Moving Mom

It will come as no surprise to anyone that an 87-year-old is not excited about moving. In fact, in a perfect world, all of us who are lucky enough to live into our 80s will already be settled into a vibrant community of seniors, with lots of activities, a communal dining area, and the opportunity for increased care as needed.

And that’s where my mom has been for the past eight years. She might occasionally tell exasperated tales about her neighbors or the food, but for the most part, she had found a situation that was good for her. It was near one of my sisters and her teenagers, who could drive for her—mom reluctantly gave up driving last fall— and run errands as needed.

But times change and things happen, and the best laid plans, etc. My sister needs to move, leaving my mom without local support. Which means my mom needs to move, too.

At the same time that she has continued to be as upbeat and positive as always, she has also managed to make it clear that she is not happy about this move. After spending most of her life in Texas, no one thought she was going to be able to tolerate the weather in Montana. My other sister lives six hours away in Louisiana, and she found a beautiful senior community that is in some ways a better fit than mom's current place. We hope she will love it. But this isn't easy for anyone, and especially not for mom.

She's having to do it while in a fair amount of constant pain. She can still walk with a cane, and she has a walker, though she mostly uses it to transport things she can't carry. But she isn’t exactly mobile. Arthritis in her ankles, knees, hips, and, well, everywhere, means that most movement is painful for her. She feels best when she is in her recliner. 

But she rarely complains, and as she frequently reminds us as she slowly moves to do something one of us could easily accomplish, she needs to keep moving. 

She’s right. She does. I have to stifle my instinctive “helpful” response to do things for her and let her do it herself. As any number of people before me have noted, it’s remarkably similar watching your toddler defiantly struggle to do something herself (me do it, mama!) when you could, in an eyeblink, do it for her. 

Slow down, I remind myself. It’s not about getting things done, it’s about spending time with her. Which isn’t going to be an option forever, lord knows. 

But unfortunately, sometimes when a move is imminent, it is about getting things done, and I’m afraid my temper didn’t always match my good intentions. Over the week I recently spent with her trying to help her pack, my good humor and patience wore down from abundant to nonexistent. I was not always my best self, although I think I managed to hide that from her. My texts to my sisters became increasingly, uh, salty.

I have no wisdom to impart here. I know almost everyone our age is going through this, except those of us whose parents are already gone, who probably wish they were still going through it. My mom and I have never been close--we are both alike and as different as two alike people can be-- and we've always had a hard time understanding each other's priorities. 

But she has been there for me at various different times in my life when support was fairly thin on the ground. She hasn't understood me, but she always tried to do the right thing by me, whatever she thought that right thing might be and however crazy it made me. I'm old enough now that I can appreciate the effort.

And we have our moments. We drove up to the bank one afternoon since she needed to close out her safe deposit box before relocating to the city where my other sister lives. I pulled up to the point closest to the bank and said, in my most annoyingly cheerful voice, "OK, you hop out, and I'll be right in!" She turned back and glared at me. "I'm not hopping anywhere," she said, and although she didn't follow it up with young lady as she might have fifty years ago, I heard it. And suddenly we were both cackling with laughter. 

Because what else can you do.

a late boomer reflects

There's no denying that by the generally accepted rules of who-is-in-which-generation, I am a baby boomer. Officially, boomers were born during the years 1946-1964, and I was born in 1961. But the oldest boomers are nearly 80, and I am 61. 

If you're under 50, that may not seem like a big difference, but it's actually fairly huge. The oldest boomers were in their early 20s during the so-called Summer of Love in 1967, bursting the confines of propriety after growing up in the straightlaced 50s and early 60s. I was barely old enough to know what was happening.

I think of those of us born from ca 1959-1964 as Late Boomers, but I've heard that we actually have an official name, The Jones Generation-- because of keeping up with the Joneses, which was a thing back in the day. 

But that doesn't feel accurate to me. The so-called hippies, with their wide bell-bottom jeans and their headbands and the constant presence of some kind of smoke dangling from their fingers or lips, were people we saw on the nightly news, in alternating shots with mud-covered soldiers in Vietnam. They might as well have been Martians for all I had in common with them.

We were grade school kids, wide-eyed and a little terrified, as uncomprehending as our Silent Generation parents. Hippies were the college kids of our neighbors down the street or the kids who were rioting after hours at the high school we were still years away from attending. 

I don't exactly know where I'm going with this, but I recently read another list of "12 things Boomers do that Drive Millennials Crazy," and there was only one thing on the list that I do (at the moment, I can't even remember what it was, so there you go-- Millennials definitely have sharper minds than we do, my memory is shot). 

In fact, several things on the list made me think, that doesn't have anything to do with being a Boomer, it's just a dumb thing to do. I haven't seen a fully carpeted bathroom since the 80s, but "They still think carpet in a bathroom is a good idea" was on the list. 

