Fun Home

After I finished reading Secondhand Time, I told myself that it was time for a break from “it’s 1939 all over again get ready for the hammer to fall” reading, and so I picked up a graphic novel. This is a complete departure for me. I really never read graphic novels or comics, but I had a Barnes and Noble gift card burning a hole in my pocket and had decided that I’d buy an actual book (I read most books on Kindle) and not a fancy notebook.(Of course, I bought a fancy notebook too, a very pretty one for only $10.) Anyway, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was sitting on a table of recent fiction, and it looked interesting and beautiful and I thought that it would look nice on my bookshelf next to Lynda Barry and Roz Chast and Jason Polan, even if I didn’t like reading it. 

But I did like reading it, very much. It took some time because when I started it, I was reading another book, and it takes twice as long to read a book when you’re reading two books at once. There is also a great deal to look at, a lot going on on each page, and you have to take your time to look at the text and the metatext and the illustrations. All of these elements work together to tell the story of Alison Bechdel’s father, who was obsessed with renovating old houses, including the house they lived in; and the rest of her family in the middle of the American century. 

Bruce Bechdel was a high school English teacher who also worked as a funeral director in his father’s funeral home, which the family nicknamed the Fun Home - hence the title, which works on many different levels. The funeral home was an oddly fun place for the Bechdel children, unlike their actual home, which was a showcase of their father’s aesthetic vision and so probably not the most homey and relaxing place to be. And Bruce Bechdel, the author’s father, lived a bit of a fun house mirror life - a respected citizen of the family’s small Pennsylvania town, he was also a closeted gay man with many secrets. 

Death is ever-present in Fun Home. The family spent a lot of time in a funeral home, a physical memento mori. And spoiler alert: Bruce Bechdel was hit by a truck and died of his injuries when Alison Bechdel was in college and just beginning to figure out the world and her place in it. His death was the dominant event of Alison Bechdel’s young adulthood, leaving many issues unresolved and many questions unanswered. 

Humans are impossibly complex, and so are human relationships, especially marriages and families. People deserve privacy; they deserve to have their little secrets, even from those closest to them. I believe that. But the secrets we keep from the people we love shouldn’t upend those people’s entire worlds when they are ultimately discovered, as secrets often are. It’s one thing not to tell your children about a wild adolescence or a disastrous early first marriage or whatever you did or didn’t do that affected you but not them. It’s quite another to have another life altogether separate and secret from that of your family, or to hide your essential identity from the people you are supposed to love and trust and who are supposed to love and trust you. 

Full disclosure - I still have a few pages to go, so I don’t yet know the whole story. But of course, neither does the author, and that’s the point. Spoiler alert 2 (you're smart, so you probably already guessed this one): Fun Home is more tragic than comic and therefor probably wasn’t the best choice for someone trying to read her way out of a doom spiral. But it is quite a beautiful book in both the visual and literary sense, and very much worth reading. And it really does look very pretty on my bookshelf.  

The course of human events

I want to write about something other than the Godforsaken election but I can’t seem to think about anything else so that’s what I’m going to write about. Maybe people will get sick of me and my vast reading public will abandon me. Whatever. Who cares. 

We went to a birthday party last Saturday. Almost every person at that party was a Trump supporter, and we wouldn’t even have gone except that the birthday person, who was turning 80, is very much not a Trump supporter. He and his lovely wife, an immigrant, spend their free time cooking for and collecting donations for various shelters. They’re among the best people I know, and I would not have missed their party. 

And they are the only reason that I was able to restrain myself when I witnessed a group of other partygoers nodding to one another and agreeing that it’s now time for “unity.” LOL! Yes, just like in 2020, right? It would be bad if a bunch of Democrats stormed the Capitol next January. It would be terrible if Harris voters spent the next four years screaming about voter fraud and stolen elections. Yeah, let’s all unify for the sake of unity. That’s a great fucking idea. 

*****

I keep waiting to no longer be absolutely furious that Grab ‘Em by the Pussy is going to be the President of the United States for a second time. 

Nope, still mad. Even madder than last week, actually. 

*****

Do you know what’s weird? What’s weird is how hard everyone is trying not to talk about politics in social settings, at least in my circles. Do we not want to offend each other? Are we all just trying to protect our own mental health? Are we afraid of what could happen in the future if people know what we believe, and how we voted? It could be any or all of those, but I’m afraid it’s that last one most of all. I’m afraid that we’re all complying in advance. I don’t want to comply in advance. 

*****

Is anyone else highly amused at the appointment of two guys to head the “Department of Government Efficiency?” Two guys in charge of one agency - does that seem efficient to you? Lol. You literally cannot make this shit up. What is entirely made up, however, is the fictional idea that Elon and Vivek can “shrink” the Federal government, when what they are actually going to do is expand the government in all kinds of new directions and then outsource most of the actual work to contractors. End result - fewer government employees (look, we “shrank” the government!) and a lot more government spending benefiting billionaires. If you remember 2008, you’ll remember a lot of Republicans screaming about “redistribution of wealth.” Everyone is about to learn what that really means. 

