The Ryan Lochte rule

I had something that I wanted to say about The Zelmenyaners, but I can't remember what it was. I can confirm, however, that it's the funniest Yiddish novel about Soviet central planning that I have ever read. I'm reading it in English, of course, so maybe it's even funnier in the original. Anyway, I'm halfway through it.  I used to read books at a much faster rate, but a person can only read so many pages in 10 to 15 minutes a day.

The Zelmenyaners is nothing like The Cazalet Chronicles, and of course, I didn't expect it to be. I don't feel like I know the Zelmenyaners like I knew the Cazalets. Elizabeth Jane Howard was writing about her own family, so there's an intimate, knowing quality that makes the reader feel very well acquainted with the characters. After a few days with the Zelmenyaners, I still don't know one Zelmenyaner from the other. But The Zelmenyaners has a poetic and whimsical quality that's rather lovely, even in translation. There's a character who is described as refusing to come out of the house, having been insulted as a child (this is a paraphrase, because Kindle won't let me search the passage). I find this charming, and very truthful.  Most days, of course, I'm not inclined to refuse to leave the house because of remembered childhood insults. But I do remember.

I probably won't re-read The Zelmenyaners. But I'm glad that I read it once.

*****

It's 7:30 PM on Saturday. I went to the pool today, and chatted with friends, and read for a bit, and then I tried to swim. I really love to swim, and I don't mind chilly water. I do, however, object to iceberg-plowing-into-the-Titanic freezing cold, and I didn't get any farther in than my ankles. Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe not.

*****
Summer swim season just started. This is our 11th year of summer swim team, so we are seasoned swim team parents. I just renewed my refereeing certification. Apparently, there's a relatively new thing called the Ryan Lochte Rule, which I learned about on Thursday night.

And now begins weeks of Friday night pasta parties, and Saturday morning meets, and writing weekly email updates, and standing on the deck with a clipboard and then being amazed at the end of July when it's all over again. I love summer.

*****
That was going to be all, because I just didn't know what else to write about, even though I've been writing in my head all day. I'm extremely prolific, in my imagination. It's about 10:45 now. I picked up my son from work at 8 and heard about the London attack on the radio, and I've been avoiding the TV until now.

I'm so tired of these cowardly barbarians, trying to drag the rest of us back into the stone age by brute force. Social media will probably be awash in the Union Jack by tomorrow, and my Trump supporter friends and family will say "See? Now do you understand?" as if my failure to vote for a corrupt and ignorant vulgarian is somehow to blame for this most recent of many outrages. And Trump was super-tough on terrorism when he visited Saudi Arabia, right? King Salman is probably still trying to wash the lip prints off his rear end.

And when it happens here again, which it will, we won't really know if it's real or staged. And it won't matter, for our purposes, because either way, the boom will be lowered. Martial law will be declared, and habeas corpus will be suspended, and the press will be restricted or silenced altogether, and lots of people will thank the administration for keeping us all safe.

OK, that took a turn. It's probably time to turn off MSNBC.

*****

It's Sunday morning now. It's beautiful and sunny and warm, and this little boy and his baby sister are coming over to go swimming later. The barbarians might be at the gate, but they're not coming in, at least not today. I have a swim team newsletter to write.

*****
I did finally go swimming today. It was freezing when I got in, but then I got used to it, and it was still unbearable.

A proportional response

Well, hello, handful of readers.  It must be Friday night, yes?

*****
"There's never an egg timer around when you need one." Nor a pair of scissors, nor a sock that matches the one that you want to wear.

Ovation is airing "The American President" right now.  On MSNBC last night, Brian Williams kept talking about the "proportional response" scene, and maybe someone in the programming department at Ovation was watching. Or maybe it's a coincidence.  "TAP" is an objectively bad movie, but I always watch it when it comes on. I don't understand why.  Another thing that I don't understand is why on earth the President's credit cards would have been "in storage in Wisconsin."  This has never made any sense to me.

Part of me is inclined to think that the airstrikes against Syria are right and justified, Trump notwithstanding. I don't trust his motives (on this or anything else), but even a broken clock is right twice a day.*  Not that I'm comparing Trump to a broken clock. Because he's not right anywhere near as often as twice a day.

