On an island and under the sea

I'm reading The Long-Winded Lady, a compilation of essays by Maeve Brennan. She was an Irish writer who for many years published short pieces in the New Yorker, under the pen name of The Long-Winded Lady. It's hard to describe her writing. They're not really essays at all, just little bits of observation, almost all about a very small piece of New York City where Brennan lived. She writes about the same handful of restaurants where she ate lunch and dinner almost every day, and about the series of hotel rooms and apartments where she lived (never, it seems, for more than a few months at a time), and about the passing scene on the city blocks where she lived and worked.

There's almost no dialogue in these essays. She writes about people, but from a remote observer's perspective. I'm about halfway through the 500 or so pages, and I don't think she wrote anything about anyone whom she actually knew. Only descriptions of strangers--their clothes (she seemed to love fashion and was knowledgeable about cuts and fabrics), their manners, their restaurant orders.

People say that big cities are the most provincial of places. I don't know who those people are, but I know that someone said that, and it wasn't me. Anyway, Maeve Brennan's New York is not so much provincial as just tiny and self-contained. She writes with great sophistication about sophisticated people and places but she seems not to have strayed beyond an area of 16 or so square blocks, except for occasional theater visits.

Because the essays are so sparsely populated, mostly with people whom Brennan didn't seem to know, they have a very lonely quality. If you have ever been in New York City (or any other big city) on a Sunday in August, you will have an idea of what it feels like to read The Long-Winded Lady. Still, the book is not sad or depressing. She writes so little about herself--even when she tells us where she had dinner, she doesn't tell us what she ate--that the reader senses that there's a lot more to this woman than she's sharing. It's like you're looking into the wrong end of a telescope, seeing a compressed and constricted view of a landscape that would be enormous, if only you could see it through the right side of the telescope.

*****
As good as The Long-Winded Lady is, it's not a completely original and groundbreaking work of art. If you've read Louis Auchincloss or Mary McCarthy or any other upper-class mid-century New York writer, then you already know something about Maeve Brennan's New York.

*****

Here's what was completely original and groundbreaking:

Even Squidward is smiling. Kind of.

I used to tell friends that I didn't know what I'd do when my children grew up, because then I wouldn't have an excuse to watch SpongeBob anymore. Fortunately, they like him just as much now as they did when they were toddlers, wide awake at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning. Only a visionary artist could have imagined an undersea world populated by cheapskate crabs, megalomaniac plankton, cynical squids, idiot starfish, bottom-dwelling squirrels; and hard-working, relentlessly cheerful, fun-loving sponges. Bikini Bottom is a world unto itself, completely original, populated by characters who are unalterably themselves in every circumstance

SpongeBob SquarePants is hilariously funny, and that would be enough. But it's much more than that. Almost every episode offers wise and compassionate insight into humanity (well, so to speak) in all its beauty and stupidity and strength and weakness and joy and bitterness. Does that seem a little much for a cartoon? Watch "Tentacle Acres" or "Band Geeks" or "The Algae's Always Greener"  and you'll see what I mean. Or just watch "Sailor Mouth" or "The Inmates of Summer," and laugh your head off.

SpongeBob will live forever; but Stephen Hillenburg, his creator, died this week.  I hope he knew how special SpongeBob is, and how much he means to so many people. I hope he rests in peace.

Holiday

It's Thanksgiving weekend; Friday to be exact. I didn't have to cook dinner this year, other than mashed potatoes, so yesterday was a pretty easy day, but of course, now I don't have a refrigerator full of Thanksgiving leftovers, either. There's always a price to pay.

*****
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I like the food, I like the thin sunlight streaming through the nearly bare trees on Thanksgiving morning, and I like seeing the happy mothers reunited with their college children for a weekend. I like the overstocked grocery stores and the busy restaurants on the Monday and Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, as people rush around collecting their groceries and avoiding their kitchens until Thanksgiving day. I like the simplicity. No one expects more than to eat a little bit too much, and then to lounge with their families around the fireplace or the TV, waiting for the food coma to set in.

I usually watch AMC's Thanksgiving Godfather marathon as I cook. My husband teases me. "This again?" he says. "Haven't you seen this movie like a hundred times?" This is a ridiculous exaggeration. I've seen The Godfather and The Godfather II no more than twenty-five times each. Thirty at MOST. My husband, however, watches football nearly every Sunday, and for a good part of Thanksgiving weekend every year. If anyone wishes to explain to me how every single football telecast is not EXACTLY like every other football telecast, I'll listen with polite interest. Only after you're no longer in the room will I roll my eyes and say "whatever" as I reach for the remote to turn the Corleones back on.

*****
We host a neighborhood get-together on the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, so I shopped for food today. It's much colder than usual this Thanksgiving weekend, but that only enhances the cozy atmosphere. Other than potatoes, I didn't cook yesterday. And other than breakfast eggs, I'm not cooking today, either. I'll finish readying the house for the party, and we'll eat some takeout, and then we'll go to the movies. I have to work a bit on Sunday because proposal deadlines wait for no one. I don't know why government contracting officers set proposal deadlines for the Monday following a holiday weekend, but I know better than to ask people about their business. But it's OK. A little work will make me feel a little less spoiled and over-privileged, a little less embarrassed by this embarrassment of riches. Happy Thanksgiving. Leave the gun, but take the cannoli.

