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: 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.

7ToT: I laughed at all of your jokes, my love you didn't need to coax

1. Since the last time I've posted a personal update, we flew down to Texas for a family wedding. It was the first time I've flown since February 2020. It seemed pretty safe-- I've had covid, and since there are many medical or medical-adjacent people in our family, most have been vaccinated. 

2. I don't think I told you that when I had covid last November, I didn't notice any changes to my sense of taste or smell. But then about a month ago, suddenly I could taste and smell again. It was subtle enough that I hadn't really noticed until it came back. Sort of like going from black&white to technicolor in the Wizard of Oz.

3. I've lived in Montana for so long now that I've lost the ability to dress the way people dress in other places. Around here, dressing up means you wear your new jeans. Or maybe your black jeans. I've never been to anything in Montana, no matter how fancy or formal, where there weren't people wearing jeans. Of course, if it's formal, some will dress up, but there are always jeans. 

4. The wedding in Texas was stated to be formal on the invitation, which is something I don't think I've ever even seen on a wedding invitation here locally. I ordered a couple of dresses from Nordstrom's, neither of which suited me or fit right, so finally I sent them back and pulled an old dress out of the back of my closet. Since I almost never dress up, even though it's an "old" dress, I'd only worn it once. It fit perfectly, and it was comfortable, and I had a pair of shoes to match, so I thought it was a total win. But there were no sequins or shiny bits, and I don't wear high heels. I didn't realize how under-dressed I was until I started looking at pictures after we got back. Oops. But I was only aunt of the bride, so probably nobody cared. 

5. This week's Interesting Listen: George Saunders (author of Tenth of December and Lincoln in the Bardo) has a new book out and he's been making the rounds of several of the podcasts I follow. He is always interesting. I was fascinated by his conversation with the So Many Damn Books guys. He is both a great writer and a long time teacher of writing (at Syracuse)(where Mary Karr also teaches, an embarrassment of riches), so if you're interested in Saunders or writing or teaching writing, definitely worth a listen. 

5a) bonus listen. I'm more cheap than I am vain, so chances are slim I will ever do cosmetic surgery or procedures (never say never, I guess). But if you're curious about what exactly people mean when they say they've "had a little work done," I thought this episode of Laura Tremaine's pod was fascinating.

6. This week's Interesting Read: Also if you're interested in writing or teaching writing, don't miss Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses. It's about reimagining the writing workshop, which has been hallowed ground in creative writing programs since the 1950s. He talks about the experience of being someone who is not a white straight cis male in a system that was designed for white straight cis males. Even when I disagreed, it was fascinating, but usually I was nodding my head. (for the record, that is not an affiliate link).

7. I got so tangled up trying to write part two of that last post that I punted. And because the problem was that I really, truly couldn't figure out what I was trying to say, it led to several days of deep thinking (danger, Will Robinson). Which in turn led to the not-very-surprising realization that I need some time away. I told you I was going to do this a couple of weeks ago, but then I kept on posting. It's hard to get out of the habit! Thanks for checking in. See y'around.

Tepid water, please

I've been such a grump this week that I thought I might scratch my own eyes out. In the midst of that, I wrote the post below. Last night, almost on a whim, I decided to drive to Missoula today just to get the heck out of town before I lost my ever-lovin sh!t. I was only there a few hours but other than a weekend trip to visit PellMel back in June, it's the first time I've been out of town since February. My mental status is much improved, so now I'm feeling a little guilty about this post, which is practically a rant. But at least I'm warning you if you're not in the mood to read my whine. 

Here is a typical situation that has happened more times than I can count over the past twenty-ish years. I'm sitting in a PTA/church/community/friend meeting and we need to make a decision. I actually enjoy listening to people's ideas and opinions, but once everyone has expressed their opinion and we're getting to the point where we're re-expressing our opinions, or re-hashing something we've been over eight times, or we're spinning our wheels because nobody wants to make a decision, I get impatient. Really impatient. So I say, "I think we should do xyz." Then suddenly, that is what we are doing. 

It's never my intention to bulldoze the group into doing what I want. In fact, I rarely care what we do. I'm just trying to get us past the endless discussion phase, and into the "let's make a decision and end this meeting" phase. I want to stop meandering around and get something done.  

Then later I find out that someone's feelings were hurt or someone thought I was ignoring them, or I was supposed to defer to someone (not necessarily the group leader) who is the queen bee. 

When I figured out that was happening (which took years, I told you I was clueless about social interactions), I started trying to be more clear. Instead of saying, "I think we should do xyz," I would very carefully make it clear that it was just my opinion, "Well, my vote is xyz, what does everyone else think?" That sometimes backfires because it can lead to reopening the endless discussion, but the intent is to prod us into moving on. 

Apparently, that still is not a good solution. I tried this a few months ago at a meeting which ended not long after. A couple of weeks later, one of the other women said to a mutual friend, "Bless her heart, Barb told us what we should do." I don't think she was especially angry with me, because I was standing right there when she said it, but still it surprised me. Is that how it came across? I thought I had said it so carefully.

