In which I prove that women in their sixties (well, me, anyway) are absolutely capable of carrying a grudge for 45 years

So here is the conversation that popped full-blown into my head the day after I published last week's post, which was (in part) about the difficulty of being friends with people who have different priorities than I do, namely because I don't want to put much energy into hair, makeup, and fashion, and I am friends with a bunch of women who are stylish and put-together in a way that I probably never will be. 

My internalized mother (who bears a somewhat distorted resemblance to my real-life mother, and who will hereafter be referred to as IM): Well, Barb, if you really care about your friends, you should be willing to put in the little bit of effort it takes to be more stylish when you meet up with them. What's important to them should be important to you.

Me (deflates significantly, because it's not like she and I didn't have a variation of the conversation a million times when I was in high school): But Mom, isn't what I want just as important as what they want? Also, define "a little bit" of effort.

IM, who apparently speaks 90% in clichés: Looking your best is important, dear, especially when you're going out in public. You only get one chance to make a first impression. Why wouldn't you want to put your best foot forward? It shows that you are a competent adult who knows how to present herself in public.

Me: But trying to conform to cultural norms about clothing and beauty is exhausting! And demeaning! And I have other things I want to do! And anyway, why does dressing up always mean being uncomfortable*? 

* Seriously. Putting on comfortable clothes is synonymous with getting home and taking off your fancy clothes. There is no definition of "getting dressed up" that includes "putting on clean jeans, my favorite sweater, and a cute pair of low-cut hiking boots" which is what I want to wear when I go out to meet up with friends. Also "cute hiking boots" would be an oxymoron to my mom. And she could (rightly) point out that people who only go hiking half a dozen times a year don't get to wear hiking boots to a restaurant. Thank God I live in Montana, where hiking boots are acceptable just about everywhere.

Et cetera. You get the idea. Of course my 87-year-old mother would never say any of this to me now that I am 62. Although come to think of it, that might be because she lives 1500 miles away and never sees me when I'm getting dressed to go out. 

You know, typing this brought back a very distinct memory from high school that I probably haven't thought about in twenty (thirty? forty?) years. My senior year, there was an all night "casino" party at the mall after our graduation ceremony. I had picked out my outfit a couple of weeks earlier and I was happy with it-- jeans with blue satin stitching on the pocket, a blue and lavender striped short sleeved cotton top, and sandals (so shoot me, it was the 70s). My mom had no comment until my boyfriend showed up at the door in dark jeans, a black shirt, and a velvet jacket. She marched me back up the stairs and made me change clothes. 

I don't know how to describe the outfit she made me change into, I just remember that it was super uncomfortable and I kept on having to readjust it and pull on it and untwist the top. I can remember arguing with her-- moo-oom, I hate this top! and her hissing at me, you can't wear that other one! you're embarrassing me! I was mad at her for years. Ha. Since it's making me mad to type it out now, I guess I still haven't forgiven her. I'm so mature. 

This was going to be the first half of a longer post but it got so long so I'm done. Also I should probably edit it a bunch more, but in an effort to be less of a perfectionist, I'm just sending it off! Wheee!

I'm just standing in a doorway, I'm just trying to make some sense

I've been thinking quite a bit recently about how difficult it is to truly be supportive of other people's individuality. It's hard even with my friends, let alone with people I barely know or don't know at all. One of the amazing things about human beings is how different we all are, and the older I get, the more I realize how true that is. But our differences aren't just a matter of liking different kinds of music, or whether or not we love horror movies, or we say sneakers or tennis shoes or trainers.

For example-- a simple one, just among my friends-- I'm not a person who puts a high value on fashion, hair, and makeup. It's not that I don't care at all, but I definitely don't care enough to put a lot of time into it. My clothes are clean and in good repair, and they're within the larger boundaries of what is currently in style (was that vague enough?), but most of the time I probably look more like a grad student than a real adult. 

Which is fine with me. The thought of putting more effort into my appearance exhausts me before I've even tried, and honestly, I've never recovered from my 80s feminist thing about fashion and beauty being an enormous waste of time and money meant to distract women from accomplishing more important things.