Cahier d'affaires

When I was in Montreal this past summer (oh, summer--how I miss you), I bought a French-language day planner for 2019. Now I'm not so sure about it. It's fine that it's in French; I know the days of the week and the months of the year. It's the format, and the tiny font. I can't see it. I don't want to talk about my eyesight right now. But it's not so good.

I started shopping for a different planner, but there are way too many to choose from. So many formats. So many "dashboards" (a candidate, along with "metrics," for most overused business word ever). I'm not sure how a paper calendar page, no matter how complex its layout, can be called a "dashboard," but that's a question for another day. Meanwhile, I'll probably just stick with the planner that I bought. C'est bien.

There's a lot going on on this page, isn't there?
And it's all in French, and too small to read. 

Anyway, French or English, a planner is necessary because I have a lot of stuff to keep track of. I'm busy morning to night, and I don't want to stop. I get anxious when I stop moving. So I keep moving.

*****

The early 50s are an interesting age to be. I have friends who are just a few years older, and they're winding down. They're not quite ready to retire, but they're planning for it, and not just in a vague, pie-in-the-sky, "someday when I retire" way. They're making concrete arrangements, and picking the actual dates when they'll just stop working.

Sometimes when I'm tired, I think that it would be nice to just retreat from the world; and I wish, just for a moment, that I was also winding down. Then I think about the implications of not having enough to do, and not being needed every day, and the whole idea of leisure loses its charm. I see the TV commercials with the soon-to-retire couples (the woman always appears to be a decade younger than her husband) meeting with their financial adviser and planning for 30 or so years of travel and gardening and boating and beach-sitting and all of the other things that people are supposed to want to do during retirement, and I just can't imagine myself embarking on a life of full-time rest.

*****


via GIPHY

Well, maybe.

*****

When Social Security and the idea of retirement as a lifestyle were invented average life expectancy was pretty low compared to now. The idea of Social Security was that if you survived past 65, then you probably wouldn't be strong enough to keep working, and there should be some sort of safety net that would allow you to spend your last few years in relative comfort and security. And I'm all for this. I'm human, so I like comfort and security. I also like travel and beach-sitting as much as the next person,. But I don't think that we're meant to spend so much time idle. People live into their 80s now, but they still retire in their 60s. Beyond the obvious strain that 20-plus years of retirement puts on a system that was designed to support two to five years at most, there's the larger question of what we as human beings were created for. As much as any person might enjoy decades of carefree downtime, it's probably not what we're meant to do.

*****

I like working. I like having something to do every day that's important and meaningful. I like making money. I like making friends with the people I work with, and having people to commiserate with when things go badly, and to celebrate with when things go well. I like taking care of my family. I don't want to stop doing those things now or any time soon.

Plus, I have a kid starting college next year.

*****

This started with something about a planner, didn't it? I don't know how it turned into a manifesto for delayed retirement and productive old age. I almost included a side trip into the (real, I promise you) world of food nostalgia. That's a whole post in itself. Something to look forward to, n'est-ce pas?

Highlights

I just finished Wallflower at the Orgy, and it turns out that Nora Ephron is just as honest about herself as Joan Didion. Maybe even more so. In an essay titled "Makeover," she writes about the women's magazine makeover craze of the 70s and 80s, and her personal experience with plastic surgery and high-fashion hair and makeup, and her disappointment with the results on herself. As a woman who learned early how to be funny because I wasn't going to get attention any other way, I completely understand her reaction to a makeup artist's claim that he can make any woman interesting if not beautiful:

"But I am interesting. It's beautiful I want to be."

Yeah, Nora. I know.

*****

Nora Ephron knew about interesting at the macro and micro levels. She writes about the famous and influential people of the time--Helen Gurley Brown, Bill Blass, James Beard and Craig Claiborne, Jacqueline Susann--and in a sentence or two you understand something essential to their personalities; and then in just another sentence or two, you see how they turned their particular preoccupations into hugely influential cultural trends. For better or for worse (it's hard for me to think of Helen Gurley Brown's influence as anything but disastrous, though I believe that she sincerely thought that she was helping young women), Ephron's subjects shaped the popular culture in which I came of age.

This has always been an interesting topic to me. With unusual prescience that allows them to see a shift in tastes or beliefs just before it materializes, some people just know what will be in or out a few minutes before the rest of us catch on. Or by sheer force of personality, they make a trend happen, instead of just predicting it. I'm a quiet person most of the time (what Helen Gurley Brown would have called a "mouseburger") and I also tend not to notice things until they're utterly impossible to miss. A stylish person can explain to me why a particular look is good or bad, and I'll understand; but even if I had the ability to envision and create a new fashion or a new literary trend or a new direction in American cuisine, I don't think that people would follow my lead. And that's OK. Cultural icon status is too much responsibility for one person to bear.