My favorite line: "I hope so. Because if that was an undecided, then we need to work on our people skills."

*****
It's Saturday now. My 12yo had baseball practice this morning, and I was actually going to sit in my car and write and read. It was still a little cold, and it's a new season and a new team, so I don't really know anyone yet. I'm not the most outgoing person in the world. I'll talk to anyone, but it wouldn't occur to me to just walk right up to a group of people whom I've never met and introduce myself and join the conversation. So if there are little clusters of women who all appear to be friends, deep in conversation, and none of them make any welcoming gestures, then I'm likely to just stand or sit by myself.

I like to sit (or stand, as the case may be) by myself, so this isn't a problem. This is not one of those tiresome rants about bitchy mean girl suburban sports mom cliques. It's not that complicated. Because I'm just as likely to be standing and chatting with people I know, and to not notice and welcome the person standing by herself.  I don't do that intentionally, and so I'll assume that other women don't do it intentionally, either.  But today, two very friendly women waved me into their group and introduced themselves, and I spent a pleasant hour and a half talking about the same things that I always talk to other mothers about.

*****
One day last week, I came into the kitchen to find my son scrubbing his sneakers with the brush that I use to scrub pots and pans. I threw the brush away. But then I realized that we had probably been eating out of pots washed with the dirty shoe brush for at least several weeks. Gross.

*****

On Wednesday and Thursday, I worked at HHS headquarters, the Hubert Humphrey Building.  It looks East Germany circa 1971-ugly from the outside (though it does have a really nice view of the Capitol and the U.S. Botanic Garden), but it's rather impressive inside; well, at least the lobby is.  You might think of a huge government ministry, housed in a huge mid-20th century building, and picture a bloated, inefficient, and agonizingly slow bureaucracy. And maybe that's a little bit true of HHS.  From the video displays in the lobby, I learned, for example, that March is both National Nutrition Month and Save Your Vision Month, but March was five days gone, and I guess that no one had thought to look up the awareness months for April.

On the other hand, the place was crackling with energy. You can argue all day about whether or not government should do whatever it's doing, but it's doing stuff.  I have tons of neighbors and friends who work for the Federal government, and I've worked for government contractors for most of the last 18 years or so.  Government people work, and they care about what they're doing, and they believe in what they're doing.  They just need to look at a calendar once in a while.

There's a Metro stop, Federal Center, right around the corner from HHS, but on a beautiful day, I'd rather walk a bit.  Plus, I hate to change trains.  As far as I'm concerned, if it's not on the Red Line, then it doesn't exist. Union Station is exactly a mile from HHS--not long, but long enough when you're wearing work shoes and carrying a computer and a bunch of paperwork.  I walked with my colleague, who lives in DC.  She is a native Washingtonian, and I've lived in the DC suburbs for 18 years, but we snapped pictures and pointed fingers like tourists. The light was perfect at 6:15 PM. We walked on the Capitol grounds, and Dana Bash of CNN rushed right past us. (She's very pretty. And very tiny.)

It's nice that even in the security state (it took me no less than fifteen minutes to get through security at HHS), you can still walk around on the Capitol grounds. Lots of people were out--tourists, runners, government employees just off work, Capitol Hill residents--and no one had to go through a metal detector, or submit to a search.

I took this picture of the Capitol on Wednesday evening. The lady on the lower right might have been a tourist, but not necessarily.  With her anorak and her canvas tote and her hair up, she reminded me of someone.  OK, it was me. She reminded me of me. I don't normally use filters, but I tried one and liked the color effect; the creamy soft shine of the dome against the pale turquoise hazy sky is very 1959 postcard, which is a good thing.

Kodachrome. 

*****
Later today:

3YO: AUNT CLAIRE!  YOU CAN'T CATCH ME!

Aunt Claire: You're probably right. (Sits down.)

(Scene.)












So that's all for now.  Once again, I was trying to use a movie line as a funny title; and once again, I ran out of post before I could make the metaphoric connection.  I have things to do, and I need to bring this train into the station.  Until next week, avoid Dupont Circle--it's a mess.