But I have friends who dress well and care about their hair and have put some thought into the makeup they wear. They have a definite personal style. It's important to them that they look put together and stylish when they go out. I get that, but I don't do that. In fact, if I'm being honest, I can't do that, because style is not something that I understand or value.

Obviously, I can be supportive (and slightly envious) of my friends who are more into this than I am. They look measurably better than I do when we get together for lunch or whatever. And of course they can be tolerant of my lack of care, because they (I hope) like me and want to get together. 

But there's a fundamental disconnect, too. Because I refuse to put much time into my appearance, I am saying that those things are not important. And because my friends do put a lot of thought and effort into their appearance, I'm de-valuing something that is meaningful to them.

It's kind of a dumb example, but it's the easiest one I could think of to say something that is actually really important to figure out about how to have civil discourse. How do we really, truly honor someone else's values and choices and opinions, when that someone's choices undermine our own choices, or go contrary to something that is important or even dear to us? 

Because obviously we are having this problem in our country right now about a lot of things that are way more important than what we wear to go out to lunch. How does someone with exuberant sexuality express that without making her friend who is more reserved feel like a prude? How does someone who believes that religion is the cause of endless evil in our world support someone whose religion is her deepest, most cherished set of beliefs? I could go on for paragraphs.

It's not easy. Or simple. And I think in order for it to truly be mutual, it takes awareness on both sides. I comprehensively disagree with you but I value you as a human being, and I support your right to make the choices you do-- that understanding has to be coming from both sides. All sides. Maybe our common ground is how strongly we hold our convictions, even if our convictions are very different. 

I don't know. This isn't very well-reasoned, I know, because even though I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently, I don't have any answers. Hmmm. I started to go off on a tangent here, but it's late, and this is probably already long enough. More some other time. Have a good weekend.

Six More Books I loved in 2023

Maame by Jessica George: Maddie is the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants living with and caring for her disabled father in their London home. Her mother has left her to it, sometimes for over a year at a time, so that she can take care of family business back in Ghana. Maame is the story of Maddie learning to stand up for herself and claim the life she wants—as soon as she figures out what it is. It is occasionally hilarious, often heartbreaking.

Family Meal by Bryan Washington: This is a tough read. Cam’s partner Kai is killed in a way that is maddening and horrible, but since you don’t find out for a while exactly what happened, I’ll leave it at that. The story of Cam’s spiral into grief and rage and self-destruction is visceral and raw. But once he nadirs out, his trajectory is toward healing— it just takes awhile to get there. Well worth hanging in there. The writing is true, and there is no higher compliment if you ask me. Check for trigger warnings, because there are some difficult moments.

We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian: Nick Russo has been a city reporter at a big NYC newspaper for several years when the publisher’s son Andy stumbles into the newsroom looking to gain experience before he has to take over when his father retires. What follows is a sweet and thoughtful story of two men figuring out how to be together in a world where even holding hands in public could land them in jail. Set in the 1950s, We Could be So Good felt as much like a window into the times as a romance, although the romance is beautifully done. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

Seven Days In June by Tia Williams:  Eva Mercy and Shane Hall spent a crazy week together during their senior year in high school. They were both in trouble, but their connection seemed to be a safe harbor in the midst of their individual traumas. The week ended badly, and they haven’t seen each other since. But they both became writers, and the books they write are a sort of conversation across the years. 

When they end up (mostly accidentally) at the same writers’ panel years later, a million emotions bubble up. Across another crazy week, they have to decide if they want to try again. In spite of being white and considerably older, I really identified with Eva/Genevieve, maybe because I also suffer from intermittent chronic migraines (not as debilitating as hers, but bad enough). The ending is excellent, and how often can you say that? (not often enough).

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff: Five years ago, Geeta’s husband disappeared without a trace. In the conservative, rural town where she lives in northern India, a woman with no husband or family is a disgrace, and rumors are swirling that she killed him. She’s lonely, but she’s figured out a way to support herself and has resigned herself to her life.