*****

Now it's Veterans' Day; another unearned gift of a day off . At 4:38 PM, it's almost dark. It's cold and heavily overcast, so I can't see the sun setting; just the light gray solidly cloudy sky with an etching of dark gray almost-bare trees. The weekend is pretty much over, but that's OK, too. I squeezed as much out of the three days as I could, and now it's time to work again.

*****
Wednesday night. I'm watching hockey; the Washington Capitals (of course) vs. fucking Winnipeg. An uneventful game thus far. Not so the weather. It's November 14 and we're already bracing for the dreaded, God-forsaken, bane-of-the-Northeast's-existence "wintry mix," my least-favorite two-word combination other than "password reset." It's going to be a long winter. Snow in November is neither interesting nor beautiful.

*****
The Capitals lost. They're very inconsistent this year. It's Thursday now. Icy pavements and sleet tapping on the windows and temperatures hovering just below freezing. I'm not ready for this dead-of-winter nonsense in the middle of November. The January inertia is descending and it's not even Thanksgiving.

On the other hand, the weather forced cancellation of an evening meeting that I hadn't been looking forward to, and now I'm finished everything I needed to do today at the delightfully early hour of 8:30 PM. Even winter has its consolations. I'm awash in free time, so I'll find something new to read. If I don't have anything coherent to say next week (because why should next week be different from any other), then at least I'll have book reviews, weather reports, and sports highlights. You've been warned

Auto-didact

I finished the Evita book, and learned more than I needed to know about the Perons and the whole sorry history of 20th century South American dictatorships. After Evita died, Argentina's political climate shifted so abruptly that exile for Juan Peron alone wasn't enough. Evita's body was also exiled, hidden in a graveyard in Italy under a false name, where it remained for nearly 20 years. Eva and Juan Peron were both objectively terrible people, and yet they inspired fanatical devotion among millions of followers. It was an instructive read.

*****

Anyway, I'm working my way through the Excel course, and it's also very instructive. I'm learning a lot. For example, did you know that you can turn an Excel rectangle into a square, or an oval into a circle? I don't know why you can't just start with a square or a circle. That's a question for Bill Gates.

I am a person who writes and thinks in mostly words.  I look at a graph or a map or a diagram, and I have to methodically work my way through it before I can actually understand it. A quick glance at a picture doesn't help me to grasp an idea, unless I think backward step by step, relating each color or shape to the information that it represents.

I realize that this is just the opposite of what is supposed to happen and that many people find it very easy to absorb information when it's presented in a visual format. They're the same people who never get lost, and who can always cut the right-size sheet of wrapping paper just by looking at the gift they need to wrap. They're the people who always say that a picture is worth a thousand words. And maybe it is. But I like a thousand words.

But now that I'm learning more about how to use Excel, I'm seeing that a particular type of visual display can actually change the way you understand something, You'd think I'd have known this already, but I didn't. A histogram or a tree map or a pareto chart or a pie chart or a column and line chart all illuminate data in different ways. I thought that one chart vs. another was a stylistic choice--flats or high heels; a dress or a skirt and sweater. But it's more than that. It's more like the difference between wearing shoes and not wearing shoes-- you'll understand your feet differently shod or barefoot.

*****
With Evita and the crazy Peronistas out of my hair (and good riddance), I needed something new to read. So I'm reading Nora Ephron's Wallflower at the Orgy. It reminds me of what I thought my life was going to be when I was young.

The first essay is about the first generation of what were once called "foodies," and it made me remember a line from "When Harry Met Sally," when Carrie Fisher tells Bruno Kirby "Restaurants are to people in the 80s what theater was to people in the 60s;" and of course the reason that I remembered that line was that Nora Ephron wrote it.

Before this, I'd never read Nora Ephron's work. It's tempting to compare her with Joan Didion, and there are definitely parallels. But when you read Nora Ephron, you feel that she was fully immersed in and engaged with the world that she's writing about, the world of well-educated and attractive and stylish young people in New York City in the 1970s. She can claim to be a wallflower, just blending into the background, but there's nothing distant or disengaged about her writing.

Didion, on the other hand, remained at a cool and impenetrable distance and even though she was also fully immersed in a very rarefied and stylish world, she seemed removed from it somehow. But she is mercilessly honest about herself in her writing. I haven't read enough of Nora Ephron to know if she's as brave, but I'm looking forward to a visit to New York and Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s, when people believed that a regime like Peron's was a relic of another time and another place and could never happen here.  It should be instructive.

Not a review

I don't write movie reviews. This partly because I'm not visually oriented, and partly because I don't have much to say about most movies other than "it was pretty good, I liked it." But every so often, I feel that my vast reading public is eager to know what I think about the latest cinematic offerings, and I do hate to disappoint.

So I saw "Can You Ever Forgive Me" a few days ago. I don't have a star- or thumb-based rating system, so I'll just say that it was really really good. Really good. I love Melissa McCarthy. Her performance in "Bridesmaids" was one of the funniest things I've ever seen in a movie, and my kids and I never tire of repeating funny lines from "Spy." Yes, I know. I'm the mother of the year.

