Bibliography 2024

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All She Lost. Dalal Mawad. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

*****

OK, back to work. 

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

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

*****

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

A few days in the Shrieking 20s

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

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

*****

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

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

Fake spring

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

*****

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

*****

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

*****

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

*****

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

*****

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

*****

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

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

******

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

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

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

Essay questions

 

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

*****

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

*****

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

*****

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

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

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

*****

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

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

*****

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

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

(parenthetical) Author of the Year 2024

For the last few days, I’ve been working on my book list from 2024, which I’ll post any day now. I’m just now noticing how much of last year’s reading was all about dictators, genocides, and gulags. It was not intentional, but most of my 2024 reading was a gosh-darn prep course for the Year of Our Lord 2025. But Margery Sharp, my Author of the Year for 2024, is an absolute delight; or rather, she was - she died quite a few years ago. Margery Sharp is probably best known as the author of the children’s book The Rescuers, which I loved (loved the 1970s Disney movie, too), but she also wrote many charming, lighthearted comic novels for adults. I read four of them last year: 

• Something Light
• The Nutmeg Tree
• The Flowering Thorn
• Cluny Brown

I can’t tell you how much I loved these books, especially the last two. I’ve only scratched the surface of Margery Sharp’s considerable output, and I’ll revisit her again this year when I need a break from (gesturing wildly at everything) all of this. Margery Sharp is my Author of the Year for 2024. 

Prophet Song

I’ve always been preoccupied with violent political upheaval and its totalitarian aftermath because I'm a ray of sunshine who wakes up every morning looking for a good time. But until 2015 or so, this was just an abstract preoccupation, grounded in neither real experience nor any expectation that anything really bad could ever happen here. For the past ten years, I’ve been expecting and bracing myself for the end of democracy and the liberal civil order in America, and it turns out that I wasn’t wrong, because what the fuck. 

Anyway, speaking of dystopian nightmares, I wrote this review of Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song early last year, and just forgot to finish and publish it, so here it is. 

*****

Why yes, I did just read yet another terrifying dystopian novel, even though I don’t need any author’s help with imagining the worst case scenario for world events. In my mind, the worst case scenario is always the most likely. The worst case scenario is my default setting.  

The novel is Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, winner of the 2023 Man Booker Award. Set in a present-day or near future Ireland ruled by a totalitarian regime, it depicts the complete breakdown of social order in the wake of an armed uprising that sparks a civil war. The novel’s protagonist, a scientist and mother of four named Eilish, grows ever more desperate as she struggles to keep her children (including an infant) safe and alive after her husband is detained by the regime, and her teenage sons disappear. Eilish loses her job just as the political situation drives runaway inflation, and she spends her days scouring Dublin for food and supplies, seeking news of her husband and sons, and caring for her elderly father who is in the early stages of dementia and refuses to cooperate in his own care. 

This book is so many things, but I’ll start with one. It’s a character study of a woman pushed past the point of reasonable endurance, each terrible thing piling up until it’s all just about too heavy to bear. With her husband detained and held incommunicado, her teenage children sad and terrified and angry all at once, a new baby demanding all of the things that new babies demand, and her father growing more confused and obstreperous each day, Eilish very likely thinks that things can’t get worse, but of course things can always get worse, and they do. Things get so much worse, and Eilish keeps getting up in the morning and keeps putting one foot in front of the other and keeps doing everything and anything she needs to do to protect her family. 

There’s a very popular social media meme, which goes something like “whatever you think you would have done during the Third Reich just look at what you’re doing now about (A, B, or C crime against humanity) because you’re doing what you would have done.” Glib and smug and reductive like most serious memes, but not altogether wrong, either. Prophet Song asks that question: What would you do - what would any of us do - in impossible circumstances? Would you resist and risk arrest, torture, disappearance, loss of everything you have? Would you collaborate with the oppressors to save yourself or your family? Would you just keep your head down and try to just survive and get through the days until things get better? Maybe things won’t get better. 

