mini-rants and updates, May 2024 edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silence is golden, but unfortunately sometimes you have to talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

hyper-criticism, clumsy shoes, and messy reality

I. 

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

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

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

II.

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

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

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

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

III. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

road listens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grandma Grammar

1. Public Service Announcement: Clamor is not the same as clamber. You do not sit on the floor and then clamor to your feet, you clamber. Good grief. What is the world coming to? The first time I saw this it was in a novel published by a big five publishing house and I rolled my eyes so hard at their carelessness. Then I saw it in another novel today, also published by a big five house. Apparently this is now acceptable linguistic drift.

I know, I know, my shrew is showing. And you've probably read enough here to know that my grammar-- tinged with equal parts East Texas roots and aging brain--is not perfect, either. But still. 

*sighs* *gives up*

This is apparently a decision that copy editors have already made. I wonder what is the age limit for being bothered by this one? Do people under age 60 really think that those two words mean the same thing? And probably people of all ages are thinking, wait, does she really care about this? seriously? because nobody else does. Except the twenty-seven of us who do care, and I bet I'm not the only one who reads here who is one of them.

2. In my previous blog, I used to run a weekly post about words. It's been more than ten years now so the details are hazy, but I think it was called Words on Wednesday, and I would pick words that were frequently confused (like peak/peek/pique) and explain why/how they were different. But I stopped doing it because I figured I was preaching to the choir (cliché). 

3. We are human beings who communicate through language, so we'll never get to the point that words don't matter. But I think we are quickly reaching the point where precision in language doesn't matter. It's easy to get all up on my high horse (cliché) about that, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad change. 

I mean, I will always regret it for myself, because words are My Thing. But it probably doesn't spell doom and gloom (cliché) for our culture. The culture snobs thought that the world was ending back in the 19th century when the novel eclipsed poetry, right? (in English speaking countries, I don't know the timeline in other languages.)

Tastes change, technologies change, and for some time now, the cutting edge of narrative art has been visual, not literary. It's no less art, and it's no less creative or challenging to create. I've seen plenty of movies that blew me away, not to mention well-written TV shows, and even music videos.

But I'm not quite to the point where I've reconciled myself to books and movies that are essentially video games in another format. I know the same argument applies-- it's not bad, it's just a new way of telling stories-- but it's harder to wrap my head around. 

We went to see "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare" last week, and about halfway through I leaned over to Doug and said, this is a movie of a video game. They gather a team, and then they walk around shooting people and blowing things up. It was well made, and it wasn't exactly a waste of time, but it didn't do much for me-- at least partly because I don't really find violence to be all that entertaining. And you know what? That probably wouldn't bother Guy Ritchie one bit. Senior citizen word nerds are not his target audience.

Have a good weekend. Go for a hike and clamber over some rocks. 

My Inner Shrew

Edited to add: this turns into a rant at the end. Avoid if you're not in the mood.

Back in the 90s (a lot of my posts start with that), getting in touch with your “inner child” was a thing. A huge thing. There were books and seminars and people talked about it with their therapist and then told you more than you ever wanted to know about having play dates with their inner child, the pure innocent being that supposedly lives deep inside us, covered over by the cares and responsibilities of adulthood.

It was helpful — maybe even life-changing — for a lot of people, even some people I knew. But it never worked for me. I was in therapy at the time, so I remember doing a quasi-hypnosis thing with my therapist, and I remember going to a "Find Your Inner Child" workship one Saturday, and I'm pretty sure I read at least one book, to no avail. I never got in touch with anything that resembled a sweet, luminous inner child. 

Then a couple of weeks ago I think I figured out why: it’s because my inner child isn’t pure and innocent, she’s as mad as a hornet trapped in a window. I was thinking about a couple of things that happened when I was four or five—not anything out of the ordinary for 1965, just how it felt to exist in my family in the world at that time— and my younger self's voice sounded in my head with perfect clarity: These people don’t know what THE FUCK they are doing. 

