mini-rants and updates, May 2024 edition

1. Like many, last Friday we watched the northern lights with awe. Unfortunately, we didn't know about the trick of enhancing the view with a cell phone camera until the next day. So the first picture is from Saturday night, which was considerably less spectacular but still very cool, and one from a few nights later, when there were no northern lights, just a beautiful night sky.

2. After four+ years of posting a mini-review on Goodreads of almost every book I've read, I suddenly found myself tired of it a few weeks back. Since then, I've tried out several alternative sites and apps, but none of them are as simple and straightforward if your main goal is just to keep a record of what you've read. (After several hours of using the most promising alternative, I still couldn't even find the list of books I've read.) Apparently the most popular features now are timers and reminders and game-like motivators, none of which I would use. 

So for now, I'm continuing on with Goodreads but without writing reviews (as far as I can tell, no one reads them except my daughter so that shouldn't be a problem). GR gets a lot of hate because it's owned by Amazon, but I have to say why not take advantage of a service that they are in effect providing for free? The current saying is, "If it's free, you are the product," and of course that's true, but the ads are way less intrusive than some of the other reading apps I tried, and I'm unwilling to pay $50 a year for what is really just a memory aid for me. I'm open to better ideas if you have suggestions. So far I've tried Book Buddy, Storygraph, and Bookly.

3. You know what works? Sportswashing. There may be plenty of unanswered questions about how the PGA (the player-owned professional golf association) and LIV golf (owned by the Saudis) will integrate, but no one is talking about human rights violations or institutional misogyny any more. It's sad and a little disgusting. Money makes all kinds of problems go away. I have rarely been as disappointed in a famous person as I was when Rahm signed on with LIV at the end of last year.

4. For years now, body positivity has been challenging cultural attitudes about women's bodies and working to end fat shaming, slut shaming, and genital shaming. And yet suddenly there is this big push for full-body deodorant and everybody seems to think it's great. Human bodies smell like human bodies. We do not need another thing to be ashamed about. I wear under-arm deodorant and I take regular showers, but I refuse to be ashamed about how my body smells. The commercials for this stuff come on sports networks all the time. It's super annoying--and this time it's aimed at men and women, which just goes to show how sensitive we all can be when it comes to body shaming.

5. The rest of this post is about migraines so you can stop reading if you're not interested. I'm pretty sure I've told you that after I had covid in November 2020, my migraines got way worse. Way worse. I guess it is my version of long covid. 

I've had migraines since I was in my 20s, and I have tried all manner of dietary changes, hormones, antidepressants, anti-seizure meds, physical therapy, chiropractic, acupuncture, cranial-sacral therapy, energy balancing-- pretty much everything, science-based and not. Some things helped (especially triptan meds), some didn't, but I have consistently averaged 6-10 migraines a month for decades--which is no fun, but manageable with the triptans. 

But post-covid, with my frequency way up, I finally qualified for stronger interventions. First up was botox injections. You get a bunch of injections, starting in your forehead and going up and over your scalp and into your neck and shoulders. Apparently the shots themselves are a deterrent for some, but the whole thing takes less than ten minutes and they don't hurt nearly as much as a migraine does.

It sounded great, and they've been life changing for some, but for me they did next to nothing, even after five or six rounds of treatment. Possibly there was some reduction in severity--and as my neurologist said, that's not meaningless-- but there was no reduction in frequency. 

So several months ago, I stopped the botox, and asked my neuro what was up next. He prescribed Ajovy, one of a number of new migraine drugs that are based on monoclonal antibodies and don't ask me to explain that. Ajovy is a monthly injection that you can give yourself at home, and I've done four injections now. 

I am cautiously optimistic. It was miraculous the first two months, the best I've felt since before peri-menopause (mid-40s). Then it started working less well, but I also had a covid-like illness during that time period (the covid test was negative, but the symptoms were similar).

So I am hopeful it will get better again. I went to see my neurologist last week and he said to do a couple more months of Ajovy before I decide it's not working. I'm not 100% cured of migraines, but even at the less effective level, it's still way better than before.

Bottom line: if you are a migraineur and you haven't been to your neurologist in years (I hadn't, pre-covid), try again, because there are new therapies. They are also super expensive, but not too bad with good insurance. I am grateful.

Have a good weekend. In case you couldn't tell, this was a filler post while I try to figure out what I'm doing next. I have two ideas, one of which I am unqualified to comment on, and one of which you're probably not interested in (apologies for dangling prepositions). Stay tuned. Maybe a third option will present itself.