*****

* The one I'm wearing on my wrist, for example. Daylight Savings Time commenced about a month ago, and I just haven't gotten around to setting my watch to the correct time.  Five more months and I'll have the correct time again.

The end of the rainbow

I should go to bed now.  I'll be tired tomorrow.  But I don't feel like going to bed. There aren't many things that I miss about being young and single. Staying up late, in fact, might be the only thing. Well, staying up late, and eating whatever I wanted with near-impunity. Those two things.

I used to stay up until all hours. If I was reading a book that I didn't want to put down (and I was almost always reading a book that I didn't want to put down), then I'd stay up until 3 or so.  I worked later hours then, and I seldom had to get up before 8, so I'd still get five hours of sleep, give or take. It was enough.

*****
I still don't get much more than five or so hours a night, and it's not really enough anymore.  But it's OK. I will catch up, when I'm (really) old, or dead.  By the way, that first part was a rare Thursday night entry.  I'm unpredictable.  But it's Friday night now, my normal start-to-cobble-together-a-post time, and so I'm starting to cobble together a post.  I'm also waiting for eggs to boil.  Lent can't end soon enough.

I'm approaching the halfway mark with the Cazalets. There are actually five books in the series: The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off, and All Change. I'm just starting Confusion now, and I'm finding it hard to avoid the temptation to read ahead (or to look up plot summaries on Wikipedia, just to see what happens.)

I still can't imagine how I never heard of Elizabeth Jane Howard or these books until this year. No other novels I've read have conveyed the heroism and romance of England during World War 2, without sparing the truth about the fear, privation, grief, and (often) terrible boredom of war. Right about now, the Cazalets and all of their friends and their remaining servants (most of whom have joined the armed forces) are obsessed with food, which makes me feel a little guilty for complaining about eating eggs again.

*****

Social media and hip-hop artists share a preoccupation with fake people. They must be everywhere.  The fake people, that is.

*****

We just returned from an overnight road trip to Philadelphia. I drove, because my husband was on call and couldn't leave town.  I like to drive; the only problem is that I can't read in the car when I'm driving it (as far as you know), so I didn't make much more progress with Confusion.  It was a very good drive--both ways--except that I panicked a bit midway through the Fort McHenry Tunnel.  The tunnel hasn't bothered me in years. Perhaps my 12-year-old's questions had something to do with the panic this time. "Wait--does this really go underwater?  Like we're driving a car, under the Harbor? So there's water on top of us, right now?"  And the answer was yes. We're driving underwater through a dimly lit dark tunnel that feels five miles long. But we did emerge from the tunnel, and the rest of the drive was quite easy and pleasant.

*****

The 12-year-old is the one who notices things, and remembers things.  We were driving last night from my brother's house (where my nephew's birthday party had just ended) to my sister's house (where we were staying) and he said "you know the bench, Mom?  The one with the sign next to it, that says The End of the Rainbow? Ever since I was little, that's how I knew we were getting close to Aunt Carole's."  I always like to hear my kids' reminiscences, though it reminds me that they're getting older. A 12-year-old has long memories; he remembers his childhood in segments, and thinks of himself as quite old, relative to when he was little.

And again, he notices things.  I actually have no idea what bench he's talking about.  I must have driven past it no fewer than 100 times, and I couldn't pick it out of a lineup.

*****
I have things in common with both of my children. Although I don't notice things like my 12-year-old does, I have the same long, encyclopedic, and detailed memory.  Although my 15-year-old is fortunately free of my tendency to borrow trouble at high rates of interest (in fact, he probably worries far less than he should), he shares my scatterbrained distractibility.  (Blogger is flagging that word as either misspelled or not a word. I assure you, Blogger, that it is a word, and a correctly spelled one.)  They're both really good company, and great traveling companions, and I'm glad we got to ride together this weekend, tunnels of terror and nonexistent rainbow benches notwithstanding.

*****
We're watching hockey now. The Capitals are winning a very important game against the Columbus Blue Jackets.  In the perfect world, the Penguins will also lose to Carolina (because in a perfect world, the Penguins will always lose), but the win over Columbus will leave us nicely positioned to let Columbus and Pittsburgh face one another in the first round of the playoffs. I'm not going to jinx anything. The less said, the better.