“These people” being my parents, and “fuck” being a word that of course I wouldn’t have known when I was four (it was not a word that was said casually in 1965), but somehow that inner self scooped the word out of my adult brain as the best way to describe how she felt. 

My parents had good intentions. They were not bad parents, especially not for the times. But they were incapable of seeing my need to be something other than what they expected me to be, and they were definitely not going to protect me from the expectations of our southern Baptist subculture.

They weren't even aware there was a problem. In their minds, and in the minds of at least a few Sunday School teachers, girl scout leaders, and other kids' moms, when I didn't fit in, the problem was me. 

Oddly, finding that enraged little knot of confused child shaking her fist at the universe has felt as freeing as I imagine the other sort of inner child would feel. I'm sure there are those who would say I just haven't dug deep enough yet; and maybe they're right-- maybe somewhere further down inside me is a pure innocent little angel. Or maybe some of us are just born to be little shits and I should own it.

OK, I said little shits because it made me laugh, but of course I wasn't really a little shit, or at least not any more often than most kids. I was just already a jaded mini-adult by the time I was five, and I couldn't foresee any chance things would ever change. I gave in early and often; I did not try to resist.

Maybe the reason this has come up is because for the past several months I have been so angry. So angry. Angry that we might end up with that conman as president again, angry that our guy didn't step aside for someone new, angry that the world is so fucked up right now, angry that there is so much hatred and spite in the air.

Most of us just want peace and safety for ourselves and our loved ones and a reasonable amount of prosperity and why is that so hard? Why are the people who are in power so determined to stay there that they will lie and propagandize and sell their own souls, no matter what it does to the rest of us? Why are the people in economic power, the billionaires who create our economy without having any sort of mandate to do so, scooping hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, out of our economy as their compensation for some weird biz school concept like "being willing to take on risk" and stagnating the wages of everyone else because anyone can be a secretary/plumber/custodian? 

Have they ever even looked around? OF COURSE not just anyone can be a good secretary. We have receipts that prove not just anyone can be a good plumber. Not just anyone can be good at cleaning a bathroom or replacing a transmission or flipping burgers.

How did we get this weird idea that the people at the top of the economic food chain deserve to be paid as much as possible, AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE, and the people at the bottom are just shit out of luck because .... ? I don't even know why. Maybe because to acknowledge that the burger flipper deserves dignity and respect and a reasonable living would mean that those people at the top wouldn't be able to win at the uniquely American game of Cutthroat Competitive Greed, a game that becomes more terrifying and more world-destroying for the rest of us every day. 

I'm starting to rant. No, I'm well into a rant. It just makes me so fucking angry. I heard a young athlete, probably 25 or 26, who has already made his first millions because he is very good at what he does, say in an interview, "I believe in capitalism, I'm going to make as much money as I can," and I thought, that is not what capitalism means-- except in our country, where self-centered, no-holds-barred greed has somehow come to be known as capitalism, and the phrase "but we can make money" is an excuse for anything and everything. 

Somewhere along the way we managed to let caring for our fellow human beings and community involvement and just plain and simple kindness become optional, the thing that seems silly and delusional, while lining our pockets is what really matters. I'm just sick of all of it, and of the people who look at you like you're a naive idiot if you push back.

Well, believe it or not, this post was originally supposed to end with some positive, hopeful commentary about something that I can't even remember anymore. I guess I got a little carried away.

Related: check out this story about an enormous study that found that venting doesn't reduce anger. But I think I do feel a little better, so maybe they're wrong. I suppose I'd better go back and add a rant warning at the top of the post. Have a good weekend. Do something that the "capitalists" would think was stupid.

a post that will make no sense if you haven't read the last two posts

I've got two half-written posts I could subject you to, and another half-dozen in my head, but I am feeling singularly unmotivated to post anything this week, so I will just leave you with a couple of addenda to past posts and maybe I will do better next week.

