It’s a Tuesday night and I’m watching Capitals hockey, my ever-present proof that October isn’t all bad. It’s not that good, but it’s not all bad. I was just reading my backlog of drafts. I have so many that I forgot about some of them. They’re like handbags. They’re like eggs or milk or strawberries--I get more than I need and then some end up going bad. Some of those old drafts are no longer relevant to anything in either my life or the world at large. OBE, as the Feds say--overcome by events.
Ten million (give or take) drafts in progress, but nothing to write about today. It’s OK. Even the most brilliant creative minds only have a few ideas at any one time, and I’m not a brilliant creative mind. I’m just a girl with a cluttered pile of Google Docs drafts, sitting in front of a keyboard, hoping that a post will finish writing itself.
*****
It must have been about two weeks ago when I wrote that.
Actually, it was just over two weeks. October 8, to be exact. Today is October 24. I realized, because I’m just that brilliant, that Google Docs must have some way to track versioning; and after I realized this, it was but the work of a moment to figure out how to do it. And so I did, and now I know exactly when I started writing this. My literary executors will need this information .
I’ve published three posts since October 8, including one from my draft backlog. Of course, I also started another draft, so I’m still overstocked with drafts. Maybe I’ll have a sale.
It turns out that there’s another good thing about October; that is, when your favorite baseball team is playing in the World Series. I love the World Series no matter who is playing as long as they’re not in New York or Boston. But I love it so much more when my team is playing. And it’s too early to say anything more about that.
*****
It’s Friday night now and we’re watching game 3. That’s not a prediction or anything, just a statement. It’s OK to mention that we’re watching a game; it’s just not OK to speculate on the outcome.
If I’m being honest, which I always am, I’m not 150 percent sober right now. I’ve only had a glass and a half of wine, but my tolerance is not what it was. I just registered my son for his first year of high school swimming, completing an online form that makes the FAFSA look like an Amazon order. I’ll recover my will to live, I”m sure, but it will take days. I should have taken screenshots. I’ll need to document the entire process so that I’ll be able to repeat it in the spring when I have to register him for baseball. I’ll have to remain clear-headed and sober. I’ll have to train. Maybe a few days of fasting and meditation first. Or maybe I’ll make my husband do it next time.
*****
Now it’s Saturday morning. I have some plans today but right now, I’m the only person in the house who’s awake, so I’m reading and writing and watching old movies. Yes, you can do all three at once.
I have always disliked Woody Allen movies rather intensely. Even before poor Dylan Farrow (who I am sure is telling the truth) told the world about her childhood sexual abuse, I found his movies annoying and self-indulgent. But “Match Point” might be the exception to my no Woody Allen ever rule.
Right after “Match Point” ended, “A Handful of Dust” came on. I didn’t watch it because I love the book, and because it was time to get off the couch and do something. I mean really. But “Match Point” seemed very much like what Evelyn Waugh (who wrote the novel A Handful of Dust) would see in 21st-century life, especially among the English upper classes, and especially in the relationships between men and women. I’m pretty sure that Woody Allen wouldn't expect anyone to compare him to Evelyn Waugh, but there it is.
Waugh was smart enough that he would have known that once abortion is available as a choice, then it’s not long before the choice is no longer in the hands of the pregnant woman but instead in the hands of the unwilling father of her baby. He would also have known that a man who demands that a woman abort his own child would have no problem killing her when she fails to cooperate.
The murderer in "Match Point" gets away with it and the viewer has no reason to think that he’ll ever pay for his crimes, but I still think that Waugh would have approved. He was smart enough to know that bad people get away with things all the time. He also knew that there are always consequences; if not in this life, then in the next.
*****
So that’s what happens when you let me get mixed up with movie reviews and theology. I’m competent at neither. I just know what I know.
It’s the last Tuesday in October now, and I’m still not making any World Series predictions (though it’s do or die tonight). I’ll say only that this weekend didn’t go quite as we expected. Much like this blog post, in fact. Maybe it did write itself.
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Sunday, October 27, 2019
It will be night
Not long ago, I was walking and listening to NPR on the radio. Ari Shapiro was interviewing Karina Sainz Borgo, a Venezuelan journalist who just published a novel, It Would Be Night in Caracas.
The novel is about a woman struggling to survive amid chaos in crumbling Venezuela. I haven’t read it yet. Ari asked the author about the difference between journalism and fiction-writing, and she said “Journalism provides answers and fiction provides questions.”
I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the idea of fiction as a question or a way to figure out the truth was appealing to me. Sainz Borgo left Venezuela in 2013 and she hasn’t been back. She has to just imagine how much Venezuela has deteriorated in the last six years. She has more questions than answers.
Sainz Borgo also talked about survivors’ guilt. She still has family in Venezuela. She has friends and former neighbors and schoolmates who are struggling to survive, while she lives safely in Europe, and the guilt weighs on her.
******
I walk almost every day. I finish work pretty early, around 4, and I walk when I get home, before I start dinner. Soon it’ll be dark early, and I won’t be able to walk after work. I’ll have to go to the gym instead.
For months, I have walked almost the same route every day. I didn’t even think about it. I just put on my sneakers and my earbuds and walked. During the last few weeks, the route has seemed longer and longer every day. On the day I listened to this broadcast, I almost dreaded going and then I realized that I was probably just tired of the same walk, and I could just walk a different way. And I did. And it was lovely.
My neighborhood is small, and I’ve lived here for 15 years. I’ve been walking through this neighborhood for a decade and a half and so I know every street and every corner. It’s all so familiar. Every house reminds me of a neighbor or a friend or a kid’s friend or a friend’s kid.
I’d miss this place if anything happened. And anything can happen. A reviewer wrote that It Would Be Night in Venezuela is a reminder of how quickly things can change and how fast the world you know can just disappear. Some people never think about this; I never stop thinking about it. The worst-case scenario is my default option. Believe it or not, there are advantages to this all-anxiety all-the-time mindset. When it finally does all hit the fan, I won’t be surprised. I won’t necessarily be ready, but I won’t be surprised.
*****
Karina Sainz Borgo misses the Venezuela that she grew up in, but as she told Ari Shapiro, “The country I want to go back to doesn’t exist anymore.” She probably remembers her old neighborhood. She probably remembers her old walking routes and her neighbors’ houses with their children and their dogs. Maybe she hung out at a swimming pool or a park, or maybe she had a favorite coffee shop. Maybe she dreams sometimes about her old haunts, and wakes up grieving her loss.
*****
I was a baseball fan when I was young, and I still really like the game (thought not as much as hockey). My grandfather taught me how to watch a game, and how to score a game. The Philadelphia Phillies were my team. And I still like the Phillies, but we are a Washington Nationals household now; and if you have been following the news, then you know that the Nationals are playing in their first-ever World Series.
During Game 1 of the NLCS, Nats vs. St. Louis, I thought about Venezuela as I watched Anibal Sanchez take a no-hitter against the Cardinals into the eighth inning. How does Sanchez feel, I wondered. Does he think about Venezuela and wonder why he’s here enjoying great success in the United States when his country has descended into chaos, and his fellow Venezuelans are suffering and struggling to survive amid shortages of food, medicine, and other basic necessities. Does he feel fortunate, or guilty, or both? Does he dream about returning to a country that no longer exists?
*****
So Daylight Savings Time is over now, and we’re back on Standard Time. Last night, everyone got a single one-time-only extra hour of sleep in exchange for losing an hour’s worth of daylight every single day for six months. Not a good bargain at all. I’ll have to get my walk in as soon as I get home from work, until late November or so, when I’ll have to give up the afternoon walk and go to the gym to exercise. We don’t have sidewalks here, so night walking is kind of hazardous. Plus bats and foxes. I don’t socialize with wildlife.
At the end of the NPR interview, Sainz Borgo read a short excerpt from the novel. The passage ended with the words “It's always night there. The people look like ghosts.” I guess that’s what I’ll try to think about every time I feel like complaining about the early darkness, which will be every single day until April. I’ll try to think about every place in the world where people can’t depend on the basic things in life--the bare necessities like food and water; and the not-quite-necessary-for-survival-but-still-really-nice-to-have things, like bright cheerful light on a dark evening. I’ll miss the early daylight, but it will be back. I hope the lights will come back on in Venezuela soon. I hope that the lights will come on in the rest of the world, too. Let’s go Nats.
The novel is about a woman struggling to survive amid chaos in crumbling Venezuela. I haven’t read it yet. Ari asked the author about the difference between journalism and fiction-writing, and she said “Journalism provides answers and fiction provides questions.”
I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the idea of fiction as a question or a way to figure out the truth was appealing to me. Sainz Borgo left Venezuela in 2013 and she hasn’t been back. She has to just imagine how much Venezuela has deteriorated in the last six years. She has more questions than answers.
Sainz Borgo also talked about survivors’ guilt. She still has family in Venezuela. She has friends and former neighbors and schoolmates who are struggling to survive, while she lives safely in Europe, and the guilt weighs on her.
******
I walk almost every day. I finish work pretty early, around 4, and I walk when I get home, before I start dinner. Soon it’ll be dark early, and I won’t be able to walk after work. I’ll have to go to the gym instead.
For months, I have walked almost the same route every day. I didn’t even think about it. I just put on my sneakers and my earbuds and walked. During the last few weeks, the route has seemed longer and longer every day. On the day I listened to this broadcast, I almost dreaded going and then I realized that I was probably just tired of the same walk, and I could just walk a different way. And I did. And it was lovely.
My neighborhood is small, and I’ve lived here for 15 years. I’ve been walking through this neighborhood for a decade and a half and so I know every street and every corner. It’s all so familiar. Every house reminds me of a neighbor or a friend or a kid’s friend or a friend’s kid.
I’d miss this place if anything happened. And anything can happen. A reviewer wrote that It Would Be Night in Venezuela is a reminder of how quickly things can change and how fast the world you know can just disappear. Some people never think about this; I never stop thinking about it. The worst-case scenario is my default option. Believe it or not, there are advantages to this all-anxiety all-the-time mindset. When it finally does all hit the fan, I won’t be surprised. I won’t necessarily be ready, but I won’t be surprised.
*****
Karina Sainz Borgo misses the Venezuela that she grew up in, but as she told Ari Shapiro, “The country I want to go back to doesn’t exist anymore.” She probably remembers her old neighborhood. She probably remembers her old walking routes and her neighbors’ houses with their children and their dogs. Maybe she hung out at a swimming pool or a park, or maybe she had a favorite coffee shop. Maybe she dreams sometimes about her old haunts, and wakes up grieving her loss.
*****
I was a baseball fan when I was young, and I still really like the game (thought not as much as hockey). My grandfather taught me how to watch a game, and how to score a game. The Philadelphia Phillies were my team. And I still like the Phillies, but we are a Washington Nationals household now; and if you have been following the news, then you know that the Nationals are playing in their first-ever World Series.
During Game 1 of the NLCS, Nats vs. St. Louis, I thought about Venezuela as I watched Anibal Sanchez take a no-hitter against the Cardinals into the eighth inning. How does Sanchez feel, I wondered. Does he think about Venezuela and wonder why he’s here enjoying great success in the United States when his country has descended into chaos, and his fellow Venezuelans are suffering and struggling to survive amid shortages of food, medicine, and other basic necessities. Does he feel fortunate, or guilty, or both? Does he dream about returning to a country that no longer exists?
*****
So Daylight Savings Time is over now, and we’re back on Standard Time. Last night, everyone got a single one-time-only extra hour of sleep in exchange for losing an hour’s worth of daylight every single day for six months. Not a good bargain at all. I’ll have to get my walk in as soon as I get home from work, until late November or so, when I’ll have to give up the afternoon walk and go to the gym to exercise. We don’t have sidewalks here, so night walking is kind of hazardous. Plus bats and foxes. I don’t socialize with wildlife.
At the end of the NPR interview, Sainz Borgo read a short excerpt from the novel. The passage ended with the words “It's always night there. The people look like ghosts.” I guess that’s what I’ll try to think about every time I feel like complaining about the early darkness, which will be every single day until April. I’ll try to think about every place in the world where people can’t depend on the basic things in life--the bare necessities like food and water; and the not-quite-necessary-for-survival-but-still-really-nice-to-have things, like bright cheerful light on a dark evening. I’ll miss the early daylight, but it will be back. I hope the lights will come back on in Venezuela soon. I hope that the lights will come on in the rest of the world, too. Let’s go Nats.
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Liquids
I wasn’t very productive today. I’m working on a new project at work, and it’s early stage, the part where I don’t really even know what the project is yet, or what I’m supposed to do. I’m doing some research. This is helping me to see that there are great, gaping holes in my knowledge, but it is not helping me to fill those holes. It’s humbling.