As anyone who saw "Bridesmaids" knows, Melissa McCarthy is afraid of nothing. She looks genuinely unattractive through most of that movie, and I don't mean movie star unattractive--you know, when a beautiful actress wears very little makeup and a plain hairstyle and baggy clothes, but her perfect skin radiates with light and her plain hair shines like the sun and the baggy clothes draped over her broad shoulders and long legs make her look like the damn Statue of Liberty. No. I mean just plain, dumpy, badly dressed, stringy hair, splotchy skin unattractive.

Movie critics used to write about actors losing themselves in a role. You know what that means when you watch Melissa McCarthy in "Bridesmaids," and now in "Can You Ever Forgive Me." She plays physically unattractive women in both movies. In the former, she is brazenly confident, not for one moment acting as if she's unworthy to occupy space, like the world expects plain women to do. In "Can You Ever Forgive Me," she's very different--plain again, but her character shrinks into herself--not because she's ashamed of her looks but because she's depressed, and every movement outside the small shell that contains her expends far more energy than she has. Both characters-- the coarse, joyful, energetic Megan; and the exhausted, angry, desperate Lee-- are actual human beings.

I read a few reviews of "Can You Ever Forgive Me" before I actually saw it. The reviews all praise McCarthy for not compromising her performance to make the character more appealing. I suppose that the viewer isn't supposed to like Lee Israel, and I understand why. In addition to being a criminal, she's also worn down with anger and exhaustion, too tired to even get out of her clothes before falling into her unmade bed. Her apartment is disgustingly dirty, and her clothes are dingy and frayed. Her career is in ruins and she has no friends, only a cat. She's bitter and all but ready to give up, and not likable at all, except that I did like her. She's not the kind of person that I'd seek out as a friend, and I wanted to shake her and tell her to snap out of it, but I liked her.

Even though I'm not visually oriented, I do notice some details. When I was young in Philadelphia in the 1980s, I spent a lot of time in New York. My friends and I liked dive bars and vintage clothing stores and used bookstores. I think that the movie captured that part of New York in the 1980s. It takes place in 1991, but that's more the 80s than the 90s. That, in fact, is really key to the story, which happens in the very last moments before the Internet changed everything. The events depicted in the movie could not have happened a few years later, when people could look things up online and easily spot a forger.

*****
And here's another reason why I don't write movie reviews: I started writing this on Saturday afternoon, and it's Monday morning now, and I still have no idea where this is going.

*****
It's Tuesday night now. I voted, using a paper ballot that I marked with a pen. Yes, the ballot was then scanned by a machine, but the actual vote was written in ink on paper. It's only been 25 years or so, but no one trusts the Internet anymore.

I still have a nagging feeling that this little movie review post should also be a comment on something else, something bigger. But this is all I have right now. It's 9:50 PM on election night, so it's too late to go out and vote if you haven't already. You can watch the returns. Or you can see a movie.

Mitzvah

I just read my post from last week and I don't even know what to think about what I was thinking. Rude phones and stowaways and banana muffins. That's pretty much the whole post. What? I mean, really. REALLY.

*****
Now I'm all business. I'm trying to improve my Excel skills, so I'm watching online videos and tutorials. My company offers free access to a training platform that used to be OK until it rebranded itself (well, you know what I mean) and now it's not so good. But the county library offers free membership to Lynda.com, so I'm going to try that, just as soon as I renew my long-expired library card.

****
I'm going to Ireland in March. I'm kind of dreading the trip, but I'm sure that I'll reconcile myself to going, until I even begin to look forward to it a little bit; and then I'll be sad when it's over.

And that? That is my whole life, in one ridiculous sentence. Did you think that this post would be better than the last one? Think again, gentle reader. Think again.

*****
Friday: I worked all day, though I didn't finish anything, other than one newsletter article. But I have at least half a dozen very solid drafts that I'll be able to finish on another, more focused and less distracted day. I'm glad they caught the bomber; and I'm even gladder that he was apparently an incompetent bomber, having failed to actually blow anyone up.

*****
Saturday: I love it when a plan comes together. I went to the library this morning to renew my library card, and today just happened to be the day of the Friends of the Library Book Sale. Two birds, one stone. Six dollars, 11 books, including three that I'm especially excited about:

Unscientific Americans, Roz Chast. I am a huge fan of Roz Chast, and her writing is almost as good as her cartoons. If you haven't read her writing, then I really recommend Going into Town and Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant. This one is just cartoons, not stories, but I'm happy to add it to my little Roz Chast collection.

Speaking Freely: A Memoir, Nat Hentoff. This is an uncorrected proof, probably donated by a book reviewer. I admired Nat Hentoff for his fierce defense of free speech and his outspoken opposition to abortion, which cost him writing contracts and speaking engagements. I haven't read a lot of his work, so I'm looking forward to reading this.

Muriel Spark, The Biography, Martin Stannard. Muriel Spark is one of my top five favorite authors. She wrote an autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, which was criticized for being vague and incomplete and lacking in detail. This is exactly how I'd write my own autobiography. Writers get to decide how much or how little of their own lives they want to tell about in their writing. But according to the book jacket, she cooperated with Martin Stannard, sitting for many interviews and sharing her papers, so I don't feel that I'm intruding on her privacy by reading this. She obviously wanted it to be written; she just didn't want to write it herself.

