Childhood nostalgia

I went back to see my mom on Friday and Saturday last week. As I drove through the Main Line on Saturday morning on my way from my sister's house to the rehab facility, which is just down the street from Haverford College, I thought about similar beautiful Saturday mornings throughout my children’s school years. During those years, at 9:30 on a Saturday morning, I’d have been at a swim meet or a track meet or a baseball game or on my way to one of those things. I loved that time, but I don’t miss it as much as I did the first year after my youngest graduated. And of course we still have college swimming, which is the greatest.

But I still miss it a little bit. I drove past the Haverford YMCA, wondering if they have a swim team, and if there was a meet going on. I pulled up to the Wawa to pick up my mom’s coffee and I listened in on the coffee station conversations - parents had just dropped kids off at lacrosse and baseball practices, or were on their way to games and picking up coffee and snacks for the morning. Some of them were harried younger parents, still figuring out how to manage spring sports along with everything else. The senior parents, the ones whose kids are in their last year or two of high school, seemed happy and a little smug. I remember that feeling during my younger son’s senior year and his last summer of summer swimming - I was happy and a little smug and also a little sad that it was all ending. I thought about saying something, just joining the conversation for a few minutes, but I decided not to. I paid for our coffees and was on my way.

*****
My mom was up and about when I arrived; or as close to as up and about as she can be right now. She had already had breakfast and was dressed for the day, and she seemed ready to do something. Her spirits were high, which was nice to see. I told her that I’d seen a “Deport Elon Musk” sign, with an Uncle Sam illustration, on the front lawn of a very nice Main Line house. “Good for them,” she said. “Maybe I’ll get one too. As far as I’m concerned, all the other immigrants can stay, but they need to send that Elon back to South Africa.” Damn right, Mom.

The nurse said that my mom was well enough to go out, so we went out - lunch at a nice little neighborhood spot called Angelo’s Cafe, and book shopping at Barnes and Noble. My mom had crepes for lunch because why shouldn’t she, and she bought a gardening magazine and two illustrated Philadelphia history books. She sat and read her books while I shopped a bit to spend a gift card that had been burning a hole in my pocket. The walk back to the car wore her out a bit, and we headed back to the Quadrangle. She was tired enough that she needed the wheelchair for the trip back to her room, but she had a good time. We sat looking at our new books together, and my mom showed me photos of the places that she remembered from her Philadelphia childhood and mine. 

No no no

"They're tryna make me go to rehab 

I say no no no"

Amy Winehouse (may she rest in peace)

*****

The Quadrangle is a somewhat fancy senior living community with a rehab facility and a memory care unit in the middle of Haverford, PA, a somewhat fancy neighborhood in the middle of the fancy Philadelphia Main Line suburbs. Haverford College is right up the street. It's a Tuesday afternoon, and I'm here with my mom in the room in the rehab facility, where she was admitted yesterday. She's less than happy about this whole situation but there's not much we can do about that. She needs professional care, at least for a few weeks. 

My mom has a ton of health issues but the big problems now are a very painful hip injury and lymphedema that keeps worsening because she doesn't move enough because of the pain. She had symptoms of an infection on Sunday so my brother took her to the hospital, and they kept her overnight. We brought her here yesterday. Rather, an ambulance brought her here, and my sister and I followed in my car. And now she's here, and hopefully on the road to recovering her strength and mobility. 

She was at my house a few weeks ago, and I could see that she wasn't well. Mobility has been a problem for her for a long time but she had a much harder time than usual getting up and around, getting in and out of the car, walking between the car and wherever we went, which wasn't very far. I took her for a haircut, as I always do, and she almost had to skip the wash, because she couldn't get comfortably settled in the chair. But she finally got her hair washed and cut and then we met my husband for dinner. Had he not been there, I would not have been able to get her back in the car to go home. So it was a situation 

*****

There are a lot of things I don't miss about Philadelphia but there are some things that I do miss, especially food. The DMV has its own special food culture, of course, and it's pretty great, but different. And of all the things I miss, I miss Wawa, the greatest convenience store on Earth. 

Yes it is. No I don't want to hear about Bucee’s or Sheetz or some weird Midwestern gas station that offers strangely good pizza. I said what I said. 

Wawa hazelnut coffee tastes like my young adulthood in Philadelphia. I'm drinking some right now in my mom's room at the rehab. She seems a bit more reconciled to her situation, but she hates the coffee here and wanted a Wawa coffee. I'd have been happy to oblige in any case, but it was also a great opportunity to get my own Wawa coffee. 

You pour your own coffee at Wawa, and then you add milk and sugar or whatever you want, and then you pay at the register. The coffee station is always busy but it's large enough that there's plenty of room for everyone. And I do mean everyone. The Wawa coffee station at 845 in the morning is a town square. At least five other people were making their coffee as I made cups for my mom and me. REM’s “Man on the Moon" was playing on the radio, and I sang along. I do happen to believe that they put a man on the moon. 