I did go back and add the recipe for Garden Minestrone in the first comment to my last post. But I did it in a hurry, and I didn't remember until I found half of a bag of frozen peas in my freezer that I only used half of the bag of peas. Apologies if you already tried it. An entire 14-ounce bag would have been a lot of peas.

Also, I was so excited to tell you about reading cookbooks that I neglected to mention a book that I meant to pass along to any other dark fantasy fans. You probably know me well enough to know that I don't like my dark fantasy very dark, but I don't know what else to call a book about a school whose students die regularly-- as in, one in four students will die before they graduate. A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik is a about a school of magic so of course it gets called a dark Harry Potter, but really it has much more in common with The Hunger Games than Hogwarts. I loved the main character El, who is doggedly determined to do the right thing in spite of being shunned by her fellow students. There has been some controversy about veiled, unintended racism-- Novik has apologized for one particular comment, but there was nothing in the book that rose to the level of boycott this book for me.

Honestly, I am so tired of hair-trigger reactions to the smallest things leading to books being canceled or boycotted. I know, I KNOW, that's a sign of my own privilege. I get that, but I'm still tired of it. This book is actually one of the best illustrations I've read of how privilege works so at least it has that going for it. You could hand it to a teenager who doesn't believe privilege exists and let them learn. It's the first book in a trilogy. The other two were good, but I think this one is the best of the three.

And finally, it occurred to me that a conservative who read my mini-rant in this post (see #5 and 6) about the agenda-driven takeover of local libraries might think that the way my parents raised me is obviously wrong because I turned out to be a liberal or progressive or whatever we're calling me. So I thought I should clarify that my parents have three daughters (I'm the middle), and I'm the only one that is no longer evangelical. The other two are still firmly within the fold, so to speak, and they are the reason that I so often say that there are conservatives I deeply love and respect, because I do love and respect my sisters who are amazing people.

And after that bunch of nonsense, I'm done. Have a good weekend. I know this was a pretty boring post but believe me, the half-written posts I didn't finish were way more boring so really I did you a favor.

Reading Report January-March 2024

I haven't read very many books in the first three months of this year, and I'm not sure exactly why. I've been reading, but mostly I've been reading books that I didn't finish (life's too short to read a book you're not enjoying), or that I've read before-- and I don't usually count re-reads in my tally. So I don't really have that much to report. Here are a few: 

Circe by Madeline Miller. I know. Everybody else read this five years ago. I just finally picked it up a couple of weeks ago. It's really good, but you probably don't need me to tell you that because you probably already read it yourself. 

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman, #2 in the Thursday Murder Club series. I enjoyed the first one in this series, but not enough to prioritize reading the sequels. I'm sorry I waited so long, because this one was much more interesting. Really enjoyed it. 

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. We listened to this on our road trip, because we're in a couples book club and this was our March selection. At the beginning of the trip, we called it our homework because it was pretty dry--we made ourselves listen to 30 minutes a day before we could listen to anything else. But once we got about a third of the way through, it became much more interesting, and before long we were listening to an hour or two a day. We finished it well before we made it back home. Whether or not you agree with any of his conclusions about mind-altering substances, it is a great book to discuss-- both for the two of us on our trip, and for our book club when we finally met up a couple of weeks ago. Also, Pollan is a great reader of his own work.

All My Knotted-Up Life by Beth Moore-- if you're an "exvangelical" like me (someone who was raised evangelical but no longer shares those beliefs), this is a must listen. In the 1990s-2000s, Beth Moore represented a lot of things about being a Christian woman that I did not appreciate (to put it mildly). I was a judgy snob about her work, even though I'm not sure I ever read any of it. But she is so candid in this memoir, and so clearly trying to do the right thing in the face of enormous opposition-- by the end, she had won me over. I went back and forth between the print version and the audio and she is also a good reader. There have been some complaints about her accent, but I went to Jr High and High School in East Texas, about three hours away from her hometown, and I can verify that people really talk like that, especially when they're telling stories. Not everybody has that much twang, but enough do that it didn't seem exaggerated to me. 