*****

Well this keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it; and by better of course I mean so much worse. It’s Thursday November 14, the day after the announcement of Tulsi Gabbard as keeper of the state secrets and Matt Fucking Gaetz as the nation’s top law enforcement officer. What’s next? I’m waiting for the appointments of George Santos as Director of the Government Accountability Office, Jared Kushner as Secretary of the Treasury, Tucker Carlson as FCC Chair, David Duke as EEOC Chair, and Kid Rock as Director of the National Endowment for the Arts. Maybe Judge Jeannine for SCOTUS. Maybe the worst coal mine owner in all of West Virginia as the Secretary of Energy. Maybe the Papa John’s guy as the Secretary of Labor. Anything can happen. Sky's the limit. The proverbial guardrails are gone baby gone. 

*****

Do I need to step away for a bit? Probably. Will I? Probably not. 

I’m trying to figure out how to remain (comparatively) sane and reasonable without cutting myself off from all information. I feel strongly that I have no right to turn away from reality under the guise of “protecting my peace” or whatever. And I also just need to know what’s going on. On the other hand, it’s not unreasonable to try to hold on to my sanity and preserve my own mental health. 

I used to listen to NPR as background noise while I worked. On November 6, I started listening to classical music on WETA, and it’s quite lovely. I’m also going to reinstate the No Trump on Weekends policy that got me through the worst of the years 2017 to 2021. But I’m not going to turn away entirely. I didn’t vote for this mess but it’s still my country and I’m going to pay attention to the course of human events in America, political or otherwise.  

A modest proposal

I'm at the doctor's office again. This is a doctor who is new to me so I don't know what to expect. Since I'm old, I have to get a routine colonoscopy and this is the consultation appointment. 

I've been through this once before but with a different doctor whom I really did not like. I was prepared, however, to see this doctor again because it's a 15-minute consultation followed by a procedure through which I will be unconscious so who cares, right? But as it turns out, my brilliant primary care doctor doesn't like him either and she referred me to someone new so here I am. 

I'm in the examining room now. A lovely African nurse came in to take my blood pressure and vitals, and we ended up commiserating about the dreadful election results. It's still raw.  She and I agreed that this country is just “not ready" for a woman leader. It probably never will be. India, Pakistan, Israel, Germany, the UK (twice), Ireland (twice), New Zealand, Finland, and Mexico have all managed to elect women to their countries’ highest offices. Not sure why we can't manage to do it here. 

*****

Or maybe I know exactly why we can’t manage to elect a woman President here. 

BTW if you are not familiar with the “your body, my choice” meme, then do yourself a favor and stay off the internet. Maybe forever. 

*****

I deactivated my Instagram account for a while. I’ll miss the funny cat videos and profane Elmo yelling “get the fuck outta my way” and the “white women ain’t scared of shit” guy,  but it’s for the best. Meanwhile, the new doctor was lovely and the appointment was fine other than the absolutely disgusting discussion of what to expect during the colonoscopy prep. But I guess that a gastroenterologist who is that enthusiastic about bowel movements is a gastroenterologist who really loves his job. If a dude is going to be scoping my large intestine, then I want someone who is really committed to his work. 

*****

Speaking of shit shows, Donald Trump will be President again in 72 days. I trust Joe Biden to use the time well, and I have some excellent suggestions: 

• Pack the Court right now. Expand it to 13 Justices, and appoint four immediately while you still have the Senate. 
• Make Kamala Harris one of those four. 
• Pardon Hunter because fuck Fox News.
• Pardon a whole bunch of other people.
• Order the Department of the Interior to claim Mar a Lago and turn it into a National Park.
• Get some rich Democrats to indemnify Marla Maples so that she won’t have to worry about her NDA.
• Issue executive orders left and right, including orders to protect the careers and pensions of the many military officers and civil servants who have angered Trump. 
• Resign on about January 15 or so, making Trump the 48th President and rendering all of the Trumpity Trumpsters’ 47 merchandise obsolete (this idea is not mine, but it’s excellent)..
• My favorite: Order the IRS to release the tax returns - not just Donald, but Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka and Jared (ESPECIALLY IVANKA AND JARED). 

OK, some of this is probably totally illegal. I guess he could only get away with it if he had some kind of Presidential immunity. 

LOL. 

Well

It is 7:17 PM on Election Day 2024, and I’m nervous. We have a neighborhood association board meeting tonight for God knows what reason (well it’s because it’s always on the first Tuesday of the month but still) and I am the secretary of the association and so I have to pay attention to the proceedings and just lol. I had a glass of wine with dinner, which is a thing that I don’t normally do on a Tuesday night, and it feels like not enough. The edge is still there. 

It was a beautiful day today. I worked from home, and after conquering my nervous distraction, had a very productive afternoon. That’s all shot to hell now. The returns are starting to come in and I am boycotting Indiana and Kentucky as if I’d ever visit either of those places to begin with, but still. 

My Kamala t-shirt got in the way of some sauce and I sprayed some stain remover on it but I’m not taking it off. This t-shirt feels very talismanic. This t-shirt is holding my body together right now. If I change my shirt, I might undergo a rapid unplanned disassembly. Maybe just one more glass of wine. What is the worst that could happen? 

*****

Well wasn’t that a prophetic and obviously unwise question because I jinxed the entire country. It’s weird how today, November 6 2024, I am feeling the exact opposite of happy, healthy, confident, and free. 