The first time I heard about identifying the different "generations," it was a way to help us understand and relate to each other. But it has ended up being just another way that we accuse and mock and blame. I count myself among the people who are having a hard time being emotionally generous and empathetic these days. What is wrong with us? (that's a rhetorical question.)(sort of.)

In other news, I told you I was going to start posting again, but I didn't. Partly because I'm not completely out of touch, I realize blogging isn't a thing anymore. No one would care if I quit. 

Not long ago, I cleared out the list of blogs I follow--which at one point numbered in the 30s-- and realized that only three of them are being actively updated these days:  two that are run by teams of writers, and one that has expanded from being a one-woman blog to a one-woman blog with six or eight employees. 

I think people who want to do the kind of online writing I used to do have moved to Substack, where you can charge a subscription fee. My musings will never be a money-making proposition, so I'm not doing that. But I'm also not sure I have the momentum to push against the tide and keep going. 

I've had a couple of people--neither of whom reads here, as far as I know--be surprised and somewhat embarrassed for me that I "still" have a blog. It would be easy enough to quit, and I'm not sure anyone but me would even realize that I had. But then I think of something I want to say. And then I go back and read old posts that I still like. So here's another one. Maybe there will be a few more.

Book Review, etc: Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman

This post got long because I had a surprising number of thoughts. Since I can't imagine anyone is all that interested, I decided not to divide it in two. This is the goodreads review I wrote of Funny You Should Ask, a romance novel by Elissa Sussman, followed by further reflections, because the book has been the subject of a minor controversy that I knew nothing about until after I was done reading (and writing my review).

----------So the review I wrote, slightly edited:

Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman

Ten years ago, Chani Horowitz was just starting out as a journalist when she was handed the chance of a lifetime, an interview with Gabe Parker, the actor who had been chosen to be the new James Bond. The story she wrote after spending a crazy weekend with him ended up going viral and changing both their lives.

They've barely seen each other since, but now Gabe’s career has nosedived and his PR team wants her to do it again. Funny You Should Ask is a complicated story that moves back and forth between ten years ago and the current time, but it reads easily— Sussman does a great job of managing the timelines so we get just enough information to move the story along. What did happen during that weekend?

What worked really well for me was the story of a smart, maybe over-educated writer who is trying to reconcile her career of writing “puff” pieces with the more serious careers of her former grad school friends. Chani’s story was pitch perfect. 

What didn’t work so well for me is the same old stuff that hasn’t worked well in almost every recent romance novel I’ve read. And since I’m clearly in the minority, I’ll just make myself sound ridiculous by saying it, but I find it tedious to read through (literal) pages and pages of how strong their sexual attraction to each other is. OK, so you want to lick him. Got it. I don't need two pages of elaboration. That stuff is easy to skim over, though, so not necessarily a deal breaker if the rest of the story is good, and in this case, it is. 

There’s another aspect of the story that had me doubtful, though. I’ve lived in Montana for thirty years, and it’s rare that a writer who doesn’t live here gets it right. So when Gabe turned out to be a Montana native, I rolled my eyes. Montana so often means some symbolic thing to people — it’s romanticized and westernized and sanitized; people who have only visited in the summer in the tourist areas, or winter in the ski towns, don’t get the reality of life here.

But I'm giving Sussman a pass on this, mainly because she didn’t make the mistake of trying too hard. In fact, you have to wonder why she picked Montana, because the handful of scenes that are set here could have been in Wyoming or Colorado or even the Sierra Nevadas. At least there was no wrinkled old ranch hand named Willy who’d known Gabe since he was knee-high and taught him everything he knows about riding a horse. In fact, she leaves horses out of it entirely. There are a lot of people who ride horses in Montana (and more who don’t), but again—super hard to get it right, so good for her.

Besides the obvious wish-fulfillment/fantasy aspect of a world-famous movie star falling in love with a nerdy nobody, the development of Chani's and Gabe's story is believably done. I read it on vacation, and it was exactly the kind of book I wanted to read at the time. Highly recommended if you're in the same sort of mood.

p.s. Gabe is from the fictional town of Cooper, Montana. It didn't occur to me until after I was done reading the book that that is probably a nod to Gary Cooper, the actor and star of many westerns, who was from Helena. 

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(If that sounds appealing to you, please stop here and read it before continuing on.) 

Then at some point I was reading reader reviews on Goodreads and discovered that Sussman has come under fire for writing this book for a reason that struck me as puzzling. Apparently, Sussman said in an interview that the original idea for the story came from an interview that another writer did with Chris Evans (of Captain America fame) that appeared in GQ. The most upvoted review related the reader's outrage that Sussman never says this in the acknowledgements, never name-checks the other writer, plus more, and is therefore a reprehensible human being because she stole the idea and etc etc etc.

I disagree with the commenter on two fronts, and but it turns out that she changed my experience of reading the book for a reason I don't think she intended. So here goes: First off, she claims that a journalist having a drink with the subject of her interview and interacting with him/her on a personal level is unethical and unprofessional. I'm not a journalist, so I don't know if there are professional ethics standards here, but I call bullshit on this. 