*****

I drove back home on Wednesday, late afternoon, so that I could get home before dark. My night driving is not good. And my daytime driving isn’t much to brag about either but I have to say that I had no trouble on this trip - no unwarranted panic, no major wrong turns, no car trouble, no fear, really. I drove to Philadelphia on Monday, and then drove all over the Main Line and Chester County on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then drove back home, and didn’t have a single bad moment other than some sun glare on Tuesday night. I felt free and at ease, much as I used to when driving. I quite enjoyed myself. 

Traffic in the Philadelphia suburbs can be heavy at times, but the volume and the driver aggression don’t compare to the Thunderdome that is driving in the DMV. Pennsylvania’s roads, on the other hand, are just silly. If you have ever driven in the Main Line suburbs of Montgomery and Chester and Delaware County, you will know what I mean. The term “rolling countryside” was invented to describe this topography, and the narrow two-lane roads bob up and down and back and forth, twisting and winding over blind hills and through little one lane bridges over creeks and railroad crossings. And it all came back to me - how to navigate those winding roads, and how to crest those little hills and bridges without being able to see what’s coming from the other side and most of all how to drive up and down Green Lane in Philadelphia. IYKYK. It wasn’t just OK. It was fun. 

Of course, the perfect weather was a big help. Green Lane would not have been fun in the rain, I tell you what. Wednesday was technically the last day of winter, and it was glorious - warm enough to wear a skirt without stockings, warm enough to leave my jacket in the car, warm enough that I remembered what it’s like not to be cold for five minutes. When I left my house on Monday afternoon, our forsythia had just started to bloom the tiniest bit. Now they’re in almost full bloom. Our cherry trees are budding now. In a few days, they’ll be bursting with pink blooms, and we’ll have a few days of forsythia/cherry blossom overlap. 

*****

OK, that is enough of the weather and traffic. Back to my mama. On Tuesday, we saw the chief occupational therapist, who did an evaluation and explained how the OT and PT would work. She asked my mom what she hoped to accomplish, and my mom snapped right back “To get out of here.” The OT did not take the bait. “Yes,” she said, “of course. We know you don’t want to live here forever. But what do you want to DO when you get home? How do you want to FEEL?” 

That gave her pause, just for the briefest moment. From her brief hospital stay last weekend through her arrival and intake at the rehab facility through the first day of adjusting to the routine and schedule, she was completely resistant to everything. She didn’t need to be in the hospital (she did), she didn’t need rehab or PT or OT or any of it (she does) and she was perfectly fine on her own at home (no she absolutely is not). But when the OT director looked at my mother, completely serious and earnest, and asked that simple question - I could see her attitude changing, just a tiny bit. Seeing an opportunity, I chimed in, reminding her about our trip to Ireland, and our beach vacations, and the shopping and lunch excursions that she loves so much. “If you do the therapy,” I said, “and I mean REALLY work at it, then you can do all of those things again.” 

She didn’t say anything. But when the OT came to collect her on Wednesday, she went without complaint, and when I asked her how it was, she said “not too bad.” The activities director invited her to come hear a DJ who spins oldies on Wednesday afternoons, and she went. And the PT came to get her as soon as she returned from the DJ’s performance, and she didn’t even try to talk her way out of it. 

My mom actually did agree to do physical therapy last year. It was not successful. This was partly because she resisted it at every turn, and didn’t do any of the follow-up exercises. And it was partly because she cancelled more appointments than she actually kept. I’d call her to ask her how her PT went. And she’d say “Oh, I missed the appointment, and now I’m playing phone tag with the guy.” 

Translation: “I cancelled the appointment. The guy is calling me to reschedule and I’m dead-ass ghosting him.” I had to explain to my mother, more than once, that “phone tag” describes a situation in which BOTH parties are attempting to reach one another. Hence the word “tag.” If only one person is calling, and the other person is avoiding the call, then there’s no game. No tag can occur. 

*****

Anyway, it’s been almost a week now, and although she is not likely to admit it, I think she’s enjoying herself just a tiny bit. And she will get daily therapy whether she likes it or not because they come to her, and there’s no place to hide. She’ll be in the care facility for two to three more weeks and will then have home therapy and a visiting nurse. She’ll spend weeks at my house and weeks at my sister’s house to give her a change of scenery and to give my youngest sister, who lives with her at home, a break from taking care of her. 

I’ll be there again next week. Stay tuned for updates, including full reports on traffic and weather conditions on the Main Line. 

Bibliography 2024

I’m about five months into a semi boycott of Amazon. Bezos kowtowing to Trump is only one reason for my disdain for Amazon. I don’t like the way they treat workers.I don’t like that Bezos brags about wanting Amazon employees to be “terrified” because terror is supposed to spark creativity and innovation or some stupid shit. I don’t like that Amazon is one of the biggest recipients of corporate welfare among US businesses (right up there with Walmart and McDonald’s). I don’t like Amazon’s impact on the environment, and its phony climate pledge greenwashing attempts. And I don’t like centibillionaires. I don’t think it should be possible for one person to grab and hoard that much wealth. 