The board meeting ended much earlier than is typical for those meetings, which was all to the good, but of course within an hour I was wishing that I was back on that call or really anywhere except in my family room watching election returns. I did have another glass of wine, which absolutely did not take the edge off. The edge is sharp. 

Like many people, I’m sad and furious and expect to be so for some time. But I’m going to just keep doing everything I need to do, and I’m going to try to be there for others who feel just as bad or worse. I’m going to try to be kind, as much as I can. But I do want to point out that if a person voted for Trump, that person is a Trump supporter. That is the definition of a supporter. I’ll have very little patience with anyone out here saying that “I voted for him because (immigration, inflation, crime, transgender prison surgery, blah blah blah) but that doesn’t mean that I support him.” Yes actually it does. Live with it. And I will lose my shit with the first person who tries the gaslighting “that’s not what he means” trope with me. Yes it is what he means, all of it. The FA part of this timeline was no fun whatsoever. I hope that the FO part won’t be as bad as I fear. 

Novemberish

Remember two weeks ago, when the Republican candidate for President addressed the very important subject of a dead golfer’s genitalia during a campaign speech? And then remember last week when that same candidate took part in a rally where speakers called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage, and made jokes about Latinos breeding like rabbits and Black people carving watermelons for Halloween and a “businessman” called Kamala Harris a prostitute? And then remember two days ago when he speculated about Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad (yes that is what he meant)? And then remember yesterday when he mimicked a sex act on a microphone after threatening to knock the hell out of the venue staff? Every time I think this has to be the thing that ends this disaster, there’s another thing that makes the last thing seem like the gosh-darn good old days. 

By the way, the Arnold Palmer jokes and the microphone thing were televised. Where are the Moms for Liberty? Won’t anyone think of the children? 

*****

Yesterday (Saturday November 2, three days out) was a really lovely day. We took the Metro to the Marymount swim meet at Gallaudet, a lovely and picturesque place especially in early November. We scuffed through the leaves in the .7 mile walk to the Gallaudet Field House, and Harris-Walz signs were everywhere in the NoMa neighborhood surrounding the campus. People were out and about, and the atmosphere was festive. Marymount won the meet in decisive fashion. Later, we took my mother-in-law to dinner for her birthday, where I drank entirely too much sangria, a rare excess for which I have absolutely no regrets. The Washington Capitals beat the Columbus Blue Jackets, continuing the best start they’ve had in years. I’d love to say that I stayed up late to watch Kamala’s appearance on SNL, but I don’t drink very much and I was asleep by 10:45. 

It’s Sunday now, and we’re just entering the fleeting weeks of perfect November light, melancholy and golden. And hopeful this year too, because I think that Kamala Harris is going to win this election. She’s going to win, and she’s going to prevail in all of the multiple Trumpity Trumpster legal challenges, and our long national nightmare will finally end. And a woman will finally finally finally get a chance to lead the country that I love so much. 

Touching the grass

If you’re on social media for more than five minutes a day, then you have seen the videos of parents and politicians and tour guides and doctors and lawyers and who knows who else using Gen Z slang, sometimes with on-screen translations, which are entirely necessary. Skibidi toilet rizz. It’s giving mildly humorous, no cap. 

*****

Last Saturday was a perfect day, especially if you like autumn-y PSL football weather. It was sunny and blue-skied but also a little overcast, enough that the sunlight was filtered and soft and not glaring but not so much that rain would seem likely. It was cool but not cold. It was breezy but not windy. I wanted to be outside, and not just to walk around the neighborhood or hang out in my backyard. I wanted nature but not camping nature, not hiking up a mountain or trekking through the woods nature. Brookside Gardens was just the thing. It’s practically around the corner from my house, and it’s just lovely - peaceful and beautiful, with just the right combination of real and cultivated nature, rife with walking paths and gazebos and ponds spanned by little foot bridges. Brookside is small, so you can walk through pretty much all of it in an hour or so; but there’s enough to look at that you could spend an afternoon. 

Lots of other people had the same idea, which was nice, actually. I like other people. There was a wedding group gathering for a photo (Brookside is a very popular wedding photo spot) and retired people getting their steps in and families with little children, much like we were not very long ago. I hadn’t been to Brookside in over a year but when my children were little, I was there all the time. My little boys loved to run on the paths. There was a climbing structure with little speakers, and you could push the buttons and hear different bird calls. It might still be there. There was a maze, which is still there but the dirt pathways through the maze are now paved over with stones that contrast with the larger, darker stones that outline the paths, but the contrast isn’t great, and so it just looks like a great big circle now. I liked it better with the dirt paths. The Japanese tea house, accessible by a little boardwalk and a little footbridge, is being repaired now so we couldn’t sit in there but I’m glad they’re maintaining it. 

We spent about an hour and a half at Brookside. We strolled around on the paths and walked through the conservatory buildings. We looked at plants and flowers and trees, and sat on benches near the ponds, and absorbed sunshine and breathed fresh air. It was just the thing. 

*****

I have not adopted very much of the new online jargon for my own use, even though much of it is colorful and delightful and hilarious (though nonsensical), because it would be silly for a 59-year-old woman to run around babbling like a 15-year-old on TikTok. It’s just not my language. 