Until one night an acquaintance shows up wanting Geeta’s help with murdering her abusive husband, since Geeta “already knows what to do.” Then she discovers her former best friend might not be as uncaring as she seems. From there, complications multiply. It’s part Thelma and Louise, part My Sister the Serial Killer, part Xena Warrior Princess, occasionally hilarious, occasionally darkly ironic, occasionally black revenge comedy. It’s the kind of thing that’s super hard to do without turning it into either a farce or a bloodbath, but Shroff handles it so skillfullly, it’s hard to believe it’s a debut novel. Loved it.

Witch King by Martha Wells: Kaiisteron, Demon Prince of the Fourth House of the underearth, comes blearily awake to realize he has no idea where he is or what happened to him. His body has been held in stasis for almost a year in an underwater coffin. He has only minutes to figure out how to respond, save an innocent victim, and rescue his friend Ziede. And that’s just the first ten pages. There is some humor, but mostly this is a deeply heartfelt story of Kai and his devoted friends figuring out how to respond to oppression, betrayal, and grief. There is magic, but it is sometimes dark and desperate.

It is also almost too complex. I felt like Kai at the beginning, trying to get my bearings as I was thrown in at the deep end with little help. When I was twenty, I would have had no trouble with it—and I’m pretty sure I would have thought this was the best book I’d ever read (at the time, that dubious honor was held by the Thomas Covenant books). I still loved it but I had to read it twice to really understand what happened. There is a lot going on across two different time lines, and Wells resists the temptation to info dump—which takes far more work on the part of the author. And the reader, for that matter. Highly recommended if you enjoy complex world-building and a loyal band of friends fighting impossible odds. I went back and forth between the ebook version and the audio version, and the narrator is great. Plunge in, because it’s a great story.

Next week I will move on, promise. Other posts in this series:
2023 Reading Roundup
Six Books I Loved in 2023

Six Books I Loved in 2023

These are not in any particular order. There aren't many surprises, I think I just loved what everyone loved.

The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton: Some climate dystopias strike me more as an exercise in paranoia than as realistic. But this one is so entirely plausible and believable— especially in the first half— that I occasionally had to remind myself when I wasn’t reading that the events hadn’t actually happened. It’s mesmerizing, and the characters felt real and like people I know. It’s deeply disturbing, and yet there are threads of hope throughout in the form of people who learn and grow and adapt. There’s also a bit of magical realism, but not enough to pull it into the realm of fantasy. 

The Mutual Friend by Carter Bays: A group of interconnected people in NYC come and go, crisscross and connect and don't, come into focus and fade away. It's brilliant and I loved it. I don't know that I can do a better job of describing it than the blurb does, but I will say that it builds slowly--not boringly, but slowly-- for the first half or so, and then all that careful character building begins to pay off. There are also a bunch of literary allusions for the lit nerds among us but you don't need to know anything about them to love this. 

Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club by J Ryan Stradal:  Stradal's newest novel tells the story of several generations of women whose lives become intertwined with a local restaurant in Northern Minnesota. Betty leaves an abusive home situation and takes her daughter Florence on the road from one precarious situation to another, until she runs into Floyd, who owns the titular supper club. Florence grows up to become a human wrecking ball, creating havoc in one life after another in her desperate search for security. Her daughter Mariel grows up and falls in love with the heir of an enormous chain of restaurants that seems to exist to put supper clubs out of business. I was enthralled. It trails off a bit at the end, but I loved it.

The Last Ranger by Peter Heller:  Ren Hopper is a ranger in Yellowstone National Park. He lives alone in a cabin, a few yards away from another cabin where wildlife biologist Hilly lives. Shortly after the book opens, he finds Hilly near death, almost certainly due to the actions of a particular poacher. Ren is recovering from the death or loss of almost everyone he loves, so parts of this book are deeply sad. There is a bit of suspense as Ren tries to figure out exactly what happened and who is to blame, but mostly this is just the story of Ren, trying to figure out how to make it through the day, and then the next. Another one that falls off a bit toward the end, but I loved this book.

Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck: George and Wren met almost by accident, but they are immediately attracted to one another. Not long after they marry, George begins to exhibit strange symptoms. They discover that he has a rare disorder that will result in his mutation into a great white shark. The premise is so bizarre that if Shark Heart hadn't come so highly recommended, I would never have believed it could work.

But it does, and it is a story of rare beauty and courage. It's hard not to compare it to Franz Kafka's 1915 novella Metamorphosis, about a young man who wakes up to find out he's turned into a giant insect. But in spite of all the parallels, the resulting story is entirely different. Kafka's story is famous for its bizarre depiction of alienation and despair, but while Habeck ignores none of the pain and suffering of George's transformation, she turns George and Wren's story into one of beauty, courage, and hope.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett: Lara is in her late fifties and her three adult daughters have come home to spend lockdown at the family cherry farm in northern Michigan. The first half is practically an empty nester fantasy- all your kids are home, getting along, working together, and hanging on your every word as you tell the story of the summer you spent having an affair with a man who would become the world’s most recognizable star. But summer flings (and cherry harvest season) eventually come to an end, and not always gracefully— the ending of that long ago summer comes back into focus and things turn a little dark. The final reveals are sad and somewhat difficult to read, but it's beautifully done-- a tour de force by an author at the top of her game. I liked it better than The Dutch House, but I think I'm in the minority there.

Entirely by accident, I read these last two books (Shark Heart and Tom Lake) immediately after one another. Both books have characters who are deeply involved in a production of Thornton Wilder's classic play Our Town, which was first performed in 1938. I've never seen it, but I ordered a copy of it after reading these two novels and it is great (of course) and makes a thought-provoking reading experience together with the two novels. Made me wish I was still teaching so we could discuss.

Six more next week. Let me know if you have any recommendations!

2023 reading round-up part one

This is the first of three posts on what I read in 2023 (I know. But reading is my thing, so apologies in advance, because three posts is probably two (three?) more than you want.) This one is about what I read, then the next two will actually list the books. I'm going to try doing the lists this year with a shortened version of the reviews I posted on Goodreads, which makes for a longer post, which is why I split it in two. 

I am all in favor of everyone reading whatever the heck they want, so I have zero intent to change your mind about what to read. But if you know how our tastes compare, then you can figure out if a book I like might be a book you will like. So, with that in mind:

What works for me: character-driven novels as long as something is happening; plot-driven novels as long as the characters are well-developed and memorable. It's not easy to make me laugh while reading, so when an author can do that, I love it. I often enjoy books that have a mystery element, but I'm only good for a handful of actual "mysteries" a year. I love some books that leave me in tears, but not many. And I especially love a book that surprises me with how good it is, which is not much help in figuring out my taste, I know. I love smart characters, competent characters, or on the other hand, characters that start out in a bad place but then learn and grow.

What doesn't work for me: horror, suspense, or anything that's going to interfere with my sleep. My main time to read is right before bed, so I don't want to read anything that's going to keep me up with dread, anxiety, or scary-ness. (That said, for my entire life I've stayed up too late on countless nights reading books I couldn't put down. I just don't want it to be because they are scary or horrifying.) I don't mind if Everything Is Awful at various different points in a story, but I don't like books whose main message is that Everything Is Awful, even if the writing is gorgeous. I do not like books that other readers describe as leaving them wrecked, sobbing on the floor with my soul torn in two. I'm just too old for that.

I was an English major in college, and I loved it. Then I went straight from undergrad into grad school to get a Master's in English, but I bailed, because I was so burned out on school. I hated grad school the first time I tried. But unlike people who get tired of reading when they have to study it in school, reading was never the problem. It was school that was the problem, not reading. I have gone through periods where I was uninterested in reading certain types of books, but I don't think I've had a day that I didn't read since I was in about second grade. 

