7ToF: crone-y

1. Everyone knows about dry, chapped lips in the winter, but a few years ago my lips were so unusually dry and cracked that it was painful. After a bit of thought, it occurred to me that a couple of weeks before I had started taking a daily cranberry supplement on the advice of Somebody On The Internet. "UTIs are the cause of all kinds of trouble for older women, take a cranberry supplement to keep them at bay!" 

I stopped taking the cranberry, and my lips were back to normal in a few days. It is actually true that UTIs can be the cause of all kinds of trouble, but apparently a daily cranberry supplement is too much for me. Now I only take cranberry (or drink some cranberry juice) if I feel something coming on.

2. This winter, it happened again, but my painful lips were so painful that it was keeping me awake at night. Believe it or not, it was a couple of weeks before I thought about what supplements I was taking, and realized that the culprit might be an anti-migraine supplement I had spotted at the health food store a month before. 

The supplement had several different herbs/minerals that I had heard were helpful for migraines (ginger, feverfew, etc), so I thought I would try it. I have no idea which ingredient was causing the problem, but once again when I stopped taking the supplement, my lips were better within a couple of days, although it was about ten days before they got back to normal. 

3. Moral of the story: not sure, because I'm not going to stop taking all supplements. A couple of them seem to be helpful. How about this: if I'm going to try something new, be on the lookout for unusual symptoms for a few weeks so it doesn't take so long to figure it out.

4. Switching gears: thirty years ago, I believed that for the most part you were done changing and growing by the time you hit 30. At that age, I had a child, my spouse and I were both working and keeping ourselves afloat, we had even bought our first house--a shabby rancher in a 1970s subdivision. We were fully grown adults, right? But by my 40s I knew that wasn't true-- I was learning new stuff all the time. And now I'm surprised to find out how much I'm still learning in my 60s. It's not a small amount. I'm learning a lot these days. 

5. One of the many new-age teachers I knew back in the 90s when New Age was still a thing (I posted a bunch about this many years ago, here is the most interesting of them) said something that still comes to mind. If you open yourself to growth, you will grow. I hate to use the phrase "setting an intention," but she probably said, if you set an intention to pursue spiritual growth, the resources you need will find you. 

6. I get less and less woo-woo as the years go by, but I have to admit this has been true every time I've tried it. As long as I stay open to growth, the tools and information I need come to hand--in the form of books or newspaper articles or podcasts or even conversations overhead at the post office-- anything. To try it for yourself, just say, maybe even out loud, I'm ready to grow whenever you think of it. I was feeling kind of stuck a few weeks ago and tried it. It's such a relief to find out that I can still grow and change at age 61. 

Make of that what you will. Of course, it could be things that would have happened anyway, and the only change is my level of awareness. Be skeptical if you want, you have my blessing.

7. A few days ago, I was looking for a post I wrote years ago. Instead of finding that one, I ran across a half dozen other posts that said pretty much exactly the same kinds of things I've been thinking about in 2023. Apparently, I can grow and change, but yup-- also I'm still exactly the same. I think it was Karen Armstrong who wrote about growth being a spiral: you keep circling back around to the same issues, but you're in a different place each time you visit them. 

Wow, I wasn't intending to go that direction when I started this. We're headed south for a couple of weeks in search of (we hope) some sun, so I'm not sure if I'll post again until we get back. Have a great weekend and enjoy the rest of January, wherever you are.

another grumpy old person unpopular opinion. I seem to have a lot of them these days.

One of the reasons I was so underwhelmed by Top Gun Maverick when I saw it last summer is that I'm so tired of mavericks. The basic mythology of ONE MAN, ALONE, breaking rules and flouting authority and saving the day is practically wired into our brains. It's part of our national character. There's Pete Mitchell/Tom Cruise in Top Gun. There's John McClane/Bruce Willis in the Die Hard series. Han Solo, Iron Man, Ocean's Eleven. There's a million westerns and heist movies and military guys gone rogue that all feed our need to see that the status quo is inherently bad and only a disruptor, a troublemaker, can make things right.

I've been as big a fan of the idea as anyone in the past, but I'm just so tired of it. I only saw the new Top Gun movie once and it was several months ago, so I don't remember the details. It was fun-- there's no denying it was fun to watch. But the whole thing was so obvious it makes me roll my eyes. Of course after he gets fired or pulled off the team or whatever it is, he's going to steal a plane and defy his superiors and get back in there and use some good old-fashioned American ingenuity to do the job the average people think can't be done. OF COURSE. Because he's Tom Cruise, and he's a maverick, and we have infinite belief in the power of a troublemaker to overcome the forces of mediocrity and save the day.