But I do find myself saying “touch grass” all the time. First, it’s a concise and sharp but not mean way to dismiss someone - “go touch grass” is the 2024 version of “get lost” or “go jump in the lake” (which are also both still very serviceable). But “touch grass” is also solid advice to a person who’s losing their grip, as in “go touch grass.” Go put down your phone and step away from the news. Go outside and take a walk, get some fresh air. Touch some grass and some flowers and some trees. Breathe. The influencers are always out here telling people to touch grass, and having taken that advice, I can tell you that they are not wrong. I spent last Saturday afternoon touching all the grass that Brookside Gardens had to offer, and I felt so much better. 

Two words that say so much - “Touch grass” is a pretty much perfect expression. I’m pretty sure that in 25 years, no one will remember “skibidi toilet,” but “touch grass” has officially entered the lexicon. 

Distracted and scattered

 *****

I’m distracted right now (meaning recent weeks through this very minute). I’m scattered and forgetful and every waking hour of my day is broken into fragments of working on or thinking about at least 10 things at a time. I’m always like this, but I’ve been REALLY like this of late. I can’t concentrate, I’m looking at my phone every five gosh-dang minutes, and I cannot keep my mind on a single task or occupation without thinking about what I need to do next or what I should be doing instead. And every day, I’m asking myself the same question: What is wrong with me? What is wrong with my brain? 

*****

I was home working one day last week, and spent the morning working on a last-minute project with a short turnaround time. This is actually my favorite kind of project. The panic keeps me focused. I worked steadily, occasionally checking the clock, and by 10:55, I had a draft ready to show at an 11:00 check-in meeting. Everyone was happy, and so I was happy too. I took a lunch break at 11:45 and after eating some leftovers (leftovers for lunch is one of my favorite WFH perks and yes I know I can bring leftovers to work and I do that but it’s not the same), I decided to spend 30 minutes on housework, and my focus fell to pieces. 

There was laundry in the dryer, which had just finished drying. I knew this thanks to the 30 seconds of  “Die Forelle” that the dryer plays every time it finishes a cycle. I do wish that all of my appliances would shut up. But I digress. 

I think I folded maybe 2 t-shirts and a towel or something, when the kitchen counter caught my peripheral vision. There’s too much mail piled up there, I thought. Time to sort through it. Time to separate the wheat from the chaff. I started doing that and almost finished and then saw that some jerk had left a coffee cup on the counter NEXT to the sink. How hard would it be, I thought, to put that cup IN the sink, or in the dishwasher? How hard would it be to just wash it? Then I noticed that it was my cup. I’m the jerk. I’m the problem. It’s me.  I stopped to wash the cup, after putting away the handful of plates and mugs that had been drying on the rack, and then I remembered the laundry. I started toward the dryer but noticed that I hadn’t quite finished dealing with the mail, so I did that and then started toward the dryer again. 

I folded and stacked shirts and towels and socks until I was almost finished. Then I noticed the debris on the laundry room floor, which turned out to be remnants of some tissues that had gone through the laundry in some jerk’s pockets. Yes, the jerk was me again but is that relevant here? Is that germane to the issue we’re discussing? Does that have anything to do with the topic of this post? 

What is the topic of this post? What are we even talking about? 

It would have been smart to just finish the laundry and then sweep up the lint and tissue debris but having noticed that mess on the floor I had to do something about it immediately. Immediately! So I swept the laundry room and then finished folding the last few items. By now, 30 minutes had passed and I needed to get back to work. In an uncharacteristic move, I left the folded laundry in its neat piles on the dryer, because if I’d gone into any of the bedrooms to put clothes away, I’d have noticed something amiss, and I’d have ended up on my hands and knees cleaning baseboards or dusting furniture or organizing a sock drawer. 

******

The afternoon proceeded apace, as afternoons tend to do. I do my best work in the afternoon, between about 1 and 5 PM. My mornings are spent responding to emails and making lists and crossing small items off existing lists, and posting stuff on various social media accounts. I always try to schedule meetings in the morning, too, because I might as well use the unproductive hours on unproductive pursuits. I can concentrate in the afternoon, and so that’s when I can do the kind of complex and demanding work that requires focus and creativity. Afternoons go by very quickly. 

But once the afternoon is over, so is the period of focus and concentration, and I’m back to my scattered and distracted self. At 5:15 or so, I decided to stop working and start making dinner. Making dinner is not my favorite thing to do and so I’m very susceptible to side tracks and diversions when I’m thinking about planning to prepare to make dinner. I started with putting away the laundry that had spent the afternoon resting on the dryer. 

Yes, you predicted correctly. I did exactly what I knew I would do, which was to sidetrack myself into closet organization and drawer straightening and baseboard dusting, frittering away 30 minutes during which dinner could have been cooking merrily away and instead the ingredients remained trapped in the refrigerator while I sorted socks and separated t-shirts into keep and donate piles. 

I did finally cook dinner, a simple stir fry of chicken and vegetables over rice. It was delicious. 

Later, I was falling asleep watching hockey, so I went to bed. And there it was on my bed - the pile of laundry that I had carried to the bedroom at 5:15. I put it away, resisting the urge to do some reorganization work in my closet and drawers, and finally climbed in under the covers. 