As I filled my water bottle for the third time, I remembered a conversation from a few days ago. Actually, I remembered part of the conversation, but not the context--I couldn’t remember where I had been, or to whom I had been speaking. Anyway, the other person said that the first thing she did every day was to fill her 2-liter bottle of water. Then, no matter how productive (or not) the rest of her day might be, she’ll have accomplished something when she finishes that giant container of water.
That’s the kind of day I had today. I didn’t get much work done (because I didn’t know what to do) but I drank the water, metaphorically speaking. And I felt better about not being the only person who did nothing but drink the water. Until I remembered that the other participant in that conversation is actually one of the most highly organized and accomplished and productive people I know. There is no day on which water-drinking would be her only accomplishment.
*****
It’s the next day now. I had an opportunity to teach someone something today. It was something that seemed pretty obvious to me, but wasn’t obvious at all to the other person. She was genuinely grateful for my help, and I was genuinely grateful for the reminder that I do have something to offer other than water-drinking and blogging about nothing.
I write every single day, seven days a week. It might be too much. I read Daphne Gray-Grant’s writing blog every Tuesday, and although I don’t follow all of her advice (mind-mapping doesn’t work for me), I do follow some of it (don’t edit as you write! brilliant!) Like most writing experts, Daphne says that writers should write every day. But she defines every day as five days a week. I”m not sure that I’m ready to give up the seven-day schedule yet. But it’s a possibility. I might be trying to do too much. I might need to make some room in my brain for something other than words.
*****
And now it’s the next day again, and if I’m going to a five-day a week schedule, then I guess I’ll start that tomorrow. Or next week.
I read something yesterday, and I admired the writer’s raw honesty, but I couldn’t decide if the piece was good or not. I still can’t decide.
I was plowing through my (figurative) pile of drafts, and I found something that was much more personal than what I usually write. I thought for a moment that I should try to do more of that, try to reveal more, be more honest. But I probably won’t. The particular draft that I’m referring to will for sure never see the light of day. There’s nothing scandalous in it, it’s just too personal. And I also really can’t decide if it’s good or not.
Yes, it’s definitely time to think about something other than words. Maybe I’ll take this weekend off and then see where I am. I’ll drink two liters of water, or maybe two glasses of wine. I’ll regroup.
As I filled my water bottle for the third time, I remembered a conversation from a few days ago. Actually, I remembered part of the conversation, but not the context--I couldn’t remember where I had been, or to whom I had been speaking. Anyway, the other person said that the first thing she did every day was to fill her 2-liter bottle of water. Then, no matter how productive (or not) the rest of her day might be, she’ll have accomplished something when she finishes that giant container of water.
That’s the kind of day I had today. I didn’t get much work done (because I didn’t know what to do) but I drank the water, metaphorically speaking. And I felt better about not being the only person who did nothing but drink the water. Until I remembered that the other participant in that conversation is actually one of the most highly organized and accomplished and productive people I know. There is no day on which water-drinking would be her only accomplishment.
*****
It’s the next day now. I had an opportunity to teach someone something today. It was something that seemed pretty obvious to me, but wasn’t obvious at all to the other person. She was genuinely grateful for my help, and I was genuinely grateful for the reminder that I do have something to offer other than water-drinking and blogging about nothing.
I write every single day, seven days a week. It might be too much. I read Daphne Gray-Grant’s writing blog every Tuesday, and although I don’t follow all of her advice (mind-mapping doesn’t work for me), I do follow some of it (don’t edit as you write! brilliant!) Like most writing experts, Daphne says that writers should write every day. But she defines every day as five days a week. I”m not sure that I’m ready to give up the seven-day schedule yet. But it’s a possibility. I might be trying to do too much. I might need to make some room in my brain for something other than words.
*****
And now it’s the next day again, and if I’m going to a five-day a week schedule, then I guess I’ll start that tomorrow. Or next week.
I read something yesterday, and I admired the writer’s raw honesty, but I couldn’t decide if the piece was good or not. I still can’t decide.
I was plowing through my (figurative) pile of drafts, and I found something that was much more personal than what I usually write. I thought for a moment that I should try to do more of that, try to reveal more, be more honest. But I probably won’t. The particular draft that I’m referring to will for sure never see the light of day. There’s nothing scandalous in it, it’s just too personal. And I also really can’t decide if it’s good or not.
Yes, it’s definitely time to think about something other than words. Maybe I’ll take this weekend off and then see where I am. I’ll drink two liters of water, or maybe two glasses of wine. I’ll regroup.
Friday, October 18, 2019
Everything is copy
Last week, I was sitting in a hospital waiting room, monitoring my husband’s status on a screen that provides alerts to waiting family members so they’ll know when to expect their loved one to emerge. Each patient is assigned a number, and you can watch as the person’s number progresses through color-coded phases: Pink for Pre-Op, Orange for OR, Blue for Post-Op, Green for Recovery. After a short time in Recovery, assuming all goes well, a smiling volunteer taps you on the shoulder and asks you to follow her to the recovery room, where your post-operative spouse or parent or friend is sitting comfortably in a chair, still wearing a hospital gown and fuzzy socks, sipping Coke over ice and eating graham crackers.
I was reading The Woman in White as I waited, because Nora Ephron told me to read that book, and where books are concerned, I generally do whatever Nora tells me to do. As I read, I overheard a conversation between two fellow waiting room occupants. “How old was he?” the woman asked.
“Eighty-two,” said the man. “But you’d never have known it to look at him. He looked more like 62.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” said the woman. Terrible that the man died, I suppose, not that he apparently looked decades younger than he was.
“Yeah, it was so unexpected,” said the man. “He was out for a run, and he had a sudden heart attack. He was gone by the time the paramedics arrived.”
“Terrible,” said the woman. “I guess we never know.”
******
Nora Eprhon writes about death in “Considering the Alternative,” the last essay in I Feel Bad About My Neck (which was much better than I described it, by the way--take all of my literary criticism with great crusty grains of salt). To paraphrase, she writes about our tendency to think of death as a remote contingency, a possibility that we should maybe, possibly be prepared for; rather than what it is--an absolute certainty; a when, not an if; the end that waits for every single one of us. Eventually, sooner or later, we’re all going to die.
Nora would have been amused, I think, about the apparent shock with which the 82-year-old jogger’s friend reacted to his sudden death. A sudden death is of course always a shock, but that an 82-year-old man dying of a heart attack during a run should provoke such disbelief speaks to a universal human tendency to pretend that death is something that only happens to other people, other people who should have taken better care of themselves.
*****
You know what else was going on on the very same day? It was apparently National Handbag Day. This should be the most important of national holidays from my perspective but I wouldn’t even have known about it if I hadn’t been in a hospital. Because a hospital is the only place where I’d ever watch the Today show; much less the third or fourth hour of the Today show, and that’s where I learned that it was National Handbag Day. Thank God, I can imagine the Today show producers saying to each other. It’s National Handbag Day, so we can do show and tell with the contents of Craig Melvin’s backpack and Dylan Dreyer’s tote bag (which was a mess, by the way--throw away your used tissues, girl). For all I know, the producers of the Today show made the whole thing up, just so they could fill a few minutes of the hours and hours of air time that the Today show occupies. It must be exhausting to work for the Today show. Relentless.
Anyway, there it was, National Handbag Day, when I had just read Nora’s essay “I Hate My Purse.” We had a doctor with what had to have been a surgically altered neck, a TV personality whose purse was an even bigger mess than Nora’s (really--don’t put chewed-up gum in your handbag, even if it’s wrapped in paper--just throw it away) and a real-life proof of Nora’s theorem about people’s reluctance to accept the inevitability of death. It was a little eerie.
Nora Ephron so disliked handbags that she didn’t even carry one when she had enough pockets to carry her essentials. Nora was right about a lot of things. In fact, she knew enough that she could write about my day 13 years before it happened. But she was dead wrong about handbags. I love pockets, but there’s nothing like a handbag. Thanks to my new favorite handbag (Longchamp Le Pliage in my favorite wine color) I was able to carry my wallet, phone, little cosmetic case, rosary, lip balm, keys, Kindle, and pen and notebook; and I still had plenty of room for all of the stuff that my husband had to hand over before they rolled him away. There was room for a water bottle. There was room for the prescriptions that we picked up at the pharmacy before we went home. I clipped my keys to the straps with a carabiner, but I could have also stuffed them inside if I needed to.
Nora hated her purse because she had the wrong purse. There’s no other reason that I can think of to hate something that’s so obviously an undisputed good. A good handbag is pretty, it carries everything you need, and it gives you something to do with your hands. An undisputed good.
*****
Not long ago, I tried to re-create a favorite childhood dish. It didn’t turn out as I’d hoped, but it was OK. I wrote a whole thing about it, actually, and then forgot about it. I have a pretty big backlog of drafts. I wrote about that, too. Everything is copy. That’s what Nora said. Unsurprisingly, Nora also wrote about food nostalgia, in “The Lost Strudel,” because every time I think I’m writing about something new, I find that Nora has beaten me to it.
Apparently, there is a thing called cabbage strudel. Nora described it and it sounds delicious. It was sold at Hungarian bakeries all over New York City until one day, tastes abruptly shifted and cabbage strudel was no longer a fashionable food. Nora was heartbroken. She hunted in vain for her beloved strudel but it was gone until a few years later, when a friend told her that a new Hungarian bakery had opened. The new bakery sold cabbage strudel and it was just as good as Nora remembered. A happy ending.
Maybe my next attempt to re-create a favorite childhood food will be successful, but not today. Today we’re having leftovers. I don’t think that Nora Ephron had anything to say about leftovers, but I’m about to read I Remember Nothing, so I’ll find out for sure. If she didn’t write about leftovers, then I will. Everything is copy.
I was reading The Woman in White as I waited, because Nora Ephron told me to read that book, and where books are concerned, I generally do whatever Nora tells me to do. As I read, I overheard a conversation between two fellow waiting room occupants. “How old was he?” the woman asked.
“Eighty-two,” said the man. “But you’d never have known it to look at him. He looked more like 62.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” said the woman. Terrible that the man died, I suppose, not that he apparently looked decades younger than he was.
“Yeah, it was so unexpected,” said the man. “He was out for a run, and he had a sudden heart attack. He was gone by the time the paramedics arrived.”
“Terrible,” said the woman. “I guess we never know.”
******
Nora Eprhon writes about death in “Considering the Alternative,” the last essay in I Feel Bad About My Neck (which was much better than I described it, by the way--take all of my literary criticism with great crusty grains of salt). To paraphrase, she writes about our tendency to think of death as a remote contingency, a possibility that we should maybe, possibly be prepared for; rather than what it is--an absolute certainty; a when, not an if; the end that waits for every single one of us. Eventually, sooner or later, we’re all going to die.
Nora would have been amused, I think, about the apparent shock with which the 82-year-old jogger’s friend reacted to his sudden death. A sudden death is of course always a shock, but that an 82-year-old man dying of a heart attack during a run should provoke such disbelief speaks to a universal human tendency to pretend that death is something that only happens to other people, other people who should have taken better care of themselves.
*****
You know what else was going on on the very same day? It was apparently National Handbag Day. This should be the most important of national holidays from my perspective but I wouldn’t even have known about it if I hadn’t been in a hospital. Because a hospital is the only place where I’d ever watch the Today show; much less the third or fourth hour of the Today show, and that’s where I learned that it was National Handbag Day. Thank God, I can imagine the Today show producers saying to each other. It’s National Handbag Day, so we can do show and tell with the contents of Craig Melvin’s backpack and Dylan Dreyer’s tote bag (which was a mess, by the way--throw away your used tissues, girl). For all I know, the producers of the Today show made the whole thing up, just so they could fill a few minutes of the hours and hours of air time that the Today show occupies. It must be exhausting to work for the Today show. Relentless.
Anyway, there it was, National Handbag Day, when I had just read Nora’s essay “I Hate My Purse.” We had a doctor with what had to have been a surgically altered neck, a TV personality whose purse was an even bigger mess than Nora’s (really--don’t put chewed-up gum in your handbag, even if it’s wrapped in paper--just throw it away) and a real-life proof of Nora’s theorem about people’s reluctance to accept the inevitability of death. It was a little eerie.
Nora Ephron so disliked handbags that she didn’t even carry one when she had enough pockets to carry her essentials. Nora was right about a lot of things. In fact, she knew enough that she could write about my day 13 years before it happened. But she was dead wrong about handbags. I love pockets, but there’s nothing like a handbag. Thanks to my new favorite handbag (Longchamp Le Pliage in my favorite wine color) I was able to carry my wallet, phone, little cosmetic case, rosary, lip balm, keys, Kindle, and pen and notebook; and I still had plenty of room for all of the stuff that my husband had to hand over before they rolled him away. There was room for a water bottle. There was room for the prescriptions that we picked up at the pharmacy before we went home. I clipped my keys to the straps with a carabiner, but I could have also stuffed them inside if I needed to.