Silence is golden, but unfortunately sometimes you have to talk

No one will be surprised if I say that introverts are usually not chatty people. In fact, small talk is one of my biggest anxieties. I have a long history of slipping out the back of meetings, parties, and barbecues in order to avoid having to make conversation. 

In fact, my biggest anxiety about having people over is not the food-- pretty much anyone who comes to our house knows not to expect anything fancy-- it's the conversation. What if we all sit down to eat and no one can think of anything to say? Because that has happened. I'm not a great conversationalist. Sometimes silence falls and I've got nothing. 

So a couple of years ago I started collecting conversation questions. Turns out there are quite a few lists out there. I printed out the promising ones, cut them into strips, put them in a jar, and came up with random "rules" for how this Q&A game would be played. I also keep a list on my phone for restaurants.

So here you go-- a few of my collection. They've led to some pretty fun conversations.

• Would you rather live in a tree house, a house boat, or a castle?
• What did you eat for breakfast? Do you eat the same thing every day?
• If you could organize your life however you wanted with no regard for your responsibilities, what time would you go to sleep and what time would you get up?
• You have fifteen minutes to evacuate your house. Besides the basics (phone, passport, pets, etc), what would you take?
• If you were a contestant in a pageant, what would your talent be? (men have to answer this one, too)(unconventional talents encouraged)
• It's vacation time: travel or stay home? If travel: beach, mountains, city....? If stay home: what would you do?
• If you could instantly become an expert in some skill or hobby, what would it be?
• What was your favorite TV show when you were a kid?
• Would you rather live in Barrow, Alaska (extreme cold), or Death Valley, California (extreme heat)?
• What would be the coolest thing about your dream house?
• What is your favorite holiday? least favorite?
• What was your first paying job? did you like it?
• If you're having a bad day, what cheers you up? 
• What age do you feel?
• Dog/cat/both/neither?
• Have you ever met a celebrity in person? Tell us everything.
• Who was your best friend when you were ten? 
• What kind of music did you like when you were 17?

Surprisingly to me, the ones who seem to enjoy this the most are the kids. Maybe because if we go around the table to answer, it puts them on equal footing with the adults. (Of course, if kids will be present, I cull the questions to suit.) 

My "rules" are: everyone pulls a question, but if you get one you don't like, you can pull a different one. If you don't want to answer a question, you can pass. Elaborating beyond a one-word response is encouraged. That's all.

I'm always on the lookout for new ones, so if you have any ideas, let me know. I did have one-- what is your all-time favorite book? -- that I've ended up discarding because it embarrassed people who are not readers, and also those of us who are avid readers would immediately be off on a twenty minute discussion.

Have a great weekend. Ask some questions and be curious about the answers!

hyper-criticism, clumsy shoes, and messy reality

I. 

I am good at analyzing a problem. Bring me into a situation or a work group, or hand me a book to read, and the skill I bring to the table is telling you what's wrong with it, often in minute detail. If I really get on a roll, I can become passionate about my analysis, and I will wrestle your wimpy defense of the status quo to the ground. 

I was well into my 30s before I realized that other people aren't always happy to be on the receiving end of my analysis. Why wouldn't people want to know what is wrong? Of course they will be grateful for my brilliance! Surely people wouldn't want to blithely, ignorantly carry on when I could helpfully point out to them how a situation (or their personality) could be improved? But shockingly to me, that is often the case. 

There are times--especially at the beginning of solving a problem-- when skills like mine are useful. But analysis is only one small part of problem-solving, and it's not the most important part. It is the easy part--figuring out how to solve a problem and moving forward into a new way of doing things is way harder than critiquing what's wrong. Getting stuck in an infinite critique loop where you are continually, more precisely, defining what's wrong is a great way to guarantee you'll never move forward.

II.

My senior year in high school, I took calculus, which was just the next class you took if you had passed all the advanced math classes you'd been enrolled in since seventh grade. There were maybe 25 students in the class, and we all knew each other because of those previous math classes. The teacher, Mr Arnold, was much beloved, one of the best teachers I've ever had.

One day he posed a hypothetical question: if you were walking toward a wall, and every step you took was half the length of the previous step, would you ever reach the wall? We smiled smugly. This was easy. Of course not. We were used to hypothetical questions, and clearly, if every step you took was only half as long as the previous one, you could never actually arrive at the wall. There would always be tiny, ever-shrinking space between your shoe and the wall.