I still shop on Amazon - and then I go to other merchants to actually buy what I need. There’s something very satisfying in using Amazon to do the research and then giving the money to another business, and I don’t even mind paying more. In fact, I LIKE paying more, just to make a point. I’m that petty. 

*****

But I do still have a Kindle, and so I haven’t yet broken with Amazon altogether. I’d go back to a Barnes and Noble Nook, but Kindle books are not compatible with Nook hardware because of course they’re not. I have too many Kindle books to abandon the technology altogether. So Jeff Bezos will still get a little bit of my money. When I figure out a way to remedy this situation, I will. Meanwhile, this was a very long and meandering way to introduce my 2024 book list. I read almost all of these books on my Kindle. 

Enough. Cassidy Hutchinson. This book exists, and yet Donald Trump is President, once again. No good deed goes unpunished. SMDH.  

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History. Lea Ypi. I wrote about this one here but fair warning - this post is kind of a mishmash of random stuff (much like this entire blog) and you have to dig for the part about the book. Caveat emptor, readers. 

Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. Mary McGrory. The best parts of this book, about McGrory’s New York literary life in the middle of the 20th century, are Helene Hanff-good. The rest of it is pretty good too, especially if you really care about correct use of “you and I” vs. “you and me” and if you have strong feelings about the serial comma. I do care, of course, but not enough to read whole chapters of exegesis explaining why it’s “Between you and me” and not “between you and I;” and not enough to listen to anyone’s impassioned arguments in favor of the serial comma. I am already on board, is the thing. It’s preaching to the proverbial choir. No need to sell me on the serial comma, Mary - I am already fully invested. 

Middlemarch. George Eliot. I have an actual degree in English - summa cum laude! - and yet I had never read Middlemarch. But when both Zadie Smith and Martin Amis tell me that I need to read something, I read it. Zadie Smith, especially, is never wrong. I loved Middlemarch so much that I wrote about it at least twice, here and here. I might read it again very soon. Check this list again next year. 

The Broom of the System. David Foster Wallace. I wrote about this one right here in yet another rambling word salad covering books, movies, college swimming, anxiety, and social media health influencers. This book was very important to me when I was young, and although small parts of it do not hold up, most of it has really stood the proverbial test of time, and I loved reading it again. Maybe I’ll read Infinite Jest again. 

Prophet Song. Paul Lynch. If you’re already terrified that the United States is on a collision course with totalitarianism then this book will absolutely not reassure you. It is a great novel - but also grim and terrifying and much more realistic than most dystopian novels. Forewarned is forearmed, right? 

Burn Book. Kara Swisher. I’m especially proud of the very last line of this little review, which I wrote nearly a year ago. It holds up, and so does Burn Book. BTW, if you don’t follow Kara on social media, you absolutely should. 

All She Lost. Dalal Mawad. 

Answered Prayers. Truman Capote. I just searched my Google Docs, thinking that I had written something about this somewhere, but I didn’t. I did find something that I wrote when I was still in school; and 11 years later, I stand by my undergraduate assertion that In Cold Blood is the greatest true crime story ever written. I read Answered Prayers after watching “The Swans,” the Hulu miniseries based on the book and the post-publication fallout. I felt sorry for poor lonely Truman, but I don’t blame Babe Paley and the rest of the Swans for cutting him off. You can’t sell your friends out in exchange for money and fame and expect to keep those friends. 

The Big Myth. Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes. Last year, I attended a lecture by the great Dr. Donald Berwick, who recommended this book. A short synopsis: The “myth” is the spurious idea that the free market is the only thing that can accomplish anything of value and that we should let it run free like it’s a wild fawn in the woods. For a long time, politicians (mostly Republican but plenty of Democrats, too) were completely taken in by this myth, and our economic and tax and regulatory policy were all based on free market fundamentalism. And now that wealth is ever more concentrated at the top, and the middle class is shrinking while people on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale seem to keep getting poorer and most people can’t afford to buy a house unless they have generous and well-to-do parents and the country’s infrastructure is literally falling apart, it’s become clear, at least to some of us, that unregulated capitalism is just the slippery slope to failed-state status.Authors Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes point out that at one time, not that long ago, most people supported the liberal order established after the Depression and WWII, and that it took a very sophisticated, well-planned propaganda campaign to convince people that government oversight and regulation were bad and that the “invisible hand of the market” (invisible because it does not exist) was capable of fulfilling every human need and solving every problem. This propaganda campaign, which took the form of everything from TV programs to textbooks for every educational level from elementary to college, was so successful that by the early 1980s or so, most people believed Ronald Reagan’s famous “Government IS the problem” line. And that is why I blame Ronald Reagan as much as I blame Mitch McConnell for the sad state of affairs that is America in February 2025. It’s not just a big myth. It’s a big fat lie. 

The Zone of Interest. Martin Amis. A rare case in which I saw the movie first and then read the book on which it was based. This is a fictionalized story about Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife and children, and their idyllic life in a lovely home with a tennis court and a pool and beautiful gardens and household staff and a death camp in the backyard. Both the movie and the book are just astonishingly good. 