******

I wrote all of this about a week ago, and I’m still a scatter-brained mess. I’m struggling to focus, and I’m making stupid mistakes. I drove home from work on Monday night and at 7:15 on Tuesday morning (Tuesday is a telework day), I realized that I had left my computer on my desk in my office. How was it possible for me to walk all the way across campus to my car without wondering why my tote bag was so light? I’m looking absentmindedly at my phone wondering just why I had picked it up in the first place, and I’m wandering in and out of rooms and forgetting completely what I needed to do in those rooms, and I’m waking up at all hours of the night and trying not to look at the news. But it’s a losing battle and will be a losing battle until at least November 6 and possibly beyond. I hope not on the “beyond” part, but I’m afraid we’re in for a shit show next week no matter what. Maybe I’ll start on a new project. It’ll distract me. 

Decision 2024

It’s October 24, the first day of early voting in my home state of Maryland. We have one week, October 24 through October 31. I’m not sure why early voting doesn’t run right through that next weekend until the day before Election Day, but I don’t get to make those calls. 

Today is the day I shop for our crazy old lady. We’re well into year 5 now and it’s just part of the routine. By the time I finish that, I probably won’t want to go vote but we’ll see. I’m definitely planning to do it sometime during the early voting window, though. I expect long lines on Election Day. Maryland’s electoral votes will certainly go to Harris no matter what I do, but we also have a very close Senate race here, and I want to make sure that Larry Hogan doesn’t win a Senate seat. He was a competent Governor and is one of the few decent Republicans left, but I don’t want to see a Republican majority in the Senate. And I like Angela Alsobrooks. And when I’m old(er), I want to be able to tell my grandchildren that I voted for the first woman president. 

*****

It’s Saturday morning and our backyard is covered with leaves. The trees are in full multicolor autumn mode, and the morning light is golden and warm. Just a few weeks from now, the trees will be almost bare, filtering white-gold November sun for a few weeks of perfect light before the winter starts asserting itself and everything turns leaden gray and stays that way for four months or so. I need to pay attention to what’s happening out there. I need to go touch grass today, or leaves, or whatever. I don’t want to miss mid-November, no matter what happens on the 5th. 

*****

I was thinking about going to vote today. I was going to wear my Kamala 2024 shirt, with a sweater over top so that I’d know that I was wearing that shirt, but the election judges wouldn’t. I was going to bring a book to read. I was going to wear comfortable shoes, suitable for standing in a long line. I had a plan. 

Then last night I was home by myself, and when I looked up the open hours for my local early voting site, I saw that it was still open for 45 minutes, and I decided to go and vote right then and there and I did. The line was very short, and the election workers were in good spirits, and even though I know that Kamala will win Maryland with or without me, I still wanted to make sure that my vote was on paper and counted. 

So now I have more free time than I thought I would today. It’s a beautiful day so I’m going to go outside. It’s going to be a long 10 days.

When the Saints go marching in

It's Saturday morning, and you know what that means - it means that I'm in the passenger seat of my husband's ride on my way to Marymount University for the second swim meet of the 24-25 season. I'm psyched. 

Last week's season opener was something of an exhibition meet. A friendly, if you will. The men's team swam against Duke, losing by about 150 points, as expected since Duke is a D1 team. But it was closer in the water than on paper, with lots of very exciting races. Marymount showed up for that meet. The Saints went marching in, and they left the Duke boys with something to think about.

There were a handful of Duke parents in the Lee Center. I'm sure that the DMV provides a good number of Duke's swimmers so it was an easy location for parents to see a meet. They all seemed nice but they were very very easy to spot. They looked like people whose children go to Duke. 

My son swam two personal best times in that meet, in 100 breast and in the 200 medley relay. His relay split beat a Duke swimmer’s split. 

*****

Today is Seagulls vs Saints, with Salisbury visiting Marymount. It's 11:42 and we're here in our seats in the Lee Center pool, waiting for the start at noon. LFG as the people say on the Internet. LFG. 

*****

Holy cow that was fun. Marymount got clobbered again (this season is not off to a great start) but Salisbury is a famously good D3 team, with a roster of 65 swimmers to Marymount’s 28. There was very little chance of a win against the Seagulls, and so every good race was a gift. 

And at least on the boys’ side (the girls’ team had five seniors last year and they’re hurting a bit this year), there were quite a few good races, and the meet was once again closer in the water than on paper. We had a win in 50 free and a 1-2 finish in 100 fly. My son picked up a second place finish in a very competitive 200 breast that his coach called the race of the meet, and a third place in an also very competitive 100 breast, just slightly off his all-time best time. 

The stands at the Lee Center were packed. Salisbury came out for this meet, and so did Marymount. We got there early enough to get our favorite spot on the bleachers, at the top with the wall behind us, so with our bleacher cushions we were very comfortable. The social media person was next to me with her iPad and I’m afraid that I messed up her audio with my constant yelling but I was not the only one and if I hadn’t been yelling “GOOOOOOO!” right in her ear, someone else would have been. I’m a quiet person as a rule, but not at a hockey game and absolutely not at a swim meet. I was hoarse for the rest of the day after that meet, which is as it should be. Let’s go Saints. 