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin-- I loved this at first. A young woman named Greta works as a transcriptionist for a sex therapist who might not actually be a licensed therapist. In the small town where she lives, it is almost impossible to maintain clients' confidentiality, even when she tries--and sometimes she doesn't try very hard. It is darkly comic, painful, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes crude, a bit absurd. But after about the first third, it got to be a bit too .... much for me. I skimmed through the middle and then started reading again about 50 pages before the end. It's sad and hilarious and profound, and not always easy to read. Sort of recommended. 

I was super disappointed in Tim O'Brien's new book. Maybe I'll write more about that another time. Super disappointed. I think the religion of progressive intellectuals is cynicism. They cling to it with fanatical devotion. It is profoundly boring to me. Just watch while I smack down your juvenile efforts to be sincere or hopeful or kind. Hmmm. That got a little preachy. Sorry not sorry.

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

Have we ever talked about reading cookbooks? Even though I'm not much of a cook-- I'm not terrible, but I'm not very good, either-- I love to read cookbooks. I almost always have at least one going.  

Reading cookbooks is a different thing than cooking from a cookbook. A cookbook with great recipes might not be interesting to read, and the reverse is also true. I'm particularly fond of Mark Bittman, Deb Perelman, Ina Garten, the Cooks' Illustrated people, and a bunch more. Normally I don't tell you about the cookbooks I read because I'm not a good enough cook to be able to recommend the recipes, and I don't know that there are all that many other people who read cookbooks for fun. But just in case, here's one: The Essential New York Times Cookbook by Amanda Hesser, "lovingly revised and exceedingly cookable," published in 2021. 

What made it so interesting to me is that it ends up being a history of cooking in the US. There's a recipe for Clam Chowder from 1881, Fried Green Tomatoes from 1897, Brownies from 1943, Mocha Cheesecake from 1976. There are recipes from Julia Child, Barbara Kafka (who wrote the famous roasting cookbook back in the 90s), Marian Burros (including her famous plum cake that is apparently the most requested recipe ever published in the NYT), and a zillion from Craig Claiborne. Each section opens with a brief essay by Hesser about food trends over the past 140 years. It's a thousand pages long, so it took me about a year to read it, a little bit at a time, but I thought it was thoroughly intriguing. 

I haven't cooked from it, though, because NYT Cooking recipes are not usually the kind of thing that I cook. Not because I wouldn't like to but because they often call for ingredients that we just can't get here, or if we can get them, they're past their prime or dusty and out of date. Then this week I tried a recipe-- Garden Minestrone, first published in 1973-- that was so good I'm rethinking that. Maybe I will try some others. 

The reason I tried it is because it was so different-- you slice/prepare all the vegetables (a mandoline makes it less onerous) and then layer them in a dutch oven, cover, and cook without adding any liquid. The veggies release their liquid as they cook and make the broth. I used a drained 28 oz can of canned whole tomatoes (no fresh this time of year in MT), frozen peas, and garbanzos instead of limas, and it was still delicious. I can't find a version of it online or I'd link to it. Maybe if I have time this weekend I'll type up the way I did it (which has enough changes that it probably wouldn't be a copyright violation)(I did it in the oven, for one thing) and put it in the comments.

Wow. Just discovered that the ebook version is currently on sale for $2.99. The print version is $40. But who wants to cook from their iPad? Not me. They probably have it at your library. The Garden Minestrone is on page 118.

Well, this got long. Here's hoping for better reading soon. Have a nice weekend.