The way we spend our time and our money and our energy and our social capital in normal, peaceful times doesn’t even resemble how we’d spend those resources in times of chaos and disorder. Every day I buy things or use things or even throw things away, because it’s a time of plenty and I don’t have to really think too hard about fulfilling needs vs. wants. Yes, I know that this is not the case for everyone, and Prophet Song certainly touches on poverty and injustice - the point is that a time of plenty is just that - a time, a passing event, a temporary condition. In America, our time of plenty has lasted for a relatively long time and has benefited a relatively large number of people - but it could all go away, and when or if it does, things would go downhill with astonishing speed. 

*****

At one point in the novel, Eilish thinks for a moment about the past, about times when other people and other countries were suffering through war, civil strife, oppression, famine - and she remembers how she herself would give a passing thought to those  who were suffering, but then she’d forget about them and get on with her day. She recalls a conversation with her sister in Canada, who says that the world is watching Ireland, and that the terror and oppression won’t stand because the international community won’t tolerate it. Eilish knows better. She knows that the rest of the world will give a passing thought or two to the suffering Irish people, and then they’ll move on. No one is coming to help. If Eilish is to save herself and her family, she has to do it on her own.

*****

When Eilish brings her children on to the smugglers' boat that will spirit the family out of Ireland and on to who knows where, she knows that the world is about to care even less about them than it does about the rest of Ireland. She knows what happens as soon as people leave their country to escape war or violence or starvation or all of the above. She knows that they are no longer citizens but migrants, at the mercy of whatever country might deign to take them in; or more likely, whatever country they can sneak into under cover of darkness. In one desperate moment, Eilish and her family are transformed, no longer people but illegal invaders, part of a faceless herd of poor and dirty and traumatized refugees. Whatever place they go to will try its best to keep them out. 

*****

No longer a prosperous and secure citizen of a safe and peaceful country, Eilish seems to wonder about her past thoughts and prayers for the poor and oppressed around the world. Do they mean anything? Did it make any difference at all that she at least thought about her suffering fellow humans, even if only for a moment? Is anyone in the world thinking about her and praying for her, and does it matter if they are or not?  Is it any help at all to pray or hope or even feel for the people of Israel, Ukraine, Gaza, Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, Central America, etc.? Most of us don’t have the skills or the wherewithal to actually do anything practical to help people in a war zone or a famine. We can send some money to whatever reputable organization might be able to help alleviate the suffering a little bit. Maybe we can call our representatives in Congress and demand that our government send aid. Or we can pray, or send positive thoughts (same thing). Most of the time it’s all we can do and it’s not much. But it’s not nothing. 

*****

Why Ireland? Well, Lynch is Irish, first of all, so he knows the country and can write about it convincingly. If you’ve been to Ireland in the last ten years or so, and don’t know much about its history, then you might think that it’s the least likely place to descend into cruelty and violence. Lynch knows better. Ireland has a very recent history of bloody violence. Last year, I started listening to The Troubles podcast; and then I picked it up again this year. If you think that Prophet Song’s descriptions of torture and mayhem are exaggerated, then listen to the episodes about Dessie O’Hare or Freddie “Stakeknife” Scappaticci or the Shankill Butchers. Hair-raising. Paul Lynch knows that the Irish are capable of cruelty and violence, and not because of the Troubles, but because human beings are and always have been cruel and violent.

*****

I manage my boss's Twitter account. Yes I know it's called X now but I'll call it whatever I want. I'll call it Herbert or Fred but I'm not calling it X. Anyway I spent five minutes on that aptly nicknamed hellsite this morning, and it was hair-raising. Some jerk - well he's a fairly well known jerk not just a random jerk but I’m not going to identify him - posted his observations about Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin and while it was not shocking at all that this particular jerk had nothing but good things to say about Putin, it was absolutely shocking to scroll the comments and see how many people love Putin.  Americans are out here rootin’ for Putin. It’s bananas. 

*****

That’s where I left off last year, right around this time. Trump was fully in the race for the Republican nomination, and I knew that he had about a 90 percent chance of winning it and then at least a 50 percent chance of winning the White House again. I knew this, but I don’t think I really accepted that it could actually happen because I was truly shocked on November 5. Anyway, if you haven’t read Prophet Song, I recommend it very very highly. It is grim and terrifying and infuriating, but also beautiful - not just beautiful writing but beautiful in the way that truth always is beautiful. 