It's all fun and games when Tom Cruise flashes his cocky grin and faces down the boring authority figures, but is it so much fun when a handful of congresspeople can hold up the entire process of government for a nation of 330 million because they believe they are lone warriors standing up to big government? How fun is it when a wealthy sloganeer spends four years in the White House because he's convinced his base he's a disruptor who can clear the swamp? There's a big cesspool of fat cats in Washington and only an outsider, a maverick, can save the day! 

At some point we need to start valuing functional systems again. We could show some respect for the people who show up for work and get their jobs done, even if it is in the service of the status quo, because it is in the service of the status quo. Maybe we could acknowledge that even if there is some deadweight in government and civil service, there is also a whole lot of stuff that works just fine, because regular, boring people follow the rules and do their jobs. And thank God for that.

Some mavericks are just a pain in the ass.

And that's (another of) my unpopular opinion(s). Next thing you know I'll be stopping gen Xers in the street and telling them to get a haircut and get a real job.

P.S. I wrote the first version of this post on Friday morning. The post title was "I am So Tired of Disruptors" and since I was trying not to target the new Top Gun movie specifically, I had only used the word "maverick" once. Then Saturday night we watched Glass Onion (not to get sidetracked, but we thought it was fun, and at least it was different--no sci-fi, no dragons, no superheroes, no romance). If you haven't seen it, the word "disruptors" plays a large part in the movie, and even though the writer used it in a way that was sort of similar to what I mean here, it just felt wrong to leave the post the way it was. So I re-wrote it a bit, and now it is much more directly about the Top Gun movie. I know a maverick and a disruptor are not exactly the same thing, but at least in the way I mean here, they are in the same group of provocateurs who think their job is to shake things up instead of being "boring" and playing by the rules. Apparently, I'm a fan of boring people at the moment.

My So-Called Reading Life: 2022 Wrap-up

I read 92 books during 2022, which will seem like a lot to some of you, and laughably few to others. That's about the same as last year, but there was a major difference: in 2022, I did a lot of re-reading, especially during the summer. I was stressed about the wedding and I didn't have enough energy to tackle anything new or challenging, so I fell back on books I already knew I would love. 

So it was kind of a strange reading year. Another way that it was strange was that I didn't read anything that had that immediate knock-your-socks-off this is one of my all-time favorites feeling. Last year there was Deacon King Kong. The year before that, there were a bunch. This year, there were several good solid reads, but no real standouts. 

For the record, probably my favorites were The Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, Olympus, Texas by Stacey Swann, The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich, and Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Apparently I just read what everyone else is reading. Honorable Mention to What are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, Hell of a Book by Jason Mott, and No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood.

Maybe the best book I read in 2022 was an oldie, A Visit From the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan), that I finished about two days before the year ended. I didn't think I was going to like it because I'd heard so much about it and it didn't seem like my kind of book. But the sequel, The Candy House, came out in 2022, and it sounded intriguing. So I decided it was time. To my surprise, Goon Squad was great. Then I proceeded on to Candy House, which I didn't like quite as well, but they're both good. 

And the two of them together are astonishing. You can just breeze through them, and they would be great that way, but being as obsessive as I am, I spent a lot of time tracing the connections between the two. There are a lot of them. I have no idea how she kept track of everything while she was writing. I would have needed color-coded spreadsheets and half a dozen poster boards. (I just finished Candy House yesterday, so officially speaking it is on my 2023 list.)

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When I started this blog back in 2015, I was determined that it would not be a book blog. At the time, it seemed to me that there were thousands of bookish-women-of-a-certain-age who were writing book blogs. I haven't exactly avoided writing about books, obviously, especially not recently, but for the most part, I've stuck with my determination to keep the book talk to a minimum. 

Almost eight years later, hardly anyone is blogging about anything anymore, let alone books. And most of the writing I've done in the last few months has been the brief reviews I write on Goodreads for (almost) every book I read. 

They're only "brief" in that they aren't full-scale, professional-level book reviews, because some of them have ended up being pretty damn long, at least compared to the average Goodreads review. Since I haven't had all that much to post about here recently, I think I may back off on my determination to avoid being the stereotypical book blogger and start posting some of the more interesting ones here. You've been warned.

I was talking to some other book lovers last fall and mentioned that I review the books I read on Goodreads. They were a little put off by that, partly because Goodreads is owned by Amazon and we all know how problematic that is. But partly also because, as one of them put it, "I could never believe that anyone wanted to read my opinion about a book." 

Which is also true of me. I can never believe that either. But that's the thing about both Goodreads and blog posts--you're not forcing anyone to read them. I'm not even really expecting anyone to read them. I just like writing them. 