Secondhand Time

I’m back to reading something serious now, after my side foray into a silly satirical murder novel. Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets is an as-told-to history of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath, and it is just devastating. I’m about two thirds of the way through it, and I can’t stop thinking about how much the Russian people have suffered and lost; and how much suffering and loss they have inflicted. Russia has been an experimental laboratory for all of the worst economic and government systems that humankind has dreamed up - Tsarism and serfdom, Soviet communism, unbridled dog-eat-dog capitalism combined with totalitarian dictatorship - the Russians have endured it all, with pretty much the same results - a very small group of ruling elites live in relative safety and comfort and a vast underclass spend their entire lives struggling to keep body and soul together. 

*****

In Secondhand Time, people who lived under Soviet rule tell their stories of life under Soviet communism and life in the immediate aftermath of its collapse. The stories are mostly hair-raising and heartbreaking. And almost everyone is a victim, and not a perpetrator. Only one or two of the storytellers admit or even touch on the truth, which is that Stalin didn’t kill millions of people on his own. He had help. People arrested, interrogated, tortured, imprisoned, exiled their fellow citizens, and then they collected their paychecks and went home. Many of those people themselves then ended up in interrogation cells or on trains to Siberia - or dead. It seems relevant to me that no one was safe, even the people who thought that they were in Stalin’s good graces. It seems that some people should look at history, and not just in Stalinist Russia but in the United States from 2017 to now, to see how loyal a dictator is to those who are loyal to him. A personality cult is a dreadful thing. 

*****

One of the reasons why I stress about politics is because I know how much of my identity and my worldview are tied up with my American-ness. I have no idea who I am, nor where I fit in the world if I’m not an American. And I think about how being an American means something more than being born or choosing to live within the physical borders of the United States. And I also think about how fragile it all is, how easily a shared national identity with shared ideas and beliefs, even among people who disagree, can just disappear. 

This is what happened in Russia, not once but twice in one century. The country that Russians knew in 1910 was completely transformed by 1920, and everything that people believed was no longer true. The country that Russians knew in 1988 or so was completely gone by 1998, and people my age, who had grown up immersed in Soviet communism and who believed in the dignity of the worker were all of a sudden in a country that glorified cut-throat capitalism, where no one cared about politics and everyone cared about real estate and expensive cars and designer clothing. It all happened so fast, leaving a whole generation completely disoriented and alienated from their country and even from their own children who didn’t share their frame of reference. As one woman told the author, the Russia of her youth had been a country in which people boasted about their working class roots, where it was a point of great pride to be the child or grandchild of a miner or steelworker or collective farmer. In the new Russia of extravagantly wealthy oligarchs, noble ancestry came back into fashion and people started looking for their familial connections to Tsars and Grand Dukes. 

*****

Almost all of these stories are those of regular working people, not the famous or powerful, which makes the book that much more interesting to me. Maybe Alexievich wasn’t able to make connections with prominent people to ask them to tell their stories. Or maybe she did ask, and was refused. Or maybe she just prefers ordinary people. “It never ceases to amaze me how interesting everyday life really is,” she writes. This is true everywhere, I think. I never get tired of looking at people doing their work or driving their cars or just hanging around. I never get tired of routine everyday life and mundane everyday things. 

*****

Some of Alexievich’s storytellers are furiously angry at their fellow Russians, especially their children and grandchildren who no longer respect the generation that fought the Nazis and put cosmonauts in space. But some are less willing to judge their countrymen and women too harshly for their sudden shallow preoccupation with possessions. As one woman says, ”The people have suffered enough…now they go shopping…They like everything colorful because it all used to be so gray and ugly.” The longing for beauty in a country of scarcity is a repeated theme. In one story, a woman tells about how her sister had learned to knit well enough that she could sell some things to the relatively wealthy people in their village. The girls were hungry all the time and when a customer paid for her shawl, she went out and cut some flowers from her garden and gave them to the girls as a present. The woman says that this unexpected gift of flowers was a turning point for her, a moment when she realized that maybe other people could see her as something other than a dirty, scrawny street urchin, and that maybe she was meant for better things. Because someone saw her as capable of appreciating beauty, maybe that meant that she was worthy of it. It’s a beautiful and hopeful moment in a book filled with dreadful, despair-inducing stories. 

*****

Toward the end of Secondhand Time, Alexievich interviews one of the “winners” of the post-Soviet Russian economy. A single woman in her 40s with one daughter born of a liaison with an older married man, she is proud of her wealth and success and openly contemptuous of the new capitalism’s many victims. “I hate people who grew up in poverty,” she says, “their pauper’s mentality; money means so much to them, you can’t trust them.” She boasts of being a predator, a “huntress,” completely self-reliant and free of entanglements with any other humans other than her beloved daughter. It’s all very Ayn Rand-ian, and it’s easy to hate this woman but it’s also easy to see the fear that drives every word she says. “I don’t like the poor, the insulted and humiliated,” she says. No one is safe in the brutally exploitative new Russia, and she knows that if she lets down her guard for one second, she could find herself among them, among the ranks of the poor, insulted, and humiliated. 