Coming Home. Brittney Griner. I keep reading these Putin-is-evil books, even though I’m on board with this thesis and have been for some time now, and don’t need any further convincing. I didn’t realize until I read this that Britney Griner was the Angel Reese or Caitlin Clark of her time. I’ve never paid much attention to college basketball, men’s or women’s, and so I didn’t know that Griner was the number one pick of her draft year and the greatest player in Baylor WBB history. I’m not the only American who didn’t know much about Brittney Griner until her imprisonment in Russia - she acknowledges that most Americans had no idea who she was. But women’s professional basketball is extremely popular in Russia, and she was LeBron-famous there. The book is very good, and I’m very happy that Ms. Griner is safely back in the US. But of course, I’m sure that Trump would have gotten her out, too, now that Russia is our BFF. 

We Were the Lucky Ones. Georgia Hunter. As an adult, Georgia Hunter discovered that she was the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. She wrote this novel based on her own family’s near-unbelievable story of courage, endurance, and plain luck. Not that many Polish Jewish families survived the war nearly intact, but Hunter’s family did, despite being scattered all over the world, both during the war and after. It’s a good, though not great book. And the Hulu miniseries based on the book is quite good. 

If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury. Geraldine DeRuiter. This is a book of essays about food and cooking. I don’t normally read books about food or cooking but then I came across some social media discussion about the NYT’s rather negative review of this book, and that review and the resulting online pushback made me want to read it. NYT book and music and media critics need frequent reminders that most of us don’t care what they think. Anyway, I liked this book, which is not really about food and cooking. Or rather, it’s ostensibly about food and cooking, and it is, on the surface; but it’s really about misogyny in the restaurant business (and everywhere else), with side forays into family trauma and secrets, and a little bit of travel. Anyway, it’s very good. DeRuiter, known on social media as The Everywhereist, really knows how to write her way around the perimeter of a thing, and to keep going, spiraling inward until she gets to the root. I’d definitely read more of DeRuiter’s work. I might even read this one again. 

No Judgment. Lauren Oyler. In 20 years, Lauren Oyler will be as good an essayist as Zadie Smith. She should quote me on this, because it’s the highest praise she will ever receive in her literary career. 

Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry and The Hero of this Book. Elizabeth McCracken. “American wiseacre” is now on my list of phrases that I wish I had coined. 

Autocracy Inc and The Twilight of Democracy. Anne Applebaum. Yes, as a matter of fact, this IS my idea of vacation reading. 

*****

Murder on the Orient-Express. Agatha Christie. Speaking of vacation reading,  I needed something to read when my Kindle went missing for a few days during our vacation, and

this was on the bookshelf at the beach house we rented. That bookshelf was filled with Tom Clancy and Mitch Albom and Danielle Steel and who knows what else, and so Agatha Christie was the only reasonable choice. And it was absolutely delightful. I’d never actually read any Agatha Christie before, but I was aware that Murder on the Orient-Express is one of the best-selling novels of all time (maybe THE best-selling novel of all time) and I enjoyed knowing that I was one of millions of people who have spent an August afternoon at the beach with Hercule Poirot figuring out who murdered the vile Mr. Ratchett. SPOILER ALERT: It was everyone. If you need a break from all of this (gesturing wildly at everything) you could do a lot worse than to spend a day with Agatha Christie or Margery Sharp or Muriel Spark or Barbara Pym or Nancy Mitford or P.D. James or really any British female novelist of the early to mid 20th century. 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.  Gabrielle Zevin. As I wrote earlier,  I was very surprised to find a novel about video game designers so absorbing, because this is a topic in which I have absolutely no interest. Zevin uses the video game industry and its fast-paced (and toxic) culture to tell a story about two brilliant young people and their decades-long on-and-off friendship, and their place in the time in which they lived, that being the waning days of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st. When I read fiction, I always want a happy ending. I wouldn’t describe the ending of Tomorrow as happy in any way, but it was fitting. 

Girl, Maladjusted and The Social Climber’s Handbook. Molly Jong-Fast. Memoir and murder - two very different books by the same author. 

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. Svetlana Alexievich. When I read this, I asked myself what the American version of this book might be like; what stories we would tell journalists and historians about the American Century and the end of the United States. At the time, I was just being dramatic. Now this is a perfectly legitimate question. 

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Alison Bechdel. Not long ago, I read a self-help book that wasn’t very good. I wrote about it, and about the fact that I never read self-help except for this one time. Maybe if I’d chosen a good self-help book, I’d be open to more from the genre, but self-help is dead to me now. Graphic novels are another thing that I never read, except that I did read this one, and it’s very good (not really a novel though, more of a memoir) and I might occasionally read more graphic novels, except not often because the print is usually too small and they don’t work particularly well on e-readers. I bought and read the actual paperback book because I liked the way it looked. 