That Reminds Me of a Story™: about ten years ago, I was chatting with a woman sitting next to me at a writers conference. She told me that she was about to start a blog and she had a professionally designed logo and a tagline and a marketing campaign all lined up. I told her that I've had a blog since 2003 (there were three before this one), and she eagerly asked me for advice. Since my blog (and my Goodreads reviews) have never really attracted much attention, I was pretty sure I shouldn't be giving anyone advice, but I told her, well, it helps if you like to write. And honestly, from the look on her face, I'm not sure it had ever occurred to her that she was going to have to actually write posts if she wanted to have any content on her new blog.

I think I might have told you that story before, and come to think of it, she is probably killing it as an influencer on TikTok these days. 

I didn't quite make it through all the reading life topics I had in mind, so this may be continued next week. Or maybe we will move on to bigger and better things. Have a great weekend.

A Grumpy Old Person and her Unpopular Opinion about the Movies

I think you can tell that time has truly passed you by--that you have, in fact, become irrelevant-- when the big blockbuster moments that are moving the culture at large leave you shrugging your shoulders. 

I've seen three big, successful films this year, and I had the same reaction to all of them: pretty or even spectacular visuals, seamlessly made, but shrug. They were OK. A bunch of hackneyed clichés, plot points that feel like they came from a checklist, all put together with beautiful actors, polished cinematography, and outstanding costume design. (For the record, the ones I'm talking about are Top Gun: Maverick, Where the Crawdads Sing, and Avatar: Way of Water.)

People talk about those films as if they are all-time classics, pure magic on the big screen. But I came out of them feeling a little disappointed and, maybe weirdly, a little manipulated. It feels like the filmmakers have sucked you in with addictively gorgeous visuals and Meaningful Archetypal Plot Points, but left you with nothing to think about, nothing to chew on, so to speak. It's all stock characters and ham-fisted morality. Even when I agree with what's being preached, I hate being preached at. 

Yesterday I listened to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast (Dec 16 2022 episode) where they discussed Avatar: Way of Water, with a panel of commentators who are all probably 30+ years younger than me. They are smart and literate and their opinions make sense, but listening to them is what made me realize, oh, the problem is that I am old. I have different expectations going into a movie. 

They were in complete agreement with me that it was a humorless, heavy-handed, ponderous plot, but they didn't care. They were so transported by the immersive visuals that they barely noticed the generic story. The innovation of what they were seeing on the screen meant more to them than an innovative plot.

They walked out awed by the groundbreaking technology that made the CGI so spectacular; I walked out thinking it was just a remake of the first Avatar movie set underwater (and on the Titanic)(you practically expected Kate Winslet* to run around the corner shouting Jack! Jack!).

I'm not sorry I saw it. It was a decent use of three hours of my time. I was invested enough that I was teary-eyed when someone dies toward the end. But I guess I'm just not a visual person, because for me all the visual wow was not enough to make up for the stock characters and derivative plot. 

That's my unpopular opinion, and I know it is, and I understand that it just identifies me as a grumpy old person. But seriously. Maverick is such a stock plot that they never even named the enemy country, because it doesn't matter. Whoever it was, Tom Cruise and all those exceptional Americans would have defeated them. The Crawdad movie was practically an entire movie about a white woman's tears and the stock characters surrounding her. It's beautiful. The acting is moving. You feel like an old grinch for even complaining, but I found myself thinking (like Timon), and... everybody's OK with this? 

The exception is the only other movie that I saw in a theater in 2022, the new Black Panther. It checked all the boxes of blockbuster budget, gorgeous costumes, pretty to look at, etc, but the way it dealt with grief over the death of T'Challa was genuinely moving to me. It had its own problems--it wasn't nearly as seamless-feeling as the other three, for one thing, and I suppose MCU movies will always be bound by the expectations of people who have read the comics-- but I came out of it thinking, that was a great movie, which I did not think of any of the others.

Those other three were fun, enjoyable blockbuster movies if you could turn off your brain and just watch. They weren't a waste of time. Maverick took the standard "arrogant hot shot young guy saves the world" plot and changed it to an old guy. Way of Water made its heroes parents with a blended family and children who misbehave. Crawdads is at heart a movie about a woman who is fed up with sexual harassment. Those aren't meaningless ideas. But they all felt so slick.

If it weren't for the way people are talking about them, my irritation would be at a level that wouldn't even be worth mentioning. But I heard someone say that Maverick is one of the ten best films ever made, and the swooning praise I've heard about the Way of Water makes me wonder if we actually saw the same film.

So, that's all I have to say. I deleted two paragraphs of further moralizing and trying to justify my opinion because there's no need. Who cares? I'm writing this out here because every time I've tried to say this irl, I've been booed down, so if I type it here, maybe I'll get my grumpiness out of my system and I can keep my mouth shut. Because entertainment is often a good thing, and those three movies were certainly entertaining.  

* Kate Winslet voices one of the characters in The Way of Water. When you see it, see if you can figure out which one it is without looking at the credits (I couldn't).