*****

Our neighbor, who is crazy, is also an Orthodox Jew. My husband is a police officer, and like most police officers, he does occasional off-duty security work, including a regular Saturday morning gig at a local synagogue. Crazy neighbor came to the door on Sunday, to thank my husband for serving the Jewish community, and to express his sorrow over the four police officers who were shot in Pittsburgh.

Yes, he calls us at all hours, and he corners us to complain about other neighbors or the government or his ex-wife, and he takes a rather unconventional approach to pest control; but on a day when he'd have been completely justified in thinking only of himself and his own community, crazy neighbor took five minutes to express gratitude and concern for someone else. It's not all bad. Some people will keep trying, but they can't stamp out basic decency and kindness.

Reality and dreams

I saw an article online, which I now can't find, no matter how I search. It doesn't matter. The article was about a phone that's supposed to help you avoid smartphone-induced distraction and stress. More specifically, it's a phone that offers only a few apps, so you can remain in touch with family and friends, and avoid the constant intrusion of social media and the Internet. Of course, it's an adjunct to your real phone, and it works only when connected to the mother ship. So for just $400 or so, in addition to the $600 or so that you already paid for your smartphone, you can have a phone that keeps you away from your phone.

My favorite-ever phone was a Samsung slider phone with a perfect little QWERTY keyboard. It was small and neat, and a pretty red color. Like most messaging phones of that time (around 2009, so smartphones were around, but messaging phones were still widely used) it had an alarm clock and calculator and messaging and calling, and a low-resolution camera. You could even play games with it; not that I ever did, but I could have if I'd wanted to. No navigation, though; and no email, and no Google. So I don't know if I could go back. But it's nice to think about. It's nice to think about being out with friends and having a spirited and good-natured argument about which actor was in that one movie, or what year it was that some team ended a long drought to win a championship, without someone settling the question with a pocket full of Google.

*****
I worked from home on Friday. I had promised to review an SOP for a coworker, and while I was on a conference call, she texted me to ask me if I'd gotten a chance to look at it. I noticed the text, but I didn't respond right away because I was taking notes during the call. Or at least I thought that I hadn't responded. Because on Saturday, I was going to text her about something altogether different, when I noticed, to my horror, that I had actually responded to her request on Friday. "Nope." That was it. Not "Sorry, I forgot about it but I'll do it now." Not "Sorry, I won't have time today but I'll have it back to you first thing on Monday." Just "Nope."

I'm using third-party keyboard and messaging apps, which normally work pretty well. But the messaging app suggests responses that don't even resemble any words that I would ever write to anyone, ever. My normal workaround is to just ignore the suggestions and write my own texts, complete with fully spelled-out words and complete, correctly punctuated sentences. But now I have to make sure that I don't inadvertently hit send on an auto-response and make myself look like a jerk. 

*****
Later that weekend, I had a dream. I was in Taiwan with some coworkers, including the one to whom my phone was so rude. Yes, Taiwan. A third coworker was, for some reason not known to me, holding on to some valuables for us. We walked down the corridor of our hotel to ask our third coworker for our things, and then we noticed that we were on an airplane. The plane began to taxi, and it was too late for us to get off. "Where is this plane going?" I asked my coworker.

"Shanghai," she said, barely looking up from her Chinese-language newspaper.

"We don't want to go to Shanghai!" the first coworker and I exclaimed. But it was too late. The plane had already taken off.

It was a strangely realistic dream, the kind from which you awaken slightly panicked and disoriented, with your brain straddling reality and the dream world. Even as I thought about what to make for lunch that day, I also worried about what the Chinese authorities would do with me when I arrived in Shanghai with no travel documents. It wasn't until halfway through my coffee that I realized that I had dreamed about actually being Shanghaied.

*****
I changed high schools after my freshman year. At the time, it seemed like a big deal. Now, 35 years later, I sometimes forget that I went to the first high school. One of my old neighborhood friends invited me to a Facebook group for my old school's upcoming reunion, and although I have no plans to attend, it was nice that people remembered me.

When you look at the Facebook profiles of old friends and acquaintances, you compare. You see their lives (such as people represent their lives on social media), and you wonder how yours measures up. Or maybe you don't. Maybe you're not one of those people who looks in the mirror because you literally don't know what you look like. Maybe you don't worry at all about what other people think about you. Maybe you're pretty clear on the difference between your friends' and neighbors' social media images and their real selves. Maybe you don't wake up expecting to spend the rest of your life in a Chinese prison. Maybe you don't worry that your phone will go rogue and be insufferably snotty on your behalf.

*****
It's the end of the day and I am worried about the world. I'm worried about displaced and homeless people who can't find welcome anywhere in the world. I'm worried about pipe bombs. I'm worried about systematic devaluation of human life.

Mother Teresa said that if you want to change the world, go home and love your family. It's the end of the day, and I'm going to make some banana chocolate chip muffins that won't solve any crises or end any wars or cure any of my ever-growing number of neuroses and fears. They'll just be a nice breakfast treat for teenage boys on a cold morning. Love is the only thing that has ever changed anything and the only thing that ever will.