*****

Normally, I try to make sure that these long and winding roads actually lead somewhere.  But not tonight. I'm flat out of words for now.  The Penguins won, but the Capitals are beating Columbus 3-0. Let's go Caps.

Put a bird on it

There's a lady in my neighborhood who writes lovely little pieces for the neighborhood newsletter, describing local nature and wildlife, especially birds.  She's a good, if slightly flowery, writer; and her knowledge of flora and fauna (again, especially birds) is pretty impressive.  When the newsletter arrives in my inbox, I almost always stop what I'm doing to read the latest about the neighborhood's animal residents.

*****

I grew up in the city. We lived in Philadelphia, in a working-class city neighborhood of brick-front rowhouses with stoops that provided a two-step buffer zone between the street and your living room.  Our whole lives depended on man-made infrastructure--the electrical grid and the sewer system and the narrow surface streets over which trucks rumbled, carrying food and supplies.  Dropped in the middle of the wilderness, the average 1970s inner-city Philadelphian would look around for a corner store and, failing to find one, would crouch under a tree and wait impatiently for a bus or a search-and-rescue team (all the time thinking to himself “What—not even a park bench?  What am I paying taxes for?”) I read a lot—the Little House books and the Anne of Green Gables series were favorites—and I couldn’t imagine how life was even possible under nineteenth-century conditions.  “What do you mean, Marilla made Anne a dress?  Made it out of what? Leaves?” I would think to myself.  I knew that Laura Ingalls and Anne Shirley didn’t have indoor plumbing, but I didn’t allow myself to think too hard about the implications of that particular lack.  It was too much to contemplate. 

My parents noticed that all of us were completely urbanized and unable to cope with nature in any form.  They’d make half-hearted attempts to get us into the wild, taking us to feed the ducks at Valley Green or forcing us all to walk “back the creek” on nice days, but no one was fooled.  A five-minute observation of my parents in any outdoor setting was enough to demonstrate that they weren’t any better prepared to cope with the stern demands of nature than we were. We were city people. That’s all there was to it. 

I've lived in suburban or beach towns for over 20 years now, so I've learned a bit.  Nature isn't quite as shrouded in mystery as it once was, but I probably still don't know quite as much as I should.  Our neighborhood was built by the Levitt company in the late 1960s, so we're lucky enough to be surrounded by tons of mature shade trees of many beautiful varieties, but I can't distinguish one from another.  We have lots of wildlife, too, but nothing exotic.  Deer, squirrels, rabbits, foxes, occasional raccoons or chipmunks--even I can tell them apart.

The birds, though, are a whole other thing.  I know pigeons from starlings; and I know robins from bluejays.  A duck couldn't fool me by claiming to be a goose.  I'm pretty sure that buzzard is just a synonym for vulture; and in any event, I know to stay the hell away from them.  But that's the extent of my knowledge of the avian world, and as far as I'm concerned, it's as much as I need.

*****

It's been pretty cold here.  If you're reading this in Minnesota or North Dakota, then go ahead and roll your eyes.  I know that this is nothing compared to where you live.  But a high temperature in the 20s is very cold where I live.  Yesterday, it was no more than 15 degrees outside when I heard a bird singing, chirpy and cheerful, right outside my bedroom window.  I'd been up for some time already, so I wasn't annoyed with the bird, just puzzled.  Who are you, little bird, I wondered; and why on earth haven't you flown south yet? Aren't you all supposed to fly south?

Or maybe it was a cardinal, I thought, not knowing for sure whether or not cardinals actually sing.  My limited knowledge of cardinals was gained from viewing painted ceramic plates and mugs and salt and pepper shakers that depict snowy nature scenes, always populated by a lone cardinal.  It just occurred to me as I heard the birdsong: Do cardinals really like cold weather, or do bad artists just like to paint them against snow and pine trees, for Christmas-y contrast? White, green, and red--what could be more wintery and holidayish?