Nora hated her purse because she had the wrong purse. There’s no other reason that I can think of to hate something that’s so obviously an undisputed good. A good handbag is pretty, it carries everything you need, and it gives you something to do with your hands. An undisputed good.
*****
Not long ago, I tried to re-create a favorite childhood dish. It didn’t turn out as I’d hoped, but it was OK. I wrote a whole thing about it, actually, and then forgot about it. I have a pretty big backlog of drafts. I wrote about that, too. Everything is copy. That’s what Nora said. Unsurprisingly, Nora also wrote about food nostalgia, in “The Lost Strudel,” because every time I think I’m writing about something new, I find that Nora has beaten me to it.
Apparently, there is a thing called cabbage strudel. Nora described it and it sounds delicious. It was sold at Hungarian bakeries all over New York City until one day, tastes abruptly shifted and cabbage strudel was no longer a fashionable food. Nora was heartbroken. She hunted in vain for her beloved strudel but it was gone until a few years later, when a friend told her that a new Hungarian bakery had opened. The new bakery sold cabbage strudel and it was just as good as Nora remembered. A happy ending.
Maybe my next attempt to re-create a favorite childhood food will be successful, but not today. Today we’re having leftovers. I don’t think that Nora Ephron had anything to say about leftovers, but I’m about to read I Remember Nothing, so I’ll find out for sure. If she didn’t write about leftovers, then I will. Everything is copy.
Sunday, October 13, 2019
Post-operative
It’s Wednesday. I worked from home today, unusual (though not unheard-of) for a Wednesday. I have far too much work to do right now, and the panic helped me to focus and direct my energies. I got quite a lot accomplished today, enough that I have some breathing room. Enough, in fact, that I can stop working now and write about having too much to do, instead of just doing it.
Yes, I know.
I finished Not that Kind of Girl, and now I’m reading Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck. I like Nora Ephron, God rest her soul, though I sometimes find her intimidating. She was a very successful journalist and writer and cultural observer and influencer, who probably accomplished more in a day than I do in a month. I don’t think I could have kept up with her in real life.
I Feel Bad About My Neck is good, though not nearly as good as Wallflower at the Orgy. It reads as a little lazy and scattershot, a little fast and loose. It was published in 2006, when she was NORA EPHRON, Nora Fucking Ephron, and so people were willing to read anything she wrote. I’m still willing to read anything she wrote, but I know the difference between really good Nora Ephron and phoning-it-in Nora Ephron.
I don’t feel bad about my neck just yet. But I don’t feel good about it either. I’m aware of it. I suppose that’s the first step, the beginning of the slippery slope. Once you start to notice your neck, a completely utilitarian body part that you used to be able to ignore, you’re on the downward spiral from middle-aged to old. And I hate turtlenecks.
*****
What is middle age anyway? What does it mean to be middle aged? I have heard comedians and others suggest that it's absurdly optimistic to call 50 middle aged because it assumes that a person should expect to live to be 100. Not an unreasonable argument, I suppose. But if you remove childhood from the equation and count only the phases of adulthood, then 50 or so is right in the middle of middle age.
Let's establish the ranges right now:
That's my final word. If you're 40 or 65, don't @ me to argue about your placement. It is what it is.
By these final and incontrovertible rules, my husband (almost 50) and I (over 50) are both middle-aged. Because we have been middle-aged for a while, it's long past time for at least one of us to accept that there are certain things that middle aged people shouldn't do. Like playing softball.
By now, you're thinking "this is going somewhere, isn't it?" And it is. We're at Montgomery Medstar Medical Center right now, waiting for an anesthesiologist to put my husband under so that a surgeon can fix his mangled hand. Softball. Ridiculous.
We're in the pre-surgery waiting area, in a semi private little curtained-off cubicle, with just a tiny hospital bed, a visitor's chair, and a hand-painted ceiling tile that I suppose is there to relax the patient. It's a nice, thoughtful touch.
My husband is uncharacteristically nervous. He's wearing a hospital gown and hospital-issued fuzzy socks and he has an IV for fluids. He can't eat or drink anything and he can't sleep because of the IV. The surgeon, a very energetic, wiry Asian man with close-cropped gray hair and an unnaturally unwrinkled face, just stopped by to check on my husband. He seems like a nice man and he comes very highly recommended, but I'm not sure I trust a man who has what appears to be quite a bit of Botox. And his neck is very very tight. Nora Ephron would be envious.
*****
This is the second time this year that I've been here at this hospital, waiting for someone else to endure the attentions of medical professionals. Last time I was only in the waiting room, feeling sorry for the obviously sick people who had to sit in a public place, visible to all, when they were at their most vulnerable. Today I'm in the pre-surgery waiting area and even here, the patients are exposed to the prying eyes of every passer-by. I feel intrusive and unfairly advantaged, with my street clothes and my shoes and my car keys that allow me to walk out of here and drive away if I want to.
*****
My husband’s surgery went well. He spent Thursday afternoon in bed, napping and watching sports and recovering. He returned to work on Friday, at least three days before he should have, but there’s no stopping him. I hope that everyone else who had surgery last week is doing as well.
Yes, I know.
I finished Not that Kind of Girl, and now I’m reading Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck. I like Nora Ephron, God rest her soul, though I sometimes find her intimidating. She was a very successful journalist and writer and cultural observer and influencer, who probably accomplished more in a day than I do in a month. I don’t think I could have kept up with her in real life.
I Feel Bad About My Neck is good, though not nearly as good as Wallflower at the Orgy. It reads as a little lazy and scattershot, a little fast and loose. It was published in 2006, when she was NORA EPHRON, Nora Fucking Ephron, and so people were willing to read anything she wrote. I’m still willing to read anything she wrote, but I know the difference between really good Nora Ephron and phoning-it-in Nora Ephron.
I don’t feel bad about my neck just yet. But I don’t feel good about it either. I’m aware of it. I suppose that’s the first step, the beginning of the slippery slope. Once you start to notice your neck, a completely utilitarian body part that you used to be able to ignore, you’re on the downward spiral from middle-aged to old. And I hate turtlenecks.
*****
What is middle age anyway? What does it mean to be middle aged? I have heard comedians and others suggest that it's absurdly optimistic to call 50 middle aged because it assumes that a person should expect to live to be 100. Not an unreasonable argument, I suppose. But if you remove childhood from the equation and count only the phases of adulthood, then 50 or so is right in the middle of middle age.
Let's establish the ranges right now:
- Young adulthood, 21 - 39
- Middle age, 40 - 64
- Old age, 65 and beyond
That's my final word. If you're 40 or 65, don't @ me to argue about your placement. It is what it is.
By these final and incontrovertible rules, my husband (almost 50) and I (over 50) are both middle-aged. Because we have been middle-aged for a while, it's long past time for at least one of us to accept that there are certain things that middle aged people shouldn't do. Like playing softball.
By now, you're thinking "this is going somewhere, isn't it?" And it is. We're at Montgomery Medstar Medical Center right now, waiting for an anesthesiologist to put my husband under so that a surgeon can fix his mangled hand. Softball. Ridiculous.
We're in the pre-surgery waiting area, in a semi private little curtained-off cubicle, with just a tiny hospital bed, a visitor's chair, and a hand-painted ceiling tile that I suppose is there to relax the patient. It's a nice, thoughtful touch.
 |
| Don't worry about the guy with the scalpel. Just look at the ceiling. |
My husband is uncharacteristically nervous. He's wearing a hospital gown and hospital-issued fuzzy socks and he has an IV for fluids. He can't eat or drink anything and he can't sleep because of the IV. The surgeon, a very energetic, wiry Asian man with close-cropped gray hair and an unnaturally unwrinkled face, just stopped by to check on my husband. He seems like a nice man and he comes very highly recommended, but I'm not sure I trust a man who has what appears to be quite a bit of Botox. And his neck is very very tight. Nora Ephron would be envious.
 |
| I don't know about your neck, Doctor. You're suspect. |
*****
This is the second time this year that I've been here at this hospital, waiting for someone else to endure the attentions of medical professionals. Last time I was only in the waiting room, feeling sorry for the obviously sick people who had to sit in a public place, visible to all, when they were at their most vulnerable. Today I'm in the pre-surgery waiting area and even here, the patients are exposed to the prying eyes of every passer-by. I feel intrusive and unfairly advantaged, with my street clothes and my shoes and my car keys that allow me to walk out of here and drive away if I want to.
*****
My husband’s surgery went well. He spent Thursday afternoon in bed, napping and watching sports and recovering. He returned to work on Friday, at least three days before he should have, but there’s no stopping him. I hope that everyone else who had surgery last week is doing as well.
Monday, October 7, 2019
40 hours
It's Sunday afternoon, 1 PM, and I'm sitting on a school bus in the parking lot at St. Patrick's, on my way to do what the priest at Mass this morning called a "crazy Catholic thing." Rosaries and scapulars and the Blessed Sacrament. Me and 100 old ladies and a bunch of Knights of Columbus.
Yesterday was the first truly fall-like day this year. It was sunny and very breezy and cool enough for an outdoor fire. We had friends and family over, and we sat around the fire pit all day long. I had awakened that morning feeling so depressed that I didn't want to get out of bed. But I had to. We had plans and I had to do what felt impossible, which was to stand upright and put one foot in front of the other, and smile and greet and welcome people. It turned out better than I expected.
So now I'm standing in a field on Norbeck Road with a rosary wrapped around my wrist and my phone in my hand, writing about the traffic whizzing by and the overcast, almost-leaden sky and the almost-damp, almost-chilly breeze that made me decide to put on a jacket before I left the house. In a few minutes, the priests will arrive, and the old ladies and the handful of young people and the Knights of Columbus and I will walk a mile or so back up Norbeck to St Patrick's, praying and singing and making something of a spectacle of ourselves. Catholics. We are a mysterious crew.
*****
My jacket and my sneakers and my handbag are all a similar color. Burgundy is probably the best word to describe it, or maybe maroon. That's what my mother always calls this color. I think that wine is the best word. Wine, like the wine-dark sea. My son is a freshman in college, and I remember two phrases from my freshman year in college: Wine-dark sea, and bare, ruined choirs. My literature professor tried his hardest to make us see the beauty in those words. And I do see it now, more than 30 years later, so his time wasn't wasted.
*****
It’s Monday now, I had to stop writing when the procession got underway. We shuffled rather than walked up Norbeck Road, singing and praying, Repetitive prayer is soothing and meditative. I don’t often forget myself, but I did forget myself for a few minutes as a drop of rain or two fell and the procession inched up the road, led by a lights-flashing silent police car. The trees have just begun to turn; and I pondered bare, ruined choirs as I listened to the chanting. The choir was the huddled and barely moving crowd of humanity making its way to the waiting church, and it didn’t feel bare or ruined at all. A wine-dark sea of maroon jackets and wine-colored jackets and burgundy sweaters and dark red raincoats made its way into the church for an hour of quiet prayer for the world. And then we went home.
Yesterday was the first truly fall-like day this year. It was sunny and very breezy and cool enough for an outdoor fire. We had friends and family over, and we sat around the fire pit all day long. I had awakened that morning feeling so depressed that I didn't want to get out of bed. But I had to. We had plans and I had to do what felt impossible, which was to stand upright and put one foot in front of the other, and smile and greet and welcome people. It turned out better than I expected.
So now I'm standing in a field on Norbeck Road with a rosary wrapped around my wrist and my phone in my hand, writing about the traffic whizzing by and the overcast, almost-leaden sky and the almost-damp, almost-chilly breeze that made me decide to put on a jacket before I left the house. In a few minutes, the priests will arrive, and the old ladies and the handful of young people and the Knights of Columbus and I will walk a mile or so back up Norbeck to St Patrick's, praying and singing and making something of a spectacle of ourselves. Catholics. We are a mysterious crew.
*****
My jacket and my sneakers and my handbag are all a similar color. Burgundy is probably the best word to describe it, or maybe maroon. That's what my mother always calls this color. I think that wine is the best word. Wine, like the wine-dark sea. My son is a freshman in college, and I remember two phrases from my freshman year in college: Wine-dark sea, and bare, ruined choirs. My literature professor tried his hardest to make us see the beauty in those words. And I do see it now, more than 30 years later, so his time wasn't wasted.