7ToT: Trip report and various other things

1. Every time we get back from a trip, I'm surprised how many people ask, "What was your favorite moment?" I guess it makes sense, come to think of it, because it keeps you limited to one moment from the trip, instead of going on and on, which nobody wants. But it surprises me because who can do that? have one favorite moment from a three-week trip? Maybe I should just randomly pick a good one and go with it. Like watching my internist spouse eat a hot dog so loaded with peppers, wasabi relish, teriyaki sauce, and jalapenos that you could no longer see the dog, or driving a golf cart in Scottsdale up and down paths that were so steep I about bit my tongue, or standing at the edge of Canyon de Chelly with my jaw dropped at the gorgeous colors. It was a good trip. There were a lot of great moments--many more than one-- including some lovely moments with long-term friends (the best kind of friends). You know who you are. <3

2. I thought of some other possible ways to write my trip report, though. One was as a "tips and tricks" for a three-week camper trip, which would have been kind of silly since it's the first time we've ever done a trip that was more than five days. Or maybe, "Things I will do Differently Next Time," but I could only come up with one: BRING MORE TOWELS. There you have it. Even counting the towel I lost (see next item), we still needed many more towels.

3. I also considered writing it like a daily travelogue, where each day I would report on The Thing I Left Behind. Day One: Left my favorite sunglasses in the bathroom at a rest stop. Day Two: Left my entire kit of toiletries behind at a hotel (the only night we stayed in a hotel because of 35 mph winds). Day Three: Left my towel in the bathhouse at that night's campground. Day Four: Dropped my favorite hat--but lucky for me, some nice guy picked it up and ran after me with it. Fortunately, by Day Five the rain of things I was distributing all over the Southwest had slowed and I think I made it home with the rest of my possessions. But those sunglasses--damn. They were good ones (not prescription, but bifocal cheaters which are super hard to find).

4. The amount of toiletries I "need" is absurd and excessive. I freely admit it. But every time I try to trim them down, I can't figure out what to leave behind. So on our second day when we were three hours down the road and we got a phone call that I had left my toiletries behind, it was kind of a problem. Our trip was a big loop, so at first I told them to hang on to them and we would pick them up when we drove back through. Then we stopped at a Target and I spent almost two hundred dollars replacing what could be replaced. Not kidding. It's all stuff that I would have bought eventually anyway, but still. That's a lot of stupid. Then that night I realized it wasn't just toiletries; my glasses and my retainer were also missing. So the very kind hotel employees mailed the whole (literal) kit and caboodle to Scottsdale, our next stop. I am forever grateful, but the hotel employee sounded so happy to do it that I wondered if maybe it was nice to get out of the hotel and head to the post office for a few minutes.

5. Moving on. Like so many other small towns, the board of our public library has been taken over by ultra-conservatives who probably hadn't darkened the door of the library in years, if ever. Now they are worried that LIBERALS ARE TAKING OVER THE WORLD through local libraries because.... ? how? I don't know. (Aside: A friend who is friends with the librarians told me that the book they are most upset about hadn't been checked out in two years until they started complaining about it, now there are dozens of people waiting to read it.)

6. I've been a liberal/progressive/Democrat/etc since I was about 22, but you remember, I'm sure, that I was raised Evangelical, and I am mystified by this attitude. I was raised to know that what we believed in our home was not what we would be taught at the public school we attended, or endorsed by any public institution (like a library). My parents took responsibility for teaching us their beliefs, and when what we believed was different than what we were taught in school, they took it upon themselves to explain why. They did not expect that the school (or a library) would be a Christian organization supporting the Christian faith, because hello, First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."). Public schools and public organizations were supposed to be neutral toward religion so that everyone--Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Atheists, Christians, and everyone else-- would be welcome. Amazing how many people there are who want to interpret the Second Amendment (about the right to bear arms) as broadly as possible, but then pretend that the First Amendment no longer applies. 