*****

It’s March 2025 now, and I’m almost finished writing this list of books that I read in 2024! Any day now! I should just power through and finish this thing right now but the tedium is getting to me. All these links. All these titles to italicize. All of this writing about stuff that I already wrote about. I’m literally dead from boredom. 

*****

OK, back to work. 

*****

Patriot. Alexei Navalny. We were at my son’s first college conference championship meet early last year when Alexei Navalny’s death was first reported. We had all watched “Navalny" together, and I bought the book soon after his death but didn’t get around to reading it until later in the year. Putin was so afraid of a peaceful political opponent that he hounded him literally to death. Navalny was so unafraid of Putin that he doubled down on his opposition to the regime every time he got out of prison. He was so unafraid that he walked away from freedom and safety in Germany, returning to certain imprisonment and eventual death in Russia. Similar extraordinary courage will soon be required in the United States. I hope that I’m up to it. I hope we all are. 

On Tyranny and On Freedom. Timothy Snyder. I read On Freedom right after I finished On Tyranny, which was the book of the moment right after the 2024 election, when On Tyranny’s first rule, “Do not obey in advance,” was all over social media. I think that Snyder wrote On Freedom before On Tyranny, but you can read them in the opposite order, as I did. You can read one or the other, though I definitely recommend reading both. 

*****

I’m finally at the end! Democracy Awakening (Heather Cox Richardson) is the last book I finished in 2024 - I started another book right after this, but I didn’t finish it until 2025 and so consistent with my customary practice, I will include it on my 2025 reading list. 

Caveat emptor: The post linked to the words Democracy Awakening discusses the book only very briefly. It discusses pretty much everything else at considerable length. 

I started reading Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American newsletter probably early last year. And when I say “read,” I mean that I skimmed it, and sometimes just looked at the first paragraph. Now I read that newsletter from top to bottom every single day. When the topic of all of this (gesturing wildly at everything) comes up in conversation, almost invariably someone will ask me (or I will ask them) “Do you read Heather Cox Richardson?” As much as I love Rachel Maddow and Timothy Snyder and Sherilynn Ifill and so many other pro-democracy writers and thinkers in the traditional media and online, I think that Heather Cox Richardson is the best of the best. As they say on social media, protect HCR at all costs. 

*****

And that is it! A year of reading; roughly 80% dictators and political upheaval and 20% everything else. No wonder I’m stressed out. It’s only about 25 books, a low for me, but I think I read a few more books that I forgot to track. And it’s not a contest, anyway. 2025 is going to skew a little bit more toward fiction, I think. I studied for 2025 last year. I knew there would be a test.  

A few days in the Shrieking 20s

I hate being sick. I hate being sick any time but especially on a beautiful early spring Saturday. I was supposed to go to a protest today. Instead, I’m on my couch in my pajamas with fever, chills, and stomach cramps. 

This just happened this morning. I felt fine yesterday and last night. We went to the Capitals game and sat with 30,000 of our closest friends watching the Capitals come back from a 2-0 first period deficit to win 5-2 against Detroit. We were surrounded by Detroit fans who left the arena dejected and disappointed. I hope they didn’t also leave with norovirus or whatever it is that has me laid out this morning. 

*****

Capital One Arena was almost full. Alex Ovechkin is ten goals away from passing Wayne Gretzky as the top NHL goal scorer of all time, and everyone wants to be there for every goal. Alex didn’t score last night, but everyone else did. 

Metro was oddly quiet for a Friday game night. We had a car almost to ourselves and the ride from Glenmont to Judiciary was very quick. When we emerged from the Metro at Judiciary (the coolest Metro exit, with the National Building Museum filling your view as you ride the escalator up to the street), we noticed how quiet the neighborhood was. A few people were out, but most of them looked like they were on their way home from work rather than on their way out for a fun Friday evening.  We got a table at the Irish Channel almost immediately - unheard of for a Friday night, especially when the Capitals are playing. The atmosphere in the Channel was subdued - not quiet, exactly, but not raucous and celebratory. Subdued. The whole town is subdued. 

*****

It’s Sunday morning and it looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day. I feel much better this morning; drained and unusually tired (this is the new normal) but no longer sick. It’s such a relief. One of the things I hate most about being sick is my own particular big baby whiny reaction to being sick. Halfway through a day of COVID or flu or a stomach bug, I’m resigning myself to a life of infirmity, certain that I’ll never feel well again. It’s ridiculous. God help me if I ever have to deal with a real health problem. I’ll be absolutely insufferable. 

It’s almost 10 o’clock. It feels earlier, of course, because today is the first day of Daylight Savings Time. One hour of sleep in exchange for six months of later daylight? I’ll take it. That’s the deal of the century. 

I’m going to do something today. I don’t know what. Something. It’s going to be a busy week at work, which is normally my favorite kind of week at work but everything is upside down now and we’re spending all our time just responding to ridiculous edicts and Executive Orders and waiting for the hammer to fall. This is not as much fun as it sounds, I tell you what. And this week is going to be especially interesting because the CR that’s currently funding the government runs out in five days and who knows what they’re doing to avert a shutdown. I’ll work Monday through Friday and if they haven’t come to an agreement on a CR by Friday afternoon, I’ll follow the news until midnight to see if I’ll be working after next weekend. Exciting. Bracing. We live on the edge in this town. 