Champions 2025

It’s Super Bowl weekend! Not football because that’s over and who cares. No, it’s day 1 of the Atlantic East Conference swimming championship meet at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. A multi-day swim meet with morning and evening sessions is our idea of fun, and we need some fun up in here, I tell you what. 

*****

The weather for this weekend is all over the place, as is typical for Maryland at this time of year or any other. I’ll see your crazy ass in Hell, Maryland weather. We had a snowstorm yesterday and it was bitterly cold. We teleworked, all of us; and I didn’t leave the house even one time. Today it’s about 20 degrees warmer and the snow is melting rapidly. It was very foggy when we woke up this morning; foggy and dim and gray-green and soft. Now it’s just sort of gray and dim, but clearing. 

Marymount won the championship last year, and we hope for a repeat on the men’s side. The women, having lost four of their best swimmers thanks to graduation last year, are very unlikely to repeat. They might even end up in third place. The coaches’ poll has St. Mary’s winning both the men’s and women’s meet, but Marymount soundly defeated St. Mary’s in regular season dual meet competition. Of course, dual meets in January are a very different thing from conference meets in February. The bottom line? We’ll see. We will just see. 

*****

We are off to a very strong start. The Marymount men's 200 medley and 800 freestyle relays flipped the psych sheet, winning both events despite their second place seeding. My son's relay, the 200 medley, also broke their own team record as well as the meet and conference records for that event. It was exciting. 

It's Friday morning now, clear and sunny and 20 degrees colder than I would prefer but I will take the sunshine. We're in the stands at the Michael P O'Brien Athletics and Recreation Center at St Mary's College, waiting for prelims to begin. The mood is festive. It's a little mini vacation for college swim parents, here and at conference meets all over the country, and we're going to have fun. The vibe, as the kids say, is immaculate, and we're going to keep it that way. 

*****

It's Saturday morning and we're crowded back into the stands at MPOARC waiting for prelims. It's 100 breast day. 100 breast is my son's marquee event and he's seeded third but he's been swimming really well and anything could happen. The Marymount boys are ahead by about 30 points. It's good to have the lead but that is a very tight margin in a championship meet. No one is running away with this today. It's going to come down to the last day. 

My phone, on which I am writing right now, has been blowing up all weekend. Signal groups, Marymount parents GroupMe chats, texts from friends and family - out of control. I’m a little bit disoriented as I whipsaw back and forth between panicked updates from friends hearing from fellow feds abruptly fired on Friday to where are we meeting for happy hour messages on the GroupMe to updates on my mom's health from my sisters and brother. There's a lot happening. This weekend is going to be memorable for more reasons than swimming. 

*****

It's Sunday now, the 4th and final day of AEC Championships. Tomorrow will feel like the day after Christmas when I was 6. It's been such a fun weekend and I'll be sad that it's over. A few days of cheering and screaming and parents happy hour and hotel chilling was a welcome break from all of this. You know what “all of this" means, I assume (gesturing wildly at everything).

And my son is now officially the greatest 100 breaststroker in Marymount history. He won both prelims and finals yesterday, and broke the program record with his finals swim, winning his first individual championship gold. A short time later, he and his relay teammates beat a heavily favored St. Mary's relay team to take the program and conference records in the 400 medley relay. The boys have a solid but not insurmountable lead heading into Day 4. Everyone needs to bring it today. They need to bring it and then leave it in the pool. 

Our girls will not be able to overcome a huge St Mary's lead today but yesterday they were one point away from falling to third place, and today, they are almost assured of a solid second place finish thanks to some absolutely heroic swims, including a 400 medley relay that completely over achieved, grabbing an unexpected program record in the process. 

People have just been lovely, too. Everyone we have encountered this weekend, from our fellow parents to the hotel staff to the cashiers at the Lexington Park Wawa, has been delightful. The immaculate vibes prevailed wherever we went. 