7. Truth in Advertising: in my last post, I told you about my obsession with NYT word games. First of all, I have subsequently flailed, which I suppose is to be expected if you publicly announce how much you love something. But also, not once but twice I said I do those games every single day and it wasn't until after the post went up that I thought, no I don't. I do them every single day except when I don't. But since right now I'm at a month and a half of yes, actually doing them every day, I guess it seems like it's always this way. Also, I made it sound like *pearls clutched* I would never use hints or cheat, and while that is usually true, I do sometimes use the spelling bee grid published by NYT, and less often, the Bee Roots page, which is maintained by fellow enthusiasts.

Also, I tried Connections again after reading about Michael Chabon's method, and it didn't work for me. I am still terrible at it. Well, maybe not terrible, but bad enough that it is not good for my mental health. 

(In the midst of the type-A takeover of the then-Twitter Spelling Bee community, I changed my profile description to "Champion of Type-B Personalities Everywhere." I don't think anyone got it except me, but it made me laugh every time I thought about it.)

This post is exactly why I frequently say I'm going to start writing shorter posts, but then I never manage to do so. Hope you have a good weekend. I had to plan a party again, so it's unlikely that my weekend will be fun, but at least it will be over soon.

NYT Word Games: In which I violate the "Teri's Hair" Rule

Back in the mid-90s, there was a Superman TV show that ran for several seasons called Lois & Clark. It starred Dean Cain as Clark Kent and Teri Hatcher as Lois Lane. I've always been a (moderate) Superman fan, so I was immediately in on this show. In fact, I got a little obsessed with it. 

Looking for similarly obsessed fans, I joined a "listserv" --cutting edge at the time, antique now--where you could send an email to one email address and it would be automatically distributed to everyone on the list. The listserv for Lois & Clark was a bunch of total nerds-- as you would expect with a group of people who cared enough to find it a decade before social media was even an idea-- but they were funny and sometimes smart and I loved it. 

Anyway. This is a long story to tell you something that is not even slightly related to today's topic, but I'm in this far so I will finish. Teri Hatcher had the same hairstyle for --oh, the details are hazy, but let's say the first season. At some point, she decided to change it, and you would have thought the world was ending. There were endless outraged emails with the subject line "Teri's hair," and some of them were paragraphs long. Many paragraphs. It went on for weeks, and then would periodically revive whenever her hair changed.

It got to the point that a contingent of us absolutely refused to read any post that had "Teri's hair" in the subject line, because it's just stupid hair, and she can wear it however she wants, for god's sake. Sometimes I would be itching to make some brilliant, witty comment about her latest hairstyle, but I refused, on principle, because no way was I going to fan the flames of what was essentially a boring topic.

And that is the same reason I have so far resisted talking about my obsession with the New York Times word games. I know there are people who post their results daily, and some of them are friends of mine, and I might in my most secret heart of hearts think they're being a little over-the-top, but I bow before their right to post whatever the heck they want on social media (because everyone else sure does). 

But I was determined to not be that person myself. Then I arrived at today, and I don't really have anything to tell you this week, besides the (unremarkable) announcement that we are about to leave on a 3-week road trip, and I don't know if that means I will be posting more or less. 

So here we are. My starter drug was the Spelling Bee. If you are uninitiated, the New York Times has a games app where they post daily puzzles, including their famous crosswords, a variety of other word games, and a handful of non-word games like Sudoku. There are a couple that are free or have free versions, but I am obsessed enough that I pay for the subscription. (You can also buy "packs" of puzzles without subscribing.)

I found out about the Spelling Bee when I followed Ben Dreyer on then-Twitter, after reading Dreyer's English, a book expressly designed to make word nerds happy. He would occasionally post cryptic messages about a word game he was playing, and based on the enthusiastic responses, it seemed he was not alone. He didn't ever mention the name of the game, but he always included a bee emoji-- enough clues to google "bee word game" and find it. 

