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.