, No one needs me to do this because other people are already doing it better than I ever could. Who needs another coming of age novel by a middle class straight white woman who loves to read?

Then I had kids, and writing became something I only did in emails and book reviews and contributions to the comments of various forums. It wasn't until our younger child was in elementary school that I started writing again. At that point, I was still trying to write a novel, but I never made it past thirty or forty thousand words during National Novel Writing Month, and the rest of the year, all I felt was relief that I wasn't trying to write a novel. 

I started a blog in 2003 (several iterations back from the one you're reading now), and for a long time, that was enough to keep me happy, because whatever else I can or can't do, I do love to write. 

But I sometimes wish I'd had the grit and determination to actually commit to a big, publishable writing project, whether fiction or non, and stick with it to the end. I tried again last summer, but I don't think I ever made it past about 5,000 words. 

It's hard to know exactly how to interpret this. Our culture, especially the writing subculture, is so full of easy wisdom that assures you that you can do whatever you want to do, that all you need to succeed is the previously mentioned grit and determination, all you have to do is believe in yourself and keep trying and you'll succeed.

Seriously, at least three times in the past year I've seen tearfully joyful Instagram posts from first-time authors, sobbing, I've been dreaming of this since I was ten! All of you out there who are dreaming of publishing your first book, I'm proof that you can do it! Just keep writing! And yet, not everyone gets published. Not everyone has the writing chops, or the of-the-moment thing to say, or the built-in audience from podcasting or blogging or social media followers. 

I know that sounds like sour grapes, and you're absolutely right, it is. But my point isn't to whine (even though I am), but to state the obvious dilemma: is it really just not "meant to be"? should I stop even thinking about trying to write a book-length project? or have I not tried hard enough, persevered long enough, worked my ass off long enough?

There were another three paragraphs along these lines, which I have no deleted, because they were boring. You get the message. What the hell am I doing here.

I'm working my way through the half-written posts in my Drafts folder. Who knows what will be next. Have a great weekend.

Start by Giving a Crap. (Right.)

At some point last fall, I think it was in October when covid numbers were dramatically spiking here locally, some inner part of me threw up her hands and said I'm done. I was past the point of caring, past the point of wanting to waste my mental energy worrying and/or arguing with the idiots. Just done.

But the thing about a pandemic is that it isn't done when we want it to be done. It's done when it has run its course, and apparently covid-19 isn't done with us yet. And of course there's all kinds of medical people (including two right here in my house) who don't have the option of shutting down. They're still right there in it. 

After getting several unrelated nudges from the universe this week, though, I'm coming around. I can't stay checked out forever. As my Ten Percent Happier meditation said on Monday--in a somewhat different context-- start by giving a crap. Damn it.

So here we still are. And I'm sorting through exactly what I'm going to care about and what I'm not.

In other news, since I just checked, I can tell you with confidence that I have THIRTY-ONE half-written posts in my Drafts folder. Maybe one way of caring would be to start posting again. 

In the meantime, here is my list of my favorite books I read in 2021. Other than Deacon King Kong being my favorite, they are in no particular order.

Deacon King Kong by James McBride
Everything I read by Martha Wells (especially the Murderbot Diaries)
Good Talk by Mira Jacob
The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K.Jemisin
The Liars' Club by Mary Karr
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson

Honorable Mention: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, King and the Dragonflies, Craft in the Real World, Hamnet, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, Under the Whispering Door, Project Hail Mary, Assassination Vacation.

This week's nostalgia listen: Whitesnake, "Here I Go Again"

OMG you have to watch the video. Did we ALL HAVE THE SAME HAIR? My hair has never in my life been that long but I sure had the perm.

Palate cleanser: try this one (song starts at 2:54) (pass the carrots, please)(but they still have the hair)