Don't cry for me Argentina

Monday: Did I promise more book notes this week? I think I did, I think I did. I remember writing something about abandoning Edna St. Vincent Millay and Nancy Mitford after one page. And then the FAFSA intruded.

I realize that people file the FAFSA, and the 1040A, and passport applications, and all kinds of other bureaucratic forms and applications all the time. I just hate it more than most people.

Anyway, back to the books. I just read The Clancys of Queens, a memoir by Tara Clancy. I liked it a lot, and not just because I have some things (but not all) in common with the author. Like me, she grew up urban working class Catholic; and like me, she had an unorthodox family situation, in a time and place when most families were of the traditional variety.

The similarities end there, but I felt a sense of kinship with her, and I like her writing. I like her voice. Rough around the edges, a little boastful, but sensitive and thoughtful and genuine. A nice break from the early USSR.

*****
Now I'm reading Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Eva Peron. 

Yeah, I know. Just when I get out, they pull me back in (in as in early to mid 20th century). But at least it's not Europe or the Soviet Union. I'm just a few chapters in, but it's very good so far, and I'm learning a lot. I know absolutely nothing about Argentina under Peron, except the part where Madonna sings from a balcony, and it's starting to occur to me that that might not have actually happened.

*****
In other news, I submitted the FAFSA and I didn't punch anyone (that you know of).

*****
Thursday: Heart-attack stressful day at work today; the kind of stress that seems not to affect other people in the slightest but that leaves me a hyperventilating, panicking mess. But I think I held it together well enough that observers wouldn't have suspected that my chest was about to explode. It's 7 PM now, and my heart and respiratory rates are back to normal.

When I get stressed out, I get scatterbrained and foggy, and maintaining my compulsive housecleaning routine helps me to settle my brain and organize my thoughts. But scatterbrained and compulsive, terrible traits individually, are even worse combined.

Let's say you were a normal person, who just likes to vacuum on alternate days because she likes a clean house. And it's Thursday, and you can't remember if you vacuumed on Wednesday or not. Do you:

A. Look around and say to yourself "Well, it looks pretty clean around here, and so I could just let it go until tomorrow regardless?" OR

B. Vacuum, because you can't remember if you vacuumed yesterday or not; and if you didn't vacuum yesterday, then you HAVE TO VACUUM TODAY.

For our hypothetical normal person, the person for whom cleaning is an activity prompted by the presence of dirt, the answer would be A. For me, of course, the answer is B. So I have to vacuum. And I'm pretty sure that I also just dusted the same room twice. Pretty sure, but not 100% sure; this is why I had to dust it (again) just to be 100% sure.

Are you thinking to yourself that it must be exhausting to be me?

OMG, you're so right.

*****
Friday: Much better today; the crazy is under control and I accomplished quite a bit today, performing each necessary task once and only once. I'm still reading about Evita, and although I sometimes envy women like Evita, who never waste a moment with anxiety and confusion and panic and indecision, I can also take comfort in knowing that at least I'm not a Nazi sympathizer. So that's something. Adios until next week.

Hand me a fork

It's Friday night and the FAFSA is making me want to walk right into the ocean. God help me. God help us all. 

*****

Let's talk about books instead. So after I finished Lina and Serge, I visited the opposite end of the political spectrum, with The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss. Actually, I have no idea what Auchincloss’s politics were (though I’m pretty sure that he was on the not a Communist sympathizer like so many writers of the early to mid 20th century). But he came from and wrote about the very rarified and inbred society of 19th and 20th century New York City aristocracy, as far from revolutionary Russia as you can get.

I liked the stories, and I’d read more of Auchincloss. Almost every one of his characters is a New York lawyer, as was Auchincloss himself; and most of the stories are set in the 20th century, though he also set a couple of them during the mid 19th century. Those stories were almost as believable and effective as the contemporary (to Auchincloss) stories because he had a thorough understanding of the inner life of people such as his characters, and of human nature in general. I don’t think that his focus on a narrow stratum of society limits the artistic merit of his work; I think that he just recognized that a writer can’t write about everyone and everything. That made him a good writer, not a bad one.

Segueing from plutocracy into anarchy, I read To the Barricades, the Alix Kates Shulman biography of Emma Goldman. It was OK. I’m not an admirer of Emma Goldman (nor of Ms. Shulman) but she saw through Soviet Communism far sooner than most early 20th century radicals. Aside from the hagiographic tone of the book and the frank admiration of Goldman’s total commitment to politics at the expense of everything else, I completely reject Shulman’s premise that anarchy has been misunderstood and poorly executed and that true anarchy is the means to a just society. Humans have an innate need for leadership, and many (maybe even most) people need a structured and organized society, with recognizable authority. And defending the weak against the strong would seem to be impossible under anarchy. Though I have to admit that if I lived as a poor person in early 20th century America (or even in early 21st century America), I’d be hard-pressed to see the value of the state, which does an absolutely shitty job of defending the weak or reining in the strong. But just because no government can ever be truly just (because we live in a fallen world), it doesn’t follow that we shouldn’t try.