I'm a curious person, usually.  If I run across an unfamiliar word, I look it up.  When kids ask questions to which I don't have good answers, I do some research.  But it never (and I mean never) occurs to me to take a picture of an unfamiliar shrub and then try to find out what kind of shrub it might be.  I know that there are hundreds (probably thousands) of varieties of birds, and although I've always liked birds, I've never been inspired to try to learn all of their names and particular physical characteristics.  They all have wings; most of them fly.  That's enough knowledge for me.

*****

Still. Chirpy birdsong on an Arctic winter day? (Shut up, Alaska and Michigan.) I couldn't see the bird, so I asked Google if cardinals sing, and as it turns out, they do.  And their song sounds very much like the song that I heard outside my icy-cold window.  

*****

And that's likely as far as my nature study will go.  I have limited brain capacity. If I'm going to maintain my wide renown for being an endless fount of useless historical, cultural, and entertainment trivia; an ironclad authority on punctuation, and an outstanding speller, then I can't start using valuable brain cells on wildlife research.  Something has to give, you know?

Tomayto, tomahto

Maybe I've mentioned this once or twice.  I have a mild but pronounced case of adult ADD, and sometimes I have a hard time focusing and maintaining concentration.  I don't remember how I learned about it, but I just started using a time management system called Pomodoro (named, apparently, after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer that the method's inventor once used to time work sessions.)  It's very simple.  You set the Pomodoro timer (now a mobile app, of course, although Luddites can still purchase the tomato timer, assuming that a Luddite would use a mass-produced plastic mechanical timer), and you stay focused on your task until the timer runs out, in 25 minutes.  You then take a five-minute break, during which you can do anything you want.  Each 25-minute work period is called, of course, a Pomodoro.

It works pretty well.  The idea is that you can do anything, even if it's boring or tedious, for 25 minutes, especially when you know that there's an end in sight.  Sometimes, I find that I'm motivated to work faster to see how much I can accomplish during a single Pomodoro.  Other times, it's enough to just get through the Pomodoro without checking my phone, looking for something in my bag, getting up to get water, or whatever else I often do to avoid doing what I should be doing.  Either way, I'm more productive.

*****

I'm not running a Pomodoro now, so whatever I'm writing here will likely be written in 30-second increments, interrupted by phone checks, the laundry timer, or what-the-hell-is-that-on-the-floor.  I guess I should use Pomodoro for personal writing, too.  I'm still working on my novel, and it's not going well.  The less said the better.  Except that I'm this close to just throwing the whole thing away and starting over, but I'm determined to continue.  For what purpose and to what end, I have no idea.  Maybe I just want to finish what I started, but that's what sent me back to school after an over 20-year absence, and look how that turned out.

Well, it actually turned out pretty well, in that I graduated, and summa cum laude, but it was an ordeal that I wouldn't care to repeat. And yet, I appear to be doing exactly that.

*****

I can't decide which is less fun: writing the book that I'm writing, or reading the one that I'm reading.  I'm still slogging through the book about the Rothschilds, which has become considerably less interesting, but I feel compelled to finish it.  Between the in-progress writing and the in-progress reading, the party never stops.  It's like Purgatory for English majors.

*****

Another summer swim season is over, and the now-familiar paradox is in effect: That which I couldn't wait to come to an end has actually come to an end, and I miss it.  I love summer swim team, but it's overwhelming, especially if you have a full-time real job in addition to your 10 or so swim team mom jobs.  But it's so much fun, and I'm sad almost the minute it ends.  Except the 6:30 Saturday morning part, of course.  I won't miss that part at all.

*****

With summer swimming over,  the end of summer itself is, sadly, not far behind.  The weather has been shifting slightly.  The temperature has dropped just a little each day for the past few days, and the humidity, dense and heavy last week, has evaporated.  It's almost dark now, at 8:20 PM.  It's still quite warm and pleasant, but it's a September kind of warm and pleasant.

*****

I still haven't used my Pomodoro timer for personal writing.  And maybe that's why this post has taken three days to finish.  But the novel took a very slight turn for the better today, even without the aid of a tomato.  I'll take it, for now.

They're on your head, Mom.