Humiliation is another consistent theme throughout these stories. It seems that the Russians who lost everything during the early post-Soviet years felt shame even more than anger at their sudden change in circumstances. A scientist ends up cleaning bathrooms in the Metro, or an engineer finds herself selling odds and ends at a makeshift kiosk, and their biggest fear is that they’ll run into someone they know, even though so many Russians were in the same boat. They all seem able to live with the material deprivation and uncertainty about their futures, but the loss of status is unbearable. 

*****

I wasn’t sure where I was going with this, because as much as I read about Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, I still don’t know a darn thing, certainly not enough to write anything coherent. But one thing I know is that a bad system is always propped up by lies. I thought about this as I watched the Vice Presidential debate. “The rules were that you weren’t going to fact check” (translation: “I was told that I would be able to lie with impunity”) was the big takeaway for me. Yes I know that all politicians lie or exaggerate or stretch the truth or shape the truth to fit their agendas blah blah blah. And I know that the lines are now blurred between truth and lies because of the 24-hour news cycle and social media and AI blah blah blah. But there’s a difference between a person who tells a lie and a person who doesn’t understand or care about the truth. And you can spread lies with or without the aid of the internet. Stalin did an excellent job of making people believe that up was down and right was wrong, using only the technology available in 1937. 

*****

Secondhand Time is on the NYT and Guardian lists of the best books of the 21st century, and deservedly so. It’s unlike anything else written about post-Soviet Russia, and it’s a beautiful book. But I’m very glad I’m finished with these stories of collapse and upheaval and lawlessness and desperation. For now, at least. 

Autumnal

I didn’t do very much this recent holiday weekend (except to attend the very first meet of the college swim season, about which I will soon have much to say). I’ve been out of sorts. I used to love election season, especially the presidential election, but it’s just upsetting now. I’m trying to stay optimistic and to remember that polls aren’t always reliable, but still - how is this close? HOW? 

For the past two weeks or so, I've been immersed - drowning really - in social media and political news, and it's too much. I'm stressed right out. I've also been reading a book of true stories about the fall of the Soviet Union, told by the people who lived through that time, which was of course absolutely dreadful for people without money and power, which was almost everyone in the Soviet Union. This book is another thing about which I will soon have much to say. Stay tuned. Preview: It's a great book, and I'm so glad I'm finished reading it. 

It might be time to read something a little more upbeat, but maybe not quite yet. I went to Barnes and Noble on Sunday and bought a copy of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, her graphic memoir. This is another book that I would normally never read - my interest in comics begins and ends with Charles M. Schulz and Lynda Barry and Roz Chast. But something about the cover appealed to me, and I had a gift card. I’m a few pages in and I’m absorbed in the story but the pages are so densely covered with text and visuals that if I paid full attention to the illustrations, it would take an hour to read a few pages. 

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe I should slow down a little bit and think about reading a book, and not just finishing it. And maybe I should turn off the news and put down my phone and go outside, and that's exactly what I'm going to do right now because it's 4:45 PM and my workday is done, and I have at least an hour of autumn daylight. After a walk, I'm going to make some chili. And after I make chili, I'm going to turn on the TV, because the Capitals are playing the Golden Knights, and it doesn't matter who they're playing because Capitals hockey makes pretty much everything better, even fall and winter. Even Donald Trump can't ruin hockey and college swimming and a brisk walk with a good playlist. 

Very secure...

I had to change a password yesterday. It’s a password for a system that I use daily so I’ll remember the new password after a few days of daily log-ins, but I just hate to change a familiar password. It's a disruption. It throws me off my game. 

The system rejected my first attempt to create a new password because it recognized it as an old password. “We’ve seen that password too many times before” the pop-up message read. Who’s “we,” I thought? Who’s seen it too many times? Not me, I tell you what. I’m very happy with that password. I like it just fine. In fact, it’s one of my very favorite passwords, which is why I keep trying to recycle it. Here’s an idea, Mr. Enterprise Solution: Suppose you let me decide when I’m tired of my password? 

The system didn’t like my second attempt either. “Choose something harder to guess.” Harder for whom, genius? If it’s hard for some hacker in the Caucasus to guess then it’s going to be dang-near impossible for me unless I write it down, and if I have learned anything in decades of yearly cybersecurity training, it’s that writing a password down is not a good idea. 

I finally came up with a new password that was acceptable to the very discerning password approving software or whatever it is, and bonus: The new password is hilarious. I cracked myself up with that password. I’m still laughing. I'm going to laugh my silly head off every time I log in now. 

Then I remembered that I had done the very same thing a few years ago in another enterprise system, and I laughed and laughed until the next day when I couldn’t remember the number and special character combination that accompanied my hilariously funny password, and I had to start all over. Determined not to let this happen again, I wrote down a hint for the new password (which is pure comedy gold I assure you). This is what it’s come to. I need a password for my password. It's a great system. Very secure. Very mindful. 

Murder and memoir

I just finished reading two very odd books. Well, it’s more accurate to say that they were odd choices for me. But they’re also rather odd in and of themselves. I chose these books because I like the author as a political commentator and TV personality and when I found out that she had written some books a few years ago, I decided to read them. 

The author is Molly Jong-Fast, and these books, published years ago, are Girl (Maladjusted), a memoir of life as the child of a very famous author; and The Social Climber’s Handbook, a novel. 