I kinda feel bad that she felt that way, but I could not regret getting out of that meeting, which had already gone on for an hour. Somehow I give the impression that I am stubborn and uncompromising.* I don't usually care what happens--sometimes I don't care at all-- I just hate the infinity loop of pointless discussion. And somehow, even when I am trying extra hard not to sound opinionated, it seems that way to other people.

Here's a sideways version of the same thing. We have a group of friends that we've known for years. When we get together, the women drink wine, and the guys drink beer (lots of good breweries around here). I don't drink wine very often because it gives me a headache, but I'd take a glass to be sociable and sip at it. Finally, a couple of years ago I decided it was silly to pretend I like wine when I don't, so I said something about how I really don't care for wine and I'd rather have a beer. 

The next time we got together with those friends, there was no wine. Everyone had a beer. Which was not my intent. I just want to do what I want, and have other people do what they want, and not get into this group-think thing where everybody has to do the same thing. 

I could go on and on. It makes me crazy. Don't change your opinion because of me. If you like wine, drink the damn wine. If you won't be who you are, I can't be who I am. I don't want a friendship where I can only be who I am at your expense.

Sorry. I'm starting to rant. Figure out what you think, and then own it. If you like wine, it's OK for you to drink wine even if it gives me a headache. And, going back to the previous situation, for the love of pete, it's OK for me to express an opinion without making an obeisance to the queen bee. 

That wasn't where I thought this post was going when I started. If you have any advice about how exactly one phrases an opinion without offending people, let me know. If it involves prefacing your words with, "Wellll, you know, maybe we could, I don't know, if it's OK with you, maybe we could think about possibly ...." I'll warn you in advance I'll be rolling my eyes.

Ignore me and have a great weekend.

* OK, ok, now that I'm back from my road trip, I can hear you laughing. I am opinionated and stubborn, it is true. But usually I only inflict it on Dean.

dispatch from home

1. We had plenty of time to talk about pandemics last week as we self-quarantined here in our house on our Not-a-Vacation. Here is my Not-an-Expert takeaway. Among the many complex factors involved in pandemics, two of them are the rate of complications/mortality, and the rate of contagion--how easily you can catch the disease as you, say, walk through an airport. AIDS and Ebola had high percentages of complications and mortality, but they were difficult to catch. In fact, it wasn't possible to catch them while walking through an airport.

COVID-19, on the other hand, appears to be pretty contagious, but thankfully has a relatively low rate of complications/mortality. If an otherwise healthy adult comes down with COVID-19, the great risk isn't that you'll die from it--although that is possible, as are complications-- but that you'll pass it on to someone who is not so healthy and thus is at much higher risk. You probably already know this, unless you've been living under a rock. And if you have, good idea! Stay there.

2. Anyway. All of that was to say, we are lucky that we're having this as our massive wake-up call. Because if something comes along that is both highly contagious and also deadly, we're in for it. We can look at COVID-19 like a practice round. Sadly it's a practice round with dire consequences for 2-5% of our population. Be safe, people. Stay home.

3. I knew that. I know that. But it's so hard to take it seriously. I'm not a person who has ever been afraid of viruses, head colds, or the winter crud that everyone around here gets and can't shake for weeks. I keep catching myself thinking, I could just run out and get a few more things. We're almost out of yogurt. I forgot to get hamburger buns. Maybe I should pick up some batteries.  And since there weren't any confirmed COVID-19 cases at our hospital before Friday, I probably did more running around than I should have. Not a lot, but you know, some.

4. Then today I woke up with a dry throat and some muscle aches and now I am panicking. If I have it, it's probably not going to do anything other than make me feel sick for a few days. But if I have it, I've probably had it for 4-5 days before the symptoms showed up, and there was that last-minute running around. What if I am Typhoid Mary? What if our town suddenly turns into a COVID-19 hotspot, and I'm the one responsible for spreading it around?

5. So, yeah, I hope you are rolling your eyes at my ability to make everything all about me. Because if I have it, I almost certainly got it here locally, and that means it's well on its way around our town and couldn't possibly all my fault. But that paranoid fear has been strong enough that I am now committed to staying home. As I probably should have been all along.

6. There will be an easy way to find out if I have it, because we were packed in this house like sardines last week on our Not-a-Vacation, and PellMel was required to be tested today before she could go back to the hospital where she works. She left before there were any warnings against travel within the US and nobody had any idea how quickly things would change. Now they are requiring anyone who has been out of state to be tested before they can return to work. She'll have her results tomorrow, and then we'll know. Because if she's got it, we've all got it. Lemmings in shiny metal boxes and all that. Although we may have done more running around than we should have, we really didn't do much.

In fact, I'll wait to post this until I can tell you her results. (IT WAS NEGATIVE. PHEW.)