The greatest 100 breaststroke swimmer
in Marymount University history.

*****

At last year's meet, I noticed a beautiful Black woman, always dressed in yellow, taking photos at the meet. One day, she wore a knife-pleated knee-length yellow skirt with sparkling clean white tennis shoes. 9 out of 10 women could not pull off that look, but this woman did. She looked immaculate, stylish, comfortable, and completely at ease. The same woman was back on deck with her camera this year, and she wore that skirt twice. On Sunday, she wore a sleeveless yellow mock-neck blouse with yellow pants and flip-flops (it’s hot in a natatorium, especially during a meet). She must work for the Conference or perhaps for the athletic department at St. Mary’s, because parents are not allowed on the deck during a meet. There are no best-dressed awards at a college swim championship but if there were, this woman would have run away with it. 10/10. No notes. 

*****

It rained all day Saturday, and although the weather forecast called for a full day of rain on Sunday, the rain ended by about 12, and the rest of the day was clear and sunny and unexpectedly warm though very windy. The wind forced bridge closures on Sunday afternoon, leaving Virginia parents scrambling for alternate routes home, since the 301 bridge across the Potomac was one of the closed bridges. Our Google Maps route home forced a small detour to avoid the Governor Thomas Johnson Bridge, a scary high bridge that connects Calvert and St. Mary’s County across the Patuxent River. That bridge freaks me out in the best conditions, so I’m glad we didn’t have to drive across it amid 40 mph winds. 

We arrived early for the last final session, which started at 4 rather than 6 to allow sufficient time for the 1650 finals and the awards ceremony after the last event. Rather than sit in the bleachers for an hour, we took a little walk across campus, past a lovely little pond and down to the banks of the St. Mary’s River, where the campus’s more picturesque buildings are situated. We sat on Adirondack chairs and watched the water for a few minutes, and then walked back to the aquatic center, arriving 10 minutes before 4. 

The bleachers at the SMCM aquatic center run the whole length of the facility, from the practice/warmup pools to the competition pool by the windows. For the sake of fairness, the team seating assignments rotate every day, and we had already had our day in the good seats at the competition pool. So it was a very nice surprise when a small group of Immaculata parents waved us over to that section, which was theirs for the day, and offered it to us, since IU had no chance of winning or even placing in the top 3. We accepted with gratitude. 

*****

One of our swimmers has a brother who is a first-year swimmer at a very high-profile D1 program. He was a repeat Virginia state champion in several events, and qualified for Olympic Trials last year. His mother, with the benefit of her experience as a D1 parent, led us in cheers before every event that included a Marymount swimmer. We also met at the team hotel every afternoon to cheer for the swimmers as they boarded the bus back to the aquatic center for finals. We wore Marymount lanyards with our swimmers’ photos. Everyone was decked out in blue. We were a force to be reckoned with. By Saturday, several other teams’ parents groups had organized themselves into cheering squads too. The swimmers pretended to be embarrassed by the whole thing, but they loved it. Who doesn’t love a hype squad? Who doesn’t want their own cheering section? 

*****

The aquatic center has huge windows at the starting end, which made the good seats generously shared by IU even better. When the meet started at 4, the sun was streaming in, and the sky turned pink and gold as twilight approached. It was dark by the time the Marymount boys won the last relay, putting them in first place. The girls finished as runners-up - a very good result for a very small team. Everybody brought it. 

After the meet ended, we hung around with all of the other celebrating St. Mary’s and Marymount parents, taking photos of our kids and their friends with their medals and the Conference championship plaques. We got family photos in front of the AEC backdrop. We stepped out of the way of the coaches’ Gatorade soakings. We watched and laughed as the kids jumped back into the pool and their fully dressed coaches took off their shoes and jumped in after them. (Marymount Assistant Coach: “Has it been this cold all weekend? No wonder you all swam fast.”) Finally, it was time for the team to pack up and board the bus, and so we said our last goodbyes and headed home. 