*****
It’s Monday now, I had to stop writing when the procession got underway. We shuffled rather than walked up Norbeck Road, singing and praying, Repetitive prayer is soothing and meditative. I don’t often forget myself, but I did forget myself for a few minutes as a drop of rain or two fell and the procession inched up the road, led by a lights-flashing silent police car. The trees have just begun to turn; and I pondered bare, ruined choirs as I listened to the chanting. The choir was the huddled and barely moving crowd of humanity making its way to the waiting church, and it didn’t feel bare or ruined at all. A wine-dark sea of maroon jackets and wine-colored jackets and burgundy sweaters and dark red raincoats made its way into the church for an hour of quiet prayer for the world. And then we went home.
Monday, September 30, 2019
Sleepless
I don’t sleep sometimes. Sometimes, I sleep almost through the night, for days at a time; and other times, I just don’t sleep. Or I sleep for a few hours, and then I’m awake at 2 and can’t fall back asleep.
Last night was one of those nights. It wasn’t so bad, really. I’d gone to bed early so I’d already slept for almost three hours. I read for a while, and I thought about nothing for a while, and I prayed for a while. I could have written, I suppose, but I was holding on to the hope that I’d fall back asleep, so I didn’t want to do anything that would keep my brain too active.
Like it takes an active brain to write about meatballs. I flatter myself.
*****
Forget about writing. Let’s talk about reading. I’m temporarily giving up on Postwar. It’s just so mercilessly long. It’s taking too long to finish and I have lots of other books to read. Maybe I’ll get back to it. I’m all the way to the late 1970s, a pretty dreary time in Europe, East and West. And everywhere else, really. In Eastern Europe, especially, people were weary and resigned, and too tired for despair. The gray, low-level terror and oppression was a morning-to-night fact of life and most people thought that their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren would live under the same oppression for their whole lives. No one saw the end coming, though it was just a few years away.
So far during my Postwar break, I’ve read Heather King’s Ravished: Notes on Womanhood, which was great, though not as great as Shirt of Flame. Now I’m reading Carlene Bauer’s Not That Kind of Girl. At least ten people have written memoirs with this title or a variation of it. Maybe I should write one and call it Exactly That Kind of Girl. Anyway, I like this book very much. She writes honestly and beautifully about what it’s like to be a girl who is both introspective and outspoken, who struggles with faith but wants to believe, who longs to be noticed and desired but doesn’t know how to deal with boys, who wants to be New York-cool but can’t hide her wide-open mind and heart. Yes, exactly that kind of girl. I know her.
But wasn’t I writing about insomnia? That’s what kind of girl I am--the kind who can’t string two thoughts together on her best day, never mind after a night of little or no sleep.
*****
Some people think that it’s better to stay up for the whole rest of the night than to fall asleep at dawn only to have to wake up again in an hour or half an hour. I could not disagree more. After several hours of walking around the house and reading and thinking and praying, I finally fell asleep, about 30 minutes before I had to get up for the day. And it was deep, hard sleep, like a whole night distilled into a concentrated half-hour. I felt fine when I woke up.
*****
At some point--during the early part of the night, or during the 30 minutes in the early morning-- I dreamed about lobster. Specifically, I dreamed about cooking and eating a lobster, by myself. I don’t like lobster that much, and I would never ever cook one. I don’t know what a dream about solo lobster cooking and eating should mean, if anything. The lobster had the texture of calamari. Vile. I’m glad it was only a dream.
I’m pretty tired now. I hope I’ll sleep tonight. I hope I’ll have more interesting dreams. If not, I have plenty of books to read.
*****
Last night was one of those nights. It wasn’t so bad, really. I’d gone to bed early so I’d already slept for almost three hours. I read for a while, and I thought about nothing for a while, and I prayed for a while. I could have written, I suppose, but I was holding on to the hope that I’d fall back asleep, so I didn’t want to do anything that would keep my brain too active.
Like it takes an active brain to write about meatballs. I flatter myself.
*****
Forget about writing. Let’s talk about reading. I’m temporarily giving up on Postwar. It’s just so mercilessly long. It’s taking too long to finish and I have lots of other books to read. Maybe I’ll get back to it. I’m all the way to the late 1970s, a pretty dreary time in Europe, East and West. And everywhere else, really. In Eastern Europe, especially, people were weary and resigned, and too tired for despair. The gray, low-level terror and oppression was a morning-to-night fact of life and most people thought that their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren would live under the same oppression for their whole lives. No one saw the end coming, though it was just a few years away.
So far during my Postwar break, I’ve read Heather King’s Ravished: Notes on Womanhood, which was great, though not as great as Shirt of Flame. Now I’m reading Carlene Bauer’s Not That Kind of Girl. At least ten people have written memoirs with this title or a variation of it. Maybe I should write one and call it Exactly That Kind of Girl. Anyway, I like this book very much. She writes honestly and beautifully about what it’s like to be a girl who is both introspective and outspoken, who struggles with faith but wants to believe, who longs to be noticed and desired but doesn’t know how to deal with boys, who wants to be New York-cool but can’t hide her wide-open mind and heart. Yes, exactly that kind of girl. I know her.
But wasn’t I writing about insomnia? That’s what kind of girl I am--the kind who can’t string two thoughts together on her best day, never mind after a night of little or no sleep.
*****
Some people think that it’s better to stay up for the whole rest of the night than to fall asleep at dawn only to have to wake up again in an hour or half an hour. I could not disagree more. After several hours of walking around the house and reading and thinking and praying, I finally fell asleep, about 30 minutes before I had to get up for the day. And it was deep, hard sleep, like a whole night distilled into a concentrated half-hour. I felt fine when I woke up.
*****
At some point--during the early part of the night, or during the 30 minutes in the early morning-- I dreamed about lobster. Specifically, I dreamed about cooking and eating a lobster, by myself. I don’t like lobster that much, and I would never ever cook one. I don’t know what a dream about solo lobster cooking and eating should mean, if anything. The lobster had the texture of calamari. Vile. I’m glad it was only a dream.
I’m pretty tired now. I hope I’ll sleep tonight. I hope I’ll have more interesting dreams. If not, I have plenty of books to read.
*****
Monday, September 23, 2019
Note to self
Did you know that it’s really easy to make your own meatballs? You probably did know that. But I didn’t, until today. For some reason, I had always been afraid to make meatballs, so I just made sauce with meat in it, and that was what we had with our spaghetti. But today, I found a recipe, and decided to make meatballs. And it was astonishingly easy, and they were very good. The End.
Were you waiting for me to turn that into some kind of lesson about overcoming fears or leaving comfort zones or some shit? No, sorry. I have nothing for you but meatballs. Slightly too-spicy but very delicious meatballs.
*****
When I say that it was easy, I don’t mean that it was fun. Rolling meatballs is like making cookies, and I hate making cookies. And I’m terrible at quantities, too. I had two pounds of ground beef, because the recipe called for one pound, and I wanted to make enough to freeze, so I wouldn’t have to roll meatballs again. But then I looked at the two pounds of meat and I thought that it wouldn’t make nearly enough meatballs to serve everyone and then have enough left over to freeze. And I was wrong, because two pounds of ground beef turns into a quantity of meatballs best described by the measurement “shitload.” Look it up. It’s somewhere between a buttload and a shit-ton.
*****
That was yesterday. My kids are still talking about those meatballs. A culinary triumph. Today, I went to an after-work happy hour, and then to Barnes and Noble to pick up a birthday present for a three-year-old girl. I’m sure she’ll get lots of toys, so I bought her a lovely hardcover copy of Anne of Green Gables. It’s so pretty that I was tempted to buy a copy for myself.
I bought a notebook instead, because my current notebook is almost full. I’m picky about notebooks, and I usually like the selection at Barnes and Noble. But I skip the Moleskine section. Moleskine is full of itself. They lost me when they introduced the silly Evernote thing and the $179 pen. I do like their bright, hard-cover notebooks, though.
Barnes and Noble also carries Leuchturm1917 notebooks. These are like Moleskine notebooks for people who don’t think Moleskine is hard enough to pronounce. I liked their red cover color, too, but they only had the red one with graph paper. So no Leuchturm1917.
The clearance section had what appeared to be lots of options, but the selection narrowed after I ruled out the ones with the inspirational sayings on the covers, and the obviously ugly ones, and the ones with the hand-tooled leather covers, and the ones from the 300 Writing (Creative/Sketching/Drawing) Prompt series.
I mean, I’m writing about shopping for a notebook. Yesterday, I wrote about meatballs. I don’t need writing prompts.
Among the remaining notebooks, at least half were bullet journals. Bullet journals are a big trend now. And because this trend combines technology rejection in the name of “authenticity” (use real notebooks with paper and real pens, not electronics!) and consumerism (not just any notebook and pen--THIS kind of notebook and THIS kind of pen!) and social media influencers (hundreds of Instagram-filtered notebook photos accompanied by multiple hashtags), it is an easy target for mockery.
Silly as it may be, though, I’m not going to make fun of bullet journaling, because if I’m being honest (and I’m always being honest), I really love the whole idea. Bullet journals are neat and pretty, two of my favorite characteristics of anything. Do a Google image search and see if you don’t want to stop what you’re doing right now and make a beautiful bullet journal. I do. I mean, what am I doing, anyway? Writing about meatballs? I could be bullet journaling.
But I know myself. My handwriting is appallingly bad, and I doodle, and I write in the margins, and I scribble. Notebooks, in fact, are my only refuge of untidiness. Notebooks and my sock drawers. Marie Kondo didn’t get to them yet. So my bullet journal wouldn't look anything like the ones that litter the Pinterest landscape. I'd feel like a failure.
Or worse. Because it's just as likely that I'd start bullet journaling and become compulsive about it, and then it would become another chore that I have to do every day. As I said, I know myself.
I saw one very nice-looking bullet journal notebook and was still tempted to buy it, bullet journal reservations notwithstanding. The notebook was covered with cellophane wrapping with a paper band for the price and brand name. "For the iist-makers and note-takers," it read. Well that's me, right? I spend a good part of my life taking notes and making lists so this notebook was obviously meant for me. But the back side of the wrapper also had a little illustration of the notebook pages and they were way too complicated. A dashboard for your notes. That’s too much to do. It’s too much work. It's the compulsivity again--give me a notebook page with seven different sections dedicated to specific content types, and I will feel compelled to use them appropriately.
Assuming you’re still reading this, at what point did you thank God you're not me? Was it the part about thinking that two pounds of meatballs wasn't enough to feed four people, or the 45 minutes of deliberation over a notebook?
And that's a slight exaggeration. Maybe 20 minutes, or 25 at the most. After no more than 25 or 30 minutes, I picked a "modular" notebook with a very lovely soft blue faux leather cover. It's modular because it comes with three interchangeable and refillable inserts, so you can have blank paper for drawing if you draw, and graph paper for graphing stuff if you do that, and lined paper for writing. I will use all three of the inserts for writing, with a few doodles here and there, and then I’ll get more inserts because the cover really is so pretty that I’ll want to keep using it. And it’s an unusual size, compact but much longer than wide than most notebooks. It’s very well suited to both lists and notes. It has a clear pocket in the front for business cards, and a clear zipper pocket in the back, where I can keep my little ruler (neat underlines under dates and list titles being my only concession to neatness in my notebooks).
*****
The notebook is just right, and my notes are very neat and well-organized, as they always are during the three- to four-day notebook honeymoon period. The inside of the notebook will soon be a jumble of scribble, comprehensible only to me. And that’s the way I like it. And now it’s time to cook dinner. I have a new perfect-for-weeknights chicken recipe that looks very promising. If it’s anywhere near as good as the meatballs, then maybe I’ll have to use one of the little notebook sections for recipes. Maybe I like to cook now. I have a new notebook, so anything is possible, anything at all.
Were you waiting for me to turn that into some kind of lesson about overcoming fears or leaving comfort zones or some shit? No, sorry. I have nothing for you but meatballs. Slightly too-spicy but very delicious meatballs.
*****
When I say that it was easy, I don’t mean that it was fun. Rolling meatballs is like making cookies, and I hate making cookies. And I’m terrible at quantities, too. I had two pounds of ground beef, because the recipe called for one pound, and I wanted to make enough to freeze, so I wouldn’t have to roll meatballs again. But then I looked at the two pounds of meat and I thought that it wouldn’t make nearly enough meatballs to serve everyone and then have enough left over to freeze. And I was wrong, because two pounds of ground beef turns into a quantity of meatballs best described by the measurement “shitload.” Look it up. It’s somewhere between a buttload and a shit-ton.