7. Back in the first week of March, when there was something dire on the horizon, I did some stocking up--not hoarding, but enough so that we could stay home for 3-4 weeks. I might have bought a 12-pack of toilet paper instead of the usual 9-pack, but that was about as extreme as I got. Of course, I didn't buy any perishables, because we were going on vacation, right?

Then we didn't leave town, and three people with young-person appetites came and stayed with us for a week, and just about all of my carefully stocked food was eaten. (Fortunately, we still have a fair amount of toilet paper. *she says drily*)(ha. did not intend that pun, but it made me smile.)

*shrugs* I'm still glad they came. We're not going to starve, although we may eat some strange meals. So here I am. I've got plenty to keep me busy: our taxes, for starters, which we decided to go ahead and get done even though the deadline has been extended. Hope you are able to stay home, too, and if you have some kind of essential job, thank you for being out there.

Puzzle solved: the appeal of City of Girls

I've been thinking lately about not fitting in. I do my best to think about this with a minimum of angst, because probably every person on this planet has had moments of feeling like they don't fit in. It's part of being human, and there's nothing particularly interesting about it.

But some of us Don't Fit In more than others of us don't fit in. I suspect that if I were a six-year-old now, I would be diagnosed as being somewhere on the autism spectrum. I've never quite managed social interactions naturally. I miss obvious social cues. I'm pretty good at reading tension and mood of a room, but I'm definitely not good at interpreting body language and facial expressions.

I think that's one reason why slow, beautifully acted movies and TV shows don't work for me. I heard a podcaster say this week that the reason they love Claire Foy so much in the TV show The Crown is because the camera can linger on her face and you can see an entire story happen in her facial expressions. I immediately understood why I've never been able to get into that show, even though everything about it sounds like something I would love. When the camera lingers on an actor's face, I just get impatient. It feels like a vanity shot-- look how gorgeous I am in all this makeup! Unless they're actually crying or laughing, I cannot see a single thing going on in the actor's face/eyes/expression.

I've especially never managed social interactions with women very well (I'm talking mainly about groups here, not individual, one-on-one interactions). Women In Groups are so complicated. I've heard it said that you can never trust a woman who is more comfortable with men than with women, so all I can say is, don't trust me! Because in a social situation like a party or a group gathering, I would a hundred times rather talk sports or tech or photography or anything with men than try and understand the nightmare-ish complications of social talk among women.

There are a whole bunch of expectations that I completely miss. Or sometimes I get them, but I can't take them seriously. I mean, I get that if you dress in ways that fit with current fashions, you feel like a competent human being who can manage adulting, but there's always an aspect of it to me that is like playing a game. I can't take seriously that someone really cares about what I'm wearing.

I wear jeans to church-- clean ones, in good condition. To me, showing respect for my surroundings means I pulled out a clean pair of jeans and I'm not wearing sneakers and a sweatshirt. But to some of the women in our congregation, it is a sign of disrespect that I don't dress up more for church. That's so far from the way that I think that it was years before I even picked up on this. I had no clue that anybody cared or even noticed what I wear. I'm just clueless about this stuff.

Aside: Remember back in the sixties and seventies when your mom would tell you that it doesn't matter what's on the outside, it's what's on the inside that counts? Can you even imagine someone saying that now? In these days of selfies and continuous online presence and endless make-up vlogs and fashion influencers?

So this entire setup was just to tell you that I finally figured out my problem with City of Girls, the bestselling novel by Elizabeth Gilbert that came out earlier this year. I am a sort-of fan of Gilbert's. I've like several of her books, fiction and non, and even the ones I haven't liked I've found to be interesting.  She really is an amazing writer. So I was looking forward to her new one, especially because so many women were posting reviews that said it was their favorite novel of the year, an instant classic, the most fun they'd had reading a book in forever.

But I could not get into it. Gilbert's writing was great, as it always is, but City of Girls just seemed dull to me. I 've read plenty of books where people got drunk and partied, but I've never read a book where there were pages and pages of descriptions of drunken partying to the point where it just got tedious. I mean, seriously, where was her editor? There is no new information, no character development (until it all comes to a crashing halt), just pages and pages of going out and drinking until you can't stand up and are puking into the gutter.

Then I read a brief description of it this morning on Vox's list of the 15 best books of 2019, and the light dawned. City of Girls is a girly-girl book. It's about getting dressed up and wearing great clothes and being dazzling, and feeling powerful because you are so gorgeous. I can understand that as a mental exercise, but it has almost zero meaning to me in practice. The Vox reviewer said that the thing that had stuck with her months after she read it was the clothes. Whaaaaat? No wonder I didn't get it. It is not a book for me. 

So problem solved, because it was really puzzling me why so many people (not just women) love, love, love this book.

Sorry I've been so absent, but for some reason, around here the stretch from Thanksgiving through the first week in December is the busiest time of the year. But I'm almost done-- this past week has been insane, but then next Wednesday I have my community band Christmas concert, and then I have almost nothing on the calendar through the rest of the month. I will drive you crazy with all the things I've been wanting to write about but haven't had time.

Have a great weekend.