Normally, I don’t mind returning to the routine after a vacation or long weekend, but things are not really normal right now, are they? It was a 4-day weekend for me, because I took a vacation day for Friday and Monday was a blessed and desperately needed holiday. Federal government employees and contractors never needed a holiday more. We're traumatized. That was the plan. They wrote it down. Musk and the DOGEbags are trying to ruin everything, but they haven’t come after college swim meets yet. We can still have some nice things, at least for now. 

Gesturing wildly at everything

Is anyone else having a hard time concentrating on anything except *waves arms, gesturing wildly at everything*? It’s not just me, right? 

*****

It’s February 5, 2025. We’re now on, as far as I know, day 5 of Elon Musk’s hostile and illegal takeover of the government. Democratic elected officials are finally on the streets, just in time because just one more performative outrage post on social media would have pushed me right past the limits of reason. What they are starting to do is good, but it’s not enough. Senators and Congresspeople are still online posting about having been denied entry to USAID headquarters and the Treasury building. They cannot stand for this. They must try to force their way in, and let the American people see a foreign-born unelected cartoon villain centibillionaire order the arrest of their democratically elected representatives. That’s what it has come to. It’s been just 16 days, and on the 53-day Hitler timeline, we’re just shy of a third of the way to the end of American democracy. Any day now, the Republicans will pass their own Enabling Act. Any day now, we’ll have our own Reichstag fire. 

*****

It’s February 6 now, and oddly enough I’m calmer today even though I’m not sleeping much, and I’m consuming news coverage like it’s cocaine, and Elon Musk has not yet been denaturalized and deported. Today is the “Fork in the Road” deadline for all of my Federal colleagues and friends, and I don’t know one single person who intends to accept this suspect “buyout” offer. Meanwhile, I am running into people who voted for Trump - including a few who I didn’t expect would have voted for him, but what do I know - who are now wringing their hands and claiming that they “didn’t vote for this,” except that I am sorry to say that yes you did, yes you MFing did vote for exactly this, all of this, and I don’t understand how you can pretend otherwise. They told us what they were planning to do. It’s all written down. Plus, everyone knew how much money Elon was spending on Trump’s campaign and since he’s not known as a philanthropist, it stands to reason that he expected a pretty big return on his investment, and he’s getting it. That’s the best $250M that anyone ever spent, really. 

*****

It’s Friday now. My son came home from school last night. He felt sick and feverish and went to the student health clinic with what turned out to be a 103-degree fever. A few tests later, and he had a flu diagnosis, some meds, and an order to stay away from his classes and activities for the next few days. My older son picked him up at school last night, and he slept on the couch in front of the Capitals game until about 10:30 PM, and then went to bed, where he remained until 9 this morning. It’s very hard to convince that child (who is now 20 and I know he’s not a child, but he’s my child) to rest and avoid activity. He is a perpetual motion machine. The AEC Championship is less than a week away and I know he’s quite anxious about missing workouts. I want him to do well in the meet, and hope he’ll recover his strength in time to do that, but as long as he’s healthy then I don’t really care how fast he swims. Meanwhile he’s not getting in a pool until at least Monday. I will stand on that business. 

*****

It’s Saturday morning, February 8. Thankfully, my son is starting to feel better. Of course, he is plotting his return to the pool even as we speak. I might not win this battle. 

The sky is lead gray and although I haven’t been outside yet, I can tell it’s cold. We’re expecting a winter storm today. We’re expecting another winter storm on Tuesday. Remember a few weeks ago when I said that I was starting to like winter, just a tiny little bit? Yeah, that’s off now. I’m done with this weather. This weather is for polar bears and penguins and ice fishing enthusiasts from International Falls, MN. It’s not for middle-aged ladies from the DMV. 

I have a lot of work to do, at work and on the volunteer front. I’m going to do some of it today because I’m not going out in the freezing rain and because getting some things done will make me feel like I have some control over something. 