So that's how I started. The Spelling Bee is run by a kid named Sam--I think he was 25 or 26 at the time--who is just a year or two older than my kid named Sam, so even though there were occasional word choices or exclusions that made me roll my eyes (like the day the pangram was "anklebone")(really?), I mostly thought that its quirkiness made it more interesting and lovable. 

Then the shutdown happened, and a bunch of hyper-competitive people were home with nothing to do, and suddenly our weird little #nytsb community got cutthroat. I quit following the discussion, but I still play the game. Every single day. And also Wordle and the Mini Crossword.

My limitation with the NYT word games is the amount of time I'm willing to spend on them. It usually takes me less than 10 minutes to do the Mini, Wordle, and make a start on the Bee. I might do the big crossword on Monday or Tuesday, but around Wednesday or Thursday (they get harder as the week goes by), they get hard enough that I run out of patience and/or time. I'm not great at it-- there are people who can solve a Friday puzzle in 10 minutes, and it takes me 30-50 minutes or more. It's not that I can't do them (she doth protest), I just don't care enough to spend 45 minutes a day on them. Unless I'm bored. Or traveling.

For the record, I quit doing Connections, because I would only get it 3 or 4 times a week and it made me feel stupid. (You can put on my gravestone that DISH is a category, not an item like PLATE or CUP. Thank you.) Same with Letterbox. 

So that's my routine. It's often the very first thing I do when I pick up my phone in the morning. I usually only play the Bee until I get to the Amazing level-- really, it isn't all that amazing since it's only half of the available words for the day-- but most days I don't have enough patience to push through to Genius (although I've been getting it more often lately because Doug has started helping). Kinda weird, right? I'm obsessed enough to do it every single day, but not obsessive enough to push through to the end.

And even Genius isn't the absolute end. It's the end they tell you about, but there is another level called Queen Bee that you don't know about unless you suddenly hit it (has only happened to me once). Queen Bee means you've found all the possible words for the day. For those hyper-competitive folks, once they know about it, they're not going to stop until they hit Queen Bee every single day. 

If you ask me, that must require cheating, because there are weird words or variant spellings that make it on the list, and unless you know about them, they're not exactly going to occur to you as possibilities. For example: when the letters are there, MAMA, MAMMA, and MOMMA are all accepted. And there are all kinds of ways to get hints or cheat-- just google "Spelling Bee hints," or even the NYT publishes a daily column with clues and spoilers.

My other favorite game, Wordle, was started by a software engineer as a birthday present for his girlfriend. In a matter of weeks it had exploded to several hundred thousand users. NYT bought it a couple of years ago. My Wordle strategey-- and all of us who do it every day have one-- is that I use a different word every day, and I try to use up consonants. 

You have six guesses to get a five-letter word. Apparently what most people do is try to use up vowels, so they start with a word like ADIEU. If you're using up consonants, usually by the 4th or 5th guess you're doing a word scramble with four or five letters instead of trying to guess what _A_E_ is.

It takes more guesses-- usually four and five, and the only way I'm going to get it in two is if I start with a totally lucky guess--but it's much more reliable than the vowel method. I think. People have done studies of this stuff, so probably someone knows. My streak was over 300 last fall when I got stuck early in the day and forgot to go back and finish. I was OK with it because I had been thinking about purposely breaking my streak anyway since we were about to go on a vacation and I didn't want to feel pressured to do it if I wasn't in the mood. 

Good grief, I am even boring myself. Are you still reading? I guess you must be if you read that.

Anyway. My streaks have been much shorter since then so it's not working as well as it used to, but it's good enough for me. If you really love Wordle, you can try out all the non-NYT variants (easy to find if you google), including Duotrigordle, a super fun version where you are solving for 32 words at once. I did it for awhile but eventually I quit because it takes so much longer.

Enough. Like I said, we are about to leave on a 3-week road trip, and sometimes traveling makes me want to post more often, and sometimes I forget all about having a blog and don't post at all. Have a great weekend, and I'll be back in 3-4 weeks or maybe sooner.