*****
That was yesterday. My kids are still talking about those meatballs. A culinary triumph. Today, I went to an after-work happy hour, and then to Barnes and Noble to pick up a birthday present for a three-year-old girl. I’m sure she’ll get lots of toys, so I bought her a lovely hardcover copy of Anne of Green Gables. It’s so pretty that I was tempted to buy a copy for myself.
I bought a notebook instead, because my current notebook is almost full. I’m picky about notebooks, and I usually like the selection at Barnes and Noble. But I skip the Moleskine section. Moleskine is full of itself. They lost me when they introduced the silly Evernote thing and the $179 pen. I do like their bright, hard-cover notebooks, though.
Barnes and Noble also carries Leuchturm1917 notebooks. These are like Moleskine notebooks for people who don’t think Moleskine is hard enough to pronounce. I liked their red cover color, too, but they only had the red one with graph paper. So no Leuchturm1917.
 |
| I was tempted. The red cover is very nice. |
The clearance section had what appeared to be lots of options, but the selection narrowed after I ruled out the ones with the inspirational sayings on the covers, and the obviously ugly ones, and the ones with the hand-tooled leather covers, and the ones from the 300 Writing (Creative/Sketching/Drawing) Prompt series.
 |
| No. |
I mean, I’m writing about shopping for a notebook. Yesterday, I wrote about meatballs. I don’t need writing prompts.
Among the remaining notebooks, at least half were bullet journals. Bullet journals are a big trend now. And because this trend combines technology rejection in the name of “authenticity” (use real notebooks with paper and real pens, not electronics!) and consumerism (not just any notebook and pen--THIS kind of notebook and THIS kind of pen!) and social media influencers (hundreds of Instagram-filtered notebook photos accompanied by multiple hashtags), it is an easy target for mockery.
Silly as it may be, though, I’m not going to make fun of bullet journaling, because if I’m being honest (and I’m always being honest), I really love the whole idea. Bullet journals are neat and pretty, two of my favorite characteristics of anything. Do a Google image search and see if you don’t want to stop what you’re doing right now and make a beautiful bullet journal. I do. I mean, what am I doing, anyway? Writing about meatballs? I could be bullet journaling.
But I know myself. My handwriting is appallingly bad, and I doodle, and I write in the margins, and I scribble. Notebooks, in fact, are my only refuge of untidiness. Notebooks and my sock drawers. Marie Kondo didn’t get to them yet. So my bullet journal wouldn't look anything like the ones that litter the Pinterest landscape. I'd feel like a failure.
Or worse. Because it's just as likely that I'd start bullet journaling and become compulsive about it, and then it would become another chore that I have to do every day. As I said, I know myself.
I saw one very nice-looking bullet journal notebook and was still tempted to buy it, bullet journal reservations notwithstanding. The notebook was covered with cellophane wrapping with a paper band for the price and brand name. "For the iist-makers and note-takers," it read. Well that's me, right? I spend a good part of my life taking notes and making lists so this notebook was obviously meant for me. But the back side of the wrapper also had a little illustration of the notebook pages and they were way too complicated. A dashboard for your notes. That’s too much to do. It’s too much work. It's the compulsivity again--give me a notebook page with seven different sections dedicated to specific content types, and I will feel compelled to use them appropriately.
 |
| Simple on the outside, complicated on the inside. I'd have needed a training class to use this notebook effectively. Ain't nobody got time. |
Assuming you’re still reading this, at what point did you thank God you're not me? Was it the part about thinking that two pounds of meatballs wasn't enough to feed four people, or the 45 minutes of deliberation over a notebook?
And that's a slight exaggeration. Maybe 20 minutes, or 25 at the most. After no more than 25 or 30 minutes, I picked a "modular" notebook with a very lovely soft blue faux leather cover. It's modular because it comes with three interchangeable and refillable inserts, so you can have blank paper for drawing if you draw, and graph paper for graphing stuff if you do that, and lined paper for writing. I will use all three of the inserts for writing, with a few doodles here and there, and then I’ll get more inserts because the cover really is so pretty that I’ll want to keep using it. And it’s an unusual size, compact but much longer than wide than most notebooks. It’s very well suited to both lists and notes. It has a clear pocket in the front for business cards, and a clear zipper pocket in the back, where I can keep my little ruler (neat underlines under dates and list titles being my only concession to neatness in my notebooks).
*****
The notebook is just right, and my notes are very neat and well-organized, as they always are during the three- to four-day notebook honeymoon period. The inside of the notebook will soon be a jumble of scribble, comprehensible only to me. And that’s the way I like it. And now it’s time to cook dinner. I have a new perfect-for-weeknights chicken recipe that looks very promising. If it’s anywhere near as good as the meatballs, then maybe I’ll have to use one of the little notebook sections for recipes. Maybe I like to cook now. I have a new notebook, so anything is possible, anything at all.
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Spectator
It's Friday night and I'm in Section 108 at Nationals Park, watching the Nats facing the Atlanta Braves. The Braves are running away with the National League East, but the Nats are playing really well, too. It should be a good game.
We're in almost the same section where we sat last time but it's 20 degrees cooler. In fact it's 20 degrees cooler than it was yesterday, too. I'm wearing long sleeves and I'm still a little cold. September. Go figure.
*****
It's the top of the third inning now, with no score. The Braves are a patient team. They know how to work a count. They're in no rush.
Baseball games are much more bright and colorful than they were when I was young. The Jumbotrons and scoreboards and advertisements are a visual riot, and the sensory overload doesn’t end there. Counting walk-up songs (Juan Soto’s are the best) and between-inning music and the national anthem, I've heard at least 30 different songs tonight. That doesn't include the organ music, which used to be the only music a person would hear at a baseball game. I like it. It's louder and more fun than it used to be.
It’s Saturday morning now, and the Braves beat the Nats 5-0. But the music was good, and after a cloudy day, the sky turned clear and inky dark blue with just a few clouds floating past the yellow-white harvest moon. And Teddy won the Presidents’ Race. He cheated, of course. Teddy only wins when he cheats. It was Friday the 13th, so Jason Voorhees joined the race, hockey mask and all, and dispatched George, Tom, and Abe, leaving Teddy the only contender. Teddy is my favorite. After the game, we walked along the Anacostia Riverwalk to our car, about ¾ of a mile from the ballpark. It was a good evening.
*****
I don’t spend many Saturday nights at the opera, but that’s what I did last night. With free tickets from a musician friend, I got to see the Maryland Lyric Opera perform Il Tabarro and Cavalleria Rusticana, two very different one-act Italian operas with a common ending--the husbands kill the men who slept with their wives.
The operas were performed concert-style, with the singers in recital dress rather than costumes, and no stage sets or props other than music stands (and very amusingly, a jacket used as a shroud--you had to be there).
Both of the operas are tragedies, but Il Tabarro has comedic elements and characters, including Tinca and Talpa the stevedores and Talpa’s wife, Frugola. Cavalleria Rusticana is more dramatic and intense; but Il Tabarro is ultimately sadder, because we know that Giorgetta’s infidelity is driven by grief at the loss of her baby. When her husband kills her lover, poor Giorgetta is left with nothing. A mother also loses her child in Cavelleria; in this case, he’s an adult child, murdered by his lover’s husband.
Super fun, right? But it really was. The English supertitles played on a screen high above the stage, so we could follow the story while listening to the glorious music; and the performances were amazing, both musically and dramatically. All of the singers were wonderful. Susan Bullock as Cavalleria’s Santuzza was heartbroken and desperate and when the beautiful Joowon Chae sang Lola’s first notes, it was all I could do not to shout “Whore! This is all your fault!” And when Il Tabarro’s Frugola, played by the amazing Allegra De Vita, sings that it’s better to be the boss in a hovel than a servant in a castle, it sounds like a happily defiant rallying cry.
*****
It’s Monday now, 8:30 PM. I worked a longer-than-usual day, then attended a meeting at Rockville High School, and then came home, five minutes ago. I wish sometimes that I was the kind of person who could walk in after a long day and just stop working, but I’m not that kind of person. So here I am.
And hockey starts tonight! Yes, it’s 90 degrees outside again after Friday’s short preview of fall, and I wish I was still swimming; and yes, it’s only pre-season, but it’s HOCKEY! And I’m not watching it. My husband and younger son are toggling between Nats baseball, about which I care to some extent; and NFL football, about which I care not one tiny little bit. Fortunately, I’m here to help them re-adjust their priorities. In five minutes or so, we’ll be swinging to the sweet sounds of Joe Beninati and Craig Laughlin.
*****
Tuesday, 9:05 PM. I’m watching “To Sir With Love,” a movie that I first saw when I was 14 or so. I read the book, too. It’s astonishingly old-fashioned now, but I still love it. I love the scene when the class shows up at their classmate’s mother’s funeral, as the camera pans back on the coal-stained East End brick rowhouses and the pale gray sky. Now I’m going to watch to the end so I can watch Sidney Poitier dance with Judy Geeson, and hear Lulu sing the title song. And that is a wrap on a few days of fandom. I think it’s time to read a book.
We're in almost the same section where we sat last time but it's 20 degrees cooler. In fact it's 20 degrees cooler than it was yesterday, too. I'm wearing long sleeves and I'm still a little cold. September. Go figure.
*****
It's the top of the third inning now, with no score. The Braves are a patient team. They know how to work a count. They're in no rush.
Baseball games are much more bright and colorful than they were when I was young. The Jumbotrons and scoreboards and advertisements are a visual riot, and the sensory overload doesn’t end there. Counting walk-up songs (Juan Soto’s are the best) and between-inning music and the national anthem, I've heard at least 30 different songs tonight. That doesn't include the organ music, which used to be the only music a person would hear at a baseball game. I like it. It's louder and more fun than it used to be.
 |
| There are ten different design elements on that scoreboard, and that doesn't count the actual box score display, which is tracking more data than a NASA mission control center. |
It’s Saturday morning now, and the Braves beat the Nats 5-0. But the music was good, and after a cloudy day, the sky turned clear and inky dark blue with just a few clouds floating past the yellow-white harvest moon. And Teddy won the Presidents’ Race. He cheated, of course. Teddy only wins when he cheats. It was Friday the 13th, so Jason Voorhees joined the race, hockey mask and all, and dispatched George, Tom, and Abe, leaving Teddy the only contender. Teddy is my favorite. After the game, we walked along the Anacostia Riverwalk to our car, about ¾ of a mile from the ballpark. It was a good evening.
*****
I don’t spend many Saturday nights at the opera, but that’s what I did last night. With free tickets from a musician friend, I got to see the Maryland Lyric Opera perform Il Tabarro and Cavalleria Rusticana, two very different one-act Italian operas with a common ending--the husbands kill the men who slept with their wives.
The operas were performed concert-style, with the singers in recital dress rather than costumes, and no stage sets or props other than music stands (and very amusingly, a jacket used as a shroud--you had to be there).
Both of the operas are tragedies, but Il Tabarro has comedic elements and characters, including Tinca and Talpa the stevedores and Talpa’s wife, Frugola. Cavalleria Rusticana is more dramatic and intense; but Il Tabarro is ultimately sadder, because we know that Giorgetta’s infidelity is driven by grief at the loss of her baby. When her husband kills her lover, poor Giorgetta is left with nothing. A mother also loses her child in Cavelleria; in this case, he’s an adult child, murdered by his lover’s husband.
Super fun, right? But it really was. The English supertitles played on a screen high above the stage, so we could follow the story while listening to the glorious music; and the performances were amazing, both musically and dramatically. All of the singers were wonderful. Susan Bullock as Cavalleria’s Santuzza was heartbroken and desperate and when the beautiful Joowon Chae sang Lola’s first notes, it was all I could do not to shout “Whore! This is all your fault!” And when Il Tabarro’s Frugola, played by the amazing Allegra De Vita, sings that it’s better to be the boss in a hovel than a servant in a castle, it sounds like a happily defiant rallying cry.
*****
It’s Monday now, 8:30 PM. I worked a longer-than-usual day, then attended a meeting at Rockville High School, and then came home, five minutes ago. I wish sometimes that I was the kind of person who could walk in after a long day and just stop working, but I’m not that kind of person. So here I am.
And hockey starts tonight! Yes, it’s 90 degrees outside again after Friday’s short preview of fall, and I wish I was still swimming; and yes, it’s only pre-season, but it’s HOCKEY! And I’m not watching it. My husband and younger son are toggling between Nats baseball, about which I care to some extent; and NFL football, about which I care not one tiny little bit. Fortunately, I’m here to help them re-adjust their priorities. In five minutes or so, we’ll be swinging to the sweet sounds of Joe Beninati and Craig Laughlin.