So many things to write about; if only I could overcome this apparently chronic case of fuzzy brain.  Well, "fuzzy" is descriptive, but maybe not entirely accurate.  Sometimes, I'm as sharp as the proverbial X-acto knife, but  then whatever brilliant and sparkling clear insight happens to occur during those moments disappears as quickly as it arrives, leaving me thinking "What was that thing? About the guy, and the Potsdam Conference?  Or was it the Yalta Agreement?  Damn it, I forgot to take the chicken out of the freezer.  What time is it? Where are my sunglasses, damn it! And did I pay the phone bill?"

*****

Aside from January's monster snowstorm, we've had a relatively mild winter, but winter is winter and by the end of February, I'm always ready for it to be over.  That's why I'm downright offended by the sight of snow on March Bloody 19th.  What's that saying again?  March: In like a bitch, out like a damn whore. Thankfully, we didn't have any sports or other outdoor activities today.  Instead, we went to one of my very favorite annual events: The Friends of the Library used book sale at the Aspen Hill Library.  I spent $5.70, and got the following:

The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald.  I love Penelope Fitzgerald so much that I bought this even though I already had a copy.  This one has a prettier cover.  Now I can lend the other one and not worry about whether or not I get it back.

Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Jean Kerr.  Another one that I already have.  This was a 35-cent Crest Books edition from 1959.  Click here if you want to read what I wrote about this book.

A Woman in Jerusalem, A.B. Yehoshua. I have no idea, but I liked the cover blurbs.

Holidays on Ice, David Sedaris.  I still laugh my head off at "You Can't Kill the Rooster."

The Pocket Book of Ogden Nash.  I love old Pocket Books.  This one is from 1962, so it was already old when a previous owner used a dentist's appointment reminder card from 1997 as a bookmark.

With All Disrespect: More Uncivil Liberties, Calvin Trillin.

If You Lived Here, You'd be Home by Now, Claire LaZebnik.  She seems delightful.  Maybe I'll send for a signed bookplate.

The Americans: The National Experience, Daniel Boorstin.  I'm reading The Democratic Experience now.

Life and Death in Shanghai, Nien Cheng.  Sometimes I read about the Cultural Revolution, when I need a break from the gulag.

More Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin.

Away, Amy Bloom.  No idea about this one, either.  I'll find out soon enough.

*****

The $5.70 that I spent also included a few books about Navy ships and magic tricks, selected by my 11-year-old son, who is now sitting on my couch with his best friend, singing "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party.)"  Apparently, you don't, though.  I'm sitting on my couch at 8:15 on a Saturday night writing about used books and memory loss, and if that's not a party, then I don't know what is. 

Version control

There's this thing, see, called NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month.  It starts on November 1 each year; the idea is that you should commit to writing every day during the month of November, and by the end of the month, you should have a 50,000-word novel, give or take.

November, first of all, is just a hideous month in which to try to do anything major.  I suppose that writing a book would fall under the heading of "Something Major."  It also falls under the headings of "What the Hell Am I Thinking?" "I Need My Damn Head Examined," and "Bad Ideas: Part Ten Million"  Since, however, easily half of the things that I have done in my life also fall under all these last three headings, I won't be deterred.  What could go wrong?

Perhaps, if you're reading this, you have looked at a calendar and correctly observed that it's not November just yet.  In un-typical fashion, I'm thinking ahead.   I started this project last year, on November 1, and ended up with many pages of draft material that in no way form anything resembling a novel, but which contain quite a few salvageable bits and pieces that I can work into this  year's magnum opus.  Silver linings are everywhere, and while I'm almost entirely lacking in focus and concentration, I do possess better-than-average organizational skills and an excellent memory.  So I can find, pretty quickly, the pages of dialogue and the street scene descriptions from early novel chapters from last year, and part of a story that I wrote for my last class at UMUC, all in different folders, each with several individual versions, and copy, paste, and rework the parts that will be useful for this latest attempt. 

Meanwhile, a POV change from first-person to semi-omniscient third-person has revolutionized the whole thing, and so now, I might have not only snappy dialogue, but an actual story, in which things actually happen.  If not, then at least I'll get to re-read some funny things that I wrote last year.  I should be ashamed of this, but I laugh uproariously at my own jokes.  I might or might not have a novel by the end of next month, but at least I'll be entertained by my funny funny self.  I really might need my head examined. 