Then I went back to grad school when I was 49 and that time, I finished and got my Master's. I wrote about a bazillion posts about that while it was happening so I'll skip over that. Unfortunately, the second time ruined me for bad writing. I used to be able to read anything. Now it has to have a certain level of good writing or I can't get through it. I know I'm supposed to be a snob about that (and I am), but I also regret it. It's much harder to find books that I love now.

The other thing grad school did for me is use up whatever patience I once had for existentialism. It's been the gold standard of academic posturing for the past sixty years and I have no use for it. If you're sincere about it, it'll make you suicidal, and if you're not sincere about it, it's just a pose. No thank you. Human existence is inherently meaningful, and inherently worth experiencing. You don't need to believe in God to believe that. So there.

Whoa. Where did that soap box come from? So anyway. If you're out of patience with existentialism, that eliminates upwards of half of "serious" literary fiction from the past couple of decades, so I've been on the wrong side of intelligent opinions for awhile now. Which makes me kind of defiantly determined to read whatever the fuck I want, you know? So I read romance novels, science fiction, memoir, and all kinds of literary fiction, and if you tell me that we need a "women's fiction" category because it's not as intellectually sophisticated as so-called literary fiction, you and I have nothing in common, go away. And lucky for me, I'm not the only one who is getting tired of existentialism, so there's a lot more good literary fiction out there than there used to be. (Good as defined by me, that is.)

As I've said before, I keep track of my reading on Goodreads (click here). According to them, I read 98 books this year, but they count books that I shelve as "skimmed," which I don't, so really I read 86 books this year, a good amount. I'm happy with it. Mainly fiction, maybe a dozen non-fiction. The non-fiction was mostly memoir except for Sharon Salzberg's book Faith, which is excellent, even though it didn't make the top-twelve list I'll get to next time I post. 

Sorry about all the grumpy opinions today. I feel like I didn't cover everything I meant to, but it's 11pm on Thursday night and I don't want to miss posting on Friday the very first week after I said I was going to start, so that is all. It's well below zero here right now (possible explanation for the grumpiness), I hope you are warm and have a stack of good books, wherever you are. 

Post from the past:  Last year's reading wrap-up

thoughts on blogging in 2024

I wrote this last spring when I was waffling about whether or not to keep posting here. Then over the summer, I decided I was done. But I miss it. I always do, and so one of my new year's changes is to start posting again. Probably not often. I'm aiming for once a week, on Fridays.

-------------------------

When I started blogging a million years ago (2003), the online world was not the center of popular culture the way it is now. Those of us who set up personal blogs early on were just a bunch of nerds having fun. Social media didn't even exist. 

It never occurred to me that by keeping a blog, people would think I was setting myself up as an expert or (god forbid) an influencer. I mean, why would I? I'm barely passable in any area where influencers excel (fashion, makeup, home decor, cooking). Other than reading a lot and thinking too much, I have few talents.

It was months after I wrote the "Makeup and Me" post back in 2015 that I figured out that some people thought I meant to give advice about makeup. It was so absurd, I was speechless-- who in the world would take advice from me about makeup? I wear as little as I can get away with. I thought I was making fun of myself, and also I thought more of my readers would be smiling along with me (which turned out not to be the case)(more about that another time).

In my mind, this blog has been about providing sometimes-snarky, sometimes-heartfelt commentary from the cheap seats, so to speak. But that doesn't seem to be possible anymore. I don't know. I'm trying to figure this out as I type. 

Based on the feedback I've been getting recently, if you express an opinion in a blog or a substack or on social media, people assume you are setting yourself up as someone who wants to be an example, listened to, noticed. Apparently it doesn't have to do with intent, it's just the way social media works these days. It feels like people are either looking for someone to follow, or someone to tear down. There doesn't seem to be any room for wiseass, hey-what-about-this-interesting-thing commentary.

Of course at various times I've hoped that by posting here, I would find like-minded people, especially years ago when I was writing intensively about recovering from evangelicalism. Or maybe I could find other people who enjoy complex, non-nihilistic literary fiction but have a soft spot for genre fiction with smart, competent female characters.

(ok maybe that's a good example-- I type that thinking I'm poking fun at my absurd zenn diagram of reading tastes, but maybe it comes across as me thinking that is an admirable goal for all readers. I don't know.) 