*****
Tuesday, 9:05 PM. I’m watching “To Sir With Love,” a movie that I first saw when I was 14 or so. I read the book, too. It’s astonishingly old-fashioned now, but I still love it. I love the scene when the class shows up at their classmate’s mother’s funeral, as the camera pans back on the coal-stained East End brick rowhouses and the pale gray sky. Now I’m going to watch to the end so I can watch Sidney Poitier dance with Judy Geeson, and hear Lulu sing the title song. And that is a wrap on a few days of fandom. I think it’s time to read a book.
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
Shopping
We’re buying a car for my son today. His very old car’s last legs are wearing out, and it’s probably better for us to bite the bullet and hand over our savings for a new car than to keep sinking money into the old one.
My son is very excited, as well he should be. My husband and I grew up poor and I don't know what we find most amazing: that an 18-year-old will be pretty much handed a new(ish) car (he's contributing $1000), or that we are now the kind of people who can go out on a Sunday afternoon and buy our child a car. Amazing.
*****
Now we're test-driving; rather, he is test-driving, and I’m sitting in the back. He's a good driver, enough that the salesman complimented him. Getting into cars with strangers all day long must be the hardest thing about selling cars for a living.
*****
Car buying is much faster than it used to be. We walked in to Carmax about 2.5 hours ago, and now we have paperwork in hand, and we're just waiting for the staff to put the tags on the new car and to make it even cleaner than it already was. We bought a 2016 Nissan Rogue, black exterior and interior. It's very nice looking. My son loves it and if he's happy, then I'm happy.
*****
That was Sunday, and today is Monday. It’s actually my birthday. It feels like a slightly more festive than normal regular day. And that’s pretty good.
I went clothes-shopping on Saturday, and I bought some things. There are fashion moments when the prevailing look matches my aesthetic and my body type and my idea of how to live in clothes, and when those moments arise, I stock up. It might be too soon to tell, though, if this is really one of those moments. Because I’m going out to dinner soon, as nice middle-aged ladies tend to do on their birthdays; and I just perused my very well-stocked closet, but I can’t find anything to wear. It’s partly a weather thing. I’m terrible at the dreaded “transitional” seasons, when you have to balance the appropriate seasonal mood with the actual temperature. But it’s partly because I’m very bad at shopping and I keep buying the wrong things. I should stick with handbags.
Most of my clothes come from one store. I had a bad experience there on Saturday and instead of just letting it go, I told the company’s customer service department that I’d never shop there again. I know. I’m ridiculous. In my defense, it was a really bad experience and it’s their fault and they were utterly indifferent to my very valid concerns. But now I’m committed to this thing and I have to either find a new store, or find a way to shop there without them ever finding out. All cash, I suppose. Completely ridiculous, that's what I am. Fortunately, I have lots of company in the rest of the entire human race.
*****
It was a good birthday. I'm a year older. That’s better, as they say, than the alternative
Meanwhile it's going to be hot for another week or so, and the transitional clothing dilemma persists. The store that so upset me has my favorite kind of mid-calf length print rayon skirts because it’s apparently 1995 again. Those skirts will be just the thing to carry me through the warm days of the final transition from summer to fall. So I borrowed my husband’s Visa, set up a new online account with the store, and had the skirts shipped to my mother-in-law’s house. I get my skirts, and my boycott continues, as far as they know. Everyone wins.
I used to think that car-shopping was difficult, It’s nothing compared to buying a skirt.
My son is very excited, as well he should be. My husband and I grew up poor and I don't know what we find most amazing: that an 18-year-old will be pretty much handed a new(ish) car (he's contributing $1000), or that we are now the kind of people who can go out on a Sunday afternoon and buy our child a car. Amazing.
*****
Now we're test-driving; rather, he is test-driving, and I’m sitting in the back. He's a good driver, enough that the salesman complimented him. Getting into cars with strangers all day long must be the hardest thing about selling cars for a living.
*****
Car buying is much faster than it used to be. We walked in to Carmax about 2.5 hours ago, and now we have paperwork in hand, and we're just waiting for the staff to put the tags on the new car and to make it even cleaner than it already was. We bought a 2016 Nissan Rogue, black exterior and interior. It's very nice looking. My son loves it and if he's happy, then I'm happy.
 |
| He looks happy, doesn't he? |
*****
That was Sunday, and today is Monday. It’s actually my birthday. It feels like a slightly more festive than normal regular day. And that’s pretty good.
I went clothes-shopping on Saturday, and I bought some things. There are fashion moments when the prevailing look matches my aesthetic and my body type and my idea of how to live in clothes, and when those moments arise, I stock up. It might be too soon to tell, though, if this is really one of those moments. Because I’m going out to dinner soon, as nice middle-aged ladies tend to do on their birthdays; and I just perused my very well-stocked closet, but I can’t find anything to wear. It’s partly a weather thing. I’m terrible at the dreaded “transitional” seasons, when you have to balance the appropriate seasonal mood with the actual temperature. But it’s partly because I’m very bad at shopping and I keep buying the wrong things. I should stick with handbags.
Most of my clothes come from one store. I had a bad experience there on Saturday and instead of just letting it go, I told the company’s customer service department that I’d never shop there again. I know. I’m ridiculous. In my defense, it was a really bad experience and it’s their fault and they were utterly indifferent to my very valid concerns. But now I’m committed to this thing and I have to either find a new store, or find a way to shop there without them ever finding out. All cash, I suppose. Completely ridiculous, that's what I am. Fortunately, I have lots of company in the rest of the entire human race.
*****
It was a good birthday. I'm a year older. That’s better, as they say, than the alternative
Meanwhile it's going to be hot for another week or so, and the transitional clothing dilemma persists. The store that so upset me has my favorite kind of mid-calf length print rayon skirts because it’s apparently 1995 again. Those skirts will be just the thing to carry me through the warm days of the final transition from summer to fall. So I borrowed my husband’s Visa, set up a new online account with the store, and had the skirts shipped to my mother-in-law’s house. I get my skirts, and my boycott continues, as far as they know. Everyone wins.
I used to think that car-shopping was difficult, It’s nothing compared to buying a skirt.
Thursday, September 5, 2019
Senioritis
If you're a person who has a hard time accepting that summer is over, then one Montgomery County Public Schools Back to School Night will yank you right back to reality. Kick and scream if you want to but you are strapped onto a freight train of lunches and homework and sports and concerts and meetings, and there are no stops between here and June.
Yes, it's BTS night at Rockville High School and I'm sitting in a stairwell waiting for the festivities to begin. Four years of Rockville BTS nights taught me that arriving early enough to get a parking spot near the exit is key, so I arrived at 6. I joined the Booster Club and the PTSA, so I'm $60 poorer but rich in the knowledge that I am a responsible member of the Rockville High School community.
It's 6:30 now so class rotations will begin soon. I don't need a map and I don't need directions from the student guides and I don't need to visit the counseling office. I'm an alumni parent so I know these ropes. I'll walk the halls when the bell rings, adding considerably to my step count for today; and I'll meet my son's teachers (several of whom I already know). Then I will skip out midway through 8th period and run to my car, and I'll be on Baltimore Road before the rest of the suckers even get out of the building. Freshmen. SMH.
Tuesday, September 3, 2019
Uptown problems
It’s the next-to-last Friday in August and autumn is coming, whether I want it or not, and I don’t. I worked from home today, the first day in a week that the daytime temperatures fell below 90, and I listened as the rain pounded my roof, drops falling faster than my hands move on the keyboard (and they move pretty fast). My younger son’s high school orientation is next Thursday and then school starts on the day after Labor Day. We still have a few days of summer to cling to but it’s slipping away.
*****
I try to swim almost every day in the summer, but during the last few days of August, swimming becomes an act driven by desperation. If it’s August 23, as it is today; and I have a choice between swimming and almost anything else in life, then I will swim because time is running out. Yes, I can swim indoors all year round if I want to, but it’s not the same. It’s not even close.
It rained all day so I never did get a chance to swim, but tomorrow is another day.
*****
I was right about tomorrow, which is now today and is in fact another day, but completely different from yesterday. It’s Saturday, bright and sunny and at least 20 degrees cooler than it was two days ago. I’m still going to swim, because the water will still be warm and because I’d swim even if it wasn’t.
It’s Saturday, so I really have no idea what’s going on in the world. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that there’s no way to consult any news source without violating my weekend Trump embargo, so whatever is happening on the world stage right now will have to wait until Monday.
WIth current events off limits for now, I’m continuing to read Postwar. Normally, I finish a book in a few days, but this one is quite long. One of the things that this book has made me think about is how many of the things that we think of as history or tradition or culture are incredibly fleeting and short-lived. Things change so much in the course of a hundred years; and while a hundred years is a long time in one sense, it’s just a single human lifespan, give or take. My great-grandmother lived to age 106. My grandmother will be 96 in December. American constitutional democracy has been around for over 200 years, but what we think of as the American way of life is a product of the last 70 years. Almost everything is temporary. Practically nothing lasts forever.
*****
Except winter. Winter lasts forever. Is it too early to start complaining about winter when it’s still August (Sunday, August 25 to be exact) and it’s sunny and bright with temperatures in the low 70s?
No. It is not too early at all. August high temperatures in the low 70s are the slippery slope (Trump didn’t invent that expression) to autumn, which is the even steeper slippery slope to six months of winter. Yesterday, the pool water was still almost warm and I had a lovely swim with a short sharp shock of cold air at the end. Last night the temperatures dropped
into the 50s, and today is the kind of day that pumpkin spice latte drinkers dream about all summer long: cool, breezy, with low humidity--the worst kind of day for outdoor swimming.
You know what? It’ll be bracing.
*****
I’ll get there eventually. Meanwhile, my son and I are watching “Any Given Sunday,” a movie that I haven’t seen or thought about for a long time. I like this movie, probably more than any other Oliver Stone movie. My husband disliked it because of the fictionalized football league and teams--he thought that Stone should have paid for licensing rights to use real NFL teams. I disagree. I think that the stylized versions of NFL uniforms and the predator team names lay bare what professional football really is, without the veneer of family and inclusiveness that the NFL is always trying to impose on it. Professional football and the whole one-percent corporate edifice that supports it is a simple matter of strong vs. weak; and strong always wins.
I don’t even know what I’m talking about right now. I feel for John C. McGinley’s character, the blowhard broadcaster. There’s a lot of pressure in talking or writing for a living. You have to churn out a lot of words in a day, and not all of them are going to be good. Not all of them are even going to make any sense.
*****
It’s Monday now and I’m all caught up on current events. And even though it’s still August, it stayed in the 60s all day today. It was cloudy when I got home, with a breeze that made it downright chilly. The water was cold yesterday (I did finally swim) and I knew it would be much worse today and I didn’t have the heart to get into a cold dank pool on an October-looking night. It feels like summer is a rug that’s been yanked out from under me without so much as a by-your-leave. I went for a walk instead. It was fine.
*****
It’s Tuesday, so there's less than a week left of real summer. It was a few degrees warmer outside today; still unseasonably cool and overcast, but the air was still and soft and humid and the sun was trying to break through the heavy cloud cover. I came home from work and grocery shopping, and my whole body yearned for a swim. The air was just warm enough and really, i thought, how cold can the water have gotten in just two days.
It was freezing cold and glorious. I swam laps and wrapped myself in a towel and went on my way rejoicing, having snatched summer from the jaws of winter. It’s not over yet.
*****
OK, so maybe it’s over. It’s Wednesday night, 8 PM, and I’m working on a proposal (well, I was until a minute ago, and I will again in another minute) and tomorrow morning, I’ll take my younger son to his high school orientation. It’s a half-day, and then he’s off on Friday and for the rest of the weekend until school starts in earnest next Tuesday. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again--the moment I have to drop a child off in front of a school building in the morning, and then wade through the pile of paperwork that will come home with him in the afternoon is the moment that summer is pretty much over.
I almost forgot to write something today because proposal deadlines wait for no one. This probably isn’t how I should be spending my time right now, but writing (like swimming) is one of only many things that I’m compulsive about. A 4 pm thunderstorm curtailed my swimming plans, which is just as well because I have a proposal to write. Hasta manana.
*****
And now it’s manana, meaning Thursday. I’m knee-deep in proposals, but that’s a big improvement over yesterday, when I was neck-deep. And speaking of deep, I also got to swim again today. The pool was even colder than it was on Tuesday, and I impressed myself by slipping right into the water without a moment’s hesitation. I didn’t have much time, and every minute I spent trying to steel myself to the cold was a minute that I wouldn’t have have been swimming, on one of the very last swimming days of the summer. Four days to go and I plan to immerse myself in that icy water on every single one of them.
*****
“I got uptown problems, and they’re not really problems at all.”