The perfect hostess

One day of poor concentration and difficulty with problem-solving: Isolated incident or symptom of early-onset Alzheimer's?

One very bad photograph, taken at 7:30 AM after a night of very fitful sleep: Isolated incident or proof that the irreversible descent into hideousness has already occurred?

Yes, the inside of my head is a non-stop party, and you're invited.  If you're smart, you'll send your regrets, claiming a prior commitment.  Meanwhile, I'll replenish the snacks and send one of these other poor suckers out to make a beer run.  Trust me, we'll need it.

Back in the USSR (second verse, same as the first)

Several years ago, I was preoccupied, in a probably unhealthy way, with the Soviet Union and specifically, Stalin's purges. I'd taken a class on 20th Century Europe, and from there, I read Martin Amis' Koba the Dread, Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin, Anne Applebaum's Gulag, Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; and then, just for contrast, Anna Politkovskaya's A Russian Diary.

The biotech company where I used to work employed a number of Russian scientists, engineers, and technicians. Although they were a socially mixed group, which included Ph.D.-level senior scientists and considerably less-educated manufacturing technicians, the group ate lunch together nearly every day, drinking steaming tea from styrofoam cups, and eating cafeteria food supplemented with homemade Russian dishes brought by one or the other of the group's members, and then shared among them.

The Russians, true to stereotypical form, seldom smiled, and when they laughed, it was with  a touch of bitterness.  It was easy to make fun of them, and we did sometimes, calling them "the Politburo" or "the Supreme Soviet."  Individually, the Russians were all quite nice, though reserved.  I'm a friendly person, and I became friendly with several of the Russians, although I sometimes wondered if they felt secret, Russian disdain for my smiling American bonhomie.  "Americans," I imagined them sneering after I passed with a cheerful wave or hello, "why are they always smiling? Like eediot children."  At that point, I had only the vaguest understanding of Russian history, and I probably thought that Stalin, while not a particularly good guy, was at least not as bad as Hitler.

In Koba the Dread, which is subtitled Laughter and the 20 Million, Amis asks a simple question: why do we laugh at the gulags and the KGB but not at Auschwitz or the Gestapo? The book is very personal, part of what was apparently a long-running argument with his friend and antagonist Christopher Hitchens, who, like a lot of writers and artists and intellectuals from the early 20th century on, were willing to ignore or excuse the worst excesses of the Soviet political system because they believed that Russian communism was the best hope for a socially just world.  Some writers and artists continued to cling to that belief long after evidence to the contrary had become too overwhelming to ignore.

It was probably five years or so ago when I first read Koba the Dread, and my Stalin preoccupation eventually gave way to other, more immediate worries, but the idea of the purges has never stopped haunting me. Because I don't have enough trouble in life, I like to borrow it at high rates of interest, so I'm reading The Gulag Archipelago now.  I bought a hardcover copy of it for one dollar at the Friends of the Library book sale, and it had been waiting on my shelf since November.

First of all, it's very good reading.  I'm 80 or so pages in, and although most of it, at this point, simply recounts details of arrests and sentences, each account is compelling and individual.  Stalin is supposed to have said something like "One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."  He lost, though.  I can't help but imagine the individual people, each unique, whom these short accounts represent.  I don't know their names, but I know that they had names.  I imagine them, and think about them, especially the ones who vanished and whose exact fates don't seem to be known.  I guess they can't be statistics if I'm still thinking about them 80 years later.

*****

My sons and I were watching a rerun of "The King's Speech" last Saturday, which was the same day that I started on the book.  As the movie version of George V asked who, if not for the English, would stand between the "Nazi hordes and the proletarian abyss," I wondered how we would answer that question.  Was Charlie Hebdo the best we could do? Are blasphemy and obscenity the only reasonable responses to savagery?   I've seen the cartoons, and I'm not in any rush to claim shared identity with that publication or its creators, God rest their souls.  Je ne suis pas Charlie.  

*****

As I tell my friends and my children, I completely understand now why old people move to Florida. My tolerance for winter diminishes with each passing year, and every November, a week or so before Thanksgiving, I realize that I won't really be warm again until Memorial Day. Every night, I think, just for a minute, that maybe tonight I'll just sleep in my clothes.  It's that hard for me to face the thought of undressing in the cold. But I live in Maryland, in a house with central heat, and not in a wooden shack in Kolyma.