*****

What’s better than a secret tunnel? Well, some things but not that many, I tell you, not that many. I’ve worked at Naval Support Activity Bethesda for three years now, but I’ve always driven to work and so until this morning, I never knew that there was a tunnel under Rockville Pike connecting Medical Center Metro on the NIH side of the street to NSAB on the other. My husband drove me to work this morning since parking enforcement is now in full effect, and I don’t have a parking pass. You can’t really drop someone off right at the base without causing a huge traffic jam, so I told him to drop me off at the Metro station, and I would either take the shuttle or walk. 

I know that there’s a shuttle between the Metro and the University. I see people boarding it every afternoon. But I have no idea where on the other side it picks up and drops off, and the parking and drop-off at Medical Center Metro is big and confusing, so I decided to just walk, because it was a nice morning. And just as I was thinking that I hoped that I wouldn’t get hit by a car crossing the very busy Rockville Pike, I noticed the signs for the underpass to NSAB. Genius! I breezed through the little tunnel and up the stairs on the other side, emerging just at the turnstiles at Gate 3. From there it’s a little bit of a walk past the hospital annex buildings - all told just about 1.4 miles from the Metro Kiss and Ride to my desk in Building D. The sun had just come up (we work early) and it was still chilly so I kept a brisk pace. It was a nice way to start the day - energizing. Still, I need to figure out where to get that shuttle because that walk won’t be fun and delightful if it’s raining or really cold. 

*****

It’s Tuesday now. I should be working and I am kind of working but I cannot concentrate and so I am taking a break to write about why I cannot concentrate, which is basically all of this (gesturing wildly at everything). Well, all of this but specifically the continuing resolution vote in the House, upon which my immediate work future depends. I know that they’re voting today and I just heard a few minutes of stupid Mike Johnson claiming simultaneously that he has the votes to pass the CR but that if it doesn’t pass, it’s the Democrats’ fault. Which one, Mr. Speaker? It can’t be both. And if you really had the votes, then why did you need to hold a press conference? You could have just held a vote, you know? 

I will be furloughed if the government shuts down. But I do not want to see one single Democrat vote for this funding package. Their only job right now is to resist Musk and Trump and Vance and Johnson and their evil plan to turn the US into a Russia-style dictatorship and oligarchy. I need my paycheck but I don’t need it more than I need a free country. 

Still, I wish they’d get this over with one way or another. I really can’t concentrate. 

*****

One of the reasons for this post and others like it is to document my life, especially right now. I’m sure my blog will be very useful to future historians researching the lives of middle-aged DMV suburban ladies in the Screaming 20s. Or the Shrieking 20s. I can’t decide which is better. The internet will figure that out. 

But I must admit that the real reason for this post to have gone on for days is that I still - STILL - need to finish my 2024 book post, not to mention my neighborhood association meeting minutes, and this is a way to avoid doing those things. So I’m going to wrap this up now. The book post is next. Who knows, maybe I’ll have plenty of time next week. Maybe I’ll have all the time in the world. 

Fake spring

It's Sunday morning, and I'm in the backseat of my own car. My husband is driving and my mom is riding shotgun because she needs the legroom. She spent the week with me. It was nice to have her even though it's very hard to work and keep up with everything while I'm taking care of her. I'm tired. 

*****

It was almost 60 degrees here yesterday, and it won't get out of the 30s today. Walking outside this morning was a punch in the face. But really, everything is a punch in the face right now. We should all have black eyes and fat lips. 

*****

One night last week (and I mean week before last, even before my mom got here) I was sitting on the couch at 8 pm, struggling to stay awake. It had been a long day but I've never been as tired as I've been since January 20. I've always wondered how dictators grab control so quickly - it's always so quick - and how they hold on for so long. Now I'm beginning to understand that it's more than just fear that keeps people from fighting back. It's exhaustion. The chaos wears people out. 

*****

And I came to that realization almost 2 weeks before the Oval Office meeting between Trump and Vance and President Zelenskyy. We are no longer on the right side of the good vs. evil divide. We are no longer the world's defender of freedom and democracy and human rights. It's been two days and I still don't have my head around this yet. God willing, I never will, because this is not something that I should get used to and eventually come to accept.   

*****

I went to work very early on Monday morning. Now that the feds are back in the office 100 percent of the time, the parking garage, which was never really big enough to accommodate everyone who drives to work here, fills up early. As a contractor, I will actually be teleworking more now because we’re not eligible for parking passes, and my boss is a good person who doesn’t want us to have to deal with public transportation or other cobbled-together transportation schemes. For the foreseeable future, I’ll be in the office on Mondays only. I have mixed feelings about this. It’s nice not to have to rush most mornings, and it’s nice not to worry too much about what I’m wearing, but I really like my job and I really like the energy of the campus and the base, and I didn’t really like 100 percent telework the last time I did it. It feels similar, actually. It feels like I’m hunkering down at home as disaster unfolds outside my front door. Little did I know that 2020 would end up feeling like the gosh-darn good old days. 