He let us yammer on for a few minutes and then he said, Of course you'd get there. We live in the real world. The material of your shoe, the nature of your physical presence, your ability to precisely move a tiny distance-- at some point, your shoe would hit the wall.

I still think about this (obviously) because it made such an impression on me. I thought math was all about the rules, and here was a teacher telling us that the real world answer is different than our ability to do the arithmetic to divide a distance in two.

III. 

I think in some ways, progressive intellectuals, myself included, think we have created a pristine critical space where our theory can slice and dice the problems of our culture ever more precisely. We are self-importantly sure that we know all the ways our society is wrong, and then we insist that it all needs to be changed. "Burn it all down" is not infrequently mentioned. 

But we live in the real world, and we're less good with exactly how that would happen and how things would look on the other side. We get so caught up in our dazzling ability to critique The Way Things Are that we forget that we are messy, imperfect people critiquing the actual lives of our messy, imperfect co-humans.

And somehow we think that if we can analyze a problem, it's not our problem. That's quite the mental leap. You get this from both sides of our polarized nation, of course, but based on some recent experiences I've had, I think that moderate conservatives are a little better at defusing this than we are. 

We're all in this together. If I'm sitting in the conference room at work and we're problem solving, I don't get to leave the room when the "analyze the problem" part is over just because it's what I'm good at. I'm still part of the team, and the real work is just getting started.

I'm only a few pages into Sho Baraka's book on creativity,* but I am struck by this thought in the introduction: "When our humility is low, and our anger is high and we are certain our ideology is right; we are capable of doing substantial damage," and this is true no matter which ideology you champion. Maybe the most important thing is humility, and the willingness to care about what's happening and then wade into the mess.

* Sho Baraka, He Saw That it was Good: Reimagining Your Creative Life to Repair a Broken World.

road listens

I'm in Louisiana this week and have been busier than expected helping my mom get her new place together (and adopt a rescue cat). So this is just a filler that I started writing at 9pm on Thursday night. I thought I would pass along some things that we enjoyed listening to while we were endlessly driving on our three-week road trip. 

Listening is not my favorite way to consume any type of media, but if I'm in the car and there's no other way to do it, I've listened to plenty of audiobooks and podcasts over the years. When you're traveling with someone, it's super hard to come up with things you both will enjoy. Here are a few that worked for both of us.

- We were latecomers to the "60 Songs that Explain the 90s" podcast, hosted by Rob Harvilla (available through all the usual podcast apps, as are all the podcasts I mention here). By the time we found it, Rob had already bumped up from 60 songs to 90, and then from 90 to 120 songs that explain the 90s. We skipped around and listened to the ones that sounded intriguing, so we've only listened to about 20 so far--which means we have plenty more to listen to the next time we travel.  

- I've told you I'm hit or miss on the "We Can Do Hard Things" podcast, hosted by Glennon Doyle, her wife Abby Wambach, and her sister Amanda Doyle. But episode 282, "Your 'Stuff' Personality Type" was a great one to listen to and discuss. 

- The audiobook You Only Die Twice by Brynn Kelly was surprisingly fun and absorbing, and I say surprising because it's not something either of us would enjoy reading in print. But the reviews were intriguing, and the narrators are great. Unfortunately it is only available from Audible-- it isn't even a print book as of this writing-- and I know that is a deal breaker for a lot of you. But if you're ok with Audible, it kept us completely hooked from start to finish. 

- Another hit or miss podcast for me is "10 Things to Tell You" hosted by Laura Tremaine. Episode 209 ("Best Books Lately") had some interesting stuff about how we talk about books online, which is admittedly more interesting to me than to Doug, but it's his payback for me listening to all the sports podcasts (see below), and he didn't dislike it. Episode 189 from last fall about the Hollywood strikes was also interesting (it's probably pretty basic if you already know all about them, but I knew nothing). She has a new "Best Books Lately" episode (#218) with R. Eric Thomas that just came out this week so I haven't heard it yet-- but usually those episodes are good, even though Laura and I have very different reading tastes.

We also listened to various episodes from our usual favorite podcasts-- ESPN Daily, Pop Culture Happy Hour, No Laying Up (golf), Radiolab, and Throughline. The key is to find some podcasts you enjoy, even if you don't want to listen to them every single time, and then before your trip, scroll through and find the episodes that look intriguing. It works for us.

Have a great weekend. I will eat an extra beignet for you. I'm not proofing this so I hope it is ok.