For one thing, it's hard to imagine a similar claim being made if the interviewer were male. For another, there's a long, complex conversation already occurring around the impossibility of any journalist being able to remain "objective" and personally uninvolved in the story they're telling. The myth of the passive observer journalist is just that, a myth. At least in this case she is upfront about her involvement.

Also there's the claim that since Sussman started with something that someone else wrote, she is stealing someone else's idea. I didn't go check, but I don't think there's any accusation made that she actually cut and pasted the words of the GQ article, so I'm inclined to let this one go, too. If you handed the original interview to a room full of novelists and told them to go write a book loosely based on that article, you would get a room full of entirely different ways of working it out, even if you restricted them to writing romance novels. Are there any novels that spring up whole cloth out of the writer's imagination? It's hard to believe that there are.

I do agree that it might have been nice for Sussman to own up to the original spark for her story in the acknowledgements, but seriously-- I am not going to start judging authors for what is and is not in the afterword. Up until the 80s (90s?) or so, most books didn't even have acknowledgements. This is not as big a problem as the commenter wants it to be.

But on the other hand, having a real person identified as the fantasy Gabe really changed my feelings about the book. Chris Evans is someone I follow on social media, and he's someone I like and admire. Putting a real person's name and face on the character of Gabe gave it a ewwwwww factor that wasn't there while I was reading and just imagining some impossibly handsome nameless movie star. 

Honestly, it's surprising to me how much this changed my attitude toward the book, all in retrospect. I originally gave it five stars (I've told you before that I believe strongly in star-inflation, but let's not get off on that right now), and I even considered going back and knocking off a star or two just because of this. The older I get, the more sympathy I have for celebrities and how their "adoring" public must make it practically impossible to have a real life. Which I suppose you could argue, they are complaining about all the way to the bank, and you have a point. 

Trying to think of some smart thing to say in summary, but I can't. That's all. 

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).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another book review: Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

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

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

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

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

***spoilers ahead***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's something you did not expect me to post about today: LIV Golf

I live with golfers. On my own, I would probably pay exactly zero attention to golf, but like most parents, I become interested in what my family is interested in, and my spouse and my younger (25-year-old) child, who was living at home until six weeks ago, are total golf nerds.

I have at various times in my life become interested in sports, but it's the personalities that interest me. I'm not an athlete myself, so their prowess and skills aren't as much of a draw. My eyes glaze over almost instantly when the conversation turns to the angle of the club face or the purity of someone's stroke. 

But if you watch these kids--because they are kids when they start out--over the course of several years, and learn their backstory, and their ups and downs, and then they get married and have kids, pretty soon they're like your own friends. You care about what happens to them.

So the whole dilemma around the recent development of a Saudi-funded golf league, known as LIV Golf, and the exodus of several prominent golf stars to play there, has been a topic of much conversation and even some emotional turmoil at our house. 

#LIVGolf is backed by the almost unlimited wealth of the Saudi ruling family, and the players who have chosen to play for them are making more money just by signing up for the league than they might in their entire career with the PGA (at least, that's how it looks-- I have no idea what's actually happening).

I'm no expert, but of course like thousands of twitter users, that's not going to stop me from giving you my opinion. I'm definitely #TeamPGA. My sympathies are with the players who want to play the best players in the world at the historic, traditional tournaments and courses of the PGA and the majors. 

But I also think a lot of the hysteria is over-the-top. When it was first announced that some of our favorite players were leaving the PGA, I will admit that we were upset-- especially my son, who idolized DJ for years. 

But now that the dust has settled a bit, I'm finding it hard to stay that way. As plenty of LIV supporters have pointed out, the PGA has advertising contracts with a number of companies who do business with the Saudis. That's not exactly the same thing as being bankrolled by the Saudi Private Investment Fund, but it does blur the lines. 

If I were making the decision for myself, I wouldn't be able to do it, but I can see how someone who is looking at his career as a business would see the move to LIV as a smart decision. 

It isn't hard to imagine that players like Brooks and DJ are looking beyond their limited shelf-life as tournament winners and seeing LIVGolf as a way to continue to play golf while at the same time giving them the time and funding to pursue other interests. And there are the Asian and Australian players who say they want to spend more time at home. I'm more sympathetic with the players who have stayed with the PGA, but at least I can understand that.

What I don't get at all is the urge to destroy the PGA in the process, and as a long-time non-fan of the shark guy, it's hard not to believe he is the source of that. Sure, go ahead and set up an alternative league with a new format. Maybe it will be fun and exciting for the players and the fans. Let the players decide who wants to play in it and let the fans decide if they're interested. Go for it.

But why the lawsuits? Why the temper-tantrum-level subpeonas? why the shady, strong-arm recruitment methods? The LIV players made the decision to leave the PGA, and they've been well-compensated to do so. End of story. Just stop already and let us get back to cheering for Rory and Scottie and Max and Tony and Jordan and Sungjae and Xander, and a whole bunch of other players who are more motivated by the love of golf.