The chekists and the KGB always came at night.  I usually wake up sometime around 3 AM, and just before I fall back to sleep, I think about the nest of warmth that my body heat and the blankets have created, and how little I want to move from that spot at that moment.  When I think about it (almost every time), I pray for the people who were yanked from the warmth by the 3 AM pounding on the door, which led to the holding cell in the Lubyanka, and then to the freight rail car to the gold mines at Kolyma or the gypsum mines in Siberia.  God help them, and all of us.

I'm Egg-sellent

That's a mixed metaphor, I suppose, because I refer to MS Excel, and not to the scrambled, fried, or poached product of a chicken.  So sue me.

I start my new job on November 3. Who else can say that she got the first job in her field that she applied to after graduating? Yes, I graduated at age 48, but my advanced age only slightly diminishes the magnitude of this accomplishment. Write that down. 

I'm actually 49 now.  This is when people start to worry about their minds (having long despaired of their bodies, I suppose) and I'm not immune to those worries.  If you have ever worked as a government contractor, then you know that the upside is that you can always find a job if you need to.  The downside (wait for it) is that you almost always need to.  Now, though, I have to worry about more than just finding a new job.  I have to worry about my brain's ability to keep up with brains half its age.  Cloud computing!  New forms of social media every damn day!  Windows 8.1! Sometimes, I'm pugnaciously upbeat, like one of those aggressively active seniors in a Medicare supplement commercial.  Sometimes, though, I descend into Luddite crotchetiness.  That's a word, because I say it is.  

Today, I'm an active senior, adjusting my fanny pack and mall-walking circles around these damn kids. I remembered how to create formulas in Excel, and I...

...am bitch-slapped by irony, once again.  That last paragraph, abandoned mid-sentence, was supposed to be a boast about how I mastered Windows 8.1 in less than 24 hours, and then, my keyboard abruptly refused to produce output to match my input. I'm sure that I must have hit something by accident.  I had to resort to the help desk first line of defense. Now that the computer has been turned off and back on again, it appears to be fine. My nerves are a little frayed, but you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. 

Technological advances

I have a new computer, and it's beautiful.  I might have to start blogging again.  It takes so little.

Quotidian, Part 75

I was supposed to write today, wasn’t I?  I made a commitment to write daily, but “daily” is looking alarmingly frequent now.  What was I thinking?  

Well, there’s a four-word autobiography if I ever saw one, but that’s a story for another day.  Time to make dinner. "Daily" is a harsh and insistent taskmaster. 

That's not all that needs examining

Weeks (no, months) of filling my head with phosphate groups and Punnett squares and all sorts of other things that really don't belong there, and the CLEP exam has been cancelled because of the (stupid and stinky) weather forecast.  I'm rescheduled for March 6, which means three more weeks of waking up in the middle of the night screaming "The homozygous recessive expresses the trait!  36 molecules of ATP!"

If I were actually capable of learning Biology, this wouldn't be such an extinction-level event for me.  I'd just enjoy the snow day tomorrow and plan for an unpleasant morning on March 6...no worse than root canal (which isn't that bad, by the way). Sadly for me, though, I have no aptitude for science whatsoever.  I'm good at passing tests, and so my efforts have been focused on memorizing just enough to get me through the exam. I have absolutely no hope of retaining any of this unless I continue to beat it into my cement-like skull every day.

Onward.  The Protists survived their demotion from Kingdom status, so I'll live through this.  Meanwhile, maybe male fruit flies will eventually learn sexual responsibility and then we won't need to worry about how many of their 112 offspring are heterozygous for red eyes.

Double-Stranded

That's apropos of absolutely nothing other than molecular biology, a subject for which I have no aptitude. As I (halfheartedly, haphazardly, and reluctantly) studied, I thought that "Double-Stranded" would make a funny funny post title.  It only works, though, if I can tie a sharply witty observation to a biological principle.  But I can't. So I won't. Years of grueling study, and I'm still slow on the uptake.  It's probably genetic.