I do post my opinions about books I've read and movies I've seen, and of course I'd love it if you agree with me, but I'm not expecting it. Maybe even when we disagree, my opinions will help you figure out what you like. It's like listening to my favorite book podcast. By my estimate, Anne and I have about a 60% overlap of books we like, and of those, there's maybe a 30% overlap on books we love. The rest we'd probably disagree on. But I can listen to her and usually figure out whether or not I'll like something she's recommending because I've been listening long enough that I have a pretty good idea of how our tastes compare. 

I've also written posts that I thought might give you a different way to think about things, or even change your mind, but I never thought anyone would actually listen to me. It's like the way I give advice to my kids-- I can't stop myself from doing it, but most of the time they ignore me (as they should, they're 33 and 26). I post almost entirely for selfish reasons. I like writing. I like the way it clears my head. I like the way it forces me to figure out what I think. And writing for a blog forces me to think harder than scrawling in a journal (although sometimes I do that, too).

After all, if I truly meant to set myself up as an influencer, I would do some self-promotion-- and I have not. I have posted a link to this blog on social media exactly twice in the past dozen or more years. Three times if you count the time I posted it to a private group on FB. The link is in my profile on all of my social media accounts, but that requires someone clicking on my profile, first of all, and then being curious enough to click on the link. I'm hardly forcing anyone to read it. 

Obviously the criticism I've received struck a chord, probably far deeper than people intended. (In fact, it was only said to my face twice--once explicitly, once implied. And then there are frequent comments online in general terms that are unrelated to me, but which I neurotically take personally. My response is, uh, clearly way out of proportion.) "I like doing it" is pretty much the only reason I have to keep going, and theoretically, that's the only reason that matters. But in reality, it's hard to keep going when people are telling you that by continuing on, you're suffering from delusions of grandeur. And yet here I am.

7ToF: there was no rain in Spain when we flew in on a plane, but it rained one day when we got there on the train

Portugal and Spain trip report! You've been warned.

1. We spent 12 days in Portugal and Spain in the first half of October, and I will first of all state the obvious: that is not enough time. We knew that when we planned the trip, but at the time, it was either go for 12 days or not go. We were able to do Lisbon (with a day trip to Sintra), Seville (with a day trip to Cordoba), Granada, and Madrid. We'd previously been to Barcelona, so we didn't go on this trip. It was fantastic and amazing, but as is always the case, now that we've been, we'd do a better job if we ever go again. And I really wish we'd had 3-4 more days. Or twelve.

2. I'm not going to try to give you travel advice because of course I'm not an expert. But I have a few observations to pass along. I was a little worried about managing the train. It was a bit awkward the first time, but after that it was a breeze and so much easier than using regional airlines. We did one regional flight, from Lisbon to Seville, because the train connections on that route are awkward and make it into a 12-16 hour ordeal. The flight was a hassle from start to finish, although it did get us to Seville by early afternoon. But for travel within Spain, the train is great. Just go to the Renfe website, choose the English option, tamp down your nerves, and buy your tickets. The farther in advance you do it, the cheaper it is. Or use a travel service, more about that below.

Cordoba

3. I've discovered that my travel tastes have changed. When we were young and adventurous, I wanted to go all the places and do all the things. We were smart enough not to overload ourselves too much on this trip--we went several different places, but we never planned more than one big thing per day. But now that we are old, I think for future trips that involve major jet lag (7-8 hour difference for us from Montana), I would spend at least five days in the first location, then maybe do 3-4 more locations over a minimum of three weeks. Since we didn't really have enough time to get over jet lag on the front end, we were playing catch up with sleep almost the entire trip. We finally adjusted just in time to do it all again after we returned home.