*****

I watched the Oscars until about 10 PM on Sunday night, so I missed the big awards. The Oscar telecast gets more boring every year; and in past years, I’ve complained about Hollywood and its “courage” in speaking out on issues that pretty much everyone in the room agrees on. Last night, I’d have appreciated seeing some real courage, but I was sorely disappointed. Other than my new favorite actor Kieran Culkin (I really loved A Real Pain), who acknowledged Jeremy Strong’s performance in The Apprentice in rather a pointed way; and the beautiful Zoe Saldana, who talked about her immigrant grandmother, most people obeyed the Academy’s “don’t talk politics” rule. This would have been the year to disregard that rule and to speak the brave truths that movie people are always willing to speak when they’re pretty much guaranteed no consequences other than a round of applause. 

*****

It’s Tuesday now. I’m about to start work on a beautiful sunny fake spring day in the DMV. I don’t fall for fake spring anymore, and I'm not getting my hopes up even thought the temperature is going to reach about 60 degrees today. That happened last week, too, and then it was freezing on Sunday. Delightful, Maryland weather is - so whimsically quirky. 

I was on the fence about whether or not to subject myself to the President’s address to Congress tonight and then I remembered that I have a neighborhood association meeting and since I have to take notes, I won’t be able to listen in on the speech while I’m on the Zoom call. It’s just as well. Ain’t no good gonna come out of that speech, and I’ll read all about it afterward. 

******

Well, I don’t know why I did that to myself. The neighborhood association meeting wrapped up 30 minutes early (God I love when that happens) and so I was finished in plenty of time to watch the speech, and I did watch it - partly out of a sense of civic responsibility, and partly out of sheer morbid curiosity. What’s he gonna do, I thought? Announce that we’re leaving the UN and NATO? Declare martial law? Appoint Andrew Tate as Secretary of the Department of Protecting Women Whether the Women Like it or Not? Anything is possible, I thought. Anything could happen. 

It was pretty much just the usual Trump lies and bluster, though, with the added excitement of Rep Al Green’s ejection from the chamber (the rest of the Democrats should have marched out with him) and the surprising news that Melania Trump is somehow a patron saint of foster children, and the President’s inadvertent admission that Elon Musk is in fact the head of DOGE right after he declared straight-faced that the era of unelected bureaucrats is over. They’re still going to get away with doing whatever they want to do, of course, but I hope that the Trump lawyers who backed up Trump’s earlier claims that Elon isn’t really in charge of anything - in court, under oath - are charged with perjury. The rest of this spectacle just made me tired - even more tired than I already was. 

Meanwhile, I’m planning to attend my first-ever protest on Saturday. It’s supposed to be sunny that day, with temperatures in the low 50s - perfect weather to recover my energy. Perfect weather to fight the power. 

Essay questions

 

Here's another half-baked review of a book that I read about a year ago. I started writing about this book before I even finished it. I finished the book a year ago. I finished writing about it 5 minutes ago. 

*****

I'm not really up to date on 21st century literary criticism, probably because I’m about 70 years behind on my reading. That is why I had to look up the word “autofiction” recently. It turns out that it’s just a new word for a pretty old literary genre, the roman a clef written in the first person. Although I guess it’s somewhat different because in some autofiction, the reader isn’t quite sure if she’s reading a novel based on the writer’s life, or a memoir sprinkled with fictional details. The question arose when I read Lauren Oyler’s essay collection, No Judgment. 

*****

Before I started on the book, I did some very quick and cursory research on Lauren Oyler. My research stopped with a Reddit thread about a Goodreads controversy. Needless to say, I didn’t actually read the thread so I don’t even know what the controversy was, although I suspect that it has something to do with review bombing and author pushback on review bombing, which seems to be what happens on Goodreads. Engaging with Goodreads reviewers doesn’t seem any wiser than trolling the comments on Elon’s latest Twitter post (note once again that I wrote most of this a year ago - and I still refuse to call it X - suck it, Elon). Not a good use of time. Anyone, no one review bombs mid 20th century literature, and dead authors don’t push back on bad-faith 2-star reviews, so Goodreads has really never been a factor in my what-to-read decisions. I’d have read this book no matter what the Goodreads community had to say about it or the author, but I’ll never know because at least for now, I’m smart enough to stay out of that internet neighborhood. “Very online” people are always ready to ruin everything for everyone, and I’m not going to let them influence my TBR list. 

*****

Do you remember Gawker? Do you remember the lawsuit that put an end to Gawker? I’m not going to write about it here and if you decide to look it up you might see some things that you don’t want to see. Hulk Hogan figures prominently. Fair warning. Anyway, Gawker was one of many self-important full-of-themselves gossip and snark sites of the early 21st century, but it was sort of uniquely important to the mid 10s information and misinformation and gossip ecosystem that Oyler writes about in “Embarrassment, Panic, Job Loss, Opprobrium, Etc.” 