Brad Pitt’s character says this to his daughter in “Moneyball,” a movie that my 14-year-old son and I will watch any time it’s on. It was on last night, so of course, we watched part of it. It’s Friday afternoon of Labor Day weekend, and I’m almost finished working, and I’m gearing up for the three-day celebration (for other people) and period of mourning (for me) that is the official end of summer. Yes, I know that summer doesn’t really end for three weeks, but Labor Day is the end of summer for those of us who define summer as no school, no bedtime, and no day complete without at least a short swim. It’s my least favorite weekend of the year, but that’s an uptown problem, isn’t it? There are lots of good things about fall if you don’t count pumpkin spice latte, and as soon as I finish complaining about the end of summer, I’ll figure out what those good things might be.
*****
It’s Labor Day now. I’m writing something else so I worked on that on Saturday and Sunday. And now I’m back to lamenting the end of summer. And I’m doing other things, too. I mean, I don’t sit around and bitch all day long. That you know of.
Labor Day is a combination holiday and prep day. Now that everyone is back to school again, I need to get things ready. Lunches and breakfast and dinner and clothes and supplies and stuff. They’re actually old enough to do all of that themselves. And they do all of it themselves. It’s just that I feel that I still need to oversee and supervise and coordinate. I like being needed.
It’s 11:50 AM now. The pool opens in ten minutes, so I’m going to do some stuff, and then I’m going to do some more stuff, and then I”m going to get out of the house and stay out of the house until 9 PM. And then tomorrow, it’s officially fall. And that’s not the best thing, but it’s not the worst thing. It’s an uptown problem, and that’s not a problem at all.
*****
I try to swim almost every day in the summer, but during the last few days of August, swimming becomes an act driven by desperation. If it’s August 23, as it is today; and I have a choice between swimming and almost anything else in life, then I will swim because time is running out. Yes, I can swim indoors all year round if I want to, but it’s not the same. It’s not even close.
It rained all day so I never did get a chance to swim, but tomorrow is another day.
*****
I was right about tomorrow, which is now today and is in fact another day, but completely different from yesterday. It’s Saturday, bright and sunny and at least 20 degrees cooler than it was two days ago. I’m still going to swim, because the water will still be warm and because I’d swim even if it wasn’t.
It’s Saturday, so I really have no idea what’s going on in the world. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that there’s no way to consult any news source without violating my weekend Trump embargo, so whatever is happening on the world stage right now will have to wait until Monday.
WIth current events off limits for now, I’m continuing to read Postwar. Normally, I finish a book in a few days, but this one is quite long. One of the things that this book has made me think about is how many of the things that we think of as history or tradition or culture are incredibly fleeting and short-lived. Things change so much in the course of a hundred years; and while a hundred years is a long time in one sense, it’s just a single human lifespan, give or take. My great-grandmother lived to age 106. My grandmother will be 96 in December. American constitutional democracy has been around for over 200 years, but what we think of as the American way of life is a product of the last 70 years. Almost everything is temporary. Practically nothing lasts forever.
*****
Except winter. Winter lasts forever. Is it too early to start complaining about winter when it’s still August (Sunday, August 25 to be exact) and it’s sunny and bright with temperatures in the low 70s?
No. It is not too early at all. August high temperatures in the low 70s are the slippery slope (Trump didn’t invent that expression) to autumn, which is the even steeper slippery slope to six months of winter. Yesterday, the pool water was still almost warm and I had a lovely swim with a short sharp shock of cold air at the end. Last night the temperatures dropped
into the 50s, and today is the kind of day that pumpkin spice latte drinkers dream about all summer long: cool, breezy, with low humidity--the worst kind of day for outdoor swimming.
You know what? It’ll be bracing.
*****
I’ll get there eventually. Meanwhile, my son and I are watching “Any Given Sunday,” a movie that I haven’t seen or thought about for a long time. I like this movie, probably more than any other Oliver Stone movie. My husband disliked it because of the fictionalized football league and teams--he thought that Stone should have paid for licensing rights to use real NFL teams. I disagree. I think that the stylized versions of NFL uniforms and the predator team names lay bare what professional football really is, without the veneer of family and inclusiveness that the NFL is always trying to impose on it. Professional football and the whole one-percent corporate edifice that supports it is a simple matter of strong vs. weak; and strong always wins.
I don’t even know what I’m talking about right now. I feel for John C. McGinley’s character, the blowhard broadcaster. There’s a lot of pressure in talking or writing for a living. You have to churn out a lot of words in a day, and not all of them are going to be good. Not all of them are even going to make any sense.
*****
It’s Monday now and I’m all caught up on current events. And even though it’s still August, it stayed in the 60s all day today. It was cloudy when I got home, with a breeze that made it downright chilly. The water was cold yesterday (I did finally swim) and I knew it would be much worse today and I didn’t have the heart to get into a cold dank pool on an October-looking night. It feels like summer is a rug that’s been yanked out from under me without so much as a by-your-leave. I went for a walk instead. It was fine.
*****
It’s Tuesday, so there's less than a week left of real summer. It was a few degrees warmer outside today; still unseasonably cool and overcast, but the air was still and soft and humid and the sun was trying to break through the heavy cloud cover. I came home from work and grocery shopping, and my whole body yearned for a swim. The air was just warm enough and really, i thought, how cold can the water have gotten in just two days.
It was freezing cold and glorious. I swam laps and wrapped myself in a towel and went on my way rejoicing, having snatched summer from the jaws of winter. It’s not over yet.
*****
OK, so maybe it’s over. It’s Wednesday night, 8 PM, and I’m working on a proposal (well, I was until a minute ago, and I will again in another minute) and tomorrow morning, I’ll take my younger son to his high school orientation. It’s a half-day, and then he’s off on Friday and for the rest of the weekend until school starts in earnest next Tuesday. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again--the moment I have to drop a child off in front of a school building in the morning, and then wade through the pile of paperwork that will come home with him in the afternoon is the moment that summer is pretty much over.
I almost forgot to write something today because proposal deadlines wait for no one. This probably isn’t how I should be spending my time right now, but writing (like swimming) is one of only many things that I’m compulsive about. A 4 pm thunderstorm curtailed my swimming plans, which is just as well because I have a proposal to write. Hasta manana.
*****
And now it’s manana, meaning Thursday. I’m knee-deep in proposals, but that’s a big improvement over yesterday, when I was neck-deep. And speaking of deep, I also got to swim again today. The pool was even colder than it was on Tuesday, and I impressed myself by slipping right into the water without a moment’s hesitation. I didn’t have much time, and every minute I spent trying to steel myself to the cold was a minute that I wouldn’t have have been swimming, on one of the very last swimming days of the summer. Four days to go and I plan to immerse myself in that icy water on every single one of them.
*****
“I got uptown problems, and they’re not really problems at all.”
Brad Pitt’s character says this to his daughter in “Moneyball,” a movie that my 14-year-old son and I will watch any time it’s on. It was on last night, so of course, we watched part of it. It’s Friday afternoon of Labor Day weekend, and I’m almost finished working, and I’m gearing up for the three-day celebration (for other people) and period of mourning (for me) that is the official end of summer. Yes, I know that summer doesn’t really end for three weeks, but Labor Day is the end of summer for those of us who define summer as no school, no bedtime, and no day complete without at least a short swim. It’s my least favorite weekend of the year, but that’s an uptown problem, isn’t it? There are lots of good things about fall if you don’t count pumpkin spice latte, and as soon as I finish complaining about the end of summer, I’ll figure out what those good things might be.
*****
It’s Labor Day now. I’m writing something else so I worked on that on Saturday and Sunday. And now I’m back to lamenting the end of summer. And I’m doing other things, too. I mean, I don’t sit around and bitch all day long. That you know of.
Labor Day is a combination holiday and prep day. Now that everyone is back to school again, I need to get things ready. Lunches and breakfast and dinner and clothes and supplies and stuff. They’re actually old enough to do all of that themselves. And they do all of it themselves. It’s just that I feel that I still need to oversee and supervise and coordinate. I like being needed.
It’s 11:50 AM now. The pool opens in ten minutes, so I’m going to do some stuff, and then I’m going to do some more stuff, and then I”m going to get out of the house and stay out of the house until 9 PM. And then tomorrow, it’s officially fall. And that’s not the best thing, but it’s not the worst thing. It’s an uptown problem, and that’s not a problem at all.
Thursday, August 29, 2019
Terrible beauty
As I mentioned here, I read Say Nothing this summer. As I also mentioned to all three of you who eagerly await my critical opinion, I wrote a whole post about it. So here it is.
*****
I went to Ireland in March. In one of the many supreme ironies that make up my life, I cannot stop thinking about the place that I had absolutely no desire to visit in the first place. Like many Irish-Americans, I grew up with sentimental Irish-Catholic parents who overdid St. Patrick’s Day and hung Cead Mile Failte signs on the front door and had 26+6=1 bumper stickers on their cars. My mother still has that bumper sticker on her car. By the time I reached my twenties, I had developed a hard shell of dismissive cynicism about what I thought of as my so-called Irish roots. So, no, I didn’t want to go to Ireland; and I really didn’t want to go to Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day, which is what we did. And then when I finally went, I loved the place and felt more at home there than in any place I’ve ever been. And I miss it and I can’t wait to go back. Oh, the irony.
So anyway, I have been reading more about Ireland, north and south, in sort of a piecemeal, whatever-looks-interesting way. In addition to being about Ireland, Say Nothing is also a critical-mass kind of book--I kept hearing about it until there was no longer any way to avoid it.
The author, Patrick Radden Keefe (who is American) appeared on the Chris Hayes show on MSNBC. I have been avoiding political media, especially TV, but one night as critical mass for this book was still building, I flipped past MSNBC only to flip right back when I noticed the words “Author of Say Nothing” on the lower third of the screen. Keefe was Hayes’s guest.
I had to turn the show off after just a few minutes of listening to these two American thought leaders recoiling in horror at the primitive Irish-Catholic way of life in which families simply accept as many children as they’re given without resort to contraception or other forms of family planning, as Jean McConville and her family apparently did. I don’t criticize anyone who wants to limit their family size. I have only two children and sometimes they’re two more than I can handle. And I would not want to live in Divis Flats or anything like it. But the materialistic worldview that believes that too many children and not enough comfort leads inevitably to misery is just so boring and tiresome.
But I digress. You should be used to that.
*****
If you had any doubt that race is a factor in how the world judges wrongdoing, then any history of the IRA should make you reconsider. If like me, you grew up in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood in a northeastern city of the United States - - Philadelphia in my case, but New York or Providence or (of course) Boston will do just as well - - then perhaps you had parents or grandparents who had a "yes but…" attitude toward the IRA. "Aren't they terrorists?" you might have asked. "Yes but…" insert excuse about religious persecution and civil rights.
And they had a point of course, to the extent that stops short of murder. Catholics in Northern Ireland endured ridiculous discrimination and persecution at the hands of the Protestant majority, who were empowered and enabled by the British. They had every right to be outraged. But the same Americans who despise Islamic terrorists excuse the IRA terrorists, who were just as murderous and just as fanatical, but also white and poetic and wryly funny and Aran sweater-clad and so just romantic enough that Irish-Americans could excuse or at least understand their cruelty and violence. If only al-Qaeda terrorists quoted Yeats or Joyce. If only ISIS looked good in cable knit.
*****
Extreme dedication to a political cause can overcome a person’s humanity. In communist countries, children were taught to betray their families in loyalty to the state. In the United States in 2019, people end friendships or stop speaking to parents and siblings who support Trump (or who don’t). In Northern Ireland in 1972, a mother of ten, a recent widow, was abducted from her home in front of her children, driven to a secret location, and then shot dead and buried in a shallow grave, because she was believed to have betrayed the IRA. Her body was found 30 years later. Her children grew up not knowing what had happened to her, wondering if she had disappeared, wondering if they’d ever see her alive again. What cause justifies a heartless cold-blooded murder without even the comfort of the dead body to bury and give certainty of the loved one’s death? How do the murderers live with the dreadful suffering of 10 orphaned children?
Gerry Adams is the main villain of Say Nothing, though not the only one. The book firmly dismisses Adams' claim that he was never an IRA member, and also partially blames him for the deaths of six of the 1981 hunger strikers. It also confirms Brendan Hughes' and Dolours Price's assertion that Adams alone ordered the abduction and murder of Jean McConville. Hughes and Price are treated with more understanding but their moral responsibility for the murder (and several other murders) is also clear. Other than Jean McConville and her poor children, Hughes is the saddest figure in the book. To his death, he defended the decision to kill McConville. He claimed to be certain that she was an informer, and like many other IRA soldiers, he believed that death was the only reasonable punishment for informers.