The latter, based on my cursory review of a review, was what I expected would be a satire of New York 21st century finance bro society, and it is. But it’s violent, too, and much more violent than humorous or satiric. Think of The Devil Wears Prada with a little bit of American Psycho and a lot of Bonfire of the Vanities, and you’ll have an idea of what Jong-Fast was trying for but did not quite accomplish with this book. 

The Bonfire influence is clear - Jong-Fast’s male characters think of themselves as Masters of the Universe, and Sherman McCoy’s name is dropped frequently. The American Psycho influence is clear, too, with heartless, wealth-obsessed characters who seem to care about nothing except real estate, fashion, expensive cars and travel, the right handbags, the right shoes and jewelry and art, blah blah blah. I’m sure the shallow materialism that Jong-Fast is trying to depict here is based on something real but even in 2010 or so, the late 90s / early 21st century socialite with a Birkin was a tired trope of the satiric New York chick lit genre. 

And speaking of New York chick lit (such a terrible term but sometimes you have to use icky jargon to make a point quickly), there’s a small element of that present here too. The book’s title is (misleadingly) reminiscent of chick lit classics like The Nanny Diaries or Bergdorf Blondes or The Devil Wears Prada. The cover, however, hints at something quite different. The blonde woman in the perfectly tailored LBD in the foreground is holding a knife behind her back, and the pen and ink rendering of NYC (against a background that is purple, not pink) resembles an Edward Gorey drawing. The title says frothy romance blended with satire blended with Jane Austen-like observations of the manners and customs of very wealthy and very shallow young New Yorkers, but the cover cautions the reader to expect some mayhem. 

But I didn’t expect any such thing because I read the Kindle edition and hadn’t seen the cover design, and the very cursory review that I barely glanced at did not mention that the main character is a serial killer, so the first murder took me by surprise. I went in thinking that I was about to read a sharper and funnier version of The Devil Wears Prada. But it’s actually a bit of a bloodbath. 

I’m not opposed to a literary bloodbath now and then, but it has to make sense. This one doesn’t really make very much sense, although you can easily see why Daisy chooses her victims. That’s part of the problem, really. The reader sees the murders coming from a mile away, and we also never hear a word from the victims. We know when Daisy is about to murder someone, and then we know when that person is dead, but we don’t know anything about the murder itself other than a cursory mention of the method. And it’s not that I want a graphic description of pain and gore - that is really just the opposite of what I want. But I do want to know about the encounter between the victim and the murderer. I want to know what they said to one another. Did Daisy tell her victims what they did to offend her? Did they beg for mercy? Or did she just sneak up and attack them? I have no idea. And I don’t really care that much because Daisy is not a very interesting character, and it’s just not a very good book. 

One thing I have found as a reader is that if you want to write about the rich and their preoccupations, you have to have a little bit of compassion for them, even the worst of them. To write about your characters’ human failings, you have to recognize their humanity. The Social Climber's Handbook mostly fails to do this, because every single character is absolutely vile. Even the children are repellent. In a comic murder novel, you should at least have some amused though horrified respect for the killer. Even when you know that the victims are way overdue for a catastrophic downfall, you should also be able to pity them when it actually happens, just a little bit. And even if you know that the killer will never be caught, there shouldn’t be a lot of loose ends left hanging. The ending of a novel about a murdering socialite doesn’t need to be morally satisfying but it should at least be tidy.

As I said, I like Molly Jong-Fast very much as a political writer and TV personality. She comes across as both brilliant and wise, and she also projects warmth and kindness that I can’t believe are fake. Maybe that is why this novel is just not very good. Maybe you need a certain amount of cruelty to write a good satirical novel about a murderous Upper East Side socialite. 

*****

Girl (Maladjusted) is a memoir. I actually read it first, and I'm glad I did because if I'd read The Social Climber's Handbook first, I probably wouldn't have bothered with this one. Jong-Fast wrote Girl when she was in her 20s, which is actually a fine time to write a memoir of youth because people in their 20s remember their childhood and teenage years with detail and immediacy if not perspective. 

A lot of this book reads as juvenilia. The young Jong-Fast was very obviously trying for a cynical and wise but flippant voice that she mostly achieves, but it comes across as inauthentic - more on why in just a minute. She’s much harder on herself than you might expect a young memoirist to be - she depicts herself as whiny, spoiled, and manipulative, and maybe she was but probably no more so than any other girl her age. Teenagers can be whiny and spoiled and manipulative but they're mostly lovely and hilarious. I know this because I've owned my own teenagers. 

The arch, hyper-ironic, world-weary young person in New York tone is alternatingly funny and annoying, and more of the latter than the former. But just as I started to write this whole book off as the self-involved prattling of a literary nepo baby, Jong-Fast would drop an amazingly beautiful and truthful observation about her life or her family, and you know right away that she’s neither cynical nor spoiled and solipsistic. Her compassion for humanity, almost absent in The Social Climber’s Handbook, is on full display here. Molly Jong-Fast was probably lovely and hilarious as a teenager. 

Flannery O’Connor once said something about a talent for writing not being the same as a talent for writing anything. Flannery wasn’t right about everything, but she was right about that. Molly Jong-Fast is not a novelist, but I’ll be first in line to read her commentary, and I’m all in if she writes another memoir.