Oyler makes interesting and thoughtful points about gossip power structures. Regarding the “whisper networks” that were always in the news during the 2017 - 2018 sexual harassment reckoning, she correctly points out that such networks only benefit those whose friendships and connections earn them an invitation to the network. If you’re not an insider, you won’t only not know what the network is talking about; you won’t even know it exists.

Word gets out, though, as the person who created and shared the infamous “Shitty Media Men” Google Doc learned. She claimed that her list of creepy and predatory men was meant to be private, just a shared resource among friends. But of course she published it on the internet, and there is no such thing as privacy on the internet. You can make your accounts private, you can make posts visible only to friends or friends of friends, you can disable comments or sharing - you can lock everything down as much as it can be locked down and if just one careless or vindictive person takes a screenshot and shares it, your “private” content is visible to pretty much the entire world. The only way to keep anything private on the internet is to just not put anything on the internet. After three decades of the World Wide Web and two decades of social media, people still don’t understand this - still!

*****

Every time I read a book written by an author born after 1980 or so, I have to look up at least one or two words. Autofiction, I inferred from context, but looked it up to confirm. And now I know what a polycule is. This is knowledge that I don’t necessarily mind having but could also have done equally well without. 

*****

In “My Perfect Opinions,” Oyler tackles the ubiquitous star rating system, tracing it back to its roots in the Guide Michelin. She points out the utter meaninglessness of a system that is supposed to be incremental but that in reality punishes any product or service or service provider rated less than perfect. Four out of five stars should be a solid rating, but it’s a kiss of death for an Instacart shopper, an Uber driver, or a writer whose work falls into the hands of the “Goodreads community.” 

Oyler’s larger question about Goodreads, and about the internet in general, is whether it’s good or bad that “normal” people, non-famous people who aren’t artists or academics or professional critics now have a great deal of influence on platforms such as Goodreads? Oyler, a Harvard graduate and acclaimed author still in her thirties, comes across as unapologetically elite, and she makes her disdain for Goodreads quite clear, though not for the reason you might think. She doesn’t seem to have any objection to the idea of an everyday reader commenting on a book, but she does object to the algorithm-driven influence economy that allows certain Goodreads reviewers and social media personalities to amass huge followings, simply because they’re good at stirring up controversy. She is not wrong. 

*****

I don’t like a lot of things that white women in their 50s are supposed to like and because I am the way I am, I always second guess myself. Why don’t I like gardening, I think to myself - I SHOULD like gardening because I certainly like to look at pretty flowers and eat tomatoes right off the vine. But I hate digging in dirt, and so my husband does the gardening. I don’t like to talk about diet and exercise. I don’t like most romantic comedies and I really don’t like serial dramas about “powerful women” unless the powerful women are hard-bitten British DCIs solving murders in the Midlands or the Yorkshire Dales or something. I don’t like Lululemon (mostly because none of it fits me but I also just don’t like it) or Tory Burch (except for my beloved black TB tote bag). People keep telling me that I have to read Lessons in Chemistry, making me that much more certain that I’d hate it and that much more determined not to read it. My hatred of pumpkin fucking spice and its autumnal works and pomps is well documented. And I really have never liked or trusted Brene Brown.

Still, I felt bad about not liking her, and I wondered if it was just me. I’m too cynical, I would think when I’d hear other women talking about how great Brene Brown is, and how everyone should read her books and listen to her TED talks and follow her advice. I tried to keep an open mind, but something was off, and my Brene antipathy persisted, though I kept it to myself because openly declaring that you hate Brene Brown is a good way to get yourself canceled if you’re a 59-year old white woman from the suburbs. 

So thanks, Lauren Oyler. Now I have critical - even scholarly - support for my anti-Brene position. To paraphrase Oyler, “vulnerable” and “vulnerability” have entered the realm of meaninglessness, having been overused and misused to the point of absurdity. And the idea of “wholeheartedness” as a state to which we should all aspire is shallow at best and kind of mean and shitty at worst - mean and shitty because it feeds into the woman-hating internet culture that encourages women to be “healthy” (thin), “happy” (never ever angry or anxious or sad), and “balanced” (rich). I’m tired of it, and I’m tired of the smart and powerful people who enable it, knowingly or unknowingly. 

*****

I enjoyed this book very much, even though I didn’t know what Lauren Oyler was talking about half the time. And that is fine because she’s just smarter than me. I like to listen to smart people. 

Sometimes reading should be easy and enjoyable; no thinking required. But not always. Sometimes, it’s good to have to reread a sentence or a paragraph; to ask yourself “wait, what? What is she saying here?” You can’t spend all your time reading the madcap adventures of zany British aristocrats and their servants in the idyllic Years Between the Wars. I do love a good essay collection, and this one is very good. Not Zadie Smith good, of course, but that would be an unreasonably high bar for a first essay collection. But very good. 9/10. Would recommend.