Apparently, no evidence exists that would prove that Jean McConville was an informer; and the circumstantial evidence--she was a widowed mother of 10 children, poorly educated, overwhelmed, not well-connected, not political--seems to suggest strongly that she wasn't. Brendan Hughes suffered from PTSD and alcoholism and remained a believer in the republican cause until he died. Maybe he really believed that Jean McConville was an informer and that she deserved to die. Or maybe he had to convince himself that she was, in order to live with the guilt of murdering her and leaving her 10 children to the tender mercies of the Northern Irish social welfare system.
Dolours Price was more complicated. Like Hughes, she rejected the Good Friday Agreement and condemned Gerry Adams and the other establishment figures who agreed to abandon the armed struggle. But she was motivated by something other than politics, too. She was proud of the hunger strike; proud of her determination and endurance. Keefe writes that Price “retained a ferocious pride in her own headlong personal history. When an American graduate student named Tara Keenan visited her in 2003, Price said, ‘I would like to think that what I did was to illustrate to the world the ability of any regular human being to push themselves to the limits and beyond, physically and mentally, because of some deeply felt belief.’”
In another life, Dolours Price might have been a great athlete or scholar or something else that requires extreme dedication and self-discipline. Of course, by participating in the murder of the widowed mother of ten children, she also pushed herself past the limits of human compassion and decency. The hunger strike ruined her body, and the flashbacks from the murders she committed ruined her mind and she died alone, addicted to drugs and alcohol. Maybe she found peace and reconciliation with God before she died. Maybe Brendan Hughes did, too. I hope so.
*****
"Now and in time to be
Wherever green is worn
All changed, changed utterly
A terrible beauty is born."
(W. B. Yeats, “Easter 1916”)
Yeats was an idiot, for lots of reasons other than this stupid poem. I can’t think about what happened to Jean McConville, nor the sad and broken-down later lives and deaths of Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes and reconcile the words “terrible” and “beauty.” There was no beauty in Jean McConville’s murder, no beauty in the abuse that her orphaned children endured, no beauty in the self-destruction of Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price and so many others who sacrificed their humanity to the Republican cause. It was only terrible. Terrible and a waste and not noble at all.
I have only been to Ireland once, 21 years after the Good Friday agreement. The country that I became acquainted with is peaceful and prosperous and happy, and that’s the only experience I have of Ireland. It's hard for me to reconcile the green and happy place that I loved at first sight with the dark maze of menace and secrets and violence and fear that was Northern Ireland in the 1970s.
There are grown people on both sides of the border who don't remember the Troubles, who only really know Ireland as it is now. But they have parents and grandparents who do remember the past, and who know that it could happen again. It’s happening again already.
*****
I finally finished the book. I was so absorbed in the story that it was hard to pull myself back to Maryland in 2019. And I found myself as angry with Gerry Adams as Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes were and more sympathetic toward Price and Hughes than any reasonable person should have been. Another day or so and I'd probably have burned a Union Jack and bought a 26+6=1 bumper sticker.
This is probably why I resisted going to Ireland for so long. There was always the danger that I would get attached. There was always the possibility that I'd go native.
*****
After I finished Say Nothing, I read Can You Ever Forgive Me? I’ll write about that later. Then I read Thatcher, a biography of one of the IRA’s greatest nemeses.
Last week, I had to take a selfie. I was the employee of the week at my job (I went from employee of the year to employee of the week--how the mighty have fallen) and HR wanted to post a picture of me on the company social media accounts. I was working from home and no one else was around to take a picture of me, so I had to do it myself. It was a mess. I took one really, really good one--my hair looked amazing, and the light must have been just right because my face was clear and unlined and glowing. I could have passed for 35 in that picture. Unfortunately, I took it in front of the bathroom door, and I didn’t want to send a picture that had a toilet as a backdrop. So I took another one from another angle, and it was horrifying. I looked like Barbara Bush, God rest her soul.
*****
I ended up finding a picture of myself from 2018 that was not terribly flattering, but not hideous either. It kind of looked like I actually look. It was as close to the truth as a picture can get, And somewhere in between Margaret Thatcher and Dolours Price, there might be something close to the truth about the Northern Ireland and the Troubles.. I won’t actually get to that truth by reading two books, but it’s a start. One question that anyone who has ever studied Northern Ireland must ask is who can ever understand anything, ever? Who but God can ever know the whole truth?
*****
I went to Ireland in March. In one of the many supreme ironies that make up my life, I cannot stop thinking about the place that I had absolutely no desire to visit in the first place. Like many Irish-Americans, I grew up with sentimental Irish-Catholic parents who overdid St. Patrick’s Day and hung Cead Mile Failte signs on the front door and had 26+6=1 bumper stickers on their cars. My mother still has that bumper sticker on her car. By the time I reached my twenties, I had developed a hard shell of dismissive cynicism about what I thought of as my so-called Irish roots. So, no, I didn’t want to go to Ireland; and I really didn’t want to go to Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day, which is what we did. And then when I finally went, I loved the place and felt more at home there than in any place I’ve ever been. And I miss it and I can’t wait to go back. Oh, the irony.
So anyway, I have been reading more about Ireland, north and south, in sort of a piecemeal, whatever-looks-interesting way. In addition to being about Ireland, Say Nothing is also a critical-mass kind of book--I kept hearing about it until there was no longer any way to avoid it.
The author, Patrick Radden Keefe (who is American) appeared on the Chris Hayes show on MSNBC. I have been avoiding political media, especially TV, but one night as critical mass for this book was still building, I flipped past MSNBC only to flip right back when I noticed the words “Author of Say Nothing” on the lower third of the screen. Keefe was Hayes’s guest.
I had to turn the show off after just a few minutes of listening to these two American thought leaders recoiling in horror at the primitive Irish-Catholic way of life in which families simply accept as many children as they’re given without resort to contraception or other forms of family planning, as Jean McConville and her family apparently did. I don’t criticize anyone who wants to limit their family size. I have only two children and sometimes they’re two more than I can handle. And I would not want to live in Divis Flats or anything like it. But the materialistic worldview that believes that too many children and not enough comfort leads inevitably to misery is just so boring and tiresome.
But I digress. You should be used to that.
*****
If you had any doubt that race is a factor in how the world judges wrongdoing, then any history of the IRA should make you reconsider. If like me, you grew up in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood in a northeastern city of the United States - - Philadelphia in my case, but New York or Providence or (of course) Boston will do just as well - - then perhaps you had parents or grandparents who had a "yes but…" attitude toward the IRA. "Aren't they terrorists?" you might have asked. "Yes but…" insert excuse about religious persecution and civil rights.
And they had a point of course, to the extent that stops short of murder. Catholics in Northern Ireland endured ridiculous discrimination and persecution at the hands of the Protestant majority, who were empowered and enabled by the British. They had every right to be outraged. But the same Americans who despise Islamic terrorists excuse the IRA terrorists, who were just as murderous and just as fanatical, but also white and poetic and wryly funny and Aran sweater-clad and so just romantic enough that Irish-Americans could excuse or at least understand their cruelty and violence. If only al-Qaeda terrorists quoted Yeats or Joyce. If only ISIS looked good in cable knit.
*****
Extreme dedication to a political cause can overcome a person’s humanity. In communist countries, children were taught to betray their families in loyalty to the state. In the United States in 2019, people end friendships or stop speaking to parents and siblings who support Trump (or who don’t). In Northern Ireland in 1972, a mother of ten, a recent widow, was abducted from her home in front of her children, driven to a secret location, and then shot dead and buried in a shallow grave, because she was believed to have betrayed the IRA. Her body was found 30 years later. Her children grew up not knowing what had happened to her, wondering if she had disappeared, wondering if they’d ever see her alive again. What cause justifies a heartless cold-blooded murder without even the comfort of the dead body to bury and give certainty of the loved one’s death? How do the murderers live with the dreadful suffering of 10 orphaned children?
Gerry Adams is the main villain of Say Nothing, though not the only one. The book firmly dismisses Adams' claim that he was never an IRA member, and also partially blames him for the deaths of six of the 1981 hunger strikers. It also confirms Brendan Hughes' and Dolours Price's assertion that Adams alone ordered the abduction and murder of Jean McConville. Hughes and Price are treated with more understanding but their moral responsibility for the murder (and several other murders) is also clear. Other than Jean McConville and her poor children, Hughes is the saddest figure in the book. To his death, he defended the decision to kill McConville. He claimed to be certain that she was an informer, and like many other IRA soldiers, he believed that death was the only reasonable punishment for informers.
Apparently, no evidence exists that would prove that Jean McConville was an informer; and the circumstantial evidence--she was a widowed mother of 10 children, poorly educated, overwhelmed, not well-connected, not political--seems to suggest strongly that she wasn't. Brendan Hughes suffered from PTSD and alcoholism and remained a believer in the republican cause until he died. Maybe he really believed that Jean McConville was an informer and that she deserved to die. Or maybe he had to convince himself that she was, in order to live with the guilt of murdering her and leaving her 10 children to the tender mercies of the Northern Irish social welfare system.
Dolours Price was more complicated. Like Hughes, she rejected the Good Friday Agreement and condemned Gerry Adams and the other establishment figures who agreed to abandon the armed struggle. But she was motivated by something other than politics, too. She was proud of the hunger strike; proud of her determination and endurance. Keefe writes that Price “retained a ferocious pride in her own headlong personal history. When an American graduate student named Tara Keenan visited her in 2003, Price said, ‘I would like to think that what I did was to illustrate to the world the ability of any regular human being to push themselves to the limits and beyond, physically and mentally, because of some deeply felt belief.’”
In another life, Dolours Price might have been a great athlete or scholar or something else that requires extreme dedication and self-discipline. Of course, by participating in the murder of the widowed mother of ten children, she also pushed herself past the limits of human compassion and decency. The hunger strike ruined her body, and the flashbacks from the murders she committed ruined her mind and she died alone, addicted to drugs and alcohol. Maybe she found peace and reconciliation with God before she died. Maybe Brendan Hughes did, too. I hope so.
*****
"Now and in time to be
Wherever green is worn
All changed, changed utterly
A terrible beauty is born."
(W. B. Yeats, “Easter 1916”)
Yeats was an idiot, for lots of reasons other than this stupid poem. I can’t think about what happened to Jean McConville, nor the sad and broken-down later lives and deaths of Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes and reconcile the words “terrible” and “beauty.” There was no beauty in Jean McConville’s murder, no beauty in the abuse that her orphaned children endured, no beauty in the self-destruction of Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price and so many others who sacrificed their humanity to the Republican cause. It was only terrible. Terrible and a waste and not noble at all.
I have only been to Ireland once, 21 years after the Good Friday agreement. The country that I became acquainted with is peaceful and prosperous and happy, and that’s the only experience I have of Ireland. It's hard for me to reconcile the green and happy place that I loved at first sight with the dark maze of menace and secrets and violence and fear that was Northern Ireland in the 1970s.
There are grown people on both sides of the border who don't remember the Troubles, who only really know Ireland as it is now. But they have parents and grandparents who do remember the past, and who know that it could happen again. It’s happening again already.
*****
I finally finished the book. I was so absorbed in the story that it was hard to pull myself back to Maryland in 2019. And I found myself as angry with Gerry Adams as Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes were and more sympathetic toward Price and Hughes than any reasonable person should have been. Another day or so and I'd probably have burned a Union Jack and bought a 26+6=1 bumper sticker.
This is probably why I resisted going to Ireland for so long. There was always the danger that I would get attached. There was always the possibility that I'd go native.
*****
After I finished Say Nothing, I read Can You Ever Forgive Me? I’ll write about that later. Then I read Thatcher, a biography of one of the IRA’s greatest nemeses.
Last week, I had to take a selfie. I was the employee of the week at my job (I went from employee of the year to employee of the week--how the mighty have fallen) and HR wanted to post a picture of me on the company social media accounts. I was working from home and no one else was around to take a picture of me, so I had to do it myself. It was a mess. I took one really, really good one--my hair looked amazing, and the light must have been just right because my face was clear and unlined and glowing. I could have passed for 35 in that picture. Unfortunately, I took it in front of the bathroom door, and I didn’t want to send a picture that had a toilet as a backdrop. So I took another one from another angle, and it was horrifying. I looked like Barbara Bush, God rest her soul.
*****
I ended up finding a picture of myself from 2018 that was not terribly flattering, but not hideous either. It kind of looked like I actually look. It was as close to the truth as a picture can get, And somewhere in between Margaret Thatcher and Dolours Price, there might be something close to the truth about the Northern Ireland and the Troubles.. I won’t actually get to that truth by reading two books, but it’s a start. One question that anyone who has ever studied Northern Ireland must ask is who can ever understand anything, ever? Who but God can ever know the whole truth?
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