After Emma, I started on Savage Beauty, the Nancy Mitford biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. It's totally coincidental that I chose another biography of a famous woman written by a different famous woman. Of course, Emma Goldman was much more famous than her biographer, but Nancy Mitford was probably just as famous as Edna St. Vincent Millay. Anyway, I stopped after one page. I'm sure it's interesting, and I'll return to it eventually. But after Emma Goldman and Louis Auchincloss and the Prokofievs, I've had enough of the 20th century for now. We are hurtling toward a replay of the years 1929 through 1944, and I don't need to read the handbook.

*****

Speaking of handbooks. Hey FAFSA: What the fuck does this mean? 

How much did your Parent 1 (father/mother/stepparent) earn from working (wages, salaries, tips, etc.) in 2017? This amount is your Parent 1 (father's/mother's/stepparent's) portion of IRS Form 1040-lines 7+12+18 and Box 14 [Code A] of IRS Schedule K-1 (Form 1065).

Does that seem to you like a straightforward question? Well riddle me this: Why, first of all, do you need to see our two individual wage incomes when we filed jointly? And WHY do you ask for the EXACT SAME THING for Parent 2? Same lines: 7+12+18. There are only ONE OF EACH of lines 7+12+18 on the 1040, and WE ONLY FILED ONE. Again: Married, Filing Jointly. What. In the ACTUAL HELL. If I had a fork, I'd stick it in my fucking eye.

Son of a bitch. 

*****

So that's me, filling out forms. That's the real reason why I lie awake worrying about a return to Soviet-style totalitarianism. It's not because of the gulag or the interrogation cells. It's because I imagine that every task in life would be prefaced by a 47-page-long web form that demands administrative details from 11 years ago, secured by two-factor authentication, and designed to time out every time your session is inactive for over 7 minutes and I just can't.

*****
It's Sunday now. I just read this over, and it reads as a little crusty.

I'll adjust your gross income!

I think that a break from the early 20th century and a break from the FAFSA would seem to be in order. Additional book reviews and procedural notes to follow. Be afraid.

Downtime

Monday: Christopher Columbus was a terrible person, and Columbus Day is a stupid, stupid holiday. But after years of 1099 contracting, I am grateful for any paid day off. I didn't do any work today. This does not count. Nor does the laundry.

Some of my friends have been urging me and other friends to do less. Reject chronic busy-ness, reject overwork and overscheduling, and just be. "You're a human being, not a human doing," they say. "You're a person, not a productivity machine." "You're allowed to exist without having anything to show for it."  All true, I suppose, but that's not how I live my life. It's not how I roll. Like Toad, I'm a veritable slave to my to-do lists; and when I'm not doing something, I worry that I should be.

But I didn't do any work today. I went shopping and bought some new things. I went for a walk and waved to Running Lady. I took a nap while my kids watched "The Office" on Netflix. I did some housework. I read a book. It was delightful.

Tuesday: The best thing about an officially sanctioned weekday off is that no one else worked, either; so you're not behind. Everything was just as I left it on Friday. If not for the password reset debacle, it would have been a good day.

But there was a password reset debacle, and I have only myself to blame for it. Last week, I had to reset my password for the timecard system. Yes, that timecard system. I was sad that I had to reset the password, because first of all I hate resetting a password like I hate rodents and invasive medical procedures. And because my old password was awesome, comprising a sharply worded insult to the company that invented the timecard system and the required capital letter, number, and special character. It made me laugh every time I logged in, and that's worth something.

But I had to change it. And I decided to outdo myself and make an even funnier password. And so I did. I created a funny funny password, and I confirmed the funny password, and I completed the captcha, chortling with glee the whole time. What could have gone wrong? What could I have possibly have forgotten?

Yes, the super-creative password is the Internet version of hiding something so well that you'll never ever find it. I played chicken with the log-in screen, refusing to click on the stupid stupid "forgot your password?" link, knowing all the time that it would lock me out after too many unsuccessful attempts. And I made too many unsuccessful attempts, and it locked me out. And that was the end of that.

So after the system administrator bailed me out of Internet jail, I created a new password. And I wrote it down.

Which is good. Because it's hilarious.

*****

Thursday: I didn't actually skip a day here; I just wrote something that is becoming a little too long to be just a daily journal entry, so I'll expand on it a bit and post it next week. I'm sure you're all agog waiting to read it.  

Several minutes of your life that you can never reclaim

Wednesday: Yesterday, I took my normal lunchtime walk through Twinbrook, and I fell down, hard. I really have no idea why. It wasn't wet or icy, and I didn't trip on anything, or step into any holes. I fell off my shoes. That's the best way I can describe what happened. One minute I was up, and the next minute I was down.

I don't generally wear high heels at all. Whenever the subject of shoes comes up, I always joke that I have to be able to run for my life in my shoes. Everyone laughs at that joke. Only I'm kind of serious. But I was wearing a kind of chunky-heeled sandal, and I guess I stepped the wrong way. I skinned my left knee pretty badly, and scraped my right hand, with which I partially broke my fall. I'm pretty sore today, but it could have been so much worse.