*****

It’s Super Bowl Sunday. Fly Eagles Fly. I don’t care very much about football, but Philadelphia is my hometown and I want an Eagles win for my family at home. And of course, I want Harrison Butker’s team to lose. We’ll watch the game, of course, because we always watch the Super Bowl. I hope that the whole stadium boos Donald Trump, who is expected to attend because what’s a better way to cut government costs than to send the President and several hundred Secret Service agents to the most high-risk high-profile event in American life? Very efficient. 

Of course I know that Trump is planning to attend the Super Bowl because I’ve been following every detail of everything that’s been happening. My no Trump on weekends rule is out the window. I’m checking my phone every five minutes. When I wake up in the small hours assuming I was asleep to begin with, I check my phone to see what might have happened, what news might have broken. It’s not good. It’s not healthy. 

*****

Fly Eagles Fly! I’m much happier about this win than I have any right to be. My mom and aunts and uncles and siblings and nephews and cousins are very happy today, and I’m happy for them. There was a pool - one of those little square things - at the Super Bowl party that I attended, and I won $100. And the TV crew kept their cameras away from Trump except for that one stupid shot of him saluting the flag (imagine me rolling my eyes here). I didn’t even know he left at halftime until after the game. I hope he left in a huff. I hope he was pissy and grouchy about the stupid Chiefs losing. 

Yes, that’s petty. Our pettiness will sustain us as a people until 2029. 

My son is 100 percent better now. Other than some lingering raspiness in his voice, he’s back to normal and will be back at school and back in the pool this week. And the last time the Eagles won the Super Bowl, the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup. I know that correlation is not the same as causation, but I’m still taking it as a harbinger. And it was nice to be with people last night. It was nice to be with my friends. It’s nice to feel like we are all in this *gesturing wildly at everything* together. 

Meanwhile, I’m going to splurge with that $100. Maybe a sweater. Maybe some new books. Maybe a dozen eggs. Anything goes. Anything is possible. 

Self-help

Every year right around this time - this time being the end of January slash beginning of February - I realize that it’s time to finish and publish my book list. This year is a little chaotic to say the very least. There’s a lot going on. And so not only have I not finished my book list, I have not even started it. In fact, I’m already writing about books I’m reading in 2025. 

I’ll get around to the 2024 book list, any day now. Meanwhile let’s talk about The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins. This is a self-help book; and to say that self-help is not a genre that I typically read would be an understatement. I never read self-help books. What was I thinking? 

*****

Well, I’ll tell you. I saw a CNN interview with Mel Robbins, and there was something about her, about the way she explained her “Let Them” theory that was compelling to me, and so I got the book. And there is nothing wrong with this theory - in fact it’s quite helpful - but I got pretty much everything I needed out of that 2-minute interview. BLUF (that’s bottom line up front): If people are doing things that bother you, that are bad for them, that are counterproductive - LET THEM. And of course there’s more, too - there’s a “Let me” component, too. Let them do what they’re going to do, and let me choose how I’m going to react to their actions. 

That’s pretty much it. An essay would have sufficed. It didn’t require a whole book. More than the length, though, I had a hard time with the writing. There’s a lot of jargon and social media speak, a lot of “holding space.” The last straw was an extended discussion of Robbins’ ABC method for resolving disagreements and improving interpersonal communication. The “A” stands for Apologize and Ask Open-Ended Questions. I can’t remember what the B and C stand for and I’m not going to look it up. And I’m absolutely not going to sit and ask someone a million “How does that make you feel” questions. Yes, that’s what Mel Robbins recommends, and no it is not good advice unless you are talking to idiots who wouldn’t be capable of seeing right through this tactic. No one wants to be manipulated, and no one wants to be psychoanalyzed by an amateur. 

*****

Just like I never read self-help, I also almost never abandon a book without finishing it but I made an exception in this case - I got about two thirds of the way through and then realized that I didn’t have to finish reading it if I didn’t want to, and I didn’t want to. Mel Robbins is a good speaker and communicator, and if you’re interested in her advice (and notwithstanding the ABC nonsense, some of her advice is quite good) then I would recommend that you listen to her podcast. I might do that, actually - I am looking for a new podcast. But I won’t be reading - or writing about - any more self-help books this year. Or maybe ever. 