4. Another thing that has changed is that I found myself more interested in Madrid than the smaller towns. The smaller towns were charming and beautiful and more oriented toward tourists, but maybe since we live in a tourist-y area, I wasn't all that charmed. I'm not sorry we went to any of those places-- there was amazing history and architecture and art--but I found myself more comfortable in Madrid. It's a big enough city that the tourists are only a small part of what's happening. I love people watching, and it felt much more like we were seeing the real modern Spain but with fabulous art and architecture everywhere. Probably many people feel the opposite, but I'm glad to know this for my own future travel plans. 

5. We thought October would be less crowded and blessedly cooler, but we were wrong. We happened into an unusual October heatwave (it was over 90 a couple of days in Seville), and there were crowds every where--apparently this is the biggest travel year Europe has had maybe ever. I hope those are situations that were specific to this year and if you go, you'll have better luck. That's not to say it was awful, and the locals were surprisingly cheerful and friendly given the heat and the crowds, but it wasn't what we were expecting.

6. One thing that was different than the last time we traveled in Spain (Barcelona, 35 years ago): women used to need a scarf to cover their head and shoulders in a place of worship. So I came prepared, and even had a scarf with me the first day. But apparently this is no longer a thing-- almost no one was wearing a head covering in churches, and there were no signs recommending one (unlike our last trip).

In fact, I was a little worried about clothing in general since I thought that Europeans dress more conservatively than Americans. But not to worry. I could not believe the clothing--teensy shorts, crop tops, low necklines--and although it was mostly young people, it wasn't just Americans. Asians, people from other parts of Europe, locals, pretty much everyone was wearing the minimal amount of clothing-- which was at least in part because of the heat. It was hot. Anyway. Not to go all grandma on youngsters wearing what youngsters will wear, but apparently it isn't even considered disrespectful any more, which is the only reason to worry about it. My shorts with the 7" inseam were completely unremarkable.

The Alhambra in Granada

7. We used a travel service, which we've never done before. In the past, I've used Booking.com for hotels (way before Idris Elba starting making commercials for them)(but what's not to love about Idris Elba, whatever he does). But we did the first part of our trip with friends, and they recommended Tour Tailors, based in Lisbon, so we decided to try them. It's not a tour, per se. You tell them your budget and they make hotel reservations, buy your train tickets, and buy tickets to the sites that require advance purchase or have "skip-the-line" tickets. Other than that, we were on our own. It was great. Highly recommend. There was a 24-hour hotline if you had any problems, but we luckily never needed it.

Regrets? I wish we'd had more time in Madrid. We arrived late one afternoon, had the next full day, and then flew home the next morning. We spent an afternoon in the Prado, but we didn't get to see the Guernica, which is at a different museum that had huge lines waiting to get in-- since our time was so short, we decided we'd rather wander around than wait a couple of hours in a line. We also didn't make it to Porto in Portugal, or the almost-completed Familia Sagrada in Barcelona, or Toledo, or the Basque country--all of which I would love to do--but those would make do-able future trips, so they seemed like acceptable compromises. The only thing I would skip is Sintra, our day trip from Lisbon, but mainly because it was so crowded. We were shuffling along through the royal palace with about a thousand of our closest friends.

Senior travel tip #1: I will never travel again without an inflatable pillow. The one I have is about 12"x16" and it inflates to about 4" thick (I think I got it at REI), but you can under-inflate it and use it to make a wafer-thin hotel pillow work for a 62-year-old side sleeper. In fact (should I be embarrassed to admit this?), I've already traveled for years with a smaller inflatable pillow that I use for between my knees to relieve pressure on my hips. Yup, two inflatable pillows. Insert ribald jokes here, but I am a huge fan. 

Senior travel tip #2: If you're choosing between the comfortable shoes and the stylish shoes, pick the comfortable ones. Not kidding.

Oh-- also, totally worth it to pay for international roaming for your cellphone. We're on Verizon, and it was about $100 each to make our phones work throughout our trip. It was invaluable--Google maps, calls, texting, and airline apps all worked just as they do in the US. You just call your cell provider before you leave, they add the extra charge for one month, and then it is automatically deleted.

That's everything I can think of. If you have any questions, comment below or email me and I will answer in a future post. Thanks for stopping by! Have a great weekend!

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. 

--------------------

(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.