Like most adults who fall for no apparent reason, I immediately looked around to make sure that no one saw me fall. I'd just walked past several other people who were walking, and had passed a house where two people were sitting on the front porch. When no one ran to my aid, I couldn't decide if I should be relieved that no one had witnessed my embarrassing failure to remain upright, or outraged that witnesses who had likely seen me fall to my knees didn't rush immediately to my aid. But as I said, the damage was relatively minor, and so no aid was needed.

But still.

*****

Friday: I'm working from home again today, as I normally do on Friday, so I'm marinating in the blend of fake outrage and indignation that is emanating from MSNBC, which is on as background noise. How is it possible that McConnell and Feinstein and Grassley and Schumer can even maintain straight faces as they decry hyper-partisanship and lament the passing of civility and reason in politics?

*****

Saturday: Well.

*****

Sunday: I'm so cranky today. No, not because of that. That doesn't matter. It was all but inevitable.

Well, it does matter. But it's not why I'm cranky. I'm cranky because I'm in the middle of the FAFSA. Which I started right after I registered one kid for winter sports, which is a 40-step process that meanders along through 27 or so electronic pages. Then after the thousandth click, the long-awaited "submit" click, you see the dreaded red error message, and you carefully examine each page to find the one error that is preventing your exit from this hell. And you find that the error was your failure to answer one required question: In addition to the sport for which your child is registering (Boys' Swim and Dive) is he or she interested in participating in pompons?

This was a yes/no question, but perhaps they could just offer pompons as a sport for which to register, thereby obviating the need for this question. And what is a pompon? Why only one M? Everyone calls them "pom-poms."

According to Grammarist, the original word was pompon, but because most people misheard it as "pom-pom" (of COURSE they did), the two-M version has come into more common use, and now each version of the word is equally popular. Grammarist might be right about the origin part, but they're dead wrong about the relative popularity of "pompon" vs. the far more common (and rightly so) "pom-pom."

So that was fun.

Then I had to pay for a field trip for another kid, using another 40-page web form, which required me to first create a "profile" of my student, and then select that profile from a drop down.

And now I'm on the FAFSA.

And I'm a little stabby.

And my knee still hurts.

So that's all for now. I wrote about something real last week. This is the best I can do this week.

Pompons. 

Ridiculous.

Testimony

I was at work last Thursday, so I didn't get to watch most of the Kavanaugh testimony. I listened on the radio on my way home. I believed her. I didn't believe him. That's probably all I have to say about that.

Last year when #metoo started as a movement, I thought a little bit about the line between inappropriate but overlookable behavior and real sexual assault. #metoo was just the beginning, as all of the millions of women who spoke up then are now sharing what happened in the aftermath, or what didn't, if they chose not to report.

I graduated from high school in 1983, just like Brett Kavanaugh. And I had a bad experience at a party. And I didn't say a thing about it. It wasn't as bad as what happened to Dr. Ford. The boy was just being a jerk, and he stopped when I told him to stop. Well, he stopped after the second or third time I told him to stop. The point is that I was angry and upset, but at no point did I feel threatened. But if something worse had happened, I promise you that I wouldn't have said a thing about it. In 1983, it was always the girl's fault. Always.

*****
So I believe her. And I don't believe him, not just because I believe her, but because it also appears that he lied about his college drinking, which was apparently anything but moderate according to classmates who have come forward since last Thursday. Even if you believe that Dr. Ford might have mistaken the identity of her attacker (and I don't; I believe that she's quite clear about who held her down and covered her mouth when she tried to scream), then it's still likely that he committed perjury.

There's no good ending to this, sadly. My guess (if I were a betting person, it would be my bet) is that he will be confirmed after a hasty and very limited FBI investigation that will unsurprisingly reveal absolutely nothing. This will be a bad outcome for everyone; for every woman who is convinced that women are systematically devalued, for the Senate as an institution, for the Supreme Court; and even for Judge Kavanaugh, who will serve his lifetime appointment with the proverbial asterisk next to his name.

*****
I was working from home on Friday, and I was watching as Senator Flake got up from his seat on the Republican side of the room, walked over to the Democratic side, and tapped Senator Coons on the shoulder. Later, I saw the video of his elevator confrontation with those two anguished women. And I looked at his face, and I saw real compassion, and something else, too--he seemed genuinely unsure how to proceed. He had already declared that he would vote to support Kavanaugh, and I think that those women gave him pause.

Yes, I know that it's not enough. I know that the White House has already placed constraints on the FBI investigation that will make it all but a waste of time. And I know that unless another bombshell drops this week, Flake will be among the Republicans voting to confirm. And I know that the Republican leadership under Mitch McConnell doesn't care--AT ALL--about doing what is right for the country, or even what is right for their own stupid party. They only care about winning each stupid street fight as it breaks out, and doing as much damage as possible in the process. But it still makes a difference to me that a Republican Senator listened to those two women instead of closing the elevator door. It makes a difference that he listened to them as if they mattered, and then tried to do something, however little. It's not enough, but it's something. I'll take something.