Proverbial forks in proverbial roads

My gosh this month has been a lot. A lot. A LOT. It’s January 30 now. Yesterday, all of the feds where I work received the infamous “Fork in the Road” email. I hope that no one falls for that because I don’t know nothing about nothing but I do know that responding “RESIGN” to a spam email sent from an illegal server is not a good way to exit a job, federal or otherwise. There is absolutely no way that OPM or the personnel directorates in all of the Executive Branch agencies are prepared to manage a mass spur-of-the-moment exodus. Most people seem to understand this, though. I know a lot of federal employees, and I mean A LOT of federal employees, and I’m pretty sure that no one is falling for this. 

*****

Last night, a passenger jet and an Army helicopter crashed in mid-air over the freezing Potomac River. First responders worked all night and were not able to rescue anyone. At this point, it’s a recovery effort. 

*****

As everyone knows now, no one survived that terrible crash. It’s Friday January 31 and they’re still pulling bodies out of the Potomac River. I love living in the DMV - I always have - but it’s hard this week. It’s a dark time in Washington DC and environs. 

*****

I normally telework on Tuesdays and Fridays. Soon, I will have to say that I used to telework on Tuesdays and Fridays because we have to return to full-time in-office work at the end of February. As a contractor, I will not be eligible for a parking pass, so I’ll have to take Metro to work. Metro fare and parking are about $3500/year. I live six miles from the base, but the commute will take an hour each way, at least. I’m looking at all of my expenses and all of the ways that I spend my time and planning to make the adjustments that will - I hope - make the commute time and the expense and the loss of telecommuting privileges sustainable. Almost everyone I know is dealing with similar challenges, and we’ll get through it. There are worse things. 

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I won’t even bother addressing Trump’s response to the crash because what else would we expect from him? Decency? Compassion? Concern? He’s capable of none of these things and his comments about DEI hires were really the least shocking thing I’ve seen or heard all week. But JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and Sean Duffy standing in front of microphones and cameras straight-faced claiming that ending DEI initiatives is all about hiring the most qualified people - that is quite another thing. I would love to hear any of these tiny little men explain exactly how they are the MOST QUALIFIED PEOPLE for the jobs they currently hold. 

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It’s Saturday morning now. It rained all day yesterday and after a morning trying to power through a bad headache, I took the afternoon off. It won’t be long before Elon Musk decides that sick leave is socialism, and so I might as well use a few hours of it while I still can. 

For four hours, I did almost nothing. I moved from my desk to the couch, and I watched “Vera” on BritBox, and I drifted in and out of sleep in a kind of twilight state. By 4:30, I felt better, so I got up and started doing things. Doing things always helps. And now it’s a beautiful mild sunny Saturday morning. The dirty weeks-old snow has finally melted and the ground is clear for the first time in weeks. January is finally over. Spring is around the proverbial corner and even Donald Trump can’t stop the cherry blossoms and the forsythia and the daffodils from blooming. 

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Write a letter

Here's the text of a letter that I wrote to my Senators (Angela Alsobrooks and Chris Van Hollen) and Representative (Jamie Raskin). Please feel free to use any or all of it to write to your own elected representatives. Note that suggestion #7 applies only to Senators. 

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Dear Representative X or Senator Y,

I am writing about allegations, reported by Reuters, that Elon Musk and his henchmen are hacking into Treasury payment systems and OPM and GSA databases. Please share concrete information about what you and other Democratic elected officials intend to do about it. If you need suggestions: 

1. Hold daily news conferences
2. Sue the Administration
3. Sue DOGE
4. Sue Elon Musk
5. Work with law enforcement to set up an anonymous tip line
6. If you receive credible information on criminal activity, arrest Musk and his goons
7. USE THE FILIBUSTER to stonewall everything the Republicans try to do until they start standing up to Trump. Do you think they'll still love the filibuster when you're using it against them? Let's find out, shall we? 

I have a million more ideas! I'm all ideas, all the time. 

In closing, PLEASE DO SOMETHING. Save the country. Like right now. Start today, February 1. 

Thanks so much!

Name and City